Here's some more honesty.
We have spent half a century backing the wrong players. Oil smeared our vision and we concentrated on the self-destructive Arab states and oil-rich Iran. We insist that Saudi Arabia, a police state that funds Islamic extremism around the world, is our friend. This is wrong and has been a mistake that has been glorified for decades. Our President (As much as I appreciate him) even plays host to its de facto king at his ranch. The oil rich Arabs and dictators of the Middle East have hijacked the Islamic religion over the decades and condemn all those Muslims that would defy their governments. And thanks to global interests in a stable Middle East, we are pledged to protect those bazaars of terror, the Gulf states, with our blood.
The Arab world, rich and poor, is nearly hopeless. With a few, strategically less than important exceptions, it has given itself over to the narcotic effects of hatred and blame. Arab civilization cannot compete on a single productive front in the 21st century. And there is nothing we can do about it. If the Arab world will not repair itself, no amount of indulgence will make a difference. We have wasted decades on governments and populations who need us as an enemy to justify their profound failures. The spark in Iraq could represent the last chance for the Middle East.
When well-meaning officials, academics or pop singers assure us that Islam is not the problem, they are utterly wrong. Do not be fooled or fall into their state of confusion and Politically Correct blindness. Islam, as promoted by Saudi Arabia and practiced by fanatics elsewhere in the Arab world, is precisely the problem. The military addresses today’s problems; tomorrow’s challenges are already fermenting. Plenty of hope remains for non-Arab, Muslim-majority states to reward their citizens with progress and tolerance. But, instead of wasting further efforts on the Middle East, where the military remains our optimal and almost only tool, we should work vigorously on the borders of the Islamic world, in those cultures where the fundamentalists have not yet been able to destroy all hope of a better future, and where Islam is still a developing faith, not merely a tomb for the living.
So far, we haven’t even gotten the numbers right. Arab populations are a minority within Islam, but their regressive form of religion has been poisoning one non-Arab state after another with an infusion of petrodollars, dogma and anti-Western vitriol. Three non-Arab countries, Indonesia, India and Pakistan, contain nearly half the world’s Muslims. Add those of Central Asia, Turkey, the Philippines, Malaysia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Azerbaijan and that struggling, vilified democracy, Iran, and the Arab states begin to look overvalued. If we want to roll back the inhumane variants of Islam and to promote constructive cooperation and the emergence of rule-of-law, market-driven states, then we should turn our energies to the lands of possibility, rather than wasting further efforts on Arab states utterly opposed to reform. If we really believe that Islam is a great world religion, we need to treat it as such and engage it where it is still developing--on its vibrant frontiers, not in its arthritic Arab homelands.
