Michael Totten looks at the mechanics of how minorities survive in the Middle East. Although the Jews are the best known of those minorities, the Druze are in their own way, subject to the same Darwinian requirements of existence. They too have to make and break alliances, gauge the direction of the wind and generally follow the prevailing breezes. His exploration of the dilemmas of Walid Jumblatt, now up at his site, illustrates very clearly why it is important to be the Strong Horse in the Middle East to have any hope of being a force for good. One of the ironies of statecraft is that peacemaking requires the ability to inspire fear. Not charity but wariness keeps the wolves at bay.
His description of Druze Leader Walid Jumblatt’s decision to mend his fences with Hezbollah to follow the lead of “the international community invit(ing) the rogue regimes in from the cold” is a classic illustration of how Barack Obama’s foreign policy is being perceived in the region.
The Druze minority communities in Lebanon, Israel, and Syria have worked out a survival formula that works better than most. They’re weathervanes. They calculate. They, more than other Arabs, side with the strong horse. … In Syria, the Druze support the Baathist regime of Bashar Assad. Israeli Druze are fiercely loyal to the state and fight harder than most against the likes of Hamas and Hezbollah in elite IDF units. …
Lebanon’s Druze leader Walid Jumblatt recently abandoned the anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah “March 14″ coalition and declared himself politically neutral. … He believes, correctly, that Lebanon can’t effectively take a hard line while the international community invites the rogue regimes in from the cold. … “Do you think the long term interests of Syria and Iran are in harmony?” … “I think the interests are too interconnected between the Syrian regime and Persia,” Jumblatt said, “and I think Persia is now stronger.
But is Jumblatt right? “Persia” for its part is despite its recent convulsions, taking a hard line with Obama. Bloomberg reports that “Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ruled out negotiations on his country’s nuclear program … the Iranian president said, “we are ready to discuss world issues with the U.S. president in the presence of mass media. The time of hidden agreements is over, and television debates are the best way.” A lot has changed since Jumblatt realigned and Iran may have calculated that weak though they have become, Obama because of the health care debacle, may have fallen even faster in political strength. This perception may underlie Hugo Chavez’s solicitude towards the US President. In a Reuters story Chavez actually said that Obama needed help.
VENICE (Reuters) – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a fierce critic of U.S. foreign policy who once called George W. Bush “the devil,” said on Monday he hoped to be able to work more closely with President Barack Obama. … “With Obama we can talk, we are almost from the same generation, one can’t deny that Obama is different (from Bush). He’s intelligent, he has good intentions and we have to help him.”
That other famous Middle Eastern minority, the Jews, were placing — and hedging their bets about who will come out on top. The government of Israel recently approved the construction of 455 settlement units on the West Bank which is being portrayed as both a concession to and defiance of US policy. The WSJ writes:
Jewish settlers scuffled with Israeli peace activists in the West Bank on Monday hours after Minister of Defense Ehud Barak approved plans for 455 housing units in the territory, adding to the tension surrounding what has become the most contentious issue of the Obama-led peace process. … The denunciations from both sides of the Israeli political spectrum underscored the difficulties Mr. Netanyahu faces as he attempts to appease demands by the U.S. and the Arabs with an agreement to partially freeze building. It is expected within days. The premier had sought to placate hard-liners by approving the new units before agreeing to a cap on construction of future units. … But this delicate balancing act puts Mr. Netanyahu in jeopardy of alienating all sides and pleasing none. In addition to local criticism, the Obama administration rebuked Israel for the new approvals on Friday.
Everybody is trying to have it both ways. When the Wheel of Fortune comes to a stop, as it periodically does in the Middle Eastern casino, history will record the winners and the losers. But however that may be, the odds are that the game will going. That part of the world has seen off the Romans, the Ottomans and the British Empire. It will probably outlast Barack Obama.
It will probably outlast Barack Obama
That part of the world may well do that, but what it won’t outlast is its date with the modern world.
A date that every society on the planet has had to meet, and almost always painfully.
ADE
Luckily, even with Radical Leftist Democrat BHO as POTUS,
the Enemy Still has AP on it’s side.
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AP Strikes Again
Robert Gates protests AP decision as ‘appalling’
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is objecting “in the strongest terms” to an Associated Press decision to transmit a photograph showing a mortally wounded 21-year-old Marine in his final moments of life, calling the decision “appalling” and a breach of “common decency.”
The AP reported that the Marine’s father had asked – in an interview and in a follow-up phone call — that the image, taken by an embedded photographer, not be published.
The AP reported in a story that it decided to make the image public anyway because it “conveys the grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it.”
The photo shows Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard of New Portland, Maine, who was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade in a Taliban ambush Aug. 14 in Helmand province of southern Afghanistan, according to The AP.
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Gates wrote to Thomas Curley, AP’s president and chief executive officer.
“Out of respect for his family’s wishes, I ask you in the strongest of terms to reconsider your decision. I do not make this request lightly.”
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Even with Obama, rather than Bush, as POTUS.
What the repeated and convoluted alliances of Jumblatt show is that in the patchwork network of tribal conflicts that stretch from the Atlantic to Central and South East Asia the one thing that does not work is nuance. It is essential to above all remain credible. The fact is that even most of the Strong Horses prove on closer examination to be surprisingly weak. Assad of Syria is merely another tribal minority boss like Jumblatt is. It is wrong to assume that these people are simple or foolish or thugs. They are perceptive and shrewd but know from thousands of years of bitter experience not to rely on abstract principles of law and justice or promises of future peace and prosperity. All contracts are temporary and the only thing they can trust is what they see. The lives of themselves and their families depend on those facts. If the palace of Assad were to vanish in a puff of smoke or the home village of the Alawite’s was to experience some catastrophe then the next week nobody would remember Assad’s name. As long as the US treats any of these people like representatives of Lockean Sovereigns who will partner with us in establishing the primacy of law over expediency we will continue to be treated like chumps and sold rotten rugs in the bazaar.
The wariness of wolves: a man who knows a LOT about animals in the wild, and who wandered around the Bush alone told me about the time he did a little experiment: there was a wolf pack around him; he started to limp and lowered his rifle; the pack started closing in; he then straightened up, and lost the limp; and the pack withdrew.
He told me this story when some southern idiots were pretending to ‘protect the wolf”, and in the process of the foolish were found to have walked some 50 feet of the highway “into the wilderness.’ Such twits. And they and their kind are running the USofA for the next 3 years (at least.)
Walid J. and the Druze know something about geography as well as alliances. Along with West Virginians, the Druze can say “Montani Semper Liberi”—or however you say it in Druze—i.e. “Mountaineers are Always Free.”
If you don’t have dependable allies covering your back, at least you can have the Chouf.
It will probably outlast Barack Obama.
So too,will this country outlast Barak Hussien Obama. The first Muslim president(traced through the father) the first Islamosypmathizing president of horrific proportions. The first demosocialistacrat
that is trying his hardest to make this country weak and extremely vulnerable. More so than it has ever been.
I would bet in Israel being around for quite some time as well.
We are on a collision course with Islam. It
will be violent, bloody and cost millions of more innocent lives. Just like every war with Islam has, since the 7th century.
Whether Obama is truly a “Muslim” or not is debatable, but by his nature and intellectual bent, he is quite sympathetic to all those “Third World” political movements. The politics of which seem to be all based on some kind of organic self determination (“people power!”), but are in reality just what Jumblatt described, as pragmatic self-preservation and deal-making. All this phoney-baloney political posturing and the eye-wash that is bleated out by the media is for dopes and marks at the carney.
Whoever follows Obama will not be as superficially sympathetic to the nonsense factor as Obama appears to be (“appears” is the operative word). There is a window of time that these people will be allowed to step through to enhance their legitimacy, or actually solve a problem.
They will miss this opportunity. As has also been said, they never miss a chance to miss a chance.
The time will pass more swiftly than they imagine, I will wager. The Islamic Republic of Iran will do something soon (in the nature of a few years), that will once again shock the West out of its self-imposed intellectual stupor. Bigger than 9/11/01, but smaller than, say, 8/06/45.
As was said above and said before and will be said again many more times, the collision course with militant Islam and the West will end up being very bloody.
Were it not so.
Were these not “interesting times” that we live in.
Were my sons not approaching military age.