On Friday, I discussed Barack Obama's tentative relationship with the truth which I believe is in part based on his unconscious adoption of the Post-Modern belief that reality is constructed by the powerful in order to oppress the weak. Obama ("I won") is now the powerful and believes he is constructing reality in order to help the weak. Unfortunately, his post-modernism poses an even greater threat to national security than it does to the economy.
Obama's adviser: Solve Arab-Israeli conflict, end global jihad
... President Obama named Bruce Riedel, a former CIA official and Brooking Institution scholar, to head up a review team for overhauling U.S. policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan. Via the Christian Science Monitor, a big part of Riedel's grand strategy for winning in Afghanistan is, um, securing a peace deal between the Palestinians and Israel:
Ultimately, the solution in Afghanistan may involve solving the age-old conflict between the Arab states and Israel, says administration adviser Riedel in a book published by the Brookings Institution, a foreign-policy think tank, last year. Al Qaeda, and the Taliban to some extent, continue to be motivated by the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, Riedel argues. If that conflict is resolved, Al Qaeda may go away.
"If Palestinians choose to make peace with Israel, the most fundamental point of Al Qaeda's narrative becomes irrelevant," Riedel writes. "In other words, making peace between Israelis and Arabs is not only wise policy in its own right, but also an extremely useful strategy for pulling the rug out from under Al Qaeda."
Please read the entire post to gain a full appreciation of how bizarre this thinking is; worse still, for those who believe that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the center of the universe, their proposals for peace in the Middle East simply discount reality. In a post discussing our new Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, who takes a nuanced view of the cause of 9/11 (please read the whole post) Jeffrey Goldberg addresses the fiction that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the core of the Middle East's pathologies:
Freeman's Blind Spot on the Saudi Question
Let's posit as true that al Qaeda acted against America out of specific grievances (I think it's also true that al Qaeda acted out of Muslim supremacist ideology, but let's put that aside as well). What was the principal political grievance of al Qaeda before 9/11? The stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government, in order to protect the kingdom from Saddam Hussein.
Most experts agree that this was the triggering event. There were many others, of course -- Bin Laden's generalized grievances against the Saudi royal family, and at number three or four, the Israel-Palestine crisis. But it was the joint American-Saudi decision to place American troops on holy Muslim soil that sent bin Laden around the bend. [Of note, bin Laden was one of the experts who actually made this point. - SW] Freeman, a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, and a recipient, as head of the Middle East Policy Council, of funds from the Saudi royal family, should know that Saudi Arabia, the native land of most of the 9/11 hijackers, also provided the raison d'etre for al Qaeda, and our entangling alliance with Saudi Arabia made us a target of al Qaeda rage. Perhaps in his new job as the government's analyst-in-chief, he'll say that.
In the Post-modern weltanschauung, there are a few rules that have been so deeply incorporated as to be equivalent of unconscious assumptions.
1) In any conflict between people or peoples, the Westerner is assumed to be at fault; all evidence must fit within the confines of this assumption.
Corollaries include the oft-stated belief that there is no such thing as anti-white racism and the conspicuous absence of concern over racism that exists between non-white people and peoples.
2) All cultures are equally valid with the exception of Western culture, which by virtue of a legacy of colonialism and racism are uniquely tainted.
Corollaries include a prohibition of criticism of cultural practices that in the West would be condemned as evil (sexism, homophobia, etc.)
These attitudes (and these ideas are attitudes more than elaborated political/philosophical structures) are pervasive among the Western elites, especially in Academia, the MSM, and our political elites. We now have a President who is so enmeshed in this world view that he may have difficulty differentiating between perpetrators and victims of evil.
One of the most serious outgrowths of this world view concerns our current struggles with radical Islam. The current iteration of expansionary Islam is at war with the civilized world. This war is conducted via the use of violence against non-combatants as well as in more subtle forms, for example, the kinds of lawfare that are designed to limit or prohibit criticism of Islam and Islamic terror. Arabic Media Shack is a blog I read regularly because Rob, et al, do an excellent job of presenting prevailing Arab opinion. I disagree with most of their conclusions and consider them to be sophisticated apologists for people whose interests are inimical to ours, but they often present thought provoking ideas:
Does Slackman read MediaShack?
The whole American academic concept of “terrorism” is widely rejected in the Middle East where noone would ever identify themselves as an expert on “terrorism” the way people do in the US. Hamas and Hezbollah, in particular, are never, ever referred to as terrorist groups but, in fact, are considered some of the most legitimate and widely admired political movements in the region. Hassan Nasrallah, for example, has Brad Pitt status among veiled women from Rabat to Baghdad. On Al-Qaeda its more nuanced (scroll down two posts).
This is why I have a hard time finding the American definition of terrorism as a useful way of analyzing “what’s going on” in the Middle East. I can absolutely see why states and politicians have political interests in defining groups as terrorist. But its harder for me to understand the academic study of terrorism. How can a concept be useful, if its rejected as an analytical framework, not just by Middle Easterners, but also by many Europeans. Terrorism is merely a tactic. Defining a group based on its tactics is like calling the war against Japan in WWII ” a war against surprise attacks (Pearl Harbor).” Is that an accurate way of looking at WWII?
In the Islamic world violence against non-combatants and non-Muslims is accepted and celebrated. The West struggled through world wars and genocide in order to reach a consensus that such attacks are to be considered war crimes, anathema to civilized people and societies. Those who suggest that we should refrain from investigating terrorism as a crime against humanity wish to level the moral playing field. By relaxing our standards we end up holding ourselves to impossible standards which makes achieving our goals much more difficult or impossible. (Consider the international condemnation that led us to call off the first assault on Fallujah, only to have to risk even more American lives going in a second time, or the international condemnation of Israel for civilian casualties in Gaza that were much more the fault of Hamas for purposely using civilians as human shields, often without their knowledge.) One expectable outcome of such moral diffidence in the interest of amity with the Muslim world is that conflicts will inevitably descend into the Hobbesian depths of total war; when measured responses are held to be unacceptable, the provocation for response necessarily must escalate and the ultimate response to the penultimate provocation must, as a consequence, be exponentially greater.
[If Israel can not defend itself against missiles and rockets from Gaza using heavy, though measured force, there will come a day when Hamas has the capacity to kill thousands of Israels and when that day comes, Israel's only available options will be to surrender or level Hamastan.]
It is not yet clear whether Barack Obama sees Islamic terror as an understandable response to oppression or i he has the capacity to escape his indoctrination into the Post-Modern weltanschauung. Early signs are not promising, though the decision to pull out of Durban II is helpful. If he is unable to escape his academic background, it bodes poorly for US interests. While he is surrounded by "realists" there is nothing realist about defining ourselves as the oppressors.
Niall Ferguson notes that we are entering a period of increasing instability:
The resources available for policing the world are certain to be reduced for the foreseeable future. That will be especially true if foreign investors start demanding higher yields on the bonds they buy from the United States or simply begin dumping dollars in exchange for other currencies.
Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now.
The combination of a relative retrenchment out of necessity coupled with the Post-Modern derived attitude that we are the oppressors is an equation that rationalizes authoritarianism around the world, essentially by no longer being able to recognize tyrants when and where they appear. Further, it offers the worst among the world's actors the assurance that their actions, and the lives of their victims, will be of less concern to the United States than maintaining a mythical molar perfection.
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