Follow me here: on 9-11, Islamists attacked the very symbols of American success: the World Trade Center, representing world trade and finance; the Pentagon, representing the US military dominiance; and ite national transportation system (the Capital building was the original target, representing democracy). THIS reactionary rage, the cry of a failed civilization, the heartland of Islam which knows no democracy, the least amount of external trade, and the least representation in the WTO, comes from peoples with, as Faoud Adjami says, "a rightous sense of...victimhood...emanat[ing] from a political tradition of belligerant self-pity." (What many do not appreciate is that Afghanistan was but one battle in a long-term US led War against Islamist Terrorism. And like WWII, the the initial cause of US entry into it was far from its chief focus: while the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor brought her into the war, two-thirds of her industrial energies were directed against Germany. In fact, the first US operation in the war was no where near Japan; it was in Morroco.) So--what would be more fitting than for this rediculously externalizing "other blaming" part of the world but to have popular sovereignty installed in its center, requiring a massive refocusing of cultural energies aimed not enviously upon its highly successful neighbor Israel--whom they. like perpetually failing businessmen, cannot bring themselves to imitate--but on the messy, important internal process of developing democracy? What would be more fitting retribution for 9-11? --Orson PS As Martin Kramer notes, Arabs have written only pamphlets on the subject of democracy. No books. After the US war on Saddam, they're gonna need books--and translations of lots of books about democracy among them!
Orson - I'm sorry if I seem petty but after reading your post, where you mention the attacks on the symbols of American success, freedom, democracy, etc. you seem to have conspicuously forgotten to mention the three thousand innocent people who were murdered. So, in answer to your question . . . No, I don't see the installation of a democracy, artificially constructed and not clearly supported by the populous as being adequate retribution. Do you? Jack
Re: Re: Is Democratic Iraq Fitting Retribution for 9-11? Jack-- Do you mean that you see the loss of three-thousand civilian's on one day, in such a spectacular fashion, as something other than an attack upon the US as a nation or culture? If you do not, then my claim follows--if you do, I don't know how to respond--not knowing you objection. (I thought the loss--as a national tragedy and cause for war--of three throusand innocents murdered were sufficiently implied.) If it is sufficient retribution, it implies the success of launching a regional transformation, not simply any intitial outcome: but busying external rationalizing peoples with the job of internally constructed mediating institutions seems beautifully symetrical to the loss sustained by the US. (A friend has even successfully deployed this insight as a pro-war argument to those who are anti-war.) Popular sovereignty always begins in some arbitrary act of hegemony, whther by King as in England, or by revolt as in the US. The crucial part for Iraq comes not now, not this year, but further down the road when a constitution undergoes a plebiscite. Can you--Jack--propose a better hope for the future there? I, too, am pessimistic about its success, say, seven or ten years from now. I am pessimistic because of how much Islam embraces fatalism. But this is the bold gamble--as Tom Friedman has put it--of the Bushies, and I think it's worth considering before rejecting out of hand. It just might work where everything else has failed. On the upside, one must note the success of the Kurds to construct the very institutions whose legitimacy you doubt they will or can support--the largest people on the planet still without an internationally recognized homeland. --Orson
