A Belgian televised debate confirms that some politicians are willing to countenance support for Al Qaeda as a lesser evil than socialism.

The debate pitted a Belgian born activist of Turkish origin among others against the Belgian Interior Minister, and focused on the worries of parents of Belgian youth leaving to fight with the rebels in Syria. As such it relates to what I wrote yesterday about the inevitable Islamization of Europe.

Bahar Kimyongur’s Turkish parents, who immigrated to Belgium as laborers, were from Hatay province, an area disputed with Syria and inhabited by many members of the Alouite sect of Shi’a Islam. In 2006 he was condemned in Belgium under anti-terrorist legislation for having translated into French documents drafted by an extreme left Turkish organization considered as terrorist by the Turkish government. Kimyongur’s case went through several appeals at various levels, including the highest, of the Belgian justice system, which finally exonerated him. It is eerily similar to what is going on in the United States with respect to ‘aiding the enemy’ anti-free speech legislation.

The crux of the debate over Belgian volunteers going to fight against Syria’a Alouite government

was whether the Minister was making reasonable attempts to get the Turkish government to find these young men, believed to have entered Syria through Turkey’s Hatay province. Kimyongur essentially accuses the minister of being more interested in not seeking help from Turkey’s Islamist government, which could find these Belgian youths, because they are, after all, fighting the Alawi government allied with Shi’a Iran.

This situation would appear to confirm the difference between the political orientation of Sunnis and Shi’as in today’s Muslim world.  Although Arab socialism has been espoused by leaders from both sects (Nasser and Saddam Hussein were both Sunnis), currently the progressive tendency is located in the Shi’a governments of Iran, Syria and post-invasion Iraq, where Shi’as constitute a majority.

The Islamist threat hanging over Europe emanates not from Iran and Syria, neither of which are proselytizing, but from Sunni Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies, financiers of the Syrian rebellion.

Yesterday on RT in a comment by an English-language newspaper editor in Istanbul I heard the term ‘anti-capitalist Muslims’ for the first time.The day before that a commentator used the term ‘cultural Muslims’.

These terms reveal to know-nothing Westerners the complexity of the Muslim world at a time when the West’s future depends in part on understanding it.

In an interview about European citizens joining the fight against Assad in Syria, RT today raised the specter of these fundamentalists coming back to their home countries to practice their fighting or terrorist skills.

Of late I have become convinced that Europe – which is after all a peninsula of the Eurasian continent – will eventually become a majority Muslim area, and these comments would tend to confirm that opinion.  There are many kinds of Islam, its practitioners are gradually making their way there from Africa and the Middle East, as the welfare state crumbles under an American-based financial assault, leaving Europeans vulnerable to competition for benefits from new arrivals.

According to former Canadian diplomat Peter Dale Scott, American foreign policy is in fact devoted to realizing a goal enunciated in the nineties, which is to effectuate regime change in Middle Eastern countries allied to Russia: Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Syria. Now it so happens that until the U.S. intervened, these four countries were all in one way or another ‘anti-capitalist’.

Although access to oil has been a major reason for America’s recent aggressions, I strongly suspect that ideology plays a key role: Syria, after all, has no oil, and the explanation that it is an ally of oil-rich Iran and Russia simply doesn’t convince me: it this were true, we would have to invade dozens of countries.

What is undeniable is that the United States has played a key role in the European financial catastrophe that now threatens its status as the poster-child for the welfare state.

Is it far-fetched to suggest that the basic thrust of American foreign policy is to ensure that welfare states as well as those practicing ‘Arab socialism’ whether under the Ba’ath Party or a Shi’ite theocratic regime, come to an end?

Bashar al-Assad is accused of ‘killing his own people’, and I have no doubt that he has been as ruthless in defending his power as anyone.  What we need to realize is that by aiding the rebels we are siding with religious extremists against a secular regime where women are not veiled but enjoy equal rights with men, and the government considers itself responsible for health and education.

Following President Obama’s decision to arm the rebels, and after months of speculation as to whether this or that policy might favor Islamists, one is forced to entertain the thought that the United States definitely prefers fundamentalist/capitalists to progressive Muslims.  Hence our support for Turkey’s Erdogan, who has been turning his country into a capitalist showcase, even if his police overdo it.

This is the kind of event that typically gives rise to erroneous interpretations, such as ‘Venezuela and Iran are both oil-producing countries.  It was a business occasion.’  Or, ‘It was a chance for the Iranian leader to be seen on world television.’

The reality is that both Chavez and Ahmedinejad are on the side of the 99%.

What?! We know Chavez was a socialist, but the president of a country that is run by clerics? Well, yes: the Iranian revolution of 1978 was not about religion, it was about inequality, and its first leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, represented Shi’ism’s traditional defense of the downtrodden. (By the way, Jesus has been referred to as the first revolutionary…)

What is even stranger is that if you read Vladimir Putin’s statement on the death of the thrice elected Venezuelan president you would never guess that Russia is no longer a socialist country: “He was an extraordinary and powerful man who looked to the future and always set the highest bar for himself.” Putin called for even stronger ties and praised the late president as “a close friend of Russia.”

Indeed, Russia’a UN Ambassador Anatoly Churkin, told reporters in New York that Chavez was “a great politician for his country, Latin America and the world.”  According to the Moscow Times, the Russian-Venezuelan partnership has developed strong political ties and led to large-scale humanitarian and development projects.      If you think this means that Russia and its allies are outliers with respect to the world community, take note of the statement by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

“President Chavez spoke to the challenges and aspirations of the most vulnerable Venezuelans. He provided decisive impetus for new regional integration movements, based on an eminently Latin American vision, while showing solidarity toward other nations in the hemisphere. His contribution to the current peace talks in Colombia between the Government of President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) has been of vital importance.

“The secretary-general renews the commitment of the United Nations to work alongside the Government and the people of Venezuela in support of its development and prosperity.”

Now here’s President Obama’s statement: “At this challenging time of President Hugo Chavez’s passing, the United States reaffirms its support for the Venezuelan people and its interest in developing a constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government. As Venezuela begins a new chapter in its history, the United States remains committed to policies that promote democratic principles, the rule of law and respect for human rights.”

The American president starts by insinuating that there could be trouble in Venezuela, just days after two American diplomats were expelled from the country amid accusations by the Vice-President and heir designate that the U.S. induced Chavez’ cancer (for example using polonium, an element that killed a Russian in London a few years ago).

Second, the President appears unaware of the depth of popular support enjoyed by Chavez, trying to drive a wedge between the Venezuelan people and the government that will succeed him.

Third, Obama shows himself to be concerned only with the ritual ‘democratic principles’ (never mind if they remain just principles), the rule of law (that can be bent to allow government assassination of citizens), and human rights (ditto).

Twenty-five years after the end of the Cold War which was all about competition for arms and allies, America’s former enemies, Russia and China, have moved on.  The other BRICS nations, Brazil, India and South Africa, also put cooperation above competition, having realized their combined strengths as well as the advantages of responding to the needs of the Third World. Only the United States refuses to acknowledge what the ‘failed system’ of socialism handed down to those free to understand it.

If you still think of the Middle East as an obscure backwater, read the figures posted by the Congressional Research Service for recent U.S. arms sales as reported by Stieven Ramdharie, a political writer in Brussels.

Thanks to the the so-called ‘threat’ from Iran, the U.S. took in an unprecedented 66.3 billion dollars selling arms in 2011, three times more than in 2010. By selling record numbers of F-15s, Apache helicopters and Patriot missiles, Boeing and Lockheed Martin made up for cuts in military spending in the U.S. and Europe.

Qatar, which played an important role in the Libyan conflict, is about to sign an agreement for 58 latest model Apache helicopters, while Oman, whose crucial role is in the Straits of Hormuz, bought twelve F-16 fighter jets last December that can neutralize their aging Iranian counter-parts. Qatar will spend 2.5 billion to buy 200 German Leopold tanks, and Saudi Arabia is expected to put out 12.6 billion for 600 or 800 of these beasts. Together with Israel, the Kingdom has the most modern planes in the region. Having  added 7.2 billion dollars forth of European fighter jets to its Air Force in 2007, Riyadh recently purchased another 84 Boeing F-25 fighter jets while modernizing another seventy. Last year it spent nearly 33 billion in the U.S., helping to shore up the American export balance.

As for the Emirates, their 2010 defense budget of 16 trillion put them in second place in the region, ahead of Israel, and they recently acquired American antimissile defense systems and transport helicopters worth 4.5 billion.

The battle for the future of Syria is recognized primarily as the first step in a campaign to neutralize Iran, and the players are identified as Israel and the United States. However, it is a mistake to think in terms of a neatly contained “surgical strike” that would leave neighboring countries intact.

The Middle East has never experienced a regional-wide war comparable to those that have devastated Europe time and again. But the fact that Persian, Shi’ite Iran has never attacked another country and would have everything to lose by doing so, is obviously irrelevant in the present situation: As the American economy declines perhaps terminally, the ruling military-industrial complex, remembering the economic benefits it reaped from the Second World War, is going all-out to bring conflict to an area whose wealth is counted not in factories and farmland, but in barrels of oil preserved underground.

l;l;l;

As if to confirm what I wrote in my previous blog about a multi-faceted MuslimSpring, early results of yesterday’s parliamentary election in Libya indicate the liberal slate may win, in contrast to the Muslim Brotherhood’s win in the recent Egyptian elections. RT pointed out that the Islamist party’s promises of Sharia law caused voters to back the liberals.  What RT doesn’t say is that under Muammar Ghaddafi’s Libya was – at least officially – the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Republic.

Western, i.e., NATO backing of the revolutionaries who overthrew Ghaddafi was certainly meant to ensure his regime would be followed by a liberal one, reliably friendly to the West and its oil companies, with no more talk of socialism.  The same is true with respect to the crisis in Syria: the West is doing all it can to change the regime in Damascus from an – at least nominally – socialist one to one which will be an obedient player in the globalization of capitalism.

I’ve always maintained that one of the primary reasons for Western support of Syrian rebels has to do with Israel, without presenting a clear picture of why.  But yesterday an American whose name I did not catch affirmed on RT that America’s insistence on regime change in Damascus – rather than signing on to Russia’s suggestion of a transitional government to include Assad – is all about Iran.  In order to be able to go after Shi’ite Iran on the Persian Gulf without a Mediterranean blowback,  the United States and Israel have to neutralize Shi’te Hezbollah that sits in its backyard.

At first I thought this sounded far-fetched, but a moment’s reflection told me otherwise: what good would it do Israel to eliminate Iran’s missiles if it were to be attacked from behind?  Syria occupied Lebanon from 1976 to 2005, in conjunction with Lebanon’s Civil War and the presence of the Palestine Liberation Front in that country. And Hezbollah is a militant organization that defeated Israel when it invaded Lebanon in 2006 and subsequently gained significant representation in the Lebanese Parliament.

The media never fails to mention the Iran-Hezbollah alliance – or the Iran-Syria alliance. But it rarely connects the dots that link the two Arab Mediterranean countries to the Persian nation on the Black Sea, because that would shine a spotlight on Israel’s weakness. The solution ]would be to remove Assad, who rules Syria and is allied with Lebanon’s strongest Muslim faction. But it’s a throw of the dice as to whether his successors will be on the Egyptian model or the Libyan one, which is why there is so much dithering whenever the Friends of  Syria meet.

As for Russia and China ‘paying a price’ for not falling in line, one has to wonder what planet Hillary Clinton lives on. The news today is that Egypt’s new President, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Morsi has annuled the military council’s dissolution of parliament and called the members back into session, further scrambling the Middle East chess board.

After reading Syriana a slim volume in French by a Turk of Syrian origin living in Belgium and published by INVESTIG’ACTION, (www.michelcollon.info/La-CIA-la-grande-muette-du-Proche.html?lang=f) that details the ethnic and sectarian strife going back hundreds of years in the Middle East, I wondered why Bahar Kimyongur repeatedly affirmed that the United States supports the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria.

Now, in a blog the same author accuses the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey of using the Muslim Brotherhood to deliver arms to Syrian rebels. That may seem peculiar considering that these same countries’ fear the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt following presidential elections there.

Here is the explanation: much as in the nineties we opposed the Russian-backed Communist government of Afghanistan, funding various Sunni-inspired rebel fighters who since have turned against us, today we fear the growth of Shi’a Islam because this current has always represented the underdog. Officially, we are opposed to Iran because it threatens Israel. But in reality we are determined to see regime change in Teheran because since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 that brought Shia clerics to power, we have feared their egalitarian – and hence anti-Western – ethos.

The countries that have significant Shia populations are known  as ‘The Shia Crescent’. They include Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon. Syria, while having a minority Shi’a population, has been ruled by the Shi’a minority Alawite sect since Bashar Al Assad’s father, Hafez Al Assad came to dominate the Ba’ath Socialist Party in 1970. The current Syrian crisis cannot be understood without awareness of the Ba’ath Party which, from its inception after the Second World War, was a key player in the decades-long struggle for unity known as Pan-Arabism.

The Ba’ath party’s motto “Unity, Liberty, Socialism” was inspired by French revolutionary ideology. Unity refers to Arab unity, or Pan-Arabism, and liberty refers to self-determination, or freedom from foreign control. Arab Socialism grew out of that dual quest, its founders believing that only a socialist system of property and development could overcome the social and economic legacy of imperialism and colonialism. During the Cold War, these convictions were at the heart of Arab socialism’s strong internationalist tendency epitomized by its policy of non-alignment,.

But what is most relevant today is that Arab socialism has always been less ideological than cultural and spiritual, and this explains the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood’s ability to cooperate with both right and left-leaning parties, as evidenced in the Egyptian elections and also in non-Arab but Muslim countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan. (In non-Arab Muslim countries such as Ahfghanisan and Pakistan, Sunni factions such as the Taliban are closer to the right-wing Salafists. And in Egypt, we would rather see a holdover from the Mubarak era than a Muslim Brotherhood President, because the latter can go with either ideology.)

At the end of the day, there is really only one political battle, that of equity. But there is also a fundamental conflict over God going on in the world. And because religion has always been the handmaiden of power, the two have often been inseparable. Following the onset of the Protestant Reformation, from 1524 to 1648, Europe was wracked by a series of religious wars. By the nineteenth century, these inter-Christian wars seemed a thing of the past. After the Terror and Napoleon’s Empire, the French revolutionary notion of equity was resuscitated, with the birth of the Socialist International. The 20th century was consumed from beginning to end with ever violent conflicts over the question of equity: Communism, which sought to definitively place power in the hands of the many, against fascism, in which the state led the few.

But September 11th, 2001 brought religion into the conflict over equity. It is not for geo-political reasons that Iran is Syria’s staunchest ally, but for ideological/religious reasons. In 1960, the Shia Crescent of the downtrodden recognized the Alawite Sect, which had acquired a political manifestation in the Baath (Socialist) Party of Syria and Iraq. Shia/Alawite opposition to Israel is not religious, but a consequence of their egalitarian and nationalist ideology which dictates support for the Palestinian Arabs’ struggle for independence from the Jewish state.

Commentators often note that opposition to Iran eventually becoming a nuclear power is inconsistent with tolerance of other countries’ nuclear status, whether it be Israel, Pakistan or India. This is to bypass the world ideological struggle between the few and the many, in which religion, as always, is a handmaiden. Israel, India and less reliably Pakistan, all with different religions, are American allies in that struggle, of which the Arab Spring is the most significant manifestation.

As of today, that struggle is reported to be spreading to Sudan, where protesters are rioting against austerity measures. Although African ethnic and tribal rivalries give protests yet another dimension, we should not lose sight of the fact that  they are manifestations of a growing world cleavage based on efforts by the many to move religion into its camp.

As an RT news anchor commented yesterday, who would have thought, twenty years ago, that Russia and China, who for decades during the Cold War traded insults, that the two largest and most populated countries would form a united front against the hitherto most powerful nation the world has ever known.

If you have been following the news on RT or France 24 or Al-Jazeera, you probably know about Putin’s recent trip to China. The existence of two new ‘blocs’ is also apparent in the Syrian crisis:  Russia has offered to host an international conference to which Syria’s neighbors, as well as Iran, would be invited. Washington, and less stridently, the European Union, are opposed to Iran’s presence at discussions on Syria, with France scheduled to host a meeting of the Western-backed Friends of Syria group on July 6th.

In another touch of irony, some readers may remember the Jewish-Black alliance in the United States that began early in the 20th century and lasted until the 1970’s, when the interests of the two groups began to diverge.  Currently Israel is expelling 4,000 Black Africans who were formerly given refuge.

And finally, on a lighter note, the English language channel France 24 confessed that the latest foreign tourists to find the French less than friendly are…… the Chinese. Apparently, while history moves inexorably forward according to the arrow of time, countries, whose ethos is largely dictated by culture, tend to remain the same.

This is true of Russia, China and the United States as well, the first two imbued with the Socialist tradition of solidarity, while the third continues a tradition of force.

The Gulf Emirates, or Gulf States, are a string of tiny, but very wealthy countries bordering Saudi Arabia along the Persian Gulf.  Among them, Bahrain is home to the American Sixth fleet, while Qatar is home to the U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center.

The situation in both these countries is getting short shrift in the U.S. media for several reasons, the most important of which is their significance.

While the G8 mulls over what to do about a defiant Greece, Saudi Arabia proposes a merger to the Bahraini monarchy, and a French website yesterday reported that Kuwait had uncovered plans for a coup d’etat hatched by Qatar.  All during the months long unrest in Bahrain we’ve been told that Washington does not want to get involved in its internal affairs.

Why should we get involved when we can get another local client state to do the dirty work?  Saudi Arabia is beginning to look more and more like Israel – a tale waging our dog in exchange for big bones.

The American press fails to emphasize the crucial difference between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims: the first invariably represent the 1%, while the second try to defend the 99% – usually without success – which is what motivated the Iranian revolution.

The replacement of a Sunni Shah by a Shi’a theocracy resulted in Iran being ostracized by its Gulf neighbors.  These states are ruled by Sunnis, and have relatively small Shi’a minorities, except for Bahrain, whose native population is about 70% Shi’a.  In 1957, Iran claimed that Bahrain constituted an Iranian province.  The matter was laid to rest in 1970 by a Bahraini referendum in favor of independence.

But as preparations move ahead for possible war between the West and Iran, Saudi Arabia’s move to keep Bahrain resolutely in the Sunni camp, via union with its weak rulers, comes as no surprise. At a time of high anti-Iranian sentiment, the long-term objective of securing all of Middle Eastern oil for the West implies keeping the Middle East firmly in the hands of Sunni rulers.

And if you’re wondering why Qatar may have tried to oust the rulers of Kuwait, it’s still only a rumor. Remember Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, setting off the first Gulf War.

As we watch, helpless, the Greatest Imperial Power the world has ever known is allowing itself to be propelled into the Greatest War Ever Fought in pursuit of the oil that will enable it to continue to grow until it snuffs out human life. The presence in the White House of an eminently educated, aware man, has been no match for the Darth Vader like forces intent on seeing the 99% march lemming-like off a cliff.

Hyperbole?  I don’t think so: Even in the good old days of the Cold War there were enough weapons around to wipe out most of humanity: now they have proliferated, and a very small country is playing a game of chicken with the rest of us, supposedly to save itself from annihilation. Israel has not signed the non-proliferation treaty, and no one (except perhaps our president) knows how many nuclear weapons and delivery systems it has. The Jewish state claims to fear annihilation by Iran, which claims it’s not producing weapons but nuclear fuel for the day when its oil runs out.  (Unrelatedly, but similarly, Greece, which teeters on the brink of a default which could, theoretically, bring down the carefully nurtured ten year old Euro system, claims, with similar dramatic emphasis, that it is being ‘threatened’ by a fellow NATO member, Turkey, forcing it to cut pensions and salaries in order to preserve its military budget. Is there something about Mediterranean peoples that inclines to overstatement?  The Greek-Turkey standoff has been going on for so long that it isn’t even worth my while to Google it. My eighties book on the (then) potential for reunification of Europe, has an annex on the Greek/Turkish standoff.  I haven’t revisited the issue since, but it seems that nothing has changed.  (Cyprus comes into this equation, but it is more complicated than that.)

The Sunni/Shi’a divide, epitomized by Iran and Saudi Arabia, as I pointed out in a recent blog, is as relevant to all of this as the survival of a small state that refuses to play nice because it has a powerful backer – or the geopolitics of oil. Iran had a democratically elected president in 1953, (Mossadegh) who was overthrown by the CIA.  Then, in the eighties, when Sunni-ruled Iraq waged an eight-year war on Shi’a Iran, we backed Iraq (under the same Saddam Hussein whom we would overthrow in 2003…). That ultimately gave us Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution (a modern outcome of Shi’a ideology). Iran’s client state Syria has been ruled by a Shi’te sect, the Alawites, for decades.  Putting an end to the civil war that opposes a mainly Sunni population to President Bashar Al Assad via military intervention of one type or another is not so much going to ‘isolate‘ Iran, as it will protect Israel. (Syria has been known as ‘the front-line state‘ by Palestinians and their supporters, because unlike Israel’s other border states – but like Iran – it has been a staunch Palestinian ally.)

European progressive blogs suggest the U.S. intends to choose a ship that has outlived its usefulness and sink it in the Straits of Hormuz, claiming it to be an act of war by Iran. If this sounds far-fetched, Franklin Roosevelt, who knew of the Japanese intent to bomb Pearl Harbor, moved our newer ships out of harm’s way.  And of course there was the shelling of the Maine off of Havana in 1898, used as a pretext for war with Spain and the acquisition of Cuba.

We can expect war with Iran and regime change in Syria, unless the thought of the combined capabilities of Russia and China forces Washington to rethink its justification for supporting Israel, right or wrong. Our closest ally Britain, is already involved in preserving the U.S. Sixth Fleet’s Bahrain base, where the ever down-trodden Shi’a of the Arab world are saying ‘Enough!‘  (A former high-ranking member of Scotland Yard, forced to resign in the wake of the Murdoch phone hacking scandal, quickly found new employment training the Gulf monarchy’s police…..)

While the U.S. is still behaving as though together with its allies like Israel and Great Britain, it dictates world outcomes, the world goes about its business without us. On February 20, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan held their third trilateral conference – this one focusing officially on counter-terrorism – in Islamabad, but also providing a venu for Iran to affirm its rights and its position in the region.

Brinksmanship is only justified in a world in which one major game is being played.  The information isolation of Americans, feeling safe between two giant seas, is a tragedy, for it leaves them ignorant of the other games being played on the world stage.

I recommend replacing MSNBC with Al Jazeera, which can be found once a day in most areas, and also, RT, the coy acronym for Russia’s English Service, which, with the participation of American and British journalists, gets Putin’s message across, but also much of importance to Americans.

Observers seem surprised that Syrian President Bashar Al Assad has accepted to create a multi-party system, even as he goes on killing his people. A Facebook comment by a young Iranian woman a few days ago, tells why: all systems, all regimes, are equally undemocratic.

So Syria’s Russian allies must have suggested that a parliamen-tary system wouldn’t change anything, and after all, it’s an elegant way out.

Although that fact is staring them in the fact on their own streets, they didn’t realize that  the Syrian rebels, whoever they are, like the young Iranian woman on Facebook, have known for some time that democracy is only a word, and that in one way or another, to one extent or another, leaders always manage to get around it.

Until the 99% get the gist.

When The Economist www.economist.com/node/21542162 celebrates the new year by publishing a story on academic studies of the Koran, it’s time to point out the values we share with Islam.

Is it not odd that the far right, the most hawkish element of American society, calls for the same family values that are practiced in Muslim countries?  Both societies prefer women at home, both are very family-oriented, tending to shun divorce, sexual and reproductive choice.  Iran’s Ahmedinejad, currently visiting Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, condemns modern morals as loudly as Pat Robertson, who, if I’m not mistaken, would blast the Muslim world to kingdom come.

As I’ve noted before on this site, Sayyid Qutb, the author and theoretician who boosted the most conservative form of Sunni Islam, visited the United States in the early sixties and identified our crisis of civilization in scathing terms. He condemned not only topless dancers, but also anomy and meaningless consumption as fatal to civilization.  We’re there now, as the Occupy and No-Growth movements at least partly recognize half a century later.

I often fault The Economist for doggedly trying to see a positive side to almost anything, but I must give it credit for reporting that: “Hotheads can generally find a passage that seems to justify their violence.  Such passage abound in the Koran, just as they do in the founding texts of Christianity, Judaism and many other religions  There is also a long tradition of interpreting such verses in reassuring ways.  For example, it is often tressed that the Koran’s injunction to ‘slay the unbeliever wherever you find him’ relates to a specific historical context in which the first  Muslims were betrayed by a pagan group who had signed a truce.”

Surely the most nonsensical justification for our opposition to a nuclear Iran came during a recent Republican debate from Rick Santorum.  He explained that because Muslims welcome martyrdom, they would be willing to use nuclear weapons more readily than other nuclear countries such as North Korea or Israel.

An extraordinary appropriation of ‘slay the unbelievers’……

It’s a corny title, but I don’t know of a better one to describe the situation of our President.

Like the Mickey Mouse character in Walt Disney’s ‘Fantasy’, who carries buckets of water ever faster to try to stop a flood he caused in his master’s house, President Obama rushes from one fire to another, to no avail.  The US is no longer the world’s policeman, but its fireman.  And no matter how many buckets of water we carry, the fire just keeps spreading.

The latest developments in Iraq are really no surprise.  In the early nineties, I translated a book by a Lebanese diplomat (whose name, alas I have forgotten) on the regimes and events that led up to the invasion of Kuwait.  It pictured an astonishing succession of megalomaniac leaders, and an unending series of expansionist policies.  Under all these rulers, the majority Shi’a were the underdogs, as in other Middle Eastern countries with the exception of Iran. The Kurds are a people without a country, living in a territory that is located in Turkey and Iran as well as Iraq.  Our eight-year occupation has been but an interlude in Iraq’s internal drama.

And for us, Iraq is part of the past.  What keeps President Obama running, is the new world that is rumbling into existence through earthquakes, floods, nuclear disasters, financial meltdowns, and rigged elections.  American efforts to carry on as usual, by setting up a base in Australia, or seeking one in the Stans, will be as ephemeral as a child’s soap bubbles.

While Americans are held in thrall by the ‘race’ to the White House, history marches on, as it always has.  Efforts to compare the present crisis with the Civil War, or other hard times, ignore the fact that the WORLD was a different place.  America’s oscillation between isolationism and domination trained its people to either ignore or look down upon what happens beyond our shores and our borders.  Hence they fail to visualize our decline within the confines of that larger world.

It’s too late for us to put out the fires ignited by our hubris and our indifference.