ShrinkWrapped

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

In the last century evil ideologies emerged which denied human nature and were consciously devoted to enabling the emergence of a "New Man," Utopia to follow.  These ideologies were socialist in nature and required that those who were not "part of the solution" would need to be removed so that the Utopian socialist vision could be realized.  We remember one of the versions of socialism, National Socialism, (collectivism based on ethnicity rather than class) as the most profoundly evil system, one based on the genocide of innocents.  Yet, while Communism has been responsible for more death and destruction than Nazism, the Left has managed to obscure its historical roots in genocide and retains the moral high ground in much of its posturing.

"The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.* [...] They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust."**

- Karl Marx

*Marx. People's Paper. April 16, 1853

**Journal of the history of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1, 1981

Genocide is a necessary component of any ideology that professes to believe in the need for the development of a "New Man"; certainly the modern Left would prefer to raise consciousness by education (and coercion), but when their desire for power is thwarted by "counter-revolutionaries", the only answer is to destroy their enemies.  Note how the rhetoric of the (true believer) radical environmentalists has become increasingly eliminationist as the idea of Anthropogenic Global Warming has been increasingly repudiated. 

The idea of improving the volk by eliminating undesirables is an old belief of the Progressive movement and goes back to its roots.  It usually surprises Liberals-by-Temperament when they are told that Planned Parenthood, for example, explicitly promoted abortion and birth control in order to rid society of undesirables:

How Planned Parenthood Duped America

At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

This does not mean that all Leftists, or any Liberals-by Temperament for that matter, support genocide.  Almost all would be horrified to accept that those most committed to their ideological preferences, inevitably must support evil once they accept that their end (saving the planet, protecting the people from [projected] enemies, ensuring dominance for one's ethnic or religious group) justifies any means. 

The greatest threat facing Civilization today is the alliance between the Left and Sharia Islam.  Most Liberals-by-Temperament have bought into the belief that Islam is under assault by the Right wing in this country.  The lack of anti-Islamic hatecrimes (whose numbers are dwarfed by anti-Semitic hatecrimes) does not impact this belief, a belief actively being promulgated by apologists for, and collaborators with, genocidal Islam.  Patrick Poole summarized the state of the "stealth Jihad" for Pajamas media last week:

2010: The Year of Islamist Infiltration

While the domestic terror trend has continued unabated, elements of pre-violent, or rather stealth, jihad are taking firm root in our government, military, judicial, and educational institutions, without the slightest opposition from the Obama administration and our homeland security agencies. In fact, if we’ve seen anything this year, it has been the willingness of government officials to lend their support to aid this stealth jihad.

The failure to recognize the “civilizational jihad” being waged against us is a bipartisan problem. Driven mainly by Muslim Brotherhood front groups and pushed by non-violent Islamist organizations in the West, the threat remains badly underrated by our national security establishment. But it was placed front and center by the report titled “Sharia: The Threat to America,” issued by the Team B II panel of national security experts including former CIA Director Jim Woolsey and former DIA Director Lt. Gen. Ed Soyster.

His summary, offered after voluminous documentation of the ways in which radical Muslims have insinuated themselves into our government, is telling:

This list is not exhaustive. Certainly more examples could be cited. The Obama administration’s failure to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization and terrorism is fundamental, fueled with an outreach-to-anyone-at-any-cost policy that is perhaps best typified by NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s July statements that his foremost mission was to improve relations with the Muslim world. What these twelve examples demonstrate is that our national security, intelligence, law enforcement, and diplomatic establishment are utterly defenseless before the stealth jihad that is attacking the heart of our Western society.

If 2009 was the tipping point for domestic terror, 2010 is sure to be remembered as the year that the “civilizational jihad” continued apace. Hopefully in 2011, it will be clear to at least some of our political, civic, and religious leadership that a dramatic change in national policy is urgently needed.

In my opinion, our President is more ideological than the usual Liberal-by-Temperament and is quite comfortable with totalitarians and murderous thugs; he barely can rouse himself and his administration to criticize atrocities committed by the varied thugs who comprise much of the International Community, ie the UN, is tolerant to a fault of attempts to limit the freedoms of individuals, whether at home or abroad, and is facilitating the spread of pernicious ideas that can serve to enable International Law, with all its limitations on speech and behavior in the name of combating bad thoughts (hate speech), to supersede American Constitutional protections for the individual.

The current war being fought between the regressive and repressive forces allied with political Islam and Western Civilization will not be fought with massed armies on battlefields; it will not even be fought primarily in terror-counterterror struggles; it will be fought in the realm of ideas; ideas, which when they finally are allowed to come to their fullest fruition, mandate the death and enslavement of millions in service to the perfect ideology. 

If we close our eyes to the battle that is already underway, just as we have been blinded to the past, we will lose.

The film I have embedded below is long and painful to watch.  It is a worthwhile antidote to those who imagine that their ideology (whether a modern pathology like Socialism or an ancient scourge returned like political Islam) justifies any and every horror inflicted upon its (real, imagined, or manufactured) enemies: [HT: Dr. Sanity, who is once again blogging regularly.]

The Soviet Story

“The Soviet Story” is a story of an Allied power, which helped the Nazis to fight Jews and which slaughtered its own people on an industrial scale. Assisted by the West, this power triumphed on May 9th, 1945. Its crimes were made taboo, and the complete story of Europe’s most murderous regime has never been told. Until now…

The current Left-Islamist alliance is the heir to the Communist-Nazi (and concomitant Nazi-Islamist) and post-WWII Communist-Islamist alliance of WWII.

The evil that is/was an inextricable aspect of Communism and Socialism has been effaced from our historical memory.  It has been a remarkably effective whitewash; just as remarkable is the current self imposed blindness of the West to the evil that infects Islam.

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.

-Verbal, aka Keyser Soze

A Time of Testing

The news out of the Middle East is dispiriting.  Israel has suffered a major defeat in the information war being waged against it.  Among Israel's friends the reactions ranges from anger at the Israeli government for botching the response to the aid convoy to appropriate concern that Israel Does Not Understand 4GW.  The soldiers who boarded the Turkish ship were inexcusably unprepared by their military/political superiors for the violent reception they met.

Yaacov Lozowick points out the ecology of Israel's existential crisis:

We need to step back and remind ourselves of the broad picture of the concentric circles at whose center we live.

The outer circle is the utter hatred large swathes of the Muslim World bear towards the idea and reality of a Jewish state. As a demonstrator in Istanbul shouted, there can be no Jewish state in the Arab world: what bothers him about the siege of Gaza is that Jews are in the position to impose it, not it's particular details. (The irony of Turks hating Jews for infractions of human rights or international law is striking).

The next circle are the Westerners of various stripes who also wish Israel gone, and reject the right of the Jews to be a nation. Many of the hate-motivated Muslims are willing or eager to engage in violence. Most of the Westerns haters aren't. They prefer to spew their malice at places like the Guardian, as documented daily by CiFWatch, or at many similar cesspools. Some, however, go further: Gerta Berlin, for example, a spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement which collaborated in launching the flotilla, tells proudly that she's been active in Palestinian causes since the early 1960s, when Gaza was occupied by Egypt, not that she cared. She and her ilk are enemies of Israel, and will hi-jack whatever narrative holds out promise of damaging Israel. Today it's Gaza, before that it was Jenin, and next it will be... whatever.

Then there's the very large circle of cynics idealists and the lazy. The cynics are epitomized by, say, China. The Chinese don't care about international law or morality. They care about power and China. When working with Israel fits their purposes they'll do so gladly; when not, not. In neither case will they be motivated by the conditions in Gaza, to which they are utterly indifferent unless there's an angle for Chinese profit.

The idealistic and lazy typically rely on an international media that has been repeatedly "played" by those forces inimical to Western Civilization and as a result tend to buy into the narrative of brutal (White) Western oppressors and innocent and desperate (brown) victims; this allows the aggressors to start each engagement with a decisive advantage.  Further, the early pictures and video come prepared with a ready narrative (built in the weeks prior to the incident)  which leaves the conventionally more powerful defender at a significant disadvantage.

All of this is unified by the international Jihad being waged by Islam and their allies on the Left against Western Civilization.  Andrew McCarthy discusses how Jihad is being waged in America, The 'peaceful' Jihad in America; the "peaceful" Jihadis leverage the violent Jihadis to advance their ideology.  As usual, Israel serves as the "canary in the coal mine" but where Israel goes, the United States soon follows.  Once Israel has been rendered incapable of self-defense, American efforts to safeguard our country will be further eroded in ways which make a successful defense of civilization itself problematic.

Barry Rubin tries to use reason and reality to fight this war: Sympathy for the Devil and the Gaza Sea Confrontation: How Can Helping a Repressive Fascist, Genocide-Intending Hamas Regime be Noble?  It is certainly important for supporters of Israel and Western Civilization to know the facts as clearly as possible but it seems to me we are well past the point where facts are going to sway public opinion in any significant way or advance the cause of Peace or Victory over those forces of barbarism that threaten us.

Richard Fernandez, perhaps remembering his Three Conjectures, believes that eventually the reality of this global war will become unmistakably real:

The Consolations of Philosophy

Both cases [the Gaza flotilla and the Cheonan sinking] demonstrate that nothing is more paramount either to the establishment nor to the politically correct sections of the media than the maintenance of a lie. For the lie is in the service of the greater good. High reasons of policy will be invoked to explain why the truth should not be so. But the extreme reliance on fantasy by parts of the Western establishment goes well beyond surrounding a kernel of the truth with a “bodyguard of lies.” Instead it is the lie itself which is guarded by even more falsehoods.  Gradually and inexorably, an entire political class has staked its existence on continuation of falsehood. The greater good is the fiction. Deception has become a necessity in itself.

As a result, any moderately well informed individual knows that there is no Islamic extremism, nor even terrorism. There are only man made disasters. Everybody knows that we can borrow our way out of debt, that the welfare state is the sustainable wave of the future; that Egypt has no border with Gaza through which it can provide supplies if it wanted; that the UN has kept Hezbollah from importing hundreds of missiles into Lebanon; that the thought of a handful of Jews has kept hundreds of millions of oil-rich Muslims from attaining prosperity; and that Global Warming is the main danger facing the planet Earth. That these assertions are untrue hardly matters; that they are indisputable is what seems to count. For who shall dispute them?

Reality might. And therein lies the problem.

Here’s what is going to happen with one hundred percent certainty. All of these lies will explode with considerable force in the faces of political establishment. Nothing can prevent it. Just as reality eventually exposed the hollowness of the financial bubble and showed that nothing was “too big to fail,” eventually it will demonstrate to our extreme cost, that no lie can be maintained forever. That is the real reason anyone should really care about what happened on the “peace flotilla.” We are as corrupt as a preacher in a whorehouse. It ain’t what we don’t know that will hurt us, it’s what we know that ain’t so that will drive the dagger into our hearts.

In 2010 we have been knowingly at war with radical Islam, now referred to using euphemisms designed to deny that very fact but recognized as such by anyone paying attention, for almost 10 years.  Radical Islam (with very little demurral from "moderate" Islam) has been at war with the West since the 1940s, more openly since the 1967 Middle East War, and most directly against America since 1993 (the first WTC bombing.)   Europe is, as has been their wont, determined to be the last crocodile by tossing Israel over-board.  Our current administration, convinced by the European style facile rationalization popular at elite Universities, is either confused, has ambivalent leanings, or is simply disinterested in understanding our current peril and as a result facilitates the growth of Islamist ideology. 

[In any local situation, the choice of submission to the Islamists versus alliance with the West must now be filtered through a lens of American neo-isolationism.  The local thugs will win every time in this calculation.]

Israel can not win this war by using conventional means.  It is a civilized community living in the middle of a population of sociopaths and lunatics.   As Max Boot points out, Israel Can Win Every Battle but Still Lose the War. 

I can see no way out for Israel in the near term.  It is rapidly being delegitimized and made a pariah.  The best, perhaps only, way to protect oneself from sociopaths (the Islamist leadership) is to threaten them with an overwhelming response.  Sociopaths desire to live and the Islamist leadership give every indication of desiring to live and continue to wield power, whether as a Prince in Saudi Arabia, a Mullah in Iran, or a heroic Hezbollah or Hamas Resistance fighter in Damascus.  Only if the leadership are convinced that their well being is at risk will they be at all willing to rein in the lunatics who they send to murder and die.  The problem for Israel is now several fold:

Can Israel credibly threaten, sotto voce, a Samson Option?*

Will its enemies believe its threats?

Can a democracy make such a threat and convince itself of its necessity?

The logic of the Information War against Israel and the Iranian race to obtain nuclear weapons, combined with European animus and American insouciance, suggests that at some point, a willingness to use nuclear weapons in the defense of Israel will become a necessity if the state is to survive long term.  The more credible the threat of use is, the less likely it will become necessary.  Unfortunately, in the Middle East, there will always be those willing to test Israel's resolve to use all means at its disposal to confirm Never Again.

I fear we are moving perilously close to that test.

* The Samson Option will be a necessary deterrent for the next 10 years.  At that point the asymmetry at the heart of Israel's problems will be addressable and the Islamists will no longer have the advantage in unconventional war.  That makes the next ten years the most perilous in recent memory. I will expand on these ideas in a future post.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

Who Are We Fighting?

In Synthesis I noted that among other problems in our current confrontation with those who wish to do us harm is a conspicuous lacunae in our acknowledgement and naming of the enemy.  According to the Bush administration we were fighting "Terror", a tactic and a first order derivative of an enemy entity; according to the Obama administration, we are now fighting "man caused disasters" or some other second derivative of the enemy. 

In my humble opinion, our enemy is radical, expansionist, fundamentalist Islam in all its iterations.  One version of this is that of Thomas Friedman, who believes we are involved bystanders to the real struggle within Islam:

Father Knows Best

Every faith has its violent extreme. The West is not immune. It’s all about how the center deals with it. Does it tolerate it, isolate it or shame it? The jihadists are a security problem for our system. But they are a political and moral problem for the Arab-Muslim system. If they won’t address this problem for us, I truly hope they will do it for themselves. Eventually, we’ll find a way to keep most jihadists off our planes and out of our volleyball games — but they will have to live with them.

I almost agree with Friedman, though believe he underestimates the problematic nature of Islam itself.  There are many people who disagree that there can be a "moderate" Islam, suggesting that I do not go far enough in characterizing the enemy.  Commenter Gary K has frequently offered cogent and well parsed explanations for this point of view, as in this comment to my post:

First, as my prior comments here have spelled out, I do not believe that these Muslim attacks, this Jihad against us “unbelievers” and the West are somehow the result of some internal conflict between “moderates” and “fundamentalists” within Islam; they are policy.

From what I have observed and studied, there is no real “reformist” party within Islam of the kind we might envision—no great public, voiced yearning for reform and a corresponding popular movement, no religious communities or centers, no major politicians or leaders, no Imams calling for reform or moderation, for modernization or revision of the Qur’an, or advocating looking at Muhammad and his Sunna or basic Islamic doctrine differently--in a “modern” way--and with an eye to de-emphasizing, or removal of its central, violent, xenophobic focus on world domination, on applying totalitarian Shari’a law to all people, and on converting, conquering or killing all unbelievers.

Conservative, rigid, inward-looking Islam has been very carefully constructed so that any such challenges to its orthodoxy are quickly detected and eliminated by bringing the power of the entire Umma’s social structure and culture, of the Muslim state, and of individual inner and outer directed Muslims to bear in order to isolate, shun, threaten, attack or—if all else fails--kill potential reformers and apostates.

Gary K's view is contested by Jimmy J's wish that it were not so:

If Gary K. is correct, we can look forward to either the need to slaughter huge numbers of Muslims (would 750 million dead Muslims convince the other half that we mean business?) or eventual surrender. My hope is that he is wrong.

I suspect Gary K will be surprised to learn that I have reluctantly arrived at the conclusion that he is correct.  However, I do not believe it is in our best interests to behave as if he is correct.  Allow me to elucidate.

While We Sleep

One of the great motivating forces in human events is inertia.  In the geopolitical realm this is a most powerful force that causes nations to slide inexorably into disasters that hindsight predicts 100% of the time. 

In 1980 the USSR was expected to be a rival for the foreseeable future and Ronald Reagan was derided as a cowboy likely to lead us to disaster.  Instead, within a decade the Berlin Wall crumbled and the monolith shattered in short order, to the surprise of all the Solon and commentators.  Once the USSR fell, its disintegration, in retrospect, was noted to be inevitable.

The Executive can only focus on a limited number of problems at a time.  If Obamacare is the primary concern of the administration, there is less energy and attention available for other problems, such as the war in Afghanistan.  Less pressing troubles fall off the radar completely.

There is little doubt that unless there is an intervention Iran will soon have a nuclear weapon.  This will certainly empower and embolden Islamists everywhere, yet there are a couple of brewing crises that may yet make our troubles with Islamic expansionism exponentially worse. 

The first bit of bad news for the West is that the model of a moderate Muslim state is no longer  operative, from Daniel Pipes: 

Lion's Den: Turkey: An ally no more

"There is no doubt he is our friend," Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, says of Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions point to the profound change of orientation by Turkey's government - for six decades the West's closest Muslim ally - since Erdogan's AK party came to power in 2002.

Read the whole thing, and try to imagine the near future when Turkey has become, more overtly, an Islamist state.  Too many "sophisticated, enlightened" Westerners, sadly over-represented in the diplomatic corps, simply cannot believe that another nation can be motivated by deep religious beliefs which are in conflict with their (assumed) rational national interests.  Why would Turkey go down the Islamist pathway when we see in every instance that it causes a decrease in freedom and economic vitality?  Since our elites assume that only primitives believe in irrationalities like religion, the assumption is that the Turks, who after all wear business suits to meetings, are just like them; ie, they imagine the Turkish leadership uses religion to acquire legitimacy among their constituents, but don't really believe in that nonsense.

Barry Rubin gets it just right in his depiction of the fecklessness and provincialism of our leadership: [All emphases mine-SW]

Turkey's Islamist Regime: Who Will Stop the Reign?

As for foreign policy, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has gone out of his way to make it clear he stands with Tehran, not Washington, on the nuclear issue. He called Iran’s nuclear program a peaceful one and said that the country has a right to have nuclear weapons. This statement was cheered by Iran’s client, Hizballah, and shocked European Union diplomats who called the Turkish leader clearly pro-Iran.

This is not the Turkey we have known for decades. The dissidents—people who were in the mainstream for many decades and now find themselves marginalized--are desperate to find some way out. The democratic margin is steadily narrowing. Ideally, the opposition parties would forget their differences, unite, make a broad appeal to the nation and stop the slide toward a Turkish version of Islamism.

In fact, though, the Turkish opposition politicians are among the world’s most incompetent. The social democratic party is led by an arrogant buffoon—every time his party loses an election he blames the voters—while the nationalist right is narrow and unimaginative. There is no international lobbying effort against the AKP regime to inform the West what’s going on in Turkey.

The traditional hope is that the army would step in to preserve the secular republic but it has been too weakened (ironically, in large part due to European Union pressure to get it out of politics) and knows it wouldn’t enjoy Western support. The AKP is also popular enough to make the prospect of a coup seem like the road to civil war. And as time goes on, perhaps the army will not be able to depend on its own troops and officers.

What about decisive U.S. action? ...

... one of the underappreciated aspects of the contemporary world scene is the extent to which there are many people like this Turkish liberal who are feeling deeply concerned or even abandoned by current U.S. policy.

While a lot—too much, actually—of focus has been put on Israel, the same thing can be said to an even greater extent of Central Europeans and Caucasus people (Azerbaijan, Georgia) who , fear being appetizers for the Russian bear, pro-democratic Arabs, freedom-seeking Iranians, desperate Turks, and many others. There are also Arab rulers and regime supporters who wonder if they can depend on America to defend them from Iran.

Even in British, French, and German ruling circles there is more concern than is being generally appreciated. True, they saw President George W. Bush as a cowboy, but now they see Obama as a cowed man.

Then there are those who are neutral or antagonistic who just can’t quite believe what they are seeing. I was told by a good source that a non-government person who works for Obama a lot showed up in Pakistan and gave the Pakistanis a lecture about how they should give up nuclear weapons and everyone in the world also wouldn't have them any more.

Can you imagine how Pakistanis thought of this proposal when they see nuclear weapons as their trump card against India, and don’t necessarily trust Iran or China that much either? Such people either think, the Americans are engaged in some incredible conspiracy or are so naive that it defies belief.

Americans are used to the idea that others may see them as irresponsible, overbearing imperialist bullies. Yet just as powerful a stereotype is that idea of Americans as sweet, well-meaning childlike creatures who are too nice to survive and have no idea what the real world is like.

Few understand that when Graeme Greene wrote a book entitled The Quiet American about why Americans are so often held in contempt it was the latter stereotype, not the former, he presented. The main character an American who is well-intentioned but makes a mess out of things holds the philosophy that the United States encourage underdeveloped countries to pursue a third way, different from capitalism or communism and based on local traditions. He sounds more like Obama than George W. Bush.

Barack Obama and those who surround him grew up during an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.  They came of intellectual age in an environment where it was simply assumed that most of the world's problems were caused by American imperialism and over-reach.  There was rarely a challenge to such naivety in academia, that place where 1 + 1 = precisely whatever you want it to equal, and cause and effect are routinely deconstructed.

Losing Turkey to Islamism will have reverberations.  It is possible that out of the Turkish dialectic will evolve a new form of liberal, tolerant Islam, but there is no evidence of such a development on the horizon.  Much more likely is that as freedoms are curtailed in the new Turkey, the economy will suffer, and Turkish society will regress further.  This is not a happy thought.

Finally, John Robb notes that it is often only the stupidity of our enemies that prevents them from attaining their goals:

Pakistan.  Attacks on government/military personnel continue while ignoring the fact that Pakistani infrastructure is past the breaking point (which makes it easier to disrupt).  If the "Taliban's" current level of effort at blood and guts terrorism were redirected against urban infrastructure -- all Pakistani cities would be inoperative, the national economy would be in free fall, and social fragmentation would be inevitable.  Unlike blood and guts terrorism, system disruption would minimize backlash/opposition (both at the national and global levels) and likely manufacture a plethora of open source allies rather than foes.

Consider, if the Taliban were smart, they could easily destabilize Pakistan by attacking its infrastructure yet they insist on terrifying people by murdering women and children, the surest way to mobilize opposition to their advance. 

As our President dithers on Afghanistan, desperate for a way to "square the circle" there, consider that as we race to abandon the fight against expansionist, radical Islam, there are trends appearing that do not bode well for the West.  We can only rely on the stupidity of our enemies for so long; at some point we need to get smarter.

Inertia in international affairs works as a guiding principle right up until the time it no longer works.

The Singularity & the 12th Imam: Part IV

In The Singularity is Near, Ray Kurzweil looked at the natural history of information processing and discovered that the rate of increase in the ability to manipulate information has a logarithmic slope; in other words, the rate of information processing ability increases at an exponential rate.  Furthermore, he suggested that within the next 30-40 years we will reach a time at which the pace of technological advance (the current embodiment of information processing) will become so rapid as to make further predictions impossible, a point which he called "The Singularity". 

Kevin Kelly, as part of an article critiquing certain aspects of Kurzweil's idea, described the Singularity in fairly accessible terms.  (Vinge refers to Verner Vinge, who originated the idea of an Artificial Intelligence Singularity):

In Vinge’s analysis, at some point not too far away, innovations in computer power would enable us to design computers more intelligent than we are, and these smarter computers could design computers yet smarter than themselves, and so on, the loop of computers-making-newer-computers accelerating very quickly towards unimaginable levels of intelligence. This progress in IQ and power, when graphed, generates a rising curve which appears to approach the straight up limit of infinity. In mathematical terms it resembles the singularity of a black hole, because, as Vinge announced, it will be impossible to know anything beyond this threshold. If we make an AI which in turn makes a greater AI, ad infinitum, then their future is unknowable to us, just as our lives have been unfathomable to a slug. So the singularity became a black hole, an impenetrable veil hiding our future from us.

In his response to Kelly's article, Kurzweil wrote a clarifying post and used the Internet to illustrate the concept of a "transformative technology":

Consider the Internet. When the Arpanet went from 10,000 nodes to 20,000 in one year, and then to 40,000 and then 80,000, it was of interest only to a few thousand scientists. When ten years later it went from 10 million nodes to 20 million, and then 40 million and 80 million, the appearance of this curve looks identical (especially when viewed on a log plot), but the consequences were profoundly more transformative. There is a point in the smooth exponential growth of these different aspects of information technology when they transform the world as we know it. [Emphasis mine-SW]

One of Kurzweil's great insights was that almost any information technology, when looked at over time, shows the same pattern of exponential growth, with minimal change until a threshold is hit, followed by explosive transformations. 

What does this have to do with Apocalyptic cults and irrational reactions to disruption fueled angst?

The Reavers of Islam

People recognize that when we try to communicate with each other, our tools of language and image are almost always inadequate to convey our full meaning, and at the same time, convey multiple meanings that we do not consciously intend.  The War on Terror, also known as the War on Isalmofascism, is being shaped by these meta-communications in ways that some of the main players seem not to recognize.

Yesterday,  Apollon Zamp guest blogged at Gates of Vienna, and in his post The Reavers' Jihad explicitly compared Islam to the marauders of the Firefly series.  The comparison may be an exaggeration, and may be based on a limited view of Islam, however it is a view that the proponents of Jihad have been assiduously advancing and in this our MSM have been complicit.  Here is Apollon Zamp's description of Reavers:

For those not familiar with the TV show “Firefly” and its subsequent film production, Serenity, the story line includes a savage breed of beings known as Reavers. Since the Firefly universe is set five hundred years in the future, one might — on a steady diet of Star Trek and other such sci-fi favorites — expect danger to come in the form of alien life. However, danger comes instead in the form of the Beast Within — the savage side of man’s nature that in civilized cultures is held in check by proper social conditioning, an instilled sense of morality, and regulation of the id by the superego.

The Rehabilitation of John Walker Lindh

Vodkapundit today takes a look at the "Long War" and wonders if we can Stay Focused.  He does not believe our society is doing what is required in order to in the war, and I see little to disagree with in his formulation:

If we’re going to win a long, ideological war, we need our primary schools to [teach] our children what patriotism is - and for the most part, they don’t. We need our college professors to give our best and brightest the intellectual ammunition to confront our destroyers – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our public thinkers to defend our laws and our way of life against foreign aggression – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our entertainers to choose the home team – and for the most part, they don’t. We need our politicians to show the backbone of Churchill, but for the most part, they don’t. And we need our military to understand, embrace, and put everything on the line for their country.

One out of six? That’s pretty bad. Is it enough? Probably not.

Our schools, our public thinkers, our entertainers, and our politicians either do not realize we are at war (which is hard to believe, but possible) or understand we are at war yet are unable to break out of their sclerotic paradigms.  Our media continues to view the world through the dialectical lens of Political Correctness.  In the PC world, there are only victims and oppressors and once a group or an individual has been determined to be a victim, they are held to minimal standards of accountability and seen as innocents whose atrocities are explained as the result of their desperate circumstances (especially their oppression by the West.)  Among other things, this allows the media to simplify the news in the service of "Stories" or "Narratives."  Although the media often has pretensions of sophistication and nuance, in reality, they have very little time or ability to explain complex stories in any depth and falling back on the ready made "victim" template is the easiest way to get stories into print.

John Walker Lindh is now being actively rehabilitated in the media.

Fast Forward: Part III

Iraq has been the central front in the war between Modern Civilization and totalitarian Islam since the United States and its coalition partners invaded.  The purpose of the invasion was primarily to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein in order to change the dynamic in the Middle East, decrease the risk of Iraq expanding or recreating their WMD programs (the jury is still out on the whereabouts or existence of any Iraqi WMD but that is not germane to this issue at the moment, in any event), and present a third option to the world's Muslims, most of whom have lived their entire lives under authoritarian or totalitarian rule, either secular or theocratic in nature.  Democratizing Iraq was often posed as an after-thought, but it was and is a crucial aspect of the larger war against Islamofascism.

The  destruction of the dome of the Golden Mosque Samarra has been the latest and perhaps most effective, attempt yet to ignite civil war in Iraq.  Bill Roggio suggests that the next few days will be key.  In Looking for Signs of Civil War in Iraq, he offers a variety of guideposts by which to determine the likely direction of future events and concludes:

Iraq has yet to encounter any of the problems stated above. The Sunni led Iraqi Accordance Front has suspended talks to form a government, but have not withdrawn from the political process. The Iraqi Security Forces have taken appropriate measures and suspended all leaves, but there are no indications they are cooperating with militias or abetting the violence in any way. There have been both encouraging statements by the Shiite and Sunni leaders. There also have been some irresponsible statements from the politicians on all sides, but this can be understood as tensions are running high. The Shiites are devastated by the destruction of the Golden Mosque and the Sunnis are horrified at the retaliation attacks. What is critical is what is said and done by these politicians in the next few days and weeks.

Iran and Nuclear Weapons

The Islamic Republic of Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979.  For much of that time, America fought a passive war of defense only.  The amount of damage that Iran could inflict upon us was considered tolerable in comparison to the damage that would incur from open hostilities.  Our capabilities had been so eroded since the post-Vietnam emasculation of our covert operations apparatus that any attempts to strike back at Iran were of necessity quite limited.  This was the status quo from the time of the American embassy take over in Tehran in 1979 until 9/11. 

Post-9/11, many people recognized Iran as a greater long term threat than Iraq, but numerous constraints, internationally and at home, made a direct response to Iran an impossibility.  I firmly believe that the strategic decision was made to encircle Iran with the aim of eventually toppling the regime, which since the advent of Ayatollah Khomeini has been the single greatest supporter of Islamic terror in the world. 

Not surprisingly, in all such wars, the final battles tend to be the most dangerous.  We are approaching the end game and the timing and outcome depend on too many factors that are either unknown or unknowable. 

The problem for the West is that modernization is incompatible with the Islam practiced by the Iranian Mullahs, which is closely related to the Islam practiced by the Saudi Wahhabists and al Qaeda.  Furthermore, every day that passes, the defeat of their version of Islam inevitably comes nearer.  Obtaining a nuclear weapon is the only hope the Mullahs have for stopping the slide of "true" Islam into apostasy; furthermore, using a nuclear weapon is the only hope they have of vanquishing the infidels.  Their version of Allah demands it and no merely human intervention by the UN will have any chance of derailing their desires.