The only hope for a pluralist secular Iraq

According to an Iraqi woman blogger named riverbend (it’s not entirely clear to me if she lives in Iraq or the U.S.), the U.S. policy in Iraq is merely giving the Iranian Shi’ites power over Iraq, and thus killing any chance of the secular tolerant Iraqi nationalism she had hoped for in the wake of the U.S. invasion two years ago. Following the below excerpt from her comment at her weblog, Baghdad Burning, I lay out the only means through which her benign dream of a secular unified Iraq would have any chance of being realized. (Hint: it is not through Bush-type democratization.)

Americans constantly tell me, “What do you think will happen if we pull out of Iraq- those same radicals you fear will take over.” The reality is that most Iraqis don’t like fundamentalists and only want stability—most Iraqis wouldn’t stand for an Iran-influenced Iraq. The American military presence is working hand in hand with Badir, etc. because only together with Iran can they suppress anti-occupation Iraqis all over the country. If and when the Americans leave, their Puppets and militias will have to pack up and return to wherever they came from because without American protection and guidance they don’t stand a chance.

We literally laugh when we hear the much subdued threats American politicians make towards Iran. The US can no longer afford to threaten Iran because they know that should the followers of Sadr, Iranian cleric Sistani and Badir’s Brigade people rise up against the Americans, they’d have to be out of Iraq within a month. Iran can do what it wants—enrich uranium? Of course! If Tehran declared tomorrow that it was currently in negotiations for a nuclear bomb, Bush would have to don his fake pilot suit again, gush enthusiastically about the War on Terror and then threaten Syria some more.

Congratulations Americans—not only are the hardliner Iranian clerics running the show in Iran—they are also running the show in Iraq. This shift of power should have been obvious to the world when My-Loyalty-to-the-Highest-Bidder-Chalabi sold his allegiance to Iran last year. American and British sons and daughters and husbands and wives are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years.

What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?

Iraq has been the land of dreams for everyone except Iraqis—the Persian dream of a Shia controlled Islamic state modeled upon Iran and inclusive of the holy shrines in Najaf, the pan-Arab nationalist dream of a united Arab region with Iraq acting as its protective eastern border, the American dream of controlling the region by installing permanent bases and a Puppet government in one of its wealthiest countries, the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdish state financed by the oil wealth in Kirkuk…

The Puppets the Americans empowered are advocates of every dream except the Iraqi one: The dream of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen… the dream of a united, stable, prosperous Iraq which has, over the last two years, gone up in the smoke of car bombs, military raids and a foreign occupation.

My heart goes out to the Iraqis who want to live free of Muslim tyranny. Unfortunately, I don’t see how the blogger’s secular nationalist dream could ever come to pass, short of three alternative scenarios that are all beyond America’s ability to bring about: (1) the wholesale abandonment of Islam by Iraqis and the Muslim world in general; (2) the mass conversion of Iraqis and other Muslims to Christianity or some other religion; (3) the Kemalization of the Muslim world, meaning the forcible restriction of Islam to a purely private sphere, as advocated by Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch.

It seems to me that the only one of those scenarios that has even the remotest chance of happening is Kemalization. And the necessary condition for Kemalization is that the Muslim world be deprived of all hopes of expanding itself, be deprived of any chance of waging jihad against the Dar al-Harb. And the only way to achieve that is through the isolation and containment of the Muslim world, the strategy I have repeatedly advocated. In other words, in the world as a whole, the West and other non-Muslim civilizations must deport their Muslim immigrant populations and forcibly isolate and contain Muslims within their historic lands, robbing them of any power to wage jihad against non-Muslim societies. This painful shock to the Islamic community would make some Muslims recognize that public, expansive, true Islam only results in the utter humiliation and powerlessness of the Muslim community, a realization that would then would fuel Kemal-type movements aimed at containing Islam to the private sphere. But, as Fitzgerald has cautioned, this internal containment of Islam would have to be perpetual, since Islam by its nature demands public power over society.

To sum up, in order for the secular nationalist dream to have any hope of being realized, two parallel and complementary containments of Islam would have be sustained perpetually: the West’s external containment of Islam; and the Kemalized Muslim world’s internal containment of Islam.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 25, 2005 02:06 PM | Send