American conservatives like to grouse about the pernicious effects of
liberal academe, and its lack of support for Dubya's war in
particular. For all that, one of the few academics with real
influence on the shape of our government's Iraq policy is Bernard
Lewis, an unabashed supporter. As Michael Hirsh notes
here,
Lewis's picture of Islam was formed in his youth, when he visited
Turkey, and decided that he really liked the policies of Kemal Ataturk and his successors, which transformed Turkey from an explicitly Muslim state
to a militantly secular one -- not just nonreligious, but overtly
anti-religious, in ways (like outright bans of religious
clothing and iconography) that would be difficult to imagine here in
the States. In part that's because he visited Turkey just when it was
having its first real elections -- it looked like secular democracy
had triumphed. And the subsequent litany of military coups by the
Kemalist military, which refused for decades to acknowledge the
supremacy of any civilian government, failed to take the bloom off
Lewis's rose.
Lewis sees the current situation in the Arab world as being rather
similar to Turkey in the early 20th century -- needing a secularizing
kick to get it out of what he sees as a failed and decadent Muslim
culture. In a sense, he thinks we're still fighting the Crusades:
- Lewis's basic premise, put forward in a series of
articles, talks, and bestselling books, is that the West --- what used
to be known as Christendom -- is now in the last stages of a
centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic
civilization. ... Osama bin Laden, Lewis thought, must be viewed in
this millennial construct as the last gasp of a losing cause.... And
if we Americans, who trace our civilizational lineage back to the
Crusaders, flagged now, we would only invite future attacks. Bin Laden
was, in this view, less an aberrant extremist than a mainstream
expression of Muslim frustration, welling up from the anti-Western
nature of Islam. "I have no doubt that September 11 was the opening
salvo of the final battle," Lewis told me in an interview last
spring. Hence the only real answer to 9/11 was a decisive show of
American strength in the Arab world; the only way forward, a Kemalist
conquest of hearts and minds. And the most obvious place to seize the
offensive and end the age-old struggle was in the heart of the Arab
world, in Iraq.
Hirsh mentions a lot of problems with this thesis. For one thing,
Arabs are reacting less to battles of the past than to 20th-century
European colonialism on their soil. They've already been conquered by
Western arms. If conquest were the cure, we'd no longer have a
problem. Also, in painting Islam itself as "the problem", Lewis
simply ignores the still-living more moderate Muslim traditions of
scholarship and science which were crucial to Europe's own
rennaissance centuries ago, and which the radicals we're fighting are
themselves trying to suppress. And on top of that, Kemal was a Turk,
who was clearly following his own agenda -- not an agent of a foreign
power, seeking to impose an externally conceived vision on the
country. That kind of thing matters.
But there's another irony that Hirsh doesn't discuss. Let's think
for a minute about what Ataturk, and the Young Turk movement in which
he got his start, were really like. They weren't democrats -- their
governments were highly autocratic, and the tradition they and Ataturk
spawned was one of frequent military coups whenever a democratically
elected government was stepping out of their line. They were rabidly
nationalist, and bloody-minded about it. The young Turks were
responsible for the Armenian genocide, and the current problems with
the Kurds in Turkey (are they allowed to speak their own language yet?)
are a continuation of Ataturk's policies. And they were, of course,
explicitly, rabidly secular, even anti-religious.
Now, if an indigenous movement like that started within the Arab
world, what ever would it look like? It would look quite a bit like -- it
would have to look quite a bit like -- the Baath party, a movement
which is secular (though not quite as militant about it as the Kemalists),
nationalistic, and thoroughly autocratic. And one of the
most prominent Baath leaders? The guy we just deposed, Saddam Hussein
-- bloody-minded nationalism, oppression of minority ethnic groups,
and all.
Now, I happen to think our project of deposing Saddam was
ill-conceived. But he was still a bad guy, and it's a different thing
entirely to say that the Middle East, or anyone else, needs more of him.
If guys like this are our solution to the problem, maybe it's time
to go back to the drawing board.
