SPECIAL REPORT: AXIS OF ALLIES
By Christopher Orlet
The American Spectator
Oct 26 2006
Writing last week in the Wall Street Journal Tunku Varadarajan made a
good case that Pakistan’s leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf has been for
the past five years two-timing the U.S. The general has "played the
Americans beautifully":
After five years of Pakistani collaboration with the U.S. military in
Afghanistan, not one Taliban leader of consequence has been captured
or killed. Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, cries himself hoarse
over the Taliban functioning out of Pakistan’s western regions and he
is treated with open ridicule by Gen. Musharraf. There is precious
little, however, that George W. Bush can do about this: He cannot
now admit that a man he has called his "ally" for the past five years
has been double-crossing him nearly every minute of that time.
Nor can he admit that there is a "vast nuclear smuggling ring emanating
from Pakistan" (Washington Post), doubtless with Musharraf’s tacit
authorization, with Pakistani weapons finding their way to every
rogue nation that can scrape together a few bucks.
Sadly, the case of Pakistan is not unique. Another so-called ally,
Saudi Arabia, has also been playing the U.S. like one of Antonio
Stradivari’s fiddles. The Saudis have never been big fans of Team
USA. In fact, 87 percent of Saudis hold an unfavorable opinion of
the U.S. And their own leaders aren’t going to win any popularity
contests either. The Saudi royal family is nothing if not a web of
contradictions: an ally of the U.S. in the War on Terror and a main
target of Osama bin Laden, while at the same time an exporter of
radical Wahhabism. In fact, the only thing the Saudis export more of
is oil.
If any Muslim state should be pro-American, it is fellow NATO member
Turkey. A secular, nominally democratic nation, Turkey longs to
modernize and move closer to the West, while paradoxically keeping
Western society at arm’s length. (About three-quarters of Turks favor
EU integration, while a recent Pew Global Attitudes poll showed that
only 16 percent of Turks held a favorable view of Christians, just
one percentage point higher than their dislike of Jews.) Politically,
Turkey is a shambles, a secular government kept that way by a powerful
military that was seriously embarrassed recently when novelist Orhan
Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Politics…errr, Literature, despite
the government’s recent attempts to have him locked up for "insulting
the Republic." Not long ago Pamuk had the bad taste to bring up the
(1915-17) Armenian genocide. The Nobel laureate deserved some kind
of award, if only because he is hated by both the Islamicists and
the Turkish military, which means he must be doing something right.
As Pamuk’s novels amply demonstrate, there is in his homeland an
intense hate of "Europeanized" Turks, a revulsion that is only kept
from violent outbreak by a thuggish military that routinely uses
torture and the threat of torture to maintain a semblance of order.
The Turkish rural majority is rabidly anti-American. A recent poll
shows that a mere 12 percent of Turks hold a favorable opinion of
the U.S. As for our allies in the capital Ankara, the Turks not only
opposed the War in Iraq, their parliament voted to forbid U.S. troops
from crossing into Iraq from Turkish soil.
EGYPT IS ANOTHER so-called friend who is an ally in name only. An
impressive 98 percent of Egyptians surveyed have an "unfavorable
attitude" toward the U.S., according to a Zogby poll. Perhaps Egyptians
hate the U.S. so much because their military is the second largest
recipient of American foreign aid, which tends to be used to prop up a
double-dealing dictatorship that encourages the spread of anti-American
propaganda ("vicious and loony lies," according to James Glassman of
the American Enterprise) which tends to feed Muslim extremism.
And thanks to Saudi meddling, Asian Muslim nations are experiencing
an upsurge of anti-Western feeling as Wahhabism replaces the mainly
peaceful, moderate version of Islam long practiced by Asians.
Wahhabism takes its most radical form in terrorist factions like
Islamic Defenders’ Front, Darul Islam, Laskar Jihad, and Jemaah
Islamiah, groups that seem determined to prove to their Arab
co-religionists that they are indeed true Muslims, and who are
responsible for the many terror attacks in Bali and the Philippines.
Jemaah Islamiah, a member of the al Qaeda network, maintains that
it will not cease its terror campaign until a pan-Islamic state,
consisting of Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippine
island of Mindanao, is established.
This is especially troubling considering that Indonesia is the
world’s fourth most populous country with the world’s largest
Muslim population. And nowhere do terrorists get off so easily as
in Indonesia. Human Right’s Watch reports that "Abu Bakar Bashir,
believed by many to be the spiritual head of the terrorist organization
Jemaah Islamiyah, was convicted in March 2005 of criminal conspiracy
behind the 2002 Bali bombings. Due to poor conduct of the prosecution,
he was acquitted of the more serious charge of planning a terrorist
attack. He received a sentence of only thirty months, which was
further shortened to twenty-five-and-a-half months in an August 2005
Independence Day sentence reduction."
The standard response is that these allies should be cut a generous
amount of slack, since they must delicately balance the conflicting
ideals of their Muslim populations and their Western allies, which
must be why they tell Bush and Rice one thing and their Muslim masses
another. This would explain the Musharraf-Bush-Karzai love-in at
the White House last month, while back home in Islamabad the natives
were hearing that the U.S. threatened to bomb Pakistan back to the
Stone Age if Musharraf didn’t cooperate in the War on Terror. Such
two-timing works to the general’s advantage, of course. A recent BBC
poll showed that 88 percent of Pakistanis believe that Musharraf was
pressured to support the War on Terror.
Majority Muslim nations and the West are not natural allies. Most
Muslim countries are undemocratic, or at best illiberal democracies
where separation of church and state and other basic freedoms are
wanting, where Sharia law trumps what’s known as Roman or British
law, where religious police or a thuggish military dispense a unique
brand of primitive justice. More and more Muslims are adopting
an anti-Christian, anti-American, and anti-modern desert Islam due
largely to the continuing exportation of Saudi and Egyptian preachers
of hate. We call these countries our allies, but only because
our vocabulary lacks a descriptive noun for such an unpleasant,
but necessary arrangement. Genuine allies share goals, values, an
interest in outcomes — they are those nations you can trust to get
your back. Britain is such an ally, Australia, Canada, Poland too.
Perhaps some industrious young linguist will come up with an
appropriate neologism. Ally isn’t cutting it.
Christopher Orlet is a frequent contributor and runs the Existential
Journalist.
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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
