Descend into the Maelstrom

The end is nigh.

People in Iran and other parts of the Middle East are boycotting Danish goods due to the publication of a handful of cartoons depicting the Muslim prophet Muhammad in the now-infamous second tier Danish newspaper, Jyllands Posten.  As someone who used to live in Saudi Arabia, I know how popular Danish dairy products and butter cookies are over there.  In my opinion here is one of the largest tragedies of this entire fiasco: little kids in the Middle East will be denied one of the world’s best snacks including sugar-crusted, pretzel-shaped delights, because their parents and leaders are ignorant enough to boycott them because some Danish editor (unaffiliated with the Royal Danish Butter Cookie Co.) solicited and printed some cartoons. 

Obviously, it’s more complicated than that.  Many Muslims aren’t just angered by the pictures, which include one of Muhammad with a ticking bomb in his turban and another of him leading a donkey.  The fact that the governments of Europe are not censoring or condemning the artwork which has been reprinted in numerous other publications also riles them.  I feel that boycotting products, and even peaceful marches, are acceptable forms of resistance.  At least they’re better than burning embassies, torching cars, and straight-up rioting L.A.-Post-Rodney King-beating style.  Boycotts and peaceful protests can promote dialogue, and conflict resolution.  But can’t we give a kid one cookie while we all just get along?

One would like to think that boycotts should be measured responses to something that the company or industry itself is involved in.  Let’s say the Royal Danish butter cookie people were hiring child labor in Djibouti.  I would be the first to boycott the product, just as quickly as if I found out that Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies were made out of girl scouts.  Or, say, that the Danish were putting insane tariffs on oil they were importing, but demanded none in return against their exports to the Middle East.  That’s unfair trade policy, and is cause for retaliation.  But, by God, these are CARTOONS!  I’ve seen them, and they’re not that bad.  The illustrations poke a little insulting fun at a religion.  Oversensitive Muslims need to collectively take a chill pill: they are not the only people in the world who have been ridiculed in a second-rate newspaper.  They do seem to be the only ones who go postal on an intercontinental scale in response.

What we are seeing isn’t just sensitivity; there’s a bigger problem.  Militant Islam rears its ugly head- and in my opinion, sadly justifies why the cartoonists and editors published the ticking bomb.  There is no doubt the artists and journalists involved had bad taste, poor decision-making skills, or even uglier, aspirations to notoriety a la Beltway Sniper.  But the fact remains: Islamist violence carrying on right now in many countries around the world in reaction fits right into the stereotype of the angry Muslim troublemaker.  The extremists, who are probably in the minority, are making all Muslims, including moderate ones look bad.  The worst perpetrators of all are the imams, religious police, and other leaders in the government and clergy who are inciting the violence.  They’re Chickenshits with a capital C just like George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and their neocon brethren: they’ll send people to the front to advance their ideological agenda, but of course they’ve never been to the front themselves, and they will never stop by for a visit in between holes on their golf courses.  Many leaders of militant Islam take impressionable youth with too much time on their hands, fill their minds with hatred against other factions such as the West, and encourage them to hijack planes, join the Suicide-Bomber-Gets-Fellated-&-Fucked-By-70-Virgins-While-Two-Watch-&-Take-Videos (SBGF&FB70VW2W&TV) Club, or burn embassies. Meanwhile the leaders themselves often hang out in the comfort of their mosque, palace, hookah bar, or camel stable.  I have no respect or sympathy or sensitivity for the leaders who bastardize the philosophies of Islam.  Muhammad would have denounced the violence just as Mahanth is doing at this very moment.  The Quran does not ask Muslims to boycott cookies in response to cartoons being drawn, any more than it asks to kill an author or illustrator for his work.

Yes, it’s true that many Muslims believe that Muhammad should not be depicted in statue form or picture form, as Muslim clerics want to avoid idol worship.  I seriously doubt that the sketches from Jyllands Posten will cause a mass pandemic of idol worship in the Muslim ranks.  Stop the presses(with a Molotov cocktail)!  Little Abdul didn’t get his cookie, and is drowning his sorrows by worshipping a cartoon that he’s never seen and never will see.  NOOOOOO!!!

That’s right.  Little Abdul will probably never see it because it’s not being reprinted in Arab media.  Internet connectivity, if available, is mostly censored.  Many of the rioters and riot-inciters have never even seen any of the cartoons.  How ignorant is that?  Fools who don’t know what they are protesting, except the vague concept behind actions that would never affect their daily lives anyway, are rioting.  And losing their said lives daily: riot police have killed people in different countries to maintain order. 

What we’re seeing is a real and terrifying problem.  Condi is right, as the situation is indeed "spiralling out of control." We have Muslims wreaking violence in many nations, from the West Bank to Indonesia, Afghanistan to India, and even in Europe.  This is the type of scenario that Osama masturbates to in his cave, while Saddam rubs one out as he fantasizes to it in jail.  Muslims the world over uniting in the common cause of hatred against the West.  They need any excuse to trigger the hatred.  I’m no hard-line right winger, but I believe that every private sector publication, right wing or otherwise, was completely within their rights to run the caricatures of Muhammad.  At stake is freedom of the press- a gift that many Muslims do not have, or could even begin to understand.  In places like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, where the uproar has been the worst, the dictatorial regimes freely (like the irony?) shut down or arrest people who publish something they don’t like.  For Arabs to expect the same of Denmark is ludicrous. 

Which brings up the yet larger problem.  I hate to use the term "Clash of Civilizations," an international relations theory proposed by Samuel Huntington, but this is the best-ever time to do so.  It states that people’s cultural/religious identity will be the primary agent of conflict in the post-Cold War world.  People threw this term around loosely after 9/11, but I didn’t buy it.  I thought the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds would both line up on America’s side in the aftermath, isolating Al-Qaeda into a corner for their crushing, dramatic, delicious obliteration.  Two stuttering occupations of Muslim nations and around 50,000 Muslim corpses later, our foreign policy is reviled by friend, foe, and half of the American citizenry.  Such is the hatred against us that even when the Europeans publish cartoons, America gets blamed: a strange and mutually unbeneficial push toward solidarity between the US and Europe after years of turmoil.  This, when the overly P.C. American media machine largely pussy-footed the issue by not even publishing the pictures.  We have a sad state of affairs: to see the pictures, I had to go on the Internet to a foreign website.  Without Internet access, you are as much in the dark as the Saudis are on this one.  Even New York Press, an irreverent independent paper, declined to publish the caricatures, resulting in the resignation of three journalists. 

Uneasy appeasement that leads to no resolution is but one symptom of this Clash of Civilizations.  The biggest question of all we are facing today is whether Westerners and Arabs can live on the same planet in the years to come.  Will extremist Muslims accept a free press in the West, let alone in their own borders?  Probably not.  Will they attack on U.S. or Euro soil again?  Probably, as evidenced by the threats being made.  Will Al-Qaeda and its offshoots die, if slowly?  Not at the rate we’re going.  Jihad, Inc. seems to be on the march.

Will the West cave in to pressure and give up its freedom of the press?  I hope not, but another 9/11 scale attack or two while the Bush Administration is in power would result in censorship "in the name of protecting our country and its citizens" along the lines of the NSA wiretapping issue.  I would bet my whole humidifier on it- and I have a dry-skin problem that gets very bad if my humidifier is not on.  Hell, do we have an exit strategy for Afghanistan or Iraq?  No.   Meanwhile, Muslims continue to flock to Europe, but many do not assimilate for generations.  The result is like an unmixed coffee, lousy, too bitter toward the top but two sweet at the bottom where the undissolved sugar lies.  France is now 10% Muslim.  As the population continues to grow, the European nations will be in trouble unless they learn how to accommodate the influx, and figure out a peaceful role for political Islam in the region. 

The surprise election of Hamas to the government of the Palestinian people will be a litmus test for the rest of the world.  It was a great example of how a democratic institution, free elections, can lead to suicide bombers coming into power.  Hamas, an organization mostly known for terrorist activity, must now sit at the "big boys’ table."  That means that Hamas must either play ball with Israel and others to grind out plans for peace and end the terror, or give the Israeli people a reason to vote the hawkish right wing back into power.  If that happens, Israel could be tempted to retaliate against the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Gaza with massive and brutal force.  This action would set off an endless series of global attacks and counter-attacks involving states and non-state actors, with no resolution in sight.  And then: the end is nigh.  It would only be a matter of time before nuclear weaponry became part of the equation.

Perhaps this all seems overdramatic to you based on the news surrounding the cartoons and the reaction around the world.  However what I have seen are disturbing trends from all sides: the conservatives, the liberals, the Administration, the Europeans, the Muslim clerics, and Arab governments.  All these parties have their hands dirty with blood in the current situation.  Nobody is above reproach.  It’s time to treat the problem of extremist Islam with the attention and resources it deserves as the largest single threat to world security and American security today. 

To mix things up a little bit, I am publishing here some words and thoughts which are not my own.  The following was written by someone who requested to be published on this site, but wishes to remain anonymous.  Although I didn’t write this screed, I happen to agree with a lot of it:

I’ve never been as interested in politics as I am now.  And why not, as it seems that politics have never been so interesting.  Hence the curse, “May you live in interesting times.”  While there are a lot of topics to hit, including the Republican effort to legislate hegemony through excessive gerrymanders etc., three other topics appeal to me - a trio of issues if you will. While some people are very upset by the ascension of Alito and Roberts to the court, I can’t complain too much.  After all, it was a Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who tried to “pack” the Supreme Court by adding six justices to the court to make a quorum of fifteen.  Hey, you can’t fault a brother for trying.  Interestingly, I think FDR is clearly the transformative president that 43 wants so desperately to be.  Bush may well be end up being a bellwether chief executive, but it is more likely to happen in the foreign policy arena than domestically.

Which leads to the first key issue: Iran and the Middle East.  The irony here is beyond comprehension.  Over 2,000 US troops and countless other coalition forces and indigenous indigent Iraqis have died in a war that was sold as an effort to secure Saddam’s alleged WMD.   Now, the very country next door to Iraq, Iran, has announced its intention to get into some serious nuclear dabbling and kick out IAEA inspectors.  Now we really do have a huge problem with WMD in the region.  Too bad we cried wolf less than three years ago on this same issue and now we have no credibility.  And after Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, the lack of WMD in Iraq, the pathetic post-war planning in Iraq, etc, who the heck would believe anything we said?  Any country that didn’t hate the US five years ago sure as hell does now and I honestly can’t blame them.  How would we be viewed in the Middle East if we invade Iran?  And then we would act surprised when the terrorists bombed us?  Gee, why do they hate us?

The point is that during the cold war the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (aptly acronymed MAD) saved us.  Loosely, the USA and USSR each had enough nukes to destroy the world several times over, so each had a strong disincentive not to use them.  This led to “cold” war and proxy wars, but not nuclear winter.  A terrorist who wants to put a bomb in a shipping container and detonate it in New York Harbor, Baltimore, or the Port of Long Beach has no such compunction.  As we saw with A.Q. Khan (Pakistani national who sold nuclear know-how on the black market), there is a real risk that terrorists or rogue states will acquire hydrogen or atom bombs.  Now Bush has declared we will militarily protect Israel from Iran.  Is this a bold gesture or our boarding pass to World War III?  Only time will tell.

In this climate, it seems that energy security would be a key topic.  No need to be a tree hugger here, it should be evident to any national security hawk that being dependent on middle eastern oil may bite us in the rear end.  Sadly, this administration is clearly in the thrall of the oil and auto lobbies (see entry under secret energy taskforce meetings) and won’t act.  Heck, I give Bush props for even mentioning it and making it an issue.  Though it may be a bit disingenuous… as an ex oil man did he just realize that the US was dependent on oil?  Sarcasm aside, I think that the country that invented the airplane, the assembly line, and road-tripped to the moon could resolve its dependence on foreign oil if it were in the mood to try.

On to our third topic (smooth segue, huh?).  For years Republican have laid claim to the mantle of being the party of national security and the military.  Not quite sure the history here, although they are the party that gave us star wars…  This claim to be the party that promotes and maintains the armed forces should seem ridiculous at the present time.  Through the extended use of National Guard troops and Army Reserve troops on the front line, Bush, Rummy, Cheney and Wolfy have destroyed morale and recruitment for these units for the foreseeable future.  Frequently used domestically to aid in control of disaster areas, for infrastructure security, and for other similar tasks, these troops have been overwhelmed abroad and the equipment procured for their use at home has been left in Iraq.   Reservists and Guard troops have lost income at home and left their families in danger of losing their breadwinners.  I might have considered joining one of these groups a few years ago as a chance to be a literal weekend warrior – but now who will sign up to die? 

Recruiting isn’t going much better for the regular Army, Marines etc, as enlistment quotas are missed and standards in place for decades are lowered.  Rumsfeld is planning to spend most of his budget on pie-in-the-sky weapons systems that may never pan out. This administration has effectively destroyed the efficacy of our armed forces, but they don’t stop there.  Anyone who has the temerity to criticize the administration or its policies on the military is promptly slandered.  It happened to Kerry, and the Republican operatives tried it on Jack Murtha too.  How disgusting.  The party that claims to value military service in the name of freedom is led by draft dodgers whose henchmen smear citizens who actually served.  That’s the way to incentivize future military service for kids today!  I dunno what Kerry or Murtha did in Vietnam, whether they earned their medals or not.  But I do know that they were there.  Which is more than can be said for some.

There are two sides to every story (hit my colloquialism quota there), and the Democrats have to be seen as at least as culpable as the Republicans.  If you can’t score seats in the Senate and House in these mid-term elections, and show the populace what’s wrong with the incumbents, then just give up.  It doesn’t get much easier than this.  Bush has overseen the cessation of an entire Louisiana civilization and the Dems let him spin it away in the press.  The Republican press machine is pretty slick.  As they say, they’re doing a heck of a job.