There's no such thing as a free Muslim
Rod Liddle says the idea that war would bring democracy to the Middle East is as absurd as all the other reasons given for invading Iraq T, here's one question which the whining, liberal, left-wing antiwar appeasenik monkeys — i.e., people like me — have
never successfully answered: if Tony Blair knew that Saddam Hussein was of no threat to the West, why then did he concur with the invasion of Iraq? What was to be gained?
I assume out of courtesy to his intelligence that he knew the military threat from Iraq was so minimal as to be non-existent but that, consistent with the reflexive dishonesty of his regime, felt that we, the public, would only agree to war if we were told that the threat was grave. Similarly, out of courtesy, I assume he realised that war would mean the deaths of British servicemen and Iraqi civilians and that Britain itself would be a slightly less safe place as a result of joint military action with the hated Yankees. And I suspect that unlike President Bush, Tony Blair was also aware that war with Iraq would lead to a loss of public support. So why, then, was he so for it?
One hears various answers from various quarters. Blair's most bitter enemies — on the Labour Left, but also among Conservative MPs — mutter darkly that it is all down to hubris. Six years into his presidency Blair was suddenly gripped by an intoxicating sense of destiny, they say, and that, together with a feeling of awe at being held in high esteem and regard and even friendship by the most powerful man in the world, proved to be the irresistible force against an all-too-movable object. A bunch of implacably Atlanticist advisers helped, too.
There is something in this; but it is not the whole story. Nor does Tony Benn's repeated contention `itsh all about oil' quite do the job. Oil was there, in the thinking, somewhere, but it was not the crucial factor, otherwise we would have witnessed other equally dramatic manifestations of such a preoccupation. And probably fewer windfarm proposals.
The most generous explanation is, of course, the pole to which belatedly (since no WMDs were found) Mr Blair has attempted to attach his little flag. It is the Clwyd-Aaronovitch-Shawcross argument — to wit, that Saddam was an evil singularity, a creature so hideous and cruel that the world had never seen the like before, or at least not since Hitler, and his destruction was therefore demanded on humanitarian grounds. Of all possible answers, this is the most difficult to swallow. Mr Blair is a pragmatist who knows that there is very much evil in the world. And he might also have guessed that overthrowing Saddam would cost the lives of more people than the Baghdad psycho would have been able to dispatch in five years. So not that, then.
Which leaves us with the more complex case one hears expounded. off the record, never in public, from pretty senior New Labour, pro-war politicians (who nonetheless quietly concede that the government made a grave mistake in the deceitful manner in which it courted public opinion about the war).
It is this: that, firstly, the US was determined to wage war and that the world would be a safer place if it were seen not to have acted alone. And that secondly, crucially, it was both possible and desirable to impose upon the most ghastly Middle Eastern tyrannies a sort of user-friendly, semi-secular, democratic Islam and that such new regimes would be comparatively 'humanitarian' and friendly — or at worst neutral — to the West.
Of all the possible answers to why Blair did it, this is to my mind the most likely. Hubris, oil and humanitarian concerns probably played a part but this last was the clincher. Why and how he came to believe such a notion is more puzzling. It is one thing to delude the public. It is another to delude oneself. Because, as Anthony Browne explained last week, the very viscera of Islam are anti-democratic and necessarily oppositional to the West.
I'm writing this in the smoky haze of south-east Asia, in a predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia, where democracy has suddenly awoken. How long it stays awake is a moot point. Writing in the Jakarta Post, Singapore's senior minister Lee Kuan Yew suggested, with the faintest hint of condescension, that successful elections in Indonesia and Malaysia 'proved' that Muslims could practise democracy, but his piece smacked as much of warning as of congratulation. It is far too early to say that Indonesia is working. Growling Muslim extremists — including the loathsome Jemaah Islamiyah, the boys who brought you the Bali bomb — gained nearly 40 per cent of the vote in the spring elections. The madrasahs continue to spew out their bilge every day, indoctrinating a new generation of Indonesians with monotheistic authoritarianism. Right now, the government is sort of secular. How long will that last?
Just across the Malacca Strait there is a Muslim success story, of a kind. There is much to admire about Malaysia. In March the country held its 11th successive, peaceful and democratic election and returned Abdullah Ahmad Badawi to the post of prime minister. The opposition — PAS, the 'Malaysian Taleban' — lost a little ground, perhaps because the government is quietly shedding any notion of secularism and thus, in the end, of religious freedom. Last year Badawi reversed the policy of the past 20 years by declaring the country an Islamic state. Just this week four Malays failed in an attempt to challenge the law which had seen them imprisoned for three years. Their crime was simply to have ceased to believe in Allah — and so they were banged up. Muslim laws are applicable only to Muslims in Malaysia (except for the prohibition on homosexuality) and so the four defendants argued that since they no longer believed in Allah Muslim laws were therefore not applicable to them. Seems a fairly convincing thesis to me — but, of course, they lost. There is no freedom of conscience within Islam.
Malaysia is the only Muslim country in the world with a tradition of democracy, albeit democracy of a somewhat paternalistic kind. However, it is a democracy in spite of Islam rather than because of it. The country has been economically dependent upon the 35 per cent of its population which is not Muslim — notably the Chinese and the Indians and, to a lesser extent, the Christians of Sarawak — and so there are safeguards and concessions to protect this sizeable and vital minority. It is largely these safeguards and, it has to be said, strong and clever leadership from Mahathir Mohamad until last November that have preserved democracy in Kuala Lumpur against every stone-age impulse from the mullahs. Neither of these qualifying conditions exist in the Middle East: there are neither the talented political leaders, nor the moderating influence of a large nonMuslim population.
Prime Minister: Islam and democracy are unnatural and in the end adversarial cohabitants, no matter how much you might wish otherwise. You will have more luck searching for WMDs in Iraq than searching for a democratic instinct in Islam.
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