Arab Street

A.D. in Basra reported that voters flocked to the polls amidst thick fog in that city, with turnout levels exceeding 84 percent at some polling centers and voters feeling safe enough to walk "in masses down the streets flying Iraqi flags and chanting for democracy in Iraq." (Other reports say turnout is about 80% in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown.) A.S. in Najaf toured 10 polling centers and quoted voter Ali-Hassoon al-Badri who said "electing our representatives is a basic right for everyone and it is not a gift from anyone." N.R. in Mosul reported that as the voting deadline drew to a close, "substantial numbers of people [were] coming to the stations" to vote, while Mosul's police command volunteered to drive in voters who lived at a distance from the polls. W. Z. reported from Erbil that one polling official was so happy with the vote "I can't even feel tired." A.T. in Babil reported, humorously, that an election official refused to let Babil's governor cast his ballot "until he showed his i.d. card," and some polling places broke out soft drinks while men and women voters sang celebratory songs. And in Hilla, A.T. reported, the city council provided 125 buses to take voters to the polls.

My, my. What kind of "Arab Street" is this? Not that anyone needs to be interested, but here's my take on where we are, and how we got here:

Five years ago, the most popular name for newborn male children in Indonesia and many Arab countries was Osama, and American flags were being burned all over the Muslim world. American interests, from embassies to ships, were being attacked with approval and impunity. The Arab Street was widely feared as a rumbling volcano, poised to erupt in a fury of militant Islam that would plunge the world into a nightmare of religious and cultural warfare. Al Qaida seemed to be everywhere, growing in boldness and attracting fighters by the thousands to its ranks, all dedicated to the destruction of the West in general and the U.S. in particular. Our retreat from Somalia was touted by bin Laden as emblematic of a U.S. grown decadent, lacking in resolve and cultural confidence, a superpower in name only, a spent case.

A great many foreign policy experts believed that the only realistic way to meet the Islamist threat was through a strategy of negotiation, accommodation, and coexistence, on the model of Cold War detente with the Soviet Union. The attacks of September 11 convinced Bush of the folly of that kind of rational approach with an irrational enemy, and he rejected it in favor of a much more idealistic and long-range alternative. The alternative combined a strong faith in both the power of capitalist economics and the necessity for political pluralism, together with an Enlightenment view of the nature, and the natural rights, of all human beings. It came, in other words, straight out of America's 18th-Century playbook, buttressed by the successful post-WWII remaking of the defeated fascist powers and by the negative example of communism's failure every place it was imposed. Bush's idealistic approach was widely characterized in intellectual circles, here and abroad, as naiveté or, better yet, as the product of his famously simple and unreflective mind. He went ahead anyway, while most of our traditional allies took a pass, or worse.

Barely four years after our invasion of Afghanistan, that country is a fledgling democracy and Osama sits largely silent in his cave, the upper echelons of his jihadist forces with few exceptions dead or in custody. The mighty tyrant, Saddam Hussein, sits humiliated in an Iraqi courtroom, his army destroyed, and his sons dead. Terrorists still plant bombs, but they are a remnant, their opportunity for historical significance gone. As ordinary Muslims recognize that the Islamist future offers nothing desirable, its appeal has dwindled to the fanatical few. There are clear signs that the Arab Street, from one end of the Muslim world to the other, is beginning to place its hopes on democracy. We are seeing, I think, the early stages of an epic historical-cultural shift.

One indicator is that America has gone from being the primary target of vilification, scorn, and hatred among Arabs to the grudgingly and reluctantly acknowledged bearer of hope for a radically different and more hopeful future. This is really more a stunning reversal than a shift, because five years ago every major tendency and all the momentum was strongly in the opposite direction. No aspect of this reversal would have happened on its own. It required a fundamental reorientation of American foreign policy, and the unflinching assertion of that policy in defiance of a corrupted UN and major countries whose financial interests made them allies of the Hussein regime. Whatever his shortcomings, Bush got the One Big Thing of our times right, he got it right from the beginning, and he never wavered.

America has now fought two wars on Muslim soil, remaining as infidel occupiers for some period following. And yet, despite that, we have managed to come into alignment with the Arab Street: the newly transformed one reflected in the quotes above that is clamoring for democracy and economic development, the one serving notice to every tyranny and faux democracy in the region, the one that represents the future. This new and improved Arab Street is a truly revolutionary force, and it's being created, expanded, and mobilized by what we are accomplishing in Iraq. That was, of course, the primary strategic purpose of our going into Iraq in the first place; even so, on any scale of probability, it is a remarkable and extraordinary outcome.

As an example of enlightened foreign policy and the judicious use of military power, nothing since the Marshall Plan comes close to the scale, difficulty, and importance of this attempt to move the tectonic plates of the Muslim world. There are many setbacks, false starts, and years to go. But a corner has been turned. As far as the opponents of this effort go, I think history is about to run them over from behind.

Byron

Justice for Tookie

There is a lot of internet comment tonight by people opposed to capital punishment about vengeance vs. justice. Their idea seems to be that you can take justice, understood as proportionality (no other definition is suggested by anyone), re-label it pejoratively as ‘vengeance,’ and then claim that it can't be justice. But that's incoherent. Justice isn’t limited to punishment, it also applies to rewards. Would anyone call equal-pay-for-equal-work an example of vengeance? As an alternative term for justice, try ‘equity’ and then see how the argument proceeds.

The idea that anti-gang lectures and children's books (even assuming Tookie actually wrote them) somehow redeem him makes no more sense. That’s easy enough to see if you come at it from the other end: Ask yourself how many children’s books someone would have to write, and how many anti-gang lectures someone would have to deliver, before he had earned enough “credits” to be allowed to murder four innocent people and avoid the needle. The answer, of course, is that there is no such number.

The talk about redemption makes me think of the old James Cagney movie where he plays a cocky, flashy criminal much admired by the kids in his slum neighborhood. He finally ends up going to the chair (for killing a cop, I think), but he's a genuinely tough guy fully able to spit in the executioner's eye as he gets strapped in

The neighborhood kids are all looking forward to seeing how their hero will show the cops and judges what a stand up guy looks like by going to the chair unbowed and with a sneer on his face. But at the last minute Cagney is made to recognize the destructiveness of his influence, that he is the very last person those kids need for a role model. So he puts on an act for the reporters witnessing the execution, bawling like a baby, weeping and pleading for his life in a shocking spectacle of abject, gutless, sniveling fear. When that shameful exit is described in the papers, the kids who idolized him lose all respect for someone now revealed as a phony and a coward. On their behalf, he irrevocably destroyed his own reputation and heroic image

If Tookie would do something like that tonight, it could be worth a trainload of anti-gang books and lectures. That really might be a redemptive act

Byron

Israel and Iran

Steyn nails it and it ain't good. My guess about Sharon's recent moves is that he judged that as head of the Likud Party he could never get the support he wants to deal with Iran militarily. The new alignment and election may give him a broader base, not that any such consideration would stop him in the end. If Iran proceeds, and the Euros and the UN certainly are no serious impediment, I don't think there is any doubt that Israel will knock out those reactors. They really have no choice about that, and Russia selling missiles to Iran only makes it worse. The question, given that Iranian anti-aircraft defenses are now conceded to be extremely good, is if it can be done with conventional bombing runs vs. something that arrives from much higher altitude.

Does anyone believe that our large military presence on two sides of Iran is a coincidence? I wonder what our carrier presence looks like in the Indian Ocean about now. Some critics of the war in Iraq have complained that Iran is the acknowledged headquarters of international terrorism and should have been our target all along. Maybe it was. Or maybe it was, but depending on the success of the domestic Iranian reform movement. In any case, that movement has failed, so here we are.

The Iranian regime is no doubt much emboldened by media/Democrat portrayals of our failure and exhaustion in Iraq, our "broken" army, etc. If they have been beguiled by that nonsense, they may be on the verge of a major mistake.

Byron

Corpse of Kyoto

A terrific column.

Kyoto was always a Euro shell-game, based on buying pollution credits from the old East Bloc countries whose heavy industry had collapsed.

Byron