Suchergebnisse

A response to Marc Lynch's "Veiled Truths". Adapted from the source document.

Tocqueville is a writer of immense emotional power, and the secret of that power lies in the poetic rhythms of his prose; and, in the whole of Democracy in America, no chapter offers a clearer or more vivid demonstration of those rhythms and their effect than "The Jury in the United States Considered as Political Institution." The editors of Dissent have selected their sundry quotations for commentary from that one chapter; but, with the readers' indulgence, I would like to restore the quotations to Tocqueville's original setting in order to lay out, in the imagination, the entire chapter in free verse. "The Jury in the United States," set in verse, begins with an extended strophe of five lines or paragraphs, in this form.

The question seems to me wrongly put in one aspect. To hurl curses and insults at the Bush administration is a worthy, right, and just thing to do; and yet there is no reason to trip all over ourselves in acknowledging that Bush and his administration did sincerely desire to achieve a democratic outcome in Iraq. For some sixty years before the Iraq War, American policy in the Middle East had nothing to do with democracy. American policy was based on a principle of malign stability, conducted in the belief that stable dictatorships would guarantee American interests.