Nation-building has become a very
controversial term. And with good reason. Our conviction that we can
reconstruct any society into another America is unrealistic. It ignores our own
exceptionalism and overlooks the cultural causes of many conflicts. It assumes
that a change of government and open elections can transform a tribal Islamic
society into America. They can’t and won’t. But it’s also important to recognize
that what we have been doing isn’t nation-building, but Islam-building.
Nation-building in Germany and Japan
meant identifying a totalitarian ideology, isolating its proponents from
political power and recreating a formerly totalitarian state as an open
society. That is the opposite of what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, never
mind Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and all the rest.
We did temporarily pursue
de-Baathification in Iraq. But the Baathists were just Saddam’s cult of
personality. Saddam was a problem in Iraq. But he wasn’t the problem in Iraq.
His rule was a symptom of the real problem which was the divide between Sunnis
and Shiites. The real problem was Islam. Because we failed to recognize that,
de-Baathification failed.
The Baathists just folded themselves
into ISIS. The Sunni-Shiite war went on even without Saddam. Today Sunnis and
Shiites are still killing each other in Iraq much as they had for a long time.
We have boiled this war down to ISIS, but ISIS, like Saddam is just another
symptom of the political violence and divisiveness inherent in Islam.
Instead of secularizing Iraq, our
efforts at democracy only heightened divisions along religious lines. The
“Lebanon” model for Iraq with power sharing arrangements between Sunnis and
Shiites was doomed.
Iraq’s first election was dominated
by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. If that name rings a
bell, it should. It came out of Iran. You know, the original Islamic
Revolution. The “free” election had given a boost to an Islamic terror group
whose goal was the creation of an Islamic State in Iraq.
The bloodiest days of the Iraq War
actually came when two sets of Islamic terror groups fighting to create an
Islamic State began killing each other… and us. We know one of those groups
today as ISIS. The other group is the Iraqi government. And a decade later,
they’re still killing each other.
Instead of nation-building in Iraq,
we practiced Islam-building. Iraq’s constitution made Islam the official
religion and the fundamental source of legislation. Its first real law was
that, “No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be
established.” The new Iraq we had built was an Islamic State.
We did no better in the Islamic
Republic of Afghanistan whose constitution declared much the same thing. Its
first parliamentary elections saw victories for the National Islamic Movement
of Afghanistan and the Islamic Society. As in Iraq and Syria, the distinctions
between the bad Islamists and the good Islamists were often fuzzy at best. We
had replaced the bad Islamist warlords who raped and murdered their enemies
with the good Islamist warlords who raped and murdered their enemies.
Our nation-building had created an
Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and an Islamic State in Iraq. It was no wonder
that the fighting never stopped.
Matters grew much worse with the
Arab Spring when Obama and Hillary’s Islam-building project flipped countries
that had been democratic and secular in the loosest sense into the tar pit of
political Islam.
Coptic Christians were massacred and
churches were burned in Egypt. The Christian communities in Iraq and Syria were
threatened with annihilation. The Jewish community in Yemen may be close to
disappearing entirely. The Yazidis were raped and murdered on a genocidal scale
by the Islamic State.
But in many cases they were just
collateral damage from fighting between Sunni and Shiite Islamists, and among
Sunni Islamists battling each other for dominance.
The ugliest part of Islam-building
was that the resulting conflicts between Islamists and secularists in Egypt and
Tunisia highlighted starkly just how wrong our policy was. Instead of backing
secular and democratic forces, Obama had thrown in with Islamists. And even
after the Muslim Brotherhood was overthrown in Egypt, his administration
continued advocating on behalf of its Islamic reign of terror.
If we had practiced actual
nation-building, then we would have identified Islamic tribalism as the central
corrosive force in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Islamic political movements as the
totalitarian threat in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia. Our efforts would have been
directed at isolating them and keeping them out of power while working to
democratize and secularize these countries on the old Turkish model. It might
not have worked, but at least it would have been nation-building, not
Islam-building.
Nation-building might very well have
failed. America doesn’t have infinite resources and the lives of our soldiers
are precious. Assuming that we can upend radically different societies is
excessively optimistic.
But we didn’t even try. What we have
been doing in this century isn’t nation building. Instead we’ve been empowering
our enemies. We’ve been sticking our hands into Islamist snake pits and
playing, “Find the Muslim moderate” and refusing to learn any better no matter
how many times we get bitten.
We have been perfectly happy to help
the Islamic terrorists that our soldiers were shooting at last week so long as
their leader signed some sort of accord paying lip service to equality
yesterday. We didn’t just get into bed with the Muslim Brotherhood, but with
former affiliates of Al Qaeda and current proxies of Iran. We allied with the
Sunni and Shiite Islamist murderers of American soldiers in Iraq. And all we got for it was more
violence, chaos and death.
Even without Islam, ethnic and
tribal divisions would have made nation-building into a difficult challenge.
But Islam-building didn’t just leave wrecked societies, but terror threats.
Tensions between Arabs, Turkmen and Kurds wouldn’t have led to massacres in
Paris and Nice. Only Islam could do that.
Islam takes local conflicts and
makes them global. That’s why disputes over the authority of the House of Saud
led to the mass murder of thousands of people in New York or why Arab attacks
on Israel became a burning international issue. Or why Sunni and Shiite feuds
in Iraq and Syria led to a massacre of attendees at a rock concert in Paris. That
is also why the combination of Islam and politics in any form is an existential
threat to us.
Not only should we not be
subsidizing it in any way, shape or form, but we should be doing our best to
stamp it out. If we must have any form of nation-building, it should be the
building of secular nations in which Islam is isolated and detached from any
political involvement.
We have two options for preventing
the spread of Islamic political violence into our countries. The first is a ban
on Muslim immigration. The second is a ban on Muslim politics.
The former has been dubbed
isolationism and the latter nation-building. Neither term is truly accurate,
but they capture the essence of the choice.
We however have chosen a choice that
is far worse than either. We have opened our doors to Muslim migration while
opening Muslim countries to further Islamic political involvement. We have
Islamized terror states and ourselves. Is it any wonder that we suffer from a severe
Islamic terror threat?
Open borders for Islamic terror and
Islam-building have led to our current state of national insecurity.
We have made the world more
dangerous by backing Islamic politics and we have made our countries more
dangerous by welcoming in Muslim migrants to be indoctrinated into terror by
Islamist organizations. The more we build up Islam, the more we destroy
ourselves.
Comments
I agree
completely. After decades of terror
attacks by Muslims, the 9/11/01 Twin Towers attack should have resulted in
banning all Muslim immigration and visas to the US. This would have included college students,
relatives, tourists, business people and diplomats. The UN should have been
moved out of the US. We should have also
prevented Obama from being elected to anything.
If we had done these two things, our National Debt would still be $5
Trillion and a lot easier to pay off.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
