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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (273589)	1/26/2010 8:27:15 PM
From: Garden Rose	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hawk, every society has their "skinheads" and militia. We have it here in the US and they have it there. It's a marginal issue in both countries. Each country can manage the problem.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (273589)	1/26/2010 9:12:28 PM
From: Sdgla	3 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Listened to a very interesting interview with the author The Strong Horse. His POV : Book Review: The Arab Dilemma BY PHILIP TERZIAN January 13, 2010 5:11 PM SHARETHIS Lee Smith, a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, Hudson Institute scholar, and a close student of Middle East politics, has been pondering the Arab world, with particular urgency, since 9/11. Resident in Cairo, Beirut, and New York, with a wide and varied acquaintance throughout the Arab diaspora, he has drawn some interesting--and in some respects encouraging--conclusions in this fascinating, complicated, eloquent study of what's wrong and right with the Arabs. The main lesson, which American policymakers should fully comprehend, is that Arabs are not a monolith, in sectarian or ethnic terms, and that while some of the problems of the Arabs -- the legacy of colonialism, economic exploitation, Western support for repressive regimes -- have been caused by the outside world, the most destructive elements are self-generated. It is true that the historic perspective of the Arab world must be understood to be appreciated--centuries of Ottoman repression, the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the West after 1919, the creation of Israel in the wake of the Second World War, the politics of oil--but the basic fact is, as Smith demonstrates, that the Arabs are equally divided against themselves, still riven with tribal enmities, fatally divided over Islam, culturally reactionary. The sporadic violence and shifting loyalties of the Arab body politic are a product of their own pathology: Natural disunity, weak civil institutions, messianic religion. These are not insoluble problems, in Smith's view, but they run deeper in Arab societies than surface irritants such as Western policies or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Smith's particular insight, however, is that the Arab world is not in decline but in transition: A stable structure for Arab societies is in the process of construction, not deterioration; and the future of an Arab political culture has yet to be seen. Just as the notion of Arab democracy in Iraq is destined to be very different from what is practiced in Ireland or California, the character of Arab civil society -- varied as it is likely to be across North Africa to the Gulf states -- is still being formed in the wake of centuries of Ottoman control and recent decades of conflict. weeklystandard.com