RUTHFULLY YOURS

“THE ARABS DO NOT SEEM BENT ON STARTING HOSTILITIES”

[Note by Tom Gross]

(This dispatch may be of interest to historians on this list.)

I attach two articles, both by Amir Oren, defense correspondent for the Israeli paper Haaretz.

The first piece, published today, reports on newly released CIA documents that detail how the agency got their predictions about the Yom Kippur War spectacularly wrong.

The CIA wrote in a briefing for the president on October 6, 1973 (the day that Israel was attacked):

“Tension along Israel’s borders with Egypt and Syria has been heightened by a Soviet airlift that is in its second day… but neither side seems bent on starting hostilities… A military initiative at this time would make little sense for either Cairo or Damascus.”

Within hours (maybe minutes, considering the time gap between Washington and Jerusalem) of that report being delivered, the Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel in a massive offensive from both north and south.

As Haaretz notes: “The CIA’s big secret was that it didn’t have a secret. It knew very little from covert sources. Many of the clauses that appeared in the PDB [President’s Daily Brief] were taken from ambassadors’ telegrams, leaders’ speeches and newspaper articles.”

(Tom Gross adds: The CIA has on many other occasion, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, made ill-judged predictions and assessments.)

The second piece below concerns a rare interview given in October 2013, on the fortieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, by Henry Kissinger for an Israeli television documentary called “The Avoidable War”.

Kissinger attempts to persuade Israelis that the U.S. helped save their country during the 1973 war, although many Israelis doubt this and indeed argue that Kissinger actually helped the Egyptian forces prepare for the war by, among other things, pressuring Israel not to destroy the anti-aircraft rocket launching pads which the Egyptians and Soviets set up in the Suez Canal a few days before the Egyptians invaded, and which were not supposed to be there according to the Rogers ceasefire.

By the time the war broke out, the rocket launching pads were armed and it was too late for Israel safely to do anything about it.

This author has argued that Europe’s Islamization — aided, abetted and enabled by the continent’s multiculturalist ideology — should serve as a warning and a lesson for America.

But when a European state does the right thing, we should take notice of that, too.

In the wake of the conviction of Britain-based Islamic supremacist preacher Anjem Choudary, an advocate for imposing Sharia law on Great Britain and supporter of global jihadism, British authorities are doing something that every Western nation ought to replicate.

Recognizing the problem of the spread of Islamic supremacism among prison populations, Secretary of State for Justice Liz Truss announced that the government would be establishing separate prison units for holding “a small number of very subversive individuals.”

Truss said prisons cannot continue to allow extremists to “peddle poisonous ideology across the mainstream prison population.” As the BBC notes, UK officials visited prisons in Netherlands for a close look at the program, as a similar “jail within a jail” program has been implemented by the Dutch.

Britain is right to acknowledge the spread of Islamist ideology in its criminal justice system and undertake a plan to remove the cancer.

Lawmakers in Germany are under increased pressure to tackle the country’s growing trend of child marriages, renewing the debate over whether to allow Islamic Sharia law to supersede the country’s legal system when applied to its refugee population.

With the wave of more than 1.2 million migrants, mostly of the Islamic faith, coming in from Iraq and Syria, German courts are being forced to consider the legality of Muslim marriages that include girls sometimes as young as 13, Britain’s Sunday Times reported.

According to estimates, the number of refugee child marriages is currently at 1,000, although activists believe the figure is much higher.

In one case, authorities ruled in favor of Fatima, a pregnant 15-year-old Syrian refugee, allowing her husband, a fellow Syrian refugee more than double her age, to be accommodated in the same town so they could be near each other. Fatima told reporters that after her family escaped Syria for Turkey, she pleaded with them to marry her off to “the next man who is willing” so she could escape to Europe.

In Bavaria, there are over 700 refugee brides under the age of 18, including 160 under 16. Typically, German law does not permit marriage under 18, although with parental consent, the court can recognize the marriage of a 16-year-old.

In addition, the U.N. estimates that 51 percent of brides in Syrian refugee camps are underage, compared with just 13 percent at the start of the civil war.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has come under a barrage of criticism from European leaders holding her open-door policy on refugees responsible for the recent wave of critical terror attacks in Germany and throughout the continent.

Last month, within one week, there were four terror attacks in Germany.

When a court in Bamberg, Bavaria ruled in June to accept the validity of a marriage between a 21-year-old Syrian man and his 14-year-old cousin, the issue of child marriage was again brought to focus, along with the debate over the extent of Islamic law and customs that will be allowed by Western countries.

The Islamic State has released a gruesome new video showing children executing captured Kurdish and Syrian soldiers.

Children of foreign fighters reportedly hailing from Britain, Egypt, Tunisia, Kurdistan and Uzbekistan pull out handguns and place them behind their captives’ heads before taking aim and opening fire in a video published by ISIS jihadis based in the group’s de-facto capital of Raqqa, Syria.

One juvenile executioner’s gun appears to lock up briefly, but he smiles smugly before coldly completing the execution. One of the victims appears to be a teen himself.

Known as ‘cubs of the Caliphate,’ children in the Islamic State have been assigned advanced roles in ISIS propaganda movies.

The Islamic State has also systematically used children both in active jihad and in recruitment practices, encouraging many of them to leave their families and join ISIS.

Fighting alongside adults, children under ISIS control attend child soldier training facilities and are used to carry out executions and suicide bombing missions.

At the end of the video, another set of executions take place. This time, the executioners are old men, likely further jihadi propaganda suggesting that from the young to the elderly, anyone can participate in jihad.

The core strategic problem we face is two conflicts with two ideologies that operate subversively until they are in power. That is, instead of stating their agenda openly, Islam and the left operate as false fronts maintaining a friendly moderate image while pursuing a far more radical agenda.

The distinction between moderates and radicals is at the heart of the debate about Islamic terrorism. Much as it used to be at the heart of the debate about Communism and its fellow travelers. Everyone will concede that there are indeed radicals, if only ISIS and Stalin. What they will deny is the extent of the complicity and, more significantly, the fact that the radicals were pursuing the same ends as the moderates, an Islamic Caliphate or a Communist dictatorship, only more rapidly and ruthlessly.

The thing that must be understood is that moderates do not disavow radicals. Rather they bridge the gap between the radicals and the larger society, justifying their ends, and eventually their means, while pretending to disavow them. Radicals reject any dialogue. Moderates emphasize dialogue.

Moderates will verbally reject the means with which an end is pursued. Accordingly they will reject terrorism. They may even claim to reject the ends, such as an ideological dictatorship, but they will, in good fellowship, ask you to accept their premise which inevitably leads to the acceptance of both the ends and the means.

For example, moderates on the left and in Islam will ask you to accept that terrorism is caused by American foreign policy. Once you have accepted this premise, then you have partially justified terrorism and paved the way for accepting an “Arab Spring” that eliminates the consequences of American foreign policy by properly Arabizing and Islamizing the governments of the region.

Nation-building has become a very controversial term. And with good reason. Our conviction that we can reconstruct any society into another America is unrealistic. It ignores our own exceptionalism and overlooks the cultural causes of many conflicts. It assumes that a change of government and open elections can transform a tribal Islamic society into America. They can’t and won’t.
But it’s also important to recognize that what we have been doing isn’t nation-building, but Islam-

building.

Nation-building in Germany and Japan meant identifying a totalitarian ideology, isolating its proponents from political power and recreating a formerly totalitarian state as an open society. That is the opposite of what we did in Afghanistan and Iraq, never mind Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Yemen and all the rest.

We did temporarily pursue de-Baathification in Iraq. But the Baathists were just Saddam’s cult of personality. Saddam was a problem in Iraq. But he wasn’t the problem in Iraq. His rule was a symptom of the real problem which was the divide between Sunnis and Shiites. The real problem was Islam.

Because we failed to recognize that, de-Baathification failed. The Baathists just folded themselves into ISIS. The Sunni-Shiite war went on even without Saddam. Today Sunnis and Shiites are still killing each other in Iraq much as they had for a long time. We have boiled this war down to ISIS, but ISIS, like Saddam is just another symptom of the political violence and divisiveness inherent in Islam.

Instead of secularizing Iraq, our efforts at democracy only heightened divisions along religious lines. The “Lebanon” model for Iraq with power sharing arrangements between Sunnis and Shiites was doomed.

Iraq’s first election was dominated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. If that name rings a bell, it should. It came out of Iran. You know, the original Islamic Revolution. The “free” election had given a boost to an Islamic terror group whose goal was the creation of an Islamic State in Iraq.

The bloodiest days of the Iraq War actually came when two sets of Islamic terror groups fighting to create an Islamic State began killing each other… and us. We know one of those groups today as ISIS. The other group is the Iraqi government. And a decade later, they’re still killing each other.

Instead of nation-building in Iraq, we practiced Islam-building. Iraq’s constitution made Islam the official religion and the fundamental source of legislation. Its first real law was that, “No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.” The new Iraq we had built was an Islamic State.