Was Kemalism the initial idea behind the Iraq war?

(Note to reader: This blog entry consists mainly of unanswered questions.)

According to Michael Hirsch writing in the Washington Monthly, Bernard Lewis had an epiphany in 1950 in which he realized the greatness of Kemalism, by which Islamic society was made to Westernize, and that this is the policy that Lewis advocated to the Bush administration in the period leading up to the Iraq war. Hirsch characterizes Lewis’s thoughts as follows:

Hence the only real answer to 9/11 was a decisive show of American strength in the Arab world; the only way forward, a Kemalist conquest of hearts and minds. And the most obvious place to seize the offensive and end the age-old struggle was in the heart of the Arab world, in Iraq.

The problem with this, of course, is that Kemalism is the opposite of democracy. Kemalism means forcing a Muslim country to give up the sharia law, give up the public Muslim culture. And this of course was not the Bush administration policy. The Bush policy was democracy. If we had had a Kemalist policy in Iraq, we would have used an overwhelming numbers of troops, gotten total control of the country, installed a Western-leaning strong man, and disempowered the imams. We did none of those things.

I am not aware that Lewis pushed Kemalism, i.e., a (Western-oriented) despotism over the Islamic world forcing it to cease to be publicly Islamic? (Hugh Fitzgerald in his many comments at Jihad Watch has advocated a Kemalist strategy toward Islam, and I wrote to him asking him if he could answer the questions I have raised here, but he hasn’t replied.)

Here is how Hirsch characterizes Lewis’s advice to the administration:

Iraq and its poster villain, Saddam Hussein, offered a unique opportunity for achieving this transformation in one bold stroke (remember “shock and awe”?) while regaining the offensive against the terrorists. So, it was no surprise that in the critical months of 2002 and 2003, while the Bush administration shunned deep thinking and banned State Department Arabists from its councils of power, Bernard Lewis was persona grata, delivering spine-stiffening lectures to Cheney over dinner in undisclosed locations. Abandoning his former scholarly caution, Lewis was among the earliest prominent voices after September 11 to press for a confrontation with Saddam, doing so in a series of op-ed pieces in The Wall Street Journal with titles like “A War of Resolve” and “Time for Toppling.” An official who sat in on some of the Lewis-Cheney discussions recalled, “His view was: “Get on with it. Don’t dither.”” Animated by such grandiose concepts, and like Lewis quite certain they were right, the strategists of the Bush administration in the end thought it unnecessary to prove there were operational links between Saddam and al Qaeda. These were good “bureaucratic” reasons for selling the war to the public, to use Wolfowitz’s words, but the real links were deeper: America was taking on a sick civilization, one that it had to beat into submission. Bin Laden’s supposedly broad Muslim base, and Saddam’s recalcitrance to the West, were part of the same pathology.

I can see where Hirsch is coming from. As a liberal, he thinks that any strong U.S. action is the equivalent of dictatorship and oppression, so he falsely characterizes the under-manned U.S. take-over of Iraq and subsequent setting up of democracy there as Kemalist strong arm tactics!

Now, I can understand that the war supporters did have Turkey as a model, i.e. a secular democratic state, but that leaves out how Turkey became that way. Turkey did not become a secular democratic state through democratic means, but by means of a dictatorship. So this leads to another question. Did the war supporters think that Iraq would get to Kemalist results without Kemalist means? Apparently they did. But what about Lewis? Did he think that?

And this leads to another question. We’ve heard that before the war, some in the administration did apparently want a “Kemalist” situation, with Chalabi leading a quickly-set-up government. But they quickly abandoned that and opted for democracy, and have touted democracy ever since then. Given their enthusiasm for the democracy policy, it’s hard to believe that they were forced to accept it (and abandon their Kemalist policy) against their will. So this gets very confusing to figure out.

But Hisch himself is a believer in a historic “moderate Islam”:

Today, progress in the Arab world will not come by secularizing it from above (Bulliet’s chapter dealing with Chalabi is called “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places”) but by rediscovering this more tolerant Islam, which actually predates radicalism and, contra Ataturk, is an ineluctable part of Arab self-identity that must be accommodated

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2006 09:42 AM | Send