RUTHFULLY YOURS

For some years now, the Obama administration has worked on developing a “Countering Violent Extremism” (CVE) strategy. Its goals: to be proactive in stopping terrorists from radicalizing and recruiting followers, and to address the factors that allow such actions to occur in the first place. Last week the result of some of these deliberations — a twelve-page strategy fronted by the State Department and USAID — was published.

In its foreword, Secretary of State John Kerry lists some of those countries affected by “violent extremism” (“from Afghanistan to Nigeria”) as well as the identity of violent extremist groups (“Da’esh . . . al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabaab, and Boko Haram”). The focus then, seems clear: countries with a significant Muslim population and Islamist terrorist groups. Yet here is where the strategy takes a turn for the surreal, because from the content of the actual strategy, you would not realize any such thing — the document is just that opaque, obfuscatory, and, ultimately, unhelpful.

Regarding why violent extremism takes root, the reader is treated to a variety of possibilities. They include “individual psychological factors . . . community and sectarian divisions and conflicts.” Other explanations are corruption, insufficiently robust courts, and a lack of tolerance among different ethnicities.

Apparently not even worthy of discussion is Islam or Islamism, words that are not mentioned once. This is no accident. There has been a concerted attempt to scrub any religious aspect from the actions of ISIS and al-Qaeda: That is why phrases like “violent extremism” even exist. (First mainstreamed by the British government, “violent extremism” was dreamed up as a way to avoid saying “Islamic” or “Islamist” extremism in the months after the July 2005 suicide bombings in London. The phrase swiftly traveled across the Atlantic and into the U.S. government’s vocabulary.)

The strategy states that “to be effective, CVE efforts must be guided by ongoing research and analysis of the context, drivers, and most effective interventions against violent extremism.” One can only wonder what would happen if this ongoing research and analysis concluded that the biggest context and driver to violent extremism was an ideologically driven reading of religion.

This is a dishonest approach in multiple ways. Consider a White House Fact Sheet on CVE from February 2015, which states that “CVE efforts address the root causes of extremism through community engagement” and that “violent extremist threats can come from a range of groups and individuals, including domestic terrorists and homegrown violent extremists in the United States.”

Taxpayer-funded warmists have no need for sacramental confession to expiate the sins of their wild inaccuracies and habitually incorrect prophecies. As a recent spate of amended theories demonstrates, they just make up new ‘facts’ and keep those grants rolling in
Catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) is the gift that keeps on giving, mainly to its adherents but, yes, also to sceptics for whom it provides an endless source of material upon which we can keep exercising our ‘little grey cells’. For example, I often wonder at what point the CAGW scam will finally expire. There have been two events which, by rights, should have at least given our governments pause in their rush to bankrupt us. The first was Climategate and the second is the warming stasis (better but more unscientifically known as “the pause”). But no, not a bit of it.

CAGW will end either because of a gradual and growing acceptance that the empirical data do not support the proposition of catastrophic warming (i.e. the science, the genuine science, at last triumphs) or, alternatively, there may be some, as yet unpredictable, watershed event (a Berlin Wall if you like) that causes the edifice to come tumbling down.

Regrettably, all the portents (and Graham Woods article Open Letter to an Alarmist Shill only reinforces my fear) are that we will have to rely on the latter. What prompted these thoughts was a series of recent Graham Lloyd reports in the The Australian. Let me say, at the outset, that any observation I make here is no reflection on, or criticism of, Lloyd. He is merely presenting the argument of the ‘climate establishment’.

The first of these articles, published on July 21, reported an interesting find:

The Antarctic Peninsula, regarded as a “global warming hot spot”, has been cooling for almost 20 years.

Natural variability was responsible both for the decades-long warming since the 1950s and more recent cooling, according to research published today in Nature.

Good news for sceptics, right? It seems to support the sceptic view that observed 20th century warming was nothing out of the ordinary.

But wait, as is always the case when observed evidence does not mesh with approved climate narrative, a warmist was quick to dismiss those inconvenient thermometer readings:

The research, led by John Turner from the British Antarctic Survey, said while the start of Antarctic Peninsula cooling in 1998 had coincided with the so-called “global warming hiatus”, the two were not connected.

So in this case ‘correlation’ has no significance. The prevarications and provisos foreshadowed by the above quote commence immediately in the following paragraph and dominate the remainder of Lloyd’s article. Just one example:

Deepak Lal is James S. Coleman Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy, University College London. His most recent book is Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty.

Unlike other Eurasian civilisations where the growth of a Western-educated elite which had imbibed some of the messages of the Enlightenment allowed modernity and tradition to be reconciled, the prevailing Islamic reaction was that of the oyster: a resolute determination to close and seal.
I came across J. B. Kelly’s magnificent book Arabia, the Gulf and the West (1980), when I was researching my book In Praise of Empires (2004). The essays and reviews collected in these three volumes by his son provide a compendium of his views on the failures of the imperial Western powers—first the British and then the Americans—to understand the Arabs and Islam, and their consequent failure in maintaining order in the Middle East. Today with the region in flames and millions fleeing the disorder in their dysfunctional homelands to the order and safety of Europe, the states system created after the fall of the Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War has more than fulfilled Field Marshal Earl Wavell’s prediction: “After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace’.”[1]

These essays emphasise the influence of Arabophiles like T.E. Lawrence and Philby pere in presenting a romanticised view of the character of the Arab tribes. This created a climate of opinion in England where officials in charge of imperial policy chose to appease rather than deal robustly with the various machinations of Middle Eastern tribal rulers against British interests. The officials of the India Office with a more realistic view of these rulers and Islam were sidelined. After Indian independence they were replaced by Foreign Office officials intent on appeasing the Arabs, and increasingly reluctant to use military force to challenge the depredations of their rulers.

The misunderstanding of the Arabs and Islam began when Lord Kitchener of Khartoum (who became Secretary of War in Asquith’s government at the start of the First World War) changed Britain’s traditional aim in the Middle East of ensuring that their regional rivals, the French and the Russians, did not change the balance of power in the region, apart from a few territorial adjustments. Kitchener, by contrast, sought to seize the Arabic-speaking part of the Ottoman empire for the British, thereby creating a Middle Eastern empire to link and rival the one in India.

Recognising the importance but misunderstanding the nature of Islam, he sought to use it as a bulwark for the new Arabic empire by offering the religious leadership of the caliphate to the Hashemite Sheriff of Mecca. But, misunderstanding that in Islam the spiritual and temporal authority could not be split, this meant he was offering the kingdom of the Arabs to the Hashemite. This led Ibn Saud, the leader of the fierce, puritanical Wahhabi sect, to conquer the Hejaz with its holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1924, driving Hussein ibn Ali into exile. As a consolation prize the British put Hussein’s sons Feisal and Abdullah on the thrones of the newly created states of Iraq and Trans-Jordan.[2] This whole edifice, including the French dependencies in Syria and Lebanon created by the Sykes–Picot agreement, is now in flames.

In reviewing Kelly’s voluminous output of essays and reviews in this article, I will concentrate on three themes of contemporary relevance, instead of the chronological sequence in which they are arranged in three volumes by the editor. These are: The British Empire and tribal societies; the US engagement with the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan and Pakistan); and Islam as a threat to global order.

Britain and tribal societies

Kelly’s essays on the British retreat from Aden are a particularly damning indictment of Britain’s pusillanimity in fulfilling its treaty obligations to the Gulf sheikdoms. This led to the Marxist takeover of Yemen, and the regional turmoil which continues. Yemen is particularly important, as the tribes inhabiting the bleak, inaccessible mountainous areas in the region are at the centre of the insurgencies currently tormenting the Middle East.