We’ve done a lot.
We’ve spent $880 billion — more than the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, that the United States has ever fought.
In Iraq we have built schools, hospitals, roads, protected oilfields and repaired those that are damaged. We have handed out packets of money: stacked it high on pallets, handed it out like confetti (“I can’t believe we are paying these people not to shoot at us” as one soldier was quoted in The Washington Times). It was not enough, you see, to assure ourselves that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction or programs that were close to manufacturing such weaponry. (The Americans did not realize that his intent was to fool Iran, not the United States, into thinking that he did possess such weapons — and apparently they still don’t realize that). Now that it is in the Shi’a thrall — the thrall of Maliki and the greatly-misunderstood Al-Sistani (see “Mugged by Reality” by John Agresto) — is Iraq now, in the scheme of things, less or more likely to be a force for “secularism”? Is it less or more likely to be such a force now that both kinds of Islam, Sunni and Shi’a, have been given a boost at the expense of the secularism? Secularism was, admittedly, thin but at least permitted, for reasons having to do with the political calculations of the outnumbered Sunnis who ruled over Iraq. It was allowed to develop, though not encouraged as, for example, it was encouraged by Ataturk or the Shah of Iran.
We have decided that it is we, the Infidels, and not the rich Arabs, who should be paying for the “rebuilding” or “reconstruction” of Iraq. Why is not clear. Why haven’t the Saudis been asked to contribute 200 billion dollars — that’s mad money to them — if they wish the Americans to prevent Iraq from descending into “chaos”? The Americans are remaining, at this point, essentially to help the Sunnis. The Shi’a already have won, and it is now only a matter of seeing just how many of their gains they can keep, despite American pressure. Why the Saudis haven’t bee asked to contribute is entirely unclear. But when did the United States ever ask anything of its Arab allies? It asks only to be allowed to keep the region safe and sound so that Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar, and others can continue to sell oil and make money, and use much of that money to pay for mosques, madrasas, Tablighi Jamaat, Hizb ut Tahrir, and armies of Western hirelings. They “allow” the Americans to defend them, their regimes, their rulers, while the Americans keep thinking they are “protecting the oil.”
The American government has been played for a sucker. At the very least, it should ask itself why it has chosen to spend close to a trillion dollars to “protect the oil” on which such likely antagonists as China also depend. Why is America “protecting the oil” and spending all that money, and save for Britain (and to a much lesser extent Italy), there have been a few dozen or a few hundred troops from other places, sent for purely symbolic reasons at the request of the Americans? Should American taxpayers be bearing every burden, paying every price, in order to defend not “freedom” but access to oil that China, inter alios, needs as much or more than we do? Why?
What will be the effect of all the building going on, thanks to the Americans and other NATO forces, in Afghanistan? Who will use those roads that are being built to connect one part of Afghanistan to another? Will it be people intent always on peaceful commerce, or will it be the Taliban or other Muslim groups? What will be the effect of making it easier for Afghans to travel to Pakistan, or Pakistanis to Afghanistan? Will those schools being built (not the ones for girls — they are being burned down faster than they can be built) teach illiterate Afghanis to read and write so that they will read Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, or is it more likely that they will be reading Islamic propaganda? When we provide that electricity, that allows for those televisions, or spread those computers and access to the Internet around, what will Afghanis watch? What will they learn? How will this improve the safety of Americans and other Infidels?
Yes, the government has had some success in arresting, here and there, this or that person who was determined to engage in violent Jihad. But what has been done in the United States, or more importantly at this point in Western Europe, to staunch the flow of Muslim migrants, to reverse that flow, and to make the campaigns of Da’wa more difficult? They should be defined as a threat, as of course they are, to the legal and political institutions of the Infidel nation-states, all of them, and a threat to the physical security of Infidels — because a convinced Muslim convert is likely to be far more effective in his or her propaganda efforts, and far more likely to be a True Believer, than those who are simply born into Islam without choosing to the religion themselves as adults.
Six years, not entirely, but largely, wasted — because of the ignorance, confusion, timidity, and sheer sentimentalism of the so-called “leaders” of the Western world, with Bush and Blair in the lead. Six years in which the kind of information that ought to have been presented, in an act of mass dissemination, by the governments themselves, have been left to private greatly-underfunded websites. Six years of false authorities telling us what and how to think: “terrorism” experts, “Bin Laden” experts, e tutti quanti. And those are the good ones.
Six years.