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In a speech to fellow Rudy Giuliani adviser Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum, Martin Kramer expounded on his view that America's big mistake in the Middle East is that it hasn't acted enough like an empire (audio here):
"Rule lightly, unless provoked. Delegate power and don't tamper with local customs. Using these rules, great empires dominated the Middle East for centuries. Our problem, though, is that we don't see ourselves as a great empire, and we don't want to rule anyone directly. We just want to transform them thoroughly."According to Kramer, the last 50 years of American policy in the Middle East have been driven by the goal of democracy, but as the Arabs have shown us nothing but ingratitude for our attempts to liberate them, we should now abandon our altruism, jettison the pretense of democratic reform, and concentrate instead on simply dominating them, projecting our power wherever and whenever necessary. Needless to say, I think Kramer's presentation of American involvement in the region would have to be substantially more plausible to even be considered ridiculous, but I do understand why he attempts it: In order to buttress his view that we need to back off of democracy promotion in the Middle East, he needs to pretend that we at least gave it a try.Kramer describes what he sees as the two competing big ideas in US Middle East policy right now: "engagement" and "staying on offense." He offers this view of the former:
