Today.

Yes -- they may temporarily coincide, but that does not mean they are the same.

I don't see how we can expect more than that. Just as long as we keep our powder dry.

The Iranians won this round. Their cat's paw forced the U.S. to negotiate instead of kill him off (which is what we would have done had we really been in charge). The Iranians also forced the U.S. to openly call on them to end the stand-off. Now one of the members of the "Axis of Evil" has official standing in Baghdad. Sistani, who also has cooperated with Sadr, won by playing Sadr off against the U.S. Sadr stays in Iran now as a potential club. Sistani can tell us, "Play my way, or I call that guy back."

The Iranians are our de facto allies too--Shi'ism is incipient liberal democracy.

As Hezbollah, Khomeni and all those militias show, Shi'ism, being more personality dependent, lends itself far more easily to fascism. You're banking on the good will of a bunch of men whose intentions you really don't know.

However, at this point, we might as well turn over the keys and get out. We're wasting the lives of perfectly good Americans for the sake of teaching ignorant savages to play nice with each other, and we're not willing to do what it takes to finish the job, so we might as well cut our losses and go. The sooner they start killing each other instead of us, the better.

Hizbullah is moving in our direction too:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/011334.html

The belief of folks like you in the sustainability of totalitarianism mystifies me.

OJ:

You are overly romantic about shi'ism. Twenty-five years ago, we were at war with the Shi'a and playing up to the Sunni's. Twenty-five years from now, who knows?

I agree that there are strands in Shi'ism that could co-exist with democracy, but, just as with Christianity, there is no compelling drive towards democracy. Let Sistani declare himself the hidden Imam or, more likely, let his followers do it for him, and any movement towards democracy goes kerplop.

The totemic belief in democracy on your part is equally mystifying. At any rate, totalitarianism prospers best when faced with an external enemy. Given that, our interests dictate we leave the the area and wait for your inevitable collapse and the coming of your utopian, democratic paradise.

I remember reading P.J. O'Rourke claiming the Wahhabis were nothing more than uptight Baptists, while them evil Shiites in Iran were the problem!

But, then again, we're at war with Eastasia and we've always been at war with Eastasia, while Eurasia has always been our dearest ally.

If Carter had just gone and gotten the histages moist of the American/Iranian angst could have been avoided. Here's a great exchange from Tony Horwitz that occurred at Khomeini's funeral:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/reviews.detail/book_id/413/Baghdad%20With.htm

One of the demonstrators peeled off to rest by the curb, and I edged over to ask him what the mourners were shouting.

'Death to America,' he said.

'Oh.' I reached for my notebook as self-protection and scribbled the Farsi transliteration : Margbar Omrika.

'You are American?' he asked.

'Yes. A journalist.' I braced myself for a diatribe against the West and its arrogant trumpets.

'I must ask you something,' the man said. 'Have you ever been to Disneyland?'

'As a kid, yes.'

The man nodded, thoughtfully stroking his beard. 'My brother lives in California and has written me about Disneyland,' he
continued. 'It has always been my dream to go there and take my children on the tea-cup ride.'

With that, he rejoined the marchers, raised his fist and yelled 'Death to America!' again.

Derek:

Precisely, one either believes in the power of our faith or doesn't. It just seems strange that in a country founded on the idea of universal freedom so few believe in it any more.

Our country was not founded on "universal freedom." It was built on a cultural framework that itself took centuries to build. The Founding Fathers understood this clearly and openly disavowed any desire to force themselves and their "faith" on the rest of the world.

And before you cite the Declaration of Independence and its "self-evident truths," which are anything but "self-evident" or "truths" (i.e., all men are obviously NOT created equal, bear in mind that Jefferson did not write the Constitution, and he himself backed off the idea of exporting democracy.

It has often given me pleasure to observe that independent America was not composed of detached and distant territories, but that one connected, fertile, widespreading country was the portion of our western sons of liberty. Providence has in a particular manner blessed it with a variety of soils and productions, and watered it with innumerable streams, for the delight and accommodation of its inhabitants. A succession of navigable waters forms a kind of chain round its borders, as if to bind it together; while the most noble rivers in the world, running at convenient distances, present them with highways for the easy communication of friendly aids, and the mutual transportation and exchange of their various commodities.

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

This country and this people seem to have been made for each other, and it appears as if it was the design of Providence, that an inheritance so proper and convenient for a band of brethren, united to each other by the strongest ties, should never be split into a number of unsocial, jealous, and alien sovereignties.

Federalist No. 2 (Jay).

Derek:

By himself he spread it to the Pacific.

He acquired a largely empty territory because Napoleon dropped it in his lap at a cut-rate price. He did it further specific U.S. interests, not to spread some "faith."

That last sentence should read "He did it to further..."

Hoo-Hoo, good one. We took the faith to the Indians, his generations "undemocratizable Arabs". W is taking it to the Middle East because that too furthers our national interests. You're thinking too provincially.

Yeah, and the Indians have been thanking us ever since. Please, OJ, Jefferson took the plains to displace the Indians (whose numbers were insignificant compared to the whites) and replace or assimilate them with white men, not to democratize their nations. From the Indian point of view, it was conquest and annexation. It's in no way analogous to Iraq. You're taking some pretty extreme liberties with the facts for the sake of your theory.

You've come a long way and quickly from:

"Our country was not founded on "universal freedom." It was built on a cultural framework that itself took centuries to build. The Founding Fathers understood this clearly and openly disavowed any desire to force themselves and their "faith" on the rest of the world."

You'll get there.

Any totalitarianism that outlasts your personal lifespan is permanent.

I don't see how I've moved anywhere. You claim our Founders felt they had some noble duty to spread an ideology worldwide (despite their words to the contrary!), and then cite a specific territorial expansion as evidence. That's a non-sequitur. The Lousiana Purchase had nothing to do with spreading some political "faith."

Orrin,

Any idea why news wires refer to holy sites in the Muslim world without using scare quotes the way they do for sites that are holy for Christians and Jews? Might CAIR have taken a bead on the AP Style Guide? I'm asking sincerely rather than rhetorically.

Mr. O'Hannigan:

They don't really put scare quotes around "Rome" or "Jerusalem" do they?

Harry:

The only thing you don't measure by yourself is evolution.

Interesting to note though that applying your test there has never been a permanent totailtarian state.

Derek:

Jefferson doubled the territory of freedom in the world. Let our generation do the same.

Thomas Jefferson: Radical and Racist (Conor Cruise O'Brien, October 1996, Atlantic Monthly)

The term "civil religion" was first used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and refers to "the religious dimension of the polity." American civil religion has been summed up by one scholar as "an institutionalized collection of sacred American beliefs providing sources of cohesion and prophetic guidance through times of national crises." Among those sacred beliefs, a cult of liberty has been important from very early on. The sociologist Robert N. Bellah quotes a 1770 observer's opinion that "the minds of the people are wrought up into as high a degree of Enthusiasm by the word liberty, as could have been expected had Religion been the cause." [...]

THERE is no difficulty in seeing Jefferson as the prophet of the American civil religion if one thinks of him as the author of its most sacred document, the Declaration of Independence, and leaves it at that. But there is great difficulty in fitting the historical Jefferson, with all we know of him, into the civil religion of modern America (as it is generally and semi-officially expounded) at all, let alone in seeing him as its prophet.

Thomas Jefferson was in his day a prophet of American civil religion. Indeed, if his original draft of the Declaration of Independence had been accepted, the Declaration would have been more explicitly linked to the
American civil religion than it is in its present form. Whereas the second paragraph of the Declaration opens with the words "We hold phese truths to be self-evident . . . ," Jefferson's original draft had "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable . . . " The drafting of the Declaration had been entrusted by the Second Continental Congress to a committee of five, of which the leading members were Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin. Although Rousseau's phrase "civil religion" does not seem to have been in circulation in America at this time (when it would have been suspect in the eyes of churchmen), Jefferson -- whether through Rousseau or not -- was a "civil religion" person in his habitual use of language. Adams objected strongly to the mixing of politics and religion. Franklin was more consistently secular than Jefferson in his style. The historian Carl Lotus Becker writes, on the change in the manuscript to "self-evident," "It is not clear that this change was made by Jefferson. The hand-writing of 'self-evident' resembles Franklin's." The change was an improvement, functionally speaking, for a revolutionary manifesto. Anyone who rejects a "self-evident truth" must be either a fool or a knave. And that is precisely what the Founders wanted to say about anyone who opposed the Declaration. Jefferson himself appreciated the polemical force of this word, and often used it later.

Thomas Jefferson served as the American Minister to France from 1785 to late in 1789, and thus witnessed the last crisis of the ancien régime. He was in Paris for the opening of the Estates General (May 5, 1789) and for the fall of the Bastille (July 14). In letters to divers correspondents he evinced growing and confident enthusiasm for the burgeoning revolution. To James Madison: "The revolution of France has gone on with the most unexampled success hitherto. . . ." To Thomas Paine: "The National Assembly [showed] a coolness, wisdom, and resolution to set fire the four corners of the kingdom and to perish with it themselves rather than to relinquish an iota from their plan of total change. . . ." To Paine again: "The king, queen and national assembly are removed to Paris. The mobs and murders under which [the revolutionaries] dress this fact are like the rags in which religion robes the true god." No mere observer of the revolution, Jefferson is believed to have played a part in formulating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, adopted by the National Assembly, the revolutionary heir to the Estates General, on August 26, 1789.

He thus became the symbol of a proposition of which he came to be a fervent apologist: that the French Revolution was the continuation and fulfillment of the American one, both being manifestations of one and the same spirit of liberty. Within a few years that proposition was to become bitterly divisive, both among the American people and among the Founding Fathers themselves. The question of policy toward France was to range Jefferson and Madison, supported by James Monroe, against Hamilton and Adams. Washington first tried to hold the balance but ultimately threw his tremendous weight decisively against the Jeffersonian theory of the continuity and kinship of the two revolutions.

The Jefferson of the early 1790s, the champion of the French Revolution, was an ardent believer in, and prophet of, civil religion in the sense adumbrated by Rousseau. That is, he sought to animate an apparently secular and political idea -- that of liberty, "the true god" -- by breathing into it the kinds of emotions and dispositions with which religion had been invested in the Age of Faith. Of this religion Thomas Jefferson was more than a prophet -- he was a pope. As the author of the Declaration of Independence, he possessed the magisterium of liberty. He could define heresy and excommunicate heretics. To fail to acknowledge, for example, that the French Revolution was an integral part of the holy cause of liberty, along with the American Revolution, was heresy, and the heretic had to be driven from public life.