Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
In this context, it is time for conservatives to retire the tiresome invocation of Turkey as a model for Islamic society. No Muslim country is going the way of Turkey, and even Turkey is no longer going the way of Turkey. Atatürk thought of himself as a European, and what he did in Turkey was anomalous and, in all candor, ridiculous. Atatürk abolished the religious courts in favor of the Swiss legal code, ended religious education in schools, legalized gambling and alcohol, replaced existing commercial laws with the German commercial law, outlawed Islamic dress in public buildings, abolished the Islamic calendar, changed the alphabet, and converted the great mosque of the Hagia Sofia into a museum. As the liberator of Turkey—a kind of Turkish Gandhi—Atatürk could in his lifetime get away with these extreme measures. But now his militant secularization of Turkey is being reversed, and on balance it is a good thing. Muslims have the right to live in Islamic states under Muslim law if they wish.
Support for democracy does not mean that conservatives need a worldwide campaign to overthrow unelected regimes. While democracy is desirable as a long-term goal, it is not always in America’s interest to have democracy now. Foreign policy is not philanthropy, but rather a way for the United States to promote its interests worldwide. America is not obliged to use its resources to produce anti-American outcomes. There are hereditary monarchs in the Middle East, as in the Gulf kingdoms, who are pro-American and enjoy fairly high levels of popular esteem. It would be imprudent under current circumstances to pressure these kingdoms to democratize or liberalize. (They are already quite liberal by Middle Eastern standards.) Nor should America seek to coerce tyrants like Musharraf, Mubarak, and the Saudi royal family to become more liberal or secular. If they do, they will become further alienated from their people and become more vulnerable to being overthrown. When there are democratic results, as with the election victories of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, America must recognize the legitimacy of the people’s choice. But this imposes no obligation on the United States to provide aid or support to governments that oppose American interests and threaten American allies.
It is necessary to show that democracy works in the Middle East, and then to let the traditional Muslims pursue it for themselves. Iraq represents America’s initiative not to establish democracy everywhere but to establish democracy somewhere. This is a good time for conservatives to revive a new form of the Reagan doctrine, which held that people should fight for their own freedom, and if they do, then America will help. In Iraq, of course, there was no prospect of the Iraqi people overthrowing Hussein on their own. But even in Iraq American policy is moving toward the Reagan doctrine. Increasingly Iraqis are protecting their own freedom while America moves into a supporting role. An updated Reagan doctrine would also be a good policy for the United States to employ in Iran. As Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons and promote Islamic radicalism on the world stage, diplomacy and the threat of sanctions cannot in the long term deter the mullahs from doing what they are clearly determined to do. Consequently the best option for America is to work with pro-democracy forces to overthrow the existing regime. Such forces do exist, but until now they have lacked organization, confidence, and most of all opportunity. This could change rapidly. If Iranians are willing to challenge the authority of the ruling mullahs, America should stand ready to assist them with material, financial, and if necessary military support. Replacing the mullahs’ regime in Iran should be an important priority for America because Iran is the one major country that the Islamic radicals now control.
Traditional Muslims have numerous concerns about American foreign policy, and most stem from the belief that America is prejudiced or unfairly hostile to Muslims. I believe these concerns are largely erroneous, and many of them could be dispelled if the administration clearly articulated its strategic concerns and made the moral case for America. This is the area in which the Bush administration has failed abysmally. Presidents have to recognize that deeds must be backed up with words. Bush seems incapable of taking on the critics of American foreign policy, and no one else in the government seems up to the task.
So my third recommendation is for the Bush administration, and conservatives generally, to level with traditional Muslims and talk sense to them. Currently Muslims who raise difficult questions about U.S. foreign policy are met with uneasy equivocations. Many traditional Muslims who do not support Hamas or Hezbollah nevertheless question the role of America as an honest broker in the Middle East. They note that while the United States poses as a neutral peacemaker, its politicians routinely assure their home constituencies they are unequivocally on the side of Israel. Muslims demand to know if America is an umpire or a player. America’s diplomats make supreme efforts to dodge this question, hoping that the Muslims will stop posing it. This hope is unrealistic, and moreover, there is no reason for the United States to equivocate in this way. Instead, the Bush administration should say, “Yes, we are on Israel’s side, and there are reasons for it. There is a religious affinity between Jews and Christians. Israel is a democratic society like the United States. Many Americans are much more comfortable with Jews, whom they know, than with Muslims, whom they don’t know. Older Americans remember that during the Cold War many Arab countries were allied with the Soviet Union, while Israel has been a reliable American ally. Memories of the Holocaust remain strong, and there is a lot of guilt about what happened to the Jews, in part because they had no place of their own to go to. Finally, Jews exert effective political influence in both of America’s major parties, and Muslims have not developed that.” The advantage of such candor with traditional Muslims is that it wins their respect, even when they find themselves on a different side. Muslims, who understand the language of political self-interest, might oppose America’s actions in a given situation, but they cannot deny that if they were in America’s position they would act in the same way.
IN THE SOCIAL
domain, the right is perfectly poised to forge an alliance with traditional Muslims. The natural basis for this alliance is the moral framework shared by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Conservatives need to discover what several thoughtful Muslims have already recognized. The attitude of the ordinary Muslims to the liberal assault on the family, Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, “is not much different from those of traditional Jews and Christians in the West.” As Nasr puts it, “Secularism is the common enemy…. Men and women in the West who are still devoted to the life of faith should know that those closest to them in this world are Muslims.” Mustafa Akyol makes the same point. “From the Muslim point of view, Christians are the closest friends and allies in the world.” He offers conservatives some sage advice: “America must help Muslims see that it is indeed a nation under God. The culture it exports should celebrate more than materialism, disbelief, selfishness, and hedonism. America must do a better job of portraying its principles of decency. Otherwise it will be despised by devout Muslims throughout the world, and the radicals will channel that contempt into violence.”
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The implication of this counsel is that conservatives must support rather than condemn Muslims when they defend their traditional values. The right must stop its ridiculous preening as the champion of secularism and feminism—a pose that does not fool the left and only alienates traditional people around the world. Nor should the right make the disastrous mistake of defending moral depravity as it did at Abu Ghraib. Moreover, the right must strive to prevent the cultural left from exporting bogus rights and cultural debauchery abroad. One way conservatives can convey their seriousness about this is by choosing appropriate occasions to attack Hollywood. Of course, the right-wing media does protest the debauched values of the movie and music industry. But this time we must do it in the full recognition that the domestic culture war has international ramifications. So the conservative critique of Hollywood must be launched with the global audience in mind. The right should organize an international conference on the effects of Hollywood and American popular culture on non-Western cultures. It would be fascinating to hear from Muslims and other traditional people about how their local cultures are being affected by Hollywood movies and TV shows. Besides, on what basis would self-styled American liberals object to a proposal so open-minded and multicultural?
Conservatives can also work with traditional Muslims, and with traditional people from around the world, to promote shared values at the United Nations. At the very least the right can lead a global coalition to thwart U.N. resolutions undermining the family. A hint of how this might succeed can be seen from the 1994 U.N. Population Conference in Cairo, where Catholic groups from Western and non-Western countries teamed up with Muslim groups to exclude any reference to abortion as a legitimate form of birth control. More recently, the Bush administration took a bold step in the U.N. when it supported a resolution introduced by Iran to deny consulting status to a group of homosexual organizations led by the International Lesbian and Gay Association. This group is so outlandish that until a few years ago it included as affiliates pedophile clubs like the North American Man-Boy Love Association. Predictably, leftist groups were incensed by the Bush administration’s stance. Imagine siding with the Iranians! Congressman Tom Lantos, a California Democrat who serves on the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, warned that Bush’s decision was a “major setback” for a “core component of our nation’s human rights diplomacy.”
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If so, our nation’s human rights diplomacy is way off track and more such “setbacks” are needed.
Conservatives usually criticize the U.N. for its financial corruption and shameless anti-Americanism. But the U.N. has also become an instrument of left-wing cultural imperialism, and this part of its agenda has been completely overlooked on the right. Conservatives typically call for America to withdraw from the U.N. or stop funding it. The right’s hostility is understandable, and was no doubt heightened by the U.N.’s refusal to authorize the Iraq invasion. Conservatives pay a price, however, for their rejectionist attitude. The left is able to portray the right as a group of isolationist cranks. Moreover, the left is able to implement its global agenda at the U.N. without being challenged in that forum by the American right.
Conservatives should recall that during the Cold War, the U.N. had the same flawed structure it does now, but the right was able to use the organization to choreograph symbolic confrontations with the Soviet Union. A series of high-profile diplomats, from Daniel Patrick Moynihan to Jeane Kirkpatrick, made the U.N. an international stage on which to successfully dramatize the differences between the totalitarian state and the free society. If the Bush administration took the U.N. seriously, it could better bend the organization to its purpose. Rather than surrender the U.N. to the left, conservatives should become more involved, not merely in the Security Council but also in the General Assembly, where American influence has been weak. Not that we need the U.N. to highlight the crimes of Islamic radicalism. It is much more important for the right to make the U.N. the international theater to expose the depravity of the left, and thereby build ties with traditional people around the world. The right can restore American influence in the U.N. by working cooperatively with non-Western cultures to stop the liberal cultural aggression that operates under the pretext of “human rights” and “international law.”
None of this is to deny that there are universal human rights. These are the rights affirmed in the United Nations charter. There is the right to human dignity, the prohibition of genocide, the right to practice one’s religion, and the right to marry and to form a family. These rights are the product of the old liberalism—of classical liberalism—and they are rights that traditional Muslims and traditional people around the world generally support. There is a crucial distinction, however, between the legitimate rights of classical liberalism and the bogus rights of the cultural left. Conservatives should feel no qualms about allying with traditional people around the world to disband this regime of bogus rights. In this way, the right can deliver a major blow to the international left and undermine the left’s domestic claim to be the party promoting “universal rights.” In reality, the left is promoting a parochial Western agenda that is morally repulsive to, and emphatically rejected by, most of the world.
Conservatives must strive to convince traditional Muslims that there are two Americas, and that one of these has a lot in common with them. To the degree that conservatives highlight the traditional morality of red America, they risk further alienating many Europeans. Let them be alienated. Despite the ancestral attachment that many on the right have for Europe, conservatives gain nothing by courting people who do not share their basic values, either on foreign policy or on social issues. Conservatives should pay less attention to Europe and more to their real allies in the rest of the world. During the Danish cartoon controversy, for example, the American right made a huge tactical blunder in viewing the entire matter through the prism of free speech. Yes, we support free speech, but that wasn’t the only issue here. As the Danish, French, and German newspapers that reprinted the cartoons understood, what was also at stake was blasphemy as a social virtue, what one newspaper arrogantly termed “the right to blaspheme against God.” So this would have been the perfect opportunity for conservatives to distinguish the United States from Europe, and declare that in this country we do not consider ridiculing other people’s religion to be a sign of virtue or enlightenment. So how should American conservatives have responded to the cartoons? With the same distaste that American liberals would react to cartoons mocking Martin Luther King! The general lesson is that while Europeans cozy up to the radical Muslims, conservatives must move closer to the traditional Muslims, and one way to do this is to seize every opportunity to repudiate European decadence.