Culture War

Wikipedia, Google

[This is a draft.]

Some people have been wondering
exactly why the U.S. media/political “elite”
seems so obsessed with fighting, rather than compromising with,
significant elements of the Islamic world.
Various explanations for this have been given by elements of “the elite”:
“They hate us for our values”
“They’re nihilists out to destroy anything that is good,
simply because they love destruction.”
“We have to fight them over there,
otherwise we would be fighting them over here.”
and so on;
more examples can be found
on the editorial pages and in the editorial cartoons of most of the MSM,
e.g., the Washington Post.

Sometimes people on the left mumble about the “military-industrial complex”,
always a convenient scapegoat,
even if it is far less politically powerful than they think.
Than, of course,
there are elements within the Jewish right who have been egging on this war,
sometimes calling it “World War IV”,
with motives that one may easily surmise essentially amount to
a version of “Let’s you and him fight”,
with the goal of easing the pressure on Israel from the Muslim world.

But on the other hand:
There are parts of the Islamic world
which are unabashedly politically incorrect—
sexist, homophobic, and surely anti-Zionist, to one extent or another.
At the very least, they oppose Israel’s post-1967 expansion into the West Bank.
Some of them, to be sure, oppose Israel’s very existence.

Is this not a key part of why the U.S. fights with,
rather than compromises with,
various parts of the Islamic world?

Recall Condoleezza Rice’s expressed desire to transform the Middle East,
and her statements that it was much in need of transformation (e.g.).
No one seemed to question her on
just why she thought it needed transformation.
(My personal opinion is that
if anything in the Middle East need to be transformed,
it is that Israel needs to abandon its occupation of the West Bank,
but I am aware that is hardly a popular view to the American elite.)


Below are some samples of what we hear from “the elite”
where the desire for a Kulturkampf seems to be present.

2010

2010-01-23-NYT-Gates-Taliban=cultural-desert

Gates Says Taliban Must Take Legitimate Afghan Role
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
New York Times, 2010-01-23

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan —

[1]
The United States recognizes that
the Taliban are now part of the political fabric of Afghanistan,
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said here on Friday,
but the group must be prepared to play a legitimate role
before it can reconcile with the Afghan government.

[2]
That means, Mr. Gates said, that the Taliban must participate in elections,
not oppose education and not assassinate local officials.

[3]
“The question is whether the Taliban at some point in this process
are ready to help build a 21st-century Afghanistan
or whether they still just want to kill people,”
Mr. Gates said.

[This is a false alternative.
What if they neither want to kill people, nor “build a 21st-century Afghanistan”,
but rather build an Afghanistan true to their view of Islamic law.
What difference does it make to America
whether that vision resembles European or Western societies
of the 21st, 19th, 17th, or medieval centuries?]

[4]
The defense secretary made his remarks in an interview with Pakistani journalists
at the home of the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson.
Mr. Gates was on the second day of a two-day visit to the country.

[5]
American officials have given qualified support to a proposed Afghan initiative
to provide jobs, security and social benefits to Taliban followers who defect.
Mr. Gates has said there could be a surge of such followers
willing to be integrated into Afghan society,
but he has voiced skepticism about whether the Taliban leadership
is ready to work peacefully with the Afghan government.

[6]

“The question is,
what do the Taliban want to make out of Afghanistan?”
Mr. Gates told the journalists.
“When they tried before, we saw what they wanted to make,
and it was a desert, culturally and in every other way.”

[Gates, in this off-the-cuff remark, is making explicit
what I think is the general view of much of the politically-correct “elite”:
that they oppose the Taliban for its effect on Afghanistan,
which they view as uncivilized, repressive and “medieval.”
Thus it is America, rather than Muslims, who are making this into
precisely the “clash of civilizations” described by Samuel Huntington.
It is we who hate them for their values,
not they who hate us for our values.
They hate us for what we do in their world,
not what we do in our homeland.]

2010-02-23-CCGA-Religion-and-Making-US-Foreign-Policy

Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy
Chicago Council on Global Affairs, 2010-02-23

The Chicago Council released its task force report,
Engaging Religious Communities Abroad:
A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy

...

Religious communities are central players in
the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan,
development assistance,
the promotion of human rights,
stewardship of the environment,
and the pursuit of peace in troubled parts of the world.
The success of American diplomacy in the next decade
will be measured in no small part by
its ability to connect with
the hundreds of millions of people throughout the world
whose identity is defined by religion.
...

2010-02-24-WP-God-gap

'God gap' impedes U.S. foreign policy, task force says
By David Waters
Washington Post, 2010-02-24

Israel and Iran

2010

2010-05-06-Giraldi

A Timetable For War
by Philip Giraldi
Antiwar.com, 2010-05-06

Readers of my articles will know that I am extremely pessimistic about
the prospects for peace in the Middle East.
I do not believe for a second that the leaders of Israel
actually consider Iran to be an “existential” threat
but the fact that they have cried wolf so often
has convinced the Israeli public that it is so.
Worse still,

Israel’s friends in the US
have convinced the American public of the same thing
even though Iran does not threaten the United States at all.

Relying on a complaisant media that has fully embraced
the fabricated narrative of fanatical Mullahs brandishing nuclear weapons
shortly before handing them over to al-Qaeda,
a majority of Americans now believes that Iran must be dealt with by force
and that it already has a nuclear weapon.
As in the case in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq,
the fictitious threat has taken on an ominous reality because
the lie has been repeated often enough to appear to be truth.

I believe several things must be understood in relationship to
the likely formula for initiation of such a conflict.

...

[O]nce the shooting begins, even if Israel starts it,
both Congress and the media will demand that Washington intervene
to support brave lttle democracy Israel.
One can be sure that on the day after Tel Aviv starts a conflict
Congress will overwhelmingly pass a motion approving the Israeli action
and also calling on the White House to have American forces join in.
The Washington Post, FOX news, and The New York Times
will be beside themselves with joy.
[How can Dr. Giraldi leave out The Wall Street Zionist? :-)]

...

[It is hard to say who is more responsible for
this disturbing (actually, disgusting) turn of events:

• American Jews for pushing the Zionist policies,


• the media for pushing those policies
  without giving the alternative view adequate voice
  (if you want an example, the fact that the cable companies,
  under pressure from the Jews, have refused to put
  the English version of al-Jazeera on most cable systems),


• or the general American population
  for not going to the effort to find and read the information sources
  (say, Michael Scheuer, Philip Giraldi, Norman Finkelstein for starters)
  that would give them a more balanced perspective on
  the claims of the Zionists.

]

2010-08-01-Porter-bomb-Iran-campaign

The Real Aim of Israel’s Bomb Iran Campaign
by Gareth Porter
Antiwar.com, 2010-08-01

[T]he aim of Gerecht and of the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu
is to support an attack by Israel so that
the United States can be drawn into direct, full-scale war with Iran.

Zionist wars

2010

2010-03-30-Walsh

Petraeus’ Cry
by John V. Walsh
Antiwar.com, 2010-03-30

[I agree with much, if not all, of Walsh’s sentiments as expressed here,
however feel it is incorrect to read too much into General Petraeus’s remark.
He surely would not have expressed himself so inflammatorily.]

Is Laura happy?

2010-10-10-WP-Laura-Bush-condemns-Taliban

Afghanistan must embrace women's rights
By Laura W. Bush
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2010-10-10

[A response from the author of this blog.

Ms. Bush, I know you want to appear strong and “on the right side of history”
so you can win the approval of your feminist friends
and appear “a modern woman.”
But I think you need to recognize, which I am not sure that you do,
what the inevitable consequences are
of trying to effect social change on foreign societies by the American military
are going to be.

Or maybe I am wrong.
Do you, in fact, acknowledge that
the horrible consequences of the U.S. war in Afghanistan
are due, not to the military, for in war such errors are inevitable,
but to the advocacy of you and your compatriots?

Do you remember the familiar chant from your college years,
“Hey hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today”?

Now, in the 2000s, how many kids have been killed due to your wars?
How many veterans have suffered horribly, both physically and mentally,
due to your wars?

It would be nice if you had as much consideration for American men
as you do for Afghan women.
Obviously you now do not.

Oh, and by the way:
If you think this is just another partisan attack,
I voted for your husband in 2000
(but not in 2004, after his launching of an unnecessary war in Iraq),
as I did for every Republican presidential candidate
from Richard Nixon in 1968 to your husband in 2000.
I expected your husband to follow the policies of his father
and his father's trusted adviser, James A. Baker (a man who knew how to place
America’s interest over that of the Zionists and feminists).
Unfortunately, in foreign policy at least, he did not.]

2011-02-13-NYT-Veterans-of-combat-being-drugged

For Some Troops, Powerful Drug Cocktails Have Deadly Results
By JAMES DAO, BENEDICT CAREY and DAN FROSCH
New York Times, 2011-02-13

...

After a decade of treating thousands of wounded troops,
the military’s medical system is awash in prescription drugs —
and the results have sometimes been deadly.

By some estimates,
well over 300,000 troops have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan
with P.T.S.D., depression, traumatic brain injury
or some combination of those.
The Pentagon has looked to pharmacology to treat those complex problems,
following the lead of civilian medicine.
As a result,
psychiatric drugs have been used more widely across the military
than in any previous war.

But those medications, along with narcotic painkillers,
are being increasingly linked to a rising tide of other problems,
among them drug dependency, suicide and fatal accidents —
sometimes from the interaction of the drugs themselves.
An Army report on suicide released last year documented the problem,
saying one-third of the force was on at least one prescription medication.

“Prescription drug use is on the rise,” the report said,
noting that medications were involved in
one-third of the record 162 suicides by active-duty soldiers in 2009.
An additional 101 soldiers died accidentally
from the toxic mixing of prescription drugs from 2006 to 2009.

...

2011-03-03-NYT-Nine-Afghan-boys-killed-by-NATO-helicopters

Petraeus Apologizes for Deaths of 9 Afghan Boys
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and SANGAR RAHIMI
New York Times, 2011-03-03

KABUL, Afghanistan —

Nine boys collecting firewood to heat their homes in the eastern Afghanistan mountains
were killed by NATO helicopter gunners
who mistook them for insurgents,
according to a statement on Wednesday by NATO,
which apologized for the mistake.

The boys, who were 9 to 15 years old,
were attacked on Tuesday in what amounted to
one of the war’s worst cases of mistaken killings by foreign-led forces.
The victims included two sets of brothers. A 10th boy survived.

...

2012-05-19-WP-Laura-Bush-nato-should-not-abandon-afghanistans-women

Don’t abandon Afghan women
By Laura Bush
Washington Post Op-Ed, 2012-05-19

[A sexist observation about women is that
women make demands without any regard to
the costs of satisfying the demands.
Women set the goals; it is up to men to figure out how to satisfy them.
Is that not exactly what Laura Bush is doing?]