A Whack Upside The Head
Reader comment on item: Is an Iraqi Strongman Emerging?

Submitted by Tom Krueger (United States), May 5, 2004 at 12:09

It is a truism--ultimately, people get the government they deserve.

We in the West simply refuse to understand that culturally, politically, scientifically, et al., we are gnats, sitting on the shoulders of giants.

We inherited this nation, this culture, this religious tradition, each of them forged, refined, built up, found lacking, torn down and rebuilt again from that which survived the testing, over the past six to eight hundred years. And by what miraculous confluence of divine coincidences was the new world discovered and settled by the one group of people, the Puritans, who could not only land there, but successfully colonize it (never forget the failure of secular mercantilism at Jamestown)? And from that miraculous beginning, set the stage for the creation of the first nation in the history of the world to be founded upon a political ideal derived from religious revelation? Which then goes on to save the world from despotism and tyranny three times in the same century?

I don't know if Iraq or any Muslim nation can ever be free and democratic. Democracy does not grow in a vacuum and one religion is NOT just as good as the next. If Iraq becomes in any way democratic it could only be a secular democracy drawn from an implicitly non-theistic liberalism. But could a coffee that weak be palatable to a middle eastern Muslim? Having sipped Turkish coffee, the answer is no.

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