One Hundred Broken Mirrors
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Old wars never really go away. Thirty years after
Falklands, Argentina and the UK are still facing off
over the islands. Bananas are going for a pound each
and there's an egg shortage among the native
population.
Thirty-one years after Israel destroyed Saddam's
nuclear reactor a few miles outside of Baghdad to
the universal condemnation of the whole world, it
seems likely to launch such an attack. Once again
Israeli F-16's are likely to head into the jaws of a
regional power and come out victorious and
condemned.
There is good reason why old wars don't go away. War
hatreds are convenient distractions for poor
economies, whether in Buenos Aires or Tehran. If a
bomb falls on Israel, few in Iran will be asking how
much money the Revolutionary Guard pocketed from
developing the massive program. And in the middle of
economic turmoil, denouncing the Brits for stealing
islands on which hardly anyone wants to live, but
the people living on them, is a fine distraction
from a closer look at how Kirchner is using
legislation to consolidate economic power.
Thirty-nine years after the last major war between
Israel and Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood will unveil
a constitution based on the Al-Azhar document, a
lovely piece of work which emphasizes the importance
of democracy and freedom-- and the subservience of
both to Islamic law. Western observers still working
up their enthusiasm for the Arab Spring are noting
the former and not the latter.
Virtually everyone has ignored one the final clauses
of the Al-Azhar document and its commitment to the
"Palestinian" cause. For the Muslim Brotherhood, the
Palestinian cause is Hamas, which is to say
themselves. A commitment to Hamas is a commitment to
an arm of the Brotherhood. A war against Israel is
inevitable, but not until the Brotherhood sucks as
much aid out of the Great Satan as it can, under the
pretense of serving as a moderating influence on
Hamas.
For all the beards and Koran thumping, the
Brotherhood is likeliest to begin hostilities when a
poor economy causes a dip in its popularity. The
Egyptian phase of the Arab Spring wasn't fired by
idealism, except in some corridors of Twitter and
even then most of the idealists ended up running for
public office. The economy was bad, the price of
bread was high and corruption was everywhere. And
none of those factors are going away. The
Brotherhood is an economic cartel just like the
economic cartels in the military and the ruling
party that it promised to get rid of. And the
Salafis are waiting in the wings to succeed them as
the incorruptible moral guardians of the nation.
Camp David never meant anything. It was a temporary
measure by military leaders looking to transfer
their allegiances from the Warsaw Pact to the West,
and expand their country's horizons beyond the
ritual throwing massive numbers of soldiers, tanks
and planes at the Jewish bastards on the other side
of the border. A feat which was accomplishing
nothing, except for providing a brief distraction
from the domestic problems of building some Arab
Socialist hybrid of Nazism and Communism for the
benefit of the ruling class.
Egypt was not particularly troubled by the battle
losses. Sure it lost twice as many men as Israel,
but it also had a population many times the size.
And the Fellaheen are always replaceable. The
massive losses of tanks and armored vehicles weren't
too much of a problem either. Uncle Leonid in Moscow
would be happy to ship Cairo more of them.
Egypt's biggest casualty in the wars was its sense
of pride and that was tied to the sense that it
wasn't getting anywhere. It had tried to imitate
Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini and none of that worked
out. The grandiosity of a Nasser or Saddam was
briefly reassuring, but it lacked forward motion. So
it tried the American way instead. Not democracy and
freedom, but a limited dash of capitalism, some
imports, some imitations and a lot of greenbacks.
That is the thing about America that most Americans
don't realize. For all the hopeful speeches made by
American leaders about exporting the Des Moines way
of life to Baghdad or Kandahar, what people in those
parts of the world see when they look at America
isn't democracy and freedom, it's wealth and power.
Those are the things they want, and they don't
understand why American leaders keep chattering on
about democracy and freedom, no more than we
understand why Muslims keep going on about the
Koran.
They're not interested in what we believe, but in
what we have, and they can't make the connection
between one and the other, as far as they are
concerned they already believe the right things.
Muslims see the West in purely mercantile terms,
decadent but rich. Dubai and Riyadh are in their own
way crude imitations of us, or how they think we
are. Luxury cars, gold encrusted things, prostitutes
and tall buildings. The same goes for Moscow and
Beijing, which gave rise to their own ruling mafias
riding around in limousines, squandering fortunes,
building tacky towers and imagining that they are
outdoing the West.
That was what Egypt wanted and its ruling elite
got it, to some extent, it just didn't have enough
natural resources to exploit and the mercantile
instincts to become Saudi Arabia, China or Russia.
And with the Soviet Union gone, the United States
faltering, it found a new path to travel or rather
an old path.
The real message of the Brotherhood, the AKP in
Turkey and Al-Nahda in Tunisia is that you don't
have to choose. You can have the modern good life, a
thriving economy, international respect and all the
shiny things of Europe and America-- and you can
have them through Islam. It's a seductive message,
but a hollow one. The Faithful of Islam are just
another mafia, even if it's one that claims to be
chosen by Allah. What they do really well is enrich
their own with gambits, tricks and juggling acts
that eventually comes crashing down.
Americans have already gotten a taste of what that
system looks like. A corrupt elite overseeing a
broken economy being goosed for the benefit of the
few. A lapdog media that is forever searching out
enemies, bleating denunciations, exposing new
threats and conspiracies, to distract everyone from
the disaster up top. The Obama era is only a small
taste of how people in Russia or Egypt live. In the
wake of the Cold War, rather than them becoming more
like us, we are becoming more like them.
The Brotherhood's caterpillar caliphate will be more
of the same with an Islamic coating. Just as Russia
and China are the same with nationalistic coatings.
Just as Iran is the same with heaps of revolutionary
martyrdom on top. Power has only one true purpose,
if you doubt that ponder how many Chavez family
members hold high-ranking positions in Venezuela or
the net worth of the Muslim Brotherhood's candidate
for president.
There's a history here that's deeper than nations
and events, it is the history of human character.
And it's why nothing will really change. Nothing
really can change. Nations can fall, but until they
do, the cycle will repeat again and again.
Israel will have to fight because nothing has really
changed. It will have to fight because it lives in a
global community and that community looks nothing
like Eleanor Roosevelt thought it would. It will
have to fight because it lives in a region where
when people get bored, angry or upset, they fight.
It lives in a region where corrupt leaders start
wars as a distraction or to keep the army pointed
away from them or because the people are angry over
the price of bread.
Had Mubarak sent the army into Israel, instead of
into Cairo, he would likely still be in power. But
he thought that he could survive without extreme
measures and knew that the United States, which
wields economic power over Egypt and particularly
its military, would not approve of such a step.
Mubarak's successor will not make that same mistake.
When things get bad, the military will roll, with a
win-win situation for the Brotherhood, which will
either see Israel destroyed or see the military
disgraced.
Iran's clerics and generals hoarding their
ill-gotten loot while the crowds are ready to lynch
them at a sign of weakness certainly will not make
that mistake. And with a nuclear weapon, they won't
even need to leave home to reap the political
benefits. And without a nuclear weapon, they will
still go on doing what they are doing now. Because
there is no other way.
The Islamic revolution, like the Communist
revolution like the Third Reich has failed. The
people at the top, who aren't completely delusional
know it. There is no place to go. No golden utopia
over the bend. Just the grim work of conquest and
repression, of internal feuds and piles of wealth.
Once the true believers are purged, the smiling men
in uniforms and beards step off their posters and
act the part of kings. And so there will be war,
because there is nothing else.
We can escape many things, but never ourselves.
Israel is proof of that in the ways that it exposes
its own flaws, those of its friends and those of its
enemies. The revival of a country thousands of years
gone is a mirror that reminds us that very little
has changed. It is an unwelcome reminder in a region
always looking to unlock a lost golden age with a
sharp sword.
No people can escape itself, but they can escape
another by killing it. If nothing else it passes the
time, it distracts the crowds worried about the
price of bread or how they'll pay for the wedding.
Even the ugliest forms of action still hold the
illusion of a forward momentum. The Nazis at the end
had lost their race across Europe, but they still
had their death camps. The shrinking Soviet Union
still had its Gulags. Muslims have their Jihad and
their Dhimmis. Power can look a lot like progress.
With the ability to kill your enemies, you can
almost forget that you have nowhere to go afterward.
History repeats itself because we repeat ourselves.
Systems fail because people fail. The more perfect a
system aspires to be, the quicker it rots and comes
apart. The wheel spins and the cycle begins again.