The silly syllogism that justifies Bush’s policy

Defending Bush’s inaugural address, Daniel Henninger of Opinion Journal reveals the amazing intellectual lightness of Bushite conservatism. One after another, this entire crew, from the president on down, employ exactly the same syllogism, which constitutes the sum total of their global democratist argument: (a) we face a dire threat from Islamist terrorism; (b) free and democratic people don’t engage in terrorism; (c) therefore we must (and can) democratize the whole Moslem world. The first statement is true; the second statement is questionable (especially since, as I argue in a recent blog entry, the more we liberate the Moslem world, the more we liberate Islam and thus empower jihadism); and the third statement, concerning what we must and can do, is a practical impossibility. Yet Bush and his acolytes regard these three statements as a sufficient basis for a policy that could be described as Wilsonianism to the nth degree. Has there ever been such a combination of intellectual fatuousness and messianic narcissism?

Even more amazing, the catastrophe of the Iraq occupation, which to a large extent is a product of those same democratist assumptions, including the failure to grasp the real nature of the social forces operative in the Moslem world, hasn’t brought the Bushites up short at all. They’re more full of themselves and their world-changing schemes and slogans than ever. Defeating by a mere three points the worst presidential candidate in history has given these kids a serious case of hubris.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2005 05:52 PM | Send