Original article: Here's to the State of Mississippi
Note from Robert Spencer:
A new article by Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, "Here's to the State of Mississippi," is available today at Human Events.
It discusses why the ideological battle in Iraq may ultimately be more important than the political
one.
The "ideological reform" will not come if the United States insists on rebuilding the country with
American taxpayers' money: for oil wells, roads, electricity grids, schools, hospitals, and those soccer balls for
those doe-eyed children. It will come when Iraq descends, as descend it should, into sectarian and
ethnic strife, when Chaos arrives, when the full failure of Islam, political, economic, and above all
intellectual, becomes clear to a sufficient number of people, as it once did to Ataturk. Ataturk's
reforms, which did not change Islamic doctrine, but tamed and constrained the practice (there is always
a danger of relapse, which is why the "reformation" of Islam is an aim based on
dreamy misinformation. Kemalism put Islam in a cage; he gave women the right to vote, he
abolished the tarboosh, so that the rimless hat that made prayer easier would no longer be
available, he cut the linguistic umbilical cord by outlawing the Arabic script and adopting the Latin
alphabet (only among the Turcomans of northern Iraq does one still find newspapers in "Ottoman Turkish"
-- a rare treat for some of the American Ottomanists among the soldiers there). And all
of this could NOT have been done by the English.
The policy of disarming Iraq and removing a deplorable regime (but one which, it has to
be said, was hardly a sport, but rather reflected the general tenor of Iraq, its people
and their moeurs) was perfectly justified. Trying to keep Iraq together, using men, materiel, money, and political
capital to do everything for the passive Iraqis (who whine continuously about how the Americans are
"taking too long" to "re-construct" the country, and who have done almost nothing themsleves), including not
only the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, the frenzied mobs of Fallujah, but also the assorted cheats
and charmers (save for the Kurds and the sole Christian among them) making their business deals,
who are in the inaptly-named "Governing Council," and that includes the man whom the Americans seem
surprised to discover, at this date, is not exactly in their corner, that Baghdadian Vicar of
Bray, the thoroughly untrustworthy and corrupt Adnan Pachachi, with his long history of sauve-qui-peut -- why,
he predates the 1958 coup, and has been betraying those who count on him for a
long time -- employed by Zayed in Abu Dhabi back in 1971, to help prepare the
dossier against Saudi Arabia over the frontier question, he was in fact making secret overtures to
go over to the Saudi side -- do the Americans know any of this? Do they
care to?).
Let the polities of the Muslim world no longer be propped up by the foreign aid
of Infidel states, the assurance that their excess populations may migrate, unhindered, to the Bilad al-kufr,
and remain serenely self-assured that nothing serious will be done to diminish their oil revenues, which
is part of the artificial life support system keeping the moribund Islamic world alive, allowing it
to leap from its bed, run down those hospital corridors and down the steps, and out
the door, and with enough energy left over, to throw a bomb or two at the
perfectly-healthy and sane Infidel passersby, who were suicidally paying for that patient's emergency care.
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