Nile Gardiner, writing in The Telegraph
It should be clear that many of the policies/actions mentioned represent not only threats to Israel, but threats to the United States and to the entire civilized world.
Middle East
On the ideas that follow us, one decade to the next….
Detente’s greatest achievement was the opening of consistent contact between the United States and the USSR in the early 1970s—a gradually intensifying engagement on many levels and in many areas that, as it grew over the years, would slowly but widely open the Soviet Union to information, contacts, and ideas from the West and would facilitate an ongoing East-West dialogue that would influence the thinking of many Soviet officials and citizens.
– From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War
Indeed Washington’s on-again off-again attention to the region, driven by relatively short term developments like the Soviet-Russian invasion of Afghanistan and the war against terror, makes Iranian and Chinese overtures appealing to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Myanmar.
– A Sino-Persian grab for the Indian Ocean? by Jamsheed K. Choksy (Small Wars Journal)
Earlier this month the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, twisted his mouth into the shape of a pretzel to explain why it was okay for the U.S. to support Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal but not okay to support North Korea’s arsenal and Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He also saw no problem with the United States as much declaring war on India when he sympathized with Pakistan’s need to use nuclear weapons against India in order to feel safe.
Then Americans wonder why Pyongyang and Tehran laugh at Washington’s lectures on nuclear proliferation. The leaders of both regimes have been doing clandestine nuke business with Pakistan for decades. They know Pakistan is the biggest nuclear weapons proliferator on the planet — and so does Mullen, who is the highest ranking military officer in the USA and as such is the principal military advisor to the President of the United States, the National Security Council, and the Secretary of Defense.
That’s not the half of the double standard America has practiced with regard to Pakistan. Barely a day goes by that the American news media doesn’t warn of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran because of the regime’s end-of-time religious views, which American news analyst John Batchelor has termed “hallucinatory.”
It doesn’t get more hallucinatory than the views of Pakistani media mogul, Majeed Nizami, the owner of the Nawa-i-Waqt, The Nation, and Waqt TV channel. During a recent speech at a function given in his honor he declared that Pakistan’s missiles and nuclear bombs were superior to “India’s ghosts,” and that unleashing nuclear war against India was imperative. “Don’t worry if a couple of our cities are also destroyed in the process.”
That would be the same Nation newspaper that cites the United States government as being behind every terrorist incident in the world, including the Times Square attack.
If you think Nizami is an isolated nut case, you don’t know much about him, or Pakistan. He is the true face of the most powerful factions in Pakistan including its military leaders.
But in the view of the U.S. government and news media it’s okay for Pakistan’s military to hold hallucinatory views whereas it’s not okay for Iran’s leaders because, well, because.
It’s the same for anti-Semitic views that abound in Pakistan. In the same article that discussed Nizami’s view that nuclear Armageddon was the ticket to peace in South Asia, Pakistani journalist Shakil Chaudhary reported on a June 18 column in Nizami’s Nawa-i-Waqt paper in which Lt. Gen. Abdul Qayyum (ret), former chairman of Pakistan Steel Mills, approvingly quoted Adolph Hitler as saying: “I could have annihilated all the Jews in the world, but I left some of them so that you can know why I was killing them.”
– He ain’t heavy, he’s my genocidal, hallucinatory, two-faced ‘ally’ by blogger Pundita.
Why do you suppose certain factions in DC appear so adamant on retaining Pakistan as a “strategic asset” post 9-11 and post Abbottabad? CBz blogger Joseph Fouche recently posted a nice piece about the tendency for some to see patterns and intrigues when mere muddle may well explain reality. Sadly, I am prone to this….
So what exactly is our muddle? Is what I’ve posted above overstated and alarmist? State and USAID want to keep its various lucrative aid programs? The Pentagon/DOD want to keep its favorite “proxy” Army for future use against any kind of “sino-islamic” alliance – or Russia or Iran? Tons of money (supposedly….take all of this with a grain of salt) sloshing around DC from various foreign entities, such as the Saudis or the Pak Mil/ISI? Plain old strategic “incompetence” typical of a big, energetic and free-wheeling democracy?
What other rationales might be keeping warring DC factions up at night? Placating the Saudis and keeping the oil flowing? Monitoring Pakistani nukes? (Okay, this one for sure). Preventing even more proliferation via Pakistani-Saudi transfers?
The world is three dimensional and complicated with various currents pulling our policy makers in different directions. I’d be delighted to hear creative thinking on any of these topics by one of the Republican presidential candidates. Your thoughts? Opinions? Relevent anecdotes, articles, films, or books?
Help a gal out, people.
Quote of the Day
The leader of the United States should never leave those willing to sacrifice their lives in the cause of freedom wondering where America stands.
Worth reading in full.
Interesting Opinion Piece on Hezbollah
I have been following the Middle East events through a variety of sources including Al Jazeera English. I know that you need many sources and many of their articles or opinion pieces on Israel are a shambles but by and large I often learn something from the site, whether or not it was what was intended from the point of the article. However, from time to time, they really surprise you, especially on their opinion page.
This opinion piece on Hezbollah and their leader Nasrallah is something that I would have been surprised to see even in Fox News. It is titled “Arab Spring exposes Nasrallah’s Hypocrisy“.
Hezbollah is Iran and Syria’s stalking horse in the middle east, the thugs willing to mix it up and do the dirty work. They cloak themselves in higher minded principles, especially when talking to the US left or the Europeans, about “justice” and the “Palestinian cause”.
Thus this Al Jazeera article, of all places, punches right at the throat of Hezbollah for always crusading against injustice against Arabs and Muslims and yet failing to protest the horrendous slaughter of innocent protestors amongst their patrons Iran and most recently Syria. Hezbollah is funded by Syria and Iran and thus they are obviously changing their tune when their patrons and funding are impacted. From the article:
The Arab Spring, the transnational uprising of masses of millions of people from Morocco to Oman, from Syria to Yemen, is making the aging warrior redundant – his habitually eloquent tongue now stuttering for words. Two years ago, he thought he got away with rejecting the democratic uprising in Iran (whose brutal ruling regime is his principle patron and financier), as a plot by the US, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. And he did – aided and abetted by the moral and intellectual sclerosis of a segment of Arab intellectuals who thought Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Islamic theocracy were the vanguard of “resistance” to US/Israel imperialism in the region and thus should be spared from criticism. And then Tunisia happened, and Egypt, and Libya, and Bahrain, and Yemen – and then, Hassan Nasrallah and Ali Khamenei’s nightmare, Syria happened. It is a sad scene to see a once mighty warrior being bypassed by the force of history, and all he can do is to fumble clumsily to reveal he has not learned the art of aging gracefully.
While I wouldn’t call him a once mighty warrior, those words have to sting a lot more coming from Al Jazerra.
Nasrallah, who could not care less for such revolting behavior by his patrons, now for second time in a row, was siding with brutal, vicious tyrants and their criminally insane security forces against the democratic aspirations of their people – once in Iran and now in Syria.
That is pretty direct stuff – I like the “criminally insane security forces” too.
The only language that Hassan Nasrallah understands is the language that keeps him in power, condemning the US, the EU, Israel, and the Saudis – all hitherto truisms that have, thanks to the Green Movement and the Arab Spring, lost their grip on reality even more than Nasrallah.
That is a great paragraph, too. The old “saw” of Israel and the US killing Arabs has to be updated since we obviously aren’t nearly as good at it as those that are willing to use tanks and heavy weaponry on their own people, such as Libya and Syria (and Iran probably would too, if it came down to that).
A very interesting opinion piece so I would recommend reading the entire article.
Anti-Assad Syria Rally in Chicago July 3
There is a large anti-Assad (Bashar al-Assad to be specific) occurring today in River North in Chicago. The rally is supported by many organizations as detailed here. The plight of civilians in Syria is horrible and the true colors of the Assad regime are unfortunately coming through.
The rally had speakers from the community and people driving by honked their support. If for some reason you aren’t aware of the situation in Syria there is a massive popular revolt and the government is using shocking force on the civilian population, including tanks, artillery, and other heavy weapons on basically an unarmed populace consisting of their own citizens.
Generally when people compare “X” to Hitler the comparisons are over-wrought. In the case of Bashar al-Assad, however, at least you can understand where the protesters are coming from. I also think that the “Hitler” reference is meant to jolt people into at least considering their plight.
The incident with a 13 year old child Hamza is cited on this protest sign; he was apparently tortured to death in a horrible manner that I won’t cite here but you can read anywhere on the internet for more information. One of the Chicago Boyz commenters said “this was bad even for an Arab country”. From my perspective not only was it evil it represented shockingly poor tactics for Bashar; it is incomprehensible what this could accomplish.
Here and at Chicago Boyz we are keen commenters on history so any time you compare someone to Stalin it also gets us interested; I think that the Stalin references are also relevant since Russia is blocking security council action (along with China) on Syria.
Cross posted at LITGM