But most of Iraq is peaceful! Why do you keep ignoring that?

Randall Parker at ParaPundit continues to catalog the chaos in Iraq, all based on reports in the mainstream press: Taliban-type gunmen are killing falafel sellers in Baghdad because there was no falafel in Muhammad’s time; lawyers are afraid to take on cases because the other side might kill them; 56 employees and passengers of a bus company were kidnapped in one fell swoop; and people decline to report kidnappings because they fear the police as much as the kidnap gangs. Parker concludes:

The US invasion—and insufficient US soldiers to maintain order—shattered Iraq. Humpty Dumpty had a big fall. All King George’s horse and all King George’s men can’t put Iraq back together again.

If the picture emerging from the media reports gathered by Parker is correct, then the irresponsibility of what President Bush did is even worse than we have thought. There was an existing Muslim country, living under a murderous tyrant who kept order, a horrible order, but at least a kind of order, through fear and terror. We destroyed that order, while it never occurred to us that order must be restored and maintained, because the president and his men, being liberals, and thus believing in the natural goodness of man, thought that as soon as Saddam was gone, the people would rise up and institute Western-type democracy. We completely ignored the most basic political realities of an ethnically and religiously divided Muslim country, thinking that freedom was cool and freedom was enough. This frivolous approach was captured perfectly by Secretary Rumsfeld’s flippant comment soon after the fall of Baghdad concerning the rioting, when he said something like, “This is freedom,” meaning, this is freedom, so it’s ok. Rumsfeld’s remark—for which he should have been fired on the spot—symbolizes our entire “democracy” policy in Iraq and the Hobbesian nightmare that it has unleashed.

So it’s not just that Muslim democratization leads to Muslim radicalism. It’s that Muslim democratization leads to total multidimensional chaos and evil—hell on earth. As I read Parker’s commentary, that appears to be Bush’s Iraq legacy.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 11, 2006 04:23 PM | Send