Bush, Turkey and the Middle East

Dean Barnett blogs at Hugh Hewitt's site and is a solid, no nonsense conservative. He's particularly chary of those who downgrade the threat of the Isamic Jihadists and the War on Terror. What follows is my response to his commentary of a couple of days ago. I include my letter to him here because I think it's ridiculous that there are those out there (almost all liberals) who think the idea of President Bush's that Iraqis and people everywhere have the same longing for freedom is absurd, that the War on Terror is an overreaction to the actions of a handful of terrorists. In my opinion these people have not grasped the essential point that the Islamic Jihadists are opposed to all freedoms we enjoy in the west (and other democracies: Japan, India, S.Korea, etc) and want the world to be ruled by Shariah law in an Islamic Caliphate. Think the Taliban in Afganistan, and the Mullahs in Iran to imagine what the Jihadists want.


Letter to Dean Barnett:

I agree with 100 per cent your overall analysis of the scope of the Jihadist threat. Let me offer some optimism. A well known commenter on the left recently pointed out that Bush's notion of freedom doesn't make sense in the Islamic world because the Islamic faith calls for the individual to submit to Allah, which is in fact what Islam literally means -- submission to Allah. This fatalism (like Christian predestination of say Calvinism and the Presbyterian sect?) according to this savant means Muslims don't believe in freedom as we in the West understand it. But conflating religious doctrine of fatalism with political and economic freedoms we in the West gradually came to embrace through the transformative experience of the Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment movements between the 12th and 18th centuries, misses the point. That point is Muslims, while not experiencing this transformation first hand, are certainly aware that the lives those who have are vastly improved as a result. Muslims understand that the West has eclipsed them materially by orders of magnitude and importantly most Muslims embrace modernity and the improvement it can bring to their lives. How do I know this? Because Muslim Turkey was successfully secularized in the 1920's, when Aututark imposed the reforms leading to individual freedom fostered by democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speach and a free press (not perfectly but workably). Turkey has reached the point of development in this regard that it is the only Muslim nation at least under consideration for membership in the European Union. In other words while not directly experiencing the RRE, Muslims in great numbers can and have emulated the western political model, have embraced modernity because they see the benefits it has brought others and can bring them. The notion of political and economic freedoms of the West, not religious freedom per se, is what Bush is selling when he says freedom is a gift from the Almighty and everyone wants it and has a right to it. I think he's right and what's more I think it's the only model that can overcome the deadly virus of Islamic Jihadism. Viva Turkey.