Quote Originally Posted by RJO View Post
I don't think my argument necessarily undercuts the democratization strategy. I should also acknowledge that my thinking on this is strongly influenced by Jonathan Shay's Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.

It's possible to accept the notion that an important root cause of terrorism is a sense of victimization and a sense of the abuse of justice and honor (which is a central theme of Shay's work, since the Iliad opens with an aborted fragging of a commanding officer who violated a subordinate's sense of justice), while at the same time seeing democratization and its consequences as a tool to get at those root causes. Following the metaphor of "letting it burn out" -- for that approach to work, you have to make sure there aren't additional sources of ignition that will restart the fire at another spot. It may be that the individual cases have to burn themselves out, but democratization (or more generally, increasing the levels of justice within a society) dampen things down overall and prevent reignition in the minds of other individuals. That permits a shift from a large-scale military strategy to an individually-focused law enforcement strategy. (Occasional mass murderers will always be with us, but organized groups of them need not be.)
But the thing is that democracy in the Islamic world seems to invariably take a populist form that doesn't vent off the perception of victimization and scape goating, it just makes it even more legitimate. Heck, democracy in the UK and Spain doesn't seem to stop the rise of Islamic terrorism.

I believe the root cause of Islamic extremism is that Islamic culture (which includes but is not the same as Islam as a religion) cannot create stable states which can be economically, technologically, and socially competitive in the 21st century. But, to the extremists and those sympathetic to them, admitting this would be admitting that their religion is flawed. So, instead of blaming the real causes of their poverty, weakness, and instability, they seek scapegoats. And the West is it.

To me this means that Islamic democracies, assuming they retain the dysfunctional elements of Islamic culture, are still going to be uncompetitive, weak, and unstable. So they're still going to seek scapegoats. If anything, a democracy will be less effective than dictators like Musharaff, Mubarak, and the Sauds at clamping down on this.

I believe promoting democracy is a good thing in itself. I think it will have no effect on Islamic extremism.