What the Quran burnings tell us
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/...rnings_tell_us
Quote:
Close your eyes, and imagine the following situation...
Suppose the town or city where you live had a bunch of heavily-armed foreign soldiers living nearby. As part of their normal duties, they sent patrols down your street with some frequency, bristling with guns and other instruments of war. Imagine that these soldiers were from a very different culture and nearly all of them did not speak your native language, although they could occasionally use a local translator to order you around. You have been (...)
I used this technique for the same purpose repeatedly; it shows the innate stupidity of the really quite primitive policy against distant extremists.
Second-order effects appear to be too difficult to grasp for today's politicians and loudmouths / pundits. Well, either that or the West is stuck in political systems that let policy drift into stupid against the better judgements of the not-so stupid power elite.
Has anyone read "Shooting of an Elephant" by George Orwell
America's problem is not that it lacks book smarts, it lacks street smarts.
I have watched, in anguish, over the past twelve years as America is being led down a path to disaster by smart men and women with degrees from the best Ivy League schools but little common sense.
This is the same country where politicians from both major parties have an almost Pavlovian response to Israel ("Israel is the best thing that happened to mankind"). Where the most bellicose Israeli Prime Minister in recent times is given a standing ovation 29 times, where the US is one of the few nations on earth that plans to/planned to veto the Palestinian bid at the UN and plans to withdraw funding to UNESCO over Palestine.
These same people also know that 70% of the Arab World watches Al Jazeera, yet you expect the Muslim World to love you!
You are not going to get the Muslim World to love you by building an embassy the size of the Vatican in Baghdad. You've got to make bold changes to your Middle East policy.
Anyway, this is Orwell's essay, it illustrates the relationship between colonised and coloniser. This is exactly the way my dad and grandad felt about the British.
http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/
Three important trends in the developing world
I think the three most important trends in the developing world are:
1. Ethnicity/tribalism.
2. Fundamentalist Islam.
3. Evangelical Christianity.
All these three find fertile soil in impoverished and/or poorly educated societies. The important thing to note is that there is nothing the West has (not MTV, not McDonalds and not even Coca-Cola) that compete with the appeal of these three.
Afghanistan and Iraq pitted the West against the first two. If the "long war" ever extends beyond the Sahel region of Africa, the West could be dealing with all three. (If Afghanistan and Iraq are complex, imagine Nigeria. In Nigeria you will have to deal with all three!).
Call it quits.