"ALL CAPS IN DEFENSE OF LIBERTY IS NO VICE."

Sunday, September 11, 2022

21 years after 9-11, lessons still unlearned

Bruce Thornton's written about how the elitists running the political store in the USA still learn no lessons from the horrible tragedy on September 11, 2001:
Twenty-one years have passed since the worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, and our foreign policy establishment and ruling elite still have not learned the lessons of that horrendous carnage. The Romans thought even fools could learn from experience, but our credentialed mavens can’t break free of their institutional orthodoxy and narratives. As a consequence, our foreign policy and international relations continue to put our national security at risk.

This misinterpretation of modern Islam’s traditional resistance to infidel hegemony began with the Iranian Revolution, the first of subsequent jihadist attacks on the U.S. that culminated on 9/11. The West filtered that religious revolution through the old ideas of anticolonialism and national self-determination encoded in the Versailles settlement. Barack Obama, in his cringing flattery of Islam during his 2009 Cairo speech, recycled this stale received wisdom, blaming “tensions” between Islam and the West on “colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations.”

[...] Oblivious to this traditional religious imperative, during the Nineties the Clinton administration didn’t take seriously enough the string of al Qaeda’s anti-American rhetoric he backed up with violent attacks on our military and diplomatic personnel. Instead, the Clinton team treated them as criminal matters, or heretical distortions of Islam by renegade Muslims, rather than as salvos in a jihad that climaxed in 9/11.

On the other hand, the George Bush administration, after its swift punishment of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq, changed the goals of those conflicts into a misguided, naïve effort to democratize peoples whose creed and its supreme law, Koranic-based sharia, are incompatible with liberal democracy and its cargo of religious tolerance, sex equality, unalienable rights, and separation of church and state. The latter was particularly myopic, given that, as Karsh writes, Islam “was inextricably linked with the creation of a world empire and its universalism was inherently imperialist. It did not distinguish between temporal and religious powers.” Muhammad could thus “cloak his political ambitions with a religious aura.”

This mistake by Bush’s foreign policy team was in part the fruit of the wrong lessons taken from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which arrogantly encouraged the primacy of the Western liberal “rules-based internal order” as the master political paradigm for the whole world. And this hubristic mentality persisted all the way to Joe Biden’s skedaddle from Afghanistan last year, where the U.S. had sponsored seminars on women’s liberation for Afghan males.
Of course, Bush also made clear where he really stands when last year, he used the Memorial service as a cheap excuse to attack Trump, no matter how indirectly, and soiled what should've been a solemn moment. It was most utterly insensitive to 9-11 Families, not to mention victims of the botched Afghanistan withdrawal. And then of course, there's the problem of a liberal guilt mentality that only applies to the west, but not to Islamic forces continuing to occupy countries they captured in the past:
Moreover, whereas the Western colonial powers abandoned colonialism and continue to provide aid to their ex-colonies, Muslims still inhabit and rule most of the territories they conquered centuries ago: all of North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Turkey had been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, i.e. proto-Western, for as long as nearly 3000 years before Islam even existed.

Nor is this ancient history: Muslim Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus, which it invaded and has illegally occupied and colonized since 1974, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots; destroying, looting, and vandalizing more than 550 churches; and refusing to this day to inform the Greeks about the fate of over 2000 of their compatriots who disappeared during the invasion. Bullying Israel over its “occupation” of the lands their ancestors inhabited 3000 years ago reveals the West’s shameful sacrifice of history and justice in order to pursue its own economic and ideological interests.
Yes, that's another sad topic to consider. Northern Cyprus continues to remain under Turkish rule, and nobody in the west does anything to reverse it. And back in the USA, who knows what more mistakes will be made, as the elitists continue their own misguided approach to the issues?

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