America and 'political' Islam

Amidst this background, fundamental questions are now being asked about the effectiveness of Bush's foreign policy in the Middle East and the wider Muslim world. While the US media debates the merits of Arab democracy and the success of the Islamic forces in Palestine, Egypt, Iraq and other countries, a fierce debate goes unreported within America's foreign policy establishment about America's relationship with political Islam.

The divergent views are not over the nuances of Bush's democracy agenda but are more about America's reliance on Islamic parties as the principal partner for transforming the Muslim world into an oasis of democracy and liberal values.

Oddly enough, it is amongst the neo-conservative movement that these conflicting views are the sharpest. On October 24 2005, neo-conservatives Daniel Pipes and Ruel Marc Gerecht went head to head in a debate entitled "Should the United States Support Islamists?" Gerecht, a strong proponent of using political Islam to buttress US interests in the Muslim world, argued: "The United States must support the participation of Islamists in democratic elections. Since the authoritarian regimes currently in power will not permit the development of democratic institutions, open elections should be the first step in the reform process. Islamist political parties must be included in these elections due to their significant popular support because a ban on their participation would discredit the electoral process---robbing it of legitimacy."

At present there are two schools of thought that dominate American thinking on this subject. The first, led by Professor Barnard Lewis and his disciples such as Samuel Huntington and the arch neo-conservative Richard Perle maintain that political Islam by definition is anti-democratic and anti-West.

Such circumstances leave the door wide-open for America's opponents -

those among western powers who seek to thwart America's hegemony in the Muslim world and those amongst the Islamic parties who desire to re-establish the Caliphate. In both situations the winner is political Islam.