Four years after Baghdad’s fall to American forces there are jitters in Washington and difficulty establishing legitimate order in Baghdad.
Every Iraqi knows—if conscience has not been stilled in their bosoms by a culture in total disarray—freedom “that came their way had been a gift of the Americans” as writes Fouad Ajami, the peerless commentator on politics of the Arab world.
In Arab-Muslim history the notion of freedom is practically non-existent. Freedom as individual rights and responsibilities, respect for the other, equality for women and protecting minorities, remain alien in a part of the world where questioning those in authority can be a capital offence.
It takes time for people and culture to make the transition, however incomplete and inconsistent, from tyranny to some semblance of representative government based on laws and accountable to the people.
America’s gift to Iraqis is not merely freedom. It is also at much cost and sacrifice, providing support to a fledgling effort of Iraqis to learn the art of government in the midst of being battered daily by the worst elements of a degraded culture that prizes tyranny over freedom.
But the pertinent question four years after Baghdad’s fall is why there are such jitters in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere at the pace of Iraqi transition from violence to order, and of faulting the Bush administration at every twist for whatever turns wrong in Baghdad?
Americans need to be asked why the mainstream media and the Democrats are prepared to abandon Iraq where sacrifices of American soldiers are of the same order as those made in France, Italy, Japan, Korea, and elsewhere in the fight for freedom?
Four years after the guns in World War II fell silent in Europe and Asia, fear and violence were stalking both continents and beyond. In March 1946, as concerns mounted across Europe of communist threats, Winston Churchill told his audience at Fulton, Miss., with President Truman at his side: “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” There was the Soviet engineered communist coup in Czechoslovakia in early 1948, insurgency in Greece, Soviet demands for territorial concessions from Turkey and Iran, and then came the Berlin blockade followed by the Soviet acquisition of the atomic bomb.
In Asia there were communist uprisings and insurgencies in the Philippines, Indonesia, the partitioning of the Indian subcontinent with unprecedented bloodletting among people with a shared history, wars in the Middle East, the communist victory in mainland China and then the war in the Korean peninsula.
Truman staked his presidency on containing Soviet communism and laying the groundwork for eventually defeating the second bid of a totalitarian ideology seeking dominance of the free world.
It was a global struggle that could not have been won without America’s might, resources, and long-term commitment. Similarly, without American leadership, Britain and her empire might have failed against the first bid of totalitarian ideology’s drive for world dominance.
Radical Islamism and its variants, despite the monstrosity of their violence, are the rage of a people and culture in death throes. The effort required to expunge radical Islamism is a pittance of what was needed to defeat German Nazism, Japanese militarism and Soviet communism.
This is why American hand-wringing over difficulties in Iraq and the region four years after Baghdad’s fall is unbecoming of a people who remain the last best guardians of freedom and democracy in our world.
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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