Forcing Mubarak from Egypt and Ben Ali from Tunisia should result in bad outcomes, and be the pattern for Middle East unrest as it spreads to Libya and elsewhere. These dictators precipitate political wildernesses resembling the lesson ignored 32 years ago when Carter discarded the Shah of Iran. The Obama Administration and other media sources encouraged, and applaud the demise of these oligarchies, but studiously ignore evidence of attendant brittle economic, social, and political environments. In the Middle East the most violent aspiring Islamic and secular totalitarians should exploit these strains to follow traditional malevolent roads to power energized with lethal political intrigues and religious heresies.
About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with God, and exalting individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions provide compelling evidence of a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
What remained was bloody electioneering among aspiring totalitarians causing them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. For them dazzling spectacle and mercurial oratory belie principled commitment to a continuum where politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. Once acquired these skills easily replicate through generations for managing philosophies from Democracy to Communism. The natural result in our present time establishes “The Democratic (or) Islamic Peoples Republic of Whatever”.
Contrary to what media sources insist, Glenn Beck does not indulge in paranoid fantasy concerning the Muslim Brotherhood. He relates caution consistent with its history since founding in 1928 for notable events such as allying with Hitler, planning the assassination of Nasser, and supporting Hamas, notwithstanding its ongoing involvement with terrorism. His analysis points up the question of why this would and organizations like Ai Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and successors ever abandon strategies proven throughout a millennium?
To council a Middle East contending against such electioneering, Obama brings his newly minted Nobel Peace Prize, and all the nominating committee’s comforting assurances. However, he must deal with people sharing the perception of Greg Lewis in American Thinker, who painted the picture of Obama as displaying classic beta male behavior. The alpha male dog approaches directly, while the beta male displays acquiescent gestures signaling uncompromising submission. Lewis saw submissiveness in offering conciliatory gestures to Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in sending John Kerry to meet Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, in bowing to King Abdullah, in airy discussions with Hugo Chavez and David Ortega, and in generally ridiculing the U.S. whenever he appears on an international stage.
Of course these actions were constructive within the worldview continually vetted by the liberal constituencies Obama cherishes. For these people the best approaches to diplomacy and politics reside within modern game theory for which John Nash and others received their Nobel prizes. All believe Islamic societies should realize the brilliance of Western conflict resolution, and should enter into peaceful, meaningful dialogues achieving gentle understandings and transitions. When instead Oriental opponents manage perceptions of submissive posturing into concessions exchanged for photo ops and sound bites, such constituencies become befuddled by the intricacies and chicanery of this unorthodox diplomacy.
In case one considers this a Democrat affliction only, consider that the Bush Administration also embraced thinking from our best universities. It abandoned the interim council of 25 ethnically and religiously diverse members, who produced the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) as basis for a new Iraq constitution. Its’ 39 articles were unique in the Arab world for conceiving republican, federal, democratic and pluralistic government guaranteeing rights for speech, religion, private property, etc. for all including Christians, Jews and former Ba’athists. Instead they artlessly marginalized these unique leaders and this document by adopting a U.N. brokered plan put forth by Algeria, which encouraged traditional authoritative Arab rule.
T. E. Lawrence provides valuable insights about Arab countries, because though he was clearly an intellectual, his education was tempered by extensive travels from 1909 to 1914 away from the colonial community, even before he lead the Arab revolt in WW I. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom he says, “They are a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place the material world has been and God would move upon the face of those waters”.
The United States, as a super power and the beneficiary of an anomalous revolution resulting in personal liberty, has a moral responsibility to bear any burden to spread the ideals to which we aspire, not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but throughout the Middle East. Notwithstanding the necessity for real politick, our country should offer moral leadership by seeking out and supporting the yet anonymous, selfless individuals and constituencies willing to endanger their lives and those of their families to establish durable economic models and representative governments. With our help such people and constituencies might not be broken by the granite of secular totalitarianism or Islamic Fundamentalism. The United States should be considered a dependable, if difficult ally or enemy.
The first statement is correct. The American Revolution was an anomalous and not to be replicated event the rest is vintage world saver Wilsonian globalony. We do not as a nation have an obligation to do anything for anybody. We do have an obligation to our citizens to defend ourselves from enemies and to pursue national interests which ought be concrete, discrete, and explainable not to engage in endless crusades to institute some sort of universalist ambitions. Many Americans like to believe we have some heaven sent mandate to save the world. This is a dangerous illusion. It muddled thinking about ends and means in the exercise of US interests. US leaders have spoken so much moralizing rubbish for so long in any discourse about foreign affairs and military operations that even though our leaders are a jaded, secularized and materialistic lot they have become so intellectually lazy that they, in many cases, can't even in their private discussions really frame an argument from national interest. The incredibly screwed up follow on to deposing the Saddam regime (for which there were some valid national interests in play)
is in large measure because of the lack of clarity about what our interests were and how to achieve them. The cartoonish, simplistic, moralizing cant that underlies the ‘we have a responsibility to bring enlightenment to the planet’ is both effrontery of the highest order and inherently damaging to pursuing real interests.