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First today, something posted on Facebook yesterday, which my dream maker last night pushed me several times to publish today. In one of the dreams, the messenger was my gracious host Todd German, who when he was younger served in the U.S. Army Special Forces and saw combat in Central America.
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John W. Gilmer One way or the other I will hold out for doing what is right22 mins · "}" data-reactid=".cs.1:4:1:$comment10153382255618781_10153384404338781:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.3.$likeToggle:0:$action:0">Like -
Sloan Bashinsky As do I, but what is right depends on who views what it right. Many, many wars were fought over who was right. The Crusades, which Islam may never forget, were elements of Christendom’s version of what was right being imposed on Islam, in Palestine. Looks to me that’s where and when this war started, and now here we are. As advised in dreams last night, I included this Facebook thread in today’s post at http://goodmorningkeywest.com/?p=30461
The Crusades, America | Good Morning Key WestFirst today, something posted on Facebook yesterday,…GOODMORNINGKEYWEST.COM
Then today, syndicated columnist’s opinion in today’s Key West Citizen (www.keysnews.com), which Todd German read this morning and then told me I should read it, it is along the lines of what I have been saying about America getting out of the Middle East.
Thomas Friedman: Contain and amplify the U.S. policy
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published 7:08 pm, Thursday, May 28, 2015
The Arab world is a pluralistic region that lacks pluralism — the ability to manage and embrace differences peacefully. As such, the Middle East’s pluralistic character — Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Christians, Druze, Alawites, Jews, Copts, Yazidis, Turkmen and an array of tribes — has long been managed by iron fists from above. But after we removed the fists in Iraq and Libya, without putting a new bottom-up order in place, and the people themselves tried to remove the fists in Syria and Yemen, without putting a new live-and-let-live order in place, a horrifying war of all against all has exploded.
The fighting has laid bare just how much the last 60 years of predatory leadership in that region failed at human development and citizenship-building. The whole Arab world package, with its artificially straight-line borders, was held together by oil and brute force.
In the wreckage, people are falling back on the only identities they think might keep them safe: tribe and sect. It is a measure of how far things have unraveled that many Iraqi Sunnis prefer the lunatic Islamic State, or ISIS, than to fight and die for a pro-Iranian Shiite-led government in Baghdad.
I have never seen it this bad. The Middle East analyst Simon Henderson captured the disintegration well in an essay in The Wall Street Journal in March, writing, “The violent chaos in Yemen isn’t orderly enough to merit being called a civil war.”
The fundamentalist mindset seems to be taking hold everywhere. The Middle East Media Research Institute posted a video from last month of Sheikh Ahmad Al-Naqib, a lecturer on education at Mansoura University north of Cairo, criticizing ISIS, but he added, “There is no doubt that they are much better than the criminal Rafidites (Shiites), who kill the Sunnis because of their Sunni identity.”
Otto Scharmer, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who works with communities trapped in perpetual conflicts, defines the main features of the fundamentalist mindset by its opposites: What is the opposite of an open mind? he asks. “You are stuck in one truth.” What is the opposite of an open heart? “You are stuck in one collective skin; everything is us versus them and, therefore, empathy for the other is impossible.” And what is the opposite of an open will? “You are enslaved to old intentions that originate in the past and not from the present, and so you cannot open up to any emerging new opportunities.”
If that zero-sum mindset continues to prevail, you can only weep for the future of this region when there is much less oil, many more kids and much less water. It will be a freak show.
For now, I see only two ways coherent self-government can re-emerge in Libya, Iraq, Yemen and Syria: If an outside power totally occupies them, snuffs out their sectarian wars, suppresses the extremists and spends the next 50 years trying to get Iraqis, Syrians, Yemenis and Libyans to share power as equal citizens.
Even that might not work. Anyway, it’s not going to happen. The other is just wait for the fires to burn themselves out. The Lebanese civil war ended after 14 years by reconciliation-through-exhaustion. All sides accepted the principle of “no victor/no vanquished,” and everyone got a piece of the pie. That’s how Tunisia’s factions managed to find stability: no victor/no vanquished.
We cannot effectively intervene in a region where so few share our goals. For instance, in Iraq and Syria, both Iran and Saudi Arabia have acted as “arsonists” and “firefighters.” First, Iran pushed the Iraqi Shiite government to crush the Sunnis. When that produced the Islamic State, they sent pro-Iranian militias to put out the fire. Thanks a lot. And Saudi Arabia’s long promotion of the puritanical, anti-pluralistic, anti-women, Wahhabi brand of Islam helped to shape the thinking of ISIS and the Sunni fundamentalists who joined them. The Saudis, too, are arsonists and firefighters. Indeed, ISIS is like a missile that got its guidance system from Saudi Arabia and its fuel from Iran.
U.S. policy now should be “containment, plus amplification.” Let’s help those who manifest the will to contain ISIS, like Jordan, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the Kurds in Iraq, and amplify any constructive things leaders in Yemen, Iraq, Libya or Syria are ready to do with their power, but we must not substitute our power for theirs. This has to be their fight for their future. If the fight against ISIS is not worth it to them, it surely can’t be for us.
I was behind a car this weekend that had a Virginia license plate bearing the motto “Fight Terrorism.” Sorry, but I don’t think that should be on any state’s license plate. We’ve spent more than a decade of lives and treasure trying to “fight terrorism,” to fix a part of the world that can’t be fixed from the outside. It has been a waste.
I wish it had worked. The world would be better for it. But it didn’t. And the beginning of wisdom is admitting that and to stop throwing good money after bad. We need to stop being the “United States of Fighting Terrorism.” If Virginians need a license plate motto, how about: “Contain and Amplify Abroad. Build Virginia at Home.”
Thomas L. Friedman writes for The New York Times.
I told Todd this morning, if America, Great Britain and other western nations stay out of it, the Muslims will fight and kill each other, like they have always done, and they will continue to sell their oil to the west, they have to, it’s the only asset they have to sell, other than perhaps rugs, which the west wants.
I did not say, but Todd and I have discussed it before, and I have published it before, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, and then President George Bush (Daddy Bush) was gearing up to lead a western coalition to oust Hussein from Kuwait, Ross Perot and Daddy Bush were on Larry King Live, and Perot told Bush and America Kuwait was not worth one American soldier’s life.
Perot said he had tried to do business with Arabs and had gotten skinned every time, so he stopped doing business with them; they don’t think like we do, Perot said; they get into fights with each other, then go into a tent and come out arm in arm, until they get into a fight again and go back into a tent and come out arm and arm again. They will sell us their oil in all events. Stay out of Kuwait.
Perot said he was a patriot, he was not a coward. After some of his own employees in Iran were captured and held hostage by the Iranian government, and after the U.S. was not able to rescue them, he hired his own mercenaries and went with them to rescue his own employees, successfully.
Oh, how things would have gone differently if Daddy Bush had listened to Perot. But, instead, Daddy Bush later told his fellow Americans on national TV that he could not let the American way of life be threatened, I saw and heard him say it, and he was going into Kuwait. He did not say it was about saving Kuwait people from Saddam Hussein. He said it was about protecting the American way of life. It was about Kuwait’s oil.
The night of September 8/9, 2001, in my sleep a familiar voice asked me, “Will you make a prayer for a Divine Intervention for all of humanity?” I awoke, startled, made the prayer. On September 11, I understood why. And, I knew the attack was bait, a trap, and the worst response America could make was go to war in the Middle East. I hoped America would sit tight, let the atrocity boomerang on the attackers politically, socially, spiritually.
America claims in its Pledge of Allegiance, that is is “one nation, under God”. Many millions of American Christians claim America is a Christian nation. However a Christian nation would behave like Jesus in the Gospels, not like Moses or Mohammed. Better for America to drop those claims, if America is not going to live up to them.
From 2nd Peter:
For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world by the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and are overcome, the last state has become worse for them than the first. For it would be better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn away from the holy commandment handed on to them. It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A dog returns to its own vomit,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.”
The true crusade, the true jihad, which the Sufi sects of Islam know, which Jesus knew, which Peter knew, which the great saints in Christendom knew, is internal: the war within, between God and everything else.
From the great Sufi Poet Rumi:
CHICKPEA TO COOK
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor,
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.
Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”
Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.
Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
“Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.
I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.”
The cook says,
“ I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.
My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices.
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”
In the Gospels, John the Baptist and Jesus both speak of Jesus baptizing people in spirit and in fire. Not in water, but in spirit and in fire.
sloanbashinsk@outlook.com
