The Culture of Denial

China Confidential has learned that the left-leaning Speaker of the House was actually advised to adopt the ugly symbol of submission to backwardness and terrorism during her visit to Syria by our own State Department, despite the Bush administration's public criticism of her outrageous "fact-finding" mission.

Reason: in the name of democracy, ascendant appeasement advocates at State wanted to signal a supposed faction of so-called moderate Syrian Islamists that the United States is sympathetic to their struggle against the secular Syrian regime.

An Islamist revival is sweeping Syria and threatening Baath Party rule, and the US, incredibly, seems to think that this is a good thing. More than five-and-a-half years after the Islamist attacks of 9/11, America's dumbbell diplomats--led by the duplicitous Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice--still believe they can ride the Islamist tiger, in keeping with decades of covert and overt backing for rightwing political Islam dating to US support for the Muslim Brothers of Egypt during the time of Nasser.

The cynical bipartisan policy, which blew back in our faces on 9/11, has not been discredited; rather, it has been revamped. The old Cold War rationale of supporting Islamism to counter Soviet expansion and influence and suspect Arab nationalism and pseudo-socialism has been replaced with the cockeyed concept that the only realistic alternative to clerical-fascist Islamism is "democratic Islamism"--an oxymoron only an intellectual, or US diplomat, could concoct and embrace.

Back to Syria. The Islamist threat to decades of secular dictatorship is largely a result of the regime's unsuccessful efforts to accommodate Islam itself. After crushing the Muslim Brothers in the early 1980s with great ferocity, the Baathists built hundreds of mosques throughout the country and encouraged people to practice pious but non-militant Islam. The policy backfired: Islamist preachers took over the mosques, and banned Islamist books were published and distributed widely.

Another military solution seems unlikely. Instead, the regime continues to promote moderate Islam, while aligning itself with Islamist Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas.

Meanwhile, headscarves have proliferated, even in the most upscale Damascus neighborhoods. Read more