Dean's World

I was watching CNN earlier and there was much ado about the Iranian election and the new "president-elect" in the bottom crawl on the screen -- nothing to even indicate anything fishy might have gone on surrounding that election. It got about the same coverage as the Canadian election, which is strange because the Canadian election was real.

The problem right now is not Iran and whether or not its recent election was phony; but Iraq and the (presumably Sun'a) islamic Arabs flooding across the more or less uncontrolled borders with Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, for purposes of lining up for an opportunity to blow up themselves and as many as possible of US or Iraq military personnel.

Unless you think we have an additional volunteer army of some 250-400 thousand men ready to send across the Iranian border to democratize that place as well.

Lesson I learned long ago as a kid on the streets of Chicago: If you find yourself on someone else's turf, be there in strength. Or shut your mouth, smile, don't act threatening to the local gang, and get the fuck out of there as soon as you can safely boogie your way over to the nearest elevated train station.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Good. You're learning the realities of the mean streets of all the crummy gang-ridden Chicagos of the entire crummy world.

In this case, never forget that "power" around the USA is now defined by what the domestic political climate will permit you to deploy, and where they will permit you to deploy it, whom they will permit you to lock up on what island, and to what degree you even can shoot dead the god-damned terrorists who are attacking our soldiers. Regardless of the provocation to go to war in the first place.

I would drink poison before I would take part in a war under these circumstances. The exclusive purpose for organizing, arming and training a military force is to smash things up and hurt people. And I firmly stand by the principle of unlimited force applied universally against an enemy on an unlimited basis until unconditional victory is achieved.

That was how my older cousins and younger uncles won World War II. Lack of it was how my own generation got stalemated in the Korea war, and how the generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s lost the war in Viet Nam. Now a new generation of American soldiers is being set up to lose yet another war, and the daily thought of this tears me to pieces.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

The fascist element in Iraq has the very same backing as did the fascist element that took down the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

Namely the Saudi gangs and their extended and wired-in families, that we presently are enriching every time we or anyone else in the West purchases a barrel of their stinking petroleum or the gasoline distilled from it. Our "allies", indeed, the monarchy of Saudi Arabia.

Nothing in the Middle East will fundamentally change unless and until that monarchy is destroyed. Because they are ones who put the fascism into islamo-fascism.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

I've never been quite so down on the Saudis as folks like you and Mary, Arnold. I think the reformist element within that kingdom can be worked with--but a necessary precondition to that was in fact Iraq.

It may be that we'll fail in all that. In that case I hope the so-called "liberals" realize what's likely to happen if we do pull out of that region and then there's another 9/11 type attack. It won't be pretty, at all.

Fairly put and well written, Dean. Moreover, to no small extent, I agree with you.

But we must not allow the long-term interests of the United States, or of western civilization, to be hang on the survival of a successful, widespread, well-connected and infinitely wealthy arabian mafia family.

Therefore, I would suggest that seriously begin planting democracy around the middle east, and stop making deals with the devil over every fundamental issue that comes up in dealing with the Arabs.

1) Stop refering to the country in question as Saudi Arabia. It will cease to be such the very moment that dynasty is overthrown. Get used to the idea of plain old "Arabia". It would also be a fine signal that we identify with the people of that country, not merely with its 67-year-old monarchy.

2) Democracy means the end of religious intolerance and hatred practiced so rigorously by the Saudis and the religious authorities who run most aspects of public and private life in that country. Support them in all ways that they choose to preach and practice the benign form of Islam supported by the Sufists. Oppose them in all ways that they choose to sustain and promote the crazed fascism of the Wahhabists.

3) Democracy means civil codes that differentiate between the state and one or more religions. Do everything possible to adopt such codes all across the Arab world, and wend their way free of the straitjackets of shari'a. Just as individual citizens of other countries are free to practice any religion of their choice, or none at all, the same should apply to any modern state that is predominantly islamic.

4) Peace in the mideast can never come unless and until the Arab world, including the oil monarchies, end their war with Israel, the sole jewish state. These same Saudis who have funded Jew-hatred for some 60 years could have helped make peace as early as 1948-1949, especially by using some of their vast oil revenues to help relocate all the palestianian refugees to what subsequently became more than 20 independent Arab states. The Zionists had and still have better long-term historical claim to the lands of Israel than any Arabs, past or present. And if they want to integrate Israel into the Arab world, why can they not begin by inviting Israel to membership in the Arab League?

5) The treatment and status of women throughout the current islamic world (just just the arab world) is despicably vicious, and is almost on a par with the practice still extent in Arabia of capturing non-islamic black Africans and reducing them to perpetual slavery. The Arab word for blacks is "abeed", which means "slave". Both their treatment of women and of blacks is a consciousless disgrace that never should be permitted anywhere in the world.

6) If the oil is so important to the United States and to the western world, then let us use just a portion of our military forces to take and hold the oil fields, and make sure that the funds derived from the sale of the oil and its resultant by-products, are used exclusively in pursuit of democracy, not in enrichment of a mafia family.

If we had wanted to make a deal with a gangster regime, we could have done so with Saddam Hussein and saved considerable expense and many lives, not a few of them American. We chose instead to pull down that gangster. The true record of the misdeeds of the Saudi family are well recorded and are well-known even to the Arabists of the US State Department. Perhaps especially well-known to them, if they choose to be honest about it.

Therefore, no matter what accommodations we must make with these gangsters in the short term, let us remember that in the long-term they are merely another failed, corrupt dynasty that one day will be removed from power, and probably to be dealt with at the hands of their own citizens in the fashion of so many other mideast kings and kinglets.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI