Posted on 03/14/2006 3:24:08 PM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
The DPW deal seems to have done something which needed doing: expose some serious flaws on the right side of the political spectrum. I called the isolationists Chickenhawks for not being able to stand next to an Arab businessman while they supported sending troops into the Middle East to arm, train and fight by Arab freedom fighters (the real ones, not the Michael Moore mythololgy).
Rich Lowry came up with a better term: the-hell-with-them hawks. The term describes those who have surrendered on the idea of bringing the Middle East into the modern world. These folks have quit and given up and have no interest in trying anymore. Rich has also perfectly described the context of our battle:
The contemporary Middle East has featured a competition of radicalisms - who can be religiously purer, and more hostile to the West? The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity and representation.
And that competition includes America and Americans. When combined with the waste byproduct of the DPW deal we see two factions competing here in the US: one group seeing who can raise the most alarms about Muslims and Arabs in America, and one competing to seperate and isolate Islamists from the broader Muslim community while reaching out to that broader community to follow our path. Not the path of the Islamists.
Liken this competition to how the ancients dealt with Lepers and their enforced isolation verses how a surgeon removes a cancer using modern medicine. In ancient times the individual who was ill was left to die away from the healthy people. Today the individual is saved by removing the illness and remains part of society. The individual in this case is the Muslim religion which can be salvaged, just like Christianity was from their bout of world domination and forced adherence in the Middle Ages.
John Podhoretz expands on this theme today and captures the blunt instrument mentality driving these folks who have found the effort to continue forward too difficult:
Their argument seems hard-headed and unsentimental. People are trying to murder Americans, and such people ought to die. Kill as many of the bad guys as you can abroad. Strike Iran from the air if you have to. Do whatever you must to secure the homeland. Dont let Arabs run the ports. Racially profile Muslims and Arabs out the wazoo. No crocodile tears for the excesses at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.
John also identifies the flaw in this view, which is the result these views will achieve. In the competition for ideas the one that promises an end to hostilities, no matter how hard to accomplish, is the better path. Here is what John envisions as the result if we quit now:
The problem is that the policies advocated by the hell hawks and by defeatist Democrats offer no real possibility of an end to the war against Islamic radicalism. It will go on forever.
And if it does, it seems certain that at some point in the next few decades, millions of people are going to die in a successful terrorist assault using weapons of mass destruction.
I agree, the easy near term solution is the wrong long term one. We cannot give up on the idea of transforming the Middle East, to foster the competition of peace and prosperity, as long as the majority of people there are willing to fight and die for that future. And they are. People waiting for a perfect situation so that obtaining the goal is easy are waiting on a fantasy. Reality never offers up a slam dunk to a hard problem through sitting back and waiting.
I mean, it couldn't possibly be like Texans voting for Texans to represent them, could it? It is, after all, a parliamentary democracy, so people are going to vote for a representative who lives in the area, aren't they? Were there Kurds running to represent areas of Baghdad? Southern Shia standing for election up in Kurdistan?
Last time I checked, Texans and Californians weren't planting bombs in each other's shopping malls.
The Dubai port fiasco will come back to bite us. I will refrain from "I told you so's" when it happens, but I hope you will remember my words.
I won't. You're a better person than I am.
I'm not a better person, simply a lazier one. I don't like to waste my time.
By the way, I heartily recommend Fred Barnes' book Rebel-in-Chief. It explains a lot of the President's actions, and it is very interesting. The perfect conservatives won't like it, but it does explain the resoning behind a lot of things like "No Child Left Behind" and the Medicare prescription drug plan. Made me think about a lot of things I take for granted as far as political/governmental theory.
You this and you that. Bah.
You better get that letter writing campaign started to the DOD. We surely can't have UAE military fighting alongside our military against terrorists. Can't trust 'em.
If we shun them all, maybe they'll change, right? Because surely leading by example wouldn't do anything.
Oh, and let me know how you plan on the ME countries coming up to the 21st century goes, I guess they'll be following Russia's model? Africa's? Venezuela's? China's? India's? Just not ours, because we can't trust 'em, none of 'em to run a business in the US. Whose do you want them to follow?
Those opposing the port deal bandy about the globalist label as easily as those who support it do the racist label. Neither always fit.
It's more like bigotry, anyway.
Rookay, just how many of the UAE native born citizens -- not sons of imports, are fighting side by side of us in Iraq?
It is not perfectly normal to vote for someone of your ethnicity because you view other ethnicities as mortal enemies. These were the NATIONAL Iraqi elections, not for the school board. And they fell precisely along confessional lines because they are the only lines that really matter. I don't expect you or the other Dubai port deal apologists to be capable of recognizing that there is nothing 'transforming' about elections in a culture drenched in ethnic hate.
Fascinating about how you shift gears from "our great friends the UAE" to "be careful, now they will hurt us so we should have kept them happy" without any consciousness of contradiction or irony.
Lets lose all our allies and then lets see how hard the WOT is.
Isn't it funny how you Dubai port deal apologists babble about how 'racist' people are who opposed the deal while you go on and prattle about how Great White Father will use it to transform and enlighten his little brown children. There is another kind of racism you know, and it is your White Missionary assumption that every 'heathen' wants to be just like you. The arrogant, imperialist assumption that you have that level of moral and cultural influence over them.
We who opposed it do not flatter ourselves that we can change a culture that has no wish to be changed. We credit them with the ability to make their own choices and have their own agenda. So who, really, is the racist here ?
Thats not the transformation I'm talking about. Economic and social transformation is what is needed. Repressive regimes coupled with poverty is what breeds terrorism.
All you see is the oil money, quit thinking of how they get their money and focus on WHO gets the money.
Repressive regimes coupled with poverty breed terrorism ? Then why aren't terrorists streaming out of sub-Saharan Africa ? How can you talk such nonsense when every major country on this planet has a Salafist Islam-based security problem ? How can you talk such nonsense when most of the armed conflicts on this planet are "Militant Islam vs ...." ?
The effortless wealth of the Muslim world has allowed it to defer cultural modernization indefinitely. The Gulf States can Scandinavian levels of cradle to grave security without having to emancipate women or tolerate other religions or have freedom of inquiry to get there.
Terrorist are all over Africa where have you been?
Last time I checked the Lord's Resistance Army wasn't kidnapping school children in Beslan.
Sub Saharan African 'terrorism' is warlordism, brigandage, nothing like al-Qaeda.
Yes, those were national elections, just like elections in Britain are national elections. And guess what: in Yorkshire, they vote for Yorkshiremen!!! Amazing, but true!!
If you think AQ isn't all over Africa you're kidding yourself.
From Iraq, this is Sam the Sham reporting for CNN.
If we can't change hearts and minds, then we better get on with the killin'. There's lots of muslims out there. I suggest you start with the women and children.
Me? I'm all for giving them choices to choose from first. We may have to kill 'em all, but we aren't quite there yet.
You don't want them to have any choices. So who, really, is the bigot? What's that phrase? The soft bigotry of lowered expectations.
See, I think our way, as flawed as it may be at times, is the best way. That's what's great about America.
So yes, if they are going to have to follow some type of example, I do want it to be us, as opposed to many other countries around the world. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.
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