As Good As It Gets

Since the demos (Greek for “the people”) of any Muslim society is diseased, any endowment of sociopolitical power (kratos, the Greek word for “power”, whence we get the “-cracy” suffix for words like democracy and theocracy) to that people (or derivation therefrom, pace Lincoln) will be as diseased as the human material composing it.

That's why the various tin-pot banana-republic dictatorships (some bigger bananas than others -- e.g., the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran, or Ataturk and the Kemalists of Turkey) which have been marginally and grudgingly amenable or pliable to pro-Western policies are, to quote Jack Nicholson in the movie by the same name, “as good as it gets” for any Islamic polity.

The “secularism” Turkey “embraced” in the aftermath of WWI was also the result of an internal revolution and coup d’etat by a Muslim apparently influenced by Western Enlightenment ideas, Ataturk. Once in power, he did do a few things to constrain the influence of Islam in Turkey (e.g., banning the veil in public; or having the government monitor mosques and censor any Friday sermons to weed out the subversion typical of such; etc.). Ataturk was the prototype of the phenomenon we saw pop up elsewhere in the 20th century in various parts of the Muslim world: the Tin Pot Dictator who would in varying degrees try to constrain and tame the natural Islamic beast within his nation, in exchange for a “relationship” with the dominant geopolitical powers (at first Great Britain and Europe; increasingly as the 20th century unfolded, America and the Red Bloc -- the pathologically adventurist Red China and the U.S.S.R.). Other typical examples of this type -- the Father and Son Shahs of Iran; the Bourguiba dynasty of Tunisia; the King Mohammed dynasty of Morocco; the so-called “nationalist” Nasser and then Sadat, then Mubarrak. This type was not monolithic: they manifested varying degrees of cooperation with the West and varying degrees of willingness to constrain Islam. At one end of this spectrum was Ataturk, at the other end the whackjobs Khaddafi and Saddam; somewhere in between, perhaps, Assad père; and so forth.

Historically and right into our present, Islamic polities have fallen into 4 categories:

Theocratic Monarchies

Ipso facto fanatical and supremacist-expansionist, with their expansionism only checked by limitations of real life -- i.e., superior non-Muslims around them, or competing Muslim polities in the context of internecine violence which has been endemic to the disease of Islam from day one; with the perennial goal being to unify under a Caliphate but this, as with other ideals in Islam, more often than not frustrated by the limitations of reality (including the reality of their own many-splendored disease inherited by Mohammed's madness, which is their obsessive-compulsive blueprint for politics and laws in this life, and Paradise in the next life).
 
Theocratic Fascism

E.g., just to pluck a few from a turban: the Taliban, al Qaeda, Al-Shabaab of Somalia, Sudan, Boko Haram of North Nigeria, certain periods of post-Colonial Algeria, the MILF of the south Philippines, the Jamaah Islamiyah of SE Asia, and of course ISIS -- and what may very well unfold in certain parts afflicted by the virus of the "Arab Spring".
 
Tin-Pot Dictatorships

This is the most common form of modern Islamic polities, due to the constraints imposed upon Muslims by a stupendously superior and globally influential West. Some have been marginally pro-Western (e.g., Egypt under Nasser and Mubarak; Indonesia under Sukarno and Suharto; Tunisia under Bourguiba and Ben Ali, Morocco under Mohammeds V and VI, Iran under the Shah, Turkey insofar as the Kemalists hold sway) while some have been rather anti-Western, such as Libya under Kaddafi, Pakistan, and Saddam's Iraq (even if, like Pakistan, they may pretend to be in accord with various Western requests and/or make veiled threats of not behaving, in order to get $$$$$); while some have been more or less monarchic (e.g., Iran under the Shah).

And, as I noted above, some of these tin-pot dictatorships have been of brassier mettle than others (e.g., Iran under the Shah or Turkey under Ataturk) -- but all share the basic infirmity of the disease of Islam, which forever hinders any society from truly evolving and progressing on its own without the help to the tune of trillions of $$$ plus human ingenuity and expertise loaned out to them by Western Kuffar, such as for example we have seen with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over the past half century, essentially a profoundly retrograde and demonically barbarian country which would have collapsed into sheer tribalistic violence had it not been for the serendipitous geological accident of oil along with the willingness of Europeans and Americans to help them with the technology and managerial expertise necessary to extract, produce and export it.

Did I say "4 categories"...? Oh yes, the fourth would be:

Progressive Islamic Democracies
 
Oh wait, there are no examples of such, and none has ever existed.

Conclusion:

Now, if we can keep in mind what is "as good as it gets" with Muslim polities, we'll be halfway to sanity and safety in this century of this new millennium of an unprecedented revival of Islam.

Clearly, as we slowly recover our former rationality with regard to the problem of Islam and adapt it to the specter of an Islam Redivivus which includes the historically unprecedented mass immigration of Muslims into the West, along the way there we'll be wise to follow the logic of Jack's wryly sage and jadedly realistic advice.

Such that, for example, given their outrageous behaviors in fomenting international sedition against the West, polities such as Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen should not be tolerated, and should be treated as hostile entities at war with us -- if not engaging in outright hot war, certainly pursuing a cold jihad against us. For such polities, to count once again as being "as good as it gets" in terms of a Realislamik, they'd have to rehabilitate their behavior radically. Since, however, those terms subsist in a framework of ruthless realism about Muslims, there would be little or no expectation of such reform ever, let alone in the near future, evolving; and thus our policies would proceed accordingly (viz., the déroulement of the motley "Arab Springs" will have to be contained and reversed as surely as would any supremacist expansionist Lebensraum).

Further Reading:

Realislamik