The ultimate proof that “democracy” should not have been our goal

Calling the trial of Christian convert Abdul Rahman an “affront to civilization,” the editors of National Review suggest that the Afghan constitution is a study in ambiguity as between individual rights and sharia law and that the Afghan legal authorities could and should have found a way of leaving Rahman alone. Hogwash, says Andrew McCarthy, one of the very few thinking adults at that publication:

Islam is the state religion of Afghanistan. The sharia presumptively governs whenever there is not an explicit law directly on point. There is no other law regarding apostasy, and in sharia regimes, apostasy from Islam is a capital offense. End of story….

… What is happening in Afghanistan (and in Iraq) is precisely what we bought on to when we actively participated in the drafting of constitutions which … ignored the imperative to insulate the civil authority from the religious authority, installed Islam as the state religion, made sharia a dominant force in law, and expressly required that judges be trained in Islamic jurisprudence. To have done all those things makes outrage at today’s natural consequences ring hollow.

… [T]he inescapable truth is: the United States made a calculated decision that it wasn’t worth our while to fight over Islamic law (indeed, we encouraged it as part of the political solution). People who objected (like moi) were told that we just didn’t grasp the cultural dynamic at work.

What McCarthy is saying is that our “democracy” chickens have come home to roost. Americans incessantly use the unqualified word “democracy” to convey all good political things, especially liberal individual rights. But of course democracy properly speaking doesn’t mean individual rights; it simply means rule by the people; majority oppression of a minority is perfectly consonant with pure democracy. Modern Americans have never accepted this brutal view of democracy, and instead have folded the concept of liberal rights into democracy, so that by “democracy,” they mean liberal democracy, democracy that protects the rights of individuals. This is very nice, but unfortunately political existence has its own imperatives. The desire of the people in Afghanistan (as in Iraq) was to be governed by the sharia law, and any election reflecting the will of the majority would have resulted in such a government. In Afghanistan, democracy and liberalism were two different things. Assuring an Afghan constitution that protected liberal individual rights would have required that we take over Afganistan and rule it against the will of its people; it would have required that we suppress democracy in the name of individual rights. But how could we do that, given that “democracy” is our god? So we opted for democracy, which in the context of Afghanistan inevitably meant sharia, even as we pretended to ourselves that the liberal rights language that we had caused to be placed in the Afghan constitution would suffice to protect individuals. As McCarthy makes clear, we were lying to ourselves. (By “we,” I mean the conservatives who supported the administration’s policy.)

I have tried from time to time over the last few years to point out to establishment conservatives that their reckless promotion of “democracy” was not just an affront to clear thinking, but would also be politically disastrous. I’ve been told that my criticisms were those of an ivory tower professor, irrelevant to the real-world concerns of political actors. But wilfully misdefined words have consequences, and one of those consequences is that we have now become, in the name of “spreading democracy,” the builders, patrons, and protectors of a regime that executes Christian converts.

- end of initial entry -

M. Jose writes:

I’m not certain I entirely agree with your assessment of Andy McCarthy as one of the “few thinking adults” at National Review. In previous writings, he has essentially said that Congress’s power to declare war is a nearly meaningless formality and that there is nothing constitutionally inappropriate about the president taking us into war with no Congressional declaration. He has also said that not only semi-domestic spying (i.e. one end in the U.S.) like that which the NSA controversy is over, but fully domestic spying is fine in a time of war; in essence, the president can declare war in all but name and then unilaterally suspend civil liberties.

Also, I don’t entirely agree with the tone of his column. Letting the Afghans write their own constitution was a good idea, more or less we let the Afghans do as they please and in return there has been no major rebellion against us. McCarthy seems to think that we ought to have expended the energy to have forced a constitution on them that we would have liked:

“But the inescapable truth is: the United States made a calculated decision that it wasn’t worth our while to fight over Islamic law (indeed, we encouraged it as part of the political solution). People who objected (like moi) were told that we just didn’t grasp the cultural dynamic at work. I beg to differ—we understood it only too well.”

No, he didn’t understand. The fact of the matter is, why should we care whether religious freedom is enshrined in the Iraqi constitution? You say:

“In Afghanistan, democracy and liberalism were two different things. Assuring an Afghan constitution that protected liberal individual rights would have required that we take over Afghanistan and rule it against the will of its people; it would have required that we suppress democracy in the name of individual rights. But how could we do that, given that “democracy” is our god? So we opted for democracy, which in the context of Afghanistan inevitably meant sharia, even as we pretended to ourselves that the liberal rights language that we had caused to be placed in the Afghan constitution would suffice to protect individuals.”

Well, yes, it was foolish to look on Afghan democracy as a wonderful thing for human rights, but with all due respect, why is that our problem? We avoided fighting over Islamic law in order to avoid turning the Afghanis against us and suffering a repeat of the Soviet invasion.

If our goal is protection of the homeland, why is it a big deal what Afghanistan does in terms of human rights?

(Personally, I think that this is the signal that we ought to leave Afghanistan and let those we put in power try to retain power without us. If the Taliban resurges as a result, we’ll bomb them again. As long as those who are connected with Al Qaeda are gone, what do we care which Islamic nutball is in charge. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if the U.S. rescued Mr. Rahman before we left and then assassinated a few of the people leading the charge to execute Mr. Rahman as a grand “Bleep you, you ingrates” gesture at those whom we put in power).

LA replies:

Calling him one of the few thinking adults at NR does not mean I agree with everything he says. And it’s evident I don’t, from your own commentary on my blog entry.

Then you write: “If our goal is protection of the homeland, why is it a big deal what Afghanistan does in terms of human rights?”

It’s a big deal to us because, as a result of overthrowing the Taliban and trying to secure an Afghanistan that would not be taken over by the Taliban again, we are now the ally and protector of a regime that does things that we cannot abide, that stands for the very opposite of what we believe in. You yourself acknowledge as much, when you say that the Rahman prosecution is the sign for us to leave.

We needed to defeat that Taliban, and that in turn necessitated being involved in a successor government in some fashion. The one changeable mistake we made was the overhyping of democracy. We told ourselves that Afghanistan would be a [liberal] democracy. And this was pure, hypocritical self-delusion, as McCarthy so ably points out . So, on the most important point in this discussion, McCarthy gets it right and his article is very useful for that reason.

Mr. Jose writes a follow-up:

Just read your later post, “On what we ought to have done in Afghanistan.” Yeah, I agree pretty much. So that basically answers the second part of my previous email. What I didn’t like was what I saw as Mr. McCarthy’s implication that we ought to have imposed a more liberal constitution on them.

LA replies;

I don’t mind what McCarthy is saying. He, like me, is trying to find a way out of the contradiction created by our willful self-delusion about democracy, and his pushing what he pushes helps us think through the alternatives better.

The alternative pushed by McCarthy was not to be hypocritical about [liberal] democracy but to insist on it. But that would have required us pushing the Afghans against their wishes, and our whole reconstructive effort might have broken down.

It was that very concern that led to the actual policy our government pursued, of letting the Afghanis have their way, letting them have their sharia, while we also put transparent fig leaf of liberal individual rights in the constitution so we could tell ourselves that we were setting up a liberal democracy when in fact we were setting up a sharia government.

That alternative is also no good, as it has led to the current situation of realizing that we are the upholders of a regime that kills people for their religion.

Which leads us to the third alternative, which I propose, that we should have been honest with ourselves about the nature of Islam and of Afghanistan and about the fact that the government we were helping set up there would not be a liberal democracy but in fact would have repellent things about it from our point of view, but that we were not there to advance democracy but to assure an Afghanistan that would not be dangerous to us.

McCarthy in his logical argumentation and intellectual honesty helps us get to that third alternative, even though it’s not his alternative.

Mark D. writes:

I have been reading your posts on Afghanistan and more generally the United States foreign policy vis-a-vis Islam and Islamic terrorism.

I agree entirely with your observations (and with Helprin’s).

It did occur to me, however, that in looking back to 9-11, that attack provoked in the United States, not a unified national response grounded in national interest with identifiable enemies subject to defeat, but rather it provoked a massive outbreak of liberalism, particularly among conservatives.

In this war, we really have no enemies; we only have the regions of the globe deprived of liberalism.

This liberalism was already there on 9-11, so deeply ingrained within our national political consciousness that any response to the bin Laden attacks was bound to uncover and unleash it.

Any rational response to the 9-11 attack—such as yours, or Helprin’s—is unsatisfactory because it gives no voice or outlet for the underlying compulsive liberalism. And, in this day and age, no project or decisive action can be conceptualized outside the categories of liberalism.

Thus, the words and language of the global war on terror must be liberal, even if that language is radically disconnected from the reality. When that language is misinterpreted for reality, we have our Secretary of State attempting to explain why Afghans wish to execute a religious apostate, while supposedly implementing a liberal constitution.

The Afghans aren’t crazy; we are. Because we can’t conceptualize our Afghan intervention in categories distinct form liberalism, we cannot fathom native political action that deviates from our concepts (which we summarize in the shorthand term “democracy,” which is actually code for full-blown political and social liberalism).

Thus, any response to outside pressure or threat, aside from outright passivity, must be limited to the only legitimate channel available within liberalism: the proselytization of liberalism itself.

And we can expect that any foreign provocation to a national state in the thrall of liberalism will not result in the renunciation of liberalism and in the adoption of a realist policy of national interest, but rather in a rabid outbreak of liberal compulsions. Which is what we have seen in the United States since 9-11, particularly among conservatives.

Recall that Neville Chamberlain, and his government, was conservative. The more they were provoked, the more shrill and insistent they became in their liberal compulsions.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 24, 2006 01:57 AM | Send