Alabama latest state to have law introduced banning Sharia.
Death penalty suggested for Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Given that the shooting happened all the way back in 2009, isn’t this a little slow even for the usual wheels of American justice? Maybe if we’re lucky, the actual trial will occur in the home stretch of the 2012 election…
There’s one unqualified success story in the Middle East that Arab countries could use as a template to improve their societies. The problem? It’s Israel.
As for what the hell is going on in Libya right now, I’m not sure I know. Rebel forces appear to control the eastern part of the nation, including Benghazi and Tobruk, while Gadhafi seems to be maintaining his grip on Tripoli, at least for the time being.
Al Jazeera continues updating. “The interesting thing is that Libya has no constitution but [Gadhafi] has threatened the death penalty for people who fail to follow the constituion.”
A popular uprising that toppled Ghaddafi would be great news, but I’m not sure I’m willing to believe he would be that easy to topple. Ghaddafi seems like the sort of dictator who would happily slaughter tens of thousands of his citizens if he thought he needed to to stay in power.
Of course, one big difference was between Egypt and Libya is that Egypt’s military is (by Arab standards) professional and pretty competent, and even though they lost the Yom Kipur war, Egyptian troops in Sinai bloodied the Israelis enough that Egyptians felt they had sufficiently restored the nation’s honor that Anwar Sadat was able to sign to Camp David accords. (The previous three Arab-Israeli wars had resulted in Israel delivering a complete ass-kicking to all the Arab armies, so only receiving a partial ass-kicking was indeed a vast improvement.)
By contrast, Libya’s army seems pretty incompetent: they got their asses kicked by Chad in the Toyota War, in which Chadian forces armed with Toyota-pickup-mounted anti-tank guns left a billion dollars worth of Soviet equipment burning in the Aouzou Strip. It would not surprise me at all to find that the Libyan army is too poorly trained to suppress a real popular uprising.
Whether they want to or not, it looks like people all across the Middle East are fated to live in interesting times…
“The Islamic fifth column present throughout the West is far larger, better funded, and more dangerous than any domestic pro-fascist movement was in any democratic country in the 1930s, with the possible exception of the Czech Sudetenland. The appeasement we see all around us is more profound and will prove much harder to root out.”
Mary Steyn: “For the last three weeks, the superpower has sent the consistent message to the world that (as Bernard Lewis feared some years ago) America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.”
“Last week, for the second time in his presidency, Barack Obama heard those footsteps, jumped up to grasp a historic opportunity … and missed it completely….This failure was not the result of bad luck. It was the predictable consequence of the Obama administration’s lack of any kind of coherent grand strategy, a deficit about which more than a few veterans of U.S. foreign policy making have long worried….The defining characteristic of Obama’s foreign policy has been not just a failure to prioritize, but also a failure to recognize the need to do so. A succession of speeches saying, in essence, ‘I am not George W. Bush’ is no substitute for a strategy.”
Michael A. Walsh in the New York Post: “No matter how things shake out in Egypt, one thing has become depressingly clear: Something is very wrong with the American intelligence services.”
“As our once-stable ally Egypt hurtles down a path leading into the dark unknown, the U.S. can blame itself. The White House apparently did little after our intelligence agencies warned late last year that President Hosni Mubarak’s government was wobbly. Like Jimmy Carter’s handling of Central America, the U.S. backed a revolution, hoping it would make the revolutionaries our friends.”
Victor Davis Hanson in National Review: “For nearly three weeks, the Biden/Clinton/Obama policy concerning the tottering Mubarak regime was contradictory, incoherent, and predicated entirely on the perceived pulse of the demonstrations.”
Like Julie Taymor’s production (which I have not seen, but I have seen enough of Ms. Taymor’s previous work to trust the reviews of it I’ve read), Obama’s foreign policy is far more concerned with flash and spectacle than the boring matter of actual substance. Unfortunately, there’s no chance that Obama’s foreign policy will fold in previews, and we can’t make things better by getting Bono and The Edge to write us a few new tunes…
Geert Wilders: “All over Europe multicultural elites are waging total war against their populations. Their goal is to continue the strategy of mass-immigration, which will ultimately result in an Islamic Europe – a Europe without freedom: Eurabia.”
So goes the rumor de jour. Of course, since Obama’s CIA director Leon Panetta is one of the sources of information, I would take that with a huge grain of salt…