The huge sums that continue to be spent on Muslim countries should also include the two trillion dollars -- Joseph Stiglitz, with a Nobel Prize in Economics, offers a higher estimate -- already spent, or committed to being spent on the war in Iraq.Stiglitz believes that when such expenses as lifetime care for tens of thousands of severely wounded American soldiers are factored in, the true cost for the war in Iraq to American taxpayers will be close to three trillion dollars.
And for what result? How has the Camp of Islam (a camp that unites only on -- but that is quite enough -- its hostility to all Infidels, and in the deep belief that Islam has a right spread all over the world, and then to become dominant everywhere, so that Dar al-Harb becomes enrolled in Dar al-Islam) been weakened by our Iraq venture? So far it has not been. And in fact, the Bush Administration, once it realized the justification for the war, the weapons of mass destruction, were not to be found, rapidly changed its goal, and presented it, in terms always vague and confused, as being that of what I have called the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project. In that Project, American intervention, and tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in American aid went to Iraq, a country that has the second largest, or even perhaps the largest, oil reserves of any country in the world, but apparently no one dared suggest it borrow against future earnings. This was done in order to keep Iraqis united (by bribing some to end their insurgency) and prosperous. And that this prosperous and unified Iraq would bring “freedom” to “ordinary moms and dads” -- as if “freedom” could be dropped from a plane onto the waiting Cargo Cultists below, who would simply pick up the parachuted packages and enjoy their contents without having to modify their own views, their own Muslim beliefs and what those beliefs mean for the possibility of a real, advanced, Western-style democracy, with guarantees of individual freedoms and legal equality for all.
Part of this strategy was either to ignore the deep-seated violence and aggression that guarantee -- I guarantee it -- that Iraq will descend once again into violence, sectarian and ethnic, no matter how long the Americans continue to hold on, or what sums are poured into that country, or, if the sectarian and ethnic fissures were recognized, to do everything possible to minimize them, to bind up these fissures, rather than to regard them, soberly and coldly, as offering a way to divide and demoralize and thus to weaken, the Camp of Islam and Jihad.
And so for this sentimentalism and this ignorance of Islam, we suffer now, and we will suffer more in the future. We suffer economically here at home, because our political elites will not, cannot, simply refuse to, study and come to understand Islam. We and our children will not have the kind of Social Security benefits and the Medicare benefits that we all expect and to which we are certainly entitled, because Washington is still full of people who have not been able to come up with a strategy for dealing intelligently, in a way that husbands rather than squanders resources, with Islam. It is crazy to continue to shift Infidel resources to Muslim states. They should, ideally, be allowed to have the Camp of Islam weakened and its appeal to Infidels in the West diminished, from the pre-existing fissures (sectarian, ethnic, and economic) that exist within, and among, the Muslim countries, and two of which fissures -- the sectarian and ethnic -- are presented on a platter in Iraq.
It is madness not to allow Muslim states to have to endure the consequences of their own political, economic, and social failures. It was only the recognition of those failures, and their connection to Islam itself, that allowed Kemal Pasha Ataturk to systematically constrain, through legislation, the political and social power of Islam, and thus to create a large secular class in Turkey, a class that, by and large, exists in something like the same moral and intellectual universe as non-Muslim Western man, even if a residual filial piety to Islamic "civilisation" still, for some, gets in the way. It is madness for Western policy-makers not to recognize that the Jihad against the entire non-Muslim world will go on forever, and therefore that a strategy that relies on Infidel resources being spent, on men, and money, and materiel being squandered, is the very worst sort of strategy for a war without end. (It isn't even, as Cheney and others thought they were so bold to call it, a "Long War," but a war that continues as long as Islam animates the souls of its adherents). It is not, primarily, a military campaign, but a war that is carried on by Muslims using whatever instruments are available and prove effective.
It is important, of course, to recognize that no Muslim state should be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or if it has already acquired then to add to the arsenal, or to be able to deliver them. It is not too late to prevent Pakistan from acquiring those means of delivery, and to prevent it from letting the weapons fall into the hands of those who are even more fanatically Muslim than the generals and officers in the I.S.I. and elsewhere.
It is certainly not too late to do everything necessary to make sure that Iran, already in the hands of a Shi'a version of the Taliban, does not acquire nuclear weapons. That responsibility at present is not being met by the United States, as a world power, as the leading Infidel power. But still worse, most horrifyingly of all, it apparently thinks it should prevent Israel from taking on Iran, when Israel is willing to take on the task and merely asks for some American cooperation (bunker-busters, access to satellite intelligence, and so on). Israel will risk the lives of its own brave pilots, who many times before have done what the Americans should themselves have done (the bombing of the Osirak Reactor in Iraq in 1981, that ended Saddam Hussein's project to acquire nuclear weapons, or just a year ago, the bombing of the nuclear installation in Syria that may have come from North Korea or Iran, or possibly been supplied by both Iran and North Korea, in quiet collaboration).
What is even more maddening is that even if one thought that, here and there, economic -- but not military aid -- made sense, (I don't think it does) the failure to demand that the fabulously rich Saudis, and other Gulf Arabs, supply the money to the poorer members of the Umma does not make sense. Why, the oil revenues that have made the Muslim members of OPEC the recipients of more than twelve trillion dollars since 1973 alone, and that continue to give them a steady income of hundreds of billions annually, though they do not have to lift a finger to earn those colossal sums, should be talked about in the Western capitals as money that the rich Arabs should share with their fellow members of the Umma, in Pakistan, in Indonesia, everywhere.
The mere discussion of this will be a Good Thing. It will focus attention on the fabulous unmerited wealth of the rich Arabs. It will increase resentment of them among the long-suffering Western taxpayers, who are forced unasked, and most unwillingly, to transfer their wealth to people whom, those taxpayers know better than their elites, are inculcated with hatred toward not just the West, but All the Rest -- that is, all of the non-Muslim world and its inhabitants who continue to resist the demands and steady encroachments of Muslims who have so foolishly been allowed to settle in the midst of non-Muslim countries, within the very borders that Muslims are taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb.
And more importantly, the American and other Western governments should stop pouring tens of billions into Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and tens of billions into Egypt, into Jordan, into the soi-disant "Palestinians" (the Gazan Arabs and the "West Bank" Arabs whose sole reason for being "Palestinians" is to camouflage, as a "national liberation struggle" of a "tiny people," the Muslim Arab Jihad, the unending Jihad, against the truly tiny, permanently besieged, and amazingly brave Infidel nation-state of Israel).
The ignorance of our leaders, which by this point is a willful ignorance and therefore inexcusable, is not only the explanation for the confusion, and comical or rather tragicomical series of surprises that characterize all of our recent dealings with Muslim states, and our little projects to hold them together, and to make their people prosperous. Consider all the effort that went into Iraq, and the "surprise" now being registered, a dawning recognition that in Iraq the Shi'a have no intention of relinquishing any of the power they have gained, and where the Sunnis have no intention of acquiescing in their loss of the power they had in the disguised Sunni despotism of Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and where the Arabs have no intention of honoring the autonomy that the Kurds have won, but are preparing to go in for the kill when the Americans leave. And surprise after surprise in Pakistan, where the Pakistani generals have been taking the credulous Americans for a ride over many decades, and American money, American taxpayers, have actually been the suppliers of the discretionary income that made the nuclear project of that thieving metallurgist A. Q. Khan, and the subsequent production of nearly a hundred nuclear weapons, possible. And now American money is making the enlargement of that nuclear arsenal possible.
What does it take for American policymakers, even those who are as stolid and unimaginative as Robert Gates, for example, to take a look at Western Europe, at NATO, and to study what is being accomplished through the deployment of the Money Weapon and campaigns of Da'wa (does Gates even know what the phrase "campaigns of Da'wa" means?), and above all, through demographic conquest? Does anyone in Washington dare to consider what the texts of Islam say, what the tenets of Islam cause Muslims to think and cause them to do, what the attitudes of those raised in societies suffused with Islam, with the atmospherics of Islam, will naturally believe in, and often act upon? And this is true even when Muslims are, living in the West, feignedly and temporarily, giving the signs of being what we too quickly call "moderate Muslims," without carefully considering what that phrase would have to mean if we were to take true comfort in it.
The Washington elites are squandering everything, because their wasteful policies reflect an inability to come to grips with the meaning, and menace, of Islam.
We need a different set of people. Do they exist? I think they do. Among the more than a million soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilians who have been in Iraq, or in much smaller numbers in Afghanistan, or in even smaller numbers, been dealing with the shape-shifting meretricious smilers of Pakistan, there must surely be those, especially below the level of generals and other high officers, who have begun to grasp, and to see the need to grasp, the nature of Islam. These people should be encouraged, should be located and promoted. And the same goes for those who exhibit signs of realism, and wish, in either party, to become members of Congress. It should not be an embarrassment for anyone to raise the matter of what Islam inculcates.
The messianic sentimentalism of George Bush, who is grateful to “religion” (Christianity saved him from alcoholism and life as a scapegrace), caused him to regard anything to which the word “religion” was affixed with a deep respect. He could not allow himself to believe that Islam was not a “religion” like any of the others. He could not recognize that it was not “extremists” but mainstream Muslims who accepted Islam in toto, its politics and geopolitics. They accepted Islam as a Total Belief-System that attempts to regulate every area of life, and that is based on a central idea: the division of the world between Muslim and Non-Muslim, Believer and Infidel, and the necessity of permanent hostility toward the Infidel by the Believer, and the duty of “struggle” or “jihad” to remove all obstacles, everywhere, to the dominance of Islam. This Bush, and Blair, and many others, simply could not see. Hence the unwillingness to soberly analyze the ways in which this situation could be exploited for the only purposes that justified the American effort, once Iraq had been invaded, and once the regime of Saddam Hussein dismantled for all time, and once power had effectively transferred from Sunni to Shi’a Arabs, never to be given up. The only purpose that justified this effort would have been the purpose of weakening the Camp of Islam by exploiting the pre-existing sectarian (Sunni and Shi’a) and ethnic (Arab and Kurd) fissures within Iraq, that, if allowed to develop further, and if they could have effects, as they certainly would have, beyond the borders of Iraq, could do much to unsettle and weaken the Camp of Islam. And that would be a good thing.
We need intelligent and wary people, intelligent enough to know they need to educate themselves about Islam, and wary enough to avoid the espositos, the armstrongs, and the smilers of MESA Nostra who offer their "expertise" and "guidance," "as Muslims themselves," to what they will so carefully bowdlerize as Islam. We need them to read and re-read the texts of Islam, to learn something of the 1350-year history of Muslim conquest, to familiarize themselves not only with Patai’s “The Arab Mind” but with books on what the Qur’an says, such as the previous guides, and the forthcoming one by Robert Spencer, and books on the dhimmi (Bat Ye’or’s “The Dhimmi” and “The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam” come to mind), and such anthologies as “The Legacy of Jihad” (ed. Andrew Bostom). And since Islam does not change, and the behavior of Believers does not change, the studies by the great and true scholars of Islam -- Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Lammens, Jeffrey, and dozens of others -- have to be found, republished, studied with care. And finally, much more attention should be given to the growing body of evidence -- including personal testimony -- as to what Islam and Islamic societies are like from within. Here the books by Ibn Warraq (“Why I Am Not A Muslim”) and articles (on the criteria that define Fascism, as supplied by Umberto Eco, and how Islam meets every one of them) and by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (“Infidel”), and both the book and the website conducted by Ali Sina (www.faithfreedom.org), with contributions by so many apostates from Islam, and the brave appearances of the outspoken Wafa Sultan, are all important.
This is not asking very much. We have a right to demand that before another trillion dollars, or even another hundred billion dollars, is squandered on Muslim peoples and polities, that those who are in policy-making positions learn about Islam. They’ve got to stop allowing themselves to take tuition on the Arabs and Muslims -- the way Paul Wolfowitz did from both Ahmad Chalabi and from his Arab divorcee girlfriend -- from those who remain Muslims. It is amazing that right on Holbrooke’s staff, for example, is Vali Nasr -- whose father is a famous apologist for Islam. Could anyone imagine such a man as Vali Nasr, however “moderate” a Muslim he may be, suggesting the merits of a policy of doing nothing to avoid, and even encouraging, Sunni-on-Shi’a violence? Of course he can’t, and he won’t. No Muslim will advocate policies truly designed to weaken Islam. Many of them refuse to recognize the real nature of Islam, for to do so would be to turn their backs, so they think, on their families, and on their pasts, and on the civilization from which they have sprung. Only the apostates, only those who have made the break, can serve as guides to Islam, from among that population that has been, through no fault of its own, born into Islam.
Thanks Jihad Watch
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