Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

Building Democracy

(Reprinted from the issue of February 10, 2005)

The Iraqi elections came off far more peacefully than many of President Bush’s critics expected, and Bush is hailing them as vindication of his War on Terror, which has morphed into a War for Democracy.

Though we can all be glad that relatively little violence occurred, Bush’s rejoicing in this “resounding success” is otherwise unwarranted. If the war is wrong in principle, no results can justify it. We may be relieved that the results aren’t worse, but that’s another matter.

At this point it’s not even clear what those results are. We gather that Iraq’s Shi’ite majority welcomes majority rule, and the Sunni minority doesn’t, but this is hardly surprising. The sober advocates of democracy have always stipulated that a legitimate government must enjoy the trust of its minorities and honor individual rights, and in Iraq this very much remains to be seen. A cautious optimism can say no more than “So far, so good.” This time even Bush knows better than to say, “Mission accomplished.”

Without belittling the courage of the Iraqis who braved death threats to vote, merely carrying off an election can hardly be hailed as the triumph of democracy. At the very least a democracy has to function effectively, and for more than one day.

Few Americans have any idea what the Iraqis were actually voting about; we know only that they did vote. All very well, but what happens next? Will the rule of law become a habit? It will take years to determine that, and [much] longer to test whether, as Bush hopes, the Iraqi example will prove contagious for the entire Mideast.

Maybe the Sunnis, whose leaders boycotted the elections, will fatalistically acquiesce to superior power; maybe that power will prove tolerable, compared with the country’s recent past. The sooner things settle down, the sooner American troops are likely to clear out. But this is how Westerners think; whether passionate Muslims will think this way is an entirely different matter.

In the short term, the success of the elections does appear to be a defeat for the resistance and al-Qaeda. Prospective suicide bombers may wonder if the struggle is worth their lives. Democracy, whatever may be said against it, does have the general effect of tempering apocalyptic furies. We can hope that even the fanatics will grudgingly feel, without necessarily saying so, that it’s time to “move on.”

But this is the rosy scenario. Only the most foolish optimist would assume its probability in a region known for sectarian furies and long memories recently intensified by a foreign invasion by infidels, where the dominant power has played ball with the invaders. These are not people to be mollified by slogans of freedom and democracy.

In its present and understandable euphoria, the administration, feeling that its goals are being realized on schedule, can easily forget that, as even Condoleezza Rice acknowledges, “the hard work is still ahead.”

This implies that the 1,400 American deaths in Iraq so far, to say nothing of the countless Iraqi deaths, are only the beginning.
 
Why They Hate Us

I often reflect that serious Catholics may have a special affinity with serious Muslims. Catholics understand that political arrangements are only provisional, not absolute goods. We may be called on to die for the faith; but for democracy?

Many pro-war American pundits, who know just enough history to make facile parallels between this war and World War II, are missing the point. World War II isn’t an important part of the Muslim memory, and the militant Islamists have nothing in common with the Axis powers.

A more useful analogy might be this: The Muslims regard a Western invasion as the Catholics of Eastern Europe, not so long ago, regarded Communist conquest — as a mortal assault on their religion and way of life. Those who take their faith seriously must regard resistance as a holy duty. To portray this as hatred of freedom is to misconceive the whole situation.

Muslims now hate and fear Americans, whom they see as both aggressive and immoral, as Catholics in Poland and Czechoslovakia once hated and feared the Soviet Union.

It’s hard for most Americans to imagine that anyone could see the United States as anything but the standard-bearer of liberty. “Infidels” seems a quaint and almost comical word to apply to us. But we should try to think of ourselves as, in Muslim eyes, the functional equivalent of the Bolshevik menace.

Putting the shoe on the other foot isn’t something Americans are particularly good at. Bush seems especially unable to grasp why people of other cultures might dread not only our power, but the morality they fear we would impose on them, just as Communism brought divorce, abortion, and other evils to the nations it claimed to liberate. So when we say “liberation,” is it any wonder that the Muslims hear “slavery”?

Bush, like many others, insists that our enemies “hate freedom.” He almost never uses the word “fear.” But the obvious truth is that those enemies intensely fear what Americans have come to mean by freedom, and what you fear, you also hate.

Why should this be so hard to understand? Fifty years ago, when America was still predominantly Christian, our relations with the Muslim world were distant but friendly. There were few huge moral differences between the two worlds.

Which world has changed since then? How would Americans then have welcomed the prospect of America today, where you can flip on your television and watch pornography? Is this what Muslims think they can look forward to if we manage to Americanize them?

Bush is a devout man, but he doesn’t grasp how many pious people on this earth see him as the head of a Godless power. Are they all wrong?
 
Thoughts on “Choice”

I am heartily sick of the term “pro-choice,” which even many opponents of abortion use to describe those who are pro-abortion. Pro-slavery people weren’t called pro-choice, though the term fit them just as well — as long as you forgot that only the slave owner had the “right to choose.” After all, nobody was forced to own a slave!

Pro-choice? Well, the mother may have a choice, but her unborn son or daughter has none. Startling when you put it that way, because the word “fetus” suggests a sexless abstraction, neither male nor female.

Just thought I’d mention it. Another illustration of my pet peeve, the way most people don’t measure their words.

You can learn a lot by listening — even, at times, by listening to yourself.


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Joseph Sobran