To add to Fitzgerald's assesment: It's also insane to train and equip troops that one day most likely will be turned on us as part of the Caliphate.

Posted by: epg at November 6, 2005 9:39 AM

It is quite clear we cannot create a western style democracy in Iraq. Yet it is entirely possible to create a qausi democracy there such as in Indonesia or Turkey, and, if Bush can accomplish this, he has succeeded..The way Fiztgerald tells it only a Taliban like theocray can emerge.this is not accurate

Posted by: Dhimmiwatch in Canada at November 6, 2005 10:30 AM

:The way Fiztgerald tells it only a Taliban like theocracy can emerge. This is not accurate..."
-- from a posting above

Nowhere do I predict a "Taliban-like theocracy." Nowhere and never. I suggest that the investment in men, money, materiel, and monomaniacal attention (while the islamization of Europe cannot be addressed as long as Iraq splits Europe from America, and as long as Islam itself, or the "Jihad" as it can be demurely reduced to, is not properly identified as the threat, one not to be mitigated by the introdution of the most primitive kind of head-counting "democracy") in Iraq is a misallocation of American resources. This is not an attack on the original decision to destroy Saddam Hussein's regime or to deprive that regime, and Iraq, of certain kinds of weapons and weapons projects that no Muslim country can be permitted to possess, no matter how outwardly secular it may appear to be, for there are always those, in the regime, in the next regime, among those who are outside any regime but can have weaponry handed off to them, who will be a menace, sooner or later, to Infidels and Infidle interests.

I predict only that once the Americans have left, one thing is certain:, the waste and misallocation of Infidel (merican) resources will end. Perhaps the Kurds will attempt to create an independent state. I hope so. Such a state, created by a non-Arab Muslim people, would do much to encourage other non-Arab Muslims, such as the Berbers of North Africa, to push for further concessions, or greater autonomy, from the Arab overlords whose linguistic and cultural imperialism (Islam containing within its universalist pretensions an Arab supremacist ideology), or even for independence and a re-berberization (how many of thse so-called "Arab" maghrebins are just a few generations away from their arabized Berber ancestors?) of North Africa.

But if a free Kurdistan is a geopolitical (and moral) desideratum, the current administration seems to be doing everything to dampen rather than encourage such efforts. It insists on its initial, ill-thought out plan or drea or scheme -- that Iraq the Model, Iraq the Light Unto the Muslim Nations -- that is looking more preposterous every day. How would this Light Unto the Muslim Nations affect Saudi Arabia? Algeria? Egypt? And how would it affect the Da'wa and demographic conquest by Muslims of Europe? How would it make less likely the decapitation of three Chrirstin girls in Indonesia, or the destruction of thousands of chruches in Indonesia, or the mass-murder of Christians and animists in the Sudan, or.. well, fill it in yourself. They can't answer this. They can just prate on about all the wonderful things the Americans are doing for the Iraqis. The sentimentality and sloganeering has no end: "we shall neither falter nor fail," "the Iraqis want the same things we want," "all people want freedom," and so on. The very use of the term "Iraqi people" or "Iraqis" shows a misunderstanding of this imaginary country. From the absurd 2003 article by Woolsey and Lewis blandly suggesting that the Kurds and Shi'a would have little difficulty accepting a Hashemite (Sunni Arab) monarch, to the continued cheerleading for the Administration by those who will not admit that the whole enterprise is silly, based on a misidnetification of the menace (not "terrorism" as in "war on terrorism" but rather "Jihad" as in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira), and on a gross ignorance of Iraq, and its sectarian and ethnic splits that are not products either of the American invasion, or of the regime of Saddam Hussein, or of the past eighty years of modern Iraq's history, but go far far back.

Perhaps the Sunni and the Shi'a Arabs will somehow establish a modus vivendi. That is what the Americans are trying, in every way, to aid, when they should be welcoming the absence of such a modus vivendi, should be welcoming any chance to see the adherents of Islam divided and demoralized. I doubt, whenever the Americans leave (ideally about a week after the December 15 elections, when the final returns are in), that the Sunni who are convinced of the rightness of their domination, and who are further convinced that they constitute not 18-20% of the population, but at least 42% (the craziness of Islam makes people more susceptible to conspiracy theories, and willingness to believe comforting nonsense and lies of every kind, plausible and implausible) will ever drop their demands. And why should the Shi'a who do constitute 60% of the populastion, and do sit on all the oil they need, and have suffered for centuries at Sunni hands -- why exactly should they be willing to share the oil wealth, or be forced to endure the o'erweening behavior of the Sunnis? Would you, if you were they?

One assumes that the handful of supposed Iraqi Nationalists -- i.e., those who spent decades in
Western exile, and had a chance to recover, as an alcoholic dries out at his substance-abuse farm, from Islam itself --such people as Chalabi and Allawi, will not do particularly well in the December elections. For American policymakers not to understand how few of those in Iraq (I will do anything to avoid that word "Iraqis") share their view, or embody their dreams of Western democracy, is not the least disturbing aspect of their almost wilful ignorance of both Iraq and of Islam.

No, I'm not expecting a theocracy. I'm expecting, and hoping, for a return to the three vilayets with which modern Iraq started. Kurdistan could stand for the proposition that the so-called Arab world contains non-Arab Muslims, and that they too deserve political expression, and the Arab cultural and lingusitic imperialism within Islam will not be endured by non-Arab Muslims as it has had to be for so long. And the Sunni-Shi'a split could be a permanent fault-line, or dividing line, between the Sunni Arabs, and the Shi'a, both Arab and Iranian. Both sides may receive reinforcements and aid from Sunnis and Shi'a outside. Fine.

Meanwhile, the Americans free of the Iraq tarbaby can concentrate on the two things that most matter now: 1) the Iranian nuclear project (it will be easier to deal with it once the American troops are out of Iraq and easy range of Iranian retaliation) and 2) the islamization of Europe.

That's what counts. Not Iraq the Model. Not Iraq where Americans kill Sunnis for the sake of the Shi'a, and build up what are hopefully, naively described as "Iraqi" national forces, but are not, never will be, cannot be, anything of the kind -- except possibly for a Potemkin unit or two, to be trotted out as an "example" of what can be accomplished.

Nonsense.

Posted by: Hugh at November 6, 2005 11:24 AM

Amen, Hugh.

Posted by: the poetess at November 6, 2005 11:53 AM

Hugh:

Please do not underestimate the momentous impetus of the military-industrial complex to keep us in Iraq. American contractor companies are making out like bandits. Did you know that my employer was charging the government for 120 hours per week and paying me for only 40? The US is always enormously overcharged and many times erroneously charged for non-exiting services. Do you think Bush and el want to see the gravy train end? I am starting to sound like a conspiracy minded leftists or Galloway, God forbid… However, when someone has personal interest in an enterprise that persons ideas and actions are bound to be skewed.

Just look at the boards, the management, and the work force of all these contractors: Senators, former cabinet secretaries and other high ranking executive branch officials, retired generals, intelligence agents, and military personal. The war is the biggest business out there.

Posted by: have_mercy at November 6, 2005 12:00 PM

I agree. The same Greed that helps explain the attitudes of those in Europe and America who have personally benefited by recycling petrodollars, and so have a stake in promoting the Saudi and Arab line (no skin off their teeth if in a generation or two Europe is islamized) helps explain the attitudes of those who are benefiting economically from the continued American presence in Iraq.

But they should consider this: if those hundreds of billions were to be spent on energy projects in this country, say on putting the best solar collectors on every possible building, and wind farms on every possible wind-collecting site, and building more nuclear reactors, surely they would be able to acquire contracts for much of this, and they would be operating in an environemnt a good deal safer for their long-suffering employees.

If they started to think straight, they might even have a little spasm of patriotism, and begin to recognize the larger picture, and not the essentially irrelevant improvements in the lives of "Iraqis" that Americans are now paying for, and paying for, and paying for, and that will not do anything to constrain or contain Islam, when the opposite -- leaving promptly -- promises to do so by dividing the Sunni and the Shi'a still further.

Maddening.

Posted by: Hugh at November 6, 2005 12:18 PM

On the Charlie Rose show, Senator McCain casually referred to the prospect of an independent Kurdistan as an unthinkable and obviously undesirable thing.

Since when is it a bad thing for minorities to have their own homeland?

Posted by: Dr. Pepper at November 6, 2005 1:09 PM

McCain's dismissal of an independent Kurdistan is maddening because it is not based on analysis, but on the received opiinion of le tout Washington. "Everyone knows" that an independnet Kurdistan is a "non-starter," so "everyone" complacently tells "everyone" else. No one stops to ask: Why? Why should that promise made after World War I to the Kurds not be fulfilled? Why is it beyond the ability of the American government to persuade Turkey, which after recent events has no chance of being admitted to the E.U., and all sensible Turks know it, and since they do not want to descend to the level of the Arabs and Iranians, are stuck with America as their possible friend and ally, and for once America might just ask some of its friends and allies (other than Israel, which is asked all the time to make possibly fatal concessions of one sort or another) to do what it wants. And what it should want is for the Turks to drop their opposition to Kurdistan, and if they do, then the Americans will extract from that same Kurdistan promises, enforceable by the Americans or by the Turks, to make no territorial demands on Turkey. Kurds in Turkey should be well satisfied with the fact that at long last there will be state which will be the political expression of the Kurdish people, a state richly endowed with resources, the same resources that the Arabs have been appropriating for themselves for the past 70 years or so. And the Kurds will be told that if, on the other hand, they want to make common cause with Kurds in Iran and in Syria, thereby unsettling both places, that would be a different matter entirely.

McCain is someone one wishes to like and would like to support. But his inability to consider that a belief-system might be a menace is of a piece with the Bush innocence and deep respect for something wrapped in the mantle of the word "religion." And the very idea that not stab ility but instability in the Middle East might be desirable, that exploiting rather than preventing potential points of division within Islam, is something that John McCain apparently is too kind to consider.

There is a point when being kind is "less than kind" to ourselves. We Infidels deserve a bit more low cunning, more Machiavelli and Mackinder, less Leo Buscaglia, in our dealings with Islam.

Is that too much to ask?

Posted by: Hugh at November 6, 2005 3:01 PM

Is that too much to ask? Mr.Hugh asks! Apparently, so!

Posted by: have_mercy at November 6, 2005 3:34 PM

The problem of Western PC quasi-dhimmitude is much broader and deeper, a problem of cultural mass psychology in the West.

Even a McCain's human decency and reasonable pragmatism cannot escape the iron clamps insinuated deeply into his psyche binding that decency & pragmatism to PC multiculturalist "respect" for Islam and the vast majority of what must be peace-loving Occident-oriented Muslims. It would be more difficult for McCain to free his mind of those iron bonds than it would have been for him to escape the prison camp in North Vietnam where he was held for over five years.

Posted by: Dr. Pepper at November 6, 2005 4:10 PM

"Since when is it a bad thing for minorities to have their own homeland?"

I don't know, ask Israel....

Posted by: Kemaste at November 6, 2005 4:46 PM

Seventeenth Century French philosopher, Descartes’, insight, Cogito ergo sum. I think for myself, therefore I know I exist, the most important task for a thinking individual, is the examination of what is true, leads a shift of authority away from dictates of religion, toward methods of modern science.

During the late-nineteenth century, a group of philosophers, Holmes, James, & Dewey, discussed Pragmatism. Pragmatists championed open-mindedness, tolerance, & democracy, evaluated ideas & values not by comparison to an abstract standard or eternal ideal, but by their usefulness--their ability to promote happiness, solve problems, & get things done. Beliefs are true if they lead to good outcomes for everyone. If they are not, they are false.

One of Islam’s most dangerous errors is to confuse the kingdom of Allah with one or more kingdoms of this world. This is not a useful belief: Allah’s decrees are made into civic laws, Allah’s truth displaces scientific truth, & Allah’s reign is not over minds & hearts alone, but also over cities & economies & battalions of soldiers. A more beneficial approach has been to keep the claims of religion from interfering with political & religious freedom. In America, the text that governs common life is the Constitution.

Posted by: Rational at November 7, 2005 2:56 AM

Why isn't anyone interested in a closer look at Grover Norquist?

Posted by: Kemaste at November 7, 2005 4:03 AM

Hugh for Chaos and against Democracy in the Muslim World?

Hugh suggests we withdraw from Iraq soon, so the Shi'a and Sunnis will be at each other's throats. As I understand him, he is not against the project of Islamic Reformation per se, but only because, as he sees it, there is no longer sufficient time, the prospects of Reformation are bleak, and dangers press too urgently on Western civilization. Maybe, but not sure I see that yet. And what of the rest of the Islamic world of 1.2 billion or whatever the figure is? I guess Hugh's idea there is to seek to put them at war with one another too? And in general to weaken the Muslim world economically, so that its danger to civilization is minimized?

It is not clear to me that creating chaos in Iraq and the Muslim world in general would be a net benefit to the West. If a federal democracy with protections for minorities can be established in Iraq, the prospect of relative transparency and docility in governance -- and the ability therefore to get verifiable compliance with arms control and nonproliferation treaties -- seems significantly greater than in an opaque autocracy. Even if Iraq were to break down into a non-state of warlords, the advance of technology will continue rapidly to make it increasingly possible for small groups with few resources to inflict ever larger apocalypses. See for example (English Astronomer Royal) Martin Rees' book, Our Final Hour.

Indeed, the ever increasing acceleration of technological advance is likely ever more quickly to invent ever more varieties and flavors of WMD with ever more destructive power at ever lower cost per unit of destruction, available to ever more people but requiring fewer and fewer people and fewer and fewer resources to inflict more and more damage. Given that scenario, encouraging chaos and impoverishment in the Islamic world will not be sufficient to protect us from WMD. Even small groups will present a large threat. This technological dynamic would seem to present Western governments with possibly unavoidable and terrible choices.

Giving up entirely on the democratic project of course makes sense if democracy is truly not feasible among Muslim populations -- but that is not clear to me. Freedom House, if I am not mistaken, records two Muslim-majority countries in the 'free' category -- and a somewhat larger group of Muslim-majority countries in the 'partly free' category and, admittedly, the largest batch in the 'unfree' category.

Nor is it quite clear to me how fomenting chaos in Iraq would help us to stop Muslim colonization of Europe. Is Hugh's idea that, by getting out of Iraq, we would be back in Europe's good graces, and then could do something (what?) to get the Muslims to stop going to Europe or to leave Europe? Or does he believe that the Europeans can't act to stop Muslim colonization, because Europe would then appear to Europeans to be like the demonized Americans -- whereas if we left Iraq, Europe would be freed up somehow?

Transparency in governance, worldwide, is going to be increasingly paramount if we are to manage the rapidly increasing speed of development of ever new technologies that have mass destructive potential. If democracy and its transparency cannot be established in Muslim lands, then the unthinkable, i.e., annihilation of those lands may, sooner than we think, be the only option left to us in our own self-defense. And yet even that may avail us nothing, given the dynamic of technology. The time may not be so far off when any disaffected nut, Muslim or otherwise, will present huge dangers to society because of the volatility and easy accessibility of new inventions in biotech, nanotech, mininukes, etc., etc.

The humanity of most Muslims may be stronger than their brittle orthodoxy -- but that still will always leave a group for whom Islamic orthodoxy will trump their humanity, and present an intolerable WMD threat. The truth is, a plan to contain or suppress Islam as a totalitarian and violent religion, i.e., what today is called a cult, would seem to be needed. But that doesn't mean, does it, that exporting democracy would be a net negative for us in eventually pursuing some such plan to contain Islam as we once contained communism?

Posted by: eduardo odraude at November 7, 2005 4:21 AM

"Democracy" is an abstraction. It can be good, it can be bad, it can make easier the expression and rule of an underlying belief-system that threatens others, or does not. Not every "democracy" turns out to be a New England Town Meeting. In Iran, in 1979 and for a long time afterwards, most of the population was just wild not about Harry (Truman), but about Ayatollah Khomeini. Hitler won a plurality in 1933. Tens of millions of Soviet citizens bawled their eyes out, heartbroken in March, 1953 when Stalin died. And there are many other examples. In Egypt, in a fair democratic vote, the Muslim Brotherhood would trump any of the infinesimally small secular parties. Erdogan is undoing, with the support of the Turkish majority, whatever he can of the Kemalist inheritance. In Algeria, the so-called Islmaists won the last election.

In the middlle, or perhaps one should say at the beginning of a war, one does not rely on abstractions to save one. All over the Western world, all over the world, three things have conspired to make Islam unusually powerful, after many centuries of weakness.

The first is the unearned, and unmerited, oil wealth -- the largest transfer of wealth in human history. Since 1973 the Arab and Muslim members of OPEC have taken in nearly $10 trillion, and they are taking in more and more, at higher rates, from here on out, with apparently no thought being given to stopping them, or seizing their assets in the West, or even seizing the oilfields of, say, the smaller sheikdoms and Saudi Arabia, and putting the accounts in some kind of international escrow, to be doled out to the locals for domestic use only (food, clothes, medicine, cable-TV, Pampers, that sort of thing), and not for funding the Jihad world-wide.

The second is the colossal errior, by every state in Western Europe, of allowing large numbers of Muslims to settle withint their countries. There was no understanding of Islam, no attempt to read and think about what the Western experts (of the level collected in "The Legacy of Jihad") had concluded about Islam and its effect on the minds of its adherents, over 1350 years, and from Spain to East Asia. They were simply allowed in. At the time, it was difficult to understand that these seemingly eager, or at least not outwardly hostile, and presumably hard-working people, from Pakistan (in England), or from Morocco (in Spain), or from Turkey and Morocco (West Germany, Holland), or from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (France), or from Egypt, Libya, and Somalia (Italy), would someday, both themselves and their many children, and their many many grandchildren, would settle, and though they would accept the free medical care (including those excellent Infidel obstetricians and hospitals), and free education (though of course over time it would be necessary to change the curriculum, so that such "anti-Islamic" authors as, say, Dante or Voltaire, and any treatment in history class of the Nazis which might somehow evoke sympathy for the Jews, would simply have to go -- and of course the entire history of the West would have to be rewritten to give full credit to the as-yet-ignored Muslims and their indispensable, indeed central, contribution), they would not accept the laws, customs, manners, understandings of the Infidels -- of all that had made the Infidels and their civilization. It was not right, it was not just, to force Muslims, who in the end will rule everywhere, to submit to Infidel authority, or Infidel ways. And as for loyalty to Infidels, or to the Infidel nation-state --- well, that is irrelevant. That makes no sense. That has nothing to do with Islam.

And the third thing, after the OPEC money and the unhindered, heedless migration of those Muslim millions, was technology The kind of quiet Islam, the Islam of the Five Pillars alone, the Islam where crowds could not be whipped up because there was no way to rapidly spread, through a population, what might be called "political" Islam, so that the image of the pious farmer in a village, his Islam of no harm to anyone, is replaced by the audiocassettes with Khomeini's lectures and rants that were recorded in France (in Neauphle-le-Chateau, where even now Muslims may be rioting), and distributed all over Iran in the last years of the Shah's reign. And the videocassettes, and the radio and television stations, including the satellite channels Al Manar, and Al Jazeera, and now the Internet -- all the products of the Infidels, and all now employed, the same way that "democracy" can be employed, to purposes quite different from, and inimical to, what the Infidels who present the Muslims with this "democratic" idea or with this "technology," have in mind.

What does "democracy" mean in Iraq? If nothing can contradict Islam, then what can "democracy" conceivably mean? It can not mean the guarantee of full equality for women (that is not in Islam), nor full equality for non-Muslims with Muslism (don't be silly -- that simply can't be, no matter what the laws may say), and all the other guarantees in the Bill of Rights, or the Universal Declaration (non-Muslim version) of Human Rights.

What is happening in Iraq is a failure, by the Administration, to realize that once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, and his weaponry captured or destroyed, that was it. The war had been "won" or "won" as much as it could be "won." The "victory" had been achieved. But because those making policy were embarrassed by the failure to find WMD (had they, we might now be out of Iraq), and because some of them, such as Paul Wolfowitz (who as Richard Pipes has noted knows very little about the influence of culture on humans, and nothing about history; he is a former weapons systems analyst, a believer in Big Schemes -- Ending Poverty now seems to be his newest, and he will spend our money at the World Bank doing it, and someone whose book knowledge of Islam is non-existent, whose reliance on Bernard Lewis at his worst (and on his student Harold Rhode, the Big Expert at the Pentagon, a man whose own trip to Iraq (so implausible -- "what am I doing here?") was so exciting (it must have been) during the period when the "hostilities ended" and everythng, as long as one forgot, or never sufficiently knew, about the full malevolence and menace of Islam, and as long as one forgot as well about the sectarian and ethnic resentments within Iraq that were not caused by the Americans, nor caused -- even if exacerbated -- by Saddam Hussein, but go back centuries and centuries, to nearly the beginning of Islam. For the Arab supremacist ideology which is reflected in the Arab treatment of the Kurds, and the Sunni aattempts to suppress or dominate the Shi'a, are both contained in the doctrines of Islam as they solidifed, a thousand years before the United States even existed.

Had there been, for the past twenty or thirty years, not an army of Saudi-financed apologists, and Arab-financed "academic centers," and had MESA Nostra not seized control of the teaching (or careful non-teaching) of Islam, had official Washington not been full of people who believed that they had to do Saudi Arabia and other countries favors, and that the Saudis were our "staunch allies," and if during the entire Cold War cooperation from various Muslim states had been received in a cold manner, rather than with all the oohs-and-aahs and complacency about how Islam was a "bulwark against Communism" and therefore Turkey was good (no need to inquire into how the Kemalist reforms were being extended, or bring up with Turkish rulers what they were doing about Islam), and Iran was good (no need to tell the Shah that Islam threatened him, and that he really should be less corrupt and less stupid, and more clever in ruthlessly undercutting and constraining Islam at every step), and Pakistan was Very Good (those ramrod-backed Terry-Thomas mustachoied Sandhurst-educated generals, so wonderful to be with after that slippery Krishna Menon, and those Fabianites in New Delhi), and then there was Afghanistan, where our "staunch ally" Saudi Arabia apparently proved itself. No one thought to suggest that the various Muslim states may have been "bulwarks" against Communism but that they hated Communism for the same reason they hated the Infidel west, that Turkey was especially anti-Russian because Russia was its historic great-power enemy, that Pakistan worried about India's diplomatic ties to the Soviet Union, that Iran had to worry about Soviet attempts to repeat its seizure of part of northern Iran, and that Saudi Arabian assistance to the muhajideen in Afghanistan, like its assitance and money and diplomatic recognition of the Taliban, had nothing to do with being the "staunch ally" of the Americans, and everything to do with Islmaic solidarity against any and all Infidels -- in this case, the Infidel Russians.

When one puts all of one's money, effort, equipment, attention, into a place -- Iraq -- into a most primitive kind of "democracy" supported by the Shi'a only because they can dominate through head-counting, and opposed by the Sunnis only because "democracy" for them means a loss of power, and not because they are somehow "haters of democracy" while the Shi'a are "lovers of democracy" in general may have less attachment to Islam than the Shi'a, then there has to be some connection made to justify the effort, the expense, the lives. Why would this "democracy" be attracitve to Sunni Arab states? And why would "democracy" lessen the appeal of Islam in Iraq, and elsewhere? Has the power of Islam been lessened, in the last few years, in Baghdad, in Basra, in the entire Shi'a south, in the Sunni west? It has not. Islam, contained by Saddam Hussein through ruthlessness, not because he was not a Muslim, not because he did not share the Muslim desire to do in the Infidels, in his case beginning with the Infidel nation-state of Israel, but because if Islam alone were to dominate, then the exploitation of "Ba'athism" by minorities in both Iraq (the Sunnis) and in Syria (the Alawites), to offer a way to attract, some members of the other groups (Shi'a and Kurdish Ba'athists in Iraq, Christian and "real" Muslim Ba'athists in Syria), and thereby to give the thinnest veneer of a national movement to what was in Iraq, and is in Syria, simply rule by a distinct and quite small minority (the Sunnis are 20% of the population in Iraq, the Alawites 12% of the population in Syria).

When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again he will tell the tale of what Iraq is really like. There is no real enthusiasm among the officers and men for the Bush Party Line about Iraq. Those heartwarming stories about the handful of people who volunteer to re-nlist and to return to Iraq are less and less about people who "believe in the mission," and more and more about people who simply want to return to fight alongisee their friends. It is a powerful and useful emotion. But the misuse of those officers and men for a policy that more and more can be seen even by them as making little sense.

In the middle of Iraq, when you care only about completing a given task, and staying alive, you hardly have time to consider the nature of Islam, or the Sunni-Shi'a split and how it might be exploited, or why the islamization of Europe should require our attention, or why the $350 billion spent in Iraq and Afghanistan might have done far more good if spoent on energy and conservation projects, because the most powerful current weapon of the Jihad is the Money Weapon that comes from oil revenues.

But if those officers and men I have talked to, or read about, are to be believed, they cannot bear most Iraqis. They cannot bear the waste of American money, the fantastic corruption, the handing out of billions to local shoddy and slippery contractors. They cannot bear the whole thing, and realize that this is not -- as Bush and Rice would have it -- the Dawning of a New Day.

The only New Day that should Dawn is in official Washington, where those in power owe it to us to study Islam, and to study tbe nature of Iraq, and to figure out how the situation in Iraq can most easily and sensibly be exploited, not to "bring toys and good things to eat to little girls and boys" -- including "democracy" and all new schools and new hospitals and new electricity grids and all the rest of it. No, those making policy are at a loss the way Chirac and D. de V., in another way, are at a loss in France. Not being able to study and analyze Islam, afraid or incapable of doing so, they grasp at straws.

The United States is not the Little Engine That Could. It should get its innocent little choo-choo out of Iraq now, or if not right now, then announce its departure, back to the roundhouse in America, right after the results -- whatever the goddamned and essentially trivial results in the long run -- of the December 15 election.

And don't leave any caboose, laden with American military equipment, behind.

Posted by: Hugh at November 7, 2005 10:07 AM

"Democracy" in Iraq means only one thing: the supplanting of a Sunni despotism by Shi'a rule. That's okay with me. But it is not the same thing as Western-style democracy, and it has little chance of being successful as a Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations precisely because all those other Muslim Arab nations are Sunni-ruled, and furious that the Shi'a, who may not in the eyes of all Sunnis be what they are to Wahhhabis and to Zarqawi -- Rafidite dogs -- but they are not the real Muslim thing, any more than the Alawites in Syria are the real thing.

The hideous sweeping-back-the-tide nature of the American effort in Iraq, which is so expensive, so dangerous (and it is demoralizing to be a sitting-duck for an I.E.D.), and further demoralizing to have taken the measure of the so-called "Iraqis," or tried endlessly to create among more than a handful some sense of something for those "Iraqis" to think about other than their own selves, their families, their tribes, and then their particular ethnic or religious identification. That's the Muslim Middle East. The British could rope three vilayets into something they called "Iraq" and plump an unemployed Hashemite on the throne, but neither then, nor later, nor now, have enough people in this place called "Iraq" thought of themselves as "Iraqis" first, nor will they this year, or next, or in the next few decades. And the menace of Islam elsewhere, everywhere, is too great, and the need to husband rather than squander resources at this point, and especially not to damage the military (which has been, and is being, damaged, by being forced to remain, because of the mistakes of obstinate civlians who cannot admit that their policy is wrong, and cannot figure out how to phrase the very plausible reasons they can offer for leaving). Is it better to have Shi'a troops, retaliating for Sunni-laid bombs, by wiping out whole families, or is it better to keep the American troops there to prevent such intra-Muslim mayhem? Is it better of a proxy war is fought between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Wahhabi version), or that the Americans remain, to ensure that such an outcome is prevented, because lots of people find it easy to parrot lines about how "we can't have instability" or "we can't leave Iraq in a mess" or "if we leave there might be civil war" -- all of which, we are simply to assume or accept, must be self-evidently Bad rather than, as I maintain, Good.

The interests of Chalabi and company are not our interests. Plausible as he may he (is he making his smiling rounds yet), he, and all the others now in the "Iraqi" Shi'a governing classes, want the Americans to stay as long as possible. The longer the Americans stay, the more damage they inflict on the Sunnis and the longer the period in which they can train, not "Iraqis" but "Shi'a" and perhaps even decide to leave some of that Wonderful American Equipment behind (that is on the minds of everyone in Iraq -- who gets to keep the stuff they leave behind, and how much can we snooker the Americans into leaving behind anyway, with plausible arguments about "pre-positioning of equipment" and os on?).

Ask yourself this question: does Chalabi care about Iran's nuclear weapons project? Does he want to make sure that that weapons project is destroyed, and that Iran, and Iraq, and all other Muslim states, are prevented -- by contant and relentless Infidel effort -- from acquiring such weaponry?

Answer: he does not care. Or rather, he would not mind if a future Iran, a nice "liberal" Iran, but still an Islamic Iran, inherited those weapons from what he may believe is a temporary Islamic Republic of Iran.

That's enough. Infidels can't take that chance. Not with the Islamic Republuc, and not with any regime that would follow upon it, even a regime like that of the Shah -- perhaps one lead by the Shah's son. No country where Muslims rule or dominate can be allowed to buy, to fabricate, or to continue to possess (Pakistan) such weapons. Period.

Our interests, ahd those even of such reasonable and westernized types as Allawi and Chalabi, are not the same. Sentimental attachments, idealism about "democracy" -- spare us all of it. We can't at this point afford to wait, to kill another decade or two findiing out, as the French and other Europeans are finding out, that inattention to Islam can be suicideal.

Despise Rice's bizarre analogy at the time of the Big Referendum on the Iraqi Constitution of Such Vital Importance, linking those men in Baghdad, and their product, with the Framers meeting in Philadelphia, Iraq is a different and riven place. The sectarian and ethinc rivalries will exist, have existed, with or without the American presence. But the continued American presence is costly to the Americans, however much some in Iraq wish them to remain -- entirley for their own purposes which are not and cannot be those of the Americans or other Infidels.

Our interest should be to weaken, divide, demoralize, show up for what it is, Islam. The interest of even the sweetest and kindest and most forward-looking Muslims is quite different. The two need to be carefully distinguished. We keep getting snookered. We want to be snookered. Stop it.

Posted by: Hugh at November 7, 2005 10:37 AM

One central point concerning democracy is this. Who are we to export democracy to anyone? This is not criticism. Our revolutionary war used European ideas(and ideals) but was home grown. An expression against taxation without representation initially . . . then it became something more, something stunning, beautiful, and American. The French revolution against the monarchy . . . was Jefferson in Paris riling up the rabble? No. Forgetting the reason for this message board for just a moment. This Wilsonian illusion that we can 'export our ideology' to anyone is for the birds. I'm so tired of it. Now, remembering the reason for this board and the foe that we face . . . does it make sense that we should spend a hundred billion after a hundred billion and so on so we can free Iraq? So we can ignite democracy to the islamic world. If I were Moslem, I would resent it. Would you resent trying to bring the fruits of Islam to the US? To our education system? Look, you can argue that reformation is possible or it isn't. I don't think that reformation is possible in Islam, but if something . . . some moderating influence occurs . . . then it must come from within. Hundreds of billions a year for people who will only spit on us as we leave. The thought what this money could have done for our sick, for our energy system, our health care system for poor Americans is enough to make you puke.

Posted by: biorabbi at November 7, 2005 12:05 PM

I agree that Iran has taken full advantage of our Iraq engagement, but I think their actions have been abetted far more by the craven appeasement of the Franco/German/UK trio, as well as the greedy encouragement from China, Russia, and Japan... Basically 4 of the 5 permanent NSC members are stumbling over each other to see who can outbid whom to win over the terror Mullahs first and most... They know they have little to worry about in Tehran...

But you state: "And without those American troops held hostage in Iraq, stronger measures against Iran can now, at long last, be taken." I wish this were so -- I would LOVE to make big glass parking lots with cencession stands next to all the fabulous Persian sites...

But I somehow think it isn't dhimmitude -- that our mediocre leadership understands that they are a far greater threat than Iraq -- But our leadership chose Iraq over Iran (and North Korea) because we COULD topple and then potentially manage Iraq -- whereas WE CAN'T topple and then manage Iran... (Different set of considerations prohibiting kicking that poof haired freak in Pyong Yang... think CHINA...)

Anyway, if we were unencumbered with Iraq, wouldn't Iran pose an even more daunting military problem than Iraq did? I'm not sure if you're proposing full war/invasion -- or just pasting them with bombs -- If the latter -- it doesn't matter where the boots are, and therefore Iraq makes no difference -- In fact, the mere proximity of 160,000 US troops right next door seems to me to be far more potentially convincing than mere threats of what we will do when the troops are once again withdrawn from the region... Yet that presence has not deterred them an inch...

Other tactical considerations seem to rear their ugly head as well... The population is over double that of Iraq -- the land mass is much much larger, and the terrain is nearly as rough as Afghanistan -- apparently there aren't the easily fractured factions to play against each other as in Iraq, and there's no corollary for the Kurds which meant that the Iraq war and aftermath was at least 1/3 won before we entered the fray... In short, Iran is an even harder case to make than Iraq from the standpoint of aftermath -- which seems to be your main objection to our Iraqi action -- We kicked his ass into a hidey hole after all -- the military campaign was BRILLIANT -- as for the aftermath...

We are now attempting to secure the downstream dividends of defeating Hussein by "fixing" Iraq, or more realistically, preventing a repeat regime or worse... Time will tell whether or not this project will bear good dividends... And whether or not what follows will be seen as an improvement...

So it's easy for me to say, but Iraq seems to be worth a try -- I think it has ALL gone as well as can be expected, and has been far better than most had feared. But I am not as naive about the longer term prospects for Islam overall -- Perhaps the Muslim/Arab sewer is not fixable -- perhaps their Islamic swamp is undrainable -- It appears that Islam always has harbored, and always will harbor the virus of hatred and Jihad, this culture necrosing, civilization annihilating agent of destruction...

If the Iraq project works -- If you are wrong, then it will be a monumental step, and may prevent the horrors of some kind of future Armageddon...

If you are right, however, then I think some kind of Armageddon is inevitable -- In other words, if Muslims are really undeterrable, and if they cannot turn or be forced to turn away from their rising fascist trajectory, then nuclear Armageddon is all but inevitable. The world now has shown itself incapable and unwilling to prevent nuclear proliferation... and the era of genuine super fiends is here -- like characters from old Superman comix...

Some more humane solutions arent' palatable to the vast majority of people in the world -- YET -- Right now, no one will countenance mass expulsions of Muslims back to Muslim lands -- No one will even countenance "racial" profiling or "religious" profiling -- though these would represent the least bloody preventative measures we could take right now... But these will NEVER be considered as real options. At least, not until UNTHINKABLE THINGS transpire against us, and make these options tame in comparison to some of the things that will occur to people after the grim facts are revealed... Such preventive measures will appear downright saintly compared to the options that will be arrayed after the gold rush...

Posted by: jsla at November 7, 2005 5:38 PM

"I'm not sure if you're proposing full war/invasion -- or just pasting them with bombs -- If the latter -- it doesn't matter where the boots are, and therefore Iraq makes no difference -- In fact, the mere proximity of 160,000 US troops right next door seems to me to be far more potentially convincing than mere threats of what we will do when the troops are once again withdrawn from the region... Yet that presence has not deterred them an inch..."
-- from a posting above

I am a gentleman in a dustcoat trying.

I have never suggested to ever again try in another country populated by Muslims what was tried in Iraq. No full-scale invasion of a Muslim country. Only destruction from afar - telemachy. Wily Odysseus was the most memorable, and ultimately successful of the Greek warriors (not because he was as skilled a fighter as Achilles, or as physically imposing as Hector, but because he was cleverer than his enemies; he could always outsmart them. And his son was called Telemachus. More of wily Odysseus, and more of the kind of combat of which he can be considered a kind of father -- telemachy -- is needed. Fighting from afar, and at the same time, sowing discord and demoralization among one's enemies.

Not Hector, not Achilles, but wily Odysseus makes it home.

Drones, planes, rockets, bombs from those missiles on ships or intercontinentally, from the very homeland that is supposedly being secured so very noisily -- that's what has always been suggested.

The presence of American troops does not make threats to Iran more threatening. Not the way those who rule the Islamic Republic of Iran see it. There may be 150,000 American troops, or 250,000. They still will have to make their way through treacherous, I.E.D.-lined Iraq. They have enemies everywhere, and are unlikely to divert troops now within Iraq, and being attacked by people within Iraq, to go and invade Iran. That would be idiotic. If one lesson has been learned from Iraq, it is that never again should ground troops be put into a Muslim country unless they are there for one reason -- all-out war, and not to win hearts or minds, but to destroy weaponry, and perhaps infrastructure to teach everyone a lesson, and possibly to seize oil fields. That's it. No more bringing "democracy" stuff, no more Model Countries, no more nonsense. Even those who still think the Americans should remain in Iraq admit its folly because they recognize that the same course as taken in Iraq should never again be repeated -- what is that if not an implicit recognition that the Iraq venture, round about two years ago, stopped making sense, no longer allowed us to come out ahead on those cost-benefit analyses that business consultants used to like to scribble on yellow legal pads.

If the American soldiers in Iraq were to try to move toward Iran, for any reason, they would merely be even more sitting-duckish than they already are, with Iraqi I.E.D.'s set for them on every highway and byway and heart-stopping bypass. Iranian military, Iranian planes, Iranian artillery, Iranian agents already infiltrated into Iraq with more coming all the time, Iraqi allies of the Iranians -- all these could be used to inflict retaliatory damage on the American soldiers. Surely that is realized, and surely those soldiers (and civilians) have to be removed asapically, so that the real business at hand -- the Iranian science project -- can be put out of its malevolent and menacing existence.

Posted by: Hugh at November 7, 2005 8:08 PM

Sorry Hugh, but I agree with Zarqawi here: democracy and sharia are incompatible opposites and mortal enemies. One must annihilate the other, and Iraqi democracy is not going away. It will annihilate Sharia.

If Iraq was facing the possibility that electing the wrong person wo8uld lead to the end of democracy, it would be a different matter. Then the temporary majority that the orthodox Muslims might have at the beginning would be sufficient to sink the whole enterprise. But having a federal structure, with a union of states, affords strong protection against such an outcome, as does the enthusiasm that the Iraqi people are showing for democracy.

Democracy will hold, and if Sharia is imposed, the majority will soon enough decide that they don't like it, as they have in Iran, and they will throw it off. What will that make them? Will they still be Muslim? The orthodox will say that the majority are apostates, deserving death, but the orthodox declare insurrection on that basis they will be crushed. The democratically controlled powers of state will extirpate them.

Of course the democrats WILL be apostates, according to every significant school of Islamic interpretation, all of which say that Sharia must rule. By exploding that principle, democracy will force open the doors of itijihad (Islamic re-interpretation) for the first time in centuries. This is where Islamic reformation is going to come from.

If Iraq is left to its own devices, the political battle over Sharia take a while. If we would hurry up and topple Iran, Muslim democratic rejection of Sharia would be achieved immediately.

Yes, we are taking too long. We should have toppled Iran long ago. But the direction is spot-on.

Posted by: Alec Rawls at November 8, 2005 1:46 AM

P.S. We already have the Iranian hearts and minds, and the Mullahs have already lost them. Pessimism about a "war for hearts and minds" in another Islamic country is unwarranted, at least in the case of Iran.

As for the military problems involved in decapitating the theocracy and handing the country over to the Iranian people, problems ON THE WHOLE would be greatly eased by taking the battle to the enemy, instead of letting Iran sow its mischief unmolested. If we act now, instead of waiting until Iran gets nukes, Iran is a house of cards. One big fat kick in the ass and the Mullahs are gone.

America has been in some real battles, with seriously competent foes, and come out victorious. Who can seriously doubt that with little difficulty (relatively speaking) we can take Iran from a cadre of raving 7th century lunatics and let the country fall to the majority who hate them? All we need to do is drop guns! (The World War II "Liberator" .45 cost $2 a pop.) Europe's intifada would be a sneeze in comparison. The bullying Sharia police with their cudgels would be dead after the first day. Just leave the army to us. That might take a month, if they fight at all.

But this is a minor disagreement. I'm with you 100% on the need to annihilate the Islamofascists. Right on my friend.

Posted by: Alec Rawls at November 8, 2005 2:25 AM

"Iraqi democracy is not going away. It will annihilate Sharia."
-- from a posting above

"Sharia" is not a single thing that has been or could be "annihilated" anywhere. It is the Holy Law of Islam which can be accepted in part, or in full, or in part and taken as a model for the rest. There is the full Sharia, or something close to it, with the hudud punishments and severe restrictions on women, that one finds applied most fully in Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Iran. But even in "tolerant" Egypt the legal system treats Muslim and Copt differently.

The two Muslim states that have done the most to constrain Islam are Tunisia, and Turkey. In both cases it was a top-down affair. In Tunisia, Habib Bourguiba and his one-man rule managed to preserve the relative mental freedom that French rule had permitted, and his successors, continuing his quasi-police-state (no one likes to think that Tunisia, by being a police-state, even a nice one, could be a force for improving things by constraining Islam, but there it is), have retained freedoms for womena nd other outward and visible signs of their determined attempt to limit the social and political role of Islam.

In Turkey, similarly, it was not "democracy" that helped to constrain Islam, but the determination of Kemal Ataturk to do something to limit the social and political role of Islam. Everything from giving women the right to vote long before they had it in some countries of Western Europe, the Hat Act (encouraging Western dress, and banning the brim-less fez that made prayer easier), the turning of the Hagia Sophia from a mosque into a museum, the discrimination in employment aginst those who graduated from non-secular schools, or who wore the hijab, the concocted history about the Turkish nation, full of falsehood but in its large claims (the Turks were apparently always in Anatolia, and somehow laid claim to the entire history of the area, right back to and including the Hittites), the very cult of personality around Ataturk that substituted for the cult of Muhammad someone else to worship, and all the rest of it -- that was not the result of "democracy" but despite the will of the people. And now what has been happening in Turkey in the past decade, and less visibly, for a long time, is the Return of Islam, and the attempt to weaken the Kemalist constraints. The guarantee of Kemalism is the army, and here one could usually be sure that the higher officers would ruthlessly prune the ranks of anyone seen to be reading the Qur'an with too great avidity. But is that still the case? If Islam has been gaining power, and it has, it is because of the will of many -- that is, the "democracy" that you insist will always clash with the Shari'a.

And in Egypt, with 77 million people, how many would be liberal and secular if a real vote, and not a farcical one, were held -- say, after Mubarak's death? Do you think that Nour and Ibrahim would, among the Arabs (of course the Coptic vote will go not to the most "democratic" candidate, but to the one most wary of Islam, and determined to limit its role), get 10% of the vote? What about 3%? And what would the Muslim Brotherhood or a group allied to it receive in an open, fair election? And what about Syria, where the Alawite despotism holds the "real" Muslims in check, not because Assad and his brother-in-law Shawkat and his redoubtable sister Bouchra are deeply secular, but because they are Alawites and know that the "real" Muslims would kill them, and a great many other Alawites, if only they could. What would "democracy" bring in Syria -- nothing good, from the viewpoint of Infidels.

If the current leaders in Iraq are a better lot, it is because they spent, many of them, decades in the West. And they spent those decades not as Edward-Said Arabs determined to hate that West, but as admirers of that West, who plucked from the crazy cauldron of the Middle East, and seeing how not a single Arab leader, newspaper, resolution of the Arab League ever denounced a single thing that Saddam Hussein did to the Shi'a(and the Kurds), began to acquire certain ways of looking at the world that were not quite the old ways. Allawi, Chalabi, Kanan Makiya, and the rest, have spent between 20 and 45 years in the West. And they were all Shi'a.

What you call "democraacy" in Iraq I call head-counting, and transfer of power to the Shi;'a because they make up 60% of the population. This has not turned them into democrats. As for Zarqawi, he is not the sole guide, nor the sole representative, of the Sunnis who do not wish to relinquish power. While Islam and "democracy" are an unnatural fit, it is not so much "democracy" that exercises Zarqawi, but the loss of Sunni power to those whom he, Zarqawi, and many other Sunnis, were happy to see oppressed and powerless in Saddam Hussein's period, those "Rafidite dogs" the Shi'a. One wonders about the intelligent Shi'a in the West -- do they not see, in the end, that the Sunni attitude toward the Shi'a as quasi-Infidels is simply the general attitude of Shi'a and Sunni to Infidels, and that the hideous treatment of the Shi'a is merely an intra-Islamic version, much muted, of the bigger divide, the Great Divide of Islam: between Believer and Infidel. And if they can bring themselves to recognize that, why don't they, why doesn't Fouad Ajami, or Kanan Makiya, both of them freethinkers, give up their residual filial piety, and identification with Islam, and say the hell with it, and show that you don't have to be a non-Arab Muslm--Ibn Warraq, Azam Kamguian, Irfan Khawaja, Anwar Sheikh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (all the worst Infidels convert to Islam, all the best born into Islam get out, and do not insist on that "Muslim-for-identification-purposes" Muslim business -- they jettison the thing, kit and "cultural" caboodle).

Very few of the Sunnis would object to "democracy" if they constituted 60% of the population. Very few, that is, are against it in ferocious principle, as Zarqawi may be. They are against what it means for them.

Bush, and Rice and the others who make or made recent policy never studied Islam and never studied the ethnic and sectarian divisioins -- or believed their Shi'a "consultants" in exile who, of course, desperately wanted to get the Americdan army to get rid of Saddam Hussein for them, and are mightily pleased that they managed to achieve that. But there our common interests should end. We don't have a stake in putting up, creating (for it would be creating) a functioning nation-state, of trying to perform the Mission Impossible of making cohesive units, where everyone trusts everyone else, out of people who, Kurds and Arabs, or Sunni and Shi'a, mostly exhibit toward the others atittudes ranging from "I wish I didn't have to be in the same country with you to "I wish you were dead." The constant din of the Party Line has had an effect on some who do not permit themselves the leisure to ask a few questions. How will the Sunnis, inside and outside Iraq, ever adjust to the loss, as they see it, of "true" (i.e. Sunni) Arab control of Baghdad, and of the Land of the Two Rivers, what was the heart of their own history-haunted civilization, the fabled Abbasid Dynasty (much exaggerated in its greatness, but it is Islamic pseudo-history and mythology that is being discussed here, not what non-Muslim historians may investigate and discover). They can't and won't.

You also write that you "somehow think it isn't dhimmitude -- that our mediocre leadership understands that they [Iran] are a far greater threat than Iraq." You are referring to the title of the piece, "Dhimmis Out of Washington," which was not mine, but one which I should have bothered to change. Of course the word "dhimmi" is not an all-purpose eptithet and I try to avoid it. I never use it adjectivally to convey attitudes and policies of Infidels I prefer to describe using such words as "appeasement-minded," "illogical," "ignorant," and "stupid." So there I'm with you: "it isn't dhimmitude" but just stupidity.

And I never wrote anywhere that the invasion of Iraq was senseless or unjustified. Every single one of my remarks about getting out of Iraq refers to the period beginning in the fall of 2003. It might be argued that the latest possible date would have been the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003. And not everything that has happened since has been a total waste. For example, these various supposedly heartening examples of "brave Iraqis" going to the "polls" in someting out of a Frank Capra movie where Mr. Citizen performs his civic duty (that is NOT what the people in Iraq were doing -- they were going off, or not, to the polls at the command of various imams, tribal leaders, and Da'wa and Sciri party bosses, to vote as they were told) -- the January 15 elections, and then the October 15 referendum on the Constitution (which, by the way, allows for a lot more of the Sharia to insinuate itself into the Iraqi political, legal, and social system than you appear to believe), and now the December 15 second round of elections -- well, all this means little, in the long run, except insofar as all of these well-publicized events can be taken, by an Administration that realizes finally that it should leave Iraq as quickly as possible, right away, and not, for god's sake, "when the Iraqis are ready" (since when do we allow the "Iraqis" -- the Shi'a especially who want us to stay, to provide as much training for their troops, and military equipment, and largesse, as they can possibly obtain -- oh, those leaders, if not always those sheep they lead, don't want the Americans to leave at all. Would you, if you were the Shi'a leaders, whether or not under it all you devoutly despised them? And since the Kurds, the only true friends of the Americans, and not entirely out of self-interesst have no sign from Washington that they will be supported if they go for broke, they are stuck with wishing that the American forces never ever leave them), they too want the Americans to stay.

But we have so many other fish that must be fried, including the islamization of Europe, and the Iran threat, and the damage to the morale of soldiers being asked (not all of them confuse patriotism with urrah-shouts of support for an insufficiently realistic, informed, and above all cunning policy to exploit Iraq, not for the Boy-Scout purposes of helping a youngster cross the political street, but in order to weaken, divide, demoralize Islam, by exploiting to the full, rather than patching up as best we can, those ethnic and sectarian divisions which will not go away, and will reappear as soon as we leave, whenever we leave -- and their reappearance is not to be deplored, but very much to be welcomed.

And to be welcomed, too, is any aid that comes from Sunni and Shi'a states (yes, let Iran now spend its money, its materiel, its men fighting a proxy war against Sunnis on Iraqi soil -- it would be the next best thing to a renewed Iran-Iraq War), to their co-religionists within Iraq. And if any party is to be supported with airdrops of supplies, or to be left any military equipment at all -- let it, for god's sake, be the Kurds and only the Kurds. And read the government of the malevolent Erdogan -- head of Turkey that we no longer need, and Europe no longer wants -- the riot act. Turkey, and the Islamic Party in Turkey, has it coming.

Use the French phrase: Touche pas a mon pote. Hands off independent Kurdistan. Got that? We guarantee the inviolability of Turkish borders, but the Kurds can do what they want outside Turkey. Don't try anything. Tne Turkish military depends entirely for its equipment and its advanced training on the Americans; it has to cooperate.

When you say that "democracy" is incompatible with the "Sharia" I disagree. I think that human rights of the kind that we associate with the Bill of Rights, or the Universal Delcaration of Human Rights, are incompatible with the Shari'a, and even with Shari'a-lite as in many of the Arab states. And the spirit of Islam of course goes against the justification of democracy. What in the end legitimizes democratic governments in the Western world is the consent of the governed. In Islam, the consent of the governed means nothing -- it is those who are governed who must submit to the dictates of Allah, as expressed ultimately in the Sharia. But this has not prevented Islamic parties, that is parties devoted to more power for Islam in political and social matters (in places where, either by an enlightened despot (Turkey), or by the legacy of rule by Infidels (Tunisia, Algeria), Islam no longer possessed the place that a real Believer thinks it should have.

Your paean to democracy as the cure for Islam is curious, given that the only limits on Islam by governments within the Islamic world have always, and everywhere, come not from democracies, but from despots. Four come to mind: Mohammad V of Morocco (a Sherifian monarch, who given his claimed descent was thought immune to Islam-based critics), Bourguiba in Tunisia (with his single-party rule -- that of his Destour Party), the Shah of Iran (corrupt, vainglorious, but Winston Churchill compared to what followed), and the most important despot of all to contain Islam, Ataturk.

Yet you wish to suggest, despite all the evidence, that "democracy" will kill Sharia. That would be greeted with laughs of various degrees of bitterness by the women now forced to wear black where once they dressed as freely as Western women, in Baghdad, and especially in the south, where the triumphant, "democracy-participating" and "democracy-supporting" Shi'a, now rule the roost, and enforce their "democratic" will. For the Return of Islam is even more pronounced, even more rigorously enforced, by those "democratic" Shi'a than among those "haters-of-democracy" Sunnis.

This whole business about "democracy" is misplaced. It is not too late for Bush and Rice, and certainly for the more responsible officers (even generals) to learn about, to convey publiclly, the reality of Iraq -- even in veiled terms. No one can come out and say: let's leave Iraw because it makes better sense to have the Kurds fight for independence while the Sunni and Shi'a are at each others' throats. That Kurdistan will inspire other non-Arab Muslims, including the Berbers, and heighten consciousness among the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs, that Islam is an Arab supremacist ideology. And let's do nothing to prevent the Shi'a from finally striking back, in all the ways they will strike back, against the Sunnis who refuse to relinquigh power and control -- yes, striking back in ways unthinkable to the Marquess-of-Queensberry, Geneva-Convention Americans.

There are ways to phrase it. There are easy ways to phrase it, plausibly. And how will the entire universe of screamers and insisters -- America Out of Iraq -- dare to turn on a dime and now insist "But you can't leave" or "if you leave all hell will break loose." (Can they say that? Really?).

For god's sake let's get out of Iraq. Bernard Lewis and his Pentagon acolyte were far too hopeful. The Refashioners of the MIddle East were wrong. They didn't study Iraq, its long history of sectarian and ethnic conflict. By not allowing themselves to think of Islam itself as the threat, but only a "handful of extremits" and then "extremists" and then "perverters of a great religion" and then (fill in whatever the latest idiotic attempt to avoid the right word --"Islam" -- may now be). Because they didn't or couldn't allow themselves to see Islam all over the world as the menace, and Muslims within the Lands of the Infidels as naturally desiring to participate in or defend the Jihad (why wouldn't they? They have every right to, it makes sense for them to want Islam, and Muslims, to dominate everywhere. What doesn't make sense is for Infidels to ignore this perfectly coherent and lucid doctrine, the tenets that are inculcated, the desires and the goals that it naturally gives rise to, the attitudes it engenders even among those who were never schooled in madrasas or seldom attend a mosque). One of those Grand Schemers -- Remaking the MIddle East, etc. -- is now the head of the World Bank, where he will no doubt, unchastened, proceed to try another Grand Scheme, someting in the Jeffery-Sachs line, about Ending World Poverty. Spare us such people. There aren't the resources, there isn't the time, there isn't the space.

Say goodbye to the Grand Schemers. Give the husbanders of resources, not the squanderers, a big welcome. Say hello to low cunning, and no more Boy-Scout efforts to bring Democracy, and Peace, and toys and good things to eat to all the boys and girls -- wherever.

Because as that Little Engine That Could keeps tootling on its narrow-gauge railway from Anbar Province to Sulaimaniyya, all the way down to Basra and the Shatt al-Arab, other things are happening. Iranians eager to enter their special Science Project in the upcoming contest are hard at work -- with the real enthusiasm of youth. And silly old Europe, which a while back, in a drunken stupor, let in milllions who claimed to be hardworking handymen, and whose passports were checked, but not the contents of their brains, and they turned out to be very expensive handymen indeed -- less This Old House, more Demolition Derby.

Out of Iraq. Quickly. Quickly and slowly.

Posted by: Hugh at November 8, 2005 6:08 AM

"Since when is it a bad thing for minorities to have their own homeland?"

While many continually talk about the possibility of an independent Kuristan, no one in the West seems to care about the most ancient nation in the region...Assyria! Maybe it's because the Assyrians are a Christian people who have long suffered under Muslim rule.

I am prepared to support an independent Kurdistan, especially if it is hostile to the Turks. But not if Kurdistan claims territory that is rightfully Assyrian. This includes the much disputed city of Mosul.

Unfortunately, the US & British occupation authorities don't seem to care one bit about the human rights and national aspirations of this ancient Christian nation.

Posted by: Provoslavni at November 8, 2005 8:07 PM

Hugh: Thanks for your long reply. I just don't think you are properly accounting the upside risk here. Islam is a stupid, disgusing, moral perversion, essentially making a religion out of criminality. Instead of being productive and cooperative, it goes for booty, just like a street predator. That perversity also permeates relations within the society. Totalitarianism destroys everyone's potential, whether they occupy the bottom spot on the totem pole (women), or some intermediate spot. Democracy gives the people a chance to throw off those chains simply by choosing to.

Obviously that doesn't make it easy. European democracy has been unable to throw off its socialist chains. Yet look at the victories. Ireland, Australia, Czechloslovakia, Poland. Word gets out. People see those who had recently been in their own miserable circumstances suddenly living much better and more prosperous lives. If democracy does just once bring economic liberty and religious tolerance to an Islamic country, that country will experience a rapid revolution of prosperity, and it can start the same slower and larger revolution across countries that is occurring in the West.

Of course we have other things we have to hurry up and attend to, but I don't see Iraq holding us back there. On the contrary. Lingering in Iraq leaves us right where we need to be, in position to take out Iran, Syria, and when the time is ripe, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Europe is not against us because we are in Iraq. They are against us because their real battle is over their own illiberalism and, like the Democrats here at home, they see the Bush administration (and the rest of the Anglo-sphere, and our Eastern Europeans allies) as the non-socialist enemy. For their domestic political purposes they want something, anything, to maim us, more than they care about any positive agenda in the world. Hopefully the Euro-fada will tip their domestic politics toward liberty, and the fight for liberty, and they will become allies instead of enemies, but that in no way depends on OUR behavior.

The upside risk of bringing democracy to fruition in Iraq and Afghanistan, then next in Lebanon, Iran and Syria, is that there might emerge a divide in the Islamic world akin to the one in the Western world, where liberty and cooperation contends as an alternative to illiberalism. The change would be huge. Right now the liberty loving parties of the west, struggling to sustain bare majorities in several key nations, have to fight internationally against both the illiberal western nations and the uniformly illiberal Islamic world.

One victory for liberty in the Islamic world--I think Iran will happen first--and suddenly the tide is turned. Not only does liberty have all the merit on its side, but it is no longer fighting alone against two fronts. Now the illiberals, both western and eastern, have another battle against liberty to fight.

Islam does present a very big problem for democracy, but is it really a bigger problem than socialism? Muslims have vested interests in the perks of station that Islam affords them, but for the most part those are ideational perks, not substantive perks. In contrast, socialist big government offers highly monied vested interests. Cradle to grave welfare, even if it means you leave nothing behind. Mighten't the more purely ideational move towards liberty in the East actually be easier? Yet some Western nations have moved towards greater liberty.

The one Islamic perk that really could hold the vote is domination of women, but women outnumber men. Once the dam breaks, I say the Islamic world throws off religious intolerance faster than Europe throws off socialism. Okay, that's fantasizing. But it is not impossible. The upside risk here is real, and crucial. We NEED to go for it.

The place to save resources is by defunding Turkey, Egypt, the Palestinians, and Germany. Iraq, in contrast, is buying us a very worthwhile gamble at a very good price.

Posted by: Alec Rawls at November 9, 2005 4:03 AM

P.S. When I say Islam makes a religion out of criminal predation, I should clarify that I mean traditional Islam. As I have been arguing, I think democracy has the potential to force a reinterpretation of Islam, where it might become moral.

Posted by: Alec Rawls at November 9, 2005 5:38 AM