Programming note: Join Mark later this evening for another episode of his nightly audio adventure: Mystery in White, a "Christmas crime story" by Jefferson Farjeon. It airs right here at SteynOnline at 7pm North American Eastern - which is midnight Greenwich Mean Time.
~The "peaceful transfer of power" is a lot quicker in Syria than in America. Some perfunctory looting of the presidential palace, and next thing you know Mr and Mrs Assad and the kids are settling into their far more manageable studio apartment in Moscow. Before his mid-life career switch to murderous dictator, young Bashar was a respected London ophthalmologist. Yet he failed to read the writing on the wall.
On the BBC some or other expert was even using the phrase "Arab Spring" in a non-parodic context. This would be the same Arab Spring that delivered Egypt from strongman Mubarak to strongman Sisi (a counter-intuitive name for a strongman but it seems to be working for him; the first time I heard it I assumed "General Sissy" was Egyptian intelligence's code name for Obama).
This would be the same Arab Spring that delivered Libya's ports into the hands of Isis and bazillions of "asylum seekers" onto the shores of Europe, thereby leaving Sweden in nothing flat with a worse "gender" imbalance in its youth cohort than China after forty years of its "one child" policy.
The same Arab Spring that permanently destabilised one of the least worst Middle Eastern states, Jordan, with millions of Syrian "refugees".
Ah, but Arab Springs eternal. The jihadists now in charge of Damascus were, not so long ago, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Isis, but don't worry, the expert analysts assure us the leadership has become far less "ideological" and far more "nuanced". Is John Kerry doing a little light consulting work for them?
On the other hand, you'll be glad to know that, while Assads come and go, some things never change:
US troops should stay in Syria, top Democrat says https://t.co/4eQvfUvLS4
— POLITICO (@politico) December 8, 2024
The "top Democrat" in question is my own senator, if you're wondering how hard it is to become a "top Democrat". Just curious: are there any "bottom Democrats"?
Whereas the incoming president declared that we should all steer well clear of this:
Opposition fighters in Syria, in an unprecedented move, have totally taken over numerous cities, in a highly coordinated offensive, and are now on the outskirts of Damascus, obviously preparing to make a very big move toward taking out Assad. Russia, because they are so tied up...
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 7, 2024
So naturally, as soon as he said it, US warplanes took to the skies to begin bombing "selected targets" - as carefully selected, I'm sure, as that family of photogenic moppets the Pentagon droned on the way out of Kabul.
What the President Elect neglects to consider is this: We need American troops in Syria so that, as in Afghanistan, ninety-seven per cent of incoming "asylum seekers" can claim to have been US military translators - even though, upon arrival in Virginia, they don't speak English and require translators themselves.
The point to remember, as my late friend Irving Caesar, lyricist of No No Nanette, told me over forty years ago, is:
No one knows nothin'.
True for Broadway, and even truer for the "Middle East" - starting with the name, which is, more accurately, the "Near East", because, as the old British Foreign Office joke used to have it (and as the French, Italians, Germans et al have since discovered), it's a lot nearer than you think.
So what's more likely? That any of the stuff the expert class posited this last weekend comes true? Or that none of that happens, and more "asylum seekers" arrive in the west?
For example, the cable experts tell us that the loss of Assad is a massive setback for Putin. These are the same experts that have told us everything in the last three years is a massive setback for Putin: US sanctions, expulsion from the SWIFT global banking sytem, mysterious detonations of pipelines. And yet there he was hosting the most recent BRICS summit and flanked by the leaders of the entire Rest of the Planet, save for America and its Euro client-states.
We are tourists in the heart of darkness: we know nothing and we learn nothing. We have no idea who has just taken over in Damascus and we cheer them on only because it is necessary for the planet's least expert expert-class to maintain their credibility even as the world moves on:
For [Robert] Kagan it's all nevertheless 'an essential attribute of the American world order,' and therefore even the booming burqa sales and state-of-the-art clitoridectomy clinic are in their fashion a tribute to American influence.
It's a bit early in the week for my "As I wrote twenty years ago" spot, but, as I wrote in The National Post of Canada on June 19th 2000 - following the death of Bashar Assad's blood-soaked father, and Bill Clinton's subsequent effusions:
'I received word not very long ago of President Assad's death in Syria today,' he said at Minneapolis Airport. 'I was very saddened by it, and I want to offer condolences to his son, his family and the people of Syria.'
Gosh. When Frank Sinatra died, President Clinton made a lame joke and didn't bother offering condolences to Nancy, Tina, Frank Jr or the people of Palm Springs. But then Sinatra was a pretty dodgy character rumoured to have some dubious associates, so presidential circumspection was warranted. Not so with ol' Hafez. The President was prepared to concede they hadn't always seen eye to eye. Regrets, Bill had a few, but then again too few to mention - state-sponsored international terrorism, Lockerbie, the razing of Hama with 30,000 dead, one or two other piffling inconsequentialities.
True, the rest of the world's powers seemed generally inclined to give Hafez a good send-off, and at least Mr Clinton didn't go as far as French President Jacques Chirac, who decided to show up at the funeral.
None of that for poor old Junior. A quarter-century ago, we practiced realpolitik. Now we practice unrealpolitik. Robert Kagan's book was called The World America Made, which I summarised in Panglossian terms:
Once one accepts this is the most American of all possible American worlds, all is as American as it can possibly be.
Trump can't end this unrealpolitik soon enough. The central reality of a quarter-century of western "nation-building" in the east is that we have built nothing in the east and, in fact, have succeeded only in semi-demolishing the west. The Spectator, the world's oldest continuously published magazine and supposedly the bible of British conservatism, has a piece this week on how good-time party-town London is now deadsville and another on how the rise of Mohammed to the top boy's name is England and Wales is a "clear integration success story" (after protests from commenters, the phrase was removed from the column) - and nobody ever stops to consider precisely how these twin phenomena might be linked.
In a world of realpolitik, the Assads functioned as a fractious but conventional Third World racket. From my National Post column of June 2000:
The President [Clinton] may genuinely believe our thoughts should now be with Assad's family, but my advice is to pick and choose which relatives you offer condolences to very carefully: Don't say it to his brother Rifaat, the ambitious and violent playboy exiled after an attempted coup who's now planning to overthrow Assad's son Bashar, whom he's never liked, especially after last year's raid by Bashar's men on Rifaat's luxury stronghold at Lattakia left hundreds of casualties. Hold the condolences, too, with Assad's nephew Sanwar, who runs the anti-Assad Arab News Network in London. Skip 'em also with Assad's younger brother Jamil, exiled along with his immediate family in 1996 and rumoured along with Rifaat to have ordered the death of Assad's son Basel, who died in a mysterious car "accident" that also seriously injured his cousin Hafez.
Got that?
Me neither. Nevertheless, an unlovely dictatorship was not ideological in any meaningful sense. So what was that Arab Spring all about? Yours truly as it was unfolding thirteen years ago:
That's looking at it from our point of view. Looking at it from theirs, the regimes are belatedly aligning themselves with demographic reality. Across the last half-century, the chancelleries of the great powers invested their effort in maintaining 'stability': The result was that governments were superficially stable while their populations wholly transformed - and a huge chasm opened up between an ever more Islamic populace and the regimes they're ruled by. Say what you like about Mubarak but he wasn't into female genital mutilation. Unfortunately for him, his people were - or at any rate the menfolk were. So he banned it. Because he's a dictator, and what he says goes, right? And the net result of that ban is that, on the day he fell, precisely 91 per cent of the country's women were estimated to have undergone FGM: Long before the 'Facebook Revolution', Egypt voted with its clitorises.
Likewise, say what you like about Colonel Gaddafi but a guy who hires as bodyguards his own personal detachment of Austin Powers fembots is unlikely to be hung up on the small print of this or that hadith. The trajectory we're now on has less to do with 'social media' than with Monday's fatwa by Imam Qaradawi, Egypt's Khomeini wannabe, calling for the assassination of Gaddafi.
The eminent scholar dismisses the Gaddafi clan as 'swords of pre-Islamic ignorance' - which shows you how he regards what's underway: The anciens régimes were 'pre-Islamic', which means that what follows will be ...more Islamic.
And so it goes - for the Assad clan as for the Gaddafi clan; for Damascus and Cairo as for London and Montreal.
I'm not sure things could be much worse. Trump is right: We should steer clear of Syria, whatever "top Democrats" say, and we should focus on saving ourselves.
~We had a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, starting with Mark's column on lessons from the Montreal massacre. His Saturday music show celebrated Piaf, Nova Scotia, a thirty-quid classic and Sinatra as chairman of the bossa. Rick McGinnis's weekend movie date marked the anniversary of Pearl Harbor, and our Song of the Week joined in the reindeer games. Our marquee presentation was a brand new Tale for Our Time: for Part Eight, click here; for Part Nine, here; for Ten, here. Part Eleven airs tonight at SteynOnline.
If you were too busy dancing in the Arab Street this weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the above as a new week begins.
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