To win a war against an ideology it is necessary to defeat that ideology, not just kill more of the enemy than they kill of your people. The ideology in question is militant Islam -which means Koranic Islam and all schools of Islam, which is most schools, that take the Koran literally as the manifestation of Allah upon the Earth. However, neither the Bush regime in the past nor the Barack Hussein regime currently in power is willing to admit that there is any problem with Islam itself, or with it core document, the Koran. Such is the price we pay for ignorance, and for the stupid view that this is all about economics, that religion is just being made use of for political aims. We do not teach Comparative Religion in the schools, or when it is done it is the Political Correctness / Multi-Culturalist version which is dishonest from start to finish. And the same goes for teaching of Islam, when it is in a school curriculum; Islam is whitewashed, or bowdlerized. And so no-one learns the actual contents of Islam, which is based on violence, on intolerance, and extreme narrow-mindedness. Because, you see, our leaders don't know much of anything about religion as a real world phenomenon and interpret all events as reflections of economic markets. Stupidity may be worse on the Right than it is on the Left, but (1) there is plenty on the Left, and (2) it isn't just the major parties that are guilty of such malfeasance but also the Libertarians and Greens and others. The view that everything reduces to economics had its origins on the Left, by the way, it was called Marxism when it began in the late 1840s. In America this false gospel has been taken over by the Right for its own purposes, aided and abetted by the libertarians. It is long past the time when the Establishment should be gotten rid of, and the sooner the better. So that we can start over on the basis of Radical Centrism, nothing else has any possibility of making one bit of lasting difference. Billy ======================================= Commentary Return of the War That Never Went Away _Seth Mandel_ (http://www.commentarymagazine.com/author/seth-mandel/) | _@SethAMandel_ (http://twitter.com/SethAMandel) 06.12.2014
The crisis in Iraq is certainly testing President Obama’s desire to wash the administration’s hands of that country, its politics, and its violence. Conservatives predicted precisely this outcome when warning of a precipitous withdrawal of troops according to arbitrary timelines or magical thinking– both of which the Obama administration relied on–though the speed of the collapse has been surprising. But it’s also testing Obama’s desire to abstain from involvement in other conflicts as well because Obama seems to realize, correctly, that borders in the Middle East are becoming increasingly abstract. If the president intervenes further in Iraq, for example, he will be essentially intervening in Syria as well, because those two conflicts are bleeding into one another. The terrorist group causing the most trouble there tellingly calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which at first appeared arrogant but now seems to simply reflect reality. In its story on Obama’s decision to deny Iraqi requests for airstrikes, the New York Times _explains_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/12/world/middleeast/iraq-asked-us-for-airstrikes-on-militants-officials-say.html?hp&_r=0) : The swift capture of Mosul by militants aligned with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has underscored how the conflicts in Syria and Iraq have converged into one widening regional insurgency with fighters coursing back and forth through the porous border between the two countries. But it has also called attention to the limits the White House has imposed on the use of American power in an increasingly violent and volatile region. There is an obvious argument to be made for intervening in Iraq but not Syria: our previous involvement there. But that argument faded greatly after Obama decided the war was over and our combat mission ended. Now we’re back basically on the outside looking in. At this point, can Obama clearly make a case for additional strikes in Iraq that would still logically avoid implicitly making the case for the same in Syria? Sentimental value won’t count for much. Obama has put great effort into differentiating conflicts so as to avoid a game of intervention dominoes, for instance by agreeing to decapitate the Gaddafi regime but not the house of Assad. He rejected the idea of humanitarian intervention in Syria as well, arguing that that the U.S. did not have a responsibility to protect but did have an obligation to curtail the use of chemical weapons. Seeking to build a case for possibly stepping up its aid to the Syrian rebels, Obama _was shifting to_ (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/world/obama-to-detail-a-broader-foreign-policy-agenda.html) “ emphasize Syria’s growing status as a haven for terrorist groups, some of which are linked to Al Qaeda.” By that standard, Iraq beckons as well. Perhaps Obama could at least make the argument that Syria and Iraq can be taken together as one conflict and thus not a harbinger of broader military action in the region. But the Times report shows why that would be a tall order: The Obama administration has carried out drone strikes against militants in Yemen and Pakistan, where it fears terrorists have been hatching plans to attack the United States. But despite the fact that Sunni militants have been making steady advances and may be carving out new havens from which they could carry out attacks against the West, administration spokesmen have insisted that the United States is not actively considering using warplanes or armed drones to strike them. Right. And suddenly it becomes clear: We’re fighting a (gasp!) global war on terror. The compartmentalization of conflicts by Obama and others was a necessary element for them to oppose the Bush administration’s war on terror because it was the only way to conceptually remove the common thread that held together Bush’s strategy. But that relied on the belief that the international state system was intact and robust enough to deal with international terrorism. It was a nice idea, but it proved naïve and dangerous. Obama learned this when he sent forces into Pakistan to get Osama bin Laden. He learned it again when he had to send drones after Yemen-based terrorists. He learned and relearned it throughout the Arab Spring, as dictatorships fell and transnational terror networks like the Muslim Brotherhood rose. He learned it when weapons from the Libyan civil war fueled a military coup in Mali. He learned it when his administration practically begged the Russian government to accept American counterterrorism help to safeguard the Olympics in Sochi. And now he’s looking at a stateless mass of terrorism stretching across the Middle East but specifically melding the Syria and Iraq conflicts. He’s looking at a global terror war and trying to figure out increasingly creative ways not to say so. Obama wanted this war to be a different war, and to be over. But he forgot that the enemy always gets a vote. And we still have a lot of enemies. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
