Why Bush and his supporters never asked whether Islam and democracy are compatible

A reader just drew my attention to, and I’ve just re-read, my August 17, 2005 article in The American Thinker, “Global democratization: the unasked questions.” For those who have never read it, I recommend it. It is, by the way, the only article I’ve ever published at TAT. Two weeks after it was published, when I proposed another article on the same subject to TAT’s editor Thomas Lifson, he accused me of using an “anti-Semitic code word” in the draft I had submitted to him. The word was “neoconservative,” in a sentence in which I merely summed up the thesis of my August 17 article: “President Bush and his neoconservative supporters justified spreading democracy to Iraq on the basis that all people are the same, all people want the same individual freedoms that we want, and therefore all people are ready and able to adopt liberal democracy based on universal individual rights.” When I then asked Lifson for an explanation or retraction of his accusation of anti-Semitism, he ended all communication with me.

- end of initial entry -

Alan M. writes:

Have you ever thought about the Bush plan as an experiment in trying to achieve the least cost path to dealing with the the Islam issue in the world?

Path A: The plan succeeds and the world is better off at the least cost.

Path B: The plan fail fails, but now the Western world understands that Islam is incompatible with democracy, and would be likelier to pay the price that the bigger struggle requires (at least the non-leftist, non-defeatist part of the world).

The price the world is going to pay for Path B is massive (in money, lives, and instability) and the cost of experimenting with Path A would seem to me to be infinitesimal in comparison (and, hence, worth the attempt)—even if the likelihood was quite low.

Perhaps the neocons were not thinking this way but I’ve seen more than one online pundit discussing this from the beginning.

LA replies:

It’s been said here before, and very recently, that the catastrophe of Iraq may be a happy catastrophe because of the lessons being learned. But the suggestion that these lessons are part of some Bush plan comes from the realm of indefeasible Bush worship—from the same kind of people who justify every leftist action of Bush’s by saying that he’s really the greatest genius in history, putting forth unworkable liberal schemes in order to discredit them.

If it is true that there is a plan here, it is the plan of Providence, not of Bush.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2007 01:33 AM | Send