I had to come out of the woodwork. I congratulate you for your excellent posts.

Regarding Yemen: The casualties were Yemeni guards and civilians. Most of the damage was to surrounding structures. Al Queda made the collateral damage error and it must be capitalized on by western media. I doubt the MSM will but sites like this can.

On another note, please check out D-N-I.net for cogent analysis of the USA’s slouch toward socialism through taxpayer bailout of the failing financial sector. It makes me sick that the executive officers of Fannie and Freddie have those 10 to 14 million $$$ golden parachutes. It makes me sick the government of the USA is beginning to bail out those other financial institutions. It makes me sick congress abetted this scam. I wonder why and I suspect the congress critters have a lot of stock in those firms. Meanwhile my 401K is taking the hit from hell and I do not believe I will get a bailout. I screwed up and sold my oil stock about 5 years ago and I didn’ but any gold with it. At least I admit I lacked foresight and take responsibility for my decisions.

All I know is USA got over the tech bubble and will also get over this housing bubble. Please forgive me for going on that tangent but the financial strength of the USA is strategically important as noted in your posts.

Salaam eleikum Y’all!

You underscore the dichotomy of the jihadi agenda: both insulate the ummah from outside influence and expand the frontiers of Islam. It would seem that those goals are mutually exclusive. (Eventually, such a modern Caliphate would confront the countervailing force of ethnicity. Iran is most decidedly muslim, but equally Persian and determined to remain so.)

The first goal would tend to the creation of a cultural preserve. In an informal way that might just be what we are seeing in Pashtunistan and it would explain some of the staying power of the Taliban.

I see some inchoate echoes of a desire for cultural preservation in the Western world as well. (No, not the obvious stuff like “English only.” That seems to me more a housekeeping measure to keep globalization manageable than a genuine desire for cultural isolation.) The more radical fringes of the environmental movement that call for a rollback to 1800’s technology and social organization seem to imply a similar nostalgia for simpler times. (Not too different from some of the fantasies of National Socialism … )

Anyway, such a democratic Caliphate may be a better road for Islam to come to terms with modernity, or, should I say post-modernity?

I ascribe the present “stability” to the existence of the United Nations and the post-1945 stasis of international boundaries. The major world powers agreed upon ideal of respecting international boundaries, however arbitrary those boundaries actually are. Although there have been exceptions such as Western Sahara, most of the boundaries that existed in 1950 still exist today.

This hasn’t kept major powers from invading other countries, but the principle has set parameters to the international acceptability of invasion. Thus, when Tanzania invaded Uganda and Vietnam invaded Cambodia in the late 1970’s, the goal was regime change, not annexation. Regime change may be frowned upon in international relations, but it can be acceptable in extreme circumstances.

In the Age of Empire, which ended sometime in the twentieth century, static boundaries existed only when rival empires could both police their claimed territory and respect each other’s strength. Woodrow Wilson’s “League of Nations” idea (resurrected as the “United Nations”) complicated international relations greatly, as it created a worldwide version of the Holy Roman Empire that promoted the tyranny of small princes against both the power of large states and the rights of common people.

I regard the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the League of Nations as having little to do with each other; the events merely coincided. The problem many Arabs have with the League of Nations regime (which still exists now) is not that it had anything to do with the demise of the Ottoman Empire but rather that it frustrates the ability of Arabs to create any future caliphate.

The irony of democracy is that it is the ideal vehicle for the creation of a future Islamic caliphate. All that is necessary is for Muslim democracies to band together into a federation and vote peacefully for a new empire – a collective caliphate of the ummah. Islamic tradition since Muawiyah has favored tyrants who carve empires through conquest, yet the present international order prevents this from happening. Al-Qaeda is attempted to institute a caliphate the old fashioned way – through terrorism and conquest. And yet, its actions have postponed the time when any real caliphate can occur.

A caliphal democracy would not necessarily be in America’s geopolitical interests, of course, as it would become a world power through its sheer bulk. It would still be an improvement over the status quo, as it would promote accountability. I do find it ironic how those who presently claim to promote a caliphate are precisely those who are preventing any real caliphate from being established, while it is America’s promotion of liberal democracy that may actually lead to a future reemergence of an Islamic Empire.

Do you ascribe the current stability with the weakening of the third force, the Ottoman empire factor? Both Nasser and Saddam aspired to a pan Arab state replacing the Ottomans.

I find the three legged architecture interesting – it reminds me of the situation in Iraq.

Mike,

Forgive me if I overreacted. Analogies are a real pet peeve of mine …

By Arab standards, Yemen is a democracy, a dysfunctional democracy with feuding clans that own their own tanks and missile launchers, but a democracy nonetheless. There is still AQ activity there, though, if only because of its relative freedom and its sheer proximity to the Saudi Kingdom.

The geopolitical architecture of the Middle East is far more stable in last eighty years than it was in previous centuries. There were three major powers, the Ottoman Empire, the Persian Empire, and the Sea Empire*. They constantly jostled for position. It is the very existence of a Wahhabi kingdom stretching from Hasa to Hijaz that is the historical anomaly.

Democracy will not solve all problems in the Middle East; it probably won’t even solve most of them. Adopting democracy won’t even make the locals like us any better, but it would be an improvement over the status quo, even for Americans. Geopolitical rivalry is part of life, but so is ideology. A vicious ideology of anti-freedom has taken root in the Middle East, and this is important because ideological influences often attain a power greater than parochial rivalry.

An undue focus on parochial rivalry can often blind statesmen to the importance of the big picture. At present, our principal ideological enemies are the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood (sponsored by the House of Saud) and Khomeiniist Shi’ites, and the main reason for their rivalry with each other is precisely because they have so much in common. They are quite capable of allying against us though, if only in the sense of Nazis and Communists working together against western democracies between 1939 and 1941.

* The “Sea Empire” refers to the hegemonic power of the Indian Ocean. It could variously refer to Portugal, Oman, the British Empire, and presently the United States.

Cedarford, however, impishly replaced Saudi Arabia with the USA in the analogy, and so I played along. Unfortunately, I am not well educated enough to debate the nuances of the Counter-Reformation and also the Rennaissance and Enlightenment. When the discussion seems to be going into those historical periods, I should turn back into a lurker and not embarrass myself.

**

Saudi Arabia is the hard case for the Bush doctrine. It is hard for me to imagine a good outcome pushing for Saudi democracy. (Jeez, what would we even call the bloody country without the ibn Saud dynasty?)

Iraq is a much easier case. It actually has a shot at becoming a real country.

The typical Islamist views us as the easily manipulated infidel who violates the divine order.

The American world order is the lineal descendent of the enlightenment: free and orderly markets, rule of law, political freedom, and pluralism. It says nothing about religion. It is more concerned with process than content.

The typical Islamist views this American vision as a mortal threat, as Spain saw its progenitor, the Protestant Revolution. Pluralism is such a profound existential threat that the Islamist feels that jihad is necessary to defend the one true universal faith.

Indeed, the Spanish empire depended on rentier wealth, extracting gold and silver from the New World. Islam today depends upon oil. The ambitious Persian Gulf states notwithstanding, both civilizations have discouraged wealth creation, in the capitalist sense, as unseemly and immoral.

There is no American inquisition seeking to extinguish islamism in its every manifestation. We have never even hinted at the merest shadow of disapproval of Turkey’s explicitly Islamic government. Our protege in Kabul is the “Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” Our president refers to Islam as the “religion of peace.”

On the other hand, we have an organization, Al Qaeda, whose express goal is to restore Islam to its rightful monopoly in its traditional lands and to fulfill the koranic commandment to spread the true faith to the four corners of the world. AQ actively seeks opportunities to oppose any and all manifestations of European enlightenment values.

No, my friend. We are the same as we ever were. An apt analogy to your analogy is to suggest that Israel is Nazi Germany ….