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September 16, 2006

What We Have Learned in 2006

By Robert Tracinski

The invasion of Iraq produced important new evidence about the moral and ideological dimensions of the War on Terrorism--but not as many lessons as the past year. Intellectually, 2006 may turn out to be the most important year in the War on Terrorism.

History has been unusually busy this year, producing three important and enormously instructive events within the space of less than nine months: the Palestinian election in January, the "cartoon jihad" in February and March, and the conflict in Lebanon in July and August. Taken together, these events reveal the full breadth and real center of the clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.

The Palestinian election demonstrated that "democracy," which is supposed to be our political and ideological weapon against totalitarian Islam, can also be used by the terrorists as a weapon against us. Unlike al-Qaeda, the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas supplements its suicide bomb attacks with social welfare spending and a political party. As a result, it was able to achieve a majority in the Palestinian parliament. The lesson drawn by Hamas: if they could convince enough Palestinians to vote for a policy of mass murder, then they could gain international legitimacy on terms set by the United States itself, which heavily promoted the Palestinian election.

As one Hamas politician gloated, "I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the US and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."

The proper lesson of the Palestinian election is that we need to examine and reject the misleading term "democracy." In today's political discussion, the term "democracy" takes some of the actual procedures of a free society, such as free elections and a free press, and packages them together with the principle of unlimited majority rule, implying that a nation is still "free" so long as its liberty is taken away by majority vote.

America's Founding Fathers explicitly rejected the term "democracy." They believed that representative government exists to serve the cause of individual rights, and so they created a republican political system that was designed, not to empower a tyranny of the majority, but to limit the power of government. The modern concept of "democracy" has turned this on its head, telling us that it is acceptable to sacrifice liberty on the altar of majority rule.

This is the approach that Hamas took to its logical extreme, using elections to legitimize a dictatorial Islamic terrorist state, on the grounds that it represents the "democratic" will of the Palestinian voters.

Many commentators grasped that in the Palestinian elections something had gone horribly wrong. By itself, they admitted, voting is "not enough" to establish a free society--but few have succeeded in naming what political principles are actually required to establish a free society.

For its part, the Bush administration has partly tried to evade the issue, claiming that Hamas won by promising to clean up official corruption--not by promising to wipe out the Jews. But the Bush administration did also make an attempt to regain control of the "weapon of democracy." In its updated 2006 National Security Strategy, for example, the administration introduced the term "effective democracy," in which a majority vote was described as just one aspect of a wider culture of respect for "human rights" and "limited government."

This represents a lesson only half-learned. It is was an attempt to combine "democracy" with "liberty"--when what we really need to do is to scrap the woozy, misleading term "democracy" and once again identify liberty and individual rights as the real defining principles of our political system.

The Palestinian elections were another sobering reminder of the cultural corruption of the Arab and Islamic worlds, a culture so depraved that Palestinians would vote to elect, as one of the new Hamas members of parliament, a woman whose main qualification is that she has sent three of her six sons to become suicide bombers.

The source of that cultural corruption was revealed in the following months by the "cartoon jihad."

The "cartoon jihad" is the improbable name given to the riots that were fomented across the Islamic world to threaten the tiny nation of Denmark for allowing its free press to portray the founder of Islam in a dozen editorial cartoons.

The essence of the "cartoon jihad" was an attempt to use terror and intimidation to suppress any criticism of Islam in the West. It was an attempt to make Western nations bow down before the tyrannical restrictions of radical Islam.

In Part 1 of this article, I wrote that for the past five years America "has been immersed in a long lesson in foreign names, places, and words." Just last week, blogger Michelle Malkin provided a helpful glossary of some of the most important terms. The term Americans learned from the cartoon jihad was "dhimmitude," which Malkin defines as "the official state of inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam; the bowing and scraping of vanquished infidels to their intellectual and military conquerors."

Whatever remnants of woozy Multiculturalism were left over after September 11 ought to have been washed away by the cartoon jihad. It demonstrated that the Muslim world is not content to live and let live, to let us have our culture so long as we let them have theirs. They demand our enforced "respect" for their religion and our enforced obedience to their religious restrictions

The cartoon jihad also refuted all of the comforting reassurances that "'Islam' means 'peace.'" It demonstrated that Islam means "submission."

I hinted yesterday that the violence and primitivism of the Islamic world is deeply rooted in its oldest traditions. This is the ultimate root. The Muslim religious ideal is the believer's total submission to the religious strictures of Islam, as interpreted by the religious authorities. Mohammed himself became a religious dictator in his own lifetime, and the religion he founded has never fundamentally rejected religious dictatorship as an ideal.

This is captured--not fully, but to a significant extent--in another term that everyone has learned in the past year, including President Bush: "Islamic fascism" or "Islamofascism." We now grasp that the enemy is not driven by poverty, by resentment against Western "imperialism," by fury at the Israeli "occupation," or by any of the politically correct rationalizations for terrorism. The enemy is driven by an ideology of Muslim religious totalitarianism.

The cartoon jihad made it clear that the Islamists' goal is the creation of a Muslim religious dictatorship, not just in Afghanistan or Iran, but over the whole globe.

Consider the context for the cartoon jihad: multiple terrorist attacks and terrorist plots in London, terrorist plots in Denmark and Germany, murders and death threats targeting critics of Islam in the Netherlands, Muslim riots in France. It is now clear that Europe will be one of the first targets for the attempt at global Muslim conquest. The Europeans have tried to pretend that the war is about the "aggressive" policies of Israel or America, and they have hoped that if they stay neutral between the United States and al-Qaeda, or between the United State and Iran, the war won't touch them. The cartoon jihad was a warning that this hope is futile, and that the Europeans are closer to the front lines of the War on Terrorism than America.

Before this year, the dark dream of global Muslim domination was known--Osama bin Laden had announced it many times--but it was widely dismissed as an isolated fanatic's delusion of grandeur. That same vision is getting a lot more attention today, now that it is being loudly stated by the leader of a nation of 70 million people with ambitions of becoming a nuclear power: the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Iran has emerged as the power arming and supporting the Shiite militias in Iraq. It has emerged as the sponsor of Hamas, which is now the leader of the Palestinian terror war against Israel. It has emerged as the main sponsor propping up Syria's previously secular dictatorship, which in turn supports the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. And Iran has emerged as the power arming and training Lebanon's Hezbollah militia--the Islamic terrorist organization that initiated a war with Israel just two months ago.

The conflict in Lebanon revealed Iran as the center of an aggressive "Islamist Axis" with its tentacles expanding throughout the Middle East. It also demonstrated, in a rocket barrage against Israel that rivals the London Blitz in the sheer quantity of explosives used, what Iran would be capable of if it is allowed to obtain nuclear weapons.

And this is precisely the conclusion that many commentators on the right have drawn. Their preferred way of expressing this conclusion is through an analogy to German fascism in the 1930s, an intellectual "light bulb moment" that I have pretty thoroughly documented in the latest print edition of The Intellectual Activist.

Some of us have been arguing for years that Iran is a central enemy in the War on Terrorism, and that we cannot win the war without toppling its theocratic regime. We might be frustrated that it has taken others five years to reach this conclusion. But it takes time for a culture to absorb new evidence and draw new conclusions--especially when they are conclusions that run against the prevailing conventional wisdom. And we should also remember that the role of Iran and its ambitions for global Islamic dictatorship were obscured by other threats--by the sectarian difference between Shiite Iran and Sunni al-Qaeda, and by the difference between the secular fascist dictatorship of Iraq and the Islamic fascist dictatorship of Iran. And Iran itself, in 2001, had recently experienced a wave of anti-theocratic dissent under the administration of an allegedly "reformist" president.

Now things are clearer. With al-Qaeda diminished and Saddam Hussein defeated, and with Iran now under the leadership of a millennialist religious fanatic who openly vows to "wipe Israel off the map," Iran now stands clearly revealed as our primary enemy and as the primary source of Islamic terrorism.

The state of the art in this process of cultural learning was showcased in an excellent speech last week by President Bush. Here is his overview of the nature and identity of the enemy:

The terrorists who attacked us on September the 11th...kill in the name of a clear and focused ideology.... They're driven by a radical and perverted vision of Islam that rejects tolerance, crushes all dissent, and justifies the murder of innocent men, women, and children in the pursuit of political power. They hope to establish a violent political utopia across the Middle East, which they call a "Caliphate"--where all would be ruled according to their hateful ideology....

This caliphate would be a totalitarian Islamic empire encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.... About two months ago, the terrorist Zawahiri--he's al Qaeda's second in command--declared that al Qaeda intends to impose its rule in "every land that was a home for Islam, from [Spain] to Iraq. He went on to say, "The whole world is an open field for us."...

As we continue to fight al Qaeda and these Sunni extremists inspired by their radical ideology, we also face the threat posed by Shia extremists, who are learning from al Qaeda, increasing their assertiveness, and stepping up their threats.... This Shia strain of Islamic radicalism is just as dangerous, and just as hostile to America, and just as determined to establish its brand of hegemony across the broader Middle East. And the Shia extremists have achieved something that al Qaeda has so far failed to do: in 1979, they took control of a major power, the nation of Iran, subjugating its proud people to a regime of tyranny, and using that nation's resources to fund the spread of terror and pursue their radical agenda.

Like al Qaeda and the Sunni extremists, the Iranian regime has clear aims: they want to drive America out of the region, to destroy Israel, and to dominate the broader Middle East. To achieve these aims, they are funding and arming terrorist groups like Hezbollah, which allow them to attack Israel and America by proxy. Hezbollah, the source of the current instability in Lebanon, has killed more Americans than any terrorist organization except al Qaeda....

Iran's leaders, who back Hezbollah, have also declared their absolute hostility to America.... [Iran's president has] delivered this message to the American people: "If you would like to have good relations with the Iranian nation in the future... bow down before the greatness of the Iranian nation and surrender. If you don't accept [to do this], the Iranian nation will... force you to surrender and bow down."

America will not bow down to tyrants.

If Iran is a more powerful equivalent to al-Qaeda, then that would imply the need for certain actions--actions that President Bush has yet to take. The gap between Bush's statements and his actions are puzzling and worth further investigation. But for now, I want to focus only on what he has learned. And the knowledge of the Iranian threat that he demonstrates in this speech--statements like this do not work their way into presidential speeches by accident--is the indispensable precondition for action.

These are the lessons that we have learned from the events of the past five years--and I mean that literally. I am not naming the lessons that ought to be learned or that might be learned. These are lessons that actually have been learned by at least some significant number of those who shape political opinion. But they have not been learned by everyone. Events by themselves, after all, do not automatically produce conclusions in men's minds. They produce conclusions only in those minds that are able and willing to put the evidence together and follow it wherever it leads.

And that leads us to the final lesson we have learned from the five years since September 11: which observers have learned from these events, and which observers have not learned.

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