"If having 27 million Arabs in the middle of the Islamic world the majority of whom are coming to the realization that there is a better way is not a very strong and basic threat to Islam, what is?

    -- from a posting at Jihad Watch here

First, about those "27 million Arabs" you describe as liviing in Iraq. Let's break that down:

Not all of those you call "Arabs" are Arabs.

There are six million or more Kurds living in Iraq. Thanks to American air cover from 1991 on, the Kurds were able to live without the threat of mass-murder from Saddam Hussein (and those "Arabs" in Iraq and outside Iraq who, as Kanan Makiya has noted, never uttered a syllable of protest at Operation Anfal, and the 182,000 Kurds murdered by Arab troops). Because they feel their Kurdishness so strongly, and because they are keenly aware of what they have suffered from Arabs, they are also more likely to understand, or at least be amenable to understanding, that Islam is a vehicle for Arab supremacism. And that realization needs to be encouraged, in all sorts of ways, among not only the Kurds but also the Berbers, and not only the Berbers, but also the black African Muslims in Darfur and elsewhere. For if the advances of Islam are to be halted and then pushed back in sub-Saharan Africa, it will be important to publicize the Arab view of blacks, and the history of the Arab slave trade, and the present-day Arab enslavement of blacks in the Sudan and Mauritania and even, one has good reason to suspect, deep within Darkest Saudi Arabia (where slavery was formally abolished, because of Western pressure, only in 1962, at a time when there were still hundreds of thousands of -- mostly black -- slaves, and where there is evidence that some Saudi masters treat many of their workers not merely as cruelly-treated wage-slaves butsimply as slaves). And all of this connects to Kurdistan, and the usefulness of an example of a non-Arab Muslim people throwing off the Arab yoke.

What about the remaining "Arabs" in that group? As almost every schoolboy now knows, those Arabs are both Sunni and Shi’a. One schoolboy who did not know, however, was George Bush, who as President of the United States, hearing someone mention “the Sunniis and the Shi’a in Iraq” interjected, in a state of some confusion, “I thought they were all Muslims.” The Sunnis make up about 19% of the population of Iraq, which means even less of the total Arab population. The Shi’a, however, who have over the entire history of modern Iraq  steadily outbred the Sunnis and also had some success in converting Sunnis to Shi’a Islam. The Sunnis are outraged at this, and refuse to accept the true figures, claiming that they constitute “at least” 42% of the population (perhaps they first count all the Kurds, who are mostly Sunni, as Sunni Arabs, and then begin, as the Arabs so often do about so many things, to believe their own propaganda).

The Shi’a, on the other hand, constitute at least 65% of the population of Iraq, which means they are well over 4/5 of the Arab population. So they outnumber the Sunni Arabs roughly 4 to 1. However, the Sunnis always formed the officer corps, before Ba’athism, and after, and have historically been more aggressive than the Shi’a (who, after all, have a religio-mytholigical  narrative of suffering, to both sustain and to mold them). So a future fight between Sunnis and Shi’a would not be quite so lopsided as it might appear.

I’ve left out the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans, who constitute the two large Christian groups, and the tiny Mandeans, and the Turcomans, of whom there are about a million.

But I think the point has been proven: Iraq is not a country whose population is adequately described by the phrase “27 million Arabs.”

And if you fail to identify the different and mutually hostile groups, you leave out the essence of Iraq, and the essence of what the Administration sees as a problem to be solved and as I have argued, as a situation to be exploited.

But your assertion, which in full read thus:

"If having 27 million Arabs in the middle of the Islamic world the majority of whom are coming to the realization that there is a better way is not a very strong and basic threat to Islam, what is?”

has something else wrong with it, besides that “27 million Arabs” business. When you say that the “majority” (of which? The Sunnis? The Shi’a? The Sunnis and the Shi’a? The Arabs only? The Kurds only? The Arabs and the Kurds?)  “are coming to the realization that there is a better way” and that this “realization” that they are coming to “is a very strong and basic threat to Islam” then I have to stop you right there and ask you to please tell me in what that “better way” consists, and how it is different from, a possible alternative to, Islam?

The Sunni Arabs and the Shi’a Arabs give no signs of abandoning Islam. If anything, Islam is now back, unconstrained, as it was constrained, for his own self-interested purposes, by Saddam Hussein (who is not to be confused, in that constraining, with Ataturk). There are far fewer women unhijabbed or even, in the south, unburqaed. Christians have been murdered and the majority have left, and among those murdered have been priests and even bishops. That ballyhooed Iraqi Constitution contains the chilling phrase that nothing in it, and no subsequent legislation, may stand if it contradicts the principles of Islam, that is of the Shari’a. That puts not the document called the Iraqi Constitution, but rather the Shari’a, in the same supreme position, as the final authority, as in this country is our written Constitution.

What is “the better way”? Elections? You mean simple vote-counting, like that purple-thumbed affair, where all the Shi’a eagerly took part, and voted as a group, for the Shi’a, as a sign of the new transference of power, already accomplished and now merely being ratified, to the apparent great satisfaction of George Bush and his myopic administration, as an exercise in “true democracy.” It was nothing of the kind. It was an exercise in vote-counting and group politics, without any of the solicitousness for individual rights and autonomy (people did not vote as individuals, but as members of this or that group). And if the Shi’a participated happily, the Kurds voted to keep their oar in, but at the same time, 98% of those who took part in a Kurds-only referendum on independence, voted for such independence. This was and is still being ignored. As for the Sunnis, they voted with great reluctance, for they knew such a vote would only ratify the loss of power that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein made inevitable.

Again, tell me what that “better way” is, the one  that you claim so many of those “27 million Arabs” are “coming to the realization” exists, and which, when chosen – as you think that vague “better way” is being chosen – will lead, so you tell us (and I suppose you think we will take it on faith), to becoming a “very strong and basic threat to Islam.”

Tell me, while you are at it, how you think the first-time-ever elections held by the “Palestinians” that gave Hamas such a victory managed to become “a very strong and basic threat to Islam”? Tell me how the situation in quasi-democratic Lebanon, where the heretofore underrepresented and downtrodden Shi’a have managed to make their voices heard, and thereby, presumably, have discovered a “better way” that will inevitably constitue a “very strong and basic threat to Islam”?

And tell me too, what you think of the only Muslim regimes that managed, for a long or a short period, to constrain Islam, and allow some time and civil space for a secular class to develop? I have in mind Tunisia, under Habib Bourguiba and the one-party rule of the Destour Party, with his successor Ben Ali keeping in check through police-state methods those who favor putting Islam front and center, and I have in mind Ataturk, who was a despot, who first systematically constrained Islam and only then, allowed for some elements of democracy to emerge, and today, the Turkish democracy has had to be intermittently corrected by the keepers of Kemalism, the officer corps of the Turkish army.

And it was the Shah of Iran, an imperfect (because vain and not very intelligent and certainly insufficiently ruthless man) Ataturk, who allowed non-Muslims in Iran to be treated decently, even to flourish, while it was Khomeini, the trogolodyte, who in “democratic elections” won in a walk.

When one looks at the Muslim lands, it is not “democracy” that offers a way to constrain Islam, but the enlightened despot – Bourguiba or the Shah or Ataturk.

But apparently those who keep supporting, because they can’t admit how wrong they have been, and for how long, and in how many ways, the Bush Administration’s policy in Iraq, are determined not to look at the reality of Islam and what helps to constrain it, but to offer more burnt offerings to the Idol of the Age, something they call, not quite accurately I’m afraid, “democracy.”