With the Arabist's post, Egypt Supports Wisconsin serving to further disappoint me as to the knowledge level and the nature of the protesters, and the spread of these riots throughout the Muslim world, I'd like to point out what should be an obvious point you probably won't hear in mainstream media.
Strategically, Osama Bin Laden is winning. Even if he's dead he's still winning.
Iraq and Afghanistan cost us money and bogged us down. I wonder if Osama realized the Fed would keep interest rates low? No matter, really- he thought that the military engagements would break our hold on the Middle East, and he was right. I wonder if he knew the Fed would cause worldwide price hikes in foodstuffs due to the ridiculous amount of money they created? No matter, Osama figured the U.S. would overreact and weaken it's hold on the Middle East. It looks like Osama was right, doesn't it?
Some dude in a cave out-thought the best and brightest from the Harvard/Yale elitist class that runs Washington D.C. He may yet still be fooling them, though sometimes I think they are using him to fool us. Sustained terrorist attacks on U.S. soil just haven't materialized. They came up with 9/11 in order to lure us into war in the Middle East- now they try to engage us there. They don't have resources to come here and attack civilians, not in the way our government overlords like to say they would. On the one hand, we can assume many of our strategic experts are merely fighting the last war, not realizing Osama got what he wanted, so why would he bother doing another 9/11 style attack? On the other hand, some of our lunatics in office have enough of a sense of self-preservation so that they'd prefer to tell you all their efforts to lock down security and beef up their own defenses is about protecting you. This Homeland Security junk is really about protecting the governing elites, probably from us. In any case, if Osama bin Laden had the ability to sustain regular attacks on the United States, don't you think he'd turn rather quickly to attacking the politicians who were responsible for the Middle Eastern Policy he doesn't like?
4 comments:
Interesting questions. How exactly has the U.S.' hold on the Middle East been weakened?
I take violence as evidence of a failure of statecraft. This an impression I got from Sun Tzu's Art of War. Saddam Hussein was our ally, Mubarak's Egypt got a huge chunk of our foreign aid, and even Kaddafi had recently got on board with the U.S.
The uprising caught the U.S. by surprise, but I think they are now improvising by trying to embrace the movements. There's some evidence here and there that it won't work- young Egyptians snubbing Hilary, for instance, but the larger question is who the militaries are listening to. Pan-Arab nationalists have a better chance with Mubarak gone. The U.S. already looks like idiots who just want to kill brown people; can you imagine what it would look like if we went into Egypt to subjugate the people we'd just praised for revolting?
BTW, Contra Niche is a nifty blog. I especially liked your post, “Team: The New Age God.”
Continuing our discussion, I see your Sun Tzu and will raise you a Clausewitz: “War is politics carried on by other means.” ISTM the wise statesman knows when it’s best to strike. Preemption is sometimes necessary self-defense.
John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of Cold War historians, has argued persuasively, that U.S. intervention overseas—from Tripoli through the Monroe Doctrine to the present—has been a consistently developing strategy calculated to protect American security interests.
While I agree with you concerning Mubarak and Kaddafi, Saddam ceased to be useful after the Iran-Iraq War and became a positive liability after attacking Kuwait, thereby provoking Gulf War I.
However, I’m not here to debate current U.S. Middle East policy. I’m genuinely interested in your views, having been suspicious of American cultural influence internationally, but less concerned—perhaps—than warranted about the use of American power.
Has it occurred to you how odd it is that the current unrest in the Middle East seems to studiously avoid foisting blame on Israel and/ or the U.S.? Is it possible that the unrest has been instigated by “our side” in a misguided attempt to spread democracy in the region—in a new application of the old Cold War domino theory?
If this is true, it seems doubtful the U.S. will interfere in Egypt on behalf of the military regime (which everyone agrees is the same, sans Mubarak) against internal threats to its survival. In Libya, we intervened to the extent that we gave the rebels a chance in the face of certain defeat, but stopped well short of determining the outcome in their favor.
Could it really be so simple as that George W. and President Obama believe their own hype: democracy is the universal prescription for peace, prosperity, and stability?
On a second reading of your post, I see you at first suggest our leaders were outsmarted by the strategic genius of Bin Laden (per the post title), but then halfway through, you turn around and suggest he might have been a pawn of the U.S. Well, which is it? Our leaders are either naïve incompetents or master deceivers, but they can’t be both.
You should go with one or the other, don’t you think? If you’ll indulge an opinion here, I’d commend the former as the likeliest, and happily, the most charitable construal. Besides, 9-11 conspiracy theories detract from the seriousness of your other ideas.
I am sorry, blogger apparently held your last comment up for ransom without telling me. It has been quite a long time, and you are probably not watching this space anymore, but I will answer your questions anyway.
The State Department has chosen to view the current unrest in the Middle East as 'democratic revolution'. Much of this spin is for the American media market. So, most of the anti-American or anti-Israel stuff is downplayed- not that the average Egyptian is buying into anti-western sentiment anyway. The islamist sects are pushing it, and the military appears to be playing with old religious/ethnic themes, but the egyptians aren't liking it. (http://www.arabist.net/)
So, it's our dominoes that are falling, and the U.S. has never actually been interested in spreading democracy. Given what seems to be a steep dive to the bottom in terms of Presidential I.Q., I think perhaps the latest idiots could believe the hype, but traditionally the U.S. just talked democracy and then made solid deals with dictators.
I think Bin Laden outsmarted the U.S. government, but that the U.S. government uses his image to confuse us. The assassination was pure political theater, and terribly wrong to boot, but it made the vast lot of Americans who still watch T.V. pretty happy. The U.S. gov. aren't particularly masterful in their deceptions, but they've managed to make a lot of people really gullible thanks to public school, television, and bad diet advice.
Post a Comment