Friday, November 29, 2002

TOMPAINE.com - A Triumphant Call To Arms

Neo-conservative writers have become increasingly vocal about an apocalyptic conflict involving the United States and Muslim world.

Start with Norman Podhoretz, the former longtime editor of Commentary and now a Hudson Institute fellow. Podhoretz calls for en masse regime change in the Middle East, beginning with Iraq and Iran from the original "axis of evil" list, and extending it to Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, the Palestinian National Authority, Saudi Arabia and Syria. He wants the United States to unilaterally overthrow these regimes and replace them with democracies cast in the Jeffersonian mold.

What neo-cons seek is not just a political transformation of the Muslim Middle East. Their end game, as Podhoretz says in Commentary, is to bring about "the long-overdue internal reform and modernization of Islam."

Rather than being dismissed as fringe thinking, these pronouncements frame the hard-right boundary for debates in conservative political circles

...

Critiquing their worldview, columnist Philip Stephens writes in the Financial Times that, "in the long term, even a nation as uniquely powerful as the United States cannot remake the political systems at the heart of the Islamic world: not in 30 years and probably not in 100."

The Muslim world will view a string of U.S. military attacks on Muslim countries as the aggression of an oil-thirsty superpower on the Muslim world, not a march to liberate people from tyranny.


I disagree with the neo-cons on this view that the United States should attempt to bring the Islamic World into the 20th Century by force,

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