We have at this point two candidates. Neither one is nearly sufficient in his grasp of this problem. One, McCain, apparently is willing to go down with the ship of fools that is the Administration, and its mad effort, and squandering of men, money, materiel, to bring "democracy" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. McCain talks of "victory" in Iraq without telling us in what that "victory" would consist -- and a "victory" can only consist, for Americans, in an outcome that weakens the Camp of Islam and therefore the Camp of Jihad. A unified, even prosperous Iraq, will not weaken the Camp of Islam. It will not have allowed the ethnic and sectarian fissures within Iraq to grow, and to have desirable destabilizing effects on the immediate neighbors, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia.
McCain is too easy on himself, for he does not follow the matter further, until even he would see that the Iraq policy, or the Tarbaby Iraq policy, does not make sense. McCain, like Bush, is a sentimentalist. He wishes good things for people rather than seeing some of them as a dangerous enemy that needs to be weakened. Nor does he see that the very best policy will be one that will force Muslims themselves (and long before that, force Infidels) to understand that the political, economic, social, intellectual and moral failures of Islamic states and societies are a direct result of Islam itself. That is not hard to show. The themes have been adumbrated, and more than adumbrated, at this website many times. McCain will have to jettison his insistence on clinging to Tarbaby Iraq, and he has to begin by seeing that "war" is much more than a matter of the merely military.
What about Obama? He is opposed to the war in Iraq, but his opposition does not appear to be of the right kind. After all, Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill were also early opponents of the war, and their worldview is a dangerous one. It is clear that Obama has some kind of notion -- he's a sentimentalist like McCain -- that his very being the son of a Kenyan father, and his childhood years spent outside the United States, somehow make him particularly sensitive to, and particularly attractive to, others who would otherwise be unsympathetic to America. It's the kind of thing that puts one in mind of the teacher who choose books for students to read not on the basis of literary merit, but solely on the basis of the racial, ethnic, religious, or other background of the writers.
Barack Obama may be fascinated by his own heritage, and may have all sorts of racial or postracial or transracial considerations that may begin to fascinate others, but at this point, the most important foreign policy question is how to rescue Western Europe, the historic West, from growing and seemingly inexorable islamization. Can someone who looks to Kenya for a genetic memory that he has made much of, and to a few years as a child in Indonesia for what is essentially merely a variant on the sinclair-lewis babbittish "travel-is-so-broadening" idea, be expected to feel keenly what is happening to France, Italy, Great Britain, and all the other countries under assault, and where a new kind of transatlantic alliance is necessary, is indispensable? Will Barack Obama, with his declared interests, background, and affinities, feel this need as keenly as he should, as he must?
Barack Obama's "apostasy" is not the problem. His campaign has stated that he never considered himself to be a Muslim. Those who keep harping on the notion that he was once a Muslim at or around the age of ten, and that he must admit to this, are setting themselves up for ridicule. What is worrisome is not that he was once a Muslim, or still more absurdly, considered to be a "secret Muslim," but that he is ignorant of Islam, and has not made any effort to investigate it, and may be sentimental about it, based on personal history: his desire to identify with his absentee Kenyan father, the fact that his mother's second husband was also a Muslim; his childhood experience in Indonesia, which may make him think he knows something about Islam but was as idiosyncratic and unrepresentative an experience of Islam -- as was that "experience of Islam" that a much older, but not wiser, Ambassador Paul Wolfowitz had when he was the American ambassador in Indonesia. Like Obama, Wolfowitz did not understand what Islam was about, and took his experience there -- with everyone trying to woo and win him ("yes, we really hope to establish diplomatic relations with Israel") -- as normative. This naiveté about Islam was not undone, but was reinforced, by Wolfowitz’s Arab girlfriend. No doubt she a lady with all the right intentions, but as she was herself a would-be reformer or tamer of Islam, in that very role she offered false hopes, and misrepresented the meaning, and menace, of Islam.
The problem with Barack Obama's supposed Muslim connection is that he has not shown any inclination to ponder the nature of Islam at its essence, and not in the modified unrepresentative form in which he may have, fleetingly and personally, encountered it. And a greater problem is a lack of historical knowledge, and a naiveté (without the viciousness) about the world that rivals that of Jimmy Carter, and a trust in such obviously disturbing "advisers" as the vicious, and naively realpolitiking, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
There's plenty to worry about with Barack Obama and his more-than-sufficient display, so far, of all the wrong foreign-policy instincts, including his dreamy belief that meeting and talking with representatives of Iran would do some good. Some say, what could be the harm in merely meeting and talking? The harm could be great. It would justify, it would dignify, it would give a boost in the minds of its own disaffected subjects, to the Islamic Republic of Iran. It would encoil us in useless, protracted discussions with those who are past masters at deception and deliberate delay, and who treat such meetings not as occasions for the exchange of views that we are expected to believe have not already, and repeatedly, been exchanged, but rather as instruments of war: the propaganda war that Muslims engage in, and we, alas, do not.
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