Category Archives: Military

Democracy In Egypt = Dar al-Islam

Christianity, Conflict, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Freedom of Religion, Middle East, Military

Remember how members of the American chattering class, libertarians too, practically tripped over one another to show-off their solidarity with the popular uprising in Egypt?

Many of the same slobbering sorts failed to mention that, when he was not ordering rendition and torture in the service of the US, Mubarak’s dictatorial powers were directed, unjustly indubitably, against the Islamic fundamentalists of the Muslim brotherhood. He kept them in check. All in all, Mubarak protected the endangered Coptic Christians of Egypt, who form “one-tenth of the 80 million people.”

So many neocons and liberals came down on Obama, his VP, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when they responded with “old-school diplomacy” to the developments on Israel’s southern border. The opposition wanted BHO to be less low key about the lovely rebels. BHO eventually complied.

PBS refuses to identify the 26 “protesters” who were killed in yesterday’s “sectarian” clashes in Egypt between Muslim and Christians. I wager that the Christian Coptic community stands less of a chance now that Mubarak is gone.

RAY SUAREZ: Some 1,000 Christians gathered last night to protest the slow response of the military government to Muslim attacks on Coptic churches, but the peaceful protest quickly grew into a melee, as Christians, Muslims and security forces battled in the streets.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK of the New York Times attests to the fact that what started as “a demonstration, a peaceful march that began in the neighborhood of Shoubra—Copts demonstrating over the attack on a church in the southern part of Egypt—“ended with “the security forces… driving a trucks into the Coptic Christian protesters and firing ammunition also at the protesters. So, today, we had bodies that were badly mangled by those vehicles and others that had those bullet wounds.”

“The Christian minority [lost] a protector in Hosni Mubarak,” admitted KIRKPATRICK.

But no. “Yesterday wasn’t a clash between Muslim and Christians, but it was led by thugs who want to stab the revolution and the political process,” said one of Egypt’s new “son of 60 dogs” (an Egyptian expression for political master).

Nice try.

Egypt, like Iraq (where Saddam kept Muslim fanaticism in check), is destined to become Dar al-Islam (House of Islam)

The heyday for Iraq’s Christian community was under Saddam Hussein, when “Catholics made up 2.89 percent of Iraq’s population in 1980. By 2008,” thanks to the Bush pig, “they were merely 0.89 percent.” Iraq’s “dwindling Christian community,” “whose numbers have plummeted since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion as the community has fled to other countries,” has suffered a terrible loss today.

Wrong About Ron

Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Military, Republicans, Ron Paul

The DC Establishment, left and right—the engorged organism I call the media-military-congressional complex—thinks of Ron Paul as “charming”; his “heresies—his denunciations of ‘militarism,’ even his suggestion that Iran might have understandable reasons for wanting nukes and it might not be so terrible if they got one—[as the] tolerated [and] lovable eccentricities of a cranky but harmless uncle.” Or so writes Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker.

Hertzberg has a point.

But his kind is as detached from mainstream America as the Republicans he lambastes (Let us hope that this will be their undoing.) Ron Paul’s stance against American militarism around the world makes him appealing to voters on the left, the (real) right, and the center. All are well represented among the millions who are jobless and without an income. All would prefer to see “charity” (I use the word in the loosest possible way for the evil the US perpetrates around the world) begin at home, not abroad. Like or dislike him, Ron Paul is the only Republican presidential contender whose foreign policy position can unite left, right and independent Americans.

Provided all factions begin to … THINK.

The Worst of Times

Bush, Economy, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Jihad, Liberty, Military, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Terrorism, War

National Journal has had an aha Moment: “The 10 years since the terrorism attacks of 9/11 rank among America’s most troubled,” concludes the Journal’s Ronald Brownstein:

[George W. Bush’s] “mismanaged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sapped U.S. strength and imposed costs vastly exceeding their benefits. Overstretched and in the red, America ends the decade weaker on many international dimensions than when it began… At home,… the median income is now lower than in 2001 and the number of Americans in poverty nearly one-third higher. Most incredibly, fewer Americans are working today than in September 2001—a decadelong record of decline matched since 1900 only during the 1930s. Faith in all public and private leadership is flickering.”

No doubt, it began with Bush, who was bad to the bone.

Quintessential Republican Cretinism

Intelligence, Military, Politics, Republicans

As the Republican presidential candidates ramp-up their faux-patriotic militaristic jingoism, it’s time to remember just how dumb these people are. Here is “The Republican Party Animals Music Video”:

The American Conservative captured this thematic, quintessentially Republican cretinism, in all its contradictions—as if both “small government” and a massive military can coincide—in the cover art and cover story of the issue titled, “GOP and Man at Yale”:

Unbeknown to Republicans, “the military is government. The military works like government; is financed like government, and sports many of the same inherent malignancies of government. Like government, it must be kept small.”

“Conservative can’t coherently preach against the evils of big government, while excluding the military mammoth.”