Take aways from the great Iraqi shit storm part 3... or is it 4 … 5? Whatever.
Is it Obama’s plan to continually sow disorder and dysfunction that he can blame on Bush and therefore distract attention from his own awful record ad infinitum?
3 - a history of commerce and trade and exploration and migration that was outward looking by necessity and therefore dynamic and predated the rise to dominance of Christian orthodoxy and therefore that history became perforce a relatively easy fit with that orthodoxy once it rose to dominate things.
4 - an intellectual tradition that again existed before the advent of Christianity and that placed much emphasis, however primitively, on discursive elements of thought that tend to push back against narrow dogmatism or at least mitigate over time the noxious effects thereof - elements like deductive reasoning, observation and analysis, empiricism, pluralism, open debate, rhetoric and aesthetics and the acceptance of the individual conscience as a phenomenon worthy of discussion and contemplation - a tradition that was preserved through the misnamed 'dark ages' and brought back to life by the Christian clerisy and oddly enough some important Muslim scholars - a pretty unique set of circumstances, all in all.
5 - and finally, no doubt more or less because of all of the above, Christianity, although often of course used for political purposes, indeed beginning with Constantine whose goals were more political than devotional when he embraced the faith, is regardless not an inherently political religion - it is ultimately focused on personal revelation - this is quite distinct from Islam and no doubt explains much regarding how the two cultures have evolved - again there is nothing in Islam like Christ’s admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto god what is god’s - which basically means that the salvation of your soul is not dependent on the politics of your habitat - a point of view which I believe the Koran judges if not exactly heretical then at odds with the true practice of Islam - which is in keeping with those who believe Islam was developed specifically as a political tool which again makes it markedly different from Christianity which during its genesis was suppressed and persecuted and grew up in the shadows and therefore the nurturing of a political component was not an option and consequently in essence became meaningless to its practice. It's difficult if not impossible to imagine Islam without a political component - not so Christianity, which is no doubt one reason why millions of Chinese are rushing to embrace the cross and not the crescent. In short, religions don't like change - but if your political and social institutions are subservient to the requisite needs of your faith, then they cannot evolve, your culture cannot evolve because change must necessarily be seen as something evil in order to preserve the purity of the faith's dogma - religions with a pronounced political component are all about protecting the purity of the faith from challenge through regimented public acts [beards for instance] which makes them quite antagonistic to change which means they're not a good fit with democracy since democracy is all about mitigating extremes through the embrace of constant change and the toleration of personal liberty that goes with it.
Again, more than 400 years ago Elizabeth said she had no interest opening windows into men's souls - is there a leader of an Islamist country today that could make the same claim and not at least be severely chastised for it, at worst be accused of blasphemy? Thus is the fundamental difference between the two cultures defined.
Is it Obama’s plan to continually sow disorder and dysfunction that he can blame on Bush and therefore distract attention from his own awful record ad infinitum?
Jokes aside, the inability of liberals to see the practice of foreign policy as anything other than doing the opposite of what Bush did is quite disturbing - I’m not gonna defend Bush and his fucking up of the Iraq adventure, but if the prosecution of that war evidenced a deep lack of understanding of how the Muslim world works, then so too did Obama’s Cairo speech and his approach to the putative Arab Spring and his abandoning of Iraq as if Maliki could be trusted and the drawing of red lines that aren't red lines and his readiness to intimate that Israel was the main barrier to peace with the Palestinians and etc etc etc - if your defence is gonna be 'well at least Obama didn't invade a country' then… is Libya the better for that? Syria? Since your presumed candidate for 2016 supported the Iraq invasion I’m not sure how you're planning to finesse the logic of blaming Bush for doing what Hillary endorsed him to do. And how without embarrassment can liberals embrace the utterly magical thinking of if only Saddam or one of his sick, crazy sons were still in power the Mideast would just be humming along perfectly right now? One can imagine scenarios where things might be better with an Iraq still under Saddam's thumb, if such was even possible regardless of Bush - but one can just as surely imagine scenarios where things might be worse or roughly the same - only thing for sure was that since the end of the first gulf war most everyone rightly or wrongly thought it likely necessary or at least inevitable that you were going to have to get rid of Saddam to have any hope of effecting positive change in the region, including Clinton, and this was especially so after 9/11, a fact which many people conveniently forget - with 9/11 as the pretext Bush did it, he just didn't have a good plan [or any plan at all] of what to do once he'd done it - that huge screw up, Obama’s failure to argue for an enduring American presence in Iraq once Bush had sort of corrected that screw up and the general fucked beyond repair nature of the Muslim world which may have by itself rendered whatever Bush or Obama did moot explains the current pile of shit.
We could be seeing the beginning of the great Muslim meltdown that I've tentatively been predicting must be coming, for better or worse. Sunni and Shia in the best of circumstances distrust each other and in the worst of circumstances hate each other and that’s a big, big problem in a place where religion is still the chief organizing principle of polities - as indeed was the case with Christianity and the battles between protestants and catholics over power and influence hundreds of years ago in the West.
But here's the key - the West had several advantages the Muslim world doesn't have and those differences probably explain why we have prospered and they have most decidely not. In short I'd describe those key differences as:
Can it possibly be true that Obama and his national security team of buffoons did not see this coming? Can anybody here play this game? Not only was something like this predicted by many when Obama pulled out and declared the Iraq war over, but since the beginning of the Syrian mess one of the great fears has been that it would exacerbate sectarian trouble in Iraq and eventually draw Iraq into the conflagration. It boggles the mind if indeed they've been 'shocked' by this turn.
Is this just the beginning of the crap we're gonna see spewed from the diseased fount that is Syria? Even if the ISIS threat can be brought under some kind of control, you still have this festering swamp of Jihadists that isn't simply gonna dry up nor content itself with just waging war against apostate Shia, not with all those juicy Western targets out there - this has the makings of a toxic epidemic just waiting to slip its borders and creep into the wider world. I mean, how many of these guys are gonna end up back in Europe? And if Obama comes to Maliki's [and thus by inference Assad's] rescue here, how pissed off are they gonna be? Alternatively, if ISIS does manage to hold its gains, what kind of magnet will they become for every discontented 16 year old Muslim boy out there hungry to blow something up for the greater glory of Allah?
Is this just the beginning of the crap we're gonna see spewed from the diseased fount that is Syria? Even if the ISIS threat can be brought under some kind of control, you still have this festering swamp of Jihadists that isn't simply gonna dry up nor content itself with just waging war against apostate Shia, not with all those juicy Western targets out there - this has the makings of a toxic epidemic just waiting to slip its borders and creep into the wider world. I mean, how many of these guys are gonna end up back in Europe? And if Obama comes to Maliki's [and thus by inference Assad's] rescue here, how pissed off are they gonna be? Alternatively, if ISIS does manage to hold its gains, what kind of magnet will they become for every discontented 16 year old Muslim boy out there hungry to blow something up for the greater glory of Allah?
Iran does what now? Will a truncated Shia Iraqi state become a protectorate of theirs? If so, can you just forget about any nuke deal [if one was even possible] because Iran's leverage viz causing trouble just spiked? Will Obama see this as an opportunity to form some sort of alliance with Iran - or indeed might we be forced into such a thing regardless of wanting it or not if the violence really starts to spiral out of control? Things play out a certain way, Iran could be the big winner here - which I think would be good for no one other than Iran.
What is it with the Muslim world and its inept militaries? What's that about? As we see also in Afghanistan, ten years of training and tutoring from the most professional army on the planet gets you nothing. Or is this yet more sectarian idiocy? Shia had no stomach or desire to fight on Sunni land in order to protect Sunnis and therefore when the going got tough they simply got the fuck out of there.
Can we now speak openly about the obvious, that Islam and democracy do not go well together and it's about time we in the West have an intelligent debate about why that is and what it augurs viz our security needs? [Islamist apologists used to be able to point to Turkey but Erdogan has effectively shown what a shallow boast that was - as he was always willing to intimate to anyone paying attention, Islamist democracy is just a more progressive friendly way of saying Islamist oligarchy or outright dictatorship - no doubt why Obama was so fond of the man since uber liberals of Obama's ilk would love to turn America into same kind of faux democracy that is in reality a progressive oligarchy - isn't that the whole point of Obamacare and open borders? Create enough poor, non-white voters who are dependent on the gov't in various ways and essentially you'll have a liberal majority that can never be defeated - a progressive oligarchy]
But here's the key - the West had several advantages the Muslim world doesn't have and those differences probably explain why we have prospered and they have most decidely not. In short I'd describe those key differences as:
1 - geography.
2 - the mostly secular nature of the formative institutions of the Greco-Roman world upon which the West was built.
2 - the mostly secular nature of the formative institutions of the Greco-Roman world upon which the West was built.
3 - a history of commerce and trade and exploration and migration that was outward looking by necessity and therefore dynamic and predated the rise to dominance of Christian orthodoxy and therefore that history became perforce a relatively easy fit with that orthodoxy once it rose to dominate things.
4 - an intellectual tradition that again existed before the advent of Christianity and that placed much emphasis, however primitively, on discursive elements of thought that tend to push back against narrow dogmatism or at least mitigate over time the noxious effects thereof - elements like deductive reasoning, observation and analysis, empiricism, pluralism, open debate, rhetoric and aesthetics and the acceptance of the individual conscience as a phenomenon worthy of discussion and contemplation - a tradition that was preserved through the misnamed 'dark ages' and brought back to life by the Christian clerisy and oddly enough some important Muslim scholars - a pretty unique set of circumstances, all in all.
5 - and finally, no doubt more or less because of all of the above, Christianity, although often of course used for political purposes, indeed beginning with Constantine whose goals were more political than devotional when he embraced the faith, is regardless not an inherently political religion - it is ultimately focused on personal revelation - this is quite distinct from Islam and no doubt explains much regarding how the two cultures have evolved - again there is nothing in Islam like Christ’s admonition to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto god what is god’s - which basically means that the salvation of your soul is not dependent on the politics of your habitat - a point of view which I believe the Koran judges if not exactly heretical then at odds with the true practice of Islam - which is in keeping with those who believe Islam was developed specifically as a political tool which again makes it markedly different from Christianity which during its genesis was suppressed and persecuted and grew up in the shadows and therefore the nurturing of a political component was not an option and consequently in essence became meaningless to its practice. It's difficult if not impossible to imagine Islam without a political component - not so Christianity, which is no doubt one reason why millions of Chinese are rushing to embrace the cross and not the crescent. In short, religions don't like change - but if your political and social institutions are subservient to the requisite needs of your faith, then they cannot evolve, your culture cannot evolve because change must necessarily be seen as something evil in order to preserve the purity of the faith's dogma - religions with a pronounced political component are all about protecting the purity of the faith from challenge through regimented public acts [beards for instance] which makes them quite antagonistic to change which means they're not a good fit with democracy since democracy is all about mitigating extremes through the embrace of constant change and the toleration of personal liberty that goes with it.
Again, more than 400 years ago Elizabeth said she had no interest opening windows into men's souls - is there a leader of an Islamist country today that could make the same claim and not at least be severely chastised for it, at worst be accused of blasphemy? Thus is the fundamental difference between the two cultures defined.
