MIDDLE EASTERN MODERNITY: I read an article a little while back about how the most popular show on Al-Jazeera is one where the host takes his Arab guests to task for Muslim governments' crimes against their Muslim subjects. While he's no shiv for America, he believes that Muslim governments cast the West as the source of Arab misfortune all the while soaking their population for virtually free labor and tax revenues while subjecting them to strictly enforced codes of personal conduct. A bit like being an indentured servant, I'd imagine, except your seven years never comes.
The popularity of his show, called
The Opposite Direction, dovetails well with a question the book
The Modern Mind poses but doesn't explicitly answer. The book aims to tell the intellectual history of the twentieth century and ends up attributing all the major intellectual advancements of the last century to Western innovation (not in a polemical kind of way). The book finds near consensus about this conclusion even as it surveys thinkers from across six continents. It touches deliberately on the question of how this sense of intellectual/cultural inferiority affects places like the Arab world, namely that it often manifests itself as hatred towards the success of the West with the idea being that the world is a zero sum game. The show on Al-Jazeera, however, demonstrates that there is at least the will to entertain another point of view on the subject.
I deliberately shied away from saying much about Iraq this past month, mostly because I believe such short term predictions about whether the elections would "work" or not seemed only to detract from the proper attention to the long view of the Middle East (something I think both the MSM and the blogosphere haven't paid much mind to recently). I think Bush's objectives in Iraq are 1) to provide a buoy against Saudi fickleness on oil prices and 2) to create a safe space for some form of democracy to take root, both because this stablizes oil prices and quells terrorism. Yet the dominant theme at many of the sneering liberal outfits seems to be that these aims are mutually exclusive, or that Bush really doesn't care whether Iraq is democratic or not, so long as it operates under the thumb of the U.S.
Those who believe this haven't learned well from the lesson of the Saudis. Those dictators may be welcome at Crawford ranch, but they are certainly no puppets of Bush's, and neither will be the people who control an oil supply like Iraq's. These arguments also glance blithely off the religious (messianic, perhaps) determination that compells Bush. While Paul Wolfowitz may see Iraq as an epicenter of democracy that ripples outward to neighboring countries and thereby neutralizes the forces that conspire to breed terrorism (in his view and mine, forces like the nihilism of living under totalitarianism), Bush shows the attitude of a man "called to serve." His is a liberator. Free market capitalism and civil liberties don't cancel each other out. These Iraqi elections portend well, but I remain committed to the view that the question of Iraqi freedom is something that is settled not over the course of a year, but of a decade. One can criticize government contracts to Halliburton, a poor, understaffed strategy of occupation, but I think that in impugning the desire of the Bush administration to see Iraq as a free country, you cripple your ability to draw insightful conclusions both about what's happening there and what the administration has planned next.
When you're at home with the sanctimony of Clinton, who advised Kerry that coming out against gay marriage would be a smart political move, it's easy to see how Bush can be viewed with such cynicism. What's not easy to see, however, when you take that tack, is what a freer Middle East means both for human rights and for terrorism. It's not a question that the republicans should monopolize, nor is it a reason on its own to have a crusading Christian in the White House, but it is a question. If you're dissatisfied with Bush's answer, perhaps it's time you found your own.