Obama chose, early on, the egregious and execrable Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s man. Does Obama really wish to be associated with Jimmy Carter in any way? Brzezinski helped Carter abandon the Shah (with Gary Sick playing his little role as an “Iran expert”), though I doubt that Brzezinski had a hand in composing Carter’s treacly letter to the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was addressed by Carter “as a fellow man of faith.” And Brzezinski, with Carter, was the chief bullier of Begin and the rest of the Israeli delegation at Camp David.
For Brzezinski, to put it mildly, has always been noticeably unsympathetic to Israel. And what is most striking about Brzezinski is that in all his decades out of power, with the usual money-making and careful promotion of his children (Mika, indistinguishable from a thousand others, having risen high, thanks you for your efforts on her behalf), has apparently not felt it his duty to learn a thing about Islam. Yet in the last six years, what has he had to do all day save to attend, a few times a year, a few board meetings? But he pontificates away. And someone -- perhaps Obama himself -- decided that Brzezinski was the man to go to. That worries.
And then there is Samantha Power, possibly just back from her honeymoon. Her entire career has been owed to her “work” on genocide; the Sudan made her. Yet there is no indication that Samantha Power, any more than her fellow traveler or fellow-dabbler in the miseries of the Sudan, Nicholas Kristof (whose career was similarly helped so mightily by his own dispatches from Sudan, or from Darfur -- dispatches that merely reported, but never explained or made sense of things for readers), understands that the Sudan has been an exhibit over the past two decades of two kinds of Muslim Arab malevolence and aggression: toward the Christians and animists of the south, it has been a classic Jihad, designed to continue the push southward by the forces of Islam that has been going on, slowly at first, over the past century in the Sudan. The result has been about 2 million murdered or starved to death. And in Darfur, which for some reason was of much greater interest to the kristofs and the powers that be, exhibits the signs of being not a classic Jihad against the Infidel, but is rather a manifestation of the Arab supremacism of which Islam has always been the vehicle.
Samantha Power is a detail girl about some things. Her last book was an unreadable 642 pages on the life and death, vita morte miracoli, of Sergio Vieira de Mello -- when if she had possessed the gift of summary, and the esemplastic or shaping faculty, she might have produced something one-quarter the size and forty times as good. There is no hint that in all her cellphone calls to Obama, Samantha Power has ever explained to him that in Darfur as in the southern Sudan, the same impulses, from the same texts and tenets, are at work as were at work in the 9/11/2001 bombing, or in the beating to death of a Hindu passing Muslims coming out of Friday Prayers in Bangladesh, or in the “Jihad” (Col. Ojukwu’s own words) against the Christians in Nigeria during the Biafra War, or in the decapitation of Christian schoolgirls by Muslims in Indonesia. Connecting the dots can only take place if you first recognize that the dots have to be connected, and that can only come after having familiarized yourself with the texts, tenets, attitudes of Islam. This Samantha Power -- is the honeymoon over yet, and did anyone think to kiss the Blarney Stone? -- shows no signs of having done. And if Cass Sunstein, whom she just married, remains an adviser to Obama, who in his right mind does not think there will be a place for Samantha Power as an “expert” on foreign policy?
Oh, she’s done very well for herself, but now she may possibly feel obliged to save even a single life in the Sudan. And that can only be done with an American military intervention, one requiring not much by way of soldiers, but simply the overnight destruction of the Sudanese airforce, and seizure of Darfur and the southern Sudan, until such time as a referendum on independence can be held.
One could go on, in a leisurely prosopographical way, holding up for inspection now this “foreign policy adviser” and now that, but this, for now, will have to do.
Brzezinski was the architect of the plan whereby the U.S. financing for anti-Soviet "mujahadeen" was directed by Pakistan. The Pakistani government gave the lion's share of this funding to the rabid Gulbudin Hekmatyar, whose followers would throw acid at women who were not covered. After the Soviet's were expelled, Hekmatyar made the country ungovernable after reneging on an agreement to share power. This paved the way for the Taliban.
Serb "aggression" against Muslims was enough for Clinton to bomb Serbia. Milosevic became the bad guy and Yugoslavia was broken up into several pieces.
Clearly, the same won't be done to Sudan. It's ruled by Muslims. Even if the south is populated largely by Christians, the land itself is Islamic and can never be allowed to revert to Christian control. We can forget independence for the Christians.
European powers would be too afraid of being charged with colonialism to do the right thing so NATO won't do much. China and all other countries that deal with the Sudanese government won't want to risk damaging their relationship. That lets out the UN.
The only reason Darfur is a cause celebre is because it's Arab Muslims attacking black Muslims. It puts a stain on the religion of peace. Arab Muslims attacking black Christians is just business as usual. No news there.
"Brzezinski was the architect of the plan whereby the U.S. financing for anti-Soviet "mujahadeen" was directed by Pakistan."
-by Pavlov's dog
This needs to be brought up again and again and again. Democrats prefer to blame Reagan, Bush and Bush for "funding terrorists in Afghanistan" during the Soviet occupation.
American foreign policy commitments don't change when the White House changes hands. Continuity is important in foreign policy.
>i>The only reason Darfur is a cause celebre is because it's Arab Muslims attacking black Muslims.
Have you seen a picture of President Bashir? A lot of those "Arab Muslims" appear to be as black as Louis Farrakhan.
Some of those "Arabs" who look, and are in fact, as black as those they treat, or mistreat, as "black," now think of themselves, or have been allowed to think of themselves, as Arabs.
We keep pointing out that most people in power in the west have not read the texts, tenants of Islam, nor do they know of the perfect man and role Model Mohammad, and how all that relates today.
It can't be anything other than deliberate, that the power people take on as advisers, others who have not looked at these texts and tenants, or have, but find it 'inconvenient', to mention it.
When all of the time there are people who actually have looked at this, become experts and scholars on the subject, like, Spencer, Fitzgerad, Pipes, R.Ibrahim, Wafa Sultan, Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq, and many others not mentioned, including many who post here, who actually 'know' what they are talking about. Yet the power, continually seeks out fake experts, or questionable muslims.
There is something wrong with this picture.
Obama will not fix this, he will participate in it and continue it. He will not ask Spencer his opinion, nor seek an interview with Hugh.
Wafa Sultan is out of his picture.
He will seek the advice and opinion of the same people he always has, and you know that list of shady characters....
Isn't one of the reasons that some of the "Sudanese Arabs" are look black is because they are the children of Arab males and black female slaves.
Isn't that why Saudi Prince Bandar has black African features? Wasn't his mother a slave?
Zbigniew Brzezinski gives me the willies, too. One reason is that Brzezinski seems to still see the world through the eyes of a Pole on the eve of not the Hitler-Stalin pact, but of the Chmielnicki rebellion. Some may argue he's a Cold Warrior like Condie Rice, but Rice at least recognized that the problem with the Soviet Union was its Marxist-Leninism. Brzezinski, on the other hand, saw the problem with the Soviet Union as its being Russian.
They say that in grad school, Brzezinski proposed that should Quebec secede from Canada, the rest of Canada would join the USA due to a common language and culture. This reflects the typical blind spots of a "small nations" European nationalist, which can see no farther than the ethnic dimensions.
Further, as Carter's minion, Brzezinski pushed for a supposed "alliance" with Communist China, whose Marxism-Leninism was in many ways more fanatical. There is not a single case in which this supposed "alliance" ever bore so much as a bud, much less any fruit; while at the same time it undercut Taiwan fatally and convinced most of the rest of Asia that American "guarantees" were basically made of used toilet paper. Brzezinski's blinders about China (it's against Russia, so it's for us) also allowed him to totally ignore the rise of dissident religious faiths, organized crime, political dissidence, samizdats, and the like in China while he was triumphantly touting that these presaged the decay of totalitarianism in the Soviet Bloc.
It is also more than a hundred percent likely that for men like Brzezinski, all of Asia, from Hualien to Haifa, is a vast intellectual terra incognita. Rice at least recognized its importance by upping the number of consualtes in India while reducing them in Yurrupp; Brzezninski probably believes Asia is a "historyless" mass.
No, we need new ideas badly. But Washington isn't going to grow them.