While the broader point is well-made, isn’t “secular” in this case code for “non-Islamic”? After all, a few decades back, the U.S. would not have been described as a “religious” country but as a “Christian” one.

DR has a point, except for the fact that along with calling for a “secular” society in Iraq, American journalists have also, as I said, been describing America as a “secular” society per se, which has never been done before. And these two parallel uses of the word would not seem to be a coincidence. Once we have determined to create a single world order based on a single set of common principles and an assumed sameness among all peoples, anything that makes countries different from each other—particularly ethnicity and religion—has to be eliminated. Thus the global democratist agenda advances hand in hand with the destruction of America’s own cultural, religious, and historical identity.

Remember the basic principle of the neoconservatives, as expressed by Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter in separate articles last year: all people in the world are qualified for American-style democracy, because all people in the world are basically the _same_. And what makes them the same, according to both Podhoretz and Decter, is that they want good things for their children and they don’t want to be brutalized by tyrants. On the basis of this lowest of common denominators, this cartoonish simplification of man and society, the neoconservatives would reconstruct the entire world including America.

People at National Review have been ecstatic about making the Middle East nations “secular” for some time now. I recall one NR writer who was enthusiastic that the youth of Iran were renouncing Islam. This same guy was excited about the (alleged) possibility of the Iranians converting to the goofy one-world Bahai faith!

In reply to Mr. Jackson, let me make it clear that, given the objective threat that Islam poses to us, I would not, in principal, be opposed to efforts to weaken Islam or even to destroy it. If, for example, the West were still articulated as the Christian West which rightly saw Islam as its mortal enemy, it would be reasonable for the West to want to de-Islamicize as much of the Islamic world as possible. Which, again, doesn’t mean that I would support any effort to destroy Islam, but that I could, in principle, see myself supporting such an effort. What could be better, as Ann Coulter said half-jokingly, than for the Muslims to convert to Christianity? But it wouldn’t have to be Christianity. To remove the threat the Muslims pose to the world, it frankly seems to me that anything would be better than Islam.

However, that is not what we have today with all the talk of secularization. This secularization is aimed as much at _ourselves_ as at the Muslims. It is an effort to homogenize and dissolve all particular cultures and civilizations including our own. Amir Taheri, an Iranian exile in Europe who frequently contributes to NRO and The New York Post, is one writer who seems to represent such an agenda. The first time I became aware of him was when he published an article for NRO proposing that European Union expand to include moderate Muslim countries, the apparent goal being to create a single, giant, Christian/Muslim (or rather formerly Christian/formerly Muslim) civilization. The fact that NRO even published such an article gives an idea of where the people at NRO are really coming from, their lack of attachment to the historic civilization of America and the West.

“This secularization is aimed as much at _ourselves_ as at the Muslims.”

Mr. Auster nailed it here. In fact, I just wrote up a length assay of NR’s decline (maybe I’ll call it “My NR problem”):

http://cellasreview.blogspot.com/2003_09_01_cellasreview_archive.html#106307497212328167

I would say we should approach Islam by the axoim that one should conduct oneself towards an enemy as if he were one day to be a friend. Note, of course, that this entails acknowledging Islam as any enemy — as all heresies are enemies of our faith.

Clearly, the new government of Iraq should be secular, to avoid its use as an instrument to oppress any religious minority. It is the fanatical religiosity of the Islamic governments that cause them to be such murderous tyrannies in the first place; who can complain against governments ordained by Allah himself?

Without a secular government in Iraq, the ascendant Shiites will slaughter the Sunnis, the Christian minority, and the Agnostics alike. It should be noted that the only Islamic government worth a damn is that of the Turks, which is in fact a secular government.

In response to Mr. Waltrip, it’s possible that by “a free, secular, democratic Iraq,” Robbins was merely thinking of an Iraq with a non-Islamic, secular _government_. But that’s not what he actually wrote. Regardless of what his conscious intentions were, his statement thus served as an example of the “secularism creep” in contemporary discourse which is my real subject. My point is that prior to very recent years, no writer for National Review, or even any mainstream liberal writer, would have said that America’s mission is to make an entire society into a “secular” society. That was the very thing we were always opposing about Soviet Communism, aka “godless Communism.” Further, this change has occurred at the same time that many journalists have routinely begun to laud America as a “secular” society. It would be interesting to do a search of NRO to see if such usage has occurred there as well.