There are various points in this article I have doubts about or outright disagree with, but the central point is right on - the one thing we can take away with a quasi certainty from our adventures in the Land of Allah since 9/11 is that Western notions of representative secular governance, personal liberty and tolerance are not good fits with Islam and whether it's a continuing naive delusion or the inane, detached from reality political correctness of multiculturalism that keeps so many from the embrace of that truth, it's true regardless. As the article states, this notion that extremism is an aberration of true Islam is absurd - all religions by the very nature of their controlling belief systems are prone to extremism if given the right circumstances, especially if they have a pronounced political component to them - and all that's true of the Mideast today just as it was more or less true of the Christian West 500 years ago - that the West was able to shake off this extremism while the Muslim world remains trapped by it is as far as I'm concerned a testament to how fundamental to its beliefs the political component of Islam is - yet many in the West insist on living in denial of this - David Cameron just gave a speech the other day in parliament about involving ourselves in dysfunctional Muslim polities that made it sound as if he hadn't paid attention to anything that has transpired the last ten years. Does he just not listen to intelligence briefings on what has gone on in Libya since he and his fellow EU idiots decided to be led from behind in the ousting of Qaddafi?
I get that in the immediate wake of 9/11 the thought that fundamental changes needed to be wrought in the Mideast had an appeal to it - it's why I reluctantly supported the invasion, I simply wasn't convinced that just chasing AQ and the Taliban across the mountains into Pakistan was gonna suffice - some more permanent changes needed to be instituted and given it's somewhat secular nature and the fact that Saddam was slipping out from beneath the sanctions and hungry to stir up who could say what kind of trouble, Iraq made sense - not to mention the unexploited oil wealth that could be used to grease the skids of the necessary changes. I suppose I viewed the first gulf war as never having ended but rather put into an increasingly untenable state of artificial suspension - I did not share the sanguine opinion that a Saddam returned to full power would be a manageable thing and in light of the changed metrics of 9/11 came to conclusion that an invasion would bring things to their proper end. If Bush had actually had a post invasion plan, who knows, maybe it would have worked - but reflecting over all that's gone on the last ten years and now with a better understanding of how the Muslim world functions it's hard for me to escape sense that even a well thought out and executed occupation may still have come up short of producing the kind of changes we were looking for - but we'll never know - and so here we are.
[does this mean you have no problem with Obama walking away from Iraq in 2011 as if everything was just hunky dory? Ahhh... no. As someone said a while back, if you're America you don't get to just walk away - if you're the lone superpower, the lone force capable of defending Western values and interests, you don't get to just walk away - not at least without having eventually to deal with the dire consequences of it - that may not sit well with Obama, such a reality may not conveniently comport with the worldview he'd prefer to embrace - indeed, his presidency has shown he very much doesn't appreciate that reality - but it's the reality all the same]
I get that in the immediate wake of 9/11 the thought that fundamental changes needed to be wrought in the Mideast had an appeal to it - it's why I reluctantly supported the invasion, I simply wasn't convinced that just chasing AQ and the Taliban across the mountains into Pakistan was gonna suffice - some more permanent changes needed to be instituted and given it's somewhat secular nature and the fact that Saddam was slipping out from beneath the sanctions and hungry to stir up who could say what kind of trouble, Iraq made sense - not to mention the unexploited oil wealth that could be used to grease the skids of the necessary changes. I suppose I viewed the first gulf war as never having ended but rather put into an increasingly untenable state of artificial suspension - I did not share the sanguine opinion that a Saddam returned to full power would be a manageable thing and in light of the changed metrics of 9/11 came to conclusion that an invasion would bring things to their proper end. If Bush had actually had a post invasion plan, who knows, maybe it would have worked - but reflecting over all that's gone on the last ten years and now with a better understanding of how the Muslim world functions it's hard for me to escape sense that even a well thought out and executed occupation may still have come up short of producing the kind of changes we were looking for - but we'll never know - and so here we are.
[does this mean you have no problem with Obama walking away from Iraq in 2011 as if everything was just hunky dory? Ahhh... no. As someone said a while back, if you're America you don't get to just walk away - if you're the lone superpower, the lone force capable of defending Western values and interests, you don't get to just walk away - not at least without having eventually to deal with the dire consequences of it - that may not sit well with Obama, such a reality may not conveniently comport with the worldview he'd prefer to embrace - indeed, his presidency has shown he very much doesn't appreciate that reality - but it's the reality all the same]