Democratizing Iraq

This is an interesting take on our 'mission' of democratizing Iraq as seen through our own European beginnings. [Excerpted from St. Francis's Failure -- Marrying Islam to West is No Easy Task by James Muldoon in The Providence Journal of Thursday, May 5, 2005.]

In 1219, Francis of Assisi paid a visit to the sultan of Egypt in order to instruct that Muslim ruler in Christian doctrine. The sultan treated the visitor kindly, listened to him, and then sent him home -- instead of killing him, as Islamic law demanded. Francis was not the only Christian missionary to enter the Muslim world to preach the Christian gospel. Many others made the effort, and, like Francis, failed to make converts.

What these medieval missionaries overlooked was that the conversion of Europe had taken place over a thousand years or so -- it was a slow, difficult process. It was extraordinarily foolish to assume that a process of religious transformation that had taken Europeans a millennium to complete would appear so obviously true to Muslims that they would immediately accept baptism.

...as obvious as the value of these elements of Western society are to us now, they did not appear so to our ancestors. These qualities are the product of a thousand years of development that began in the Middle Ages...

We are now asking the Iraqis to undergo in a few months a process of transformation that took us a thousand years. They are to undergo the church-state conflict, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment of the 18th Century, and become modern at the wave of a wand. Why should we expect them to immediately accept the truths that our ancestors did not? Why assume that their response to the calls for change will be any less violent than European responses? The call for religious reform in 16th Century Europe unleashed the bloodiest wars that the continent had ever seen, and would not see again until the 20th Century. While it may seem noble to assume that the Iraqis, once presented with the truths of modern Western liberal democratic society, would see the truths and accept them, the odds are against it. [italics mine]

Does this mean that the Iraqis and Muslims generally are incapable of creating liberal democratic societies? Of course not. What it means is that over the past thousand years, Western Christian European society developed along one course, and Muslim society developed along another. For most of that time, the Muslim world was more successful than Europe, and thus a military threat to Europe. After all, the last great Muslim invasion of Europe ended only in 1683.

Americans who go to Iraq with the intention of transforming that society should probably keep a small statue of St. Francis on the dashboards of their Humvees. It will remind them that they are not the first to attempt the transformation of the Islamic world, and they may not be the last.