Here we are back in Iraq, jets screaming and buildings exploding, fighting the same war we just “finished.” It’s déjà vu of the worst kind; we have been here before, and this recurrent nightmare begs some troubling questions:

Why weren’t we successful in building a democracy in Iraq? Why couldn’t we just coach the Iraqis through democratic procedures and walk away and have it all function well? What is essentially different about Muslim populations that makes democracy so fragile? I’d like to offer some possible answers to those questions.

In the first place a democratic constitutional republic demands integrity, and integrity is only possible when people take responsibility for controlling their own actions and decisions -- that only happens when people feel they are accountable and grateful to a higher power whose integrity is perfect.

If integrity = justice righteousness veracity, then Allah is not such a higher power. Allah demands none of these attributes from his adherents -- quite the opposite. Allah demands that the victim of rape be punished. Is that just? Of course not. Allah demands death for all who disbelieve. Is that righteous? Allah demands that Muslims lie in order to promote Islam. It there any veracity in that?

Islam, in fact, has no set morality code. It promotes tight controls on women, but these are human controls, not issues that are between a woman and her god. Islam requires adherence to the goal of promoting itself, but allows and encourages followers to engage in absolutely any behavior that will further that goal.

A republic like ours demands a belief in free will. This is part of the reason that our own “democracy” is faltering; free will is a concept that’s only applicable to theists -- it has no relevance to the materialist, to the Darwinian naturalist, or to the atheist. Without God our “decision making” is nothing more than chemistry and synapses, so free will is nonsense. If free will is nonsense then so is freedom. Enter Islam, where freedom of thought and action are completely off the table. (If you want an intellectual and inside look at this read Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi.) Fourteen centuries of truncated individual thinking and it’s no wonder that democracy is a blinding light in the darkness of their lives.

A democratic republic demands an informed, intelligent, and mentally healthy populace. This is a scary one because Americans are losing these abilities; our schools are doing more propagandizing than informing, our people are dumbing themselves down with drugs, while our trying so hard to do it all without God is ruining our mental stability. But Iraq and Afghanistan have an even steeper hill to climb.

Nothing in their ideology demands or requires thinking in any productive, inventive, questioning fashion. We take for granted that all humans do that kind of thinking, but in a society where it is rarely rewarded, let alone taught and encouraged, it is unlikely to occur. The recent news about an Al Qaeda operative inventing a new bomb using toothpaste and clothing is unusual indeed -- almost unbelievable. Just try naming a half-dozen things that Muslims have invented that have been of benefit to the world, and don’t tell me “numbers.” The so-called “Arabic” numerals were invented in India.

Here we get into genetic territory. Nothing in the genetic makeup of Muslim societies makes the traditionally American approach to problem solving and rational discussion possible. I don’t mean this as a racist slur. There are Chinese Muslims, African Muslims, and lately, European Muslims. It’s not racial, nor is it ethnic, it is a cultural problem. For 1400 years, almost 47 generations, Muslims have been marrying 1st cousins -- and not just occasionally. So?

We know what happens when unethical dog breeders practice the breeding of closely-related dogs; the offspring become erratic, nervous, and hard to train. They develop structural difficulties like hip dysplasia and immunodeficiency disorders. Similar things happen with humans, so ever since Moses there have been laws forbidding first-cousin marriage.

Islam prohibits many close relational marriages, but not 1st cousin marriage, in fact it has been actually encouraged; it keeps money, and therefore power, within the clan and allows the tribal elders to keep tighter control over their young women. Today, as many as 70% of Muslims are inbred (Pakistan). Nick Sennels’ famous study of Muslim immigrants in Denmark shows a marked difference in intelligence and mental health between native Danes and immigrants from Muslim countries.

Reports from American servicemen assigned to train both Iraqi and Afghani soldiers indicate that these young men are almost untrainable. They demonstrate very feeble recall abilities, a low level of problem-solving aptitude and very shaky mental stability. It is no wonder that when ISIS attacked the Iraqi army ran away.

I know that it is politically incorrect to make such sweeping statements about a group of people. Truth, though, is often politically incorrect, politics and truth being such distant cousins. And the truth is that first cousin marriage for nearly 50 generations has augmented the negative traits of the people of any race whose family has long been practicing this Muslim tradition. Without an influx of new blood -- which may be what drives their hyper-aggressive proselytization -- there is little hope of Muslim societies fitting comfortably and prosperously into the world of the 21st century. 

The final reason we have not been successful at rehabilitating Iraq, nor Afghanistan, for that matter, is that we’ve tried to do this job without making any moral judgments about those societies. We’ve tried to guide these countries with our eyes tightly closed and our ears plugged. If we can’t be honest, not even with ourselves, about what has gone wrong for these people, there is no permanent way we can be helpful to them, and therefore no way to protect our own society. We can make no progress apart from the truth.

As this “war” heats up, anyone with any common sense can see what is going to go wrong militarily, but beyond that we must be aware of the mistakes we made the last time we “won” a war against militant Islamists. We pretended that this negative, brutal, damaging culture didn’t matter. We pretended that God Almighty didn’t have a stake, a plan, a solution. We acted as if Islam had nothing to do with the brutal attack on our homeland. We acted like this culture of hatred didn’t matter. It does matter and we’re going to need divine intervention and a lot of it if jihad is going to become a permanent thing of the past.