Victor Davis Hanson compares presidents Obama and Carter, and finds both wanting.
Check out the last paragraph:
There is one consolation in that the progressive Western Europeans, the United Nations, and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee sometimes appreciate American indecision and self-confession. As a result, this time around our sermonizer-in-chief was given the Nobel Peace Prize without lobbying for it ”” and during, rather than after, his presidency.
…Groundhog Day!
Let’s watch it again and again and again and…
…again, till we get it right.
It’s funny how Judge Vinson’s ruling against the constitutionality of the HCR individual mandate has been called “judicial activism” and “overreaching” by the left and the Obama administration.
Here’s an article that points out that it’s not really “activist” to use the constitution to restrain the expansion of the powers of the federal government. To call it such is quite an feat of verbal gymnastics. “Restraint” might be a better word—unless one thinks the judiciary’s purpose is to automatically rubber stamp acts of the legislative and executive branches of government (as long as both branches are under Democratic control, of course).
There are heaps of snow outside my door right now, and in that I’m hardly alone. From midwest to northeast we’ve had a huge disruptive blizzard. Some places have had the pleasure of an ice storm as well, which brings with it the threat of a power outage.
These events introduce a small bit of chaos into our lives. That disorder is almost always a mere annoyance, and a temporary one at that. And yet it can still make us very uneasy, because it points out how closely we live to real chaos, which lies just a power grid away for most of us.
Then there’s private chaos of a different sort. We’ve just had a reminder of that, too, within our virtual family here on the blog, with the announcement of commenter strcpy’s very serious illness. When illness strikes, all the usual plans and expectations are thrown into the air and life goes into another mode, a crisis one that focuses on treatments, with a whole new vocabulary and way of being to be learned.
And then there’s public chaos of the type brought about by the demonstrations in Egypt and the resultant instability there. It’s far away, and reaches us only through computer, newspaper, or TV screen. But for the people of Egypt it’s up close and personal, and it must be both exhilarating and terrifying.
I said it is far away for us, and that is true. But, just as the events in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century dominated our foreign policy for much of the latter half of that century, and the ascension to power of a strange mustachioed orator in Germany spelled doom for tens of millions of people around the globe, and the return of the turbaned Khomeini to Iran started that country on a repressive path that included supporting terrorism against us and our allies, so do events in Egypt today have the potential to affect us all in ways large and small. We just don’t know yet what those ways will be.
Michael Totten has an important must-read interview with Iranian exile Abbas Milani, professor at Stanford, who discusses the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution that led to the present theocracy there, and how it might relate to Egypt today.
Here’s Milani is on the events leading up to 1979 in Iran:
MJT: But what should Carter have done instead [vis a vis the Shah]? Are you saying he was he wrong to talk about human rights?
Abbas Milani: No, he should have talked about human rights, but he also should have understood that you have to go step by step. Concessions need to be made in a timely fashion from a position of power. Carter should have made it clear that he was for change, but not for change at any price. Brzezinski understood this much better than anyone else in the administration but didn’t get his way. And on the other side we had the Shah undergoing chemotherapy and his endogenous paranoia, depression, indecisiveness and vacillation. The result was disaster…
And lurking around the corner was Khomeini who cleverly understood what the Americans wanted. The Americans wanted a more responsive democratic government, and Khomeini promised it to them. I have found evidence of his contacting Americans.
MJT: Who in the US did he contact?
Abbas Milani: The American Embassy in Paris. He also sent a letter to Carter. His allies in Tehran were also in contact with the American Embassy. They were saying Khomeini was not as bad as the Shah was making him out to be. All of them were helped by Iranian intellectuals who have a great responsibility in all this.
MJT: What did you think about Khomeini at the time?
Abbas Milani: I was an opponent of the Shah. I spent a year in prison. For six months I was in Evin Prison. The future leaders of the Islamic Republic were my cellmates.
MJT: You knew these guys?
Abbas Milani: I knew all of them. I spent six months with them. I knew they were bad news. I knew that what they were going to deliver was not democracy.
But most people had never read any of Khomeini’s writings because they were banned. The Shah, instead of making them mandatory reading, banned them. In the 1960s and 70s Khomeini had already talked about almost everything he did. Even in 1944 he talked about how evil democracy and modernity are, how evil the rule of law is. He talked about the establishment of Velayat-e faqih, the rule of Islamic jurists. These books could have been an absolutely clear indication of where his regime would go, but they were banned. Even those who were willing, like me, to actually read this stuff, we dismissed it because we were under the Age of Enlightenment illusion that religion is the opiate of the masses and that there is an inverse correlation between reason and science on the one hand and religion on the other. We believed that Iran was too advanced for these ideas.
Milani and his cohorts can be forgiven their failure to understand what was about to happen. After all, it was exceedingly unusual for a modern and secular (or seemingly modern and seemingly secular) country to become a fundamentalist theocracy. But from the example of Iran we know full well that it could happen in Egypt too, so there are no more excuses for ignoring or minimizing the possibility.
Milani also says:
Governments can no longer rely on fear alone. It’s much easier now to break through it than it used to be.
I disagree. Governments could rely on fear alone—it is just that most modern governments, even that of the ayatollahs, are more reluctant than tyrannies of the past to get out the big guns and use them freely on their own people. When a dictatorship gets to the point where it is reluctant to kill large numbers of demonstrators to stay in power, then it is much easier for the people to “break through,” because the population will always outnumber those in power, who can only stay in power either by serving the needs of the people or by frightening them into submission.
I’ve received word from long-time commenter “strcpy” that he’s been taken ill and is awaiting a definitive diagnosis, but it appears he has some form of cancer. Please join me in wishing him well and add your prayers, if you’re the praying kind.
I was going to write a long post about this today but alas, I already got caught up in long-windedness on another topic, that of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. So I’ll just do a roundup.
Putting on my Instapundit hat:
This seems about right to me.
Likewise, this.
Surprisingly, Ezra Klein has a pretty good list of links on both sides of the argument.
South Dakota gets into the act. And it’s not even April Fools Day.
Romney walks a tightrope. But it’s true that states can do things the feds can’t. Not that it’s worked out that well for Massachusetts.
And via William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection we have this handy explanation of what happened:
In my previous post for today, I called those who discount the jihadist intent of the Muslim Brotherhood fools and useful idiots.
But it occurs to me that they might instead be knaves. Or both.
It’s the age-old question—although what would be in it for them in supporting jihadists who are out to destroy all the advances of the Enlightment is a puzzlement to me. That’s why I go with the “fools” hypothesis.
Your mileage may differ.
[ADDENDUM: And is this any real surprise?
he Obama administration said for the first time that it supports a role for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned Islamist organization, in a reformed Egyptian government.
The organization must reject violence and recognize democratic goals if the U.S. is to be comfortable with it taking part in the government, the White House said…
Monday’s statement was a “pretty clear sign that the U.S. isn’t going to advocate a narrow form of pluralism, but a broad one,” said Robert Malley, a Mideast peace negotiator in the Clinton administration. U.S. officials have previously pressed for broader participation in Egypt’s government.
The George W. Bush administration pushed Mubarak for democratic reforms, but a statement in 2005 by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice did not specifically address a role for Islamists.
“This is different,” said Malley, now with the International Crisis Group. “It has a real political edge and political meaning.”…
[The Brotherhood] is not listed on U.S. terrorism lists, as the militant Hamas and Hezbollah organizations are…Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, who has become the leading symbol of the effort to oust Mubarak, has said the group poses no threat. The Muslim Brotherhood on Sunday announced its support for ElBaradei as a transitional president if Mubarak was toppled.]
[ADDENDUM: Caroline Glick weighs in. Her conclusion, “The US policy towards Egypt is dictated by the irrational narcissism of two opposing sides to a policy debate that has nothing to do with reality.”]
Ever since the turmoil in Egypt began, I’ve been saying that no one knows what will happen there. That is still my position.
But amidst all the speculation, I think we discount the possibility of an Islamist state at our peril—and, to speak bluntly, those who discount it are fools, no matter how learned they may be.
The Muslim Brotherhood—the Islamist fundamentalist group based in Egypt—is such a fine name. Who could be against brotherhood (well, a few feminists; but you know what I mean)? The history of the group is a chilling one, however. And it is no accident that 9/11’s Mohammed Atta and Ayman al Zawahiri were highly educated Egyptians (note that al Zawahiri joined the Brotherhood at the ripe old age of fourteen).
Sayyid Qutb was another Egyptian. He became a leading voice of the “spiritual” wing of the Brotherhood in the 50s and 60s. This was his advice to the Muslim world:
Qutb…taught that Muslims and Muslim rulers who fail to implement God’s laws are takfir [apostate], they live in a state of jahiliyya [ignorance] and must be opposed…This idea has influenced the rise of contemporary takfiri militants who use this doctrine to legitimize the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy. In contrast to Abul Ala Mawdudi [1903-1979], who advocated the establishment of “Allah’s law in Allah’s land” by a gradualist methodology of infiltration into both secular and nominal Muslim lands, Qutb declared direct, immediate action against jahili and takfiri states…and gave such jihadis legitimization for the killing of Muslim by Muslim for alleged apostasy.
The Brotherhood wasn’t all talk and no action. Here’s some of the group’s influence on Egyptian political affairs:
The Society of Muslim Brothers, the oldest and most influential fundamentalist group in Egypt, instigated an uprising against the British, whose lingering occupation of the Suez Canal zone enraged the nationalists. In January, 1952, in response to the British massacre of fifty Egyptian policemen, mobs organized by the Muslim Brothers in Cairo set fire to movie theatres, casinos, department stores, night clubs, and automobile showrooms, which, in their view, represented an Egypt that had tied its future to the West. At least thirty people were killed, seven hundred and fifty buildings were destroyed, and twelve thousand people were made homeless…In July of that year, a military junta, dominated by an Army colonel, Gamal Abdel Nasser, packed King Farouk onto his yacht and seized control of the government, without firing a shot. According to several fellow-conspirators who later wrote about the event, Nasser secretly promised the Brothers that he would impose Sharia””the rule of Islamic law””on the country…
It quickly became obvious to Nasser that Qutb and his corps of young Islamists had a different agenda for Egyptian society from his, and he shut down [the Brotherhood’s] magazine after only a few issues had been published. But the religious faction was not so easily controlled. The ideological war over Egypt’s future reached a climax on the night of October 26, 1954, when a member of the Brothers attempted to assassinate Nasser as he spoke before an immense crowd in Alexandria. Eight shots missed their mark. Nasser responded by having six conspirators executed immediately and arresting more than a thousand others, including Qutb. He had crushed the Brothers, once and for all, he thought….
I have quoted at length because I would imagine most of us are unfamiliar with the finer points of Egyptian history, and it’s important to get some historical perspective on what’s happening now.
What’s more, these events from the 50s and 60s have had a direct affect on us before, notably in regard to 9/11:
One line of thinking proposes that America’s tragedy on September 11th was born in the prisons of Egypt. Human-rights advocates in Cairo argue that torture created an appetite for revenge, first in Sayyid Qutb and later in his acolytes, including Ayman al-Zawahiri [later to become al Qaeda’s second in command]. The main target of their wrath was the secular Egyptian government, but a powerful current of anger was directed toward the West, which they saw as an enabling force behind the repressive regime. They held the West responsible for corrupting and humiliating Islamic society.
But let’s go back a bit, and see what transpired between Nasser and Qutb:
In 1964, President Abd al-Salaam Arif of Iraq prevailed upon Nasser to grant Qutb parole, but the following year he was arrested again and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government…Qutb received a death sentence. “Thank God,” he said. “I performed jihad for fifteen years until I earned this martyrdom.” Qutb was hanged on August 29, 1966, and the Islamist threat in Egypt seemed to have been extinguished. “The Nasserite regime thought that the Islamic movement received a deadly blow with the execution of Sayyid Qutb and his comrades,” Zawahiri wrote in his memoir. “But the apparent surface calm concealed an immediate interaction with Sayyid Qutb’s ideas and the formation of the nucleus of the modern Islamic jihad movement in Egypt.” The same year Qutb was hanged, Zawahiri helped form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular Egyptian government with an Islamic one. He was fifteen years old.
While we’re looking at history, let’s not ignore the events surrounding the assassination of Anwar Sadat:
In January 1977, a series of ‘Bread Riots’ protested Sadat’s economic liberalization and specifically a government decree lifting price controls on basic necessities like bread. Dozens of nightclubs on the famous Pyramids Street were sacked by Islamists. Following the riots the government reversed its position and re-established the price controls.
Islamists were enraged by Sadat’s Sinai treaty with Israel, particularly the radical Egyptian Islamic Jihad. According to interviews and information gathered by journalist Lawrence Wright, the group was recruiting military officers and accumulating weapons, waiting for the right moment to launch “a complete overthrow of the existing order” in Egypt. Chief strategist of El-Jihad was Aboud el-Zumar, a colonel in the military intelligence whose “plan was to kill the main leaders of the country, capture the headquarters of the army and State Security, the telephone exchange building, and of course the radio and television building, where news of the Islamic revolution would then be broadcast, unleashing – he expected – a popular uprising against secular authority all over the country.”
In February 1981, Egyptian authorities were alerted to El-Jihad’s plan by the arrest of an operative carrying crucial information. In September, Sadat ordered a highly unpopular roundup of more than 1500 people, including many Jihad members, the Coptic Orthodox Pope, Bishop, and highly ranked clergy members, but also intellectuals and activists of all ideological stripes.
The round up missed a Jihad cell in the military led by Lieutenant Khalid Islambouli, who succeeded in assassinating Anwar Sadat that October.
And now please take a look at the following remarks made yesterday by Fareed Zacharia in an interview with Elliot Spitzer, and then some commentary on them by Andrew McCarthy which occurred on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. First, Zacharia and Spitzer:
FZ: The Brotherhood, even the Muslim Brotherhood, does not have the aspirations of the Iranians to create a kind of Islamic state…
ES: You said the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have the aspirations to create a theocracy. Do they not have the aspirations? Or do they not have the power to do it at this point?
FZ: For the last thirty years or so, the Muslim Brotherhood seems to have moved in the direction of wanting to be a conservative, socially religious organization that wants to institute some greater element of Sharia. Now to understand what that means, a lot of that is social welfare stuff. Some of it is things like the veil. Some of it is court procedures in which unfortunately, women would have fewer voices. But it’s not some kind of totalitarian dictatorship. They seem to have accommodated themselves to the idea of democracy, and they have done so for decades now.
Do you think this is likely, after having read the earlier history right up to the early part of the present century? Or do you think we have a fine old bridge in Brooklyn to sell Mr. Zacharia?
I don’t know whether the Brotherhood will succeed in finally taking over after all these long decades of trying. But those who don’t think they still want desperately to do so, and have instead become social workers, are what might be called useful idiots.
And that’s the best thing we can call them. I’m with Andrew McCarthy on this one:
I just think that is willfully closing your eyes and your ears to what they say and what they write. I mean, look, the head of the Muslim Brotherhood, just a few months ago, gave a raging speech calling for jihad. I think Mr. Zacharia is paying attention to what the Brotherhood says to their rapt, English audience, and not a whole lot of attention to what they say, either when they think no one’s listening to them, or in the Arabic press, which tends to be virulently anti-American and anti-Israeli, and does aspire to the creation of a theocracy. What more do you need to know than that their slogan, their motto remains to this day the same. The Koran is our law, jihad is our way, dying in the way of Allah is our highest aspiration.
This willful, hopeful closing of the eyes and ears of a large part of the intelligentsia is inexplicable to me, and yet it happens time and again. It happened with Hitler. It happened with Castro. It happened in Iran with Khomeini, whom the left thought it could control and co-opt. It happened with the West and Yassir Arafat, their revolutionary darling turned pussycat. I don’t know how many people agree with Zacharia about the Brotherhood (here’s an influential one), but I fervently hope their numbers are small, and that they do not include our own president and State Department—although I fear they might.
[NOTE: This post is already very long, but I must add a link to Andrew McCarthy’s excellent article covering some of this same territory. I just noticed it, after having written my post; if I’d seen it earlier I might have saved myself the trouble of writing this and just linked to McCarthy!
If you don’t feel like plowing through the McCarthy piece, however, I’ll just quote the end, which bears on the ending of my post as well:
The Obama administration has courted Egyptian Islamists from the start. It invited the Muslim Brotherhood to the president’s 2009 Cairo speech, even though the organization is officially banned in Egypt. It has rolled out the red carpet to the Brotherhood’s Islamist infrastructure in the U.S. ”” CAIR, the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Society of North America, the Ground Zero mosque activists ”” even though many of them have a documented history of Hamas support. To be sure, the current administration has not been singular in this regard. The courting of Ikhwan-allied Islamists has been a bipartisan project since the early 1990s, and elements of the intelligence community and the State Department have long agitated for a license to cultivate the Brotherhood overtly. They think what Anwar Sadat thought: Hey, we can work with these guys.
There is a very good chance we are about to reap what they’ve sown. We ought to be very afraid.]
Historian Andrew Roberts seems to be channeling neo-neocon.
Not really. But this article of his on Egypt and revolutions sounds a number of themes I’ve been writing about in the last couple of days.
Every time these rulings come down, I refuse to get too excited one way or another, because the only ruling that will end up mattering is the one that will one day almost inevitably be issued by SCOTUS—in other words, what will Justice Kennedy think?
But it is still big news that US District Judge Roger Vinson of Florida has struck down the individual mandate as being unconstitutional, and because there is no severability clause he has extended that ruling to the entire HCR act itself.
As Ezra Klein and several others take pains to inform us, Vinson is a Republican-appointed judge. Rhetorical question: do you think that when liberal rulings come down, those same people are equally eager to lead with the fact that the judges in question are Democrat-appointed?
And then there’s noted constitutional scholar Nancy Pelosi, back in October of 2009:
This article by Gerry Garibaldi in City Journal—about the enormous number of teen pregnancies, our attitude towards them, and the state of education in our country today—is a must-read.
Garibaldi is a teacher in an urban school in Connecticut. The tale he tells is a heartbreaking one, of teenagers who have given up all hope of marriage as unworthy of contemplation or expectation, and who are having children in a system that, in its attempt to be humane, rewards them and supports them for doing so.
They are mostly the product of unwed teen mothers themselves. Although not unintelligent, they are uninvested in school and much of anything else except the frantic search for love, be it from a missing father, a swaggering teenage boy, or the babies they have with alarming frequency.
As Garibaldi points out, tons of taxpayer money is being flung at the problem. But the end result, unfortunately, is only to encourage the behavior.
I have no solution; these things begin in the home, and this system is broken down. It’s not just urban schools, either—the problem is worse there, but it is everywhere.
The contrast between the world I remember from my high school days could not be greater, in which the few girls who got pregnant usually became more quiet and withdrawn, and then were sent away for months to continue their pregnancies in homes for unwed mothers. Later they would return, empty-handed, a sad and newly-adult look in their eyes.
Not so today. The pregnancies of these girls are often the happiest events in their lives, and the babies are almost always kept to be raised by the teens and their thirty-something moms. The single female parent is the norm:
My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”
“Two,” I say.
The next question is always heartbreaking.
“Do they live with you?”
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? It hardly matters at this late point, unless the answer would lead to solutions. Do we withdraw the supports from pregnant teenagers and possibly doom them (and their babies) to a worse situation? But if we don’t, aren’t we just perpetuating the problem? Does the phenomenon lie more in the realm of the emotional? But can’t the emotional be influenced by practicalities? If the consequences of teen pregnancy are made more dire, will it matter at all to these children and their children, who know so little of marriage that it is a foreign territory, almost never visited by anyone in their acquaintance?