re: "Obama's Misplaced Mideast Optimism"

Daniel Pipes at danielpipes.org (" Opine briefly on diverse topics ") provided some thinkery on likely fallout from the Arab Spring.

10/25

re: "New Libyan Ruler Proposes More-Radical-Than-Expected Islamic Law"

Ace at Ace of Spades HQ noted the fallability of experts and that social evolution doesn't happen overnight.

Money quote(s):

"Unexpectedly.

I am beginning to note our current cadre of putative "experts" is surprised by "unexpected" news that our non-experts actually expected (and predicted).

Perhaps "expertise" now means "idiocy.""

An "expert," as it was explained to me when I was just a wee street-agent-in-training, is either:

a. Someone from out-of-town with a briefcase; or

b. (etymology) "ex" (former or "has-been") + "spurt" (a drip under pressure).

"I've had mixed feelings about these uprisings. Some say that tearing down despots is a necessary step in the process of political maturation.

Others say that such despots will be replaced by vicious thugs worse than before.

Here's the thing: I think both are right. I think that democracy, for this part of the world, will only come after a long series of violent spasms and failures. I think one purge will give way to the next. I think one tyrant will replace the next, and then share his fate." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

&

"(T)he people of these lands are probably going to have to learn all the lessons of history that the West learned from ca. AD 1300 to the present. The Islamic world has been essentially frozen in the middle ages forever.

I suppose, if they were smart, they could skip over the long, violent process of discovering that a liberal (classic sense) democratic republic is the only system that really works, by studying our example, and applying the lessons our ancestors learned.

But of course they despise us, and despise democracy because they despise us, so they will endeavor to prove that "their" ways can work.

I think they will try virtually everything before attempting the model of the despised Western infidels." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Awhile back CAA attended a brown-bag presentation at Johns Hopkins' Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies.

(This is not to brag, it was open to the public.)

The developing country under discussion that day was Congo (formerly Zaire) and academic superstar Francis Fukuyama was one of the speakers (although he disavowed any country-specific knowledge or experience of Congo).

The main speaker was an academic, Dr. Séverine Autesserre. From my notes:

"She noted the difficulties inherent with development and nation-building in a place like Congo due to the interconnectedness of the various mutually reinforcing political elements of nationhood: laws, representative institutions, and an independent judiciary. Perhaps her most crucial observation had to do with the unrealistic expectations of donor nations and international institutions regarding development in Congo and elsewhere. This was that nation-building in Europe and North America was a process which took centuries, five hundred or even a thousand years, to accomplish, uniting tribes and regional groups into a single nation. She deconstructed the European model of state development into three historical phases: state building to establish central institutions, development of a rule of law to limit the excesses of the state through equal protection and rights under the law, and finally institutionalizing of processes of accountability, so that state institutions and officials are accountable under the law to the people or their representatives."

(Bold typeface added for emphasis.)

Unexpectedly!

10/24

re: "Blogger Agonizes Over Col. Momo Not Being Given a Fair Trial"

Emperor Misha I at the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler ("HQ of the Rottweiler Empire. An Affiliate of the VRWC.") was untroubled by Col Qadhafi's end.

Money quote(s):

"(W)e really don’t give a hoot how obviously guilty beasts like Momo get sent to hell.

You see, we tend to believe in “live by the sword, die by the sword”, just in the same way that our SympathyMeter™ doesn’t as much as register a twitch of the needle when people holier than us agonize over terrorists not being offered the full protections of the Geneva Conventions.

Momo died the way he chose to live. He had tyrannized, murdered and brutalized without ever giving a second thought to the “rights” of his victims and those victims, some of them we might add, chose to send him off to Satan in the same way."

&

"Was he given fair treatment by American standards? Of course he wasn’t, but he had deliberately chosen todisregard anything even resembling those standards for every year of his tyrannical, murderous regime, so why should he be treated differently? Because he “deserved” it?

We could think up at least four full pages of what he truly deserved, and we can assure you that the list would make even the most hardened barbarian savage vomit his guts out in fear.

His Imperial Majesty firmly believes that the only way you can convince somebody to play by the rules is to make it abundantly clear that if he disregards the rules, then the rules will be disregarded where he’s concerned too." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

10/24

re: "Libya: Muslim law and secular dreams"

McQ at Blackfive ("the paratrooper of love") was unsurprised at anti-secular developments in Libya.

Money quote(s):

"If your hope for the latest version of “Arab Spring” to be found in Libya was a secular democratic state, you can quickly forget the secular part of the dream."

&

"I’d love to tell you this comes as a complete surprise, but then I’d be acting like some politicians I know.

I’m certainly not going to contend that keeping Gadhafi was the best thing we could do, but let’s be clear, what has happened darn sure doesn’t seem to be an outcome that we’d have hoped to see either. At least as it now seems to be shaking out.

In that area of the world, secular dreams seem to me to be the most foolish. How that particular dream manages to stay alive among the elite of the West is beyond me. It isn’t now nor has it ever been a probable outcome of any of these so-called “Arab Spring” revolutions. The revolutions are steeped in Islam because the governments being replaced were relatively secular for the area and the Islamic groups now rising were the ones being repressed."

Hope is still not a plan. (And it's not a very useful analytical tool either.)

10/24

re: "Gaddafi and the desecration of the dead"

Neo-Neocon ("slowly but surely leaving the fold and becoming that dread thing: a neocon") was troubled by the barbarity of barbarians.

Money quote(s):

"It’s hard to escape the grisly death photos and videos of Gaddafi. A flamboyant figure who was photographed often during his long and very public life, his well-earned enemies have made sure that his death has been especially well-documented, too."

It's called globalization, which, St. Thomas Friedman of Globalization notwithstanding, is not an unmixed blessing. Nowadays even barbarians can, and do, use cell phone cameras to record video of grisly torture and executions.

"My reluctance to gaze on Gaddafi’s dead face or to watch people mistreating his corpse has nothing to do with any admiration for the man. I have little doubt that he’s perpetuated many murders and kept the people of Libya under his brutal and capricious yoke for four decades, and that their rage at him is justified.

However, the moral stature of a culture and its people are judged by many things, and one of them is the way the bodies of the dead are treated, even the most hated and reviled dead on whom they understandably wish to wreak revenge."

So consider the "moral stature" of the culture of Libyan militiamen for a moment.

"This issue is not Gaddafi at all, nor anyone in particular—it’s about how a society behaves. There is a word for this sort of thing, and that word is “barbaric.”"

None of this bodes well for the "Arab Spring."

10/21

re: "These things happen for a reason"

Lemuel Calhoon at Hillbilly White Trash ("Commenting about politics, religion, firearms, food, Celtic music, beer, science fiction and the Asheville Vortex. Home of the Hillbilly Ecosystem.") is experiencing some existential-level cognitive dissonance. And with good reason.

Money quote(s):

"America went to war with two nations in response to Islamic terrorism and we have killed or captured most of the top leadership of al Qaeda, including bin Laden himself. However our failure to identify the nature of the problem (which is nothing more or less than Islam itself) and our suicidal fealty to the culturally lethal ideologies of multiculturalism and political correctness have rendered us almost defenseless against this kind of home grown jihad and seriously hampered our ability to deal with the problem on an international level.

Right after Sept. 11 president Bush hosted Islamic religious leaders at the White House to prove that the US was not at war with Islam. Then it came out that most of those imams were tied to terrorism in some way. TSA screeners at airports are told not to pay any special attention to people who look Arab/Middle Eastern for fear of being accused of profiling."

Islam's problem seems to be either that it never underwent a reformation (which might have shifted it from its medieval moorings) or that the reformation it has undergone took it in the wrong (from Western perspective) direction.

I understand that Pres. Bush took pains to emphasize that the West, and the U.S. specifically, was not at war with Islam so as to head-off initiating the sort of Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" that Osama Bin Ladin dreamed of waging. Not playing into what Al-Qaida wanted is a pretty good argument for Bush's policy there, whatever else you may think of the former president.

As for TSA screening guidance.... from a security perspective, you don't want to necessarily exempt non-Arabs/Middle Eastern persons from security screenings since that sort of loophole creates a security vulnerability that just begs to be taken advantage of.

But that doesn't seem to be how things are actually done; TSA gives the appearance of being more afraid of CAIR's press releases than is healthy or helpful. Going out of the way to avoid paying attention to the patterns and indicators of likely terrorists is a losing proposition and indicates a lack of courage of conviction.

That's a recipe of losing the larger war.

"Christian and Jewish clergy must be banned from the 9/11 memorial service at Ground Zero but a building ruined by wreckage from one of the 9/11 planes (making it as much a part of Ground Zero as the WTC site) must be torn down so that a giant Islamic Victory Mosque can be built.

The United States has helped to bring about regime change in Egypt and Libya (actually going to war in Libya's case) to replace governments that were bad but not currently supporting Jihad terrorism with far worse governments that are connected with organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda.

The United States and Western Europe (that part of the world once known as Christendom) has seemingly lost faith in itself. In its value to the world. It is very likely too late for Europe but not for the US. That is if we screw up our courage and face facts and take appropriate action."


8/28

re: "Friendless in the Middle East"

Daniel Pipes at DanielPipes.Org ("the Internet's most accessed sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam") explains why the "Arab Spring" and "democracy" aren't necessarily good things in the mid- to long run.

Money quote(s):

"(O)ther than in a few outliers (Cyprus, Israel, and Iran), populations are predominantly hostile to the West. Friends are few, powerless, and with dim prospects of taking control. Democracy therefore translates into hostile relations with unfriendly governments.

Both the first wave of elections in 2005 and the second wave, just begun in Tunisia, confirm that, given a free choice, a plurality of Middle Easterners vote for Islamists. Dynamic, culturally authentic and ostensibly democratic, these forward a body of uniquely vibrant political ideas and constitute the only Muslim political movement of consequence.

But Islamism is the third totalitarian ideology (following Fascism and Communism). It preposterously proposes a medieval code to deal with the challenges of modern life. Retrograde and aggressive, it denigrates non-Muslims, oppresses women, and justifies force to spread Muslim rule. Middle Eastern democracy threatens not just the West's security but also its civilization.

That explains why Western leaders (with the brief exception of George W. Bush) shy away from promoting democracy in the Muslim Middle East." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Interesting that Prof. Pipes includes Iran among the outliers whose populations are not hostile to the West, but it's substantially true. It's Iran's governing regime, the mullah-cracy, that hates the West, not the overwhelming majority of the people(s) in Iran.

"Summing up the West's policy dilemma vis-à-vis the Middle East:

Democracy pleases us but brings hostile elements to power.

Tyranny betrays our principles but leaves pliable rulers in power.

As interest conflicts with principle, consistency goes out the window. Policy wavers between Scylla and Charybdis. Western chanceries focus on sui generis concerns: security interests (the U.S. Fifth Fleet stationed in Bahrain), commercial interests (oil in Saudi Arabia), geography (Libya is ideal for Europe-based air sorties), the neighbors (the Turkish role in Syria), or staving off disaster (a prospect in Yemen). Little wonder policy is a mess."

It's very easy to criticize U.S. foreign policies in the Near and MidEast regions.

(It's so easy that even CAA can do it!)

Prof. Pipes does us all a service by pointing out some of the limiting realities that constrain any effort to design and implement a humane, consistent, and non-suicidal foreign policy.

(It's rather like the "you-can-have-this-cheap-good-fast-pick-any-three" conundrum, only with humanitarian, consistence, and self-interest being your "pick-any-two" constraints.)

11/8

re: "Obama’s Muslim Brotherhood Favoritism Will Lead to War in the Middle East"

Keith Davies at Big Peace attributes to malice what can adequately be explained by naïveté.

Money quote(s):

"Over the last year we have seen our government sell out Hosni Mubarak, the key leader who has brought relative peace and stability in the region. Instead, we have jumped on board with the “Arab Spring” which has led to Islamists taking power. My colleagues and I are not privy to CIA intelligence, but if we were able to predict such things based on common sense and our expertise in Middle East affairs, why could not our government see? Or maybe they can. It seems our government is infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood and, along with political correctness from politicians who choose reelection over common sense, has allowed the Middle East to become a powder keg ready to explode."

Still and all: once is happenstance or accident; twice is coincidence (even if some folks don't believe in "coincidence"); but three times is enemy action.

12/3

re: "Ten Years After"

Francis W. Porretto at Eternity Road aims to influence your opinions.

Money quote(s):

"I've received a fair amount of email this past week, inquiring about whether I planned to write something on the tenth anniversary of Black Tuesday: September 11, 2001, when Islam openly declared war on the United States. Yes, I said Islam, not "terrorists," "extremists," or "fundamentalists." We have it on the authority of a head of state -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey -- that there is no "moderate Islam;" there is only Islam. Any number of imams, mullahs, ayatollahs and so forth have said the same -- and have proceeded to justify the atrocities of Black Tuesday as a response to the "humiliation" Muslims have endured at America's hands.

What humiliation? Daring to rise and progress out of the seventh century. Proclaiming a doctrine of individual rights beyond what their scriptures allow. Treating persons of all races, sexes, and faiths as possessing a perfect right to be as they are and believe as they do. Letting women read, drive, and go about in attractive clothing, unaccompanied by a male chaperone.
We "humiliate" Muslims and Islam by being Americans: believers in freedom, a secular state, and an objective rule of law and justice." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

There're what, a billion muslims in the world? That's almost as many muslims as there are Catholics! Surely all of them aren't at war with the United States?

"If you're a person of wholesome values and rational mind, you were as outraged about Black Tuesday as I was -- and you remain so, as I do. If we differ at all, it's in what would constitute the appropriate responses, short and long-term, and the enduring stance America ought to take toward the perpetrators, their enablers, their apologists, and their co-religionists.

Needless to say, even among men of good will, that's a wide spectrum of opinion. What I'm here to do, today and every day, on this and every subject of public import, is to pull your opinions toward mine. Anyone who writes op-ed is trying to do the same. " (Bold type added for emphasis. - CAA.)

I know it's supposed to be a bad thing to hold onto anger all this time, but frankly I've come to doubt whether the veracity itself of that bit of modern-day folk wisdom. Anger isn't always a bad thing, it seems to me. It can help keep you focused on whatever, presumably important, thing that has angered you. After all, if the thing is still making you angry, maybe the fault isn't you after all.

Not to rule that out, you understand. Let's not rule anything out, let's keep an open mind to all the possibilities and then start to rule them out, based on facts and observations.

Regarding the bolded portion of the excerpt above, I have no quibble with Mr. Porretto's wording except the final three (including one compound-) words: "and their co-religionists." And I'll tell you why:

My issue, my anger, my "eternal hostility" remains with "the perpetrators, their enablers, (and) their apologists." And while I certainly don't limit that hostility to "their co-religionists," nor do I intend to categorically sweep them into the "eternal hostility" category unless, by their perpetration, their enablement, and their apologetics, they place themselves therein.

Frankly, those who are in essence accessories, before and after the facts of 9/11, constitute a sufficiently broad category within both the non-Muslim and Muslim worlds as to provide no end of enemies.

But, as we are in a war, not a criminal court, the object is not conviction of the guilty (including the accessories) but their defeat. So let not your heart be troubled.

"We are at war with Islam, and have been since Iranian "students" stormed the American Embassy in Tehran, took 52 Americans hostage, and kept them for 444 days.

Don't bother to argue with me about this. Either we are or we aren't. If we aren't, the evidence for the proposition demands a better explanation than any I've heard. Worse, there's no objective evidence that we aren't, and no Islamic apologist has dared to present any.

But we're not fighting that war. We're acting, in large measure, as if some other force were responsible for the crimes and atrocities committed in Islam's name. We're acting, in other words, as if Islam and Muslims generally are the victims rather than the cause and the perpetrators."

A couple of points:

First, while certain Islamic actors (including entire governments) have been at war with the U.S., indeed with Western civilization, for at least since the Tehran embassy takeover, we have not ourselves been at war back. At least not until 9/11 when the war which had been being waged against us abroad for all these years came crashing into the home front. No pun intended.

Second, the first (and last) victims of the Sharia-based ideology of militant, fundamentalist (and occasionally socialist) Islam are always muslims themselves. Muslims who disagree, muslims to aren't fundamentalist, aren't militant, aren't murderous enough; they are always the ultimate victims of our Islamist enemies.

This is not to minimize our role as an obstacle to a Sharia-controlled world where muslims may be terrorized and murdered without hindrance, since there won't be anyone else left to terrorize and murder; we're the Great Satan, after all. And with that greatness comes great responsibility.

"In part, it's because of the barrage of propagandization we've received about Islam, about American "imperialism," and about our duty to "tolerate" this totalitarian creed. Like it or not, people's attitudes and unconscious assumptions are shaped by the Legacy Media even today. They see, hear, or read a "news report" and accept it as undiluted, unpolluted fact. They read a bit of op-ed from some eloquent columnist with whom they agree on less weighty matters, and they accept his rendition rather than performing their own. They hear persons whom they admire, and whose good opinion they crave, declaim in this or that fashion, and they accept it and parrot it back to him for no better reason than their need for his approval.

And in part, it's because we've become uncomfortable with the concept of evil. We simply dislike the idea that there are persons in the world whose ultimate aim is our subjugation or destruction. And since it's an abstraction, not represented by any individual we have close at hand, we scowl and shrug it away.

Got a hot flash for you, sports fans: There is evil in the world. Now and then it's codified into a creed and set down between book covers. The Communist Manifesto. Mein Kampf. The Koran. Those who embrace such a creed are embracing evil.

Yes, it's a Christian's part to hate the sin but forgive the sinner and pray for his repentance. But it's a free man's part to fight the evildoer with all his power -- especially when at the end of the contest, one of you will be dead, and the other free to go on as he's done.

We are at war with Islam. We've been at war with Islam for forty-one years." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

See my remarks above. Islamic terrorists (including entire governments) have been at war with us for each of those forty-one years, but for much of that time we brushed aside the insults, the murders, the treachery, and the attacks against our military, our diplomats, and our civilians, as mere nuisances to be ignored or somehow bought off. Actual warfare, at least since the Jefferson administration, against Islamic terrorists, bandits, and pirates (but I repeat myself) has been quite rare, and more the occasional skirmish indicental to various rescue or other reactive and defensive missions.

"Try reading this concise report on Muslims' behavior in Western countries to which they've been admitted. Try rationalizing its evidence against any other conclusion than that Islam is an aggressive program of totalitarian conquest of the world, with a few theological trimmings as protective coloration.

Try imagining how "tolerance" for such a creed could eventuate any other way than in mass slaughter of the "tolerant" and the subjugation of the survivors."

Those with eyes to see need only observe developments in the erstwhile "Arab Spring" nations for a sneak-preview of what may be in store, Ralph Peters notwithstanding, for Western Europe.

9/11/11

re: "The ‘First Fruits’ Of Our Support Of The Arab Spring Endeavor In Libya"

John Bernard, 1st Sgt. USMC (ret.), at Big Peace doubts that Libya's Arab Spring will amount to an improvement.

Money quote(s):

"(B)oth the United States and France have reached out to the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) and predictably, the NTC turned it’s back on those very same nations that came to their rescue.

The US State Department reached out to our “new friends” in Libya, hoping to retrieve Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the mastermind behind the 1988 Lockerbie airline bombing and the NTC said no. The no was neither tentative nor was it contingent on some prerequisite understanding or action. They said no with emphasis. The NTC spokesman said; ” [We] will not give any Libyan citizen to the West…”. So much for thanks, the spirit of cooperation, any understanding of right and wrong or any semblance of a common understanding of human rights, just; no."

Followed by a mention of disappointment regarding France's expections about Libyan oil production.

(One begins to suspect that "no blood for oil" doesn't parse well into French.)

"For those who choose to immediately dismiss these as the “growing pains” of a new regime protecting it’s interests, let me say that this continued naïveté toward the Islamic mind and their collective vision of the west and all non-compliant nations, is delusional! These are not the actions of righteous people whose vision includes a belief that all men are created equal. These are the actions of a people who deem all men are either submitted to Allah or they are not; and there are consequences for non compliance.

Naïve or not, the United States and our NATO friends, embarked on a mission to help secure freedom for the Libyan people, as though freedom is a universally understood concept. The US Constitution generally defines freedom as every individual’s God given inalienable right to self determination."

What about the Libyans' definition?

"What the Koran teaches is anathema to any constructive understanding of personal freedom. Rather it teaches submission and it’s adherents, to propagate, by the sword if necessary.

This is not a new revelation, this is an age old truth as defined in the Koran, the Hadith and the very words of the Islamic Scholars. So what continues to give hope to our western minded “leadership” that what these various rebellions are seeking is indeed, freedom? And what gives them the idea that supporting their efforts will in the end support our unilateral interests to defend these shores, and our Constitution?"

Change is not always for the better. And some do not see their interests, even while in national office, as being unilateral.

"Let me be clear; the world will be no worse off with Ghadaffi’s head on a pike but supporting a gaggle of 7th century thugs who would have Al Qaida in their number never mind in a position of leadership, will set us all back two decades."

1st Sgt Bernard is specific in just what kind of U.S. leadership there was two decades ago, and cites an example in U.S.-Libyan relations to make his point.