In one of my earliest science classes, I vividly remember my teacher making a crucial point about the scientific method: that no scientific experiment is ever a "failure." Even if an experiment doesn't provide the result your theory had predicted, that very fact gives you valuable information. No matter what the result of the experiment, you have learned something.
A similar lesson applies to setbacks in war and politics. Failure--especially an unexpected failure--gives us valuable information about the enemy's strengths and our weaknesses. It helps us to better understand the nature of the conflict and determine where our efforts will be most effective. While the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections caught the Bush administration and most commentators by surprise,yet the sheer magnitude of the Hamas landslide was informative, revealing the wider shape of the War on Terrorism. The first and clearest lesson of the Palestinian election is that it reveals our most dangerous weakness. As I wrote last week, the concept of "democracy" is the ideological "soft underbelly" of America's war policy. The modern concept of "democracy" is an attempt to package together the institutions of a free society--elections, a free press, parliamentary debate, etc.--with the collectivist principle of unlimited majority rule. It is an attempt to separate freedom from its foundation in individual rights, giving the moral authority of a "free society" to any exercise in mob rule. This is why the Palestinian election is such a big setback. It is not merely that the Palestinian territories are now an openly declared terrorist state, the one nation (or quasi-nation) in which avowed Islamist murderers have risen to power since September 11. It is that the terrorists also managed to secure the sanction of being "democratically elected"--the one characteristic recognized throughout the West as conferring moral legitimacy on a government.
In short, it is not just that Hamas will create a terrorist regime; it is that our declared principles force us to accept that regime as legitimate. In response, the best today's culture can muster is represented by this op-ed in today's LA Times, at http://tinyurl.com/cx8at, which asserts that "Voting Isn't Democracy." Eytan Gilboa, an Israeli university professor, argues: "Current US policy will not lead to democracy because democracy is much more than elections. Elections encourage public participation in choosing leaders, but democracy is based on values, institutions, and constitutions--constitutions that by their very democratic nature cannot empower Islamic terrorist organizations such as Hamas. "All political movements must embrace the basic principles of democracy and meet minimum conditions before they can participate in elections. And racist movements are forbidden by law to participate in elections in Europe. "Hamas should have been banned from participating in the Palestinian elections for five reasons: It wants to establish an Islamic theocracy in the Palestinian territories; it maintains an independent, armed militia; this militia has often challenged the Palestinian government and has conducted an unauthorized, extensive terrorist campaign against Israel; Hamas rejects the Oslo agreements, which provided the basis for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority; and finally, Hamas wants to destroy Israel and opposes peace and negotiations."
Expect to hear a lot of this in the near future, especially from President Bush. This is good, in a way, because it our culture's attempt to learn the lesson of the Palestinian election. But notice that this author is unable to name what "basic principle of democracy" should bar racists, Islamists, and terrorists from participation in elections. He can't do it, because he would have to grasp that the "basic principle" and goal of legitimate government is not "democracy," but rather liberty. If that is America's weakness, what is the enemy's strength? What enabled Hamas to probe this weakness in our strategy--and to drive an electoral truck-bomb through it? The mainstream media is saying that Hamas won because the old Fatah establishment was corrupt and unpopular, and there is some truth to this. Hamas won in part because it promised to be the more consistent terrorist group, making no compromises with Israel; but it also won because it has a serious grass-roots organization that Fatah was never able to match, because it provided schools, hospitals, and "social services" (funded largely by Iran) that allowed it to buy loyal voters, and because it avoided Fatah's reputation for corruption.
You can see it with Iranian-backed Hezbollah in Lebanon, with the Iranian-allied SCIRI (Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq) in Southern Iraq, and even in Iran itself. Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected partly because the ruling class of theocrats hoped he would be fanatical enough to suppress internal dissent, but also because he has some actual support within Iran. Most Iranian dissidents are from the middle class, which is more secular and Westernized. But among the uneducated, more religiously devout poor, Ahmadinejad campaigned as a populist who would curb official corruption.
By contrast, the Sunni insurgency in Western Iraq and the threat of al-Qaeda is fading into the background as a less potent threat. Bin Laden, Zarqawi, and their whole gang have always been dictatorial and contemptuous of public opinion, not just in the substance of what they want to achieve, but in their style. They never lowered themselves to the grass-roots organization required to do well in an election; they simply condemned elections as heresy. By contrast, the Iranians are the only Islamists who have a history of combining religious tyranny with the trapping of electoral politics: parliaments, local party organizations, vote buying through welfare spending, party propaganda through local television stations complete with children's programming, and so on. This is the lesson of the Hamas victory, and that lesson illuminates the nature of the next big phase of this war. The enemy that is clearly emerging is not the phantom menace of al Qaeda--neither its isolated leaders in Waziristan nor its remaining minions in Western Iraq. The enemy whose outlines we can now see more clearly is Iran and its offshoots: the Islamist parties in Southern Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine. They are the most dangerous enemies because they are the only ones who can break through our moral defenses, creating enough of a "democratic" facade to win Western sympathy and protection.
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