United they stand

A central theme in Bush’s rhetoric is that freedom and democracy are one and the same thing. He believes, or wants us to believe that he believes that the huddled masses of Muslims are yearning to breathe free and that once there are elections, governments will become less repressive and corrupt.

Of course we’ve been voting for a couple of centuries and we have of late been moving toward repression and corruption at a disturbing rate, but the argument that a country like Iraq will embrace a liberal democracy that respects the individual rights we hold to be self evident, is either wishful thinking or a blatant and cynical lie.

Of course you may consider the rule of extremist Mullahs as preferable to a secular tyrant and perhaps many Americans secretly do wish for something similar in our country, but when given a choice, Islamists in Islamic countries choose strong Islamist leaders and submit (as the word Islam suggests) to their rule willingly.

Witness the success of Islamist candidates in Egypt’s recent elections and indeed Iraq’s.  Seattle Times writer Warren P. Strobel argues that the real beneficiary of Bush’s current excuse for the unprovoked war against Iraq have been the Islamists.  In Lebanon, the Shiite Muslim militia Hezbollah is part of the government for the first time and Hamas appears likely to do well in the January 25th Palestinian elections.  These, needless to say, are terrorist groups dedicated to destroying Israel and perhaps any other secular government in the Muslim world.  Elected leaders in Iran are building nuclear weapons and threatening Israel, and of course that threatens the world.

An administration that has made much use of false accusations of weakness on the part of its opponents is hard pressed, in my opinion, to make a case for strength on its own part as it wages a war making it more probable that Islamist extremists will prosper and unite against us.