Posted on 09/10/2021 4:49:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
When the hijacked planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that first 9/11, the Taliban were in control of Afghanistan and providing sanctuary for al-Qaida.
Today, the Taliban are in control of Afghanistan and providing sanctuary to al-Qaida. What then did our longest war accomplish?
The Afghan army and government we stood up and sustained for decades has collapsed. The U.S. military has withdrawn. U.S. citizens and thousands of Afghans who fought alongside us have been left behind.
The triumphant Taliban of today are far stronger than were the Taliban of 2001 who fled at the approach of the Northern Alliance. Al-Qaida is now present in many more countries than it was when we first launched the Global War on Terror.
Nor is the America of 2021 the hubristic self-confident country of George W. Bush and the neocons who were going to convert the Middle East into something like our Middle West and advance from there "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Our country is a changed place from 2001. Gone are the unity, confidence and resolution. And how have all our interventions gone?
Call the roll.
Afghanistan is a lost cause, receding anew into the darkness.
There are reports the Chinese may be interested in establishing a residence at Bagram Air Force Base.
Saddam Hussein is long gone. But the Iraq we invaded to strip of weapons of mass destruction it did not have is now dominated by Iranian-backed Shiite militia. Only at the sufferance of the Baghdad regime are 2,500 "non-combat" U.S. troops permitted to hang on.
Syria, where we intervened to support anti-Assad rebels -- and retain 900 U.S. troops -- is a human rights hellhole.
Bashar Hafez al-Assad is victorious in his civil war thanks to Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah intervention on his behalf. The million Syrian refugees who fled west during that civil war have helped to turn Lebanon into a failed state.
In Libya, where Barack Obama's air attacks helped bring down the regime of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Russians, Turks and Egyptians battle for control. The Americans are nowhere to be found.
Despite our support for Saudi air strikes that turned Yemen into a second humanitarian disaster, Houthi rebels still control the north of the country and the capital, Sanaa.
Looking back at the half dozen Mideast wars in which we have engaged since that first 9/11, where are we better off now than we were then? Al-Qaida, ISIS, Boko Haram and their variants have established a presence in Arab, Asian and African countries far beyond Afghanistan.
Looking forward, where do we Americans go from here?
How do we sustain all the commitments that have bled and drained us for 20 years, when our adversaries and enemies appear to be growing stronger, while our own claim to being the world's last superpower is increasingly subject to challenge?
Like Donald Trump before him, Joe Biden appears to be giving up on nation building, pulling our troops out of the Middle East, staying out of its future wars, and addressing the challenges of Russia and China?
But how long can we defend a Europe that refuses to defend itself from a Russia that is stronger and more assertive than it was two decades ago, when Vladimir Putin succeeded the feckless Boris Yeltsin.
In the Arctic, Baltic, Belarus, Ukraine and the Black Sea, Putin is more assertive and Russia less intimidated than it was in 2001.
Only one in three NATO countries meets the commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense, as Europeans today identify immigration as the major threat to the continent.
Among the malingerers is the Germany of Angela Merkel, retiring chancellor who approved the Nord Stream II pipeline that will soon double Germany's dependence on Russia for natural gas.
How long can the U.S. sustain its new policy of containment of Xi Jinping's China? How long can we contain China's expansion in the South and East China Sea at the expense of the Philippines, Japan and Taiwan?
In the year 2000, China's economy was smaller than Italy's. Today, it is a peer-competitor of the United States, with four times our population.
Beijing manufactures more than we do, has a growth rate that has exceeded ours for decades, and runs an annual trillion-dollar trade surplus with us in produced goods.
And the China of 2021 is more aggressive and confrontational than was the China of Y2K. How long can we keep 30,000 troops in South Korea and remain responsible for deterring Kim Jong Un's North Korea from attacking the South?
In relative terms, America is not so dominant a power as it was 20 years ago, while her adversaries seem stronger and more united. Our most powerful rival, Xi Jinping's China, seems belligerent and bellicose compared with the China we brought into the World Trade Organization.
Looking back, and looking ahead, the trend line is not good.
Even the Taliban...now that you have it...what the hell are you going to do with it.
this was planned to take our Constitutional rights.
FauXi: “Yes. There is a VAX for that”
Well, we no longer have a republic...
So, gee, I don’t think so.
DUH.
A lot of changes came about for women. While the Taliban may tell women to cover up and stay home...they’ll probably eventually concede as it’s a benefit to men let them go to school, work and exhibit their loveliness.
Just remember the ‘smart’ people brought us to this point.
I’m not so sure that’s gonna happen, Pollyanna. From your lips to God’s ears.
As much as I dislike it, I must agree with Pat Buchanan, we are a much weaker nation in 2021 than we were in 2011.
The UN is a jobs program for politicals who could never get elected to an office. So now they’re bureaucrats that try to assume power on their own.
To answer your question.
NO.
Just watch an old movie and look at the scenes where they travel, go to hotels, buy stuff and you’ll see how many freedoms we’ve lost.
This country is a sh*t hole.
The federal government is the enemy. If Biden makes good on the threat to go after resisting governors, thus will go kinetic.
The only thing that has changed for us is that we elected a Muslim for President and he won against all odds. That he made us bow to PC and it will never end. And now we’re removing statues under the guise of “offensive”. We’ve been dumbed down.
As always, Pat Buchanan asks an irrelevant question.
Pat is old and seriously worn to a frazzle
Wanna bet Braindead and his cronies surrender to the Chicoms? If not already.
The problem stems from how the United States became a Super Power. That problem was that the United States was tuned from a peace-time economy to a war-time economy. Since WWII, the United States has always had a better economy when it was increasing its arsenal and military. That being said, we were never supposed to be a nation building country. That is where we went wrong and again that problem lies in the aftermath of WWII when we tried to rebuild the nations of both Japan and Germany. This was then carried on to each war and conflict we entered into.
Nation building is where the United States goes awry with good intentions. Don’t conflate that with the United States should not have been there in the first place because the United States does need to look after her own self-interests, first. It is what we did afterwards, after the conflict was over, that we went awry.
Look at Iraq. The United States tried to nation build there and yet their currency is still artificially low due to the war. Their currency is still held at the program rate. Although that rate has changed over the years and has gone from 4300 dinars per USD to 1460 dinars per USD. Now look at the Iraqis. Are they better off than they were? Some would say yes while others would disagree. The UN’s food program, fraught with corruption by itself, say Iraqis are starving due to the purchasing power of the dinar. Basic necessities for Iraqis have risen in cost long before the Deep State coronated Biden as President. Iraq has always been a very corrupt nation and it remains so til this day. With more Iraqis starving today than they were when Hussein was in power, does that make them any better off? Hungry people do irrational things to feed their bellies.
The Founding Fathers knew conflict outside the borders of the United States was inevitable but they never envisioned the United States as being a nation builder. And that is where the United States goes awry, especially since WWII.
I feel like we were hoodwinked by Bush who wasted our precious service members on “daddy’s war “ instead of rooting out bin laden in the Afghan/Pakistan region. ‘ Mission Accomplished’ my @$$.
It can not. That is obvious.
You ask where the UN is? The UN is useless it make no sense to expect them to come to our rescue.
Al-Qaradawi
This is old and the links don’t work. But the Obama administration shared support for the same objectives as Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Using the media to create the Arab Spring Wars to overthrow the Syrian, Libyan, Tunisian and Egyptian governments and the support of Muslim Brotherhood Morsi as the Egyptian president.
Iraq and Afghanistan wars were wars on terror, not regime change wars.
Born in the village of Saft Turab in the Nile Delta, Al-Qaradawi, an Islamic theologian, was raised by his uncle after his father’s passing. There, he attended “kuttab” (Qur’anic schools), memorizing the Qur’an by the age of 9.
He eventually began to lead Ramadan prayers in his area, and joined the Institute of Religious Studies in the Egyptian city of Tanta, graduating nine years later.
He met the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al-Banna, when he was giving a speech at the school.
Al-Banna’s writings influenced and shaped Al-Qaradawi’s political and religious thinking for years to come.
The Brotherhood was deemed dangerous by Egypt in the 1940s, and a terrorist organization by many countries later in the century.
As a young man, Al-Qaradawi attended Brotherhood meetings and lectures, and joined its youth wing at the age of 14 after meeting Al-Banna.
Al-Qaradawi later pursued his studies at Al-Azhar University, studying Islamic theology and graduating in 1953.
He was imprisoned during the reign of King Farouq in 1949, and three times under Gamal Abdel Nasser, for plotting a failed assassination attempt on the president in 1954, for preaching against the presence of the British command in Egypt, and for escalated Islamic political activity.
After his release, Al-Qaradawi continued his studies and received his master’s degree in Qur’anic studies in 1960 from Al-Azhar University.
The Brotherhood was forced underground in the 1960s soon after his graduation, prompting his move to Qatar in 1961.
While working in Qatar, he grew close to then-ruler Sheikh Khalifa Al-Thani and was granted a Qatari passport.
From his new post, Al-Qaradawi openly advanced his inflammatory political interests in the region and broadened the Brotherhood’s Qatar chapter, backed by Doha.
His professed mission was to reclaim the proper mantle of Islam by liberating the Muslim world from Western hegemony.
After Sheikh Khalifa was deposed by his son Sheikh Hamad in a bloodless coup in 1995, Al-Qaradawi rose to greater prominence.
The cleric justified the coup as “necessary” for the nation, and he developed closer ties with Sheikh Hamad thereafter.
In 1996, the state-owned news channel Al Jazeera went on air, with “Ash-Shariah wal-Hayat” as one of its top live shows.
As host, Al-Qaradawi was given a platform where he reiterated his radical views to an estimated audience of more than 40 million.
He has written extensively on Islam and Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), while building close relations with Islamic organizations worldwide.
Through the publishing of his book “Fiqh Al-Jihad” in 2009, he spearheaded a global campaign to reaffirm his view of jihad in the Muslim world.
He issued extreme and violent fatwas (religious edicts) that justified suicide bombings, violence against all Jews, and the killing of American soldiers, apostates and homosexuals.
For years, millions across the Arab world watched Al-Qaradawi’s face on TV. He exploited new media to reach a global audience, gaining fame by serving in various Islamic organizations and hosting his own shows, starting from the 1970s on Qatari radio then moving to TV.
He frequently appeared on Al-Hayat TV, BBC Arabic, Palestinian Authority TV, Al-Faraeen TV and Al-Hiwar TV.
Al-Qaradawi established the International Union of Muslim Scholars in Doha in 2004, which was listed as a terrorist organization by various Arab countries. He founded several other organizations to spread his extremist ideologies.
As the Arab Spring gained momentum and created a power vacuum, Al-Qaradawi voiced his support for the overthrow of the Syrian, Libyan, Tunisian and Egyptian governments.
In a thunderous voice on “Ash-Shariah wal-Hayat” in 2013, he lambasted Muslim countries as weak, calling for people to overthrow their governments and launch a war against all who oppose the Brotherhood.
He referred to these people as “khawarij” (enemies of Islam), including those who participated in the June 2013 revolt against then-Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, who hailed from the Brotherhood.
Al-Qaradawi issued fatwas calling on Egyptians to boycott the 2014 election that brought Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to power. The cleric called on the nation to “resist the oppressors” and support a Muslim state.
He was sentenced to death in absentia in 2015 by Egypt’s government for his involvement in a 2011 jailbreak during the uprising that ousted then-President Hosni Mubarak.
In January 2018, an Egyptian military court sentenced Al-Qaradawi, again in absentia, to life in prison on charges of incitement to murder, spreading false news and vandalizing public property in relation to the 2015 death of a police officer.
Since Sheikh Hamad handed power to his son Sheikh Tamim in 2013, Al-Qaradawi has remained close to Qatar’s current emir while continuing to rise in global notoriety.
IDEAS
On jihad and terrorism
Al-Qaradawi is an avid advocate of suicide bombings, saying in a fatwa on his website that martyrdom is a higher form of jihad.
In a 2005 interview on the BBC’s “Newsnight” program, he praised suicide bombings in Israeli-occupied Palestine as martyrdom in the name of God.
“I supported martyrdom operations, and I am not the only one. Hundreds of Islamic scholars supported these operations. We were in the International Islamic Fiqh Academy in Kuwait and hundreds of scholars signed a fatwa (supporting such operations),” he said.
Al-Qaradawi condemned the 9/11 attacks in a statement a few days after they occurred, and forbade the killing of American civilians, drawing a contrast between an unprovoked attack and a war against occupiers in a fatwa issued later.
He justified an uprising against the American presence in Iraq and permitted the killing of those who fight.
He encouraged Muslims who were unable to fight to financially support mujahideen (those engaged in jihad) everywhere in foreign lands.
In a juxtaposition to his documented rhetoric, he recently denied supporting extremists in a tweet from his official Twitter account.
“I stood against extremism and extremists for approximately a quarter of a century,” he tweeted. “I saw its threat on deen and dunya (religion and the temporal world), on the individual and society, and I have reinforced my pen, tongue and thought (to support) the call for moderation and reject exaggeration and negligence, either in the field of fiqh and fatwa (Islamic jurisprudence and legal pronouncement in Islam) or in the field of tableegh and da’wah (revelation and preaching).”
On Jews and Europeans
Al-Qaradawi has issued fatwas authorizing attacks on all Jews. On Al Jazeera Arabic in January 2009, he said: “Oh God, take your enemies, the enemies of Islam … Oh God, take the treacherous Jewish aggressors … Oh God, take this cunning, arrogant band. Oh God, they’ve spread too much tyranny and corruption on Earth. Oh God, take this Jewish Zionist band of aggressors and do not spare a single one of them. Oh God, count their numbers, slay them one by one and spare none.”
He has similar disdain for Europeans, advocating for the return of Islam to the continent on Qatar TV in 2007.
“I think that Islam will conquer Europe without resorting to the sword or fighting. Europe is miserable with materialism, with the philosophy of promiscuity and with the immoral considerations that rule the world — considerations of self-interest and self-indulgence,” he said.
“It’s high time (Europe) woke up and found a way out from this, and it won’t find a lifesaver or a lifeboat other than Islam.”
On women
Al-Qaradawi’s fatwas against women include justifying the beating of wives. “Beating is permitted (to the man) in the most limited of cases, and only in a case when the wife rebels against her husband,” he said on Al Jazeera’s “Ash-Shariah wal-Hayat” in October 1997.
“The beating, of course, will not be with a whip, a stick or a board. The beating will be according to what the Prophet (Muhammad) said to a servant girl who annoyed him on a particular matter: ‘If it were not for fear of punishment in the Hereafter, I would have beaten you with this miswak (a teeth-cleaning stick)’,” Al-Qaradawi added.
“Likewise, the beating must come only after admonishment, and expelling (the wife) from the bed (as is said in the Qur’an 4:34): ‘Admonish them, leave them alone in their beds, and beat them’.”
In a fatwa posted on www.islamonline.net, Al-Qaradawi said: “It is forbidden to beat the woman, unless it is necessary, and she ‘is in a state of rebellion’ against the husband and flouts him. This is temporary discipline (ta’adib) that is permitted to him according to the Quran in exceptional circumstances, when other efforts of admonishing (the wife) have failed and removing her from the bed as Allah said: ‘As to those women on whose part you fear disloyalty and ill-conduct, admonish them (first), (next) refuse to share their beds, (and last) beat them; but if they return to obedience, seek not against them pretexts (for annoyance): for Allah is Most High, Great (above you all)’ (Qur’an 4:34). Despite this permission for the hour of necessity, the Prophet said: ‘The good men from among you do not beat (their wives)’.”
In the case of masturbation, Al-Qaradawi said on Qatar TV in 2006: “Female masturbation is more risky than male masturbation … Sometimes women insert a finger, and some women insert objects that may be risky, especially since the hymen is very sensitive, and any tampering with it may tear it. This might expose the woman to accusations. She may tell them ‘I did this or that,’ but they may not believe her. They will think she must have had forbidden relations with some guys.”
CONCLUSION
Al-Qaradawi’s far-reaching fatwas and contentious doctrines are a dangerous threat to the Islamic world and beyond, which is why he has been banned from many countries. His usually calm temperament belies his allegiances to terrorist organizations such as Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
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