The neo-liberals

Updated below

Harvard professor Orlando Patterson has a good op-ed in today's NY Times (behind subscription wall), explaining that, contrary to the view held by neo-conservatives, many other cultures don't necessarily want "freedom" stuffed down their throats at the point of a gun. He concludes as follows:

The good news is that freedom has been steadily carrying the day: nearly all nations now at least proclaim universal human rights as an ideal, though many are yet to put their constitutional commitments to practice. Freedom House’s data show the share of the world’s genuinely free countries increasing from 25 to 46 percent between 1975 and 2005.

The bad news is Iraq. Apart from the horrible toll in American and Iraqi lives, two disastrous consequences seem likely to follow from this debacle. One is the possibility that, by the time America extricates itself, most Iraqis and other Middle Easterners will have come to identify freedom with chaos, deprivation and national humiliation. The other is that most Americans will become so disgusted with foreign engagements that a new insularism will be forced on their leaders in which the last thing that voters would wish to hear is any talk about the global promotion of freedom, whatever “God’s gift” and the “longing of the soul.”

But what I really love about the piece is how he repeatedly refers to the neo-cons as "neo-liberals." Boy, if that isn't stiking in the knife and turning it.

Update:

Obviously Tristero, over at Hullabaloo, read this op-ed differently than I did. I took it that Orlando was snarking the neo-cons by labeling them with the librul stigma. Tristero seems to believe he's trying to blame the war on liberal thinkers because "real" conservatives couldn't have come up with anything this awful. Who knows? I don't know anything about Orlando Patterson, so perhaps Tristero is right.