Obama’s Arab Spring,…
…making the world safe* for Islamicists.
I called it Obama’s Arab Spring, but that’s a bit unfair, because although he has a big role I’m not at all sure that anyone could have prevented this. The Arab world is what it is, and the aftermath of the Iraq War (not the war itself) showed us that we lack the will to put in the resources, blood, and time that might have a chance (it was only ever a chance) of changing things around.
Fanatics, on the other hand, don’t lack for will:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
That poem, “The Second Coming” by Yeats (written in 1919 after WWI), kept rising to my mind after 9/11. If you’re familiar with it, you may know how it ends:
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
[*The first sentence of this post refers to this slogan from WWI.]
If we’re in the mood for apportioning blame, then the blame lies with anyone who believes the flowers of Western democracy could bloom when the seeds are planted on the topsoil of Islam.
The war was lost very early–as early on when Bush the Younger declared Islam to be a religion of peace. Look at the Middle East and tell me where the flowers have been: Lebanon back when it was majority-Christian, but no more now that the Christians have been demographically overpowered; Turkey back when it was still faithful to its Kemalist secular heritage, but no more now either; and Israel. Don’t you see the pattern? The problem, simply put, is Islam.
Having realized this, it’s clear that trying to make Western democracy flourish where Muslims are the majority is a waste of blood, money and time. Implementing Ann Coulter’s third point in her call right after 9/11 would have changed things, but OK, we’re not in the Middle Ages anymore. So apart from my country, which is better off left dealing with the Islamic threat in its own ways (yes, we need weapons, but it would be better for us to buy them in plain business deals), and helping the local Christians against their Islamic predators, the Middle East and Af-Pak should be recognized for the money (at best) sinks they are and accordingly be avoided.
The corollary of observing that a Western-style state can’t flourish with a Muslim majority is that the current Western-style states would do well to take care that Muslims don’t become the majority in them. That shifts the battleground radically: The fight isn’t far away in the heckholes of Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria, it’s mainly in Western Europe where the indigenous population is in the process of being colonized by Islamic invader-immigrants at the Far Left’s invitation and protection. Don’t ask who lost Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan or Syria–those are foregone conclusions; ask how the loss of states like Lebanon, Nigeria, Britain, France or Sweden can be prevented, because those are (or were, in Lebanon’s case) once functional states that have succumbed to some degree or other to Islamic colonialism.
In summary, if I didn’t happen to be an inhabitant of the Middle East, I wouldn’t find the region very interesting. It’s mainly in the West’s heartlands that the war is now being waged.
Making the world safe for Obamocracy.
Now there’s a concept.
Not to worry, Obama has his eye on the ball: “Obama calls climate change the ‘global threat of our time’ in Berlin address“
Ann:
He really does depend on low information voters, doesn’t he?
ziontruth,
I am in 100% agreement with your comments. Islam is antithetical to Western Civilization. “The war was lost very early–as early on when Bush the Younger declared Islam to be a religion of peace.” This is the problem. If you don’t understand the nature of the enemy you will never successfully defend yourself against that enemy. My deep disagreement with the post 9/11 response this very simple truth.
And as much as I agree the real fight is here at home; it will be necessary from time to time to kick ass abroad and then stand back until it is necessary to do it all over again.
US drops demand Taliban renounce al-Qaeda to allow talks to progress
“America will engage in its first formal direct talks with the Taliban on Thursday, after dropping its long-standing demand that the movement renounce ties with al-Qaeda in order for them to progress.”
So Barack Obama has caved to the Taliban. Was there ever any doubt that he would? Was there ever any doubt that the election of Obama would result in Al-Qaeda regaining its strongholds in Afghanistan?
Just one more example of making the world ‘safe’ for Islamists.
It’s going to get harder to kick ass abroad thanks to Obama’s Muslim outreach program. He has invited them into our own government, where they are making sure that statements like ziontruth’s can never be uttered (such as removing any mention of Islam in Pentagon training materials). http://tinyurl.com/lc5bzbz
Did you hear that the State Dept. is covertly recruiting Muslims to work at the State Department as Foreign Service officers? http://tinyurl.com/bbkebtb
Neo, you write “Islamicist.” For what I think you mean, I use the word “Islamist.”
In addition to sending serious money and military equipment to the likes of Syrian rebels and Muslim Brotherhood-run Egypt, it also doesn’t help that the Obama administration has a habit of leaking Isreael’s secrets.
Neo: “the aftermath of the Iraq War (not the war itself) showed us that we lack the will to put in the resources, blood, and time that might have a chance (it was only ever a chance) of changing things around.”
To be fair, we achieved Clinton’s standard for resolving the Saddam-Iraq problem: Iraq in compliance, Iraq at peace with its neighbors and international community, and Iraq internally reformed via regime change.
As such, from the standpoint of immediate goals, our Iraq mission was a checklist success. In terms of the big picture and long term goals for IR-liberals/neocons like us, however, the Iraq project has been a disappointment.
Here are my 10th anniversary thoughts on OIF in which I discuss and link to my thoughts on this issue:
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/10-year-anniversary-of-start-of.html
Iraq is especially frustrating for us liberals/neocons because there are strong reasons – articulated by Clinton, Bush, and Obama – that *specifically* Iraq was viewed as the best seed ground for a long-term social-political movement in the Middle East.
Contra ziontruth, the fate of our Iraq project didn’t and – albeit to a significantly lesser degree now than before Obama – still doesn’t look like a foregone conclusion. If a pluralistic liberal nation fails to take root in Iraq, it was an honest failure that could – if not should – have been a nation-building success on par with our past nation-building successes as ‘leader of the free world’.
Before we can conclude the Iraq project was an inevitable failure due to intrinsic conditions on the ground, we need to understand the failures in our execution – “we” to include the whole West beyond just US military and Bush officials.
Which isn’t to say our nation-building history was a record of perfect execution before Iraq. The main difference, however, is in the past we stayed long enough to work the project and outlast our mistakes. Until Vietnam, anyway.
In Iraq, we simply didn’t stay long enough to judge it fairly as a nation-building project. More frustratingly, at the point Obama bungled the SOFA negotiation with Iraq, Iraq appeared to be trending solidly toward stability and a nascent though still fragile version of the pluralistic liberal vision for Iraq that Clinton articulated in 1998. The Iraq mission at that point was analogous to something like Korea 5-10 years after the Korean War – immature and worrisome but clearly trending in the right direction. (Note that the Korean War happened 5 years after liberating Korea from Japan; Iraq isn’t the 1st mission where the Post-War Plan A fell through.)
In fact, US soldiers in Iraq were beginning to describe duty there as ‘boring’ and ‘routine’. The Commandant of the Marine Corps petitioned to shift his forces in Iraq to Afghanistan because he no longer viewed Iraq as a ‘combat mission’. (Soldiers and Marines both fight, but long-term garrison duty belongs to the Army.)
The speed and degree of success by the counterinsurgency “surge” in turning around Iraq in its darkest, most violent hour was surprising. Especially factoring in the critical role of the Sunni Awakening, the success of the “surge” indicated that the success of our Iraq project was not as unlikely as intervening events had indicated. That we weren’t that far from right on the original project concept; that the fault was at least as much in our execution as in the intrinsic conditions.
Indeed, throughout our military history, the greatest American military successes have routinely been built upon disasters. Our military has *always* learned how to win by failing, and we learned that way again in Iraq.
Maybe Islam is as corrosive as ziontruth says, or maybe, as Clinton and Bush claimed from a liberal/neocon perspective, there are other underlying factors that can be rationally reformed. Note that there was a point in our history where the consensus belief in the West was that Asia was fundamentally incompatible with Western style government, as evidenced by the Western-inspired deformities that happened in China and Japan. But we spent enough blood and treasure, and stayed long enough in Asia to prove the belief was wrong.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the OG of neoconservatism, said civil reform within the US required a 30 year commitment and that’s about how long it took to be confident our Asian nation-building projects had permanently succeeded. The difference between our Asian and Iraq projects is we didn’t stay long enough in Iraq to confidently secure the change.
Geoffrey Britain,
Barack ‘Neville’ Obama. Apparently, appeasement is the style again.
Add: When Obama said we had restored a 9/10 state in the War on Terror, maybe that meant we were restoring al Qaeda and the Taliban to what they were on 9/10 before we wacked them in Afghanistan.
Ira:
No, I mean “Islamicist.” See this, the second definition:
The word is often used interchangeably with “Islamist,” but I prefer “Islamicist” because I think it’s less likely to be confused with “Islamic,” which would just mean pertaining to Islam. I actually think the longer term “Islamicist totalitarian” is better and more specifically descriptive, but it’s quite a mouthful.
I wrote about Islamicist totalitarianism here. Please read for a fuller picture of what I’m talking about.
Eric:
Please see this for a fuller discussion of what I meant when I say we lacked the will.
The news that we’re in talks with the Taliban is truly depressing.
I guess I always sort of suspected Obama would do it, but I was clinging to the hope that he wouldn’t in the end.
God-awful disgrace.
Eric,
“Iraq was viewed as the best seed ground for a long-term social-political movement in the Middle East.”
Agreed. Saddam’s Baathist regime were secularists and had since the 30’s repressed Islam in Iraq. Saddam had a low-sympathy factor and was bent on restarting his WMD programs as soon as sanctions were lifted.
I was an early and strong supporter of the neocon pov. The Neocon view relied upon the premise that a universal ‘human’ aspiration for freedom and individual self-determination automatically trumps cultural loyalties. We were wrong because we didn’t understand the conditions that must exist prior to a society successfully adopting a new cultural dynamic.
You get close, though without specifying, when you state;
“Before we can conclude the Iraq project was an inevitable failure due to intrinsic conditions on the ground, we need to understand the failures in our execution — “we” to include the whole West beyond just US military and Bush officials.”
The West did indeed fail to execute and the left did all it could to sabotage Bush’s efforts at grafting democracy in Iraq. Yet had the left never opposed Bush’s efforts at grafting democracy in Iraq, it would nevertheless have failed.
And, it has failed, there’s no do-over.
The reason that America’s execution was destined to fail is because of two interrelated factors, the first factor necessitating the second factor.
Firstly, the American people and Bush refused to face the inherent nature and identity of our enemy in the M.E. That enemy is Islam itself, a totalitarian ideology which is completely antithetical to classical western values. It’s true, you cannot defeat an enemy whom you refuse to face the nature and identity of…
Secondly, to displace a deep rooted, totalitarian/religious ideology like Islam (comparable to Nazism and Japan’s Bushido culture) with the West’s antithetical culture requires complete discrediting of the prior cultural dynamic. Complete discrediting inescapably involves total military defeat and unconditional surrender. The condition that applied to both WWII Germany and Japan.
We did not do that, in fact we assisted the Iraqi’s in constructing a shariah compliant constitution and that spelled the death knell for a permanent democratic republic in Iraq. Iraq’s current representative government is living on borrowed time.
In a field filled with weeds, you have to uproot the weeds, root and branch, before you can plant a new crop.
You cannot do that if you refuse to define and identify the weeds.
Neo,
Well said. I agree with you.
You are correct that “This split may have begun to occur as early as 9/11 itself, shortly after the towers fell.” Except there’s no “may have” about it. I witnessed it in real-time the week of 9/11.
I was in my 1st semester of college in Fall 01, and I was astounded to witness the gut resistance to the War on Terror coalesce from the start among my classmates.
Note that I attended college in NYC.
It’s true that immediately upon 9/11, the anti-Americans of various stripes organized and ramped up their propaganda machine immediately, as expected. They bothered me but didn’t upset me because as a former Army MI soldier, I was taught to respect the enemy and expect no grace from him.
However, what immediately upset and worried me the most was the reaction by the general student population. Among most of them, there was an immediate emotional rejection to going to war over 9/11.
For example, my 1st day back in class after 9/11 was my Intro to Poli Sci 101 discussion section on 9/14. 17/20 of my classmates in the section were against a military response. For them, 9/11 was a tragedy to move on from and try to avoid in the future, not go to war over. The 3/20 dissent supporting a military response was me and 2 Israeli girls.
Obama’s present-day appeasement is the articulation of the emotional resistance that I saw manifest on campus the week of 9/11. I say ’emotional’ because it wasn’t articulated as such. Not yet. It was most often expressed as a passive-aggressive, willful bemusement over Bush’s articulations of the War on Terror.
Granted, Bush was a poor public speaker, but his speeches were thoughtful, informative, and articulate. At the time, I wondered, frustrated, at intelligent people who insisted on ignorance even when I repeatedly explained in my own words *and* cited Bush’s source material that directly answered their questions.
It became evident that the phenomenon was more than these intelligent people not knowing. It was they *didn’t want to know*.
They didn’t understand what Bush was saying because they didn’t want to understand a war they emotionally rejected from the outset. It was with relief that they seized on the Bush-strawman promulgated by the Leftists and eventually (and rapidly) adopted by the opportunistic Democrats. BDS and reasons against the war, including those advanced by ‘Cold War’ IR realists and libertarians, were in their comfort zone. Supporting the ‘neocon’ war was not.
We the People made one choice upon Dec 7, 1941. We made a different choice upon Sept 11, 2001.
* Oops, minor point, but the discussion section was 9/13, on Thursday, not 9/14.
Eric:
They also “didn’t understand what Bush was saying” because they had already defined him as an idiot, and who would want to listen to, or agree with, an idiot? And everyone who was anyone knew he was an idiot.
Eric:
Obama is very clearly on the other side. He is an enemy of America.
Nobody can seriously doubt that now.
And I wish you would quit saying “We The People”. Some of us knew exactly who and what Obama was and never supported him in any way.
Geoffrey Britain,
I agree that Bremer and even Petraeus were not allowed the dominant hand of MacArthur in Japan.
Bush’s strategy in response to 9/11 was to revive the ‘grand promise’ of the leader of the free world that characterized our position in WW2 and the Cold War. Yet it could very well be that America, by self-imposed rule set and structure, is simply no longer allowed to duplicate the rise and victory of American hegemony in that era.
That said, beyond the pragmatic considerations due to the ruination of the domestic and international political conditions necessary for a long-term nation-building project, I think the (perhaps rationalized) goal was to form a pluralistic liberal model in Iraq that was compatible with Islam. Therefore, ‘Iraq the model’ could spread from Iraq throughout the region without requiring a nation-building US intervention at every step.
Analogy is genetically engineering a species-jumping virus.
funny…
but do you guys really think that the people on the street fighting are fighting for the rhetoric that is being bantered? or maybe it was the lack of low priced food and goods in a mostly (as our economy is becoming) nationalized economic state? (not to mention the monopolies with the state. heck, even itally has such nationalizing problems…
The welfare class is relieved not to be burdened with the slog to the Middle Class and the crony capitalists are not interested in more competition. Both agree on a static society managed with subsidies and monopolies. This system had more than a passing resemblance to the dysfunctional countries of the Middle East. The only difference is that America still has a Middle Class for the system to drink dry. S Knish
as it was in france, the subsidies ran dry…
where were the subsidies from?
from another source:
sound a bit familiar? that a society can not care or realize what it is and how it accepted to be that way?
we have much the same, as the players dont want the attention if it goes the wrong way and they fought.
they are waiting for the roulette ball to drop before they bet (abroad and here)
when welfare cant afford food, we will have similar in the US… and it will be candy coated as two sides of something else…
rickl,
“We the People” is a form of Rousseau’s ‘general will’. The general will is a collective expression that is not the sum nor categorical division of individual expressions.
American colonists opposed the Revolutionary War. Americans opposed going to war over the Constitutional Confederate secession. Americans opposed US intervention into WW2. Americans opposed the election of Obama. But revolting against the King, preserving the Union, going to war against the Axis, and electing Obama – who signaled his foreign policy direction from the outset – were all choices made by We the People.
Artfldgr,
I agree a functional state is more than one thing.
Some state functions are universal for all political styles of state. For example, the notion that security is a prerequisite for liberty. The trains running on time matters everywhere, not just Italy. I think of it as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs applied to nation.
Neo,
Yeah, that, too.
I just don’t know that ‘Bush the chimp’ was the root cause of it because the shifting reasons to oppose the War on Terror have had such a du jour character. They’ve struck me as convenient rationalizations that may have only included disrespect for Bush rather than have been caused by disrespect for Bush. Or it could be both.
I was a supporter of OIF. Iraq under Saddam was a secular country with a decent infrastructure, some educated people, and oil. The ground seemed quite fertile for building something like Turkey pre Erdogan.
My knowledge of Islam at that time was limited to knowing a couple of Muslims. One was an African American man who did some contract work for me. He was a hard worker, honest, and did not seem unfriendly toward Christians/whites. In fact he twice came back and did improvements on the work at no cost to me. My wife and I spent two weeks in the bush in central Africa with a guide who was a Muslim. He was a delightful person. Well informed, witty, and fun to share long hours in the bush with. I never thought for a minute that he might resent us because we were infidels. I asked him questions about Islam, but in looking back I can see that he was not a fundamentalist by any means. So, I really knew little about Islam on 9//11. When Bush said it was a religion of peace, it sounded about right to me.
Since 9/11/01 my eyes have been opened as to the true nature of fundamentalist Islam or Wahabbism. It is quite clear now that sharia and democracy are incompatible. There are a few “moderate” Muslims around (Zhudi Jasser is one) but they have NO impact on the Ummah. Until we see imams preaching tolerance and brotherly love in most mosques, trying to plant seeds of democracy in Muslim countries is a fool’s errand. Even trying to live in mutual tolerance with Muslims in a democracy seems a fool’s errand as well.
Our Judeo/Christian traditions of tolerance and brotherly love as our highest values have blinded us. Based on those values Islam is not really a religion. It seems to be a political cult that exults in killing, converting, or enslaving non-believers. As such, it seems to me that we, as a nation, need to evaluate whether we want this cult to operate under the protections of the First Amendment. I know that sounds absolutely Islamophobic, but look at what has happened to our society since 9/11. It isn’t a pretty sight and it’s all because of a fear of this cult.
JJ,
“look at what has happened to our society since 9/11. It isn’t a pretty sight and it’s all because of a fear of this cult.”
I wonder, what’s the last major Hollywood movie that used Islamic terrorists as the villain? Hollywood certainly had no reservations about vilifying Germans as Nazis during WW2.
Well, if they can’t be like us, can they be enough like us to share the world peaceably?
The problem is even if out of 100, 1000 or 10,000 Muslim Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Libyans, Egyptians, etc, only 1 is a totalitarian Islamicist, and the rest are willing to find common ground with us, that 1 out of X wins if he and his gang are willing to use total terror and everyone else is not.
There are liberals in the Middle East. The problem is the liberals aren’t terrorists.
Eric says,
“Complete discrediting inescapably involves total military defeat and unconditional surrender. The condition that applied to both WWII Germany and Japan. We did not do that, in fact we assisted the Iraqi’s in constructing a shariah compliant constitution and that spelled the death knell for a permanent democratic republic in Iraq. Iraq’s current representative government is living on borrowed time.”
Was there any doubt, from the onset, that we would not dictate precisely what form of government we would allow to replace the rule of Saddam in Iraq? The very concept of “nation building” is idiotic unless the victor is willing to enforce via the muzzle of a gun the terms under which the defeated society is allowed to rebuild? The campaigns to reform Iraq and Afghanistan were doomed from the start.
“the (perhaps rationalized) goal was to form a pluralistic liberal model in Iraq that was compatible with Islam.”
Of course it was a rationalization because Islam can never be compatible with a pluralistic liberal model. Islam is a supremacist totalitarian ideology. As well ask a lion to lie down with a lamb.
Islam cannot be compatible with a pluralistic liberal model because it’s an irresolvable contradiction in terms.
One or the other has to “get out of Dodge”.
To succeed in implanting a pluralistic liberal model in Iraq, Islam has to be seen by Iraqi’s as a dead ideology, no less than Nazism became in Germany.
It was German shame in the face of unequivocal Allied certainty of the Nazi’s evil that drove the stake through the heart of Nazism in Germany. That failure to impart shame, that absence of unequivocal certainty in Islam’s evil, in effect conveys agreement with Iraqi’s continued embrace of an evil ideology.
parker,
Geoffrey Britain said that, not me.
“dictate precisely what form of government”
Our conditions were that it be pluralistic, elected, and representative. Beyond that, other than Japan, where have we precisely dictated the form of government in our nation-building projects?
“and the rest are willing to find common ground with us”
:-; At most there is a tiny minority willing to find common ground with the West. Granted, a majority of muslims are reluctant to sacrifice their first born son for sharia, but this majority will never (as in NEVER) stand up against the rabid jihadists.
Only a fool….
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3dYKMM8b6s
Add: Plus follow the rule of law, of course, ie, the basic tenets of liberal government.
“Geoffrey Britain said that, not me”
My apologies Eric.
parker,
Actually it was I whom you quote.
Bush’s invasion of Iraq was predicated upon the premise that once Saddam and the Baathists were deposed, that Iraqi’s would embrace democracy wholeheartedly. Bush accepted his advisers assurances that Islam was a ‘religion of peace’, highjacked by radical extremists. The rationale being that once freed from Saddam and the Baathists, Iraqi’s would enthusiastically welcome a representative democracy. He thought there would be no need for gunboat diplomacy.
The very notion that Islam’s fundamentalists are radicals is mistaken, it’s the ‘cafeteria’ Muslims who are the radicals. As it is the fundamentalist jihadists who occupy Islam’s theological ‘high-ground’.
Since Bush’s premise that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’ was gravely mistaken and that instead Islam is a totalitarian ideology wrapped within the facade of religion, the neocon proscription, however sincere, was doomed to failure.
“To succeed in implanting a pluralistic liberal model in Iraq, Islam has to be seen by Iraqi’s as a dead ideology, no less than Nazism became in Germany.”
I would add that to succeed in the implantation it must be made clear that failure to comply is a death sentence for you, every member of your family we can hunt down and kill, and all future generations of survivors until life under the sun is extinct.
If we are not willing to burn it down and salt the soil, and then stand back and napalm anyone poking their head above the rubble; we lack the will power to do what must be done. 0.01 measures ain’t going to cut it.
Geoffrey Britain,
Plus the Nazis actually rather slickly subverted a democratic state. While the Nazis were an organic movement that relied on an attractive aggrandized ethno-national identity, Nazism was not ingrained in the German identity.
I agree Nazism had to be discredited to reform Germany, but Nazi Germany was the deviant so the reform didn’t require peeling away too many layers.
Asia was tougher to change than Europe. The Middle East has been tougher to change than Asia. The thing is, how much of it is tougher due to our reduced capability and how much is it due to their intrinsic character?
Geoffrey Britain: “The rationale being that once freed from Saddam and the Baathists, Iraqi’s would enthusiastically welcome a representative democracy.”
It wasn’t only Bush’s premise. He inherited the premise from Clinton.
The majority of Iraqis did. But not all of them did, at least not in the same way, and more influentially, other factors came into play.
An early schism was that democracy isn’t the same as pluralistic liberal democracy. Most Shiites, quite reasonably, assumed democracy in a Shia majority nation meant simple Shia domination. Our imposed condition of a pluralistic Iraq that upheld the statuses of Sunni, Kurds, and other Iraqi minorities required more education.
Even so, that wasn’t a deal breaker. The major Shia leaders representing the majority of Shia were on board with us and patient.
However, Iran-sponsored Moqtada, a minor figure before OIF, wasn’t on board with us, and was willing to use total terror and act as Iran’s agent. As I said, a small minority willing to use total terror has greater effect than a peaceful majority.
The Kurds were on board with us.
The Sunni made the horrendous error of accepting al Qaeda’s offer of help, but were not otherwise religiously dogmatic, irrational actors. Remember, the key development of the “surge” was the Sunni rejection of al Qaeda and their belatedly joining the US project.
The problem in Iraq was more civil sectarian war with a religious skin than actual religious war.
In my opinion, if security and stability had been sustained in Iraq with the provisional peace between Sunni and Shia enforced during the configuring of post-Saddam Iraq, OIF would have looked like the anticipated nation-building project.
Just flipping the one switch of SASO would have facilitated more beneficial developments (eg, international resources) and prevented enough of the problems that compounded downstream, so that the entire course of OIF would have been altered for the better.
I don’t believe the Saddam loyalists, famous for terrorism in their own right, foreign al Qaeda, Sadrists, and JAM represented the majority of Iraqis. I believe the majority of Iraqis did want what we promised them.
But a small minority willing to use total terror has greater effect than a peaceful majority. Our 1st duty was to stop that small minority from ruining everything else and we failed to do that. They beat us to 1st base on security and stability and everything else followed.
So, the issue in Iraq was mechanical, not religious.
We made mistakes in Iraq, but at the same time, perfect preemption and as-planned execution is an ahistorical standard. Our victories have always been fruits of failure where we learned from and outlasted our mistakes. Similarly, Iraq looked like it was on the path to success at the point that Obama bungled the SOFA negotiation and we left prematurely.
Add: My belief that Islam is not the cause in Iraq rests on this – if Islam was the cause, then the COIN “surge” wouldn’t have worked.
Great comments throughout this thread.
Neo, thanks for the link to your article On patience: the West vs. Islamicist totalitarianism.
You wrote, “I actually think the longer term ‘Islamicist totalitarian’ is better [than Islamist or Islamicist] and more specifically descriptive, but it’s quite a mouthful.”
The term “Islamicist totalitarianism” is redundant and both helpful to and confusing for a low information voter.
I think we all understand that tenets of Islam can be interpreted as leading to a totalitarian state, and that all Islamists seek a totalitarian state. (While all Islamists are Muslim, not all Muslims are Islamists.) So, while the redundant term helps teach what is inherent in the first word of the term, it also may mislead someone into thinking that an Islamist (or, as you say, Islamicist) just might not prefer totalitarianism.
Japan has, I’ve heard, taken a VERY tough line against Muslims and Islam.
They’re not allowed to immigrate; they’re not allowed to buy any property in Japan; they are kept track of and expelled if they overstay their visas. The practice of their religion is, IIRC, against the law there as well.
The Japanese sized them up, and said “No Way will we allow these nutters to come into our country and turn it into another heckhole.” [Love that word.]
Japan is very monolithic. Their strength is the strength of Germany, before WWI.
Therein lies their weakness as well, since their PM can copy America’s money printing and only the nationalists try to stop it. When Japanese nationalists say the Japanese should start acting independent, without relying on America, that’s what they are thinking of.
But Japan will make for powerful allies, assuming their Constitution ever changed (which perhaps depends on our status of forces agreement).
“But a small minority willing to use total terror has greater effect than a peaceful majority. Our 1st duty was to stop that small minority from ruining everything else and we failed to do that. They beat us to 1st base on security and stability and everything else followed.”
I would say the same thing about the Leftist alliance here in the US, actually.
A nation that can’t even fix its own hell hole cities doesn’t have good odds of doing much better in Iraq, almost on the other side of the world. Of course, if that nation proved it could do so, that knowledge could be turned back internally and used to destroy the poisons of the body. That is, if the project wasn’t aborted by Islamic Jihad allies in the US Administration.
There are many questions shold be asked before talking about Arab Spring.
First who is promoting this spring the Big Fat Ameer who showers billions which his own country have no democracy with full support and backing by US which where militry bases on Big Fat Ameer land
Ymarsakar: “Of course, if that nation proved it could do so [fix its own hell hole cities], that knowledge could be turned back internally and used to destroy the poisons of the body.”
Patriots worried about America’s current course under our current leaders ought to collect and preserve the tools that will be needed to fix America if/when it finally breaks.
Chief among the tools should be folks with practical ground-up, hands-on, trial-and-error, nation-building experience. That means our OIF and OEF veteran peace operators and counterinsurgents.
parker,
“…it will be necessary from time to time to kick ass abroad and then stand back until it is necessary to do it all over again.”
To cut off the funding for the global jihad, maybe; but more than that is a waste of resources, or worse. It was stupid to send troops to “fight them over there so we won’t fight them over here” while admitting loads of Saudi students to the United States. The trouble with the WWII (Pearl Harbor) model of thinking about 9/11 is that it keeps assuming a threat needs to be explicit (a military, or actual terrorists with known plots), instead of recognizing the changed reality that Islamic imperialism conquers by means of an army of invader-immigrants–which you’re not allowed even to suggest for fear of the R-word.
Eric,
I once thought as you do, that given enough time any place could be Westernized. What changed my mind was the situation in Turkey. Mustafa Kemal (Ataté¼rk) spent years secularizing not only the Turkish state but the populace as well, and for many decades after his rule that secularization looked permanent, yet here we are with a Turkish state and populace backslidden to Islam.
As others have said, Nazism wasn’t so deeply ingrained within German identity as to make de-Nazification impossible, and in Japan it was only the Emperor-worship component that had to be purged out of Shinto. In contrast, Islam is as integral to most Muslims’ lives as Christianity was to the Europeans in the Middle Ages, and the political aspects of Islam are not an add-on to the religion but welded inextricably to it. Hence, my contention that Ann Coulter was the only one with a plan that could work; but she was shouted down immediately, and the “Religion of Peace” remarks followed quite soon after.
Maybe it’s because I have no “abroad” to worry about, only a home front, that I’ve never favored the concept of nation-building at all. It strikes me as a redux of Kipling’s age, fit for a period when the West was ascendant, unchallenged and confident, but now that the West itself is the target of colonialism–Islamic colonialism–those neocon fantasies of nation-building and “Iraq the Model” look like musty anachronisms.
Upon further reflection my comment; “To succeed in implanting a pluralistic liberal model in Iraq, Islam has to be seen by Iraqi’s as a dead ideology, no less than Nazism became in Germany.” ignores an important dissimilarity between Iraq and Nazi Germany. Islam encompasses the entire M.E. whereas Nazism was essentially limited to one country. That is IMO a crucial difference. Islam cannot be thoroughly discredited in one part, the whole must be addressed. In completely defeating Germany, we did completely discredit Nazism.
“I would add that to succeed in the implantation it must be made clear that failure to comply is a death sentence for you, every member of your family we can hunt down and kill, and all future generations of survivors…” parker
Does that include children? A case of the ends sought, justify any means necessary?
I’ve argued since June of 2010 that making war upon Islam does NOT require killing millions of Muslims. That relatively little violence would be required. But it would require consensus in both America and Israel and the will needed to impose a new doctrine upon Islam and Muslims.
That is of course lacking and so ultimately, we are left with Wretchard’s Three Conjectures.
“I think we all understand that tenets of Islam can be interpreted as leading to a totalitarian state, and that all Islamists seek a totalitarian state. (While all Islamists are Muslim, not all Muslims are Islamists.)” Ira
I must take issue with “can be interpreted” as leading to a totalitarian state…
Islam’s tenets cannot be ‘interpreted’. Mohammad ensured that when he made his most basic claim; that the Qur’an are not his words but Allah’s. That he only took dictation from the archangel Gabriel with Gabriel looking over his shoulder to make sure Mohammad got it exactly correct.
‘Moderate’ Muslims or more accurately ‘cafeteria’ Muslims pick and choose which parts of the Qur’an they will follow but the reason you don’t see moderate Imams arguing with ‘radical’ Imams is because the ‘radicals’ stand upon Islam’s theological ‘high-ground’ and cafeteria Muslims know this…
Allah’s words, plainly spoken and of unequivocal meaning, cannot be ‘interpreted’ to mean what they plainly do not.
ziontruth,
I’m unfamiliar with Coulter’s proposal.
“Mustafa Kemal (Ataté¼rk) spent years secularizing not only the Turkish state but the populace as well, and for many decades after his rule that secularization looked permanent, yet here we are with a Turkish state and populace backslidden to Islam.”
Is that development exclusive to Islam, though? How different is it from Christianity as well as Islam quickly bursting out in the former Communist nations? Even China, renowned for its heavy hand even after Mao’s excesses, has been unable to stamp out religions that are considered less rigorous than Islam.
The Turkey example explains in part our allowance of Islamic incorporation in the new constitution, whether that tolerance was Plan A or compelled pragmatically by circumstances. If repressing religion in the law doesn’t work, then what about accommodation of religion in the law in a selectively hybrid manner?
It may not work any better than secular Turkey, but it’s something different and worth a shot.
Pragmatically, in spite of the fear-mongering about neocon intent, the US goal never was and could not be changing the ME by force. That goal would have been impossible both practically and politically. Bush’s 2002-2003 intervention in Iraq was defined by ample law, policy, precedent, exhausted alternatives, compelling interest, and was only the tail end of a contiguous US intervention in Iraq that began in 1990-1991. In other words, our case for war with Iraq was unique to Iraq.
I used the virus analogy upthread. We needed to create a liberal social-political system in Iraq that was tailored to the Middle East and could spread out from Iraq without direct and/or overbearing US intervention. It had to be organic and serve to preclude autocracy *and* not alienate Islam. The idea was to create a liberal hybrid that would fulfill liberal tenets while stealing thunder from the moral claim of the Marxist Islamicists. The idea isn’t to convert Muslims to secularists, but rather to adapt liberalism to Islamic culture.
Think Adam Smith: consider it a form of liberalism that’s custom-tailored to a disparate individual interest in the invisible hand of the marketplace. As I said to JJ rhetorically, if they can’t be like us, can they at least be *enough* like us to share the world peaceably?
A liberalized Iraq need not be America in the Middle East in order to serve our national interest and existentially threaten the terrorists.
“It strikes me as a redux of Kipling’s age, fit for a period when the West was ascendant, unchallenged and confident”
I agree Americans ought to be proudly robust, vigorous, and most of all, chauvinistic. With respect to the ladies we need to stand proud with us, American men need to be American Men again.
“now that the West itself is the target of colonialism–Islamic colonialism”
Part of being an American chauvinist is preserving the spiritual core of American identity and wearing our pride in the American brand. Like I used to counsel my newly arrived young troops back in the day: Never forget and always respect the three ways you identify yourself on your uniform: your family name, your country, and your Army.
“those neocon fantasies of nation-building and “Iraq the Model” look like musty anachronisms.”
Do they, though?
The most frustrating part of Obama’s bungling of the SOFA negotiation and our subsequent premature withdrawal from Iraq is that the nation-building Iraq project wasn’t allowed to play out to its logical conclusion so we could know for sure either way. Based on nation-building precedents that were conducted in more favorable conditions than Iraq, we didn’t even stay for a minimum sufficient length in Iraq. Yet despite the traumas, the Iraq project looked like it was working and on a rising trajectory at the point we pulled stakes.
If we could knew that we tried our best and it didn’t work, then I could accept that America’s ‘leader of the free world’ role is obsolete. But Obama’s bungling took away our chance to complete our Iraq project so we could know either way.
Recall Eisenhower. Ike campaigned on a military-industrial complex reduction and anti-Korean War platform when Korea was less important to our national interest than Iraq and we were losing the Cold War.
Yet Ike didn’t bungle our long-term post-war presence in Korea like Obama did with Iraq. Nor did Ike pull out of our other military commitments. Imagine our history if, in the early 1950s, Ike had pulled an Obama on our various military occupations – and they were then still full-on military occupations – from Europe and Asia.
US global liberal leadership would have looked like a “musty anachronism” then, by our own actions.
Of course, Afghanistan is not Iraq. Nation-building in Afghanistan was always going to be a long shot even with perfect execution on our part. There’s are good reasons that Bush rationally prioritized resources for Iraq over Afghanistan. Our best hope for Afghanistan is a minimally functional state that will tamp down terrorist support.
Iraq the Model, on the other hand, could have been our pivot in the War on Terror. Yet just when it looked like we had the Iraq project back on track, a turnaround we and the Iraqis paid for at a terrible cost, Obama took the winning hand in Iraq he inherited from Bush and fumbled it away.
It’s hard to blame Islam when our own incompetence is at fault.
Eric,
‘A liberal social-political system’ MUST alienate Islam because Islam’s very foundational tenets cannot tolerate or accommodate it. A liberal social-political system is a mortal threat to Islam.
To ‘adapt’ liberalism to Islamic culture is to declare that our Constitutional principles can be ‘adjusted’ to comply with Shariah law, yet remain viable.
They cannot, no more than oil can mix with water.
Geoffrey Britain: “A liberal social-political system is a mortal threat to Islam.”
The frantic all-out extent to which the terrorists attacked our Iraq project, attacking the Muslim Iraqi participants most of all, implies they viewed ‘Iraq the Model’ as a viable threat.
“They cannot, no more than oil can mix with water.”
We didn’t stay long enough to shepherd the process so we could know that for sure.
The uncertainty is that Iraq is not like Vietnam. At least when we betrayed South Vietnam, we could tell ourselves the situation had no realistic hope of improving. (Our reneging on Nixon’s promise from the Paris Peace Accords guaranteed things didn’t get better for South Vietnam.) But in Iraq things were getting better. We had even turned a corner.
Our leaving Iraq when we did put other factors into play while Iraq is still fragile. Now, even if Iraq fails due to Islam, we won’t know whether Islam was the root cause or those other factors are to blame.
The thing is, Islam did to the Middle East, what many said the West could not do to the Middle East. Destroy or overturn all or most local customs and submit them to a new ideology, a philosophy of Good and Evil.
The Middle East was Romanized, meaning Westernized in the Greek educational sense as well as the Christian sense. Until Islam conquered it from Medina/Mecca, little old camel raiders from the deserts.
Persia tried to fight them. Zoroastrianism in Persia is dead now.
So if Islam has the force of will and military might to conquer the Middle East, but the West lacks the vigor and will to re-conquer it… what does that says about who really deserves to win here?
“To ‘adapt’ liberalism to Islamic culture is to declare that our Constitutional principles can be ‘adjusted’ to comply with Shariah law, yet remain viable.”
Liberalism is allowing the people to decide for themselves what is best. It’s another form of American imperialism to think other nations have to follow America’s historical procedure to succeed. In fact, if other nations did that, they would be left where we are now (dead or dying in the water). It would be best if they didn’t follow America too closely.
It’s often all too easy to use American success and power as another way to influence and control another nation’s foreign policy. It’s one thing to do so for a permanent alliance or mutual support, but it’s quite another thing to do so and then discard them as America did with Cubans and the Vietnamese. Such a nation will find that not only will it have fearful slaves as international “allies”, but also a domestic problem that gets worst as time goes on. For a nation that thrives on controlling what other people do, to their detriment, will soon apply those technological methods of slavery to its domestic population… if it hasn’t already.
It is up to Muslims whether they want to destroy or obey Islam or reform it. Those who don’t want the federal US government dictating how they live, should think more than twice about doing the same thing to foreign nations with a completely different culture.
Ymarsakar,
“The thing is, Islam did to the Middle East, what many said the West could not do to the Middle East.”
Ah, but it was not through benign nation-building efforts that they achieved that goal, as we all know. This ties in to what Ann Coulter suggested, most probably in spontaneous outrage, as she said it right after 9/11. Since Eric asked what her proposal was, here it is: She said, “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” Naturally, the third point was the most controversial, although it was exactly the thing that could have prevented all the nation-building efforts from becoming the fruitless wastes of men, money and materiel that they were.
Lest you think this is a modern outcome of lack of self-confidence, it was already in the late 19th and early 20th century that the missionary Samuel Zwemer (1867—1952) complained of the West’s lack of will to Christianize the Muslim world–and that was back when the West was in the best position to do it and was yet to be eaten by self-skepticism. Apparently Islam’s jealous guard against apostasy may have had something to do with it.
Me, as an Orthodox Jew I have no dog in this fight; since Judaism doesn’t seek converts, the option favored by those Jews who recognize Islamic imperialism as a threat is mass expulsion, hence my emphasis on it. But back to Eric’s ideas, I think what I find most disturbing about them is that he believes it’s in the U.S.A.’s best interests to go down a path that has worn down even Britain, once the “Empire where the sun never sets,” as well as the Chinese Q’ing dynasty. Which, Ymarsakar, is related to what you say:
“It’s another form of American imperialism to think other nations have to follow America’s historical procedure to succeed.”
That’s about right. Note, though, that if I were to criticize American imperialism, it wouldn’t be from the Leftist point of view of “America as an oppressive colonial force.” No, I believe America to have been a benign hegemon, as Mark Steyn puts it. My criticism would be from the point that branching out abroad is something that can wear out even the toughest of nations, q.v. Britain and Q’ing China. From that point alone, even without bringing the question of Islam into it, Bush the Younger’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were a mistake; and they would have been so even had his nation-building efforts succeeded.
That, briefly, is why I believe the threat of Islam will be finally countered only when the nations under threat let go of the Pearl Harbor model of the confrontation and recognize immigration itself as the mode of warfare employed by Islamic imperialism today–colonialism pure and simple, only now, ironically, with the West (plus other nations like Nigeria, India, Thailand, Israel…) filling the role of the indigenous peoples under attack. I suggest looking at the situation in Europe more closely, because that’s a far more accurate lens from which to view the nature of the Islamic threat.
ziontruth,
As you said, the US has been a hegemon at the head of a certain world order – ‘leader of the free world’.
A hegemon is not an empire.
Your statement that even if the nation-building projects succeed (who knows – they still might, despite all) you view them as a mistake is interesting, because setting aside the ultimate judgement for any project of success or failure, the post-war nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same kind as our post-war nation-building projects in Asia and Europe that laid the cornerstones of the 20th century ‘free world’.
From that standpoint, the “men, money, and material” we’ve paid since 9/11 are no more wasted than what we’ve paid since WW2, really WW1. This is who we have been as a world leader.
To be fair, you imply you view the whole liberal US foreign policy since WW2, ie, the “Pearl Harbor model”, to have been a mistake, or at least that the application of the fundamental liberal principles of our 20th century leadership to the War on Terror has been a mistake because Islam itself is the foe and Islam is not a rival social-political system as such.
Fair enough. That doesn’t change that our foreign policy options are constrained by our identity as a world leader. That said, I view your suggested domestic prescription as a separate consideration from our foreign policy. I agree we can and should handle our homeland affairs differently than our international affairs.
“Bush the Younger’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan”
There are the wars and then there are the post-wars.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were each justified distinctly from the post-war nation-building projects – Afghanistan by al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts and Iraq by a critical mass of reasons with ultimately Saddam’s refusal to honor his last chance to comply. OIF was a police action. The origin for both wars was the Gulf War, although the back stories extend further, with our world leadership as a constant factor.
Bush inherited the Iraq and Afghanistan problems and those problems reached a head with 9/11. There comes a point where kicking the can reaches its limit.
Bush, however, did face a fresh choice for how to conduct the post-wars and, indeed, the OIF and OEF controversies have been mostly fueled by the post-wars.
But as the leader of the free world, the US realistically didn’t have a choice in how to do the post-wars anymore than an observant Jew has a choice in what to do Friday evening.
As Paul Wolfowitz said, “We went to war in both places because we saw those regimes as a threat to the United States. Once they were overthrown, what else were we going to do? No one argues that we should have imposed a dictatorship in Afghanistan having liberated the country. Similarly, we weren’t about to impose a dictatorship in Iraq having liberated the country.”
And we weren’t going to just leave the broken countries to whomever wished to fill the vacuum, which most likely would have been the same bad guys or someone worse.
If Bush’s textbook liberal internationalist response to 9/11 has failed, there are 2 ways to assign blame.
One way is that the strategy used by the leader of the free world to compete with the Communist world order is fundamentally unsuited to compete with political Islam.
Another way is that the liberal strategy could work again except the leader of the world is no longer capable (to include no longer willing) enough to sustain the strategy to the degree necessary. Ie, the US is no longer that nation, that dynamic leader of the free world, that once upon a time defeated the Axis and the Communists without a break in between.
If we are no longer that world leader, then we should rationally adjust our foreign affairs and lower the bar accordingly rather than pretend to a leadership – to ourselves and the world – that we can no longer fulfill.
Add: I’ll emphasize it again – here’s the thing …
The counterinsurgency “surge” in Iraq worked.
If there is such a thing as a pure distillation of liberal intervention in ground application, the COIN “surge” in Iraq was it.
And it worked with a speed and degree of effect, in what seemed to be hopeless circumstances, that surprised everyone, in large part because the turnaround included the voluntary participation of Iraqis who had previously thrown in their lot with terrorists.
It looked like we got it right in Iraq after a painful stage of trial and error (again, not the first painful stage of trial and error that preceded victory in American military history), until we got it wrong by leaving Iraq prematurely.
Eric,
“…the post-war nation-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan are the same kind as our post-war nation-building projects in Asia and Europe…”
Putting aside the factor of Islam, which changes everything, it could be argued that American nation-building in Germany and Japan contributed to the eventual wearing down of America just as much as Iraq and Afghanistan did. Of course, one might argue that the effects were minimal because America was at the height of its power back then; but it all adds up.
The effort might still have been worth it in Iraq and Afghanistan if those weren’t Muslim-majority countries. But that single factor means any effort would be wasted, which it was.
“…because Islam itself is the foe and Islam is not a rival social-political system as such.”
Islam itself is a social-political system. It’s a religion with a political program attached to it, a program little different than those of Nazism and Marxism.
If you could decouple the religion from its political system, you’d defuse the Islamic threat. However, that would no longer be Islam–and the Muslims know it, hence their fierce resistance to (or co-optation of) any such attempts at decoupling.
“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were each justified distinctly from the post-war nation-building projects…”
The invasion of Afghanistan may have been justified in order to make it possible to hunt Osama Bin Laden down, but otherwise, Afghanistan and Iraq were both wastes of effort. My criterion is in their efficacy in making the homeland safe. They didn’t. In order to make the homeland safe, you need to deal with the soldiers of Islam situated on your own soil. In that area, the world has been going only backward.
“One way is that the strategy used by the leader of the free world to compete with the Communist world order is fundamentally unsuited to compete with political Islam.”
That is my assessment. In fact, I’m not sure it was successful even with regard to Marxism. The U.S.S.R. is no more, but America has been under Marxist rule for nearly five years now, and a lot more if you count academe, education and the media.
Too little attention has been paid to the problems at home. All the free world (including my country) has been neglectful in this.
“…rather than pretend to a leadership … that we can no longer fulfill.”
This 20th-century thinking is no longer helpful in a 21st-century reality. Our reality is that Islamic imperialism colonizes and attacks the homelands with impunity under the cover of Marxist treason. Sending troops abroad could not possibly improve the situation.
The mistakes of neoconservatism, I hold, may well have been inevitable right after 9/11, in a world that needed years to digest the meaning of the event; in 2013 we are wiser, hence I consider it inexcusable to cling to the misguided idea of nation-building. Defending one’s nation by dealing with the attacks of imperialism (Islam) aided and abetted by treason (Marxism) is where it’s at now.
Policymaker, update thyself.
ziontruth,
If Islam preempted it from go, then the COIN “surge” in Iraq shouldn’t have worked. How do you account for its success?
Remember, there was no deadline on it, so we weren’t being waited out in Iraq. The COIN “surge” could have set up a long-term sheperding presence in Iraq like our garrisons that still remain in Europe and Asia with roles that have parentally adjusted to host nation maturation through the decades. As such, while Bush’s last SOFA agreement with Iraq had an expiration date, that’s normal SOP for SOFA.
We didn’t leave Iraq because Islam preempted or defeated the COIN “surge”. We left Iraq because Obama screwed up the SOFA negotiation.
In the end, our choices may indeed reduce to a zero-sum contest, but only because We the People sabotaged the alternative by undermining Bush, and then Obama dropped the Freedom Agenda and failed to stay long enough in Iraq to generate better choices.
I agree that the thorough Marxist infiltration and corruption of the progressive liberal school is an urgent problem. Most liberals have adopted the Marxist frame to the degree that the liberal label has come to mask Marxism. Ie, Marxists to liberals as parasitoid wasps to caterpillars.
However, Bush’s liberal internationalism didn’t detract from anti-Marxism.
One, as I said, our homeland affairs, while politically related, are a distinct category from our foreign affairs.
Two, Bush’s liberal internationalism was as hateful to the Marxists as it was to the Islamicists.
Beyond the homeland/foreign affairs divide, if America and the West had rallied around our non-Marxist liberal internationalist goals, that could have been the beachhead for rebooting liberalism.
However, the Marxist-corrupted ‘liberals’ on the Left – with a generous assist from the IR realists and libertarians who opposed Bush’s liberal internationalism from the Right – were able to neutralize the genuine liberals, ie, neocons.
“update thyself”
We did – we chose Obama. We don’t have a choice anymore, do we?
Eric,
“If Islam preempted it from go, then the COIN ‘surge’ in Iraq shouldn’t have worked. How do you account for its success?”
You’re talking about a military operation to keep the pro-American government safe from the insurgents, while I’m thinking about the character of the nation in general. That’s the difference between our views in a nutshell. I’d call Iraq a success if it had been as secularized as Turkey following Mustafa Kemal’s reforms, which, given the current situation in Turkey, isn’t saying much either, but what the heck.
And here’s another marked example of the difference between our thinking:
“Beyond the homeland/foreign affairs divide, if America and the West had rallied around our non-Marxist liberal internationalist goals, that could have been the beachhead for rebooting liberalism.”
In my view, the problem isn’t with America’s foreign policy, the problem is foreign policy itself–the fact that there’s too much of it when there should be as little as possible and the emphasis should be put on home affairs.
I repeat: Nation-states do nothing, absolutely nothing, to prevent the next 9/11 by sending troops abroad while admitting hordes of Muslim invader-immigrants to permanent residency on their homelands.
“…the Marxist-corrupted ‘liberals’ on the Left — with a generous assist from the IR realists and libertarians who opposed Bush’s liberal internationalism from the Right…”
I belong to neither of these groups. Never have I suggested that America’s invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq were “crimes,” nor that they have generated “hatred toward America” abroad. I know full well that the hatred of Muslims toward the entire non-Muslim world–far beyond the West, as the cases of India and Thailand and Burma show–stems from nothing but the internal imperialistic logic of Islam itself. All it takes as a pretext to inflame them is a few stupid cartoons. My criticism is from a practical standpoint: That those invasions and occupations did nothing to keep the American homeland safe, and ended up wasting American resources. I hold that even an additional decade of trying at such nation-building might not have been enough to change the situation, seeing as it was conducted under politically correct thinking (“Islam is a religion of peace”) that had the U.S.-occupied countries write constitutions that enshrined the primacy of Islamic law.
“We did — we chose Obama.”
No, that wasn’t an update adapting the policies to the reality, quite the opposite, it was a doubling down and capitulation as the cases of Egypt, Libya and now Syria show.
More and more it seems to me that the only leader in recent times who actually understood the reality of Islamic colonization and started doing something about it was the Serb who eventually found himself at the crosshairs of an errant American president acting on the behalf of the Islamic oilmasters.
ziontruth,
Merely “keeping the pro-American government safe from the insurgents” may describe the effective extent of our Afghanistan mission, but the Petraeus-led COIN “surge” in Iraq was comprehensive and, at least at the time, organically formative of the “character of the nation” at a granular level.
For insight on the nuts and bolts of the COIN “surge”, some links:
http://learning-curve.blogspot.com/2013/03/10-year-anniversary-of-start-of.html#surge
If anything, “pro-American” is the weakest part because we are a liberal hegemon of a world order, not a centrally controlled empire. Iraq, like all our allies – nation-built or otherwise – relate to the US out of rational interest. Since we pulled stakes in Iraq, that rational interest has reduced. Thus, Secretary Kerry’s rather sad last visit to Iraq that poignantly highlighted the drop of US influence there since Obama’s bungling of the SOFA negotiation.
“I’d call Iraq a success if it had been as secularized as Turkey following Mustafa Kemal’s reforms”
The CPA’s Plan A included ambitious plans for reform, but I don’t believe that kind of secularization was ever one of them. The process with the Iraqis was participatory. Even if secularization was on the table in the beginning, the goal quickly became compatibility with a pluralistic liberal system rather than replacement.
I understand your adamant view that that compatibility is impossible. You may be right, but 60+ years invested in liberal hegemony meant Bush had to at least try it our way first. The frustrating part is that our premature exit from Iraq means that from a historical perspective, our attempt was incomplete. If Iraq goes right on its own, then good, we did enough. But if Iraq goes wrong, we won’t know whether seeing the project through would have made a difference.
“No, that wasn’t an update adapting the policies to the reality, quite the opposite, it was a doubling down and capitulation as the cases of Egypt, Libya and now Syria show.”
The COIN “surge” ordered by Bush was doubling down.
What Obama has done is uncouple rational means from ends. Bush tried to position American leadership and the West to measure up to the epochal upheaval heralded by 9/11. But We the People wouldn’t have it. Obama retained the liberal frame, but changed course from Bush. Rather than firm leadership, Obama has responded limply to events with a little bit of Reagan and a little bit of Clinton. Either Obama is simply inept at foreign policy or he purposely is trying for American leadership to fail. And fall.