American Dissenters

Via Michael Ledeen at the Corner comes this powerful piece by Giuliano Ferrara appearing in the Italian paper Il Foglio:

Yes, agreed, it’s all true: the nobility of the vote, the courage of the Iraqis, the challenge to the Terror Party, the lines to the voting booths with the smiling women who make the victory sign and show their inked fingers, and now the hope for a sovereign national solution that banishes the memories of the horrors of war and occupation.

All true, heaven knows, but also all false and cynical, too comfortable and easy, too condescending and consoling.

The true glory of these elections is that they flowed from bayonets, which are the dry and bitter fruit of a war and a tenacious military occupation, they are part of the global strategy of the United States, part of a wager and a strategic doctrine for global security and therefore command, they are purely and simply the exportation of a modern Western cultural model that is alien to the very roots of fundamentalist Islamic culture , that rightly considers it blasphemous, according to the fundamentalists’ principles. From a certain point of view, Democracy and Liberty are meta-principles, recurrent forms of universal human identity that run through history, from and to which they enter and exit in a thousand different forms. The Iraqi version is the reincarnation, in Arab-Islamic soil, of a social method that has become a philosophy and a myth and even a religion, which it is hard to resist in modern times.

But it is also a much more prosaic political strategy, made possible by thousands of deaths, by enormous wealth spent in weaponry, by the decision to move and use armies to confront an ambitious, global terrorist challenge, a fundamentalist uprising within a great premodern civilization like the Islamic one.

Too easy, and stupid, is the position of those who were opposed to the war and now praise the elections, without reconsidering their previous position, because the elections are a direct product of the war, they would be inconceivable without the Anglo-American troops, without the overthrow of Saddam Hussein by bombs, without all the dirty work of the Coalition Provision Authority, without the checkmate of the U.N., and the acceptance of the fracture within the West.

The elections in Iraq are an act of global sedition, the imposition of liberty as a model, a revolutionary act of the imperial sort, a ring in the chain of political necessity, not a new version of rainbow idealism, of the religion of good, humanitarian religion.. Their nobility, which is real, is tempered by steel and does not permit hypocrisy

Global sedition. The United States is one long history of revolutions. What made the original American Revolution so successful is that it never really stopped. Periodically it has been necessary to revisit it, within the US itself, as with the Civil War and in the Civil Rights movement, but quite often outside the US as well. World Wars I and II and the Cold War were such extensions. Lincoln, King, Wilson, Roosevelt, and Reagan are fathers of the American Revolution too- the one that continued well after that war in the 1770's.

At the center of the revolution is the idea of freedom, even as the ironically super-aware amongst us roll their eyes. Repeatedly in history, stagnant systems which demean and waste human potential have been wiped away, and for the last 200 years it has been the American engine of revolution that is most responsible. New systems too, devised in Europe and elsewhere as the antidote to rabble-rousing American influence have been challenged and defeated by the US. It will happen again.

George Soros, in the Lebanon Daily Star (via LGF) writes:

If it is freedom and democracy that are wanted, they can be fostered only by strengthening international law and international institutions.

I don't think he's been paying attention. International law and international institutions did nothing for Iraqi freedom and democracy, unless you count the US Marine Corps as an international institution- which it isn't, though it has an international reach to be sure. He continues:

Bush is right to assert that repressive regimes can no longer hide behind a cloak of sovereignty: what goes on inside tyrannies and failed states is of vital interest to the rest of the world. But intervention in other states' internal affairs must be legitimate, which requires clearly established rules.

And the rules say that a handful of countries have to vote on whether an intervention is legitimate, on whether evil should be dealt with. You know the roll call.

But the US dissents. Much is made within the US left about the glory of dissent, and the duty to dissent, and the patriotic virtues of dissent. Some speak as if they believe that the fact of their dissent is more important than the ideas with which they are dissenting.

It would be somewhat ironic for them, if they considered it, that the US finds itself repeatedly dissenting from the rules of the calcified UN and the sclerotic EU. Why does the left find no virtue in this for the US? Why is dissent within the US a noble undertaking while American dissent on the world stage a matter of national shame? No matter.

That the US and its partners are continuing the revolution is what matters. Last year Americans voted for more American dissent and more global sedition. As ever, the price is high but we'll find that sticking to our principles will be worth it.