I've been listening to various discussions, on the radio, or rather not discussions but exchanges of firmly held non-negotiable views, about Obama and his speech on Afghanistan. No one seems fully satisfied. Those who support Obama's decision to send 30,000 more troops mostly dislike the announced pull-out of all American troops from Afghanistan after eighteen months, though since the speech was delivered, that promise has been glossed by Secretary Gates and others. Admiral Mullen, for example, on CBS News, said this: "It's very clear that the president has given us guidance that in July of 2011, we'll start to transition security responsibility to the Afghan national security forces," Mullen told "Early Show" co-anchor Harry Smith. "There's no determination of how long that will take... There's no specific guidance with respect to how many. It could be very few, it could be a large number."
So all those worries about a definite date when the American troops absolutely, positively have to be out, that "date certain" (lots of people love saying that phrase - to them it sounds so Covington-and-Burlingish), are perhaps not necessary. For those who think the Afghan game worth the American candle, and judging by Mullen, Gates and others, the gloss to be put on Obama's phrases admits of such flexibility about the phrase that not even W. C. Fields should bother his pretty little head and spend time "looking for loopholes." The "loopholes," Gates and Mullen assure us, are already there.
And then there are those who have had the opposite reaction, who are made furious by Obama's decision. Many of these are his original, true-blue supporters. What do they talk about? They talk mainly about money. They are horrified - rightly - that another one or two hundred billion dollars is going to be spent in Afghanistan. They are well aware of what that money could do. Why, just $400 million of it would restore the cuts in Medicare that the Senate approved the other day. There would be no debate, there would not have to be any debate, about health care if the sums squandered in Afghanistan and Iraq had been kept at home. Nor would there be a problem with paying for road and bridge repairs all over the country, for tuition assistance for practically everyone, for energy projects. Oh, they have a point all right, those who talk about the money.
But they would be in a stronger position if one did not suspect that many of them also, at the same time, have no great interest in resisting, or even in recognizing, the Jihad. No one I have listened to who is against continuing the effort in Afghanistan has suggested all the other, much less expensive, more effective ways, to divide and demoralize the enemy, and to weaken the hold that the ideology of Islam has on its adherents. No one, in fact, mentions Islam at all, mentions the ways in which both the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan are irrelevant to the instruments of Jihad that really count, above all in the historic heart of the West, Europe. No one mentions the Money Weapon, and how it makes no sense to keep spending money - any money at all -- on Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan. No one mentions the need, if indeed one were to believe (no one should) that "jobs" would lessen the recruitment rate for the Taliban - for Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E., and other fabulously rich Arab sheikdoms to be contributing billions and tens of billions to those states. For it was they who funded, they who diplomatically recognized, they who gave every assistance, through institutions and individuals, to the Taliban, and then the Taliban gave succor and refuge and aid to Al Qaeda.
So on the one hand, there are the Republican loyalists, the people who still implicitly must think (do they think?) that Muslims are essentially swell, that Islam itself is not a problem, that only some "violent extremists" are the problem -- though no one, ever, has come up with a single text, a single passage, that those "violent extremists" rely on that is not from the Qur'an, Hadith, or from the example furnished by Muhammad in the Sira. No one has dared to define the ideology of "violent extremists" that somehow is supposed to set them apart from the ideology of Islam itself. And of course they can't. What they could do is instead ask themselves another question: in what ways do those who are not "violent extremists" manage to pursue the same goal, using slyer methods, especially in the Western world? And what are those instruments of Jihad - the very same Jihad, with the very same goals, but pursued through qitaal, or combat, and terrorism, by those "violent extremists" whom we all agree are very bad? If the ultimate goals are the same, shouldn't we look to see not only how to diminish terrorism, but to deal with all the other weapons of Jihad - the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest? This is something about which the Republican Senators and Congressmen are silent. They think they can continue to claim to be "tough-minded" by supporting troops, and more troops - that is, by supporting the squandering of men, money, materiel, and morale, both civilian and political. And they are opposed by people who won't discuss Islam, as an ideology, at all, but will only talk about all the money that could be spent on other things.
The problem I see with people who focus on Islamization is that they can only see the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem that is destroying our beloved culture. There’s an enormous mass of ice that has hit the “Titanic” since the middle 1950’s, as conservatives who see the big picture know. The following for example is the masthead of my blog:
Liberalism, the belief that non-discrimination is the highest and ruling value of society, is a suicidal ideology. If Islam were to disappear tomorrow, the West would still be at grave risk. If modern liberalism were to disappear tomorrow, it would be Islam facing the grave risk from a newly-revived West based upon Non anti-Semitic white nationalism.
Obama strategy in Afghanistan? It's called "denial", something Liberals are very fond of, and I don't mean a river in Egypt. Mr. Karzai has already made it clear he wants more money for the next 15 years. Their ain't no "exist strategy" out of Afghanistan, folks. We'll be paying jizya for a very long time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8400806.stm
Folly indeed.
There are those who think that Islam is not enough of a worry, and that we must not deal with Islam alone or even with Islam mainly, nor seek and find allies (for some, possibly allies of convenience) wherever possible, even among "liberals" (say, Paul Berman) or even "leftists" (such as Oriana Fallaci), or among non-whites (such as all those Christian blacks in the Sudan, or the Ibo in southern Nigeria, or Pakistani Christians or even Muslim apostates), in order to diminish to manageable size the permanent threat from Islam. We might indeed discuss, endlessly, and promise to take on, if one wished, what a poster above describes as "Liberalism, the belief that non-discrimination is the highest and ruling value of society" because, [i]f Islam were to disappear tomorrow, the West would still be at grave risk." I'd like to worry about Islam, and to take or make whatever allies can be found. That includes, by the way, the Russians and the Chinese, no matter what threats they may otherwise pose to the Western world.
I agree with your assessment, Cesar Tort. Modern liberalism is the ultimate enemy. Were it not around, the West would still know what to do in order to preserve itself from within and without. Yes, conservatives would still make some mistakes here and there (e.g., trying to spread democracy in places where it won't take) but would recoup from these with relative ease, in part because they would not have to waste so much of their time exhaustively dealing with idiotic liberal inventions like political correctness and multiculturalism.
By contrast, modern liberalism doesn't just make mistakes now and again, it is itself one giant mistake. It doesn't even have the capacity to appreciate the greatness of the West and consequently sees no reason to defend what it does not value. Indeed, modern liberalism is so convoluted and full of self-loathing that it actually esteems most any culture over Western culture. Can't get much stupider or more suicidal than this.
I would only tweak your quote one small bit and substitute "patriotism" for "nationalism." Alexander Solzhenitsyn drew a distinction between the two, with the former being a proper attitude towards country and the latter the wrong way, the ugly way, to maninfest one's affection for one's nation. Unfortunately, in Russia today, the effective leader of that country, Vladimir Putin, is a nationalist, not a patriot.
Yes Hugh: an alliance with China and Russia is fundamental. And yes: Islam is an extremely serious threat for the West. But my point is that if the West has been sinking since the 1960s it’s because the ideology of suicidal liberalism. In fact, liberalism itself caused the Islamization of the West:
“This liberal principle of destruction is utterly simple and radically extreme. Yet very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of this principle and the hold it has over our society. Instead of opposing non-discrimination, they oppose multiculturalism and political correctness. But let's say that we got rid of multiculturalism and political correctness. Would that end Muslim immigration? No. Multiculturalism is not the source of Muslim immigration. The source of it is our belief that we must not discriminate against other people on the basis of their culture, their ethnicity, their nationality, their religion. This is the idea of the 1965 Immigration Act, which was the idea of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applied to all of humanity: all discrimination is wrong, period. No one in today's society, including conservatives, feels comfortable identifying this utterly simple idea, because that would mean opposing it.”
In The Brussels Journal Takuan Seiyo agrees with this principle that very, very few people, even self-described hard-line conservatives, are aware of. As Seiyo put it: We have been dedicated somnambulists for 40 years now, including conservatives.
Wellington: I am a great fan of Solzhenitsyn. Although his Gulag book is mainly about Russia, at least in its abridged version it’s must reading for those who cannot understand why today’s West is raving, suicidally mad. “Patriotic” sounds indeed better than “nationalist”. But there’s already a movement that calls itself “white nationalism” out there. My semantic innovation was just adding “non anti-Semitic” before that term because I believe that anti-Semitism is counterproductive, and even suicidal for white patriots. Anyway, your point is taken, thanks.
While your concerns for liberalism are well-founded, Wellington, your apparent lionizing of 'conservtives' is rather off base.
Spread democracy? Since when? Where does the Western tradition say such a thing, along with the supposedly requisite religious indifferentism, rapacious market encroachment, and condom distribution to top it all off. Even the early American fathers recognized such inanity for what it was, with John Q. Adams warning against roaming the world looking for monsters to destroy.
These 'conservatives' that you appear to largely admire, for the most part: they not only do not believe in the Social Reign of Christ, source and summit of true Western Greatness, not only don't recognize any objective, authoritative notion of Natural Law [witness our last GOP president and vice president with regard to homosexual buggery], but don't even respect and will not subject themselves to the positivist man-made law of our U.S. Constitution, since it's just a 'God d*** piece of paper', to quote the last GOP president.
Our 'conservatives' are not much better than our 'liberals'. But insofar as we have created them and voted for them, we reap what we sow.
The Catholic confessional state is where our greatness lies. And if folks want to wax poetic about 'stopping Islam', then I would hold up Tours, Lepanto, and Vienna for your consideration as to what the Rosary has given us. Far better and far more than any Horowitz nonsense.
Gosh, we better not "spread" democracy. What would tyrants do for a living? Maybe we could build an island for them all. We could call it "Dictator's Island" - just like "Fantasy Island"! We would not have to change the name since tyrants live in a fantasy world to begin with.
We better keep that democracy light under a bushel. No telling what would happen if Islam had to abide by those pesky secular rules.
Read through the entire blog you linked to, Cesar. Very powerful stuff. Thanks.
For once I concede you have a point when you bring up someone like John Quincy Adams and his admonition that Aemrica should not take up the mantle of actively spreading freedom around the globe. But Quincy Adams lived in an age when America was not yet the great power and before modern weapons of war made it all the more imperative that the world's worst regimes should not be in possession of the world's most destructive instruments of death.
In the last century or so the world has shown that much of it is pathetic and in need of American supervision and force. The two world wars are demonstrative of this. So is the Cold War. So are all the local enmities around the world which would flare up but for the presence of American military power, especially America's navy. And now we have the terrible prospect of not just authoritarian types getting hold of Armageddon-type weapons but crazy authoritarian types from the Islamic world doing so. In short, things have changed and the world has forced obligations on America which, from FDR and Truman onwards, America has had no choice but to shoulder. I would suggest JFK's Inaugural Address as a needed revision of what that other fine man, Quincy Adams, had to say about America's role in the world.
I see the poster above I took for a Muslim is merely a coughlinite. Well, Dearborn is still in the picture.
Meanwhile, the corrupt ineffectual ruler of a corrupt country -- its corruption can be explained by reference to the absence of civic sense, and of the idea of citizenship in a nation-state, that is endemic in Islam --Hamid Karzai, emboldened perhaps by the Obama plan not to even begin to remove troops for 18 months (and with Gates and others making loud noises about how the Americans may stay for 2-4 years)-- is already angling, just like the meretricious Pakistanis, for more, more, more American aid:
"President Hamid Karzai told visiting US Defence Secretary Robert Gates on Tuesday that Afghanistan would need aid to fund its security forces for up to 20 more years, calling for a long-term US commitment.
The newly re-elected Karzai said his government would work to assume responsibility for Afghanistan's security within five years, but that the impoverished country lacked the funds to foot the entire bill.
Gates, who held talks with Karzai on implementing a new war strategy that involves sending 30,000 extra US troops to fight the Taliban, reiterated that the United States intended to start withdrawing its forces from July 2011.
"For 15 to 20 years, Afghanistan will not be able to sustain a force of that nature and capability with its own resources," Karzai told a news conference.
'We hope that the international community and the United States, as our first ally, will help Afghanistan reach the ability to sustain a force.'
These "long-term commitments" of funds for Afghanistan, as for Pakistan, or any other Muslim state or entity, should be rejected summarily, even angrily, and the men with their hands out for endless baksheesh (how many Iraqis decamped with tens or hundreds of millions of American dollars to the villas and playgrounds of Europe, where they are now living quite comfortably?) told to cut the crap, and if they want any money, to go to the Saudis, or other rich members of the Umma. The Americans are beginning to look as large, lumbering, credulous, and stupid, as Baby Huey. I don't like having to endure watching hundreds of billiions, and trillions, squandered simply because our rulers can't recognize the ideology of Islam as the problem, and keep wasting money on the idea of the "moderate Musliims" who will be of such help, if only keep supplying them with fantastic sums and fantastically expensive military support and a fantastic jobs program, so that no unemployed Muslims get the wrong idea and sign up for the Taliban, or Al Qaeda, or something.
The trouble with America today are the people in "charge" keep wanting us to be more like the Europeans. Why we are expected to think that way is a real wonder. Considering America was founded by those who wished to get away from Europe or by those who Europe didn't want anymore.
The American Revolution had as much to do with kicking out what aspects of Europe we had no use for, as anything else.
Europe is criminalizing free thought and what American has any use for that?
The trouble with America today are the people in "charge" keep wanting us to be more like the Europeans. Why we are expected to think that way is a real wonder. Considering America was founded by those who wished to get away from Europe or by those who Europe didn't want anymore.
The American Revolution had as much to do with kicking out what aspects of Europe we had no use for, as anything else.
Europe is criminalizing free thought and what American has any use for that?
No, the trouble with America today is not that some wish to make America more like the countries (which countries, and in which ways?)of Europe but, rather, that those who now run things are insufficiently interested in, insufficiently knowledgeable about, insufficiently worried about, and therefore not at all focussed on how to help rescue, the countries and peoples of Western Europe from islamization. Members of n older American political class were different. They had travelled to Europe, some had studied in England, or, in the ninteenth century, in Germany, they knew at least one and sometimes two or three foreign languages well, and understood as a matter of course that America was a child of Europe, and whether they members of the English-Speaking Union or not, knew that Europe, mainly England, was the source of our political system, our literature and language, our artistic traditions, and that this did not change because of the fact that more of those who came to America did so from outside Western Europe.
Lepanto, mentioned as a great victory for Catholic Europe by the coughlinite-lefebvrite poster whom I allude to above, was indeed a victory for the forces of Catholicism against the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire, but it was a battle in a war that was soon lost. The naval forces of Venice and Spain, with financial and spiritual support from the Papacy (the Duke of Savoy may have, in the Pope's name, contributed some ships but the Papacy itself possessed less than a dozen ships), were defeated, and Venice forced to sign a treaty with the Ottomans in 1573. Venice, Spain, and the Papacy had previously, as members of the Holy League, fought the Ottomans in 1537-1540, over some Venetian colonies in Greece but, as in the ;ater Cyprus War, the Ottomans were victorious. As a result of the Cyprus War, for some years Catholicism was banned from the island, while the largely Orthodox peasantry continued to practice their religion, with constraints, under the new, Ottoman rule.
I understood America has been at odds with Europe sense before 1776. From 1776 onward to the Birth of Multiculturalism, we have made every effort to keep them out. When parts of Europe stopped fighting us, they moved on to their Neighbors. That only lead us to go over there to prevent them from coming back.
As for the Europe of today.I'll need your explanation as to what they actually have to offer.
From all the offering and opinions stated here at JW, there seems slim pickings on that banquet table of life that appeals to American tastes. Europe itself seems to be the main course, dressed nicely on the finest of Silver Service.
I see the long line of diners eating with their fingers while passing us the check.
I am among those who regard the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region as being a very special case within the Islamic world due to (1) its strategic importance, (2) its history as a staging ground for Al Qaeda and (3) the shifting loyalties among different factions -- warlords if you will -- in southern Afghanistan. I recognize that the USA has spent vast sums in the Islamic world (Egypt being one example) and is no better liked than it was before making the expenditure. But I regard the stakes as being so high in Afghanistan-Pakistan that the USA has to make the expenditure because the alternative would be so dire.