Interesting point of view. In fact, it’s probably the only viable course of action open to the us at this point in time. I don’t think the voters in the USA will be willing to throw good money after bad into Iraq anymore, no matter what their party affiliation. We tried to help Iraq build a stable democratic country and it didn’t work because the Shia Muslim Arabs we turned the country over to made a mess of it and the US government didn’t insist that they do things right (and leave troops behind to make sure they did it). We gave it the old college try and it didn’t work (of course, many factions both in Iraq and America didn’t want it to work, they wanted to see another “Vietnam”. But that is another story). Now we’ve learned that the Shia military leaders ran away in battle when they were presumably fighting to defend their own interests, just like they did when they were fighting for Saddam. No wonder the Sunnis always believed they were tougher than the Shias! If the Iraqi Shia Arabs are not willing to stand and fight for themselves, American’s won’t be willing to sacrifice their children to help them. So now we should stay the heck out and let chips fall where they may.
The lesson learned here is that to establish a stable democracy in a Muslim country you must be willing to do two things:
1. Kill off the people who oppose democracy. The fewer chronic trouble makers that survive into the post war period , the more stable the new democratic society will be. Democracies are fragile because they require participants who are not seeking to take control of the government by force to work as intended.
2. Insist that the leaders of the new government create a secular government, not an Islamic one. Islam is inherently anti-democratic because why would committed Muslim leaders allow people to vote not to follow the will of God , particularly as those committed Muslims saw that will? As we have learned committed Muslim leaders are not willing to allow people to “follow their own conscience”. Freedom to follow your own conscience is an important feature of democratic societies. Muslim factionalism, on the other hand, seems to do nothing but de-stabilize Muslim countries.
By Epictetus
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