Eleven Years of the Same Mistake

These 11 years of delusion, which have culminated in the Obama administration’s empowering a jihadist regime in the strategically important and most populous Arab state in the Middle East, are the consequence of our continuing failure to understand accurately the motivating religious ideology of the jihadists. We have perpetuated the empirically dubious claim that Muslims like the Ayatollah Khomeini or Osama bin Laden, revered as heroes across the Muslim world, had “highjacked” the noble “religion of peace.” Once again Thomas Friedman provides the best example of this sort of thinking: “Muslims have got to understand that a death cult has taken root in the bosom of their religion, feeding off it like a cancerous tumor.” Friedman’s simile, however, is false. Jihadism is not a diseased “tumor” in Islam, but a vital organ. Jihad is a core Islamic belief copiously documented in the Koran, hadiths, and theological writings, a belief that fueled Islam’s great conquests from the Atlantic to China.

” . .failure to understand accurately . . .”

-— compounded by a bone-headed refusal to acknowledge the fundmental nature of the enemies’ mind set.

One of the relatively few errors of Pres. George W. was his prompt and needless labelling of Islam as a “religion of peace.” Fortunately, a great many Muslims seem of a mind to disregard the demands of their revered “Book” that all those that refuse to submit to Allah must die.

Indeed, reactions to these events reprised the unexamined assumptions about democracy as the default global political order that had animated the Bush Doctrine... Senator Joseph Lieberman’s article in Foreign Affairs summarized the Arab Spring as a struggle for “democracy, dignity, economic opportunity, and involvement in the modern world.” And President Obama claimed that Egyptians revolted against Hosni Mubarak because they wanted “a government that is fair and just and responsive.” All ignored the numerous polls and evidence that critical masses of rebels wanted to create Islamic regimes founded on shari’a law.

Darn it. Bruce is falling into the old trap of conflating democracy with a liberal (in the original sense of free) civil society, assuming the two are the same. They're not.

Democracy is seven wolves and six sheep voting on what to have for dinner. A liberal civil society is the recognition that the sheep have inalienable rights the wolves, despite their being a majority, do not have the right to take away.

A free civil society can exist, at least to some extent, under a wide variety of governmental types. Elections are not an essential component. Free civil society is about how the government treats its citizens, not about how the government is chosen.

Democracy, OTOH, is simply about how the government is chosen, not about what the government does when it is in power. There is no reason at all why it must coincide with a free civil society.

Iran has a sort-of democracy, with frequent and often somewhat free elections. Our own South, under Jim Crow, had regular elections in which the majority freely chose to oppress the minority, though to be fair the minority was often prevented from participating in those elections.

Egypt apparently held reasonably fair elections, and the foes of a free civil society won with 3 out of 4 votes.

To Bruce and most commentators this means Egyptian voters are rejecting democracy. It means no such thing, what it means is that they reject a free civil society. That IS their democratic choice.

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