Editor’s note: Business Reform Magazine provides real biblical answers for real business problems.
Having won the military war in Iraq, America now faces the far more daunting task of attempting to bring Western-style democracy to a Middle-Eastern population with a Middle-Eastern worldview of reality. While countless experts are opining on this prickly proposition, I hear few of them directly addressing what I personally consider to be some of the most important issues. What follows is my attempt to call our attention to some of them.
Issue Number One:
The concept of democracy is built upon the premise of a society that both tolerates and embraces divergent points of view: religiously, politically, and personally. It also presupposes that unity is centered in allegiance to the concept of freedom of conscience, opinion, press, ownership, and movement. Historic Islamic societies have demonstrated little concern for these issues and barely tolerated differences even among themselves. Modern Turkey and Egypt are somewhat an exception to this rule. Add to this challenge an “Israel paranoid” climate, and establishing a democratic society may prove well nigh impossible. Obviously, I hope I am wrong.
Issue Number Two:
Democracy presupposes a culture of self-governing people. Either in the current “democratic West” or in the hoped-for “democratic Middle-East,” self-government is a concept much under attack. Self-government presupposes a commitment to internal self-control as one of the highest of virtues. Indeed, the more a people are self-governing, the less external laws are required to govern them. An externally law-oriented culture, by its very nature, tends to inherently undermine the very virtue of self-government required to maintain, let alone establish a democratic culture. It will be a tightrope act to even promote such a foundational discussion in the historically authoritarian-based culture of Iraq.
Issue Number Three:
In the rhetorically anti-West and anti-American “charged atmosphere” of the Islamic world, anything from the West is highly suspect. Democracy is a concept largely established in the European world of the Christian Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That stigma alone is a huge barrier to overcome. Beyond that, if democracy works in Iraq, it will be an indictment to numerous other surrounding Islamic authoritarian regimes. As others have already noted, this may have spurred the greatest fear of U.S. policy in the Middle East by other Arabic nations. In any event, “democratic nations,” principally the U.S., have supported Israel’s right to exist, a democratic notion, and one therefore highly problematic to the exercise in question.
May democracy prevail in Iraq. It will not be easy to establish it. And, in the process, it may well help America shore up some of our own deteriorating values that helped to establish representative government here!
Visit Dennis Peacocke at www.gostrategic.org.
Helene and the ‘climate change’ experts
Larry Elder