Excerpts
SUMMARY: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks talk to Judy Woodruff about the week's top political news, including how the U.S. should be responding to continuing clashes in Egypt, their take on the new N.C. Voter ID law and late political columnist Jack Germond's greatest legacy.
MARK SHIELDS: And I think that they're aware of the fact that there are very few repercussions, certainly based on Syria, for brutalization of a civilian population, that intervention is unlikely from the civilized world, that the United States, having been through a decade of two unhappy and ultimately unsuccessful wars to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, have no will, no appetite.
DAVID BROOKS: I would say we have two things to worry about.
The first is, we shouldn't be allowing people to massacre their own citizens. And we have allowed that to happen in Rwanda. And we have allowed it certainly to happen in Syria. And I do think, to underline Mark's point, Syria sent a message: This works. You can do it. No one else will do anything.
And so when we decide not to go into Syria, we have to be aware of the downstream effects that will have. The second thing is, we should be promoting democracy, but only in ways that are fitting that society. If parts of that society, as in Egypt, are extremely sophisticated about democratic rights and understand things, then we should be giving them legal help to draw up constitutions.
If parts of the society don't get the basic concepts of legitimacy, we should be having national institutes for democracy and other things to give them those concepts. But our emphasis should always be on the ideas, not the implementation, because our ability to influence another country's implementation is always going to be limited.
COMMENT: While the West fiddles, Syria and Egypt burn.
ALSO: 'Politics DOES matter,' my opinion as my readers can tell.
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