Quote du Jour

Fouad Ajami, director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, conveniently touches on two of the subjects addressed in Kiko's House posts below -- the spread of democracy in the Middle East and the Danish Cartoon Controversy in a piece in today's Wall Street Journal.

The money quote:

Hitherto, we had granted the Arab world absolution from the laws of historical improvement. We had ceded it a crippling "exceptionalism." We explained away our complicity in its historical decay as the price paid for access to its oil, and as the indulgence owed some immutable "Islamic" tradition. To be fair, we could not find our way to its politically literate classes, for they were given to a defective political tradition. American power now ventures into uncharted territory; we have shaken up that world, and broken the pact with tyranny. In the shadow of American power, ordinary men and women who had known nothing but the caprice of rulers and the charlatanism of intellectual classes have gone out to proclaim that tyranny is neither fated, nor written.