Jeane Kirkpatrick

Wall Street Journal Saturday, December 9, 2006

Her blunt style and strong defense of liberty will be missed.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, who died yesterday at 80, was that rare thing–a public intellectual and a public figure. She excelled at both.

Ms. Kirkpatrick is known to the public at large because Ronald Reagan, after defeating Jimmy Carter for the Presidency in 1980, appointed her U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. It is worth mentioning in this context that earlier this week Senate Democrats succeeded finally in driving John Bolton from the U.N. ambassadorship. The mind’s eye recalls the televised image in the early 1980s of Ambassador Kirkpatrick, a Democrat then, seated at the U.N. Security Council table and publicly defending U.S. interests against the Soviet Union with an articulate, no-nonsense bluntness that makes Mr. Bolton sound like Little Bo-Peep by comparison. That style–American interests made perfectly clear–will be missed.

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1 thought on “Jeane Kirkpatrick”

  1. It’s too bad the right wing doesn’t read it’s own literature. In November 1979 Jeane Kirkpatrick wrote a piece in Commentary magazine in opposition to the U.S. undermining non-communist, authoritarian regimes. Although it was written in 1979, much of it could have applied to Iraq of 2003:

    “In his essay on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill identified three fundamental conditions which the Carter administration would do well to ponder. These are: ‘One, that the people should be willing to receive it [representative government]; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them.'”

    “Fulfilling the duties and discharging the functions of representative government make heavy demands on leaders and citizens, demands for participation and restraint, for consensus and compromise . . . Moreover, leaders of all major sectors of the society must agree to pursue power only by legal means, must eschew (at least in principle) violence, theft, and fraud, and must accept defeat when necessary. They must also be skilled at finding and creating common ground among diverse points of view and interests, and correlatively willing to compromise on all but the most basic values.”

    “In addition to an appropriate political culture, democratic government requires institutions strong enough to channel and contain conflict.”

    “Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits [necessary for democratic government].”

    “But it seems clear that the architects of contemporary American foreign policy have little idea of how to go about encouraging the liberalization of an autocracy. In neither Nicaragua nor Iran did they realize that the only likely result of an effort to replace an incumbent autocrat with one of his moderate critics or a ‘broad-based coalition’ would be to sap the foundations of the existing regime without moving the nation any closer to democracy. Yet this outcome was entirely predictable. . . . The fabric of authority unravels quickly when the power and status of the man at the top are undermined or eliminated. The longer the autocrat has held power, and the more pervasive his personal influence, the more dependent a nation’s institutions will be on him. Without him, the organized life of the society will collapse, like an arch from which the keystone has been removed. . . The speed with which armies collapse, bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the autocrat is removed frequently surprises American policymakers and journalists accustomed to public institutions based on universalistic norms rather than particularistic relations.” [emphasis mine]

    “Thus, in the hope of strengthening a government, U.S. policymakers are led, mistake after, mistake, to impose measures almost certain to weaken its authority. Hurried efforts to force complex and unfamiliar political practices on societies lacking the requisite political culture, tradition, and social structures not only fail to produce desired outcomes; if they are undertaken at a time when the traditional regime is under attack, they actually facilitate the job of the insurgents.”

    You can read the original article here:
    http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=6189&page=all

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