Gingrich on Cultural Relativism

""I'm so worried about the fact the marjaiyah [top Shiite clergy] is given so much power," said Hatem Mukhlis, a secular Sunni Arab politician. "The Americans should be really aware of what's happening. It's giving a lot of power to Sistani that he shouldn't have."

A cleric close to Sistani acknowledged that the statement did signal a new role for the Shiite clergy, that of "monitoring" the performance of the next government and weighing in, perhaps more frequently, on broad policy issues.

"The marjaiyah intends to interfere in some issues," Sheik Abu Mohammed Baghdadi, a Najaf cleric, said in an interview. "This monitoring and direct interference is an essential matter that has never before been proposed by the clergy. The marjaiyah, through this act, is expressing the voice of the people."

Sistani's statement followed a meeting with Prime Minister-designate Nouri Maliki, a conservative Shiite leader. Maliki came to Najaf to solicit Sistani's views in the midst of efforts to form a government, reinforcing a growing relationship between Shiite politicians in Baghdad and their religious counterparts in Najaf."  LA Times

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Are we nuts, or what?  We invaded Iraq to free it from a fascistic but secular dictatorship and now we are sponsoring the creation of a medieval theocracy?  I thought we were supposed to stand for something in the world and that one of those things was freedom OF RELIGION but also FROM RELIGION.  What?  This is their way of doing things?  Genocide and the oppression of minorities and women are "their way of doing things" in many parts of the world.

"Cultural relativism?"  I will quote Newt Gingrich, the sage of the "contract with America."  "Cultural relativism is like saying that going to McDonald's or boiling up your neighbor have equal merit as culturally driven ways of having lunch."  I heard him say it as part of his famous (not) speech about the "bloody footprints in the snow..."  In this, I agree with him.

It is one thing to respect other peoples' ancestral ways and to be considerate in what you say and do when operating on their turf.  It is quite another to set out to empower the most anti-modern, anti-Western elements in a society and then "wink" at the coming subordination of the constitutional government to the theologically driven opinions of clergy who have been waiting all their days for the return of the occulted 12th Imam.  They have been waiting so that they can turn over power to him.

What happened to the part in which the Iraqi Shia higher Clergy were not interested in political power?  Did that "reality" depart with the children's crusade that was the CPA?

Where are the neocons and their familiars and their famously Jacobin and secular "principles?"

Pat Lang

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-sistani28apr28,0,3209360.story?track=tothtml

Comments

[canuck]

I'm not knowledgeable enough about the role of Sustani, but it's my understanding he seldom interferes in the political process.

Whether he's been politized I don't know? If I were in their place, to get rid of the militias, I would have called on Peter Rabbit if he had any influence over the population . Why wouldn't they turn to 'anyone' who can assist in controlling the size and number of the militias who now dominate?

[canuck]

BTW, Gingrich isn't my idea of an authority on anything.

[DeWitt Grey]

Colonel:

Perhaps you've "forgotten" that this is exactly how we managed the post-war occupations of Germany and Japan -- you know, the way we brought back the Hohenzollerns and the Prussian aristocracy in Germany and the Tokugawa shogunate in Japan . . .

[Patrick Henry]

Col..Good Post...

I Agree with your Points...
SECULAR..HOLY WAR Anticipated RESULTS>>also see a Strong Trend in that direction..

Reality is...Its a Very Powerful event..Its a Complete RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT
Based on a UNIVERSAL RELIGION..ISLAM..and itts Teachings..and NOW>>>based on its PROPHECYS.."SIGNIFICINT EVENT.."

Its Militant Wing..and Political structure has been around a long time..

I/E..BERUITE..and before..
since the 40's..

They have almost now alot of GUNS..behind them...and are gaining in POWER..

I think you and I see current events in IRAQ..the same with.... GROWING SHIA Influence and ARRANGEMENTS..and TRIBAL TRUCES>>so the United States will start a withdrawl from the Region..

What Happens THEN..??

Whats going to happen in Afghanistan..??

Same Thing..??

AND......NO BIN LADEN..

The MAIN MAN....

We`Americans .and Free World Peoples...Need to Anticipate a Major Religious Confrontation...a Threat of RELIGIOUS WAR..and UNIVERSAL..Because of the CONSEQUENCES..

As a CHRISTIAN..and Believer in JESUS....as a TEACHER..As a RABBI..as a PROPHET..EMPOWERED..by the HOLY SPIRIT..(Gods GIFT to MAN)

Who came to FUFILL GODS WILL..The ONE He called ">>
ABBA..

And Taught and did wonderful things about GODS "LOVE''
..and Peace...and Forgiveness..

and BROTHERLY LOVE..Which Binds Us as Believers..and Good Christians..

I am Watching and Anticipating a Growing Undertsanding among the Universal Christian Body..

That ISLAM FACTIONS...are Declaring War with the WEST..and CHRISTIANS and JEWS..

with the INTENT of REGIONAL Domination ..of a THEOCRACY..VERY STRICT..and CONTROLLING ..

and Domination of OIL..and Using it to PUNISH...other Nations at WILL..and Impose ECONOMIC HARDSHIPS..
and Basicaly CONTROL the Industralized Nations and anyone else they Chose..

So We Now have MANY..MANY Issues to CONSIDER...Foreign and Domestic..
and OUR OWN Religious Values and Beliefs..

As Christians..as Individual Persons..and as FREE PEOPLE..

With a GOOD CONSTITUTION..

and who Have been through the Seperation of Church and "STATE" Issue..in our past History..

and now Believe in the RIGHT to WORSHIP..

But NOT Impose RELIGION..on SOCIETY..

God wants us to come to HIM Willingly..

Then he knows we are SINCERE..with OPEN Heart..

[W. Patrick Lang]

DeWitt Grey

Baloney!

This is NOTHING like the way we managed either of those occupations. In Germany we fostered the re-instututionalization of constitutional and representative government based on principals that we belieived in. I had the advantage of living in Germany during the occupation and remember well the program my father and his colleagues carried out.

As for Japan, MacArthur, whatever his other faults, oversaw the creation of a democratic and anti-militaristic government which has stood the test of time. pl

[W. Patrick Lang]

Canuck

Hey! Irony, remember that? Irony! pl

[T-Bone]

Canuck, your understanding is incorrect. Sistani has made it a point to avoid directly intervening in politics, true. I think the saying goes something like, the best politicians seek to work with clerics, but only the worst clerics work with politicians. He has even retained his Iranian citizenship in order to distance himself from the various Iraqi factions. Still, on virtually every issue of substance, political leaders of all stripes have sought his guidance. So while he has not promoted an overt Iranian-style vilayat-i-faqih (guardianship of the jurisconsult), in practice the effect is similar. On the other hand, as the highest source of emulation, Sistani could be considered to be the most popular figure in Iraq, and thus the most democratically supported leader. Believers are free to follow their own marjas, and millions have chosen him.

[W. Patrick Lang]

Canuck

I missed the first part. Try thinking what the Iraqi government will be like if they let the "clerics" determine policy. pl

[W. Patrick Lang]

T-Bone (why not Porterhouse?)

All that is true but it comfiteth me not. pl

[McGee]

Hi Colonel - can't speak for anyone else, but pretty sure DeWitt Grey's comment about the Holenzollerns and Tokugawa merited an Irony Alert.....

[McGee]

Hohenzollerns, and sorry about the double-posting!

[Happy Jack]

canuck - Sistani might not be sitting in the driver's seat, but it's been clear for some time that he's holding the map.

[Curious]

People. This discussion was supposed to be carried out a year ago. At this stage, there will be no progress in Iraq government side unless we remove ALL of our own civilian leadership so we can do 'real' damage control and repair instead of long series of CYA and blunders.

Current crucial discussion. What to do with our war with Iran. (yes we are already in the opening phase conflict with Iran) Only skillfull diplomacy will get us out of the eventual open clash. And we know what Bush diplomatic skill consists of.

Either we do something or it will become full blow regional conflict.

a year or two from now, we will be discussing how to save our base in UAE and how many troops it takes to protect it. Nobody will care which Imam is more palatable than the other.

[linda]

Where are the neocons and their familiars and their famously Jacobin and secular "principles?"

working up that cakewalk recipe for iran ...

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:
I read your comments.
I respectfully disagree with your strong sentiments. The Muslim people love their religion; that simple faith has given hundreds of millions of people an inner dignity that the latest pronouncements of godless-but modern- Western intellectual cannot.
What exactly this Western modernity is about? Is it about the neo-paganism of MTV? Or the death of God? Are not the 60 million dead of WWII sufficient witness to the moral bankruptcy of the West European modernity experiment that began after the Reformation?
Yes, much of their heritage is mediaeval but all existing religions, in their current forms, are creatures of that time period. Mr. Sistani and the Najaf scholars were empowered by the events and not by US. A similar thing happened in Iran when the Shah of Iran was busy destroying all structured opposition to his rule. It left the Muslim Scholars of Islamic Jurisprudence and their network of lesser mullahs as the only political organization left capable of running Iran after the collapse of the Pahlavi regime.
Islam is inherently political. Ibn Khaldun observed this several hundred years ago. Expecting scholars of Islamic Jurisprudence to have no say in the politics of an Islamic country is like expecting there to be no lawyers in US government structures.
I would also like to point out that, in Argentina, by law, the President of the Republic has to be a Catholic.
Lastly, the strong religious polity of Iraq was an opportunity that was not exploited by US. I suspect that had the President of the United States, his Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, Ambassador Bremer, and their immediate families had converted to Islam before or after the invasion of Iraq; the current situation would not have transpired.

[ckrantz]

Personally I don't think the administration care what kind of state Iraq develop into or what kind of goverment there are as long as they welcome a long-term U.S. presence.

Isn't Iraq a testing ground also for Rumsfelds "lily pads" basing with ready equipment warehoused there for expeditionary forces to use when needed. With embedded special forces and airpower doing most of the fighting.

[W. Patrick Lang]

Babak

We agree to respect each other and our sometimes differing views.

What would be your explanation of the holocaust of blood shed in the Iran-Iraq War or the bestialities of the Algerian civil war of the last fifteen years?

Actually, the Christianity of the modern West was shaped and tranformed by the experiences of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Renaissance in general. Islam has not passed through analogous experience or transformation.

Your point about the unitary nature of the Islamic view of life is clear to me or anyone else who knows anything of value about the religion. My point was that this point of view is inimical to American values, and that the US should not be sponsoring the creation of such a state.

Argentina is not the United States.

I regret to say that your last point is absurd and I presume is meant as humor.

[T-Bone]

Col.,
Absolutely; I'm not saying it's a good thing, just recognizing that's where it stands, that Sistani's not and never would be some quietist who stays above politics. The clerics will likely not "determine" policy, merely "approve" it.

Anybody who had studied the Iranian Tobacco Concession, the Constitutional Revolution, the 1920 Revolt, the rise of Dawa, Mohammed Baqir Sadr or Mohammed Sadiq Sadr would have planned for this eventuality. This is the ulama's chance to reverse its defeat in 1920. Unfortunately, we don't institutionally reward such historical perspective in our national security apparatus, we punish it.

"T-Bone"'s what the kangaroo court designated me. Good times.

[W. Patrick Lang]

McGee

Sounds like I missed somethiing rhetorical here. Which Hohenzollerns? I remember people like Adenauer and Brandt. pl

[W. Patrick Lang]

Mcgee

Ah! Hoist my own petard? pl

[W. Patrick Lang]

T-bone

You know your stuff. welcome aboard. pl

[Dewitt Grey]

Colonel:

I was, in fact, kidding -- indeed, attempting to draw a sharp contrast from what one would hope was recent memory of our approach to being an Occupying Power to the mess we have on our hands today.

At the risk of getting my head bit off again (given your General Marshall-like dim views of careless staff work), it seems to me that we have permitted our policy to be driven by our propaganda instead of the propaganda being tailored to suit the policy. We insisted on national elections even when the security situation was so bad that many of the candidates had to withhold their names out of fear of assassination or other reprisals. We didn't insist that the governments which were formed adhere to the principles we thought important, such as national unity, even though we controlled then (as we still effectively control) the Iraqi exchequer. I recognize that the hand we're playing in Baghdad is not nearly so strong as the hand we were holding in Germany and Japan in 1946, not least because the Germans and Japanese could generally see that the alternative (the Russians) were worse, but all the same I have a hard time believing that Lucius Clay and John J. McCloy and Douglas MacArthur would not be utterly dumbfounded by our complaisance in the face of an Iraqi government dominated by religious parties with close links to Iran.

[Gertrude Bell]

Ah yes, there were Sadrs galore in the old days, too.

Hard to work at your map table with all the commotion.

[c]

@Dewitt Grey

"We insisted on national elections even when the security situation was so bad that many of the candidates had to withhold their names out of fear of assassination or other reprisals."

Sistani insisted on elections when Bremer tried to push some "selected representation". Sistani did bring some 100,000 folks to the streets and Bremer had to pull back and indorse him.

http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/iraq/011704_clerics_urge_shiites_to_protest.htm

"policy to be driven by our propaganda" you say ...

[Babak Makkinejad]

Col. Lang:

If I were a Catholic, I could argue that the Nazism and Communism were direct results of the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Even in the darkest days of Inquisition we did not have anything reaching the scales of death and destruction that were reached in the 30-Year War and later surpassed in WWI & WW2.

The Iran-Iraq War was carnage that could have ended if certain well-known states had not decided to select the looser as a winner. My expectation was that Iraq would have been defeated by 1984.

About Algerian Civil War, all I can say is that civil wars are always ugly. I think the reason is mostly that the combatants are irregular and have not gone through military training; they are not professional soldiers.

As for the need for Reformation in Islam; I completely disagree because, in my opinion, there is not even a semblance of an analogy between the two historical moments. You can argue for a need for reform but that is something that Muslims have been grappling with for the past 180 years. As I said before, Reformation was not such a great thing.

I disagree with the statement that the unitary nature of Islam is inimical to the values of US. There is much that is common heritage of the Semitic religions of West Asia. What isn't common, in my opinion, stems from the strong tradition of personal liberty in US. That tradition does not exist outside of (Northern) Europe and North America, in my judgment.

I disagree with your conclusion “the US should not be sponsoring the creation of such a state.”. The salient interest of US in ME is oil and only secondarily Israel’s security (a distant second). A stable and lawful Islamic Republic of Iraq that is peaceful, prosperous, and reliably pumps oil will have met major aims of US policy in ME. If US can be reasonably assured of the success of such an endeavor, why not?

And yes, I know US is not Argentina; my point was that different countries are different and that some non-Muslim countries also have strong religious influences in their State-Israel being another one.

My last point was not black humor. In WWI, the Muslim people were galvanized by the rumor, spread by the German Secret Service-no doubt, that the Kaiser has converted to Islam and has changed his name to Hajji Mohammad Wilhelm. It certainly would not have hurt the US cause in Iraq if the pro-Consul and/or the President had seen the light of Islam when they suddenly found themselves rulers of Muslim people.