Progress toward democracy in Iraq! The terror supporters are joining the government!

In its story on the Iraqi reconciliation conference in Cairo (“Iraqi Factions Seek Timetable for U.S. Pullout”), this is all the New York Times had to say on the subject of the conference’s closing announcement legitimizing armed resistance against U.S. forces:

The statement, while condemning the wave of terrorism that has engulfed Iraq, also broadly acknowledged a general right to resist foreign occupation. That was another effort to compromise with Sunnis who had sought to legitimize the insurgency. The statement condemned terror attacks and religious backing for them, and it demanded the release of innocent prisoners and an investigation into reports of torture.

Three observations: (1) The Times does not quote the announcement itself, so that the reader is dependent on the Times’ own incomplete summary of it. (2) The story does not make clear the key point that the announcement pointedly omitted attacks on U.S. (and even Iraqi) troops from its definition of the “terrorism” it was supposedly condemning—thus leading the reader to believe that the announcement was condemning terrorism against U.S. forces when in fact it was legitimizing it. And (3) the conference legitimized attacks on the Americans and on the Iraqi government forces in order to placate the Sunnis.

So, in order to get Sunnis to join the government, the Shi’ites have to legitimize the Sunni jihadists and Baathists who are engaged in an ongoing wave of mass terror to destroy the government. This is politics in the Arab world.

As I wrote at VFR on March 6, 2003:

[E]verything we know about Arab and Muslim societies suggests that they are so rife with sectarian divisions and political and religious fanaticism that no government can survive in those countries except through despotism. The Bush administration and the neoconservatives seem disturbingly blind to these profound tendencies in the Muslim culture, or seem to imagine that they can be easily cured with a little American good will and know-how, backed by military force.

In trying to make such deeply sick societies “work,” we only make ourselves insane. We should have nothing to do with the internal affairs of any Arab or Muslim society, and certainly not with any effort to “democratize” it. In helping Iraq democratize, we inevitably help our jihadist enemies, who, as a substantial part of the Iraqi population, must be included in any democracy. We should therefore redeploy our troops out of central Iraq to a secure base in Kurdistan, henceforth keeping our forces in the Mideast only for the purpose of suppressing any Muslim regimes or groups that threaten us and our interests.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 23, 2005 01:06 PM | Send