Dhimmi shrinks harpoon Obama's choice for CIA director

To be honest, the CIA doesn't have the best track record on combatting terrorism. It backed the wrong people in Afghanistan, by taking the advice of the Pakistani intelligence service, for example. It never seems to learn from its mistakes either.

This is a case of someone possibly being opposed for the wrong reasons, and kept out for the wrong reasons, but there are other aspects of John Brennan's mental preparation for the post -- including his understanding of both the Islamic Republic of Iran and the role of Hezbollah in Lebanon-- that may be insufficient for one of the main tasks at hand for a head of the C.I.A., which is to grasp, in both its immutable, inculcated goal, and in its shape-shifting and vaied instruments, and in the triumphalism of Islam that must never be fed, for the satisfying of Muslim demands, no matter how plausibly presented (just push Israel back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, just give us Kashmir for Muslim rule, just allow the Shari'a as an alternative legal system in Great Britain, just allow the wearing of the hijab in the schools of the French laic state, just force Spain to give up Meilia and Ceuta, just make the Danish and Dutch governments promise to punish those who dare to exhibit "islamophobia" in their countries, just do this, and just do that), will always whet, and never sate, Muslim appetites.

An article published by Brennan earlier this year makes one realize that someone can have made all the right enemies (those offended by Brennan's sobriety on interrogation methods), and yet upon further inspection, still exhibit signs -- so obvious all over official Washington -- of still not having grasped the full nature of Islam, or of rulers and peoples in societies suffused with Islam, where those rulers and peoples take that Islam fully to heart. It is not true that it makes sense to support, or at least not to oppose, Hezbollah's attempt to enforce its will in Lebanon, and it is not true that a "deal" can be struck with the Islamic Republic of Iran, as even the French will now warn, after years and years of patient negotiations with the deeply deceptive, and implacably malevolent, determined-to-acquire-nuclear-weapons-at-all-costs chiliastic rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Here's a bit more on that side of Brennan:

"Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic reports that John Brennan is likely to head the CIA. See my earlier posting on Brennan below.

John Brennan, who heads the Obama team managing the transition process for the intelligence community, is rumored to be Obama's pick to head the CIA. Brennan published a long article on Iran in July 2008, expressing a benign view of the Islamic Republic and harsh criticism of U.S. policies that he believes have driven Iran in the wrong direction. Excerpts follow:

"Notwithstanding the fiery rhetoric coming from Iranian officials such as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian theocracy has made much more limited use of terrorism over the past decade than it did in the first twenty years of its reign....Although it would represent a significant act of domestic political courage, U.S. national security would be best served if Washington publicly acknowledged and explored the roots of this shift in Iranian state support for terrorist activities....While it may serve some narrow political agendas to lump together a wide variety of Iranian policies and actions that are antithetical to U.S. policy aims under the rubric of state-sponsored terrorism, U.S. strategic interests require a more nuanced analysis of and less absolutist approach to this problem....Instead of pursuing a nuanced strategy that could have allowed flexibility in U.S. policy, the Bush administration regrettably opted to conduct its activities under the overarching banner of "The Global War on Terrorism" and declared it would make no distinction between terrorist operatives and their state sponsors....Despite a December 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that assessed "in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program," the administration indicated no interest in easing the pressure on Iran (National Intelligence Council 2007)....The bellicose volleys coming from the chief spokesmen of both the American and Iranian governments have served to widen the rift that exists between the two countries and to make constructive engagement virtually impossible in the current climate...An improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations will not take place overnight, and the new U.S. administration must be willing to exercise strategic patience....It would not be foolhardy, however, for the United States to tolerate, and even to encourage, greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon's political system, a process that is subject to Iranian influence....The best hope for maintaining this trend and for reducing the influence of violent extremists within the organization—as well as the influence of extremist Iranian officials who view Hezbollah primarily as a pawn of Tehran—is to increase Hezbollah's stake in Lebanon's struggling democratic processes."

From: "The Conundrum of Iran: Strengthening Moderates without Acquiescing to Belligerence," by John Brennan, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 618, No. 1, 168-179 (2008) http://ann.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/618/1/168

_________________________

If John Brennan has such a strange understanding of Iran, does not grasp the nature of that regime, cannot understand what the attainment of nuclear arms by the Islamic Republic of Iran would mean for the Western world, and also for much of the Muslim world, and what it would mean to the cause of those Iranians, inside andoutside Iran, hoping to undo the Islamic Republic, then he should be kept as far from the corridors of power as possible. Let Kierostami, let Taheri, let Aziz Nafisi, somehow get through to those advising Obama so as to head off the possible appointment of Brennan as head of the C.I.A..

That assumes that the quote above is representative. It appeared in an article published not five years ago, but this year. It appears from the excerpt that Brennan apparently thinks that because, he argues, Iranian support for terrorism has, over the last decade, as compared to the first twenty years of the Khomeini regime, waned (apparently the Statute of Moral Limitations has run out on those who blew up the nearly 300 Marines in Beirut or nearly 100 people working in a Jewish Center in Buenos Aires), this must mean that Iran is not a threat, because even as Brennan appears to recognize that "terror" is not the only (and not even the main) weapon of Jihad (a word he does not use), he appears to think that some kind of diplomatic maneuvering can continue to go on, while the clock ticks, and the centrifuges whirl, and the components are ever closer to being composed into a bomb, or two, or five.

The next C.I.A. director must understand that the duty of Jihad, or the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, is not tangential but central to Islam, a Total Belief-System that contains a politics and a geopolitics, and that inculcates the idea, in Believers, that the world is divided between Muslims and non-Muslims, Believers and Infidels, and between the two a state of permanent war (though not always open warfare) must exist. And the instruments of Jihad, used in the most important theatre of that war at present, include not only terrorism, which gets exclusive attention, but also deployment of the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest.

Brennan's excerpt above implies a lack of seeing things, of seeing them feelingly, of grasping the nature, and the immediacy of the threat that acquisition of even a few nuclear weapons by the Islamic Republic of Iran would pose, to the Western world and its oil supplies, and also a mortal threat to Israel, whose existence and safety is important to the moral survival of the West.

The excerpts offered above, in their chilling naivete about the chiliasm of the Islamic Republic of Iran, based on the assumption that the whole wide world consists -- it does not -- of "rational actors" (and from such behaviorial economists as Dan Ariely. one has come to understand that the figure held up as the quintessential rational actor, American homo economicus, is not really a creature of reason alone) but of those moved by calculations economists of the traditional school might define as "irrational." But Islam encourages irrationality, discourages skeptical inquiry; insists that "slaves of Allah" must not question this or question that, for Allah Knows Best.

Why would those raised since birth, and surrounded by those similarly raised since birth, in societies suffused with Islam, as dutiful "slaves of Allah," believers in a Total Belief-System that, as one can see from reading Khomeini (reading, say, his advice on to whom islamically to serve the meat of the animal with which, when it was alive, you had sexual congress), results in a world that does not, morally, correspond to ours, and that holds up as The Perfect Man (uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil) a man who revelled in murderous attacks on all those who did not submit to him.

The next director of the C.I.A. should know about, has to have studied, has to have taken in the texts, the tenets, the attitudes, the atmospherics, of Islam. Or if such a person does not exist in the dizzying heights of official Washington, then the next best pick would be someone who at least senses that this is what he, and others, have to find out about, and not deny or refuse to learn about something because what it would reveal would be so deeply unsettling, and require such a rethinking of current strategies, and even long-held pieties or Idols of the Age, as to seem to present the kind of practical difficulties formulaically described as "insuperable." Judging by the ex-ungue-leonem excerpt from John Brennan above, he may not be such a person. His remarks on Iran do not reveal someone who has grasped the scope, and duration, of the world-wide war of self-defense (recognized by many or not,) by all Infidels, against those who pursue the "struggle" or Jihad to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam, Brennan looks as if he might be in the line of Scowcroft and Brzezinski.

One hopes not. For Scowcroft and Brzezinski have long been known for their palpable want of sympathy for Israel, and their belief, or at least their pretense of believing, that if Israel is pressured, is thrown to the Arab wolves, then the Arab Muslims will be our friends, when in fact such pressure and such feeding will merely whet, not sate, Arab and Muslim appetites, Arab triumphalism, and those appetites and that triumphalism are not limited to a scarcely-discernible strip of land on the eastern Mediterranean. Scowcroft may even be an agent of various Muslim states; he has been careful not to reveal how much money, and from whom, he has received since putting out his shingle with Kissinger Associates. And Brzezinski is the man who helped Carter lose Iran, at a time when more American resoluteness might have rescued from Khomeini, whose takeover was not inevitable. Even if the Shah was vainglorious and stupid, he was, compared to what followed, practically Winston Churchill. Neither Brzezinski nor Scowcroft has shown any signs of thinking about Islam as an ideology (and why should they, when like so many in official Washington thatt would require study, and the habit of study has, in the hectic vacancy of jostling for position and influence, been lost by so many).

And a desire for a prompt American withdrawal, is not enough. That desire must be prompted by the right reason, that is a desire not to diminish, but rather to allow to reappear where temporarily suppressed by American power and lavish aid, ethnic and sectarian rivalries and hostilities, in Iraq and then elsewhere in Dar al-Islam. It is disturbing to see that Brennan shows, in his writing above, a willingness to ignore or minimize the mortal threat to Israel. One hopes, at least, that in his case this seeming incomprehension of the threat to Israel is not an indifference to it, of the kind exhibited by the scowcrofts and the brzezinskis, an indifference that, some will maintain, and with reason, can only be explained as a symptom of a well-known, never-to-be-eradicated, pathological condition. And that pathological condition is not always recognized, when it appears in its forme fruste, especially by those who, being innocently immune themselves, find it hard to believe that others are not equally impervious.

But Brennan has now taken himelf out of the running. Far more worrisome, at this point, is the apparent felt need of Barack Obama to pick some gruff, rough, tough, military man - the rougher, the gruffer, the tougher the better-- on the assumption that this will give him street cred where he thinks, or his advisers think, he may need it, when the street in question is the one that runs in the mind from the White House to Congress, and then to the Pentagon.

Apparently the rough, tough, gruff National Security Adviser who is being considered is a Marine, General James Jones, former NATO Commander. But what is so disturbing about that possible appointment deserves a post, an article, a little tribute of its own.

Here's what ought to be sent to Obama:

http://jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/011325.php

Since he reads so much about Lincoln, how about the Founding Fathers' thoughts on and experiences with Islam? Thomas Jefferson and the Adamses deserve to get more attention than those 200 dhimmis.

Aren't these psychos the same group that offered the opinion that interest in guns and gun ownership is a sign of mental problems?

Also, it is looking like our next POTUS may also be the Dhimmi in Chief and inclined to agree with the psychs. Don't be surprised if you start seeing a lot of "404" messages next year.

Cultural humiliation is torture? Gee, I was being tortured by my left-wing high school English professor and I didn't even recognize it?
The left says anything a muslim finds insulting is torture. So a non-muslim handling a koran, reading it aloud, and making obvious associations with islamic oppression and violence is considered unspeakable torture to a muslim.
This leaves nothing for the CIA to use. Exactly what the left, and bin Laden, want.

The loonie left won't even allow HUSSEIN Obama to make one good appointment?

Max Publius, very good point!! Can I sue Bill Maher and Grossie for "cultural torture"?

Max Publius, very good point!! Can I sue Bill Maher and Grossie for "cultural torture"?

And al the rest of the loonie libs..

Olbermann, Oprah, Matthews, Couric.. and on and on ad NAUSEAM!

Psychologists and psychiatrists are elitists, and supremacists by definition...

They are going to identify and fix, what is mentally wrong with 'you'/society. They can't do that from an inferior position.

The problem is that they are unhealed healers.
Most of them can't run their own lives, but will tell you how to run yours.

The field of psychologistology, the study of psychologists, is in its infancy, but what is clear is that most of them are full of themselves and something lumpy and unpleasant.

Unless you are paying them for an opinion, disregard anything they say...If they offer you pills, run...

Oh, Swami, these aren't even psychologists or psychiatrists -- they're psycholanalysts. One has to wonder where on Earth one can even obtain a degree in psychoanalysis, since it has been regarded as an illegitimate field of study/occupation by all educated people since the 1930s. This isn't even a case of your typical academic psychology wackjobs being at the forefront of hypocrisy and myopia, e.g., by supporting women who falsely accuse men of rape so as to shame innocent men into pariah-hood or by constantly getting on a soapbox about how "oppressed" women are (we're not) while turning a bling eye to the sexual enslavement, female genital mutilation, "religiously" sanctioned incestuous pedophilia, and sale to a much older cousin of every nearly every Muslim little girl in their own towns, and every other act of absurdity described in hilarious detail in Dr. Mike S. Adams' 'Feminists Say the Darnedest Things.' This is a case of people who simply have nothing better to do grasping for anything that just might kinda-sorta justify their existences, which they themselves have made irrelevant through the choice of an occupation which serves as much purpose and which is held in equally high esteem in the modern world as that of phrenology or the making of whalebone corsets. IBD should be ashamed of themselves for giving these archaic morons a soapbox at all, and for printing this story as if they were somehow in a legitimate profession which would warrant the attribution of any validity to any opinion they may have. They should have asked phrenonogists or whalebone corset-makers. Their opinions would have been considerably more relevant.

I have been in the dark since 9/11. I read the Qur'an, studied many books, tried to get information from others (failed miserably) and knew there was something incredibly wrong but couldn't find many to agree with me, Since stumbling onto JW, reading several of Spencer's books and just now reading some of his posts from way back in 2005 and 2006, I see what I have been missing. To acknowledge that I am grateful for Robert Spencer and Hugh and the rest of the JW tribe is hardly enough, so change that to undying gratitude.