ShrinkWrapped

Watching a Meme Evolve

For several years now I have been writing about the mythical Moderate Muslims, suggesting that we cannot win this war on radical Islam and that the primary struggle concerns Islam's relationship with the modern world.  I further have suggested that if Islam does not come to a peaceful resolution of their battle against modernity and tolerance, they will essentially end up "walled off" from the civilized world, just as the body walls off chronic infections that cannot be cured.  Israel is at the leading edge of such walling off (only partly literal; large sections of the separation wall have not been built and probably never will be build short of another Intifada) and the results shave been salutary for the Israelis and the Palestinians alike.  (Gaza's self imposed economic distress contrasts vividly with the metaphoric economic boom currently taking place in the West Bank.)

Today Tom Friedman advances the meme that one possible result of a failure of the World of Islam to behave themselves will be separation from civilized human intercourse:

What’s Our Sputnik?

Dick Cheney says President Obama is “trying to pretend that we are not at war” with terrorists. There is only one thing I have to say about that: I sure hope so.

Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.

Am I going isolationist? No, but visiting the greater China region always leaves me envious of the leaders of Hong Kong, Taiwan and China, who surely get to spend more of their time focusing on how to build their nations than my president, whose agenda can be derailed at any moment by a jihadist death cult using exploding underpants.

Could we just walk away? No, but we must change our emphasis. The “war on terrorists” has to begin by our challenging the people and leaders over there. If they’re not ready to take the lead, to speak out and fight the madness in their midst, for the future of their own societies, there is no way we can succeed. We’ll exhaust ourselves trying. We’d be better off just building a higher wall. [Emphases mien-SW]

As the terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman noted in an essay in The Washington Post: “In the wake of the global financial crisis, Al Qaeda has stepped up a strategy of economic warfare. ‘We will bury you,’ Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev promised Americans 50 years ago. Today, Al Qaeda threatens: ‘We will bankrupt you.’ ” And they will.

Our presence, our oil dependence, our endless foreign aid in the Middle East have become huge enablers of bad governance there and massive escapes from responsibility and accountability by people who want to blame all their troubles on us. Let’s get out of the way and let the moderate majorities there, if they really exist, face their own enemies on their own. It is the only way they will move. We can be the wind at their backs, but we can’t be their sails. There is some hope for Iraq and Iran today because their moderates are fighting for themselves.

I suspect most Americans would agree that we have expended enough lives and treasure trying to bring freedom to the Middle East.  Iraq may some day be a functional democracy which respects the rights of non-Muslims, but the signs are not auspicious.  We are disengaging from Iraq and no longer losing lives there; we are trying to replicate the surge in Afghanistan and there is probably a one or two year window before we become ready to give up there.  Pakistan is widely thought to be unsalvageable with  the emphasis going forward on managing the threat of disaster there (and in the long term this is more a problem for India than for us.)   For all of the administration's verbal emphasis on Palestine and Israel, nothing is likely to emerge from all the hot air until the Palestinians become willing to accept that Israel will not voluntarily surrender or be forced by the United States to accept defeat.  At some point, the Europeans will curtail Muslim immigration; at some point, after a further accumulation of insults and outrages, we will take radical Islam seriously and begin the process of minimizing the power of Wahhabi Imams and Saudi money to radicalize our most vulnerable people.  (It will first be necessary to more directly confront PC-thought but eventually, as per Tom Friedman, reality does re-assert itself.)

Our technology enabled walls are growing stronger and the Islamic World may have much less time than they imagine to reconcile themselves to the modern world.  The meme of separation is growing and once it appears, albeit reluctantly, in the New York Times, the time until it reaches critical mass is growing shorter. 

Its Their Nature

The parable of the Frog and the Scorpion is familiar to most of us.  A scorpion begs a frog to carry it across a river:

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.

"I could not help myself. It is my nature."

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.

In the Jerusalem Post this morning:

Erasing Ezekiel's Jewish identity

For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims came to Al-Kifl, a small town south of Baghdad, to visit the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel and pray. 

The distinctive Jewish Character of the Al-Kifl shrine, namely the Hebrew inscriptions and the Torah Ark, never bothered the gentile worshipers. In the 14th century a minaret was built next to the shrine, but the interior design remained Jewish. The vast majority of Iraq's Jewish community left some 60 years ago, but Shi'ites took good care of the holy site.

Until now.

Recently "Ur," a local Iraqi news agency, reported that a huge mosque will be built on top of the grave by Iraq's Antiquities and Heritage Authority, while Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site, all as part of renovations.

Iraq is the newly minted "democracy" for which so many Americans sacrificed so much.  now they are behaving just as Muslims have behaved for a thousand years: Once a majority, they force non-believers into dhimmi status and erase all signs of the hated infidel.  This is a story as old as the Temple Mount and the Hagia Sofia and as recent as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. 

In May 2005 I wrote a post in which I made an analogy between "Good Muslims" and "Good Germans":

I liken the Islamic world to the state of the German nation in the 1930's. The Nazis were a minority party with a small following at first, in the early years of the decade. The percentage of people willing and eager to join in the party's thuggery was quite small.  A far larger number sympathized with the Nazi program of externalizing all blame for Germany's straits with special emphasis on anti-Semitism, an even larger number were quietly alarmed or indifferent but the number willing to stand against the Nazis was minuscule, and hampered by the fact that they were typically not thugs themselves. By the late thirties, Hitler had been legally elected by a minority of voters and once in power he unleashed a growing band of bullies and thugs who were the spiritual ancestors to Zarqawi and his ilk. By the time the danger of Nazism was noticed by the population, opposition became deadly dangerous. It is one thing to risk your life to protect yourself and your family, it is something else altogether to risk your life to defend an outsider, like the Jew. As it was by the late 1930's and increasingly into the 1940's, to be an anti-Nazi German was to risk a horrible, lonely death; today, in "1930's Islam", to be a moderate Muslim is to risk death.

We cannot expect any help from Moderate Muslims in saving their own hides. Their governments cynically use the radical Islamists to keep pressure on their enemies and to keep their own populations under control. There will be minimal help from that direction. Further, every poll taken of an Islamic country shows a sizable population supporting the most rigorous and most intolerant, often Wahhabi or Wahhabi influenced (thanks to Saudi oil money), brands of Islam. These populations are still minorities in many places, but they are sizable, passionate, and ruthless. In general, the more provincial and unsophisticated a society, the more conservative they tend to be. While we can't expect much help from Saudi Arabia, still playing their double game, protected by their oil for the time being, it should surprise no one that Egypt, Pakistan, the Sudan, parts of Indonesia, and other areas, are extremely fundamentalist, extremely anti-American, and extremely unlikely to ever utter a word of complaint about the desecration and persecution of Christians, Jews and others unfortunate enough to live within their midst.

It is also worth wondering if there even exists a sizable population of moderate Muslims. The MSM, our government, most civilized people seem to believe that if they insist there exists a moderate Islam, then it must be so. While I have no doubt there are moderate Muslims, their lack of visibility is troubling. When even in this country, where dissenters are safer than most anywhere else, a rally for Muslims against terror draws minimal numbers, it is troubling.  Whenever there is an article written, or a public stance taken, opposing the Islamic fascists, the brave individual Muslim puts their life at risk, receives condemnation from official organs of Islam, and often receives death threat fatwas. They receive nothing but calumny from the governments which are supposed to be our allies in this war. The official Egyptian press and the state sponsored Imams in state supported mosques, regularly spew out the worst hatred of infidels (that is Americans and Israelis, especially, but with special vitriol for those Europeans who have the temerity to object to their increasing dhimmitude) and apostates. Most Islamic states have death penalties for apostasy, for desecration of the Koran, and for any of a number of offenses against Islam; at the same time, Shariah law openly, arrogantly, discriminates against those who are not sufficiently Islamic, and grants almost no rights to non Muslims.

I continue to believe we need to behave as if the majority of Muslims are moderate.  We do not want to prematurely precipitate a state of war in which the entire Muslim world is convinced they are under attack.  If we continue to kill the terrorists when possible and insist upon minimal standards of civilized behavior where possible, we will win this War with minimal casualties.  Fundamentalist Islam cannot long survive a collision with the modern world.  Unfortunately, our own feckless responses to the Islamists (including treating terrorists as if they deserve full Constitutional protections as criminal defendants, allowing agents of the Islamists to speak for American Muslims while dictating the "proper" approach to Muslims in this country, and demurring when a steadfast defense of our Rights would be appropriate) embolden the Islamists, convinces the majority of Muslims that the West is weak and rotten to the core, and makes a greater eventual conflagration much more likely.

When Muslims behave as traditional Muslims, the Christian and Jewish populations under their rule tend to disappear over time.  The Arab world is essentially Judenrien  and the Christan population in Muslim countries is under great duress.  Apparently, such genocidal colonialism and religious supremacism is simply their nature.

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.

Islam and Democracy: Part II

Whenever I post on such topics as Moderate Muslims and Islam and Democracy, I receive numerous comments supporting the contention that there is no such thing as a Moderate Muslim and that Islam is incompatible with democracy.  There is little doubt that any form of Islam that supports Sharia law is, in fact, incompatible with democracy.  For the purposes of this post, I will even go further and agree, for argument's sake, that the vast majority of Muslims have incorporated some of the most egregious tenets of their religion.  Let us assume that they believe that Muslims are superior to non-Muslims, that the Koran is the infallible and unchangeable word of Allah, and that every devout Muslim must wage Jihad against infidels.  Further, let us agree that most Muslims clearly recognize that Jihad does not refer to a spiritual struggle but to a more prosaic struggle to force infidels to submit to Islam.  What are the implications of such a position?

The ultimate conclusion to be drawn from the supposition that Western Civilization and expansionist Islam are mutually exclusive and inexorably heading toward a clash, is that the planet is simply not big enough to support both civilizations.  This supports the idea that at some indeterminate point, the second of Richard Fernandez's Three Conjectures will come to fruition:

Conjecture 2: Attaining WMDs will destroy Islam

[If you have never read The Three Conjectures, read it now; this post will still be here when you return.]

Since Iran is speedily approaching the point of no return in their quest for a deliverable nuclear weapon, despite the NIE which chose to err on the side of inanity, Conjecture 2 is looking more and more possible.

I suspect even those of us who take the dimmest view of Islam would agree that losing Western cities in exchange for destroying hundreds of millions of Muslims is the worst case scenario.  That raises the question of what policies and behaviors the West could adopt which could minimize the risk of the worst case scenario.  After all, we should not particularly care if 75% or 90% of Muslims think they are superior to us and want us all to submit or die, as long as they do not actively seek to bring it about.  The question then becomes, how do we best convince them to leave us alone.

Thus far, in some areas we are doing an adequate job, in some areas we are doing a poor job, and in other areas we are actively advancing the worst case scenarios.

Islam and Democracy

Richard Fernandez has taken a look at a question that has been examined here on many occasions and is at the core of our struggle against Islamic terror. 

Unspoken

There seems to be a bipartisan political consensus not to examine the subject of political Islam publicly. It is the most verboten of foreign policy subjects. But like other "open secrets", its exclusion from formal discussion doesn't banish it from public consciousness. It merely pushes it underground, like Barack Obama's middle name.

The key problem with subjecting the question of political Islam to debate is that every other conclusion except that of regarding it as a "religion of peace" implies consequences no one dares face. Concluding that Islam is a 'religion of war' would precipitate a revolution in diplomacy, energy policy and military strategy. It's a bottle of nitro nobody wants to shake; it's a can of worms nobody wants to open: not a Republican administration and most especially not a Democratic one.

Explosive questions such as this are as likely to be resolved by events as by debate. To a very great extent the West is genuinely hoping that Islam is a "religion of peace"; and I suspect many Muslims are too. Unfolding events will resolve the issue -- and perceptions -- one way or the other. Ten years from today we'll have a better understanding of the truth.

In response, Josh Manchester e-mailed Richard from Anbar province and made several important points, all of which summed to the conclusion that the question of Islam as a "religion of Peace" versus the Unspeakable consequences that would follow from the alternative is too complex to be readily answerable.

Spoken

The real text to turn to in understanding what comes next is not the Koran but the Leviathan. The Iraqis have lived in a state of nature for the past 5 years, and in a state of nature there is no law, no order, no justice or injustice, only survival, period. And so, their ability to care about each other is stunted a bit. Not only that, but the history of Saddam's regime is that of playing people off against each other and destroying the trust between them. These are the crucial issues today in my town in Iraq -- social trust, how to incubate it, and especially how it relates to good governance. Nepotism and corruption are part and parcel of life here, as I imagine they are in many parts of the developing world, Muslim or not. Advancing democracy in Iraq is not a question of Islam, it's a question of helping the Iraqis move past the concept of "me against my brother, me and my brother against my cousin, all three of us against everyone else." Perhaps it seems a gargantuan task, but so did defeating Al Qaeda in Anbar about a year ago.

I think that when we frame the question as whether or not Islam is compatible with freedom, democracy, and peace, we are doing a disservice to ourselves, the Islamic world, and the complexity of the question.  Those who attempt to simplify an extremely complex set of interactions make the least propitious outcomes more likely.  We need to think about this war in terms of asking what policies we can adopt that will minimize the chances of worst case outcomes and maximize the chances of better case outcomes.

First, an appreciation of the complexity involved.

Moderate Muslims, Nuclear Weapons, Democracy and Pakistan

Arguably the greatest threat facing the West in the near term is the situation in Pakistan.  For several years Pervez Musharaf has been balancing the competing demands of Islamic extremists, both within and without his government and military, with pro-Democracy forces; failure by Musharaf risks chaos and the move of Pakistan from a reasonably, if ambivalent, rational actor and ally in the war on terror toward an extremist Islamic state.  Since Pakistan already possesses as many as 50 nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them via missile or terrorist, this is a rather alarming prospect.  Last weekend Musharaf introduced martial law and suspended the Constitution.  The proximate causes of the emergency declaration are two-fold.  The Supreme Court, acting in accord with what seems to be the prevailing wisdom among Western trained and influenced legal absolutists that the form of the law should trump reason and reality, attempted to circumvent Musharaf's election for another term as President, which incurred his objections; further, the courts were reportedly making an already difficult struggle with Islamists, in the Northwest of the country as well as in the major cities, more problematic.  The United States has been placed in a difficult position by Musharaf's behavior.  Following a time tested pattern, Musharaf takes an increasingly authoritarian position and then claims only he stands between stability and chaos; since chaos implies a very good likelihood of nuclear technology finding its way into the hands of those most inimical to America and our allies, this is a powerful argument.

As with so many issues in the last several years, our response to the recent developments in Pakistan have evoked some partisan responses. 

Joe Biden is widely considered (at least by himself and the MSM) one of the leading lights of the Democratic party when it comes to foreign affairs, and his article suggesting A New Approach to Pakistan is in keeping with his typical wisdom.  Note that as with most Biden pronouncements, the self-referential first person point of view is inescapable:

"Good Muslims" and "Good Germans"

In the fall out of the Newsweek "Flushing Koran" story, a lot of people have begun to take more notice of the primitive and viscious response of the Muslim world to any real and/or perceived insults. Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe, wondered Why Islam is disrespected and concluded:

...what disgraces Islam above all is the vast majority of the planet's Muslims saying nothing and doing nothing about the jihadist cancer eating away at their religion. It is Free Muslims Against Terrorism, a pro-democracy organization, calling on Muslims and Middle Easterners to ''converge on our nation's capital for a rally against terrorism" -- and having only 50 people show up.

Yes, Islam is disrespected. That will only change when throngs of passionate Muslims show up for rallies against terrorism, and when rabble-rousers trying to gin up a riot over a defiled Koran can't get the time of day.

Yesterday, Bloggledygook wrote an impassioned piece, Taking Islam Seriously.

We may be winning or losing this war; it's getting harder each day to tell. But if we lose, it will not be because the enemy is superior in strength, morality or guile. It will be because we have failed to take the threat with the seriousness and dead calm that an existential crisis demands. We have failed to identify the enemy and in doing so have turned the fight in on ourselves. The current spat between the government and the media would make for lively entertainment in another time. As we grow towards what is likely to be a showdown with thousands, maybe millions, of radicalized religious fanatics it might be a good idea for us to come to some agreement on whom we fight before it is too late.

The majority of tolerant, moderate Muslims must do the same. It is incumbent on both the media and government that they explain that the enemy we face is their enemy also. And it is of the greatest import that Muslims finally decide that they will indeed take their religion, and the internal threat to its very survival, seriously. An army of free Muslims mobilized alongside that of the West would be an overwhelming force in the fight against Islamofascism. It has yet to be enlisted or even contemplated. We must demonstrate to our Muslim allies that we take the threat to their religion and culture as serious as we take the same threat to ours, and that we expect them to do the same. Until Muslims show respect for their own ways, the West will be impotent to force a surrender."

Many, many others are awake to the dangers of radical Islam and the, to them, curious silence by the vast, moderate majority of Islam. I wish the situation were as simple as mobilizing the moderates to repudiate the radicals.

I liken the Islamic world to the state of the German nation in the 1930's. The Nazis were a minority party with a small following at first, in the early years of the decade. The percentage of people willing and eager to join in the party's thuggery was quite small.  A far larger number sympathized with the Nazi program of externalizing all blame for Germany's straits with special emphasis on anti-Semitism, an even larger number were quietly alarmed or indifferent but the number willing to stand against the Nazis was minuscule, and hampered by the fact that they were typically not thugs themselves. By the late thirties, Hitler had been legally elected by a minority of voters and once in power he unleashed a growing band of bullies and thugs who were the spiritual ancestors to Zarqawi and his ilk. By the time the danger of Nazism was noticed by the population, opposition became deadly dangerous. It is one thing to risk your life to protect yourself and your family, it is something else altogether to risk your life to defend an outsider, like the Jew. As it was by the late 1930's and increasingly into the 1940's, to be an anti-Nazi German was to risk a horrible, lonely death; today, in "1930's Islam", to be a moderate Muslim is to risk death.

We cannot expect any help from Moderate Muslims in saving their own hides. Their governments cynically use the radical Islamists to keep pressure on their enemies and to keep their own populations under control. There will be minimal help from that direction. Further, every poll taken of an Islamic country shows a sizable population supporting the most rigorous and most intolerant, often Wahhabi or Wahhabi influenced (thanks to Saudi oil money), brands of Islam. These populations are still minorities in many places, but they are sizable, passionate, and ruthless. In general, the more provincial and unsophisticated a society, the more conservative they tend to be. While we can't expect much help from Saudi Arabia, still playing their double game, protected by their oil for the time being, it should surprise no one that Egypt, Pakistan, the Sudan, parts of Indonesia, and other areas, are extremely fundamentalist, extremely anti-American, and extremely unlikely to ever utter a word of complaint about the desecration and persecution of Christians, Jews and others unfortunate enough to live within their midst.

It is also worth wondering if there even exists a sizable population of moderate Muslims. The MSM, our government, most civilized people seem to believe that if they insist there exists a moderate Islam, then it must be so. While I have no doubt there are moderate Muslims, their lack of visibility is troubling. When even in this country, where dissenters are safer than most anywhere else, a rally for Muslims against terror draws minimal numbers, it is troubling.  Whenever there is an article written, or a public stance taken, opposing the Islamic fascists, the brave individual Muslim puts their life at risk, receives condemnation from official organs of Islam, and often receives death threat fatwas. They receive nothing but calumny from the governments which are supposed to be our allies in this war. The official Egyptian press and the state sponsored Imams in state supported mosques, regularly spew out the worst hatred of infidels (that is Americans and Israelis, especially, but with special vitriol for those Europeans who have the temerity to object to their increasing dhimmitude) and apostates. Most Islamic states have death penalties for apostasy, for desecration of the Koran, and for any of a number of offenses against Islam; at the same time, Shariah law openly, arrogantly, discriminates against those who are not sufficiently Islamic, and grants almost no rights to non Muslims.

Thus, sadly, we can expect minimal help from any Moderate Muslims who might exist, and only the minimal levels of assistance that they can get away with from the so-called Moderate Islamic states in the world. If our MSM and their allies in the Academic, Left wing, and European elites, succeed at disarming us, and the Islamofascists husband their resources, the fight in which we are in the early stages may yet feature all of Islam against the civilized world. The fall out (literal and figurative) will touch everyone on the planet before it is over.