| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"ArKLyte_" |
| Date: |
15 May 2004 03:14:09 PM |
| Object: |
Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib? |
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/096uutti.asp
Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib?
The Weekly Standard
May 27, 2004
Reuel Marc Gerecht
The scandal won't determine the fate of democracy in the Middle East.
ACCORDING TO Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat professor for peace and
development at the University of Maryland, "the humiliating scenes of
abused Iraqi prisoners" and the war in general "have turned that
country [Iraq] into a model to be feared and avoided in the eyes of
many in the Middle East, and a tool in the hands of governments
reluctant to change." Telhami, who was a driving force behind a recent
major Muslim-targeted public-diplomacy project chaired by former
assistant secretary of state Edward Djerejian and paid for by Uncle
Sam, sees American-occupied Iraq as "a far cry from the anticipated
model of inspiration that the administration promised would spur
demands for democracy in the Arab world." In the eyes of Jackson
Diehl, a liberal columnist for the Washington Post who regularly lends
his voice to Arabs struggling against dictatorship, "the photos from
Abu Ghraib prison may have destroyed what was left of the Bush
administration's credibility with Arab popular opinion,"
which--combined with the administration's recent actions backing
Israel's Ariel Sharon and Libya's unreformed dictator Muammar
Qaddafi--have surely undermined the promotion of democracy, supposedly
the administration's top priority in the Middle East.
Echoing the same themes in the Financial Times, former senior Clinton
administration officials Ivo Daalder and Anthony Lake see the Abu
Ghraib scandal as a significant factor undermining "whatever
credibility or legitimacy the U.S. presence in Iraq may once have
had." They are certain that "in Iraq today, America no longer offers a
solution," rather "it has become part of the problem." Also panicked
and shamed by the images of Abu Ghraib, Secretary of State Colin
Powell has been telephoning all over the Middle East and listening to
Arab rulers and foreign ministers express their dismay at what
transpired. "They are disappointed in us," Powell commented. The
rulers and the ruled are "outraged and there's a serious backlash. . .
.. We have presented ourselves as a value-based country--and we are.
And so when they see this kind of activity taking place--this
horrible, horrible series of pictures that we've witnessed--it causes
a tremendous response out in the region." To try to stem the tide of
ill will, the secretary is soon traveling to Jordan to "have a chance
to talk with many, many Arab leaders and try to put this in some
context and perspective, and to convey to them what we are doing to
help the Iraqi people."
In the battle for Muslim hearts and minds--which many on the left and
right believe is the only solution to Islamic terrorism aimed at the
United States--things have just gone to hell thanks to a perverse,
kinky group of American soldiers and their military-intelligence
overlords who seem to have mixed the U.S. armed forces' manuals on
interrogation with S&M techniques. Even a viewer of the Fox News
Channel who never hops to CNN might now conclude that our goose is
cooked in Iraq and the greater Middle East. With such American
depravity and Arab hatred, the Bush administration has dug a hole that
we may never get out of.
But is our situation in Iraq really in any way compromised by Abu
Ghraib? Have the chances of democracy in the Middle East really been
set back because sexually sensitive Muslims are so revolted that they
won't embrace representative government? Or to put it more broadly, is
America's standing in the Muslim world a popularity contest where our
chances of success--whatever the mission may be--are directly
proportional to how much an American president and his officials or
the American people and their values are liked and esteemed?
LET US LOOK at Iraq post-Abu Ghraib. As disgusting as the tactics of
the 800th Military Police Brigade may have been, they have not
elicited much condemnation from Iraq's Arab Shiites and Sunni Kurds,
who represent about 80 percent of the country's population. Most
critically, the senior clergy of Najaf, in particular Grand Ayatollah
Ali Sistani, Iraq's preeminent Shiite divine who virtually has a de
facto veto over American actions, has hardly mentioned the matter, let
alone aroused the faithful against the moral pollution of the American
occupation.
There are probably several reasons for this. Both the Shia and the
Kurds, not to mention the Arab Sunnis who were on the receiving end of
Saddam Hussein's wickedness, know very well what real bestiality is.
They know real sexual torture--Saddam institutionalized rape as a
means of destroying and preemptively neutering individual male and
tribal pride. Though there are surely too few U.S. troops in Iraq,
most Iraqis have had some contact with American soldiers. They may not
view them as German children viewed World War II GIs, but they have
certainly had enough contact to know that American personnel, with the
rarest exceptions, aren't rapists, sexual deviants, or by reflex or
training particularly violent people. If this weren't the case, the
senior clergy of Najaf would have long ago declared a holy war against
the American occupation, as they declared a jihad against the British
in 1920. The young clerical militant Moktada al-Sadr would have tens
of thousands of recruits, and coalition forces would be fortified in
their barracks, not on the offensive.
Also, the Shiites and Kurds probably assume that the humiliated
prisoners in Abu Ghraib are Sunnis (which may in fact be the case).
Though the Shiites and Kurds have so far been remarkably restrained in
their desire for intiqam--revenge--which is a leitmotif of Iraqi
culture, they probably are not above enjoying schadenfreude. They also
want the Americans to beat the ex-Baathists, Sunni Arab
fundamentalists, and foreign Sunni holy warriors who are trying to
drive the Americans out of Iraq and stop the march toward democracy.
After all, democracy will inevitably empower Shiites and frustrate the
Sunni Arab penchant for pummeling the Kurds. Their tolerance for
unpleasant American tactics in this endeavor is probably quite high.
Unlike much of Washington, D.C., they have not lost sight of the
larger objective: creating a democratic Iraq where they and their
children will never again know the horrors of dictatorship.
Which is why, of course, the Shiite clergy has been focused throughout
the Abu Ghraib affair on the guerrilla campaign of Moktada al-Sadr,
who is detested by the traditional clergy since he is challenging
their religious leadership and Sistani's decision to cooperate with
the Americans. They've also been watching the Marines at Falluja and
the American decision to return Baathist soldiers to duty to placate
and quiet the town, which has been a center of Sunni Arab resistance.
The American decision in Falluja provoked Jalaluddin al-Saghir, a
spokesman for Sistani, to warn that "members of the Baath party
committed the most heinous crimes and created bloodbaths and the
biggest mass graves in the history of mankind." A very healthy
self-interest is an obvious and major reason why Iraq's Shiites and
Kurds--and perhaps a decent slice of its Arab Sunnis--can watch the
images of Abu Ghraib and maintain their equanimity. They have vastly
more important things to worry about.
AS DO ARABS throughout the Middle East. A very odd, very American
notion about foreign affairs has now become gospel in certain quarters
in Washington: Bin Ladenism will end and democracy spread throughout
the Muslim Middle East only when a critical mass of Muslims like,
respect, and trust us. Democracy cannot exist in the Muslim mind on
its own merits but is judged overwhelmingly by the actions and
intrinsic goodness of the United States. Or, as Professor Telhami put
it, "When you don't trust the messenger, you don't trust the message,
even if it's a good one." Muslims, especially Arab Muslims to whom
Bush administration officials feel especially obliged to apologize for
Abu Ghraib, have become so America-centric, according to this view,
that they cannot admire democracy even though democracy as it is
practiced in much of Western Europe has produced political elites that
are pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Zionist. But Muslims'
appreciation of democracy cannot be that nuanced. Or, to put it
another way, Muslims aren't rational, historical actors. Their
political predilections--unlike those of Americans or Europeans or
Japanese--aren't shaped primarily by the societies in which they live,
but by foreigners whom they rarely see except on TV.
A historical analogy. Let us suppose that George H.W. Bush had marched
to Baghdad in 1991 and ousted Saddam Hussein and the Baath party. Let
us suppose that the Abu Ghraib scandal had happened then. Does anyone
believe this would have altered attitudes toward elected government
in, say, Algeria? In 1991, the Algerian military regime canceled
parliamentary elections when it became clear fundamentalists were
going to win. Would the Algerian generals' case against democracy have
been more appealing to the members of the Islamic Salvation Front and
other Islamist parties who really wanted a democratically elected
alternative to military autocracy because American soldiers made Iraqi
prisoners stack themselves naked? Algerian democrats--not the
hard-core fundamentalists who wanted one man, one vote, one
time--could have managed, I think, to hate America (and their former
colonial master, democratic France), hate the one-party state that had
impoverished their country, and still have the wisdom to see that
democracy would end the tyranny of the latter and allow them to
continue to detest the former.
Or consider a contemporary parallel. In March 2004, the new Supreme
Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest and most influential
fundamentalist organization in the world, allied his followers to a
plan for gradual but substantive constitutional and political reform
in Egypt. Egyptian liberals, like Saad Eddin Ibrahim, also back the
effort, as do a fairly wide array of individuals and organizations,
many of which, like the Muslim Brotherhood, you would never describe
as "pro-American." Does anybody really believe that these people,
especially the followers of the Muslim Brotherhood, will find Egyptian
president-for-life Hosni Mubarak's case against democracy more
persuasive because some American soldiers and intelligence officials
in Baghdad thought forced onanism was an effective aid to
interrogation? Democracy and anti-Americanism can happily and
healthily coexist. What's true in Latin America is true in the Middle
East. Muslims are not children.
Indeed, the democratic ethic in the Middle East has often been carried
by men who have a tense, if not hostile, attitude toward the West.
"Islamic modernists" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
wanted to import more representative government into the Muslim world,
in addition to many other Western ideals and manners, in order to
fortify their homelands against European influence and imperialism. A
modern-day version of this is Iran's "moderate" president, Mohammad
Khatami, who desperately wants to insert some democracy into Iran's
theocracy precisely to allow Iranian society, and via Iran the entire
Muslim world, to stand toe to toe against the perfidious influence of
the United States. In Khatami's books, Fear of the Wave and From the
World of the City to the City of the World, the cleric clearly depicts
democracy as an essential mechanism to allow the Muslim faith and
culture to flourish and compete against the awesome liberal (too
liberal), increasingly irreligious, tradition-crushing, cleric-hating,
anti-Muslim bulldozer called America. Is it too much to suggest that
Khatami and Iranian mullahs who are even more committed to democracy
than he have not lost faith in the virtues of representative
government because some U.S. soldiers and military intelligence
officials have some things in common with the state-sanctioned
torturers who thrive in clerical Iran's prisons?
It is true that the democratic ethic is not as highly developed in the
Arab Sunni world as it is among the Shiites of Iran or the clerics of
Najaf (see again the Grand Ayatollah's stunning June 29, 2003, fatwa,
or juridical opinion, in favor of democracy to see how advanced Iraqi
Shiite thinking is on the virtues of representative government). But
Arab Sunnis are much more advanced than many in the West, especially
among the "pro-Arab" crowd in academe and in the Near East Bureau of
the State Department, appear to think.
TO PUT IT TERSELY: The Abu Ghraib affair hasn't hurt at all the cause
of democracy in the greater Middle East, so long as the United States
doesn't believe it has. For most Muslims, the affair really doesn't
matter politically. It's the Americans who are the weak link.
Unfortunately, much of our view of the Muslim Middle East is shaped by
our own profound, understandable, and in other circumstances often
commendable liberal guilt. (We are certainly more ashamed of ourselves
than Muslim fundamentalists are ashamed of us--you have to admire or
feel some fraternity with someone before you can feel ashamed of
them.) And Muslim, especially Arab, liberals, who often serve as a
lens for Westerners on the Middle East, have not helped either.
They are in an awful predicament. Often far from the Muslim mainstream
on sensitive issues, regularly scared of being labeled "pro-American"
or worse "pro-Zionist" for having distinctly Western views on many
subjects, Muslim liberals live in fear of American actions that for
them could reverberate badly. They are not the cutting edge of
democracy in the Middle East--religiously oriented organizations
are--though they fancy themselves the vanguard. And they always have
the ear and usually the sympathies of the Western press and diplomatic
corps. Pain for them inevitably gets magnified and transmogrified into
pain for the entire Middle East. We should always wish them well--on
many issues the liberals fight a very lonely and noble fight. But they
are too often poor analysts of the Muslim world in which they are
politically and morally off-balance. For them, the Abu Ghraib affair
opens up a cultural can of worms that could easily and gleefully be
exploited by their opponents. We should not allow, however, their
emotions over Abu Ghraib to become ours.
Properly understood, the spread of democracy in the Muslim Middle East
is now well into its second century. Bitter experience with the
Western pathogens of socialism, communism, and fascism, which arrived
after World War I, started building an appreciation among Muslims for
checks on power. So, too, the explosion of hybrid pathogens in the
form of Islamic revolution in Iran and Sudan, and the awful indigenous
violence of extreme Sunni fundamentalism of which bin Ladenism is one
expression. The political experience of Muslims has been long and
painful. And in that pain, the constant trial by error, Muslims have
learned and evolved. A democratic ethic really does exist in Iran and
Iraq and among ordinary people in the Sunni Arab world, even among
fundamentalists. You can see it in the Arab press, in the dictators'
and hard-core fundamentalists' fear of free elections where one man,
one vote ultimately will decide the mores and political leadership of
a country.
For over a thousand years, Greek thought fortified the antidemocratic
strain in Muslim monotheism. As the great Oxford and Harvard scholar
of the Middle East Hamilton Gibb once pointed out, Greek logic and
physics, which took the Muslim world, particularly its scholarly
classes, by storm, powerfully reinforced the "Koranic conception of
God as absolute will . . . and the Koranic statements as absolute
postulates," leading Muslims to always "stress the unimaginable
transcendence of God" and his Holy Law. "Islamic theology is thus
always forced into extreme positions. There can be no agent of any
kind in the universe except God, since the existence of an agent
implies the possibility of an action independent of God, and therefore
a theoretical limitation on the absolute power of God."
But Muslims have always given more weight to practice than philosophy
and theology. Islam's philosophers and religious scholars are
perpetually playing catch up, trying to make the ideal match the
reality. That reality for the last one hundred years has been
increasingly dark, where the absolutist traditions within Islam have
merged with absolutist political strains imported from the West to
make life ugly, if not hell on earth. Muslims this time round are
increasingly embracing the democratic idea--perhaps the most seductive
Greek creation--to limit the damage that one Muslim can do to another.
America and its power may be an important element in this process.
They may not. But two things are certain. First, Secretary Powell
talking to Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah about our
Abu Ghraib shame is truly odd given that we have asked both to
interrogate al Qaeda suspects more "aggressively" than the 800th MP
Brigade ever did Iraqi prisoners. And second, in the nearly 1,400
years of Islamic history, Abu Ghraib is a blip that cannot possibly
derail the long Muslim march to a time when the faithful elect their
political leaders, just as they believe their forebears did after the
death of the Prophet Muhammad.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
--
* See the REAL 'Religion of Peace', Islam, on this site - EXCELLENT
* http://www.mathematik.net/homepage/islam/islam.htm
* Translated: http://tinyurl.com/2ooqh
.
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| User: "kuff \Isaac Adams" |
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| Title: Re: Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib? |
15 May 2004 06:05:41 PM |
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"ArKLyte_" <ArkLyte_@Now.Net> wrote in message
news:1muca0p0km8jpsen9q9uj4c49v9rtco2qn@4ax.com...
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/096uutti.asp
Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib?
The Weekly Standard
May 27, 2004
Reuel Marc Gerecht
The scandal won't determine the fate of democracy in the Middle East.
That's true. The democrazis had already lost before this.
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| User: "Scott Marquardt" |
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| Title: Re: Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib? |
15 May 2004 03:51:31 PM |
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ArKLyte_ opined thusly on May 15:
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/004/096uutti.asp
Who's Afraid of Abu Ghraib?
The Weekly Standard
May 27, 2004
Reuel Marc Gerecht
A very good analysis (as we'd expect from the Standard). The relative calm
among the Shia (Sadr's handful of renegades aside) has been the most
fascinating rebuttal from Iraq itself of claims that "oh good lord the
jig's up we're doomed in iraq" that seems to be on the lips of the
administration's enemies so much lately.
Then there's this:
AS DO ARABS throughout the Middle East. A very odd, very American
notion about foreign affairs has now become gospel in certain quarters
in Washington: Bin Ladenism will end and democracy spread throughout
the Muslim Middle East only when a critical mass of Muslims like,
respect, and trust us. Democracy cannot exist in the Muslim mind on
its own merits but is judged overwhelmingly by the actions and
intrinsic goodness of the United States. Or, as Professor Telhami put
it, "When you don't trust the messenger, you don't trust the message,
even if it's a good one." Muslims, especially Arab Muslims to whom
Bush administration officials feel especially obliged to apologize for
Abu Ghraib, have become so America-centric, according to this view,
that they cannot admire democracy even though democracy as it is
practiced in much of Western Europe has produced political elites that
are pro-Arab, pro-Palestinian, and anti-Zionist. But Muslims'
appreciation of democracy cannot be that nuanced. Or, to put it
another way, Muslims aren't rational, historical actors. Their
political predilections--unlike those of Americans or Europeans or
Japanese--aren't shaped primarily by the societies in which they live,
but by foreigners whom they rarely see except on TV.
There's the rub. It's an arrogant conceit that only if America -- one
democracy among many in the world -- is perfect, will Arabs ever have
reasons to prefer democracy themselves.
The entire article, well said.
--
Scott
Almost summer! http://snipurl.com/trebuchet
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