This compelling opinion on what last decade or so of Great Satan in the lands of Allah has wrought in the minds of Americans, both amongst the foreign policy inner sanctum of big thinkers and the frustrated, largely untutored laity - and it reminds me that though I chide, ridicule, condemn the vacuous progressive assumptions underlying Obama's Muslim outreach, which for all its would be clever calculation remains an initiative that was naive, misguided and seemingly wholly predicated on the remarkably arrogant belief that the splendour of his personality, the pure luminance of his world celebrity would be enough to guide all through the darkness of discord and into the bright land of amity and universal wonderfulness - regardless of my mocking of this foolishness the article reminds me that it was with Bush that this delusional view of Muslim culture began - the delusion being, in essence, that despite the hard lessons our own history taught us over the course of hundreds of years regarding the problem of mixing religion and politics, when it came to Islam and democracy we decided, in what can only be described as a near suicidal fit of political correctness, to just ignore all those hard lessons learned and pretend there was no real need for democracy to be secular after all - hell, to think such a mean spirited thing could only be yet another ugly instance of haughty Western bigotry looking down on the non-Christian world - the sins of white privilege, as the progressives like to call it [yes, to read, understand and interpret our own history in an entirely rational and objective way and attempt to apply it to a contemporary problem is of course nothing more than an act of bigoted intolerance - how could I not see that?].
[but to pardon Bush a wee bit, his democracy push in the land of Allah was pretty much just an afterthought - Iraq was falling apart amidst sectarian barbarism, no WMDs had been found, you've mired yourself in the caretaking of this mess and had to have some hopeful reason for being there - democracy. Democracy promotion clearly had an ad hoc feel to it and clearly few people at the top had coherently thought it through - I mean if they had there would have been plans to invade with many more troops than they did and plans to stay there, occupy the place for several years - instead, Rumsfeld kept trying to knock down the number of troops and many 'experts' thought the US would start pulling out a few short months after the fall of Saddam - some even thought the pull out would start immediately after the fall. No, although there certainly was talk about how Iraq could become a lesson in democracy for the dysfunctional autocracies of the region, the war was mainly about getting rid of Saddam, which everyone, including Clinton, had hatched plans for since the end of the first Gulf war, and rounding up the WMDs and in doing those two things send a loud don't you dare fuck with Uncle Sam message to all the bad players in the neighborhood - didn't quite work out that way. Personally, I think actually there was a third reason for going into Iraq that probably contributed to the lack of after war planning - namely, domestic politics: someone in the White House was fixated on what an electoral boon a successful invasion of Iraq would be and that fixation, combined with the fantasy success in Afghanistan had fed regarding the ease with which Saddam could be overthrown, led to some tunnel vision, some group think that really corrupted any coherent and thorough analysis of the bag of snakes they were about to open.
As for COIN in Afghanistan and Obama's part in the delusion - COIN to me never made any sense: you're in the country because the culture is dysfunctional, yet you're choosing to fight a kind of war that imagines you can effect change without changing that culture - how does that make sense? And Petraeus et al weren't idiots, they had to have understood or recognized in some way that democracy is all about the cultural presets that are necessary precursors to the embrace of freedom and universal suffrage and that these presets don't exist much in the Muslim world as a whole and pretty much don't exist in Afghanistan at all, so how explain their foolishness? What I said before, a suicidal fit of political correctness? I dunno. And then when Obama tacked a withdrawal date on the mission, which is surely the one thing you absolutely can't do when it comes to COIN, well, then, the enterprise really became nonsensical.
But what to make of Obama's thinking? Well, his best buddy's Erdogan, an Islamist - and he welcomed and encouraged the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood - so what's that about? Seems awfully foolish but maybe he thinks when it comes to democracy Islamism is the best that part of world can do. Or is it a reflection of his own uber liberal dislike of American democracy? Could be when it comes to foreign policy he's simply a one trick pony - that being, shrink American influence, American power, draw down and draw back - and either he has no clear thoughts on what the results of that will be, is misguided on what the results of that will be, or simply doesn't care in sense that goal of shrinking American military is paramount above all other considerations. I mean, the ideals of modern liberalism are really not compatible with a large military with huge responsibilities - just look at Europe - military spending becomes a tertiary consideration when measured against the massive needs and dependencies of the welfare state and the pacifist mentality it necessarily encourages]
