View Full Version : Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America
I guess instead we wait and see...
Wanted: A Grand Strategy for America
NEWSWEEK’s new columnist on Obama’s Egypt debacle and the vacuum it exposes.
by Niall FergusonFebruary 14, 2011
“The statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all.” Thus Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian statesman who united Germany and thereby reshaped Europe’s balance of power nearly a century and a half ago.
Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely.
In Bismarck’s case it was not so much God’s coattails he caught as the revolutionary wave of mid-19th-century German nationalism. And he did more than catch it; he managed to surf it in a direction of his own choosing. The wave Obama just missed—again—is the revolutionary wave of Middle Eastern democracy. It has surged through the region twice since he was elected: once in Iran in the summer of 2009, the second time right across North Africa, from Tunisia all the way down the Red Sea to Yemen. But the swell has been biggest in Egypt, the Middle East’s most populous country.
In each case, the president faced stark alternatives. He could try to catch the wave, Bismarck style, by lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in a direction advantageous to American interests. Or he could do nothing and let the forces of reaction prevail. In the case of Iran, he did nothing, and the thugs of the Islamic Republic ruthlessly crushed the demonstrations. This time around, in Egypt, it was worse. He did both—some days exhorting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave, other days drawing back and recommending an “orderly transition.”
The result has been a foreign-policy debacle. The president has alienated everybody: not only Mubarak’s cronies in the military, but also the youthful crowds in the streets of Cairo. Whoever ultimately wins, Obama loses. And the alienation doesn’t end there. America’s two closest friends in the region—Israel and Saudi Arabia—are both disgusted. The Saudis, who dread all manifestations of revolution, are appalled at Washington’s failure to resolutely prop up Mubarak. The Israelis, meanwhile, are dismayed by the administration’s apparent cluelessness.
Last week, while other commentators ran around Cairo’s Tahrir Square, hyperventilating about what they saw as an Arab 1989, I flew to Tel Aviv for the annual Herzliya security conference. The consensus among the assembled experts on the Middle East? A colossal failure of American foreign policy.
This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried. The president himself is not wholly to blame. Although cosmopolitan by both birth and upbringing, Obama was an unusually parochial politician prior to his election, judging by his scant public pronouncements on foreign-policy issues.
Yet no president can be expected to be omniscient. That is what advisers are for. The real responsibility for the current strategic vacuum lies not with Obama himself, but with the National Security Council, and in particular with the man who ran it until last October: retired Gen. James L. Jones. I suspected at the time of his appointment that General Jones was a poor choice. A big, bluff Marine, he once astonished me by recommending that Turkish troops might lend the United States support in Iraq. He seemed mildly surprised when I suggested the Iraqis might resent such a reminder of centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule.
The best national-security advisers have combined deep knowledge of international relations with an ability to play the Machiavellian Beltway game, which means competing for the president’s ear against the other would-be players in the policymaking process: not only the defense secretary but also the secretary of state and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency. No one has ever done this better than Henry Kissinger. But the crucial thing about Kissinger as national-security adviser was not the speed with which he learned the dark arts of interdepartmental turf warfare. It was the skill with which he, in partnership with Richard Nixon, forged a grand strategy for the United States at a time of alarming geopolitical instability.
The essence of that strategy was, first, to prioritize (for example, détente with the Soviets before human-rights issues within the U.S.S.R.) and then to exert pressure by deliberately linking key issues. In their hardest task—salvaging peace with honor in Indochina by preserving the independence of South Vietnam—Nixon and Kissinger ultimately could not succeed. But in the Middle East they were able to eject the Soviets from a position of influence and turn Egypt from a threat into a malleable ally. And their overtures to China exploited the divisions within the Communist bloc, helping to set Beijing on an epoch-making new course of economic openness.
The contrast between the foreign policy of the Nixon-Ford years and that of President Jimmy Carter is a stark reminder of how easily foreign policy can founder when there is a failure of strategic thinking. The Iranian Revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.
Remind you of anything? “This is what happens when you get caught by surprise,” an anonymous American official told The New York Times last week. “We’ve had endless strategy sessions for the past two years on Mideast peace, on containing Iran. And how many of them factored in the possibility that Egypt moves from stability to turmoil? None.”
I can think of no more damning indictment of the administration’s strategic thinking than this: it never once considered a scenario in which Mubarak faced a popular revolt. Yet the very essence of rigorous strategic thinking is to devise such a scenario and to think through the best responses to them, preferably two or three moves ahead of actual or potential adversaries. It is only by doing these things—ranking priorities and gaming scenarios—that a coherent foreign policy can be made. The Israelis have been hard at work doing this. All the president and his NSC team seem to have done is to draft touchy-feely speeches like the one he delivered in Cairo early in his presidency.
These were his words back in June 2009:
America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.
Those lines will come back to haunt Obama if, as cannot be ruled out, the ultimate beneficiary of his bungling in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains by far the best organized opposition force in the country—and wholly committed to the restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia. Would such an outcome advance “tolerance and the dignity of all human beings” in Egypt? Somehow, I don’t think so.
Grand strategy is all about the necessity of choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran’s ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an economic rival, to guard against a Russian “reconquista” of Eastern Europe—and so on. The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, “I am not George W. Bush” is no substitute for a strategy.
Bismarck knew how to choose. He understood that riding the nationalist wave would enable Prussia to become the dominant force in Germany, but that thereafter the No. 1 objective must be to keep France and Russia from uniting against his new Reich. When asked for his opinion about colonizing Africa, Bismarck famously replied: “My map of Africa lies in Europe. Here lies Russia and here lies France, and we are in the middle. That is my map of Africa.”
Tragically, no one knows where Barack Obama’s map of the Middle East is. At best, it is in the heartland states of America, where the fate of his presidency will be decided next year, just as Jimmy Carter’s was back in 1980.
At worst, he has no map at all.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/wanted-a-grand-strategy-for-america.print.html
I guess instead we wait and see...
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/02/13/wanted-a-grand-strategy-for-america.print.html
This is becomig very reminiscent of 1980. Different events....same calamity:mad:
Jimmy Carter and the UN hand Rhodesia over to the ANC (Communist), then he screws the Shah and basically hands Iran over to a bunch of nuts, the South Korean President was assassinated in October 1979, Iranian Hostages taken in November, the Soviets invade Afgahnistan in December and in 1980, our embassies are all under attack and the world is left wondering what's next.
I arrived in the 82d around May of 1980 in time to become part of Jimmy's Rapid Deployment Force. We just new a good day to die was coming....
Jimmy's bumbling gave us Reagan and we recovered. I hope theres another Reagan out there for this mess but, I don't see him yet.
:munchin.....jd
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Richard :munchin
Post hoc ergo propter hoc
Respice, adspice, prospice?
silentreader
02-17-2011, 21:40
To my thinking, this article makes much more sense. (http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/17/why_egypt_says_nothing_about_obama-and_5_other_thoughts_about_the_revolution) Ferguson claims that Egypt was some giant failure on the part of Obama's administration, but offers no suggestions for what should have been done. Only that we need a grand strategy.
When drama fills the headlines, reason deserts the pundits. Here are just a few thoughts:
1. Egypt says nothing about Obama. The United States had no control over events in Egypt. It is silly to proclaim that events in Egypt proved Obama either feckless or brilliant in his foreign policy. All he could do is watch, make carefully-moderated public statements, and place a few private phone calls. Making that a test of his foreign policy acumen is like judging the Super Bowl by the coin toss. Obama's foreign policy mettle is tested on issues in which he actually has a role to play, like the war in Afghanistan.
2. If Obama gets any credit, so does Bush. Obama rightly sided (albeit cautiously) with the protesters. His pro-democracy rhetoric would have been stupendously hypocritical and opportunistic if George W. Bush hadn't given Obama legs to stand on. Bush reversed decades of U.S. foreign policy by publicly criticizing Egypt and Saudi Arabia for their political oppression. Obama sounded more plausible as a result when he threw Mubarak under the bus and reached out a hand to the protesters.
3. Despite the basic goodness of people rallying against autocracy and corruption, their movement won't seamlessly usher in a golden age of good governance. Recent pro-democracy movements across the developing world are largely discouraging about the long-term effects of such popular outbursts.
The Georgian government never succeeded in exercising full control over its territory after the 2003 Rose Revolution. Disputes with breakaway regions helped trigged the 2008 war with Russia, which hobbled Georgian sovereignty.
Six years after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine toppled Viktor Yanukovych for corruption and fraud, Ukrainians reelected him.
The 2005 Cedar Revolution in Lebanon created an ephemeral sense of national unity that vanished in 2007. The national assembly couldn't agree on a President, the office went vacant, violence erupted in Beirut, and the country veered towards civil war. A national unity government was patched together in 2008. It collapsed last month.
The 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan installed Kurmanbek Bakiyev as President on a platform of reform and clean government. Bakiyev was as bad as his predecessor. He faced down violent protests in 2007, rigged his reelection in 2009, and finally caved to more protests and violence when he fled the country in 2010.
4. Be careful what you ask for. Every day I expected The Onion to run the headline, "Egyptians Demand Military Rule," because that, for now, is exactly what they have got. Democracy is possible, contrary to cultural determinists who think Arabs are barred by the laws of history from self-government -- but neither is it inevitable, or even particularly easy. The eventual emergence of good government and democratic elections would be a better test of Obama's handling of Egypt than parsing his utterances of the last month.
5. No one knows how the Muslim Brotherhood will react, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Elections have a track record of blunting the hard edge of some revolutionary, illiberal movements (the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq), and empowering others (the Nazis). The Brotherhood's greater freedom of action in the post-Mubarak Egypt is something to watch closely. The Brotherhood's choices in the coming months and years will be more important to Egypt and the Middle East than the toppling of one autocrat. They may be a bellwether for political Islamist movements across the world.
6. James Clapper should resign.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Richard :munchin
So in other words, believing that the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise?
interesting
incarcerated
02-18-2011, 00:38
1. Egypt says nothing about Obama. The United States had no control over events in Egypt. It is silly to proclaim that events in Egypt proved Obama either feckless or brilliant in his foreign policy. All he could do is watch, make carefully-moderated public statements, and place a few private phone calls. Making that a test of his foreign policy acumen is like judging the Super Bowl by the coin toss. Obama's foreign policy mettle is tested on issues in which he actually has a role to play, like the war in Afghanistan.
This argues essentially the same thing that the Newsweek piece does, namely, that Obama was not directing or influencing a particular outcome in the Egyptian unrest. It wasn’t him. He wasn't a factor.
As we have already discussed, we have this:
http://www.professionalsoldiers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=32109
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/8289686/Egypt-protests-Americas-secret-backing-for-rebel-leaders-behind-uprising.html#
And now this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/world/middleeast/17diplomacy.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Secret Report Ordered by Obama Identified Potential Uprisings
By MARK LANDLER
Published: February 16, 2011
WASHINGTON — President Obama ordered his advisers last August to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday.
Mr. Obama’s order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said….
“There’s no question Egypt was very much on the mind of the president,” said a senior official who helped draft the report and who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss its findings. “You had all the unknowns created by Egypt’s succession picture — and Egypt is the anchor of the region.”
….The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.
The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo…
Indeed, except for Egypt, the officials refused to discuss countries in detail. The report singles out four for close scrutiny, which an official said ran the gamut: one that is trying to move toward change, another that has resisted any change and two with deep strategic ties to the United States as well as religious tensions. Those characteristics would suggest Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
By issuing a directive, Mr. Obama was also pulling the topic of political change out of regular meetings on diplomatic, commercial or military relations with Arab states. In those meetings, one official said, the strategic interests loom so large that it is almost impossible to discuss reform efforts.
The study has helped shape other messages, like a speech Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave in Qatar in January, in which she criticized Arab leaders for resisting change.
“We really pushed the question of who was taking the lead in reform,” said an official. “Would pushing reform harm relations with the Egyptian military? Doesn’t the military have an interest in reform?”
Mr. Obama also pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not. He is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.
While the report is guiding the administration’s response to events in the Arab world, it has not yet been formally submitted — and given the pace of events in the region, an official said, it is still a work in progress.
You just may get it.
We shall soon see if the second part of the Egyptian Constitution remains or if the Constitution is rewritten to include all peoples and all faiths.
My money is on "remains" and that means...............
Niall Ferguson is well on his way to being this generation's version of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
IMO, it is unsound for a historian to comment on what a sitting head of state has done nor not done without access to documentary evidence. (This point is the second biggest lesson of Eisenhower revisionism.)
Ferguson's implication that the U.S. does not have a "coherent" grand strategy flies in the face of the open source document available here (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefa ult%2Ffiles%2Frss_viewer%2Fnational_security_strat egy.pdf&ei=VfheTey4KYissAPB0IXCCA&usg=AFQjCNGFojGF51OBMdOOydQZXriPCQJPwQ). The question isn't of coherence but of execution and efficacy.
incarcerated
02-19-2011, 00:29
Ferguson's implication that the U.S. does not have a "coherent" grand strategy flies in the face of the open source document available here (http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CBcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.whitehouse.gov%2Fsites%2Fdefa ult%2Ffiles%2Frss_viewer%2Fnational_security_strat egy.pdf&ei=VfheTey4KYissAPB0IXCCA&usg=AFQjCNGFojGF51OBMdOOydQZXriPCQJPwQ). The question isn't of coherence but of execution and efficacy.
Eight attempts to open the link, including a computer restart and accessing it from Google, all failed. Must be something wrong with my computer. Too bad. I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how turning our back on an important, peaceful ally and siding with soft revolutionaries who seek to overthrow its legitimate government is in the national security interests of the United States. What does that do to the efficacy of our other alliances, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan? For that matter, how are American national security interests furthered by conducting outreach to Islamic ‘activists’ in Egypt and France, while secretly studying the Middle Eastern and North African nations for vulnerabilities to revolution?
Do we have a national security document, or an unstated strategy?
silentreader
02-19-2011, 01:11
Eight attempts to open the link, including a computer restart and accessing it from Google, all failed. Must be something wrong with my computer. Too bad. I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how turning our back on an important, peaceful ally and siding with revolutionaries who seek to overthrow its legitimate government is in the national security interests of the United States. What does that do to the efficacy of our other alliances, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan? For that matter, how are American national security interests furthered by conducting outreach to Islamic ‘activists’ in Egypt and France, while secretly studying the Middle Eastern and North African nations for vulnerabilities to revolution?
Do we have a national security document, or an unstated strategy?
Sigaba's link worked for me, try a new browser if it's not working for you (I'm using Chrome). To answer your last question, it's a 52 page open source national security strategy, so yes, we do have a document.
As for your first question, what alternatives did Obama have? How would Reagan, for example, have dealt with the situation any differently? The people of Egypt seem to have overwhelmingly decided that Mubarak had to go. It is hard for me to imagine a way the US could have interfered and kept Mubarak in power.
Finally, you call Mubarak's government legitimate. What is your criteria for legitimacy? The country has been in a continuous state of emergency rule for 30 years and has never had open or free elections. It's been notorious for corruption and inefficiency.
I think your concerns are well founded- Egypt was a useful ally in the Middle East and is not the only country we have unsavory relations with. There's certainly potential for all of this to go very wrong. But there's also hope that things will get better. The ideal outcome of all of this is that we maintain our partnership with the country while helping it usher in a new, peaceful and more open government. Had we made a stand against the protestors (which seems to me like it would have been futile) the odds of this best-case scenario would have dramatically dropped and Mubarak would have died in a year or two anyways, leaving us in the same place with a lot less leverage.
Perhaps there's another angle that I don't see. I am genuinely interested to know what you think they US could have done differently, as I really can't conceive of an action we could have taken that would have saved Mubarak.
incarcerated
02-19-2011, 03:39
As for your first question, what alternatives did Obama have? How would Reagan, for example, have dealt with the situation any differently? The people of Egypt seem to have overwhelmingly decided that Mubarak had to go. It is hard for me to imagine a way the US could have interfered and kept Mubarak in power.
He could have kept silent. Exactly how is his support for the revolutionaries consistent with the national security interests of the United States?
Finally, you call Mubarak's government legitimate. What is your criteria for legitimacy? The country has been in a continuous state of emergency rule for 30 years and has never had open or free elections. It's been notorious for corruption and inefficiency.
The emergency rule was in place to control the Muslim Brotherhood and domestic extremists. Those are the only people likely to derive freedom from this revolution. Yes, they have no elections. So what? Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is an elected official: does this mean that Iran is a Democracy? IMO, without Western traditions of human rights and the concept of the individual (none of which have ever existed east of Palestine), Freedom and Democracy in the Middle East will mean little more than they did in the Soviet Union.
The Mubarak government was legitimate insofar as it was recognized and accepted by the United States until these events. We did not have a problem with the Egyptian government 60 days ago. We maintained normal relations with them. They were an ally. Are all governments that are subject to substantial demonstrations, by definition, illegitimate? The MSM would have us think so.
I am genuinely interested to know what you think they US could have done differently, as I really can't conceive of an action we could have taken that would have saved Mubarak.
I am not particularly interested in how Obama could have saved Mubarak. Given that the White House has been working clandestinely with the demonstrators for months, saving Mubarak was never in the cards. My interest is, having done what he has done by supporting the demonstrators, how does Obama explain himself? His course of action has alienated Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and France. It has pleased Iran. By supporting the demonstrators, we have helped destabilize the region. This is all being sold to us, vigorously, as Freedom and Democracy. Those are terms which we understand, and cherish. It is, in my opinion, a sales job. IMO, the Middle East doesn’t want Democracy: it wants the Quran.
So in other words, believing that the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise?
interesting
No. http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/post-hoc.html
For anyone having trouble with the link in post #9, you can find it by going to the following link and scrolling down and then clicking on the blue link titled "Read the full National Security Strategy (pdf)":
http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/defense
And can often be the case in foreign affairs, the following may aptly apply:
“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.”
- Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin
And so it goes...
Richard :munchin
Here I am going to shed some light on my ignorance but here goes:
He (Obama) is the leader of a country that decided long ago that we will support any people who decides to take control of the direction of their nation, but we only support that right when is serves us? Doesn't work that way IMO.
Excluding Israel, right?
We can call that government legitimate all we want, but we'd have to seriously consider redefining the term "legitimate."
Who's "we"?
incarcerated
02-19-2011, 13:54
So what? We went into Iraq and ripped that regime completely out of control of that country? You think that didn't please the Iranians? I mean come on now, we can't have this both ways.
Do you see little value in having pro-Western regimes in that part of the world? Since Egypt and Jordan have come over to the West, the world has not seen a major conflict involving Israel. The region has known peace.
While Iran was happy to see the Ba’ath Party driven from power in Iraq, the presence of American combat forces there does not please them. To the contrary, they represent the primary security threat to Iran. The Quds undertook a bombing campaign against American troops to underscore the point.
That the United States did in a matter of months what it could not do in eight years at a cost of 180,000 dead also bothers Iran.
You mean to tell me the leader of the United States of America, the country with the most advanced Constitution and what many consider (well, used to anyway) the absolute champion of individual freedoms and human rights, is supposed to say.....nothing??
Only if he is interested and invested in the stability and security of the region and of our allies. If that were the case, his public statements should have been neutral, or should have been gobbledygook that amounted to nothing.
He is the leader of a country that decided long ago that we will support any people who decides to take control of the direction of their nation, but we only support that right when is serves us? Doesn't work that way IMO.
When did we decide this? Did we support the Iranian people when they decided to take control of the direction of their nation and overthrow the Shah? If, as you suggest in post #14, we are probably the most meddlesome nation in the world, and we do a very, very poor job of it as is stands now in our history, how is it consistent that we should provide unqualified support for any popular or democratic movement in foreign countries?.
We do what is in our national interests to do.
We can all rag on the POTUS for his policies and decide we don't like the direction he is taking the country, but not responding positively to the overthrow of a dictator - admittedly our "ally" if you can call him that - goes against our ideals as Americans, IMO.
Does it go against American ideals, or the current ideals of the MSM?
I am not ragging on the President. I am asking him to explain himself. What is our policy regarding popular revolutionary movements of Islamic political violence? The only explanation I have heard thus far is “Dictator = Bad, Democracy/Freedom = Good.” What is our plan for the Middle East if we are discarding or undermining pro-Western regimes in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel? What does this mean for the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan?
We can call that government legitimate all we want, but we'd have to seriously consider redefining the term "legitimate." That was not a legitimate government. We didn't turn our back on him, either. Do you expect our Republic not to support the people of Egypt protesting against a corrupt, hardcore dictator? What is best of the people of Egypt is not always best for the national security interests of the US, and vice versa. But I can say with confidence that coming out in support of Mubarak and against the people of Egypt was not going to be in the best interests of the US long term. Siding with a tyrant, especially in that part of the world? Not good judgment.
Mubarak was hardcore? Like Pol Pot? Is the House of Saud a dictatorship? How are they less tyrannical than Egypt? Are you suggesting that we should put the good of the Egyptian people above our own national interests, security and otherwise? Should we assist in the overthrow of King Abdullah of Jordan? After all, he’s a king, for cripe‘s sake. Is France a dictatorship? There has been civil unrest and political violence there among its Muslim population for a decade.
Had Obama come out in support of Mubarak, it would have been gasoline on the fire. The people of the Arab world generally do not want the Infidel Uncle Sam telling them what to do. The important thing for Obama to have done was to say nothing.
Was Anwar Sadat a dictator?
By tagging him with the label of ‘Dictator,’ the MSM has stereotyped Mubarak and has portrayed him as essentially the equivalent of Saddam Hussein. The funny thing about this is that the MSM never demonstrated this kind of enthusiasm for Saddam’s overthrow until 3ID was pulling his statue down in Baghdad.
The funny thing about this is that the MSM never demonstrated this kind of enthusiasm for Saddam’s overthrow until 3ID was pulling his statue down in Baghdad.
And nearly half the Country is blind or apathetic to the hypocrisy.
This subject is one I find really confusing.
So the major problems if I am understanding right now are:
1) Not all regimes are the same (some are benevolent, others are extremely violent).
2) Democracy isn't necessarilly good, as it is rule by the mob, and you of course need a system that protects individual rights, human freedoms, and the minority from the majority. If the majority are a bunch of people who want to infringe on human rights, or implement hardcore Sharia law, then it is better to have a regime that is not very brutal to the people and friendly to America, as opposed to having said regime overthrown and a government very anti-American and evil thrown in.
However, if we are talking about say a regime that is friendly to America, but then the people want to establish a truly liberal democracy (they want to implement protections for human freedoms and individual rights), and there is no threat of religious extremists, then what should the U.S. do then? For example we supported the Solidarity Movement in Poland because that hurt the Soviets, but what if the Polish government had been a regime wholly separate from the Soviets that had become friendly to America in recent years? Should we have still propped up such a regime?
I could see if the regime came under possible attack from people wanting democracy who were very pro-Soviet (or prone to voting in a pro-Soviet government that would implement hardcore communism), but what if the people wanted a full liberal democracy as the United States has it?
"Follow the money".
bailaviborita
03-01-2011, 10:18
I'll just post my signature as an explanation! ;)
incarcerated
03-25-2011, 01:40
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/567042/201103241709/Will-Mideasts-Upheavals-Put-Extremists-In-Power-.htm
Will Mideast's Upheavals Put Extremists In Power?
First in a series from a Middle East observer who just returned from the region and whose last report for IBD was "A Restive Egypt Faces Succession," nearly two weeks before the revolt began in that country.
By CHUCK DEVORE
Posted 03/24/2011 05:09 PM ET
With unrest, revolutions and civil war in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, are al-Qaida and its "moderate" cousin, the Muslim Brotherhood, on the verge of a stunning strategic victory in the Middle East?
It's possible that this extremely negative development won't happen — that the Middle East may experience the blossoming of liberty, rule of law and respect for minority rights. It's also theoretically possible that the federal deficit may vanish next year.
How did U.S. national interests come to the precipice of suffering the worst setback since the Chinese Communists seized the world's most populous nation in 1949?
In 2008, America was wrapping up its successful surge in Iraq. Al-Qaida was a spent force, unable to mount any successful attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11. Candidate Barack Obama opposed the surge, claiming, with the anti-war left, that the only morally just war was in Afghanistan, a theater which, the narrative went, had gotten short shrift because of the unneeded war in Iraq.
Obama assumed the presidency in 2009 claiming a new beginning in foreign relations — pushing the "reset" button with U.S. rivals and enemies like Russia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, as well as entire peoples, as was his intent with his Cairo speech to the Muslim world on June 4, 2009.
In retrospect, Obama's Cairo speech will be seen as the catalyst that handed Islamists the victory that decades of terrorism and pan-Islamic political maneuvering failed to spark. Pointedly, Mr. Obama's advisers saw fit to invite leaders of Egypt's banned Muslim Brotherhood to the speech, providing them with an important boost in prestige at the expense of now-former Egyptian President Mubarak's regime.
Abdullah Attai, a professor of Islamic Shariah law at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, which sponsored the president in Egypt, called the speech a historic turning point that marked the beginning of the isolation of al-Qaida. At the time, President Obama's national security advisers viewed the "isolation" of al-Qaida as a good thing. The question they should have asked themselves is: isolation from what?
Al-Qaida and its affiliates represent a branch of Islamist thought that is impatient and hyper-violent and sees itself as much at war with the apostate Muslim world as it is with the infidel West.
The Muslim Brotherhood and its myriad franchises differ from al-Qaida in method, not outcome. The Muslim Brotherhood views the existing Muslim order as in need of revival rather than bloody revolution, to be followed by confrontation with Jews, Christians and the West.
What is important for U.S. policymakers is that neither al-Qaida nor the Muslim Brotherhood is interested in the modern reformation of Islam, allowing for a separation of church and state in a pluralistic, tolerant, moderate and democratic society.
On Feb. 18, Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, the long-exiled spiritual leader of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, made a triumphal return to his homeland to deliver a victory speech to over 200,000 people in Cairo's Tahrir Square. Al-Qaradawi, the most important Sunni Muslim religious leader, with some 40 million viewers on his Al-Jazeera program, "Sharia and Life," has fastidiously cultivated a "moderate" image in the non-Arabic-speaking world.
His words in Egypt that day were anything but moderate. Al-Qaradawi called for jihad to reconquer Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, linking the call for war with Israel with the demand that the Egyptian army break the blockade of Hamas terrorists in Gaza. His comments were met with thunderous applause.
Western journalists, with a proclivity for both laziness and shallowness, focused on Al-Qaradawi's call for "freedom and democracy" — but completely missed the point that al-Qaradawi's Muslim Brotherhood, known as the Ikhwan in Egypt, sees democracy as the means to the end of an "Islamic State by the will of the people" vs. al-Qaida's desire to achieve the same ends through violent revolution.
These same journalists ignore al-Qaradawi's vast array of damning interviews, religious edicts (fatwas) and sermons in which he has called for the creation of a United States of Islam (the recreation of the Islamic Caliphate), jihad "martyrdom operations," the conquests of America and Europe, the worldwide application of Shariah law and the extermination of all the Jews.
As the Arab world seethes with unrest, al-Qaradawi's Muslim Brotherhood and its vision for a United States of Islam represent only one possible unwelcome outcome for U.S. national security interests.
Al-Qaida's affiliates remain a potent challenger to the Brotherhood, standing to gain immensely from the soon-to-be failed state of Yemen and the rash Western military intervention in Libya, a nation that has recently contributed one-fifth of the foreign jihadi fighters in the global war on terror.
The Turks, now under the leadership of an Islamist political party, may also seek to reassert the historic role of the Ottoman Empire as the defender of the faith. Turkish support of Hamas in Gaza and distancing of their once-close relations with Israel are part of their effort to burnish their pan-Islam credentials in the region.
Finally, the Iranian Shiite theocracy is making a play too, encouraging unrest in Bahrain and oil-rich eastern Saudi Arabia while dangerously escalating the military capabilities of Hamas by clandestinely supplying them with Silkworm anti-ship missiles to threaten the Israeli navy and commercial shipping.
Hezbollah, Iran's proxy in Lebanon, possesses 40,000 rockets and already has a proven anti-shipping capability, effectively creating the specter of an Arab blockade of Israeli shipping.
Pan-Islamism was the basic glue that held the Ottoman Empire together. Arab nationalism pushed against the Ottomans and was exploited by the Allies to hasten the defeat of the Ottomans in 1918. After WWII, pan-Arabism was the driving force in the region, with dynamic leaders like Egypt's Gamal Nasser seeking, without lasting success, to fuse Arab nationalism and socialism.
Now the Middle East appears headed for a protracted season of pan-Islamic jockeying. The Muslim Brotherhood and its rivals dream of caliphates centered in Cairo, Tehran or Istanbul, cleansing the land of both Jew and Christian and reasserting Islam as a dominant, vigorous and conquering faith.
Sadly, pan-Islamism, just as pan-Arabism before it, will fail its people. Focused on virtually-impossible-to-obtain unity and external matters like confrontation with Israel, pan-Islamism will inevitably ignore internal economic development, rule of law, the fostering of democratic institutions and the protection of religious minorities, like Egypt's 8 million Coptic Christians.
In this, the Muslim Brotherhood's likely long-term failure will open up the door for al-Qaida and its successors to mount a comeback from their soon-to-be-expanded havens in Yemen and Libya.
• DeVore served in the California Legislature from 2004 to 2010. He is a lieutenant colonel (retired) in the U.S. Army Reserve and served as a special assistant for foreign affairs in the Reagan-era Pentagon. He studied abroad at the American University in Cairo in 1984-85.
So in other words, believing that the rooster’s crowing causes the sun to rise?
interesting
Not necessarily. There is most times a hole in the pompous, Latin quotes of many pseudo-intellectuals who attempt to eliminate the scrutiny of Dustmeister-class rednecks.
In the case of this thread, just go with your first inclination...
Not necessarily. There is most times a hole in the pompous, Latin quotes of many pseudo-intellectuals who attempt to eliminate the scrutiny of Dustmeister-class rednecks.
In the case of this thread, just go with your first inclination...
Thanks Dusty....I did.
The ability to pigion hole an opposing opinion into sexy little latin quotes which don't realy add to the base discussion is something I've never mastered. People should just say what they mean.
Cheers.......;)
greenberetTFS
03-25-2011, 06:06
Respice, adspice, prospice?
Nice job akv,we finally found an interrupter for Richard when he does his thing......;)
Big Teddy :munchin