Salim Mansur: Divided On Defending Us

Fides_et_Ratio · November 20, 2006, 6:37pm

Latest column from the Canadian Muslim political scientist Salim Mansur, in Saturday’s Toronto Sun…

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DIVIDED ON DEFENDING US: U.S. election shows world must step up to plate

By Salim Mansur

Now that the dust has settled from the 2006 U.S. mid-term election, the results show the American people remain politically as much divided as they were in the 2000 presidential vote.

That election was so evenly split that the issue of the disputed Florida vote count, which decided the presidential election in George Bush’s favour, was settled by a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.

DIVIDED ELECTORATE

But an evenly divided electorate is not unusual in American politics.

It is consistent with the design of the republican system bequeathed by the founding fathers – a system of checks and balances in government that rules out the likelihood of any party or individual subverting democracy, or obtaining unchecked power for any period of time.

American democracy is unlike any other. Its strength and virtue are buried in the fractiousness of American politics.

Even with a deeply divided electorate, the freedom of Americans is defended because the people are sovereign.

This is why the world beyond America has difficulty understanding the outcomes of American politics.

Republican President Richard Nixon was driven from the White House in 1974 by the Watergate scandal, when America appeared to be a hapless giant defeated in the jungles of Vietnam.

Yet within one election cycle, Americans returned the Republicans to the White House under Ronald Reagan in 1980, and that so-called hapless giant went on to engineer the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Similarly, as fascists and militarists took to their barbaric posturing in the 1930s, a majority of Americans turned inward, wanting to ignore the world beyond its oceans.

American isolationism was read in Berlin and Tokyo as a permanent condition of a decadent American democracy.

German Nazis and Japanese militarists saw this as a signal for launching their wars for world domination.

But when an isolationist America was awakened after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, it pushed aside all doubts about its commitment to freedom and took the war to its just conclusion against the modern barbarians in Europe and Asia.

The main question after the mid-term election in the U.S. is where Americans, as a divided people, stand in the war on terror precipitated by radical Islamists and their fellow-travellers.

The obvious answer is that they are almost evenly divided on the issue.

That is, whether to remain in Iraq until the new government in Baghdad is on a sounder footing or to begin bringing American soldiers home before that mission is accomplished.

BURDEN OF WAR

This will be debated with much rancour during the life of the 110th Congress when it convenes in January, 2007, as well as during the presidential election in November 2008.

In the meantime, Americans will ask themselves why they alone should carry the burden of the war against radical Islamists when it is global in nature.

Following 9/11, a divided America rallied behind Bush and gave him its support – validated in the 2004 presidential election – in demolishing the Taliban hold on Afghanistan, as well as bringing about regime change in Iraq.

The Americans have secured their homeland from a repeat of 9/11, thus far, by the war Bush unleashed against the contemporary barbarians from the Arab-Muslim world.

This has come with a price, however – much unwarranted criticism of Americans by those in Europe and elsewhere, who remain most exposed and proximate to these barbarians raging against the modern world.

Hence, if there is a message to be squeezed out of the U.S. mid-term election, it might well be that a divided America is no longer willing to assume the sole responsibility for defending the West against today’s barbarians, if Europeans (and Canadians) are going to be merely reluctant allies and shrill critics.

Salim Mansur is professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario.

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nbachris2788 · November 20, 2006, 6:44pm

Al-Qaeda and other like groups are not a government, an army, or a nation. It’s an idea, or a violent philosophy. You can’t gun down an intangible concept that takes root in people’s mind with each bomb and missile carelessly dropped on faceless masses. Americans, and the world, rallied around Bush after 9/11 and there has been no improvement in security, and if anything, the world is more dangerous. People’s blind faith in the Bush administration has led to the Iraq mess that has become a breeding ground for terrorism. And your solution to this problem is… More blind faith in Bush and his like-minded contemporaries?

How hypocritical when the U.S. or Europe gets attacked, it’s barbarism and terrorism, but when the rest of the world is dying because of the U.S. or Europe, it’s war, liberation, etc.

Fides_et_Ratio · November 20, 2006, 7:46pm

The US and her allies are planting a democracy in Iraq, creating a Western-style country right in radical Islam’s backyard, with the quite realistic hope of that democracy spreading to other regions and countries in the Middle East, and therefore killing radical Islam off in an organic way – without missiles and bombs. It’s messy and chaotic at the moment, but that’s because we’re currently in the thick of the initial slog. Radical Muslims are fighting against it very hard, because they recognize the great threat that a pro-Western country in the heart of the Middle East is to them and their future in any sort of power position.

People need to give it time; these things don’t happen overnight. More to the point, Americans need to get behind their president on this. The only way America will lose this war is if the American people lose their will and resolve to see the job through. More and more every day, it looks like this has already happened. And that’s friggin’ sad to me.

If the world is a more dangerous place, I don’t blame the Bush administration at all. I blame the American people, for failing to support the mission.

Xe_Ln_Ag_A · November 20, 2006, 8:17pm

Every war analyst and general on the ground knows the Iraq war is undoubtedly unwinnable. It’s time to cut our losses and extricate ourselves from this mess.

Even as our troops stand on the ground now, the civil war that has been festering for months in Iraq is beginning to emerge. It’s impossible to stop this inevitability, even if we had twice as many troops on the ground as we do now.

Now, I know that you would say that 2800 soldiers will have died for no reason if we leave, but if we stay, 5000 soldiers will have died, and still for no reason. I hate to make it a numbers game, but that’s the cold reality of the situation.

Fides, there is nobody to “blame” here except for the President and the Vice-President.

We don’t need another Vietnam.

nbachris2788 · November 20, 2006, 10:31pm

The U.S. likes democracies, as long as the people vote in favour of American interests. How’d “democracy” turn out in Central and Latin America again?

Quite true. It took Western countries centuries of violence, protest, philosophizing, and the like before they got the democracy thing down to an acceptable level. We can’t expect theocracies to change overnight.

Salim Mansur: Divided On Defending Us

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