Part One is here, Part Two here, Part Three here, Part Four here, and Part Five here.
On August 21, 2009, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war (allusion-hunters welcome), The Times, that of New York, had an article that ought to have startled. It began thus:
U.S. Officials Get a Taste of Pakistanis’ Anger at America By HELENE COOPERKARACHI, Pakistan — Judith A. McHale was expecting a contentious session with Ansar Abbasi, a Pakistani journalist known for his harsh criticism of American foreign policy, when she sat down for a one-on-one meeting with him in a hotel conference room in Islamabad on Monday. She got that, and a little bit more.
After Ms. McHale, the Obama administration’s new under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, gave her initial polite presentation about building bridges between America and the Muslim world, Mr. Abbasi thanked her politely for meeting with him. Then he told her that he hated her.
“ ‘You should know that we hate all Americans,’ ” Ms. McHale said Mr. Abbasi told her. “ ‘From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.’ ”
Let’s stop right there.
Ansar Abbasi is not some marginal figure, some crank without a following. You can find out all you need to know about him online. He even has his own website. He’s a journalist, and he has seen a little of the outside, non-Muslim world, having received an education at home at private schools that still retain the influence of their non-Muslim founders. (Muslim elites tend to send their own children to schools run by non-Muslims, such as Baghdad College, formerly run by Jesuits from Boston College, and Victoria College (in Egypt), run by Anglicans, and schools run by nuns for girls. And of course there is the American School in Kuwait City, and so on round the Muslim world.
If they are sufficiently lucky, some of those students manage to study or even live in the West. But the amazing thing is that, while they obscurely recognize -- as Ansar Abbasi does -- that things are ordered far better, in every way, in the Western world, they tend to treat this as merely a matter of money (although the Muslims have received twelve trillion dollars since 1973 alone) or of “modern technology.” But why has no “modern technology” -- not one whit -- come from the Muslim lands? Why has nothing at all of cultural significance come from the Muslim lands in the last millennium -- that is, ever since the non-Muslim peoples who had been conquered had been reduced in influence as, usually, in numbers too? They seem never to consider if, just perhaps, the failures of the Muslim lands -- political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures -- are perhaps explained best by reference to Islam itself.
This is something the ansar-abbasis of this world cannot do, for it calls into question their entire beings, and the core of their being is Islam, and the supposed superiority of Islam. What if, in fact, the true explanation for the despotism, economic backwardness, gross legal and social inequality for women and non-Muslims, and civilisational poverty -- in art, music, literature, ideas -- is a result not only of outright bans, in Islam, on many varieties of artistic expression, but on the encouragement, in Islam, of a habit of mental submission, of never questioning any of the rules of Islam? For this habit of mental submission inhibits moral development -- and that, of course, has consequences as well in all areas of life, including the development of science (which is not to be confused with having the money to buy the technological fruits of Western science), and of the kind of questioning that leads to the Enlightenment and to free and skeptical inquiry without which intellectual progress is hardly possible.
And Ansar Abbasi surely knows -- or does he? -- that for fifty years Pakistan, its generals, and its zamindars, have been among the spoiled children of America’s Islam-ignorant and, as a consequence, needlessly expensive foreign policies.
But the beliefs that animated the support for Pakistan begin not with Pakistan itself, but with Turkey. For Turkey was early on seen as a steadfast ally against the Soviet Union, and against the Communism that the Soviet Union was naturally identified with. Turkey became a member of NATO at the urging of the United States, in a kind of prefiguring of American support for Turkish admission to the E.U., over the objections of many, and by now probably most, of the European countries that make up the E.U., and whose fates will be affected far more immediately by the admission of Turkey to the E.U. When, in distant Korea, Communist aggression had to be stopped, the Turks sent a contingent, and that contingent managed, while serving in South Korea, to convert thousands of Koreans to Islam -- which extra-curricular activity failed to attract any notice then, or any comment since.
Turkey supplied the American forces with listening posts into the Soviet Union, and bases that were to be used by American airmen. Even if the government of Morocco were ultimately to force the Americans out of the bases they used in that country, and Khaddafy, when he came to power in 1969, promptly kicked the Americans out of their giant Wheelus Air Base, and even though “our staunch ally” Saudi Arabia regarded American military forces as “blue-eyed slaves” to be “summoned” -- as one Saudi ruler put it, whenever “I want” -- and even though the Americans had never had a base in Pakistan and still today do not have one and will never be allowed to have one, and even though all the plans for American bases in Iraq were finally seen to be completely pie-in-the-sky, at least in Turkey the Americans thought they had a stable and secure ally, one that could be counted on.
But in the spring of 2003, when the Americans wanted to use four divisions to invade Iraq, with one coming from the north, from Turkey, the Turks would not permit it. It should have been understood then that even Turkey, a member of NATO, could not be counted on in any military operations by the Americans, or by NATO itself, against another Muslim country.
Pakistan, however, was given American aid, even though Pakistan was of little use, direct or indirect, during the Cold War, until the moment that the Red Army streamed into Afghanistan, and then Pakistan came into its own, or at least some Americans thought it did. For in helping the muhajideen, including trans-shipping American military aid to the muhajideen, the government of Pakistan was helping the United States, in the view of those Americans, including some in the C.I.A., who were became so hell-bent on defeating the Soviets that they ended up helping many of the same people who later on would promote the Taliban, or even join the ranks of the Taliban, and the Taliban were those who gave aid and sanctuary to Al-Qaeda.
If the Americans had thought for a bit, and read, for example, the Manual on Jihad written by a Pakistani general (Malik), and if they had been more willing to come to grips with Islam, they might have decided that the ruthlessness of the Soviet forces in suppressing Islam in Central Asia, in the “stans” of the Soviet Union, was not a thing to be deplored but to be welcomed, and that government by those who, in the Afghani context, called themselves “Communists” (a word which sometimes merely signaled “secularist”) would not be enough of a victory to give the dying Soviet Union a reprieve from its fate, but at least would not help, and might hinder, the renewal of Muslim power in parts of Central Asia. Sometimes an enemy’s behavior should be recognized as, objectively, furthering one’s own goals. But the Americans in dealing with Afghanistan thought only about defeating the Soviets, and not about what that defeat, and the victory of the muhajideen, might mean.
This inability to think ahead has always been a problem. Had the American government in 1945, just as the war was ending, immediately stopped thinking about the Soviet Union as a necessary “ally” (as it was during World War II), and instantly recognized the malevolent designs on Eastern and Central Europe by Joseph Stalin, and had the Americans moved troops in or at a time of the American nuclear monopoly made other threats, a great deal of anguish, lasting nearly a half-century, might have been spared all the Central and Eastern European countries that came under Soviet domination after World War II. It is just possible that the Soviet Union itself might have collapsed earlier than it did.
It is the same with Islam. The mind-set of American policy-makers has been that of the Cold War, and in the Cold War various Muslim countries, and Islam itself, were seen, not quite accurately in the former case and completely misleadingly in the latter case, as enemies of totalitarianism, Communist division.
Robert Gates is a child of that Cold War. And so are many others in the Administration who did not, in the eight years that have followed 9/11/2009, taken even a month, even a week off, to try to learn about Islam. Washington is full of people who remain confused about the subject, and determined to rely on Muslim advisers, or on the repetition of soothing phrases such as “we must win the confidence of Muslims” or “we must win Muslim minds and hearts.” They do not find out whether or not such goals are either possible or worthwhile, given the kinds of violence we might have to do to our own ideals, and to our alliances, and to our own understanding of what the Western world is, and to the rights of other, but less powerful, Infidel lands. Those less powerful Infidel lands are often deemed expendable by some of the false “realists” who want us to win those unwinnable hearts and minds, or to curry favor with Muslims by paying them in the coin of the security of other Infidels (in Western Europe, or Israel, or India, or Thailand, or elsewhere).
For our own leaders, civilian and military, are willfully ignorant and unable, or incapable, of learning enough about Islam to cease to be taken in by the what should be seen as the most transparent kind of Muslim blague, designed to separate us from ever more of our money and war materiel, and to keep getting American and European concessions, in all kinds of ways, in order that the will-o’-the-wisp of Muslim cooperation and “appreciation” can be (impossibly) obtained.
Here we have, in the meeting of McHale and Abbasi, a distillation of all that we need to know. The United States taxpayers have been paying, and paying, Pakistan since the days of CENTO, when American supplied money and weapons to this country. It was decades of American aid that allowed the I.S.I. to support the metallurgist A. Q. Khan, who in the West -- because of the innocence of trusting Westerners -- stole nuclear secrets and returned with them to Pakistan. Then the Pakistani military used the critical support -- a grant-in-aid, for all you N.I.H. researchers out there -- from the American government to pay for the development and the building of Pakistan’s “Islamic bomb.” It is the existence of a few dozen of those bombs that now causes nightmares in Washington, New Delhi, and all over the Infidel world, both for what the Pakistanis themselves might do, or what a group of Muslim terrorists who might seize, or be handed off, one or more of those bombs, just might possibly be able to do.
From time to time, those who follow closely the Pakistani government finally get fed up. That was why, years ago, the Senate passed the Pressler Amendment discussed in a previous segment of this article. This was why Senator Glenn kept bringing up Pakistan’s continued violations of the solemn promises it had repeatedly made to the American government in order to receive continued aid. But Senators Glenn and Pressler are gone, and so are others, from Congress, who over time had managed to be disabused of any faith in Pakistan or its promises. This changeover of personnel is what allows someone to make the kind of astonishing remark that Robert Gates did a week or two ago, telling the Pakistanis that “we” -- the Americans -- had let down “you” -- the Pakistanis -- by “walking away twice,” but “we” won’t, he assured those Pakistanis, do that again. This is not merely incorrect. This is a statement so wrong, so very much the opposite of the truth, that it displays a kind of weird genius in reverse. It takes real amnesia, the deepest kind, to make such a statement.
When Judith A. McHale agreed to meet with Abbasi -- or did she seek him out? Or did he ask to meet with her? -- was she hoping to find out something about what the locals think? But if she had studied Islam, she would not have been surprised by the viciousness of Ansar Abbasi, because she would have been well-prepared to understand what Raphael Patai has called, in his excellent study, “The Arab Mind,” (one now widely read in Washington), but can be with greater exactitude called the “psychology of the Muslim.” That can be found studied, for example, in the book, now online, of Andre Servier. If you have a grasp of the mental and emotional substratum, not only of this particular Ansar Abbasi, but of the world of Islam, the world of those who grow up in a family, a city, a country, suffused with Islam, from which there is no escape and no relief, then you will possibly become a past master at prying aid from Infidels. But you will also be a past master at retaining your inward hostility that cannot be bought off by any such aid. No gratitude, of the long-lasting and genuine sort, should be expected. Those who have been well-prepared in the texts, tenets, history, and psychology of Islam are the only ones who can make policies likely to be effective. Such policies are likely in the first place to be effective because they will not be directed at goals that are unattainable (making Muslim states into prosperous, unified, well-governed places), and if attained, would have no effect on the worldwide threat to all Infidels, of Islam and those who are prompted by its teachings to engage in the “struggle” or Jihad to remove all obstacles to the spread and then the dominance of Islam.
Abbasi thought Musharraf was corrupt, and he denounced not only Musharraf, but his American backers. Abbasi is consumed with all kinds of hostility towards the non-Muslim world, and his study in England did not lessen but probably increased his rage, his ill-concealed envy, his fury that Muslims do not have the position in the world that is theirs, as he deeply believes, by right. Yet no one would dare tell the ansar-abbasis of this world that the cause of their own distress, in their own countries, is a result of Islam itself. Well, how, really, could he take that in, and recognize the truth of it, unless we insist and insist and insist, and do not waver in our certainty, and force him, then, to begin to recognize that truth, however unpleasant it may be for his self-esteem? I wonder what Lord Palmerston, or Churchill, or Tocqueville, or John Quincy Adams, would have thought about Westerners making policies for dealing with Muslims that were based on a deep solicitude for Muslim “self-esteem.”
No, we Americans are Infidels, and Abbasi, telling Judith McHale that “we” (all Pakistanis) “hate” not just a few, but “all Americans,” was more or less telling the truth. But the next step is up to McHale and her bosses, and that is to finally realize that that hatred is not, in the end, about the pursuit of Bin Laden, or support for Musharraf, or for someone who follows Musharraf. It is about Islam, and about the fact that everything in Islam prepares the mental and emotional ground to ensure that Muslims will naturally dislike, or even hate, Infidels, no matter how much innocent or naïve generosity and goodwill those Infidels display.
And watch out for “Charm” as a weapon of Jihad. Most people, alas, often make judgments about large matters on the basis of the most trivial anecdotal evidence, or personal experience that, if analyzed correctly, would be seen in the nature of things to be deceptive. I am thinking in particular of the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, and his helpmeet, in every sense, one of the very attractive Ispahani girls (the Ispahani family being one of the richest in Pakistan), all of whom have gone to excellent American schools. So use your imagination, with these smooth Anglophones, well-versed in the conversational arts of Georgetown and McLean, with the wife being so able to fit into her jeans (which allows us all to forget about the hundreds of millions of women forced to wear burqas or chadors or even the niqab), and who can allude to a picnic at Lake Waban (Wellesley!). All this can make conversationalists forget all about Muslim strictures on the education of women (enforced violently in Afghanistan), and of a host of legal and social disabilities that Muslimahs must endure, not because of “cultural practices” but because of Islam itself, which clearly assigns an inferior place to women, and spells out the reasons in Qur’an and Hadith, with details from the Sira, the Life of Muhammad, offering illustrative, and illuminating, examples.
Georgetown must get beyond mere “charm.” Then Husain Haqqani et ux. can be enjoyed the way Trollope might have enjoyed them, by engaging with them in outwardly affable social intercourse but at the same time casting a cold unswerving novelist’s eye on how they operate, and what they are attempting to achieve. And that is not money, or social status, as with Trollopean protagonists. Rather, they are attempting to win billions more in aid and military equipment, and above all continued political indulgence, for Pakistan.
I can imagine the two of them at Georgetown parties, seated next to, say, Teresa Heinz Kerry and her morganatic-marriage-in-reverse husband, artfully displaying their Western-educated ways, and in that very display, helping their dinner partners, Americans and other non-Muslims, to forget or not to inquire too deeply into the nature of Islam, and even to forego, later on, trying to find out more about Islam. For Husain Haqqani and his charming wife are there to ‘splain it all, night after night after night.
Judith A. McHale, and Robert Gates, and Richard Holbrooke, and Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, and a few hundred others in Official Washington, must start hitting the books instead of relying on the likes of those ambassadors who truly do put into practice what the old definition of a diplomat describes: “someone who is sent abroad to lie for his country.” The formula would be more accurate if instead of “country” the word were “his faith.” Because what Ambassador Haqqani does is only what all the Muslim ambassadors do, though since Prince Bandar ruled the diplomatic roost (even showing up at the Pentagon for top-secret gatherings, apparently), it has not been quite the same.
And not only should Judith A. McHale never meet with the likes of Ansar Abbasi again, but if any representative of the Pakistani government ever dares to talk that way, the American interlocutor should walk out of the room, cancel any further meetings, and make sure that the displeasure of the United States, which has been milked and milked and milked for decades by Pakistan, is made known, made known so that is never again to be overlooked, or forgotten.
"...but if any representative of the Pakistani government ever dares to talk that way, the American interlocutor should walk out of the room, cancel any further meetings, and make sure that the displeasure of the United States, which has been milked and milked and milked for decades by Pakistan, is made known, made known so that is never again to be overlooked, or forgotten."
Good advice, but will it be taken? Doubtful, for all those men and women of Washington who were educated at Wellesley, Brown, Harvard, and Yale, are not ones who will acknowledge that what they know and what they have learned about Islam is simply and utterly wrong. They cannot be told. They cannot unlearn what they know in there hearts to be right, that Islam is truly a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a few extremists. And because they will not learn, they need to be replaced.
The people who know about the "meaning, and the menace, that is Islam" are not the elites, but the people who come to sites like JW, AtlasShrugs, Gates of Vienna, TROP, Jawa Report, and others. They are people who have taken the time to read authors like Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Robert Spencer, Ibn Warraq, Andy Bostom, and yes, even those scholars of Islam, such as Majid Khadurri, who are frequently referenced by Hugh. These are the people who know about Islam and these are the people who are on the front lines of the defense. These are the people who are writing letters and emails, attending town hall meetings, and joining organizations such as ACT for America. These are the people who are making a difference.
And watch out for “Charm” as a weapon of Jihad. Most people, alas, often make judgments about large matters on the basis of the most trivial anecdotal evidence, or personal experience that, if analyzed correctly, would be seen in the nature of things to be deceptive. I am thinking in particular of the Pakistani ambassador in Washington, Husain Haqqani, and his helpmeet, in every sense, one of the very attractive Ispahani girls (the Ispahani family being one of the richest in Pakistan), all of whom have gone to excellent American schools. So use your imagination, with these smooth Anglophones, well-versed in the conversational arts of Georgetown and McLean, with the wife being so able to fit into her jeans (which allows us all to forget about the hundreds of millions of women forced to wear burqas or chadors or even the niqab), and who can allude to a picnic at Lake Waban (Wellesley!). All this can make conversationalists forget all about Muslim strictures on the education of women (enforced violently in Afghanistan), and of a host of legal and social disabilities that Muslimahs must endure, not because of “cultural practices” but because of Islam itself...
Behind the particulars of this articulation we see the broader exemplification of the function of the "Moderate Muslim" in general. And a rather large wing of the Anti-Islam (woops! I mean "Anti-Jihad") Movement remains earnestly (if not desperately) gullible to innumerable "reformist" Muslims as their Great Brown Hope to save us from the problem of Islam (woops! I mean "the problem of Jihad"), not seeing that the Moderate Muslim's role is precisely to deflect our attention from Islam itself and onto some safely amputatable appendage -- in effect falling for the charm of these seemingly Westernized Muslims as foolishly and embarrassingly as some have fallen for those pretty Ispahani girls in their blue jeans. (And speaking of Ispahan, this gullibility attained a painfully embarrassing level recently during all the gushing for the Iranian People and their starry-eyed Opposition to the Iranian Regime.)
"...who did not, in the eight years that have followed 9/11/2009, taken even a month, even a week off, to try to learn about Islam."
There are innumerable individuals throughout the West going back to the 19th century (but increasing in number after 1950 as the deformation of PC MC became dominant and mainstream) who have spent not only a month, or even a week, but years, if not positively decades in the study of Islam -- many of them learned in the original languages of Arabic, Farsi, Urdi, etc. -- including most if not all of the relevant corpus of foundational and subsequent texts. And yet for all that study, they maintained the myth of a tolerant, civilized Islam (where the exceptions to this could always be contextualized and therefore exculpated through the Ego Quoque argument as well as other complicated obfuscations). This is not a peculiarity of the Academic, but reflects a more complex problem than one for which the mere supply of information will suffice to solve. In addition to the simplex framework implied by many (and by the writer of the quote above) --
Information about Islam --> Recipient --> Jihad Watch Epiphany
-- and complicating it usually irrevocably, there has developed a paradigm throughout Western societies over the past century (with roots going back much longer but only attaining mainstream dominance in the past 50-odd years) by which the information is deformed in a variety of complex ways. There is not single monolithic paradigm of course; but there is a discernible unity amid the ragged edges and seemingly amorphous nature of it among the various models floating about the West, whereby, for example, the academic scholar who has studied Islam for 35 years and yet still would think that Jihad Watch is a bigoted enterprise, shares more or less the same constellation of givens as the politician and as the suburban housewife and the teacher and the union boss and the corner grocer and the starry-eyed teenager who volunteered for the Obama campaign and on and on, probably numbering throughout the West into the millions of people of all classes and walks of life not merely "Elites". The mere presentation of information to these various people is not enough -- as anyone who has tried to reason with any number and type of them would know all too well and has experienced time and time again the frustration with their complex stubbornness that often infuriates when it doesn't clench you by the viscera with a devastating depression.
And then on top of this daily, seemingly implacable problem of PC MC, one has to deal with a simple-minded myopia to that same problem among one's own fellows who have crossed over to the epiphany. As they keep running up for years and years against the wall of the PC MC paradigm as manifested in a wondrously exasperating rainbow of variety, they keep holding fast in a strangely childish way to their simplex view of that wall. One would think that over time the more intelligent among them would begin to surmise that the wall is held together by a more complex concatenation than mere ignorance of information augmented by a smattering of universal venial sins is able to explain.
It is not mere ignorance we are up against that explains the irrationality of the West in the face of the problem of Islam: it is quantum ignorance. For quantum ignorance, education has to move onto a whole new level: it's not just about supplying information. It's also and more importantly about tackling the interpretative frameworks by which information is received, filtered, re-routed and reconfigured. For every piece of information we have in our arsenal that we think automatically damns Islam, when it is presented to the person who is more or less deformed by PC MC, it enters a complex mental machine that is assaulted on all sides by a complex interlocking jigsaw mechanism of assumptions, givens, prejudices, logical fallacies, emotionally powerful incoherencies, and among the more intelligent of them, a dizzying array of factoids that can keep popping up through the debate like gophers one after another -- after you think you've whacked one another pops up, seemingly forever. What I have described in this paragraph here is only an impressionistic stab at the phenomenon and reflects only a small portion of the magnitude and complexities of the problem.
There are many things that cannot be discussed at length, much less spelled out, for various reasons, including the constraints not so much of time and space for the writer, as the time and space for exposition, and the time for reading and assimilating (given the most widespread means of communication) which one suspects today's audiences are likely to endure.
Furthermore, implications of certain truths can lead, not so much to irrelevancies, but to matters well outside Islam that, if raised and then discussed truthfully, and at length, are likely to antagonize some who might otherwise be willing to agree on the matter of Islam. And right now that is the most important matter. Perhaps that constitutes a little more realpolitiking than the writer of the post just above -- a post well worth reading, re-reading, and assimilating -- finds defensible.
I am already pushing certain limits, making demands of certain kinds on an imagined audience. I keep continually in mind the need to widen, not narrow, the appeal of what what is offered up here. And sometimes a civilisational diagnosis, if it is too broad, or requires too much in the way of preparation, in the analysis of the history of ideas (we can't all tkae part in Mr. Lovejoy's Little Outing), or the psychology of self-delusion based on certain unexamined pieties that everyone seems determined to observe, will in the end not convince, but merely repel, some who might otherwise be useful allies. The trouble you describe, in attempting through adducing of evidence, and appeals to logic the minds of those who -- for the reasons noted in the excellent posting just above -- keep seeming to take in, and then after a time show that they did not do so, so eager are they to reject, the conclusions they would have to come to, and the difficulties they would have to face, the policies they might have to endorse that, in so many ways, go against the spirit of the Idols of the Age, the ones to which incense has been burned, in the advanced Western world, for at least the past half-century and, no doubt, in some places far longer. What you write is useful, and will be read, by some. The question is: how many will be won over, and how many will be even less willing to listen, if the theme is narrowed.
In my own presentation I have chosen to narrow the theme -- though always allowing for allusion to larger problems beyond. It's a practical choice, a matter of calculation. You may, on your own mental abacus, add things up, or substract them, differently.
Of all the characteristics that mark out Islam, reflexive victimhood is the one that defines it - and the one that is exploited to drive its innate violence and hatred of outsiders.
Every day, in every madrassa and every Friday in every masjid, the West and the Jews are berated and cited as the reason for their area/city/culture/country's misfortunes.
But the cold fact is that it is Islam itself which is the common denominator for the relative poverty and rank underachievement of Muslim countries.
Aside from, say Turkey, which has a strong secular component in its constitution and a naturally entrepreneurial people; or the oil-tick fiefdoms of the Gulf, where stratospheric GDPs driven almost entirely by unearned income and the sweat of people they hate are the norm, Muslim states tend to be poorer and more underdeveloped than their non-Muslim neighbours.
Outside these exceptions, most Muslim states are either repressive dictatorships or failed/borderline failed states - 7 out of 10 of the places on this year's Failed States Index are filled by Muslim countries.
We did not do this to them - but their leaders know that someone has to take the fall and if we're not there we can't argue.
They will never prosper If they choose to spend all day worshipping Allah.
Stop talking mediaeval nonsense, get out of the mosques - take some pride for a change - stop hating and blaming everyone but yourselves and do some work.
"Robert Gates is a child of that Cold War. And so are many others in the Administration who did not, in the eight years that have followed 9/11/2009, taken even a month, even a week off, to try to learn about Islam. Washington is full of people who remain confused about the subject, and determined to rely on Muslim advisers, or on the repetition of soothing phrases such as “we must win the confidence of Muslims” or “we must win Muslim minds and hearts.”
Another child of the Cold War is the Polish-born American political scientist, geostrategist, and statesman who served as United States National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter from 1977 to 1981. Known for his hawkish foreign policy at a time when the Democratic Party was increasingly dovish, he is a foreign policy "realist" and considered by some to be the Democrats' response to Republican Henry Kissinger.
In FOREIGN AFFAIRS September/October 2009 "AN AGENDA FOR NATO" Brzezinski argues that NATO have been uniting the West and can play a major role in future security arrangements.
The weakening of NATO unity since "The War on Terror" is due to Washington´s (read Bush) arrogant unilateralism in Iraq and its demagogic Islamophobic sloganeering - according to Brzezinski:
ADJUSTING TO A TRANSFORMED WORLD
And yet, it is fair to ask: Is NATO living up to its extraordinary potential? NATO today is without a doubt the most powerful military and political alliance in the world. Its 28 members come from the globe's two most productive, technologically advanced, socially modern, economically prosperous, and politically democratic regions. Its member states' 900 million people account for only 13 percent of the world's population but 45 percent of global GDP.
NATO's potential is not primarily military.
Although NATO is a collective-security alliance, its actual military power comes predominantly from the United States, and that reality is not likely to change anytime soon. NATO's real power derives from the fact that it combines the United States' military capabilities and economic power with Europe's collective political and economic weight (and occasionally some limited European military forces). Together, that combination makes NATO globally significant. It must therefore remain sensitive to the importance of safeguarding the geopolitical bond between the United States and Europe as it addresses new tasks.
The basic challenge that NATO now confronts is that there are historically unprecedented risks to global security. Today's world is threatened neither by the militant fanaticism of a territorially rapacious nationalist state nor by the coercive aspiration of a globally pretentious ideology embraced by an expansive imperial power.
The paradox of our time is that the world, increasingly connected and economically interdependent for the first time in its entire history, is experiencing intensifying popular unrest made all the more menacing by the growing accessibility of weapons of mass destruction -- not just to states but also, potentially, to extremist religious and political movements. Yet there is no effective global security mechanism for coping with the growing threat of violent political chaos stemming from humanity's recent political awakening.
The three great political contests of the twentieth century (the two world wars and the Cold War) accelerated the political awakening of mankind, which was initially unleashed in Europe by the French Revolution. Within a century of that revolution, spontaneous populist political activism had spread from Europe to East Asia. On their return home after World Wars I and II, the South Asians and the North Africans who had been conscripted by the British and French imperial armies propagated a new awareness of anticolonial nationalist and religious political identity among hitherto passive and pliant populations.
The spread of literacy during the twentieth century and the wide-ranging impact of radio, television, and the Internet accelerated and intensified this mass global political awakening.
In its early stages, such new political awareness tends to be expressed as a fanatical embrace of the most extreme ethnic or fundamentalist religious passions, with beliefs and resentments universalized in Manichaean categories.
Unfortunately, in significant parts of the developing world, bitter memories of European colonialism and of more recent U.S. intrusion have given such newly aroused passions a distinctively anti-Western cast. Today, the most acute example of this phenomenon is found in an area that stretches from Egypt to India. This area, inhabited by more than 500 million politically and religiously aroused peoples, is where NATO is becoming more deeply embroiled.
Additionally complicating is the fact that the dramatic rise of China and India and the quick recovery of Japan within the last 50 years have signaled that the global center of political and economic gravity is shifting away from the North Atlantic toward Asia and the Pacific. And of the currently leading global powers -- the United States, the EU, China, Japan, Russia, and India -- at least two, or perhaps even three, are revisionist in their orientation. Whether they are "rising peacefully" (a self-confident China), truculently (an imperially nostalgic Russia) or boastfully (an assertive India, despite its internal multiethnic and religious vulnerabilities), they all desire a change in the global pecking order. The future conduct of and relationship among these three still relatively cautious revisionist powers will further intensify the strategic uncertainty.
Visible on the horizon but not as powerful are the emerging regional rebels, with some of them defiantly reaching for nuclear weapons. North Korea has openly flouted the international community by producing (apparently successfully) its own nuclear weapons -- and also by profiting from their dissemination. At some point, its unpredictability could precipitate the first use of nuclear weapons in anger since 1945. Iran, in contrast, has proclaimed that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes but so far has been unwilling to consider consensual arrangements with the international community that would provide credible assurances regarding these intentions.
In nuclear-armed Pakistan, an extremist anti-Western religious movement is threatening the country's political stability.
These changes together reflect the waning of the post-World War II global hierarchy and the simultaneous dispersal of global power.
Unfortunately, U.S. leadership in recent years unintentionally, but most unwisely, contributed to the currently threatening state of affairs. The combination of Washington's arrogant unilateralism in Iraq and its demagogic Islamophobic sloganeering weakened the unity of NATO and focused aroused Muslim resentments on the United States and the West more generally."
Brzezinski had a good understanding of Soviet ideology and politics but when it comes to Islam he is even more blank and naive than Gates.
Aside from, say Turkey, which has a strong secular component in its constitution and a naturally entrepreneurial people; or the oil-tick fiefdoms of the Gulf, where stratospheric GDPs driven almost entirely by unearned income and the sweat of people they hate are the norm, Muslim states tend to be poorer and more underdeveloped than their non-Muslim neighbours
Unidhimmi,
I'm not sure even those exceptions are valid. Turkey had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the West. Once the Soviet threat dissipated, so did their secular impulses. Islam reared its head. As for the fiefdoms, except for UAE, how many of them are developed beyond their oil? The sheikhs and their closest associates control the oil wealth. How much of their "GDP" finds its way to the people? I've wondered what would happen to Saudi Arabia if the airports that service the hajj were destroyed and the volume of "pilgrims" didn't materialize because only those in the immediate vicinity could get there by means other than air travel. Do the Saudis have the infrastructure to move people around the country on such a vast scale?
“It is not mere ignorance we are up against that explains the irrationality of the West in the face of the problem of Islam: it is quantum ignorance.”
“…a dizzying array of factoids that can keep popping up through the debate like gophers one after another -- after you think you've whacked one another pops up, seemingly forever.”
Well written and thought provoking. I have tried my hand at whacking gophers myself, frequently with frustrating results.
PC/MC is a religion. As in all religions, it has a core that is based on faith not fact. One of the main tenets of PC/MC is that all cultures/religions are equal (except the Christian religion and sometimes Capitalism and the values of the founding fathers – these are inferior and the cause of much trouble in the World).
By subjugating the beliefs of the West and elevating the cultures/religions of the “other” especially if brown, it allows the PC/MC believer to feel magnanimous
And that he/she is “the best of people” – especially better that some Islamophobe. Any facts that contradict the core beliefs of PC/MC will be reflexively rejected and the religion defended at all costs – you see exactly the same behavior with Muslims as they defend Islam against inconvenient facts.
The recipient instinctively views any serious threat to the religion of PC/MC as a PERSONAL affront. In this atmosphere, there can be no analytical exchange of information, because the well-being and sense of worth of the believer (that he/she gets from his religion) is under attack.
If the argument is pressed, the PC/MC believer will first obfuscate, then attempt to shout down and finally break off all communication with the bearer of difficult facts.
Thank you for this series of articles Mr. Fitzgerald, they have been enlightening.
I am angered and embarrassed for my country. The meek, apologetic behavior of our State Department, and government as a whole is like that of a child being scolded by a parent for bad behavior.
This is an untenable situation, it not only embarrasses US it deliberately places the free west and USA in a weakened position on a global scale. This is the calculated choice of the Obama administration.
We The People are not being defended or protected by those elected to serve us. They do not behave with dignity or honor at home or abroad, and they demonstrate appalling ignorance of the true value of Western Civilization and all it has to offer.
Davegreybeard,
"The recipient instinctively views any serious threat to the religion of PC/MC as a PERSONAL affront. "
And a MORAL affront too. The PC MC are quite (self-)righteous.
Davegreybeard,
"The recipient instinctively views any serious threat to the religion of PC/MC as a PERSONAL affront. "
And a MORAL affront too. The PC MC are quite (self-)righteous.
Quite so Hespers.
Obama is the wet dream of the PC/MC crowd – our very first affirmative action President.
What I have described in this paragraph here is only an impressionistic stab at the phenomenon and reflects only a small portion of the magnitude and complexities of the problem.
Posted by: Hesperado [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 29, 2009 9:59 AM
Any suggestions on how to solve the problem? Can you explain why some people instinctively "get it"? Understanding why the truth about islam is crystal clear to some people, even people who have not spent decades studying it, might help in formulating a method to penetrate the minds of those who don't believe their lying eyes.
We know that people who lean far to the left are the toughest nuts to crack, but there are many conservatives who are islamic apologists and really believe that islam has been "hijacked" by a few radicals. Cultural Marxism has definitely poisoned millions of minds and I once believed that this idiocy would pass, phase out, go away. But it intensified after 9/ll. Many have come to believe that we deserved it.
Another phenomenon that baffles me is why some people so easily fall into the trap of Cultural Marxism and others are immune. I know children are indoctrinated throughout their twelve years in public schools, but I also know that many do not succumb. Parental/family influence plays a role in come cases, but not all.
This is definitely a perplexing, exasperating problem, especially since the truth is so blatantly obvious.
Susanp,
"Any suggestions on how to solve the problem?"
It seems only two routes will help:
1) patient long-term attempts at clarifying the complexities, by tackling the interpretative framework of the PC MC paradigm
2) several mass-murderous attacks on us by Muslims over the coming decades combined with increased candor by Muslims as perhaps they become more and more emboldened by their sense of impunity to drop their masks, an impunity that they probably don't realize has limits.
It would be nice if we could wake up our fellow Westerners only through #1 without #2 also being necessary to shake their tenaciously irrational worldview; but I'm not optimistic about it.
"Can you explain why some people instinctively "get it"? "
I've been wondering about that for years. I have no answer. Of course, the stock answer among our critics is that the people who "get it" are mostly, or all, "bigots" already -- and/or right wing nuts, etc. But we know that isn't true. The fact that a large proportion of those who have "gotten it" are not bigots and right wing nuts makes the mystery even more baffling. I've recently had the disheartening experience of knowing a friend, mostly a Leftish type on most issues, who for the last few years was showing encouraging signs of growing on the learning curve about the problem of Islam, to the point where he was virtually on the same page as me -- in the last month suddenly reversing himself and actually regressing to the point of view that there is no great problem of Islam. It felt like the intellectual and emotional equivalent of a blow to my solar plexus to hear him remark, almost casually, on a recent stroll we took when he was visiting town from Tokyo where he has made his home for over 15 years, that Islamic terrorism is no more of a threat, if not less of a threat, than "right wing" terrorism. His subsequent defense of this preposterous statement only further mired him in bullshit. I was too throttled with fury to think coherently, thuough I did my best to keep a level head; but thankfully, he didn't want to talk about it further.
Susan, Hesperado
Hugh has remarked that those who hate Jews seem particularly prone to recruitment for the cause of Islam - either as converts or as enablers.
Perhaps we can flip that around- it may be that those who are not fazed by Jews, who simply don't have an antisemitic bone in their bodies, who feel goodwill - real goodwill - toward the Jewish state of Israel, are the ones least likely to become enablers for Islam.
Use Israel, and the Jews, as a simple litmus test: to spot both the clearheaded, and the confused or brainwashed.
Find the politician who at least acknowledges that Israel has a right to defend itself against murderous Arab terrorism, and you may have someone who is educable in other respects. Instead of trying to convert the unconvertible, just look carefully at our parliaments, in the West, to try to find the genuine Friends of Zion. Same deal with journalists and clergy.
In my parish church there are two gentlemen who are perfectly agreed with me, about the menace from Islam.
One day, a visiting preacher, one Greg Jenks (whom google, to know *all* you need to know about him, and more...he has happily lapped up all of Sabeel's monstrous propaganda), delivered himself of a sermon about 'the Holy Land' (he could not bring himself to even pronounce the word 'Israel') that - not openly, but in all sorts of sly and sneaky ways - tried to get us to blame the Evil Jooz for the misery of the Arab Christians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and for the decline in their numbers in those areas. Needless to say, Islam, and jihad, and dhimmitude, were not mentioned at all.
At that point I didn't know everything I now know, so I didn't tackle the fellow, after the service. But one of my friends did. This gentleman simply marched up to Rev Jenks and told him, flatout, that he was an antisemite. Jenks boggled at him - but was totally unable to make any rational response.
I don't know why there's a correlation between being a Lover of Zion, and being clearheaded (or at least, potentially clearheaded) about Islam; but there seems to be such a correlation.
The deeper Multiculturalism becomes entrenched, the worst Islam becomes.
PC/MC is a sickness and a weakness in our culture, which paralyzes our ability to defend ourselves.
Muslims sense our weakness and exploit it – as any predator would.
Islam is made up of 'good cop' Islamic states and 'bad cop' Islamic states.
Playing the sucker infidels for all they're worth.
But their aim is the same: destroy the non-Muslim world.
By every device the stupid heretical dogs allow them to use: legal, educational, cultural, governmental or openly terroristic.
It is all Jihad, STEALTH or not.
EID = IED.
"Islam is made up of 'good cop' Islamic states and 'bad cop' Islamic states." -- profitsbeard
And good cop Muslims and bad cop Muslims; the former being any Muslim who seems okay.
dumbledoresarmy,
At first glance that's a good litmus test -- support of Israel -- but unfortunately it might have one significant limitation: support of Israel has become sufficiently outside the pale of the prevailing PC MC paradigm such that the difference between supporters of Israel on the one hand, and Jihad Watchers on the other, may largely be redundant. There might be a residual overlap -- a number of people out there who are Israel supporters but who have not gone forward on the parallel track of "Islamorealism" and who only need to be nudged to get on that track. But I fear that that number is not that high, and that most Israel supporters we run across will have already become Islamorealists anyway and will, of course, reflect the still relatively small minority of the latter.
and that most Israel supporters we run across will have already become Islamorealists anyway and will, of course, reflect the still relatively small minority of the latter.
Posted by: Hesperado [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 30, 2009 12:09 PM
Well, there's still the mind-boggling mystery of why millions of American and Israeli Jews, (not to mention 90% of the American people) still don't understand that the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is a RELIGIOUS conflict, not a war over land. The muslims want all of the land and no Jews, and unless the Jews are willing to give up Israel and leave that part of the world, there will never be peace. How could any Jew not understand that?
I have never had an anti-Semitic bone in my body but I must admit that I get livid when I hear Jews defending muslims or going to great lengths to engage in "interfaith dialogue" with them. Every Jew in the world should understand that Jew hatred is intrinsic to islam.
Christian persecution of Jews is ancient history but Jews seem more focused on a perceived threat from Christians than from muslims. On more than one occasion, Jewish acquaintances have offered detailed, historic accounts of the Crusades and the Inquisition and the suffering of Jews at the hands of Christians, as if I didn't know or care. Jews are well versed in the history of Christianity's shameful persecution of Jews, but they never mention the 1350 years they have been despised, subjugated, slaughtered, and uprooted by muslims.
I respect and admire the Jewish people but I don't understand them. Why are most American Jews Democrats? Why do they fear Christians more than muslims? Why do they support the political party that is sympathetic to their worst enemies, the muslims?
Susan - re Jewish denial of what the *Muslims* have done to them...I think Bill Warner over at the Political Islam site is onto something when he argues that the various populations who, over the centuries, have been subjected to severe Islamic abuse, are in the same kinds of denial as we see being practised by abusees in other kinds of severely abusive relationships.
Most Jews are in denial.
Most Christians are in denial.
Most Hindus are in denial.
At least Mr Bostom's massive tome, 'The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism' is a start, for Jews (and should also be pressed upon Christians). One can present it to the neighbourhood synagogue or yeshiva (as also to one's priest, pastor, parish church or seminary) and urge that it be read. Couple it with the text of Maimonides' 'Letter to the Jews of Yemen'.
Keep trying. Keep hammering away. And those of us who are believers - whether Jews or Christians - should *pray*. Pray for the deception and confusion to be undone.
The entire Islamic gestalt strikes me as being *exactly* like the psychopath killer who first charms and deceives..then kidnaps...then, sadistically, for fun, tortures his slave-victim to death, either straightaway, or after keeping them at his mercy for awhile. Even if the victim is rescued, or manages to escape, it usually takes them ages to get their head straight.
People have to wake up and realize they're being conned (or, if they are, or descend from, former dhimmis, that they or their ancestors were not only conned, but in effect enslaved) - and by a mass-murderer, at that.