Liberty

It’s hard to carp about Secretary of State Rice’s magnificent speech in Cairo last week. She took the principle of freedom and democratic reform to the autocrat in his capital and raked the Arab world in its own front yard. As Americans, we thrilled at the words, “Liberty is the universal longing of every soul.”

But as policy wonks, we cringed.

It’s hard to carp about Secretary of State Rice’s magnificent speech in Cairo last week. She took the principle of freedom and democratic reform to the autocrat in his capital and raked the Arab world in its own front yard. As Americans, we thrilled at the words, “Liberty is the universal longing of every soul.”

But as policy wonks, we cringed.

Liberty is NOT a universal longing; in dark places it is a rare spark that lives only in the strongest souls. Asserting otherwise has made it difficult for the Bush Administration to properly understand the machinations within the Palestinian Authority and the reasons the PA cannot and will not function as a partner to Israeli aspirations for security and legitimization in the region. And this makes Israel’s very real sacrifices for security and the disengagement more difficult, more dangerous, and ultimately less tenable.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad simply have no longing for liberty. The opposite – they are fascist organizations and like all fascist organizations, they need to be destroyed. But the Palestinian Authority under Abu Mazen refuses to do so in part because loyalty to other Palestinians is greater than any possible loyalty to Israel, the U.S. or the little-understood institution of democracy. And because liberty and democracy are not at the foundation of the PA. The scheduled July parliamentary elections in the territories were cancelled by Abu Mazen because his party was going to lose to a party (Hamas) that should never have been allowed to run.

OK, you say, but the “people” long for liberty. Maybe. Certainly most people prefer to be left alone by their governments, the very most basic requirement for personal liberty. But what to do with people who want their government to leave them alone, but turn its violent tendencies on others – in this case Israelis? What about people who want to blow themselves up in order to deny liberty to others? Or people who cheer for those who do? What about people who truly believe the 11th Century was the height of civilization and are willing to sacrifice themselves, not for liberty, but in idealistic service to that notion? All of those people live in the Palestinian territories. All of them live in the Arab world.

Secretary Rice was humble about the stain of slavery on American honor. Our Founding Fathers chose not to deal with it, but recognized the ability of an evil institution to undermine the fabric of our society. A horrible civil war was required to create a single standard for citizenship in America, and almost another century to enforce it.

There is an evil institution afoot in the Middle East – fascism. It can be secular as in Egypt, religious as in Saudi Arabia, or both as in the PA. It may not take horrible wars in the Middle East to excise it, but it may, and the Secretary of State of the United States cannot simply skip over that possibility.

Evil must be suppressed, forcibly where necessary, to create the space in which liberty might flourish in more souls and be reflected in more governments.