This morning we quoted a neoconservative writing:
Remember the Iranian revolution when all sorts of people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now president.
Remember the Beirut spring when people poured out into the streets to demand freedom? Hizballah is now running Lebanon.
Remember the Palestinians having free elections? Hamas is now running the Gaza Strip.
Remember democracy in Algeria? Tens of thousands of people were killed in the ensuing civil war. It doesn’t have to be that way but precedents are pretty daunting.
A friend responds:
The extremity of all these groups was fed, fueled and fanned on U.S. policies that enabled oppression and suppression. 1979 in Tehran was as bad as it was because the U.S. and the Brits squelched 1953. That was 25-years more of pent-up frustration that caused things to swing way the other way in ’79. And, in fact, cutting off these places completely — ie, not maintaining diplomatic relations, labeling as terrorists and not ever allowing people to talk to them, etc — has hurt the U.S.’s ability to both, if necessary (yes), intervene in matters and help set up the very institutions and delicate societal crutches upon which democracies lean to stand up.
Imagine if in 1979, we started giving Mubarak $1.5 billion a year to build girls schools, gave Iran $140 million (how much cash the U.S. distributed in the coup against Mossadegh) in 1953 to build them, or made the Afghans start building them in 1989 with the $600 million we were giving to the Mujahedeen every year. Well shit, it’s 2011 now, and we’re spending more than $3 billion a month there going to war now.
While the historical record is at best mixed, to exclude religious politics altogether is fundamentally illiberal. And we are proud liberals. So Islamic democracies just have to have minority protections and assurances of non-exclusivity (bound to be imperfect). Now that’s an Islamic democracy with the umph in the second word.
MLK was a liberal, too, and he was certainly religiously inspired. Would I let MLK write my constitution, and write it as a religious one? Maybe begrudgingly, I would (he’s MLK, I’m pretty sure his Christian State wouldn’t come after me). This is how I feel about the notion of Islamic democracy — I don’t like it, but I’m willing to live and let live. I don’t like Islam either (my long term hope is that everyone gives up on this God stuff, but as long as they believe, that’s fundamentally illiberal, too). I am more sure of the fact that God doesn’t exist than I am of the fact that I could not live in a religious democracy (in the true sense of the word ‘democracy’, meaning that people are empowered — not just elections, but the institutions, private, civil, and public, that make it work right).
Just like the Christianists in the U.S., many of the Islamists in the Middle East haven’t gotten this piece — that other people have to be able to rock out with their cock out, too. But when the Tunisian guy (not the exiled one who called for attacking U.S. interest in 1991, but the domestic one who’s young and whose serene mustachioed face was blown up in the New York Times) said that he’s cool with tourists sipping French wine in Bikinis up by the beach, and that women wouldn’t need to cover their hair, and they would be well represented in parliament — Quotas! The guy called for quotas, ’til they find their “voice”! — that’s music to my ears. Now, I’m particularly excited about this one, I’ll admit. The advancement and education of Iranian women since the Islamic Revolution is actually nothing to scoff at (even if they’re oppressed and made to cover up). And I learned way back in my youth days in school that focusing on advancing women’s place in society helps in about a thousand ways, from reducing sizes of families, economic boosts, and goddamn if I don’t think a woman should run for President of Tunisia, one with a Hijab. You see how my imagination runs away from me.
But you always have to remember, you’re a proud liberal, and so you’re willing to try. If you don’t, that Hijabi woman doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in Egypt.
