Iraqi Policy

Submitted by Hugh (United States), Nov 19, 2003 at 08:32

The notion that Iraq might be become a light unto the Muslim nations was always preposterous. In any case, we already have such a light -- it is called Turkey, the Turkey of Kemal Pasha, or Ataturk. It may be that Iran, if its mullocrats are prevented from permanently staying in power (which, if they are allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, they will) -- for their prestige will overcome all domestic opposition), will also be a light unto the Muslim nations, as it recoils from the imposition of shari'a, part of its its intellecutal elite even suggest a return to Zoroastrianism, and Islam -- for at least a generation or two -- is discredited among those who think.

The Kemalist republic, separating mosque and state (monitoring the mosques, with the army as guarantor of secularism and the necessary cult of personality around Ataturk), was the product of a total defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and based on a desire to save Turkey. Any similar change in Iran would be based on the recognition of the disaster that Khomeini and his epigones have brought to Iran. In other words, the change which non-Muslims would welcome in Muslim states comes only when the disaster is recognized from within, and acted upon from within -- not by outside, non-Muslim forces. Both Turkey and Iran are, furthermore, non-Arab -- i.e. their amour-propre and identity are not so heavily and completely wound up with Islam as is the case with Arabs; they have both a pre-Islamic and non-Islamic component in their civilizational makeup to which they can mentally repair. The Arabs do not. Let us, then, do what we can to create the conditions to allow, from within, a realization that Islam is not the solution to the woes of the Islamic world, but the problem.

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