By ROGER KAPLAN on
9.13.12 @ 6:09AM
They are murderers and, yes, they are Muslim murderers.
When President Jefferson decided to
send a naval expedition to Tripoli to rescue American seamen and punish the
Barbary pirates, the opposition to him was practical....
The third president's answer to the first set of issues was to remind
Americans that we already were being taxed due to the lawlessness in the
western Mediterranean: the reason our ships were attacked by proto-Islamist
terrorists (they justified their criminality with Koranic references, as
Jefferson, who studied the Koran, was aware) was that it was lucrative to
attack them, steal the goods they carried, and ransom their crews........
He also was well
aware, of course, that a republic that did not defend its citizens would not
last long. ...........
But the Gaddafi problem, like the
problem of the Barbary pirates 200 years earlier, was destined to remain emblematic,
in its relatively small way, of our problems with what first was called the
Orient, later the Near East and the Middle East. We did not understand -- our
allies disagreed -- we disagreed among ourselves -- we hesitated between force
and reason -- we thought, always, the people could be differentiated and
separated from their rulers.
Messrs. Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama told their
own people, and the world, they were doing this purely out of the goodness of
their hearts. The Libyans were waiting for a chance to be just like us! How
could we turn them down? ....
The Libyan assembly that was elected this past spring included
perhaps more self-described secularists than avowed theocrats than did the ones
elected in Libya's western and eastern neighbors, Tunisia and Egypt. The
influence of Islamist agitators, quite overt during the civil war, was not
diminished by this political development.
Recent administrations have been, with
curious perspicacity, unable or unwilling to grasp the sources and motivations
of the Islamic political movement, commonly called Islamism. It is not as if
the information to understand it is unavailable or hermetic. ........
U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens,
murdered alongside three aides in the line of duty, paid the ultimate price in
the service of his country. Sadly, he paid the price, too, of administrations
and foreign policy establishments unwilling to take the full measure of
political Islam....
B. H. Obama, following Jimmy Carter, thinks of himself as a
champion of human rights, wherein if you remove the obstacles to indigenous
self-expression (including Western imperialism), mutual respect will follow and
universal peace will be just around the corner.
We cannot do much about it. We can, however,
stop fooling ourselves. The regimes that we foster in the Islamic world are not
what we think they are, or what we want them to be.
