Posted on 09/09/2016 6:13:35 PM PDT by Louis Foxwell
Sum up our failed Middle East policy in a nine-letter word starting with an S. Stability.
Stability is the heart and soul of nation-building. It’s the burden that responsible governments bear for the more irresponsible parts of the world. 
First you send experts to figure out what is destabilizing some hellhole whose prime exports are malaria, overpriced tourist knickknacks and beheadings. You teach the locals about democracy, tolerance and storing severed heads in Tupperware containers.
Then if that doesn’t work, you send in the military advisers to teach the local warlords-in-waiting how to better fight the local guerrillas and how to overthrow their own government in a military coup.
Finally, you send in the military. But this gets bloody, messy and expensive very fast.
So most of the time we dispatch sociologists to write reports to our diplomats explaining why people are killing each other in a region where they have been killing each other since time immemorial, and why it’s all our fault. Then we try to figure out how we can make them stop by being nicer to them.
The central assumption here is stability. We assume that stability is achievable and that it is good. The former is completely unproven and even the latter remains a somewhat shaky thesis.
The British wanted stability by replicating the monarchy across a series of Middle Eastern dependents. The vast majority of these survived for a shorter period than New Coke or skunk rock. Their last remnant is the King of Jordan, born to Princess Muna al-Hussein aka Antoinette Avril Gardiner of Suffolk, educated at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and currently trying to stave off a Muslim Brotherhood-Palestinian uprising by building a billion dollar Star Trek theme park.
The British experiment in stabilizing the Middle East failed miserably. Within a decade the British government was forced to switch from backing the Egyptian assault on Israel to allying with the Jewish State in a failed bid to stop the Egyptian seizure of the Suez Canal.
The American experiment in trying to export our own form of government to Muslims didn’t work any better. The Middle East still has monarchies. It has only one democracy with free and open elections.
Israel. Even Obama and Hillary’s Arab Spring was a perverted attempted to make stability happen by replacing the old Socialist dictators and their cronies with the political Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood. They abandoned it once the chaos rolled in and stability was nowhere to be found among all the corpses.
It might be time to admit that barring the return of the Ottoman Empire, stability won’t be coming to the Middle East any time soon. Exporting democracy didn’t work. Giving the Saudis a free hand to control our foreign policy didn’t work. Trying to force Israel to make concessions to Islamic terrorists didn’t work. And the old tyrants we backed are sand castles along a stormy shore.
Even without the Arab Spring, their days were as numbered as old King Farouk dying in exile in an Italian restaurant.
If stability isn’t achievable, maybe we should stop trying to achieve it. And stability may not even be any good.
Our two most successful bids in the Muslim world, one intentionally and the other unintentionally, succeeded by sowing chaos instead of trying to foster stability. We helped break the Soviet Union on a cheap budget in Afghanistan by feeding the chaos. And then we bled Iran and its terrorist allies in Syria and Iraq for around the price of a single bombing raid. Both of these actions had messy consequences.
But we seem to do better at pushing Mohammed Dumpty off the wall than at putting him back together again. If we can’t find the center of stability, maybe it’s time for us to embrace the chaos.
Embracing the chaos forces us to rethink our role in the world. Stability is an outdated model. It assumes that the world is moving toward unity. Fix the trouble spots and humanity will be ready for world government. Make sure everyone follows international law and we can all hum Lennon’s “Imagine”.
Not only is this a horrible dystopian vision of the future, it’s also a silly fantasy.
The UN is nothing but a clearinghouse for dictators. International law is meaningless outside of commercial disputes. The world isn’t moving toward unity, but to disunity. If even the EU can’t hold together, the notion of the Middle East becoming the good citizens of some global government is a fairy tale told by diplomats while tucking each other into bed in five-star hotels at international conferences.
It’s time to deal with the world as it is. And to ask what our objectives are.
Take stability off the table. Put it in a little box and bury it in an unmarked grave at Foggy Bottom. Forget about oil. If we can’t meet our own energy needs, we’ll be spending ten times as much on protecting the Saudis from everyone else and protecting everyone else from the Saudis.
Then we should ask what we really want to achieve in the Middle East.
We want to stop Islamic terrorists and governments from harming us. Trying to stabilize failed states and prop up or appease Islamic governments hasn’t worked. Maybe we ought to try destabilizing them.
There have been worse ideas. We’re still recovering from the last bunch.
To embrace chaos, we have to stop thinking defensively about stability and start thinking offensively about cultivating instability. A Muslim government that sponsors terrorism against us ought to know that it will get its own back in spades. Every Muslim terror group has its rivals and enemies waiting to pounce. The leverage is there. We just need to use it.
When the British and the French tried to shut down Nasser, Eisenhower protected him by threatening to collapse the British pound. What if we were willing to treat our Muslim “allies” who fill the treasuries of terror groups the way that we treat our non-Muslim allies who don’t even fly planes into the Pentagon?
We have spent the past few decades pressuring Israel to make deals with terrorists. What if we started pressuring Muslim countries in the same way to deal with their independence movements?
The counterarguments are obvious. Supply weapons and they end up in the hands of terror groups. But the Muslim world is already an open-air weapons market. If we don’t supply anything too high end, then all we’re doing is pouring gasoline on a forest fire. And buying the deaths of terrorists at bargain prices.
Terrorism does thrive in failed states. But the key point is that it thrives best when it is backed by successful ones. Would the chaos in Syria, Nigeria or Yemen be possible without the wealth and power of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Iran? Should we really fear unstable Muslim states or stable ones?
That is really the fundamental question that we must answer because it goes to the heart of the moderate Muslim paradox. Is it really the Jihadist who is most dangerous or his mainstream ally?
If we believe that the Saudis and Qataris are our allies and that political Islamists are moderates who can fuse Islam and democracy together, then the stability model makes sense. But when we recognize that there is no such thing as a moderate civilizational Jihad, then we are confronted with the fact that the real threat does not come from failed states or fractured terror groups, but from Islamic unity.
Once we accept that there is a clash of civilizations, chaos becomes a useful civilizational weapon.
Islamists have very effectively divided and conquered us, exploiting our rivalries and political quarrels, for their own gain. They have used our own political chaos, our freedoms and our differences, against us. It is time that we moved beyond a failed model of trying to unify the Muslim world under international law and started trying to divide it instead.
Chaos is the enemy of civilization. But we cannot bring our form of order, one based on cooperation and individual rights, to the Muslim world. And the only other order that can come is that of the Caliphate.
And chaos may be our best defense against the Caliphate.
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This guy can write.
Thanks for posting this article. It eliminates all the smoke and mirrors and gets down to the point.
I believe Trump understands this intuitively and is a master at the game.
I think Greenfield makes an excellent point. We should stop interfering and just let them kill each other off. Mission accomplished.
I hope so.
He gets it.
—
Chaos is the enemy of civilization. But we cannot bring our form of order, one based on cooperation and individual rights, to the Muslim world. And the only other order that can come is that of the Caliphate.
And chaos may be our best defense against the Caliphate.
—
Finding order in apparent chaos is the highest form of creativity. That is the true test of a leader. ~TF
Chaos is the logical choice for a foreign policy and geopolitical strategy in the mid-east. It simply employs the political and cultural reality already in place. The “arab brothers” fundamentally distrust each other - hence the tribe-centric culture, and they hold a grudge. OMG do they hold a grudge. — Chaos is the inevitably toxic by product. Pursuing a doctrine of Chaos for the mid-east only means we are going with the flow. — There may be a case to be made that by dividing up the land and creating the post-Ottoman empire borders, we actually reduced the level of chaos. - What has followed with the Queen Bitch’s tenure as Sec. of State has arguably made the situation much worse.
Chaos is the logical choice for a foreign policy and geopolitical strategy in the mid-east. It simply employs the political and cultural reality already in place. The “arab brothers” fundamentally distrust each other - hence the tribe-centric culture, and they hold a grudge. OMG do they hold a grudge. — Chaos is the inevitably toxic by product. Pursuing a doctrine of Chaos for the mid-east only means we are going with the flow. — There may be a case to be made that by dividing up the land and creating the post-Ottoman empire borders, we actually reduced the level of chaos. - What has followed with the Queen Bitch’s tenure as Sec. of State has arguably made the situation much worse.
I must here point out that while order is central to civilization, social order differs in different civilizations. Muslim ‘civilizations’ are mired in a 7th century ‘order’.
My personal definition of genius is the ability to see order where others see only randomness. Chaos is close enough to randomness for me to extrapolate to say that the American civilizational model enables its members to see, and function in terms of,the work of geniuses.
Average Americans use the vision of the Founders and continue to build the most creative, desirable, free, and productive society the world has ever known.
Muslims use the vision of Mohammed and still desire to live in the 7th Century.
Think of the creative results of Jobs, Gates, and all the winners of Nobel prizes in the hard sciences, and the fact that virtually none of them are Muslim. Take careful note that Muslim hard science Nobel laureates are astoundingly rare.
Now remind yourself that the world is becoming an evermore cognitively demanding place. Don’t forget that the Muslim world has accumulated a remarkably high rate of genetic defects from 1,400 years of first cousin incest.
Finally, ask your self what place has a society which is Muslim. Churchill’s summation of such societies is as accurate today as when he published it in 1899, in his two volume work titled “The River War”.
Churchill on Islam: “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die: but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.
Churchill, Winston (1899). The River War Vol. II (1st ed.). London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Islam is about to force us to destroy it. The approaching final Crusade can easily be won. Islam is based on Allah having his holy place on earth being the Ka-abaa in Mecca.
Nuke it into Meccatite.
Simultaneously nuke Medina and Teran.
Then use the fact that Muslims believe any Muslim killed by a mere woman goes to Hell by publishing photos of the blond female pilots who did the nuking. Make sure they know that if Allah did ever exist, he is in Hell by the hand of a woman.
Then tell the surviving Muslims that if Allah were a God, he would have been able to prevent the nuking of Islam’s holy cities. The fact that the cities were nuked by women is proof that Allah is not a God.
Finally, order them to destroy all Korans, Mosques, madrasses, and kill all Imams and other Muslim leaders or be destroyed.
Those who want to kill or enslave others are too dangerous to be allowed to continue to exist.
Out of chaos, order. Until the chaos completely grinds the chaotic into dust there can be no order. One cannot make order with chaos. Only after chaos has completed its natural process of destruction can order be established.
You are precisely correct. The practice of Mohammedanism must be outlawed everywhere on earth. Where a local government refuses to eradicate its practice the holy places within the offending nation’s border must be destroyed. (Yes, by a woman.)
Christian proselytization is the key to ending the scourge of Islam. Thousands of devout missionaries are already working with the heathen of Islam. Thousands have been converted to the peace of Christ. Millions more need to be brought to Christ. Muslim practice must be ended for all time in our life time.
In the beginning God brought order out of Chaos.
It is not a natural degeneration from chaos to order.
Some gifted people can see order in what appear to be chaos.
I’ve seen business leaders who have done exactly that. Taken a company bordering on total failure and in a short time turning it around. They don’t teach those skills in universities.
“made the situation much worse”
Indeed, Much Worse.
Bad enough to generate global warfare. Nobody wins a war. The winners survive.
It’s essence is truly evil.
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