It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace-- but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death.
--Patrick Henry
--Patrick Henry
The #3 top story of the year is the new Iranian revolution—proof that you should never count out the strength of the human spirit or the appeal of the cause of liberty.
TIA Daily was on top of this story early, reporting on the unexpectedly radical campaign of Mir Hossein Mousavi shortly before the Iranian election, then providing extensive coverage of the protests after the election was rigged. Most important, we have followed the way in which the uprising changed from a protest over a stolen election into a broad rejection of the whole theocratic system. The main title above is taken from a recent report on this growing support for a secular republic as the goal of the "green" protest movement.
TIA Daily's running coverage of the Iranian revolution has been a bit too detailed to excerpt easily, so below I have reprinting the one feature article, originally published on July 24, that provides my deepest answer on the cause and meaning of the events in Iran. This article also has the virtue of integrating the uprising in Iran with the underappreciated story that I wanted to highlight: the shift in public opinion against the Taliban in Pakistan. Taken together, these two stories could bring America a substantial victory in the War on Terrorism—even despite the current president's failure (or in the case of Iran, refusal) to do anything to encourage these trends.
And the story of the Iranian revolution is not over. Just in the past week, the protesters may have begun to gain the advantage over the regime. The London Times has a very good report on last weekend's clashes between protesters and police, while Michael Totten discusses how killing Muslims on Ashura—"like crucifying Christians on Christmas," as one protester puts it—further undermines the moral legitimacy of the regime.
See also a good slide show of images from the clashes, which make it clear that in many cases the protester are putting the police on the defensive.
The Iranian revolution may take a while to succeed, but it is looking increasingly likely that the regime will fall—and that it will do so in the next year. That's a top story I'm really looking forward to recapping a year from now. Stay tuned.—RWT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FEATURE ARTICLE
Morality Ends Where a Gun Begins
by Robert Tracinski
If the Iranian regime falls and we are able to make progress against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it may turn out that President Bush did just enough for victory in the War on Terrorism. It still seems so little compared to what he might have done. I will not rehearse here the many lost opportunities in Israel and Lebanon and elsewhere, or Bush's failure to act to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Yet what he did do is nevertheless working.
So it is important to start asking: why? What are the strengths that make victory possible to us—and what are the weaknesses that have put our enemies on the defensive, facing the very real possibility of defeat?
Over the years, I have offered a few answers on this topic, in bits and pieces as events made them relevant. Now is a good time to bring all of those pieces together.
Let us start with the weakness of the enemy, because this is a very substantial cause of the events we have witnessed in the past few months, particularly in Iran.
It is fascinating to note how, in a contest between opposing ways of life, Islamic theocracy keeps losing, every time people get the slightest choice in the matter. There must be something about radical Islam that makes it lose, something that makes it uniquely repulsive and unappealing and causes it to lose the loyalty of the people who live under it, even as free societies tend to gain the loyalty of those who live in them.
I drew some initial conclusions on this issue in the March 3, 2005, edition of TIA Daily. This was at another point when events were beginning to break our way—Syria was retreating before the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, for example, and there was speculation (four years premature, as it turned out) about a "Pink Revolution" in Iran as young women began to openly rebel against religious restrictions—and I asked the same question: "now that we can sense that the enemy's collapse is possible, we need to ask: why?"
"That our enemy in the current war is materially weak has been clear from the beginning: terrorism is by its nature a weapon employed by the weak, by those who are unable to fight with tanks, warships, and missiles. But this enemy has also put up a wall of strident-sounding propaganda that obscures his profound spiritual weakness….
"What I think we are learning from recent events…is that no ideology can seal itself off from comparison to reality. Even religious dogmas make statements about the nature of this world—statements whose falsity can be definitively demonstrated by the course of history….
"[The Islamists] claim that theocratic rule will guarantee the rule of virtue on this earth. The religious police in these countries always have comical names like the 'Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue.' Yet in one country after another, and most especially in Afghanistan and Iran, Muslims have been able to observe that theocracy actually leads to rule by the most evil, vicious, and corrupt men. The Taliban are global synonyms for sadistic brutality, and the mullahs in Iran are notorious for running a literal mafia devoted to the looting of the country's wealth. And in Iraq, as the insurgency has increasingly targeted Iraqi civilians, Muslims can observe that the 'holy warriors' they are supposed to admire have degraded into plain, brutal, senseless mass murderers."
Note that I wrote this in early 2005, about a year and a half before the beginning of the Anbar Awakening, which happened when al-Qaeda's local allies in Iraq finally became so enraged by its atrocities that they rebelled against it.
I expanded a bit on the same theme more recently, in April, in discussing the impact of a video showing the Taliban beating a young woman in a town where they had taken over in Pakistan.
"[T]he new Taliban video…demonstrates the central failure of Islamism, revealed clearly even to those in the Muslim world. The Islamic theocrats offer their supporters one central promise: to establish the rule of virtue on earth. But they always provide the exact opposite: the rule of brute force and the doctrine of 'might makes right.' Their code actually banishes morality from public life, subordinating it to force. The routine brutalization of women and girls under the rule of Islam is a constant and vivid reminder of this fact."
More recently, I ran across some additional evidence that will allow us to take this conclusion a bit further.
The first story is the unexpected confession of the sole surviving gunman from last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Ajmal Kasab stunned a New Delhi courtroom by standing up and talking for hours about how he was recruited by militants in Pakistan and how he helped carry out the attacks. After days of listening to witnesses describe his crimes, he was clearly feeling a profound sense of guilt. "'I don't think I am innocent,' he said, speaking in subdued Hindi. 'My request is that we end the trial and [I] be sentenced.'" He must know that the most likely sentence is death by hanging.
What was most revealing about Kasab's confession was his description of how and why he came to be a terrorist:
He told Judge M.L. Tahilyani that he was broke and tired of his job working for decorator in Jhelum, a small town in Pakistan, and making a pittance. He and a friend had hatched a plan. They would earn cash by robbing people. And to improve their banditry skills they would seek out military training from the easiest source available to a young Pakistani man: Islamic militants.
Mr. Kasab and his friend went to Rawalpindi, he said, and asked in the market where they might find mujahedeen. They were directed to the office of [the Kashmiri terrorist group] Lashkar-e-Taiba.
So there you have it, the ideal recruit for Islamic fundamentalists: an aspiring armed robber.
Even more revealing is the Jerusalem Post's shocking interview with a member of the Basij militia, the supposed guardians of religious morality in Iran.
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard—essentially raped by her "husband."…
"I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."
The rule of virtue on earth? No, this is sadism under the cover of morality. And it is standard operating procedure for the Basij. The interview describes the Basij member's view of who has been committing many of the beatings and killings of protesters.
He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces"—recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered.
"Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please—forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want."
These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said.
This doesn't even rise to the level of a theocracy. It's Lord of the Flies. And that's the sick tragedy of this story.
Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them. When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug."
A desperate widow, raising her son alone and afraid he will become a criminal, brings him to the religious militia in the hope that they will keep him on the straight and narrow—and instead, they turned him into an even worse criminal. There is the enemy's fatal contradiction laid bare.
It seems that many members of the Basij and the other security forces sense this—that under the cover of moral idealism they have become accomplices to evil.
The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers—a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl—who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections. "There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors."
This guilt and uncertainty on the part of the regime's own security personnel is the sort of thing that rots an evil regime away from the inside and brings it down. It falls because even the men who are supposed to defend it know that it is evil.
This story gives us a fuller idea of the exact issue that has caused the rejection of Islamic theocracy in Iraq, in Iran, and hopefully also in Pakistan—even among people who are not educated liberals and who are unlikely advocates of secularism or the separation of mosque and state. And it is why many of the leading opponents of the regime in Iran are themselves members of the clergy.
The issue at stake here is more basic and elemental than dictatorship versus representative government, or separation of church and state. The issue is the role of morality in human life.
What is at stake is whether morality is to have any such role—and the defenders of theocracy are the ones who have come out against morality.
The specific form this takes is an internal theological dispute within Islam, so it is easy to dismiss it as nothing more than a power struggle between different religious factions. But religion here is a stand-in for morality as such, and the theological dispute is whether religion and morality take precedence over force and terror.
This is the literal theological issue behind both al-Qaeda as established by Osama bin Laden and the Iranian theocracy as established by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Last summer, I linked to an important article on the defection of al-Qaeda's chief religious theorist, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who had been convinced, while in an Egyptian jail, to denounce al-Qaeda and bin Laden. One of the central issues of his defection was a dispute over who ought to be in charge of the jihad: religious scholars like Fadl, or practical leaders like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.
The Middle East Media Research Institute provides several eye-opening reports (a short version here and a long version here) describing this conflict between "the party of jurisprudence" and "the party of action." At the time ("The Fundamentalist Apostates," June 5, 2008), I noted that this report explains "the reason why the jihadists have historically been so dependent on the support of established Islamic scholars: most of them are laymen—malignant malcontents who want to claim the ideological support of Islam but who have no specialized religious training that allows them to claim such support on their own authority."
Hence one of the issues behind Dr. Fadl's defection. As I described it: "It turns out that the current Sunni jihadist movement, while billing itself as a fundamentalist movement that wants to go back to traditional Islam, is actually a religious rebellion against the currently recognized Sunni religious authorities….
"[T]he jihadist movement has devolved into an attempt to establish the 'charismatic' jihadist leader as an infallible religious authority, enjoying a status similar to that of the prophet Mohamed himself—arguably a blasphemous notion. The goal is to free the jihadist leader from the necessity of religious scholarship, qualifying him to overrule the entire religious establishment."
According to MEMRI:
In the past, religious authority within this movement stemmed primarily from the scholarly credentials and reputation of the individual. This changed with the advent of a new group, namely the jihadi Salafi camp…. Though the members of this movement could not compete with the traditional Salafi scholars in erudition or devoutness, they nevertheless wished to gain religious authority. Consequently, they sought a new basis for religious authority that would include them within its scope.
To this end, the jihadists began promoting the idea that charisma—a personal trait that endows one with extraordinary and even supernatural qualities—was also a basis for authority on religious and social matters…. By describing the mujahideen as infallible, the jihadi Salafis removed them from the earthly realm of learning and erudition—a sphere monopolized by the traditional Salafi scholars—and elevated them to the level of individuals blessed with supernatural spiritual powers.
I then observed: "This is the deal with the devil every religion makes when it justifies the use of force to spread or enforce its influence. In the end, using force as a means to enforce the faith ends up subordinating the faith to the rule of force…. [T]hat is why, on the Sunni side, bin Laden and his henchman are trying to establish the precedent that their acts of ruthlessness automatically grant them the status of prophets."
I also observed: "That's why Iran is ruled by the Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the religious equivalent of a mail-order diploma; he was pushed through to ayatollah status, not because he was an eminent religious scholar, but because he had the political power and ruthlessness to defend Iran's Islamist dictatorship."
I did not realize until recently how literally true this is. In the middle of a very useful guide to the theological conflicts among Iran's Shiites—and particularly the history of the liberal and "reformist" factions—Abbas Milani provides a revealing summary of the doctrines of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Before coming to power, Khomeini argued that the most important duty, indeed the raison d'etre of an Islamic government, was to implement fully the tenets of sharia [Islamic law]. But once in power and faced with the complexities of modern Iranian society, he subtly changed the very foundation of his theory. He introduced the concept of maslaha—interests of the regime—and declared, much to the consternation of nearly every other ayatollah, that these interests, as determined by him or his successor, would supersede even the fundamentals of Islam. In other words, the state was everything—and sharia was nothing but its legitimizing narrative, a narrative that could be suspended at the will of the leader.
Both al-Qaeda's theory and Khomeini's are literally doctrines of might makes right. It is not the case that Osama bin Laden claims the right to kill because of his established moral and religious authority; rather, he claims moral and religious authority because he kills. He has made brutality into the source of religious authority.
Similarly, Khomeini did not cite religious law as the foundation of his right to stay in power. Rather, he made staying in power the foundation of religious law.
So when I observed that the code of the Islamists "actually banishes morality from public life, subordinating it to force," it turns out that this is the essence of their theological doctrines. And it has to be the essence of their doctrines, because there is no other way to maintain a dictatorship. The dictator or terrorist leader cannot admit the authority of any permanent rules or the influence of any moral authority independent of his power, because this would impose checks and balances that limit his action. So he seeks to make his ideology bend to his whims and to assert the supremacy of those whims over any kind of ideological or religious establishment. He establishes a doctrine of might makes right.
This explains the brutal equation now obvious to any Iranian: theocracy equals thugocracy. And that explains why both al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime have suffered such a spectacular loss of moral legitimacy among the populations they depend on to support them. They cannot claim moral legitimacy, because they are in favor of the subordination of morality to brute force.
Islam is particularly susceptible to such doctrines, because it was founded by a criminal and a dictator: Mohammed established himself first as a prophet, then as a brigand plundering Arabian trade routes, and finally as the tyrant of Medinah. So Khomeini and Bin Laden could plausibly claim they were following in his footsteps.
But this same contradiction is inherent in any form of theocracy. In attempting to impose the rule of religious authority, a theocracy necessarily launches a heretical assault on religious authority. This applies to any theocracy in any religious tradition—and even, for that matter, to any secular doctrine. The moment any doctrine imposes itself by force, it commits suicide. Intellectually, it ceases to be a living idea and turns into an empty formula. Morally, it ceases to be a code of values and becomes a rationalization for sadism.
What this makes fully clear to me, for the first time, is the centrality of force as a moral issue. What I have always found compelling about politics is that it is the arena for the most important moral questions of the age. But it is specifically the arena for what is, in a social context, the central moral question, the one with the power to render every other moral issue moot. That question is: will force be subordinated to the mind? Because this is the only thing that makes morality possible.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand writes that "Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins." Morality is a phenomenon of the free mind: it is a matter of choice, of values, of principles and arguments. When a doctrine is imposed by force, it is imposed without regard for any of these things—and thus without regard for morality. When a gun replaces an argument, it also replaces morality. Then the sadists and killers sense that they are in control and take over. That is how you get moral and religious movements composed of such "idealists" as armed robbers and rapists.
This is the fatal contradiction of the Islamists. It is what repels and disillusions their followers wherever the Islamists try to take over—from the atrocities of al-Qaeda in Iraq, to the public beatings and murders and juice-bar bombings committed by the Taliban in Pakistan, to the beatings and assassinations carried out in the streets of Tehran. The substitution of brutality for morality leads to a catastrophic loss of moral legitimacy and a subsequent rejection of the Islamists by the people they seek to rule.
Why are our enemies in the War on Terrorism losing? Why are they always doomed to lose, in the long run? Because morality ends where a gun begins.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
TIA Daily was on top of this story early, reporting on the unexpectedly radical campaign of Mir Hossein Mousavi shortly before the Iranian election, then providing extensive coverage of the protests after the election was rigged. Most important, we have followed the way in which the uprising changed from a protest over a stolen election into a broad rejection of the whole theocratic system. The main title above is taken from a recent report on this growing support for a secular republic as the goal of the "green" protest movement.
TIA Daily's running coverage of the Iranian revolution has been a bit too detailed to excerpt easily, so below I have reprinting the one feature article, originally published on July 24, that provides my deepest answer on the cause and meaning of the events in Iran. This article also has the virtue of integrating the uprising in Iran with the underappreciated story that I wanted to highlight: the shift in public opinion against the Taliban in Pakistan. Taken together, these two stories could bring America a substantial victory in the War on Terrorism—even despite the current president's failure (or in the case of Iran, refusal) to do anything to encourage these trends.
And the story of the Iranian revolution is not over. Just in the past week, the protesters may have begun to gain the advantage over the regime. The London Times has a very good report on last weekend's clashes between protesters and police, while Michael Totten discusses how killing Muslims on Ashura—"like crucifying Christians on Christmas," as one protester puts it—further undermines the moral legitimacy of the regime.
See also a good slide show of images from the clashes, which make it clear that in many cases the protester are putting the police on the defensive.
The Iranian revolution may take a while to succeed, but it is looking increasingly likely that the regime will fall—and that it will do so in the next year. That's a top story I'm really looking forward to recapping a year from now. Stay tuned.—RWT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FEATURE ARTICLE
Morality Ends Where a Gun Begins
by Robert Tracinski
If the Iranian regime falls and we are able to make progress against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it may turn out that President Bush did just enough for victory in the War on Terrorism. It still seems so little compared to what he might have done. I will not rehearse here the many lost opportunities in Israel and Lebanon and elsewhere, or Bush's failure to act to destroy Iran's nuclear program. Yet what he did do is nevertheless working.
So it is important to start asking: why? What are the strengths that make victory possible to us—and what are the weaknesses that have put our enemies on the defensive, facing the very real possibility of defeat?
Over the years, I have offered a few answers on this topic, in bits and pieces as events made them relevant. Now is a good time to bring all of those pieces together.
Let us start with the weakness of the enemy, because this is a very substantial cause of the events we have witnessed in the past few months, particularly in Iran.
It is fascinating to note how, in a contest between opposing ways of life, Islamic theocracy keeps losing, every time people get the slightest choice in the matter. There must be something about radical Islam that makes it lose, something that makes it uniquely repulsive and unappealing and causes it to lose the loyalty of the people who live under it, even as free societies tend to gain the loyalty of those who live in them.
I drew some initial conclusions on this issue in the March 3, 2005, edition of TIA Daily. This was at another point when events were beginning to break our way—Syria was retreating before the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, for example, and there was speculation (four years premature, as it turned out) about a "Pink Revolution" in Iran as young women began to openly rebel against religious restrictions—and I asked the same question: "now that we can sense that the enemy's collapse is possible, we need to ask: why?"
"That our enemy in the current war is materially weak has been clear from the beginning: terrorism is by its nature a weapon employed by the weak, by those who are unable to fight with tanks, warships, and missiles. But this enemy has also put up a wall of strident-sounding propaganda that obscures his profound spiritual weakness….
"What I think we are learning from recent events…is that no ideology can seal itself off from comparison to reality. Even religious dogmas make statements about the nature of this world—statements whose falsity can be definitively demonstrated by the course of history….
"[The Islamists] claim that theocratic rule will guarantee the rule of virtue on this earth. The religious police in these countries always have comical names like the 'Ministry for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue.' Yet in one country after another, and most especially in Afghanistan and Iran, Muslims have been able to observe that theocracy actually leads to rule by the most evil, vicious, and corrupt men. The Taliban are global synonyms for sadistic brutality, and the mullahs in Iran are notorious for running a literal mafia devoted to the looting of the country's wealth. And in Iraq, as the insurgency has increasingly targeted Iraqi civilians, Muslims can observe that the 'holy warriors' they are supposed to admire have degraded into plain, brutal, senseless mass murderers."
Note that I wrote this in early 2005, about a year and a half before the beginning of the Anbar Awakening, which happened when al-Qaeda's local allies in Iraq finally became so enraged by its atrocities that they rebelled against it.
I expanded a bit on the same theme more recently, in April, in discussing the impact of a video showing the Taliban beating a young woman in a town where they had taken over in Pakistan.
"[T]he new Taliban video…demonstrates the central failure of Islamism, revealed clearly even to those in the Muslim world. The Islamic theocrats offer their supporters one central promise: to establish the rule of virtue on earth. But they always provide the exact opposite: the rule of brute force and the doctrine of 'might makes right.' Their code actually banishes morality from public life, subordinating it to force. The routine brutalization of women and girls under the rule of Islam is a constant and vivid reminder of this fact."
More recently, I ran across some additional evidence that will allow us to take this conclusion a bit further.
The first story is the unexpected confession of the sole surviving gunman from last year's terrorist attacks in Mumbai. Ajmal Kasab stunned a New Delhi courtroom by standing up and talking for hours about how he was recruited by militants in Pakistan and how he helped carry out the attacks. After days of listening to witnesses describe his crimes, he was clearly feeling a profound sense of guilt. "'I don't think I am innocent,' he said, speaking in subdued Hindi. 'My request is that we end the trial and [I] be sentenced.'" He must know that the most likely sentence is death by hanging.
What was most revealing about Kasab's confession was his description of how and why he came to be a terrorist:
He told Judge M.L. Tahilyani that he was broke and tired of his job working for decorator in Jhelum, a small town in Pakistan, and making a pittance. He and a friend had hatched a plan. They would earn cash by robbing people. And to improve their banditry skills they would seek out military training from the easiest source available to a young Pakistani man: Islamic militants.
Mr. Kasab and his friend went to Rawalpindi, he said, and asked in the market where they might find mujahedeen. They were directed to the office of [the Kashmiri terrorist group] Lashkar-e-Taiba.
So there you have it, the ideal recruit for Islamic fundamentalists: an aspiring armed robber.
Even more revealing is the Jerusalem Post's shocking interview with a member of the Basij militia, the supposed guardians of religious morality in Iran.
He said he had been a highly regarded member of the force, and had so "impressed my superiors" that, at 18, "I was given the 'honor' to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death."
In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a "wedding" ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard—essentially raped by her "husband."…
"I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their 'wedding' night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die.
"I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over," he said. "I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her."
The rule of virtue on earth? No, this is sadism under the cover of morality. And it is standard operating procedure for the Basij. The interview describes the Basij member's view of who has been committing many of the beatings and killings of protesters.
He pinned the blame for much of the most ruthless violence employed by the Iranian security apparatus against opposition protesters on what he called "imported security forces"—recruits, as young as 14 and 15, he said, who have been brought from small villages into the bigger cities where the protests have been centered.
"Fourteen and 15-year old boys are given so much power, which I am sorry to say they have abused," he said. "These kids do anything they please—forcing people to empty out their wallets, taking whatever they want from stores without paying, and touching young women inappropriately. The girls are so frightened that they remain quiet and let them do what they want."
These youngsters, and other "plainclothes vigilantes," were committing most of the crimes in the names of the regime, he said.
This doesn't even rise to the level of a theocracy. It's Lord of the Flies. And that's the sick tragedy of this story.
Explaining how he had come to join the volunteer Basiji forces, he said his mother had taken him to them. When he was 16, "my mother took me to a Basiji station and begged them to take me under their wing because I had no one and nothing foreseeable in my future. My father was martyred during the war in Iraq and she did not want me to get hooked on drugs and become a street thug."
A desperate widow, raising her son alone and afraid he will become a criminal, brings him to the religious militia in the hope that they will keep him on the straight and narrow—and instead, they turned him into an even worse criminal. There is the enemy's fatal contradiction laid bare.
It seems that many members of the Basij and the other security forces sense this—that under the cover of moral idealism they have become accomplices to evil.
The Basiji member, who is married with children, spoke soon after his release by the Iranian authorities from detention. He had been held for the "crime" of having set free two Iranian teenagers—a 13-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl—who had been arrested during the disturbances that have followed the disputed June presidential elections. "There have been many other police and members of the security forces arrested because they have shown leniency toward the protesters out on the streets, or released them from custody without consulting our superiors."
This guilt and uncertainty on the part of the regime's own security personnel is the sort of thing that rots an evil regime away from the inside and brings it down. It falls because even the men who are supposed to defend it know that it is evil.
This story gives us a fuller idea of the exact issue that has caused the rejection of Islamic theocracy in Iraq, in Iran, and hopefully also in Pakistan—even among people who are not educated liberals and who are unlikely advocates of secularism or the separation of mosque and state. And it is why many of the leading opponents of the regime in Iran are themselves members of the clergy.
The issue at stake here is more basic and elemental than dictatorship versus representative government, or separation of church and state. The issue is the role of morality in human life.
What is at stake is whether morality is to have any such role—and the defenders of theocracy are the ones who have come out against morality.
The specific form this takes is an internal theological dispute within Islam, so it is easy to dismiss it as nothing more than a power struggle between different religious factions. But religion here is a stand-in for morality as such, and the theological dispute is whether religion and morality take precedence over force and terror.
This is the literal theological issue behind both al-Qaeda as established by Osama bin Laden and the Iranian theocracy as established by the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Last summer, I linked to an important article on the defection of al-Qaeda's chief religious theorist, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, who had been convinced, while in an Egyptian jail, to denounce al-Qaeda and bin Laden. One of the central issues of his defection was a dispute over who ought to be in charge of the jihad: religious scholars like Fadl, or practical leaders like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.
The Middle East Media Research Institute provides several eye-opening reports (a short version here and a long version here) describing this conflict between "the party of jurisprudence" and "the party of action." At the time ("The Fundamentalist Apostates," June 5, 2008), I noted that this report explains "the reason why the jihadists have historically been so dependent on the support of established Islamic scholars: most of them are laymen—malignant malcontents who want to claim the ideological support of Islam but who have no specialized religious training that allows them to claim such support on their own authority."
Hence one of the issues behind Dr. Fadl's defection. As I described it: "It turns out that the current Sunni jihadist movement, while billing itself as a fundamentalist movement that wants to go back to traditional Islam, is actually a religious rebellion against the currently recognized Sunni religious authorities….
"[T]he jihadist movement has devolved into an attempt to establish the 'charismatic' jihadist leader as an infallible religious authority, enjoying a status similar to that of the prophet Mohamed himself—arguably a blasphemous notion. The goal is to free the jihadist leader from the necessity of religious scholarship, qualifying him to overrule the entire religious establishment."
According to MEMRI:
In the past, religious authority within this movement stemmed primarily from the scholarly credentials and reputation of the individual. This changed with the advent of a new group, namely the jihadi Salafi camp…. Though the members of this movement could not compete with the traditional Salafi scholars in erudition or devoutness, they nevertheless wished to gain religious authority. Consequently, they sought a new basis for religious authority that would include them within its scope.
To this end, the jihadists began promoting the idea that charisma—a personal trait that endows one with extraordinary and even supernatural qualities—was also a basis for authority on religious and social matters…. By describing the mujahideen as infallible, the jihadi Salafis removed them from the earthly realm of learning and erudition—a sphere monopolized by the traditional Salafi scholars—and elevated them to the level of individuals blessed with supernatural spiritual powers.
I then observed: "This is the deal with the devil every religion makes when it justifies the use of force to spread or enforce its influence. In the end, using force as a means to enforce the faith ends up subordinating the faith to the rule of force…. [T]hat is why, on the Sunni side, bin Laden and his henchman are trying to establish the precedent that their acts of ruthlessness automatically grant them the status of prophets."
I also observed: "That's why Iran is ruled by the Ayatollah Khamenei, who has the religious equivalent of a mail-order diploma; he was pushed through to ayatollah status, not because he was an eminent religious scholar, but because he had the political power and ruthlessness to defend Iran's Islamist dictatorship."
I did not realize until recently how literally true this is. In the middle of a very useful guide to the theological conflicts among Iran's Shiites—and particularly the history of the liberal and "reformist" factions—Abbas Milani provides a revealing summary of the doctrines of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
Before coming to power, Khomeini argued that the most important duty, indeed the raison d'etre of an Islamic government, was to implement fully the tenets of sharia [Islamic law]. But once in power and faced with the complexities of modern Iranian society, he subtly changed the very foundation of his theory. He introduced the concept of maslaha—interests of the regime—and declared, much to the consternation of nearly every other ayatollah, that these interests, as determined by him or his successor, would supersede even the fundamentals of Islam. In other words, the state was everything—and sharia was nothing but its legitimizing narrative, a narrative that could be suspended at the will of the leader.
Both al-Qaeda's theory and Khomeini's are literally doctrines of might makes right. It is not the case that Osama bin Laden claims the right to kill because of his established moral and religious authority; rather, he claims moral and religious authority because he kills. He has made brutality into the source of religious authority.
Similarly, Khomeini did not cite religious law as the foundation of his right to stay in power. Rather, he made staying in power the foundation of religious law.
So when I observed that the code of the Islamists "actually banishes morality from public life, subordinating it to force," it turns out that this is the essence of their theological doctrines. And it has to be the essence of their doctrines, because there is no other way to maintain a dictatorship. The dictator or terrorist leader cannot admit the authority of any permanent rules or the influence of any moral authority independent of his power, because this would impose checks and balances that limit his action. So he seeks to make his ideology bend to his whims and to assert the supremacy of those whims over any kind of ideological or religious establishment. He establishes a doctrine of might makes right.
This explains the brutal equation now obvious to any Iranian: theocracy equals thugocracy. And that explains why both al-Qaeda and the Iranian regime have suffered such a spectacular loss of moral legitimacy among the populations they depend on to support them. They cannot claim moral legitimacy, because they are in favor of the subordination of morality to brute force.
Islam is particularly susceptible to such doctrines, because it was founded by a criminal and a dictator: Mohammed established himself first as a prophet, then as a brigand plundering Arabian trade routes, and finally as the tyrant of Medinah. So Khomeini and Bin Laden could plausibly claim they were following in his footsteps.
But this same contradiction is inherent in any form of theocracy. In attempting to impose the rule of religious authority, a theocracy necessarily launches a heretical assault on religious authority. This applies to any theocracy in any religious tradition—and even, for that matter, to any secular doctrine. The moment any doctrine imposes itself by force, it commits suicide. Intellectually, it ceases to be a living idea and turns into an empty formula. Morally, it ceases to be a code of values and becomes a rationalization for sadism.
What this makes fully clear to me, for the first time, is the centrality of force as a moral issue. What I have always found compelling about politics is that it is the arena for the most important moral questions of the age. But it is specifically the arena for what is, in a social context, the central moral question, the one with the power to render every other moral issue moot. That question is: will force be subordinated to the mind? Because this is the only thing that makes morality possible.
In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand writes that "Force and mind are opposites; morality ends where a gun begins." Morality is a phenomenon of the free mind: it is a matter of choice, of values, of principles and arguments. When a doctrine is imposed by force, it is imposed without regard for any of these things—and thus without regard for morality. When a gun replaces an argument, it also replaces morality. Then the sadists and killers sense that they are in control and take over. That is how you get moral and religious movements composed of such "idealists" as armed robbers and rapists.
This is the fatal contradiction of the Islamists. It is what repels and disillusions their followers wherever the Islamists try to take over—from the atrocities of al-Qaeda in Iraq, to the public beatings and murders and juice-bar bombings committed by the Taliban in Pakistan, to the beatings and assassinations carried out in the streets of Tehran. The substitution of brutality for morality leads to a catastrophic loss of moral legitimacy and a subsequent rejection of the Islamists by the people they seek to rule.
Why are our enemies in the War on Terrorism losing? Why are they always doomed to lose, in the long run? Because morality ends where a gun begins.
Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist (TIA) and contributor to The Freedom Fighter's Journal
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