If you all want to feel sick to your stomach, even though you expected it, read the following. Remember Fouad Ajami, the "moderate" man talking about Saddam, made famous by CNN during the Gulf War? I find it interesting that he is not showing his face on national television these days. That in and of itself is something very notable and important. Why not stand up and be heard, moderate you profess to be, instead of hiding at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore?
This is his cowardly piece:
foreignaffairs.org
Almost 6,000 words of it. I find it very interesting. It purports to be an intellectual view of the Middle East and the current crisis, a would-be insider's view of the Arab mind. It's a smokescreen. The fact is, when done reading this, your feeling is one of complete demoralization. I wonder if that is any coincidence. The fact is, I am quite sure this is completely intended. Here is his last statement:
It is both heartbreaking and ironic that so quintessentially American a figure as George W. Bush -- a man who grew up in Midland, Texas, far removed from the complications of foreign places -- must be the one to take his country on a journey into so alien, so difficult, a world.
This essentially veiled insult directed at President Bush: "that poor simpleton from Texas, he has no chance of succeeding in such a sophisticated and complex Middle East. America is in deep trouble." It really says it all, and this is one of the most famous so-called moderate Arabs in America. The fact is, throughout his entire monotonous, lull-you-to-sleep, pseudo-intellectual, from-their-side-you-see (but actually I agree with them, hahaha) blathering script, he is actually laughing up his sleeve at America, and intensely enjoying the spotlight Islam now has achieved, even if through mass murder. Here are some telling comments, adjectives that are way off base describing those of whom he speaks, "moderating" savage killers:
...those Islamic domains have since worked their way and their will on the American victory of a decade ago.
The terror was steady, and its geography and targets bespoke resourcefulness and audacity.
A radical Islamist opposition had emerged, putting forth a fierce, redemptive Islam at odds with the state's conservative religion.
[Saudi Arabia] could not appease the new breed of activists who had stepped forth after the Gulf War to hound.
American military planners could not find ideal refueling conditions in a region of great volatility. This was the imperial predicament put in stark, cruel terms.
The animus toward America and Israel gives away the frustration of a polity raging against the hard, disillusioning limits of its political life.
This kind of fury a distant power can never overcome. Policy can never speak to wrath.
The Iraqi ruler knew well the distress that settled on the region after Pax Americana's swift war.
The Iraqi ruler then set out to show the hollowness of the hegemony of a disinterested American imperium.
An American-led brigade against terrorism was being assembled.
How incredibly arrogant to think we would not notice the reference - the use of the word "brigade" is intentional - from our own literature. This is a direct reference to British Poet Laureate Lord Tennyson's world-famous "The Charge of the Light Brigade,"
(http://eserver.org/poetry/light-brigade.html)
which enshrined forevermore a notion that this war - fill in the blank - cannot possibly be won, and our sons will be slaughtered hopelessly. This is truly beyond belief. Arab arrogance knows no bounds at present.
In the best of worlds, Pax Americana is doomed to a measure of solitude in the Middle East.
A broad coalition may give America the comfort that it is not alone in the Muslim world.
The frustrations to come lie in the more ambiguous and impenetrable realms of the Arab world.
They were from the Arab world, where anti-Americanism is fierce, where terror works with the hidden winks that men and women make at the perpetrators of the grimmest of deeds.
The 1990s were a lucky decade, a fool's paradise.
The war will not be easy for America in those lands. The setting will test it in ways it has not been tested before.
This was deliberate. I now am completely certain there are no moderate Islamic leaders to speak of left. If this man writes with barely concealed joy of America's crisis then there is little hope in any reconciliation. The Arabs clearly believe they have won a great victory, struck a giant blow, exposed forever the corrupt, decadent, degenerate weakness of Western, tolerant democracy. They will suffer an enormous pounding before they will wake up from their stupendous delusions. That much seems clear now.
I truly hope the President is prepared to deliver that message. I am beginning to wonder. The message the United States is now sending is one of weakness. We are a nation massively attacked. There should be massive retaliation without any discussion with the Arab world about it. The only way we do honor to the memory of the victims of the catastrophe of Sept. 11 is to see to it that ALL those responsible are punished 1,000 times mores severely than the force of the acts which caused this retaliation. |
