Rod Dreher

How to beat Paris Syndrome

Oh joy. An Islamist Libya.

By Rod Dreher • October 23, 2011, 9:54 PM

Who, oh who, could have foreseen this from the new top man in post-Qaddafi Libya?:

“We are an Islamic country,” he said as the sun descended. “We take the Islamic religion as the core of our new government. The constitution will be based on our Islamic religion.”

Among other things, he promised that Islamic banks would be established in the new Libya. He also talked of lifting restrictions on the number of women Libyan men can marry, The Associated Press reported.

The comments reflected not only the chairman’s personal religious conservatism and the country’s, but also the rising influence of Islamists among the former rebels. The Islamists, who include some influential militia commanders, have warned that they will not permit their secular counterparts in a new government to sideline them.

Thanks, NATO! On to Syria with John McCain!

23 Responses to Oh joy. An Islamist Libya.

Noah says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:03 pm

Silence, you isolationist! There will be gay marriage in Benghazi! There will be direct flights from Tripoli to Tel Aviv! Bedouin women will finally have access to the abortions they crave! The costs of the NATO liberation will be paid for from Libyan oil revenues!

What are you, some kind of Buchananite?!
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:05 pm

Yes, well, that’s today’s sound byte. The Islamists are voicing their position, those who were certain this would be the dominant position are rushing to say “I told you so.” Add up the sound bytes in about a year, and we’ll talk about the long term. This sort of grandstanding, as I’ve said before, is a bit like deriving long term economic trends from the work of day traders.

It is true that when a popular protest has to resort to arms, those with the arms, and the greatest capacity to use them, tend to acquire vastly greater influence. Too bad Qadaffi didn’t go peacefully when he had the chance.

We should also remember that neither at the beginning nor the end of the American Revolution was “freedom of religion” a principle anyone carried on their banners. Most colonies had an official religion. The First Amendment was written to quiet the ambition of both the Congregational and Episcopalian churches to be named the official Church of the United States.
Hector says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:11 pm

I don’t have any problem with Islamic banks, and I think they’re a compelling alternative to Western usurious capitalism, which more Christians ought to consider. (See for example the comments to my blog post here, http://aleksandreia.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/de-usura/. That said, the next sentence gives it away, this fool wants to legalize polygamy, and dragoon the women of Libya into patriarchal Islamic marriages.

Remind me again just why the h*ll we got involved. As I’ve been saying for months now, we didn’t have a dog in this fight.
Rod Dreher says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:22 pm

Remind me again just why the h*ll we got involved. As I’ve been saying for months now, we didn’t have a dog in this fight.

The only Realpolitik reason I can figure is that we (= US & Europe) calculated that Gaddafi’s days were numbered anyway, and we wanted to get in on the right side of his successors, so we could have an inside track on Libya’s oil, versus China. That, and Europe wanted to forestall a refugee crisis that would have badly affected it had Gaddafi crushed the rebels.
Charles Cosimano says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:24 pm

None of this surprises me in the least.
MattSwartz says:

October 23, 2011 at 10:54 pm

The only Realpolitik reason I can figure is that we (= US & Europe) calculated that Gaddafi’s days were numbered anyway, and we wanted to get in on the right side of his successors, so we could have an inside track on Libya’s oil, versus China. That, and Europe wanted to forestall a refugee crisis that would have badly affected it had Gaddafi crushed the rebels.

I can’t fault the logic in any of this, but I find it more likely that the Realpolitik is pointed in the other direction.

Neoconservatives and centrist liberals agree that we need to be fighting evil around the world, and the act of doing so creates a false sense of unity here at home. I suspect that this is the central reason for our empire-building stance. Strategic trade benefits and the survival of Israeli hegemony are merely gravy. The money is to be made at home, in our increasingly closed finance system, and the real spiritual causus belli is located here as well, in the continued dominance of the coastal cultural agenda,.

The advances in Islamism since the Arab Spring, then, are a feature, not a bug. They distract us from the trends Angelo Codevilla describes in his Ruling Class article. What hegemon doesn’t seek to create distractions? If I was ruling an ill-gotten kingdom, I know I’d make them job one.
IanH says:

October 23, 2011 at 11:43 pm

“We should also remember that neither at the beginning nor the end of the American Revolution was “freedom of religion” a principle anyone carried on their banners. Most colonies had an official religion. The First Amendment was written to quiet the ambition of both the Congregational and Episcopalian churches to be named the official Church of the United States.”

I just wanted to say that not one single bit of that is true.

Comparing colonial America to Libya is so ridiculous I can’t even believe it.
cecelia says:

October 23, 2011 at 11:48 pm

Uh – why we got involved – how aboput Hillary Clinton – who apparent;ly has much guilt the US failure to intervene in the Rwanda tribal bloodbath – feared that another such bloodbath would occur in Libya and apparently persuaded a reluctant Obama to join in – of course – our allies also reasons of their own to go after Quadaffi and obviously – since they have followed us on our less savory adventure in Iraqu – we had to help them out.

As for the type of government Libya ends up with – I am not wild about the polygamy deal but – Islam is the predominant religion over there so this is not exactly surprising. And while it would be nice if miraculously the Libyans turned into perfect Americans with seperation of Church and state and all that – it is their future and they do get to determine how they want to go. That they fashion a Islamic state need not mean they will promptly start engaging in terrorist acts against the West.
Thomas says:

October 24, 2011 at 12:10 am

People usually get the leader tgey deserve.

People who deserve to be free will make themselves so.
Surly says:

October 24, 2011 at 12:11 am

Ok, hang with me for a bit. Islam was “founded” in 622 A.D. That puts it about 500 years, or half a millenium behind Christianity. 300 years if you are being really charitable and don’t count anything before the First Ecumenical Council and the Nicene Creed.

So–if you go back 600 years what where Christians up to? That would be 1411-somewhere in the middle of the Great Schism. Fast forward 300 years and we are mopping up from the Reformation and people are killing each other over matters of Christian doctrine.

Muslims are evolving as a faith, and it will take time. I believe they need to live in a society of Islamism, as we North Americans had to live in a society of Puritanism, in order to get to whatever is next. I was encouraged to read ( sorry–can’t remember the source) that Iran could well be the first “post Islamic” society–after only 35 years a significant percentage of the population is fed up with Islamism and wants to try something different.

Our Founding Fathers were wise about the prohibition against Government establishing a religion. It is toxic in many, many ways, not to mention being against the doctrine of rendering to Caesar and to God what is due to both of them.
James says:

October 24, 2011 at 3:15 am

Islamic banking is widely practiced in sub-Saharan Africa. Major secular banks offer Islamic banking services, and the majority of clients in many countries are non-Muslims.

Islamic banking is much more transparent than the European system, and thus much less more susceptible to corruption, chicanery, or just the bad practices that have gotten European and American banks in such trouble recently. It’s a good system.

Polygamy is also widely practiced in Africa, regardless of majority religion. In some countries it is officially prohibited, but is still common. The Protestant president of South Africa is legally married to two women, and engaged to be married to two more.

In other words, neither Islamic banking nor polygamy are necessarily signs of raging violent Islamism. Both are practiced widely in many stable, peaceful majority-Christian countries.
MIke says:

October 24, 2011 at 6:52 am

In a predominately Muslim region, who exactly did people believe the revolutionaries were . . . . Baptists? The problem with revolutions and democracy is that you can’t always control who people choose to lead them.
Liam says:

October 24, 2011 at 7:08 am

The immediate reason was the potential refugee crisis that would have made the Euro credit crisis much worse, and more likely to have deeply affected the US economy.

That doesn’t mean it was right to do, of course, and I didn’t and don’t support the action. But that was the proximate cause, as it were.
Dmitri Aleksandrovich says:

October 24, 2011 at 7:22 am

If I remember correctly Gaddafi correctly branded the core of his opposition Al Qaeda like (indeed some probably are Al Qaeda members) Islamists before the Western “humanitarian intervention” against his regime.
Hunsdon says:

October 24, 2011 at 7:51 am

Rod said: The only Realpolitik reason I can figure is that we (= US & Europe) calculated that Gaddafi’s days were numbered anyway, and we wanted to get in on the right side of his successors, so we could have an inside track on Libya’s oil, versus China. That, and Europe wanted to forestall a refugee crisis that would have badly affected it had Gaddafi crushed the rebels.

Hunsdon replied: If our Very Serious Thinkers think we can get on the side of the Islamists who appear to be taking over, they must be smoking something stronger than the Mexican ditch weed that hazed my college days.

Re: oil. How are our exclusive contracts on Iraqi oil working out? About like the occupation itself? (If we’re going to be an empire, we should be an empire: kill people, break things, bring subject peoples into our orbit, and extort a heavy toll on them. If we’re not going to be an empire, well, we shouldn’t be an empire.)

Re: regufees. Just gonna be a different class of refugee, is what Hunsdon thinks. (Like Al Haig, Hunsdon refers to Hunsdon as Hunsdon sometimes.)

Hubris is the defining sin of late stage America.
Al-Dhariyat says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:17 am

This can’t really be a surprise, can it?

Even in democracies such as Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia, there are many elements of traditional Islamic law and Islamic parties have a voice in government. And none of these countries are going off the rails. Polygamy is not legal in Bangladesh but is very sparsely practiced only in some very rural communities and the main Islamic party there is a clear 3rd/4th place party.

Listen, I’m not trying to say that an Islamic Republic of Libya will be a bastion of tolerance and full women’s rights (and lawd knows I wouldn’t want to live there) but let’s wait a minute before we declare it part of the new Axis of Evil.
Al-Dhariyat says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:20 am

Fun fact: polyandry was not uncommon in Pre-Islamic Arabia. (Prophet Muhammad made sure to get rid of that immoral practice tout de suite!).
Scott in PA says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:22 am

re “The only Realpolitik reason I can figure is…”

It’s gotten so bad that we have to strenuously discern, no matter how faint, the Realpolitik reason for the latest American foreign policy disaster. It hasn’t sunk in that we are governed by liberals and neocons who actually believe that people all across the third world want freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and representative government. Realpolitik never enters their minds, it’s all liberal universalism.
Rod Dreher says:

October 24, 2011 at 8:32 am

This can’t really be a surprise, can it?

No, not to me, and not to a number of people. I was just pointing out, indirectly and sarcastically, that we Americans are suckers for seeing all rebels against dictators as uncomplicated good guys, and liberal democracy as the natural state of humankind.

It is absurd for anyone to believe that any regime in the Islamic world that has popular legitimacy won’t be Islamist to some degree.

It is also absurd to believe that the US can do anything to stop this development. Mubarak was corrupt, his government was sclerotic, and it was bound to collapse. I just ask my countrymen to dial back on the enthusiasm, and to question the narrative we love so well. The Shah of Iran was a corrupt autocrat too, and look what happened when the popular revolution got rid of him.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 24, 2011 at 9:34 am

IanH, you can pronounce that you don’t believe the earth revolves around the sun, you can proclaim that this is not true, but as Galileo said “It still moves.”

Now perhaps you have some facts to offer, some documents, dates, authors, some quotes from soldiers in the revolutionary war, which refute my summary of history I have read in some detail… but you haven’t offered any. Who do you think you are, the Pope of history, whose ex cathedra pronouncements dispose of a question by fiat? Evidence please, give us the evidence.

Your best case might be to reference Ethan Allen’s deism, but he was definitely ahead of his time, and the thinking reflected by most members of the Continental Congress. If you look for documents, like the Virginia statute on religious freedom, you will find that such principles developed in the years AFTER the Revolution, against the opposition of, e.g., Patrick Henry, who wanted to tax the people of Virginia for the support of ministers of the Gospel.

I wouldn’t be surprised if one European motivation was a desire to avoid a massive influx of refugees from Libya. They did have the beginnings of one early on. Can any of you anti-immigration conservatives blame them, for wanting to choose who they admit to their society?
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 25, 2011 at 4:34 pm

P.S. Rod’s last presentation is sound. It is absurd to think that a government in an overwhelmingly Islamic part of the world that has popular legitimacy won’t be Islamist to some degree. We are not going to get a carbon copy of the United States out of the “Arab spring.” What I question is the reflex to see doom and horror. A government based on genuine popular legitimacy that respects the norms of peaceful international relations and trade, and is more concerned with the security and prosperity of its own people than grandstanding across the oceans, is probably the best we are going to get, and quite acceptable. It is certainly better than Qadaffi or Mubarak, and IF we don’t get in the way, even perhaps help things along in a neighborly way, probably a whole lot better than what al Qaeda has offered.
cb says:

October 25, 2011 at 6:56 pm

it’s terrible that a brutal dictator is gone, because there is the chance that he might be replaced by people who think that their religion should influence the shape of their government?

There are plenty of reasons to have opposed intervention, but this is just asinine.
Siarlys Jenkins says:

October 26, 2011 at 11:37 pm

Like I said before cb, American Christian conservatives want their Muslims liberal, in the worst sense of the word, the kind of liberal they decry among American Christians. We shall be true to the faith of our fathers, and you shall abandon the faith of yours. (Both Christianity and Islam are a lot more diverse and have a much more fractured history than almost anyone credits — the atheist versions are no better than those of the Truly Devout).