Democracy and tyranny: using Iraq as a model, the Bush administration intends to export democracy worldwide. But as our founders warned, and Iraq proves, democracy isn't synonymous with freedom.

Roughly one year ago, U.S. soldiers and Marines deployed to Iraq were caught in an escalating conflict with the Mehdi Army, a guerrilla force led by radical Islamic cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. With battles raging in and around religious sites in Najaf, many thousands of Shi'ite Muslims enlisted in al-Sadr's insurrection.

In April 2004, an Iraqi judge, acting on orders from the U.S.-created Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), issued an arrest warrant charging al-Sadr with ordering the murder of rival Muslim leader Abdel Majid al-Khoei. Taking their cue from President Bush's earlier statements about terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden, CPA spokesmen declared that al-Sadr was wanted dead or alive.

Rather than marginalizing the radical cleric, that designation actually led to a recruiting windfall as countless Iraqi Shi'ites embraced al-Sadr as a nationalist hero. Posters of al-Sadr began to materialize throughout Najaf and some of the poorer sections of Baghdad. The CPA responded by issuing an order outlawing Iraqis to display portraits of the "anti-coalition" cleric.

Skirmishes and pitched battles with the Mehdi Army have killed dozens of U.S. soldiers and wounded scores, or hundreds, of others. By late last year al-Sadr had earned a niche alongside Osama and Saddam in the official demonology of the "war on terror."

That al-Sadr is worthy of that designation is beyond serious dispute. Yet one result of the January 30 Iraqi election--regarded by the Bush administration and its supporters as an unalloyed triumph for freedom--may be a prominent role for al-Sadr in a new Iraqi government.

Describing al-Sadr as "a good person," Ibrahim al-Jaafari of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) told the London Daily Telegraph that al-Sadr and his followers would be welcome in a Shi'ite coalition government. "Moqtadr Sadr's father [a prominent Shi'ite religious leader] was killed by Saddam Hussein," stated Jaafari, whose Shi'ite political coalition emerged as an overwhelming favorite in early ballot counts. "He has a large number of followers. We can involve them"

President Bush and his supporters insist that bringing democracy to Iraq was an objective justifying the loss of American lives. But it's difficult to imagine that the families of fallen U.S. servicemen would consider the elevation of al-Sadr and his ilk to be an accomplishment worthy of such sacrifices.

Purple Fingers

Democracy's triumph in Iraq was highlighted in a piece of political theater staged during President Bush's 2005 State of the Union Address. "We've been placed in office by the votes of the people we serve," Mr. Bush told the joint session of Congress. "And tonight that is a privilege we share with newly-elected leaders of Afghanistan, the Palestinian Territories, Ukraine, and a free and sovereign Iraq."

With that applause line serving as the cue, congressional Republicans stood and raised their hands, displaying right index fingers that had been dipped in purple ink. This gesture was supposedly done in solidarity with those who had voted a few days earlier in Iraq's national election. But the "finger salute" was a partisan exercise intended to recognize Mr. Bush as Iraq's liberator.

Lost in this orgy of cynical partisan self-congratulation was the fact that it wasn't Mr. Bush who pressed for a general election. Instead, it was the Grand Ayatollah All al-Sistani, the Iranian-born religious leader of Iraq's Shi'ite Muslim majority.

As an exponent of a revolutionary version of Islam similar to that ruling Iran, Sistani has no interest in liberty as we would recognize it. But because he understood that majority rule would turn power over to his faction, the Ayatollah pressed for elections and issued a fatwa (religious decree) ordering his adherents to the polls. In fact, the Ayatollah was so enthusiastic about the triumph of Iraqi democracy that his decree specified that women should vote, even if they had to defy their husbands to do so.

"A year ago," noted a February 6 Los Angeles Times dispatch from Baghdad, "hundreds of thousands of [Sistani's] followers took to the streets to support a faster timetable [for elections] than one proposed by the U.S. And, even more impressively, Sistani was able to send them home, as if he were turning off a tap. Once elections were set, he engineered the formation of a largely Shi'ite slate of candidates.... Sistani let the slate use his picture on its campaign materials and he issued a fatwa ... making voting a duty on a par with lasting in Ramadan"--one of the highest religious obligations for faithful Muslims.

In both physical appearance and political strategy, Sistani bears a remarkable resemblance to Iran's late, unlamented Ayatollah Khomeini, who took power in Iran in February 1979. Like Khomeini, Sistani merges the concepts of Islamic religion with a decidedly modern variety of revolutionary politics. Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan notes, "the language that Sistani uses in Arabic is quite distinctly drawn from the Enlightenment," particularly from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the prophet of the French Revolution.

Rousseau pioneered the totalitarian concept of the State as the all-powerful agent of the "General Will." He also devised the notion of the "Civil Religion," which he defined as "a purely civil profession of faith of which the sovereign should fix the articles, not exactly as religious dogmas, but as social sentiments without which a man cannot be a good citizen or a faithful subject."

Under Rousseau's formula, all citizens would be compelled to profess the tenets of Rousseau's civil religion, and dissenters would be dealt with severely: "It [the sovereign] can banish from the state whoever does not believe them--it can banish him, not for impiety, but as an anti-social being, incapable of truly loving the laws and justice, and of sacrificing, at need, his life to his duty. If any one, after publicly recognizing these dogmas, behaves as if he does not believe them, let him be punished to death: he has committed the worst of all crimes, that of lying before the law."

As David Farber illustrates in Taken Hostage: The Iran Hostage Crisis and America's First Encounter with Radical Islam, Khomeini's regime was built as much on mass democracy as doctrinaire Islam. For instance, "Students Following the Imam's Line," the Khomeini-inspired terrorists who seized the U.S. embassy staff, issued political manifestos describing the "Imam" (Khomeini) as not only a spiritual leader but the embodiment of Iran's General Will.

In 1980, with dozens of Americans held hostage by terrorists in Teheran, Khomeini's regime conducted elections. In fact, regular elections--competitive and reasonably free of fraud--continue to be held in Iran. But once again, democratic elections have not brought about liberty in Iran.

"Iran has regular parliamentary elections that are quite democratic in nature," Middle East scholar Charles Featherstone told THE NEW AMERICAN. Featherstone, who has lived in the region and is very fluent in several varieties of Arabic, predicts that while Shi'ite rule in Iraq will differ in some respects from the Iranian version, the result will hardly be the shining model of "democratic" freedom the Bush administration anticipates.

"Once the coalitions settle into place we are likely to see Iraq become a corrupt client state somewhat like Saudi Arabia," he declares. "It's difficult to believe that other nations in the region are going to look at what Iraq becomes, as the administration anticipates, and say, 'We want that.' " For this reason, he continues, "I don't think the Bush administration is really serious about the idea of building a democratic 'Greater Middle East,' much less exporting democratic rule around the globe."

Republican Marxists?

Featherstone's analysis may prove to be too optimistic. Sharif Ali bin Hussein, head of Iraq's Constitutional Monarchy Party, predicted during the early election returns that "Americans are in for a shock." Comparing the vote tabulation to a "Sistani tsunami," he added: "We've got 150,000 troops here protecting a country that's extremely friendly to Iran, and training their troops." President Bush, of course, has identified the Iranian regime as part of the "axis of evil," and in this year's State of the Union Address he warned that "Iran remains the world's primary state sponsor of terror."

Regardless of exactly what kind of regime emerges in Iraq, it is already clear that the administration, not content to allow other Middle East regimes to "democratize" on their own terms, is prepared to compel regime change by military force, where possible. Whatever its true intentions, the Bush administration, from the president down, hasn't backed away from its promotion of a "global democratic revolution" in the aftermath of the Iraq election. In fact, the administration's rhetoric--in which "democracy" is consistently used as a synonym for "freedom" and "liberty"--has actually grown more brazen.

"In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder," insisted Mr. Bush in his State of the Union Address. "The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom. Our enemies know this, and that is why the terrorist Zarqawi recently declared war on what he called the 'evil principle' of democracy. And we've declared our own intention: America will stand with the allies of freedom to support democratic movements in the Middle East and beyond, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

Mr. Bush's unbuttoned embrace of global revolution as a way of healing the "root causes" of terrorism earned sarcastic plaudits from liberal commentator Michael Kinsley of the Los Angeles Times. "[Bush] sounds less like a Republican than a dorm-room Marxist," commented Kinsley in a February 9 op-ed column. He also drew telling parallels between Mr. Bush's "conservative" exaltations of democratic revolution and those published nearly a century ago by Marxist agitator Emma Goldman in her essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence." Goldman wrote that "the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" fuels acts of terrorist violence. "Terrorism ... is inevitable as long as tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it," she insisted in words that could easily have been uttered by Mr. Bush.

In a February 8 speech in Paris, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice elaborated on the Bush administration's ideology of global revolution by tracing its roots to the French Revolution. She proudly recalled accompanying the first President Bush to France in 1989 during "the bicentennial celebration of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man," which took place while we also celebrated the bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution. That alignment, she insisted, wasn't coincidental: "The founders of both the French and American republics were inspired by the very same values and by each other. They shared the universal values of freedom and democracy and human dignity that have inspired men and women across the globe for centuries."

Citing al-Zarqawi's statement that democracy is "an evil principle," Rice insisted that terrorists around the globe are motivated by a hatred of democracy: "To our enemies, Liberte, Egalite and Fraternite are ... evil principles." But as even a cursory study of America's founding documents reveals, America's Founding Fathers explicitly rejected democracy, understanding that it is the midwife of tyranny--and contemporary terrorists are the product of a pedigree that can be traced to the French Revolution's embrace of democratic terrorism in the name of "liberty, equality, and fraternity."

As James Madison warned, "democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." "Every step ... towards a more complete, unmixed democracy is an advance toward destruction," warned legal scholar and legislator Fisher Ames in 1801. "It is treading when the ground is treacherous and excavated by an explosion. Liberty has never yet lasted long in a democracy, nor has it ever ended in anything better than despotism." (See also "The Perils of Democracy," page 23.)

Ames and others of the founding generation saw the French Revolution as a tragic illustration of the murderous consequences of unchecked democracy. And as historian Albert Parry wrote in his seminal 1976 study Terrorism: From Robespierre to Arafat, modern terrorism is the offspring of the democratic terror unleashed in France in 1789.

The Great Terror of 1793-94, Parry observes, "was the phenomenon chosen by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin as the subject of their intense study and the foremost model for their own preachments and activities. Since, overwhelmingly, Marx, Engels, and Lenin are the prime sources of inspiration for modern terrorists throughout the world, it is through them that these terrorists owe their beginnings to [French revolutionary leader] Maximilien Robespierre and his Reign of Terror."

Robespierre's reign, continued Parry, "was the first terror organized nationwide by revolutionaries actually seizing power and becoming a punitive government proclaiming murder as the law of the land. The very terms 'terror,' 'terrorism,' and 'terrorists,' used in their modern sense in so many languages, have come to us mainly from Robespierre's reign of terror--one more confirmation that today's exercises of terror trace their lineage to Robespierre."

The democratic revolution in France pioneered the techniques of mass murder later perfected by the Communists and Germany's National Socialists. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered when the revolutionary Jacobin government sought to conquer the traditional Catholics of La Vendee, who rebelled at the Jacobin regime's attempt to pervert the Church into an instrument of state power. The eruption of murderous factional warfare within the revolutionary elite gave rise to the dictatorship of Napoleon and more than a decade of aggressive warfare in the name of spreading democracy.

"Fire in the Minds of Men"

For more than two centuries, revolutionaries, radical leftists, insurrectionary terrorists, and Marxist academics have proudly claimed the Jacobin heritage as theirs. Secretary Rice's Paris speech demonstrates that the "conservative" Bush administration has joined the Jacobin ranks. An even more forceful acknowledgement of that heritage came from President Bush's second inaugural address:

   Our country has accepted obligations
   that are difficult to fulfill, and
   would be dishonorable to abandon.
   Yet because we have acted in the
   great liberating tradition of this nation,
   tens of millions have achieved
   their freedom.... By our efforts, we
   have lit a fire as well--a fire in the
   minds of men. It warms those who
   feel its power, it burns those who
   fight its progress, and one day this
   untamed fire of freedom will reach
   the darkest corners of our world.
   [Emphasis added.]

Perhaps unbeknownst to Bush himself, the "liberating tradition" he invoked is Jacobin, not American. The phrase "fire in the minds of men" served as the title of a book by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington: Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith. The first prophet of that revolutionary "faith," Billington documents, was Adam Weishaupt, founder of the Bavarian Illuminati, an occultic organization that, working through front groups and surrogates, did much to bring about the French Revolution.

Billington took his title from a line found in Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed, which Billington calls "the most searching work of fiction ever written about the revolutionary movement." Therein Dostoyevsky himself a one-time adherent of a radical group descended from the Illuminati) describes a small town under siege by Jacobin-inspired revolutionaries. After a mysterious fire broke out, a local official observed: "The fire is in the minds of men, not in the roofs of buildings."

What began as an open-ended "war on terror" has morphed into a campaign to promote a Jacobin vision of democracy. By using the power of the U.S. government to ignite the fires of democratic revolution, the Bush administration is fighting terrorism using methods pioneered by the political forefathers of modern terrorists. Thus it shouldn't surprise us to see a near-clone of Ayatollah Khomeini rise to power as a result of the Bush administration's democratic triumph in Iraq.

Though not surprised, Americans should be infuriated to think that thousands of their fellow citizens have been killed or maimed in order to bring about such a "victory"--and horrified to think of the price we will pay if the Jacobin-infested Bush administration is permitted to pursue its incendiary designs.