The press is, today, full of articles concerning the ISIS attack on a public gathering in Moscow. It appears that US intelligence warned Moscow, but Moscow claims the quality of the warning was insufficient for them to take action. The back and forth reminds me of a similar story emerging from the Hamas attack on the Israeli music festival. My guess is that in both instances we had a glimmer of an idea that something was going to happen, but we did not have enough detail about where and when for the attack to be prevented. Because both attacks were horrific, the host country feels it necessary to discredit the intelligence provided.
I see the back and forth as being of tactical importance. My interest in the two events is slightly different. I am far more interested in Radical Islam's anger with modern civilization, be it Russian, Chinese, Jewish, American or virtually anything else. Muslim insurgents are at war with all of the rest of us that do not accept Islam as the guiding light for our various societies. Periodically, this provides moments wherein we forget our antipathy to one another and unite in our fear of Radical Islam, but even there we usually fail to find a path forward that permits us to cooperate.
Today, China enslaves a vast Muslim Uighur population while simultaneously seeking to increase its role in the world at our expense. Russia is doing pretty much the same thing with its Muslim Chetchyn population. We are engaged in hunting down Radical Muslim leaders and assassinating them all over the Middle East and North Africa. None of us are trying to win the hearts and minds of Muslim populations, except perhaps President Biden's feeble tactical electoral effort among Muslim voters inside this country.
The Muslim world is split between Shia and Sunni. Today, the principal leaders of the two sects are Teheran and Riyadh. Whether we like it or not, we are impacted by the divisions that separate these two formidable entities, as are China, Russia and the rest of the world. I contend that none of us in the non-Muslim world have an adequate strategy that successfully addresses the challenge, and I firmly believe that our own weak-kneed policy vis-a-vis Teheran is extraordinarily dangerous. The people that are in power in Teheran are apocalyptic in their thinking. A nuclear holocaust in the name of Allah would be a good thing, particularly if it obliterated Jews and Americans, even if it martyred Arabs. Martyrdom in the name of Allah is, after all, the greatest honor to which an individual can aspire.
To the best of my knowledge, no Americans are thinking adequately about the challenge that Radical Islam presents. We see a threat and our knee-jerk reaction is to try to deal with it with bullets and missiles. All our policy does is increase the number of people that hate our guts. Because most of this is happening at village level in "shit hole countries," we are oblivious of it unless and until it bubbles over in places like North Africa ,the Middle East, or New York City. Our response to Radical Islam is one of the very few places where Americans are agreed as to what our policy should be. Kill the leaders with a drone strike on a pickup truck in some far off desert oasis.
I contend that what is necessary is an all-out effort to bring all peoples into the Western way of thinking and wean it away from Radical islamic thought. That is going to entail extensive, vigorous, expensive, continuing engagement down to the village level. I am not optimistic. Our over-the-horizon assassination strategy is much cheaper and far, far easier to understand than a policy set based on worldwide economic development. I am absolutely convinced that we could do the necessary and increasingly fearful that we will never admit it - neither here in this country nor in any other country in the world. Although our blindness has an origin different from that of our Radical islamic foe, it is, at root, very similar in being all encompassing and pervasive.
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