a slippery slope
islam teaches the killing of the infidel is justified
an islamic state is by definition a terrorist one
That's the moderate way to go about winning a war and it's not particularily working. The BEST way to win a war is to stomp out your enemy. We never would have won WWII the way we're fighting this war. We went in and put the hammer down!
Bush's idea of moderately going about trying to win friends and influence people around extremist in countries who have no respect for human life and want to dominate the world is becoming increasingly dangerous.
What the U.S. needs to do is subjugate Iraq, secure the oil fields,...ban islam, write a constitution for them, put into power people who are on our side and "make" them to live under the law.
A PC "war" where we don't really want to hurt anybody or bruise muzzie feelings is getting us nowhere. Muzzies get their feelings hurt really easily...a mere cartoon will do it.
In time Iraq will get used to the idea of living under a western style "democracy" and learn to like it. Japan did....and it didn't take them very long to get used to the idea.
I agree we should not be hung up on liberal secular democracy. However, the project that includes Iraq and Afghanistan “clears a space” where there is sufficient security and rule of law to foster commerce and prosperity. If you have true sharia law, the stilting rule of the clerics will kill this process.
The Democrats want Americans to fail in the war on terror.
General George Patton understood that very well, as did General Douglas McArthur. I wish we had men like that running the Iraq operation, as well as politicians with their kind of stones.
Values like taqiyah (lying to the Infidel for the advancement of Islam), women as property, justifying the killing of Infidels just because they ARE Infidels...
No thanks, Dinesh! Let them move to an Islamic hellhole and try to "moderate" it.
This is a bit self-contradictory. If traditional Islam is the recruiting pool for radical Islam then what justifies the distinction we're supposed to all pretend to see?
What this means is that America cannot win its battle with radical Islam simply through military means.
You know, I think people need to be corrected when they say this. We could win a battle with radical Islam simply through military means - all we would have to do is kill a large enough number of people (think Hiroshima squared). I don't say this because I wish for that outcome, but because it is a logical possibility, and because our enemies need to be reminded of that possibility.
What D'Souza, and others who say this, really mean to say is "we can't win it through military means, without resorting to mass slaughter that would offend our sensibilities". Quite. But let's not all forget that we do have more offensive options open to us at all times; forgetting this is neither good for us, nor our enemies.
Therefore it is indispensable for America to seek to drive a wedge between traditional Muslims and radical Muslims.
Sounds great. Easier said than done.
So should we permit traditional Muslims to establish Islamic societies under sharia if they wish? Yes, we should. This is the essential meaning of democracy—Muslims must choose their own way.
It's the essential meaning of pure democracy, but few people in the West who use the word "democracy" are referring to pure democracy in the first place. To most in the West, "democracy" really connotes constitutional democratic republicanism. There may be aspects of "allowing sharia" which conflict with constitutional democratic republicanism; however, it's not clear because it's not clear exactly what "sharia" means in this or that implementation.
So, to say "we should allow sharia because that's democratic" is flawed in two ways:
1) no one ever said we wanted to bring pure democracy to Iraq or anywhere else;
2) "sharia" is a vague term that could mean anything on a scale from which meat can be sold in which markets, to beheading accused "rapists" for being in a room alone with a girl, on the say-so of 3 of the girl's relatives. which "sharia" are we supposed to allow in the name of "democracy"? It matters.
That said, D'Souza's basic advice - we should support democracy when it's in our interests to do so - is essentially sound, if vacuous. He's really saying almost nothing that doesn't merit the simple answer "Duh!". For example, I take his advice and apply it to Iraq and I discover that we should do.... precisely what we're doing already.
Fascinating.
Just as democracy has enabled Japan to establish a very different kind of society than France or America, so democracy will enable Muslims to define their own civilization. This is multiculturalism in its truest and best sense, and it deserves American support. Democratization does not mean Westernization.
It did in Japan. D'Souza is being dishonest a bit here with his historical analogy. We didn't "allow" Japan to just develop whatever sort of governance they "wanted" in the name of "democracy".
Nor should America seek to coerce tyrants like Musharaff, Mubarak and the Saudi royal family to become more liberal or secular. If they do, they will become further alienated from their people and become more vulnerable to being overthrown.
That's fine (I basically agree) but now I'm confused about what D'Souza's point was supposed to be. The existence of these regimes, and our "support" for them, is precisely one of the factors touted as being a reason that "they hate us" (tm/2001). If we "don't pressure" them to liberalize - even if we do nothing material to support them - then this can, and will, be painted as "support" for such regimes by terrorist recruiters. And those recruiters will get recruits on that basis.
Didn't D'Souza promise to tell us how to drive a wedge between recruiters and their potential recruits? Here he's saying: let's not pressure tyrannies to liberalize if, for example, we're allied with them. But our alliance with such tyrannies is a recruiting tool by itself. So this won't work, unless D'Souza is going to take it a step further and advocate the isolationist approach, that we need to distance ourselves from such regimes entirely. I sense that he's trying to point us in that direction, without coming out and admitting it.
Iraq is America’s best chance to promote traditional Islam as a viable alternative to radical Islam.
Hmm. It may also be demonstrating the wrongheadedness of the thinking that "promoting traditional Islam" can, or ought, to be one of our goals. It's not as if there's a huge amount of evidence, as of yet, that huge numbers of Muslims like what we're doing in Iraq because it's supporting neither secular tyranny nor religious tyranny. But we'll see, I suppose.
An inclusion of Turkey is prominently missing from this article.