Not only must we not talk to our enemies – just ask Sharansky how much he and his fellow dungeon dissidents preferred Reagan’s unapologetic and open moralism to Nixon’s detente – but we must become increasingly suspicious of our once-cherished Arab allies. Dwight Eisenhower once remarked that if one could not solve a problem, he would be wise to enlarge it. The solution to our current quandary in the Mideast is not a reversal and return to the old order, but to rile up a few more hornet nests. We are engaged in an audacious counterinsurgency across hostile Sunni municipalities with hundreds of thousands of indigenous Iraqi allies at our side. If we were to accept any of the ridiculous Vietnam comparisons, at least let us acknowledge that we have not only toppled the adversarial government (which was not done then), but we have also, wisely, skipped the half-decade as loner and have moved on to contemporary Vietnamization.

Keeping the historical analogies alive, if this is in fact the decades-long struggle we are told it is, and victory, as only a determined few define it, rests not only with the capture of specific terrorists or with the continued prevention of domestic attack, but with the transformation of an undemocratic, self-righteously puritanical, and intolerantly hierarchical part of the planet, then let us not embrace a new detente. George Bush Sr., the stone-cold pragmatist, should creep out anyone who champions the promotion of human freedom. Like his associates, the so-called “wise men” from Powell to Baker, Bush the elder served the United States with credit and as he saw fit, in service and in government. But as he saw fit – as Baker, Gates, and that gang see fit – is wrong.