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No Arabs had been emotionally invested in Mullah Omar and the Taliban, but the ruler in Baghdad was a favored son of that Arab nation. The decapitation of his regime was a cautionary tale for his Arab brethren. Grant George W. Bush his due. He drew a line when the world of the Arabs was truly in the wind and played upon by powerful temptations. Mr. Obama and his advisers need not pay heroic tribute to the men and women who labored before them. But they have so maligned their predecessors and their motives that the appeal to 9/11 rings hollow and contrived. In those years behind us, American liberalism distanced itself from American patriotism, and the damage is there to see.
Barack Obama's transparent duplicity in pursuing a war in Afghanistan while craven political cowardice makes him allow a malicious persecution of the CIA is the undercurrent of Fouad's article in the WSJ. George W. Bush will be remembered for his guts of steel in doubling down with the "Surge" in 2007 while his political enemies were dissing him and booing his State of the Union Address [lest the moronic left forget, it's on the videotape, as Warner Wolf used to say]. But the real treason is not the Fifth Column of political opportunists like Reid and Pelosi, it is in the Eurotrash surrender to Islam implicitly as it cowers and kowtows in abject frozen deer-in-the-headlights panic:
For the American effort in Afghanistan to stick on the ground in the face of a Taliban insurgency that's gaining in strength and geographical reach, Mr. Obama will have to make a hard choice. He will need a troop commitment of sufficient weight to turn the tide of war. Furthermore, he will have to face his own coalition on the left and convince it that there is a project in Afghanistan worth fighting (and paying) for.
By the evidence of things, this is a decision that he has refused to make, as he pursues his sweeping domestic agenda while keeping Afghanistan in play. He had been sure that NATO forces would rush to his banners, that Europe had stayed away from a serious commitment in Afghanistan because it had been seized with an animus for his predecessor. But Mr. Bush had been an alibi all along. The Europeans are in no mood for this war.
There is a British contingent of decent size in Afghanistan, but there had been one in Iraq as well. The likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder (who dabbled in the most craven of anti-Americanism) are gone and forgotten, but the French and the Germans have not ridden to the rescue of Kandahar. The stringent restrictions on their forces, their very rules of engagement, have left Afghanistan an Anglo-American burden in much the same way Iraq had been.
Robert Graves' mother was German and a relative of the eminent historian Von Ranke. Graves knew the Germans well from his long summer vacations as a youth in Bavaria and somewhere in his writings says "You have to remember to treat the Germans like dogs, or else they will turn on you." Ditto for the Arabs and Turks, whom the Germans resemble in more ways than they care to admit. If the Turks are Arabs with a work ethic, the Germans are Turks with organizational discipline. But they still fall short of being a trustworthy ally.:
There is a British contingent of decent size in Afghanistan, but there had been one in Iraq as well. The likes of Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder (who dabbled in the most craven of anti-Americanism) are gone and forgotten, but the French and the Germans have not ridden to the rescue of Kandahar. The stringent restrictions on their forces, their very rules of engagement, have left Afghanistan an Anglo-American burden in much the same way Iraq had been.
But the shakiest allies are the anarchic Arabs and their built-in duality of an autocrat/underclass division permanently in a state of tension. Since their world conquest days ended with the Umayyad move to Damascus with its Spanish Andalusian outlier, the Arabs have been under the thumb of various internal autocrats. Then they fell to external conquerors such as the Turks, Mongols, and later European overlords. Fouad was a guest at my condo back in the day for a few weeks and told me of his Pan-Arab passions [and delusions] after Nasser declared that the Umma-t-il-Arabiyya of the first four caliphs would return if the Arabs united and threw off the yoke of Sultans and Kings and various other dispensations, like Egypt had done with King Farouk and Iraq was soon to do with its Hashemite monarch in 1958. What ensued, however, was the new dispensation of Saddam Husseins, Hafez-al Assads, and other ethnarchs of minority status---the Sunni minority in Iraq, the Alawite minority in Syria, et cetera.... "new boss, same as the old boss..." as the Who put it in "Won't Get Fooled Again." Switching from inefficent arbitrary Soviet-style terror to a more efficient Hitler-type modality in effect.... But the Arabs appear stuck and even congealed in a self-destructive cycleof political stagnation well-documented over the past few decades by the UN and othe World NGOs. Fouad's perspective sums it up well:
Eight years ago, we were visited by the furies of Arab lands. We were rudely awakened from a decade whose gurus and pundits had announced the end of ideology, of politics itself, and the triumph of the world-wide Web and the "electronic herd." We had discovered that on the other side of the world masterminds of terror, and preachers, and their foot-soldiers were telling of America the most sordid of tales. We had become, without knowing it, a party to a civil war in the Arab-Islamic world between the autocrats and their disaffected children, between those who wanted to live a normal life and warriors of the faith bent on imposing their will on that troubled arc of geography.
Our country answered that call, not always brilliantly, for we are fated to be strangers in that world and thus fated to improvise and make our way through unfamiliar alleyways. We met chameleons and hustlers of every shade and had to learn, in a hurry, incomprehensible atavisms and pathologies. We fared best when we trusted our sense of things. We certainly haven't been kept safe by the crowds in Paris and Berlin, or by those in Ankara and Cairo who feign desire for our friendship while they yearn for our undoing.
The spineless and degenerate Europeans connive at our undoing while dining off our steadfast resistance to Communism and [with Schroeder's assistance] the post-Soviet Putinism seeking to make Europe into an economic energy colony. Sadly, it doesn't seem this time that it's a case of "reculer pour mieux sauter" than drives the Europeans, even the formerly doughty Brits.
Instead, Europe's "Middle Way" of a mixed economy is leading the EU into complete mediocrity, and any economic gains are made ultimately at the cost of enriching the surrounding satrapies giving the EU the raw materials and, sadly as baggage, the religious and other hysterias a mediocre second-rate civilization is in no ways equipped to forestall. My other buddy from the glory days when Fouad was my houseguest [and later rented my condo after my wedding to a condo-equipped spouse], was Christopher Hitchens, who also has morphed into a late-onset Realpolitik appreciation of America's role in the world.
But the Fifth Column now running Congress and, to a lesser degree, the Oval Office, cannot abdicate and just walk away from America's responsibilities abroad, including Latin America and Iran where BHusseinO has shown apparent weakness. The price to be paid will be far higher than a political payback in the short term. As Fouad astutely reckons, the long-term cost of American negligence in national security vis-a-vis the rest of the planet will punish our descendants here in what is still the land of opportunity.
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