Give Me A Reason
I'm no military expert or international diplomat, so I can't honestly tell you what the President's latest course of action is actually going to achieve. It seems reasonable to think that a greater strength of force can crush the enemy and curb the violent attacks in the short run. But our ultimate goal in Iraq is now to establish democracy in the Muslim world. And, when you consider this, you might start to wonder if any army, regardless of size and firepower, can accomplish such a task.
What can the military accomplish in such an environment? See, e.g., The Battle of Lepanto.
And while I'm on the subject, why hasn't the story ever been made into a summer blockbuster? Ridley Scott could direct and Orlando Bloom could star as Don Juan. It would be a great opportunity to highlight the rational nature of the Muslim culture while juxtaposing the deceptive and tyrannical practices of the Church. And if we are really lucky, they'll incorporate a scene where Orlando murders a priest with no remorse and leaves the audience to feel as though the entire Church, and not just that one priest, had it coming. Oh, that's been done?
The metaphysical support for natural law not only laid the foundations for modern science, but also provided the basis for the gradual development of constitutional government. The primacy of power in Islamic thought undermined a similar prospect. If one does not allow for the existence of secondary causes, one cannot develop natural law. If one cannot develop natural law, one cannot conceive of a constitutional political order in which man—through his reason—creates laws to govern himself and behave freely. Because democracies base their political order on reason and free will, and leave in play questions that Islamists believe have been definitively settled by revelation, Islamists regard democracies as their natural and fatal enemies.
What can the military accomplish in such an environment? See, e.g., The Battle of Lepanto.
And while I'm on the subject, why hasn't the story ever been made into a summer blockbuster? Ridley Scott could direct and Orlando Bloom could star as Don Juan. It would be a great opportunity to highlight the rational nature of the Muslim culture while juxtaposing the deceptive and tyrannical practices of the Church. And if we are really lucky, they'll incorporate a scene where Orlando murders a priest with no remorse and leaves the audience to feel as though the entire Church, and not just that one priest, had it coming. Oh, that's been done?
posted by Qahal at 5:30 PM
7 Comments:
This was tried once before in a little country called the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an almost completely Catholic nation. The power vacuum that existed after Wilson killed Bl. Karl I paved, in the infrastructure, the way for Hitler. It also happened to the Romanov dynasty before the Bolsheviks took over. Again, a very Catholic/Orthodox nation. I don't think the issue is God and Democracy it is an issue of power and culture. If Britain could rule pagan India for hundreds of years through British institutions, there is a way to fill the vacuum. (Remember, India was mostly Hindu but had many many Muslims). Our presence there is not paternal, it is invasive and politically parasitic. Because the US is balkanizing Iraq and getting ready for a war with Iran, it is hard to show any moral authority over those people and that gives us no credibility, whether they be Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, or Catholic. They may not have the natural law, but they are naturally human, desiring order, authority, and moral right.
If I understand you, even people of Catholic/Orthodox traditions have rejected democracy. So its not exclusive to the Muslim faith.
I think that both of the examples you cite can be attributed to modern philosphy rather than religious traditions. I don't think Catholics/Orthodox people would have overthrown the monarchies if they weren't being misled by the errant philosophies of the time. Obviously the easy example is the Marxist influence in Russia. I'm not nearly familiar enough with the decline of the Hapsburgs to understand what the driving force behind the populace (or Wilson) was. Perhaps Freud, but that's just an ignorant guess (Ransom should be able to comment given his preparations for next week's book club meeting). It could be said that the political upheaval in either case actually resulted from a rejection of the religious traditions and thereby a rejection of natural law and moral authority.
Also, I think the British "success" in India was more a measure of the military technology and strategy at the time. If the warring Iraqis actually built armies and fought outright, I don't know how the U.S. would be any less successful than the British were. In any case, they certainly weren't successful because they were seen as a moral authority.
As a tangent, here's a comment from Wikipedia, or as I like to call it "Gospel Truth": 'Although majority Hindu and minority Muslim political leaders were able to collaborate closely in their criticism of British policy into the 1920s, British support for a distinct Muslim political organization from 1906 and insistence from the 1920s on separate electorates for religious minorities, is seen by many in India as having contributed to Hindu-Muslim discord and the country's eventual partition.'
I find that interesting given your comment about balkanizing Iraq. And now Brownback has adopted the idea of partitioning the country into three separate nations. That sounds like a good recipe for violence given the history of India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine. How about Kurdistan/Sunnia/Shia Lanka?
You're right that we have no moral authority over there. But I'm not sure there are any circumstances that would ever give us "infidels" such authority in their eyes. How can a people want freedom when they believe in slavery. They are slaves to Allah and they seem to expect as much from their political leaders. They believe in an unending war and they equate suicide with martyrdom. (I'm talking about fundamentalist Muslims, not Neocons) The problem isn't that we went over there without any moral authority or credibility, or even that we went over there at all, but that we have chosen to stay there and try to fix a problem that seems to be primarily one of faith. Its not to say that Islam isn't compatible with natural law or that there aren't Muslims who accept the natural law, but those who do not are not amiable to democracy or even a just monarchy. The natural human desires of order, authority and moral right will be perverted in an enviroment where the natural law is rejected. These people don't want proper order, they want subordination.
P.S. You just got served.
ok qahal, the burkas are coming off now.
The U.S. and Britain created much of the tension that exists today with the M.E. due namely to our support of Israel and political maneuvering between nations to create instability. The problem of Islam is only one of the issues facing us over there. It is a problem, it creates a wicked conception of God and therefore state authority.
The current rise of Islamic fundamentalism is relatively recent though of a recrudescent nature. My intuition is that any religion like Islam or Calvinism that creates such a conception of God creates a ripe environment for totalitarianism and extremism. But before the 60's and 70's, there were many West friendly regimes in the ME where extremism was a subculture like in Algeria, Egypt, and Iran. Extremism developed as a response to Western cultural influence which implicated the leaders of those regimes. (Oh, and the CIA training torturors in Egypt for the King helped too... add to that Zionism and their use of Pornography in war against the palestinians). So what does that mean?
There is a way to colonize that is legitimate and proper and then there are puppet regimes that don't convince anyone. Muslims respect power and moral authority separately, they are entirely different concepts. They do not like power vacuums as do almost all traditional societies.
Bolshevism was a Jewish (foreign to most non-urban Russians) movement that murdered the mighty Romanov dynasty and fomented discord creating a power vacuum. Parliamentarianism in the Austro-H. Empire was imposed by the Americans. They were not internal of the religious of the nation. If it didn't work for these people, it wont work for the Muslims. What we are doing is imposing a flawed system and fast-tracking to the end which is always totalitarianism, from our hands. Why?, because American style democracy has nothing to do with the natural law, it has to do with what the Angelic Doctor calls the "Dictatorship of the majority" It is not a supercession but a replacement that doesn't fit.
And let's remember, Democracy does not mean freedom but usually ends in the opposite. I believe the Iraqis desire freedom, but not to go get starbucks and vote in some meaningless puppet show. The fundamentalists desire their own conception of freedom. That conception cannot change by threat of force but only through legitimate political and cultural influence which is exactly what we lack. And if I may take something of Mr. McIntyre, "Whose Justice? Which Rationality?.... Which Natural Law?" They do not need democracy, they do not need MTV. They need legitimate political authority which the US cannot give because our supplanting of their political system without justification has as it should have tarnished our name. They see us as invaders with interests in the permanent balkanization of a proud nation which is exactly what we are. Whatever the religious implications of Islam, history shows that Muslims can possibly live in peace under proper government, it is the US that seems unable to live without war.
"Thus Calvin, Knox, the English Puritans and their glorious revolution, the American Puritans and their Bill of Rights, the Declaration of '89 in France, Wilson... the links are splendid and the chain is unbreakable." Emile Doumergue, "Calvin et l'entente de Wilson a' Calvin"
Look, just because you watched some video on YouTube and Fahrenheit 9/11 and read Peace Not Apartheid doesn't mean that you know what is "actually" going on over there.
I'm just kidding. I don't really disagree with you. We're just looking at this from different angles. I'm saying that this extremism is a product of religion and you are saying it is a product of western influence. Its a combination of both. I don't think that excuses extremism nor do I sympathize with it. At the same time, I certainly don't subscribe to this modern manifest destiny that compels us to implement American democracy in all nations. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:American_progress.JPG
But you sound like you are lumping the extremists with the rest of the population. There are no circumstances under which America would ever represent the type of moral authority that drives leadership in the eyes of those who we are at war with. With those extremists there is no higher ground. That's not to excuse the President or his interventionist foreign policy. Moral authority would only be relevant in regard to the rest of the population, we'll call them the rational Muslims.
It sounds like you think there was some alternative here and I'm just not seeing it. Perhaps we created a power vacuum in the sense that we eliminated the ruling government party, but Saddam Hussein was not Bl. Karl I and the Baathists were not the Hapsburgs. The United States did not create the animosity between these people and the current state of affairs is far more a product of the former dictatorship and the history of hatred between the religious sects than of US involvement. We facilitated the violence by removing the man and party who suppressed it, but we are not the force that is driving this conflict. We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning. We didn't light it, but we tried to fight it.
Can Muslims be reasonable and peaceful and have stable governments whether democratic or not? Absolutely. Was that the case in Iraq before we invaded? Absolutely not. Will American democracy resolve that? Hell no. And why not? Because they already hated each other and they think we are an enemy of Allah. Somehow I think you want that to be our fault. Maybe we were the catalyst, but the foundation was laid by Islam. Just like you said, "such a conception of God creates a ripe environment for totalitarianism and extremism." There is no political solution, Jimmy Carter. There's no military one either. Its not a problem that America or its democracy created and its not a problem that America or its democracy can solve.
Maybe the foundations were there, but American liberalism caused/catalyzed modern Islamic fundamentalism and Saddam did keep a lid on it. Agreed. As for America, I am trying to, I guess, repeat the old dictum: mind your own business.
I think at heart I am trumpeting an Aristotelian solution to a Platonic problem. If you have legitimate law making, with understood and respected authority, the law changes culture, not vice versa. Whatever platonic conceptions of God, the Moslems (isn't that spelling curious?) are still political "animals" (ignore the unintended humor) and that means that the educative and formative aspects of law will have effect on them. There is no purely irrational muslim as there is no purely rational either. Like our Mormon friends, as much as they would have us believe that blind faith is separate from reason, everyone knows that it isnt and they should be deeply ashamed of such a proposition.
Revolution, extremism, etc... are responses, usually evil, that develop in their nascent stages with disaffection for political leadership and authority, not religion. It began as a political issue in Egypt, and the religious issues were secondary to the political discussion.
To hold any different is to create an irreconcilable conflict. If indeed they are a bunch of irrational jihadists running around waiting to die with the smell of Nitro Glyc., then nothing could work over there. It is like trying to talk a kamikaze pilot into wearing a safety belt. But look at other muslim nations such as Morocco, Jordan, Turkey, etc... Not model nations to write home about, (neither is the US or Israel) but actively engaged in dialogue with the West because their political leadership has been strong for the benefit of their people. They may be clandestine or something more pernicious, but they seem to be the rule rather than the exception historically. If there is true, legitimate political authority, there is no problem with fundamentalists outside of a few holdouts in Tikrit and Waco.
That is my take, I am at work and my boss is getting suspicious.
I like what you are saying, but you didn't quote any Billy Joel.
On a side note, Ransom and I had a roommate in college that love Greco-Roman wrestling. He would talk about it all the time and show us videos of him doing it. He would go back to his high school and watch the team compete. Anyway, sometimes Ransom and I would get into a disagreement that would erupt into our very own Greco-Roman wrestling bout. Ransom always won those arguments because he pounded me into the ground, but the best part was that our roommate would come running in to witness the skirmish. He would stand there anxiously waiting for us to finish as if to say, "I've got next!" And when we would finally unravel and sit back exhausted and definitely done with wrestling for the day, our roommate would dejectedly walk away.
The moral of this story is that Ransom is currently very busy with his work. I have the feeling that if he has even had the time to read the blog he has been watching the two of us wrestle much like our old roommate. Sorry you're so busy Ransom, but there's always room for three on this mat.
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