We're not all the same, and that's a good thing

:Rant Warning:

It's not as if we haven't heard it before: "this is the biggest election in recent history." But for those of us who are also facing the first election in our history, the words ring a bit hollow.

With polling showing that young voters are trending Democratic, the Get Out the Vote movement seems to be a staple of the Democratic ticket.

But this is just more passing the buck onto our generation. If Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton hadn't ignored the dangers of fundamentalist Islamic militance, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about a debacle in Iraq. Our past presidents have been happy to treat the emerging threat in the Middle East as one that can be dealt with on a military level, and the current president and Senator Kerry have taken the exact same tact.

Saying that we will "hunt down and kill" all the terrorists is simply lunacy. There isn't an Al Qaeda army that we can defeat in battle. We can't just kill a certain number of people and then say we've done our job.

So the conventional wisdom is that what we need to do is foster democracy in the Middle East, under the premise that when we show the Arabs just how great our democracy is, we'll be BFF.

The problem with that line of thinking is twofold. First, it's not as if the Arabs aren't aware of what democracy is. We here in the States, and in the Western world tend to think that everyone else in the world is too stupid to see how great democracy is, without our shoving guns down their throats. Secondly, speaking with Christopher Allbritton a month ago, he told me that he doubts that the current generation of Iraqis will ever adopt democracy, at least not in any true sense. If anything, it would be an Egyptian-style "democracy" with the winner getting 90% or more of the votes.

Chris' rationale for why the Iraqis would be slow, at best, to adopt democracy was that their cultural beliefs include a sense of subordination to authority, both paternal in the home and towards local officials. Thus, the idea of campaigning or voting against the ruling party, or one's elders, seems really unreasonable. Secondly, more than just a religion, Islam sets out a total way to live a life, including providing governmental leadership. Asking the Iraqis, and by extension the rest of the Middle East, to adopt a truly democratic government is like asking them to become born-against Christians (which is sure to be tried).

My take on it is that the US would have a lot better success when it comes to foreign policy to accept cultural and political diversity, not to try and proselytize the rest of the world. If the Defense Department actually spent the money to have a set of analyists for virtually every country, we'd find that we can actually get along with most of them. I don't get the sense that foreigners hate us just because we're Americans, they hate us because too often we don't seem to care that they're different than us.

This isn't meant to be some rosy-tinted paeon to World Peace or some meaningless drivel like that. It's simply my belief that if we put actual energy into understanding other cultures, and dealing with them as they are, instead of trying to change them, we'd find out that foreign policy is actually a lot easier than we think it is.

My problem with this election is that I fear that whether Kerry or Bush wins, it'll still be more of the same when it comes to foreign policy.

UPDATE:

Drudge has this transcript of comments made by Osama bin Laden to Al-Jezeera.

It's not particularly effective in this day and age to cite OBL to support an argument, but we think we can here. He's merely saying that U.S. provocations against Muslim people and various Arab nations are a part of the rationale for 9/11 and other attacks against the U.S. We're not excusing 9/11, attack civilians is no way to fight a war.

But OBL does show something that we've been saying for years, that saying that all Islamic terrorists hate freedom is ridiculous. As he puts it, "[we fight for reasons]contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. He should tell us why we didn't hit Sweden for instance."

The problem is that both Bush and Kerry have presented this as a war against unreasoning, irrational madmen, so that it would take a radical change in the tenor of our foreign policy to say that, actually, Islamic terrorists don't hate us because they "hate freedom," they hate us because we attack their nations, condescend to them, refuse to respect their culture, and generally don't care about them as more than a source for oil.