I defy anyone on the Left to come up with...

[The Ressurrected One]

...a liberal historian and commentator that makes as much sense as Victor Davis Hanson; without agreeing with him, of course.

C'mon, show me the Left's answer to rational, thoughtful, and intelligent commentary.

July 29, 2005
Reformation or Civil War?
The jihadists cannot be reasoned with, only defeated.

Remember how shortly after September 11 Mohammed Atta’s lawyer father sounded worried in his cozy apartment? He stammered that his son did not help engineer the deaths of 3,000 Americans. According to him, the videos of the falling towers were doctored. Or maybe the wily Jews did it. Why, in fact, he had only talked to dear Mohammed Junior that very day, September 11. Surely someone other than his son was the killer taped boarding his death plane.

Apparently Mohammed el-Amir was worried of American retaliation — as if a cruise missile might shatter the very window of his upper-middle class Giza apartment on the premise that the father’s hatred had been passed on to the son.

He sings a rather different tune now. Mohammed el-Amir recently boasts that he would like to see more attacks like the July 7 bombings of the London subway.

Indeed, he promised to use any future fees from his interviews to fund more of such terrorist killings of the type that his now admittedly deceased son mastered. Apparently in the years since 9/11, el-Amir has lost his worry about an angry America taking out its wrath on the former Muslim Brotherhood member who sired such a monster like Atta.

Yet one wonders at what he is saying now, after the worst terrorist attack in Egyptian history at the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt finally is suffering from the same terror and mayhem that its radical sons like the pampered Atta and Dr. Zawahiri unleashed on so many poorer others. The Mubaracracy may not take kindly to Atta’s father endorsing such carnage from his pleasant apartment that is incinerating those other than Jews and Westerners — and threatens to ruin the nation’s entire tourist industry.

The father of Mohammed Atta is emblematic of this crazy war, and we can learn various lessons from his sad saga.

First, for all their braggadocio, the Islamists are cowardly, fickle, and attuned to the current political pulse.

When the West is angry and liable to expel Middle Eastern zealots from its shores, strike dictators and terrorists abroad, and seems unfathomable in its intentions, the Islamists retreat. Thus a shaky al-Amir once assured us after 9/11 that his son was not capable of such mass murder.

But when we seem complacent, they brag of more killing to come. Imagine an American father giving interviews from his apartment in New York, after his son had just blown up a shrine in Mecca, with impunity promising to subsidize further such terrorist attacks. If our government allowed him to rant and rave like that in such advocacy of mass murder, then we would be no better than he.

The other lesson is that the war the Arab autocracies thought was waged against the West by their own zealots has now turned on them. The old calculus of deflecting their failures onto us by entering in an unspoken unholy agreement with the Islamists is coming to an end. George Bush’s “You are either with us or against us” is belatedly arriving to the Middle East’s illegitimate regimes.

And the governments of Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other autocracies are in worse shape than we are. At least we are promoting democratic alternatives to their dictatorships, in the hopes that when such strongmen fall, there is another choice besides the jihadists. But the autocrats themselves have nowhere to go. Since they never allowed a loyal democratic opposition, there is only the unsavory choice of either liberalizing while they are in the middle of a bombing war with extremists — or the fate of the shah.

Quite simply, Islam is not in need of a reformation, but of a civil war in the Middle East, since the jihadists cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Only with their humiliation, will come a climate of tolerance and reform, when berated and beaten-down moderates can come out of the shadows.

The challenge for the Middle East is analogous to our own prior war with Hitler who sought to redefine Western culture along some racial notion of a pure Volk long ago unspoiled by Romanizing civilization. Proving the West was not about race or some notion of an ubermenschen ruling class did not require an “internal dialogue,” much less another religious reformation, but the complete annihilation of Nazism.

So it must be with the latest fad of radical Islamicism. Contrary to popular opinion, there has not been a single standard doctrine of hatred in the Middle East. Radical Islam is just the most recent brand of many successive pathologies, not necessarily any more embraced by a billion people than Hitler’s Nazism was characteristic of the entire West.

In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini — who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious.

Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable.

By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy.

Each time an -ism was defeated, it was only to be followed by another — as it always is in the absence of free markets and cons utional government.

Saddam started out as a pro-Soviet Communist puppet, then fancied himself a fascistic dictator and pan-Arabist nationalist, and ended up building mosques, always in search of the most resonant strain of hatred. Arafat was once a left-wing atheistic thug. When the Soviet Union waned, he dropped the boutique socialism, and became a South-American-style caudillo. At the end of his days, he too got religion as the Arab Street turned to fundamentalism and Hamas threatened to eat away his support.

The common theme is not the Koran, but the constant pathology of the Middle East — gender apartheid, polygamy, religious intolerance, tribalism, no freedom, a censored press, an educational system of brainwashing rather than free inquiry — that lends itself to the next cult to explain away failure and blame the West, which always looms as both and Madonna to the Arab Street.

Iraq has inadvertently become the battleground of a long overdue reckoning, a bellwether of the future of the Middle East. If the cons utionalists win, then the jihadists will be in retreat and there will be at last a third way between radical Islam and dictatorship.

We must now step up our efforts. At home we should no more tolerate the expression of Islamic fascism on the shores of the West than Churchill would have allowed Hitler Youth to teach Aryan global racial superiority in London while it was under the Blitz.

When the extremists are repatriated to the Middle East, and understand they are never again welcome in Europe and America, millions of others will know the reason why — and decide by their own at udes to the killers in their midst whether they themselves wish ever again to visit, work, or be educated in the West.

If the terrorists are not isolated and ostracized at home, then any Western government would have to be suicidal to admit any more young males from the Islamic Middle East. Indeed, if the Iranian public or the Saudis, or Egyptian citizenry do not begin creating a climate hostile to radical Islam, then they de facto can only become the enemies of the United States in a war that they can only lose.

To fathom our success abroad, read what the Islamic websites — or Mohammed Atta’s own father — now say about the evil Americans and George Bush, who, they lament, have set Muslim against Muslim in Lebanon, Egypt, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine. The foreign contagion of democracy and reform, despite the best efforts of both the mullah and the strongman, now infects the Arab Street and it seems to be driving bin Laden and Bashar Assad alike crazy.

Iraqi guardsmen are fighting al Qaedists as Afghans die in firefights with Taliban remnants. Note well that at the loci of American democratizing presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, there are few local Iraqis and Afghans — as there are few Turkish or Indian Muslims — who are eager for global jihad against the West. The killers instead flock from elsewhere to those new nations to stop the experiment before it spreads. Give dictatorial Pakistan or Egypt billions, and we get ever more terrorists; give the Iraqis and Afghans their freedom and their citizens are unlikely to show up in London and Madrid blowing up civilians, but rather busy at home killing jihadists.

In this Mexican standoff, the Islamists, dictators, and democratic reformers are waging a struggle for the hearts and minds of the Middle East. We have had our own similar three-way shootout in the West between fascists, Communists, and liberal republics. Backing Communists to stop fascists or helping autocrats fight Communists were stop-gap, wartime exigencies — never solutions in themselves.

The Middle East does not need a reformation in Islam as much as a war to eradicate a minority of religious fanatics who are empowered through their blackmail of dictatorships — and to do so in a way that leads to cons utional government rather than buttressing a police state. So far governments have chosen appeasement and bribery — if at times some torture when demands for investigations rise — and so time is running out for the entire region.

There are a million Muslims in Israel — the mother of all evils in the radical Islamic mind. Yet very few have turned themselves into global jihadists, and hundreds are not blowing themselves up daily in Tel Aviv, much less in London or New York. Why? Perhaps the twofold knowledge that they have rights in Israel not found in the Arab world that they don’t wish to forfeit, and they are surrounded by people who would not tolerate their terrorism.

For the first time, Afghans and Iraqis have a stake in their own future — and know the United States is at last on the right side of history and intends to stay and win by their side.

So we press on.

[ChumpDumper]

So civil war in every middle eastern country is the answer?

How are we going to bring this about?

[The Ressurrected One]

So civil war in every middle eastern country is the answer?

How are we going to bring this about?

Okay, that wasn't the question and you obviously didn't read the article...

[JoeChalupa]

Oh, come on TRO. Just because this Victor Davis Hanson has you drooling don't mean he makes sense. Yes, he has some valid points as almost all commentators from the righ and left do. Doesn't make him the "Dubya" of commentators does it?

There are plenty of "liberal" commentators who make sense but not to you because you live inside the box. Read Ted Rall, Richard Reaves, David Shribman, Cynthia Tucker, Alan Colmes and a host of others.

Op-ed columns can be read by many and also have many interpretations or opinions of said commentator.

But it was a nice read and thanks for posting it.

[ChumpDumper]

Quite simply, Islam is not in need of a reformation, but of a civil war in the Middle East

The Middle East does not need a reformation in Islam as much as a war to eradicate a minority of religious fanatics who are empowered through their blackmail of dictatorships

Perhaps you should read it again.

[The Ressurrected One]

Oh, come on TRO. Just because this Victor Davis Hanson has you drooling don't mean he makes sense. Yes, he has some valid points as almost all commentators from the righ and left do. Doesn't make him the "Dubya" of commentators does it?

There are plenty of "liberal" commentators who make sense but not to you because you live inside the box. Read Ted Rall, Richard Reaves, David Shribman, Cynthia Tucker, Alan Colmes and a host of others.

Op-ed columns can be read by many and also have many interpretations or opinions of said commentator.

But it was a nice read and thanks for posting it.

Except that Hanson is an historian first, commentator second.

Ted Rall? C'mon, he's hysterical. I've never heard of Reaves, Shribman, or Tucker and Colmes, well, he's no historian either.

So, what are the flaws in Hanson's assessment, Joe?

[The Ressurrected One]

Perhaps you should read it again.

I did, and what he basically says is that if the Middle East doesn't want the West to solve their problem -- much like we did the Nazi issue of Germany, they need to get serious about stopping their own cancer.

And, he went on to demonstrated examples of where that is happening and where it needs to happen.

It was an affirmation of the Bush Doctrine and the Bush Middle East foreign policy.

[JoeChalupa]

Except that Hanson is an historian first, commentator second.

Ted Rall? C'mon, he's hysterical. I've never heard of Reaves, Shribman, or Tucker and Colmes, well, he's no historian either.

So, what are the flaws in Hanson's assessment, Joe?

Well, until you posted it I'd never heard of this Hanson dude. Is he related to that hot boy band, "Hanson"?

I didn't say there were any flaws in his assessment but to say that he's the all powerful and knowing Oz of conservative commentators, err...historians is simply a matter of opinion.

[JoeChalupa]

I did, and what he basically says is that if the Middle East doesn't want the West to solve their problem -- much like we did the Nazi issue of Germany, they need to get serious about stopping their own cancer.

And, he went on to demonstrated examples of where that is happening and where it needs to happen.

It was an affirmation of the Bush Doctrine and the Bush Middle East foreign policy.

So now since the all knowing Hanson has "affirmed" the so called Bush Doctrine it makes it fool proof? I don't think so.

[ChumpDumper]

I did, and what he basically says is that if the Middle East doesn't want the West to solve their problem -- much like we did the Nazi issue of Germany, they need to get serious about stopping their own cancer.

That's a nice thought, but how? How do you change the status quo of these dicatorships and Islamofascists states from within?

It was an affirmation of the Bush Doctrine and the Bush Middle East foreign policy.

Well that foreign policy is pretty much forcing that civil war by occupying Iraq and threatening to invade other mideast countries -- I wouldn't call that hands-off.

[The Ressurrected One]

Maybe you should learn something about the guy.

I don't hold him up as all-knowing either. But, he does make his points without calling Ted Kennedy an idiot (which he is) or bashing the Left, which I've yet to see any Liberal commentators who can talk about the Middle East without tossing Bush's policies out with the bath water.

Any Liberal assessment of the turmoil in the Middle East seems to begin and end with how Bush is responsible for all that is wrong and how there is nothing going right there. And, when they do mention positives, they fail to recognize it as a consequence to Bush's Middle East policies and, instead, torture logic to place the credit elsewhere.

Let me give you an example:

Tom Friedman, of the New York Times, is knowledgeable about the Middle East, but intellectually, he is a follower, not a leader. So he is a little late to the party in terms of understanding, and apparently endorsing, the Bush administration's strategy for the Middle East. In yesterday's New York Times, Friedman wrote:

In visiting Gaza and Israel a few weeks ago, I realized how much the huge drama in Iraq has obscured some of the slower, deeper but equally significant changes happening around the Middle East [Or, maybe caused them? --TRO]. To put it bluntly, the political parties in the Arab world and Israel that have shaped the politics of this region since 1967 have all either crumbled or been gutted of any of their original meaning.

Iraq is not the only country in this neighborhood struggling to write a new social contract and develop new parties. The same thing is going on in Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Gaza. If you like comparative politics, you may want to pull up a chair and pop some popcorn, because this sort of political sound and light show comes along only every 30 or 40 years.

"Fatah never made the transition from a national liberation movement to civil society," said the Palestinian reformist legislator Ziad Abu Amr. Iraq's Baath Party was smashed to bits by President Bush. Syria's Baath - because of the loss of both its charismatic leader, Hafez al-Assad, and Lebanon, its vassal and launching pad for war on Israel - has no juice anymore. Lebanon's Christian Phalange Party and Amal Party, and the other ethnic parties there, are all casting about for new iden ies, now that their primary obsessions - the Syrian and Israeli bogymen - have both left Lebanon. Egypt's National Democratic Party, which should be spearheading the modernization of the Arab world, can't get any traction because Egyptians still view it as the extension of a nondemocratic regime.

Intensifying these pressures is the big change from Washington, said the Palestinian political scientist Khalil Shikaki: "As long as Washington was happy with regimes that offered only stability, there was no outside pressure for change. Now that the Bush administration has taken a bolder position, the public's expectations with regard to democratization are becoming greater. But the existing parties were not built to deliver that. So unless new ones emerge, either Hamas or anarchy could fill the vacuum."

In other words, the Bush administration's strategy for the region is working. So far, Friedman's loyalty to the Democratic Party has always trumped his willingness to draw the obvious conclusions from his own observations. It will be interesting to see whether at some point, he will be willing to acknowledge that he and, you in this forum, his fellow liberals were wrong, and President Bush was right.

[The Ressurrected One]

That's a nice thought, but how? How do you change the status quo of these dicatorships and Islamofascists states from within?Well that foreign policy is pretty much forcing that civil war by occupying Iraq and threatening to invade other mideast countries -- I wouldn't call that hands-off.

I thought he offered a great example in Israel, Chump.

Over a million Muslims live in the "non-occupied" areas of Israel -- the ultimate evil spon on earth, according to Islamic extremists -- and none of them are blowing themselves up. Why?

Well, he makes the point that they enjoy their freedoms and they realize their society (Israel proper) wouldn't stand for any nonsense.

This train of thought needs to be brought to the rest of the region.

[ChumpDumper]

Over a million Muslims live in the "non-occupied" areas of Israel -- the ultimate evil spon on earth, according to Islamic extremists -- and none of them are blowing themselves up. Why?

Well, he makes the point that they enjoy their freedoms and they realize their society (Israel proper) wouldn't stand for any nonsense.

This train of thought needs to be brought to the rest of the region.

Nice thought, but that doesn't change governments in other countries where it doesn't matter what the general population thinks, AND it seems to go against the "all Muslims are bad Muslims" philosophy pervasive in this forum.

[JoeChalupa]

Maybe you should learn something about the guy.

I don't hold him up as all-knowing either. But, he does make his points without calling Ted Kennedy an idiot (which he is) or bashing the Left, which I've yet to see any Liberal commentators who can talk about the Middle East without tossing Bush's policies out with the bath water.

Any Liberal assessment of the turmoil in the Middle East seems to begin and end with how Bush is responsible for all that is wrong and how there is nothing going right there. And, when they do mention positives, they fail to recognize it as a consequence to Bush's Middle East policies and, instead, torture logic to place the credit elsewhere.

Bush has been in the White House too long and you've forgotten how conservative assessments were when Clinton was president. It goes both ways. Many like to throw out how "Clinton never did anything..blah, blah, blah" and how Bush does nothing wrong.

I'm all for the liberation of people but tell it like it is and don't use WMD or other BS. I wish we would do more in other parts of the world so liberate and save human life but we can't do it all.

I don't believe you can force democracy on people unless they want it themselves and while I'm sure the majority of Iraq does it doesn't change the fact that the leaders of Iraq are not getting the message out to the their people. I fear some at the top are going to be Saddam's in drag and out to stuff their pockets with any scam they can get away with.

But I hope I'm wrong.

[The Ressurrected One]

Bush has been in the White House too long and you've forgotten how conservative assessments were when Clinton was president. It goes both ways. Many like to throw out how "Clinton never did anything..blah, blah, blah" and how Bush does nothing wrong.

I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any of Clinton's bold foreign policy initiatives...

Let's see, there was the Jimmy Carter foray into North Korea. That went well. Granted, I'm not so sure it was Clinton's foreign policy prowess as much as it was Jimmy Carter's arrogance that led to that initiative.

Then, there was the normalizing of trade status with China resulting in the largest one-way transfer of U.S. trade and military secrets in the history of our nation. Yeah, that's a bonus.

Then, how can we forget the White House handshake between Arafat and Rabin. Wow! The peace was palpable...

So, fill me in on the Grand Foreign Policy initiatives of President Clinton's that I apparently missed.

I'm all for the liberation of people but tell it like it is and don't use WMD or other BS. I wish we would do more in other parts of the world so liberate and save human life but we can't do it all.

You just have to do your part, Joe. The world will do the rest...

I don't believe you can force democracy on people unless they want it themselves...

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the former totalitarian Soviet Union stand in bright contrast to that statement.

...and while I'm sure the majority of Iraq does it doesn't change the fact that the leaders of Iraq are not getting the message out to the their people.

You're not reading the right sources...there are successes all over the place in Iraq.

I fear some at the top are going to be Saddam's in drag and out to stuff their pockets with any scam they can get away with.

Then they'll fall like Saddam.

But I hope I'm wrong.

I'm betting you are.

[JoeChalupa]

I'm sorry, I'm not aware of any of Clinton's bold foreign policy initiatives...

Let's see, there was the Jimmy Carter foray into North Korea. That went well. Granted, I'm not so sure it was Clinton's foreign policy prowess as much as it was Jimmy Carter's arrogance that led to that initiative.

Then, there was the normalizing of trade status with China resulting in the largest one-way transfer of U.S. trade and military secrets in the history of our nation. Yeah, that's a bonus.

Then, how can we forget the White House handshake between Arafat and Rabin. Wow! The peace was palpable...

So, fill me in on the Grand Foreign Policy initiatives of President Clinton's that I apparently missed.

You just have to do your part, Joe. The world will do the rest...

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and the former totalitarian Soviet Union stand in bright contrast to that statement.

You're not reading the right sources...there are successes all over the place in Iraq.

Then they'll fall like Saddam.

I'm betting you are.

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the former Soviet Union the people made it happen. The Iraq leaders are pussy footing around, IMO.

See, what I mean. All negative statements about Clinton and Carter.

So I guess Bush is just doing his part and the World will take care of the rest.

I think I may be wrong too.

[The Ressurrected One]

Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and the former Soviet Union the people made it happen. The Iraq leaders are pussy footing around, IMO.

It took 4 years of intense combat and several more of U.S. Military presence and policy enforcement for Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan to be transformed. It took many years of chess-like foreign policy and intermittent armed conflict in minor communist-leaning holes for the same to happen in the former Soviet Union...and for the PEOPLE to demand the freedom and independence they witnessed in the West.

Peristroyka and glasnost, lowered the iron veil of Communist society and allowed those who had been, until then, held captive in countries that tightly controlled the intrusion of Western influence...to see what self-determination promised on the other side of "wall". And, keep in mind, Peristroyka and glasnost were never intended to end the Communist chokehold on their subjects, they were just forced -- by Reagan's foreign policy initiatives and the efforts of Pope John Paul II and the defiance of Lech Walesa and decades of out-spending their resources into oblivion -- to either self-destruct or attempt some limited loosening of Soviet oppression and try a hybrid model of communism and democratic reform.

Oooops! Port Wine stained Gorbechev didn't realize that peristroyka and glasnost would result in a complete and total rebellion from the people -- beginning in East Germany -- who, when they saw Ronald Reagan demand that the iron curtain be dismantled, saw for the first time, they could similarly demand change from their government...or, destroy it.

China and Iran, in particular, are similar to the former Soviet Union in that respect. But, even they, are having trouble containing the influx of information and exposure to the freedoms and independence inherent in Western culture and ideology.

It is all about getting the message to the masses. Western freedom and independence, for all it's warts, it superior to the oppressive forms of theocracy and totalitarianism enjoyed by the elite Mullahs and Dictators of yore.

That's what President Bush is doing.

See, what I mean. All negative statements about Clinton and Carter.

I was giving you a chance to point to some successful Clinton foreign policy initiative and, instead, you whine about my pointing out his obvious failures.

So I guess Bush is just doing his part and the World will take care of the rest.

Yep. Libya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan are a good start and a shining example of the effects of the Bush Doctrine on the Middle East. Individual freedom and individual rights -- no matter under what type of government they're exercised -- are the genie that cannot be re-bottled. Maybe a thousand years ago but, not in the current global context.

I think I may be wrong too.

Fair enough.

[ChumpDumper]

Libya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan are a good start and a shining example of the effects of the Bush Doctrine on the Middle East.

Again, how is Afghanistan just "spreading the message" when we overthrew the government?

[Cant_Be_Faded]

Why does it have to be someone "from the left" that is so needed to express a view similar to the view fo another individual?

TRO you're so full of crap man, its like you talk so much about how you're pro this and pro that, you're a true american, why is it that you attempt to divide people up before you even get to the body of your post?

Its like you consider left'ers from another country

why can't left wingers agree with this? There is no real solid black line dividing left and right, i hope you remember this TRO. The majority have been going more extreme left and more extreme right, but the middle is always and has always been blurry...

[spurster]

I am all for getting rid of the violent religious fanatics. It is hardly a new, liberal or conservative idea to make a policy with that goal. The question is how.

[danyel]

Egypt finally is suffering from the same terror and mayhem that its radical sons like the pampered Atta and Dr. Zawahiri unleashed on so many poorer others.

Egypt has been suffering from terrorism for decades...the article didnt make that much sense to me, I didnt find it enlightening at all.

21st century social values on countries and people mostly still living on the 15th century won't be that easy to achieve. Even moderated islamic or arabs countries dont have steady democracies, Morocco for example.

[Cant_Be_Faded]

I think the solution is for US citizens to give up more civil liberties in exchange for the promise that we'll be kept safe.

[ChumpDumper]

It's nice to say all Muslims need to do is have a taste of representative democracy and everything will take care of itself, but that is easily countered with the example of Pakistan. Pakistan's flip-flopping between elected governments and military dictatorships, their use and abuse of cons utions and amendments thereof to establish and legitimize dictatorships, and huge, seemingly intractable differences between secular and religious interests, between religious groups themselves and ethnic groups still longing for self-rule -- all those make it quite difficult to make a lasting, stable democracy.

[The Ressurrected One]

I take it from all the flak that you've neither decided on a Liberal historian worth their salt or come up with a Clinton foreign policy achievement worth crowing about.

Well, there was Mogadishu....no...nevermind.

[ChumpDumper]

Well, I'm confused by his opening -- that Atta guy is bragging after the London bombings -- does that mean that the west was complacent leading up to and following them? According to his words, we were.

I thought we weren't -- and if we weren't the Islamists were supposed to be cowering away.

Which is it?

[Edit - timeline was off]