THE EBB AND FLOW OF GLOBAL LIBERTY
Novak, Michael
24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 S WE APPROACH THE END OF THIS SERIES on the meaning of liberty, three large questions loom before us. In mid-2007, what can we learn from the ironies and...
...Democracy at all times is easier to destroy than to build...
...For these foes of democracy, no outrage is too terrible...
...Sometimes that is only the best good achievable at this time, a rather chastened sense of the good, but a noble and mature one...
...1. The Case of Iraq TOPPLING THE REGIME of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad in 2003 required only three swift weeks of rapid armored attacks by Coalition forces...
...For certain, the enemy counterattack upon it will be stoked by desperate ferocity...
...Meanwhile, facing China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea...
...it will destroy them indiscriminately if that is in its temporary military interest...
...Not only for the sake of all the inhabitants of that region, but also for the safety of the rest of us, replacing in the hearts of the Arab young the jihadist passion for destruction, with a new passion for human dignity and prosperity, is the single glimmering hope of the entire region...
...3. The End of the Democracy Project...
...As Fouad Ajami writes: It was not naïve idealism, it should be recalled, that gave birth to Bush’s diplomacy of freedom...
...Democracy is a morally worthy goal, but it is neither an inflexible moral imperative nor a procrustean bed...
...Almost immediately the difference began to be visible...
...But visible enough are homicidal bombings in marketplaces, nightly kidnappings, murders, assassinations, and other mayhem that almost all find weightily depressing, and some find unendurable...
...Some political experts had long argued that not all peoples are “ready” for democracy...
...On its eastern border lies its ancient antagonist, Iran, in our time the great paymaster and clearinghouse of worldwide terrorism...
...Lawlessness broke out, and a combination of al Qaeda and Baathist raiding parties caused as much mayhem as they could...
...Further experience is now suggesting favorable adjustments to that balance...
...Its more moderate focus is simply the re-establishment of the ancient Caliphate, that is, unified Muslim rule from Spain and Portugal on both sides of the Mediterranean, and on through the whole Middle East toward the great centers of Muslim population in Indonesia, Bangladesh, India, and the Philippines...
...The circumstances of Iraq, of course, are in many ways unique...
...Second, almost 80 command centers had to be established in 80 different Baghdad neighborhoods, so that Iraqi and U.S...
...their stability had come at America’s expense, as the scapegoating and the anti-Americanism had poisoned Arab political life...
...The constitution as drafted tried to strike a balance between continuing in some form the historical influence of Islam upon the state, while recognizing the two-sided principle that the JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 25 THE EBB AND FLOW OF GLOBAL LIBERTY Mosque does not control the state, nor the state the Mosque...
...Dhimmitude is a system of vassalage and systematic humiliation, by which the subservient (unworthy of becoming Muslims) make annual payment of special taxes, to subsidize their own “protection” by the Caliphate...
...M ANY HIGHLY ACTIVE POLITICAL PARTIES are at work among Iraqis...
...5. The Greatest Threat to Liberty on Earth I SLAMIC TERRORISM IS A NEW FORM of political totalitarianism...
...This one stubborn fact suggests that a substantial majority of Iraqi adults prefer to live under the rule of law, under limited government, and under governments formed and altered by their own consent...
...Nonetheless, the steady stream of terrorist attacks within Iraq, paid for and fomented by her nearest neighbors Syria and above all Iran, may in the end prevent Iraq’s democratic project from being brought to success...
...They have purposefully blinded themselves...
...Vladimir Putin has quietly and steadily built up a new police state in Russia, an autocracy of the preCommunist model, but with all the nefarious cruelties mastered by the Soviet KGB during the 74-year life of the Soviet Union after 1917...
...Third, what today is the greatest threat to liberty on earth...
...All these developments are crucial parts of “the democracy project...
...That diplomacy issued out of a reading of the Arab-Muslim political condition and of America’s vulnerability to the disorder of Arab politics...
...rorists across the Iranian and Syrian borders...
...The foreshadowing of some future sort of federalism is also discernible in the constitution, with many details left to be worked out...
...Thus, it was not naïve idealism that led Bush to call attention to his North Star up in the foreign policy firmament...
...JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 THE EBB AND FLOW OF GLOBAL LIBERTY Despite Bush’s modest framing of the democracy During 2006, the underlying issue of Iraq society beproject in Iraq, others have been saying from the very gan to fly apart, even though considerable progress first that the United States has overreached...
...Against tremendous ridicule, abuse, and sheer visceral hatred from his political foes and significant elements in the press, the President had to remain as hard and firm as a diamondtipped drill...
...Another description of the same facts is that the President has been uncommonly brave and maintained uncommon inner equanimity...
...The symbolic tremors of the trial of Saddam Hussein are likely to be felt in the region for many decades to come...
...This band of intimidators does not even have to create chaos, only the appearance of chaos...
...We may even be witnessing a kind of “democracy demotion”: After two decades of the steady expansion of democracy-building programs around the world, a growing number of governments are starting to crack down on such activities within their borders.… Some… have begun to publicly denounce western democracy assistance as illegitimate political meddling...
...More recent polls by the BBC/ABC report that, after the ruthless violence of the insurgency during 2006, only 43 percent of Iraqis thought their lives were better than before the war...
...Although it masks itself in the trappings of a selectively primitive form of Islam, this movement is, once its self-deceiving mask is torn away, primarily political...
...When the insurgency was no longer able to meet the U.S...
...The most bitter of them assert that President Bush is living in a world of delusions and lies...
...As Christopher Orlet tartly observed on this magazine’s website last November, “There is more to liberal democracy than voting one day and slitting your neighbor’s throat the next...
...Only then, perhaps, does the search for government by mutual consent arise, through mutual respect for the natural rights of all, and the search together for institutions to secure those rights...
...Since June 2003, these associations have built and repaired 830 schools and 337 roads, launched 298 healthrelated initiatives, and improved 292 electric utility centers...
...If there were no WMD in Iraq, it was the responsibility of the government of Iraq to do what at least a dozen other nations under a similar obligation had done, viz., to prove what had happened to them...
...A FTER THE HIGH POINTS in 2004-2005—the massive “purple finger” elections, and the low point of al Qaeda efficacy and morale—the foreign foes of democracy determined with impassioned ruthlessness that they must launch one last surge...
...Against tremendous ridicule, abuse, Without any physical security for simple daily living, many Iraqis began to feel the cold fear that and sheer visceral hatred from his Saddam Hussein had years ago incited in them...
...Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki promised twice that many brigades of the Iraqi Army, each of them at more than 90 percent of full strength—and he delivered...
...It was the salience of the new orientation of the region toward democracy and economic opportunity, not the important but secondary concern with WMD, that distinguished the President’s approach...
...Yet not to get started on the long march toward democracy in the Arab Middle East is to abandon to despair and misery a very large part of the world...
...He adds: American power and the very force of what had played out in the Arab-Islamic lands in recent years have rendered the old order hollow, mocked its claims to primacy and coherence...
...Finally, the constitution, perhaps properly, did not settle the longstanding rivalrous claims of the Thus, one condition of the success of the democratic project in Iraq had not been met by the end of 2006: the enforcement of security and good order in urban centers, beginning with the capital...
...By the time this article appears, readers should be able to judge for themselves how much progress has been made toward these three goals...
...or it is shown to be a paper tiger...
...A falling camel attracts many knives...
...The line about marmalade convinced me, and stuck in my memory...
...24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 S WE APPROACH THE END OF THIS SERIES on the meaning of liberty, three large questions loom before us...
...But the truth is not on their side...
...For myself, I remember well President Bush’s formal address at the annual banquet of the American Enterprise Institute early in February 2003, just six weeks before the war was launched...
...Democracy is a humble and imperfect system, driven by a morality of the imperfect and the partial, but one that presses onward toward the good...
...Democracy has many faults and many limits, and its success requires the fulfillment of many preconditions...
...Who in the future would want to ally themselves with the United States in a project to build democracy...
...The constitution, as adopted, was not perfect in the eyes of outside observers, yet it was difficult for anyone to point to a better one among the Muslim peoples in the Middle East...
...Next, has the extension of the Lincolnian policy that President Bush announced in his Second Inaugural now proved to be impractical—the positive promotion around the entire world of “government of the people, by the people, for the people...
...We must anticipate it, and beat it back, and press on to accomplish the three main goals that General Petraeus has set forth...
...responsibility to account for that missing anthrax lay with the government of Iraq...
...Others say the project is outside the United States’ own national interest...
...At one point, Lincoln even turned Southern states against Stephen Douglas on the ground that if States could “choose” slavery they could also choose not to heed the Fugitive Slave Act...
...The regime of organized torture and arbitrary violence practiced for decades by Saddam Hussein and his sons has left behind bitter memories that few who are not Sunni would like to relive...
...So in late 2006, he was not yet ready to give up his “grand design...
...All her arises the most dreadful force the Western world has faced since 630 A.D., when Moham-have become enemies of democracy...
...but in Italy, Germany, and France...
...They may wallow in vitriol, hatred, and contempt...
...In order that men remain civilized or become so, the art of associating must be developed and perfected among them...
...Besides, by the terms of the ceasefire of 1991, which was still the controlling legal authority, the It may be that the American and Coalition surge of 2007—the surge which ought to have been launched early in 2006, or even earlier—will be too little, too late...
...The point is not to contrast the degree of violence in Iraq with that in France, but to note the difference in the press’s fascination with the two...
...In the more extreme version of this vision, some Iranians already imagine the subjugation of all Europe to Islam, both by demographic migration, superior fertility, and skillful intimidation...
...Even he himself cannot cling to this principle in all cases...
...He added in a memorable phrase: “Mustard gas is not like marmalade,” it was not simply misplaced, some one has to know where it is, or what had happened to it...
...The beginnings of power sharing were put in place, representing all three groups, and are no doubt subject to adjustment as experience will point out...
...A weaker administration than Bush’s—one merely following polls—might have seized the opportunity for “cutting losses” and left...
...Democracy requires a politics of compromise—a step forward from which nobody gains everything he wants, but everybody gains at least a little—and a politics respectful of irony, tragedy, the law of unintended consequences, and the principle that the perfect is the enemy of the good...
...Outsiders, they said, may be able to lead peoples unprepared for democracy into the structures of democracy, but if the latter choose to relapse into mutual destruction, that is their own dreadful choice...
...Add to these Hugo Chavez, the latest caudillo in a long Latin American tradition, boastfully deploying Venezuela’s oil wealth to grow steadily in his capacity to intimidate, subvert, and inflame weak neighboring governments...
...In Hungary, too, on October 23, 2006, evoking awful scenes from the worst Soviet years, police ringed the main city square and bloodily cudgeled unsuspecting crowds...
...While 41 percent believed Iraq is heading in the right direction, only 13 percent believed withdrawal of Coalition forces from Iraq should be the top priority to turn the country in the right direction...
...Two trucks would not be so hard to hide...
...Negatively, the jihadist ambition is to reduce to impotence the civilization of freedom...
...moting democracy universally, the United States has attempted something far beyond its powers...
...The new constitution also sharpened the differentiation between the separate roles of the clergy and the state authorities...
...Ironically, each Coalition success was met by a new form of opposition...
...New automobiles and other large-scale consumer goods have begun to be visible in stores, on the streets and in homes...
...I calculated that 8,500 liters of anthrax could be loaded into not much more than two large trailer trucks...
...This one fact does not prove that this majority has the skills, the leadership, the organization, and even the ferocity to fight for the durability of what they have begun...
...Very few were seen on American television (certainly not every day, not even once a month...
...There is an independent judiciary, human and civil rights, freedom of press, speech, etc., tolerance and pluralism, majority rule with rights for minorities, and most importantly there is basic local governance and security...
...Only in that way could 25 tribal sheiks of the area be persuaded to side with the new Iraq democracy, and against the murderous invaders...
...What we must not lose sight of is the strategic vision: to ing to the testimony of one who became a youthful terrorist, then awakened, this political-military movement feeds upon the hot sexual frustrations of its young males, taught that it is wrong even to masturbate, while daily tantalized by visions of 70 lusty virgins Democracy has many faults and many limits, and its success requires the fulfillment of many preconditions...
...This is the point made by Fouad Ajami in November of 2006: Iraq and the struggle for a decent polity in it had been America’s way of trying to extirpate these Arab troubles...
...They carefully stage their most demonstrative accounts where the security-conscious Western media can film it, day by day...
...The moment our soldiers flushed Saddam Hussein from his filthy spider hole, we had put on display the farce and swindle of Arab authority...
...According to the new coalition commander, General Petraeus, the Army’s best expert on counterinsurgency warfare, three early goals had to be met: The Mahdi Army of Sayyid Al Sadr in Sadr City had to MICHAEL NOVAK be appropriately disarmed...
...MICHAEL NOVAK Worse still, Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept, Mr...
...That failure clouded the larger success...
...Thousands of civilians were tortured and their dead bodies left out on the streets...
...They’re BACK...
...As the al Qaeda leader of a year ago said—he is now dead—this is a defining moment of glory or of ignominious defeat...
...Suppose, however, that by early this summer, armies of Shia and Sunni, numbering perhaps hundreds or even thousands in each camp, clash in barbaric battles in several cities at once, routing and killing hundreds of civilians in open warfare...
...F OR THESE REASONS, those who blindly shout that the President “lied” are themselves, by knowledge I heard with my own ears, plain and unvarnished liars...
...But personally, I was convinced about the existence of WMD in Iraq by the January testimony of Hans Blix, the UN inspector of the Iraqi arms programs, to the effect that he knew for certain that 8,500 liters of anthrax known to be in the earlier possession of the Iraqi government now were “unaccounted for...
...Will its passing toll the knell for all the slow but steady moves toward democracy around the world...
...Furthermore, the practice of polygamy assures that there will never be enough Muslim women to go around...
...that would vaporize Israel, and also precipitate the end of the world, at which will return the long-absent Mahdi, sword aflame...
...When Saddam’s army was defeated, the foreign-fed insurgency erupted...
...In October of last year, Richard Nadler, writing on National Review Online, offered a helpful comparison of the death toll under Saddam to the number of Iraqis tragically killed by insurgents after the fall of his regime: “Scholars of civilian mortality place the daily Saddam-era toll of regime-caused deaths between 75 and 125 citizens per day—roughly double-to-triple the average post-war mortality reported by the body-counters...
...political foes and significant elements The Americans had always known that no one but the Iraqis could make democracy work in the press, the President had to remain as hard and firm as a diamond-tipped drill...
...Meanwhile, a few powerful Middle Eastern states are in remarkable secrecy stimulating, supporting, and prompting terrorist cells (and even small armies) in a drip-drip of violent attacks upon the civilization of freedom...
...26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 ancient, singularly beautiful, and long-cherished mosques, rejoiced in the assassination of clergymen and worshipers on holy days, and invented other schemes of barbaric murder...
...It is also to leave untouched a sanguinary vortex of destructive passions, at the central crossroads of the three great land masses on this planet: Asia, Africa, and Europe...
...so far, I mean, as we are now at liberty to do it.… Taking care always to keep ourselves by suitable establishments on a respectable defensive posture, we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies...
...Yet all seemed to have done their duty...
...Although California is a state comparable to Iraq in area and population, the media choices of “multi-cultural Angelos” are less varied than those in Baghdad today...
...And yet in free Iraq in only three years there were 54 TV stations, 114 commercial radio stations, and 268 independent print organs...
...These, in turn, join up with indigenous insurgents to prevent democracy...
...Thus did Lincoln use a seemingly pro-slave argument for his long-term goal, defeating slavery...
...Yet not to get started on the long march toward democracy in the Arab Middle East is to abandon to despair and misery a very large part of the world...
...med began the conquest of the world in the name of Allah...
...The most daring jihadists claim that they will reduce much of Europe to vassalage by the year 2030, through the threefold pressure of continued immigration, demographic fertility, and the region-wide radicalization of young males...
...Meanwhile, current fears of violence reduce many in urban centers to uncertainty and fear, to a degree not long sustainable...
...Whence would come allies, at least in those places in which authorities fiercely reject the very idea of democracy...
...The difficulty of the task is no excuse for avoiding it.… Some have questioned the global appeal of liberty—though at this time in history, four decades defined by the swiftest advance of freedom ever seen, is an odd time for doubt.… We do not accept the existence of permanent tyranny because we do not accept the possibility of permanent slavery...
...Further, at least four nuclear powers are today exercising brazen moves to divert, distract, dissipate, and eventually undermine American military power—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea...
...Further, accordlim lands have enormous new wealth from oil reserves, and more lately nuclear weapons...
...One hears some speak of subduing nations as far to the north as JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 THE EBB AND FLOW OF GLOBAL LIBERTY the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden by the year case, we would all agree that precision demands 2030...
...The lawlessness, ruthlessness, and naked ambition demonstrated over these years by the wicked rebel Al Sadr, who once gathered round himself an army of more than 4,000, his “Mahdi Army,” all by himself threatens so to alarm its Sunni foes as to thrust the entire Baghdad region into civil war...
...Included in the dream of this Caliphate is the subjugation, humiliation, and taxation of all who refuse to submit to Allah, in the secondary status known as dhimmitude...
...Although many predicted in advance that the following actions could not be successfully completed, the people of Iraq were able, even under threat of death, to vote in very large numbers both for a temporary government tasked with preparing a constitution for public ratification...
...In any case, the situation in Iraq in late 2006 raised many questions about the practicality of promoting democracy...
...Democracy is also a fragile project...
...And, by The police had been ordered to prevent extension, cannot work, where there are other any large gathering on the 50th strong anti-democratic forces willing to be anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising ruthless...
...mise, a loyal opposition, habits of cooperation, accommodation, and peaceable ways—made the transition from democratic voting to democratic governance uncertain, even stormy...
...Not everywhere, but in a few key places, the anti-democratic thugs are back...
...In that 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 place in which democracy seems to be going backwards...
...Further, they are helping to advance civic education, women’s advocacy, anti-corruption, and human rights...
...A NUMBER OF MY FRIENDS OPPOSE, and have from the beginning opposed, the “fantasy” of promoting democracy in Iraq...
...They’re BACK...
...A June 2006 survey conducted by the International Republican Institute revealed that nearly half of Iraqis believed the future of Iraq would be better in a year...
...The aim of this surge was to incite sectarian reprisals...
...They sometimes become passionate in insisting that he “lied” about weapons of mass destruction, and since these WMD were the number one reason given for the war, the whole adventure is based upon this lie...
...Friends write to me that he has been “supercilious, arrogant, unwilling to listen to others, obdurate, misled and stupid...
...I NDEED, PRECISELY AT THIS POINT another grievously wounding criticism is launched against President Bush’s “democracy promotion...
...Army or Marines head-to-head in the field, even at platoon-size, suicide bombers and roadside devices multiplied...
...These were the two most neuralgic points of civilian insecurity and fear...
...Democracy has a long way to go in Iraq...
...Yet even in Washington’s time, American vessels were obliged to go to war to protect distant shipping lanes...
...Central among these sponsors of terrorism is oil-rich Iran, newly wealthy heir of the ancient Persian continued on page 34 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007...
...In a fit of absent-mindedness… western Europe acquired not a colonial empire but something of an internal colony, whose numbers are roughly equivalent to the population of Syria...
...In addition, the Iraqi inexperience in many preconditions of actual democracy—inexperience in democratic comproA by Michael Novak The Ebb and Flow of Global Liberty The Ebb and Flow of Global Liberty There is no way around it: America’s efforts to promote freedom in the world and protect her own security from Islamic extremism are ultimately dependent on success in Iraq...
...Either al Qaeda succeeds in forcing the Americans to depart from the scene in humiliation...
...one-quarter believed conditions would be the same—neither worse nor better...
...Wealthy, ambitious, and worked up to a high pitch of ferocity, Iran is motivated by a far more bloody vision than the building of democracy...
...Where there is no respect for the rule of law, violence overwhelms it—until all parties recognize that the “war of all against all” means in the end their own death, too...
...Third, the back of the foreign occupation of Anbar Province by al Qaeda had to be snapped...
...They should expect a massive al Qaeda counterattack, however, for now is the moment of truth...
...He ordered another five brigades of crack combat troops to Baghdad—with some elements slated for Anbar Province...
...At times alone, he pressed ahead...
...To measure the dimensions of the tragedy that would ensue from open civil war would not be easy— but all of this humiliating and bloody unwinding of a once-noble experiment in democracy would be broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera television...
...The early defection of Qaddafi, civil unrest in Iran (especially among the young), and the “cedar revolution” in Lebanon made his course seem plausible...
...His aim was to replace a politics of bombs, assassinations, and secret police with a politics of public argument, civil persuasion, and economic opportunity...
...The ruthless assassination of a cabinet minister in the new democracy of Lebanon on November 21, 2006, flashed yet another signal in the gathering global darkness...
...More than 4,000 nongovernmental associations, both international and indigenous, have sprung into life...
...And it succeeded, inasmuch as Shia death squads very soon began to do to Sunnis what Sunnis were doing to them (most of the foreign terrorists, like Saddam’s political musclemen, are Sunnis...
...Few of us know that in actuality, there were on average 112 cars a day torched across France in 2006...
...One of the most grievous problems faced by any scheme of federalism, however, is the fact that the capital city, Baghdad, is heavily intermixed with Shia and Sunni, and many large cities (Kirkuk, Mosul, and others) also have mixed populations...
...Eighty percent of Iraqis were confident in the Iraqi government announced by Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki...
...Bush throughout his political career in Texas Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance, and Claire and as President of the nation has many times shown Berlinski’s sensitive and frightening report, Menace his respect for doing what is possible, pressing forin Europe, fearlessly recount from their own personal experiences the intensity, irrationality, and ferocity of the loathing for America among Europe’s high-brow elites...
...It has no respect for Muslim mosques, or prayer services, or imams, or worshipers...
...Even a few determined men can undermine it...
...It is to be understood as a long-term goal, a lodestar, a GPS towards which one can look to find one’s way in darkness and storm...
...Nonetheless, the main stress of the President’s long policy address to the AEI that February was not on WMD, but on the need to turn the young people of the Middle East in a new direction, away from repression and submission under draconian dictatorships, in favor of new vital civil societies under democratic regimes committed to human rights and region-wide prosperity...
...No doubt the conduct of the trial was ragged (not least because of the antics of the defense), and no doubt immense fortitude was required on the part of all the principals in the case—defense attorneys and prosecutors, as well as the judges...
...Every day at dusk its demise is predicted on the morrow...
...Among the laws that rule human societies there is one that seems more precise and clearer than all the others...
...This task is rendered harder by the steady invasion of hostile terOne of the most grievous problems faced by any scheme of federalism, however, is the fact that the capital city, Baghdad, is heavily intermixed with Shia and Sunni...
...In a yet more extreme vision, the president of speaking of civil war in Iraq...
...And not just once, but three times during three long years of danger-fraught elections, ever greater numbers turned out to vote...
...It is true that he said about WMD what President Clinton also had said, as well as Senator Clinton, former Vice President Gore, and a virtually unbroken chain of others in a position to know, not only in the U.S...
...But much of this work had been disrupted by the end of 2006...
...More daringly, therefore, its terrorist visionaries now imagine reducing Europe, Britain, and North America to submission to Allah, either through forced conversion, or through the imposition of dhimmitude...
...Americans could give them an opportunity, but it could not force Iraqis to fight for democracy and to make democracy work for the common good of all...
...It may be that the American and Coalition surge of 2007—the surge which ought to have been launched early in 2006, or even earlier—will be too little, too JUNE 2007 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 THE EBB AND FLOW OF GLOBAL LIBERTY late...
...but there is nothing harder than the apprenticeship of freedom.… Freedom… is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know its benefits...
...Armed bands turned, as if by traditional habit, to violence, slaughter, revenge, and bitter rivalry...
...Since the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein in the summer of 2003, four years ago, the accomplishments of the democracy project in Iraq, in that brief span, are many and admirable...
...In 2003 the question was, what has happened to them...
...One really does sense that during the next 30 years, the United States might be standing (as Mark Steyn At least four nuclear powers are today exercising brazen moves to divert, distract, dissipate, and eventually undermine American military power— puts it) pretty much alone...
...T HE SALIENT FACT in Iraq since March 2003 is that its people did not reject democracy, but on the contrary, acted often heroically in braving threats of violence against them by streaming openly to their voting stations...
...30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2007 in Iraq...
...What renders a people a people, and not merely a mob, is a rich, thick, and variegated social life prior to and more basic than the institutions of the state...
...The law of association, Tocqueville wrote, is the first law of democracy...
...Democracy is the contrary of the utopian...
...4. Is the New Strategy Too Late...
...Iraq had used WMD before 1991, and an inventory of all it possessed at that time had been in large measure completed not long afterwards...
...One has not yet seen the formation of whole rival armies in the field, truly engaged in open civil war...
...Positively, its ambition is to construct a new Caliphate from Spain to the Sea of Arabia, and from thence eastward to the teeming Muslim lands of Asia...
...As critics of the Iraq strategy such as of 1956...
...beckoning them into martyrdom...
...This course is what al Qaeda and its allies passionately desired the Americans to take...
...As compared with a century ago, the Muslaunch a free and stable new democracy in the Arab Middle East, as a harbinger of a new flowering of democracy in the least democratic part of the world...
...Unhappily, later outbreaks of intimidation against non-Muslim believers caused far too many of the latter to lose heart and flee for their own safety...
...MICHAEL NOVAK In democratic countries the science of association is the mother science...
...Does such an outbreak of Iran has publicly ranted about a nuclear holocaust civil war mean that the American policy of “democracy promotion” did not work in Iraq...
...ward steadily but taking detours and setbacks as circumstances necessitate...
...To temporize, to take a step back in order to go forward at a more propitious time, to push as much as the traffic will bear—this was precisely Abraham Lincoln’s tactic in regard to slavery...
...They bombed several of the most revered Shia mosques, assassinated the most effective local Shia leaders, and wreaked horrific bloodshed in universities, markets, and official buildings around the country, but especially in Baghdad and in Anbar Province to its west...
...This political movement is fed by fierce resentment of what its members perceive to have been five centuries of subservience to morally inferior Western societies, whose sole temporary advantage is superior technology...
...Nonetheless, many informal institutions and active associations of civil society have blossomed in Iraq, as they had not during the Saddam decades...
...Under Saddam, independent media were banned...
...In not many of the countries neighboring Iraq is there yet a comparable rule of law, under whose tribunals even former heads of state may stand trial...
...They have stooped to the heavy bombing of three main ethno-religious groupings of the Iraqi nation—the majority Shia who predominate in the South, the minority Sunni who predominate to the West, and the Kurds of the North...
...The ruling regimes in the region had displaced their troubles onto America...
...The police had been ordered to prevent any large gathering on the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956...
...The American project in Iraq has been unimaginably difficult, its heartbreak a grim daily affair...
...The new constitution at least opened up the path toward greater experimentation in protecting the free exercise of religion by Muslims and non-Muslims alike...
...the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one...
...Instead of surrendering, he decided to match the surge of the jihadist haters of democracy with a welldesigned surge of his own...
...See Mark Steyn’s indispensable America Alone...
...It seems, rather, that this new growth is ripe for the grim scythe of doom...
...If, then, one weighs the world balance of power at the present moment, at least on the face of things, “democracy promotion” is not in the ascendancy...
...he himself has had to turn a blind eye toward non-democratic regimes such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Putin’s Russia, and many others...
...President Bush, however, had his sights set on making democracy work in at least one volatile nation in the incendiary Middle East, knowing that the example of one would irrepressibly spread to others...
...Not Thomas Carothers write, Iraq is not the only everywhere, but in a few key places, the anti-democratic thugs are back...
...forces could secure these neighborhoods by living there, and offer medical services and other basic assistance to their people...
...As the world learned in 1933, the mere fact of an electoral process does not prevent a dictator from entering upon and exercising power...
...It may have been prophetic that America’s first foreign war was against Muslim renegades...
...In mid-2007, what can we learn from the ironies and the tragedies of the Coalition effort to build democracy in Iraq...
...Furthermore, by overcoming immense obstacles, the successful trial of Saddam Hussein and the bringing down of a guilty verdict whose decreed punishment was death by hanging, the court system of Iraq struck the clearest possible signal of equal justice before the law, for the mighty as well as the lowly...
...Protecting freedom for all citizens—the firm foundation of democracy—is a long-term project, Tocqueville reminds us: There is nothing more prolific in marvels than the art of being free...
...It may even be the most decisive defeat of the first three decades of this century...
...When these began to subside, al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi tried to ignite a spiral of mutual retaliation between Shiites and Sunni, bombing the most sacred mosques and prompting massacres of 200 Shia here, 150 Sunni there...
...But it is to be doubted that Bush has a lesser sense of the irony and tragedy of history, or less respect for the art of the possible, than his perfectionist critics...
...As George Washington put it in his Farewell Address (at a time just before the war against the Barbary Pirates), the United States should avoid foreign entanglements: It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world...
...But the impulse that gave rise to the war was shrewd and justified...
...They see growing signs that internal self-deception and moral decadence are slowly reducing the West to muddle-headedness and impotence...
...Will it again reduce political philosophy to morally blind realism...
...2. Measuring Failures and Successes L ET US COUNT UP, FIRST, THE SUCCESSES of the democratic project in Iraq...
...That is why the downward slide during 2006 made many Americans lose heart...
...The death toll of the past two months, unusually bloody in four of Iraq’s 14 provinces, has matched this range...
...In Bush’s mind, the principle of democracy promotion is not to be taken as a one-sizefits all, all-nations-at-once, operational handbook...
...His aim seemed to be less to enable one faction to dominate the other than to destroy any hope of democratic governance under a rule of law...
...One feels again the lights blinking out, one by one, all around the world, such as one began to feel in the late-1930s...
...Soon afterwards, immense new difficulties welled up from the deep...
...It was not the responsibility of the nations of the United Nations to go look for it...
...Alas, the record shows that a small determined band of some 12,000 warriors can wreak enough destruction and disruption to intimidate the rest of the population, and to induce in an aborning democracy a partial-birth abortion...
...The infliction of constant harassment of one group upon the other, often through rival death squads employing torture and mutilation, seems aimed at inducing mass migration, or perhaps simply submission to the terror masters...
...Robert Leiken, writing in Foreign Affairs, seems to have reached the same conclusion: As a consequence of demography, history, ideology, and policy, western Europe now plays host to often disconsolate Muslim offspring, who are its citizens in name but not culturally or socially...
...All have become enemies of democracy...
...As President Bush said in his Second Inaugural: The great objective of ending tyranny is the concentrated work of generations...
...This vision has two parts...
...and then, in due course, and in even larger numbers, for that ratification...
...Even now Arab scholars publish widely on the “democracy deficit” and “freedom deficit” of the Arab Middle East...
...I heard the President elaborate on these ideas about the crucial role of democracy in a new Middle East in addresses to the National Endowment for Democracy, too...
...In pro-was still being made in various social sectors...
...Nonetheless, even in the year of al Qaeda mayhem, Iraqis reported belief that their lives will be better in the near future...
...It is political, military, and totalitarian, as is evident in its express ambitions, its energizing motivations, its ends, its methods...
Vol. 40 • June 2007 • No. 5
