Monday, December 10, 2007

America's Naive Courage - An Iraq Post Petraeus Primer (Sept. 20, 2007)

America is courageous yet irrevocably naïve. Old Europe is cowardly, understanding yet fearing evil. The Arab world is, ironically, an erratic and changing amalgam of all the above. Their foot soldiers will blindly sacrifice themselves for Jihad whilst their leaders and handlers unerringly never lead from the front, these masters of propaganda, savoring their privileged life in advance of the world to come and its 72 virgins. Furthermore, in their grand Jihadist experiment this Wahabi world realistically fears and abhors the ever-creeping risks to their uncompromising fundamentalism that western secularism, democratic culture and Hollywood liberalism brings.

America empathizes with the bald eagle’s endangerment; it sensitively allocates foot basins for Muslims in college washrooms. America protects the right of genocidal Ahmadinehjad, Mephistophelean Chavez and the pistol-packing master terrorist Arafat to address the United Nations in Manhattan with many acolytes and accolades in tow.

America is squeamish when it comes to wiretapping of foreign callers linked to terrorism. It imagines in a Chamberlain-like fugue of fantasy that isolationism and temporary appeasement can roll back the 1000-year-old passion for a universal caliphate that is the essential “raison d’etre” of today’s Wahabists. These are the Saudis who are spending 50 billion dollars a year to build radical mosques and madrassas, to clone their Jihadist children, maintain their prodigious birthrate and to buy and influence friends. And all in their backyard as well as ours.

It is indeed most ironic that we, who wish all the animals and peoples of the world well and who contribute more charity and deed than any other nation in support of these laudable goals, fail in large measure to fully comprehend the nature of evil, even after 9/11. It’s as though the world remains divided into those capable of prosecuting evil and those incapable of perceiving evil. We in the “New World” desperately protect our rose-tinted glasses from all historical lessons, all cynicism, all contemporary realities. We hope that if we ignore evil long enough it will just go away. We are prepared to see evil in George Bush but not in bin Laden or Ahmadinejad.

We imagine somehow that America has stolen the oil fields of Iraq. Rather our $70 per barrel and much of the hundreds of billions transferred to the Middle East’s oil markets continue to service an anti-American and anti-West Jihad. We have given the new Iraq control and ownership of 100% of their oilfields – yet we suicidally help finance our fanatical enemies through our oil addiction. We disrespect our soldiers, disdain our freedoms and even dislike, at times, our unique and successful country whilst remaining infatuated with primitive and fundamentalist cultures, endlessly inventing excuses for their rabid chauvinism, their expansionist terrorism, and their limitless fascism as though these are wayward children merely finding their temporary opaque path to accommodation and modernity.

The truth is otherwise and until we develop some of Europe’s realism and a modicum of the Arab world’s self-interest, we will continue to bare our idealistic chest to an adversary this is both implacable and totally indifferent to our freedoms, our democracies, and the future of our children.

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