With all the recent MSM hype about an Iraq civil war, behind the scenes, a much greater civil war might be brewing. The US is aware of this, and is working to forstall it from happening.
It is a war within Islam itself. It is not easy to calculate, because their are many factions with conflicting agendas, and no easy alliances.
The obvious fight is between Sunni and Shiites. But it is unclear, as while the Iranians might dream of a Shiite empire, the Shiite are intensely divided among themselves. As are the Sunni. So this brings into play lesser factions, minority interests, and their programs.
One such split is between the primitive, fanatical, Wahabbi and Salafist movements vs. the modern, secularist, and even socialist Moslems. While not actively fighting, they constantly conspire against each other, and wait for an opportunity.
Another split is between Wahabbis and factions such as the Sufi, especially in Saudi Arabia. While the Wahabbi rule half the country, the Sufi are quite powerful among the upper classes, and if the Wahabbis ambitions become too great for them, and they openly challenge the Sauds, they might be replaced by the Sufi. As managers of all the Saudi holy sites. This could be markedly violent.
Other factions, such as the Moslem Brotherhood, could turn on whoever they see fit, in an almost unpredictable, but powerful way.
All told, it has become one task of the US military in the region to control any of these, or other outbreaks, that could spiral out of control and cause chaos through the ME.
#2
everyone wants to wear the bejeweled turban. Divide and conquer baby. That's why in the end, democracy will win - because in this modern global world, the guy who ultimately wins will be the one who learns the power of sharing.
#3
The more you learn about Iraq, the less you like it.
I often wonder if they are capable of self-government. I know that sounds egocentric, but look at all the major political groups and one thing stands out among them. They are all radical. Radicals don't seem to make good leaders, you can't reason or compromise with a radical and that is what democracy is all about.
#4
It's not about self-government as much as it is about a BALANCE of power. If you get the balance of power right, between the people, the legal, the executive, the military, and the congress - it will work.
#8
A civil war sounds like a good way to describe it. It isn't new, and as he says it isn't a single battle. One aspect is the neo-Kharajites against the rest.
Forty years ago I was a young lad in Africa, living at a mission school with a Muslim village next door. I'm not sure it is fair to call the villagers "moderates;" they were perhaps a bit too syncretist for the label to be perfectly accurate. But there was no seething, Israel wasn't on anybody's radar, and I never heard of apostates getting killed. Ostracised from the family, yes. There weren't a lot of conversions among the Muslims; there were a lot more among the animists (who could also face ostracism, by the way).
Aside from the minor detail that the whole school grounds turned into a giant refugee camp a few years ago, I rather doubt that the village would have the same attitudes now as it did then. The Salafi missionaries have been around, teaching Muslims to "come back to the pure path." That is, the pure path as taught by the Salafis.
So what do the native Muslims do? It has long been an article of faith that following any of the 4 main schools makes you an acceptable Muslim, so they have to accept the Wahhabis as legit. (And the Wahhabis have got lots of money and custody of the holy places, so they must be very legit, right?) But the Wahhabis reserve the right to declare other Muslims to be infidel. So native Muslims are in a position analogous to our own, where we accord freedom of speech to people who want to deny us freedom of speech. And the Wahhabi schools and mosques have enough money to drown out opposition voices, even when there are any.
The result is obvious: native leaders lose influence and Wahabbi rules and priorities reign.
I've never been to the Middle East, and no doubt the dynamics there are different.
Posted by: James ||
04/01/2006 16:12 Comments ||
Top||
#9
I often wonder if they are capable of self-government.
Ever watched sessions of the Taiwanese legislature?
Gang fights in the aisles. :)
Too bad our own 'esteem' body of the people no longer witnesses the occassional 'caning'. When words fail you ....
#10
Excuse me, but these violent factions within Islam have pre-existed the entrance of the US involvement in Iraq by decades, if not centuries. Implying that it is the job of the United States to resolve these as well is probably intended to imply that the United States is somehow to BLAME for them.
It may seem obvious, but Trolls and lefties exploit preconditions and ambiguity, so making things clearer and more obvious limits their options: "I didn't MEAN THAT!" is their obvious response that covers up their irritation that their loophole just got closed.
This is a post from a Canadian blog. He asks some very good questions (emphasis mine)...
While Im not too keen on what is going on in France, I cant bring myself to denounce the students. There are too many conflicting agendas at work, and this sort of mass protest provides cover for the small group of anarchists, vandals, and thugs who couldnt care less about the CPE. But the question at the centre of the dispute is not the specific policy, but the dysfunction of the French parliamentary system.
When I first arrived in France at the start of the anti-CPE protests, I was a bit confused. Under the impression that the CPE was a bill still under debate in the parliament, I asked some students why they didnt work with the opposition parties to try to water the bill down, or (better) push for it to be expanded to the job market as a whole. I was a bit surprised to hear that the CPE wasnt a bill, it was a law that had already been passed by the legislature and was simply awaiting ratification in the senate.
I spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out just how things worked over there:
Why didnt you start the protests before the bill became law?
Why didnt the legislature draw attention to the problems?
Why didnt the media get involved sooner? Etc.
No one had any answer except to say look, that isnt the way it works here. The bill got presented as a fait accompli. The only thing to do is take to the streets.
It is only when you look at France that you realize how open and effective our democratic institutions really are. Ours is an essentially adversarial and partisan system, which is what a lot of people dont like about it. Theyd rather politics be more consensual and coalition-based, with less party discipline, more free votes, and so on. But look at France, and see our systems virtues.
Sure, question period in the Commons might be a zoo, but it serves its function of focusing sustained public attention on divisive issues. The media and public interest groups get involved, and the government is forced to decide how much political capital it can afford to spend on the issue. It can either push through, moderate its position, or back down entirely. In the end, regardless of what happens, democracy is served. The adversarial nature of parliament motivates public consent for the system as a whole. Win or lose, people accept the result.
Death everywhere and always is the penalty for apostasy, in Islam and every other faith. It cannot be otherwise, for faith is life and its abandonment is death. Americans should remove the beam from their own eye as they contemplate the gallows in the eye of the Muslims. Philistine hypocrisy pervades Western denunciations of the Afghan courts, which were threatening to hang Christian convert Abdul Rahman until the case was dropped on Monday.
Afghanistan, to be sure, is a tribal society whose encounter with the modern world inevitably will be a train wreck. The trouble is that the West has apostatized, and is killing itself. There turned out to be hope for Rahman, but there is none for Latvia or Ukraine, and little enough for Germany or Spain. That said, I wish to make clear that I found the persecution of Rahman deplorable.
The practice of killing heretics has nothing to do with what differentiates Islam from Christianity or Judaism. St Thomas Aquinas defended not just the execution of individual heretics but also the mass extermination of heretical populations in the 12th-century Albigensian Crusades. For this he was defended by the Catholic philosopher Michael Novak, author of learned books about the faith of the United States of America's founding fathers (see Muslim anguish and Western hypocrisy, November 23, 2004).
Continued on Page 49
#2
There are so many mistakes in this piece. Here a just two striking ones: It strikes me as the most tortured effort at moral equivalence that I have ever seen.
Europe's Christians could not summon up the "moderation" necessary to tolerate their Jewish neighbors until after 1945, when Europe was conquered and rebuilt by the Americans.
They may not have invited them to tea and they indeed lived in separate worlds, even if they lived next door to each other, but, for the most part, I'm not aware of the accepted practice of Christians burning Jews at the stake or throwing them to lions or chopping off their heads.
But the stubborn fact remains that if the English Separatists who founded Massachusetts had not deviated from Christian theology, and set out to become a new chosen people in a new Promised Land, we would not be talking about the United States of America to begin with. Christianity drew the notion of a People of God from the Jews, upon whose trunk it proposes to graft the reborn Gentiles. But the graft did not take except where radical Protestants emulated the Jews, and set out to make a new people in a new land.
What is he talking about? This makes no historical sense. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and probably the majority of the founding fathers were from the Church of England or Episcopalians. Their ancestors didn't originally come here for religious freedom, but for OPPORTUNITY, like most American immigrants. Maybe Spengler never heard of Jamestowne or the Virginia company. They came to find wealth and fortune. I don't know how many of the founding fathers were Puritans or Shakers, I'm sure there were some. But I can't even begin to guess what tortured point he is trying to make with this nonsensical and innacurate argument.
#5
Spengler's thought is pretty much orthagonal to most of the discussion that goes on here. He is attacking the same problem we are attacking but from an almost purely philosophical/theological basis. Read his comments section. almost nobody there argues facts. The debate is all about whether the Islamists are more like the Calvinists or Nihilists or whether Aquinas or Kirkegaard is more applicable to this or that point of theology. I think that his columns do a good job of establishing root cause, but are almost worthless if you are interested in exploring solutions. In fact, if you were to try to engage Spengler in a discussion on his board about solutions, he would almost cetainly turn around and point out that the current clash between Islam and the West was "tragic" and that nothing could be done to avert the killing and dying.
My main criticism of Spengler is that while he understands that the US is different than the Old World cultures, he is blind to what it is that makes us so different. Rather than really exploring what it is that makes the US culturally unique, he falls back on the old platitude that the US has _no_ culture. This is exactly analogous to the American travelling out of country for the first time (and I fit this description during my first long term sojourn overseas) who fails to understand the people among whom he was now living and labels them as not human or less than human.
Spengler realizes that American culture lacks a sense of the tragic, but fails to realize that we not only lack a sense of the tragic, we _are_not_ tragic. We are not a non-culture, we are a post culture. We don't destroy our enemies, we beat them then we rebuild them. We don't ignore our minorities; we try a fix and if that doesn't work, a generation later, we try another one. If you fail in one career, you keep trying until you find one where you succeed. You screw up in undergrad, you go to night school and get your BA.
Spengler always points to the Civil War as a tragic event in American history. Yet he doesn't seem to know (or perhaps he cannot address it because it would upset his world view) that 25 years later vets of both sides were quaffing whiskey side by side at big reunions. What other culture has ever achieved that degree of reconcilliation and overcome the tragic to that degree?
Old World cultures have written and unwritten laws and rules that cannot be broken. Tragedy occurs when those rules force society into conflict from which there is no backing down. In the US, we simply change the rules. We're on the verge of a race war? No problem. We'll rewrite the laws, open up the schools, and invent affirmative action.* People are getting tired of living in crowded cities? Piece of cake. We'll build freeways, change zoning laws, even change residency laws.**
Look what's happening in France right now. There is an example of culture at it's most tragic. After months of rioting by Muslim youths, the French youths cannot accept a solution that would help to ameliorate Muslim unemployment and help prevent future unrest. There is no thought, no deliberation, and no debate. Just culture acting blindly through people arrogant enough to believe that they are beyond culture. Tragedy and irony compound.
I find it sad that Spengler understands American post-culture so poorly. But since I', an American, I never give up hope that he will figure it out. Tragedy after all is for losers. Post-cultural Americans find solutions.
* No, I'm not in favor of affirmative action. It didn't work well, and we are finding new solutions now. They'll probably be better ones.
** Pre-WWII residency laws would have left most Americans disenfranchised due to longish residency requirements. We addressed this issue quite easily at the local level. Contrast this with European efforts to make the Single European Act work. The only way a foreigner can find work in another country is if he is a corporate executive or a sex worker in the black economy. Again we see the blind hand of culture undermining good policy.
#7
Point well taken 2b. I personally think that he's missing One Big Clue and has a lot of other clues. He _does_ want Western Civ to win this war. I consider him to be an ally, though not a particularly effective one.
No educated Muslim would tell a Christian that the latter is going to heaven, unless they did so to cultivate dhimmism. We will all learn that, in time.
However, the case I made at Orrin Judd's posting of this article by Spengler is a bit more damming: Spengler wanted us to think that Islam and Christanity are the same TODAY, because Islamists do TODAY is what Christians did over 180 years ago. He HAS to go back 180 years ago, because Christianity TODAY does NOT do today what Islam does today. In doing so, he demands that we have to ignore the CHANGES that took place in Christianity, the internal debates, the schisims, the arguing, that took place over that period THAT CREATED THE CHANGE.
I came up with an illustration of what Spengler (and a lot of other people) are doing to make it a bit clear. An employer has two candidates: a 20 year old drop-out with a 10th grade education, and a 40 year old with a Master's degree and 15 years of experience. Mama wants her dear little boy to get the job, so she argues that her boy is SO much better educated today than the 40 year old WAS 35 YEARS AGO. True, but it ignores the fact that the 40 year old man is no longer 5 years old. Also, the point of the exercise was to determine who is better for the job based on education and experience: by demanding that the 40 year old be judged by the way he was 35 years ago, the mother is saying, "Ignore the experience this guy has accumulated. Ignore the learning that took place in that 35 years." Ignore, in short, that very thing that, if taken into account (NOT IGNORED), would award the job to the 40 year old.
The question whose answer spengler is trying to answer for us is "which religion is superior?" Clearly, Christianity TODAY is better than Islam TODAY because they don't kill apostates today, but he doesn't like that conclusion, so he compares Islam today with Christianity 180 years ago to show one is not superior to the other. "Ignore everything they did in the past 180 years" he asks us, "to become better than Islam." "Ignore" mama asks, "everything this man learned and did over the past 35 years to become more qualified than my drop-out son."
Same fallacy is involved when talking about America today by citing what happened before the civil war.
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