McCain’s Islam policy

From John McCain’s foreign policy speech:

I have called for major changes in how our government faces the challenge of radical Islamic extremism by much greater resources for and integration of civilian efforts to prevent conflict and to address post-conflict challenges. Our goal must be to win the “hearts and minds” of the vast majority of moderate Muslims who do not want their future controlled by a minority of violent extremists. In this struggle, scholarships will be far more important than smart bombs.

This is the standard liberal view of how to deal with Islamic radicalism. Muslims suffer from various forms of backwardness, and this makes them turn to terrorism, so we need to initiate a global welfare and nation-building program (or rather a civilization-building program) to transform Muslims from Third-World people into First-World people. Our task is not to defend ourselves from an enemy. Our task is to reconstruct, modernize, and democratize our enemy, even before the enemy has been defeated. In other words, McCain’s policy is a global extension of the Bush-neocon logic pursued to such marvelous effect in Iraq for the last five years.

Now please tell me again why McCain is so much better than the Democrats that we must vote for him.

McCain calls this winning the hearts and minds of moderate Muslims. But if they’re moderate, why do we need to win their hearts and minds?

It’s now 50 hours since McCain gave his speech, and still not a word about it at Powerline. If you want to ask the Powerline writers why they are silent about a development which is so relevant to the central concerns of their website, you can write them at powerlinefeedback@gmail.com.

Here’s my theory of why they don’t want to talk about it. If they talk about it, they will say that they support McCain despite his adoption of a left-liberal policy on Iraq and “radical Islamic extremism,” a policy that Powerline has always opposed. But once they say that, it will become evident to everyone that their bottom line is to support the Republican candidate, no matter what his positions. Now the Powerline writers are supposedly independent, though pro-Republican, commentators—not Republican politicians or employees of the Republican National Committee. They do not want to make it so obvious that they believe in party over principle

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 28, 2008 02:19 PM | Send