Section
Pepperdine Links
Online Publications
What do millions of purple fingers, thousands of green flags and one white helicopter have in common? Each offers an image of the hope and fear of freedom. Over the past two years, millions of Iraqis rejected terrorist threats and Western naysayers to cast their ballots in a series of democratic elections.
The purple finger is now an indelible sign of man’s ability to let words, not guns, determine the foundation of government. In the face of fierce opposition from former Baathists and al-Qaida cronies, Iraqi citizens are showing themselves and the world the power of freedom.
Recently, Palestinians made headlines in an equal, if opposite, way. Sometime in the next week, the terrorist-affiliated and democratically elected Hamas plurality will begin to assume control of the Palestinian Authority. Already the party’s green flags are waving in the streets of Gaza, and soon they will be placed on the negotiation tables with Israel’s Star of David. At least, that is the hope.
Apart from moonlighting as a political party, Hamas also has strong ties to Iran. When the Iranian leadership tires of denying the Holocaust and building weapons of mass destruction, it finds time to fund Hamas-recruited suicide bombers bent on killing as many Israelis as possible. In fact, together with the ayatollahs, the Hamas platform dedicates itself to the decline of the Jewish state.
Perhaps the differing trends in Iraq and Palestine cast suspicion on the notion that free and peaceful elections result in free and peaceful governments. Perhaps U.S. troops are the only difference makers needed to assure the preservation of a nation at war with itself.
And perhaps not. One of the most heart-wrenching images to emerge from the Vietnam War is the photograph of dozens of Vietnamese civilians standing atop the American Embassy in an attempt to board one white helicopter. As communists from the north came barreling in, eyewitnesses reported Vietnamese leaping for the helicopter’s landing gear in a final, fatal rush for freedom. The experience was no doubt swift and terrible. Freedom’s home was no longer across the street; it was across the sea.
At the heart of the issue in the Middle East is whether Arab societies can democratize before they liberalize. America’s founding generation understood this intuitively. They were not fighting for “new” rights divined from Thomas Jefferson’s pen; they were fighting for their rights as Englishmen.
For more than 170 years Americans experimented with limited self-government. This incubation period was a critical proving ground for ideas about rights and freedoms that finally found their voice in the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution.
Like the Vietnamese, Arabs in Iraq and Palestine have never known democratic rule.
Deified kings and sheiks were followed by colonial masters who stripped the land of its resources and the people of their dignity. The American equivalents of this are the Native Americans, not English settlers.
The greatest failure of colonial rule was not assimilating their subjects into the Western world. The events of the past two years in the Middle East are giving American and European leaders the opportunity to correct that mistake. The push for democracy in the Arab world, although premature, is essential if there is to be any hope of changing the status quo.
This is why the United States must maintain its commitment to stabilizing Iraq and pacifying Palestine. We must also be willing to take care of those for whom failure is death.
For every Iraqi brave enough to create a new government, there may be a Palestinian eager to renounce his.
If the democratic initiatives unleashed in the Middle East fail to take root, America must be ready to assimilate those foreign nationals that took at us at our word when we said “we’re here to help.” The word of U.S. leaders should be its bond, even if it means sending one more helicopter.
Submitted 02-02-2006
MALIBU, CA
