PARSING THE FAILED STATE CONUNDRUM

Democracy don’t rule the world,
You’d better get that in your head.
This world is ruled by violence
But I guess that’s better left unsaid.
—Bob Dylan

"Politics should be the part-time
profession of every citizen who would
protect the rights and privileges of free
people and who would preserve what is
good and fruitful in our national heritage."
—Lucille Ball

Another formidable essay by Hugh Fitzgerald at Jihad Watch...

FOR SEVEN YEARS, SUCCESSIVE American administrations have squandered men, money, materiel, morale (both civilian and military) in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-Pakistan, wars whose goals—something to do with keeping or making these places unified, prosperous, and above all, preventing them from becoming "failed states" (a strange new and fashionable phrase, that is never defined but simply employed as if its significance were obvious) because then, you see, it doth follow as the night the day that as "failed states" they will become putty in the hands of Al Qaeda, which will move in, lock stock and barrel, and the United States will be unable to do a thing about it, then or at any time in the future.

Meanwhile, Muslims attack and kill non-Muslims in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand; the ISI-backed terrorist groups, slightly quieter after the Mumbai murders, have not been disbanded or weakened in any way by the Pakistani military; the zamindars and generals still share power and still exhibit the same sly meretriciousness toward the Americans as they inveigle ever greater amounts of military equipment, and money, and keep on producing weapons-grade plutonium, that is essentially paid for by American taxpayers. Saudi Arabia continues to spend its tens of billions all over the world paying for mosques, madrasas, campaigns of Da'wa, and propaganda churned out, in part, by armies of Western hirelings, some directly and some indirectly employed on behalf of Saudi Arabia and Islam; in American universities Muslims hire and promote each other, or the occasional non-Muslim willing collaborator, in academic departments devoted to the Middle East or to Islam, and in some Ivy League schools, there have been disturbing reports as to how one or two Muslim faculty members can prevent any open discussion of Islam in its historical context, or subject it to scholarly (i.e., unworshipful) study, and they can do this, sometimes, by even threatening to call on local Muslims to enforce such a ban.

The peoples of Western Europe are now enduring, or suffering, the consequences not of undifferentiated "immigration" but. rather, of Muslim immigration—and the American press hardly begins to touch this topic, to sink beneath the surface of things, and everywhere, the indigenous Europeans regret bitterly the heedlessness of their own political and media elites in allowing in so many Musims over just a short time—the last 20-30 years—and the fact that, because of this large-scale Muslim presence, life for those indigenous non-Muslims who live in societies,and countries, created entirely by non-Muslims (and none of their artistic, literary, musical achievements or political and religious freedoms for one minute conceivable under Islam), has become far more unpleasant, unsettled, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence.

The West does not have to squander trillions in these idiotic ventures to save Muslim states and societies from the consequences—political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral—of Islam itself. Indeed, it should not do so. And the fact that so many European countries are now unwilling to contribute to the American Building-the-Bridge-Over-the-River-Kwai project, one that is being conducted by the military who are given a task, but whose highest officers are apparently unwilling to question the efficacy and sense of that task, should give one pause. Why, for example, do those, such as Geert Wilders, who sense most keenly the danger of Islam infiltating and encroaching from within, are the least keen on sending soldiers to Afghanistan, to engage in what they rightly recognize as a snare, and a delusion?

Those countries that are part of the West, or part of the Rest—for the world-wide Jihad is a war of Islam against not the West but against All the Rest, and its ideological promptings are those contained in the Immutable and Uncreated Qur'an, as supplemented or glossed by the Hadith and the Sira, the sayings and deeds and biography of that Perfect Man, Muhammad—need to figure out what Islam, taken straight up and not on the rocks, not diluted by local custom or the ability of some Muslims not to take to heart what the texts teach (though at any point anyone still calling himself a Muslim may revert to that old-time religion, the faith straight up, with dangerous consequences for non-Muslims)—means, and intelligently construct a defense that relies mostly on allowing the pre-existing fissures—sectarian, ethnic, economic—within the Camp of Islam to widen, merely by doing nothing to prevent this.

And the other task—the one that is shown in the colossal failure, over many years, to deal effectively with the nuclear project of the Islamic Republic of Iran—is to make sure that no Muslim state, no Muslim group, no Muslim groupuscule, anywhere in the world, gets its hands, in posse or in esse, on weapons of mass destruction. It should by now be obvious that nothing except military force will stop the Islamic Republic of Iran in its determination to acquire nuclear weapons. Those who did not read what Ayatollah Khomeini wrote, and who thus abandoned the Shah and accepted Khomoeini's ascent to power— what worse group could one imagine being in control of American policy toward Iran than Gary Sick, William Miller (an early promoter of Khomeini), Zbigniew Brzezinski (that fake "realist" so ignorant of Islam and so determiinedly hostile to Israel), Jimmy Carter (ditto, but with an added holier-than-thou belief in the sheer goodness of a "fellow man of faith"—as he addressed Khomeini in a letter)—have not been sufficiently mocked, and their recent ideological heirs, the ones who believe in diplomatic maneuvering and cajoling long after it has run its course, will regret that they did not deal with the nuclear project of the Islamic Republic of Iran when they could.

And it is intolerable as well—flabbergastingly foolish—for the Obama administration to have done everything they possibly can to discourage and prevent Israel, willing—as it has been so many times in the past (bombing the Osirak reactor and then the Syrian nuclear installation, forcing Syrian tanks back from Jordan so as to rescue King Hussein of Jordan, warning Arab rulers of terrorist plots against them).

It should be the United States, and not little Israel, that as a world power and leader—if it saw itself correctly—of those resisting Jihad, should be dealing with the Iranian nuclear project. The claim that this would "only set back the Iranians by a year or two" is unproven, and in any case silly. The mere demonstration of American willingness to destroy major parts of such a program would not result in a renewed effort by a now at long last chasteneed Islamic Republic of Iran, for if the Americans showed themselves willing to attack once, it would be clear that they would be willing to attack again, and in all kinds of places—the port of Um Qasr, for example, or destroying the Iranian navy in the Gulf, or aiding Kurds in northwestern Iran and in another pocket in northeastern Iran, and Arabs in Khuzistan, and perhaps even suggest to the Azerbaijan government that the Americans wouldn't mind, as they did in 1946 with the Red Army, an expansion into northern Iran, to "re-unify" the Azeri people. All kinds of things are possible, but the very idea that an attack on Iran's nuclear project could only be a one-time thing, and that there would be no effect on the Islamic Republic of Iran—which, if it does acquire nuclear weapons, will never be dislodged by its domestic opponents, some of whom at long last realize this, though they cannot openly call for a Western attack on the nuclear project lest they be accused of treason.

It's madness and if, in a year Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, even the folly of the Bush Administration with its crazed and messianic sentimentalism—and the way in which so many policy-makers allowed themselves to be inveigled by Shi'a exiles such as Ahmad Chalabi, and failed to grasp the nature of Iraq and what would inevitably happen—will seem not quite so bad, for the Obama Administration, prompted by a different kind of naivete, but exhibiting the same willful ignorance about Islam, will have outdone even the Bush Administration. And its entire foreign policy will be seen to have been idiotic, and lie in ruins. For some, that will be a grim consolation. For others, more sensible, it will be no consolation at all.