Sunday, September 6, 2009

Bring Them Home

In the ten years that I’ve been reading conservative blogs, perhaps no other issue has caused so much commentary among conservatives as George Will’s calls this week for the U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan and Iraq.  Will, the dean of conservative columnists and arguably still the most influential columnist among the public at large, was an early supporter of both wars.  Not only that, he was a supporter of the democracy project, i.e. not simply the wars but the continued U.S. occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq in order to help both countries foster free, democratic societies.  He has changed his mind, and many conservatives who support a continued presence in those countries have taken him to task.  To say there has been some outrage is nearly understatement; among neo-conservatives the idea that we should leave before the democracies have been allowed to stabilize is near apostasy. 

I agree with Will, though it was not his arguments that have persuaded me but rather Andy McCarthy’s over at National Review.  In an initial column and then in responses to others on the Corner, McCarthy has laid out a lucid, cogently-argued position that appears to me to trump every argument put forth by those who support a continued presence.  Most supporters of a continued presence in both Afghanistan and Iraq point to the success of the surge in Iraq.  We’ve won in Iraq, they argue, though the job is not yet finished; we should not leave until the Iraqi democratic government is secured.  As for Afghanistan, the generals are now planning a similar surge there.  We should stay, allow the surge to work as it did in Iraq, build up the Afghan army, and only start drawing down troop levels once the Afghans can secure the country on their own. 

In his column and responses, which you should read in full, McCarthy explodes the entire ‘democracy project’ rationale:

There’s no question that the surge in Iraq resulted in the rout of al-Qaeda. For that reason, it has to be counted as a net success. It would have been a strategic disaster to retreat while al-Qaeda was present and fortifying itself.

But then there was the rest of the surge rationale: the claim that we needed to secure the Iraqi population so a stable government, one that would be a reliable ally against terror, could emerge. The same argument now is being made about Afghanistan. Have you taken a look at Iraq lately? We went there to topple Saddam; we stayed to build an Islamic “democracy,” and the result is an Iranian satellite. The new Iraq is a sharia state that wants us gone, has denied us basing rights for future military operations, has pressured a weak American president into releasing Iran-backed terrorists, has rolled out the red carpet for Hezbollah, allows Iranian spies to operate freely (causing the recent ouster of the intelligence minister, who was an American ally), tolerates the persecution of religious minorities, and whose soon-to-take-power ruling coalition vows “not to establish relations with the Zionist entity” — a vow that would simply continue longstanding Iraqi policy, as Diana West points out. If that’s success, what does failure look like?….

….The State Department’s new “democratic” constitutions for Afghanistan and Iraq are a disgrace: establishing Islam as the state religion and elevating sharia as fundamental law. That is not exporting our values; it is appeasing Islamism. It is putting on display our lack of will to fight for our principles, which only emboldens our enemies.

I hadn’t known much of this.   Like a lot of people, I’d lost interest in keeping up with the day to day events of the war.  I had assumed that the government in Iraq was holding back the Islamist influence, that while they were giving a nod to Islam as they must, the leadership was for the most part secular and for the most part pro-American.  From what I’d read in the past I had also assumed that a permanent U.S. base in Iraq was a given.  Most troubling, I also had no idea that the Iraqi leadership was now cozy with the Iranian mullahs.  If all of the above is true, it appears that Iraq, whether we stay for one more day or for another decade, will end up being more threatening to U.S. interests and security that it did when Saddam was in power.  McCarthy further points out that we can stay until kingdom come, the results will be the same because of the nature of Islam:

Islamism is not terrorism. To be sure, Islamism includes terrorism in its arsenal. Still, there is major disagreement among Islamists about when violence should be used and how effective it is. In any event, we must fight the tendency to meld these concepts. Terrorism is a tactic that divides Muslims. Islamism is a belief system that unites tens of millions of Muslims. Abdurrahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia, estimates what he calls the “radicalized” portion of the umma at about 15 percent. I think he’s low-balling it, but even if he’s right, that would be about 200 million people.

So what is Islamism? It is the belief that Islam is not merely a religious creed but a comprehensive guide to human existence, conformity to which is obligatory, that governs all matters political, social, cultural, and religious, from cradle to grave (and, of course, beyond)….

Why should Islamism matter to us? Because, besides being the ideology that catalyzes jihadist terrorism and threatens our freedoms in sundry other ways, Islamism rejects the premises of Western democracy. Islamists believe that sharia is the perfect, non-negotiable blueprint for law and life, prescribed by Allah Himself. Therefore, Islamists reject the notion of free people at liberty to govern themselves, to legislate in contradiction to God’s law. They reject freedom of conscience: Islam must be the state religion, and apostasy from Islam is a capital crime. They deny the principle of equality under the law between men and women, and between Muslims and non-Muslims. They abjure any semblance of Western sexual liberty: gay sex, adultery, and fornication are brutally punished. They countenance slavery. They encourage polygamy. I could go on, but you get the idea.

This is all horrifying to us, but that is because we are a different civilization. Tony Blair was wrong, as Will has realized in more recent times. Individual liberty and democracy are not “universal values of the human spirit.” And our democracy-building enthusiasts are wrong, and unintentionally insulting to Muslims, when they intimate that the Islamic world will fall in love with our values once they taste a little freedom.

President Bush decried the “cultural condescension” of us democracy doubters. But the shoe of arrogance is on the other foot. Those of us who’ve studied Islam have never doubted its “aptitude for democracy” (to borrow Will’s phrase). The issue has never been one of aptitude; it is about principled beliefs. Fundamentalist strains of Islam, including Salafism, have been developed by extraordinary minds. It is not that these Muslims fail to comprehend our principles; they reject them. They have an entirely different conception of the good life. They believe freedom is not individual liberty but individual submission to Allah’s law. Their very conception of freedom is the opposite of ours. When we talk to them about “freedom,” we are ships passing in the night.

That doesn’t make the Islamists backward. They are convinced that Western liberalism and the Judeo-Christian veneration of reason in faith are corrupting influences that rationalize deviations from Allah’s law and His natural order. They believe, instead, in a pre-ordered, totalitarian system in which the individual surrenders his freedom for the good of the umma — and in which sowing discord (i.e., engaging in what we think of as free speech) is a grave sin, on the order of apostasy. They are wrong in this. Our civilization is superior to theirs, which is why we have flourished and they have faltered. But being wrong doesn’t make them crazy. They don’t want what we’re selling, and they have their reasons….

The fact that Islamists disagree with their terrorist factions on tactics obscures the reality that they heartily agree with the terrorists’ contempt for the West. Most of the places that are sources of Islamist terror do not want Western democracy. They want sharia.

If those who support our continued presence in Afghanistan and Iraq could convince me that the continued presence would affect the final outcome in ways substantially beneficial to the U.S., then I would say stay.  But given the nature of the Islamic mind, the hostility the native populations show towards our continued presence in their countries, the slim chance of our ever setting up secular, pro-democratic, pro-western governments there, I say, enough.  Bring our boys home.

This does not mean I am anti-war or am calling for a retreat from the war on terror.  Again, I’ll let McCarthy speak for me:

Mind you, I’m no dove. I daresay I’m as much or more of a hawk than the nation-building side of the house. I’ve bit my tongue for a long time, and it kills me to write this, because I’ve never bought the nonsense about how you can support the troops but not support the mission. And if someone can convince me we need 40,000 or 400,000 or 4 million more troops in Afghanistan to destroy enemies who would otherwise attack the United States, count me in.

That is what the U.S. military is for: to smash the enemy.  Nation-building is beyond our capabilities in nations that simply aren’t interested.  It is not worth a single extra life of our nation’s finest and bravest to continue an occupation, even for the most benevolent reasons, that will accomplish little of benefit to us. 

Bring them home. 

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