Visiting the way stations of a new 'long war'

[Journeyman]

Egypt crisis: Will Barack Obama trust 80 million Egyptians?
Mubarak's days are numbered and the US is in a quandary: can it trust a new regime's foreign policy

Well, that's pretty much a textbook example of putting the cart before the horse.

Let's see what the new regime is.
Let's see if the new regime lasts.
Let's see what, if any, changes to their foreign policy occur

...before worrying about whether "US trust of the regime" is an issue.

 

[Old Sweat]

I think we are still quite a ways from knowing how this will work out. (It would be interesting to be a fly on the wall in the Israeli Defence Ministry. They must be concerned that all at once their only secure flank might not be so secure.) Again, that is premature, but I am sure many of us have noticed that many of the Egyptian protestors are of the westernized ilk, and may not necessarily be those who support the Islamist view of the world. This same demographic made up the bulk of the protestors in Iran a while back, but were beaten down by the regime. These people might be able to support a more democratic government which maintains the status quo (quietly) in international relations.

The question might be what will the mass of the poor, down trodden masses do, especially if a leader appears who seems to offer them a solution? I also wonder about the attitudes of the rank and file of the military, as opposed to the senior officers who are living quite well off of the current regime.

The punditry would be well advised to heavily weasel their words. It's too bad the German octopus that predicted the World Cup results died.

 

[Journeyman]

......many of the Egyptian protesters are of the westernized ilk, and may not necessarily be those who support the Islamist view of the world.

True enough, but as noted earlier, moderate interim leaders often show up in revolutions.... before a more powerful group takes over.

In 1917, the Mensheviks were wringing their hands that Lenin and the Bolsheviks unfairly 'stole' the revolution, but the outcome was the same. (Hmmm....some similar conditions: ideological minority behind protests [many islamist groups present]; country facing financial bankruptcy [exacerbated in Egypt by investors fleeing and tourism collapsing]; wide-spread strikes [called for tomorrow]; army called out to quell protests [yesterday, although that appears to be a bizarre fight between the Ministries of Internal Affairs vs Defence] ).

The westernized protesters should be careful what they wish for. While I believe the country has no desire for a radical islamic government, turmoil has facilitated stranger moves.

Damn, didn't that octopus have any friends or relatives??   

 

[Old Sweat]

moderate interim leaders often show up in revolutions.... before a more powerful group takes over.

The westernized protesters should be careful what they wish for. While I believe the country has no desire for a radical islamic government, turmoil has facilitated stranger moves.

You'll get no argument from me.

For whatever reason, intuition or deduction, I don't have a warm, fuzzy feeling about this.

 

[dapaterson]

Hopefully the Canadian Embassy is getting ready for some "unexpected" visitors... not that history ever repeats itself.  Not that a somewhat Westernized country would ever overthrow its American-supproted dictator, and end up a religious dictatorship instead.

 

[observor 69]

BBC
Huge protests fan Egypt unrest

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said that he will not stand for re-election in September, as protests against his rule grow.

Speaking on state TV, Mr Mubarak promised constitutional reform, but said he wanted to stay until the end of his current presidential term.

The announcement came as tens of thousands rallied in central Cairo urging him to step down immediately.

The demonstration was the biggest since protests began last week.

The BBC's Jim Muir, among the protesters in Cairo's Tahrir Square, says the crowd erupted in jubilation after hearing the president's speech.

Egyptians are patient, he says, and may be prepared to wait for a few more months for his departure.

Mr Mubarak said he would devote his remaining time in power to ensuring a peaceful transition of power to his successor.

But he criticised the protests, saying what began as a civilised phenomenon turned into a violent event controlled by political cowards.

He said he had offered to meet all parties but there were political powers that had refused dialogue.

Leaders of the protests had called on Mr Mubarak to step down by Friday, when demonstrators were planning to march on the presidential palace.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12340923

 

[Journeyman]

Congressional Record Research Service reports provide background information to the US Government, rather than info on 'breaking news,' which are archived by the Federation of American Scientists.

If you're interested in some background info on Egypt and Tunisia (because, he said harpingly, informed opinions are better than mere opinions  ):

See the newly updated report "Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations,"January 28, 2011:  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RL33003.pdf

On events in Tunisia, see "Tunisia: Recent Developments and PolicyIssues," January 18, 2011:  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RS21666.pdf

 


Edit: 

 

[Journeyman]

An interesting view on Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood from STRATFOR's Reva Bhalla:

[Relevant copyright warning]

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is playing a very careful game right now. I think the Brotherhood is very well aware that the romanticism of the revolution in the streets could wear off the longer the people go without a regular supply of food, without security, and most important without results. It’s become clear so far that Mubarak does not have any intention of leaving anytime soon.

At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood needs to sustain the momentum in the streets right now. What they want to avoid is having people think that “Look, I waited three decades to get rid of Mubarak, I can wait another eight months until September elections for him to be deposed.”

At the same time, the Muslim Brotherhood is very conscious of the negative connotations associated with its Islamist branding and for that reason it’s trying to reach out to certain secularist leaders for example, Mohamed ElBaradei, who may lack credibility but at least he’s a secular leader that a lot of people can at least look to for some sort of leadership while the Muslim Brotherhood works on creating this political opening that they’ve been waiting for for decades.

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting article that attempts to tie all the pieces together. How much of this is true and how much is speculative remains to be discovered, but certainly there are various webs being spun to evade the sanctions and hobble the Western Alliance:

http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2012/01/22/world-war/?print=1

World War

Posted By Michael Ledeen On January 22, 2012 @ 12:54 pm In Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Speaking at the Pentagon on January 5th, President Obama proclaimed: “Even as our troops continue to fight in Afghanistan, the tide of war is receding.”

He could not be more dangerously mistaken. As he spoke, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was packing his bags for yet another foreign sortie, not, as you might imagine, to Damascus to bolster the morale of Bashar Assad — alongside whom Iran’s killers are conducting mass murder [1] in Syria’s cities and villages — but rather to Latin American capitals much closer to us, including Caracas, Quito, Guatemala City, Havana, and Managua. The Nicaraguan visit was on the occasion of the inauguration of our old enemy, Daniel Ortega.  The others are to discuss matters of “mutual interest.”

Venezuela is far and away the most important, but each of the others is significant, and shows that we are engaged in a global war that is advancing, not receding.  The “matters of joint concern” feature military and “asymmetrical” projects aimed directly at the American homeland. And that is only the Western hemispheric dimension of the real war. Ahmadinejad and his cohorts have worked very energetically to forge a global network that includes Russia, China, (sometimes) Turkey, Syria, and the Western hemisphere gang. In part, the network helps Iran bust the sanctions that have recently catalyzed a spectacular drop in the value of Iran’s currency. Money, weapons, refined petroleum products, and even crude oil get laundered through foreign banks, shell companies, and ports.

Sanctions-busting is the least of it [2]. Al-Qaeda terrorists of the stature of Saif al Adel (acting AQ chief between bin Laden and Zawahiri) fought against us in Mogadiscio, and lived for years in Iran.  Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, operated from Tehran for a long time.  Hezbollah, an arm of the Iranian regime, sends killers to Syria to massacre protesters.

The Latin American network sends Iranians (or their surrogates, as in the plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington) into the United States.  CBN reports that 28 Iranians were detained, arrested and released by Homeland Security in the first two years of the Obama presidency, and promptly vanished.  And numerous reports refer to joint Iranian-Venezuelan ventures, including weapons and missile manufacture and assembly in Venezuela.

The administration is not happy to paint this picture for the American people.  State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, asked on January 6th about Ahmadinejad’s trip, warned that “now is not the time to be deepening ties, not security ties, not economic ties, with Iran,”  But Ms Nuland did not wish to point to the well-established pattern.  Instead, she carefully misdescribed the network as if it were something brand new, as if it were a panicky response to Obama’s tough policies:  “As the regime feels increasing pressure, it is desperate for friends and (is) flailing around in interesting places to find new friends.”

Yes, Iran is under a lot of pressure, both from without and within.  Its currency is in free fall (as of yesterday it had dropped 50% against the dollar since September), there are open rifts within the governing elite, and some of the Revolutionary Guards’ most important bases have been bombed in the recent past.  For extras, the Latin network is not all it can be, since the Iranians are so unreliable.  They’ve promised many things, but delivered only some of them, and the Latinos have complained openly.  But the unkept promises haven’t slowed down the military programs, or the quest for uranium, which, along with the expanding terror network, are the most threatening to us.

Nor are many people paying much attention to the remarkable Chinese activities inside Iran [3], where the People’s Republic is establishing a chain of virtual colonies to ensure its access to Iranian resources.  CNN reports that a draft treaty gives China total control over three big areas, including gas and oil deposits both on the ground and in the Gulf.  All personnel is Chinese, not Iranian.  Security is in the hands of the Chinese, not the Iranians.  There are now upwards of ten thousand Chinese military men in Iran, organizing operations at these sites, which are slated to remain under Chinese control well into the 2020s.  For their part, the Chinese offer banking outside the reach of the United States government, shipping companies that lend their flags to Iranian vessels, access to their ports, and easy entry to the international drug and weapons traffic.  Furthermore, the increasingly effective throttling of the Iranian people’s access to Internet and other communications media is in large part courtesy of the Chinese.  The Iranians then turn around and pass their expertise to the embattled Syrians regime.  Thus, the network sabotages American policy, threatens American security, and tightens the noose around the necks of the people we sometimes claim to support.

For those who might think the rule of law applies to our enemies’ network, consider that, way back in 1965, a European court declared such schemes “Soft Colonialism,” and told all Western countries engaged in such activities to withdraw forthwith.

Then there are the Russians, about whose role in the global war much remains to be learned.  They are clearly part of the money-laundering apparatus, and are major suppliers of weapons. Well-informed people believe that the American drone that recently came to earth in Iran was defeated by a Russian system that jams satellite communications, including sat phones and tv broadcasts.  More ominously, I was informed by a high-ranking Iranian intelligence official that there is also close cooperation between Russian intelligence and the Iranians, including terrorist operations against American troops.

Finally, lest we forget, there are the North Koreans, who provide the mullahs with missile technology, and a considerable work force that is highly skilled at digging tunnels.  Many of the actual diggers for some of Iran’s underground nuke sites were from Pyongyang.

In short, we face a global war waged by a well-established alliance of Iranian and Syrian Islamists, Russian and Chinese crony plutocrats, and Latin American radical leftists who share a love of totalitarian control of their own people and a hatred of America. We have failed to design a strategy to win this war, and indeed it often seems as if our leaders share the world view of our enemies. Obama thought he could make deals with all of them, apparently believing this would come about when they realized he shared their conviction that most of the world’s problems are America’s fault.  Indeed, when push comes to shove in their own countries, his instinctive response, as Fouad Ajami recently wrote regarding Syria, is to favor the success of the anti-American tyrants.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan once famously said of Jimmy Carter’s administration that our leaders could not distinguish between our friends and our enemies, and had ended by adopting our enemies’ view of the world.  It’s as accurate today as it was 35 years ago.

Article printed from Faster, Please!: http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2012/01/22/world-war/

URLs in this post:

[1] alongside whom Iran’s killers are conducting mass murder: http://gerarddirect.com/2011/12/22/iranian-air-bridge-brings-weapons-men-to-assad/

[2] the least of it: http://www.abc.es/20111212/internacional/abcp-teheran-extiende-iberoamerica-20111212.html

[3] remarkable Chinese activities inside Iran: http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-719390

 

[a_majoor]

Israel has surrounded the Arab world with their strategy. An interesting way to outflank your opponents:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/02/24/lawrence-solomon-israels-oil-diplomacy/

Lawrence Solomon: Israel’s gas diplomacy
Lawrence Solomon  Feb 24, 2012 – 9:07 PM ET | Last Updated: Feb 24, 2012 9:43 PM ET

Israel: ‘Gas is our strategic interest for new partnerships’

How do you survive when you’re surrounded by enemies, as is Israel? You win allies among the nations that surround your ­enemies.

This increasingly successful Israeli approach — dubbed the periphery strategy — exploits an arsenal of Israeli assets that its new-found allies need: Israel’s military, its counterterrorism skills, its technology, and especially of late, its surprising wealth of hydrocarbons.

Israel’s periphery strategy is nothing new. After Israel survived its war of independence in the late 1940s, when it was invaded by six neighbouring Arab armies, Israel set about winning friends in the Middle East among non-Arabs. In this it succeeded wildly — Israel won friends among black African states, to which it transferred water-conserving agricultural technologies; among small non-Arab Muslim countries and ethnic groups that were at odds with the Arab states, and with Iran and Turkey, two non-Arab regional powers that became full-blown military allies.

Then the strategy all but collapsed with the OPEC oil boycott of 1973. “Stay friends with Israel and we’ll cut you off from oil,” the Arab states told the many poor oil-dependent countries that had relations with Israel. Poor countries felt they had no choice but to comply. Israel was from that point mostly abandoned, its former friends suddenly harsh critics at the United Nations, where they voted en masse to condemn Israel in one Arab-sponsored resolution after another.

Now Israel’s periphery strategy is back big time, thanks largely to hydrocarbon diplomacy. Apart from a major oil find in its interior, Israel has known gas reserves of some $130-billion in the Mediterranean, with some estimating that twice as much will materialize as exploration continues. Israel’s Mediterranean neighbour, the island nation of Cyprus, is also discovering immense amounts of gas in the sea bed adjacent to Israel’s. The two are now developing their gas jointly, with plans to export it to Europe or Asia or both. Greece, which may have more oil and gas in its extensive Mediterranean waters than either, is now talking of joining Cyprus and Israel in joint ventures.

The sea change in the attitude of Greece and Cyprus is breathtaking. Until recently, these two ethnically Greek nations were frigidly cold toward Israel, partly because they believed their economic interests lay in the more populous Arab world, partly because they feared for the safety of the 250,000-member Greek community in Egypt if they were to establish good relations with Israel.

Today the Greek calculus has changed. Not only did Greek trade with Arab states fail to blossom, the Greek presence in Egypt has all but vanished. Egypt’s Greek-owned industries were nationalized; Egypt’s Greeks were persecuted for their Christian faith. The official remaining count for Egyptian Greeks, once the most affluent and influential minority in Egypt, is but 3,000.



In contrast, Greeks now have common cause with Israel in exploiting their hydrocarbon riches and in defending them — Turkey, an enemy of the two Greek nations as well as Israel, has vowed to stop both Cyprus and Greece from developing their hydrocarbons on the basis of long-standing territorial claims. The Israeli-Greek-Cypriot alliance is likely strong enough to stand up to Turkey and allow these new-found friends to profit together.

But for Israel, profit is only the half of it, as a senior advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu told the press in an interview last week, when the two were in Cyprus to further their hydrocarbon co-operation. “Gas is our strategic interest. It is … a diplomatic tool for creating new partnerships, first in our region, as well as with the great powers of India and China.”

Israel views Cyprus and Greece as part of the “Western arc” of its periphery strategy, along with other European countries such as Christian Romania and Bulgaria, and Muslim Albania, which has been a standout defender of Israel in the United Nations. Israel now also has allies to the east, such as Georgia and Azerbaijan in Central Asia. And as part of its southern diplomacy, Israel recently established an East African alliance with predominantly Christian Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and South Sudan designed to fend off Iran and Islamist terrorism. Israel’s stock in East Africa is particularly high because of its role in gaining independence for South Sudan, the world’s newest state.

Over much of South Sudan’s half-century struggle for independence, Israel almost single-handedly armed and supported the black African rebels against what was widely recognized as genocide and enslavement perpetrated by the Arabic rulers based in northern Sudan.  In recognition of Israel’s role in its liberation, the leader of South Sudan made Israel his first foreign stop following independence and promised to establish his country’s embassy in Israel’s capital of Jerusalem, the only country in the world to do so.

Israel’s military help will continue to be needed in East Africa. The oil-rich South Sudan may well find itself at war again with the north and East African countries may find themselves subject to terrorist attack, particularly since South Sudan plans to pipe its oil eastward to ports in Kenya and Ethiopia instead of north through Sudan, which relies on South Sudan’s oil.

Focus on Israel and it appears to be a tiny isolated country surrounded by a sea of hostile Arab nations. Zoom out, though, and it is the Arab nations that are revealed to be isolated, increasingly surrounded by age-old adversaries, most of which have growing ties to Israel. With Israel’s hydrocarbon assets continuing to grow, and with Israel’s military and intelligence assets remaining dominant in the region, Israel’s periphery diplomacy has emerged as one of the country’s remarkable achievements.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe.

 

[a_majoor]

This is rather disturbing, although it should have been expected that a minority view such as this would exist and possibly work its way through the system. My take is this sort of thinking is born out of frustration with the apparently chaotic and slow pace of the current "Long War", and the lack of easily identifiable metrics to demonstrate success or failure. Certainly this is an extreme option for the end game should we be in danger of losing the "Long War", but most military, politcal and economic metrics would place us either ahead of the game, or tied at worst. If we were to actually engage with our full power, militarizing our societies like we did in WWII, there would be no way the enemy could effectively respond. Even now, without breaking out more than a small fraction of our GDP, the West can project power globally to any place that it is thought appropriate and engage and disengage at will. The fact that public opinion and political will is lacking to achieve a clear cut "victory" in any of these deployments is what drives these fantasies:

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/all/1?pid=1194

U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam
By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman Email Author May 10, 2012 |  4:00 am |  Categories: Crime and Homeland Security
| Edit


Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley's Joint Staff Forces College presentation on "A Counter-Jihad Op Design Model" (.pdf) calls for violent measures in a war against Islam.

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.

That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”

Dooley’s ideological allies have repeatedly stated that “mainstream” Muslims are dangerous, because they’re “violent” by nature. Yet only a few of al-Qaida’s most twisted fanatics were ever caught musing about wiping out entire cities.

“Some of these actions offered for consideration here will not be seen as ‘political correct’ in the eyes of many,” Dooley adds. “Ultimately, we can do very little in the West to decide this matter, short of waging total war.”

Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010, began his eight-week class with a straightforward, two-part history of Islam. It was delivered by David Fatua, a former West Point history professor. “Unfortunately, if we left it at that, you wouldn’t have the proper balance of points of view, nor would you have an accurate view of how Islam defines itself,” Dooley told his students. Over the next few weeks, he invited in a trio of guest lecturers famous for their incendiary views of Islam.

Shireen Burki declared during the 2008 election that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate.” In her Joint Forces Staff College lecture, she told students that “Islam is an Imperialist/Conquering Religion.” (.pdf)

Stephen Coughlin claimed in his 2007 master’s thesis that then-president George W. Bush’s declaration of friendship with the vast majority of the world’s Muslims had “a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine.” (.pdf)  Coughlin was subsequently let go from his consulting position to the military’s Joint Staff, but he continued to lecture at the Naval War College and at the FBI’s Washington Field Office. In his talk to Dooley’s class (.pdf), Coughlin suggested that al-Qaida helped drive the overthrow of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. It was part of a scheme by Islamists to conquer the world, he added. And Coughlin mocked those who didn’t see this plot as clearly as he did, accusing them of “complexification.”

Coughlin titled his talk: “Imposing Islamic Law – or – These Aren’t the Droids Your Looking For!”

Former FBI employee John Guandolo told the conspiratorial World Net Daily website last year that Obama was only the latest president to fall under the influence of Islamic extremists. “The level of penetration in the last three administrations is deep,” Guandolo alleged. In his reference material for the Joint Forces Staff College class, Guandolo not only spoke of today’s Muslims as enemies of the West. He even justified the Crusades, writing that they “were initiated after hundreds of years of Muslim incursion into Western lands.”

Guandolo’s paper, titled “Usual Responses from the Enemy When Presented With the Truth” (.pdf), was one of hundreds of presentations, documents, videos and web links electronically distributed to the Joint Forces Staff College students. Included in that trove: a paper alleging that “it is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians” (.pdf). So was a video lecture from Serge Trifkovic, a former professor who appeared as a defense witness in several trials of Bosnian Serb leaders convicted of war crimes, including the genocide of Muslims. A web link, titled “Watch Before This Is Pulled,” supposedly shows President Obama — the commander-in-chief of the senior officers attending the course — admitting that he’s a Muslim.

Dooley added the caveats that his views are “not the Official Policy of the United States Government” and are intended “to generate dynamic discussion and thought.” But he taught his fellow military officers that Obama’s alleged admission could well make the commander in chief some sort of traitor. “By conservative estimates,” 10 percent of the world’s Muslims, “a staggering 140 million people … hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit” to Islam. He added, “Your oath as a professional soldier forces you to pick a side here.” It is unclear if Dooley’s “total war” on Muslims also applied to his “Muslim” commander in chief.

After the Pentagon brass learned of Dooley’s presentation, the country’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, issued an order to every military chief and senior commander to get rid of any similar anti-Islam instructional material. Dempsey issued the order because the White House had already instructed the entire security apparatus of the federal government — military and civilian — to revamp its counterterrorism training after learning of FBI material that demonized Islam.

By then, Dooley had already presented his apocalyptic vision for a global religious war. Flynn has ordered a senior officer, Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim, to investigate how precisely Dooley managed to get away with that extended presentation in an official Defense Department-sanctioned course. The results of that review are due May 24.

Ironically, Dooley and his guest lecturers paint a dire picture of the forward march of Islamic extremism right as its foremost practitioner feared its implosion. Documents recently declassified by the U.S. government revealed Osama bin Laden fretting about al-Qaida’s brutal methods and damaged brand alienating the vast majority of Muslims from choosing to wage holy war. Little could he have known that U.S. military officers were thinking of ways to ignite one.

Slideshow here: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/05/total-war-islam/all/1?pid=1198&viewall=true

 

[a_majoor]

One thing that seems very clear is that *we* don't seem to have any clear understanding of what we are fighting against, and indeed, may people do not eithyer take this seriously or do not believe we are at war at all. We may not be "at war" by oldd metrics, but there is indeed an enemy out there who believes thay are at war with us. A new book which talks about this...

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743257499/ref=ase_wwwviolentkicom/103-1545606-9973455?v=glance&s=books

Forgetfulness occurs when those who have been long inured to civilized order can no longer remember a time in which they had to wonder whether their crops would grow to maturity without being stolen or their children sold into slavery by a victorious foe....They forget that in time of danger, in the face of the enemy, they must trust and confide in each other, or perish....They forget, in short, that there has ever been a category of human experience called the enemy.
"That, before 9/11, was what had happened to us. The very concept of the enemy had been banished from our moral and political vocabulary. An enemy was just a friend we hadn't done enough for yet. Or perhaps there had been a misunderstanding, or an oversight on our part -- something that we could correct....

"Our first task is therefore to try to grasp what the concept of the enemy really means. The enemy is someone who is willing to die in order to kill you. And while it is true that the enemy always hates us for a reason, it is his reason, and not ours."

 

[Journeyman]

A new book which talks about this...
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0743257499/ref=ase_wwwviolentkicom/103-1545606-9973455?v=glance&s=books

Bearing in mind that the book's author is openly gay and has said repeatedly that "radical Islam would have him killed in the worst possible way."

I haven't read that particular book, so cannot judge or comment on it; just be aware that its author may have an anti-Islam axe to grind.

 

[a_majoor]

A possible new strategic direction, if only the West was willing to seize it:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/09/14/lawrence-solomon-let-middle-easts-minorities-go-free/

Lawrence Solomon: Let Middle East’s minorities go free

Lawrence Solomon | Sep 14, 2012 8:00 PM ET | Last Updated: Sep 15, 2012 9:19 AM ET
More from Lawrence Solomon
   
Stop propping up ­despotic governments

‘They all hate us,” Americans across the country are saying, as Muslim rioters storm U.S. embassies and consulates throughout the Middle East and beyond. The flag-burning Death-to-America sentiment on view is real enough, as is the rioters’ outrage, but it is a mistake for Americans to think that they have no friends in the dozen-plus countries in Africa and Asia where the public is venting its rage.

The U.S. has numerous friends and prospective allies in the Middle East, quite apart from Israel and monarchies such as Saudi Arabia. These prospective allies are unbeknownst to most Americans, and to others in the West, because they have been mostly invisible to us, ironically because our Western governments marginalize them, treating them as nonentities while empowering their oppressors.

These marginalized, mostly pro-Western ethnic and religious minorities within the protesting countries include Azeris and Balochs, Copts and Druze. They include Bahais and Somalilanders. They include Assyrians and Maronites and numerous others, some of them — like the Kurds — more populous than the present population of Syria. Yet these peoples have been denied countries of their own due to an historical injustice: The Western colonial powers who carved up the Middle East a century ago after seizing it from the Ottoman colonial powers parcelled land out to their wartime buddies as spoils of war, rather than endowing the lands to the indigenous peoples that had inhabited the lands for many centuries and sometimes for millennia.

The West needs to wake up to the damage caused by the artificial states that they established and that they then propped up with aid. The result: Western-funded military despots that then oppressed their minorities. The foreign aid granted to tyrannies that neither share nor respect Western values has not won the West any friends, as the West in its delusions at times believed it would. To the contrary, this aid has acted to disempower the West’s would-be friends among the Middle East’s many ethnic and religious minorities.

Seeing themselves so hated, and the Middle East in flames, some have begun to argue that the West should pull out of the Middle East and leave the region to its fate. Others argue that the West must make concessions and somehow manage its relations with the despots, otherwise they will turn to the Russians or Chinese for aid, leaving the West at a future disadvantage. The choice for the West, however, is not limited to abandonment or appeasement.

Far better for the West to do what is only right and natural: support our friends; abandon our enemies.

For starters, we should stop propping up hostile regimes, either through direct country-to-country foreign aid or through indirect aid funnelled to these countries through multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. To date, literally hundreds of billions of Western dollars have gone to the region’s despotic and corrupt regimes, keeping them in power while making their leaders and their cronies rich. By putting a stop to the aid, the grip that despotic central governments have over their minorities would loosen. Some of the minorities, their bargaining hand strengthened, would argue for more autonomy within their existing national boundaries. Others would seek to set up a state of their own.

In addition to ending aid to hostile regimes, Western states should undermine these regimes by supporting the aspirations of West-friendly minorities. This too-rarely-tried approach just succeeded in the case of South Sudan, the world’s newest country, which separated from the brutal Islamic regime of Sudan following a referendum last year in which 99% voted for independence. Yesterday, anti-American and anti-German riots broke out in Sudan, but you won’t see any riots on the streets of South Sudan, a country that now lies proudly in the Western camp. The West now has an additional friend in a hostile region of the world; the hostile region now has the people of one fewer region to oppress.

Had the West in the past taken the same approach to hostile regimes such as Syria’s, Somalia’s, and Pakistan’s, the broad anti-American swathe from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean that the West now sees chanting Death to America would have looked more like a patchwork, if it had occurred at all. More likely, the many new pro-Western countries in the region would have dramatically changed the region’s dynamic, from a monolith of religious or secular tyrannies to a culturally and religiously diverse mosaic of nations that saw Western embassies as aids to trade, rather than affronts to their religion.

Financial Post

Lawrence Solomon is a founder of Probe International. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

 

[a_majoor]

Another view which spports what has been said on this board; a regional war will reset the board and (hopefully) lead to a new era of relative stability. As for an Islamic reformation, we can only wonder:

http://atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/NI18Aa01.html

All-out Middle East war as good as it gets
By Spengler

TEL AVIV - It is hard to remember a moment when the United States' foreign policy establishment showed as much unanimity as in its horror at the prospect of a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran.

In a September 10 report for Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies, Anthony Cordesman warns, "A strike by Israel on Iran will give rise to regional instability and conflict as well as terrorism. The regional security consequences will be catastrophic."

And a "bi-partisan" experts' group headed by former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and co-signed by most of the usual suspects states, "Serious costs to US interests would also be felt over the longer term, we believe, with problematic consequences for global and regional stability, including economic stability. A dynamic of escalation, action, and counteraction could produce serious unintended consequences that would significantly increase all of these costs and lead, potentially, to all-out regional war."

If a contrarian thought might be permitted, consider the possibility that all-out regional war is the optimal outcome for American interests. An Israeli strike on Iran that achieved even limited success - a two-year delay in Iran's nuclear weapons development - would arrest America's precipitous decline as a superpower.

Absent an Israeli strike, America faces:

A nuclear-armed Iran;
Iraq's continued drift towards alliance with Iran;
An overtly hostile regime in Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood government will lean on jihadist elements to divert attention from the country's economic collapse;
An Egyptian war with Libya for oil and with Sudan for water;
A radical Sunni regime controlling most of Syria, facing off an Iran-allied Alawistan ensconced in the coastal mountains;
A de facto or de jure Muslim Brotherhood takeover of the Kingdom of Jordan;
A campaign of subversion against the Saudi monarchy by Iran through Shi'ites in Eastern Province and by the Muslim Brotherhood internally;
A weakened and perhaps imploding Turkey struggling with its Kurdish population and the emergence of Syrian Kurds as a wild card;
A Taliban-dominated Afghanistan; and
Radicalized Islamic regimes in Libya and Tunisia.

Saudi Arabia is the biggest loser in the emerging Middle East configuration, and Russia is the biggest winner. Europe and Japan have concluded that America has abandoned its long-standing commitment to the security of energy supplies in the Persian Gulf by throwing the Saudi monarchy under the bus, and have quietly shifted their energy planning towards Russia. Little of this line of thinking will appear in the news media, but the reorientation towards Moscow is underway nonetheless.

From Israel's vantage point, the way things are now headed is the worst-case scenario. The economic sanctions are a nuisance for Iran, but not a serious hindrance to its nuclear ambitions. When US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey intoned on August 30 that he "did not want to be complicit" in an Israeli strike on Iran, he was stating publicly what the Pentagon has signaled to Tehran for the past six months. The US wants no part of an Israeli strike.

This remonstrance from the Pentagon, along with the State Department's refusal to identify a "red line" past which Iran would provoke American military action, amounts to a green light for Iran to build an atomic bomb, Israeli analysts believe.

What if Israel were to strike Iran? From a technical standpoint, there is no question that Israel could severely damage the Iranian nuclear program. As the respected German military analyst Hans Ruhl wrote earlier this year: There are 25 to 30 installations in Iran that are exclusively or predominately dedicated to the nuclear program. Six of them are targets of the first rank: the uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, the conversion works in Isfahan, the heavy water reactor in Arak, the weapons and munitions production facility in Parchin, the uranium enrichment facility in Fordow, and the Bushehr light water reactor.

The information about Natanzare is solid. The project has been under satellite surveillance from the beginning and been watched by Israeli "tourists". At the moment there are a good 10,000 centrifuges installed, of which 6,500 are producing. Israel's strongest "bunker buster" is the GBU-28 (weight 2.3 tons), which demonstrably can break through seven meters of reinforced concrete and 30 meters of earth. It would suffice to break through the roof at Natanz. In case of doubt, two GBU-28s could be used in sequence; the second bomb would deepen the first bomb's crater and realize the required success.

The trick is to put a second bunker-buster directly into the crater left by a previous one. According to Cordesman, the probability of a direct hit with existing smart-bomb technology is 50%. Half a dozen bombs should do for each of the six key sites - assuming that the Israelis don't have something more creative in the works. Israel has had 10 years to plan the operation, and it is a fair assumption that the Israeli Air Force can accomplish the mission.

The deeper question is: what constitutes success?

"When Israel bombed [Iraq's] Osiris [nuclear reactor in 1981]," said an Israeli who took part in the planning, "we expected a three-year setback of Iraq's nuclear program. It was delayed by 10 years. But that wasn't the most important thing. What was most important to us is the ripple effect through the region."

The ripple effects are what America's foreign policy establishment fears the most. The vision shared by the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, albeit with some variation, of a Middle East dotted with democratic regimes friendly to the United States would pop like a soap-bubble. What ripples would ensue from a successful Israeli strike on Iran?

Iran probably would attempt to block the Straits of Hormuz, the gateway for a fifth of the world's oil supply, and America would respond by destroying Iranian conventional military capabilities and infrastructure from the air. This would add to Tehran's humiliation, and strengthen the domestic opposition.

Iran's influence in Iraq and Syria would diminish, although Iran's supporters in both countries probably would spill a great deal of blood in the short run.

Hizbollah almost certainly would unleash its missile arsenal at Israel, inflicting a few hundred casualties by Israeli estimates. Israel would invade southern Lebanon and - unlike the 2006 war - fight without fear of Syrian intervention. In 2006, the Olmert government restricted the movements of the IDF out of fear that the Syrian Army would intervene. Syria's army is in no position to intervene today.

There is a possibility, to be sure, that Syria would launch chemical and biological warheads against Israel, but if the Assad government employed weapons of mass destruction, Israel would respond with a nuclear bombardment. In this case deterrence is likely to be effective. Iran's influence in Lebanon would be drastically diminished.

Stripped of support from its Iranian sponsor, the Alawite regime would fall, and Syria would become a Saudi-Turkish co-dominium. Ethnic butchery would go on for some time.

Egypt would be cut off from financial support from the Gulf States as punishment for its opening to Iran. The domestic consequences for Egypt would be ugly. The country is almost out of money; some of its oil suppliers stopped deliveries last August, and Egypt's refineries lack funds to buy oil from the government.

Al-Ahram reported September 12 that Upper Egypt now suffers a 30% shortage of diesel fuel. The newspaper wrote,

Egyptians started feeling another diesel crisis at the end of last week, with amounts available shrinking and prompting lengthy queues at stations. A shortage of liquidity in the Ministry of Petroleum has delayed payments to refineries that provide the crude needed to produce diesel. "The Finance Ministry is late delivering the required funds to the Ministry of Petroleum," Hossam Arafat, head of the division of petroleum industries at Egypt's Chambers of Commerce, explained. The total daily supply of diesel on the Egyptian market has fallen to 33,000 tonnes from 40,000, press reports estimate.

Cairo well might become a radical Islamic state, a North Korea on the Nile, as I wrote in this space last month (see North Korea on the Nile Asia Times Online, August 29, 2012.) But the consequences of such a devolution would be limited. With Iran neutralized , Egypt would be less of a threat to Saudi Arabia. It might become a threat to Libya and Sudan. That is unfortunate, but what have Libya and Sudan done for us lately?

In the absence of an American leadership willing to assert American strategic interests in the region, Israel well might save the United States.

In the long view of things, there is not much cause for optimism about the Muslim world. It contains two kinds of countries: those that can't feed their children, like Egypt, and those that have stopped having children, like Iran, Turkey, Algeria and Tunisia. Muslim nations seem to pass directly from infancy to senescence without stopping at adulthood, from the pre-modern directly to the post-modern, as I wrote in my book Why Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too).

Turks have just 1.5 children per family, like the infecund Europeans, while Turkish Kurds have four or five children. That makes the redrawing of the map of Turkey inevitable sooner or later. In a generation, Iran will have an inverted population pyramid like the aging industrial countries, but without the wealth to support it.

There is no reason to expect most of the Muslim countries to go quietly into irreversible decline. All-out regional war is the likely outcome sooner or later. We might as well get on with it.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared last fall, from Van Praag Press.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Good catch, Thucydides; I agree with David Goldman (Spengler) on almost every point.

 

[Edward Campbell]

Another "way station" is to be the subject of the UN's (brief and ineffective) attention according to this report which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Los Angeles Times:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/world_now/2012/09/extremists-cut-off-hands-fear-mali-coup-united-nations-human-rights.html

Strategy to improve 'alarming situation' in Mali expected at U.N.

September 26, 2012

Nearly half a year after Mali underwent a military coup that left its northern stretches open to takeover by rebels and extremists, nobody has mobilized to stop the chaos.

The question of how to help Mali cope is slated to be taken up Wednesday on the sidelines at the United Nations  in  a closely watched meeting on security in the troubled Sahel region.

“Extremism is on the rise. Arms are easy to obtain, while jobs are hard to find,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Tuesday of the Sahel crisis. “The international community needs a major concerted effort to address this alarming situation. Tomorrow, I will outline our ideas for an integrated strategy.”

Though Mali has reportedly reached agreement with a West African coalition to welcome troops, the U.N. Security Council has pressed for more details about what a military intervention would look like. Outside experts have warned that simply sending in troops could backfire, igniting more conflict.

Soldiers overthrew the government in March, upset over its handling of a Tuareg rebellion. But rebels gained ground, taking control of the north and declaring their own country. Islamist armed groups piggybacked on Tuareg advances and seized on the chaos for their own ends, installing a harsh and brutal interpretation of religious law and ejecting the Tuareg rebels from the territory.

Witnesses who live in northern Mali or fled the area told Human Rights Watch of grim abuses under three armed Islamist groups: an adulterous couple being stoned to death, eight men suffering amputations after being accused of theft and robbery, children as young as 11 or 12 being used as foot soldiers and spies. Islamists have clamped down on daily life, banning music and flogging women whose heads are bare.

“They’ve even outlawed chatting in groups,” a 23-year-old driver who fled Bamako told the human rights group. “They say instead of talking we should go home and read the Koran.”

Children have been beaten for swimming in the river and scolded for playing foosball; men were forbidden to watch a soccer championship on television in public, other witnesses said to Human Rights Watch. The only ringtones allowed on cellphones are Koranic verse readings, northerners and refugees said.
“We’re Muslims, good and faithful Muslims, but honestly, these people have taken all the joie de vivre from our lives,” a young man complained.

The violence and suffering plaguing the north has disheartened a former rebel leader, who said Monday that he was leading a splinter group breaking away from the independence movement to seek peace.

“What is foremost in our minds is saving these people whose hands are being cut off,” Col. Hassan Ag Medhi told the Associated Press in Burkina Faso. A Tuareg rebel spokesman in Mali called the move "blackmail."

Meanwhile in the south, though the military junta behind the Mali coup has since stepped down, newly selected government leaders have little ability to quell the crisis, the International Crisis Group lamented in a recent briefing. International groups such as the Economic Community of West African States, the African Union and the United Nations have also failed so far to make “rapid, firm and coherent decisions,” it stated.

Any action needs to tackle two levels of the crisis in Mali, said Comfort Ero, Africa program director for the International Crisis Group. Besides the turmoil in the north, the crisis is also tied to continued instability in the  Malian government, where the junta is still acting as a spoiler to peace, Ero said.

Human Rights Watch has reported that  soldiers loyal to the coup have abducted and tortured opponents. Outside observers are skeptical that the military has completely handed over power since the coup.

While Mali remains divided within, there are also disagreements with other countries over how to handle the crisis. Mali disagreed with the West African coalition over what international troops would do to assist its political transition; countries within ECOWAS have disagreed over plans.

The Wednesday talks may lead to a United Nations envoy to help bring all the players to the table and coordinate response to the crises afflicting the region, Ero said. Those problems include not just conflict, but devastating hunger and chronic insecurity.

“What needs to come out tomorrow is a very clear line from the African Union and ECOWAS that they understand what’s at stake in Mali and they understand how to map out a way forward,” Ero said. “Winning the north is going to be key, but you can’t do it if you don’t have coherence of leadership.”

Mali is one of the poorest countries in the world (per capita GDP is $1,099 according to the Wordl Bank), but it "matters" because its problems - and there are many - threaten to spill over into its neighbours (Senegal (per capoita GDP of $1,981), Mauritania ($2,571), Algeria ($8,715) and Niger (at $732 even poorer than Mali!) (amongst others) all of which are, like Mali, predominantly Muslim countries and many of which are facing take overs by fundamentalist Islamist factions.

But the UN will consider Mali's problems so every thing will be OK ...

 

[a_majoor]

Events are taking on a momentum all of their own now, and it looks like enough players have entered the game to really call this as a regional war; even the religious war that Edward has predicted. Perhaps it has stayed "under the radar" to us because we have been mentally thinking of high intensity combat in the WWII/Gulf War 1/OIF mode, even though experience should have told us that warfare has evolved towards insurgencies and "4GW". (History should be a guide as well, the 100 years war or the 30 years war did not involve decades of constant combat....)

Walter Russel Mead lays out many of the players in this short piece, and demonstrates how the American Administration may have been burned by placing their trust in the wrong people (or at least not providing enough oversight to understand what was really happening):

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/12/07/arms-allies-and-the-horror-in-syria/

Arms, Allies, and the Horror in Syria

Last year, the United States okayed a weapons shipment from Qatar to Libyan rebels. Now the New York Times is reporting that some of these weapons fell into the hands of Islamist militants:

    “The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government… The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments.”

This is especially troubling given the recent reports of Libyan arms being funneled through the Sinai peninsula to Gaza.

The fallout from the misbegotten Libya mission is well known by now, but the implications for Syria are more interesting. As regular readers of this blog will remember, we have suggested arming Syrian rebels:

    This is now all about trying to prevent the worst rather than promoting the best. It means arming people, many of whom we don’t like and who don’t like us, to reduce the likelihood of a dangerous increase in the power of people who consider themselves at war with us and our friends.

The dangers are real, and in both Libya and Syria it seems that too many arms have fallen into the wrong hands. A major problem in both cases seems to be the role of Arab money from the Gulf. Many Gulf Arabs see the conflagration in Syria as part of a broader war (and war is the right word) between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam to control the Middle East. While they may deplore the excesses and radicalism of some groups, on the whole they see the war against the Shia as a way of consolidating the role of the Arab royal houses on the Gulf. They can win religious legitimacy by promoting the faith.

The current anti-Iran alliance between the Gulf monarchies and the United States is a bit like the Cold War cooperation against the Soviet Union. Back then, it was Afghanistan, and the Americans, Pakistanis, and the Gulf monarchies cooperated against the Soviet Union. With the help of the Pakistanis, who fought tooth and nail any American efforts to control who got the money, radical groups were the chief beneficiaries of the arms and aid.

The United States wants Assad out as much as the Gulf Arabs do, and we are just as interested in checking Iran as they are, but we have very different ideas about what should come next in Syria. In Afghanistan we outsourced control over who got aid to Pakistan and the Gulf, with results that are all too evident. In Syria we didn’t face the same kind of blockage that Pakistan and the ISI imposed in Afghanistan, but because we never managed to find a group we liked that was competent and reliable enough to back to the hilt, aid from the Gulf (combined with fighting prowess on the ground) seems to have had the effect of strengthening more radical forces against more moderate ones.

It’s not at all clear that there was anything we could have done to build up the “good guys” in Syria, but the effect of our policy has been that the Gulf Arabs have had a bigger hand in arming and therefore shaping the Syrian resistance than we have done, while the length and bitterness of the conflict has further reinforced radicals and radicalism.

All told, a grim situation, and not one that bodes particularly well for the future. There may be a ray of light in reports that the French (with a history of colonial and post colonial ties to the region and a desire to work closely with rich Arabs today) have been active on the ground and in weapons distribution in Syria.

But even if things go as badly as it sometimes looks that they will, American policy in the Middle East has long been reasonably successful in safeguarding our vital interests in the teeth of a very hostile political climate. Post Assad and post Mubarak, we may be back to more of the same.

Interesting times.

 

[Edward Campbell]

In line with my known fondness for historical analogues, here, reproduced under the Fair Dealings provisions of the Copyright Act,  is a comment, from today’s (15 Jan 07) Globe and Mail, by Alan G. Jamieson, a Canadian (Alberta) author:
 
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070115.wcowar15/BNStory/specialComment/?page=rss&id=RTGAM.20070115.wcowar15
It is interesting to remember that the Dutch rebels were, actively, supported by England – sometimes with troops, mostly with money.  That seems to be the case today for the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Jamieson also reinforces my view that both Iraq and Afghanistan are but ‘way stations’ on the long, arduous journey from Islam’s founding to its final clash with the dominant secular, liberal Western and secular, conservative Asian civilizations.  It is my belief that such a clash is inevitable – not between civilizations but, rather, between civilization, as we understand it, and a barbaric, medieval, Arab/Persian theocracy.

Some commentators, including Jamieson, argue that the Arabs and Persians (and West Asians and North Africans and Indonesians and, and, and …) are too deeply divided amongst themselves – on religious, linguistic and cultural grounds – to come together any time soon (say within the next two or three generations) to and launch an all out war between Islam and the West or the East.  That may be the case but strong leaders have united most of Islam in the past and I believe there is a cultural proclivity for many (most?) Muslims to submit to a high religious authority and submerge their religious and social differences in pursuit of a ‘greater Islam’ – Osama bin Laden’s caliphate.

I'm not sure if this should be here, or in a humour thread in Radio Chatter, but the clash between the increasingly Arab or Iranian influenced versions of Asian Islam and the more traditional Buddhist or Confucian cultures is a well reported problem in Burma (Myanmar). In this report, which is reproduced under the Fair Dealing provisions of the Copyright Act from the Guardian, we see an interesting way of trying to maintain some social balance:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/burma-muslims-two-child-limit?CMP=twt_fd

Burmese Muslims given two-child limit
Rakhine state officials say limit on children will help ease tensions with Buddhists, whose population is growing at slower rate

Associated Press

guardian.co.uk, Saturday 25 May 2013

Muslims in a province of Burma have been ordered not to have more than two children in an attempt by the government to stop Buddhist attacks on Muslims.

State officials said the two-child limit in the state of Rakhine would ease tensions between Buddhists and their Muslim Rohingya neighbours.

Local officials said the new measure was part of a policy that will also ban polygamyin two Rakhine townships that border Bangladesh and have the highest Muslim populations. The townships, Buthidaung and Maundaw, are about 95% Muslim.

The measure was enacted a week ago after a government-appointed commission investigating the violence issued proposals to ease tensions, which included family planning programs to stem population growth among minority Muslims, said Rakhine state spokesman Win Myaing. The commission also recommended doubling the number of security forces in the volatile region.

"The population growth of Rohingya Muslims is 10 times higher than that of the Rakhine (Buddhists)," Win Myaing said. "Overpopulation is one of the causes of tension."

Sectarian violence in Burma first flared nearly a year ago in Rakhine state between the region's Rakhine Buddhists and Muslim Rohingya. Mobs of Buddhists armed with machetes razed thousands of Muslim homes, leaving hundreds of people dead and forcing 125,000 to flee, mostly Muslims.

Since the violence, religious unrest has developed into a campaign against the country's Muslim communities in other regions.

Containing the strife has posed a serious challenge to President Thein Sein's reformist government as it attempts to institute political and economic liberalisation after nearly half a century of harsh military rule. It has also tarnished the image of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who has been criticised for failing to speak out strongly in defence of the country's embattled Muslim community.

Win Myaing said authorities had not yet determined how the measures will be enforced, but the two-child policy will be mandatory in Buthidaung and Maundaw. The policy will not apply yet to other parts of Rakhine state, which have smaller Muslim populations.

"One factor that has fuelled tensions between the Rakhine public and [Rohingya] populations relates to the sense of insecurity among many Rakhines stemming from the rapid population growth of the [Rohingya], which they view as a serious threat," the government-appointed commission said in a report issued last month.

Predominantly Buddhist Burma does not include the Rohingya as one of its 135 recognised ethnicities. It considers them to be illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and denies them citizenship. Bangladesh says the Rohingya have been living in Myanmar for centuries and should be recognised as citizens. Muslims account for about 4% of Myanmar's roughly 60 million people.

See, also, my comments about how the Chinese plan to deal with their Muslim Uyghurs ~ by "breeding" them into irrelevance.

 

[George Wallace]

But ERC, the proliferation of Muslims through procreation is one of their more subtle strategies of world domination.  Perhaps the Burmese Government has woken up to this fact and are taking a proactive stance in protecting their culture and way of life.