America and the Arabs

One item to be seriously considered in connection with the print column on Libya and the Iraq Syndrome is the one aspect of the war in Afghanistan.
Consider how long it took for the "surge" that Obama approved to be effective, how long it took to get 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. That is apart from the problem where to put them.
Every soldier has to be flown in by air! At an estimated maximum of 250 per transport (perhaps fewer), that required 120 plane loads.

Now consider the problem of disengaging from Afghanistan - 130,000 personnel: about 1000 plane loads. That assumes that we leave all the gear behind: electronic communications equipment, tanks, trucks, artillery, helicopters, and assorted military gear. Leave it to the Afghan army? That means the Taliban might get it.
How long would it take to get everybody out? Six months, a year?
The Russians had it easy in 1989, they just packed up and drove home across the northern border.
We can only hope that the Taliban and associates will not lay their hands on missiles capable of shooting down troop transports.
If that happens, the end of the Vietnam war and the Saigon evacuation will come back to memory. There we had ships just off shore. In Afghanistan, where is the nearest friendly soil????
Not Pakistan!!
Leaving Afghanistan should bring home the failure of Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al's failure to read up on history: British evacuation of the country through the Khyber Pass to their own territory.
Where would the US transports fly to? Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan ???

Lexington made the US seem frighteningly Borg-like,
"Resistance is futile.....you will be assimilated."
But I guess that is better, marginally, than being like Daleks.

Faedrus wrote: Feb 13th 2011 4:25 GMT "One of the best ideas coming out of the US in recent years is that it could elect a president whose father was a Muslim.

In other words, that democracy can help a country move beyond petty tribalism.

In the Arab world, and elsewhere, this is big."

This is so true. It came up in my class of international students two days ago. The Arabs, the South Americans and the Europeans
all said that the Election of a black man with a Muslim name was such a shock to their concept of what the US was like that they had to revise their thinking. I asked them what they would have said three years ago if someone had told them such a man would be elected President of the US in the next 2 years. The whole class chorused one word, "impossible'"

Since July 2, 1776 these words have reverberated around the world,

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” The US Declaration of Independence.

Many governments have fallen as have ideologies before the inexorable advance of this truly revolutionary idea. It does not matter if an American administration fails in obiesance to the idea as long as the idea itself lives. And it lives in the hearts of the American people even when their government pays it only lip service.

Tremble tyrants, wherever you may be, of whatever political or religious bent, the truth shall set your people free.

doublehelix wrote:
Feb 13th 2011 5:44 GMT

“You get fifteen Democrats in a room, and you get twenty opinions” - Patrick Leahy

“You get fifteen Republicans in a room, and you get one opinion, whatever is favorable to big business.” -- McJakome

Dirk Gently wrote: Feb 13th 2011 4:07 GMT @Working Man: «In his eyes, to use his own words, "Islam is the most democratic religion in the world".»

"Funny comment. Is there any religion in the world that has ever attempted democracy?"

Yes, the Friends [Quakers], and some liberal Protestant sects like Unitarians, Universalists and, occasionally Congregationalists. Other American sects like Baptists face scism when groups disagree [on virtually any subject] and the losers seceed. It is democracy by secession.

One information that I would love to find out in 2021 would be WHO insisted on sparing Saddam in February 1991. General Schwarzkopf surely intended to march on to Baghdad, judging from his successful transposition of von Manstein's "Fall Gelb", making Dunkerque out of Basra. Was it Bush Senior, of King Fahd, who had the last say on aborting the drive to Baghdad?

roadrunnr wrote:
Feb 13th 2011 7:26 GMT

"AIPAC has little to do with Mubarak. It's goal is to promote Israeli interests in the US."

-----------

LOL.

... to keep American taxpayers subsidizing a dispute in which America has no genuine strategic interest, whatsoever;

... and to prevent America from following America's genuine strategic interests in the Middle East.

If a lobbying body representing, say, the Soviet Union, or China, or Cuba, undertook that same activities that AIPAC does, Americans would have been, and would be, outraged. AIPAC's efforts amount to little more or less than subborning America's elected representatives to the will of a foreign power.

AIPAC is a cancer, plain and simple.

In general I'd say that the Arab world needs to do as they think best and forget what all the wagging tongues of the West have to say. If they want true freedom they should be willing to pay the price. Freedom is worth nothing less.

I think America, and the Western tradition of which America is a part, has already won the war of ideas - although probably the Arab world would not care to admit it. Dignity, freedom and (in the long run) good governance equates to liberal democracy and only liberal democracy.

The question is whether a free and democratic people can restrain themselves to the role of observers while a foreign power grinds their cousins into the dirt; denying them the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

@XogFs8w6Hy: Economic Democracy is codeword for socialism, might as well say it.

As for the first Iraq Qar, it was a UN-delimited action to put Iraq out of Kuwait - national soveriegnty was affirmed for both sides. Not entirely like Korea from 1950-53, it was a war that lost alot, and left only the status quo, rather than any resolution. Gulf War 2 was a resolution, or at least the end of that conflict. Now, we can disagree as to motivation, causes, etc., but it is what it is. The conflict between America and Iraq, as nation-states, is over. That conflict of course, revealed a far more deep and far-reaching one: the very concepts of freedom vs. terrorist-states-masking-as-religious. Who wins this? Time will tell, and history may as well.

Democracy and Freedom aren't new ideas. They just scare those in power, especially the entrenched. This could be any entrenched system, autocracy, monarchy, even pseudo-democracies all fear the word freedom. It means, choice, personal responsibility and the ability to pursue, as Jefferson, put it, happiness. It's the last one that those in power seem to have the biggest issue with.

God forbid the Arabs will fall for our corporate business run foolocracy.
We need examples of real democracies in this world, i.e. economic democracies.

Lastly, while we're talking about imperfections while establishing a representative government, we have a constitution that explicitly described black people as only counting as 3/5ths of a citizen.

So you really don't need a perfectly enlightened Constitution and a perfectly enlightened constituency to establish a democracy. Our country did fight a civil war *in part* because the notion that black people are equal to white people was just so darn controversial. So even if I were to accept all of your generalizations about Arab people, our very non-Arab Founding Fathers didn't exactly hold completely enlightened views and made a representative government work.

Heck, there are plenty of Americans who believe 9/11 was an inside job and/or that Barack Obama is not an American citizen who was born in Hawaii, despite a Certificate of Live Birth issued by the state of Hawaii and two newspaper article mentioning the birth of a Barack H. Obama (which is kind of a rare name in Hawaii)...and the fact that his mother was an American citizen.

Doublehelix, if I recall correctly, back when the U.S. government was first created, women were treated barely better than property, black people WERE property, and to vote you had to be a landowning white male. Yet we have a successful democracy, do we not?

Bush Sr aka -in the US Congress- "the unbeatable vetoer" stopped the Gulf War because he had achieved his objective: to impress the world and scare to death his enemies, present and future.

Had he marched into Baghdad he would have taken out Saddam but things would have been messier, it would have taken more time and casualties (guerrilla resistance) and his perfectly clean Gulf War sheet would have been tarnished.

He needed a perfectly clean sheet to justify his next, bigger war.

@ doublehelix RE Egypt: let´s watch the TV images of Cairo. I failed to see the huts and the witch doctors...there were a few camels...
Egypt´s GDP per capita is higher than that of for example Paraguay and Bolivia (both democracies, more or less),and doubles that of Indonesia and India (the largest democracy in the world since 1948, even if it is no Sweden)

I just don´t see why India, even muslim Indonesia can be democracies and Egypt, just across the Med from Europe, can not.

'"Desert Storm" gave America its first chance to demonstrate how its command of precision weapons made military resistance to the superpower futile.'
...and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated how it is relatively trivial for a civilian resistance to bog down an occupying superpower indefinitely in a war of attrition. Let's hope that the lesson had been learned.

'its (America's) power of example remains strong in an Arab world'
If the Arab world starts following America's recent (and historic) example of using agression as a tool of statecraft then expect the middle east to go up in flames.

The first Iraq war was of US design. You can now hear an account of it in US congress. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JANYT8FCik

What were the consequences other than a failed regime change operation which in turn led to the invasion and disaster. G HW Bush and Clinton and their cronies were every bit as incompetent as his Dubya. History will be more sympathetic to wrong headed Dubya than the other two in the fullness of time.

That the US imperial adventures are failing on the ground is not disputed in this narrative but the failure is down to GHW's imperialist adventurism in the Teddy Roosevelt tradition and overreach. Heard that one before? The seeds of US decline were sown when McKinley was assassinated. Between then and now all we have had is opportunism and decline since they were arrested at the 53rd parallel and from the resulting depression turned themselves into a debt based economy from 1960 onwards.

To put it as briefly as possible, I think in the short-run there are new difficulties that America has to deal with, probably encountering the same breed of people who are ruling Turkey right now. But there is really no way around it, this could not go on forever, thus in the long-run if the US succeeds in aligning its position with that of these democracies, our position in the MidEast will be okay.

@ doublehelix: "I will not even make an effort to hide my scepticism that a people who still believe to this day that 9-11 was an inside job concocted by the CIA, George W. Bush, and Israel are capable of forming a stable democracy, or if they even truly desire one."

I know, and yet somehow in America we manage to make it work!

Wait, I'm confused; wasn't this discussion about Egypt?