Sunday, October 09, 2011
Libyan Calls for 'Moderate' Islamic Political Role
BLOODBATH IN EGYPT
Islamist Iran Tries to Exploit US Protests
The Awful Truth
IRAQ SUPPORTING SYRIA
Monday, 10 October 2011
Ten years into the Afghan war, it is painfully clear that America, which is losing the war, has been radical Islam's best friend.
Successive American administrations have supported rightwing political Islam, also known as Islamism, or radical Islam, and overlapping organized and state Islam, dating to the Eisenhower administration's secret support for the Muslim Brotherhood against Egypt's Soviet-leaning, immensely popular president, Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Brotherhood was behind several unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Nasser; it is commonly believed that the United States and Britain were involved in or at least aware of the plots.
The pro-Islamist policy transcends traditional party politics, as shown by the sordid history of the Afghan adventure. Covert U.S. support for Islamist warlords and drug dealers against a Soviet-sponsored, secular Afghan regime began during the administration of President Jimmy Carter. His National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, promoted the intervention in order to draw the Soviets into invading Afghanistan. Moscow fell into the trap; and the U.S. intervention was subsequently escalated by the Reagan administration into the largest-ever U.S. covert operation. It cost U.S. taxpayers at least $3 billion.
More important, with Saudi and Pakistani support, the jihad against the Soviets morphed--or metastasized--into a global jihad that blew back horrifically in the Islamist/Al Qaeda mega-terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland of September 11, 2001 (9/11).
The Bush administration's relatively restrained response to the attacks--the worst-ever on the U.S. in its history--shows that the administration was bent on preserving the pro-Islamist policy. Instead of declaring war on Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the country that had aided and abetted and played host to Al Qaeda, and on Islamism--the clerical fascist creed responsible for the Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--Bush declared war on "terror" and took too long to do little, relying on supposedly sympathetic but still notoriously unreliable Afghan warlords for much, if not most, of the fighting on the ground.
The U.S. obviously had the means to wipe out Al Qaeda and the Taliban; and the political will was there on the popular level. With the exception of the far left, the country would have accepted--in fact, the people longed for and expected--a truly merciless and swift response, including use of the most devastating conventional weapons and, if necessary, tactical nuclear weapons, to obliterate the enemy.
But Bush disappointed the nation. He dislodged the Taliban and Al Qaeda; but he did not destroy them. More specifically, Bush allowed Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar and their most senior commanders to escape into Pakistan--the country that created and sustained the Taliban and had also aided Al Qaeda. It seems that Bush declared war on terror--instead of on radical Islam--and let the mass murderers flee for the following reasons:
Bush's blunders and failures paved the way for the ascent to power of Barack Hussein Obama--an almost unbelievable development, not because of Obama's mixed-race heritage--the U.S. was obviously "ready" to overcome its racist past and elect an African-American President--but in view of his Muslim roots. Obama's Muslim birth--his father was a Muslim and Islam traces the religion through the father--and upbringing--he studied and practiced Islam as a child in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country, in the home of his adopted Indonesian Muslim father and radical leftwing mother--should have disqualified him given the ongoing (but deliberately mislabeled) war against Islamism. But the damage caused by Bush was so great that the voters ignored Obama's background--including his radical Left, Black Muslim, and Black supremacist associations--and embraced the Candidate of Change as a kind of savior.
Or mahdi--meaning, Muslim messiah. Hailed as "one of us" throughout the Middle East, Obama has made outreach to what he insists on calling "the Muslim world"--itself an Islamist concept--the foundation of his foreign policy. His odious bow to the Saudi petro-tyrant, obsession with squeezing Israel and creating an irredentist Palestinian state, appeasement of and attempts to align with nuclear-arming Iran, support of the Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey's Islamist regime, undermining and complicity in the actual overthrow of Egypt's pro-American, peace-preserving president, and unnecessary intervention in Libya--on the side of Islamist-led rebels--belie a continuation of U.S. efforts to exploit and manipulate radical/organized/state Islam. Obama can be credited with finally killing Bin Laden--found hiding in a safe house in Pakistan, in the shadow of its equivalent of West Point--and other Al Qaeda leaders. But Obama has also narrowed the definition of the Islamist enemy to Al Qaeda alone. All other Islamist organizations and entities are OK to engage, according to the Obama administration, including the Taliban. Secret talks with Mullah Omar's murderers are underway.
From Eisenhower to Carter to Reagan to Bush to Obama ... from failed attempts to assassinate Nasser to the overthrows of Iran's Shah and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak ... the dots cry out for connecting.
What Bush wrought in Iraq: an Iranian satellite. Every day brings fresh proof. Click here to read today's troubling dispatch.
Memo to diehard Republicans: you have practically nothing to brag about. Your last President, an arrogant ignoramus (blessed with a legacy Ivy League education), ruined America and the Republican Party. 9/11 happened on his watch. He blew the response. He allowed the most senior leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to flee Afghanistan; and he needlessly invaded a contained secular enemy, Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction and no meaningful connections to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.
No nation can afford permanent war. Countries and people need peace and stability. Bush and his henchpersons and advisors forgot or deliberately chose to ignore this simple truth.
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