Youssef Ibrahim states that “America’s war on terror is premised on the rejection of religious tyranny and the separation of mosque and state.” Would that that were true. The sad reality is that our culture at large, including our current president, has lost the ability to grasp the core American principle of inalienable individual rights and its corollary principle of the separation of church and state. As a result, “freedom” for our deeply religious president means the spread of unlimited majority rule—by means of war, if necessary—to a part of the world untouched by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and whose citizens are therefore far more likely to vote for a dictatorship founded on Islamic sharia law than for a republic founded on a constitution that protects individual rights.
The Iraq War vs. The American Revolution
For President Bush to compare the Iraq war to the American Revolution, and, by implication, himself to George Washington, is morally obscene. The American Revolution was fought to establish the first and only country in history explicitly based on the principle of the recognition and protection of individual rights. The Iraq war is being fought, neither to protect the rights of Americans, nor to establish a new, free country that protects the rights of its citizens, but rather, to establish the so-called “right” of a philosophically bankrupt population to vote in any form of government they choose. In the context of the Middle East, this will almost certainly result in a new Islamic dictatorship, and ultimately, a much more threatening enemy than Saddam Hussein.