As Saddam was being hung, the voices of several of those present in the room were heard crying out. They didn’t cry out “a bicameral legislature!” They didn’t cry out “checks and balances, for god’s sake let us have checks and balances.” They didn’t cry out “we want a government of limited powers.” No, they cried out “Moqtada al-Sadr, Moqtada al-Sadr.”

Amurath an Amurath succeeds.

And will, until it is realized that people suffused with the tenets and attitudes of Islam are not interested in Western parliamentary democracy. Nor are they interested in guarantees of the rights of minorities and especially of the individual, or in the Spirit of Liberty, which is defined by Learned Hand as the spirit that is “not quite sure that it is right.” Try to imagine a Muslim Washington, a Muslim Jefferson, a Muslim Adams, a Muslim Madison, James Wilson, Clay or Webster or Calhoun or John Randolph of Roanoke, a Muslim Lincoln, or for that matter a Muslim John Marshall, a Muslim Louis Brandeis, a Muslim Oliver Wendell Holmes. You can’t. And you know why.

And unless, and until, the Camp of Infidels understands that it must not only understand, but make its constant theme, the connection between those assorted amuraths and the politico-religio-legal system of Islam, that refuses to locate legitimacy in the will of mere mortals, all of them rightfully slaves of Allah, and that urges submission to the ruler, no matter how despotic, as long as he is declared to be a Muslim, you never will be able to imagine such creatures. They will continue to be chimerical as long as the connection between the inshallah-fatalism of Islam and the economic backwardness, despite the OPEC trillions, of Muslim lands (where the only real economies are found, in some form, in those countries where Islam has been constrained — as in Turkey or Tunisia) continues to go unnoticed. And the connection between the social failures, the moral failures, the intellectual failures, of Muslim societies must be connected to the doctrines, the teachings, the attitudes, the atmospherics of Islam. The case for such a connection is overwhelming. It will not be easy to deny it, and at the very least, the world’s Infidels will see that connection, and so will the most advanced people born into Islam. It will put Islam permanently on the defensive among its own adherents, who will indeed begin to wonder why their countries have a series of despots succeeded by other despots, why their countries are so naturally violent in their politics, why they are, despite such oil revenues, unable or unwilling to create advanced economies, why their societies, so hostile to non-Muslims and to women, will remain estranged from the rest of the world as that world passes them by, and why the habit of mental submission encouraged by Islam will always prevent them from the enterprise of science, or from all else that requires the encouragement, and not the punishment, of free and skeptical inquiry.

Mahdi this, and Mahdi that. “What do you want to do tonight, Mahdi?”

“I don’t know, Angie, what do you want to do tonight?”

“Jeez, I don’t know, Mahdi, what do you want to do tonight?”

God, it’s going to be boring under the new dispensation.

The re-primitivization of the world proceeds, proceeds because the advanced peoples do not appreciate their own achieved advancement. The uncivilized are inheriting that civilization, because the civilized themselves are insufficiently grateful their own legacy, and indifferent or ignorant of the conditions that were necessary for its achievement over time. And the uncivilized, seizing control of that very civilization they had so little a hand in creating, will determinedly undo it. They already are.

En passant par la Lorraine… (old song)

En passant par l’Irak…and then leaving at long last, and while removing all the planes, all the helicopters, all the Humvees, all the Bradley fighting vehicles, all the trucks, all the tanks, all the everything — now remember, boys, don’t leave any war materiel behind, including computers, including absolutely everything, god knows American taxpayers have spent or committed nearly $500 billion to hideous Iraq and its largely hideous people, and nothing should be left behind.

Let Moqtada al-Sadr be forced to deal, without the Americans to do the fighting for the Shi’a, with those stout-hearted Sunni yeomen of Fallujah, Ramadi, and Tikrit.

That will be fun. That will make it pleasant, and not disturbing, to get up in the morning, and read the latest dispatches from “Iraq.”