Sending very expensive-to-recruit-train-maintain-and-outfit Western troops to Iraq, and keeping them there to attempt to attain a goal impossible of attainment, is, to say the least, unwise. The Sunnis will never acquiesce in their loss of power to the despised Shi’a.
And the Shi’a Arabs, who constitute 60-65% of the population in Iraq (and hence about 80% of the Arab population), will never surrender the power, and the money that comes with the power, that they acquired — inevitably and inexorably acquired — once Saddam Hussein’s regime had been overturned.
The current American government — and by the looks of it, either of the two alternative successors to the Bush Administration — fail to grasp this. They fail, furthermore, to grasp that being worried about “chaos” and “violence” that would follow “an American pull-out” misses the point.
Chaos and violence in the Arab and Muslim world, chaos and violence that weakens that world, that causes men, money, materiel to be used up not by Americans and other Infidels, but by Muslims fighting with each other, is not a bad thing, but a good thing.
We interrupt this posting to ask, for the hundredth time, the following question:
Was the Iran-Iraq War a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing, from the point of view of Infidels?
Answer: it was a very Good Thing. It should have gone on forever.
Now back to our regularly-scheduled posting.
The failure of the Bush Administration to grasp this is in the main a failure of intelligence and imagination, but also a failure to admit that it has been wrong. And the claque, the so-called “neoconservative claque,” of the boots-kagans-kristols, won’t admit it either. Because they are in the “Spreading Democracy in the Muslim World” racket and their funds and therefore their personal well-being depend on their continuing to argue for and at this point to pretend to believe in some version, perhaps a little toned down, of the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project, they will never admit they were wrong.
And the anointed Republican candidate, John McCain, himself a military man, continues to think of “war” only in the most obvious military terms, as in Iraq, as in Afghanistan. He does not realize that the permanent war that Islam is requires its followers to engage in — see Qur’an, see Hadith, see the Sira — whenever Muslims possess the necessary wherewithal, continues and gains strength, as we squander our men, money, materiel, and morale, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.
The Jihad is not a tangential but a central duty. It is the “struggle” to spread Islam, not in one place, not in the Middle East alone, but everywhere. It is waged in order to remove all the obstacles to the spread, and then to the permanent dominance, of Islam — including such obstacles as the legal and political institutions of Infidels that are flatly contradicted by both the letter and the spirit of the Shari’a. And among the greatest of those obstacles are he Constitution of the United States, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s not something fabricated by “Islamophobes.” It’s clearly in the texts and tenets. And those texts, those tenets, have been acted on, over the past 1350 years, in most unambiguous ways, in the conquest of lands possessed by non-Muslims, and then in the subjugation of non-Muslims (where they were not killed or forcibly converted at once), who are reduced, where allowed to remain alive, to the status of dhimmis, a status that is one of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity.
McCain doesn’t know this. Will anyone on his staff begin to explain it to him, so that he, in turn, can begin — in time — to make the appropriate signs that he has at last begun to understand that the mission in Iraq to bring “freedom” to “ordinary moms and dads” was one of sentimental messianism, or messianic sentimentalism (take your pick)? That mission ignored the nature of Islam and the view of man, and of the ruler, that Islam implicates: the ruler is to be obeyed if he is a Muslim, and the legitimacy of any ruler depends not, as in Western democracy, on the expressed will of the people, but on the will expressed by Allah, through his medium Muhammad, in the Qur’an, and as further glossed by Muhammad in the Hadith, or as revealed by the details of Muhammad’s life collected in the Sira.
There is a kind of “victory” that can be obtained by America, and by the West, in Iraq, but as I have written here a hundred times before, that “victory” depends not on staying but on going. That “victory” must be defined as ending in a situation that causes division and demoralization within the Camp of Islam and Jihad. In Iraq there is a great chance, a great opportunity. For in Iraq there is permanent sectarian hostility and sometimes, open warfare. There is permanent ethnic hostility, between the supremacist Arabs and the non-Arab Kurds.
All the Americans have to do is recognize that if they continue in the present course, there is no end to this. They will be using up men, materiel, and money (now approaching, or perhaps having exceeded, two trillion dollars, spent, squandered, in Iraq — money that might have gone, for example, to energy projects that would have made a real dent in the Muslim Money Weapon, that comes entirely from the sale of oil and gas) this year, next year, the year after. The officers and men in Iraq are spinning their wheels. And some of them know it. The morale problem in the army grows; 15,000 captains have not re-upped. The suicide rate, which tells us something, is up; morale is down. And it is down, in large part, because the American soldiers have come to understand, even if they do not yet understand why, that is not yet understood at high levels what Islam teaches, what Islam causes. It is not understood that the Iraqis will take and take and take, and whine and whine and whine, and use the Americans against their local enemies, but no real friendship can be expected, no loyalty — only meretriciousness, only malevolence, only, in the end, the hostility that Muslims must feel toward all non-Muslims.
It is cruel, and it is stupid, for the American civilians, in the Pentagon and in the White House, and in Congress, to keep wasting mens’ lives in a vain effort, an effort that is based on a refusal, a great unwillingness, to study the meaning, and then the menace, of Islam. McCain may think he understands it, but he doesn’t. And those who calling themselves “conservatives” nonetheless keep loyally defending an indefensible and stupid and wasteful policy, often because they have a personal stake in this. They don’t want to be shown up. They don’t want to be judged as irrelevant. If you were an early enthusiast, and have stayed such, at this point it is almost impossible to allow yourself to realize how foolish and ignorant of Islam, how careless of fact, how negligent of, for example, the Money Weapon, Da’wa, and demographic conquest you have been. And you just won’t do it. Nor will assorted operators, in every sense, who in their one-man or ten-man operations (ah, think of the donors, think of the need to maintain plausibility with the public, and the private, donors) who have a personal stake, even a financial one, in continued belief in the “democratization of the Muslim world” project. They’re all in the same galere.
We have a chance, by leaving, to create a permanent fault-line between the forces of Sunni Islam (the local Sunnis being backed by Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., other Gulf Arabs, Jordan, Egypt, and Sunni Arabs in Syria who may be let out by their Alawite rulers to join co-religionists in Iraq, as a way of getting rid of some domestic enemies of the syncretistic Alawites) and Shi’a Islam (the Shi’a Arabs of Iraq are not all admirers of the Iranian regime, but the Iranian regime will feel compelled to help them against the Sunnis).
Make provisions to rescue, or protect, the Christians — Assyrians, Chaldeans, even tiny non-Christian and non-Muslim sects such as the Mandeans. They can be moved into redoubts in the north, and armed, possibly in Kurdistan, if and only if the Kurds agree to protect them, and if and only if the Americans will, possibly over the horizon with air power, be there to be the final enforcers of that promise and to add a little protection of their own. Some may wish to leave, for Syria. I have suggested why an exchange of populations — local Muslim Arabs in the “West Bank” for Arabic-speaking Assyrians and Chaldeans — should not be dismissed but looked into. Let Israel be the protector of some of those hounded, persecuted, murdered Christians — fellow non-Muslim victims of Muslims. That will be good for Israel, and good for the way in which the non-Muslims of the world will then begin to understand Islam, and the threat it poses to all non-Muslims.
As for Afghanistan, it’s much the same kind of expensive waste. It’s an impossible place, a primitive place. Build a school for girls. The next day, or next month, or next year, it will be blown up. Teachers will be dragged out and killed. Girl students will themselves be killed. Build a grid of roads, and the Taliban will use those roads. Put in more electricity, and the Taliban will exploit that to spread more easily, through computers and televisions, their message — the message not of an Islam misunderstood, but simply an Islam taken seriously, in its every aspect.
Let the Uzbeks and Tadjiks fight with the Pashtun. Let one group of Pashtun fight another. Let the Hazara, whom the Taliban wished to wipe out, be supplied with enough weaponry to fight, in turn, the hyper-Sunnis of the Taliban. Let it be all against all.
And in Pakistan, don’t keep pouring money into the meretricious Pakistani military. That was done for decades. In return, we got A. Q. Khan, and the Pakistani military’s “Islamic bomb,” and attacks on India supported by, paid for by, planned by, those in Pakistan.
Cut off all aid to Pakistan if there is not a complete change in attitude toward not only the Taliban, but toward all Pakistani mosques where hatred of Infidels is inculcated. Look for an Ataturk, and make sure the Pakistani military realizes that the decades of being taken in by them are over. We want our tens of billions back, and we want that money now — or we want results. We in the West can cut airlinks to Pakistan — no more toing and froing to Great Britain. We can halt all Pakistani immigration, and start to expel non-citizens from Pakistan, and then go from there, to find out which among those who have acquired citizenship committed perjury in their oath of loyalty, leaving only those who can swear allegiance to an Infidel nation-state and mean it — which means that they are not going to be good Muslims, not those loyal, as they are supposed to be, only to Islam, only to fellow Muslims.
We can help the rebels in Baluchistan, who deserve a little help. Last year the Pakistani military murdered the most beloved tribal leader in Baluchistan, aged 79, and his son. We can do all kinds of things, including boycotting Pakistani goods — so many of those rugs, after all, are made by child-labor, and according to reports, the children in question are often miserably treated Christians. Oh, and as for the Sunnis of Sipaha-e-Sahaba, the ones who specialize in killing the Shi’a? What would they do if they saw the Shi’a in Iran helping co-religionists in Iraq kill Sunnis? Do you think they wouldn’t be inspired to seek revenge — just a little?
There should be in the Pentagon, a wing, open only to non-Muslims, that will be the nerve-centers for listing, and studying ways to encourage, the Pre-Existing Divisions within the Camp of Islam. Start with Sunnis and Shi’a, and list all the places where there could be, are likely to be, more Sunni-Shi’a trouble if in Iraq a permanent simmering warfare, or perhaps not so simmering, between the two sects continues. List them all: Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia (where several hundred thousand Shi’a live in the Eastern, oil-bearing, Province). List numbers, list groups, list resentments, list fears, of these Shi’a, or those Sunnis.
Have another room, devoted only to the matter of non-Arab Muslims and the various ways they have suffered from Arab supremacism, whether it be mass-murder (as with the Kurds and black African Muslims in Darfur), or cultural and linguistic supremacism, as with the Berbers in North Africa, or a combination of these, as well as the political exploitation of non-Arab Muslims by the Arabs who essentially dominate, even run, the O.I.C. and lay down the law about what constitute the most important Muslim causes.
And have still another room devoted to the economic resentments and splits within the Camp of Islam. The poorer Arabs have had those resentments dampened because they have been allowed to rely, for tens of billions in aid, on the Western world. That aid almost immediately took on the character of Jizyah: that is, a tax on non-Muslims, paid to Muslims, to buy temporary tolerance. The American government is now afraid — afraid! — to cut aid to malevolent Egypt, Jordan, meretricious Pakistan, the so-called “Palestinians” who are merely the “West Bank” and Gazan Arabs who are the shock troops of the pan-Arab and pan-Islamic Jihad against Israel.
And if the Infidels are “afraid” to end the Jizyah of what they still call “foreign aid,” the recipients of that aid are not grateful for it. They do nothing to deserve it. They continue in Egypt and among the “Palestinians” to be viciously antisemitic and anti-American. We have heard enough nonsense about this line that reporters are sometimes fed and sometimes believe, because they know nothing of Islam: the line about how “we (Egyptians, Jordanians, “Palestinian” Arabs) don’t like your government but we like the American people.” Islam tells us otherwise. It tells us that as Infidels, no matter what aid we give, no matter how much we knock ourselves out for them in other ways, they will still hate us. Ah, those hundreds of billions, even trillions, spent to make Iraq a better place, a place where we will rebuild everything, schools, hospitals, power grids, roads and bridges, you name it! And what’s more, we will rebuild, or build, the country, so that lions can lie down with other lions, as all of them feign for the gullible Infidels to have been lambs in the first place.
Basta.
The men in Iraq know it. The officers, or those not wedded to parroting the party line, know it. Many, pari passu with the increase in their knowledge of Islam, know it.
What is keeping those who presume to instruct us and to protect us (in the government) from finding out the same things, from studying the same things, that we have all done, at this and other websites? What? Too busy praising each other as the most important people in the world, and giving even a Tim Russert practically a State Funeral, or at least coverage worthy of Winston Churchill? What is it, exactly, that makes so many of those who report, or pontificate in columns, think they can continue to get away with such ignorance? Or those who remain ignorant in the executive branch, and the legislative branch, and even in the judicial branch — where judges are going to have to find out a lot more about Islam if they are going to make sound judgments in terrorism cases?
After such ignorance (as noted before), what forgiveness?