John Podhoretz divines a new category, between hawk and dove, regarding the war against Islamist terror: what he calls to-hell-with-them-hawks. He refers to folks like William Buckley, who have turned against the democracy project in the Arab and Muslim world. Instead, the THWTHs argue that we should kill as many of the bad guys as possible, end Iran's nuclear program from the air and avoid the impossible task of spreading democracy in an Islamic polity whose believers prefer the "stark certainties" of a religious faith to the "ambiguities and confusions" of modern Western-style liberal democracy. Elections gave us Hamas, and we face folks who riot for weeks over a bunch of stupid cartoons.
Podhoretz counters by arguing that the genesis of Bush's democracy project was the belief that tyrannical, fundamentalist and terrorist regimes were a vast collective incubus for Islamist terror. Only by changing the terms of debate within such societies could such a production line possibly be shut down. Podhoretz warns that sooner or later one person willing to die will find a way to carry off a WMD strike for terror sponsors.
Missing from the THWTH arguments are the political errors that have gravely endangered the Iraq project. As noted earlier on LFTC, a nationwide party-list electoral system creates opportunities for minorities to exert decisive influence, in excess of what their popular support would dictate. Worse, we allowed radicals like Moqtada al-Sadr to continue to captain armed militias while working the electoral system to undermine our project. We should have insisted on "bullet or ballots but not both." Perhaps our inability to suppress the insurgency convinced our leaders to allow bullets and ballots as a short-term fix to allow elections to go forward on schedule, seeing delay, rightly, as a severe setback. But such short-term peace was purchased at the expense of medium- and long-term success. Meanwhile our "values" doves were blocking efforts to clandestinely fund pro-democracy interests, knowing that our adversaries were under no such handicap. State waged nuclear war against pro-US, pro-secular democracy leader Ahmad Chalabi while assisting the radical al-Sadr. No wonder we are in serious trouble.
For another view on the flaws in the Iraq political system, here is an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by a Duke law & political science professor that warns of the dangers not only of muddled government but also of partition, a policy LFTC favors. The op-ed also, however, agrees with LFTC that a party-list system is not likely to produce salutary outcomes. Missing from the analysis is anything about al-Sadr.
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