Taking the President at His Word
I was just watching the president’s press conference today (I love streaming video and I love C-Span), and he said something that caught my ears, especially in light of the book I started reading yesterday.
Speaking about the resentment that has bubbled up from the subterranean layers of Middle Eastern society and out into the world in the form of the insurgency, President Bush said:
This totalitarian movement…is willing to spread its propaganda through death and destruction, to spread its philosophy. Some in this country don’t, I can understand, don’t view the enemy that way. I guess they kind of view it as an isolated group of people that occasionally kill. I just don’t see it that way. I see them bound by a philosophy, with plans and tactics, to oppose their will on other countries…Their objective for driving us out of Iraq is to have a place from which to launch their campaign to overthrow modern governments…moderate governments…in the Middle East.
Perhaps it’s just me, but it seems that the president could be talking about the United States in that paragraph, because the United States is apparently willing to spread its own philosophy through the death and destruction of neighborhoods in Iraq. It is willing to do that because is bound by a philosophy of reform throughout the Middle East, a reform that would create the Middle East in the U.S.’s own image, with plans and tactics for making that reform a reality. The United States has openly declared its view of Iraq as the launching pad for spreading that reform throughout the region. The president said today, “A democratic Iraq is good for the neighborhood. A democratic Iraq will inspire reformers for a part of the world that is desperate for reformation.” The reform the president talks about is nothing less than the overthrow of governments in the Middle East — “modern governments,” governments existing in the real modern world.
Later on in the conference, the President continued:
It’s an interesting debate, isn’t it? About whether this country of ours ought to work to spread liberty. I find it fascinating to listen to the voices around the world about whether it is a noble purpose to spread liberty around the world. My position is affected by my belief that there is universality when it comes to liberty, that this isn’t an American liberty, this isn’t America’s possession. Liberty’s universal. People desire to be free. And history has proven that democracies don’t war [sic]. So the issue is to lay peace. We ought to pursue liberty. We ought to not be worried about a foreign policy that encourages others to be free.
He is definitely right on this one. It is an interesting debate. But the question is not whether our country should work to spread liberty. The question is how our country should work to spread liberty. While the president says that liberty isn’t an American possession, his militaristic policies seem to demonstrate his belief that we have the power to deliver liberty to these people.
If we take the president at his word, however, if we believe that he doesn’t think America offers liberty the way it might offer food and medicine, then it seems his policy is not to deliver liberty, but to deliver the citizens of these people from the evil that has stolen their liberty from them, to deliver them from the tyrannous individuals who would repress their liberty, individuals such as Saddam Hussein and the leaders of the Taliban. The president’s policy is to deliver the people of the Middle East from evil. This seems like a noble purpose, it really does, and it is a purpose that is easy to get behind, but it scares me because of how much it depends upon understanding United States as the hand of God — and the Christian God at that.
The president continued:
Imagine an enemy that says they’re willing to kill innocent people because we’re trying to encourage people to be free. What kind of mindset is it of people who say we must stop democracy? Democracy is based upon a kind of universal belief that people should be free.
First, I disagree that democracy is based upon a universal belief that people should be free. I think it based upon a belief that people should have a say in their government. This is not the same thing as freedom. Democracy is what happened in Palestine, and the people chose Hammas, who, as far as I know, never promised to institute the freedoms you might find in a liberal democracy (such as the freedom to criticize one’s government without becoming the target of secret state-sanctioned surveillance).
The president’s insistence of locking up democracy to the spread of liberal freedom reveals how much he underestimates the draw of a religious government. While his religion has (in theory) been separated from the operations of the state since the nation’s founding, the Muslim religion has — at its bottom level — directions for how a state should be run. There is no separation of mosque and state in the Middle East, and for many individuals, there is no desire for such a separation.
Freedom includes the freedom to worship in the way one desires, but there has never been, to my knowledge, a major Protestant Reformation of Islam. The Protestant revolution in Christianity led directly to the democratization of European governments because it reinforced the notion that every individual should be an active partner in his or her relationship with the heavenly Creator — and that every individual should be free from the mediation of that relationship by the religious authorities; it is only a matter of a few steps to the notion that every individual is an active partner in his or her relationship with the State. Because Islam has not moved through those steps, the freedom to worship in the way one wants is bound up in the desire to worship in the ways one’s Imam says one should.
As Charlie McDaniels writes in the paper linked to above, “Muslims have tended to reverse the [Protestant] order of [the] precedence of [faith] over [works], emphasizing practice vis-à-vis personal belief in most expressions of the faith.” This difference in priority demonstrates that the Muslim’s desire is less for free expression and more for proper social action. It reveals the Muslim privilege of responsibility over freedom, where the former serves as a sort of checks and balances upon the arbitrary power of the latter.
The president is right when he says that freedom is not America’s gift to the world, but his policies are wrong in that they insist that America has the power to deliver it to the world. The freedom of the individual must be realized by the individual, by which I mean, only the individual can make his or her freedom real. In a social order that privileges responsibility to society over the freedom of the individual, however, the individual may not desire to make his or her freedom real. This is not necessarily the movement of ignorance or the result of oppression, as some Westerners would like to believe, but rather, it could be seen as the move of an ethics.
The president suggests that freedom’s realization isn’t possible in the Middle East because individuals such as Saddam Hussein and the leaders of the Taliban refuse to give up their power. He said in his press conference today:
They rule by intimidation and fear, by death and destruction. And the United States must take this threat seriously, and must never forget the natural rights that found this country. The people who say that the natural rights only exist for one people, I would say they’re denying the basic rights to others.
The threat that the United States must take seriously is not that Saddam Hussein and the Taliban rule by fear and murder. That is the threat that the Middle East must take seriously. The president is talking about the threat of totalitarianism, which will spread out after its success in the Middle East and attempt to penetrate into our hearts and homes.
But I suggest that this isn’t a threat that we need to take seriously. The threat we need to take seriously is the threat that develops in the slums of any country. The cure to terrorism is not dropping bombs, but dropping books. The cure is to stop propping up “friendly dictators” who will do what the United States tells them to do, despite the interests of the people who live under them. The cure is to make the people who live under these dictatorships aware of their own interests — their own economic interests, in the etymological sense of that word, which includes the interests of the women, the children, and the spirit — to make them aware of those interests and then leave them alone to act as they see fit.
One is not delivered into a state of freedom. One raises oneself up by its power. One realizes one’s freedom by acting free. The president is correct when he says that natural rights do not exist only for one people, but he forgets that one people is not at liberty to provide those rights to another. The natural rights must be claimed naturally, by which I mean, one realizes one’s natural rights when one acts naturally through them. The freedom of speech doesn’t mean much unless one wants to speak.
And the Middle East has never said to itself — with any lasting force, anyway — that it wants to speak. But thanks to our actions, it is telling us that we don’t have the right to speak for it.
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I know the gut response to all of this.
“Would you rather have let Saddam stay in power, Kyle? Would you rather he kept on killing thousands of Iraqis who would dare speak for themselves?“
To which I would respond that if you want to talk about what we should or should not have done in the past, we’re going to be here all day, and we’re going to go all the way back to the West’s first forays into the region. It’s not a question of what we should or should not have done. It’s a question of what are we to do today.
I don’t know the answer, but I agree with the president that it is an interesting debate, and I want to contribute to it.
My question to those who want to stay in Iraq is whether the president’s stated objective — to create a stable democracy in the Middle East — can actually be achieved by the United States. Can it be achieved? Yes. But can it be achieved by the United States? That I am not too sure about. This post offered some of the reasons on why I am not too sure.