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The Rival Fanaticisms of Our Day

By Tom Bethell on 7.21.04 @ 12:04AM

(Page 2 of 2)

Bush keeps talking about Iraqi freedom, but Bernard Lewis pointed out some years ago that the notion of political freedom was unknown in the Islamic world for over a thousand years. Its appearance at the time of Napoleon was "patently due to European influence." Scholar were unable to translate it into Arabic.

Democracy is normally a bulwark against fanaticism. But the neoconservatives saw the U.S. military as a reservoir of power that could be mobilized, and U.S. foreign policy redirected. They saw, too, that the public would mostly slumber on. The masses still had their bread and circuses. The airwaves were so filled with cross-talk about avenging 9/11, weapons of mass destruction, punishing al Qaeda, catching the dictator Saddam, that few could keep their eye on the goal, which I guess was planting the U.S. military in the Middle East with a view to "changing the culture."

The residual American power is supposed to be transferred from the Pentagon to the State Department. There was (maybe still is) a crazed American plan to ensure that in the coming democracy, 40 percent of the legislators would be women. That was fanaticism, another instance of U.S. policy being captured by ideologically motivated groups. There have been plans to unleash all kinds of liberal nostrums, ranging from fuzzy math to condom distribution.

If such idiocies survive, my guess is that the Iraqis in charge will play along to keep the reconstruction billions flowing. Then they will privatize as much of the money as they can by moving it to offshore accounts. Maybe they will sweep Western news media out of the country, and then do whatever is necessary to consolidate power. Our Islamic enemies will be emboldened. A perceived American defeat is likely to turn Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East, into a more dangerous place than it was before the war began.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Foreign Policy, Television, Islam, Military, Iraq, Iran