Democracy in the Sand Trap
I know my side isn’t supposed to like Richard Clarke, but he has an interesting historical overview of democracy in the Middle East in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
Beyond Iraq, in the greater Muslim world, opposing democracy is not uppermost in the mind of Al Qaeda or the larger jihadist network. (In Saudi Arabia, for example, Al Qaeda wants the monarchy replaced by a more democratic government.) Radical Islamists are ultimately seeking to create something orthogonal to our model of democracy. They are fighting to create a theocracy or, in their vernacular, a caliphate (a divinely inspired government administered by a caliph as Allah’s viceroy on earth). They are also seeking to evict American influence from nations with a Muslim majority (or even, as in Iraq, a Muslim minority, given their view that Shiites are, as Zarqawi put it, part of a ”wicked sect” and not true Muslims). In pursuing these goals, today’s loosely affiliated Islamic terrorist groups are part of a trend dating back to at least 1928, when the Muslim Brotherhood was founded to promote Islam and fight colonialism.
This trend hasn’t abated with the spread of democracy. In Indonesia, which just achieved its third democratic transfer of power since Suharto’s rule ended in 1998, the jihadist movement is growing stronger, as it is in other Asian democracies. In Algeria, free elections in 1990 and 1991 resulted in victories for those who advocated a jihadist theocracy. Throughout Western Europe, the jihadists are becoming deeply rooted among disaffected Muslim youth. Free elections, in short, have not dimmed the desire of jihadists to create a caliphate.
Even when we’re winning we’re only losing in that sand trap.
2 Responses to “Democracy in the Sand Trap”
Al Qaeda would like democracy in Saudi Arabia because a democratic election there would probably bring theocratic fascists to power, which is exactly what al Qaeda wants in the long term.
What we should insist upon is not democracy, but the rule of law and respect for individual rights, religious tolerance, private property, and women’s autonomy. These are the things the terrorists hate–and that we can all agree upon. By contrast, democracy is a distraction in the war on terror, one that taken in isolation helps our enemies more than it helps us.
I think those things are generally what Americans think of when they hear the word “democracy.” But it is important to keep in mind that democracy as an end in itself can just as easily lead to “tyranny by majority.”