The central thesis of the neoconservatives and liberal hawks, and the latent justification for the war in Iraq is that by promoting democracy in the Arab and wider Muslim world - by military means if necessary - the constituency for radical Islamism will be diminished, and as it is diminished so will the threat of radical Islamist terrorism to the west. Even if it does not amount to liberal democracy, in the modern western sense, the more illiberal elements of Arab and Muslim society will at least have an opportunity to express their particular passions in electoral politics, rather than by flying airplanes into our respective places of work - or so the theory goes.
Despite my lack of enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, and my conviction that dramatically reducing western dependence on oil, and strategically withdrawing from the region could also accomplish an end to the Islamist threat, I always found this thesis more sound than many on the left, or at least more sound than what the liberal internationalists have been trying to sell me.
But is it?
Over in Indonesia, which is not only a nascent Muslim democracy, but a nascent Muslim democracy in which the electorate handed a moderate the presidency this past year, there is a thriving radical Islamist movement bent not only on toppling the elected government, but also on taking its war with modernity to the west, and westerners. Remember that little bombing in Bali?
And don't even say Turkey, which was of course modernized, and liberalized through decades of iron-fisted secular authoritarianism in the twentieth century.
Then there's the sad case of Nigeria, where democracy has brought hardline sharia to all aspects of law - family, civil, and criminal - in the Muslim north. It has more than 80% approval there, and the central government, fearing a religious civil war, has no power to prevent women from becoming the de facto property of their husbands, the hands of thieves chopped off, and adulterers stoned to death. This is the face of Muslim democracy in the early 21st century, as much as those teary eyed Shia voting in Basra in January.
But while I'm on the subject of Iraq, it seems only a question now of how much sharia will be written into Iraqi law (particularly in the south) not if. I'm all for democracy, and to be frank I found the response by certain segments of the left to the elections in Iraq little short of vile, but if invading and occupying foreign countries at the cost of billions (and probably eventually trillions) of dollars, and thousands of lives, not to mention losing half our civil liberties at home, means we a) don't end the threat of Islamist terrorism and b) the people of the Muslim world choose deeply illiberal leaders and policies how is that worth it?
No one is going to convince me that a "war on terror" in which Washington continues to enable and protect repressive Arab and Muslim regimes, and does not seek political reform in the Arab and broader Muslim world is anything but a recipe for perpetual anti-American Islamist terrorism, which is to say that no one is going to convince me that liberal internationalism, or realism, or whatever you want to call it, vis a vis the Muslim world in the coming years is a good idea.
But count me decidely less convinced that the liberal hawks, neoconservatives, and eagles know what they're talking about.
My initial instincts, post 9/11, were isolationist. Perhaps those instincts were right, although count me as skeptical that we'll ever have a chance to find out.