Boston Globe. A good review of a neo-con patriarch: Richard Pipes. He was one of the intellectual architects of the Reagan administration's strategy of confrontation with the Soviet Union. He had some choice bits to say:
He bluntly dismisses the promise of a democratic Iraq — “impossible, a fantasy” — citing obstacles similar to Russia's. “Democracy requires, among other things, individualism — the breakdown of old clannish, tribal organizations, the individual standing face-to-face with the state. You don't have that in the Middle East. Iraq is tribally run.”
It is not lost on Pipes that his criticism goes directly to the judgment of the Bush team, conservatives like himself, in some cases former colleagues, most prominently Team B's own Wolfowitz. “Paul didn't have much education in history,” Pipes says. “It's not his field. He was educated as a military specialist, a nuclear weapons specialist. Like most scientists, he doesn't have a particular understanding of other cultures.”