SAN’A, Yemen – A bomb rigged to a motorcycle blew up amid a crowd of worshippers leaving Friday prayers at a mosque in a rebel stronghold of northern Yemen, killing at least 18 people and wounding about four dozen, officials said. — from this news article
Shi’a and Sunnis at it again. Yes, of course, the American government must do what it can to try to stop this kind of internecine warfare among Muslims, in Yemen as in Iraq. Otherwise there might be a “catastrophic” situation. Otherwise there might be “chaos” in the Middle East.
And somehow this “chaos” and this “catastrophe” that will ensue will, we are told, be bad for us, in ways always unspecified, as if we are simply to accept the conclusion of our betters — you know, the people in the government who pick up their news just as you and I do, but who lack the time, and the inclination (unlike you, unlike me) to spend the time to read about Islam, to read the texts of Islam, to learn what the Western students of Islam (not the espositos but the real thing) have said about the contents of Islam.
For they are just too occupied and preoccupied to sit in a room and read. They may be cosseted, chauffeured about, and so on , but their daily lives are full of meetings, and hectic busyness, and travelling hither and yon, and getting someone above to “sign off” on something, and coming up with “policies” that need to be formulated by consulting with everyone and his brother, and then written up in the stilted bloodless bureaucratic language which is now the favored medium — they know no other, they have never been exposed to any other — of those in the government, and who presume to instruct, and to protect us. They have to deal now with this crisis, now with that, and with every part of the world.
How can someone as mediocre as Bush, advised by someone as mediocre as Rice — people who have never had the inclination or leisure to read widely in history, or to exercise their imaginative faculty through literature — be expected to have read about Islam? Yet if you cannot imagine something, it is difficult to think about it. If you cannot imagine an islamized Western Europe, if it is simply beyond you, then you will not worry about what that would mean, and are not likely to come up with ways to avoid that completely plausible and deplorable, and entirely avoidable, future for the heart of the West.
One more thing. If leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, cause great disruption, chaos, a “catastrophe” in the area, then why don’t any of the Sunni Arab states, presumably those who would have the most to lose, bother to give any aid at all to the government of Iraq? Answer: why should they? They do not wish to shore up Shi’a who rule in Baghdad. They will, however, continue to urge the Americans to stay, in order to keep the Sunnis in Iraq supplied with guns and money and with a powerful protector that will pressure the Shi’a to make concessions, and concessions — and the Americans will, listening gravely to the advice of rulers of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the other small sheikdoms, fall for it, not realizing how they are being suckered.
And if leaving Iraq would, as some direly warn, lead to terrible disruptions in the supply of oil (during the Iran-Iraq War, that lasted for eight years, there was little disruption and the price of oil went steadily down), then why aren’t other oil-consuming nations concerned? Why hasn’t China lifted a finger, or spent a penny, to help promote stability and prosperity in Iraq? Could it be that the Chinese are, like the Sunni Arabs, perfectly content to watch the continuing squandering of American money, materiel, men, morale, happy to see us bleed ourselves, in order to do something which will benefit China and other oil-consumers as much as, perhaps more than, it will benefit the United States?
How dumb do we have to be, and for how long?