Robert Whitcomb: Is Europe ready for this future?

  The haunting picture of a little Syrian boy’s body being carried up a Turkish beach has intensified demands that the West admit millions more refugees from the Islamic world’s violence, tyranny, bigotry, corruption and poverty. How much of the problem is Islam in general?  Or is the main problem  simply some Muslims'  savage adherence to some of its harsh 7th Century scriptures?

The West is the best place. See where people flee to. Its democracy, tolerance, rule of law, free inquiry, ingenuity and energy have produced what are the world’s most humane and prosperous conditions, along, it is true, with sybaritic excesses. Of course, since we’re told to respect “multiculturalism’’ (whatever that means) it’s politically incorrect to say that some cultures are better. And, yes, non-Western societies have some admirable elements, some of the finest of which the West, the most open culture, has adopted.

But everybody wants a piece of the West. For example, when Muslim Arabs get very rich, many live in, drink in and have bank accounts in Europe and North America.

However, the West’s success could be its undoing. The economic and political refugees pouring into Europe include many (nice and not-so-nice) people who don’t share many of our values. Many will continue to adhere to Islamic ideas antithetical to Western societies.

Many, perhaps most, Muslims drawn to the West’s wealth and security don’t accept our full separation of religion and the state. They’ve been indoctrinated to believe that Islam ( “submission’’) should replace other religions. (A minority of the refugees are Christians, increasingly brutalized by Mideast Muslims. Will a few of the Muslim refugees become Christian out of gratitude to their rescuers?)

Mull how negatively many, perhaps most, Muslims confront such Western causes as equality for women, gay rights (including gay marriage) and freedom of religion and speech – including the right to criticize the murderous bigotry encouraged by some Muslim scripture. The presence of so many Muslims in Europe has already led to growing self-censorship from fear of being murdered by Islamic fanatics. Yes, there’s violent barbarism, bigotry, extreme sexism, etc., in the Bible, mostly in the Old Testament, but very few Jews or Christians follow those archaic directives anymore.

Some Muslim immigrants, especially those young men who find getting a job more difficult in Europe than they had thought it would be, will grow angry when they discover the streets aren’t paved with gold. Then a few will become the same sort of fanatics who have terrorized swaths of the Muslim world daily and from time to time the West.

It would generally be better if most Muslim refugees were permanently resettled as new citizens in Muslim states, particularly the rich Arab states on the Persian Gulf and (non-Arab) Turkey. But with the callousness that most Arab nations have long displayed in refusing resettlement of Palestinians in their lands, the Gulf dictatorships are loathe to accept waves of Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Afghan and Pakistani refugees, though they do provide financial aid to temporarily assist some of them.

And the big nearby corrupt police states of Russia and Iran won’t take the refugees, though they have plenty of room. The latter, a Shiite Muslim theocracy, doesn’t want Sunnis, and the former fears adding more Muslims who might fuel Islamic separatism in Vladimir Putin’s kleptocratic empire.

Many Westerners, even as their heartstrings are pulled by so many desperate people trying to escape the Muslim world (while planning to remain Muslims), are understandably anxious about the influx. Their anxiety is fueling right-wing and even fascist responses that, along with so many people coming from an undemocratic and intolerant tradition, could threaten European democracy.

What to do? Refugee applications should be decided case-by-case. But the West must do what it can to stem the tide of refugees if it wants to remain, well, the West. This would include creating safe areas, supplied with massive, open-ended foreign humanitarian aid, in Syria and Iraq – such as “no-fly’’ and other protected zones. There people could live relatively safe from Islamic State killers and rapists and in Syria, also from Bashar Assad’s barrel bombs and poison gas. Further, the West should apply much more pressure to get rich Muslim countries to take in their co-religionists and let them become citizens. 

And it would be both humane and in the interest of the West’s security for Europe, Canada and the U.S. to provide  much more aid in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon  and Egypt to help those nations host the millions of refugees there, within the Islamic world.

Meanwhile, Europeans better think more clearly about the future they want. How many intolerant refugees can a nation accept before that nation becomes intolerant too?

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a Providence-based writer and editor, is  a former editorial-page editor  of The Providence Journal, former finance editor of the International Herald Tribune and a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.

Netanyahu's big win and fear of a West Bank ISIS

I suspect that a major reason for Benjamin Netanyahu's big win in the Israeli election was the well-founded fear of many Israelis that giving all or part of the West Bank to the Palestinians would open up Israel to  innumerable attacks across its borders from Islamic State killers. Given what has happened in much of the Mideast, it only stands to reason that the #isis crowd would move into an Arab-run West Bank, too.

-- Robert Whitcomb

Linda Gasparello: ISIS's cultural devastation reaches new level

 

The ruins of Hatra

There is horror in the recent news that the Islamic State bulldozed the ruins of two of the greatest #assyrian cities #nimrud and #nineveh. And there is irony. These ancient cities, in what is now northern Iraq, were built by a ferocious people whose profession was war – people for whom the Hebrew prophets, including Isaiah, Nahum, Zechariah and Zephaniah, reserved some of their fiercest denunciations.

In the 9^th Century B.C., Assurnasirpal II, a brutal militarist, erased entire nations as far as the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, stretching through what is now Syria, Lebanon and northern Israel. But he restored the ancient city of Nimrud and established his capital there. His magnificent Northwest Palace, first excavated by the British explorer Austen Henry Layard in the 1840s, was probably completed between 865 and 869 B.C. Its dedication was celebrated with a banquet for 70,000 guests.

Sennacherib, who moved the capital to Nineveh in 704 B.C., was as bellicose as his forefathers. When the city of #babylon rebelled against his despotic rule, Shennecherib destroyed it, saying, “ The city and its houses, from its foundation to its top, I destroyed, I devastated, I burned with fire. The wall and outer wall, temples and gods, temple towers of brick and earth, as many as there were, I razed and dumped them into the Arahtu canal.” But in Nineveh, he built a palace decorated with precious metals, alabaster and woods. Mountain streams were diverted to provide water for the city's parks and gardens, resplendent with trees and flowers imported from other lands – along with captives who were enslaved and brought back to Assyria to build and tend them.

It is a wonder that these Assyrian kings who were capable of such ruthlessness were also capable of building cities filled with such majestic architecture.

In the 1970s and 1980s, in the time of another ruthless leader, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi antiquities board reconstructed large parts of Assurnasirpal II's palace, including the restoration and re-installation of the carved-stone reliefs lining the walls of many rooms, according to Augusta McMahon, a professor in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Cambridge.

“The winged bulls that guard the entrances to the most important rooms and courtyards were re-erected. The winged bull statues are among the most dramatic and easily recognized symbols of the Assyrian world,” McMahon wrote in a BBC report.

Nimrud, she added, “provided a rare opportunity for visitors to experience the buildings' scale and beauty in a way that is impossible to find in a museum context.”

That is lost for all of us, now and in future generations.

Fortunately, a significant number architectural artifacts from Nimrud and Nineveh are housed safely in museums in Europe and North America, including the limestone and alabaster reliefs, portraying Assurnasirpal II surrounded by winged demons, or hunting lions or waging war, and the monumental, human-headed winged lions that guarded important palace doorways, currently displayed in the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

As if the loss of Nimrud and Nineveh were not horrible enough for world heritage, #isis continued its campaign to eradicate ancient sites it says promote apostasy last week by leveling the ruined city of Hatra, also in northern Iraq, founded in the days of the Parthian Empire over 2,000 years ago. Hatra's massive walls withstood attacks by the Romans.

Irina Bolkova, director-general of UNESCO, said, “The destruction of Hatra marks a turning point in the appalling strategy of cultural cleansing underway in Iraq.”

I hope it does. And I hope that what Zephaniah prophesized for Assyria will befall the Islamic State: “Assyria will be made a desolation.”

Linda Gasparello (lgasparello@kingpublishing.com),  is  a longtime journalist and the co-host of “White House Chronicle,” on PBS. She was a master's candidate in Arabic and Islamic Art and Architecture at the American University in Cairo.

Robert Whitcomb: Holiday cards: History at the micro level; ransoms cause killing

Every Christmas week I send “Happy New Year’’ cards to people who have just sent us holiday cards. If they took the time to send us cards then we should reply. Thus you can reconnect with a lot of people, if only once a year. In doing so, you stay in the fabric of a wider life than you might have without the card exchange. Going through them is a sort of forced review of recent history at the micro-level. And then there’s the reminder of mortality, as these cards report more and more deaths to you as the years roll by, along, of course, with the births. Then there’s the obituary by omission: Cards from certain people just stop coming. These pieces of brightly colored paper can be like those models of skulls that priests and scholars used to keep on their work tables to focus their minds.

Along with the cards comes the knee-jerk reaction to review the year past and make resolutions about the next. My central resolution is always, as Thoreau advised, to “Simplify, simplify.’’ (As a bachelor and grand moocher on friends and neighbors, it was easy for him.) But simplification is far from simple in 21st century America, and the machine upon which I’m typing this is one reason. It offers endless distraction.

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” Peter Kreeft, a philosopher/theologian, wrote: “We want to complexify our lives. … We want to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hole in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.’’ (Or maybe luxurious leisure can fill it!)

Some people e-mail their holiday cards — to simplify and/or to save money. But these transmissions obviously lack the emotional weight and resonance of physical cards. (By the way, scientists say that reading on paper supports more memory of text than does reading on a screen.) And e-mails are too easy to delete. A really good paper card may be kept for years, perhaps in a scrapbook.

The Internet won’t destroy the paper-card business anytime soon.

xxx

The New York Times ran a piece Dec. 28 headlined “U.S. Policy of No Ransom Closes Off Other Options,’’ which I took as an implied defense of paying ransom to murderous groups such as the Islamic State in order to free kidnapped people from rich countries with big media.

Of course, these stories of Americans (such as New Hampshire’s James Foley) and other Westerners who go to the Mideast for humanitarian, journalistic and other reasons and then are kidnapped by the likes of IS are horrific. But the United States’ paying ransom to get them back will create many more such cases.

The basic problem with stories like The Times’s is that they divert attention from the broad duty of destroying a depraved group that would, with pleasure, kill millions of people if it could, to tragic individual human-interest stories. In this diversion, it puts many more people than the hostages in peril, whatever the heartwarming pictures of paid-for kidnap victims being reunited with their families.

David S. Cohen, U.S. Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and finance intelligence, nicely summarized where the ransom money goes: “[to] help fund the full range of [terrorists’] activities, including recruiting and indoctrinating new members, paying salaries, establishing training camps, acquiring weapons and communications gear, staging deadly attacks, and helping to support the next generation of violent extremist groups.’’

Why not just ship the Islamic State weapons or pay them their wages instead of paying ransom? Save time.

Paying ransom to terrorists kills. People know this, but …

Robert Whitcomb oversees New England Diary.

Amanda Ufheil-Somers: Bombing I.S. will make matters worse

Once again, a U.S. president vows to eliminate an extremist militia in the Middle East to make the region, and Americans, safe.

And that means it’s time again for a reality check. Having failed in its bid to destroy the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan, the United States is still trying to dismantle both organizations. Over  13 years of war, that mission has spread to Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Mali and West Africa, as militant groups on two continents have adopted the al-Qaida brand.

Contrary to normal logic, the White House wants everyone to see this failure as a badge of expertise. As President Obama vowed in an interview on Meet the Press, fighting the Islamic State forces “is something we know how to do,” mainly because we’ve been battling similar groups “for five, six, seven years.”

Years of air strikes, drone-operated killings and covert operations have brought neither peace nor safety to the region and its people. Estimates of the death toll from U.S. attacks in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia alone range from 3,100 to 5,400, including 570-1,200 civilians. Precise figures are impossible to obtain since the strikes remain classified, and investigating drone attacks is difficult and dangerous work.

Nor has the drone campaign halted the proliferation of groups seeking to link their — usually local — agendas to the idea of a global struggle represented by al-Qaida. Indiscriminate killing — and the constant fear of death from above — has only destroyed communities and provided easy recruitment material for extremist groups.

Obama promises that his plan to combat and destroy the Islamic State forces will also address the underlying political problems in Iraq and Syria. Such claims are tenuous, at best. What’s far more certain is that all military campaigns have unintended consequences, some of which don’t appear for many years afterward.

The Islamic State itself is largely a product of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Dismantling the Iraqi state and rebuilding it along sectarian lines produced an authoritarian government dominated by Shiite Islamists who ignored minority grievances and often suppressed dissent with bullets. The result? An entrenched civil war with no end in sight.

Although U.S. media coverage of the violence in Iraq subsided following the withdrawal of combat troops, sectarian attacks against civilians have continued. Car bombs, street assaults, and kidnappings have transformed Baghdad into a city segregated by sect. Large parts of the country, including the Sunni majority areas in the west and north, feel abandoned by the central government.

These political tensions are the reason why the Islamic State has found some support in the areas it has taken over. Bombing Islamic State targets — especially where they are embedded in communities and liable to cause civilian casualties — carries no promise of changing this dynamic for the better. It’s more likely to change it for the worse.

The Islamic State is indeed a danger to the people of the region and to efforts to resolve the political conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Yet the past decade has shown, again and again, that American firepower doesn’t solve these problems. Even if Washington manages to help destroy this al-Qaida spinoff, the grievances that give rise to groups like it can’t be bombed out of existence.

The campaign formerly called “the War on Terror” has only proven to perpetuate both war and terror. No amount of rebranding or wishful thinking will change that reality this time around.

Amanda Ufheil-Somers is the assistant editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project. MERIP.org. This is distributed via OtherWords.org.

Carbon tax, Putin and the Islamic State

President Obama and many other people in the West would like to think that Vladimir Putin is basically a reasonable guy. By “would like to think,’’ I mean that they fear him and so their default is appeasement. Welcome to Czechoslovakia, 1938. Some in the West even lauded the “cease-fire’’ in eastern Ukraine engineered by the Russian dictator that left in place  his occupation there, not to mention the seizure of Crimea. And  the Russian-led violence continues in eastern Ukraine. But Putin is a relentless liar and schemer driven by a thirst for power for its own sake and a longing for the Soviet Empire.

The West has failed so far to send weapons to the Ukrainians so that they can properly defend themselves from the Russian invasion. And there’s little sign that European defense budgets will be rising  substantially anytime soon to counter Putin, who can be summed up in his obscene remarks that that the collapse of “Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century.’’ The Soviet regime killed many millions of Soviet subjects. But then, former KGB man Putin did very well under the Soviets. He also knows, as gangsters tend to know, how to manipulate his foes.

For example, he’s peddled, with some success, the lie that most Ukrainians in the Russian-invaded part of that sovereign nation want to be part of Putin’s regime.

The economic sanctions so far imposed by the West are mostly a joke to the likes of Putin and his entourage. If they cause some distress among the Russian population, who cares? Putin’s entourage will be okay.

Then there’s the Islamic State. It’s good to see that President Obama is finally trying hard to get other nations to join us in destroying it, but it will be difficult because of our Western allies’ disinclination to unduly exert themselves in military matters — the thing that counts most when it comes to the perverts staffing this “caliphate.” (As for such U.S. “allies’’ as Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia — they are deeply corrupt dictatorships some of whose people have helped finance and otherwise create the likes of the Islamic State and al-Qaida.)

For the longer term, we must defang the Middle East and the Putin regime by weaning ourselves and the world off the oil and gas that pay for their barbarism. One way would be a carbon tax to get people off fossil fuel in the United States, and thus reduce demand for it worldwide.  And, for the immediate future, we can do what Thomas Friedman of The New York Times suggested — “lift our self-imposed ban on U.S. oil exports’’ to lower the world price of a commodity that disproportionately benefits dictators.

We might make fun of those Renaissance paintings in which little devils skitter around. We don’t like to accept that there’s something like evil in the world. But you look at something like the Islamic State and the Putin regime and you realize that those people in 1500 were on to something.

 --- Robert Whitcomb

Tripartite march of the thugs

While the U.S.  focuses on confronting the perverts of the Islamic State, the fascist dictatorship in Russia continues to try to eat away at adjacent states and the other big fascist dictatorship, China, continues its attempt to take over the entire South China Sea. Their  neighbors waver between appeasement and something a bit braver as the thuggery gets worse.

Francis Fukuyama's idea in the '90s of the inevitable triumph of liberal democracy seems more frayed than usual this year.

David Warsh: The 'pie-giver' and the 'liberal' vs. 'realist' view of Russia

Perhaps the single most intriguing mystery of the Ukrainian crisis has to do with how the Foreign Service officer who served as deputy national security adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney for two years, starting on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, became the Obama administration’s point person on Russia in 2014. Victoria Nuland took office as assistant secretary of  state for European and Eurasian affairs a year ago this week.

It was Nuland who in February was secretly taped, probably by the Russians, saying “F--- the E.U.” for dragging its feet in supporting Ukrainian demonstrators seeking to displace its democratically elected pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, two months after he rejected a trade agreement with the European Union in favor of one with Russia. She made a well-publicized trip to pass out food in the rebels’ encampment on Kiev’s Maidan Square in the days before Yanukovych fled to Moscow.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin said the other day, “Our Western partners, with the support of fairly radically inclined and nationalist-leaning groups, carried out a coup d'état [in Ukraine]. No matter what anyone says, we all understand what happened. There are no fools among us. We all saw the symbolic pies handed out on the Maidan,” Nuland is the pie-giver he had in mind.

Before she was nominated to her current job, Nuland was State Department spokesperson under Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton during the congressional firestorm over the attack on the diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

So how did the Obama administration manage to get her confirmed – on a voice vote with no debate?  The short answer is that she was stoutly defended by New York Times columnist David Brooks and warmly endorsed by two prominent Republican senators, Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, and John McCain, of Arizona.

Clearly Nuland stands on one side of a major fault-line in the shifting, often-confusing tectonic plates of U.S. politics.

A good deal of light was shed on that divide by John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, in an essay earlier this month in Foreign Affairs.  In “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,” Mearsheimer described the U.S.  ambitions to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit via expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization as the taproot of the crisis.  Only after Yanukovych fled Ukraine did Putin move to annex the Crimean peninsula, with its longstanding Russian naval base.

Mearsheimer writes:

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

Why does official Washington think any different? (It’s not just the Obama administration, but much of Congress as well.)  Mearsheimer delineates a “liberal” view of geopolitics that emerged at the end of the Cold War, as opposed to a more traditional “realist” stance.  He writes,

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of NATO expansion took place in 1999, and brought the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland into the treaty. A second round in 2004 incorporated Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia.  None but the tiny Baltic Republics shared a border with Russia. But in 2008, in a meeting in Bucharest, the Bush administration proposed adding Georgia and Ukraine.  France and Germany demurred, but the communique in the end flatly declared, “These countries will become members of NATO.”  This time Putin issued a clear rejoinder – a five-day war in 2008 which short-circuited Georgia’s application (though Georgia apparently continues to hope).

The program of enlargement originated with key members of the Clinton  administration, according to Mearsheimer. He writes:

They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, post-national order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like Western Europe.

In contrast, the realists who opposed expansion did so in the belief that Russia had voluntarily joined the world trading system and was no longer much of a threat to European peace. A declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not, they felt, need to be contained.

 Mearsheimer writes:

And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in Eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

 

Policies devised in one administration have a way of hardening into boilerplate when embraced by the next. So thoroughly have liberals come to dominate discourse about European security that even the short war with Georgia has done little to bring realists back into the conversation. The February ouster of Yanukovych is either cited as the will of a sovereign people yearning to be free or, more frequently, simply ignored altogether.

  Mearsheimer writes:

 

The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.” Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

Nuland was present at the creation of the liberal view. She served for two years in the Moscow embassy, starting in 1991; by 1993 she was chief of staff to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott. She directed a study on NATO enlargement for the Council on Foreign Relations in 1996, and spent three more years at State as deputy director for Former Soviet Union Affairs.

After a couple of years  of Nuland being on the beach at the Council on Foreign Relations, President George W. Bush named her deputy ambassador to NATO, in 2001. She returned to Brussels in the top job after her service to Cheney. When Obama was elected, she cooled her heels as special envoy to the Talks on Conventional Forces in Europe for two years until Clinton elevated her to spokesperson. Secretary of State John Kerry promoted her last year.

It seems fair to say that Putin has trumped Obama at every turn in the maneuvering over Ukraine – including last week, when the Russian president concluded a truce with the humbled Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko while leaders of the NATO nations fumed ineffectively at their biennial summit, this year in Wales. Never mind the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; China; Israel. Even in Europe, the president’s foreign policy is in tatters.

Backing away from the liberal view is clearly going to be costly for some future presidential aspirant. The alternative is to maintain the expensive fiction of a new Cold War.

David Warsh is a longtime financial journalist and economic historian. He is proprietor of economicprincipals.com.

Llewellyn King: In U.K.: Sex, booze, rock and Jihadism

  It is a simple question, but there are only fragments of an answer. The question is: Why do so many Muslims, born in Britain, turn to Jihadism?

The best numbers available show that more than 500 young, British-born Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. By comparison, an estimated 100 Americans have taken up arms for the Islamic State. As the population of the United States is 313 million, compared to 63 million for the whole of Britain, the disparity is huge.

The “the enemy within,” as the British media call these young people, has deeply disturbed the British public, as it looks to its political leaders to take action. One writer, in The Daily Telegraph, says that the government has been soft when it should have been tough, and tough when it should have been soft.

The truth is that successive British administrations have been silent on the consequences of immigration since the second Churchill government, in 1951-55. Everyone is to blame and no one is to blame.

Britain never saw a large influx of immigrants after the Norman Conquest, in 1066. In fact, it had become quite proud of its tolerance for émigrés; Karl Marx was the exemplar. The Jews were tolerated after the 1650s, but excluded from many occupations and social circles.

Past and present Britain is made up of enclaves remarkably uninterested in each other. Hence, a small island nation can support 53 distinct, regional accents and dialects.

Idealists believed that post-World War II immigration would change Britain for the better, sweeping away its imperial trappings. Actually if anything eroded the class structure, it was the great wave of pop music and fashion in the 1960s.

Surveys show that of the immigrants from the  Indian Subcontinent, the Indians, mostly Hindu, assimilated best and took to business -- and the class system -- with alacrity, many becoming millionaires. The Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, have fared the worst. They assimilated least and imported practices that are a savage affront to British values: forced and under-age marriages, honor killings, and halal butchers, opposed by many British animal-rights groups.

These same values have made life rough for young men of Pakistani descent. For working-class British youth, sex, booze, music and soccer are their safety valves. Sexual frustration is endemic all over the Muslim world; it is at work among devout, young Muslim men in Britain, where sex is celebrated in the culture.

British business had a role in the mix of immigrants in the 1960s. Businesses wanted workers for the textile mills and factories in northern England, who would do the dirty, poorly paid work nobody else wanted. The proprietor of large tire-retreading company boasted to me in 1961 how he had solved the labor problem by recruiting rural Pakistanis, who worked hard and cheaply and kept to themselves. His words have echoed with me down through the years.

This alone does not explain why, for example, a preponderance of the Jihadists are from London, or why some of them seem to be university types from the London School of Economics, King's College London, the School for Oriental and African Studies, and others. If you are young, male and Muslim, and even somewhat religious, it is easy to be convinced that you live among the infidels with their alcohol and preoccupation with coitus.

But, again, it is not explanation enough; not an explanation of why a generation of British-born young men are attracted to the life and values of their distant ancestors, or why they have shown such savagery.

Britain has comforted itself by dealing with self-identified “community leaders” in the Muslim community. Unfortunately the real leaders have been fiery, foreign-born imams who proselytize hatred in the mosques that serve Britain’s 2 million Muslims. The Muslim communities have been hidden in plain sight from the British mainstream.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle," on PBS, and a long time international journalist, publisher and business consultant.

Llewellyn King: 2 potential dam catastrophes in the making

This is a tale of two hydroelectric dams. Two dams far from each other, but either of which could produce the next great humanitarian crisis.

The first is the Mosul Dam, which stretches across the Tigris River in a valley north of Mosul, Iraq. As dams go, this one is a civil engineering horror. It was captured by the Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.  But Kurdish and Iraqi forces, aided by American air power, have taken it back, at least for now.

Should the two-mile-wide dam fail, Mosul would be wiped out and the damage would extend to Baghdad. Loss of life could reach 500,000, and millions could be deprived of water and power. An immense catastrophe piled on the daily pain of Iraq.

The second dam, far away in Southern Africa, on the Zambezi River, is the Kariba. This 55-year-old dam, by some measures, is the world’s second-largest. It was a civil- engineering masterpiece and has held up well, given the spotty maintenance by its owners — Zambia, on the north bank and Zimbabwe, on the south bank.

If the Kariba Dam fails, as it is predicted to do in three years without repairs, surging water would rip a vast trench down the length of the Zambezi River on its route to the Indian Ocean. The wall of water would take out another giant dam, Cahora Bassa, in Mozambique. Loss of life could reach 3.5 million, with untold damage to wildlife. Central Southern Africa would lose 40 percent of its electric supply.

While the Mosul and Kariba dams are linked in their potential lethality, they are very different structures.

The Mosul Dam was a rush job, ordered by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s without regard to the engineering realities on the site. It is anchored in gypsum, which dissolves in water. So leaks in the foundation have to be plugged daily with “grout,” a mixture of cement and sand. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said the Mosul Dam is fundamentally the wrong structure for the location, and called it the “most dangerous dam in the world.”

Even with careful tending, the Mosul Dam is in danger. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, many of the workers who have kept the dam going fled when the Islamic State arrived, and only one dedicated manager is known to have remained.

The United States spent $33 million trying to stabilize the Mosul Dam, but the money, according to an inspector general’s report, was largely wasted. Now the United States cannot bomb near the dam for fear of destabilizing it further.

Apart from general-maintenance issues, the Kariba Dam issues are a little simpler. When the dam was built, between 1955 and 1959, it was planned that the river flow would be controlled though six sluice gates set in the wall. These empty into a plunge pool before the water flows downstream.

The trouble is that the plunge pool has grown from an indentation in the riverbed to a vast crater 285 feet deep. There it swirls around with great force and is eroding the basalt rock on which the dam is anchored. The dam is eating itself alive. All the sluice gates dare not be opened at once, and have not been since 1966.

The fix is a mixture of blasting the plunge pool, so the water goes downstream without creating a whirlpool, and injecting grout — in the form of underwater concrete — to shore up the foundation.

A consortium of the World Bank, the European Union and the African Development Bank this month agreed to provide $250 million to save Kariba. Engineers say the work must be done in the next three years or it will be too late.

If Zimbabwe and Zambia can agree on the contracts and let them in time, work should begin next year. But in that part of the world, the only thing that moves fast is the Zambezi River. The future of Mosul Dam is anyone’s guess.

Llewellyn King (lking@kingpublishing.com) is executive producer and host of "White House Chronicle," on PBS.

 

Robert Whitcomb: The Islamic State's soothing 'system'

  The Islamic State being set up in parts of Iraq and Syria (still usually abbreviated in our press as ISIS, from the "Islamic State of Iraq and Syria'' -- now being given a simpler, more ambitious name) challenges the idea of the nation state as we in the West know it. The mostly young men who are the ISIS shock troops want to help swiftly impose the will of the ISIS on a swath of territory from Morocco to Pakistan in an extra-national empire that would justify its dictatorship by religion. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS chief, would be its “caliph” — supreme leader.

  In such utopian (or dystopian) schemes, ideology and theology are used to excuse what mostly ends up as just a power drive, often married to sadism and greed. The ISIS version of Islam promotes a totalitarian view of society in which all human activities are said to come under 7th century Koranic rules. It’s particularly attractive to frustrated and often psychopathic young men seeking the opportunity to dominate others while finding clarity amidst the unsettling ambiguities of life. One thinks of the Nazis and Bolsheviks. (If only the World Health Organization could address the problem of crazy people seizing power. Unfortunately, however, psychopaths run some U.N. member nations.)

  Broad strains of Islamic culture encourage mercy, tolerance, charity, open-mindedness, hospitality and learning. But too often, violent and reactionary bigots have hijacked the name of Islam, as such people did, mostly in the past, Christianity. (Historian Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong is a useful look at the Muslim world’s troubled encounter with modernity.)

  The followers of ISIS and similar groups seek to address their economic, existential and even sexual anxieties and drives by embracing the kind of desert barbarism found in much of the Old Testament, albeit with modern devices. They seem desperate to avoid the stress associated with having to think and act for themselves. An all-encompassing “system” takes them by the hand.

  Part of the problem is that, other than Turkey, Iran, Israel and Egypt, the Middle East lacks “real countries,” and thus the calming sense of national order and belonging that applies in, say, the United States and Europe. Iraq, Syria and so on are collections of tribes, some ethnically based, and religious groups (mostly Sunni and Shia) within borders drawn by European colonialists. (Yes, overcrowded “real country” Egypt is a mess.)

  Sending back lots of U.S. troops won’t help. America cannot afford to occupy large swaths of the Mideast, where we’re generally not wanted anyway. Note, meanwhile, that ISIS has armed itself with large quantities of U.S. weapons and other equipment it seized when it took over much of western and northern Iraq. We left the stuff there for the “Iraqi government” (which mostly means Shiites) when we left at the end of the “American war” there. ...

  From time to time, the United States may have to use drones and perhaps even commandos to attack “Islamic” criminal enterprises to save civilians from being massacred and to block attacks on the U.S. and our allies.

  But in the long run, starving such groups of money may be the best strategy. This would include stepping up surveillance (sorry, National Security Agency foes) of international money transfers that benefit these criminals and cracking down on the Saudi, Qatari and other Persian Gulf Sunni individuals and groups that support these terrorists in the face of our too-mild complaints. After 9/11, the United States did a fine job in tracking terrorists’ money flows; we will have to ramp up again.

  More generally, we can cut the cash that goes into the Mideast from oil and gas sales, much of which ends in the hands of dictators and terror groups (sometimes effectively one and the same). Places that depend on extractive industries (see Russia) tend to be more corrupt and dictatorial than those with diversified economies. Another reason to turn away from fossil fuels. The hope is to marginalize the Mideast until the passage of time, modern communication, humanitarian aid, wider travel and trade can moderate its worst aspects and encourage these tyrannies to become “normal countries.” To a point. We're in for a long struggle,

  None of this is to say that the secular Western nation state is perfect. We’re commemorating this summer the opening of World War I, which drew in a Europe that in June 1914 seemed poised to climb yet further onto the broad sunlit uplands of progress. Part of the tragedy of young Serbian terrorist Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was that the archduke was a reformer whose rise to the top would probably have meant a more democratic and humane central and eastern Europe. That mild empire, in any case, was generally better than what followed. Terrorism tends to beget more terrorism and worse tyranny. Things can get worse very quickly.

Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com) is overseer of New England Diary,  a former editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and a former finance editor of  the International Herald Tribune. He is a Fellow of the Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy.