Are the Arabs willing and able to support democracy?
Do they want it? Can they handle it?
Here's how President Bush framed it in his speech in London:
In the West, there's been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We're told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world's Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it.
I don't know if Islam and democracy can be reconciled; I know for sure that the fundamentalists don't think so. As evidenced by their actions is Saudi Arabia and Turkey, where dozens of Muslims were slain in terror attacks, the terrorists regard moderate Muslims with the same hatred they show Christians.
President Bush points to secular Muslim nations, nations that have successfully segregated religion and government, creating the opening for democracy, but there is another side to the story. In the remaining Arab nations, Islam still provides the basis for the government. There is no separation; the church is the state. Will a people brought up for generations under this system be able to break free?
The President's vision presupposes that freedom and democracy represent the natural state of man, which is a questionable assumption. Democracy certainly is the most successful governing system today; but it remains to be seen whether that is a one time occurance, or a general truth.
However, the Iraqi people should be the ones to make the choice. As many critics before the war mentioned, you can't force democracy on anyone. But what you can do is give them the chance to take it for themselves.
Which brings me to Salam Pax, who provides the best argument that some Iraqi's are not ready for democracy.
He had a letter in the Guardian which reads in part:
You have spilled a glass full of tomato juice on an already dirty carpet and now you have to clean up the whole room. Not all of the mess is your fault but you volunteered to clean it up.
This reminds me so much of the aging infant at the Clinton-Dole debate who whined that the President should be like a father, and "take care of us."
Bull!
I've got a message for both of you from a real father. Grow the hell up! Pax, we're not there to clean up the mess Saddam made; we're there to give you the chance to clean it up yourselves. It's called being an adult, nimrod! We did what you couldn't; we're always glad to help out. But now, the ball is in your court. Leave England (you might want to say "Thank you" to Tony Blair on your way out. He helped in your liberation immensely and it's just good manners) and go back to Iraq and get to work. Remake your country into what you want it to be. Take part in the writing of the constitution; work on the provisional government; do something that shows you are willing to take on the awesome responsibility inherent in self rule.
Unless you just like being a subject instead of a citizen.
Posted by Rich at November 24, 2003 2:47 PM | TrackBack
Outstanding post...
Posted by: Eric on November 24, 2003 5:39 PMDid you see Lileks post about Mr. "Pax"...ouch! Nicely done Rich.
Posted by: Justin on November 25, 2003 8:51 PM>>Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization
Maybe I'm missing the definition of "high civilization", and maybe I'm condemning a civilization based on the acts of a few but I've seen very little in the majority of the Middle Eastern/Arab world that would could be defined as "high civilization".
Civilized people don't attack their liberators and drag them through the streets. They don't spit on the people who are trying to free them. There are hundreds of other examples that seem to me to show that these people just don't seem ready to truly govern with their brains instead of their emotions.
I hope I'm wrong, but hearing the rhetoric, seeing the demonstrations and actions, knowing what terrorists are capable of...it doesn't make me very hopeful.
On the other hand, there are plenty of Americans and other Westerners that do the same things, but here it's a fringe behaviour and not a cultural norm.
Posted by: Barry on November 26, 2003 2:01 PMDoes Dubya really believe the saccharine platitudes that drip from his lips?
Islam is a religion of war, a religion that denies free will and personal responsibility. The Arab world is stuck in the Iron Age and will be stuck in the Iron Age unless and until Islam has its own Renaissance and Reformation, which do not appear to be looming on the horizon.
It is politically incorrect to notice that certain ideas that we Westerners take for granted are in fact Western ideas, not universal in the world, which barely existed even in the West before the Renaissance and Reformation.
Personal responsibility is a Western idea; non-Western cultures are distinguished by an all-pervading spineless fatalism that opens the door to every horror and madness.
After all, if everything that happens is the Mandate of Heaven, then there is no shame and no stigma in aligning oneself with whoever appears to be the winning side at the moment.
After all, if your state in life is determined by your caste and karma as judged by the Gods, then even attempting to dig a well for clean water is blasphemy, because clearly the Gods intend you to drink the filthy waters of the "Holy Ganges," with human feces and human bodies floating in it, just as you and your ancestors have been doing since the Bronze Age (and dying like flies from cholera, typhus, bilharzia, dysentery, malaria, dengue fever, and a thousand other diseases that the blasphemous Westerners eradicated from their own lands a century ago and more).
After all, if everything that happens is the Will of Allah, then it is perfectly acceptable to hijack an airliner and ram it into a skyscraper full of innocent people--Allah wouldn't allow them to be harmed if he didn't want them all dead in the first place, you see.
Mercy, too, is a uniquely Western concept; to the rest of the world, it looks like madness and weakness.
Likewise moderation and tolerance are uniquely Western ideas, and are only a few centuries old here.
The Arabs are utterly incapable of coexistence with other cultures; wherever Islam is in contact with other cultures, from Nigeria to Palestine to Kashmir to Indonesia to the Phillipines, there is and has been only war. There is a reason for this.
The Arab mind, warped by superstition, is a simple and childlike mind that has no grasp of consequences and comprehends only the Jihad, the all-consuming holy war against all outsiders, all foreigners, all who are not exactly like himself, everywhere, forever. It is war to the knife, and the knife to the hilt--and note that when there are no foreigners, no non-Moslems to attack, Arabs will happily kill one another, socialist versus monarchist, Shi'a versus Sunni, Berber versus Bedouin. In the Jihad, there is no negotiation, no control, no law, no consideration of this bizarre Western concept of "mercy." There is only death, and Allah grins when he sees a Palestinian suicide bomber murder twenty Israeli schoolchildren.
To put it bluntly, the Arabs are homicidal savages--cavemen with AK-47s. They do not comprehend even the idea of democracy, and would not want it if you explained it to them in slow and careful words of few syllables. And the difference between Wahhabi Islam and the other Islamic sects is one of degree, not of kind, and not a very large difference of degree, either.
The Arabs aren't going to stop until they are slapped down so hard that their great-grandchildren will still feel it. The US entered into a conflict with a similarly warlike race sixty-two years ago. The Japanese didn't reconsider the wisdom of starting a war with the United States until General Curtiss LeMay's strategic bombing campaign levelled all but six cities in Japan and then levelled two more with atomic bombs, and even then it required the personal intervention of the Emperor to force Japan's war cabinet to surrender. Since 1945 the survivors and their descendants have been considerably more polite and circumspect in their dealings with the rest of the world, because they have become civilized. Hiroshima and Nagasaki illustrated to them the error of their ways, and made it plain to them that if they did not behave themselves, the US would not hesitate to exterminate them to the last man, woman, and child. Savages do not comprehend anything but force and fear.
The Arabs do not appear to be nearly as bright as the Japanese. Millenia-long traditions of incestuous marriages (for example, in relatively secular Iraq, over 60% of marriages were between first cousins) have rendered their average IQ around 80, making them rather slower on the uptake than the clever and cunning Japanese (average IQ around 110). Before the terrorism stops, they're going to have to be taught that actions have consequences, Hiroshima and Nagasaki style. We may very well end up having to kill them all.
Posted by: Nobody on November 27, 2003 3:27 AM