Boldly Uttering The I Word
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

As the commentators have noted, President Bush’s October 6 address to the National Endowment for Democracy was important not so much for anything new that the president said as for the way he said it – specifically, for his use of the terms “Islamic radicalism” and “Islamo-fascism” to describe the phenomenon of Muslim terror and of the regimes, past and present, that support it. The president has come a long way from the days after 9/11 when “Islamic” and “terror” were two words that political correctness forbad to use together. He deserves to be commended for this.
The president is of course right to insist now, too, that the enemy is not Islam itself. He is perfectly justified to have stated in his October 6 speech that a religion like Islam that “demands individual moral accountability, and encourages the encounter of the individual with God, is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of [democratic] self-government.” The whole American endeavor in Iraq would make no sense if one didn’t believe this.
And yet while an American president can go only so far in what he says, Mr. Bush might have spared himself some unnecessary mealymouthedness had he not hastened to add that, even though “whole societies” in the Middle East “remain stagnant while the world moves ahead,” these “are not the failures of a culture or a religion” but merely those of “political and economic doctrines.” To refrain from speaking the whole truth for reasons of political expediency is one thing; to utter obvious untruths is another.
Surely the president and his advisers must realize by now that the failure of Arab and Muslim societies to modernize and democratize is precisely the failure of a culture and a religion and cannot logically be explained otherwise. It would be an astonishing coincidence if one after another Arab and Muslim society were mired in political autocracy and economic backwardness without this having anything to do with Arab culture or the Muslim religion.
Indeed, culture, economics, and politics invariably go together. Everywhere in the world one sees how the economies and political systems of countries mirror their cultures. There is no way of understanding, for instance, why some countries in ex-communist Europe, like Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary, have adopted quickly to democratic government and become economically dynamic societies, while others, such as Romania or Ukraine, lag far behind, without reference to deep-rooted cultural patterns of behavior.
The same holds true of the Middle East. It can hardly be an accident that, apart from Israel, the one Middle Eastern country to have had, until torn apart by civil war in the 1970s, a prosperously free economy and vigorously free society was Lebanon – which was also the one Middle Eastern country to have had a Christian majority. Today, too, wherever they exist in the Middle East, including Israel, Arab Christians are better educated, more Westernized, more open to new ideas and ways of doing things, and more economically successful than Arab Moslems.
What is it about Arab and Islamic societies, rather than merely the “Islamo-fascists” or “Islamic radicals” acting in their name, that is so resistant to modernization and democratization? One might mention many things, among them an unchallenged religious fundamentalism that makes it impossible to question publicly the dogmas or precepts of Islam; rigid family and clan structures, which strictly subordinate every member of society to the group and make supreme values out of loyalty and conformity; a deep-rooted misogyny with its systematic suppression of women; the absence of intellectual habits of critical thought, accompanied by the tendency always to blame others, never oneself, for one’s faults and deficiencies, and so on and so forth. What all of these things have in common is the downplaying, if not outright condemnation, of individual freedom, independence, and self-fulfillment, which are expected to defer to authority and tradition.
Needless to say, these are not social or religious values that are conducive to modern economic or political life. In fact, any attempt to change such life without also changing these values is ultimately doomed, the least stable countries always being those whose cultural norms are in a state of dissonance with their ways of doing things politically and economically.
And yet precisely because religion, culture, politics, and economics are so closely interrelated, it is sometimes possible, when one cannot change their overall gestalt by jiggling it at one end, to do so by prodding it at the other. Although the Western world has no ability to influence Muslim culture directly and a society’s politics will never change from within unless its culture changes too, you may, by changing the politics from without, force the culture to change with them.
This is essentially what America, partly with eyes open and partly acting on pure intuition, has set out to do in Iraq. And this is why the widespread criticism that the Bush administration is misguided because it is fighting the war on terror in the wrong place is so misguided itself. The question is not whether Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a base for international terror. (It obviously was not – Saddam was into other games.) The question is whether, by turning the worst Arab tyranny in the history of the Middle East into a functioning democracy, you can shake its society into changing culturally and religiously as well, thus making it a model for the entire Arab and Islamic world.
President Bush’s critics are right: The war against terror cannot be won by military means, but only by political and cultural ones. But to start winning it, it may be necessary to use military force to set the desired political, and ultimately cultural, changes into motion. The high turn-out in this week’s constitutional referendum in Iraq is one more sign that things are indeed beginning to move.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.