Arab Spring & Beyond -- the "Endgame"

[Tromotorac]

Zanimljiv clanak:

March 30, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Middle East Howlers
If we expect the successors of Mubarak and Qaddafi to be freedom-loving democrats, we will be dangerously disappointed.


http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/263361

A "howler," the Wall Street Journal called it in an editorial yesterday. That certainly is a fitting description of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's latest mindboggling foray into Middle East analysis. It makes sense, she maintains, for American armed forces to get "kinetic" in Libya but not in Syria because Moammar Qaddafi is a brutal dictator while brutal dictator Bashar Assad is really a "reformer." Perhaps she has been watching too much al-Jazeera, this former first lady who was so instrumental in her husband's airbrushing of the terrorist kleptocrat Yasser Arafat — a peace-seeking statesman . . . at least between intifadas.

Al-Jazeera is the Islamist communications hub. The network's brightest star, Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood, fresh from his triumphant return to Egypt to dance on the grave of the pro-American Mubarak regime, recently issued a fatwa calling for Qaddafi's murder. And in the network's showcase cause, the annihilation of the Zionist entity, Assad and his Hezbollah confederates are just what central casting ordered. Yet, according to Secretary Clinton, al-Jazeera is the place to which people turn for the "real news," the serious analysis you just can't get from the talking heads on U.S. television.

Another howler . . . or is it? Fox News, for example, is fast becoming the Arab Spring Channel.

On its weekend talking headliner, Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace spent several minutes grilling Newt Gingrich on his marital infidelities. "Man to man," the host hectored, the former House Speaker must have had some glass-house qualms. After all, he was cheating at the very moment when he was leading the charge against Mrs. Clinton's intern-chasing husband. Gingrich — who is not yet even a declared presidential candidate — is a long shot for a nomination that won't be decided until over a year from now. Yet Wallace thought it essential, right now, to get to the bottom of indiscretions that are nearly two decades old.

Tough questioning — fair, but tough and unyielding. That is Mr. Wallace's trademark — or at least it was until Sunday's program shifted to the breaking news in Libya. Without congressional consultation, much less endorsement, the Obama administration had just dispatched the nation's armed forces to take sides in a civil war. Problem? Not at all, not for Mr. Wallace's giddy guests. One after the other, Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Ct.), longtime Islamic-democracy-project enthusiasts, gushed over the "rebels" and the joys of America's finally being aligned with the "Arab street" (i.e., the people who celebrated the 9/11 attacks and, just this month, the murder of the Fogels, a family of Jewish settlers in the West Bank). Without a hint of challenge from the formerly dogged Wallace, McCain and Lieberman seemed to compete over who could ooze more affinity for the "freedom fighters."

The pattern continued through the program's concluding panel of pundits, in which Fox's Brit Hume, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and Fortune's Nina Easton glowed over the "rebels" of the "Arab Spring." But who are the rebels? There was apparently no need to tarry over that seeming irrelevancy. It could only distract from the truly urgent question of whether we are doing quite enough for them — whether President Obama's Alinskyite play of helping these "freedom fighters" while claiming not to help them will be enough for them to prevail.

Perhaps not, the consensus seemed to be. It will probably take arming them and providing other logistical support. It was left to the house lefty, Juan Williams, of all people, to point out that we really don't know much about the rebels — except that some of them seem to be anti-American Islamists. Maybe, he suggested, we ought to find out more before we start passing out matériel that could one day be turned against us.

Williams had stumbled, at long last, on the fact so inconvenient that it must not be spoken: The "Arab Spring" is actually the Islamist Spring. Islamists as "freedom fighters"? Now that's a howler. The very concept of "freedom" in Islam is markedly different from the "freedom" at the root of Western democracy. Islam envisions not individual liberty but its antithesis, perfect submission to Allah's law — and the Judaeo-Christian notion of equality is nowhere to be found. There is a reason why Islam has no democratic tradition.

The Islamist mission is to impose this law, sharia, a totalitarian code to be enforced by rulers who would be just as authoritarian as the despots they are replacing. There is too much evidence to permit the Arab Spring heralds to refute this proposition head on, so they deflect. They spin Middle East developments as a major defeat for al-Qaeda and its philosophy of extorting change through violence.

This, however, confounds ends and means. Al-Qaeda's approach — holding that even Muslims should be killed if they won't hew to the terror network's construction of Islam — has always been an outlier, attracting only a fringe of Muslims. In contrast, its goal of imposing sharia as the gateway to Islamicized societies is not merely an al-Qaeda goal; it is a majority position in the Muslim Middle East. It is not al-Qaeda that is trying to put Muslim apostates to death in Kabul; it is the U.S.-backed Afghan government. It is not al-Qaeda that is administering "virginity tests" in Cairo; it is the U.S.-built Egyptian military.

The biggest difference between Qaddafi and the coming Islamist despotism is that the latter, faithful to its ideology, promises to be intractably anti-Western and disdainful of non-Muslim religious minorities. Thus Arab Spring enthusiasts tend to develop laryngitis when it comes to the taxonomy of their "rebels." Nor, other than the mantra that troop surges have succeeded, is there much chatter about the spring that came early for Iraq and Afghanistan — where non-Muslims are persecuted, homosexuals are abused under the guidance of the clerics, Iran's influence grows, and the "Zionist entity" is dutifully reviled. (Anybody want to bet me on whom the new Iraq will support in kinetic Islam's next faceoff with Israel?)

Only days before Secretary Clinton's Assad howler, we had the Arab Spring's first blooms in Egypt. In a referendum, Egyptians voted by more than 3 to 1 (an overwhelming 77 to 23 percent) to adopt a framework for swift new elections — the opposite of the deliberate transition process that would have given non-Islamist democrats a fighting chance to build effective secular democratic parties and institutions. The plan voters endorsed quite intentionally will enable the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve electoral success in parliament this September. The Brothers will then be poised to rig the presidential election three months later, and to control the drafting of any new Egyptian constitution. We already know that one part of the current constitution will remain sacrosanct: the article establishing Islam as the state religion and sharia as fundamental law.

Arab Spring fans told us the urbane Egyptians were even more determined "freedom" seekers than the tribal Libyan "rebels." They scoffed at those among us who warned against having too much confidence in the Egyptian military — which has been mentored by American counterparts for the last 30 years — as a hedge against the slide toward Islamism.

In the event, the military — which, like the Brotherhood, mirrors Egyptian society — predictably favored the Brothers. To stoke the illusion of a true democratic uprising, Secretary Clinton sought to meet with the anti-Mubarak vanguard. They rebuffed her. It's not hard to understand why: She is an American, and they despise Americans; she is tilting at windmills, and they are hardheaded Islamists. Meanwhile, campaigning Muslim clerics and activists publicly framed a "yes" vote as a call for more sharia and a denial to the Coptic Christian minority of an equal role in civic life (for in Islam there is no separating civic life from sharia). The Islamists won going away.

So what we can expect from the "rebels" if they oust Qaddafi? What can we learn from the Egyptian election — coupled, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with rampant anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and abuse of non-Muslims despite years of U.S. democracy-building? You won't find out from watching the talking heads. They've decided not to ask.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy

[Hate mail]

Taj jebeni narod uvek hoce izbore odma' ...

[Pijanista]

[Tromotorac]

Into the Libyan Labyrinth

April 1, 2011 10:15 A.M.

By Victor Davis Hanson 




We should watch for some very strange things in Libya in the days ahead: (a) Euros bet on the wrong rebel horse, and if Qaddafi survives, he will surely "renegotiate" his massive oil exports to Europe, or perhaps prefer to deal with the Chinese. So Britain, Italy, and France will become increasing panicky and want us to ratchet things up. (b) Expect to hear less and less about the UN and the Arab League as Obama, to win, needs more and more to ignore their restrictions on using American ground troops and direct bombing of Libya's assets. (c) Expect the Left to get increasingly antsy as it weighs the viability of Obama's progressive domestic agenda versus their own humiliation at having to keep still and support a preemptive bombing campaign against a Muslim, Arab, oil-exporting nation, without congressional approval, that was not a national-security threat to the U.S. The Left is going to have to accept Obama's rendering inoperative the UN and Arab League restrictions when he inserts some ground troops or orders some Milosevic-like bombing. His supporters also will have to endure the fact that Obama's prior pledges of "turning over" and "toning down" a war that we would supposedly fight neither on the ground nor by sustained aerial bombardment are simply untrue — and this on top of everything from the now jim-dandy Guantanamo and A-OK renditions. (d) We are quickly evolving beyond the choices of both a Mogadishu- or Beirut-like clean skedaddle and a 12-year-Iraq-like-no-fly-zone humanitarian mission, and most likely are considering either bombing Qaddafi like crazy or sending in some troops or both.

Bottom line: It is always a dangerous thing for a president to start a war without Congress, without a consistent mission, without a coherent methodology, without a plausible end game, and without a clue who our rebel allies are or just how strong their opponent actually might be — contingent on a fickle UN, impotent but oil-enthused allies, and a passive-aggressive Arab world, all to prove a point that we could reinvent our military into a humanitarian rescue force, subordinate to international unelected bodies — and all the more dangerous during the golfing, basketball-playoffs, and resort seasons.

[Hate mail]

But it was gonna be a cakewalk???

[Tromotorac]

Cakewalk for Alqaeda? Yes.   :(






Foolish Thoughts
By Ben Stein on 4.1.11 @ 10:02AM

Herewith a few, no doubt foolish, thoughts about President Barack H. Obama's Middle East policy.

First, it doesn't make any sense. President Barack H. Obama's close friend and apologist, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts (D) wrote a week ago in the Wall Street Journal to the effect that one of our main goals in helping to oust our longtime ally, Hosni Mubarak, in Egypt, and our nutty "friend," Moammar Gaddafi in Libya was to get the Egyptian and Libyan people good jobs.

Yes. I am not making this up. Surely, this must be the first time in human history that one nation bombed the hell out of a much smaller, weaker nation to get the people there jobs. And anyway, how are we going to get those poor people jobs? How can a cruise missile get people good jobs (except maybe cleaning up the rubble)? And if Mr. Barack H. Obama and Senator Kerry know how to get "good jobs" for the people of Libya, maybe they could use that knowhow to get jobs for the roughly 15.5 million Americans who are unemployed.

When I think that we have gone to war with rationales like that one, I really want to just find a cave and hide in it until Mr. Obama goes away.

2.) It is now cruelly apparent that the Egyptian Revolution has not gone as well as we might have hoped. Islamic law, enforced by the military, is taking hold in Egypt. The poor beleaguered Copts, who made a show of solidarity with the demonstrators, are an endangered species. Businessmen are put on trial just for being successful.

Protest itself is now illegal. Women who protest are raped or hauled off for involuntary virginity testing. (I am not making this up. It was in Nick Kristof's column in the New York Times. He has a wicked sense of humor, but this does not sound like a gag.) Professors who do not endorse the Moslem Brotherhood are threatened with summary killing. (By the way, this does not bother Mr. Kristof much, if I read him right. It's "messy" and no more.)

And this was supposed to be a revolution that ushered in a rule of democracy and human rights.

The Moslem Brotherhood of Egypt, sworn to destroy Israel, hand in glove with Hamas, proponent of Shariah law worldwide, is poised to take over the whole country and put it on a war footing with Israel.

This Revolution (as I respectfully predicted) is turning into exactly the kind of nightmare that the Iranian "Revolution" against the Shah became: the replacement of a fairly mild tyranny with a brutal, violently reactionary Moslem terror state. The amazing part is that this was coming as plainly as a freight train barreling down the track.

Mr. Barack H. Obama ignored it, and pushed for Mubarak's ouster. Now, instead of a friend in Egypt, we have a bitter enemy -- armed with superb U.S. made weapons.

3.) The exact same thing is happening in Libya. Certainly Col. Gaddafi is a wild man. But we don't even know who the rebels are. The Israelis, who have a life or death interest in knowing these things, say the al Qaeda is a big part of the rebellion. The Moslem Brotherhood is another big part.

So, we are attacking Col. Gaddafi -- again, a crazy man -- on behalf of people who may well be far more dangerous to us than Gaddafi was in the last ten years. Surely this must be the first time we have ever gone to war for total strangers.

Of course, Libya will end up dominated by the Islamists, because that's how all Moslem countries in the Middle East wind up when there is a rebellion. That's as predictable as gravity. They are organized, smart, and fearless. Our present leadership is confused, confused, and confused. They are run by patient, cunning tough guys. We are run by Hillary Clinton. You get the picture?

4.) Interestingly enough, while we literally go to war to oust Col. Gaddafi, who is no threat to anyone outside Libya, we do not lift one finger to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons or to change the regime in Syria which is unremittingly hostile to us and always has been. If we have all these great, accurate Tomahawk missiles, why don't we blow up the Iranian nuclear bomb making sites? Why are the evil allies, Iran and Syria, immune to our righteous anger as they slaughter their own people, while crazy clown-like Gaddafi gets hammered? Could it be that Mr. Barack H. Obama is afraid of Syria and Iran? And if he's terrified of Ahmadinejad now, what's it going to be like when Iran is a nuclear power?

Or is Mr. Barack H. Obama secretly sympathetic to Iran and Syria? Is there some wicked connection between the Assad/Ahmadinejad axis and the Minister Farrakhan/ black Muslims of Chicago world? And from them to the President? One hears such things, but they are too upsetting to be believed.

And yet, and yet. Why will Mr. Obama act to save the citizens of Libya (or so he says) and do nothing for the people of Iran -- who actually like us?

5.) As far as I can tell, the Islamists now basically have a heck of a lot more than they did on 9/11. They have a giant new pal, Egypt. They may soon have Afghanistan again. They will probably soon have Libya.  The war in Iraq is far from over. And now there are rumbles from Algeria and Morocco. Gaza used to be Israel. Now, it's Hamasland. The Moslem radicals have figured us out: if they pretend to be democrats, we stand back and let them take over -- and even help them. Then when they show their true colors, it's too late. They are on the march in Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Bahrain, all extremely important to us.

If Saudi Arabia is taken over by the Islamic radicals, it's a world class catastrophe and yet every sign is that Mr. Obama will not help our pals there when push comes to shove. This is getting truly terrifying.

Two questions:

Whose side is Mr. Obama on?

Where is Richard Nixon when we need him?

Oh, now I remember. He was a peacemaker. He was crucified.






Ben Stein is a writer, actor, economist, and lawyer living in Beverly Hills and Malibu. He writes "Ben Stein's Diary" for every issue of The American Spectator.

[Pijanista]

Najpametnije sto SAD i EU mogu da urade je da priznaju gresku, plate ratnu odstetu Libiji, posalju ratne zlocince (Obamu, Sarkozija, generale sa vrha i ljude na terenu koji su cinili zlocine) u Hag, izvinu se Libijskom narodu i drze se po strani. Dakle pojedu govno i sklone se iz WC-a.

P.S. Ja sam mrtav ozbiljan.

[Hate mail]

Sve te rabid right loudmouths u stvari zabole za bilo sta osim da primitivnom, increasingly outsourcable puku trube o antihristu, muslimanu, pusacu, crncu, Kenijcu, komunisti, teroristi, socijalisti, sebicnjaku, neodlucnom da stupi u akciju, kretenu zato sto je stupio u akciju, cikaskom gangsteru, jahacu apokalipse Obami.

A sve to posle 10 godina i 2-3 triliona $ (ongoing) no-bid ludila born-again prethodnika.

Mrzi me da citam to sve.

[AFord]

Iz teksta provejava zabrinutost za Izrael. Zar je normalno ocekivati vecito da ideja vodilja americke spoljne politike bude dobrobit Izraela?!

Kod Egipta mislim da Obama nije imao opcija. Da je ostao uz Mubaraka ispalo bi sranje, ovako se uhvatio u kolo sa egipcanima i ostatkom sveta.

Libija je drugo. Pisao sam da sam se zgranuo da je Amerika uopste povela posle svog Francusko-Britanskog busanja. I sada posle par nedelja se povlacimo (pod pritiskom javnosti). Pri tom iz svega sto citam niti se tacno zna ko su ti sto se suprotstavljaju Gadafiju, ovaj ih guzi kako stigne uz svu no-fly-zone a sada ispada da ukupan broj vojnika je oko 1500 ljudi.
Neverovatno u kakvo govno smo sa Libijom ugazili...

[Tromotorac]

Karter je izgubio Iran, ovaj ce izgubiti celu severnu Afriku i ceo bliski istok. Istorija se ponavlja, pred nasim ocima.

[Pijanista]

Ma to sve treba izolovati, trgovati da, ali nista dalje. Nikakav protok ljudi, i drzati na oku da se ne domognu atomske bombe:

http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/04/01/afghanistan.un.attack/index.html?hpt=T2