And what IF Islamists take power in more countries?(response to Pipes' response)

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Nov 7, 2012 at 21:19

I wonder if anyone has considered the thesis that if Islamists continue to take power in various countries, while this is an immense danger to minorities in those countries, an increased danger to Israel from countries nearby (and of course Iran with the bomb), and a lesser increased danger to the United States, it may also lead eventually to a kind of suicide of a whole civilization?

Who thinks that the fact of Islamists dominating Muslim countries is going to lead to a higher, more stable, more prosperous state for the populaitons of those countries?

While it may be initially hair-raising to consider the prospect of more Morsis and Ahmadinejads, a realpolitik argument might be made that this result ultimately portends social, economic, political, and cultural disaster for those countries.

A massive civilization-wide IMPLOSION may be the logical destination of more Islamists coming to power. The latest 'star' of this strange assumption that Islamism in the saddle means more power for these countries appears to be Turkey. Most everyone assumed that Turkey going Islamist meant a higher level of development. That appeared to be true for awhile, but it now appears that what Marxists used to call 'internal contradictions' are starting to take their inevitable toll. As in Iran after the fall of the Shah, but more slowly the dream of the peace and glory that would come with a triumphant Islam appear to be turning into something very different, politically and economically.

And with enough evidence of this implosion of a 'perfected' islam in these countries, maybe, just maybe, some portion of opinion in the leadership ranks of the West will wake up from its long somnabulation, and decide that we have to actually combat the ideology that will produce this slow-motion suicide of a civilization. We may actually transcend our self-imposed taboo and censorship to finally debate whether Islam is compatible with modernity at all. If we have that debate, in the midst of increasingly dysfunctional Muslim societies and states, then maybe we'll discover, to our surprise, that there are many elements of dissent, latent or potential, among the people that we should have been looking for all along, and as we supported with such ultimate profit in the last fearsome totalitarianism we faced, Soviet Communism and its captive satellites.

So I am far from certain, and do not regard it as an obvious conclusion, that more countries going islamist is an inevitably bad development for the national security interests of the West, and even for Israel.

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