Iraqis Rejecting Islamic Extremism, Bush Doctrine Cited

Abe Greenwald has an awesome post on the implications of events covered in this morning's New York Times story, "Violence Leaves Young Iraqis Doubting Clerics."

Iraq's young radical extremist are renouncing not just terrorist violence, but the nihilist religious doctrines justifying it.

Here's Greenwald:

Question: What is the most extraordinary thing about the following extraordinary sentence?

BAGHDAD — After almost five years of war, many young people in Iraq, exhausted by constant firsthand exposure to the violence of religious extremism, say they have grown disillusioned with religious leaders and skeptical of the faith that they preach.

Answer: It is the lead of a story in today’s New York Times. The paper of record, which for the past few years could accurately be described as a body count with a styles section, is now acknowledging the realization of the most ambitious goal of the Iraq War: the de-radicalization of Muslim citizens. This is, in its way, more important than political reconciliation and even more important than hunting down al Qaeda. This is the long war stuff, the hearts-and-minds stuff.

The goal was to offer freedom as an alternative to extremism; the criticism was that it was a dream; the reality is that it is happening. From the Times:

Such patterns, if lasting, could lead to a weakening of the political power of religious leaders in Iraq. In a nod to those changing tastes, political parties are dropping overt references to religion.

And the revelations don’t end there. Sabrina Tavernise, who wrote the piece, notes that the extent of Iraqis’ wholesale rejection of jihad is unique in the region:

The shift in Iraq runs counter to trends of rising religious practice among young people across much of the Middle East, where religion has replaced nationalism as a unifying ideology.

It is impossible not to infer that the Bush Doctrine and the commitment of the men and women in uniform has facilitated this shift. Far from “creating more terrorists” as the failed cliché goes, the war has helped to nurture an appreciation for liberty among Iraqi youth.

Greenwald's absolutely right to note the epochal nature of this development, and the essential, continuing vindication of the Bush administration's Iraq policy. Greenwald also note the obvious: That these developments will not be recognized by Bush-bashers and America-haters who want nothing more than the U.S. to fail in Iraq. The antiwar forces will spin these developments in the most deranged ways imaginable.

For example, as al Qaeda has resort to even more barbaric tactics than previously imagined (stapping remote-control bombs to mentally-impaired Iraqi women), our nihilist leftists at home praise such developments as "brilliant strategic adaptations" in the fight to kill more and more Americans and Iraqis.

Even as the New York Times piece itself notes that...

Violent struggle against the United States was easy to romanticize at a distance.

“I used to love Osama bin Laden,” proclaimed a 24-year-old Iraqi college student. She was referring to how she felt before the war took hold in her native Baghdad. The Sept. 11, 2001, strike at American supremacy was satisfying, and the deaths abstract.

Now, the student recites the familiar complaints: Her college has segregated the security checks; guards told her to stop wearing a revealing skirt; she covers her head for safety.

“Now I hate Islam,” she said, sitting in her family’s unadorned living room in central Baghdad. “Al Qaeda and the Mahdi Army are spreading hatred. People are being killed for nothing.”

...Our nihilist, freedom-hating defeatists explain it all away as a fluke, a rejection of the point that allows the antiwar cadres to blame it all on the occupation.

The antiwar defeatists are the same forces who compared the Taliban's 12 year-old boy terrorists - who inflict beheadings and live-immolations on their hostages - to the Catholic Church's scandals of homosexuality.

Nope, it's all moral relativism. Indeed the U.S. is even worse than our enemies, claim the antiwar types: The Bush administration's is the new Nazi regime.

We're winning in Iraq: The administration sees it, the military sees it, the American people see it, and Iraqis themselves see it - as they increasingly renounce their own religion's fight against the historic forces of freedom.

Yes, that's victory, on the largest scale imaginable.

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