From Nelson Ascher at EuroPundits comes this clear and concise statement of the nature of our current experiment:
Besides deposing a bloody and threatening tyrant, the invasion of Iraq had, as its most obvious goal, the establishment of American military bases right in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, in order to keep and eye on the rest of the region and to be able to intervene there whenever necessary.Posted by Vanderleun at December 18, 2003 10:29 AMBut maybe there was still another objective. Actually, we do ignore whether Islamicisim, politically militant radical Islam, is the sickness of a minority or has already infected the majority of Arabs and/or Muslims; and though we usually blame their despotic regimes and corrupt elites for the hostile climate of opinion they have generated, all over that part of the world, against the West, the US, Christians, Jews atc., the truth is that we cannot be sure about this.
What if those are and have always been the true feelings of the majority? Speculation won't do and there's only one way of knowing: you pick an Arab/Muslim country, remove the tyrant and the corrupt elites, give the people the possibility of developing civilized institutions. We might call this a very ambitious empirical/cientific experiment. If it works, then a causal relationship between tyranny and fanatical religious and nationalistic madness can be established. If it doesn't, and we discover that, in spite of all, they have been thinking, feeling, behaving in such a way not because of Saddam, but out of their own free will, then the conclusion will be that plan A (the liberation and democratisation or the Arab/Muslim world) is not the solution and it will be time to try out plan B, whatever this is.
