In a previous Samizdata.net article by Brian Micklethwait, he quotes an article by fellow Samizdata contributor Natalie Solent written on her own blog:
Natalie says that it would have been better for the Algerian fundamentalists to have kept their election win and taken Algeria down the Iran trail, which eventually, if Iran itself is anything to go by, gets better. I think I agree.”
Great. “Algeria” is better off for the next twenty years under Islamic fundamentalist rule. Yet again Brian sees people as an amorphous mass. Several thousand individual women have had their throats cut in the past decade for not wearing ‘modest dress’. Several hundred children have been slaughtered by similar means. But that’s OK ‘cos in twenty years someone else’s kids might not be shot for demonstrating against the ban on “The Simpsons” or Pepsi adverts.
It’s one thing to take a libertarian isolationist view (it is a better one since the end of the Cold War, in my opinion). Liberal interventionism on the nineteenth century scale can be ineffective (Afghanistan after toppling the Taliban springs to mind) and is arguably a misuse of British taxpayers’ money. But on what possible grounds can a libertarian support the imposition of a theocratic dictatorship by a rigged ballot only a week after attacking Christian creationists for wanting to keep Darwin out of the classroom in some U.S. southern state?
As for Natalie, I wonder what future she thinks her Algerian contemporaries see for their families. I don’t suppose many of them blog under their real names either. I thought a libertarian position would be that if consenting Islamic fundamentalists wished to purchase land and build a shining model of the good society for us all to learn from; then so long as they didn’t use force to get people in, or to prevent them from leaving, that would be fine. Unlike Iran, the Algerian Islamists are quite open about scrapping elections, something even Adolf Hitler was vague about.
To the extent that the armed forces see their job as protecting the constitution or the population from external invasion or tyranny, I reckon they’ve got a point in opposing Theocratic despotism. This is also true in Turkey where a similar problem exists albeit in a less bloody form. I’m not saying “send in the Marines”. But every Algerian soldier who shoots a fundamentalist terrorist is making the world a better place in my books.
Natalie’s remarks about “two-sided” cruelty is another fine one. The Algerian equivalent of Guardian readers think the Islamists will let them live, just like their late and un-lamented predecessors in Iran did (atheists die too). The Guardian and the Independent have played a very dirty game indeed. The standard line they put out is to attribute every other massacre to the army first, then reluctantly admit that maybe, this time the fundamentalists did it. Imagine if every time the IRA planted a bomb, the American press claimed the British police did it? I can just hear the conspiracy theorists reply “They’re the ones that don’t go off, because the British army’s detonators don’t work”.
There are only two things to do about terrorist organisations, either destroy them by any means, or surrender (if they’ll let you). I don’t think the fundamentalists will let their opponents surrender.
As for those who think that a temporary dictatorship far away would be fine, I suggest this simple exercise, imagine that you are being told to submit to it for the rest of your lives, by someone sitting in New Zealand (who may even object to your escaping to his country).
