My glass is half empty today, folks. I present to you Andy McCarthy at NRO, who only speaks aloud what we’ve all been thinking for a while now. Afghanistan is a disaster and it’s time for us to come home. The fault lies nowhere near our military. It actually lies with George W. Bush (and every other naive believer in good, myself included).
When Iraq and Afghanistan were tasked to complete constitutions for their countries, they insisted on forming Islamic Republics based on sharia law. Oh, you all know this and so do I. We knew it at the time. In a way, though, we didn’t know it because we didn’t fully understand what sharia law meant. Over the years, unfortunately, we’ve received an education. In hindsight we understand we should have never, ever, agreed to such an evil monstrosity. We were ignorant and hopeful. We were trying to do the right thing.
Let Andy take over the post:
As Samuel Huntington explained, however, there are two senses of “civilization.” One assumes that all human beings, all cultures, are essentially the same and share the same concept of the higher form of life — that there is only one real civilization. The other holds that different cultures have very different ways of looking at the world — that there are several different civilizations, and what is an affront to one may be a convention to another.
The underlying premise of the democracy project is the former sense of “civilization.” As I argued at the time, the real world is the latter. And now, five years removed from the Abdul Rahman case, five more years of intensive, costly American entanglement with Afghanistan, Paul Marshall gives us the harrowing plight of Said Musa. When he told the Afghan court he was a Christian man, no Afghan defense lawyer would have anything to do with him — except the one who spat on him. [...] We think of this as an affront to civilization. They, on the other hand, think they have their own civilization, and that our civilization and Said Musa are affronts to it.
The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.
I stole a lot of text there. More exists at the site. Please pop over and read the whole thing so I don’t feel too guilty. However, when a writer clarifies an issue they way McCarthy has distilled this one, it’s best to present him in his own words.