U.S. Democratizing Agenda in Middle East Lends Credence to Jihadist Complaint
Holmes also distills the later neoconservative justification for a war to 'liberate' Iraq. In this reasoning, more democracy would mean less terrorism. President Bush has explicitly offered this explanation more than once, as he was when speaking before a Fort Bragg audience in 2005:
Our mission in Iraq is clear. We're hunting down the terrorists. We're helping Iraqis build a free nation that is an ally in the war on terror. We're advancing freedom in the broader Middle East. We are removing a source of violence and instability, and laying the foundation of peace for our children and our grandchildren.
As Holmes explains, however, while this democratizing agenda sounds logical on its face, it ends up giving credence to the jihadist cause and, by the by, demonstrating illogic at the core of the American response to terrorism since 2001:
The idea that the United States should devote blood and treasure to spreading democracy around the world has not always been fashionable among strong-on-defense American conservatives. Its extraordinary prominence in justifying the Iraq war, although in large measure hypocritical, is therefore worth exploring. What it illuminates, in the end, is the deep incoherence of the U.S. response to 9/11. The idea that jihadist terrorism is caused by lack of democracy in the Arab world deserves to be evaluated on its own merits. It is a theory officially endorsed by the U.S. President, however. What is remarkable, therefore, is that this theory implicitly acknowledges a strain of justice in the jihadist cause. It assumes that terrorism is an understandable by-product of American-backed autocracy, that is, of the absence of serious opportunities for political participation in much of the Muslim world. The proposal to democratize the Arab Middle East also implies that any durable solution to the terrorist threat must be political, not military.