The New York Times is crowing over this, of course, because of its animus toward anything emanating from the Bush Administration. But it is decent of them to have mentioned "the political rise of Islamists" as one reason why this is so. I warned about that in an article published in April 2003.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, April 9 — Steps toward democracy in the Arab world, a crucial American goal that just months ago was cause for optimism — with elections held in Iraq, Egypt and the Palestinian areas — are slowing, blocked by legal maneuvers and official changes of heart throughout the Middle East.Analysts and officials say the political rise of Islamists, the chaos in Iraq, the newfound Shiite power in Iraq with its implication for growing Iranian influence, and the sense among some rulers that they can wait out the end of the Bush administration have put the brakes on democratization.
"It feels like everything is going back to the bad old days, as if we never went through any changes at all," said Sulaiman al-Hattlan, editor in chief of Forbes Arabia and a prominent Saudi columnist and advocate. "Everyone is convinced now that there was no serious or genuine belief in change from the governments. It was just a reaction to pressure by the international media and the U.S."
In Egypt, the government of President Hosni Mubarak, which allowed a contested presidential election last year, has delayed municipal elections by two years after the Muslim Brotherhood made big gains in parliamentary elections late last year, despite the government's violent efforts to stop the group's supporters.
In Jordan, where King Abdullah II has made political change and democratization mandates, proponents see their hand weakened, with a document advocating change put on the back burner. Parliamentary elections in Qatar were postponed again, to 2007, while advocacy groups say that laws regulating the emergence of nongovernmental organizations have stymied their development.
In Yemen, the government has cracked down on the news media ahead of presidential elections this year, intimidating journalists who had been considered overcritical of the government.
In Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah has refused calls that the country's consultative council be elected, while the arrest last month of Muhsin al-Awaji, a government critic, raised questions about how far the country's newfound openness would go. And in Syria, promises for reforms have been followed by a harsh crackdown on the opposition.
Is it any wonder why the New York/Dhimmi Times' readership has fallen off?
The topic of democracy is one that is particularly fraught with pitfalls when discussing it with Muslims. A Muslim can honestly say that they support democracy, provided the discussion is narrowed to encompass only the electoral process for choosing leaders or to matters that are not specifically addressed in the Islamic canon (Koran, hadiths and Sira). The standard Muslim retort to the charge that Islam is incompatible with democracy is that the tribal shura mechanism is “democratic”.
It is quite another matter however when the democratic process is used to legislate, as in the original Greek and Roman philosophy upon which modern democratic systems are modeled. Democratic legislation implicitly embodies the notion that sovereignty is vested in the people. It is the use of democracy to legislate that is anathema to Islam because sovereignty of the people is explicitly eschewed by the Islamic canon. The Islamic ideology immutably vests complete sovereignty in Allah (as expressed in the Quran, haditha and Sira) and no human institution can posses authority to create law. In this regard, the use of democracy to legislate is fundamentally incompatible with shari’a and constitutes blasphemy.
The most profound distinction between shari’a and Western law is that the canonical foundations of shari’a are immutable and the Western constitutions are entirely amendable. No one in the Muslim world has authority to abrogate a single word of the Islamic canon, whereas the power to amend the Western constitutions is fully vested in the sovereign people.
Having elections for leaders by using popular democratic voting systems does not make a democracy. Even a truly clean democratic election may do nothing more than install a fascist despot. A democratic society is one in which sovereignty is vested in the people and in which self rule is operationalized through democratic public choice mechanisms in matters of legislation, not just choice of leadership.
"Democracy", without a written Constitution and Bill of Rights that defend the basic Universal Declaration of Human Rights, merely regurgitates the mob's mentality at that moment. In the Islamic world that means Sharia Law.
To "democratically" bring about a tyranny is nothing to cheer on.
The freedom-guaranteeing fundamentals are more important than any later "free" voting processes -which then end up establishing the bitter irony of "one man, one vote, one time".
Sharia is theocratic terror. To allow it to get its claws into a country through the smoke screen of "democracy" is folly.
One that has hypnotized the superficial politicos who like slogans over seriousness and quick fixes over meaningful freedoms.
This is sad. Bush could be the last chance for the Muslims. In the future interactions with America will likely only get more Hobbesian if freedom does not start to emerge in the Middle East. I doubt Islam will be a major religion in 50 years.
The polypragmonic impulse, the result of all the most unattractive, and some of the attractive ones as well, of the American character, and of our rulers who do not take ideologies seriously because they fail to recognize that they, too, have an ideology --- that of Economic Growth, and Enlarging the Pie, and the Rising Tide Lifting All Boats, and Economic Performance as the Measure of All Things, and the Sheer Rightness, in All Aspects of Life, of the "Free Market" As It Currently Operates-- and that that ideology is not exactly wonderful, or to go unchallenged, always and everywhere.
This polyprgagmonic impulse ranges from mere busybodiness to all the way to an outright messianic fervor, as when Bush believes that there exists an universal "desire for freedom" (whoch "freedom" is that? The freedom to trade, the freedom to beat the Infidels, the freedom for complete license?) and that the United States is here to solve all problems around the world -- for the American people like nothing better than to solve all the world's problems, with their lives, and their money, and who cares if it cannot be done, or who cares if it can only be done over centuries, and who cares if no one else cares, and regards us with continued indifference or hostility?
Successive American governments did very little to encourage, in the right way, the taking hold of "democracy" in post-Communist Russia. The kind of busybodies who thought that Russia could simply be plunged in to a cold bath of capitalism did not factor in either human nature, or its Russian variant. Jeffery Sachs, the deplorable Master Busybody, has been taken apart for his misunderstanding of Russia -- or rather, his general negligence and ignorance of the specifics as he is so intent on Curing the World of Poverty and doing other great things. And there are lots of such sachses all over the place, perhaps not each with his own World Institute, but not for want of trying.
Nor was the bombing of the Serbs undertaken with sufficient consideration of what it would do in russia. It was not the only, or even the best way, to deal with Milosevich. It has had a terrible effect on the Russian view of the United States, leading to a deepening and completely unjustified --but to many Russians plausible conspiratorial view of the Americans as plotting Russia's further weakening, when the Americans would like nothing more than a strong, prosperous Russian state able to withstand both Islam's possible demographic conquest of Russia from within and China.
It is not true that the "whole world wants freedom." It is not true that those raised up in a system where the Perfect Man was a despot and a warrior, far more reminiscent of Stalin in his works and days than of any of the American Framers or overlapping Founders, that what goes on in Baghdad is not, despite the absurd remarks of both Bush and Rice, reminiscent of what went on at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, that the habit of mental submission in Islam, and the acceptance of rule by the most powerful, and the locating of legitimacy not in the people -- a sine qua non of democratic theory -- but rather in the Qur'
an, the Sunna, and the Holy Law of Islam or Shari'a that is based on both -- means that Islam will accept democracy only in the narrowest sense of vote-counting, without any acceptance of the idea that the will of the people can ever be permitted to violate the tenets or attitudes of Islam.
Among the lessons to be learned from tarbaby Iraq is that nowledge of Islam must properly precede attempts to deal with Islam, that the word "war" should not fool Infidels into thinking that the only instruments of war are those of combat or terrorism, and that all the instruments of Jihad need to be dealt with. And another lesson is to be alert to those fissures within the camp of Islam which, if properly exploited, could help to divide, demoralize, and weaken that camp.
Surely some remember that during the Cold War, the Americans were pleased at Tito's defection in 1948 from the Eastern bloc. They sent secret aid to the "Forest Brotherhood"(the "leshii") in Lithuania, did not expect but surely welcomed the Hungarian Revolution as a sign of disaffection, and the same with Dubcek and what became known as the Prague Spring, and of course always welcomed signs of a Sino-Soviet split.
Yet there has been not a single article -- save here at Jihad Watch, where a hundred odd pieces have gone over and over the same ground -- about the usefulness of the ethnic (Kurd-Arab) and sectarian (Sunni-Shi'a) fissures being not patched up by the Americans, but allowed by a a natural process to lead to the reversion of Iraq to the three Ottoman vilayets from which it was origindally formed, with the expectancyy and hope that Shi'a elsewhere will be inspired by this new Shi'a, oil-possessing entity, and possibly, everywhere from Bahrain (70% Shi'a chafing under a Sunni ruler) to Yemen to Lebanon to Pakistan to Saudi Arabia, the Sunni fear of Shi'a, and the Shi'a fear of Sunnis, will work its natural almost inevitable way.
The Bush Administration, obstinate and not knowing quite how to admit to itself, much less to the American public, that after late 2003, or certainly, in no case later than the day that Saddam Hussein was seized, it made sense to leave Iraq, will never it seems find a way out of tarbaby Iraq until the voters force it. This is a pity. It is a pity because it may mean that the Administration, fearful of doing the most important thing -- destroying Iran's nuclear project -- will continue instead to pretend that it is on the verge of "success" in Iraq when the definition of "success" that the Bush Administration offers is in fact a definition for "failure." For a stable nation-state in Iraq will not be good for Infidels. What will be good is a Sunni-Shi'a proxy war, in which both Iran and Saudi Arabia feel themselves necessarily drawn in, and an independent Kurdistan that can inspire other non-Arab Muslims, including Berbers, and within Iran, the Kurds, the Azeris, the Baluchis, and even those Arab Muslims in Khuzistan.
But one does not get the sense that in the Pentagon there is an office devoted to the world-wide anti-Jihad. One does not suspect that even now plans are being drawn up for shoring up black Christians in Nigeria, the Sudan, Kenya and Tanzania, Ethiopia. One does not have the sense that a room exists with a map of Europe, and with all the demographic figures about Muslims and non-Muslims, and the list of local leaders who need support, and those who are in the camp of appeasement. One does not get the sense that a propaganda war has been launched, in which the Infidel publics will cleverly be made aware of what is actually contained in Qur'an, Hadith and Sira. One does not get the sense that Rumsfeld, Rice, Bush and many others have spent a day, a week, two weeks reading "Islam and Dhimmitude" or "Onward Muslim Soldiers" or "The Legacy of Jihad" or "While Europe Slept" or any of the available literature. One does not have the feeling that enough people have printed out, from this site, the three parts of "Islam for Infidels" as a handy short-course in the subject.
It will happen.
But will it happen after another year or two goes by, with that squandering of men, money, materiel, army and civilian morale, and diversion of attention from Iran, or will it happen now, in a few months? The Iraqis have provided every opportunity for the American administration to call a halt and insist that by, say, September 1 it will leave. That is plenty of time to get everyone out, and not to leave a single rifle behind (well, maybe a few rifles, and a few Jeeps, but only for the Kurds, and only if they agree to protect any Christians who wish to flee to a safe area while the Sunnis and the Shi'a have it out).
There are the squanderers, and the husbanders. The Bush Administration's continued ignorance, and obstinance, puts it among the former, not the latter. We don't have all the resources in the world, certainly not enough to last for decades. Husbanding resources will also husband morale for a longer term.
Where are the mahans and the mackinders and those who wrote "Casablanca" and all those who helped persuade, or created the conditions in which the penkovskys and then the amalriks and galanskovs, and then finally the yakovlevs, were able to persuade themswelves, of the moral and practical failures of the Soviet Union? Where are they hiding? Or are they being kept deliberately down, and out for the count?
Good to see the p- word isn't just a hapax legomena.
Hapax legomenon, that should be.
Polygragmonic, polypragmosyne, polypragmonistic have all been been used more than once at this winsome website, and that more-than-once-use naturally disqualifies all of them, now phoenixes too frequent, from being considered true hapax legomena.
And that is the paradox and the problem. For years I have been keeping a mental list of hapax legomena run across in reading. Were I to write someting using hapax legomena, as is tempting, they would then lose that quality, and cease to qualify as, and be deducated from the total quantity of, known hapax legomena. Even offering a of hapax legomena causes that list to self-destruct or disappear, as if written in tinta simpatica.
What to do? Do not tell a soul. Keem them secret. Take them to the grave, which is a fine and private place -- or so an old poet told me.
Like any stupid plan drawn up by a bunch of ethnocentric school-kids the plan to democratise the Middle East has failed miserably.
Hapax Legomena sounds like something that one takes for constipation. Do y'all use them big words to confuse everyone else?
Hugh,
You have, in a very complicated way, stated the very reasons why I am so disappointed in this particular president and the people he has surrounded himself with. ( I can end my sentences with a preposition if I want to, so there.) The really disturbing thing is that there is no one, absolutely no one waiting in the wings who can really grasp this problem. They either don't understand or are really afraid of not getting elected. I don't see anybody who knows what the hell is going on who is remotely close to winning the '08 election.
"Do y'all use them big words to confuse everyone else?"
-- from a posting above
No, we are attempting to trip one another up, and hope that everyone else will be discreet and not listen in.
And "hapax legomena" would have been the taxonomic Greek for the ordinary fruit-fly, had Linnaeus chosen to employ, for his system of classification, the other language of classical antiquity.
Hapax legomenon
Is the term applied to a word that is recorded only once in the work of an author or in the whole of a language. The plural is hapax legomena which in itself may denote a contradiction.
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Polygragmonic, polypragmosyne, polypragmonistic have all been been used more than once at this winsome website, and that more-than-once-use naturally disqualifies all of them from being considered hapax legomena.
The users of polygragmonic, polypragmosyne, polypragmonistic probably really meant:
Polupragmosune
Every great civilization has some equivalent of what the fifth-century (BC) Athenians called polupragmosune. As defined by William Arrowsmith, that word "connotes energy, enterprise, daring, ingenuity, originality, and curiosity; negatively it means restless instability, discontent with one's lot, persistent and pointless busyness, meddling interference, and mischievous love of novelty." This is a wonderful description of Americans.
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Now Hugh and Interested, your secret is out.
Why is The New Duranty Times improperly referred to above? Eternal vigilance is the price etc.
Of Arrowsmith's many meanings, the one that has been used here, when the word has been employed, has been that which characterizes the "persistent and pointless busyness" of those who believe they can transform the Muslim world, when it makes sense only to create those conditions in which many in that world will be forced to come to the conclusion that the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of their polities and peoples come not from anything done to them by Infidels, but as a result of Islam itself, its teachings, its attitudes, its atmospherics.
Hey Hugh, do you ever sleep??
No. How about you?
Actually, the Dorm Master has just come by and insisted that it's Lights Out. So just like jesting Pilate, I will not stay for your answer. It's not easy being in boarding school.
I sit at my desk all day and a good part of the night working and sub in and out of Jihad Watch when I can. Spent a good part of the afternoon emailing my senators and congressman about the foreign invader demonstrations.
I think I will call it a night, got to get up tomorrow and start it all over again.
Yall do a good job, keep it up.
Have a good night.
Later,
The Texican.
Hugh-
Have you read "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind"?
Worth a plunge, if you haven't.
(It beats "String Figures and How to Make Them" or Picasso's only book of poetry "Hunk of Skin" hands down. Or lobes up, depending on your praxis, or even parapraxis.)
Now Hugh and Interested, your secret is out.
Flee at once. All is known.
"Have you read 'The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind'"?
-- from a posting above
Hard to concentrate what with the breakdown of consciousness in our bicameral legislature.