Chapter on the bitter experiernce of NLF and PRG cadre, Bui Tin, Truong Nhu Tang, both of whom sacrificed decades on behalf of the Party only to see massive corruption and repression after the Liberation, examined in, "The End of Committment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality, " by Paul Hollander.
The Provisional Revolutionary Gov't. was frozen out of any role in governance after '75 by Hanoi, in contradiction to all the agitprop presented over many yrs. at the Paris peace talks.
Yoshie's perspective on the SCIRI and Da'wa mirrors Reuel Marc Gerecht of the AEI. http://www.aei.org/books/filter.all,bookID.799/book_detail.asp http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.21739/pub_detail.asp
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Q: Even so, wouldn't we be better off working with pro-American, pro-democratic Muslim moderates?
A: No. Bin Ladenism grew from contemporary Islamic fundamentalism, and only the fundamentalists can defeat bin Ladenism. Muslim "moderates" can't defeat bin Ladenism since they don't speak to the same audience with the same language and passions. Pro-American dictators also cannot defeat bin Ladenism since they have been an important part of the equation that gave us bin Ladenism. Many American liberals and neoconservatives think that you somehow get to have Thomas Jefferson in the Middle East without first having Martin Luther. The fundamentalists—not the "moderates" who are already too evolved—will produce the Muslim Martin Luther. The "moderates" are essentially like us, which is to say they are more or less irrelevant. They are not part of the Muslim mainstream. They are not competitive in most Middle Eastern intellectual circles, which are increasingly dominated by fundamentalists.
Q: How do we get to the Muslim Martin Luther—don't the fundamentalists just want to take over the government and establish their own religious dictatorship?
A: They may want that. It's impossible to know for sure until you have elections. But it's imperative to remember that hard-core Islamic militants have usually preferred to take a state by coup d'état, as Khomeini did, not through elections. Elections introduce the idea of popular sovereignty and make it competitive with, if not superior to, the Holy Law. Elections thereby force fundamentalists—who are hardly a monolithic bloc—to compete against each other and against others of a more liberal and secular stripe. Intellectually, the age of dictatorship is dead in the Muslim Middle East.
Q: Don't you fear the anti-Americanism of the fundamentalists?
A: No. Paradoxically, it's essential to the process of defeating bin Ladenism. Anti-Americanism will rise sub-stantially in the Middle East as democracy develops. Fundamentalists will surely lead the anti-American charge, playing on grievances—real and imagined, ancient and modern—and eventually it will backfire. Twenty-five years of clerical government in Iran has destroyed the appeal of "Islamic government" in Iran and made that country the most pro-American Muslim country in the Middle East. Fundamentalists' competition for votes and the responsibilities that come with governance is likely to shake profoundly the entire mental landscape in the Middle East. At the end of this process, you might actually see the Muslim Middle East become less anti-American.
The expansion of democracy is the key to the process of defeating bin Ladenism since the evolution of fundamentalist thought can only go forward when fundamentalists have the chance to compete for power. There really is no other escape from future 9/11s. You have to attack the roots of the problem—and only Muslim fundamentalists can get close enough. Jihadism is already dead in Iran, which was once the most anti-American and holy-warrior country in the Middle East. It will die in the greater Arab world when Muslims see that "rightly guided" Muslims don't have all the answers. Once democracy starts to roll, the evolution of fundamentalist thought could happen quite quickly.
-- Michael Pugliese