(no subject)

[fpb]

I cannot believe that Obama is now proposing, as his Big Idea, to bribe the Taliban out of the war. Does he imagine that has not been tried in decades of war? And does he not imagine that they will take the money with a grin on their faces - said grin becoming rather fixed when they realize how far the dollar has been devalued - and use it to purchase more plastic explosive and heavy machine-guns? Come on, Mr.President, this is a real world.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I doubt it. I do suspect, however, that he has no wish to look at Afghani and Muslim reality in the face. In his life, he has always met polite, upper-class Muslims of the same kind as himself, and the savage and homicidal obstinacy of the Taliban is something, I suspect, that simly contradicts all his categories. And it is also true that the Taliban are something new, unprecedented in Sunni Islamism. In spite of long years of war and of several major defeats, they have never shown any sign of developing serious internal divisions, let alone of turning on each other. They are cohesive, like Khomeinist Shia or a Western political party. As someone pointed out, in other cases of war with Sunnis, you could have counted on someone important breaking with his friends and becoming vulnerable to bribes or the thirst for vengeance. But if that had been the case with the Taliban, it would have taken place long ago. To the contrary, not only have they held together in spite of severe defeats and long and unprofitable struggle, they have also spread to Pakistan (in which there is a bitter irony, given that Pakistan virtually invented them).

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

In his life, he has always met polite, upper-class Muslims of the same kind as himself

I really wasn't going to comment on this post, but please tell me that was a Freudian slip?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Not in the least. The operative words are "polite, upper-class" - members of an international aristocracy who have as much in common with each other as with their own countries, if not more so. I met them in Oxford. Obama is the type to the life.

[inverarity.livejournal.com]

It was the "Muslim" part I was questioning. As written, it read as if you've actually thrown in with the "Obama is a secret Muslim" crowd.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I certainly do think that his religious identity is marginal. But then, many American presidents including Lincoln and probably Washington were not Christian. (The most recent was Taft, who was a Unitarian and stated in so many words that he did not believe in the Incarnation.) If Obama were a Muslim, he would be quite outrageously out of skew with the average - rather like a family of Egyptian diplomats I knew in Rome, whose teen-age daughter used to laze around the semi-public local pool with my sister in a bikini in the summer, and would consider aloud becoming a Christian because she had liked Jesus Christ Superstar so much. It is his ignorance, and not his knowledge, of Islam, that bothers me.