Getting real on Iraq

Diana West marches on, challenging the set of radical liberal assumptions that are today called conservatism:

But what if we accept the politically incorrect fact that our failure to establish liberty and justice for all in Iraq—namely, freedom of conscience and equality before the law—is due to the nature of Islamic culture, not to the inefficacy of American efforts? If, five years after Sept. 11, we finally faced the fact that liberty in Islam—defined, literally, as “freedom from unbelief”—has nothing to do with liberty in the West, we could finally understand why an Iraqi constitution enshrining sharia is wholly incompatible with everything our own democracy stands for, and is thus not something worth dying for.

Or, as I wrote here a year ago: “I will support a winnable war for national defense. I do not support an unwinnable war for liberal utopianism.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 12, 2006 08:32 AM | Send