Saturday, May 6, 2006
We need to stay in Iraq, and Afghanistan for a very long time
It will take blood, tears and sweat to change fascism at the source but we have no choice
by Ferdinand III
Freedom is a more important ideal than the chatter about democracy. I am not a big fan of mass democracy. Mass democracy produced Hitler; Chavez; and Euro-Canadian socialism. Freedom gets lost in the mad rush to tax; extort; coerce and divide benefits and monies by groups; sex; minority status and class rank. Democracy in the abstract means little. More important is the pursuit of life and liberty – protected by the institutions of law, policing, and Constitutions and suffused with cultural virtue and not values. Values are political tools to buy votes [vote for me I stand for the value of socialized health care!]. Virtues imbue a society’s attitudes; education; arts and politics. It is the glue of the social contract that elevates a nation and forms character. To build the above in Islamic, fascist infested states, with a pagan ideology as its guide will take not months, but many, many years. Yet we have no alterative but to stay and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan.
Consider our own history. For centuries, only Great Britain and its former colonies--Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States--could be called democratic. And even in those countries, the struggle to acquire both liberal and democratic values was a long and hard one. It took half a millennium before England moved from the signing of Magna Carta [1215] to the achievement of parliamentary supremacy [1661]. The United States was a British colony for two centuries, and less than a century after its independence was split by a frightful civil war – in part to end the pernicious practice of slavery. Remember this: only capitalism and the Western democracies ever stopped the practice of slavery. If you regard Europe, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Eastern Europe became free only in the mid to late 20th century. In Latin America [outside of Chile], Russia, Africa and China, democratic-liberalism is largely unknown.
The Islamic-Arab world is a fascist-pagan mess. Even the so-called ‘Arab democracies’ of Lebanon; Turkey and Morocco are chimeras. Lebanon is a vassal state of fascist Syria. Turkey is an Islamic nation where the military is the power broker and human rights abuses legion. Morocco is a Western friendly but family run state with limited checks and balances and is hardly a free democratic liberal polity. Elsewhere in the Arab-Islamic world Western methods of revolutions of the mind and spirit have made no impact. Except for selective crony and state managed capitalism little from the West makes an imprint on the fascist-paganisms that constitute the Arab-Islamic world. From such a pit of medievalism we must rebuild the failed states of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The surest path to rebuilding failed fascist states is to detach the state from the ideology. In Iraq the Constitution clearly addresses this issue by making secular laws predominant even over Sharia. The same is in force in Afghanistan. This is an imperfect but necessary first step. Separating the ideology from politics was the key to the development of liberal nations in the West. For example the Protestant Reformation helped set the stage for religious and even political freedom in the West. Can something like that occur in Muslim nations? That is highly doubtful. There is neither a papacy nor a priesthood against which to rebel; nor are mosques comparable to churches in the Catholic sense of dispensing sacraments. There will never be a Muslim Martin Luther or a hereditary Islamic ruler who, by embracing a rival faith, can thereby create an opportunity for lay rule. So the only way to change Islamic nations is from without through military force and the separation by an outside power of church and state. That much should be obvious.
In Iraq Great Britain tried twice to bring strong central government to Iraq, and both times it failed. In the 1920's the British army occupied the country; when that became too costly, the British withdrew, leaving behind a constitution that empowered King Faisal. When Faisal died and his son could not manage affairs, the country splintered along ethnic lines. Civil war erupted, with military officers emerging as heroes. By the 1930's, the army controlled politics. At the beginning of World War II the British Army once again occupied Iraq, in order to prevent Baghdad from forming an alliance with Hitler that would have jeopardized access to Iraqi oil. Britain also wanted to prevent the creation of an anti-British barrier between Egypt and India. This time the army stayed for seven years, ending with a failed effort to create a successful constitutional monarchy. As soon as its troops departed, the Iraqi army took power and initiated a reign that did not end until the American invasion of 2003.
Here is the important lesson. Scholars at the RAND corporation have studied America's efforts at nation-building in the last half-century, ranging from successes [Germany and Japan] to failures [Haiti and Somalia, both of which were hampered by UN control] and to all the uncertain outcomes in-between [Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, all of which have UN involvement]. One of the most important things we should have learned, they conclude, is that "while staying long does not guarantee success, leaving early ensures failure." In order for freedom to have a chance of developing in Iraq, or in Afghanistan we must be patient as well as strong. It would be an unmitigated disaster to leave too early. Our Iraqi supporters would be crushed, terrorists and Islamic radicals would have won, and our own struggle and sacrifices would have been for naught.
It is obvious that Western liberalism and democratic processes would recreate a sad, sorry sick area of the world. Institutional building as our own history tells us, takes a long time and yet what other policy choice presents itself to fight terror and reform Islam? Let’s hope the dimwits in the media, in political opposition and on college campuses don’t destroy an overdue foreign policy initiative and we stay in Iraq and Afghanistan if need be for 20 years or more.