The four-year-old war in Iraq is very revealing of the state of politics—and society—in the United States and the West in general.
The fury Americans felt after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, has dimmed. Across the political spectrum, a shared opinion came together that perpetrators of 9/11 were punished, their safe refuge torn down and Islamist terrorism eliminated.
There was also the shared opinion among Americans that rogue regimes in the Middle East sheltering Islamist terrorists were held accountable. In the case of Iraq, Saddam Hussein’s rogue regime was viewed as immensely dangerous given its record of seeking weapons of mass destruction, of waging wars against its neighbours, of systematic killings of its own population, and of disregarding Security Council resolutions under chapter seven headings of the UN Charter for more than a decade.
The decision to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime was made by U.S. President George W. Bush. But earlier, in 1998 during the Clinton administration, Congress passed a joint resolution calling for regime change in Iraq. A majority of Americans agreed with the Bush administration on Iraq, and in November 2004 they voted a second-term for Bush as president.
The war in Iraq, as in Afghanistan, to bring regime change was swift. The post-war effort to help put in place the basic requirements for democracy in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, however, was met—not surprisingly—with stiff resistance from both within and outside of Iraq.
Al-Qaida killers and their local supporters learned that indiscriminate violence against fellow Arabs and Muslims could weaken Americans in their commitment to the making of a free and modern Iraq.
Al-Qaida’s strategy is seemingly working. Harry Reid, the U.S. Democratic Senate Majority Leader, has declared the war in Iraq is lost. Hence, the winners would be the terrorists—the barbarian marauders from the 7th century taking full measure of the greatest Western power of the 21st century and its inability to stomach the cost of defeating them.
This defeatism is more than Vietnam revisited. It is, in part, the never-dead virus of isolationism in American politics that is re-infecting a near majority of Americans into believing that if they shut the door to the world beyond the oceans then that world will not exist, nor torment them.
This “politics as a snapshot of the society” is the result of nearly two generations of education and media messaging that have brought about what political philosopher Allan Bloom documented so well in his book, The Closing of the American Mind.
In America, the most advanced attributes of the “instant gratification society” are to be found. The media has created a culture where anything of substantive value has merely a half-life between the relentless downpour of the trivial and the sensational.
It is not surprising that for many Americans the response to difficulties in Iraq is to pull out, unmindful of consequences for Iraqis and repercussions far beyond the region.
Iraq became a challenge to this generation of Americans as were Germany and Japan to the generation led by U.S. presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
The difference between the two generations in meeting history’s challenges also informs the world how greatly America has changed—not necessarily for the better.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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