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Fitzgerald: The art of sinking in geopolitics
Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald
discusses the advantages of supporting an
independent Kurdistan:
Kurdistan, as a place and not as an idea, could, by
its mere existence, if given a little boost (a
boost, not boots on the ground -- they are different
things), do a good deal of damage to the interests
of both Syria and Iran.
Syria is a hideous place with a hideous regime. One
wishes to preserve the Alawite regime, under
different and much more chastened management, only
because the alternative is a regime of "real" Sunni
Muslims. Everyone in Syria, though apparently few in
the Infidel world, knows what that would mean for
the Christians of Syria, and of Lebanon. Only the
Alawites, out of their own self-interest and terror
at what would happen if they lost control, can keep
a lid on the real Muslims, the
non-Miriam-worshipping Muslims who, if they could,
would massacre as many people as they could in the
Alawite villages, and among the Christians the
Alawites protect. Syria is a country where the
government shuts down -- the government! -- on
Christmas Day.
Why would an independent Kurdistan help to weaken
Syria? Because there are many Kurds in Syria who do
not like the way they have been treated, and would
be encouraged by the mere existence of an
independent Kurdistan. And they would be even more
encouraged if the American government wished to
funnel military aid to Kurdistan, and through
Kurdistan to Kurds in Syria and Iran, and at the
same time to remove any threat of Syrian bombing by
removing, in one fell swoop, Syria's air force. The
Israelis, when they last encountered Syrian planes,
destroyed 82 at one go, with no loss of any Israeli
plane. One suspects that the Americans will be able
to perform at a similar level of competence.
And then there is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Unlike some in Washington, who meet those
unrepresentative Iranians and are quick to believe
all kinds of things that they wish to believe, the
Iranian dictatorship is not on the verge of
collapse. But it can be weakened, and weakened most
effectively by exploiting the one main thing to know
about Iran: ethnic Persians make up about 50% of the
country; Azeris make up one-third (Azeris as in
"Azerbaijan," as in Soviet-occupied "northern Iran"
after World War II), and Baluchis, Kurds, and ethnic
Arabs (in the oil-bearing region) the rest. There is
already low-level unrest here and there. Appeals to
Muslim solidarity do not always work, and especially
do not work where there is a long history of
government from Tehran indifferent to the desires of
non-Persians. This is what the rulers of the Islamic
Republic fear most -- and because they fear it, some
of them have concluded that they now have a stake in
dampening unrest within Iraq, and a stake in
preventing a free Kurdistan (which would inspire the
Kurds in Iran -- and do more than inspire them). In
other words, what the Islamic Republic of Iran now
fears is a "civil war" in Iraq, just the way, for
different reasons, the Sunni Arabs outside Iraq fear
such a "civil war."
What maddens is that the "civil war" that could do
such damage to the interests of the two main
beneficiaries of the removal of Saddam Hussein, the
Islamic Republic of Iran and the (Wahhabi) Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia, is being prevented or delayed
almost entirely by the presence of American troops,
and by naive American attempts at directing this or
that while failing so completely to relate the
fissures within Iraq to the larger picture of the
menace presented by the Jihad.
Pope wrote Peri Bathous, or, The Art of Sinking in
Poetry.
There is another art, not as high, but even more
necessary at this point in history if the poetry of
Pope, and everything else that has been left as a
legacy in the Western world, survives and continues
to be added to. That is the art of how to deal with
the many different levels and instruments of Jihad.
It involves how to deal with the many different
levels of ignorance or denial among Infidels, and
how to inflict the most damage, of the right kind,
the kind that will help to weaken Islam in the most
effective, and likely least expensive way. That way
would be to play upon the natural divisions and
resentments and animosities within Dar al-Islam.
This would allow intelligent people who through no
fault of their own were born into Islam to ponder
what it is about this belief-system, with its
abhorrence of free and skeptical inquiry, its limits
on artistic expression, its inshallah-fatalism, its
support for The Ruler as long as the Ruler is
considered to be a Muslim, that makes Islam itself
the cause of the political, economic, social,
intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim states
and polities.
And there is one more audience. The spectacle of
internecine strife among Muslims will be instructive
for Infidels. It could take place in Iraq but will
draw in men, money, and materiel from both Sunnis
and Shi'a outside Iraq, and therefore have
consequences (good for Infidels, bad for Muslims) in
Lebanon, and Pakistan, in eastern Saudi Arabia and
Bahrain and Yemen. It will hurry along the
enlightenment of those who are taking their sweet
time in discovering what the Jihad is really all
about. And who can blame them, given the way that an
informal, but most effective withal, Islamintern
International has placed its members in the U.N.
bureaucracy, its apologists in the E.U. bureaucracy,
its willing collaborators in the press, radio, and
television of much of Western Europe, in those areas
that include coverage of Islam and the Middle East,
and finally, have managed, as in this country with
the members of MESA Nostra, to control the access to
study of Islam to those who are apologists rather
than students of the subject.
The Iran-Iraq War tied two ruthless regimes up for
eight years. From the Infidel point of view, it
should have gone on forever. There is another
chance. The Bush Administration, having still failed
to grasp the scope of the problem and the nature of
the problem posed by the Jihad and its various
instruments (hardly limited to terrorism), is
obstinate in its titanic -- in every sense --
efforts. It needs to be forced, through political
pressure, to withdraw from Iraq, to end the
misallocation of resources, the colossal sums being
spent that could so much better be applied to energy
projects. It needs to be forced to give to
small-scale efforts, as in Kurdistan, a little
"equalizer" (as the Colt .45 was once known) to the
side that we wish to prevail, but only from afar.
Telemachy -- fighting from afar. And Telemachus was
the son of Odysseus. Wily Odysseus. All this
nonsense, this hallucinatory nonsense, about how
"everyone loves freedom" and how we "are going to
win the war on terror" through "our success in Iraq"
which will take care of the "terrorists" forever
(there is no "forever" that will end Jihad --
containment, and reduction in the size of the
threat, is another matter) -- this has to stop.
Events will cause it to stop, because in the next
presidential election only someone who promises to
remove our troops, right away, from Iraq, can
conceivably win But the American government should
not wait that long. The silence of the Democratic
lambs, who are capable, apparently, of breaking that
silence only in order to bleat all the wrong kinds
of criticism of Bush, rather than the unanswerable,
and therefore deadly, kind that is offered here --
needs to change.
It only takes one or two intelligent people. They
must exist. Where are they? And the same is true of
the Republicans, whose misplaced loyalty to a
foolish and wasteful policy could do great damage to
their own political survival.
A big failure all way round.
There already exists, as noted above, "The Art of
Sinking in Poetry."
Practitioners of geopolitics should look at all the
advantages an independent Kurdistan could bring --
not least as an inspiration to non-Muslim Arabs
everywhere, who might begin to focus on Islam as the
vehicle of Arab cultural and linguistic and
political imperialism. They might begin to see Islam
-- correctly, despite its universalist pretensions
-- as the Arab national religion. This could begin
to reduce its appeal to the 3/4 of the world's
Muslims who are not Arab.
And that new geopolitics, of selectively sinking
this or that threatening ship of state, or even
wandering coastal barks, laden with explosives, that
have made their way along the shores, or even into
the waterways, of the Lands of the Infidels (as
Muslims call them), is perhaps a harder art, a
colder craft.
Let's call it "The Art of Sinking in Geopolitics."
http://www.jihadwatch.org
http://www.israpundit.com/2006/?p=679
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