Once the worlds dependance on oil ends (and it will, quite possibly in our lifetime), the entire region (save Israel) will rapidly sink back into the 7th Century. While some there will enjoy that result, I rather suspect that a significant percentage of the people will have become used to modern civilization…unfortunately, it will no longer be available to them.

George Bush and the Dreaded Neoncons are the best friends the Muslims, and especially the Arabs, ever had. With rare exceptions like Tony Blair and Natan Sharansky, they are the only people in the world who think the Arabs are fully adult human beings capable of governing themselves by consensual government. Everybody else, including our liberals here in the USofA, think they are a bunch of rag-headed wogs who will make a pig’s breakfast of ruling themselves and must be governed by bloody handed tyrants like Saddam if they are not to be a pain in the rear to themselves and everybody else.

Second, Bush and the Dreaded Neocons want to suppress this jihad nonsense before the jihadists provoke the rest of the world into responding in kind, with indiscriminate slaughter of Muslims in retaliation of the indiscriminate slaughter of non-Muslims by the jihadists and other Muslims. The failure to suppress jihad will mean that soon, as an Indian put it to a friend of mine right after 9/11, Kali will start to march West.

I might add that Bush’s critics blather about “the root causes of terrorism” without having a clue of what they are talking about. The actual root causes lie in the dysfunctional political culture of the Arabs, and until that is reformed we are just going to keep getting horrors out of the Arabs until the end of time. Bush identified that real root causes within a few weeks of 9/11 and tried to do something about it. Unfortunately he could only make a start, and guys like that twit who shied his shoes at Bush are helping prevent that reform. Preventing it is liable to end in massive slaughter for the Arabs. Be careful what you wish for, Arabs, you may get it. In this case wishing for jihad and failure to act on Bush’s reform agenda will being you mass death.

This is one of the reasons why Western civilization is superior. God knows we have our problems but especially in the U.S., self-criticism is simply taken for granted. Same for Israel, by the way. I have told people if you want to read vitriolic but not anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, you can go to the English-language websites of the Israeli newspapers.

Self-criticism promotes change and reform. A refusal even to countenance the idea that some of your problems are self-created or amenable to your actions irrespective of what anyone else does, produces a society which will not recognize its problems, much less attempt to deal with them.

Tied in is an unusually rampant incuriosity. I keep reading claims that the entire Arab world translates fewer books into Arabic in any year than Greece translates into Greece. I don’t know if such claims are correct, but it seems clear that Arabs are not particularly interested in other cultures except as they may be seen as conspirators against Arabs, etc.

I guess it’s more a topic for another post, but this turns Edward Said’s claim of “orientalism” on its head. It would be hard to write a similar book about Arab occidentalism because there don’t seem to be many scholars among the Arabs working to explain the west to their readers…I say “explain” rather than “lambaste,” because I’m sure there’s no shortage of books about how the west has done in the Arabs.

But how many books are accessible to average readers in Arab lands that try to give a fair picture of western society and western culture? I don’t know; does anyone out there in the Merylsphere?

I wonder what Bubbie thinks!