Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the example of Turkey to show how democracy was established there, and how it might be established in Iraq and Afghanistan, were different perspectives prevailing in Washington:
Beginning in the early 1920s, Kemal Ataturk did everything he could to constrain Islam as a political and social force in Turkey. He abolished the Caliphate. He gave women the right to vote. He forbade the promotion of the religious Muslims within the army. He outlawed the wearing of the hijab for those employed by the government. He abandoned the Ottoman (Arabic) script for the Roman alphabet. He commissioned a Qur'an in Turkish and a commentary (tafsir) in Turkish as well. He required imams to vet, or later to read, sermons (khutbas) prepared by a central office, that would carefully limit the contents. He passed the Hat Act, to end the wearing of fezzes (which made praying easier) and to require the wearing of Western-style caps and dress. He did everything he could to destroy the power and influence of the Muslim clergy, even going so far as to attack some mosques and hang some clerics.And he did this systematically until his death in 1938. After his death, Inonu and others continued the same line. And they constructed an entire mythology around the figure of Ataturk -- the kult lichnosti. That cult of personality was a clear attempt to replace the cult of Muhammad, as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. And with the cult of Ataturk, the Great Man, came the history of the Turks, the Sun-People, who had always been in Anatolia, and who managed to include almost everyone who had ever been in the region, right back to the Hittites.
Yet what has been, after 80 years, the result? Erbakan, now Erdogan. The majority in Parliament of the so-called "Islamists." The slow undoing of Kemalism, halted here and there only by threats from the army.Islam turns out to be permanent. Why does anyone think that what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan will make those countries less Islamic, when in the first, Islam has reappeared with a vengeance among both the Shi'a and the Sunnis (not that it ever went away, but was merely hidden) and in the second, the Taliban have reappeared because whatever memory there is of their miserable rule fades quickly?
And why do so many think that the Americans should remain in both places, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, squandering the lives of soldiers and the morale of the armed services (where standards for new recruits have been lowered, where young officers are quitting, where fewer now join the citizen-army of Reserves and National Guard)? All in the doubtful hope that somehow, despite the experience with the sole Muslim country to have democracy and to have a systematic attempt to curb Islam, Islam yet remains, and comes back, like Rasputin. But unlike Rasputin, who finally succumbed to Yusupov, Sharia cannot be killed.
Concentrating on Muslim states, attempting to make them "better," will do very little to protect Infidels from the Da'wa campaigns and demographic conquests being made right now in the Lands of the Infidels, above all in Western Europe. Iraq and Afghanistan are expensive and exhausting distractions; the game is not worth the candle.
Many say that the example of Communism should be kept in mind. I agree. To me, Communism fell not because of one person or one thing, but because of everything that was done by the Western alliance, and above all by the United States, from the late 1940s on. Some part of it involved military alliances -- the founding and funding of NATO. Some of it involved military campaigns, as in Greece, and later in Korea. Some of it involved propaganda, everything from Wladimir Weidle on Russian emigre poetry on Radio Liberty, to Willis Conover on American jazz on Voice of America ("O Sen Lui/O gorod moy/O Sen Lui/Kogda proshchayus' ya s toboy/O Sen Lui/Na sto vtoroj etazh/Ne khochesh' stoya, tak lyozha sdash'....), to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, publishing houses that were CIA fronts (Editions de la Seine), Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe -- the works. And then there was all the money spent to help De Gasperi fight Togliatti and his consort Nilde Jotti in Italy, and to help the non-Communist left fight Maurice Thorez in France. And by the mid-1980s, the most intelligent members of the Nomenklatura saw that on its own terms Communism had failed.
Islamic jihad must be constrained, right now, and we cannot wait for decades. But the situation in Iraq can be exploited so that the camp of Islam is divided and demoralized, and the camp of the Infidels does not squander, but husbands its resources. And that is important, because every effort must be made to undermine the role and presence of proponents of Sharia in the West. That requires that America and Europe not be divided, that the American and other Infidel publics remain convinced that an anti-Jihad effort will make sense (as the war in Iraq does not, to many, make sense), and to see, sooner rather than later, that the most effective instruments of Jihad are not "terror" (and it is supposedly to fight "the terrorists" that the Americans are in Iraq, when the main opposition to them consists of local Sunnis unwilling to relinquish political, and therefore all other kinds of power) but rather Da'wa and demographic conquest.
The "victory" to be achieved in Iraq in Bush's view consists of the establishment of a functioning nation-state, and in my view would consist of continued and growing hostility between Sunni Arabs and Shi'a Arabs, in the best outcome drawing in, and using up, money, men, materiel, and attention from the two greatest beneficiaries of the removal of Saddam Hussein -- the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The American President once had an idea, and now the idea has him. If he does not seize the opportunity presented on a platter in Iraq to exploit ethnic and sectarian fissures within the dar al-Islam in order to constrain the Jihad, that will be a very great mistake. Two parallels come immediately to mind: the failure of the French to reoccupy the Rhineland when the Germans violated the Treaty of Versailles and remilitarized that area, and in 1919, the limiting of the British, American, and Czech expeditionary forces to 19,000 men, when a hundred thousand of them, well-armed by the Americans, might have made all the difference in the Civil War, and avoided 70 years of Soviet Communism.
But he is caught in a web of his own making. He cannot see this.
O.T.
Andrew Bostom takes on Bernard Lewis:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=22763
President Bush is an oil-man with ties to the Saudis that he seems intent on harboring. If Jeb Bush ever thinks he's going to be President in this country after the debacle that George has gotten us into, he might as well go climb a tree. Enough Bushes, enough blunderers, enough ignorant millionaires.
Perhaps we need a Fitzgerald in Washington.
I agree that Islam is persistent. It has been constrained by Turkey somewhat successfully and the Baathists seemed to have arrested the jihad in places such as Iraq and Syria.
However, unlike communism, Islam as a system does work. It creates hell on earth for women and creates paranoid, closed-minded societies, but it does survive without any moderating influences making an impact.
I believe human beings will have to decide whether or not the world can tolerate Islam as a political and social system. Probably the greatest advancement the world could experience by the year 2100 would be the extinction of Islam. Barring that, we are probably stuck with Islam forever.
Communism was an economic system that was vastly inferior to market capitalism and it failed on that basis. Islam is not economic, indeed it is anti-economic for it is based on rewards and bounty in the hereafter (the rape and plunder that it foments here and now notwithstanding). Suicide bombing is the ultimate non-economic act. This "feature" of Islam - that is need not be economically viable, is what has caused it to last 1500 years where Communism was done in less than 100.
What do you think the outcome will be if we stay on the current path? Will not the Shi’a, once they feel empowered and secure, not ask us to leave and exact a bloody revenge on the Sunni? Your thoughts?
"Will not the Shi’a, once they feel empowered and secure, not ask us to leave and exact a bloody revenge on the Sunni? Your thoughts?"
-- from a posting above
The mere asking of such a question is telling: the part about will they not "ask us to leave" at a certain point.
Of course they will. But not before having kept us around, if they can, as long as possible, for several reasons. The most important is to have the American soldiers do as much of the fighting and dying and getting wounded as possible on behalf of the "government of Iraq" -- i.e. the Shi'a who now control the "government of Iraq." The second is to make sure that as much of the money that can possibly be inveigled out of those Americans (and how many Iraqis are now living high, including those who escaped abroad, with loot from the generous and freespending Infidels, winning hearts, winning minds, spending like there was no tomorrow). The more time the Americans spend there, the more money they are likely to hand out. The more time they spend in Iraq, the more likely it is that they, those Americans, will keep building that absurd $595 million dollar monument to a fantasy, that American Embassy complex in the Green Zone that will never, ever, serve the function, or be filled with the personnel, that were so blithely envisioned when that ridiculous project was begun three years ago). The longer the Americans stick around, the more likely it is that they can be inveigled into handing over all kinds of military equipment, on the theory that "without it" the "Iraqis" can't function, can't protect themselves. The American generals, or some of them (not Abizaid, probably, but hearts-and-minds Chiarelli, and Casey, and some of the others) will find that plausible. The Administration will find that plausible. It isn't enough, after all, to train the "Iraqis" to be a real fighting force, and thus to create the best-trained Arab Muslim army in the MIddle East. No, we must arm it better -- after all, aren't they going to be our permanent friends? Otherwise, why would we have spent all the money we already have spent? Why would we be building that $595 million dollar embassy complex? No, having spent so much, now's not the time to become suspicious -- let's give the Iraqis what they so desperately need. That is the Iraqi calculation.
But the telling part of your question is that business of when they "ask us to leave." When, in god's name, did the disposition of American soldiers become a matter of waiting around to be told when to stay or go by others, and especialy by others who are innately, irreducibly, immutably hostile -- hostile every time they hear a Qur'anic recitiation, hostile when they read the Hadith, hostile when they leave Friday Prayers after a horrific anti-Infidel khutba is fierily delivered, hostile even if they never read the Qur'an and never attend a mosque because the atmospherics and attitudes of Islam suffuse every part of society, so only a few, the advanced, Westernized, few, can conceivably escape from this general attitude?
Why in god's name do we accept the very idea that American officers and men must stay until the "Iraqis" (the non-existent Iraqis) tell us that we can go, tell us that they have "stood up" sufficiently in their own minds, so that we can "stand down." They want us there for other resons, for as long as possible. And I haven't even gotten to why the Sunnis might want us to stay as well, for they may see us as their protectors from the full viciousness of Shi'a-trained police and army units. And then there is the Iranian side -- the Iranians want us to stay, bogged down, and also close to possible Iranian retaliation should any attack be made on their nuclear project. Thus it is entirely conceivalbe that the Americans may now be holding back the Israelis from doing what the Israelis can hardly be expected to refrain, at some point, from doing what, if the United States continues to dither about, Israel will have to do. For after all, Ahmadinejad has called for Israel's destruction, and there is no doubt that he is willing to endure casualties in return for that destruction -- a small price to bring about the Mahdi's return, and everything wonderful. So the Iranians, too, have a stake in keeping the Americans there.
And even if one side were to decide that they wanted the Americans to leave, what would the other side then do? It would immediately scream that the Americans "ruined things" and "they must stay" and "protect us." In other words, the Tarbaby of Iraq will never ask us to unstick ourselves. The American govenment has to stop allowing its policies to be held hostage either by the behavior, or capacity, or express wishes of some "Iraqi" government. It should make up its own mind as to what is best for America.
And here is what the American government should do, after the failures of Maliki to complete a government, after his outrageous denunciation of putative American attacks -- a "common occurrence" in his view -- on civilians: announce a complete withdrawal, within a few months, to be completed within six months. And leave, and leave no equipment behind. Let them "stand up" then, or not, as they see fit or are able. And stop work on the damned embassy. And show that the hopelessness of creating an "Iraq" out of disparate and hostile groups has been recognized, and now a different, cooler and for some crueler strategy will be implemented. And it will now be up to the Muslims, in and out of Iraq, to make that situation work for them -- for otherwise it will work for us.
And while both Sunnis and Shi'a jockey, and appeal to co-religionists outside of Iraq, other states in the area should be read the riot act, for we will no longer be needing them to preposition troops at bases -- and that should begin with Qatar, a state whose ruling family gives refuge to Al-Jazeera, tips off Al-Qaeda members, and financially supports Hamas. That can continue, but it can't continue with American bases, and implied American protection against Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia (the three regional bullies). No, Qatar will be on its own.
Stop waitiing to be asked, like an anxious guest who won't leave until the host starts to yawn and direct him toward the door. We don't have to wait for what the "Iraqis" (and those various "Iraqis" may vary, over time, in whether they want us to stay or to go -- a decision they will make only on the basis of what's in it for them, never what might further American interests).
Time to go. Long past time.
"However, unlike communism, Islam as a system does work. It creates hell on earth for women and creates paranoid, closed-minded societies, but it does survive without any moderating influences making an impact."
from post above
Perhaps it's ultimate viability can only be tested once it achieves its ultimate goal of world domination. It is a parasitic pathology that requires a viable host, be it wealthy and productive Western societies that are all to willing to help nurture and spread the disease, or a dhimmi population determined to survive at any cost, albeit in humiliating servitude. Without the host, I think it would be hell on earth for the ummah, too, and the parasite would devour itself.
I'm with you, Hugh. Whenever the faithful kill each other I feel like going out into the street and handing out candy. My only regret is that our boys sometimes get caught in the middle.
Here's the Jewdog Doctrine:
Only use military force to prevent the Muslims from having WMD, and then make it air power as much as possible.
Put a ban on Muslim immigration and beef up the borders.
Form an Infidel Church with Ali Sina as Pope and proselytize with a new Crusade.
Yes, I too believe we're being played for suckers and had hoped you'd have many thoughts on the matter. I was amply rewarded. Thanks.
Hugh-
As I read your comments re Turkey I thought of this-
http://www.movie-list.net/classics/terminator2-teaser.mov
In the end, as an internal logic in the movie dictated, there was only one conclusion that could result with Arnold-though two possibilities hung in the balance in the drama. The Termiator would do his job or else the Terminator would be terminated. The Termiator dictated that.
try this-
http://www.movie-list.com/trailers.php?id=terminator2
Here's a question: if Turkey went to such great lengths to curb the influence of Islam, and still failed, what hope does Europe have? We don't even admit that there's a problem. Even if did admit it, we wouldn't have the resolve to do anything nearly as drastic as Turkey did. As far as I can tell, the only effective solution is to eject all Muslims from Europe, no matter how moderate and integrated they are. Throw them all out, and never allow Muslims to immigrate again. This is really, really drastic, so it's never going to happen anywhere.
"Throw them all out, and never allow Muslims to immigrate again. This is really, really drastic, so it's never going to happen anywhere." Jesus Christ Supercop
It will after we lose a couple of million from a nuke. Sad that we have to lose that amount but hey that is life. Human nature overcomes all: religion, social systems, economics, political correctness, political parties...
Its called self preservation....Its basic biology 101. We need a little "Fang and Claw" from Mr. Huxley and enough with cute bambi nature courses from Mr. Gore.
Hugh - All that to say "pull out." Wow.
I'm convinced that not even a nuke would persuade Western leaders to take even elementary action againts Islam.
During the Cold War, our government, (US) made some alliances in the 50s 60s, and 70s with some unsavory dictators who would be a bulwark against communism's spread. I have forgotten some of the names, but we aligned ourselves with the Philippines, North Korea, Iran (the Shah), and more than one South American dictator. Don't forget Viet Nam, hardly a beacon of democracy in 1963.
Democracy is nice, but that alone will not defeat the looming Jihad.
Hugh,
I follow your logic, but it worries me. It seems to me the logical conclusion is that we'll have to commit a mass slaugher of muslims at some point if we want a world in which people can lead good lifes. After all, muslims seem to be more than willing to take time out from honor killing and other forms of slaughtering each other to kill infidels. Taking the long-run view of history, a slaughter of the muslims is no big deal. There have been plenty such slaughters through history. However, it seems that we live in a moralistic era where we are determined to follow moral rules no matter vile the results of those rules--an era of objective PC morality run amock, without the slightest constaint by common sense. I suppose I see little hope for the future. It looks to me like it will either be muslim hell world or the obliteration of homo sapien.
And jihad is not the only Islamic issue. We also face serious issues with global warming and human overpopulation. The muslims want to spawn like rabbits. Again, it is hard to escape the idea that catastrophe is coming.
Despite this post, I'm actually an optimistic kind of guy. I suppose I want to know what hope you see for the future.
"I follow your logic, but it worries me. It seems to me the logical conclusion is that we'll have to commit a mass slaughter of muslims at some point if we want a world in which people can lead good lifes[sic]."
-- from a posting aboveI cannot understand the question above.
This makes no sense to me. Again and again I've suggested a use of other means, other instruments of war, other than the merely or mainly military. If the Infidels do not invade Muslim lands, have as little to do with those lands as possible, work to dimiinish or use up that "money weapon" of the Jihad that pays for mosques, madrasas, propaganda, and armies of Western hirelings, and only, militarily, intervenes from afar, from the sky, to destroy any Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction projects (such as that in Iran) that, it would seem to me, all goes completely against what you accuse me of encouraging -- some kind of "mass slaughter." Not at all.
If ethnic and sectarian divisions within Islam lead to all kinds of problems for the camp of Islam, keeping it off balance, requiring many Sunni Arab regimes, for example, to worry about the Shi'a both within and without, that may make for redirection of attention and instability within the Arab lands, but hardly to "mass slaughter."
And if, similarly, the Infidels change their immigration policies to keep out those who bear, undeclared in their mental baggage, a belief-system inimical to the wellbeing of Infidels, and to their political and legal and social institutions and understandings, that will not involve, in any way, this "mass slaughter" you refer to.
If, however, the instruments of Jihad -- Da'wa, demographic conquest, and the "money weapon" -- are not countered, then it is likely, in Europe first, there will be great disorder, violence, and slaughter.
Everything I urge makes such an outcome more avoidable, less likely. Why do you deduce from my hundreds of postings on the subject of Iraq, and on how to conduct the counter-Jihad, exactly the wrong thing? Have you read them?
Hugh,
I'm sorry. I'm not trying to accuse of you advocating in any way the slaughter of Muslims. I am aware that you want to avoid such an outcome. I don't think that either you or I are bloodthirsty people.
I'm just saying that it sometimes appears to me that at least some Muslims have the attitude that they are willing to fight to death for Islamic global domination. Given weapons of mass destruction, I'm not so sure how we do anything less than fight back to the death. I can't emphasize enough that the only reason for the possibility that we may forced to slaughter Muslims is simply their utter unwillingness to not kill us. Surely, Iran will use nuclear weapons, if it gets them. I don't feel safe about those nuclear weapons in Pakistan either. Maybe, if government's followed your ideas, we could avoid heinous events, but I doubt that they will. And after the heinous events, what happens next?
[Bush]is caught in a web of his own making. He cannot see this
Or he does see it and wants it that way so the Muslims can win and the "Insders" can usher in world government.
Bush is pro-Islamic!
"Or he [Bush] does see it and wants it that way so the Muslims can win and the "Insders" can usher in world government.
Bush is pro-Islamic!"
-- from a posting above
Spare us all conspiracy theories. The truth is horrible enough. Stupidity explains so much, stupidity and ignorance. The ignorance was perhaps understandable for a while -- but by September 12, 2001, a program of intense study of Islam ought to have been underway, at the Pentagon, at the State Department, at the White House, in Congress, at major newspapers and television stations, so that no one who was involved in the making of policy, and no one involved in discussing policies, would not have had a good sense of what Muslims are taught to belief, and what it is reasonable to assume that they do believe, or believe much of, and are loyal, for all kinds of reasons, to Islam and to fellow Muslims who may act on the duty to support or participate in Jihad.
Ignorance can be dispelled through study. As for stupidity...