Stanley, I think this “let’s embrace the Muslim Brotherhood” flier is indicative a wider problem, as to which I haven’t settled in my own mind whether the democracy project is another symptom or the cause itself.
We have apparently settled on a foreign policy that always and everywhere elevates process over substance. I remember, back when the surge was first being announced, being briefed by an administration official who mentioned that the president had been on the phone with ”moderate Iraqi leaders” with whom we’d been consulting, including Abdul Aziz al-Hakim. I mentioned that al-Hakim was the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and asked whether we really thought he and SCIRI were “moderates.” I was told yes — because they are willing to participate in the “democratic process.” The Iran-modeled sharia state they would like to accomplish through the “democratic process” was of no concern. They purported to be content to vote and legislate rather than blow stuff up (at least for now), so, presto, they were moderates.
I note, by the way, that SCIRI has since dropped the “Revolution” from its monicker. But that’s obviously a cosmetic alteration. It maintains an armed wing, the Badr Brigades which is a big part of the problem over there, and of which al-Hakim used to be in charge. And the five Iranian operatives captured in Baghdad last December plotting murder and mayhem against our troops were reported to have been apprehended in al-Hakim’s own compound — although he later denied that this was so (not very convincingly, from what I can tell).
As I’ve argued before, the Shiites are a substantial majority in Iraq, so their purported buying on (at least for now) to what we call the democratic process is reflective of the fact that they stand to win all popular elections, not that they’ve become democrats. But meanwhile, whether it’s with SCIRI, the Brotherhood, Hamas, Fatah, or whoever, if our only test for who is worthy of U.S. support, cooperation, and negotiations is whether they are willing to participate in a process, we are (a) legitimizing and empowering a lot of bad people who have some very un-democratic ideas about how societies should be governed, and (b) relieving ourselves of the burden of examining — before we commit our military to any future experiments in Islamic democratization — whether these societies really want something we would recognize as democracy.
For my money, what these folks want to achieve is just as important as how they are willing to go about achieving it.