A new Gallup poll (HT: Tempus Fugit) suggests that we’re both wrong to a degree: Islamic radicals don’t cite religious motivations, but they’re not economically downtrodden, either.

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were horrifying. We should never forget the murdered civilians and sacrificed lives of the police officers, firefighters, Flight 93 passengers, and other brave men and women. And it’s likely we as a nation won’t forget, thanks to the work of the national memory system–Hollywood–in depicting for various fictional accounts the events of 9/11.

Unfortunately our more substantial responses are disappointing. Even the war in Afghanistan, mostly a success, has put into power a government so cowed by Islamist tribal leaders that it doesn’t grant its own citizens even basic liberties such as the freedom of religion. And the invasion of Iraq–almost completely irrelevant to achieving the goals of the “war on terror”–has overextended U.S. military resources, sapped international good will, and created greater instability and danger.

Unlike many of his detractors, I think President Bush means well–I don’t believe he’s principally motivated by potential oil profits or other such cynical explanations offered by leftist critics. However, he and his policy advisers have made a number of naive assumptions about Iraq, most especially the assumption that freedom from tyranny is sufficient for democracy to flourish. The opposition party hasn’t countered with any ideas of substance.

What we lack in our foreign policy is realism. Instead we have conflicting and unrealistic ideologies. The political right doesn’t seem to recognize how important are cultural characteristics (as opposed to innate human qualities). The political left seems unwilling to condemn as inferior (and in need of change) those same cultural characteristics that breed violent Jihad. The right holds to an ideology of the innate goodness of mankind: just provide the right conditions, and people will naturally gravitate towards a just society. The left holds to an ideology of cultural relativism: no culture or religion is better than another, so we should just live and let live.

A realistic foreign policy would acknowledge that important cultural differences keep e.g. Iraqis and Afghanis from creating a just, democratic society on their own; it would acknowledge that although the United States has a responsibility to promote peace in the world, its policing powers are finite; it would note that wars with vaguely defined goals usually go badly; it would also admit that while the U.S. as a superpower can do many things independently of other countries, it has always been most effective in addressing serious international problems when working multilaterally. These aren’t new lessons–we learned them in the mid-Twentieth Century. Why haven’t we applied them in the Twenty-first Century?

I was particularly interested in the psychology of her abductors. The men who kidnapped Carroll murdered her translator, and they were apparently closely associated with al-Zarqawi. Yet they repeatedly expressed concern that she be comfortable, and they even repaid her for her laptop when they released her, seeming to want her to think she was treated well by them. What explains this hodgepodge of cruelty and kindness?

Steven Vincent authored In the Red Zone almost a year before he was murdered in Basra, Iraq. When I read about his death, I knew I had to read the book. A freelance journalist (actually a former art critic), he wrote articles from Iraq that were published in the National Review and The New York Times, among other periodicals. Unlike other journalists, he wasn’t whisked between safe zones in armored convoys. Instead, he rode unarmed with Iraqis, staying in their hotels and getting to know them first-hand. Though the book draws conclusions, it’s much more of a personal reflection than a political commentary. But those personal reflections and experiences revealed to me just how complicated and fascinating Iraq is.

Except for the Kurdish-controlled parts of northern Iraq where U.S. support is strong, everywhere Vincent went Iraqis told him they were thankful Saddam was gone but they hated U.S. troops and wanted them to leave. As Vincent explains it, the Iraqis are a proud people who are ashamed that they didn’t overthrow Saddam themselves and are even more ashamed about what the presence of the troops says about them: they can’t rule themselves.

The problem with Iraqi self-rule is that Iraq is a fractured country. I was already somewhat familiar with the major fractures: the independent, secular Kurds, the minority Sunni Muslims (largely former Baath party members), and the majority Shia Muslims, once oppressed by Saddam. But the fractures run even deeper. Families form enclaves, withdrawing so much into themselves that something like half of Iraqi marriages are between first or second cousins. This isolation reduces the sense of community; while many Iraqis keep the interior of their homes spotless, they allow garbage to pile in the streets, thinking nothing of constant littering.

That fractured condition allows radical religious leaders (or thugs hiding behind a religious name) to vie for ascendancy. Once they gain power these groups usually demand the rule of Islamic law, which oppresses women, stifles journalism, and offers draconian punishments (such as death for conversion from Islam). Yet Vincent was ambivalent towards Islam. He often dressed as an Islamic Iraqi, once even saying the words that made him technically a Muslim (Vincent calls himself a lapsed Presbyterian) in order to gain the trust of his translator at that time. He visited a prominent Shia festival in order to learn more about the popular Shia version of Islam. But that Shia festival also showed him one dark side of Islam.

The Shia, long persecuted by Saddam, have little love for the Sunni Wahabbi Islamists associated with Al Qaeda. Because the Wahabbi think the Shia are guilty of blasphemy, they often make the Shia victims of their attacks. Indeed, while Vincent visited the town of Karbala for the Shia festival of Ashura, the Wahabbi attacked again. However, it seems to be the festival itself, not the attack, that most impressed Vincent.

Ashura shocked him. Expecting to see a celebration along the lines of Easter, he instead realized that it was a glorification of death and suffering. Many Shia cut themselves to commemorate the slaughter of the Battle of Karbala.

Something else felt immobile, too: the spirit of the whole festival.

All this devotion doesn’t lead anywhere, I realized. It seemed circular, repetitious. For all its religiosity, Ashura lacked symbols that lift the spiritual imagination beyond the Battle of Karbala. What it needed, I thought heretically, was an image of resurrection: Hussain rising, Christ-like, from the ashes of his failure and defeat.

. . .

At the same time, though, I began to wonder if the Christian motifs in Shia iconography weren’t exactly what they seemed: a desire to emulate Christianity and–in a case of flagrant shirk [blasphemy]–deify Hussain and Ali, transform them into Christ-like incarnations of God. Ashura could use such a myth. Lacking a sense of transcendence, the festival offered the Shia no catharsis, no symbolic redemption. And so, like trauma victims, the pilgrims obsessively repeated scenes of the Karbala massacre, reliving the agonies, the suffering, their religiosity growing increasingly overwrought.

In the Red Zone pages 110-111

Vincent thought the antidote to religious extremism in Iraq would be a secure democracy, but he was under no illusions about how difficult achieving democracy in Iraq will be. However, he met a number of remarkable Iraqis, who in their fearlessness in the face of true danger and their love for democratic ideals, gave him hope for the country’s future.

Sadly, one of Vincent’s revelations about the difficulty of achieving political freedom in Iraq seems almost prescient about his own fate. Having just finished a lecture to Iraqi journalists about the relationship between freedom of the press and democracy, he felt as though “something hadn’t clicked.”

Leaving the meeting room, a tall, serious reporter from al-Ahkbaar newspaper stopped me. In English, he thanked me for my talk, then added, “but you underestimate the problems we face here. You talk about freedom, but Iraqi journalists still are not free. If we go too deep into some stories, we will anger certain people–and they will kill us.”

The reporter’s words startled me, and I realized at once my mistake. Swaggering a bit in my role as an American journalist, I’d forgotten that there are dangerous forces throughout Iraq who do not want the media to investigate their activities. . . . How glib my comments about “being true to truth” must have seemed! How naive my emphasis on “proof” and “fairness”–particularly to journalists who could lose their lives in pursuing those ideals! Too late, I remembered something Yussef told me: “In Iraq, freedom of the press is a freedom that must be carefully applied.”

I apologized to the young man for my oversight and thanked him for reminding me of how fortunate I am to be an American journalist. Taking constitutional protections for granted, I had stressed to the Iraqis the necessity of press freedom to democracy without noting the opposite: that without democracy, without the almost instinctive commitment of millions of Americans to principles of a free and responsible citizenry, true journalism (and many other occupations) would be impossible.

In the Red Zone pages 158-159

The Irish Republican Army announced an end to its armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland on Thursday, in a move British leader Tony Blair said could mark the day “politics replaces terror” there.

In Hollywood movies where space aliens try to destroy humanity inevitably various nationalities forget their differences, banding against their common enemy. Perhaps on a small scale we’ll see a similar reaction among Western political groups as they respond to Islamic terrorists bent on destroying civilization.