Are Muslim countries ready for democracy?
The featured article on today's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page is a response by Peter Wehner, deputy assistant to the president and director of the White House's Office of Strategic Initiatives, to three conservative—and one ex-conservative—pundits who are "harsh critics of the Iraq war." They are William F. Buckley Jr., George Will, and Francis Fukuyama, respectively. While I support the war for various reasons, I found myself defending the war critics. Below are some selections from Mr. Wehner's article, and my thoughts.
Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face?***[T]he critics of the Iraq war have chosen an odd time to criticize the appeal and power of democracy. After all, we are witnessing the swiftest advance of freedom in history.
What Wehner really means is that we are witnessing the swiftest advance of democracy in history. And perhaps he is right. But since democracy does not equal freedom, Wehner's claim is beside the point.
Of course, implicit in Wehner's praise of democracy is that we support it only if we approve of the results. After all, just as democracy brought Hitler to power, so could it usher in Islamic (Shariah) Law to Muslim nations. In fact, this is the danger in Afghanistan: Abdul Rahman was charged with converting to Christianity, a capital crime, and only avoided conviction on a technicality (i.e. international pressure). Fortunately, he is now safe in Italy. Here is what the judge said during the trial: "We have the perfect constitution. It is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished." What good is a democracy that chooses to impose on itself a strict totalitarian religious law oppressive to women and other minorities?
The problem with Iraq, Mr. Will said in a Manhattan Institute lecture, is that it "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a [John] Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout." There is no "existing democratic culture" that will allow liberty to succeed, he argues. And he scoffs at the assertion by President Bush that it is "cultural condescension" to claim that some peoples, cultures or religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government. The most obvious rebuttal to Mr. Will's first point is that only one nation in history had at its creation a Washington, Madison and Marshall--yet there are 122 democracies in the world right now. So clearly founders of the quality of Washington and Madison are not the necessary condition for freedom to succeed.
True, not every single free nation needs their own Founding Fathers of America's caliber,but I would venture a guess that most modern democracies have a stronger historical foundation in natural law and the idea of human rights than most Muslim countries have today. Democracy is not simply the silver bullet to the world's problems. Democracy is arguably the best method to achieve a society that respects the rule of law and lives according to it; it also serves well as a check against the government gaining dangerous levels of power. Once again, if a people vote in a vile dictatorship, what good was the democratic process?
If cultures are as intractable as Mr. Will asserts, and if an existing democratic culture was as indispensable as he insists, we would not have seen democracy take root in Japan after World War II, Southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America and East Asia in the '80s, and South Africa in the '90s. It was believed by many that these nations' and regions' traditions and cultures--including by turns Confucianism, Catholicism, dictatorships, authoritarianism, apartheid, military juntas and oligarchies--made them incompatible with self-government.
Perhaps, but it seems glaringly obvious that not a single one of these examples is a Muslim nation. (I'm not sure of this; correct me if I'm wrong. The place where I may be wrong is likely a South African country. However, the influences of the European empires--most notably the British--is a unique contributor to a foundation in natural law.) The standard example in rebuttal to the claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy, natural law and/or human rights is Turkey: democratic, a prime minister, elected legislature, civil law system, universal suffrage at 18, independent judicial branch, high literacy rate for both sexes, and 99.8% Sunni Muslim. Honestly, I don't know why Turkey is the exception, but whatever they've got seems to work. NRO's Jim Geraghty currently blogs from Turkey, and apparently he hasn't been imprisoned or killed for speaking from a western, non-Muslim perspective.
[Culture] matters a great deal. But so do incentives and creeds and the power of ideas, which can profoundly shape culture.
Indeed, the supreme question is whether the ideas of natural law and human rights are powerful enough to gain support among those whose religion promotes Shariah law. And that is where I doubt. President Bush has declared that all people desire freedom, that it is a basic and universal part of humanity. I may agree with that. But if history (and psychology) has shown us anything, it has proved that man is incredibly adept at denying, suppressing, or alternately fulfilling certain "natural" instincts or desires (especially inconvenient ones). Ted Bundy's desire for sexual fulfillment, which was fed and twisted by the evil that is violent pornography, led to rapings and killings of innocent girls. Corrupt leaders often speak in the words of equal rights and natural law, yet their own greed and/or lust for power informs decisions which directly contradict their public presentation. Every religion tries to answer certain questions about man; all faiths besides Christianity are alternate fulfiller which ultimately fail. Back to government: this ability and tendency in man is exactly why checks and balances are necessary in our democratic system, lest a small group of leaders lets their so-called "basic human desire for freedom and equality" morph into a power-grab.
What has plagued the Arab Middle East is not simply, or even primarily, culture; it is antidemocratic ideologies and oppressive institutions. And the way to counteract pernicious ideologies and oppressive institutions is with better ones. Liberty, and the institutions that support liberty, is a pathway to human flourishing.
True, but forcefully giving people a choice when they don't even understand the options is not actually giving them a choice. I refuse to believe that any people group that truly understands the undeniable truths of natural law, human rights, and equality, would ever purposefully choose totalitarianism. Did the Afghanis truly get what their options were? I doubt it. Perhaps they were too afraid to vote right, or a convoluted form of self-interest prohibited them. How many Muslim men, immersed in the Shariah culture, would choose to lessen their power over their wives and children? And how many Muslim women, oppressed and--perhaps happily--subservient to men, would choose to vote for their rights if such a vote was in violation of their husbands' will?
Despite my uncertainty about all this, I still support the Afghan and Iraq wars. The former was a necessary response to 9/11, and the latter I still believe was necessary from a national security standpoint. Indeed, more information continues to be unearthed about Saddam's terror connections and his pursuit of WMDs, including nukes, and at least we're fighting terrorists overseas instead of on American soil. Who knows if the goal of a western-friendly democratic Iraq will pan out. Maybe Iraq will make a correct choice and make itself look more like Turkey than what Afghanistan seems to be headed for.
Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world [in the Middle East]--and because the work is difficult doesn't mean it can be ignored. The cycle has to be broken.
Agreed. The question is how. It remains to be seen if simply blowing away a murderous regime, rebuilding a country and training a home-grown Iraqi military is enough to convince the Iraqis that natural law and human rights should be their vote. (Apparently that's already failed in Afghanistan.) The point could be made that we shouldn't even give them their chance to choose until we know they'll choose right. But what would that look like--an increase in Voice of America broadcasts into Muslim countries? Dropping millions of pamphlets about natural law on the citizens of oppressed nations? No, that seems ridiculous and unfruitful. Is the best strategy for gaining a natural law-friendly Middle East to encourage democracy in the region (with possible military force), let nations make mistakes, and hope for the best? Even if Iraq ends up not choosing the way we would want, they sure are a heck of a lot closer to that ideal than they ever would have been under Saddam. Is that progress? Only time will tell.
[cross posted at Critical Mass]
[cross-posted at Right of Way Show]
Tags: Iraq, Wall Street Journal, Peter Wehner, democracy, freedom, muslim, shariah, totalitarianism, conservative, Abdul Rahman, Christianity, religion, Ted Bundy, Afghanistan, George Will, Fukuyama, President Bush, arab, middle east, Saddam Hussein, WMD
Does Mr. Fukuyama believe Iraqis prefer subjugation to freedom? Does he think they, unlike he, relish life in a gulag, or the lash of the whip, or the midnight knock of the secret police? Who among us wants a jackboot forever stomping on his face?***[T]he critics of the Iraq war have chosen an odd time to criticize the appeal and power of democracy. After all, we are witnessing the swiftest advance of freedom in history.
What Wehner really means is that we are witnessing the swiftest advance of democracy in history. And perhaps he is right. But since democracy does not equal freedom, Wehner's claim is beside the point.
Of course, implicit in Wehner's praise of democracy is that we support it only if we approve of the results. After all, just as democracy brought Hitler to power, so could it usher in Islamic (Shariah) Law to Muslim nations. In fact, this is the danger in Afghanistan: Abdul Rahman was charged with converting to Christianity, a capital crime, and only avoided conviction on a technicality (i.e. international pressure). Fortunately, he is now safe in Italy. Here is what the judge said during the trial: "We have the perfect constitution. It is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished." What good is a democracy that chooses to impose on itself a strict totalitarian religious law oppressive to women and other minorities?
The problem with Iraq, Mr. Will said in a Manhattan Institute lecture, is that it "lacks a Washington, a Madison, a [John] Marshall--and it lacks the astonishingly rich social and cultural soil from which such people sprout." There is no "existing democratic culture" that will allow liberty to succeed, he argues. And he scoffs at the assertion by President Bush that it is "cultural condescension" to claim that some peoples, cultures or religions are destined to despotism and unsuited for self-government. The most obvious rebuttal to Mr. Will's first point is that only one nation in history had at its creation a Washington, Madison and Marshall--yet there are 122 democracies in the world right now. So clearly founders of the quality of Washington and Madison are not the necessary condition for freedom to succeed.
True, not every single free nation needs their own Founding Fathers of America's caliber,but I would venture a guess that most modern democracies have a stronger historical foundation in natural law and the idea of human rights than most Muslim countries have today. Democracy is not simply the silver bullet to the world's problems. Democracy is arguably the best method to achieve a society that respects the rule of law and lives according to it; it also serves well as a check against the government gaining dangerous levels of power. Once again, if a people vote in a vile dictatorship, what good was the democratic process?
If cultures are as intractable as Mr. Will asserts, and if an existing democratic culture was as indispensable as he insists, we would not have seen democracy take root in Japan after World War II, Southern Europe in the 1970s, Latin America and East Asia in the '80s, and South Africa in the '90s. It was believed by many that these nations' and regions' traditions and cultures--including by turns Confucianism, Catholicism, dictatorships, authoritarianism, apartheid, military juntas and oligarchies--made them incompatible with self-government.
Perhaps, but it seems glaringly obvious that not a single one of these examples is a Muslim nation. (I'm not sure of this; correct me if I'm wrong. The place where I may be wrong is likely a South African country. However, the influences of the European empires--most notably the British--is a unique contributor to a foundation in natural law.) The standard example in rebuttal to the claim that Islam is incompatible with democracy, natural law and/or human rights is Turkey: democratic, a prime minister, elected legislature, civil law system, universal suffrage at 18, independent judicial branch, high literacy rate for both sexes, and 99.8% Sunni Muslim. Honestly, I don't know why Turkey is the exception, but whatever they've got seems to work. NRO's Jim Geraghty currently blogs from Turkey, and apparently he hasn't been imprisoned or killed for speaking from a western, non-Muslim perspective.
[Culture] matters a great deal. But so do incentives and creeds and the power of ideas, which can profoundly shape culture.
Indeed, the supreme question is whether the ideas of natural law and human rights are powerful enough to gain support among those whose religion promotes Shariah law. And that is where I doubt. President Bush has declared that all people desire freedom, that it is a basic and universal part of humanity. I may agree with that. But if history (and psychology) has shown us anything, it has proved that man is incredibly adept at denying, suppressing, or alternately fulfilling certain "natural" instincts or desires (especially inconvenient ones). Ted Bundy's desire for sexual fulfillment, which was fed and twisted by the evil that is violent pornography, led to rapings and killings of innocent girls. Corrupt leaders often speak in the words of equal rights and natural law, yet their own greed and/or lust for power informs decisions which directly contradict their public presentation. Every religion tries to answer certain questions about man; all faiths besides Christianity are alternate fulfiller which ultimately fail. Back to government: this ability and tendency in man is exactly why checks and balances are necessary in our democratic system, lest a small group of leaders lets their so-called "basic human desire for freedom and equality" morph into a power-grab.
What has plagued the Arab Middle East is not simply, or even primarily, culture; it is antidemocratic ideologies and oppressive institutions. And the way to counteract pernicious ideologies and oppressive institutions is with better ones. Liberty, and the institutions that support liberty, is a pathway to human flourishing.
True, but forcefully giving people a choice when they don't even understand the options is not actually giving them a choice. I refuse to believe that any people group that truly understands the undeniable truths of natural law, human rights, and equality, would ever purposefully choose totalitarianism. Did the Afghanis truly get what their options were? I doubt it. Perhaps they were too afraid to vote right, or a convoluted form of self-interest prohibited them. How many Muslim men, immersed in the Shariah culture, would choose to lessen their power over their wives and children? And how many Muslim women, oppressed and--perhaps happily--subservient to men, would choose to vote for their rights if such a vote was in violation of their husbands' will?
Despite my uncertainty about all this, I still support the Afghan and Iraq wars. The former was a necessary response to 9/11, and the latter I still believe was necessary from a national security standpoint. Indeed, more information continues to be unearthed about Saddam's terror connections and his pursuit of WMDs, including nukes, and at least we're fighting terrorists overseas instead of on American soil. Who knows if the goal of a western-friendly democratic Iraq will pan out. Maybe Iraq will make a correct choice and make itself look more like Turkey than what Afghanistan seems to be headed for.
Democracy and the accompanying rise of political and civic institutions are the only route to a better world [in the Middle East]--and because the work is difficult doesn't mean it can be ignored. The cycle has to be broken.
Agreed. The question is how. It remains to be seen if simply blowing away a murderous regime, rebuilding a country and training a home-grown Iraqi military is enough to convince the Iraqis that natural law and human rights should be their vote. (Apparently that's already failed in Afghanistan.) The point could be made that we shouldn't even give them their chance to choose until we know they'll choose right. But what would that look like--an increase in Voice of America broadcasts into Muslim countries? Dropping millions of pamphlets about natural law on the citizens of oppressed nations? No, that seems ridiculous and unfruitful. Is the best strategy for gaining a natural law-friendly Middle East to encourage democracy in the region (with possible military force), let nations make mistakes, and hope for the best? Even if Iraq ends up not choosing the way we would want, they sure are a heck of a lot closer to that ideal than they ever would have been under Saddam. Is that progress? Only time will tell.
[cross posted at Critical Mass]
[cross-posted at Right of Way Show]
Tags: Iraq, Wall Street Journal, Peter Wehner, democracy, freedom, muslim, shariah, totalitarianism, conservative, Abdul Rahman, Christianity, religion, Ted Bundy, Afghanistan, George Will, Fukuyama, President Bush, arab, middle east, Saddam Hussein, WMD
posted by Seth at 8:00 PM
3 Comments:
Seth, good analysis. I like your stuff. I'm glad that not everyone is abandoning the blogging world right as I join it. I hope JBU is going well.
p.s. check out my blog!
Ben
The point all of them miss is this: it's not really a question about whether Arabs or Muslims are 'ready' for democracy because plenty of Arab and/or Muslim countries have democracy now or had it in the past prior to a foreign-sponsored coup; the question is whether the West is ready to let them have it. And the answer to that seems to be 'no'.
I'm not sure what you're getting at, Loyal. Care to expand?
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