Romney’s mindless foreign policy speech

I’ve now read the key parts of Romney’s 3,400 word speech at VMI on Middle East policy. It is the pure neoconservative position: we must support Muslims’ desire for democracy, and then, once they have it, we must, unlike Obama, give the moderates enough support so that these Muslim democracies will be liberal and free, not oppressive, aggressive, and anti-American.

After describing a demonstration in which “tens of thousands” of Libyans protested against the extremists who attacked the U.S. consulate, Romney continues:

This is the struggle that’s now shaken the entire Middle East. It’s the struggle of millions and millions of people—men and women, young and old, Muslims, Christians and nonbelievers—all of whom have had enough of the darkness. It’s a struggle for the dignity that comes with freedom and opportunity and the right to live under laws of our own making. It’s a struggle that’s been unfolded under green banners in the streets of Iran, in the public squares of Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen, and in the fights for liberty in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya, and now in Syria.

In short, it’s a struggle between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair.

In the bolded sentence, Romney is saying that once these Muslim countries have “freedom,” i.e., democratic elections, they’ve got to struggle for “dignity” and (in the next paragraph) “liberty” i.e., they’ve got to struggle for a liberal, tolerant society, which they can only achieve with America’s help, guidance, and military might. But why must free societies struggle for dignity and liberty? Obviously, because the dominant trend of those societies is against dignity and liberty, and so once those societies becomes free, that dominant trend is also freed to assert itself.

Therefore, states Romney, after we have encouraged and helped Muslims to throw off tyrants and adopt democracy (which we did in Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere), we must give all kinds of aid and support to the moderates and the secular liberals to help assure that these democracies democratically choose liberal-secular rather than sharia-fundamentalist governments. This assumes that we can control or direct what a Muslim democracy chooses. But, as I keep saying, once Muslim countries have democracy, they will democratically choose the governments that THEY want, not the governments that WE want them to choose. And since Muslim countries are populated by Muslims, the governments they choose will, inevitably, be sharia governments. Sure, every Muslim country has a moderate-Muslim or secular-liberal minority, such as the people who participated in the pro-American demonstration in Benghazi. But they are vastly outnumbered by the sharia-believing majority.

In short, Muslim liberty is a contradiction in terms. Only people who steadfastly close their eyes to the doctrinal and historical reality of Islam could believe in it, and, worse, seek to invest the energies, power, and wealth of the United States in promoting it. And the bitter fact is that the Republican nominee—our only hope of getting rid of Obamageddon Man—is such a person.

- end of initial entry -

October 10

Steve R. writes:

In 1998, the mayor of Istanbul made the point metaphorically:

“Democracy is like a streetcar, you ride it until you arrive at your destination and then you step off.”

So how does a high IQ neoconservative go about preserving his worldview when confronted with that quote by Tayyip Erdogan?—especially, now that Erdogan has “proved” his point. Does the neoconservative dodge like a leftist, resorting to “It doesn’t have to turn out like that”?—as leftists do, reacting to the failures of N.Korea, Albania, USSR, et al?

LA replies:

In a word, yes. That is exactly what the neoconservative (and generic mainstream Republican/conservative) does.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 09, 2012 05:24 PM | Send