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Muslim modernizers—by reform or revolution—concentrated their efforts in three main areas: military, economic, and political. The results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest for victory by updated armies brought a series of humiliating defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought in some countries impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource—oil. And even this was discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity and industry, and is doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted, or, more probably, superseded, as the international community grows weary of a fuel that pollutes the land, the sea, and the air wherever it is used or transported, and that puts the world economy at the mercy of a clique of capricious autocrats. Worst of all are the political results: the long quest for freedom has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to dictatorships that are modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.
Many remedies were tried—weapons and factories, schools and parliaments—but none achieved the desired result. Here and there they brought some alleviation and, to limited elements of the population, some benefit. But they failed to remedy or even to halt the increasing imbalance between Islam and the Western world.
"Who did this to us?" is of course a common human response when things are going badly, and many in the Middle East, past and present, have asked this question. They have found several different answers. It is usually easier and always more satisfying to blame others for one's misfortunes. For a long time the Mongols were the favorite villains. The Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century were blamed for the destruction of both Muslim power and Islamic civilization, and for what was seen as the ensuing weakness and stagnation. But after a while historians, Muslims and others, pointed to two flaws in this argument. The first was that some of the greatest cultural achievements of Islam, notably in Iran, came after, not before, the Mongol invasions. The second, more difficult to accept but nevertheless undeniable, was that the Mongols overthrew an empire that was already fatally weakened; indeed, it is hard to see how the once mighty empire of the caliphs would otherwise have succumbed to a horde of nomadic horsemen riding across the steppes from East Asia.
The rise of nationalism—itself an import from Europe—produced new perceptions. Arabs could lay the blame for their troubles on the Turks, who had ruled them for many centuries. Turks could lay the blame for the stagnation of their civilization on the dead weight of the Arab past, in which the creative energies of the Turkish people were caught and immobilized. Persians could lay the blame for the loss of their ancient glories on Arabs, Turks, and Mongols impartially.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries British and French paramountcy in much of the Arab world produced a new and more plausible scapegoat—Western imperialism. In the Middle East there have been good reasons for such blame. Western political domination, economic penetration, and—longest, deepest, and most insidious of all—cultural influence changed the face of the region and transformed the lives of its people, turning them in new directions, arousing new hopes and fears, creating new dangers and new expectations without precedent in their cultural past.
But the Anglo-French interlude was comparatively brief, and ended half a century ago; Islam's change for the worse began long before and continued unabated afterward. Inevitably, the role of the British and the French as villains was taken over by the United States, along with other aspects of Western leadership. The attempt to transfer the guilt to America has won considerable support but, for similar reasons, remains unconvincing. Anglo-French rule and American influence, like the Mongol invasions, were a consequence, not a cause, of the inner weakness of Middle Eastern states and societies. Some observers, both inside and outside the region, have pointed to differences in the post-colonial development of former British possessions—for example, between Aden, in the Middle East, and Singapore or Hong Kong; or between the various lands that once made up the British Empire in India.
Another European contribution to this debate is anti-Semitism, and blaming "the Jews" for all that goes wrong. Jews in traditional Islamic societies experienced the normal constraints and occasional hazards of minority status. Until the rise and spread of Western tolerance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they were better off under Muslim than under Christian rule in most significant respects. With rare exceptions, where hostile stereotypes of the Jew existed in the Islamic tradition, Islamic societies tended to be contemptuous and dismissive rather than suspicious and obsessive. This made the events of 1948—the failure to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel—all the more of a shock. As some writers observed at the time, it was humiliating enough to be defeated by the great imperial powers of the West; to suffer the same fate at the hands of a contemptible gang of Jews was intolerable. Anti-Semitism and its image of the Jew as a scheming, evil monster provided a soothing antidote.
The earliest specifically anti-Semitic statements in the Middle East occurred among Christian minorities, and can usually be traced back to European originals. They had limited impact; during the Dreyfus trial in France, for example, when a Jewish officer was unjustly accused and condemned by a hostile court, Muslim comments usually favored the persecuted Jew against his Christian persecutors. But the poison continued to spread, and starting in 1933, Nazi Germany and its various agencies made a concerted and on the whole remarkably successful effort to promote European-style anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine greatly facilitated the acceptance of the anti-Semitic interpretation of history, and led some to attribute all evil in the Middle East—and, indeed, in the world—to secret Jewish plots. This interpretation has pervaded much of the public discourse in the region, including that seen in education, the media, and even entertainment.
An argument sometimes adduced is that the cause of the changed relationship between East and West is not a Middle Eastern decline but a Western upsurge—the discoveries and the scientific, technological, industrial, and political revolutions that transformed the West and vastly increased its wealth and power. But this is merely to restate the question: Why did the discoverers of America sail from Spain rather than from a Muslim Atlantic port, out of which such voyages were indeed attempted in earlier times? Why did the great scientific breakthrough occur in Europe and not, as one might reasonably have expected, in the richer, more advanced, and in most respects more enlightened realm of Islam?
The point has often been made: If Islam is an obstacle to freedom, to science, to economic development, how is it that Muslim society in the past was a pioneer in all three—and this when Muslims were much closer in time to the sources and inspiration of their faith than they are now? Some have posed the question in a different form—not "What has Islam done to the Muslims?" but "What have the Muslims done to Islam?"—and have answered by laying the blame on specific teachers and doctrines and groups.
For those known nowadays as Islamists or fundamentalists, the failures and shortcomings of modern Islamic lands afflict those lands because they adopted alien notions and practices. They fell away from authentic Islam and thus lost their former greatness. Those known as modernists or reformers take the opposite view, seeing the cause of this loss not in the abandonment but in the retention of old ways, and especially in the inflexibility and ubiquity of the Islamic clergy, who, they say, are responsible for the persistence of beliefs and practices that might have been creative and progressive a thousand years ago but are neither today. The modernists' usual tactic is not to denounce religion as such, still less Islam in particular, but to level their criticism against fanaticism. It is to fanaticism—and more particularly to fanatical religious authorities—that they attribute the stifling of the once great Islamic scientific movement and, more generally, of the freedom of thought and expression.
A more common approach to this theme has been to discuss a specific problem: the place of religion and of its professional exponents in the political order. In this view a principal cause of Western progress is the separation of Church and State and the creation of a civil society governed by secular laws. Another approach has been to view the main culprit as the relegation of women to an inferior position in Muslim society, which deprives the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people and entrusts the other half's crucial early years of upbringing to illiterate and downtrodden mothers. The products of such an education, it has been said, are likely to grow up either arrogant or submissive, and unfit for a free, open society. However one evaluates the views of secularists and feminists, their success or failure will be a major factor in shaping the Middle Eastern future.
Some solutions that once commanded passionate support have been discarded. The two dominant movements in the twentieth century were socialism and nationalism. Both have been discredited—the first by its failure, the second by its success and consequent exposure as ineffective. Freedom, interpreted to mean national independence, was seen as the great talisman that would bring all other benefits. The overwhelming majority of Muslims now live in independent states, but this has brought no solutions to their problems. National socialism, the bastard offspring of both ideologies, persists in a few states that have preserved the Nazi-Fascist style of dictatorial government and indoctrination through a vast security apparatus and a single all-powerful party. These regimes have failed every test except survival, and have brought none of the promised benefits. If anything, their infrastructures are even more antiquated than those of other Muslim states, their armed forces designed primarily for terror and repression.
At present two answers to the question of what went wrong command widespread support in the Middle East, each with its own diagnosis and corresponding prescription. One attributes all evil to the abandonment of the divine heritage of Islam and advocates return to a real or imagined past. That is the way of the Iranian revolution and of the so-called fundamentalist movements and regimes in various Muslim countries. The other condemns the past and advocates secular democracy, best embodied in the Turkish Republic, proclaimed in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk.
For the oppressive but ineffectual governments that rule much of the Middle East, finding targets to blame serves a useful, indeed an essential, purpose—to explain the poverty that they have failed to alleviate and to justify the tyranny that they have introduced. They seek to deflect the mounting anger of their unhappy subjects toward other, outside targets.
But growing numbers of Middle Easterners are adopting a more self-critical approach. The question "Who did this to us?" has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. And the question "What did we do wrong?" has led naturally to a second question: "How do we put it right?" In that question, and in the various answers that are being found, lie the best hopes for the future.
During the past few weeks the worldwide exposure given to the views and actions of Osama bin Laden and his hosts the Taliban has provided a new and vivid insight into the eclipse of what was once the greatest, most advanced, and most open civilization in human history.
To a Western observer, schooled in the theory and practice of Western freedom, it is precisely the lack of freedom—freedom of the mind from constraint and indoctrination, to question and inquire and speak; freedom of the economy from corrupt and pervasive mismanagement; freedom of women from male oppression; freedom of citizens from tyranny—that underlies so many of the troubles of the Muslim world. But the road to democracy, as the Western experience amply demonstrates, is long and hard, full of pitfalls and obstacles.
If the peoples of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination—perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some expanding superpower in the East. But if they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavor, they can once again make the Middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is theirs.
Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, kicking off the campaign theme on which the Democrats say they will ask for the people's vote in 2006, has just called this Congress "the most corrupt in history." "Corrupt" is a word with more meanings than Senator Reid intended. In the world of software, something that is "corrupt" doesn't work.
Pick a subject: Hurricane Katrina, Iraq, national spending, advice and consent. The larger the challenge, the smaller our politics becomes. Washington's man of the year is Jack Abramoff.
Washington's response to Hurricane Katrina, a national catastrophe, was the clearest example of our incredible shrinking politics. The August hurricane reduced much of New Orleans to muck, ruin and misery. Almost as quickly, a floodtide of media-made melodrama and political recrimination broke the levees of perspective that once helped to keep volatile public events in manageable context. One recalls how TV's anchors and reporters covered the Challenger disaster or even the Kennedy assassination. Now the media weeps along with the nation.
With images of the city's bereft black population replaying hourly, the aftermath of a natural disaster was reprogrammed into an act of man-made racism. The nation's politicians, rather than damp down this falsity, exploited it, falling on each other with long knives and hurling charges of incompetence, neglect and again, racism.
With TV and the press focused on politicians spitting at each other amid a natural catastrophe, average people in communities across the nation, aided by many can-do private companies, opened their doors to the genuine homeless people of New Orleans.
Episodes in the Year of Unseriousness abound: The bipartisan highway bill with its Bridge to Nowhere; the Abramoff lobbying sleaze; a truly feckless year-long media hunt to identify who "outed" Valerie Plame, a story with virtually no resonance beyond the Beltway and whose special prosecutor charged no violation of the supposed underlying crime; and now pretend outrage from the likes of Senators Reid and Arlen Specter over the "exposure" of the Bush surveillance program, which much of official Washington knew about and which turns out not to have violated anything. Like radio's six-second delay to catch obscenities, maybe Washington needs a 12-hour delay on the public comments of senators to spare the public's ears of offensive inanities.
Normally these deformations might be seen as the system's unavoidable flotsam. But the deal is that the people are supposed to get something in return for enduring the debris of politics. What happened to the public's side of the bargain this year? Doing something about the out-year costs of Social Security and other entitlements is much needed (the elderly are beside themselves over the incoherence of the new Medicare drug entitlement). But at the mere suggestion of Social Security reform, the idea was simply swept off the table. Washington's ability to govern seriously falls now as the challenges of public life rise.
The patronizing derision around Capitol Hill of the effort to build a democratic order in Iraq is especially ironic. Some proportion of Iraq's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish leadership spent the past year, such as during their November reconciliation conference in Cairo, in painstaking conversations to reach the accommodations that allowed the extraordinary parliamentary election on Dec. 15. Here, members of Congress read illustrated front-page accounts of bomb stories and call for "withdrawal." They know more about the "politics" of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi than about any of Iraq's organized national parties. I suspect there have been more serious, good-faith conversations toward a common national purpose among Iraq's leading political figures this past year than have occurred on any subject in Washington.
The rank politicizing of foreign policy is unfortunate because functional bipartisanship in this realm once served as ballast to the predictable divisions over domestic policy. Now, with the ballast gone, the two sides of our politics hardly ever touch. Even if the government informs senior Democrats such as Senator Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of a sensitive policy decision like the surveillance of suspected terrorist phone calls, their only comments on the leaked press reports are feigned expressions of denunciation and outrage. America's enemies and competitors will be popping their champagne corks next weekend in celebration of a Washington whose first response to undeniable threats is to disadvantage the other political party.
What makes this standoff disturbing is that it comes at a critical turn in history, and neither side seems able to climb down from it. The quick rise of new communications technologies like the Internet has made it possible to wage total political war 24/7. Both sides use the Internet daily to thwart, impede and kneecap the other side. There's no downtime anymore, no space to reassess one's position or arguments. Fight or die, every day. More than at any previous time, much of political life now consists of feeding propaganda into this combat machinery.
The U.S. remains the sole superpower in a world beset by organized Islamic terror, by nations such as Iran and North Korea that are actively proliferating nuclear bombs and long-range ballistic-missile delivery systems, by a China with strategic ambitions, and by a geographically important Russia of profoundly amoral political intent. For men and women seeking the high challenge of a serious public life in Washington, this should be a golden age. On the evidence of 2005, we are heading toward the Stone Age.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com."Some centrist Democrats say attacks by their party leaders on the Bush administration's eavesdropping on suspected terrorist conversations will further weaken the party's credibility on national security," reports Donald Lambro of the Washington Times:
"I think when you suggest that civil liberties are just as much at risk today as the country is from terrorism, you've gone too far if you leave that impression. I don't believe that's true," said Michael O'Hanlon, a national-security analyst at the Brookings Institution who advises Democrats on defense issues.
"I get nervous when I see the Democrats playing this [civil liberties] issue out too far. They had better be careful about the politics of it," said Mr. O'Hanlon, who says the Patriot Act is "good legislation."
PowerLine's John Hinderaker doubts the party leadership will heed these warnings:
One basic question is how many centrist Democrats still exist. My guess is that most of those who could legitimately be termed centrist, especially on foreign policy, have left the Democratic Party, or at least stopped voting for its candidates. The party's leadership team of Howard Dean, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi must be the most extreme in modern American history. But I've seen no indication that their extremism hurts them with the party's rank and file. So I don't see much prospect that the Democrats' leftward march will be halted; the question, I think, is whether they are marching off a cliff.
Perhaps tellingly, Lambro does not quote any elected officials who are unhappy about their party's solicitude for the "civil liberties" of terrorists.
It's worth pondering just what it is that the Democrats are arguing here. They claim not that President Bush isn't doing enough to keep America safe from terrorism, but that he's doing too much. The implication is that the threat of terrorism within America is not all that serious and never was--that 9/11, horrific though it was, was a one-off.
There is, at the very least, a tension between this blasé approach and the oft-heard Democratic claim that liberating Iraq increased the threat of terrorism. If that threat still isn't serious enough to justify the merest attenuation of "civil liberties," then this argument against Iraq, even if true, is trivial.
In any case, it strikes us that the Democrats' current approach to terrorism is a dangerously complacent one. The 9/11 attacks plainly were not a one-off; even before Sept. 11, 2001, the World Trade Center had been hit in 1993, and Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called blind sheik, had gone to prison in a plot to blow up New York City bridges and tunnels.
True, there hasn't been a major terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, but it would be stunningly fatuous to conclude therefrom that the threat is negligible. It may be that we are out of danger for now because of the efforts the Bush administration has taken to prevent attacks, and that the Democrats, by opposing those efforts, are inviting another mass murder of Americans. Or it may be--heaven forbid--that the administration's efforts have not been sufficient, and another terrorist attack is only a matter of time.
Either way, if there is another attack on the scale of 9/11, complacency about terrorism would be wholly untenable. The public would demand much tougher measures. By fretting about imagined threats to civil liberties today, the Democratic left may be helping to endanger real civil liberties tomorrow.
Lemmings of the Press
Our fellow journalists should not escape blame for attempting to foster a climate of complacency that could prove catastrophic. Click on the link atop this item and check out MSNBC's gallery of political cartoons about "domestic spying." Of 24 cartoons spread out over eight pages, 23 take essentially the same position: that civil liberties are in danger, Bush is another Nixon, the government is spying on ordinary people, etc. The only exception is Michael Ramirez, recently fired from the Los Angeles Times.
Although these cartoonists fancy themselves independent-minded rebels, they are in reality a bunch of dull conformists. Fully one in four of the 24 cartoons uses the same gag, a play on "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" ("gonna find out who's naughty and nice," that kind of thing). Let us hope these sheep do not succeed in leading the rest of us to the slaughter.
Meanwhile, here's a Reuters headline that reveals something of the journalistic mindset: "Secret Surveillance Up Since 9/11." The government stepping up its antiterror efforts after a major terrorist attack ought to be a dog-bites-man story, but to the denizens of Reuterville it apparently is surprising enough to be news.
Hail the Tribune, Swat the Bee
A pair of editorials from medium-size newspapers provide a nice contrast between responsible and irresponsible criticism of the Bush administration. The Chicago Tribune conducts a dispassionate "inquest" of the Bush administration's case for liberating Iraq. It finds some of them wanting ("In putting so much emphasis on illicit weaponry, the White House advanced its most provocative, least verifiable case for war when others would have sufficed") and others compelling ("The White House was correct in predicting that long subjugated Iraqis would embrace democracy").
On balance, the Trib comes down on the side of the president: "After reassessing the administration's nine arguments for war, we do not see the conspiracy to mislead that many critics allege." The paper acknowledges that "people of patriotism and integrity" can disagree. But if they do, they ought to admit where the administration has been right.
By contrast, the Sacramento Bee attacks the administration by repeating a proven lie:
Then there's the story reported in The Standard-Times newspaper in Massachusetts of a University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, student doing a research paper for a history class on fascism and totalitarianism. He requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung's "Little Red Book" through interlibrary loan for a paper on communism. Two agents of the Department of Homeland Security later showed up at his parents' home in New Bedford, Mass., to interrogate him, telling him they were there because the book was on a "watch list" and the student had spent time abroad.
What else is on that "watch list"--Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" or "Das Kapital"? Hitler's "Mein Kampf"? Other staples in the history of political thought courses?
This editorial ran yesterday, three days after the Standard-Times acknowledged it had been snookered by the story, which was never plausible to begin with.
