Can democracy be imposed on societies from the outside? Current debates tend to focus on immediate aims without clarifying the terms for discussing them. A historically grounded definition provides a starting point for these discussions. Experience indicates that democracy requires a particular combination of institutions and informed public opinion. Outside efforts to impose change typically bring unforeseen consequences that may result in neither stability nor democracy. Indeed, a comparative overview of the history of democracy points towards a reassessment of current U.S. policy, to bring ends and means in line.

Studies focusing on the historical development of democracy typically compare Great Britain and Germany. The German Sonderweg, or special path, toward authoritarianism thus offers a cautionary tale of how modernization can go wrong, but two world wars and the Nazi era make this an emotionally charged analogy. Its focus on the emergence of German liberalism in the mid nineteenth century, followed by its suppression under Otto von Bismarck and later revival during Konrad Adenauer’s post-1945 ascendancy, imposes a relatively narrow frame of reference. Looking instead to Britain and France, two countries identified as democratic, highlights the impact of public opinion and representative government on democracy while taking a much longer view of how the system emerged. The Anglo-French comparison also engages the way in which institutions stabilize or destabilize countries where the political order must expand to accommodate a larger portion of society. Samuel Huntington set out the problem with reference to the developing world in Political Order in Changing Societies (1968), and recent academic literature on the “institutional deficit” plaguing failed states reflects its ongoing importance. The fundamental question connecting these issues to the wider debate is whether and how democracy can provide a stable framework for governing.

Current debate over democratization as a foreign policy objective reflects two conflicting views of democracy with deep roots in American thinking on international relations. Advocates of spreading democracy connect their agenda with a global order favorable to American interests. September 11 shifted the Bush administration toward a more aggressive policy that invoked the memory of Woodrow Wilson. Containment and deterrence had failed to block terrorism, and Bush’s second inaugural speech cast spreading democracy as a moral obligation that would secure domestic peace against tyranny overseas. His rhetoric paralleled Wilson’s request to Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, which argued that only regime change could end the threat Germany’s government posed. Despite the different context for the speeches, both describe tyranny as an aggressive threat to the United States to be countered by spreading democracy.

Defining Democracy?

Liberal, representative democracy, where political parties mobilize and focus public opinion and alternate in power to provide regular accountability, provides the only example of a stable democratic order. It combines institutions with a reinforcing political culture that guarantees the rule of law and ensures that policy follows the considered opinion of the people expressed over time. Other models either mimic some attributes of democracy or simply lapse into anarchy or authoritarianism. Truly democratic institutions and political cultures engage public opinion within a framework of checks and balances that limits both majority rule and government power. Representative bodies oversee executive government, with control over taxation and budgets as leverage. Transparency in public business and debate characterizes liberal regimes. Stable, periodic transfers of power ensure accountability while limiting the costs to those who lose the political contest at any given point. Representative democracy allows people to rule themselves in polities beyond the smallest communities by enabling leaders to mobilize opinion, facilitate consensus, and develop policies they can implement. Democracy works as both a political culture for regulating behavior and governing institution

Democracy grew organically within societies in response to challenges, and parliamentary liberalism as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain embodies the liberal, representative order that brought stability during a painful transition. It created a system within which potentially incompatible interests—whether classes, nationalities or sects—accepted an overarching code of law that guaranteed each a wide variety of liberties. The combination of representative government and public opinion that formed parliamentary liberalism in Britain provides the archetype for true democracy, but other countries took different paths toward modernization. A comparative historical view sharpens definitions while engaging problems connected with imposing democracy from the outside.

Absolutist France and the Ancien Régime

France’s history from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries demonstrates how institutions fail when they prove unable to manage conflicts or adapt to pressures. Religious disputes from the Reformation, social and economic changes, and external military pressures challenged regimes across Europe. France under Cardinal Richelieu and Louis XIV responded by developing a centralized royal bureaucracy to mobilize resources and concentrate authority. War had already expanded the responsibilities of royal officials France at the expense of both local institutions and the old military classes, while failure of the Fronde revolt in the 1750s left no alternate authority. Absolutism met challenges that had undermined the older partnership between rulers and social estates, and it worked well enough to provide an appealing model of rational, efficient royal governance that other European rulers copied. Representative government seemed backward and an impediment to progress when measured against the modernizing efforts to absolutist regimes. The fragility of the absolutist state only became apparent as financial crises and forceful popular resistance to state policy emerged during the 1780s.

Financial crisis undermined absolutism in France, but the relationship between public opinion and the state played a crucial role in the government capacity to mobilize resources. French rulers declined to call an Estates General between 1614 and 1789 because such assemblies inevitably led to trouble. While some provincial estates and judicial parlements advised the crown and occasionally acted as a venue for expressing public opinion, these bodies’ narrow focus limited their impact. Public opinion thus emerged as a political category in France from the gap created when representative institutions failed to provide an outlet of criticism and discontent. It acted as an abstract category of authority invoked to give positions the legitimacy that an absolutist political order could not provide. Because only the king could legitimately decide questions on behalf of the community, absolutism precluded a public politics beyond the court. The notion of government as private royal business made unauthorized discussion illegal, but the French crown failed to stop debate, and political contestation forced the government to argue its own case. If French rulers minded public opinion for lack of an alternative, they failed to give it a stabilizing institutional role. Political culture in eighteenth-century France and other absolutist states therefore tended towards polarization. Disengaged from practical concerns and lacking a political role, public opinion under absolutism fostered a culture of critique that turned on society itself.

British Institutions and Parliamentary Liberalism

Britain offered a very different model from France and other ancien régime states in continental Europe. Representative government in England withstood the challenges that marginalized it elsewhere, and an effective partnership between elites and the Crown through parliament defined eighteenth-century British political culture. Britain became a fiscal military state after 1688 as a parliamentary regime able to secure resources through consensual taxation and long-term loans guaranteed by parliament. National politics focused on parliament and the capital, with a parallel local politics operating at the level of parliamentary constituencies that gave politicians at Westminster prestige to bolster their national standing. Constituency politics largely emphasized local concerns before 1812 as rival interests competed for popular support. Elaborate rituals connected with mediated relations between elites and population in a way that shows the limits of authority, and elections tested the standing of candidates or their patrons. The whole process tied local constituencies with the political contest at Westminster, but provincial and national politics remained separate outside those rare occasions when general elections focused on a single issue. Public opinion also played a very different role in Britain’s political culture than under French-style absolutism. Newspapers covered parliamentary debates closely from the mid-eighteenth century, and printing the proceedings tied parliament into a broader discourse that extended beyond the elite or educated classes. Public discussion of affairs in Britain had an accepted place that emphasized specific issues over abstract speculation.

Britain entered the general European crisis of the late eighteenth century with a stronger, more flexible system than most of its counterparts. Representation followed older patterns that did not account for industrialization and demographic change, and the provincial groups demanded a greater voice in policy from the 1780s. Political reforms that recast the constitutional order between 1828 and 1832 followed from confrontations that set the Tory government against a Whig opposition that revived itself through an alliance with provincial interest groups. Where Edmund Burke had constructed a justification for party activity in the 1770s, Henry Brougham applied the concept and extended it beyond Westminster to create an expanded political nation. Brougham, a Whig barrister and politician, mobilized opinion beyond the capital to give his party leverage in parliamentary debates, and his efforts transformed the Whigs into a viable governing party that dominated British politics through 1886. They also expanded the political nation to encompass a wider range of provincial interests and integrate constituency politics with the party contest. Parliamentary liberalism in Britain marked an institution that more effectively linked government with the governed.

Challenges to Parliamentary Liberalism

The need to reconcile competing groups defined Victorian parliamentary liberalism. Where appropriate, the political nation could expand to accommodate new interests. Lord John Russell had equated “the people” with the middle classes in 1831, but by 1861 he expanded its scope to include the respectable working classes. Benjamin Disraeli realized that a wider suffrage would add ballast to the political order by enfranchising working men with conservative sentiments. The writer William Lecky described extended suffrage as reaching “below the regions where crotchets and experiments and crude utopias prevail” to an industrious working class of settled habits and “the deep conservative instincts of the nation.” Broadening the basis of consent could improve stability.

If extending the political nation built a sustainable democratic order, at least in nineteenth-century Britain, failure to accommodate groups threatened it. Parliamentary liberalism broke down when it could not reconcile difference within a framework of law. When the Irish Nationalist party led by Charles Stuart Parnell forced its agenda by obstructing parliamentary business, the political system lacked recourse beyond changing its rules to prevent them being used against it. Irish home rule split William Gladstone’s government in 1886 and ended the Liberal ascendancy, but it also showed that parliamentary government required acceptance of rules, written or otherwise. Stretching the system beyond its breaking point curtailed minority rights and stifled debate. George Dangerfield described the turbulent years in Britain from 1910 to 1914 when suffragettes, trade unions, and Ulster Protestants forced their demands with extra-constitutional as the “death” of liberal England. The period shows how democracy could falter, but in Britain it marked a departure from general patterns of stability.

Illiberal Democracy

Historical challenges to parliamentary liberalism highlight a contrast between liberal and illiberal democracy that is very relevant today. Liberal democracy allows for the expression of public opinion and reconciling competing interests with the rule of law; illiberal democracy preserves institutional forms while hollowing out the substance of representation and accountability. Parliamentary liberalism’s democratic order did not offer the only solution to political transformation. Louis Napoleon established the French Second Empire in 1852 through a plebiscite, a different path toward establishing a national politics with institutional legitimacy. He carefully appealed to the French peasantry over elites that might check his power. Representation meant embodying the nation rather than providing voice to its citizens. Decades later, Henry Cabot Lodge would remark that “[Woodrow] Wilson’s comprehension of government is that of the third Napoleon, an autocrat to be elected by the people through a plebiscite and no representative bodies of any consequence in between.” Lecky concluded from the French case that plebiscitary despotism was “just as natural a form of democracy as a republic”, and he warned that “some of the strongest democratic tendencies are distinctly adverse to liberty.”

Populism and the managerial state provide two sides to the authoritarianism that reacted to parliamentary liberalism’s perceived inadequacy. They have a symbiotic relationship. Populist challenges prompt elites to restrict public opinion’s impact, and the consequent lack of accountability may spark a backlash. Populism covers a range of movements that challenged the existing representative order as corrupt and oligarchic while demanding a more direct voice for the people. Far from empowering people, populism typically strengthens leaders claiming to embody the people in their struggle against elites. While challenging some elites, it also helps others manipulate politics in their favor.

Managerialism solves political deadlock by redefining major decisions as problems for experts rather than the political process. Business administration in large corporations provided a model, and, like populism, the managerial state grew from the perceived failure of representative government. Crises brought by World War I and the Great Depression raised its appeal. Karl Lowenstein argued that democracy must become “the application of disciplined authority by liberal minded men, for the ultimate end of liberal government: human dignity and freedom.” Planning defined the new liberalism after World War II and the view that benevolent elites with expertise and vision would give the people what the elites thought best for them shaped policy in the United States and Europe. Resistance grew, however, with the failure of grand projects that cost institutions and elites their legitimacy. A populist backlash where voters use radical parties as a vehicle for protest has marked European politics since 2001, and it reflects the political establishment’s failure to address key issues. A system intended to defuse conflict now promotes it, raising the specter of populism and the managerial state working in a fundamentally anti-democratic cycle.

Promoting Democracy? Civil Society and Group Competition

Democracy cannot be transferred as a package because it developed organically and requires a supportive political culture to operate effectively. Institutions must run along the grain of societies rather than cutting across or against them. A long view suggests that few countries will create sustainable liberal democratic regimes. Copying superficial aspects of democracy typically brings either illiberal or simply unsustainable outcomes. Some countries, like Singapore, sustain a relative liberal order without complete democracy. Other authoritarian regimes in Egypt, Morocco, and Jordan restrict their population’s opportunity for political activity while limiting the scope of state intervention in personal or economic life. Rather than an absolute polarity between democracy and despotism, politics operates at different levels with a variety of systems adapted to particular contexts.

No easy path exists to national cohesion and democratic institutions in developing nations. Forcing democratization’s pace risks unrest, particularly where deep fault lines exist within societies. Sectarian differences and opposing economic interests can both work against the basic level of consensus that democracy requires, and ethnic conflict introduces another volatile factor that often combines with religion and economic disparities. Rapid change and competition for power within a society exacerbate preexisting ethnic tensions, as seen in post-1989 conflicts from Yugoslavia to Rwanda. Populists from the late Slobodan Milosovic to Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez seize upon ethnic resentment as a populist tool for maintaining their power as leaders of populist movements operating behind a quasi-democratic façade. Whether conflict derives fundamentally from ethnic differences or economic conflict matters less than its impact on stability. Civic patriotism cannot establish a demos without social cohesion and a general agreement on rules for public behavior. Public opinion driven by demagogues or ideology exerts a destructive force. Forced democratization that unleashes such forces defeats its own aims, and fosters a backlash that can make the United States less secure.

Current efforts to promote democracy uncannily echo the global meliorism that brought profound disillusionment when it failed during the Vietnam era. Indeed, the Bush administration has backtracked as questions arose regarding the specific policies that would follow from the president’s rhetoric. While the United States prefers democracy over authoritarianism, it also values gradual change over stasis and, above all, friends over adversaries. The present debate offers a reprise of earlier tensions between realist and idealist perspectives. Such cycles typically end with frustrated idealism giving way to a cautious realist focus on stability and protecting American interests. Not only does attempting to export democracy usually fail, but the endeavor distracts resources and attention from other pressing challenges. A more reasonable guide to managing political change involves adapting existing structures in target societies and securing a rough balance among competing groups to provide the order necessary for promoting the growth of civil society. Such an approach fits the means and objectives of American foreign policy more realistically than the grand strategy of promoting democracy in countries where it has no roots.

An Islamic school in London is teaching that non-Muslims are akin to pigs and dogs, and it is doing so with subventions from the British taxpayer. More alarmingly, when notified of this problem, the British authorities indicate they intend to do nothing about it.

The Times (London) reported on April 20 in"Muslim students ‘being taught to despise unbelievers as ‘filth'," that the Hawza Ilmiyya, a Shi‘i institution, teaches from the writings of Muhaqqiq al-Hilli. This scholar lived from 1240 to 1326 and wrote the authoritative work on Shi‘i law (Shara'i‘ al-Islam). About non-believers, called kafirs, he taught:

The water left over in the container after any type of animal has drunk from it is considered clean and pure apart from the left over of a dog, a pig, and a disbeliever.

There are ten [sic] types of filth and impurities: urine, faeces, semen, carrion, blood of carrion, dogs, pigs, disbelievers.

When a dog, a pig, or a disbeliever touches or comes in contact with the clothes or body [of a Muslim] while he [the disbeliever] is wet, it becomes obligatory-compulsory upon him [the Muslim] to wash and clean that part which came in contact with the disbeliever.

In addition, a chapter on jihad specifies conditions under which Muslims should fight Jews and Christians.

Although Hilli's attitudes were standard for a pre-modern Shi‘i, they are shocking for 2006 London. Indeed, several students in the Hawza Ilmiyya found them"disturbing" and"very worrying." Their spokesman told the Times that students"are being exposed to very literalist interpretations of the Koran. These are interpretations that would not be recognised by 80 or 90 per cent of Muslims, but they are being taught in this school. A lot of people in the Muslim community are very concerned about this." The spokesman concluded with an appeal urgently to re-examine"the kind of material that is being taught here and in other [Islamic] colleges in Britain."

The Tehran regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sponsors the Hawza Ilmiyya; for example, three of the eight years in the curriculum are spent at institutions in the Iranian city of Qom. Indeed, the school's 1996 founding memorandum states that"At all times at least one of the trustees shall be a representative of the Supreme Spiritual Leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran."

The institution that funds this school, the Irshad Trust, is a"registered charity" at the Charity Commission (see the trust's page at the commission website), a privilege that qualifies it for various tax concessions; in other words, the British taxpayer is effectively subsidizing the school. In particular, the school benefits from a program called"Gift Aid," under which the government refunds the income tax paid by the donor. Gifts made to registered charities can claim and receive a 28 percent tax refund. A gift of £100 to the Irshad Trust, for example, earns it £128.

A correspondent of mine, on reading the Times article, immediately complained to the Charity Commission and asked it to take steps concerning the Irshad Trust. He got a quick reply:

Subject: RE:"non-Muslims are ‘filth'"
From: Monaghan-Smith Tracey [tracey.monaghan@charitycommission.gsi.gov.uk]
To: xx

Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006

Dear Mr xx,

Thank you for your e-mail, the contents of which are noted. However, as per booklet CC47, the Commission will not become involved in this particular matter. You may wish to peruse the booklet in further detail, as this outlines our role quite clearly in this respect. The Commission will not look into this particular complaint. I hope this clarifies the position.

Regards

Mrs Tracey Monaghan-Smith
Charity Commission

Booklet CC47, titled"Complaints about Charities," provides guidelines about commission procedures. The key phrase:"Complaints that the Commission will take up as regulator are, generally speaking, ones where there is a serious risk of significant harm or abuse to the charity, its assets, beneficiaries or reputation; where the use of our powers of intervention is necessary to protect them; and where this represents a proportionate response to the issues in the case." Mrs Tracey Monaghan-Smith and her superiors have clearly concluded that the Hawza Ilmiyya is not causing"significant harm."

Comments:

(1) Ironically, even as some Muslim students attending the Hawza Ilmiyya find its teachings"disturbing" and"very worrying," mandarins at the Charity Commission deem them not causing"significant harm."

(2) The unbridled radicalism of the Hawza Ilmiyya fits a larger pattern of Islamic schools in the West teaching hostility to Jews and Christians or having links to terrorism. I document this pattern at"What Are Islamic Schools Teaching?" and"Troubles at Islamic Schools in the West."

(3) One can only assume that the Hawza Ilmiyya will go on its merry way, undeterred by the pleas for help by its students, the exposure of its practices, questions raised in parliament, and the complaints of citizens, and it will also continue to enjoy its 28 percent Gift Aid. Thus does the enemy's infrastructure build in our midst.

This article is reprinted with permission by Daniel Pipes. This article first appeared at frontpagemag.com.

The great mystery of the 2003 war in Iraq -"What about the WMD?" has finally been resolved. The short answer is: Saddam Hussein's persistent record of lying meant no one believed him when he at the last moment actually removed the weapons of mass destruction.

In a riveting book-length report issued by the Pentagon's Joint Forces Command, Iraqi Perspectives Project, American researchers have produced the results of a systematic two-year study of the forces and motivations shaping Saddam and his regime. Well written, historically contexted, and replete with revealing details, it ranks with Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear as the masterly description of that regime. (For a condensed version, see the May-June issue of Foreign Affairs.)

It shows how, like Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union, Saddam's Iraq was a place of unpredictably distorted reality. In particular, Saddam underwent a change in the mid-1990s, developing a delusional sense of his own military genius, indeed his infallibility. In this fantasyland, soldiers' faith and bravura count far more than technology or matériel. Disdaining the U.S. military performance from Vietnam to Desert Storm, and from Somalia to the Balkans, the tyrant deemed Americans a cowardly and unworthy enemy.

Also about this same time, Saddam began insisting on only good news, isolating himself further from often harsh realities. As ever-fewer underlings dared to contradict the boss's perceptions, his determined self-deception wreaked havoc outward from the presidential palace to the entire Iraqi government and beyond. The lead author of Iraqi Perspectives Project, Kevin M. Woods, and his four co-authors note,"By the mid-1990s, most of those near the regime inner circle recognized that everyone was lying to everyone else." Deceits were reinforced and elaborated. In the words of an air defense officer,"One [officer] lied to another from the first lieutenant up, until it reached Saddam."

That no one really knew what was going on was symbolized by the widespread credence in the wartime nonsense spouted by the Iraqi minister of information (mockingly dubbed Baghdad Bob by Western reporters) as he regaled the world with glowing accounts of Iraqi victories;"from the point of view of Iraq's leaders, Baghdad Bob was largely reporting what they were hearing from the front." A militia commander confessed to being"absolutely astonished" on encountering an American tank in Baghdad.

The same situation extended to the military-industrial infrastructure. First, the report states, for Saddam,"the mere issuing of a decree was sufficient to make the plan work." Second, fearful for their lives, everyone involved provided glowing progress bulletins. In particular,"scientists always reported the next wonder weapon was right around the corner." In such an environment, who knew the actual state of the WMD? Even for Saddam,"when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth."

Iraq's strategic dilemma complicated matters further. Realizing that perceptions of Iraqi weakness could invite attack, from Iran in particular, Saddam wanted the world to think he possessed WMD. But eventually he realized that to fend off the coalition, he needed to convince Western states that his regime no longer possessed those very weapons. As coalition forces geared up for war in late 2002, Saddam decided to cooperate with the United Nations to establish that his country was clean of WMD, as he put it, so as"not to give President Bush any excuses to start a war."

This lucid moment, ironically, fell victim to his long history of deceiving the United Nations; Iraqi steps to comply with the inspections regime had the paradoxical effect of confirming Western doubts that the cooperation was a ruse. For example, intercepted orders"to remove all traces of previous WMD programs" were misinterpreted as yet another ploy, and not the genuine effort they really were.

Saddam's belated attempts at transparency backfired, leading to what the report authors call"a diplomatic and propaganda Catch-22." Monumental confusion followed. Captured senior Iraqi officials continued for many months after the 2003 war"to believe it possible … that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability hidden away somewhere." Coalition intelligence agencies, not surprisingly, missed the final and unexpected twist in a long-running drama. Neither those agencies nor Western politicians lied; Saddam was the evil impostor whose deceptions in the end confused and endangered everyone, including himself.

Apr. 25, 2006 update: I have received many questions about the disposal of the WMD - Syria? Belarus? - and wish to clarify that I purposefully did not deal with this question in the above article (just as the Iraqi Perspectives Project did not). The topic here is exclusively the functioning of the Saddam Hussein regime in relation to the WMD mystery. Any thesis of what was done with the WMD is compatible with the above background explanation.

From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment....

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Who would have thought that Belmont University of Nashville, Tennessee, would apply the Islamic law to its staff? But just that happened earlier this month.

Bill Hobbs, a Republican political advisor, blogger, and news writer for Belmont, which bills itself as"the largest Christian university in Tennessee," was upset in February 2006 about the cowardice of the American media in not publishing the Danish cartoons. So he drew a primitive cartoon of his own and posted it on his personal site. It sat in obscurity until April 5, when a Democratic political operative, Mike Kopp, wrote about it, calling it

a bizzare page with the heading Draw Mohammed that spotlights a stick drawing of the Prophet Mohammed holding a bomb. The cartoon is entitled"Mohammend Blows." Under the cartoon Hobbs issues an invite to"exercise your right to free expression by drawing pictures of Islam's Prophet Mohammed". He ends the post with the phrase"Here's my first mo-toon." All this was posted at 12:40 pm, on Friday, February 24, 2006.

Hobbs responded within a few hours on Kopp's website, writing (spelling mistakes uncorrected):

I live in America, and am blessed to have the First Amendment, and am angry that the American media is too cowardly in the face of Islamofacists to run the cartoons. I posted that cartoon, and invited others to draw their own cartoons, as a way of protesting both American media cowardice and Islamist attempts to suppress free speech via threats of bombs and bullets and burning and beheading. But then I never publicized the site and, quite frankly, forgot is was up until today.

P.S. I am insensitve toward religions that have a large number of adherents who are running around blowing stuff up and threatening to kill non-believers over cartoons. Yes, I plead insensitivity. I would prefer my children not grow up in a world governed by Islamofacists.

On April 13, John Spragens of Nashville Scene picked up on this story in an article titled"One local blogger's crude cartoon, posing as principle, betrays little more than tackiness." He included a miniature version of the page in question .... As his headline implies, Spragens (who, another blog notes, is leaving the Nashville Scene to work for a Democrat, U.S. Representative Jim Cooper) came down heavily on Hobbs:

by deliberately desecrating Islam's central figure—"the ‘Prophet Mohammed'" as Hobbs sneered, using quote marks for sardonic emphasis—he attacked an entire religion, not a group of fanatics who pervert the religion's teachings. Then he drew him as a bearded stick figure holding a bomb and said he"blows." It seems bearded Muslim terrorists are the new big-nosed, money-grubbing Jews. The more things change…. [ellipsis in original]

On the other side, Roger Abramson, Spragens' predecessor at Nashville Scene, defended Hobbs early on April 14.

Nonetheless, the damage had been done. Hobbs announced in the late morning at NashvilleFiles.com,"I am resigning from Belmont University in an amicable and mutual parting of the ways, effective Monday[, April 17]."

A week later, the university has let calls from the press asking for more information go unreturned and has made no statement about Hobbs' resignation. Its silence attracted notice in the blogosphere (for example, from Hugh Hewitt) but still not a word was forthcoming.

Although it was an article in the Nashville Scene that prompted the resignation, that publication's editor, Liz Garrigan, came down hard on Belmont:

Belmont's action here—assuming this was a forced resignation, and I think everyone believes it is—is cowardly. I mean, Hobbs' political views haven't been a secret. Why is the school suddenly putting stock in what we have to say about one action by one individual? The school shouldn't sacrifice him just because we happen to think that something he did was pretty tacky.

"Pretty tacky" is putting it mildly; Belmont's actions have real consequences. Like the Danish corporation Arla Foods denouncing the cartoons or the Swedish foreign minister forcing the cartoons off a website, this firing in Tennessee amounts to a capitulation to Islamic law. Each surrender means the Shari‘a will move inexorably forward.

In a stunning setback, the Council on American-Islamic Relations' defamation suit against Andrew Whitehead of Anti-CAIR has been dismissed with prejudice.

The Anti-CAIR website, www.anti-cair-net.org, reports a"mutually agreeable settlement," the terms of which are confidential. However, Whitehead notes that he issued no public apology to CAIR, made no retractions or corrections, and left the Anti-CAIR website unchanged, so that it continues to post the statements that triggered CAIR's suit. Specifically, CAIR had complained about Whitehead calling it a"terrorist supporting front organization … founded by Hamas supporters" that aims"to make radical Islam the dominant religion in the United States." It also objected to being described as"dedicated to the overthrow of the United States Constitution and the installation of an Islamic theocracy in America."

That clears the decks; no additional actions are pending between these two parties. In brief, Whitehead won a sweet victory, while CAIR suffered a humiliating defeat.

CAIR initially filed suit in a Virginia Circuit Court on March 31, 2004, claiming six of Whitehead's statements were false, that Whitehead made them"with knowledge of their falsity," and that the statements were actionable because"they impute the commission of a criminal offense." CAIR further claimed injury to its"standing and reputation throughout the United States and elsewhere," and sought $1 million in compensatory damages, $350,000 in punitive damages, plus legal fees and interest. It did so despite Whitehead's telling a reporter"I haven't got any [money]."

The original five statements as quoted in CAIR's complaint were:

• "Let their [sic] be no doubt that CAIR is a terrorist supporting front organization that is partially funded by terrorists, and that CAIR wishes nothing more than the implementation of Sharia law in America."
• CAIR is an"organization founded by Hamas supporters which seeks to overthrow Constitutional government in the United States and replace it with an Islamist theocracy using our own Constitution as protection."
• "ACAIR reminds our readers that CAIR was started by Hamas members and is supported by terrorist supporting individuals, groups and countries."
• "Why oppose CAIR? CAIR has proven links to, and was founded by, Islamic terrorists. CAIR is not in the United States to promote the civil rights of Muslims. CAIR is here to make radical Islam the dominant religion in the United States and convert our country into an Islamic theocracy along the lines of Iran. In addition, CAIR has managed, through the adroit manipulation of the popular media, to present itself as the ‘moderate' face of Islam in the United States. CAIR succeeded to the point that the majority of its members are not aware that CAIR actively supports terrorists and terrorist supporting groups and nations. In addition, CAIR receives direct funding from Islamic terrorists supporting countries."
• "CAIR is a fundamentalist organization dedicated to the overthrow of the United States Constitution and the installation of an Islamic theocracy in America."

In January 2005, Whitehead's counsel, Reed D. Rubinstein of Greenberg Traurig LLP's Washington, D.C. office, submitted 327 discovery requests of CAIR; I have posted this important, well-informed discovery document at http://www.danielpipes.org/rr/3511_1.pdf. Whitehead sought extensive information regarding CAIR's finances, its relationship to Hamas, its ties to Saudi Arabia, and ties to other Islamists.

Signs of CAIR's problems came in June 2005, when – perhaps realizing how much was available in the public record about its activities, perhaps wishing to curtail some of the discovery process – it amended its complaint by dropping nearly all of its original claims. The amended complaint alleged only two brief statements to be false and defamatory:

• "Let their [sic] be no doubt that CAIR is a terrorist supporting front organization."
• CAIR"seeks to overthrow constitutional government in the United States."

(For an analysis of this amended complaint, see Sharon Chadha and my article,"CAIR Founded by ‘Islamic Terrorists'?")

In anticipation of a court hearing regarding discovery, Rubinstein filed papers in the Virginia Circuit Court in October 2005 and December 2005 alleging extensive links between CAIR's organizers and control group with Hamas and other foreign and domestic Islamists. Among other things, these papers alleged:

• CAIR's lineage goes back to a key Hamas leader (Musa Abu Marzook), and that CAIR has long been connected with, and"exploited" the 9/11 attacks to raise money for the Holy Land Foundation, a Hamas front group.
• CAIR is heavily supported, financially and otherwise, by suspect Saudi and UAE-based individuals and groups.
• CAIR states that the U.S. judicial system has been"kidnapped by Israeli interests," and claims that anti-terror law enforcement action against the Holy Land Foundation was"an anti-Muslim witch hunt" promoted by"the pro-Israel lobby in America."

CAIR refused to respond to Anti-CAIR's discovery requests in its November 2005 response to Rubinstein. For example, it did not admit that Hamas murders innocent civilians, it refused to disclose the identities of its Saudi donors, it declined to answer whether it aims to convert American Christians to Islam, and it avoided questions about the anti-Semitic and anti-American activities of its founder and executive director, Nihad Awad, including his communications with Hamas terrorists, speeches supporting suicide bombings, and advocacy of violence against Jews.

In March 2006, shortly before a scheduled court hearing to decide on several of Whitehead's requests (compelling CAIR to disclose its financial data, to answer questions about its relationship with Hamas and other Islamists, and to provide information regarding its leaders' activities and intentions), the case was settled and then dismissed with prejudice by stipulation (meaning, the plaintiff has agreed to forever drop all of the claims that were in, or could have been in, the complaint).

Asked about these developments, CAIR's spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, confirmed to the New York Sun that the libel case was dismissed at the request of both parties and added that"It was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount." Asked if he implied that Whitehead had paid the organization to drop the case, Hooper replied,"We filed the suit." Asked the same question again, Hooper repeated the same answer.

Comment: (1) I had a role in this story, for it was my article,"Why Is CAIR Suing Anti-CAIR?" published only a week after CAIR's initial filing, that brought this case to Reed Rubinstein's attention and led to Greenberg Traurig LLP's serving as Whitehead's wonderfully capable, pro-bono legal counsel.

(2) In that initial article, I expressed puzzlement why CAIR would voluntarily expose itself to discovery. Did it file this case expecting to steamroll Whitehead, whom CAIR may have perceived as an easy target, and thereby intimidate its critics? What seemed early on to be a mistake by CAIR is now confirmed as such; it ran into a litigation buzz-saw, and it seems to have cut and run. CAIR preferred the ignominy of walking away from the case it initiated rather than open to public scrutiny its finances, its list of supporters, and the beliefs and intentions of its key leaders.

(3) CAIR's November 2005 brief to the court contains several statements of note:

• "CAIR has established a status of enviable prestige within highest echelons [sic] of the ‘Washington establishment'" (p. 3). That is correct and it neatly sums up Sharon Chadha's and my extensive analysis in"CAIR: Islamists Fooling the Establishment."
• CAIR"stands up for America and speaks out against terrorism in pronouncements to the general public, thereby earning the enmity of the very terrorists Whitehead claims CAIR supports" (p. 6). Sounds good, but CAIR did not provide any evidence in its brief of such"enmity."
• "CAIR has communicated with various members of the United States Senate concerning" both the Holy Land Foundation and the Global Relief Foundation. (pp. 27-8) This comes as news. One wonders what information on these two terrorism-funding groups CAIR provided.
• CAIR states that it"advised Frontpagemag.com of possible legal action concerning a doctored photograph it employed to illustrate an article" written by Whitehead (p. 28). It's amusing that CAIR, which itself famously doctored a photograph, accuses FPM of doing this; in fact, FPM merely posted a graphic, as it often does, one showing Hooper with Hamas figures in the background.

(4) Hooper stated the case settled for"an undisclosed amount" but did not disclose in which direction that amount went. The terms being confidential, one can only speculate. Perhaps CAIR desperately wanted out of the burdensome, embarrassing, and harmful case it foolishly had initiated? Rubenstein hinted as much when he observed that CAIR became more disposed to settle in late 2005, when a judge was considering what CAIR would have to divulge about its financing and its ties to Hamas and other terrorist groups. Rubenstein told the New York Sun that the lawsuit"would have opened up CAIR's finances and their relationships and their principles, their ideological motivations in a way they did not want to be made public."

(5) According to CAIR's own analysis of Whitehead's initial statements, they"impute the commission of a criminal offense" by CAIR, in that these suggest CAIR"actively supports" terrorists, and advocates the"overthrow" of the U.S. Constitution in favor of Islamic law. It bears noting that none of these words were found to be false, they were not retracted, and they remain posted on Anti-CAIR's website.

(6) The collapse of this lawsuit, combined with the even more recent ending of two other CAIR legal actions (versus Cass Ballenger and David Harris), suggests that CAIR is no longer the plaintiff in any court cases; more broadly, what I in 2004 called its pattern of growing litigiousness seems finished.

(7) With CAIR's hopes of defeating its opponents in the legal arena at least temporarily defeated, the next step for those of us in North America unwilling to live under Islamic law is to thwart the organization's social and political ambitions. I am doing my part by announcing today the establishment of"Islamist Watch," a new project to combat the ideas and institutions of nonviolent, radical Islam in the United States and other Western countries.

One of my teachers, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence, used to say that going to war is not like asking a girl out on a date. It is a very serious decision, to be made on the basis of carefully crafted answers to even more carefully crafted questions.

Some serious questions, then, about whether the United States should bomb Iran's nuclear installations.

The first and most obvious question is whether it is worth doing in the first place. Starting right after Hiroshima, each time a country was about to go nuclear Washington went out of its way to sound the alarm, warning of the dire consequences that would surely follow. From 1945 to 1949 it was the Soviet Union which, once it had succeeded in building nuclear weapons, was supposed to make an attempt at world conquest.

In the 1950s it was America's own clients, Britain and France, who were regarded as the offenders and put under pressure. Between 1960 and 1993, first China, then Israel (albeit to a limited extent) and finally India and Pakistan were presented as the black sheep, lectured, put under pressure and occasionally subjected to sanctions. Since then, the main victim of America's peculiar belief that it alone is sufficiently good and sufficiently responsible to possess nuclear weapons has been North Korea.

As the record shows, in none of these cases did the pessimists' visions come true. Neither Stalin, Mao nor any of the rest set out to conquer the world. It is true that, as one country after another joined the nuclear club, Washington's ability to threaten them or coerce them declined.

However, nuclear proliferation did not make the world into a noticeably worse place than it had always been — and if anything, to the contrary. As Europe, the Middle East and South Asia demonstrate quite well, in one region after another the introduction of nuclear weapons led, if not to brotherhood and peace, then at any rate to the demise of large-scale warfare between states.

Given the balance of forces, it cannot be argued that a nuclear Iran will threaten the United States. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fulminations to the contrary, the Islamic Republic will not even be a threat to Israel. The latter has long had what it needs to deter an Iranian attack....