Yea, I don't think he has any real influence on the course of islam. If he did, if he truly was able to moderate, or ameliorate it in some way, he would be getting death threats.

The fact that the enemy seems to take no notice of him, speaks volumes.

But there isn't any reason to denigrate our Iraq gambit by constantly portraying it as a "tarbaby," which it isn't. We're a nation of well nigh 300 million people, with a GDP of 10 trillion dollars per annum. We're spending less than 4.5% on defense spending. And the money were spending in Iraq and Afghanistan is chump change, effectively nothing more than chump change for our economy.

Nor is there any need to denigrate the effort as some naive "light unto the nations" nonsense. Our founders saw our nation as a light thrown against the prevailing darkness of monarchy and despotism. We've established democracies in the past, and we've supported them through defense expenditure and economic investment, such as the Marshall Plan. Some of those expenditures were criticized at the time in the same manner you're criticizing our current mideast policy.

You haven't given the project enough time to succeed. You're criticizm is over the top.

THERE MAY BE A TIME when that criticism is warranted, but not yet, not yet. And it would help your arguments that when that time actually does arrive, if and when it does, it would help if it didn't appear that you had been keeping one eye on the door all along, ready to bolt at the first sign of failure.

At the end of the day, after all of our efforts, AFTER ALL THE ATTEMPTS BY THE MEDIA TO ENSURE FAILURE FROM THE BEGINNING, we're going to know more about islam, we're going to know whether we can predicate policy upon a supposition that there are moderate muslims in sufficeint number throughout islam.

Moreover, if sterner actions are necessary, which I think is the case, those actions must meet with the approval of the American people. Americans need to be sure that we tried to civilize them, we tried to find moderates to work with, we poured billions and billions of dollars into their economies, we built schools, we built sewers, we built roadways and wells, but all our efforts were vain.

You're too impatient, and you're frustrated that the American people don't see the issue in stark terms as you do.

Give it time, and instead of echoing the conclusions that the media desire you to reach, why not check out the military blogs. If the thing is a failure, shouldn't we see evidence of that failure in the blogs of army and marine officers. BUT WE'RE NOT.

The officer corps is confident, they see progress.

That being the case, why continue to ridicule the war effort?

Posted by: Dan at May 31, 2006 1:32 PM

Greetings! US Infidel.

Doesn't look like the hell-hole you paint where I live. Am I still in Europe? Well the UK. Last time I looked I was - I am!

Subjegated? Won't happen here mate. Not in England. Won't happen in US either.....for the same reason.
By the way....I have been reminded a million times never to exagerate :-)

Keep your powder dry.

Posted by: Turbinehead at May 31, 2006 1:39 PM

I will now tell those who do not want to spend the time to "figure it out," although of course you can: "au-dessus de la melee" means "above the fray."

Here's the deal. Strunk and White and probably almost anyone who argues for clear English advises against foreign phrases, especially foreign phrases that are not in widespread use. A cliche does not become a non-cliche because you express it in French. Most important, the point of a political polemic is not to force an upgrading of someone's language education.

We are busy people, and it takes time to look this stuff up. The vernacular is where it's at.

I also wonder if anyone will want to learn French after the immigrants and leftists and the sillies of the Sorbonne make the country even more of a dusty backwater than it already is.

Posted by: StillBreathing at May 31, 2006 2:12 PM

Tom, one cannot live wholly separated from the obtuse. Why not just cut and paste the content you want to send?

Posted by: StillBreathing at May 31, 2006 3:17 PM

"The officer corps is confident, they see progress."
-- from a posting above

I must be talking to different officers. But even if I talked to not a single officer, or even if every single one of the officers I talked to said that they "see progress," , and that final "victory" in the "war" would be achieved, I would then ask this queston:

What do you mean by "progress" from the American, or Infidel, point of view?

And what do you mean by "victory" from the Infidel, or American, point of view?

I don't consider a result which will cost even greater damage to the morale of civilians (and at least some members of the military), that may make people less willing to engage in a Cold War that will go on forever, at some level, unless the forces of Islam are completely deprived of oil and gas revenus, and will cost hundreds of billions of more, only to end up -- if the goals are achieved and the mission as presented accomplished -- with an avoiding of a Sunni-Shi'a split. I consider that not to be a victory but the very opposite of victory. To take a situation which was perfect for exploitation, that would inevitably exhibit sectarian and ethnic fissures just as soon as the monstrous despot and his regime were removed, and then not to allow that natural course of events to work itself out, but to do everything possible to prevent what can only help the camp of the Infidels and damage, by dividing, the Camp of Islam -- well, that takes real genius in reverse.

I don't consider the building of some kind of quasi-capable quasi-acceptable quasi-nation-state out of the the Shi'a and Sunni Arabs, and Kurds, to be something that will lead to any "victory" for the Infidels. I would consider it to be an opportunity squandered, just like the money, men, materiel, and money being squandered.

Since Islam, or to be kinder and gentler the Jihad, was never properly identified as the world-wide problem, instead we got this idiotic "war on terror." If all one worries about is this "terror" then presumably one can forget about the appeal of Da'wa, forget about demographic conquest (and at some point, demographic conquest by Muslims will be reflected in a veto powr over the use, by European governments, of such weaponry, or perhaps even Muslim control over such weaponry), one can forget entirely about the money weapon --the ten trillion received since 1973, the trillions more that will be received, and much of which will inevitably go to pay for the building of mosques, madrasas, propaganda campaigns, academic "centers" that will toe the Muslim or Saudi party line, and the swelling of the ranks of the army of Western hirelings -- ex-diplomats, ex-intelligence agents, former politicians, academics, journalists -- who have been so useful, over the past 30 years, not only in disguising the nature of Saudi Arabia and of Islam, not only in promoting the Lesser Jihad against Israel and in distracting the attention of Infidels from what has been going on in Europe as millions of Muslims settle behind enemy lines, but most importantly, have prevented, by constantly harping on the notion of Saudi Arabia as an "ally," any intelligent energy policy to be put in place, as it should have been back in 1973.

It is understandable that those deeply involved in planning or in execution of the policy in Iraq would naturally have a strong psychic stake in overlooking all kinds of evidence of what the war being waged not on the West, but on all the Rest, is about. It is understandable that people used to deploying equipment and troops would not think hard about the ideology of the enemy, of how that ideology can reappear even in those who seem, for the moment, "moderate" or unobservant in their Islam, and who are unlikely to question policies if, to do so, is to endanger their careers. It is especially difficult when those policies appear to emphasize what is best and most hopeful -- the malleability of men, the belief that everyone "wants the same thing" and that any differences are really either a matter of misunderstanding, or of emphasis, or of "poverty" (for Bush, like so many fundamentalist free marketeers, shares with old Marxists a deep belief that everything begins and ends with economics, and in Bush's case, if only more "reconstruction" is brought to Iraq and Afghanistan, then the natural desire, as he sees it, of all people everywhere for "freedom" which in his view is somehow the same everywhere, and is the solution to all problems. It isn't. All the money in the world has not made the people in Saudi Arabia less fanatic in their faith, though it has certainly made them more able to promote their fanatical faith. Iraq can only be of use to Infidels if the ethnic and sectarian divisions fester, and are not repaired -- temporarily, of course, for permanent repair is possible -- by the misplaced efforts of American soldiers.

Posted by: Hugh at May 31, 2006 3:44 PM

"we've established democracies in the past"

-posted by Dan

When have we ever established a democracy anywhere in a muslim-majority country? You're bypassing Hugh's main points regarding the depth of the Sunni/Shia divide and the Kurdish resentment of Arab dominance. To believe in the possibility of a unified and stable Iraq is to believe that 1400 years of fanatical ethnic and sectarian strife can be reversed in a short time with the instilling of a synthetic "Iraqi" identity at the cost of so much American blood,sweat and money- and this in the face of the apathy and outright hostility of much if not a majority of the people of the United States and Europe along with the apathy and outright hostility of those "Iraqis" themselves -not to mention the campaign of terror and armed resistance directed at Coalition troops.

Can you actually envision this working out? Could you wish upon a star? I wouldn't give that lark a slim chance in Fat City.

It would seem to a caual observer that the only way Sunni, Shia and Kurd could ever live together as one would be to kneel together in fear as one at the feet of some unforgiving, tyrannical overlord and master- be it Mongol, Turk or Tikriti. If and/or when this venture fails, it will not be seen as resulting from the failure of "the Iraqis" to rise to the moment and "seize the day!"; no, it will be seen as a failure for Bush, for Democracy and for the projection of American Power abroad. The image of "Islma" will hardly be tarnished.

What Bush & Co need to do is sit back and share a big, steaming-hot bowl of Turkey, Rice and Kurds, then re-think this tarbaby lark of an Iraq Gambit

Posted by: hasan salami at May 31, 2006 4:09 PM

At some point, there may well be a political price to pay for the war. It's dragged on longer than electorates in the U.S. or UK expected, and those electorates surely don't see any clear benefit from the war, and realize that different factions are killing each other. In the early phase of the war I recall pictures of an Iraqi deserter emerging from the desert and kissing a British paratrooper because he was so happy. The Iraqi army had tied him up with barbed wire as a punishment for something and he'd run of and hid out in the desert. That was Saddam's Iraq for you. Unfortunately, the killing hasn't stopped.

Iraq isn't a nation; it's a three-cornered competition.

And it's not only Iraqis deserting now:

3,000 UK troops are Awol since war began

(There is, however, some dispute over whether this is "soldiers [going] Awol for personal, domestic reasons" or dissatisfaction with the war. I haven't seen any figures for the U.S. Army.)

Of course, if there is a political price to pay, this may mean that politicians may be less willing to act militarily in future when it's necessary for them to do so.

Posted by: Yojimbo at May 31, 2006 4:10 PM

The Marshall Plan is invoked, not for the firs time, above.

The Marshall Plan was supported by the American population, at a time when the United States had, with the help of allies, completely defeated its enemies in World War II, and when the United States was responsible for half of the world's economic outpout. The aid was directed to countries in Europe that either were, or had, long democratic traditions, and in the case of the enemies Germany and Japan, that had in the past possessed certain traditions not activley hostile to despotism, that had even had, before Kodo and Nazism came along, some tradition of parliamentary democracy.

The Marshall Plan, then, took place in a context of total defeat of the enemy. The main cities of Germany and Japan lay smoldering, their leaders captured or killed. The ideologies that made Germany and Japan our enemies, and the enemies that we had had to destroy, were that of National Socialism and Japansese militarism and Emperor-worship (Kodo).

What has been discredited in Iraq? Has Islam, the belief-system that prompts not only terrorism, but all the various instruments of Juihad (the reason that terrorism alone is talked about is either that Bush and Company really do not understand the nature of Islam, and the full scope of the menace, or they wrongly believe they don't dare talk openly about all the other instruments of Jihad, which if they have chosen this silence deliberately, has been a great error), been discredited? Not at all. The signs of Islam coming back as a political force, having been checked by Saddam Hussein, who while hardly a "secularist" as some seem to think, was not prepared to endure mosque-based politics, because 80% of the Arab Believers in Iraq are Shi'a, and he couldn't risk that.

Islam has not been discredited. Islam has not been weakened, divided, demoralized. If the Shi'a participated in those purple-thumbed elections, it was only because they, as 65% of the population, knew they would win. Had the Sunni Arabs constituted 65% of the population, they would have been just as enthusiastic. The misinterpretation of this result, the misplaced enthusiasm for what is seen as a demonstration of the love of "freedom" when it was nothing of the sort, or an exercise in "democracy" when those who voted almost always did exactly as they were told by their ethnic or sectarian leaders -- with a few exceptions among those who voted for the Allawi slate and a few others -- that is not "democracy" as it is understood in the Western world, or rather, it is Democracy Lite.

The American government, and its longsuffering taxpayers, should not be funding any Muslim state. Period. At a time when Saudi Arabia alone, without a single Saudi lifting a single finger on a single hand, can take in half-a-billion dollars a day, and Kuwait, the U.A.E., Libya, Algeria, Iran, and other members of OPEC can certainly afford to share some of their money with their Muslim brothers, fellow members of the Umma al-Islamiyyah, it is infuriating that we, those long-suffering taxpayers, have had to shell out not only the Jizyah of foreign aid to Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan -- all of them not allies but very occasionally collaborators, in the narrowest of senses, and only when the regime's own perceived self-interest, or to the "Palestinian" Arabs who are simply the local shock troops of the Lesser Jihad (that against Israel). is thereby furthered, for their own good and sufficient reasons of self-interest, (a meretricious "ally").

If one takes into account sunk costs, and then the costs that will be borne into the future, such as support for nearly 20,000 troops, some of whom will need lifetime care, and the extra costs to replace equipment when it finally comes home and is examined, to offer bonuses to get recruits to still sign up for the regular army, the Reserves, and the National Guard, if one also adds in the enormous costs that will be incurred even to get those men and that equipment home, it is now close to $400 billion.

What could have been done with $400 billion had it simply been spent on building nuclear reactors, on solar and wind energy, and the rest? And how much are you willing to spend, or do you think -- given that everything must take place with some kind of rational awareness of whether it will be politically possible -- the American public is willing to spend, on Iraq and Afghanistan? How much more? All resources are finite. And what is perceived as a misspending or squandering will lead to diminished support even for things that would be much more effective in constraining Islam, beginning with a campaign of education for Infidels, and propaganda designed to demoralize Muslims -- merely by pointing out, truthfully, that their own distempers and failures, political and economic and social, are a direct result of the teachings and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam.

That would be money well spent. The Light Unto the Muslim Nations blend of arrogant belief that the world is infinitely malleable, if only enough Yankee ingenuity and money is spread around, and that we have a damned mission to spread Freedom.

People who say that forget. What the Mayflower Compact, and those colonists, were all about was to establish a City on a Hill. America has, in some ways, and for some people, inspiring. In the 19th century, there was Tocqueillve. There was Garibaldi -- who visited New York and Boston -- and similarly found American democracy inspiring. In the 20th, one thinks of Jose Figueres, as a young student in the United States, eking out a living, and reading the Constitution and Lincoln. And in some limited cases, the Americans have managed, when they were much better off relatively than they are today, to help put countries that already had experience with advanced democracy (i.e., more than mere head-counting) back on their feet.

Neither Iraq, nor any other Arab country, fits that bill -- save for Lebanon, and there only because of its large and until a few decades ago having a very powerful Christian population that at one time constituted the majority.

Spending hundreds of billions on Iraq for a "victory" that, if achieved, would be the opposite of the only result that can favor the camp of Infidels and cause damage to the camp of Islam, is madness.

Posted by: Hugh at May 31, 2006 4:13 PM

Hugh, not only is Iraq going to hell in a Shia minute, but it looks as if Kabul is going ballstic as well. The Kabulites seem to pine for the likes of Mullah Omar. I have a friend in the National Guard who is in charge for 'educating' the Afghans on democracy. The situation is so unstable, he's been told to stay in the secure military barracks, relax and workout. If Kabul continues to implode, where will further troops come from? I'd say we're about as stretched thin as we can.

Sadly, both 'missions' started out with noble, practical goals: eliminate the bad guys, smoke 'em out of their holes, and WMD. Once these objectives were met, we should have gone home. Now the mission is to create a viable, democracy X 2 in a world that wants no part of us or our freedoms. What a sad, tragic waste.

Posted by: biorabbi at May 31, 2006 6:26 PM

"eliminate the bad guys..."
-- from a posting above

The very idea that there is an identifiable, finite group of "bad guys" (the infantile phrase mimics the infantilism of the thought), and that once these "bad guys" have been "eliminated" all the others, who by definition must be the "good guys," will simply take over.

Unfortunately, the number of "bad guys" in endlessly replenished by other "bad guys" who may even have been, a day or a week or a year ago, among the "good guys," that is among those Muslims who did not take Jihad, or hatred of Infidels, to heart, but for some reason, including the mere presence of those Infidels who, in trying to "eliminate" the "bad guys," will almost inevitably antagonize the so-called "good guys" (who aren't really that "good," and whose hostility toward the Infidels may not yet be murderous, but certainly exists, for it is encouraged by the tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam which can seldom be repressed in a Muslim society).

There is no "eliminating" the "bad guys." There is an ideology, Islam. Its power and appeal can be constrained. Best to let Muslims themselves do the constraining, as Ataturk did. And this will only happen when they reach that stage of desperation, without any aid from Infidels, or any further yielding by Infidels, that will force them to stop blaming those Infidels, and start looking closely at Islam, and what it does, with its inshallah-fatalism, its location of political legitimacy in the Shari'a rather than the expressed will of human beings, and its morally unacceptable treatment of women and above all of non-Muslims, that explains almost entirely the failures, political, economic, social, moral, and intellectual, of Islam itself. If Infidels are around, they will be blamed. If Infidels are around, all sorts of unrealistic expectations that can not possibly be met will be raised - some Iraqis thought Baghdad would be given an instant makeover as New York or possibly Beverly Hills. Get the Infidels out of there. Let Muslim states and peoples fail, and be seen to fail, on their own. Keep them away from the most dangerous weaponry, keep them from migrating to the Lands of the Infidels, keep their failures on display and the subject of endless discussion and analysis.

And wait.

Posted by: Hugh at May 31, 2006 7:42 PM

Hugh, biorabbi - you are both mistaken.

As someone who lived under the wretched Soviet system, I can tell you that freedom is like a narcotic - not addictive until you actually try it.

You might be curious, but not addicted to it. When I look back, I'm surprised to actually find myself not yearning for it as I would today if placed under the same circumstances, even though I have always hated communism coming from very patriotic family.

Both of you are looking only at the part of the picture: the theocrats and their proponents rally and strike back.

Of course they do! Because they rightly feel threatened!

De Tocqueville wrote smth on weird propensity of Americans to very quickly get tired of the war. He's still right today it seems.

Even if Iraq is going all to hell and Kabul, too, the seeds of destruction in their order have been planted, and they know it. That is why they are so shrill and desperate.

It takes time for any cultural evolution to take place. Many critics, like insightful Jim McDonald here:

http://www.jim.com/rights.html

..have noted:

"In the west, for the last four hundred years, society been shaped by ideas, with a lag of roughly one human lifetime between the idea and the social order."

It all takes time. Remember Reagan and his military buildup? It still took over a decade for all the seeds of destruction in SU to develop. I have watched it from within as a kid.

Reagan didn't have to go to all-out nuclear war with Soviets to collapse this evil system. He found another way. Learn from this.

Additional factor is slower pace of life in those societies, much like marasm of Soviet system seemed never to have end in 1980s (and then one day it begins to crash). The pace of life in the Western countries, as I have found, is truly very hectic. I do understand due to this being your everyday experience, you may have trouble understanding that life in third world hellholes, err, developing countries would seem like slow-motion video to you, but it is like that.

It is naive to expect anything different with Islam. Both Afghanistan and Iraq will pay off in two or three generations. But they will.

Even if it erupts in ethnic fighting, that is still better than Islamic encroachments!

A more important thing has happened: it was made painfully visible for Muslims that their order is a loser if only struck hard.

You HAVE TO BELIEVE YOUR ORDER AT THE END OF THE DAY IS A WINNER.

I cannot emphasize this point enough. This is what killed Soviet Union. In 1970s commies were drunk with power and what they perceived as their own success. Then it started to dawn on them they don't. From then on, the faith in entire venture has quickly collapsed. For some time the system worked with pure inertia, and this inertia to me seemed like never ending. To my surprise, it turned out to actually have had an end.

Destruction of Taliban in Afghanistan and Hussein in Iraq may not instantly produce flourishing liberal democracies, but while that would be nice, strictly speaking is not necessary. It's only necessary to show whose ideas and systems are more viable in the long run.

Islam thinks in terms of centuries. You can't even think in terms of years?

At the end of the day, while kicking Taliban's ass feels good and they deserve it, the more important is the strategic goal: not even if democracy will win (and quickly! and with cheese on top!), but if muzzie "order" there will lose. Political nature abhors the vacuum: something has to fill it. If communism fails, it is nationalism and muzzie theocracy that fills it. If you kill muzzie theocracy as the winner in particular circumstances, ceteris paribus, liberal democracy becomes the only viable option.

There will be victories and setbacks, it may get worse before it gets better; but I believe Nathan Sharansky was fundamentally right.

There is a very good chance for what we see in Afghanistan and Iraq today to develop into what you would never expect there.

If somebody told you in 1980 that Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact will collapse and instead most of Soviet-style countries will transit to democracy successfully and only Russia will stay behind, most of you would react with comments like above and declare such guy insane. Yet it happened, and stranger things have happened.

Patience...

Posted by: NotSpengler at May 31, 2006 7:44 PM

"If Infidels are around, they will be blamed."

If infidels are not around, they will be blamed, too. Better to be there and bash the theocrats as much as possible. It's not a political loss and it can be only gain.

"If Infidels are around, all sorts of unrealistic expectations that can not possibly be met will be raised - some Iraqis thought Baghdad would be given an instant makeover as New York or possibly Beverly Hills."

LOL, your intution is correct - I can't believe how naive my countrymen were naive when they jumped into reforms, they expected exactly this.

What you uncovered, though, is just a small fraction of the picture: even though bitching, whining, moaning and crying almost none of them would even consider coming back to communism. A handful of proles and postcommies whine for it, sure, but they are as relevant as French aristocrats would be whining in USA in 1990s to restore the monarchical rule over old French lands.

"Get the Infidels out of there. Let Muslim states and peoples fail, and be seen to fail, on their own."

Nope.

For them this is a natural state: official ideology of Islam stresses unity, de facto they are divisive, which is paradoxically their strength.

I think they can't tolerate "foreign bodies" in their culture, though - it was the smuggled VCR and the music that made Soviet citizens envy the West and say "fuck this system".

Soviet system was more vulnerable, because it was so much top-down commanded and controlled. Islam is more resilient, because it is cult-social doctrine that isn't so hierarchical and also being divided, it has multiple "lines of defense" - local faction, tribe, schism ('denomination'), mosque, clan, top-down govt as well - if you get my drift.

That doesn't mean that each of those lines of defense is impenetrable.

But you have to be there to penetrate them. Otherwise they fall back to their stable "order".

Posted by: NotSpengler at May 31, 2006 7:53 PM

"and this in the face of the apathy and outright hostility of much if not a majority of the people of the United States and Europe along with the apathy and outright hostility of those "Iraqis" themselves -not to mention the campaign of terror and armed resistance directed at Coalition troops.

Can you actually envision this working out?"

Yep. I can.

Apathy is the best part. Combined with necessities, freedom and conflict being there, it's raison d'etre of intervention.

Apathy makes your system of beliefs collapse. Then you have to rebuild it, because life doesn't stop for you and goes on. You can't just sit there all day and feel sorry for yourself. That's not an option.

I wouldn't be able to tell you how many times we felt apathetic during last 15 years of reforms here, for I would have lost count.

To be sure, reforming after Islam might be a tougher nut to crack than after communism. But I don't see a good reason for fundamentally different principles to be there.

"Could you wish upon a star? I wouldn't give that lark a slim chance in Fat City."

There are things in the world political philosophers did not dream about.

Posted by: NotSpengler at May 31, 2006 8:14 PM

NotSpengler-

I want you on my side, in my trench, and foxhole.

The Iraq and Afghan wars are teaching the troops, first hand, up close, and in blood, the true nature of the future enemy (still unnamed by the pussyfooting political leadership in the West).

As bad as both situations can seem -when you grotesquely press your face up against the glass of the daily casualties ...remarkably tiny compared to all previous warfare, as with Iwo Jima or Normandy or even Hue, during the height of the Tet Offensive- the education of the military will be more valuable than any other aspect of this poorly planned, half-heartedly directed, and ultimately-indecisive pair of conflicts.

But the War against Islamic Imperialism, when it is finally fought outright (and with all of the resources of a country truly at war: psyops, subterfuge, propaganda, serious counter-insurgency, etc. as Hugh wisely advises) shall have a new generation of military leaders schooled in the truth of the Muslim warrior. And the folly of treating them as trustworthy allies.

As bad as it now looks, when exaggerated by the anti-Western, self-loathingly suicidal, hysterical mainstream press, it will have been the best introduction to the enemy that we could have hoped for.

P.C. about Islam will be dead.

And the jihadist enemy will follow.

Until they are driven out of the free world and back -to consider the disastrous effects of blindly following their murderous, intolerant cult- inside the "Muslim world".

Out of which they should never have been allowed to spread.

I agree with you, and Ali Sina, that Islam is built on sand.

And getting shiftier every day.

The more we learn of it, the more it disgusts.

And our feeling will influence some Muslims.

And the corrupt edifice will teeter more and more.

It is our job to be sappers of the dogma walls of the pedophile "prophet".

And help his rotten creation fall.

Posted by: profitsbeard at May 31, 2006 9:43 PM

Well, there have been some significant critiques of my earlier comments, and I will have to respond at some length.

But I just got in, it's been a long day.

So I'll try to respond tomorrow.

Posted by: Dan at May 31, 2006 10:47 PM

It's pomps like Lewis who make the John Espositos possible.

Lewis may indeed be trying to somehow create a new form of Islam that will be less lethal to the West.

He and tens of thousands of other elites over the last 1,400 years. With zero success. But reinventing Islam makes for some darned interesting college lectures and stupefying guest appearances on the TV and radio talk shows.

And it's a great way to commit slow mo suicide.

Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at May 31, 2006 10:47 PM

If I understand Hugh, he advocates leaving the Muslim world to itself and letting it self-destruct to the point where Muslims start to reflect on the problems of Islam and restrain it themselves.

I wonder if Hugh would not only advocate leaving Islamic societies to self-destruct; does he also advocate secretly fomenting all kinds of internecine conflict within and among those societies, using deception to set Muslim against Muslim, and in general stimulating and enhancing Islamic societies' own self-destructive tendencies? If he does advocate that kind of intervention by surreptitious social sabotage, how far would he be willing to take it? Where would he set a limit as to means and goals? Would he support secretly fomenting a war of all against all within the Muslim world?

The answers would surely vary depending on the circumstances facing us at a given time. But I wonder what Hugh's answers would be now.

Posted by: traeh at June 1, 2006 12:34 AM

"It is naive to expect anything different with Islam. Both Afghanistan and Iraq will pay off in two or three generations. But they will"
-- from a posting above

Beginning in the early 1920s, Kemal Ataturk did everything he could to constrain Islam as a political and social force in Turkey. He abolished the Caliphate. He gave women the right to vote. He forbade the promotion of the religious Muslims within the army. He outlawed the wearing of the hijab for those employed by the government. He abandoned the Ottoman (Arabic) script for the Roman alphabet. He commissioned a Qur'an in Turkish and a commentary (tafsir) in Turkish as well. He required imams to vet, or later to read, sermons (khutbas) prepared by a central office, that would carefully limit the contents. He passed the Hat Act, to end the wearing of fezzes (which made praying easier) and to require the wearing of Western-style caps and dress. He did everything he could to destroy the power and influence of the Muslim clergy, even going so far as to attack some mosques and hang some clerics.

And he did this systematically until his death in 1938. After his death, Inonu and others continued the same line. And they constructed an entire mythology around the figure of Ataturk -- that kult lichnosti with which the poster above is no doubt familiar. That cult of personality was a clear attempt to replace the cult of Muhammad, as uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil. And with the cult of Ataturk, the Great Man, came the history of the Turks, the Sun-People, who had always been in Anatolia, and who managed to include almost everyone who had ever been in the region, right back to the Hittites.

Yet what has been, after 80 years, the result? Erbakan, now Erdogan. The majority in Parliament of the so-called "Islamists." The slow undoing of Kemalism, halted here and there only by threats from the army.

Islam turns out to be permanent. Why do you think what has happened in Iraq and Afghanistan will make those countries less Islamic, when in the first, Islam has reappeared with a vengeance among both the Shi'a and the Sunnis (not that it ever went away, but was merely hidden) and in the second, the Taliban have reappeared because whatever memory there is of their miserable rule fades quickly.

And you think the Americans should remain, in both places, spending hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of soldiers, the morale of the armed services (where standards for new recruits have been loweered, where young officers are quitting, where fewer now join the citizen-army of Reserves and National Guard)? All in the doubtful hope that somehow, despite the experience with the sole Muslim country to have democracy, and to have a systematic attempt to curb Islam, Islam yet remains, and comes back, like Rasputin. But unlike Rasputin, who finally succumbed to Yusupov, Islam cannot be killed.

Concentrating on Muslim states, attempting to make them "better," will do very little to protect Infidels from the Da'wa campaigns, and demographic conquests, being made right now in the Lands of the Infidels, above all in Western Europe. Iraq and Afghanistan are expensive and exhausting distractions; the game is not worth the candle.

You say that the example of Communism should be kept in mind. I agree. To me, Communism fell not because of one person or one thing, but because of everything that was done by the Western alliance, and above all by the United States, from the late 1940s on. Some part of it involved military alliances -- the founding and funding of NATO. Some of it involved military campaigns, as in Greece, and later in Korea. Some of it involved propaganda, everything from Wladimir Weidle on Russian emigre poetry on Radio Liberty, to Willis Conover on American jazz on Voice of America ("O Sen Lui/O gorod moy/O Sen Lui/Kogda proshchayus' ya s toboy/O Sen Lui/Na sto vtoroj etazh/Ne khochesh' stoya, tak lyozha sdash'....)to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, publishing houses that were CIA fronts (Editions de la Seine), Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, the works. And then there was all the money spent to help De Gasperi fight Togliatti and his consort Nilde Jotti in Italy, and to help the non-Communist left fight Maurice Thorez in France. And by the mid-1980s, the most intelligent members of the Nomenklatura saw that on its own terms Communism had failed.

Islam must be constrained, right now, and we cannot wait for decades. But the situation in Iraq can be exploited so that the camp of Islam is divided and demoralized, and the camp of the Infidels does not squander, but husbands its resources. And that is important, because every effort must be made to undermine the role and presence of Islam in the West. That requires that America and Europe not be divided, that the American and other Infidel publics remain convinced that an anti-Jihad effort will make sense (as the war in Iraq does not, to many, make sense), and to see, sooner rather than later, that the most effective instruments of Jihad are not "terror" (and it is supposedly to fight "the terrorists" that the Americans are in Iraq, when the main opposition to them consists of local Sunnis unwilling to relinquish political, and therefore all other kinds of, power) but rather Da'wa and demographic conquest.

Even were there more to be said for the so-called "victory" to be achieved in Iraq -- a "victory" that in Bush's view would consist in the establishment of a functioning nation-state, and in my view would consist of continued and growing hostiity between Sunni Arabs and Shi'a Arabs, in the best outcome drawing in, and using up, money, men, materiel, and attention from the two greatest beneficiaries of the removal of Saddam Hussein -- the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Saudi Arabia.

If the American President, who once had an idea, and now the idea has him, does not seize the opportunity presented on a platter in Iraq to exploit ethnic and sectarian fissures within Islam, that will be a very great mistake. One thinks for parallels, and two come immediately to mind: the failure of the French to reoccupy the Rhineland when the Germans violated the Treaty of Versailles and remilitarized that area, and in 1919, the failure of the British, American, and Czech expeditionary forces to have been limited to 19,000 men, when a hundred thousand of them, well-armed by the Americans, might have made all the difference in the Civil War, and avoided 70 years of Soviet Communism.

Posted by: Hugh at June 1, 2006 12:38 AM

"kult lichnosti" means "personality cult." i don't have time to translate the poem.

Posted by: StillBreathing at June 1, 2006 9:00 AM

Not poem, song. St. Louis Blues. Tribute to Willis Conover.

Posted by: Hugh at June 1, 2006 9:19 AM

lyrics: http://tinyurl.com/ry9va

by the way, Orwell argued not only against foreign phrases, but against latin forms (for example, "finalize") rather than english ones (like "complete," i suppose).

Posted by: StillBreathing at June 1, 2006 9:39 AM

... does he also advocate secretly fomenting all kinds of internecine conflict within and among those societies, using deception to set Muslim against Muslim, and in general stimulating and enhancing Islamic societies' own self-destructive tendencies?

Sounds like an excellent and productive approach to saving freedom from the jaws of Sharia.

As an added benefit, all those thousands of dweebs sitting on their dead asses over in Langley can do something useful for a change.

Posted by: Alarmed Pig Farmer at June 1, 2006 12:04 PM

Mr. Lewis may have noble intentions and I have no ill to speak of him. But it is VERY UNLIKELY THAT ANY non-Muslim WILL EVER BE ABLE TO INFLUENCE ISLAM for the simple reason that Islam has already pre-empted any possiblity of this by branding non-Muslims as beneath Islamic folowers under any and all conditions. All input from "infidels" to Muslims' ears is (politically anyway) automatically discounted from the start by Islamic leaders (even if he WAS right).

Mr. Lewis of course is an infidel.

I doubt if any imams in the Middle East will be a party to any of Mr. Lewis' insights.

But if nothing else, perhaps he may have some insights the western democracies (the ones that still value it) may be able to use to combat Islam's global jihad invasion more effectively.

Posted by: pythagoras at June 1, 2006 10:55 PM

Lewis attempts to address two audiences at once, but the one he needs to inform truthfully, the Infidel audience, is likely to be misled by his attempt to appeal to, even assuage the possible delicate sensibilities of, those Muslims to whom he thinks he is appealing. This won't work.

Posted by: Hugh at June 2, 2006 1:20 AM

The only influence that we non-muslims will ever have over islam, is that influence that Sherman had over the South.

The influence that derives from utterly reducing their pretensions to dust, and slaughtering without let or hindrance vast swaths of their men foolish enough to offer battle, or accept the same.

That is NOT an inconsiderable influence.

And we are unwise to forget that.

Battle, slaughter and war HAS influenced every single society in history.

Why do we think that islam and muslims should be any different.

Posted by: Dan at June 3, 2006 2:44 AM

Think of it this way, AS THEY HAVE BEEN ENORMOUSLY influenced by the nostalgia for their age of imperial conquests, LIKEWISE will they be influenced by an age of utter destruction.

Japan had it's zenith, it's time when it NEVER knew defeat. But then they ran into the United States, and Imperial Japan has NEVER been the same since.

If we unleash upon the muslim states in the manner that we can, if we go after the mullahs in Iran with a will, if we move on Saudi Arabia as they deserve, if instead of being apologetic about it, we were to appear downright EAGER to move on any muslim state that so much as utters a peep in protest, we can create a new attitude in islam, and in the bosum of muslims.

If islam and jihad is primarily a vehicle for Arab supremacism, then why not reduce Arab pride to the dust.

Wouldn't that go a long way towrards solving the entire islamic problem.

Posted by: Dan at June 3, 2006 2:49 AM

some posters above can take comfort that their words may have gone from their mouths to God's ears. It was reported today or yesterday that that sterling progressive militant for all the right causes, Zarqawi in Iraq, has come out with a call for Sunni war against the Shi`ites. No doubt the so-called "left" in the West will continue to see him as a progressive humanist and humanitarian. But how do we reconcile chomsky's pandering to the Shi`ite Hizbollah with Ramsey Clark's pandering to the Iraqi Sunnites? How does a fellow make up his mind? It's Ramsey against Noam. Which one is politically correct?

Posted by: Eliyahu at June 4, 2006 10:06 AM