Sometimes things have to get worse, much worse, before they get better. Disaster, war, famine, oppression, murder, hatred, recrimination – often these things are clarion calls to men and women of good faith, waking them up to the threat in their midst, urging them to take action. Sometimes it’s the klaxon of the fire station – too late to prevent the fire, but maybe early enough to save the neighborhood. Sometimes we sleep through the siren, and it’s reduced to an ugly trumpet for the four horsemen. Other times, it’s a wakeup call and we respond.

I still hold out hope that we have time to respond to that siren we hear wailing right now. If I hear its message correctly, it’s warning about the suicidal tendencies in western culture, and about the threat of Islamacist radicalism. Few people seem to have the same understanding of it. But increasingly, it seems that folks in the west hear it, and are responding.

But first, things have to get bad.

Mike notes the significance of Hamas’ big electoral victory in Palestine. I’m pessimistic about the short term prospects of the Hamas government. How does one negotiate with somebody, whose opening demand is your destruction, and the scattering of your ashes across the desert? Does one offer one’s amputated leg as a sign of good faith? But on the other side, this is the second election the Palestinians have enjoyed. If we are indeed backing democracy, building up a habit in Arab culture of being able to go to the polls and throw the bums out, may be worth something. Even life under Islamacist lunatics may not be the worst thing that can happen to the Palestinians. Bloodshed and tyranny aside, if they indeed manage to go to the polls in a few years and throw the bums out, a bad experience with Islamacist rulers may be just the thing they need to change their mind on on these notions of Sharia rule and premanent religious warfare. This “worse before it gets better” paradox seems to be in operation in Iraq, where the people are sick of the Mullahs, and striving to build up critical mass toward a democratic revolution. It has worked in Afghanistan, where a people once thought ungovernable appear to be reconciling western democracy and plurality with strong Muslim faith and traditional tribal self-governing habits. Similarly, Muslim Brotherhood gains in Egypt may not be a bad thing, so long as the people get a taste of exactly what the clerics have in mind for them. You see, it’s not about whether this election has a result we like; it’s about whether there’s another election a few years down the road where the people get to reconsider. That’s the best we can hope for, if we really believe in self governance, and it’s a good strategy in the long run because few people will keep electing an oppressive warmongering tyrant to office.

Things do indeed have to get bad first before those in a deep slumber can be stirred. I believe that the French Arab riots combined with Iran’s crazed threats have served as a wakeup call to the French political classes, who at long last are shedding a bit of the post modernist moss and returning to their cultural roots. France under Chirac is standing surprisingly tall right now. But it took weeks of riots and an internal political crisis to make them wake up, however briefly, from their slumber. Will they remain awake, or will they settle back into their dreams of the end of history? It’s hard to say right now. One danger is that instead of waking up, when we hear the alarm clock, we swat at it, give the appearance of waking up for a moment, then go back to sleep. The difficulty with this is that the next time, it’s much harder to wake us up. We’ve already shut off the alarm, and passed the time when we should have been wide awak.

The same thing goes for Iraq. People were moaning a few weeks ago about how it was going to be a mullah-ocracy because the Shiites had such a strong showing. Well, it turns out that the Shiite religious parties are strongly represented, but not well enough to have a controlling majority. So they have had to form a coalition government with secular parties rather than facing another general election. Did you wonder why the Shiites, supposedly possessed of a uniform outlook, didn’t just vote in a strongly Shiite religious government? Well, first of all, religious Shiites rule in a couple of major southern cities, including Najaf. I believe the experiences of Iraqis under these dismal Mullahs has convinced many Iraqis to avoid mullah-ocracy as a form of government, Iranian government sponsored vote fraud efforts notwithstanding. While it got worse for some Iraqis, I think the ultimate result was a better one, because the CPA had the patience to sit tight, keep pushing democracy, and let the people figure it out for themselves.

The same process is underway here in the U.S. 9/11 simply didn’t happen for roughly half the country’s politicians and people. It is off the radar. Half the country woke up, the other didn’t. I have a suspicion that we just hit the snooze alarm on that alarm clock. Maybe we didn’t – perhaps enough of us are awake to shape the response for quite some time to come. I have a gut feeling that isn’t true, and that it’s going to take the destruction of a major city to get us to come to grips with the struggle going on in the Islamic world. I hope it’s not the case, but it could be.

I believe the reason we’re stuck in a worse-before-better cycle, is that most people have very poor predictive abilities. We don’t learn from history, we ignore obvious facts that cut against our politics and sentiments, and as a result we generally don’t do a good job of foreseeing how events are likely to turn. Thus we respond to stimuli, more than charting out a coherent course and sticking to it. Right now, as we speak, a the usual subset of lefty commenters over at John Cole’s place are pining for a dictator to run the Palestinian authority, mocking the notion of democratic self governance and so forth. These are the same folks who no doubt were trumpeting “root causes” on 9/12/01, and ranting about U.S. support for anti-democratic “But he’s our bastard…” tyrants that we relied on as proxies during the Cold War. I think they misunderstand that sometimes, things simply have to get worse before they get better.

The real test comes, of course, when it’s time for the Palestinians to have a third election. One that some “third way” Palestinian group, other than Fatah or Hamas, is allowed to enter. Still, little steps are better than none. Let’s see how it pans out.