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BS ‘n’ About…
Islamic Democracy
When a situation goes awry, the fault lies usually with either the execution or the plan. America invaded Iraq to topple a dictator and replace him with democracy. Or so we were told. Four years later Saddam is long gone but Iraq is a lot closer to civil war than it is to democracy. Where did we go wrong?
That our ‘mission’ in Iraq has gone awry is obvious to us all by now. But ‘staying the course’ assumes that the fault lies with the execution of the plan, rather than the plan itself. But if the fault lies with the plan in the first place, we can ‘stay the course’ for a thousand years and still not achieve our aims.
History shows that democracy has never really gained a foothold in the Muslim world, nor even much support. Lebanon holds elections and elects Hezbollah. The Palestinians hold elections and elect Hamas. The Iranians throw a full-blown revolution, then hand power over to the Ayatollahs. What made us think the results were going to be any different in Iraq? When our Cassus Belli for being there is to give the Iraqi people something they don’t even want, and probably can’t even conceptualize, how can we hope to come across as the Good Guys for ‘giving’ it to them? These are a people driven by faith and all we came offering was politics.
Democracy is an ideal that was birthed in Ancient Greece at a time when faith was a fluid, personal thing. History shows that it is an ideal too fragile to exist in cultures driven by rigid faith. Democracy requires a compromise that faith cannot accept. Faith requires a rigidity that makes democracy impossible. When voters go to the polls and vote their faith, in blocks, on the secular issues which drive their country, that is theocracy, not democracy.
The Islamic world, as ought to be obvious to us by now, isn’t yet ready to separate church and state. Without that separation, the Hamas’ and Hezbollahs’ are going to get elected every time. Political parties will break down along spiritual schisms. These are a people who view everything through the filter of their faith. Politics and economics are overshadowed to the point of being virtually irrelevant. Our politicians can label what’s going on over there with whatever western terminology they think will be palatable to the masses, but as long as it is a Holy War for them, it is a Holy War for us. That is scary in this day and age.
Democracy and Islam aren’t yet ready for each other. The two don’t mix. Unfortunately, faith makes a people uncompromising. And that makes them a dangerous foe. How can we hope to defeat a people capable of passions we can’t even begin to comprehend? Are we willing to strap a bomb to our belly for the cause? They obviously are. The next “Suicide Bomber for Democracy” will be the first. They are playing a completely different game, for completely different stakes, than we are. That too is scary.
If we accept our war rhetoric for its loftiest ideals, we are in Iraq to give the farmers, accountants, and mothers the freedom to elect a government that reflects their will. But after all the hardships endured by the Iraqi people since we bombed their infrastructure in to the Stone Age and plunked them into the middle of a civil war, how could free elections elect anyone who is anything but rabidly anti-U.S.? Knowing them as we know them now, how could we expect them to vote anything but their faith? We’ll lose that one.
Undoubtedly, if the Iraqi people ever truly get to the polls, we’re going to be blamed for every single minute of hardship endured by them. At least under Saddam they had electricity and weren’t getting shot at on the way to work. For the vast majority of the farmers, accountants, and mothers of Iraq, Saddam was a necessary evil. He wasn’t much better of worse than whatever else they’d endured based on thousands of years of culture and history. He wasn’t much better or worse than the regimes that surrounded him.
At least he was Iraqi. He may have been evil but he was a familiar, comfortable, Muslim evil. He may have been a ruthless, autocratic strongman, but the last few years have gone a long way toward proving that a ruthless, autocratic strongman was probably what it took to hold such a crazy place together.
No matter how benevolent or repressive any given regime is, its excesses still affect only a small proportion of its people. The rest wake up, go to work, raise their families, bury their dead, and pay their taxes to whomever shows up to collect them.
The vast majority of the citizens of any given country are just like you and me: good, honest, hard-working people: farmers, accountants, and mothers. The main difference between America and Iraq is that most of us have never seen a dead body outside of a funeral home. Most of them have by now buried loved ones who got caught in the crossfires of democracy.
Iraq was not in danger of dissolving into a terrorist-breeding, civilian-killing, Holy Jihad of a civil war until we bombed it for democracy. If we were truly there to better the lives of the Iraqi people, we wouldn’t have dropped about a billion of our tax dollar bombs out of the skies on them. How many civilian casualties did we think we could inflict and still unite them and be hailed as a liberator?
We have nothing in common with these people. We don’t share language, faith, culture, values, or geography. From what we see, there has never been any hue and cry from the Muslim world for anything we stand for or have to offer. Democracy is something the Muslim people have no concept of or history with. It seems to be something we want to give them a lot more than they seem to want. As for capitalism, if they wanted that, they’d be building sneaker sweatshops and offering “free rate quotes” by now. And as for the faith thing… What were we thinking!
There are people dying in Iraq every day and none of them are dying for democracy. The Iraqis are dying for God and why we’re dying is a story for another day. But we sure as shootin’ ain’t dying for democracy. At this point, truly free democratic elections would be our worst Imam nightmare.
The Plan is flawed.
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