If proof were needed that there is a Devil, the Greek Civil War of 1945-49 is it:

1. Entirely homogeneous people with the same language, religion and culture dating back to the Trojan War -- a culture which is one of the pillars of Western civilization.
2. As strong a national identity (as opposed to a tribal identity) as any nation in the history of earth.
3. A constitutional monarchy with a democratically elected parliamentary system of government in place since 1832.
4. Safety valves for unconstitutional acts by the monarch -- there had been four deposings of a king in the last 100 years.
5.a) The Balkan Wars of 1912-14;
b) The Asia Minor debacle of 1922;
c) The fighting against the Italians and Germans;
d) Half a million Greeks dead at Dachau and another million in Greece by SS machine guns and starvation during the German occupation;
so you would think that they had fill of dying.
6. An even freer and more democratic government than they had before the Axis invasions.

And still there were those who felt that more Greek blood needed to be spilled over an ideology created for starving Russian peasants.

The Left (at lest in America) has categorized Asians (by which I mean Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, et al) as "effectively white". They're too successful, you see. Since the Left's taxonomy starts with whites and their victims, and the Asians stubbornly refuse to play victim and fail, they're white.

Since the Left controls the world view of the chattering classes, it tends to leak into everybody's thinking.

The Left is both racially bigoted and delusional.

Not even Thomas Jefferson believed in Jeffersonian democracy, if we are to use the standards of Barnett and others. They do not know their American history well enough to be making these comparisons. Jefferson thought the French Revolution was a good thing, because it shook things up. George Washington was very much in disagreement. Jefferson was very partisan whereas John Adams thought that partisan politics was a threat to the Republic. And Jefferson did not support the concept of a strong federal government holding sway over states.

Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man with a complicated legacy. He was a slave holding libertarian who wrote the Declaration of Independence..but when he talked of his country he was speaking of Virginia as much as the United States.

In other words, it is ridiculous to talk about Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq when so few people understand Jeffersonian democracy in our own history.

In truth Bush said we would help the Iraqis create a representative government..that is not the same thing as Colonial America.

So yes, the argument that the Arabs are savages or barbarians incapable of anything other than butchery and mayhem is a racist concept and one I do not want to be associated with.

I think you've read a little more into Barnett's comments that is really there. I don't see him saying that democracy can't work in Iraq, but rather that the radical elements, Al Qaeda and Iran's proxies, aren't interested in a functional democracy. We can't hinge the whole enterprise on reconcilling those groups.

But other than that, nice post!

PS

Pete S.:

I think you've read a little more into Barnett's comments that is really there. I don't see him saying that democracy can't work in Iraq, but rather that the radical elements, Al Qaeda and Iran's proxies, aren't interested in a functional democracy. We can't hinge the whole enterprise on reconcilling those groups.

Barnett says that the radicals have no interest in democracy, which is true; but he uses the phrase "Jeffersonian democracy" to supposedly describe what the Bush administration is trying to do -- which is flatly wrong and is only used by certain conservatives and libertarians who attack the entire policy of the democratization of Iraq.

(And note that he does not, in his answer, go on to say that other Iraqis do believe in democracy, and that it is of any importance in defeating the extremists on both sides.)

An analogous term is "trickle-down economics;" proponents of tax cuts for business never use that term.

Its use is a dead giveaway that the speaker is a liberal Democrat who completely opposes tax cuts in general and utterly rejects the idea that taking less money away from companies via taxation will result in more jobs.

Similarly, anyone who uses the term "amnesty" to describe Bush's immigration proposal doesn't support it. This can include not only right-wingers who want an enforcement-only system but also Democrats who want real, actual, honest-to-badness amnesty, flat amnesty, for all illegals: they also refer to the Bush proposal as "amnesty" because they know that enrages the base and they want it (and Bush himself) to fail.

So calling the immigration proposal "amnesty" is an unmistakable sign that the speaker opposes the proposal.

We all use word-choice to try to shape an argument; for example, I typically refer to the People's Republic of China as "Red China," because I want no one to forget that it's run by a Communist Party. And I reject the term "Islamofascist" (and especially Michael Medved's linguistic atrocity "IslamoNazi") because the shout-word "-fascist" turns the rest of the word ("Islamo-") into a whisper... thus obscuring the most dangerous aspect of militant jihadism: its fanatical religious origin.

The phrase "Jeffersonian democracy" has one major effect: it tends to make readers more skeptical that people not of European descent can support a democracy. There is no other reason to use such a term in this context, where nothing of the sort has been proposed or argued.

Dafydd

And Then There Are the Problems No One Wants To Talk About:

Calls for American troops to put more emphasis on training Iraqis, ignores the dismal results of over three years effort in that department. In this case, it's not entirely the fault of the Iraqis. Saddam's government depended on the Sunni Arab minority to provide nearly all the officers and NCOs in the military, as well as officials in the government and secret police. Few of these Sunni Arabs are working for the government these days. Not because many Sunni Arabs don't want to give democracy a chance, but because the diehard Sunni Arab nationalists have used terror (including murder and kidnapping) to persuade Sunni Arabs to not work for the democratic government.

This leaves the Shia Arabs and Kurds to staff the new Iraqi army and police force. But as we have reported here over the past three years, that's a time consuming process. And it is made more difficult by the culture of corruption and tribalism (family and tribe come before loyalty to the nation). Year by year, there are an increasing number of competent officers and NCOs, but it's still not enough to enable U.S. troops to go home. But the trend is clear. If American troops suddenly disappeared by the end of 2006, the Iraqi security forces would be able to cope.

The Sunni Arab terrorists never really had a chance of regaining control. What chance they did have, went down steadily over the past three years. Currently, the Sunni Arabs are outnumbered, in terms of population, by about eight-to-one. In terms of people with guns, they are outnumbered about five to one. The Sunni Arabs still have an edge in skills (and education), and attitude. Many Sunni Arabs still believe they will prevail because, well, because they believe Sunni Arabs are simply superior to those Kurd and Shia scum. But in a fight-to-the-death, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are a very long shot to win.

The Shia and Kurds also have a secret weapon; hatred of the Sunni Arabs. The Shia and Kurds want revenge. What no one wants to admit out loud is that the Shia and Kurd population are very much in favor of doing a "Bosnia" or "Rwanda" to the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. The Iraqi government won't touch this one, because they know that it would cause their Sunni Arab neighbors to start talking openly of intervention. This is what the Iraqi Sunni Arab terrorists want. This is what all Sunni Arabs in the region want. That's because the Sunni Arabs do not want an Arab state controlled by Shia.

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