Is It Mogadishu?
A free Iraq could transform the Middle East, according to Sen. John McCain (R-AZ). However,
success in transforming Iraq into a consensual government with personal freedom and economic vitality is, as National
Security Advisor Condolezza Rice recently said, a generational commitment, requiring steady resolve over a multitude
of presidents.
Who is with us? Who hopes that we fail?
Victor Davis Hanson gives us a list of those who oppose a free Iraq as we envision it. The list of opponents begins
with the Ba'athist holdovers in the Sunni triangle. They not only have no productive and useful skills but fear
trials and retribution for their decades of terror in Iraq. The Sunni minority fears a Shia majority either secular
or radical that outnumbers them three to one. The radical Moslem theocrats within the region fear that the power
of the clerics would be undermined by Modernism. Without a tribal society, women will not be subjugated, the young
won't remain uneducated and unemployable and seeds of hate will not be sown among the populace. Freedom means chaos
to radical mullahs whose strategy is t o present themselves as the alternative to chaos.
The mullahs in Iran are in a race against time to either obtain nuclear weapons or subvert a Shiite-dominated secular
government in Iraq. The corrupt and mostly Sunni elites in the neighborhood also cannot stomach the thought of
a secular, free market democracy next door. Ideas such as the Saudi Wahhabi theocracy might seem to be truly repulsive
if there were a comparison nearby. Other neighbors - Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority -have enjoyed
lucrative contracts with Saddam that they would not like to see investigated by an Iraqi Parliament. The same is
true on an ever larger scale for the big faux friend recipients of American aid, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The impotent and corrupt United Nations is mostly an assembly of dinky tyrants who have no interest in helping
America create a just society. That would provide the world with an unfavorable comparison to their countries.
In addition, Germany and France have invested enormous prestige in stymieing the United States. Their interests
rest in suppressing the past records of their perfidious dealings with Saddam under sanctions, regaining oil contracts
and dominating the political process through their Security Council veto so that the next "benign" tyrant
appears.
World-wide leftists cannot sustain the thought that unilateralism might succeed where multilateralism failed. U.S.
failure is vital in order to confirm the entire European worldview. Success of a free market democracy in Iraq
would be an indictment of their socialist paradise. No further indictment is needed, however, than the recent heat-related
death of the elderly in France. It is an amoral country indeed when the young and healthy expect the state to care
for the old and unwanted from their own families. And the state is on vacation.
Finally, there are the domestic political opponents of the current administration - the activist media and the
pols - who see disaster and quagmire everywhere they look. Much of their impatience is feigned and political. There
are many, many political forces, governments and institutions that see themselves as losers should current policy
succeed. Calls for Defense Sec. Donald Rumsfeld's head are already being heard.
Regardless of the many forces who wish the United States would fail, the cost of failure is unacceptable. If the
administration produces indifferent results or withdraws under a U.N. umbrella, the spirit of Mogadishu will be
confirmed. That is the belief held by radical Islamists and many others that America has no stomach for a fight;
that democracies cannot make long-term commitments and stick to them, and that guerilla terror tactics coupled
with pressure from a hostile media and the overt support of organized appeasers can defeat a technologically superior
force.
As the United Nation's debate begins this week, the central issue will be to see if an acceptable final Iraqi resolution
will look like the Kosovo model. In the Kosovo resolution, political control rests with an appointee of the Security
Council. The question will be if a compromise is reached which makes current American Pasha Paul Bremer the U.N.
appointee for at least a little while.
If that compromise passes, then the United States will have placed its sovereignty over foreign affairs in the
hands of a French veto. The hyperpower will be corralled.
There are two other alternatives. The first is that nothing happens but several months are wasted proving that
there is no circumstance where France and Germany will cooperate unless the United States cedes control to them.
The second is that the United States proves beyond doubt that the U.N. is dangerously irrelevant and must be ignored.
Before the administration pays the Security Council price, it should look at exactly what is being offered for
sale. Besides providing cover for an ignominious retreat, what can the U.N. do that would really help?
The military of France and Germany are already over-extended and have little to offer. Their self interest would
only lie in providing administrators and bureaucrats who would secure Iraqi business. It is said that Russia, Turkey
and India could provide substantial numbers of troops, but who would want them? The Russians are the folks run
out of Afghanistan with a reputation for brutality, the same brutality currently found in Chechnya. They are motivated
only by-+ the prospects for oil and being repaid for previous illicit arms sales to Saddam. Turkish troops lust
for a presence in the northern oilfields and would provoke the Kurds, splitting them from the united factions.
India won't provide help when we support the regime in Pakistan.
In most all cases, combat troops are not what are needed. Trained civil police are. Non-Iraqi blue helmets from
the folks who brought Iraq sanctions are of dubious appeal compared to local Iraqi forces. An easily-targeted patch-work
force from elsewhere is a formula for terror, delay and slow but persistent failure. We have already seen what
a U.N. force under Kofi Annan did in the Congo, with its three million dead.
The United States cannot win the terror war because of the United Nations but in spite of it. We have seen U.N.
dithering many times before - there will be an answer if we just wait a little longer. We cannot delay because
the solution is more money now.
The inability to fix the power shortages will eventually turn the Iraqi public against the United States. The price
tag may be $60 billion on top of a deficit-ridden budget. A large number of civilian experts must also be safely
deployed in the nation. Fear that in an election year the Democrats will complain about ongoing casualties in war
and that the money would be better spent at home cannot override the importance of winning the war with radical
Islam.
At the moment, the hyperpower, the United States; the great power, the United Kingdom and the regional power Australia
plus the beleaguered local power Israel are what stands between Western civilization and Islamist tyranny. The
Mogadishu issue of self-doubt remains - do we believe that we will win or lose in the long run?
If we cannot muster the will to win now and over there, we will fight the next generation of terrorists here and
not all that long into the future. The adversary is real.
Al Qaeda has recently published a new book, journalist Amir Taheri writes in the New York Post. The author is Yussuf
al-Ayyeri. Islam faces a new form of unbelief, al-Ayyeri writes, which he calls "secularist democracy."
This threat is more dangerous to Islam that all its predecessors combined because of its "seductive capacities."
Secularist democracy persuades people that they are in charge of their destiny and that, using their collective
reasoning, they can shape policies and pass laws as they see fit. That leads them into ignoring the "unalterable
laws" promulgated by God for the whole of mankind and codified in the Islamic Shariah until the end of time.
The goal of democracy, the author says, is to make Muslims love this world, forget the next world and abandon jihad.
Muslim militants must make sure that the United States does not succeed. If a secularist democracy is established
in any Muslim country for a reasonably long time, democracy could lead to economic prosperity, which, in turn,
would make Muslims "reluctant to die in martyrdom" in defense of the faith. If democracy comes to Iraq,
al-Ayyeri concludes, the next target would be the whole of the Muslim world.
The book's author, Yussuf Al-Ayyeri, whose nom de guerre is Abu Mohammad, was killed in a gun battle with authorities
in Riyadh this past June.
