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Yes you indeed did read that correctly. I am an “appeaser” as that term should be understood properly from a historical perspective. So much hot air and verbiage has been spewed both over the television airwaves and in print this past week since President Bush’s speech before the Israeli Knesset which in most circles was viewed as an attack on the likely Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama that the time is ripe to examine that oft-maligned term and give it some perspective.

Most people associate the term with, of course, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s alleged coddling of Nazi dictator Adolph Hitler at the Munich Conference of 1938 that ceded the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. It is suggested that in doing so appeasement of this nature invariably leads to destabilization and war in the long run as supposedly such men as Hitler are incapable of being appeased. In the debased culture of contemporary political discourse the shorthand is that any talks with unsavory regimes are to be eschewed as a sign of weakness. Conservatives of the stupid school (of which I count myself an opponent) of foreign policy suggest that appeasement is a peculiarly liberal (read: Democratic Party) tack that will leave America weaker. This is not only historically untrue it is also rubbish of the first order ideologically considered.

Leaving aside the fact that Chamberlain was a Tory British prime minister having succeeded the more liberal pacifist coalition government of Stanley Baldwin by pledging to do more to rearm Great Britain, the roots of sensible appeasement go back to the previous century and the inventive and productive foreign policy of another much-maligned figure Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich of Austria. Today Metternich is viewed by leftist ideologues as a reactionary and apologist for the ancien regimes of Europe and indeed he was “guilty” of the latter charge but that’s ignoring the landscape in which he worked.

Metternich’s greatest fear was that the nationalism unleashed by Napoleon’s conquests would result in a new nationalized Europe of perpetual war and disorder and as we have seen in Iraq, little good can come of disorder. After the crushing Austrian defeat at Wagram which ended the war of the Fifth Coalition against Napoleon, the newly-appointed Metternich had little choice but to appease Napoleon so as to preserve Austria to fight another day and this he did brilliantly first by arranging the marriage of Austrian Archduchess Marie Louise to Napoleon (thus giving the upstart Corsican an air of legitimacy by a tie with the ancient House of Hapsburg) and the Treaty of Schonbrunn which concluded the War of the Fifth Coalition while seemingly harsh for Austria preserved the Austrian Empire and brought a lot of unhappy German subjects into Napoleon’s orbit. Most importantly in positioning Austria as a future “armed neutral” juxtaposed between Napoleon and Russia he assured the greatest possible freedom of movement Austria could imagine at the time. And when Napoleon eventually overreached and invaded Russia and sealed his defeat and first trip into exile it was Metternich and Austria who reaped the benefits. Ultimately, of course, the endgame would play out at the Congress of Vienna that marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars and ushered in a century of peace in Europe (interrupted only by the Austro-Prussian War that would make the beginning of modern Germany and the Franco-Prussian War a few years later).

Now as we all know (or should know) the greatest American foreign policy mind of the past century, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was/is a Metternichian to his core having written his doctoral thesis at Harvard on the Congress of Vienna. Kissinger too was roundly condemned by the arch-conservatives who would later rally to Ronald Reagan for his policy of détente with the former Soviet Union. But here again one should examine the historical record. Albeit belatedly, Kissinger did succeed in getting the United States out of a disastrous war in southeast Asia and most importantly with Nixon opened the door to China as a counterweight to Soviet influence worldwide.

All of this brings us to the current contretemps. As Col. Jack Jacobs wrote here over the weekend both Obama and McCain are wrong. McCain is wrong to state that we shouldn’t be talking to the likes of Iran (which, in fact, we have been for some months with little to show for it as regards Iraq) and Obama is wrong to suggest that diplomacy in and of itself is likely to lead to salutary results. What is needed now is to identify our strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis our positions on the ground in the region and to enter into talks based on a realization of same while at the same time examining a series of points on which we might make common cause with both the Iranians and Syrians. That will be the subject of another essay I shall offer shortly on this crucial issue of the coming electoral campaign.

Author’s Note: While the views expressed in this article are my own I am indebted to my old grad school professor, Enno E. Kraehe, Willam W. Corcoran Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia, for many things including my understanding of this crucial period of modern European history and for imparting such pearls of wisdom that the Holy Roman Empire was not “very holy, very Roman or much of an empire” and that Frederick the Great is never referred to by that moniker in Austria.

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen - and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?”) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

I disagree with that conclusion. Today’s Muslim predicament, rather, reflects historical circumstances more than innate features of Islam. Put differently, Islam, like all pre-modern religions is undemocratic in spirit. No less than the others, however, it has the potential to evolve in a democratic direction.

Such evolution is not easy for any religion. In the Christian case, the battle to limit the Catholic Church’s political role lasted painfully long. If the transition began when Marsiglio of Padua published Defensor pacis in the year 1324, it took another six centuries for the Church fully to reconcile itself to democracy. Why should Islam’s transition be smoother or easier?

To render Islam consistent with democratic ways will require profound changes in its interpretation. For example, the anti-democratic law of Islam, the Shari’a, lies at the core of the problem. Developed over a millennium ago, it presumes autocratic rulers and submissive subjects, emphasizes God’s will over popular sovereignty, and encourages violent jihad to expand Islam’s borders. Further, it anti-democratically privileges Muslims over non-Muslims, males over females, and free persons over slaves.

For Muslims to build fully functioning democracies, they basically must reject the Shari’a’s public aspects. Atatürk frontally did just that in Turkey, but others have offered more subtle approaches. Mahmud Muhammad Taha, a Sudanese thinker, dispatched the public Islamic laws by fundamentally reinterpreting the Koran.

ATATÜRK’S EFFORTS and Taha’s ideas imply that Islam is ever-evolving, and that to see it as unchanging is a grave mistake. Or, in the lively metaphor of Hassan Hanafi, professor of philosophy at the University of Cairo, the Koran “is a supermarket, where one takes what one wants and leaves what one doesn’t want.”

Islam’s problem is less its being anti-modern than that its process of modernization has hardly begun. Muslims can modernize their religion, but that requires major changes: Out go waging jihad to impose Muslim rule, second-class citizenship for non-Muslims, and death sentences for blasphemy or apostasy. In come individual freedoms, civil rights, political participation, popular sovereignty, equality before the law, and representative elections.

Two obstacles stand in the way of these changes, however. In the Middle East especially, tribal affiliations remain of paramount importance. As explained by Philip Carl Salzman in his recent book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, these ties create a complex pattern of tribal autonomy and tyrannical centralism that obstructs the development of constitutionalism, the rule of law, citizenship, gender equality, and the other prerequisites of a democratic state. Not until this archaic social system based on the family is dispatched can democracy make real headway in the Middle East.

Globally, the compelling and powerful Islamist movement obstructs democracy. It seeks the opposite of reform and modernization - namely, the reassertion of the Shari’a in its entirety. A jihadist like Osama bin Laden may spell out this goal more explicitly than an establishment politician like Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but both seek to create a thoroughly anti-democratic, if not totalitarian, order.

Islamists respond two ways to democracy. First, they denounce it as un-Islamic. Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna considered democracy a betrayal of Islamic values. Brotherhood theoretician Sayyid Qutb rejected popular sovereignty, as did Abu al-A’la al-Mawdudi, founder of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami political party. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Al-Jazeera television’s imam, argues that elections are heretical.

Despite this scorn, Islamists are eager to use elections to attain power, and have proven themselves to be agile vote-getters; even a terrorist organization (Hamas) has won an election. This record does not render the Islamists democratic but indicates their tactical flexibility and their determination to gain power. As Erdogan has revealingly explained, “Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.”

Hard work can one day make Islam democratic. In the meanwhile, Islamism represents the world’s leading anti-democratic force.

~by Daniel Pipes