Posted on 04/14/2004 12:46:03 PM PDT by knighthawk
The current insurrection in Iraq was discernible a year ago, as I already noted in April 2003: ''Thousands of Iraqi Shiites chanted 'No to America, No to Saddam, Yes to Islam' a few days ago, during pilgrimage rites in the holy city of Karbala. Increasing numbers of Iraqis appear to agree with these sentiments. They have ominous implications for the coalition forces.''
The recent wave of violence makes those implications fully apparent.
Two factors in particular made me expect Iraqi resistance. First, the quick war of 2003 focused on overturning a hated tyrant so that, when it was over, Iraqis felt liberated, not defeated. Accordingly, the common assumption that Iraq resembled the Germany and Japan of 1945 was wrong. Those two countries had been destroyed through years of all-out carnage, leading them to acquiesce to the postwar overhaul of their societies and cultures. Iraq, in contrast, emerged almost without damage from brief hostilities, and Iraqis do not feel they must accept guidance from the occupation forces. Rather, they immediately showed a determination to shape their country's future.
Second, as a predominantly Muslim people, Iraqis share in the powerful Muslim reluctance to being ruled by non-Muslims. This reluctance results from the very nature of Islam, the most public and political of religions.
To live a fully Muslim life requires living in accord with the many laws of Islam, called the sharia. The sharia includes difficult-to-implement precepts pertaining to taxation, the judicial system and warfare. Its complete implementation can occur only when the ruler himself is a pious Muslim (although an impious Muslim is much preferable to a non-Muslim). For Muslims, rule by non-Muslims is an abomination, a blasphemous inversion of God's dispensation.
This explains why one finds a consistently strong resistance to rule by non-Muslims through 14 centuries of Muslim history. Europeans recognized this resistance, and in their post-Crusades global expansion stayed largely away from majority-Muslim territories, knowing these would awesomely resist their control.
The pattern is striking: For more than four centuries, 1400-1830, Europeans expanded around the world, trading, ruling and settling -- but distinctly in places where Muslims were not, such as the Western Hemisphere, sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia and Australia. In a clear pattern of avoidance, the imperial powers (Britain, France, Holland and Russia especially) took control of faraway territories, while carefully avoiding their Muslim neighbors in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia.
Only in 1830 did a European power (France) find the confidence frontally to confront a Muslim state (Algeria). Even then, the French needed 17 years just to control the coastal region.
As European rulers conquered Muslim lands, they found they could not crush the Islamic religion, nor win the population over culturally, nor stamp out political resistance. However suppressed, some embers of resistance remained; these often sparked a flame of anti-imperialism that finally drove the Europeans out. In Algeria, for example, a successful eight-year effort, 1954-62, expelled the French colonial authority.
Nor was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq the first Western undertaking to unburden Muslims of tyrannical rule. Already in 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte appeared in Egypt with an army and declared himself a friend of Islam who had come to relieve the oppressed Egyptians of their Mamluk rulers. His successor as commander in Egypt, J.F. Menou, actually converted to Islam. But these efforts to win Egyptian goodwill failed, as Egyptians rejected the invaders' proclaimed good intentions and remained hostile to French rule.
The European-run ''mandates'' set up in the Middle East after World War I included similar lofty intentions and also found few Muslim takers.
This history suggests that the coalition's grand aspirations for Iraq will not succeed. However constructive its intentions to build democracy, the coalition cannot win the confidence of Muslim Iraq nor win acceptance as its overlord. Even spending $18 billion in one year on economic development does not improve matters.
I therefore counsel the occupying forces quickly to leave Iraqi cities and then, when feasible, to leave Iraq as a whole. They should seek out what I have been calling for since a year ago: a democratically minded Iraqi strongman, someone who will work with the coalition forces, provide decent government, and move eventually toward a more open political system.
This sounds slow, dull and unsatisfactory. But at least it will work -- in contrast to the ambitious but failing current project.
Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum.
Muslims have no tradition of democratic institutions or a modern legal system or rule of law, or any of the other structures of democracy.
Turkey has a predominantly Muslim population and a secular state. It's been a democracy much longer than Germany or Russia. If Pipes makes this argument, he should not omit this important example.
With the exception of Turkey for most of the 20th century, and maybe Pakistan and Malaysia, I should have added.
Respected Iraqi religious leaders want a say in the government and they want Islamic law to be respected, but they are not demanding another Iran (which they don't seem to like).
So what do the Iraqi civilians want? The vast majority of Iraqis want what all of us want. We need to get to basic human needs here. Remember Maslow's heararcy of needs:
First come the physical needs (they are complaining now that Saddam kept the electricity on, water flowing, etc.) That is because, unlike what some have posted here, their country is pretty much gone to pieces by the 12 years of allied bombing, Saddam exploiting and embargoes.
But a close second is the need for safety: If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs, (security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, and limits; strength in the protector; and so on). (Abraham Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 18)
These needs are part of all of us. They are part of natural law. The desire for freedom is part of all of us. The gift of freedom, as Bush said, is a gift from God. He feels, and so do I, that with the power of being the most powerful country on earth, comes the responsibility to help God in bistowing that gift, where possbile. If it is done in the middle east, there is a good possibility the terrorists coming from there will be stopped by their own governments (democratic ones), before coming here. It is a bold vision, but not an irrational one. It has been accomplished in Japan, Germany and Italy.
Yes, except what looks to you as oppressed people may not be oppression: it may be the choice those people made. That is the poitn Pipes makes. You may or may not agree with that point, but you should at least understand it. And history is relevant, then: it shows which choices those people have made. If I see you smoking, by choice, every day after dinner, I am unlikely to be successful liberating you from cigarettes. Only you can do that.
Some food for further thought: our Constitution has been an open book for more than two centuries -- how many countries have adopted it? Dozens if not hundreds of counties came into existence in the last 50 years. How many of them adopted any part of what we consider sacred?
So before you liberate, you shold know what the intended beneficiaries prefer.
I also think that he is right, but not for the reason stated: it's not so much that Islam is weighing on the issue (Turkey is a counter-example) but the Arab culture. The Turks have proven that they can maintain democracy, and the Persians have potential for it too. The Arabs are something else for cultural reasons.
In application to Iraq, therefore, I think that he is correct.
This week they had the choice to pick up arms and create an Islamic state like Iran, and they voted NO!
True. There are differences. Some have pointed out that Germany was demolished and rebuilt from the ground up, while Iraq was not. Iraq did, on the other hand, go through 30 years of horrificly brutal rule, a fact which cuts both ways, leaving us with some people who are determined not to go back, and others who are merely cynical and brutal themselves.
The biggest difference, though, is that in both Germany and Japan we came to stay. We out-lasted early insurgencies, and rebuilt their political systems in our own image, imposed control over them for 10 or 15 years, and kept a conspicuous presence in both countries for decades.
If we expect to be successful in Iraq, we had better be prepared to do the same. The present level of discourse suggests that at least half don't get it, and the other half are watching their words to avoid panicking them.
You could add that Japan and Germany were also not surrounded on land by neighbors with a huge stake in undermining the project.
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