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The Middle East: All Bad Choices [VDH]
National Review ^ | 8/20/2013 | Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on 08/20/2013 4:59:30 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross

From Libya to Iran, our past actions have drastically limited our current choices.

Survey the Middle East, and there is nothing about which to be optimistic.

Iran is either fueling violence in Syria or racing toward a bomb, or both.

Syria is past imploding. Take your pick in a now-Manichean standoff between an authoritarian, thuggish Bashar Assad and al-Qaeda franchises that envision a Taliban-like state. There is increasingly not much in between, other than the chaos of something like another Sudan.

Our Libyan “leading from behind” led to Mogadishu-like chaos and Benghazi. Do we even remember the moral urgency of bombing Tripoli as articulated by the ethical triad of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power?

A day late and a dollar short, we piggybacked on the Arab Spring in Egypt, damning the damnable Mubarak without much thought of who or what would take his place. The result is that a kleptocratic dictatorship gave way to a one-vote/one-time Muslim Brotherhood theocracy — and then full circle back to the familiar strongmen with epaulets and sunglasses. Even in the Middle East, it is hard to get yourself hated all at once by Islamists, the military, the Arab Street, Christian minorities, and secular reformists. In Egypt, the Obama administration has somehow managed all that and more. I wonder about all those supposedly pro-Western Google-using types who toppled Mubarak: Are they still there? Were they ever there? For now, the military is engaged in an existential struggle against the Islamists, who retaliate by going after Christians — a crime of enormous proportions going on throughout the Middle East, which is completely ignored by Western governments.

(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...


TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; Government; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: bad; choices; middleeast; vdh
It's like there's a muslim brotherhood mole or moles in the WH ... or something.
1 posted on 08/20/2013 4:59:30 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
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To: Sir Napsalot; Kaslin; neverdem; EXCH54FE; 2ndDivisionVet; Rummyfan; smoothsailing; Hojczyk; ...

VDH ping.


2 posted on 08/20/2013 5:01:20 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: Servant of the Cross

There actually is a policy and a coherence to this. Obama sides with every group that has the most radical and aggressive Islamist goals and the most anti-Western views. He is a racialist and a leftist extremist who believes that these are his Third World “freedom fighters,” rebelling against the eevil white man, the eeevil West and the eeevil US in particular. He hates us.

Brett Stephens had a good article in the WSJ this morning, in which he mentioned another unmentionable: Much of the Middle East is convinced that Obama is a Muslim and a supporter of radical Islam. They talk about this openly, but we can’t.


3 posted on 08/20/2013 5:06:57 AM PDT by livius
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To: Servant of the Cross
Do we even remember the moral urgency of bombing Tripoli as articulated by the "ethical" triad of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Samantha Power?

The real disgusting video that incited the Libyan attack ... we came; we saw; he died ...


4 posted on 08/20/2013 5:07:34 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: Servant of the Cross
“Even in the Middle East, it is hard to get yourself hated all at once by Islamists, the military, the Arab Street, Christian minorities, and secular reformists. In Egypt, the Obama administration has somehow managed all that and more.”

“O” s a cypher and there is nothing else to be said for him.

He has NO substance and no ability to lead... even IF he could understand what leadership is.

He forfeited all and everything the US has accomplished and all the credibility we strived for so long to attain...just to remain above and apart from the issues WHILE retaining the wholesale approval of his Muslim friends. The US tradition of diplomacy and mediation has meant nothing to him... it is all secondary (if that) to his BS ego.

5 posted on 08/20/2013 5:11:52 AM PDT by SMARTY ("The test of every religious, political, or educational system is the man that it forms." H. Amiel)
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To: Servant of the Cross
ensure that our fiscal house is in order, become energy independent, and not promise any help we could not deliver or threaten anyone whom we are not willing to attack....a complete break from the dysfunctional Middle East

It is not even clear that we retain the power of choice. Our own internal dynamics, really a rate of internal disintegration, is forcing our withdrawal to concentrate on saving our economy and our representative democracy.

The longer we fail to recognize this reality be more difficult will be the reckoning.


6 posted on 08/20/2013 5:15:44 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: Servant of the Cross

“A day late and a dollar short, we piggybacked on the Arab Spring in Egypt, damning the damnable Mubarak without much thought of who or what would take his place.” I think Obama got who he wanted — the Muslim Brotherhood — to control Egypt.


7 posted on 08/20/2013 5:33:45 AM PDT by winkadink (During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. George Orwell)
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To: livius
I posted this reply yesterday and I wonder if you have any reaction:

A couple of recent stories have caused me to reconsider my assumptions about the Muslim Brotherhood and especially Barak Obama's unaccountably solicitous attitude toward this terrorist organization.

The first headline says that the Egyptian military might very well have been motivated to move against the Morsi government and against the demonstrations which occurred after the coup because the Muslim Brotherhood was setting up an independent army and an independent secret police force which quite clearly represented an existential threat not just to the primacy of the military in Egypt but to the very lives of its commanders. They had to act to protect their very lives. They could not have been unaware of the fate of generals after the Iranian revolution.

The second headline says that the Saudi's will step into the breach and cover any gap in financial aid to the Egyptian military created by a possible suspension of American military aid. Why would the Saudis do this? Why would they favor the Egyptian military over the the Muslim brotherhood?

Let's change the way we look at these developments in the Muslim world and at the same time let's consider how Obama looks at these developments and let's try to see that world through his eyes instead of through our prism in which we see the world in terms of a threat to our national interests or not. We do not know for sure if Obama shares the Muslim faith. We do know that he has very deep ties which go back to his education in a Muslim school as a Muslim in Indonesia. We know that he traveled to Pakistan with Muslims, perhaps on a homosexual holiday, perhaps for some other motivation. We know that he was sponsored into Harvard Law School by his connections to a Saudi Prince who pulled strings to gain his admittance. We know that Obama bowed deep to the Saudi King.

Are these ties spiritual or are they ideological? In other words, is Obama a Muslim or is he a Marxist whose ideology for the moment connects him intimately with Islam? I simply cannot answer whether he is a closet Muslim but it is clear that he is a Marxist. How would a Marxist look at the struggle between the Muslim Brotherhood and the rule of military in Egypt? I think he would look at it the same way a Marxist looks at the struggles in a Latin American country in which you have on the one hand a fascist style dictatorship and on the other hand a leftist revolutionary insurgency. The examples of Latin America are numerous. We saw how the left acted in Nicaragua and we certainly saw how Obama reacted to the coup in Guatemala. He acted to support a Marxist dictator.

A Marxist would look of the Muslim Brotherhood as a heroic insurgency against a fascist puppet of an imperialistic United States; he would react viscerally to the close relationship between the American military and the Egyptian military. He would not measure The Muslim Brotherhood in terms of a threat to America's national interests so much as he would judge it in accordance with Marxist doctrine. If the American commander-in-chief must implement American foreign policy and choose between The Muslim Brotherhood and the Egyptian military, the choice would seem to me to be easy, a commander-in-chief would consider that the American national interest is best served by the Egyptian military and that the Muslim Brotherhood is threatening to establish a caliphate running from China in a giant arc all away along the shores of the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. The Muslim Brotherhood is expressly an enemy of the United States but the Egyptian military has kept faith with its treaty commitments and has refrained from attacking Israel. The Muslim Brotherhood is disrupting Iraqi and Afghanistan and waging Civil War in Syria and no doubt murdered our ambassador in Benghazi. The choice should be easy but for Barak Obama but it is not. He dithers.

Does this Marxist view of the Muslim Brotherhood explain the intimacies which are encouraged inside the walls of the White House itself by granting these terrorists extraordinary access? Does it explain the heavy infiltration in the administration of members of the Muslim Brotherhood? Does it explain the existence of Hillary Clinton's Chief of Staff, the daughter of a mover and shaker in the Muslim Brotherhood? What is the significance of the biography of Valerie Jarrett, born in Iran? She too is a Marxist but where lie her sympathies toward Islam?

How would Frank Marshall Davis, a committed communist and mentor of Barack Obama, look at the Muslim Brotherhood, would he see it otherwise than how Brack Obama apparently sees the Muslim Brotherhood?

But what of Obama's ties to the Saudis? How can they be explained on purely Marxist terms? They are after all a plutocracy, a ruling elite, and exploiter of other tribes and races, classically hostile to women, homosexuals, atheists and even secularists. They are reflexively anti-Communist. How is it that Obama would have a decades long intimate financial relationship with them and what does it do to the thesis that he supports the Muslim Brotherhood as a Marxist would?


8 posted on 08/20/2013 5:33:57 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: livius
I read the Bret Stephens article. It is right on the mark. Here is the money quote from the article:

"Politics in Egypt today is a zero-sum game: Either the military wins, or the Brotherhood does. If the U.S. wants influence, it needs to hold its nose and take a side."

And the Stephens recommendation is: Support General Sisi. Supporting the Brotherhood, as Obama is doing by withdrawing financial support to Egypt is doing just the opposite - it is an action taken in support of the Muslim Brotherhood. Bringing those guys back into power is a death sentence for a huge number of Egyptians and Egypt as well.

What a policy. And I would note that, at least according to the article, one supported by Rand Paul. And of course by the Dumbo Twins, McCain and Lindsey Graham as well.

9 posted on 08/20/2013 5:40:27 AM PDT by InterceptPoint
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To: nathanbedford
I posted this reply yesterday and I wonder if you have any reaction

Well I do. I agree with almost everything you say and I've been posting similar sentiments regularly here on FR.

The one very small objection I have: Your reference to Obama dithering. I haven't detected that. I think he has been all-in for the Muslim Brotherhood right from the get-go and those spots are not even close to changing.

Obama has a very simplistic policy in the Middle East and in Egypt specifically: Support the Muslim Brotherhood and do everything you can to help bring them to power. You can look for contrary evidence but your findings will be meager at best.

In any case, nice post.

10 posted on 08/20/2013 5:53:08 AM PDT by InterceptPoint
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To: Servant of the Cross
September 11th now has a New Meaning... ... Benghazi
11 posted on 08/20/2013 6:05:48 AM PDT by 2001convSVT (Going Galt as fast as I can.)
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To: nathanbedford
The Saudi tie is interesting, and you (as usual) have identified a contradiction in the conventional wisdom.

Perhaps we should try to bring the Nation of Islam onto the stage of our little play.

After all, the NoI is conventionally Marxist in some ways, but they grant négritude primacy over the working class in terms of exposition of power relationships.

The NoI also favors an internationalist Islamic supremacy movement, as does the royal family of "Saudi" Arabia. Their view, of course, is that a caliphate would serve the interests that it would share with the Tribe of Shabazz, namely, pulling down the (no longer) Christian white power structure and placing its lost African children in the seat of power of the caliphate's Western provinces.

"Obama's" mentor had a background with the NoI, and has maintained close ties with Minister Farrakhan. Valerie Jarrett, likewise, has been at least a friend of Munir Muhammed and Farrakhan.

Perhaps the Marxist-Muslim antithesis reaches synthesis in the Chicago-based NoI, and the contradictions that you perceive in Obama's actions can be thereby resolved.

12 posted on 08/20/2013 6:10:28 AM PDT by Jim Noble (When strong, avoid them. Attack their weaknesses. Emerge to their surprise.)
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To: 2001convSVT

Yep. What we are seeing in the ME is happening here in the US. I expect the constitution to be invalidated by 2015 and Zero will institute a Sharia based Government. To do that, he has to arrest and detain all off congress, their staffs and families. He also must arrest the Federal benches and their families.

He has already signed the UN small arms treaty wo the Senates’ consent and will use this to get the blue helmets into our major cities, ports, airports, and major trucking/train facilities.

All that is left is to cutoff and starve malcontents. If it means CWII, so be it.


13 posted on 08/20/2013 6:18:50 AM PDT by DownInFlames
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To: Jim Noble
Thanks Jim, that contribution was invaluable. It does provide synthesis.

Somewhere in the annals of FreeRepublic there is a photo of Obama and Minister Farrakhan. Was there not also some sort of flap prior to his 2008 election about Obama attending Farrahkan's March on Washington?


14 posted on 08/20/2013 6:22:50 AM PDT by nathanbedford ("Attack, repeat, attack!" Bull Halsey)
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To: Jim Noble; nathanbedford
Perhaps the Marxist-Muslim antithesis reaches synthesis in the Chicago-based NoI ....

Glenn Beck: Farrakhan calls Obama the Messiah?

Farrakhan on Obama: 'The Messiah is absolutely speaking'

15 posted on 08/20/2013 7:00:04 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: Servant of the Cross
2016: 0bama's America

The "anti-colonialism" that Dinesh D'Souza accurately portrays, could have been the roots of what has now evolved into his "Marxist-Muslim antithesis", as the most supreme form of anti-colonialsim ever. With revenge on their minds.

16 posted on 08/20/2013 7:33:25 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross (the Truth will set you free)
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To: nathanbedford

I think that you’re right, in the sense that there is a point where an absolutist religious dictatorship and Marxism come together or at any rate see each other as useful, especially in the case of Islam, which is a “religion” that has no use for the individual and thinks only in terms of the subjugation of peoples.

As for Obama, I think he has a romantic leftist attachment to Islam, and while I doubt that he actually practices anything, he probably does identify as a Muslim.

Obama comes out of the Franz Fanon “Third World” school of Marxism, and for Obama, it’s all very tied in with sticking it to the West and it’s nonsensical ideas about the individual, freedom, personal morality and ethics, etc. I think the thing he really hates more than anything else is the entire Western intellectual tradition, which we could describe as Judeo-Christian/Greco-Roman, and one of the reasons he hates the US Constitution is because it implicitly expresses these ideas in a political form.

Obama’s entire life is based on a pathology of hate, in my opinion. It’s obviously a personal thing, an expression of his own sociopathic personality and lack of identity, possibly because of his strange, alienated upbringing. So I think in Obama we have a truly terrifying combination of hostile ideology and personal disconnect.


17 posted on 08/20/2013 7:51:30 AM PDT by livius
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To: nathanbedford

Oh - the Saudis and Obama - I think the Saudis are very pragmatic. It’s all about maintaining the power of the royal family, and when they think somebody is useful to them for that, they cultivate that person; when that person (or entity) is no longer useful to them, it’s bye-bye.


18 posted on 08/20/2013 7:52:56 AM PDT by livius
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To: InterceptPoint

I also liked his point about the difference between a policy and an attitude. Obama is full of attitudes.

This has made us totally powerless and foolish-looking. Of course, perhaps that really is a policy, after all: he even said at one time that the US has too much power and that he felt it should be diminished. So perhaps his attitude actually is his policy.


19 posted on 08/20/2013 9:08:10 AM PDT by livius
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To: nathanbedford
Why would the Saudis do this? Why would they favor the Egyptian military over the the Muslim brotherhood?

Because the Saudi Royals are the targets of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The weakness of the MB has been they had no base. In Egypt they would have had a base. A "safe harbor" in you will.

That could not be allowed.

20 posted on 08/20/2013 9:12:09 AM PDT by Harmless Teddy Bear (Revenge is a dish best served with pinto beans and muffins)
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