Category Archives: Middle East

Deconstructing Reality In Benghazi

Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, Islam, Middle East, War

So why do you suppose the storyline as to why “they” attacked our consulate in Benghazi last week keeps morphing?

First it was because of an obscure, online, YouTube preview that has been in cyberspace for months, and takes its place among many similar films.

Presumably, that was preferable to accepting the fact of a coordinated attack on a despised presence, timed for the 9/11 anniversary. The maternal instincts of the revered Hillary and her she warlords—these guided the intervention in Libya’s affairs—could not have been wrong!

You dare not concede that by leveling Libya, the Americans “invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives.”

The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.” To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

Reality is always deconstructed to suit the political purposes of the powers that be. Witness the way Iraq-related War stories kept “evolving.”

“RATIONALIZE WITH LIES“ details some of the “rather creative post hoc arguments made to justify the unnecessary war the United States waged on that sovereign nation—a nation that had not attacked us, was no threat to us, and was certainly no match for us.”

UPDATE II: Why I Am So Sad (It’s not About Libya, Israel or 9/11)

Democracy, Elections, Foreign Policy, Free Speech, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Israel, libertarianism, Middle East, Private Property, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry

The current column, now on WND, is “Why I Am So Sad.” An excerpt:

“I AM SO SAD—and it is not because a justifiably angry crowd of Libyans in Benghazi stormed an embassy that represents the brute force that destabilized their lives for decades to come.

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

To those who imagine the death of our diplomats in Libya turns on American free-speech, I say this: You have no right to deliver your disquisition in my living room. You have only the right to request permission to so do from this (armed) private-property owner.

By extension, you have no universal right to “free speech” on another man’s land. More so than to America’s diplomats—Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen a most inopportune time to insert himself into the middle of a rancorous American election season, and by so doing, make Mitt Romney’s foreign policy bellicosity look good to a war-weary people that can ill-afford it.

Now is not a good time, Bibi. Israel is a wedge issue in the coming election. If Israelis love Americans as Americans love Israel, they need to understand that, “The Titan is Tired”:

We Americans have our own tyrants to tackle. We no longer want to defend to the death borders not our own—be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, wherever. And we don’t need our friends looking to us to do so.

I AM SO SAD—and it is not because another 9/11 has come and gone. The polls indicate that Americans want to move on; have moved on. Perhaps Americans have realized that it behooves our “overlords who art in DC” to keep them stuck in grief. By stunning us like cattle to the slaughter, the statists have been able to perpetrate in our name crimes way worse than 9/11.

I AM SO SAD because … ”

The complete column, “Why I Am So Sad,” can be read now on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY BY:

Using the content-sharing icons on Barely a Blog posts.

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections, and on Facebook.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” WND’s “Return To Reason” , and RT’s “Paleolibertarian Column.”

UPDATE I: In answer to a Facebook reader, my saying that, “More so than to America’s diplomats – Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran belong to the people of Libya, Yemen, Egypt and Iran” is not collectivist. It is, overall, correct, not least as a just sentiment intended to discourage interventionism.

Moreover, as a libertarian thinker, I choose to offer meaningful insights that comport with reality, rather than score reductive, pedantic points for the sake of theoretical purity. Tell the Arabs rioting that YOU are one of them b/c you, an American, bought the city their ancestors inhabited for centuries. I’m a private property absolutist, but the institution of private property has a cultural and historical dimension and context.

UPDATE II (Sept. 14): For describing a reality the US brought on itself with its Lawrence of Arabia complex, I am accused by a reader of “sympathizing with these al Qaeda people.”

For one, how in logic do you arrive at sympathy for savages from this:

I feel for my countrymen who perished in that embassy, but the truth remains that they acquiesced in leveling Libya. And by so doing, they invited into that country the very lynch-mob that took their lives. The Americans targeted had become an irritant to the long-suffering Libyans, who will use any US provocation, real or imagined, to expel the people who “came, saw, and conquered.”

Force breeds force; nation building where you have no business imposing your will—will results in what transpired in Libya. Fact: Those idiotic and arrogant interventions have a price. These are the people our diplomats were working with in a patronizing foolish way. I just heard Hillary say as much. This was, in part, a reaction to imposed authority. Yes, Hillary is trying to separate the attackers from her lovely rebels. Our reader is buying what Hillary is selling because it feeds into a storyline neocons simply can’t resist.

I suggest the reader mine the Archives here. I’ve documented this vehement hate for the US—beginning in our decade long expeditions to the region—that have seen the US remain over there indefinitely.

Americans do not understand the culture. The writer actually grew up in the region, so I have a better inkling. I hear Hillary declare that the ambassador was working with the “rebels” and that they had come to love him. Oh yes? That’s Lawrence-of- Arabia type romantic rot. And can you be that dumb? A smile and outward charm don’t mean they like you! But our navel-gazing, patronizing (unarmed) diplomats think that everyone should love the US despite its actions in the region, in general, and in Libya, in particular.

I suggest the reader reconsider the logic of his accusation. Calling reality as it is does not imply sympathy for the offending parties on my part. I suppose the reader would prefer that I fulminate irrationally like some of the neoconservative Jihadi and Sharia trackers whom he probably follows. (And who never even mention the possibility that we should, as true patriots, defend our own porous borders, before we violate and then presume to “defend” the boundaries of other nations.)

Sober Up About The Arab Spring

Democracy, Islam, Middle East, Reason

“Romanticism is man’s revolt against reason,” wrote the great classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises. Minds ravaged by the rot of romanticism were everywhere on display in mainstream media’s coverage of the “unfinished revolutions of the new Middle East.”

But not only mainstream. The same wishful thinking infected the garden-variety, left-libertarian column. To wit:

“A long-oppressed people finally rises up and braves tanks, secret police thugs, and the inertia of routine humiliation to say: ‘Enough’!”

Tunisia received a more sober analysis from the same source. Still, an analysis that uncouples cultural and religious factors from the events on the ground is bound to end in a disconnect. (“Ah, how the hell did we get from A to B?”)

The missing link: “Democracy was not sprung as Athena was from her father’s head.” Not every person who longs to breathe free is willing to let the other guy breathe (or walk around with a head on his shoulders, for that matter).

Sentimental gushing about THE ARAB UPRISING notwithstanding, those of us who’ve lived in the region have remained skeptical and disinterested, befitting the non-interventionist mindset.

John R. Bradley’s AFTER THE ARAB SPRING, reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement, will sober up the dreamer in no time:

Consider Tunisia, a small, literate country where abortion is legal and sex education taught in a world-class education system, all thanks to Habib Bourguiba, who led the fight for independence from France and ruled “with an iron fist” for thirty years. The still-beloved Bourguiba held power by limiting political freedoms but granting social ones and raising middle-class living standards.
Here was a “Muslim authoritarian country” that got it right. It might have continued, had Bourguiba’s successor, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, been less greedy and arrogant, his wife less ostentatious and her family less thuggish and opportunistic. Tunisians objected, but what did they get? Bradley paints a sinister portrait of Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Ennahda party and head of Tunisia’s elected interim government. When Ghannouchi states “we want a system based on coalitions since only this will protect us from tyranny”, Bradley hears “a power sharing deal”, where liberals have some say in the economy while the Islamists “pursue [their] social agenda of Islamizing Tunisian society from below … [eradicating] the country’s secular inheritance [and] dragging Tunisia, chanting and ululating, back to the Middle Ages”. Far from empowering the people, the Jasmine Revolution was “the dumbest most selfdefeating uprising in history” and the Arab Spring a dismal failure that “socially and economically has put back countries like Tunisia, Yemen and Syria by decades”.

UPDATED: Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown (Knownothings)

Democracy, Foreign Policy, Hillary Clinton, Islam, Middle East, The State

“Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown“ is the current column, now on RT. Here’s an excerpt:

“If you care about Rebels the world over, as Senators John McCain, Joseph Lieberman and Lindsey Graham think you ought to, consider the fate of one brave rebel. Stacked as they are with The Dictator’s judges, the courts in this Rebel’s country want to place him behind bars for shooting a predator on his property. Ursus arctos horribilis is a wild and extremely dangerous carnivore that thrives in the northwestern parts of this dictator’s dominion.

The tribesman is guilty of no more than aggressively repelling from human habitat a creature that had become brazen, making itself at home near the man’s six young children, as they frolicked.

It used to be that the country’s tribesmen instilled fear in encroaching beasts, animal and human. But due to decades of cultural and legal emasculation, under a succession of like-minded dictators, the queered men folk are no longer licensed to protect home and hearth. If they do, they risk losing their liberty.

One man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist. Our rebel’s plight would never be popularized by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, or the rest of America’s journalistic priesthood. For he is an American, one among many.

‘Jeremy M. Hill, 33, pleaded not guilty in U.S. District Court to killing a grizzly bear with a rifle on his 20-acre property near Porthill, Idaho, at the Canadian border.’

At least five of Mr. Hill’s six young kids, ranging in age from 14 years to ten months, were home when their dad killed a brown bear that had gone after penned pigs that the kids had been raising.

I wonder how many Syrian rebels or regulars President Bashar al-Assad has arrested for shooting wild animals that had threatened their families.

If given the choice, this scribe would choose the absolute right to defend life and property over the democratic vote, any day.

Fighters for the family and the farm are never “rebels.” Or so Senators McCain, Lieberman and Graham would impatiently insist. Wresting dominion over the distributive state: now that’s the defining battle of an “authentic” freedom fighter.

Speaking of our Syrian soul-mates, the Free Syria Army, aka, “The Rebels.” By now you’ve viewed their handiwork. Purity of arms is not exactly their military or moral motto. …”

The complete column, “Hillary’s Next Blood-Inspired Hoedown,” can be read on RT.

Also available from WND is my book, “Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

The paperback edition features bonus material, including an Afterword by Burkean philosopher Jack Kerwick, Ph.D. Order it from WND. (Read the editorial reviews.)

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive libertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE DISCUSSION, AND DO BATTLE FOR LIBERTY:

• At the WND and RT Comments Sections.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” “Return To Reason” on WND, and the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT.

UPDATE (Aug. 3): As to the state of knowledge in the West about Syria, the TLS reviewer alluded to in the column concludes:

In the end these disparate groups are united by two things: fear and ignorance. They are caught between a state media that lies and a foreign media with its own biases, which relies on unverifiable YouTube videos. The general conclusion is that no one in Syria knows what is going on, either inside or outside their own neighbourhoods. It is therefore a strange kind of enlightenment that this book offers, but probably an accurate one.