Debate: Regional Problems Hinder Arab-Israeli Peace

by Lee Smith


The confrontation with Israel is not the principal reason behind the slow development and well-being in the Arab world. Rather, the Arab—Israeli conflict is a manifestation of a much larger issue, and it is this regional dynamic, more dangerous even to the Arabs than it is to Israel, that is primarily responsible for the lack of development, material and human, in the Arabic-speaking Middle East.

In the United States, columnists, regional experts and former policymakers have remarked of late that for the first time in their memory—perhaps, indeed, for the first time since the founding of the state of Israel—the Arab–Israeli conflict does not dominate American thinking about the region. Of course, the United States has always had multiple interests in the Middle East, primarily the free flow of Persian Gulf energy resources. But even in maintaining those interests, the Arab–Israeli conflict was still a central part of the American conversation.

For instance, even after the US-led coalition pushed Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991, the George H. W. Bush administration still had an eye on the peace process. Then-secretary of state James Baker saw Arab–Israeli peace as a natural consequence of Operation Desert Storm and convened the Madrid conference in an effort to broker a deal between Israel and the Arabs. Similarly, when more than a decade later George W. Bush invaded Iraq, American officials contended that the road to Jerusalem went through Baghdad. By this, they meant that a democratic government in the heart of the Middle East would open up the rest of the region to democracy, too. These US policymakers believed that once all the Arab states had a say in their own governance, surely Arab voters would prefer trade to war and choose wealth and opportunity over moribund economies.

The Americans were wrong because they did not understand, as Hazem Saghieh explained a decade ago now, that the problem with Iraq was not Saddam Hussein. No, the problem with Iraq was its own broken society, of which Saddam and his vicious regime were merely a reflection. Ten years after US troops invaded Iraq, Americans and Arabs alike have a different picture of what the problems in the region truly are: the Arab–Israeli conflict is no longer the key topic of the American conversation about the Middle East because it has today been overshadowed by sectarianism.

It would be hard to overstate how much the growing sectarian conflict throughout the region has shifted the American focus. The increasingly deadly war between Sunnis and Shi’ites, stretching now from the shores of Beirut to the heart of Baghdad, has compelled American Middle East experts to re-adjust their paradigm for understanding the region. Where once Washington policymakers understood all the Middle East in terms of how other parts of the region affected, or were affected by, the Arab–Israeli conflict, now all the talk is of sectarianism.

Given the amount of bloodshed now in Lebanon, Iraq, and especially Syria, and given the nature of the strategic balance of power (revolutionary Iran and its Shi’a allies vs. the US-backed status quo order of the Sunni Arab regimes) embedded in the sectarian battle, it is not surprising that Americans or Arabs, or Israelis for that matter, should see it like this. But I have to disagree. Sectarianism, or what many believe is an age-old struggle between Sunnis and Shi’ites, is no more an essential or necessary feature of Middle Eastern reality than the Arabs’ confrontation with Israel. They are two different aspects of the same issue.

It was Bashar Al-Assad who gave away the game when he called the Syrian opposition “foreign terrorists.” These were Syrians who protested peacefully for months before they picked up arms in self-defense. The war of extermination Assad has waged against the Sunni-majority opposition is the same sort of battle plan he and other Arab leaders, from Nasser to Nasrallah, have had in store for Israel, for the Jews, for more than 60 years. ‘We will drive them into the sea,’ Arab officials have shouted for six decades, ‘and destroy them.’ We hear these same echoes now in the battle cries of Assad’s regime in its war against the Sunnis. If they’re “foreign terrorists,” let us recall how many times Israel has been labeled a colonialist export, “foreign” to the region.

Like the long confrontation with Israel, sectarianism is just an aspect of the regional dynamic that has retarded every kind of possible development in the region—economic, industrial, political, social, and above all human. Development is not possible if you are incapable of accepting and living with the other, whether they are Sunnis, Shi’ites, Alawites, Druze, Christians, or the Jews of Israel.


Lee Smith is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has written for many publications, including the New York Times, the New Republic, the Boston Globe, and Wired, and is the author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Doubleday: 2010).

Source: http://www.aawsat.net/2013/08/article55314648

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

War Games in Syria

by Dr. Reuven Berko

The horrific pictures of the children of Ghouta, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Damascus, laying side by side in deathly silence in ditches, are still splashed on screens across the world as evidence of atrocities that refuse to be silenced. Syrian opposition spokespeople continue to blame the Assad regime for using chemical weapons and demand foreign intervention, while the regime is claiming it has found evidence of chemical weapons stored in the rebels' tunnels.

The discussions at the U.N. Security Council this weekend only produced one sterile decision, that a U.N. delegation already in Damascus should be dispatched to the affected chemical zone to examine it before anyone is found guilty. Indeed, Angela Kane, the U.N. high representative for disarmament, accompanied by Swedish chemical weapons expert Professor Ake Sellstrom, arrived in Syria on Saturday.

The barrage of condemnations and accusations continues unabated. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius blames the Syrian regime; U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is asking that inspectors be allowed to investigate what appears to be a crime against humanity. German Chancellor Angela Merkel openly accused China and Russia for their obstinate stance against taking any measure that would objectively try to determine whether chemical weapons were used and by whom.

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu hosted his Qatari counterpart in Istanbul. These latter two adamant supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, who support the Syrian rebels of course, demanded an immediate U.N. search in Syria to prevent the tampering of evidence. Even Iran's new president, Hasan Rouhani, described the use of chemical weapons as a crime against humanity, called the victims "shuhada" (martyrs), and self-righteously said these types of weapons should not be used.

As per his custom, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the Syrian opposition for preventing the U.N. inspection team from investigating the disaster zone. In a telephone discussion with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday, the two decided that the U.N. team would finally be allowed to enter Ghouta, with both sides guaranteeing that the inspectors will be allowed to work unhindered. This agreement signifies progress, as both the Syrian regime and its Russian patron agreed to the investigation despite their claim that the rebels were behind the chemical weapons attack.

Something dramatic, nevertheless, is changing. American Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that national security officials and White House advisers would gather later this week to formulate their next steps depending on the outcome of the U.N. inspection. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey said he would present President Barack Obama with target options in Syria, despite Russia's muscle-flexing.

Meanwhile, there are signs of heightened alert along Jordan's northern border with Syria, with the deployment of Patriot missile batteries and F-16 fighter jets, and multinational military preparations that include reinforcements and the fortification of the American headquarters in Amman -- all of this outside the framework of the U.N. and the Security Council. The Arab media claims that within this framework army commanders will examine the possibilities for acting in Syria if the order from Washington is given. On the naval front, the Americans ordered four warships stationed in the eastern Mediterranean to be prepared for battle and a fifth battleship is being deployed to the area.

The Americans are unable to help the divided Syrian opposition because most of its fighting force comprises radical Islamic terrorist groups that cannot serve as an alternative to Assad. These groups have recently expanded their activities across the Lebanese border, attacking Hezbollah, and they in turn were hit back in a double mosque bombing in Tripoli on Friday.

The composition of the military force in Jordan, including Western and Muslim nations, resembles the umbrella of legitimacy provided by the coalition prior to the U.S. attack against Iraq in the Second Gulf War. Senior officials in the Syrian regime warned that they would not let the West use the fraudulent chemical "trick" against them, which they claim was used against Saddam Hussein as a justification for invading Iraq.

The tense multinational standoff surrounding Syria is reminiscent of the U.S.-Soviet standoff during the Cuban missile crisis. That crisis, which began on October 14, 1962 and ended 14 days later, could have realistically ignited a war between the two superpowers.

It appears as if the West is willing to act in Syria. The time has come for the Americans and their allies to hit hard at the criminal Syrian regime and a nuclear ambitious Iran. The Russians will get the message.

We're lucky that someone already destroyed Syria's nuclear reactor.

Dr. Reuven Berko

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5483

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Obama's Middle East Disaster Area

by Richard Baehr

As the United Nations Security Council met to debate the situation in Syria, amid charges that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons and killed hundreds, if not more than a thousand civilians in recent days, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power was nowhere in sight, and State Department officials would not reveal her whereabouts.

Although there may be a legitimate explanation for her absence, avoiding embarrassment might have been a political reason to avoid the debate. The self-described "genocide chick" was a key part of the push for U.S. involvement in Libya, aiming to avoid the possibility of massive civilian casualties in that conflict. Power was believed to be the proponent within the administration of the doctrine known as "responsibility to protect," or R2P. But she has been unusually quiet about the goings on in Syria the last two years, where more than 100,000 have been slaughtered in exactly the kind of conflict Power hoped to avoid in Libya.

President Barack Obama, of course, has his own embarrassments to handle over Syria. After establishing a "red line" on the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons, the red line appears to have been violated at least twice, with zero consequence so far for the Assad regime. It is a very bad sign when a humorous newspaper popular with younger Americans, such as The Onion, begins to treat the Obama pronouncements with ridicule. The Onion's headline was: "Obama Deeply Concerned After Syrians Gassed To Death On White House Lawn."

Of course, Syria is not the only Middle East hot spot spinning out of control, or more significantly from the Obama perspective, away from any American role or influence. In Egypt, the nation that Obama chose for his long-promised outreach to Islam speech in 2009, we have witnessed all of the following within two years: The government of long-time American ally Hosni Mubarak was overthrown, an interim government was installed, elections were held which may have resulted in a victory for the Muslim Brotherhood (the results are disputed), the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi pushed for a new Islamist constitution which was approved by voters, unhappiness with the Morsi regime on many fronts led to huge demonstrations demanding he leave office, the army forced Morsi from power, and then cracked down on pro-Morsi demonstrators. And while all of this was going on, Morsi supporters, both when he was in power and since he was deposed, have gone after Egypt's sizable Coptic Christian community, most recently with dozens of church burnings.

Today in Egypt, it is hard to find anyone with any respect or admiration for the role played by Obama in all this. Secularists and supporters of the military taking power from Morsi believed Obama always sided with the Muslim Brotherhood. They point to Obama demanding that Brotherhood leaders attend his Cairo talk in 2009, which contradicted the official policy of the Mubarak government to exclude them from political events, a reason why Mubarak did not personally attend the talk. Obama's ambassador to Egypt appeared to side with the Morsi regime and against its millions of opponents when they took to the street. There was certainly the appearance that Obama was a supporter of the popular will expressed in huge crowds demanding the end of Mubarak's government, but held no such regard for the even larger crowds demanding that Morsi step down.

But supporters of Morsi and the Brotherhood are also unhappy with Obama and his actions, or lack thereof. They believe that the Americans did not use the leverage they had with the military and the new military-led government to prevent the "coup" that ousted Morsi, and the crackdown which occurred soon after when Brotherhood supporters took to the street. Obama has been relegated to offering the kind of bromides that no one takes seriously in Egypt or the Middle East -- calling for pluralism, for inclusiveness, for nonviolence, for democratic rule, for a role by all major political parties and constituencies.

These would all be nice, but it is not how things are getting done these days in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and pretty much every other "Arab Spring" address you can list. There is respect for the strong horse, and the government that produces for the people, not for the better sounding political message.

There are other problems for Obama in the region. This week the administration found itself denouncing the latest in a string of ever more strident remarks emanating from Turkish leader Recep Erdogan.

After pointing to Erdogan for years as a model for the kind of Islamist government that the administration could work with and find common cause, this week the Turkish leader went too far, with a predictable anti-Semitic rant about Israel and the Jews being responsible for the collapse of the Morsi government, a government with which Erdogan had bonded. With the Turkish "economic miracle" in full stall, continuing problems with the Kurdish minority and complaints about press censorship and cavalier jailings of political opponents, the bloom is off the rose for another of Obama's favorites.

Just months ago, on his first visit to Israel as president, Obama's going away gift for his Israeli hosts was an arranged three-way discussion with Erdogan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, an attempt to finally get the two former allies beyond the problems in their relationship associated largely with the Mavi Marmara incident during the Turkish flotilla's attempt to break the blockade of Gaza in 2010. Once Obama got off the phone, the Israelis followed through with their promises, and Turkey, naturally, did not choose to reciprocate.

It is hard to disguise the shocking transformation that has occurred with regard to respect for American power or will in the region.

The Obama team has been comfortable picking off al-Qaida leaders with drone strikes, but has signaled at every turn that it wants no more deployments (or wars) involving U.S. ground forces. While Iran is spinning near 20,000 centrifuges and moving closer to becoming a member of the nuclear weapons club, the Obama team has slowed the approval of sanctions by Congress and welcomed the new Iranian government, as if it really is a fresh start, and can bargain with the U.S. This naïveté suggests that the Obama team believes President Hasan Rouhani's government can act independently of the ruling mullahs who have been toying with the West for over a decade on their nuclear program, always offering the lure of negotiations, when this serves only to delay any serious action by the U.S. and has also led to American pressure on Israel not to act unilaterally.

The message that Iran takes home from American dithering in Syria and Egypt, and our eagerness to talk some more, is that this administration will not use military force to stop their nuclear effort.

President George W. Bush had a very different reputation and image in this part of the world. He was certainly not loved, but our enemies never suspected that we would run from a fight. We still have enemies, but now we seem unable even to take sides. This will only lead to more testing of our resolve by those who have lost respect for our willingness to project the power we have.

And where is the president during all this, now that he is back from golfing at Martha's Vineyard? He has been on a bus tour of college campuses (where some true believers still reside) bashing Rush Limbaugh. We have an unserious man for a serious time.

Richard Baehr

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5485

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Stats, Graphs, and Wizardry - Playing the Numbers Game with Muslim Sexual Groomers

by Paul Austin Murphy

Statistics is a funny science because one of the first things statisticians usually do -- when speaking to novices or introducing their subject -- is warn you about their discipline. So even though statisticians don't always quote this well-known line from Benjamin Disraeli themselves, here it is anyway:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

One of the reasons why people should be suspicious of stats is that many people -- especially Leftists -- have told us to be so. Nonetheless, in the case of the Leftists just mentioned, they are usually only talking about the stats which work against their own ideologies or causes. When they work in their favor, then, of course, 'stats never lie'.

Take the case of the British Labour Party's deliberate policy of flooding Britain with a mass of immigrants (around three million between 1997 and 2010) in order to transform the country from being a 'hideously white' hell into the multicultural Island of Bliss we have today. (The other major reason for such mass immigration was -- in the words of one Labour Party politician involved in this huge experiment at the time -- 'to rub the nose of the Right in diversity.') In order to help that massive piece of social engineering along (which was on such a scale that even Josef Stalin would have been impressed) the Labour Party needed the help of abundant stats and graphs in order to make blue seem green and 1 + 1 equal 3. 

The thing about the endless citation of stats and graphs by Leftist, Labour and other propagandists is that other 'experts', even multitudes of them, could quite easily come along --and they often do -- with just as many stats and graphs which work directly against all the positions and causes they are trying to advance or support with their own. That's the thing about statistics -- they can be made to say just about anything.

The fact is that many people are clearly using stats and graphs politically and ideologically. What I mean by that is such people start off with a set of ideological and political positions (on immigration, racism, employment, etc.), and then apply stats to them. The ideology or politics comes first and then the stats and graphs dress up or justify the ideology or political position/cause. 

This isn't an argument that 'all statistics lie' or even that there's no place for statistics in political debate. It's just an argument for being skeptical about them. Indeed Leftists -- and not just self-described Marxists -- often give a similar warning about theory and ideology. They advise us to 'take note of the ideological or theoretical underpinnings of what people say.' Of course the implicit assumption here, again, is that the ideological or theoretical underpinnings of what Leftists say should be either ignored or embraced.

'Most groomers and paedophiles are white, not Muslim'Hah! That classic British soundbite and also a classic statistical deceit. (Click here for some context on this.)

Take a fictional town or city in which only one percent of the population is Muslim. Of course most sexual groomers and paedophiles in that town or city will be white. Now say there are five percent Muslims in that town or city; the same will likely be true in that case too. You can keep this argument up even until the overall percentage of Muslims in the town is as much as 30 percent. If the percentages equalize any more than that, though, then the situation will indeed change. Then that opening phrase above will start to make some sense and be somewhat more politically legitimate. 

If in that first example of 1% Muslims in the overall population, Muslims also made up 1% of the figures for sexual grooming, that would be what you would expect. However, the chances are that Muslim groomers, as a percentage of all groomers, would greatly exceed 1%.

Consider the real cases of places where Muslims make up from 1.7% (Colchester), to 24.7% (Bradford), all the way to 36% (Tower Hamlets) of the overall population; often the ratios are far higher when it comes to sexual offenders (especially in the case of sexual grooming). For example, there are cases in which Muslims make up 5% percent of a town or city yet account for nearly all sexual groomers.

In others words, simply citing the percentage of the overall population of a town or city who are Muslim groomers or paedophiles will be misleading, and the same goes for the entire UK. What has to be stated is the percentage of groomers or paedophiles who are Muslims, not how many Muslims groomers there are in a town/city or in the UK as a whole. That makes a big difference.
For example, according to Al Jazeera, this was the reality in 2013 (29th June):

"[A study] done in 2011 looked at 2,300 potential offenders who had been caught grooming. Of the 940 whose race could be identified, 26 percent were Asian, while 38 percent were white."

Now here we see another problem -- that ubiquitous and insulting term (to the Chinese, Indians, Japanese, etc.) -- 'Asian'. It is clear that almost all of these 'Asian' groomers were Muslims. In addition we can ask: What about Arabic, Kurdish, Turkish, North African, etc. Muslim groomers -- were they classed as 'Asian' too?

Instead of percentages, we can express the reality in terms of numbers. For example, another survey found that 367 groomers were white and 346 were 'Asian' (yes, that term again!). Again, even though the numbers and proportion of Muslims are very high, the areas or towns and cities we are talking about will still need to be addressed too.

Conclusion
 
Of course stats and graphs look sexy. Or at least they look vaguely academic and serious. So what can happen -- though not always -- is that they are used to impress us or to bolster a pre-existing political or ideological case which was otherwise -- up until their use -- completely free of stats and numbers. This is a kind of fake objectivity or even a mild case of scientism. You find this phenomenon all over the place: from the legions of commonplace philosophy students (as well as some professors) who tart up their work with logical symbols, Ps and Qs and various visual 'schema' (when they're simply not needed), to academics who place at least ten footnotes at the bottom of each page and a thousand references at the end of each paper. Nonetheless, these things can indeed be necessary and useful in academic literature (or even outside academia). However, they are still often used to bowl people over or to hoodwink us.

Paul Austin Murphy

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/08/post_8.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

World Learns to Manage without the US

by David P. Goldman


The giant sucking sound you here, I said on August 15 on CNBC's The Kudlow Report, is the implosion of America's influence in the Middle East. Vladimir Putin's August 17 offer of Russian military assistance to the Egyptian army after US President Barack Obama cancelled joint exercises with the Egyptians denotes a post-Cold-War low point in America's standing. Along with Russia, Saudi Arabia and China are collaborating to contain the damage left by American blundering. They have being doing this quietly for more than a year.

The pipe-dream has popped of Egyptian democracy led by a Muslim Brotherhood weaned from its wicked past, but official Washington has not woken up. Egypt was on the verge of starvation when military pushed out Mohammed Morsi. Most of the Egyptian poor had been living on nothing but state-subsidized bread for months, and even bread supplies were at risk. The military brought in US$12 billion of aid from the Gulf States, enough to avert a humanitarian catastrophe. That's the reality. It's the one thing that Russia, Saudi Arabia and Israel agree about.

America's whimsical attitude towards Egypt is not a blunder but rather a catastrophic institutional failure. President Obama has surrounded himself with a camarilla, with Susan Rice as National Security Advisor, flanked by Valerie Jarrett, the Iranian-born public housing millionaire. Compared to Obama's team, Zbigniew Brzezinski was an intellectual colossus at Jimmy Carter's NSC. These are amateurs, and it is anyone's guess what they will do from one day to the next.

By default, Republican policy is defined by Senator John McCain, whom the head of Egypt's ruling National Salvation Party dismissed as a "senile old man" after the senator's last visit to Cairo. McCain's belief in Egyptian democracy is echoed by a few high-profile Republican pundits, for example, Reuel Marc Gerecht, Robert Kagan, and Max Boot. Most of the Republican foreign policy community disagrees, by my informal poll. Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld blasted Obama for undermining the Egyptian military's ability to keep order, but his statement went unreported by major media.

It doesn't matter what the Republican experts think. Few elected Republicans will challenge McCain, because the voters are sick of hearing about Egypt and don't trust Republicans after the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither party has an institutional capacity for intelligent deliberation about American interests. Among the veterans of the Reagan and Bush administrations, there are many who understand clearly what is afoot in the world, but the Republican Party is incapable of acting on their advice. That is why the institutional failure is so profound. Republican legislators live in terror of a primary challenge from isolationists like Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), and will defer to the Quixotesque McCain.

Other regional and world powers will do their best to contain the mess.

Russia and Saudi Arabia might be the unlikeliest of partners, but they have a profound common interest in containing jihadist radicalism in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular. Both countries backed Egypt's military unequivocally. Russia Today reported August 7 that "Saudi Arabia has reportedly offered to buy arms worth up to $15 billion from Russia, and provided a raft of economic and political concessions to the Kremlin - all in a bid to weaken Moscow's endorsement of Syrian President Bashar Assad."

No such thing will happen, to be sure. But the Russians and Saudis probably will collaborate to prune the Syrian opposition of fanatics who threaten the Saudi regime as well as Russian security interests in the Caucasus. Chechnyan fighters - along with jihadists from around the world - are active in Syria, which has become a petrie dish for Islamic radicalism on par with Afghanistan during the 1970s.

The Saudis, meanwhile, have installed Chinese missiles aimed at Iran. There are unverifiable reports that Saudi Arabia already has deployed nuclear weapons sourced from Pakistan. The veracity of the reports is of small relevance; if the Saudis do not have such weapons now, they will acquire them if and when Iran succeeds in building nuclear weapons. What seems clear is that Riyadh is relying not on Washington but on Beijing for the capacity to deliver nuclear weapons. China has a profound interest in Saudi security. It is the largest importer of Saudi oil. America might wean itself of dependence on imported oil some time during the next decade, but China will need the Persian Gulf for the indefinite future.

A Russian-Chinese-Saudi condominium of interests has been in preparation for more than a year. On July 30, 2012, I wrote (for the Gatestone Institute):

The fact is that the Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoots represent a threat to everyone in the region:
The Saudi monarchy fears that the Brotherhood will overthrow it (not an idle threat, since the Brotherhood doesn't look like a bad choice for Saudis who aren't one of the few thousand beneficiaries of the royal family's largesse;
The Russians fear that Islamic radicalism will get out of control in the Caucasus and perhaps elsewhere as Russia evolves into a Muslim-majority country;
The Chinese fear the Uyghurs, a Turkic Muslim people who comprise half the population of China's western Xinjiang province.
But the Obama administration (and establishment Republicans like John McCain) insist that America must support democratically elected Islamist governments. That is deeply misguided. The Muslim Brotherhood is about as democratic as the Nazi Party, which also won a plebiscite confirming Adolf Hitler as leader of Germany. Tribal countries with high illiteracy rates are not a benchmark for democratic decision-making ... As long as the United States declares its support for the humbug of Muslim democracy in Egypt and Syria, the rest of the world will treat us as hapless lunatics and go about the business of securing their own interests without us.

The Turks, to be sure, will complain about the fate of their friends in the Muslim Brotherhood, but there is little they can do. The Saudis finance most of their enormous current account deficit, and the Russians provide most of their energy.

Apart from the Egyptian events, American analysts have misread the world picture thoroughly.

On the American right, the consensus view for years held that Russia would implode economically and demographically. Russia's total fertility rate, though, has risen from a calamitously low point of less than 1.2 live births per female in 1990 to about 1.7 in 2012, midway between Europe's 1.5 and America's 1.9. There is insufficient evidence to evaluate the trend, but it suggests that it is misguided to write Russia off for the time being. Not long ago, I heard the Russian chess champion and democracy advocate Gary Kasparov tell a Republican audience that Russia would go bankrupt if oil fell below $80 a barrel - an arithmetically nonsensical argument, but one the audience wanted to hear. Like it or not, Russia won't go away.

American analysts view Russia's problems with Muslims in the Caucasus with a degree of Schadenfreude. During the 1980s the Reagan administration supported jihadists in Afghanistan against the Russians because the Soviet Union was the greater evil. Today's Russia is no friend of the United States, to be sure, but Islamist terrorism is today's greater evil, and the United States would be well advised to follow the Saudi example and make common cause with Russia against Islamism.

In the case of China, the consensus has been that the Chinese economy would slow sharply this year, causing political problems. China's June trade data suggest quite the opposite: a surge in imports (including a 26% year-on-year increase in iron ore and a 20% increase in oil) indicate that China is still growing comfortably in excess of 7% a year. China's transition from an export model driven by cheap labor to a high-value-added manufacturing and service economy remains an enormous challenge, perhaps the biggest challenge in economic history, but there is no evidence to date that China is failing. Like it or not, China will continue to set the pace for world economic growth.

America, if it chose to exercise its power and cultivate its innate capabilities, still is capable of overshadowing the contenders. But it has not chosen to do so, and the reins have slipped out of Washington's hands. Americans will hear about important developments in the future if and when other countries choose to make them public. Readers should be warned that those of us with reasonably good track records won't do as well in the future.

My track record in general has been good. I warned in 2003 that the George W Bush administration's attempts to build nations in Iraq and Afghanistan would have a tragic outcome. And in early 2006, I wrote: "Like or not, the US will get chaos, and cannot do anything to forestall it."

In February 2011, I said that we did now know whether then-beleaguered president Hosni Mubarak of Egypt "will be replaced by an Islamist, democratic, or authoritarian state. What is certain is that it will be a failed state." And in March 2011, I added about Syria, "We do not know what kind of state will follow Basher Assad. We only know that it will be a failed state."

In April 2011, I declared Israel to be "the winner in the Arab revolts" because "the most likely outcome [in the Arab world] is a prolonged period of instability, in which two sides that have nothing to gain from compromise and everything to lose from defeat - the dispossessed poor and the entrenched elite - fight it out in the streets. Like Yemen and Libya, Syria will prove impossible to stabilize; whether Egypt's military can prevent a descent into similar chaos remains doubtful."

In January 2012, I announced a "recall notice for the Turkish model", adding, "Among all the dumb things said about the so-called Arab Spring last year, perhaps the dumbest was the idea that the new democracies of the Arab world might follow the Turkish model."

Now the dogs of war are loose and will choose their own direction. You don't need foreign policy analysts any more. You can hear the dogs bark if you open the window.


David P. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, is a fellow at the Middle East Forum and the London Center for Policy Research.

Source: http://www.meforum.org/3590/manage-without-us

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Smiling to the World While Preparing with the Sword

by Raymond Ibrahim

 

In many ways, the above picture of a known pro-Brotherhood protester, Walid al-Khatab, is representative of the two faces of the organization.  As reported by Al Dalil, he earlier called into a live show calling for the “slaughter” of every police officer in Egypt, to background cries of “Allahu Akbar!”  and then later apologized, saying he was just “angry” and “didn’t really mean it.”  Here he is, however, holding the famous yellow smiley face, with the words “Smile to the world, and it will smile back at you.”

In the upper corner the sign also displays the Brotherhood’s banner, two swords crossed over the Koran, with the word “prepare” underneath — a reference to Koran 8:60: “And prepare against them whatever you are able of power and of steeds of war by which you may terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy and others besides them whom you do not know [but] whom Allah knows. And whatever you spend in the cause of Allah will be fully repaid to you, and you will not be wronged.”

In other words, smile to the world so that it smiles back, but prepare with the sword so “you may terrorize the enemy of Allah and your enemy” — a perfect summation of the Muslim Brotherhood and “Sharia’s Sinister Smiles.”


Raymond Ibrahim

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/raymond-ibrahim/smiling-to-the-world-while-preparing-with-the-sword/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Turkey Caucus Should Speak Out on Anti-Semitism

by Michael Rubin


I’ve written a number of times about the Congressional Turkey Caucus, the congressional organization which seeks to promote and encourage a strong U.S.-Turkey relationship. While many Caucus members simply join to burnish foreign-policy credentials or qualify for Istanbul junkets, Namik Tan, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, has used membership numbers in the Turkey Caucus to imply U.S. endorsement of Turkey’s foreign and perhaps even domestic policies.

Alas, those Turkish policies run increasingly counter to U.S. interests with regard to the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, al-Qaeda, the Eastern Mediterranean, and NATO. The Turkish government has grown more noxious in recent weeks as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or his top aides have blamed Jews and/or Israelis for everything from the protests in Gezi Park to the coup in Cairo to the the alleged use of telekinesis to undercut Erdoğan and his allies. He has promoted films which depict Jews as scavenging Iraqis for their organ, and Mein Kampf has become a best-seller. Anti-Semitism is rife increasingly among Turkey’s civil servants and diplomatic corps, and Erdoğan has suggested that Israel’s existence is a hate crime.

When it comes to political theories and Jews, Erdoğan increasingly sounds like a cross between Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi, and former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The difference between Erdoğan and those three footnotes to history, however, is that only Erdoğan has 135 congressmen watching his back. How shameful it is that the chairmen of the Congressional Turkey Caucus have not spoken out on Turkish anti-Semitism. Their silence convinces the paranoid and conspiratorial Erdoğan that American congressmen support his theories. Sometimes, diplomacy isn’t simply about making friendships; true diplomacy requires sometimes breaking them as well.


Michael Rubin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/25/turkey-caucus-should-speak-out-on-anti-semitism-congress/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Why It Matters Who Wins in Egypt

by Daniel Greenfield

 

These days and weeks of bloody struggle in Egypt have implications that go far beyond the country and the region.

The conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and its opponents will determine whether an Islamic terrorist group will run Egypt.

Forgotten in all the Arab Spring cheerleading is the simple fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist group. And not only is it a terrorist group but it is the single most influential Sunni Islamic terrorist group in the world, spawning entire networks of terrorist organizations; including Al Qaeda.

Egypt holds great resources and great wealth, advanced weapons and even limited nuclear capability. But beyond that it is also where the modern age of terror began, where Western ideas crossbred with the ancient Jihad of Islam to create a new strategic threat.

The Arab Spring, the Islamist Winter and the Military Summer are more than just seasons for Egypt, they are also transformative phases for the country that long stood at the crossroads of terrorism.

The road to America’s modern confrontation with Islamic terrorism began in Egypt. The World Trade Center bombing was spawned by a leader of the Egyptian Islamic Group, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mohamed Atta, the key figure in the September 11 attacks, was an Egyptian member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Today the Engineers Syndicate, the Brotherhood front group that Atta was a member of, is holding rallies in support of Morsi.

The Syndicate is one of many front groups that the Muslim Brotherhood uses to recruit new members. That same process takes place at most American colleges through front groups such as the Muslim Students Association; four of whose chapter presidents became high-ranking Al Qaeda members. One of whom co-founded Al Qaeda.

The clash between the Egyptian military and the Muslim Brotherhood is at the heart of the War on Terror. Al Qaeda may often be associated with Saudi Arabia, but its real roots lie closer to Egypt.

Before Ayman al-Zawahiri became the leader of Al Qaeda, he was a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and headed up the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization spun off from the Muslim Brotherhood that eventually merged into Al Qaeda.

Membership in the Muslim Brotherhood is a biographical note that Ayman al-Zawahiri shared with Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda’s interim Emir after Bin Laden’s death was Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, maintaining the Egyptian identity of the new Al Qaeda leadership.

Zawahiri was described as the “brains” of Al Qaeda while Bin Laden was its purse and its public image. That organizational and interpersonal relationship mimics the greater one between the Muslim Brotherhood and its wealthy Gulf oil backers.

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and other oil kingdoms may fund terrorism, protect terrorists and fill out their ranks; they may spread the corrosion of its clerics into the West, but they aren’t its brains.

Al Qaeda after Bin Laden is more “Egyptian” and more “Brotherhood” than ever. It draws its rank and file Jihadists from the usual sources, but its orientation has shifted away from Azzam’s global Jihad against the infidels and toward the Islamic civil wars that Zawahiri had sought to fight all along.

There have been no major Al Qaeda operations launched against America. Instead Al Qaeda has reemerged as a loosely aligned group of franchises fighting to take over Muslim countries.

The strategy that emerged distinctly in Iraq, where Al Qaeda often seemed more focused on killing Shiites than on killing Americans, has exploded into full scale civil war in Syria, where Al Qaeda in Iraq is operating as the Al Nusra Front.

In Syria, Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front and the Muslim Brotherhood’s brigades in the Free Syrian Army appear to also be loosely aligned, fighting toward the same objectives.

The Arab Spring helped complete the realignment of Al Qaeda’s objectives. It became what its Egyptian faction of Muslim Brotherhood activists had always wanted it to be; a force for helping them take over entire countries, rather than aimlessly bombing Western targets.

Al Qaeda’s two biggest operations took place after the Arab Spring and were carried out on a much bigger scale than September 11. In Mali and in Syria, Al Qaeda franchises attempted to capture entire countries. These operations were aligned with the regional objectives of the Muslim Brotherhood.

When Al Qaeda attempted to seize Mali, President Mohammed Morsi came out firmly against any intervention. Morsi also aggressively pushed for intervention in Syria and called for a No Fly Zone.

The second wave of attacks of September 11, a day most remembered for the assault on the Benghazi mission and the murder of Ambassador Stevens, was concentrated largely in countries and areas under the control of the Brotherhood and allied Islamists, whether it was entire countries, such as Egypt and Tunisia, or cities, such as Benghazi.

In Washington and London, the politicians wanted to believe that the Muslim Brotherhood was a check on its violent splinter groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Egyptian Islamic Group and even on Al Qaeda. Instead the Muslim Brotherhood was quietly working with them to advance the common Islamist objectives of imposing total Islamic rule on the region in the form of a united Caliphate.

Morsi’s regime freed Egyptian Islamic Group terrorists and even attempted to appoint an EIG leader as governor in Luxor, where memories still linger of its infamous massacre. That appointment may have been one of the tipping points that toppled the Brotherhood, but it was also a clear message that not only was the Muslim Brotherhood not disavowing its so-called splinter groups, but it was aiding them.

Washington and London may think that they are playing the Muslim Brotherhood against Al Qaeda, but they are the ones being played.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s defeat has damaged the group’s morale by hitting its sense of historical inevitability. It is a long way from being destroyed, but if it suffers a series of defeats in Egypt, Syria and beyond, it will lose members and momentum. And the Brotherhood’s loss will also be Al Qaeda’s loss.

Obama’s weakness created an opening that the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda took advantage of. Now they are at the climactic moment in their great game of Jihad. Either they win here and the road to the Caliphate becomes much smoother or they lose badly and risk becoming relics of history.

It’s a crucial strategic moment that will determine whether the next bomb goes off in America or Egypt.


Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/why-it-matters-who-wins-in-egypt/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

What’s Motivating Erdoğan on Egypt?

by Michael Rubin


Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become the most outspoken international leader condemning the coup in Egypt and calling for the restoration of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi. Certainly, part of Erdoğan’s commitment to Morsi is ideological: Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party is, at its roots, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both share an ideological and religious agenda and hope to remake their societies fundamentally.

It would give Erdoğan too much credit to suggest his only motivation is religious. Erdoğan is no saint; he is vain, coarse, and has amassed an amazing amount of money far beyond his salary or religious alms. In the months before Morsi’s ouster, Turkish defense contractors cultivated Egypt. From Hürriyet Daily News:

An Arab diplomat in Ankara said he expected “difficult times” in Turkish-Egyptian relations, which may disrupt economic relations too, unless Ankara and Cairo prefer to pursue a pragmatic line… In May Turkey granted Egypt a $250 million loan to finance Turkish-Egyptian joint defense projects. The loan, the first of its kind, intends to boost defense cooperation and Turkish defense exports to Egypt. Earlier, Egypt expressed an interest in buying the new ANKA Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicles built by Turkish Aerospace Industries (TAI). Egypt was one of the pioneers in unmanned aerial systems, fielding the Teledyne Ryan Model 324 Scarab high speed drone and SkyEye tactical UAVs since the early 1980s. The addition of a MALE platform will fulfill the gap offering better persistence, improved imagery and multi-payload capacity. The potential sale of six to 10 ANKA systems to Egypt was discussed during Erdoğan’s visit to Cairo last November… In a separate deal, Ankara had approved the sale to Egypt of six multi-role tactical platforms, MRTP-20 “fast-intervention crafts,” produced by the privately-owned shipyards Yonca-Onuk.

Erdoğan may be angry at the financial hit Turkey took in Egypt, but the episode should also be a wake-up call to the changing military balance in the Middle East. While the United States provides Turkey with high-end military platforms, Turkey has been building up a military industry which potentially can change the military balance in the region. The coup may have voided Turkish military contracts in Egypt, but it is an open question what Turkey has provided to Islamists in other Arab Spring countries.
 

Michael Rubin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/25/whats-motivating-erdogan-on-egypt/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Cameron Beating the Drums of War against Syria

by Rick Moran


British Prime Minister David Cameron, "sickened" by images of children suffering after a chemical attack outside of Damascus, wants to convene an emergency session of the Security Council and issue an ultimatum to Syrian President Bashar Assad; disarm or suffer the consequences.
Telegraph:

The Prime Minister spoke with President Barack Obama by telephone to ask for help with convening an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council.
The Prime Minister is also to hold a meeting of the National Security Council. However, senior military figures have said privately that the "window of opportunity" for a successful intervention in Syria has long been closed.
But US officials were studying the Kosovo conflict, in which Nato launched weeks of air strikes without UN support and in the teeth of Russian opposition.

He wants to put forward a "game-changing" resolution that would give the Syrian government, led by Bashar al-Assad, "one last chance" to disarm.

Mr Cameron is said to have been left sickened by images of children killed by the chemical weapons.

One charity yesterday said at least 355 people had died and 10 times that number were treated for poisoning.

Britain and France have blamed the Assad regime for the chemical attack.
On Saturday night four American destroyers were moving closer to Syria, armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, which are capable of precision strikes.
Gen Sir Nick Houghton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, is to take part in a summit in Jordan tomorrow with his US, French, Turkish, Saudi Arabian and Qatari counterparts.
It follows the strongest indications to date from Washington that direct military intervention by the West was possible in the conflict.
Diplomats talked of a "change in the American posture" following the attack on the suburb of East Ghouta on Wednesday.
Mr Cameron's officials were drafting the text of a resolution to put before the UN said to be modelled on one that offered Saddam Hussein, the late Iraq leader, "a final opportunity" to disarm in 2002.
The move risks a public row with Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, who does not want any action taken against his ally.

As horrific an attack that it was (and we're still not sure who launched it), Cameron's resolution solves nothing. Because after all is said and done, Cameron is, in effect, volunteering the US for military action. Nobody expects Great Britain to bear the brunt of any intervention. The only nation that can project military power over distance is America, and neither Hollande or Cameron can do much except cheerlead from the sidelines.

Tossing a few cruise missiles at Syrian army bases would be a futile gesture. Only a sustained bombing campaign can degrade Assad's ability to reist the rebels. And if we've decided to take the side of the Islamists, we better be prepared to fight al-Qaeda in Syria as well as Iraq.

The computer in "War Games" had it right: " A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2013/08/cameron_beating_the_drums_of_war_against_syria.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.