Darkened earth: cartoons, ports, shrines, and the Islamic bomb

The big news stories of the past few weeks have left me drained and discouraged.

In Pakistan rallies, demonstrations, and protests continue despite official bans. Worldwide scores of people have died. Over cartoons. I don’t believe that the outrage is about cartoons or blasphemy or dishonor. I think it’s about rage itself. Along with the shouts of “Death to Denmark” they’re calling “Death to America” when major news media in America haven’t published the notorious cartoons and the president has criticized their publication.

What else can I think?

It is rage at modernity; it is rage at powerlessness; it is rage at poverty. The rage is at a thousand insults, real and imagined, over a thousand years or more.

The Cartoon Jihad, as some are calling it, galvanized an undercurrent of anger in this country that emerged in the reaction to the acquisition by UAE-based Dubai Ports World of British company Peninsular and Oriental Steamship Company and, along with it, the port terminal operations in six American cities. I don’t believe the deal caused the anger; I think it had been simmering there for five years or more; the riots, demonstrations, embassy-burning, boycotts, and murders over cartoons turned the heat up; and the heat resulted in the disproportionate reaction to the deal.

Not a single credible authority believes that the deal poses a security threat to the United States.

I’ve been arguing the merits and practicalities of the deal for more than a week here. The discussion isn’t about the merits: it’s about the anger.

The anger is for 9/11; the anger is at Arabs; the anger is at Muslims. The anger is at the President and Michael Moore and Ann Coulter and Democrats and Republicans and at the world.

Americans have sent a message loud and clear: Arabs can’t be trusted. That will have blowback.

On Wednesday of this week in an act of desparation terrorists destoyed a shrine in Iraq important to the Shi’a sect of Islam. Since the attack more than a hundred people have died in retaliatory attacks, Sunni mosques have been attacked and some destroyed, and an entire country is under curfew at the brink of civil war.

Creating terror is not the only objective of terrorist attacks: an equally important objective is provoking a response—preferably a misdirected or disproportionate response. Despite the incessant attacks over two years the terrorists and thugs in Iraq haven’t been able to provoke a response that would really turn the people of Iraq against our forces there or the government that our forces support or that would ignite a self-sustaining conflagration of sectarian or ethnic violence. The attack on the Shrine of the Two Imams was a desparate attack because it may well unite the people of Iraq in opposition to the thugs and terrorists who depend on at least their tacit support instead of plunging the nation into civil war. Neither we nor the terrorists can be certain of the outcome.

Deaths and threats of murder over rather innocuous cartoons; exaggerated fears about threats to national security posed by Arab ownership of a stevedoring company; a golden dome lying in rubble in the dusty streets of Samarra. These are the stories that have occupied our attention. Meanwhile the real story of the day is the inexorable progress of the Islamic Republic of Iran in activities which no reasonable observer can doubt will lead to the development of nuclear weapons in a month, a year, or 5 years, which may throw the Middle East and the entire world into war and economic upheaval.

Of the Middle Ages Dutch historian Johan Huizinga wrote:

It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened earth with his black wings. And soon the end of the world is expected. But mankind does not repent, the church struggles, and the preachers and poets warn and lament in vain.

I’m beginning to wonder if things have changed overmuch.

2 comments… add one
  • asdf Link

    “Not a single credible authority believes that the deal poses a security threat to the United States.”

    “Citing broad gaps in U.S. intelligence, the Coast Guard cautioned the Bush administration weeks ago that it could not determine whether a United Arab Emirates-based company seeking a stake in some U.S. port operations might support terrorist operations.”

    http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060227/ap_on_go_ot/ports_security

    “The former head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit joined in the criticism.
    ‘The fact that you are putting a company in place that could already be infiltrated by al-Qaeda is a silly thing to do,’ said Mike Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit until 1999.”

    http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20060224-1539-portssecurity.html

  • I don’t see Iraq on the brink of civil war. It’s a cobbled-together state to begin with, but the Kurds are not going to let their new-found freedom and prosperity go down the tubes.

    The Shia/Sunni problem is being exacerbated by Iran and Syria. The former because it desperately needs Iraq to fail and will not stop at anything to make sure it happens. The Syrian regime because it wants to take the heat off of its own fragile existence.

    The latest polls show that the great majority of Iraqis are glad we came and are glad we’re there. They’d like things to settle down enough so they could send us home. This is externally-aroused animosity. The same kind that kills off those who would try Saddam Hussein.

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