Secretary of State Clinton expresses outrage over the way women are being attacked. Wow, Hillary, who saw that coming when a Western-friendly, secular strongman was overthrown and replaced by the military in conjunction with the Muslim Brotherhood?
As I pointed out sometime ago, the Arab riots glorified by Beltway brainiacs, and immortalized by Time ragazine as Person of the Year, were bread riots. They were used by the Al Qaeda-like extremist Muslim groups in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya to gain new, stronger footing. We won't hear much about it on the news, but there are reports that Christians in Egypt are being subjected to intensified persecution. Who do you suppose is doing that? The Amish? Those guys really get around. Oh, wait, maybe it's the Juuuuus.
It is sure starting to look more and more like 1979. Abandoning the Shah and allowing his regime to be overthrown by a "popular" Islamist uprising turned out so well.
I have trouble deciding who to blame for all this. Carter started it by giving us a full terrorist state in Iran. Bush is guilty. The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan should have been pitched as what I am convinced military planners envisioned -- a two-pronged pincher movement to isolate and destroy Iran -- the real head of the snake. Democracy in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, or Egypt for that matter, is a joke. That should never have been our goal. Nation-building should be left to the survivors. After American contractors were brutally murdered and hung from a bridge in Fallujah early in the Iraq War, the city should have been surrounded and sealed and residents given 24 hours to evacuate through authorized checkpoints. Then it should have been turned into a smoking crater.
The people in this region understand nothing except strength. They cannot be trusted. There is no reason to negotiate with them. You either adapt to their culture as British agents often did (see The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or Buchan's Greenmantle), or you destroy it. There is no in-between. Bush tried to be noble and magnanimous. The cost in American lives, money, and momentum has been fatal to our efforts there. The incursion should have massed forces on the borders of Iran and, from there, bombed Iranian cities and nuclear facilities. Then we should have left the practitioners of the Religion of Peace in the region to murder one another in peace, with a note to the Saudis that it will be Mecca next time America is attacked.
While we were at it, it would have been an excellent time to tell the UN to go build themselves a headquarters in Somalia or some other Third World hellhole.
But we didn't. Thus we are left with the ineptitude of Obama and the weakness of Clinton while being subjected to the staged assassination of Zombie bin Laden who most likely died in a Tora Bora cave before the end of 2002.
At this point, our best way forward is to disengage from the Middle East and seal the Mexican and Canadian borders.
I hope our days of nation building are over. The "nice guy" invader approach doesn't appear to be working. In retrospect, even though I supported them, I believe the Iraq and Afghan wars, as fought, were a mistake.
ReplyDeleteAs I told my liberal friend on facebook as he was celebrating the Arab Spring in Egypt.
I hope it doesn't become an I-ran re-run.
Even if we, as a nation, had the political will to flatten a country and walk away, I don't think Russia or China would allow it.
It certainly a mistake the way they were fought. The military does a good job, but you just can't try to take it easy on the enemy -- which is what we've been doing since Korea.
ReplyDeleteI talked my wife into watching Blackhawk Down with me a few months ago, and she could not believe that they didn't more or less "nuke 'em from orbit." Why put good men into untenable situations to fix some rat-infested hellhole that is never going to change?
You're probably right about the Russians and Chinese -- maybe even the French.