Posted on 04/02/2011 10:43:40 AM PDT by Palter
The West's leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, sees cause for optimism in the limited-government traditions of Arab and Muslim culture. But he says the U.S. should not push for quick, Western-style elections.
'What Went Wrong?" That was the explosive title of a December 2001 book by historian Bernard Lewis about the decline of the Muslim world. Already at the printer when 9/11 struck, the book rocketed the professor to widespread public attention, and its central question gripped Americans for a decade.
Now, all of a sudden, there's a new question on American minds: What Might Go Right?
To find out, I made a pilgrimage to the professor's bungalow in Princeton, N.J., where he's lived since 1974 when he joined Princeton's faculty from London's School of Oriental and African Studies.
Two months shy of his 95th birthday, Mr. Lewis has been writing history books since before World War II. By 1950, he was already a leading scholar of the Arab world, and after 9/11, the vice president and the Pentagon's top brass summoned him to Washington for his wisdom.
"I think that the tyrannies are doomed," Mr. Lewis says as we sit by the windows in his library, teeming with thousands of books in the dozen or so languages he's mastered. "The real question is what will come instead."
For Americans who have watched protesters in Tunisia, Egypt, Iran, Libya, Bahrain and now Syria stand up against their regimes, it has been difficult not to be intoxicated by this revolutionary moment. Mr. Lewis is "delighted" by the popular movements and believes that the U.S. should do all it can to bolster them. But he cautions strongly against insisting on Western-style elections in Muslim lands.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
ML/NJ
Um, ... CALIPHATE, anyone?
They wouldn't know what to do with themselves except for tyranny..
Without tyranny they would have no government..
Mexico is another example.. and any muslim country..
Currently America is learning to love tyranny..
Wisconsin is a prime example.. weaning them of tyranny might be hard to do..
Same with Mexifornia and New York.. People in Massachusetts love tyranny..
“The West’s leading scholar of the Middle East, Bernard Lewis,”
I must have missed that election—what a buffoon. My vote goes to Dore Gold....
The CIA is a lot like the UN or unions. It seemed like a good idea but it hasn't done much that it was supposed to and a whole lot that it wasn't supposed to and shouldn't have.
Forcing Mubarak from Egypt and Ben Ali from Tunisia should result in bad outcomes, and be the pattern for Middle East unrest as it spreads to Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Notice that so far these fragile oligarchies are all secular governments. The demise of these dictators precipitate political wildernesses resembling the lesson ignored 32 years ago when Carter discarded the Shah of Iran. The Obama Administration and other media sources encouraged, and applaud the demise of these oligarchies, but studiously ignore evidence of attendant brittle economic, social, and political environments. In the Middle East the most violent aspiring Islamic and secular totalitarians should exploit these strains to follow traditional malevolent roads to power energized with lethal political intrigues and religious heresies.
About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with God, and exalting individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions over a century provide compelling evidence of a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
What remained was bloody electioneering among aspiring totalitarians causing them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. For them dazzling spectacle and mercurial oratory belie principled commitment to a continuum where politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. Once acquired these skills easily replicate through generations for managing secular philosophies from Democracy to Communism. Why would the Muslim Brotherhood or any organizations like Ai Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and successors ever abandon strategies proven throughout a millennium? The natural result in our present time establishes “The Democratic (or) Islamic Peoples Republic of Whatever”.
To council a Middle East contending against such electioneering, Obama brings his newly minted Nobel Peace Prize, and all the nominating committee’s comforting assurances. However, he must deal with people sharing the perception of Greg Lewis in American Thinker, who painted the picture of Obama as displaying classic beta male behavior. The alpha male dog approaches directly, while the beta male displays acquiescent gestures signaling uncompromising submission. Lewis saw submissiveness in offering conciliatory gestures to Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in sending John Kerry to meet Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, in bowing to King Abdullah, in airy discussions with Hugo Chavez and David Ortega, and in generally ridiculing the U.S. whenever he appears on an international stage.
Of course these actions were constructive within the worldview continually vetted by the liberal constituencies Obama cherishes. For these people the best approaches to diplomacy and politics reside within modern game theory for which John Nash and others received their Nobel prizes. All believe Islamic societies should realize the brilliance of Western conflict resolution, and should enter into peaceful, meaningful dialogues. When instead Oriental opponents manage perceptions of submissive posturing into concessions exchanged for photo ops and sound bites, liberals become befuddled by the intricacies and chicanery of this unorthodox diplomacy.
In case one considers this a Democrat affliction only, consider that the Bush Administration also embraced thinking from our best universities. It abandoned the interim council of 25 ethnically and religiously diverse members, who produced the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) as basis for a new Iraq constitution. Its’ 39 articles were unique in the Arab world for conceiving republican, federal, democratic and pluralistic government guaranteeing rights for speech, religion, private property, etc. for all including Christians, Jews and former Ba’athists. Instead they artlessly marginalized these unique leaders and this document by adopting a U.N. brokered plan put forth by Algeria, which encouraged traditional authoritative Arab rule.
T. E. Lawrence provides valuable insights about Arab countries, because though he was clearly an intellectual, his education was tempered by extensive travels from 1909 to 1914 away from the colonial community, even before he lead the Arab revolt in WW I. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom he says, “They are a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place the material world has been and God would move upon the face of those waters”.
The United States is a super power and benefits from an anomalous revolution resulting in personal liberty. I believe this heritage includes a moral responsibility to bear any burden to spread the ideals to which the country aspires, not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but throughout the Middle East.
Notwithstanding the necessity for real politick, our country should first offer moral leadership by seeking out and supporting the yet anonymous, selfless individuals and constituencies willing to endanger their lives and those of their families to establish durable economic models and representative governments. With our help such people and constituencies might not be broken by the granite of secular totalitarianism or Islamic Fundamentalism.
The United States should be considered a dependable, if difficult ally or enemy. Unfortunately, with recent administrations, I think there seems little chance this country will base foreign relations on the intangibles which define the best aspects of our national character, but move too quickly to real politick. Most likely the U.S. will follow other countries that prosecute national interests by making deals for access to natural resources with the ruling elite of the ascendant tribe. A generation later new Western leaders will likely follow the same process during the next wave of revolutions.
Really, these intellectuals are certainly dense, are they not?
Forcing Mubarak from Egypt and Ben Ali from Tunisia should result in bad outcomes, and be the pattern for Middle East unrest as it spreads to Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. Notice that so far these fragile oligarchies are all secular governments. The demise of these dictators precipitate political wildernesses resembling the lesson ignored 32 years ago when Carter discarded the Shah of Iran. The Obama Administration and other media sources encouraged, and applaud the demise of these oligarchies, but studiously ignore evidence of attendant brittle economic, social, and political environments. In the Middle East the most violent aspiring Islamic and secular totalitarians should exploit these strains to follow traditional malevolent roads to power energized with lethal political intrigues and religious heresies.
About 1100 AD Hassan bin Sabah, who inherited the Assassin’s Guild, enlightened Islamist societies to terrorism as foundational statecraft for political prosperity. Philosophical and religious lawyers retained their lives, and obtained support for dictators by backwards engineering the Koran into useful totalitarian heterodoxies. Concurrently, foundational thought including Jews, Christians and Muslims as ‘People of the Book” became hazardous. Concurrently, Saladin’s Sufism stressing individual relationship with God, and exalting individuals in society became marginalized. Concurrently, extraordinary Arab achievements in mathematics, philosophy, science, and medicine submerged within authoritarian and feral societies. Omar Khayyam, Ibn al-Haytham, and Abu Ali al-Hussain Ibn Sina had no successors for uncompromising, independent thought. Such simultaneous extinctions over a century provide compelling evidence of a pervasive contagion subverting the Middle East.
What remained was bloody electioneering among aspiring totalitarians causing them to grasp and retain their power by crafting superior alliances of human cunning and animal brutality. For them dazzling spectacle and mercurial oratory belie principled commitment to a continuum where politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. Once acquired these skills easily replicate through generations for managing secular philosophies from Democracy to Communism. Why would the Muslim Brotherhood or any organizations like Ai Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and successors ever abandon strategies proven throughout a millennium? The natural result in our present time establishes “The Democratic (or) Islamic Peoples Republic of Whatever”.
To council a Middle East contending against such electioneering, Obama brings his newly minted Nobel Peace Prize, and all the nominating committee’s comforting assurances. However, he must deal with people sharing the perception of Greg Lewis in American Thinker, who painted the picture of Obama as displaying classic beta male behavior. The alpha male dog approaches directly, while the beta male displays acquiescent gestures signaling uncompromising submission. Lewis saw submissiveness in offering conciliatory gestures to Sudanese leader Omar Hassan al-Bashir, in sending John Kerry to meet Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, in bowing to King Abdullah, in airy discussions with Hugo Chavez and David Ortega, and in generally ridiculing the U.S. whenever he appears on an international stage.
Of course these actions were constructive within the worldview continually vetted by the liberal constituencies Obama cherishes. For these people the best approaches to diplomacy and politics reside within modern game theory for which John Nash and others received their Nobel prizes. All believe Islamic societies should realize the brilliance of Western conflict resolution, and should enter into peaceful, meaningful dialogues. When instead Oriental opponents manage perceptions of submissive posturing into concessions exchanged for photo ops and sound bites, liberals become befuddled by the intricacies and chicanery of this unorthodox diplomacy.
In case one considers this a Democrat affliction only, consider that the Bush Administration also embraced thinking from our best universities. It abandoned the interim council of 25 ethnically and religiously diverse members, who produced the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) as basis for a new Iraq constitution. Its’ 39 articles were unique in the Arab world for conceiving republican, federal, democratic and pluralistic government guaranteeing rights for speech, religion, private property, etc. for all including Christians, Jews and former Ba’athists. Instead they artlessly marginalized these unique leaders and this document by adopting a U.N. brokered plan put forth by Algeria, which encouraged traditional authoritative Arab rule.
T. E. Lawrence provides valuable insights about Arab countries, because though he was clearly an intellectual, his education was tempered by extensive travels from 1909 to 1914 away from the colonial community, even before he lead the Arab revolt in WW I. In the Seven Pillars of Wisdom he says, “They are a people of starts, for whom the abstract was the strongest motive, the process of infinite courage and variety, and the end nothing. They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail. Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coasts of flesh. Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place the material world has been and God would move upon the face of those waters”.
The United States is a super power and benefits from an anomalous revolution resulting in personal liberty. I believe this heritage includes a moral responsibility to bear any burden to spread the ideals to which the country aspires, not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but throughout the Middle East.
Notwithstanding the necessity for real politick, our country should first offer moral leadership by seeking out and supporting the yet anonymous, selfless individuals and constituencies willing to endanger their lives and those of their families to establish durable economic models and representative governments. With our help such people and constituencies might not be broken by the granite of secular totalitarianism or Islamic Fundamentalism.
The United States should be considered a dependable, if difficult ally or enemy. Unfortunately, with recent administrations, I think there seems little chance this country will base foreign relations on the intangibles which define the best aspects of our national character, but move too quickly to real politick. Most likely the U.S. will follow other countries that prosecute national interests by making deals for access to natural resources with the ruling elite of the ascendant tribe. A generation later new Western leaders will likely follow the same process during the next wave of revolutions.
I am soooo sorry my comment posted twice. My computer was having an attitude problem. I do much better communicating with my wife than I do with this machine.
I am soooo sorry my comment posted twice. My computer was having an attitude problem. I do much better communicating with my wife than I do with this machine.
How so? The author basically confirmed PENANCE' diagnosis that the Muslim world is heading toward a Caliphate.
Guess I should click the link and read the rest of the story, right?
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