Great post. I'm disappointed each and every time I hear of a new push to just "pack up and go home" and pull our troops out of Iraq with the remarks that "the Iraqi people just don't want it badly enough". Why is it that so many Americans are willing to just write off the entire population of a country because of the actions of a minority of those people? Especially when it has been reported numerous times that many of those "insurgents" are not even Iraqi nationals, but foreign fighters. The effects of thirty years of oppression don't just disappear overnight.
I agree with Jamie. Great post.
Tom, I think this topic of democracy and its potential in the Middle East is the most important issue of our time.
Thomas Sowell wrote that in the Muslim world women have been elected prime ministers. We tend to forget such things because we think of the Islamic world as being against woman having power. But Sowell mentioned in this column (I'll try to find the link) that many tend to confuse the Arab world with the Muslim world and Arab culture with Muslim culture.
Perhaps the real problem we face is a backward Arab culture superimposed on an unreformed Islamic religion.
Democracy might not be easy to establish in Iraq or in the Middle East in general, but what other options are there? None that I can see.
Ok. Here's the link to the Thomas Sowell column where Sowell discusses the possibility of democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Some blame the Islamic religion for narrow and backward features of many Moslem countries. Yet there are Moslem countries which have had women as heads of state, which the United States has not yet had. But these were not Arab countries in the Middle East.
Islam cannot be blamed for everything that has gone wrong in Islamic countries, any more than Christianity can be blamed for everything that has gone wrong in Christian countries. Middle Eastern civilizations existed for centuries, and developed their own distinctive character, before the rise of Islam.
Norman Podhoretz has written a column titled The war against World War IV, which I think is relavent to this "can democracy work in Iraq" debate.
"Perhaps the real problem we face is a backward Arab culture superimposed on an unreformed Islamic religion."
Interesting take, Mark. I hadn't thought of it that way but it makes sense.
You are right, that most people didn't know that women had been leaders of the world's three biggest Muslim countries at one time; Turkey, Pakistan, and Indonesia. Most people probably didn't even know that Indonesia was Muslim until the Tsunami.
Many like to think that "oh yeah, we knew all along that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe could reform." Sharansky reminds us of how untrue that is. He also reminds us of what forced the changes: Reagan, Jackson-Vanck & Helsinki. I.E. NOT accomodation and a quest for "stability" a la Carter or Scowcroft.
Tom: Reagan, Jackson-Vanck & Helsinki. I.E. NOT accomodation and a quest for "stability" a la Carter or Scowcroft.
Precisely. Reagan was the Anti-Appeaser. And he got results.
I've become sceptical about the possibility of a coexistence between Islam and democracy, in large part due to Turkey's example and also because I live in Europe, where things are getting worse, worse and also worse.
But I'm still - more than ever - standing behind the US initiative in Iraq and the ME. There is no other option.
I've become sceptical about the possibility of a coexistence between Islam and democracy
Michael,
Islam and democracy are compatible only if we define Islam in a way dramatically different from the way it is being defined today.
If Ali, Omar and Mohammed, the former and current bloggers on Iraq the Model, can be considered Muslims, then I think it is clear that Islam and democracy can coexist. But if these three are properly categorized as phoney Muslims or even ex-Muslims, then we should hope for the triumph of democracy over Islam.
But how do we explain the recent election in Afghanistan? How about Indonesia, the world's most populous majority Muslim nation? It's a very dicey issue.
Here's Jonah Goldberg's take on democracy and Islam. Pretty interesting.....
Islamic fundamentalism, for example, rejects democracy for much the same reason — to use Bill Buckley’s phrase — that baloney rejects the grinder. But does anyone doubt the ultimate conclusion of such a conflict? The jihadists aren’t really competing with democracy — they’re opposing it the way barbarians have always opposed modernity and civilization. They can’t cope with it otherwise. The expansive, decent version of democracy will come to the Middle East and the rest of the world — eventually.
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More from Jonah Goldberg's piece.....
What is so astounding is how undisputed democracy is as an ideal. In 1990, Francis Fukuyama wrote an enormously influential essay for The National Interest, which remains the best English-language foreign policy journal in the world. Titled "The End of History," Fukuyama’s essay argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled, well, the End of History. He didn’t mean clocks would freeze and coins would stop in mid-flip, like in some twilight zone. His was a Hegelian point. Mankind had fought for millennia in an effort to figure out how to organize society. This is what pushed history forward. Liberal democracy, in all its forms, seemed to settle that argument. That was the end of history.
And that’s what we are witnessing before our eyes. Indeed, throughout the 20th century even the worst dictatorships and totalitarian regimes insisted that they were “real” democracies.
One of my first post was about the terrorist being more Arab than Muslim. Arab tribalism was not erased by Islam, Islam simply was adapted to suit the tribes. When Muslims focus on the moral tenets of their faith, rather than on the wars of days gone by, that'll be a giant step toward ending the Arab dominance and ignorance, and a step toward Arabs being free enough in thought to accept the ideals of liberty while maintaining their faith (should they choose to).
Great post and comments.
Marvin,
Thank you for your comments. I will have to visit your web site and post some comments of mine.
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