McCarthy’s amazing attack on democratization at The Corner

I find Andrew McCarthy’s plaint at NRO’s The Corner so astonishing that I’m going to reproduce the main part of it here. Again, maybe I’m wrong, and McCarthy has been, as he now claims, saying such things all along. But I sure don’t remember him or anyone at NRO expressing ideas like this. A possible exception would be John Derbyshire, but he is a genial anecdotalist whose opinions, since they’re based on personal attitude rather than logic or principle, no one takes very seriously. That’s why NRO, otherwise a strictly neocon publication nowadays, allows “the Derb” to sound off with his paleo-sounding, race-conscious, anti-homosexual, anti-inclusivist views. Florence King, another sort-of-paleocon whose views were personal rather than principled, filled a similar role at National Review in the 1990s.

Now here’s McCarthy:

There is grave reason to doubt that Islam and democracy (at least the Western version based on liberty and equality) are compatible. But that is an argument for another day. The argument for today is: the American people were never asked whether they would commit their forces to overseas hostilities for the purpose of turning Iraq into a democracy (we committed them (a) to topple a terror-abetting tyrant who was credibly thought both to have and to covet weapons of mass destruction, and (b) to kill or capture jihadists who posed a danger to American national security). I doubt they would have agreed to wage war for the purpose of establishing democracy. Like most Americans, I would like to see Iraq be an authentic democracy – just as I would like to see Iran, Syria, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, etc. be authentic democracies. But I would not sacrifice American lives to make it so.

But even if I suspended disbelief for a moment and agreed that the democracy project is a worthy casus belli, I am as certain as I am that I am breathing that the American people would not put their brave young men and women in harm’s way for the purpose of establishing an Islamic government. Anyplace.

And now get this. McCarthy rejects the distinction, sacred among mainstream conservatives, between Islam and militant Islam, which I also don’t recall his saying before:

It is not our place to fix what ails Islam. But it is utter recklessness to avert our eyes from the fact that militant Islam thrives wherever Islam reigns. That is a fact. When and where militant Islam thrives, America and the West are endangered. That is also a fact. How can we possibly be urging people who wisely don’t want it to accept the government-institutionalized supremacy of Islam?

While it is remarkable that McCarthy is saying these things, this is, after all, only a blog entry. Will he develop the same critique in a full-length article? And if he does, will NRO publish it? Now that McCarthy has opened this potential breach in the pro-Bush right, will he go once more into the breach, or back away from it?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 21, 2005 06:29 PM | Send