The Big Bang in Benghazi
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US consulate in Benghazi on fire.
Photo Credit: EPA/Mustafa El-Shridi
The most important thing that any leader needs to know about war is that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. That includes a plan of fighting bloodless wars using drones and droning speeches.
The brilliant plan that Barack Hussein Obama and some of his more useless advisers cooked up for defeating Islamic terrorism was to isolate the “extreme” violent Islamists who want to kill people from the “moderate” political Islamists who are willing to take over entire countries in elections.
The Islamist terrorists would be deprived of a meaningful reason to kill people in the name of implementing Islamic law if their political brethren got to take over entire countries and implement Islamic law. Once the Muslim Brotherhood took over a few countries, then Al Qaeda would be marginalized and irrelevant. Its operatives would soon have to drop the terrorism and get jobs teaching about LGBT rights or building solar panels.
Whoever came up with this plan probably had a grandfather in the State Department who said in 1919 that the Communists would become less dangerous to Western Europe now that they had all of Russia to use for their economic experiments because stupidity doesn’t go away. The same old ideas that cost millions of lives a few generations ago are repackaged with some artful worldplay and are parroted by the smart set as the sort of thing that should be obvious to anyone.
Islamism, now joins Communism and Nazis on the shelf of things that we don’t really have to worry about once we’ve appeased them enough, at least until they stop taking off fingers and start biting off hands and then suddenly we have to start worrying all over again.
The problem with Obama’s split Islamists maneuver is that Al Qaeda had spent more time attacking Saudi Arabia, the most Islamist Sunni country on earth, than any other Muslim country. Turning Egypt and Syria Islamist was not going to dissuade or isolate Al Qaeda. For Islamists, there is an endless well of “extremes” so that the rise of one Islamist government is just an excuse for more Islamists to arrive and denounce them as fakes and puppets of America and Israel.
Islamist governments have a traditional way of occupying the attention of their angrier Islamist brethren. They buy them flight lessons and maps of American landmarks. That’s how the House of Saud largely solved its Islamist terror problem and that is how our “moderate” friends in Egypt are hard at work solving their Islamist terrorist problem by pointing them at Israel and using their attacks as an excuse to militarize the Sinai.
In Libya, the Benghazi consulate was being guarded from other Islamist militias by the Muslim Brotherhood militia. The ways in which plan failed are a microcosm of the larger failure of the entire plan to buy peace by selling out our allies to the Muslim Brotherhood and hoping that the Islamists we backed will be more moderate than the ones bombing us.
Much as the Saudis had been doing for years, the Muslim Brotherhood just sold out the consulate to Al Qaeda and then sent out a condolence message while warning that unless we accept the Islamic definition of un-free speech, attacks like this will keep on happening. And they will regardless of how many Mohammed movies get made or don’t get made.
The only way that anyone in the region knows how to stop terrorism is either by massacres or by handing the terrorists a giant bag of money and pointing them at a new target. The Brotherhood is not about to start fighting other Salafists over American foreign aid and they couldn’t even if they wanted to, without empowering the army, which in their part of the world quickly becomes a government. Instead they will do what the Saudis have been doing, talk out of both sides of their mouths, telling the terrorists to hit America and telling America that if we don’t support them, the terrorists will win.
This is an old game and it works really well. We send a Muslim country money and weapons. It hands 10 percent of them to the terrorists in exchange for attacking us some more. Then it asks us for more money and weapons to stop the terrorists. Unlike most investments, this one is stable and pays out really well as long as Washington DC is full of so many chumps that it ought to have more card sharps and pool sharks than any other place in the country.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Daniel Greenfield is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/. The views expressed in this blog are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of The Jewish Press.
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