Analyst's note:  Absolutely must read and carefully consider.  Over the last 30-days this is the one article that simply must not be ignored.  This extremely hard-hitting article takes on the total lack of understanding that comes from the American elite of our country's regarding the Islamist enemy.  An fascinating argument is made that, "Three trillion dollars is surely enough in squandered and desperately needed wealth to cause some to think, or rethink, about the folly of policies based on confusion, ignorance, wishful thinking -- that is, on a refusal to understand the ideology of Islam."  Three reasons are provided for the reemergence of the global Islamist jihad.  Dr. Phares lays totally bare the faulty understanding by the extremely rich in the West who would try to demonstrate there newly found self-perceived "skills" at strategic thinking and their still faulty understandings of what they call "nation building" in the Middle East. 

I provide here just enough of the argument to whet your appetite.  After reading the highlighted portion of this material by Dr. Walid Phares, please click on the above title and read the entire article.

 

"[...] But in all the talk and chatter about that economic degringolade, it maddens not to hear howls of protest about the vast sums that have been spent and are being spent, and if many in power have their way, will continue to be spent in order to "deal with the problem of Islam" in all the wrong ways - by bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq, which was supposed to serve as some kind of model for other Arab countries. But what Arab country, all of them ruled by Sunnis, would take any comfort, much less model itself on, Iraq, where the Sunnis have been stripped of their power, which is now firmly in the hands of Shi'a Arabs? And in Afghanistan, the theme is one of "reconstruction," which is certainly an odd word to use about one of the poorest, least accessible, most remote, and least developed countries on earth, a place where whatever is spent is likely to be diverted into the pockets of the endlessly corrupt. For in Afghanistan there is hardly any understanding of the concept of citizenship, of good government, of true patriotism. In Muslim countries, political power has always been the way to seize wealth as well, and then to distribute it to one's family, one's tribe, fellow members of one's village or city or sect.

In America, the very rich, having acquired their wealth, want the glamor and glory of entering politics, and are willing to spend large sums - even hundreds of millions of dollars - to obtain high office. In Arab and Muslim lands, high office is ordinarily obtained by violence and guile and sometimes both. The point of acquiring political power is to acquire wealth for oneself and one's closest associates -- the Family-and-Friends Plan is very popular in the Middle East.

The failure to be well prepared has had many disturbing consequences. The failure, that is, to learn about the doctrines of Islam has had many disturbing consequences. Those doctrines are immutable because they are based primarily on the Qur'an and on the Sunnah. The Sunnah consists primarily of the attitudes and practices derived from the sayings and acts and details of the life of Muhammad, believed by Muslims to have been preserved in written form in the Hadith (the record of his sayings and deeds) and the Sira (his biography, as written for Believers). The people in charge in our political system, and the people who are in charge of our media - that is, the two groups of people who presume to protect and instruct us - have singularly failed to take on the task of learning about Islam. They have not read and reread the relevant texts. They have not read, much less reread, the scholarly material available that has been compiled by dedicated Western scholars from dozens of different lands, in the century of Western scholarship that came to an end round about 1970. At that time, Arab money began buying up, or even helping to open, "academic" centers where only those who toed the apologist's line were hired or promoted.

Hired and promoted were Muslims who were quick to defend the faith, and as part of defending it, to misrepresent it in ways not always detected by the unwary. The membership, for example, of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, has gone from 7% to over 70% Muslim. Even this figure does not tell the full story, for those non-Muslims who enter the field and expect to survive consist often of those who are self-selected admirers of, say, what they take to be a milder form of Islam (such as Sufism). Others have found a vocationally and socially acceptable outlet for their own otherwise-unacceptable mental pathologies (i.e., antisemitism). Still others may be working out their resentments toward Christianity. The ex-nun Karen Armstrong, though not in academic life, has found a well-paid niche where she can indulge her dislike of Christianity, as well as other antipathies, in her "neutral" treatment of what she keeps telling us are the "three abrahamic faiths." She also provides a sanitized version of the life of Muhammad, and of the tenets of Islam, that at this point appears so grotesque that the need to rebut her may not be as pressing as it once was (see "The Coherence of Her Incoherence").

But just as ideas have consequences, the lack of ideas, or the lack of knowledge, has had consequences. The doctrines of Islam have not changed in 1350 years. While there are certainly differences of sect (Sunni, Shi'a, Ibadi) and differences of approach to God (the Sufis, for example) and differences in emphasis, it cannot be said that the essential irreducible doctrines of Islam vary, even if Muslims themselves may vary in the degree to which they fully accept, or fully apply in their own lives, the doctrines that are inculcated.

The doctrine of Jihad did not disappear between the time Europe entered the Middle East in 1798, with Napoleon's entry into Egypt, and the latter half of the twentieth century. And it did not suddenly reappear in the last few decades. Rather, it was always present, but in a period of perceived Muslim weakness and Western strength, was not, in the West, acted upon. All that has changed, and changed for three reasons. The first is that I have already mentioned - the trillions of dollars in OPEC revenues that the recipients of that colossal wealth did nothing to deserve. But with that money, they have bought trillions in arms, bought the ability to spread Islam through mosques, madrasas, propaganda, Westerners on the payroll. The second are the millions of Muslims who have been allowed to settle deep within the countries of Western Europe, without any thought being given as to whether or not Islam itself, the ideology of Islam, might make it impossible for all but a handful to truly integrate into Western societies.

Those immigrants came not to be loyal and grateful to the Infidels for saving them from the hellholes of their own countries but, rather, came to enjoy what the Western world had created and could not have created had that Western world been Muslim. Yet failing to understand this, these Muslim immigrants held fast to their contempt for Infidel laws and institutions and social arrangements. A great many supported the same goals as the many Muslim terrorist groups, even if they did not participate in terrorism, or indeed in violent acts, directly. The third change that helped to bring about the "return of Jihad" was the exploitation by Muslim propagandists of Western technology - audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television, the Internet - to spread the full message of Islam both to those who were always Muslims but knew very little about the faith beyond the Five Pillars. So many illiterate villagers have now, alas, been made more aware of what is required of them as Muslims, and more aware, too, of just how wicked are the Infidels.

Jihad never went away, but the ability to engage in Jihad, and to dream that it might be possible to conquer the hereditary enemy, "Western Christendom," not through military means but through demographic conquest, has been discussed by several Muslim leaders (Boumedienne, Qaddafy) in public, and by others, no doubt more prudent and clever, in private. And the theme is never far from Muslim websites, produced by and for Muslims, but which you may eavesdrop on at any time.

What maddens about the failure to grasp all this is that it has led directly to the squandering of three trillion dollars. Had the American government under Bush, or under Obama, been filled with people who had taken it upon themselves to spend the time to study Islam, then the irrelevance of the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan to the real goals and the important theatres of war, and the instruments of war or rather Jihad that matter, would have been seen. Yet Islam is not hieratic, it's not obscure or abstruse, it's not particularly difficult. Almost anyone of moderate intelligence could do it, and in a few weeks learn enough to at least not be fooled so readily.

What result can be achieved for the Americans and other Infidels in Iraq by creating a state that remains relatively free of internecine strife, and able to use its vast oil wealth wisely? What good does that do us? If we build up Iraqi forces by 600,000 men (army and police) how does that help us? If we do everything we can to prevent Shi'a and Sunnis from warring with each other in Iraq and possibly causing similar strife between Sunnis and Shi'a in Bahrain, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, Al-Haza province of eastern Saudi Arabia, how does this help to divide and weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad? And will this strife not happen inevitably, because the atmospherics of Islam encourage violence and aggression? We'll soon find out, and I am convinced that many Americans will suffer pangs of remorse for having been so foolish as to indulge their nation-making polypragmonic impulse, rather than to follow and even happily embrace the wisdom of exploiting, by doing nothing, the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within that Camp of Islam.

And the same squandering of resources can be seen in Afghanistan. What is the outcome desired? That the Taliban will cease to exist? That it will allow itself to make peace with the government? That the government of Afghanistan will be, could ever be, a true friend of the Infidel Americans, even though every Muslim in Afghanistan learns that the permanent enemy of Muslims are Infidels, and that no matter how seemingly generous those Infidels may be, it is only to promote their own, Infidel, and therefore unacceptable, interests? And if we supply Afghans with electricity grids so that every village can now be hooked up to the outside world, doesn't that mean that every village will now be able to receive Islamic propaganda, which is far more likely to be listened to and accepted than anything else on offer, because the audience already consists of people who think of themselves as Muslims and, as Muslims, are ready to do whatever they find out that Muslims are expected or required to do? How many Muslims have you heard of who, ignorant of much of Islam, upon finding out more about it, and what it says about the treatment of non-Muslims, recoiled in horror and decided to drop Islam? There are remarkable exceptions, people who did jettison Islam. But how many? Can policies be constructed on the hope that the numbers of the remarkable exceptions will magically increase? Does that make sense? Is that wise?

In Iraq, we will be blamed, we are being blamed, on all sides, for whatever outcome they do not like. If the Sunnis do not acquiesce, the Shi'a will blame us for trying to "foist Allawi" on them. If the Shi'a do not surrender some of their power, the Sunnis will blame us for having given power to "the turbans" and not having supported Allawi (whose party had two more seats than Maliki's slate), whom they claim was "the winner" even though the Shi'a outnumber the Sunni Arabs by 3 to 1, and have shown they will make deals in order to preserve Shi'a dominance. The Arabs will blame us for encouraging Kurdish dreams of independence. The Kurds will blame us for "abandoning them" if we try to force them to accept the Arabs in Mosul or Kirkuk and to abandon dreams of independence, and so on. And the same blame-the-infidels scenario will occur and is already occurring in Afghanistan, where the oily Karzai has turned into the slippery Karzai, threatening to "join the Taliban myself" if the Americans don't watch it - and now he has turned on the charm again, in order to keep the American men and money there.

But we don't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world in order to do the impossible, to give Afghanistan a central government that works and whose writ runs far beyond Kabul. Or rather, we might be able to do it if we are willing to stay for five or ten or twenty years, and to spend another few trillion dollars to make that our little project for the first quarter of the twenty-first century. But should we? Does it make sense? If we refuse to do this, if we leave, are we then forever prevented from vigilantly monitoring the territory of Afghanistan lest "Al Qaeda come back"? And can't we, intermittently, using Special Forces, drones, and missiles from afar, from time to time disrupt any attempt to return Al Qaeda or any of a dozen terrorist groups to Afghanistan? Wouldn't that make better sense? And why should we build up yet another Muslim country, when it is impossible for its Muslim inhabitants to abandon Islam and what it teaches them? And what it teaches them requires them to view us with permanent, deep, if occasionally hidden, malevolence. Even if there are sincere examples of Afghan Muslims who do not feel this way, that is, who ignore a central feature and duty of the ideology of Islam, what comfort should that bring us? Why should we base a policy in Afghanistan on a handful of touchingly charming women trying to be educated, or a seductive warlord, or a Gunga-Dinnish army commander who truly, deeply, madly, wants to be on our side? Such exceptions can, given American sentimentality, cloud the mind. Those who make policy have to sober up.

Why should money be the theme of this article? Because not everyone thrills to the subject of what Islam inculcates. Not everyone quite wants to go through learning about Jizyah, or dhimmis, or naskh, or isnad-chains, or any of the rest. But everyone in the United States knows that we have been having a terrible time economically, and that we are talking about losses of tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars, and are regarding these losses with horror - just look at the State of California. Yet we have not focused on the greatest (continuing) expenditure of them all - the wars to protect ourselves against jihad by refusing to see it as primarily an ideological war, and by continuing to fool ourselves into thinking that if we create better (by our lights) societies in Iraq and Afghanistan, that will somehow - no one has ever explained how, or even thought he had an obligation to explain how - dampen the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide for Jihad. That Jihad, however, is based, let it be emphasized, not on an "interpretation" of Islam that can be changed, but on the immutable text of the Qur'an, and the Hadith that more than a millennium ago were studied, and winnowed. What remained was assigned different ranks of "authenticity" by those deemed to be the most authoritative muhaddithin, such as Al-Bukhari and Muslim. This can't be undone, not by Bright Young Muslim Reformers who keep getting grants from the American government and the Carnegie Foundation, or who keep getting hired and promoted on the basis of their entirely factitious achievements in this line."