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DavidWarrenOnline
ESSAYS ON OUR TIMES
David Warren
March 13, 2006
http://www.davidwarrenonline.com/
Revisitation
The Americans went into
Afghanistan
and
Iraq
with my blessings, as my readers may recall. I thought both decisions to
invade were right, before either had been taken. But I thought this for
reasons I never fully explained, that were never quite George Bush’s
reasons -- more those of Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). I was, for instance,
sceptical about the project of bringing Western-style, bourgeois democracy
-- and everything needed to support that -- to countries where politics by
violence had so long prevailed. But if anyone could do it, I thought the
Americans could, with their own history of heroic optimism, prevailing
against insuperable odds.
A new book just landed in my mailbox, Redefining
Sovereignty, ed. Orrin C. Judd. It contains an essay by me from four years
ago, in which I tried to explain President Bush’s Lincolnesque thinking
on world order. I think the essay has borne up fairly well, to this short
passage of years. I said that Mr Bush was trying to vindicate and uphold
the existing national state-system in the world, in exactly the way
Lincoln
went about upholding the American union. And that, Mr Bush’s commitment
to spreading democracy was like
Lincoln
’s commitment to extinguishing slavery -- not the key point, but
necessary to the key point of recovering order. If
Lincoln
could have preserved the union, and it meant keeping slavery, he would
have done that.
Ditto, if Mr Bush thought he could restore the status
quo ante of a
Middle East
that was no threat to the West, without pushing democracy down anyone’s
throat, he would do that. But as he examined the problem presented to him
by the Arab raids on
New York
and
Washington
, the morning of Sept. 11th, 2001, he saw that something more would be
required. He believes, still, that there can be no lasting peace in the
world until the “root cause” of this terrorist violence is removed.
Hence, the evangelizing for democracy. Hence, the willingness to
kick-start, by taking out two of the most abhorrent regimes known to man,
and trying to repeat in
Afghanistan
and
Iraq
what the Americans accomplished in
Germany
,
Italy
, and
Japan
after World War II.
In this view -- which I hold to be Mr Bush’s -- we
are dealing with what amounts to a planetary civil war, between those who
accept the state-system descended from the Treaty of Westphalia (1648),
and an emergent Islamist ideology that certainly does not. To Mr Bush’s
mind, only legitimately-elected governments, presiding over
properly-administered secular bureaucracies, can be trusted to deal
locally with the kind of mischief an Osama bin Laden can perform, with his
hands on contemporary weapons of mass destruction.
But Mr Bush was staking his bet on the assumption
that the Islamists were not speaking for Islam; that the world’s Muslims
long for modernity; that they are themselves repelled by the violence of
the terrorists; that, most significantly, Islam is in its nature a
religion that can be “internalized”, like the world’s other great
religions, and that the traditional Islamic aspiration to conjoin worldly
political with otherworldly spiritual authority had somehow gone away. It
didn’t help that Mr Bush took for his advisers on the nature of Islam,
the paid operatives of Washington’s Council on American-Islamic
Relations, the happyface pseudo-scholar Karen Armstrong, or the profoundly
learned but terminally vain Bernard Lewis. Each, in a different way,
assured him that Islam and modernity were potentially compatible.
The question, “But what if they are not?” was
never seriously raised, because it could not be raised behind the mud
curtain of political correctness that has descended over the Western
academy and intelligentsia. The idea that others see the world in a way
that is not only incompatible with, but utterly opposed to, the way we see
it, is the thorn ever-present in the rose bushes of multiculturalism.
“Ideas have consequences”, and the idea that Islam imagines itself in
a fundamental, physical conflict with everything outside of itself, is an
idea with which people in the contemporary West are morally and
intellectually incapable of coming to terms. Hence our continuing surprise
at everything from bar-bombings in Bali, to riots in
France
, to the Danish cartoon apoplexy.
My own views on the issue have been aloof. More
precisely, they have been infected with cowardice. I am so
“post-modern” myself that I, too, find it almost impossible to think
through the corollaries from our world’s hardest fact. And that fact is:
the post-Christian West is out of its depth with Islam.
David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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