I Read The Atlantic With A Pink Highlighter
Such a terrific magazine. This month's (January/February) Atlantic Monthly has (among others) a fantastic cover story, "After Iraq, What Will The Middle East Look Like," by Jeffrey Goldberg. An excerpt, which echoes my thought that democracy is not possible in Muslim countries:
The neoconservatives’ big idea was that American-style democracy would quickly take hold in Iraq, spread through the Arab Middle East, and then be followed by the collapse of al-Qaeda, who would no longer have American-backed authoritarian Arab regimes to rally against. But democracy has turned out to be a habit not easily cultivated, and the idea that Arab political culture is capable of absorbing democratic notions of governance has fallen into disfavor.In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”
After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.
“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”
Islam is a violence-based, collectivist religion which guides pretty much every moment of the Muslim's life. Democracy values the individual. There's a clash here that can't be worked out.
The election of Hamas was not democracy. It may have involved vote-counting, but democratic parties do not have private armies.
The SISO's (senior Israeli security official) approach is what leads to Noriegas - and indeed to Al Quaedas and Husseins. It's supporting the devil you know. The trouble is, the devil you know can turn and bite the hand that feeds it; and you can end up riding a tiger. I think these are all short-term solutions that lead to bigger problems in the long term.
Perhaps if they were seen as short-term solutions, it would be better. Perhaps the problem is using perfectly good short-term solutions as if they were long-term solutions.
Norman at January 23, 2008 8:07 AM
Sad but true. Christianity used to be the same way but I'm not willing to endure something Crusade-like before they evolve into something more benign. I just am getting the bad feeling (from the number of people screaming be tolerant of their "peaceful" religion) that we will see another round of dark ages brought about by having our minds so open that our brains fell out.
Donna at January 23, 2008 8:22 AM
so yeah, what Donna said but more...
The question becomes will it require hundreds of years of bloddy rebelion, insurrections and civil wars for Islamic society to come to the conclusion that monarchy is only as good as the monarch, like it did for western civs? How will that play on the current world stage? Are we in the midst of it? Due to geo-politics, is it even possible? When many places where in upheaval in the last several hundred years, travel was hard, communication difficult, and weaponry primitive.
Those things aren't true now. Makes me wonder if thr rules that we followed haven't be overcome by events... it's a much more complicated world.
SwissArmyD at January 23, 2008 12:16 PM
Ann Coulter: "Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity."
Islam is the problem. Unfortunately, too many people have equated Islam and Arab, and concluded that Arabs are too dumb, too selfish, or too whatever for self-rule. Not true.
What needs to happen is a massive repudiation of Islamic supremacy. Destroying the Taliban and Al Qaeda lead in that direction, by showing that Allah isn't giving them the victories they want. Some will respond by thinking that they haven't been Muslim enough, but some will think that maybe they gotta tone down the whole Sharia thing.
Capsize Islam, and the majority of the problems go away.
brian at January 23, 2008 12:26 PM
> The neoconservatives’ big idea
> was that American-style democracy
> would quickly take hold in Iraq
It's not that they believed it would happen fast, it's that morally, we have zero choice. It has to happen. Did your really think we were going to be out of Iraq in 18 months?
> There's a clash here that
> can't be worked out.
It can't be worked out if you think the blessings of democratic feeling don't have universal appeal. I think they do. I think if your average fucktard in Islamic stasis knew that his life could be as fulfilling as mine is, or yours is, he'd get on board it would make your head spin.
Besides, what the fuck does that mean, "It can't be worked out"?
Crid at January 23, 2008 12:33 PM
Crid -
It's an extension of the old colonialist thought that certain people just weren't ready for the intellectual rigors of self-determination.
You know, darkies.
It's become so ingrained in the collective consciousness of the West that it isn't even thought of as racist, or classist, or culturalist. It's just an accepted fact. Some people just aren't capable of democracy, and it's just a coincidence that most of them happen to be on the African continent or the Arabian Peninsula.
brian at January 23, 2008 12:41 PM
One has to be delusional not to accept that some societies are more capable of becoming democratic entities than others. Human cultural diversity ensures that to be so.
Culture plays a large role in how people accept pluralistic democracy. If the culture isn't primed for that system of government, then democracy simply will not work.
Cody at January 23, 2008 2:45 PM
Brian wants to leap to the worst possible conclusion, but Brian, it's not that certain "types" of people can't deal with democracy or self-determinism; I think that's inherent in human nature. It's that certain cultures are especially difficult climates for ideals about self-determinism to take root. Europe was much the same before the Enlightenment and the work of scientists like Isaac Newton began to shine light on the previously-unexplainable except-through-religion mysteries of the Universe. Prior to that, only religion offered explanations, and the Christianity of the day and the culture it produced was inherently anti-determinism, just as Islam - and the cultural values entrenched due to the Islamic tradition - is now. It has nothing to do with race or skin color and everything to do with mindset. People who jump to the conclusions that you do (assuming that people are automatically referring to race or some inherent inferiority of Arabs) are the suspect ones, not the people realistically examining the problem of an oppressive and totalitarian social structure.
Sort of like the feminists who jumped all over the target ad. If you see everything through the prism of race, everyone looks like a racist.
Jennifer at January 23, 2008 3:26 PM
Jennifer -
DUH!
Which is precisely the way that CAIR wants it to be seen. They have successfully conflated Islam with race, and the inherent racialist dialogue among the elites has gone along for the ride.
In order to make the middle east compatible with Democracy - just get rid of Islam.
brian at January 23, 2008 5:30 PM
Wow. Jennifer, you nailed it precisely and with good style too.
My take is pretty simple. Like pre-Reformation Christianity, Islam cannot abide the idea of separation of religion and state. That means we must deal with Islam as a political ideology. Islamic politics are authoritarian at best, totalitarian at worst. Mainstream Islam is the problem, and it's must be dealt with as a political problem.
Western nations are particularly ill-suited to combat a unified social-religious-political movement like Islam. Indeed, most Westerners would eschew the very meaning of the word 'nation.' If one accepts the meaning as "a form of self-defined cultural and social community," then it is easy to see why. Influential author/thinker Edward Said wrote in 1998,
Left-leaning people agree with Said. They cannot generalize. They cannot think in terms of groups or nations or peoples because they deny the intellectual legitimacy of all groups or nations or peoples. They deny it on the basis of a lack of nuance, the simulated nature of linguistic representations and images. The argument runs something like,
The practical and logical problems of such ideas are obvious. People who hold this view are a majority in Europe and a large minority in the US.
One can't say the multiculturalists (or whatever they are called) are anti-Western, although some are, but one can say they are pseudo-Western. That is they eschew any concept of culture or "peoples" altogether in the name of an ultra-realist epistemology. It's a classic case of concept smuggling. They want to generalize while denying generalizations. They want the benefits of Western society without first upholding the existence of a Western society.
In their view, it's we in the West who are suspect because we have made the erroneous picture to begin with. It's a grave error in its own right.
Jeff at January 23, 2008 6:06 PM
Hmmm. Not sure why I got all that extra white space. Webmaster?
Jeff at January 23, 2008 6:07 PM
You got it because you put double breaks between all the paragraphs in HTML. Just write and use carriage returns. Never understand why people are compelled to put all these HTML hoohas between their paragraphs when it works perfectly fine without them on every blog I go on. Including mine.
Sorry, just tired, and they're shooting a TV show at my house with me in it tomorrow, and I am decidedly unready.
Amy Alkon at January 23, 2008 7:10 PM
It was actually a P between . I went through it and found them all and pulled them out. You had this at the end of every para and the beginning of the next. Sigh.
Really, no need for this. Just like you're typing on a sheet of paper. Type. Carriage return, and so on.
Amy Alkon at January 23, 2008 7:13 PM
Awww. I'm a dunce. I do ASP.NET and DHTML all the time so I was just typing it habitually. Crike. It's easier not to use it. Sorry about that, and thanks for setting it right.
Sorry you're feeling a bit under. I'm at home sick. Thats why I've been lurking and posting on the blogs all day. Your blog is the best. Your posts are good, and the community of commentators is intelligent and boisterous. That's a tough thing to pull off.
You will soon be in a movie! That's cool. You're, well, gorgeous. So be careful not steal the scene from the female lead. ;-) Or are you the leading lady?
Jeff at January 23, 2008 7:36 PM
Amy, I just noticed something. In preview mode, the carriage returns don't show up. The text is all squashed. It appears correctly in blog comment column, though.
Jeff at January 23, 2008 7:38 PM
There is the idea that freedom and libery as we undestand them in modern democratic societies are universal human aspirations.
But as one looks at history it seems possible that the most common human aspiration is not freedom but security.
This is more of a stray thought than a hardcore belief on my part and I am curious as to what others think.
winston at January 24, 2008 2:19 AM
@brian - "In order to make the middle east compatible with Democracy - just get rid of Islam." - I think tribalism has to go, not Islam. Tribalism stops people from becoming nations, because they can't think of anything bigger than the tribe. So when you have national elections the results are not much more than a tribal population census.
This is true whether you have Islam or not, and the tribes can be family-based, religion-based, ethnically-based, or whatever.
I don't know if you can remove tribalism without also removing islam, or whether Islam minus tribalism is significantly different from Islam plus tribalism. No doubt someone else here knows the answer to that.
On the plus side, removing tribalism is also known as nation-building. It is much less threatening than Ann Coulter's "Invade their countries, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity" - which would always be a hard sell. Nation-building is much more positive! So, any suggestions on how to go about it in, say, Iraq or Afghanistan?
Norman at January 24, 2008 5:58 AM
Leave a comment