Andrew McCarthy, lead prosecuter against 1993 World Trade Center bombing leader Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, offers a colossally backwards assessment of the war in today's National Review online. Convinced that removing authoritarian societies (the same that corrupted Islam after Arabism's intellectual and military fuel had run out) is a diversion to winning the war on terror, McCarthy treads into culturally relativist foolishness on the order of declaring that penicillin is a diversion from the war on toxic bacteria:
Thinking about the war's outcome implicates a second salient point. Contrary to the increasingly received wisdom, we are not in Iraq — or Afghanistan for that matter — to transform tyrannies into democracies. It would be great, and surely in our interest, if we could accomplish that as a corollary. But it's not why we came. The war on militant Islam is about eradicating a mortal, global threat to the United States. It is, moreover, worth bearing in mind that wiping out the enemy, aside from being the first and foremost imperative, happens also to be the best path to stability and, eventually, democracy in places like Iraq.
McCarthy begs the question: how can one "eradicate" a force when its region-wide production facilities — closed societies, mass unemployment and no means for redress or political expression, "religious schools" that convert the frustrated into the fanatical, mass media encouragement of hatred and violence against Jews and Westerners, support for terrorism in all forms directly from governments — are left intact? The Wall Street Journal said it best yesterday: without destroying and replacing the authoritarian culture on which terrorism feeds, the war is nothing more than a "game of whack-a-mole." How does McCarthy intend on reforming tyrannies? By asking? Unfortunately, polite deference is what the free world relied upon for the half-century following the Second World War. Russia's acceleration back towards statism and autocracy not twenty years after giving up the Soviet ghost — next to the solid roots of liberty in Germany and Japan, two nations forced to democratize — underscores the point: that a tyrant might reform on his own is the tragic, bloody exception to the rule.
McCarthy has made the same mistake reactionists make by confusing Ba'athists and terrorists with Iraqi Sunnis. The tiny number of murderers, less than one-hundredth of one percent of Iraq's population, are not to be reformed. They are to be killed or incarcerated, and the peaceful people they terrorize to be given the time, resources and protection necessary to design, build and maintain a democratic society.
Ironically, McCarthy attaches "permanence" to the strategy of snipping at the tops of weeds instead of gouging their roots. It is exactly the wrong way around: democratization is the final but irreplaceable step in destroying any authoritarian manifestation, be it Nazism, militarism, Communism or, in this case, Islamofascism. One might as well cut a man's chest open, forgo the dacron polyester, plastic, and aluminum replacement, and bid him good health and heart until the next half-operation. What are Iraq and Afghanistan producing today that they were not on September 11, 2001? Budding democrats; brave men and women, young and old, diving headfirst into a kind of danger-ridden civics that even the good American volunteerist would find intimidating. A great volume of evidence can easily knock aside McCarthy's lack of faith in Iraqis and his apparent disregard for their swift and significant investment in liberty. What are the governments of Iraq's and Afghanistan's neighbors, Iran and Syria, producing, while squelching native democrats? Islamofascists. From my essay, A Democratic Paraclete:
By no means is the failure of a well-established free state surrounded by stable democracies nearly as likely as its being consumed by a foreign, authoritarian entity in the present time. Mortality of human conscience requires the protections invested in constitutions and common laws of liberal democracies...because potential antagonists of free societies can be counted as those living within them. This should diminish neither the authenticity of consensual government nor the prodigious danger of the external rule of force, but instead emphasize bestial will as a constant of man’s affairs and the source in abstraction for all ideologies that have and will challenge the rule of law. Human nature cannot be changed but isolated and relatively unaccoutred forceful means would, in a free nation, likely remain limited to theft, murder, immorality and corruption: all indigenous and manageable flaws of democracy.
A little wordy, but my point still holds well in the Iraqi and Afghan experience: democracies do not change men but nullify their dominative tendencies through a common good dedicated to lawfulness and charity. Ideologies of power through strength are consigned to the shamed edges of free societies; the stronger the democracy, the further extremists are pushed from legitimacy. It is no coincidence that strongmen are viscerally hated by Iraqis and Afghans, acting of their own volition. In Iraq:
While al Qaeda manages to set off one or more suicide bombs a day in Iraq, it finds itself losing the war it is waging. The bombs are killing mainly Iraqis, and the Iraqis have noticed this. ...Al Qaeda makes itself unpopular by killing hundreds of Iraqis with suicide bombs. Baath makes itself hated with its continued terror campaign, kidnapping and assassinations.
Andrew McCarthy isn't offering us anything new: he suggests, in the face of adversity, retreat to the morally untroubling and physically undemanding routine of accepting the foreign captivity of tyrannized people. For him, the lessons of the last century's world wars — that the free world is, without qualification or interruption, endangered by authoritarian societies — go unheeded. The absence of freedom is a foothold for evil; peace is made only with peaceable men. To ignore this is McCarthy's own loss.
