Dissident Down But Not Out

ThreeSources patron saint Natan Sharansky is profiled in a nice interview in the Wall Street Journal OpinionJournal (free link) this weekend. First, the sad truth:

The fortunes of Mr. Sharansky and his ideas about freedom rose and sunk with President Bush's opinion polls. His "The Case for Democracy" came along, three years ago, when the administration seriously looked to push it in the Muslim world. The president loved the book, and Mr. Sharansky became the in-house philosopher for the Bush Doctrine. "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy, read Natan Sharansky's book," blurbs Mr. Bush on the back cover of the paperback edition.

But democracy is a dirty word these days. So Mr. Sharansky is lonely too, bounced out of Israeli politics and out of favor. He, Vaclav Havel and other former Eastern European dissident faces of the freedom agenda are dismissed as Cold War naïfs, pernicious Utopians, or worse--men whose moral Manichaeism has no business in the "complex Middle East."

Even with the freedom movement "on its back foot," Sharansky is pretty sanguine about Russia, and moderately upbeat about the Mideast. It's a great read.

Freedom on the March Posted by jk at November 3, 2007 7:20 PM