In Allah and Democracy Can Get Along Fine Dilip Hiro makes an enlightening discussion on the possible forms an Islamic Iraqi democracy may take. More interesting to me, though, was this sentence from the first paragraph: “This prospect is sending a chill down the spines of many Westerners, who see it as a preamble to the rise of a theocratic regime in Baghdad that would be a far cry from the liberal, secular Iraq envisioned by the Bush administration.”
Anyone who seriously suggests that anyone in the Bush Administration expected a secular Iraq is feeding the audience a line; while some of the Neocons may have wished fondly for a secular Iraq, even I do not believe them to be that naive. What really caught my attention was the other adjective Hiro used: liberal. This guy may have written two books (as his end of essay credit mentions) about the Middle East but he clearly isn’t a member of the same reality-based community as me.
Alternatively, Hiro is correct in using the liberal label but does so in a 1984-like style where words mean what the government says they do rather than, say, the OED. In that case, of course, he is free to use liberal in this instance but then we are left with a term that no longer has any semantic value. After all, the Republicans big curse in the 1980s was to call someone (*cough* Dukkakis *cough*) a “card carrying Liberal” to dismiss any of the person’s positions or policies as worthless. If the Bush Crew did indeed use the term in reference to post-liberation Iraq I can only sit here and gaze blankly at my screen.
BillSaysThis 