THE YEAR WE LOST AFGHANISTAN, IRAQ, EGYPT, TURKEY, TUNISIA
AND MOST OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Daniel Greenfield
FrontPage, January 3, 2012
About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren’t the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar, but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate.
The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking to carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia’s elections, Turkey’s Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya’s future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces.
Time Magazinedeclared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester; they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. They won’t go by that name of course. Most of them will have elaborate names with the words “Justice” or “Community” in them, but they will for the most part be minor variations on the Muslim Brotherhood theme.…
This was the year that Obama helped topple several regimes that served as the obstacles to Islamist takeovers. The biggest fish that Ibn Hussein speared out of the sea for Al-Qaradawi was Egypt, a prize that the Islamists had wanted for the longest time, but had never managed to catch. That is until the Caliph-in-Chief got it for them. Egyptian Democracy splits the take between the Brotherhood and the Salafists, whom the media is already quick to describe as moderates. First up against the wall are the Christians. Second up against the wall are the Jews. Third up is all that military equipment we provided to the Egyptian military which will shortly be finding its way to various “moderate militants” who want to discuss our foreign policy with us.
But there’s no reason to sell the fall of Tunisia short or the transition in Yemen. And when mob protests didn’t work, NATO sent in the jets to pound Libya until Al-Qaeda got its way there. Turkey’s fate had been written some time ago, but 2011 was the year that the AKP completed its death grip on the country with a final crackdown on the military, which has now ceased to be a force for stability.…
The Islamists [now have] a nice chunk of North Africa to chew over, not to mention a few more slices of the Middle-Eastern pie, and Afghanistan will be back in their hands as soon as they manage to outmaneuver Karzai, which given his paranoia and cunning may admittedly take a while. But the Taliban are not big on maneuvers, they have the manpower, which means it’s only a matter of time until they do what the Mujaheddin did to the puppet Soviet regime. A history that everyone in the region is quite familiar with.
The ugliest part of this story isn’t what Obama did. It’s when he did it. If he really had no interest in winning Afghanistan, and if as he had said, the Taliban are not our enemy, then why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.…
But whatever motives we may attribute to the Obama Administration the outcome of its policies in backing the Arab Spring with influence, training and even weapons is indisputable. What Carter did to Persia, Obama has done to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and that’s not the whole of the list. Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war.…
Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it’s only a matter of time.… The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position [in Syria] and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they’re Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.
All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. For all that Time and other mainstream media outlets continue splashing the same protest pornography photos on every page, the region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs.
Carter can breathe a sigh of relief. In one year the Obama Administration has done far more damage than [Carter] did in his entire term.… Things have gotten so bad that we can safely say that Obama on a good day is worse than Jimmy Carter on a bad day.…
2011 was the year we lost Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and many others, but it should not be the year that we lose hope. For all that the bad guys have been gaining and domestic prospects don’t look good, the bad guys have a way of destroying themselves. Give evil its head and it will kill millions, but it will also self-destruct in a spectacular way. Even when it seems as if we have run out of productive things to do, it is instructive to remember that there is a Higher Power in the destinies of men and that the aspirations of evil men to play at being g-ds eventually leads them to complete and utter ruin through their own arrogance.…
WELCOME TO 2012—FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS
Ross Kaminsky
American Spectator, January 2, 2011
2011 was a year of worldwide turmoil and great change. I expect—and to a certain degree fear—that last year was the warm-up act to 2012 which, both internationally and domestically, seems likely to be one of the most consequential years in recent history.
Imagine a boulder which had been sitting atop a mountain for longer than anyone can remember suddenly being pushed off. That was 2011. Imagine the unpredictable turns, bounces, and destruction the boulder will cause as it hurtles down the mountainside toward its next, if not final, stopping point. That is 2012.
On the global scene, some of 2011’s most significant events pose very different short- and long-term results. For example, the Arab Spring initially appeared to be a move toward freedom in an historically repressive part of the world but is now drifting toward other forms of tyranny. The Middle East remains likely to be the biggest source of turmoil in the coming year.
Egypt’s long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak was removed in what was essentially a military coup given cover by both real and fake pro-democracy demonstrators. (By fake, I mean supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic groups whose goal is not democracy but rather immediate governance under Sharia law, followed by a continued regional push for a caliphate.)
It’s not just Egypt where 2012 has the potential to be more significant and more bloody than 2011. Yemen, where al Qaeda has infiltrated…will be heading into a critical situation with their dictator of three decades, President Saleh, playing cat and mouse with his intentions to give up power while those who surround him work to make sure that they, rather than Islamists or democrats, fill the vacuum.
Libya, which is mostly off the news pages these days, is now seeing efforts by al Qaeda to recruit terrorist fighters. Libya’s new government is probably strong enough to fend off the extremists, but nothing should be taken for granted except that people, including innocents, will die before the answer is truly known.
Libya’s place in the news has been replaced by Syria, where Bashar al-Assad…is following in his father’s footsteps, ruthlessly killing civilians to protect his family’s and tribe’s power. The Assad family are Alawites, a Shi’ite sect of Islam which makes up about 12 percent of Syria’s population of about 22 million, versus the three quarters of Syrians who are Sunni. In other words, Assad and his co-religionists recognize that if they lose power, they’re likely to face intense reprisals from a large national majority for their years of tyranny. Assad will have help from Shi’ite Iran which wants to support the current regime both to assist in the mullahs’ power projection into Lebanon and to maintain access to a major direct path into Israel. This, along with the fact that Syria’s geography and western politics make NATO or other intervention unlikely, means that Assad will hold on longer and kill more people than Libya’s Gaddafi did in his final months. The question will certainly be raised “If Libya was worth western involvement, then why not Syria?”
But the biggest problem in the Middle East will be Iran which…is rapidly progressing toward the development of a nuclear weapon. In recent days, Iran has said they are ready to resume six-party nuclear talks while insisting that their nuclear ambitions are peaceful. The West may agree to these talks for two main reasons: France, Germany, and Russia make a lot of money trading with Iran. And Barack Obama along with Baroness Catherine Ashton…will delude themselves into thinking that Iran is interested in honest discussion.
These people never learn. But Israel does. And one thing Jews have learned is that when the leader of a country says he wants to eliminate us, believe him—he really does want to. Rumors have swirled for months of Israel’s considering a pre-emptive strike on Iranian nuclear facilities. This is certainly part of the reason for Iran’s most recent pretending that they’re interested in multilateral talks.
The Iranians learn as well, and they remember 1981 when the American embassy hostages were released after 444 days in captivity at the very moment that Ronald Reagan took his first presidential oath of office. The Iranians were not afraid of the weak and anti-Israel Jimmy Carter and felt free rein to act while Carter was president. They feel the same way about Barack Obama. And why shouldn’t they? This is a man whose first major foreign policy speech as president was given in Cairo and offered little more than reverence for Islam couched in an apology for the United States. This is a man who pulled all U.S. troops out of Iraq, leaving the Iranian mullahs laughing in delight at how the Great Satan could spend so many lives and so many hundreds of billions of dollars just to clear the way for Iranian regional hegemony. Iran knows that Barack Obama stands a real chance of, like Carter, being a one-term president and they are working as fast as they can to reach their multiple nefarious goals in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and their own nuclear weapons program.…
2012 promises to bring the most important election in recent American history.… It is difficult to imagine that people (other than members of public sector unions) will look at their ballots this November, see the name Barack Obama, and say “sure, let’s do that again.” But difficult and impossible are not the same thing, especially with Obama and unions aiming to spend a billion dollars on his reelection.…
President Obama can’t and won’t run on his record. Instead, he’ll have a two-pronged approach: First, he’ll try to divide the nation along economic lines, the “millionaires and billionaires” or “the 1 percent” against the rest of us. Second, he’ll argue “it would have been worse.” But the first of these approaches is fundamentally against the nature of American thinking. And the second of these approaches cannot withstand the exact same question Ronald Reagan asked in 1980 when running against Jimmy Carter: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?…”
THE SPECTRE OF 1932: HOW A LOSS OF FAITH IN POLITICIANS
AND DEMOCRACY COULD MAKE 2012 THE MOST
FRIGHTENING YEAR IN LIVING MEMORY
Dominic Sandbrook
Daily Mail, December 31, 2011
The dawn of a new year is usually a time of hope and ambition, of dreams for the future and thoughts of a better life. But it is a long time since many of us looked forward to the new year with such anxiety, even dread.…
In the Middle East, the excitement of the Arab Spring has long since curdled into sectarian tension and fears of Islamic fundamentalism.… Meanwhile, as the eurozone slides towards disaster, the prospects for Europe have rarely been bleaker. Already the European elite have installed compliant technocratic governments in Greece and Italy, and with the markets now putting pressure on France, few observers can be optimistic that the Continent can avoid a total meltdown.
As commentators often remark, the world picture has not been grimmer since the dark days of the mid-Seventies, when the OPEC oil shock, the rise of stagflation and the surge of nationalist terrorism cast a heavy shadow over the Western world. For the most chilling parallel, though, we should look back exactly 80 years, to the cold wintry days when 1931 gave way to 1932. Then as now, few people saw much to mourn in the passing of the old year.
It was in 1931 that the Great Depression really took hold in Europe, bringing governments to their knees and plunging tens of millions of people out of work.… Eighty years ago, the world was struggling to come to terms with an entirely new financial landscape. In August 1931, the system by which currencies were pegged to the value of gold had fallen apart, with market pressure forcing Britain to pull the pound off the gold standard. Almost overnight, the system that was supposed to ensure global economic stability was gone.…
Today’s situation, of course, is even more frightening. Our equivalent of the gold standard—the misguided folly of the euro—is poised on the brink of disaster, yet the European elite refuse to let poorer Mediterranean nations like Greece and Portugal leave the eurozone, devalue their new currencies and start again. Should the eurozone collapse, as seems perfectly likely given Greece’s soaring debts, Spain’s record unemployment, Italy’s non-existent growth and the growing market pressure on France’s ailing economy, then the consequences would be much worse than when Britain left the gold standard.
The shockwaves across Europe—which could come as early as next spring—would see banks tottering, businesses crashing and millions thrown out of work.… And as the experience of 80 years ago suggests, the political and social ramifications would be too terrible to contemplate. For in many ways, the 12 months between the end of 1931 and the beginning of 1933 were the tipping point between democracy and tyranny, the moment when the world plunged from an uneasy peace towards hatred and bloodshed.
In the East, new powers were already on the rise. At the end of 1931, Imperial Japan had already launched a staggeringly brutal invasion of China.… In the Soviet Union in 1932, meanwhile, Stalin’s reign of terror was intensifying. With dissent crushed by the all-powerful Communist Party, his state-sponsored collectivization of the Ukranian farms saw a staggering 6 million die in one of the worst famines in history.…
By comparison, Europe’s democratic leaders look woolly and vacillating, just as they did back in 1932. However, for the democratic West, this was a truly terrible year. Democracy itself seemed to be under siege. In France, President Paul Doumer was murdered by an assassin. In Portugal, the authoritarian, ultra-Catholic dictator Antonio Salazar launched a campaign of terror that would last into the Seventies. And in Italy, the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini strengthened his grip, consolidating Italian power in the looted colonies of Albania and Libya.
Eighty years on, we have no room for complacency. Although the far Right remains no more than a thuggish and eccentric minority, the elected prime ministers of Greece and Italy have already been booted out to make way for EU-approved technocrats for whom nobody has ever voted. In the new Europe, the will of the people seems to play second fiddle to the demands of Paris and Berlin. If the eurozone crisis intensifies, then it is no idle fantasy to imagine that Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and their Brussels allies will demand an even greater centralisation of powers, provoking nationalist outrage on the streets of Europe’s capitals.
Sadly, there seems little point in looking across the Atlantic for inspiration. In 1932, President Herbert Hoover, beleaguered by rising unemployment and tumbling ratings, flailed and floundered towards election defeat. Today, Barack Obama cuts a similarly impotent, indecisive and isolationist figure.…
Above all, though, the eyes of the world back in 1932 were fixed on Germany. As the Weimar Republic staggered towards oblivion, an obscure Austrian painter was setting his sights on supreme power. With rising unemployment eating away at the bonds of democratic civility, the National Socialist Party was within touching distance of government. And in the last days of 1932, after the technocrats and generals had failed to restore order, President Paul von Hindenburg began to contemplate the unthinkable—the prospect of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.
We all know what happened next. Indeed, by the end of 1932 the world was about to slide towards a new dark age, an age of barbarism and bloodshed on a scale that history had never known. Eighty years on, it would be easy to sit back and reassure ourselves that the worst could never happen again. But that, of course, was what people told each other in 1932, too. The lesson of history is that tough times often reward the desperate and dangerous, from angry demagogues to anarchists and nationalists, from seething mobs to expansionist empires.
Our world is poised on the edge of perhaps the most important 12 months for more than half a century. If our leaders provide the right leadership, then we may, perhaps, muddle through towards slow growth and gradual recovery. But if the European elite continue to inflict needless hardship on their people; if the markets continue to erode faith in the euro; and if Western politicians waste their time in petty bickering, then we could easily slip further towards discontent and disaster.
The experience of 1932 provides a desperately valuable lesson. As a result of the decisions taken in those 12 short months, millions of people later lost their lives. Today, on the brink of a new year that could well prove the most frightening in living memory, we can only pray that our history takes a very different path.
2012: A U.S. REFERENDUM ON EUROPE
Bret Stephens
Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2011
The conventional wisdom about this year’s presidential election is that it’s mostly about domestic issues and barely about foreign policy. That’s wrong. What kicks off today in Iowa is America’s referendum on whether it wants to become an honorary member of the European Union.
GOP-leaning voters generally get this.… Many on the left also understand American politics as a referendum on Europe, and it wasn’t all that long ago that they were more-or-less prepared to say it. For example:
—“Europe is an economic success, and that success shows that social democracy works.”—Paul Krugman, Jan. 10, 2010
—“The European Dream, with its emphasis on collective responsibility and global consciousness…represents humanity’s best aspirations for a better tomorrow.”—Jeremy Rifkin, “The European Dream,” 2004
—“If we took Europe as a guide, we would do a lot better at capitalism.”—Thomas Geoghegan, “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?” 2010
These views have now become a bit embarrassing, intellectually speaking. But it hasn’t done much to change the basic terms of the debate President Obama will have with whoever emerges as his challenger.
The contours of that debate are familiar enough. Should government be an engine of employment growth? Does government investment in favored industries or technologies make economic sense? May government compel individual economic choices in the name of a social good? Should the rich pay an ever-rising share of the total tax burden? Are higher taxes the best way to close a budget deficit? Is financial regulation generally effective? Are labor unions good for overall employment? Is inclusiveness the best test of fairness? Must environmental concerns (or phobias) take precedence over economic interests? Is consensus-seeking the ideal mode for international conduct?
To all these questions, Mr. Obama’s record answers yes: the Solyndra and Fisker subsidies; the Keystone XL pipeline postponement/cancellation; Dodd-Frank; the SEIU’s Andy Stern as the top White House visitor; the growing government work force; the individual mandate; the nonstop rhetorical assaults on Wall Street; federal debt moving north of 100% of GDP; the “balanced approach” to deficit reduction; the perpetual deference to the United Nations.
That’s the Obama presidency in a nutshell. It’s also how Europe, mutatis mutandis, became what it is today.
There’s an alchemistic quality to some of the more common explanations of Europe’s crisis. Wizards of finance contrived to lay a European economy low. The contagion spread. Financial fires could not be put out in time. Investors stampeded for the exits.
The mixing of metaphors alone betrays the flimsiness of that analysis. The truth is that what began in Greece (and the U.S. financial crisis before it) simply put a match to already very dry tinder. Uncompromising labor unions have spent decades driving European jobs and industry overseas. Confiscatory tax rates have given every incentive to tax evasion, capital flight and the emigration of the fittest. Work-force rules have diminished productivity and discouraged hiring. National budgets have been strained to breaking by delusional pension promises and the mounting cost of everything a welfare state supposedly offers free, like health and education.
Worst of all, the European model has generated a self-reinforcing combination of prejudice and interest that is almost impossible to break. A cultural bias against “savage Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism” limits the political options for structural economic reform; routine labor strikes, politically entrenched civil services (38% of Belgians work for the state, doing Lord knows what), and other beneficiaries of public largess eliminate all remaining hope. Europe’s crisis is not just fiscal and monetary. It’s also a crisis of vision and character.
Do the Iowans who will turn out to vote today know all this? I suspect they do. What is happening in Europe is more than an economic crisis: It’s the coming apart of a world view that held together for over a century. For Europeans it will probably mean a decade of economic hardship and political risk. For Americans, it’s a loud pinging signal coming across the Distant Early Warning Line.
It would be absurd to say that Americans have nothing valuable to learn from the rest of the world, Europe included. But sometimes the most valuable lessons are negative ones. Though he did not mean it quite in this way, Mr. Obama was right to compare his administration to those of FDR and LBJ: Like them, he has driven the U.S. miles down the road toward the social democratic model he so admires. Then again, neither of his predecessors had such visible evidence of where social democracy ultimately leads. What’s this president’s excuse?
