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Fitzgerald: The innocents in charge of us

May 21, 2008 8:57 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

Another part of Bush’s speech dealt with the supposed spread of “democracy” in the Muslim world:

“He [Bush] also offered plenty of praise for democratic advances, naming countries like Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq, Morocco and Jordan.

‘The light of liberty is beginning to shine,’ he said.”

Is he crazy? In Turkey, the so-called “light of liberty” is undoing Kemalism, putting the secularists in the universities, the judiciary, and the army, under great pressure, and bringing Islam back, step by grim step, as Erdogan and now Gul, cleverly backed by all kinds of people, including the shadowy millionaire Fethullah Gulen, probe and prod at every possible weak point in the Kemalist system. Is this “liberty”? Is this the goddam “light of liberty”?

In Afghanistan, after all the vast American and NATO effort, the Taliban are back. And even without the Taliban, the democratically-elected members of the Afghani Parliament have shown, every step of the way, that they are mostly moved by the ideals of the Shari’a, and are happy to punish “blasphemers” with death. They are happy to deny women equal rights. They are happy to undo every bit of the reforms that Westerners initially managed to accomplish, in the legal rights of women and non-Muslims. The notion that “liberty” has come to Afghanistan is false. Indeed, had the Soviets won their war, and installed a puppet Communist regime, and had that regime acted with the kind of ruthlessness that the Soviet authorities did toward Islam during the 1920s and 1930s, that might have done more in the vein of Ataturk to eventually make Afghanistan a plausible candidate for democracy.
Iraq? Does anyone think Iraq is a place where “liberty” has arrived? It’s a place where, at the moment, no one sect can arrogate complete power over the country to itself, but it is also a place where a Sunni despotism has been replaced by a Shi’a despotism, and the Shi’a, whatever their party, have no intention of sharing power in any significant way with the Sunni Arabs, or indeed to allow the Kurds to continue to dream of independence. A cosmetic compromise may be possible, in order to extract more weapons and money, over the next few years, from the Americans, but that’s it.

“Morocco”? If anything, the current king is worse, when it comes to pan-Arab hostility to the West, either than his father or than Mohammed V. The ballyhooed “reforms” are nothing at all. He still retains his position because, as a Sherifian, he possesses the prestige to withstand an outright assault by the most militant Muslims. But try to find that “light of liberty” Bush prates about in Rabat, or Sale, or anywhere else in dismal Morocco, from which every day hundreds or thousands set out, determined to make it to Spain or to Italy, and from there, once they are safely in the E.U., to its farthest reaches.

The same is true with Jordan, the last country on Bush’s list of places where, he claims, the “light of liberty” is spreading. Jordan remains a police state, and thank god for that, because bad as it is, what might follow the overthrow of thick-necked Abdullah and his photogenic bride would be far worse. But there have been no reforms, no spirit or light of liberty.

Bush is a hallucinator. He talks, he likes the sound his words make, he thinks they must conform to some higher reality, and he has convinced himself they must be true. He’s messianic, and also a marxist, because he believes that economic well-being, or lack of it, explains the behavior of people, and that by improving the lot of Muslims, or “ordinary moms and dads” in the Middle East, we will do away with the “root causes” of all the distempers, and all the craziness, and all the hatred directed at Infidels.

He’s still unclear about Islam, about the simplest things about Islam. He asked the Arab students whom he saw in Israel if they attended dances with Jews. The American ambassador, Jones (himself someone with deplorable views on Israel, and also exhibiting a failure to grasp the Islamic roots of the war against Israel — because if he grasped those roots, he could not possibly be such a promoter of further surrenders of territory or territorial control by Israel), explained to Bush that such mixed dances were not exactly possible, and indeed, the very idea of such dances, among Arab boys and girls, also impossible. That Bush did not know this, that he has no real idea of what Islamic societies are like, shines from his every innocent word.

We don’t want innocents running us. We want people who may not be nice, may not have such touching faith in “democracy” or any other ideal, for that matter, except the ideal of keeping us, the Infidels, from succumbing to the many-pronged assault of Islam. We can’t afford the naive and sentimental lovers of something they thing is swell, something they call — a bit too enthusiastically and too unthinkingly and too inaccurately — call “democracy.”

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