The Islamic democracy project is nothing if not beguiling. From Clinton’s Orwellian “peace process” through Bush’s cloying “freedom agenda” to Obama’s contortion of an Islamist ascendancy into “the Arab Spring,” the dream teems with self-congratulation, so much so that its debilitating downsides go unseen and unaddressed. Thanks to the Islamic Republic of Iran, that situation has just gone from dangerously delusional to dangerous, period.
The list of downsides is long. There is the rudimentary problem that democracy promotion does not work. As a national-security strategy, it is irrelevant to our threat environment.
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Yes, democratic nations tend to avoid war with each other. If al-Qaeda were Afghanistan, it might make sense to spend tenfold Afghanistan’s GDP to drag it kicking and Allahu-akbaring 14 centuries forward. But principles fit for sovereign states are inapposite when it comes to global terror networks. The latter have no incentive to secure citizens and territory; for them, democratic freedoms are not values to be cherished but weapons to be exploited. To plot their gruesome business, Mohamed Atta & Co. found democracy in Hamburg, Madrid, Scottsdale, and Venice, Fla., perfectly suitable.
Then there is the unwelcome fact that promoting Western democracy in Islamic lands actually increases the threat to us. This owes to our enemies’ animating ideology — the one doctrine that gets even less scrutiny than that of democracy promotion.
Under sharia, the law of Islam, non-Muslim forces that occupy Muslim territory must be attacked until they are driven out. It makes no difference that the non-Muslims believe they are engaged in a humanitarian effort to make life better for Muslims. In Muslim lands, Islamic doctrine holds that sharia is to be regarded as the supreme law, and it is a code that rejects core democratic principles, including the foundational conceits that people are free, equal, and at liberty to enact the laws of their choosing, irrespective of sharia.
Consequently, the sowing of Western ideas and institutions in Islamic soil is perceived as a hostile act by the Muslim mainstream — strong majorities of which desire to live under sharia. That is why, for example, the Muslim Brotherhood’s influential jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, issued a fatwa calling for jihad against American personnel in Iraq. It is why, far from being grateful for our sacrifices, Iraqis say they want us out of their country yesterday. It is why al-Qaeda built a strong regional following when its signal cause was driving U.S. forces out of Saudi Arabia — in accordance with Koranic scripture, non-Muslims are deemed unfit to set foot in Mecca and Medina.
There is also the perverse manner in which democracy promotion degrades democracy overseas and at home. Because Muslim countries do not want Western democracy, we have to inject it with sharia to carry the charade off. As a member of any persecuted minority in Iraq or Afghanistan might tell you, that is like injecting Superman with kryptonite. Meanwhile, in our own country, we are told the charade’s “success” requires the steady abrasion of our free-expression rights, lest the resulting slights to tender Muslim sensibilities — and sharia’s strict ban on negative critiques of Islam — engulf our troops and our homeland in reactionary violence.
Nevertheless, today’s most pressing challenge stems not from these consciously avoided perils of the freedom agenda, but from another.
For several years, I’ve contended that democracy promotion’s steepest downside would be the dissolution of our will to defend the United States from a determined enemy. As the American people became inured to the new calculus — that victory is no longer our goal, that destroying enemies who endanger us is no longer sufficient, and that the price-tag of our security now includes spending thankless years, unrecoverable billions of dollars, and the precious lives of our best young people in rebuilding the aggressor nation — they would resist actions vital to their own security.
There is no reason to confine this thinking to Iraq or the immediacy of the Iranian problem.
It applies to the rest of the arabs (especially 'palestinians' et al) and muslims in general. The fact that Malaysians and Indonesians etc. are more pragmatic does not mean their sentiments are any different.
The Iraqi fiasco has never spawned from the fact of military action but in the subordination of a military objective for an amorphous, ethereal and ideologically driven political one.
If the Iraqi people were left in a state of social and economic collapse who cares? Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
Whatever cut throat autocrat that would have succeeded SHussein they would have learned that much so as not to threaten the material or physical well being of the United States or be thoroughly plastered.
To borrow from the dialogue of Klaatu; whilst muslims endlessly kill each other in their petty disputes, rivalries and feuds we couldn't care less.
But when they threaten to export their violence THIS we will not tolerate and exact from them such a price that they will be forced to confine their savagery to themselves.
No-one is interested in building their cultures, civilising them to our liking or telling them what political system they must adopt.
Let them stew in their own juices. They all deserve it and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
"We don’t want another “You break it, you own it” lecture — as if it were an ironclad rule that attacking America somehow obliges us to fix your dysfunctional country."
From the beginning of the "democracy projects" in Afghanistan and Iraq, I sensed that it wouldn't take and that, terrible as it may seem, our policy should have been to bring them to their knees, go home and then dare them to try it again.
This is probably what we should've done, both Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan were at war with us when 9/11 happened. We needed to go George Patton, then send in the missionaries like in the old days.
Demolishing Iran's ruling elite will help secure the US. Add in drilling for and refining our own oil to remove the largest client to the terror-sponsors left in the Middle East closes the circle. But of course, none of this will happen while the current regime is in power. They'd like to arrest someone and have a show trial. The current regime to too sophisticated actual action.
We need to review our history with Islam. In the first foreign military action, Pres. Jefferson sent the Navy and Marines to the so called Barbary Pirates (Muslim warriors) after years of trying to buy them off. The action was successful, for a while. They left us alone. Guess what, they're back! After years of investing billions (which didn't work the first time) we go to war (kind of). They understand and respect only one thing; overwhelming military force. They left us alone for a century or so but they never, never change their purpose, world conquest in the name of Islam. We need to deal with the problem now, overwhelmingly and without blinking.
Islamic democracy is not democracy. Any democracy must have a separation of religion from state. If Islamic Countries want our American aid, America must become smart enough to demand a separation of religion from state before giving them one American Dime.
America does more harm than good by supporting what the Islams call democracy. Islamic Democracy is just holding a vote to get more $ from the west.
Any Islamic vote, without a separation of church and state, ends in genocide of the minority religions. We see that now in the Arab Spring movement in Egypt and Syria calling itself a democracy to get western money.
Our current president is destroying governments and giving money to the terrorist organization "the Muslim Brotherhood" and their so called democratic Arab Spring. The Arab Spring movement is not a democracy.
Voting for a majority religion is not a democracy. It ends in a Theocracy and ends in persecution and genocide exactly like Iran. Stop the American funding of Theocracies if you want to stop the genocide, persecution and killing of Americans. Teach Americans that the difference between a democracy and a theocracy is a separation of religion and state.
Our troops in Africa should be on a search and destroy mission to destroy-dissarm-deploy home w/in 30 days.
In Iran; put a carrier group in the persian gulf and one in the Med sea.
Use hundreds tomahawk missiles to take out some air defenses, mullahs, and gov officials along with a couple of buildings the gov meets in to keep them from meeting. Make no special provisions for mosques! Other than destruction.
Then do a 45 day bombing campaign on military and known nuke sites. Let the 2009 protesters clean up the mess.
No boots on the ground other than spec-ops. We may lose a couple of planes other than that it can be a pretty clean operation.
Isreal can take care of their local knuckleheads if need be.
No they aren't and no we mustn't. Iran is no concern of ours, and those who think America has any interest meddling in the affairs of Middle Eastern states have brought misery on us and them.
The worst mistake we can make is to believe that they are rational and if we leave them alone they will leave us alone. They will not and cannot (from a belief perspective) while the current regime is in place. Since 1979 we have been and are the Black Satan and as such we have to be destroyed no matter how long it takes and by whatever subterfuge. We all want to be loved and understood – only wish life was that simple. They hate our freedoms and want to destroy those freedoms rather than the individual. Get used to it, we are at war and it’s not going away any time soon. And here we are, reducing military expenditures. Insane.
Whether we like it or not, the evidence seems to indicate that Islam, directed by its most intense 'advocates,' is on a collision course with classical western liberal freedoms. Mr. McCarthy is saying what is not popular, but just as Churchill made unpopular warnings eighty years ago and was ignored, people will wonder at some point in the near future, "...why didn't we know...?"
I see the Military-Industrial complex in the proxy of Andrew wants to get us involved in another war. Here is the problem, How do you propose we 'remove' the regime? ONLY way I see is a MASSIVE land war, anything else risks the Iranians hiding and expanding their Nuclear capabilities with the ONLY goal of producing weapons.
How does a destructive bombing campaign expand their capabilities? Maybe we should attack Detroit to spur the Michigan economy. Who knows...it might even lead to more & cheaper green cars.
