Excerpted from a loooong article in Foreign Affairs Magazine. Hattip Instapundit. Lots of meat, and concisely written. The writer is very worried about the long term situation, but I read it that those who have faith in the future will end up inheriting the earth through their grandchildren, even if there will be pain for a while. ;-) Read the whole thing.
Summary: Most people think overpopulation is one of the worst dangers facing the globe. In fact, the opposite is true. As countries get richer, their populations age and their birthrates plummet. And this is not just a problem of rich countries: the developing world is also getting older fast.....
[A] closer look at demographic trends shows that the rate of world population growth has fallen by more than 40 percent since the late 1960s. And forecasts by the UN and other organizations show that, even in the absence of major wars or pandemics, the number of human beings on the planet could well start to decline within the lifetime of today's children. Demographers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis predict that human population will peak (at 9 billion) by 2070 and then start to contract. Long before then, many nations will shrink in absolute size, and the average age of the world's citizens will shoot up dramatically. Moreover, the populations that will age fastest are in the Middle East and other underdeveloped regions. During the remainder of this century, even sub-Saharan Africa will likely grow older than Europe is today.
The root cause of these trends is falling birthrates. Today, the average woman in the world bears half as many children as did her counterpart in 1972. No industrialized country still produces enough children to sustain its population over time, or to prevent rapid population aging. Germany could easily lose the equivalent of the current population of what was once East Germany over the next half-century. Russia's population is already contracting by three-quarters of a million a year. Japan's population, meanwhile, is expected to peak as early as 2005, and then to fall by as much as one-third over the next 50 years -- a decline equivalent, the demographer Hideo Ibe has noted, to that experienced in medieval Europe during the plague.
Although many factors are at work, the changing economics of family life is the prime factor in discouraging childbearing. In nations rich and poor, under all forms of government, as more and more of the world's population moves to urban areas in which children offer little or no economic reward to their parents, and as women acquire economic opportunities and reproductive control, the social and financial costs of childbearing continue to rise....
Today, when Americans think of Mexico, for example, they think of televised images of desperate, unemployed youths swimming the Rio Grande or slipping through border fences. Yet because Mexican fertility rates have dropped so dramatically, the country is now aging five times faster than is the United States. It took 50 years for the American median age to rise just five years, from 30 to 35. By contrast, between 2000 and 2050, Mexico's median age, according to UN projections, will increase by 20 years, leaving half the population over 42. Meanwhile, the median American age in 2050 is expected to be 39.7.
Those televised images of desperate, unemployed youth broadcast from the Middle East create a similarly misleading impression. Fertility rates are falling faster in the Middle East than anywhere else on earth, and as a result, the region's population is aging at an unprecedented rate. For example, by mid-century, Algeria will see its median age increase from 21.7 to 40, according to UN projections. Postrevolutionary Iran has seen its fertility rate plummet by nearly two-thirds and will accordingly have more seniors than children by 2030....
Over the next decade, the Middle East could benefit from a similar "demographic dividend." Birthrates fell in every single Middle Eastern country during the 1990s, often dramatically. The resulting "middle aging" of the region will lower the overall dependency ratio over the next 10 to 20 years, freeing up more resources for infrastructure and industrial development. The appeal of radicalism could also diminish as young adults make up less of the population and Middle Eastern societies become increasingly dominated by middle-aged people concerned with such practical issues as health care and retirement savings. Just as population aging in the West during the 1980s was accompanied by the disappearance of youthful indigenous terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades and the Weather Underground, falling birthrates in the Middle East could well produce societies far less prone to political violence....
Even if the United States could compete with Europe for immigrants, it is by no means clear how many potential immigrants these regions will produce in the future. Birthrates are falling in sub-Saharan Africa as well as in the rest of the world, and war and disease have made mortality rates there extraordinarily high. UN projections for the continent as a whole show fertility declining to 2.4 children per woman by mid-century, which may well be below replacement levels if mortality does not dramatically improve. Although the course of the AIDS epidemic through sub-Saharan Africa remains uncertain, the CIA projects that AIDS and related diseases could kill as many as a quarter of the region's inhabitants by 2010.
The writer also talks about how with increased social welfare costs of aging populations, nations will not be able to afford armies or wars, not even the US, so there'll be no more wars. Less innovation from oldster-heavy populations as well, so no increase in productivity from the remaining youngsters, and no discussion of the impact of a Bird Flu or other pandemic. My personal view on the army thing is that, at least in the Anglosphere and Israel, while the median age of the troops will increase, there will be no lack of those willing to serve. I wouldn't have thought so before I started hanging out here, but now I know that old sheepdogs never really stop standing guard. I'm not as worried about the innovation thing either -- my father discovered interferon just before being pushed into retirement, which meant the world had to wait another decade before someone else came up with it (and got the cover of Time Magazine and all the other rewards as a result -- Daddy was *not* happy about that, poor man). In a culture that rewards innovation, innovative people don't stop just because the clock turns over.
#1
If declining birthrates are a real problem and I am far from convinced they are, then the solution is straightforward. You give financial incentives. To avoid rewarding welfare mothers you deliver them as tax breaks, i.e. only those with one or more family members working receieve them.
Children are expensive and doubling or tripling the tax breaks for kids would do wonders for the birthrate.
#2
TW, that's interesting about your father discovering interferon.
The Oz government has just enacted a budget that significantly increases the incentives to keep working past 'retirement age'. Unfortunately, no more incentives for having kids, but they have significantly increased those incentives in the past.
#3
Thanks, phil_b. I'm sure Daddy isn't the only person ever forced into scheduled retirement at a critical juncture. The other guy discovered interferon independently, I believe, so it's not as if Daddy's idea was stolen or anything.
The one thing this article doesn't address is the future of the species homo sapian. For what it's worth(at rough estimate slightly less than you just paid to read this), I don't see that as being at risk -- there are enough of us who like and want children that we should be around for a long time to come. Just keep your pantry stocked with multivitamins, Purell hand cleanser, and canned ravioli in case of a Bird Flu pandemic in the meantime. ;-)
#4
TW, I had my bird flu panic about a year ago. I have a reasonable understanding of disease spread and we are unlikely to wake up to an out of control bird flu outbreak, i.e. we will have warning. Having said that, a stockpile of masks and food basics will do no harm.
The problem with panicking, is everyone does it at the same time.
#5
Another interesting scientist who didn't get credit for his discovery. I suspect it happens a lot more than we imagine. The real tragedy is losing the benefits of the discovery for 10 years.
#6
So we arent racing towards overpopulating the earth?
Oh shit! We're all deadmen!
And besides, I thought the arabs in Europe were shitting out litters like there is no tomorrow?
#7
There are lots of problems here, call them variances that have little impact individually, can still add up as a group. For example, in much of Africa, 35 years old is "old", comparable to 65 years old or more in the west.
But in the west you have a health care system where 75% of all money goes to people "with four years or less to live", an unsustainable imbalance. What happens when this system returns to balance, and beyond a certain point, it refuses to pay for critical medicine of great expense and little effect. A sharp decline in the number of seniors.
Plague, FYI, only have a short term effect on total population. They are much better at attacking a particular strata of a population, such as the very poor, the old and infirm.
#10
All I know is that with the Middle East aging faster than the West, and all the young terrorists U.S. forces are making dead, I see this as a positive for the west and a big negataive for the islamos.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
05/12/2006 10:52 Comments ||
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#11
phil_b: the US is facing a demographic bubble as the baby boomers enter retirement, that when associated with "rising health care costs", eventually will force rationality onto the system.
In a purely free market, that would mean that only those who could pay in cash could get extraordinary medical services, which would limit "vanity" life-preservation to a relative few. Most people would still have reasonably good care up to the point where their doctor would advise them that "it's just not worth it."
However, in the US, the government is rapidly reaching the point where it *cannot* offer vanity health coverage either by paying for it directly, or by coercing private concerns, such as insurance companies, to pay for it.
This in no way implies coercive euthanasia, just that the public must embrace the concept that everyone will die, no matter how beloved, and spending millions of dollars to give an 80-year-old another week in a coma on a ventilator is unrealistic.
It is the recognition that there is a finite amount of funds available, so that medical procedures such as heart-lung replacements of extremely premature infants, with a statistically insignificant chance of success and a million dollar pricetag, just shouldn't be done; especially if the public funds used would be diverted to pre-natal care to dozens of women, which ironically would prevent most cases of extremely premature birth in the first place.
This will not be easy. For example, bereaved parents of an extremely premature infant can suffer tremendous loss--and project that loss into endless demands for public monies. They will also feel incredible bitterness at being denied.
Conversely, in the name of "fairness", leftists will advocate involuntary euthanasia, depriving those who have the resources from attempting what is most likely, but not guaranteed to be a fruitless endeavor. Or, "Why should a millionaire be allowed to spend their money trying to save their extremely premature infant, when a poor hispanic not be able to try with public money?"
Such realism still provides for expensive quality medical service in public charity--it is not cruel.
But no longer can we tolerate straight-line cost growth many times greater than the rate of inflation, when the law of diminishing returns makes what is gained through such great expense marginal at best.
It does not matter if it is a truly sympathetic case. If it is so sympathetic there is no prohibition against private donations; but at the same time, there is no right for the fickle disbursement of public funds for the vanity of lost causes.
#12
It's the slowing of the growth RATE of populations not of the absolute number.
What does the writer think you can grow and grow the population until we are all shoulder-to-shoulder?
It is ok to shrink the GROWTH rate, and stable numbers could be happily kept at a lower rate than what we have now.
I'm glad, less people the better.
It's quality not quantity that counts. Quantity is when you get the problems.
Now secondly i just don't believe this report.
Yeah right the Middle East with it's female baby factories churning out 5-7 kids apiece (and they do it when they migrate here too, you see them walking down the street with the double pram, a kid in tow and a younger sister holding another kid all walking along to the nearest Dole office) as if those third world countries have a shrinking population!
Bring on the next Tsunami the first one didn't kill enough!!
Oh for a plague to wipe out Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Pakistan and Jordan.
Oh happy day that would be. Bring on the Bird Flu, God, I'm waiting!
Some medical proceedures are a pure waste of public money.
But in the system, at least in Australia, the medical professionals do make those decisions which allow some to die all the time.
My dad died of cancer in a hospice. My friend, a head nurse at a hospital, said they'd just up his morphine dose until it's lethal. They did this for 'pain relief' and sure enough that's what they did.
and they didn't bother sucking the phlegm out of his rattling chest so like all comatose humans who can no longer swallow or cough or move at all, he drowned in his own phlegm, hopefully so dosed up on morphine he couldn't feel it anyway.
So nurses and doctors do make decisions that allow people to die quicker and free up the beds for the next one. They just don't tell you they do it.
Bye the way: If you are young and the hospital knows you have young children, and you are in the emergency ward after an accident, you have about 10x the survival rate of an older person known to have children who are fully grown or who has no children.
THink about that next time you fill out those next-of-kin sheets at emergency!
if they think you have dependants, they try harder to fix you.
and if you have no dependants and are old, write a will because they just won't try too hard on you.
#14
In a race to the bottom, the one who gets to the finish line last wins. With native European birth rates of 1.3-1.5 and muslim immigrants 3.5, it's not hard to see how this race ends.
Posted by: ed ||
05/12/2006 12:34 Comments ||
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#15
anon1, I agree with moose also, but I'd wait to hear from Dr. White before agreeing with you, at least as to tretment in the U. S. . In fact, my experience watching my father and grandfather die is that doctors will keep one alive as long as the bills are paid and long past the time when it is humane. It's hard to know when that line has been crossed and they have no interest in losing customers. How they treat non-payers I don't know.
But I know that I'm never taking 36 different prescriptions from "specialist" doctors who won't call back in 24 hours. I'll take a Smith and Wesson Brothers cough drop first. It's an inhumane system now.
#16
Interesting link, Nimble Spemble. I remember reading about the possible link between the good doctor's innoculant and AIDS, although the epidemiologists were also looking at needle contamination due to multiple re-use without sterilization between innoculations -- the responsible parties being too cheap to pay for disposable needles or proper sterilization. And when some of the innocuees came already infected with one of the various types of ape AIDS endemic to the continent, the viruses got a chance to recombine, dammit. Thus today's lesson: Always clean your tools between uses. ;-)
In Daddy's case, though, what was taken from him was the time to demonstrate interferon's efficacy; a pity, because Mr. Wife (then in his cancer researcher phase, before he discovered the joys of cooling towers and negotiations) tells me Daddy laid out an elegant experimental plan. *shrug* Part of the strength of science is that it does not in general rely on individual genius, but on each bringing his own bit of discovery and verification to a group effort. Much like Rantburg, in fact (a good thing, for were genius required here, I'd not even be allowed to sign on!).
#17
Interesting take from everyone. Having studied demographics for some time I have a bit of extra info to add. The next 50 years show a dramatic increase in populations through Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Gamabia, Ivory Coast. North Africa will have less dramatic as mentioned before r/e Algeria and Morrocco. Egypt is trying desperately to reduce their birthrate while Sudan's population is exploding despite civil war. In the short term do to the GROWTH RATE reduction the population will continue to rise globally. The factors controlling global population are not wars, famines, plagues but social programs. If China reverses the 1-child policy and economic incentives are offered for larger families then growth rates can and will rise. The current issue being the governments are unwilling to give substantial amounts to families haing more children because it's contrued as welfare and there is to much of that going around. I assure you being a father of 4 it's difficult in more ways than one. But I can't imagine life without any of them.
Whenever I hear some granny-glasses baby boomer talking about overpopulation I have the urge to shout "DEAD MEME WALKING!"
If socialism and welfare-state capitalism produce societies which have wonderful lifestyles, diminution of stress and anxiety, and elimination of some human suffering for 2-5 generations but ultimately end up lacking the will to reproduce in numbers sufficient to continue existing, are they really utopias?
Are they even better than the "heartless" capitalism they purport to replace? I submit that they are not.
The Founding Fathers seemed to have a sense that no matter the the good things possible from a nanny state and the numerous faults of small government free market societies, in the end the free market small government societies had the best combination of outcome plus sustainability.
How wise they seem now.
Some stress and risk and possibility of negative outcome in every day life seems to inoculate against demographic immolation. As Gene Burns used to say, freedom is meaningless unless it includes the freedom to fail.
Posted by: no mo uro ||
05/12/2006 16:25 Comments ||
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#20
The more weaker or primitive a society is, gener the more children they have as a means for enhancing the society's probabilities of survival - over time, however, and regardless of econ class, once it becomes realized that having too many kids isn't resolving the base situation, people will stop having them, like the human body eating itself after so many days or weeks without food or water. Both CHINA and INDIA, despite their massive populations, or even world Muslim nations as a class, collectively are all suffering from serious to severe abnormal demographic patterns. Progressivity is best achieved when opportunities for private wealth is closely matched with having large family units.
#21
Singapore cuts off access to various forms of state funding for healthcare when a person reaches 80 years of age. After 80, people can still access healthcare, but it becomes a lot more expensive.
#22
Re: #20
Very good points. A pity so many have so much wrapped up in falsifying your points. Still, I'm not particularly thrilled at the idea that "letting nature run it's course" is going to wind up being the default policy position after 2025.
Waitaminnit....
Who are you?
What have you done with our Joe?
Posted by: N guard ||
05/12/2006 21:00 Comments ||
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#23
whoop! Joe M! No mention of the gender imbalances caused by the Chinese HillaryClintonBettyCrockerOneChild policies?
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/12/2006 21:10 Comments ||
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#24
Well, there goes the Ai theory, LOL. Check the IP, please - is it really Joe M, the future UN SecGen?
To understand what went so badly wrong at the CIA under Porter Goss, it's worth examining the career of his executive director, the onomatopoetic Kyle "Dusty" Foggo. His rise illustrates the conservative cronyism, leak paranoia and political vendettas that undermined Goss's tenure.
Foggo was an affable employee of the CIA's Directorate of Support, managing logistical activities in Germany, when he came to the attention of then-Rep. Goss and his aides on the House intelligence committee. Foggo is said to have endeared himself to Goss and his staff director, Patrick Murray, by facilitating trips overseas for members of the House panel.
More Appeasement
When Goss and Murray arrived at the CIA in the fall of 2004, their first choice for the agency's No. 3 job of executive director was a former CIA officer named Michael Kostiw, who had many friends in conservative political circles. But Kostiw's nomination was sabotaged when a CIA insider leaked the fact that he had once been accused of shoplifting. The charges were dropped after Kostiw resigned and agreed to seek counseling. Kostiw's past made him an inappropriate choice for such a senior position, in the view of many career CIA officers, but to Murray the leak was evidence of a liberal cabal at the CIA that was determined to obstruct the Bush administration's agenda.
Goss's second choice for executive director was the ingratiating logistical officer. As is standard procedure with such senior appointments, Murray and other senior aides were briefed on Foggo's file, which included what one former CIA official describes as instances of "dumb personal behavior." The briefers included Mary Margaret Graham, then chief of counterintelligence, and Jeanette Moore, then head of the Office of Security, who, according to ABC News, had once reprimanded Foggo about alleged insubordination, though the CIA says a formal letter was never filed. Murray rejected the material about Foggo as petty and is said to have warned Graham, "If this leaks, you're dead."
Foggo was duly installed on the seventh floor and, to the amusement of his colleagues, began placing pictures of himself prominently around headquarters. Meanwhile, a period of internal bloodletting ensued that was worthy of the Soviet NKVD under Joseph Stalin. The associate deputy chief of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, Michael Sulick, complained angrily to Murray about his tongue-lashing of Graham, arguing that he was treating CIA officers as if they were Democratic congressional staffers. An indignant Murray thereupon demanded that Sulick be fired for insubordination. His boss, Operations Deputy Director Stephen Kappes, refused Murray's demand, and both he and Sulick resigned.
The political fallout from Foggo's appointment continued. Graham left in 2005 to become a top aide to the new director of national intelligence, John Negroponte. Moore, the head of security who had reprimanded Foggo, soon retired; at the time she was the agency's highest-ranking African American woman.
And what became of Foggo? As executive director, he is said to have continued as an aggressive CIA logistician, though that sometimes put him crossways with the new DNI structure and magnified the tension between Goss and Negroponte. Foggo also carried on Murray's cold war with the operations directorate, telling agency colleagues that no unit at the CIA was more important than any other and that, in a phrase meant to urge unity, "We're all purple."
The sad last act of the Foggo drama involves allegations of corruption. It turned out that he had attended poker parties hosted by his old school pal Brent R. Wilkes, a military contractor whose activities were described in the bribery indictment of former representative Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.). According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the CIA inspector general's office has been investigating whether Foggo, back when he was a support officer in Germany, helped steer to one of Wilkes's companies, Archer Logistics, a roughly $3 million contract to supply bottled water to CIA operatives in Afghanistan and Iraq. Foggo, who resigned from the CIA on Monday, has denied any wrongdoing.
The chronic mismanagement of the CIA under Goss and Murray has been an open secret for many months, and the real question is why it took the Bush White House so long to fix it. When I posed this question a few weeks ago to a senior administration official, he repeated the line that the agency was full of leakers and obstructionists. The political vendetta against the CIA went to the top, in other words. It did real damage to the country before President Bush finally called a halt.
#2
The Russians figured out a long time ago how to multiply moles at will. The Russians didn't just recruit for the sake of pilfering information, they fed successes to their moles, adjusted disinformation ploys, instructed moles to promote other moles, and forced out the honest and competent talent. The Russians turned the agency into their puppet, and destroyed it in the process.
#3
Oldspook: It should be in the nature of of a good clandestine service that the victories are little known. But in the case of the CIA, the defeats over the past thirty years have been so public and so manifest, I've simply got to ask, when was the last time this outfit had any success of any kind?
#5
There have been some good successes, but recently, other than the Ops finally workign in SW Asia, there's not much out there.
And the reason is that the agency IMHO, rotted from within by being led by political hacks and a loss of purpose in the 1990's. It promoted people who were good with twiddling budget numbers, spinning reports, and protecting their jobs and their power in the agency (by curring favor to those like themselves all the way up to Clinton and Bush I). And thats what they did instead of serving the nation, they served themselves.
Hayden needs to take a flamethrower to the place. And you'll see even more politically motivated leaks as these rat bastards try to damage the nation in hopes of holding their jobs and power and dishonest way of living.
#7
I spoke with someone today who knows a lot more about the CIA than I do, and he figures just about the same as Oldspook does.
He traces the CIA degradation back to the fall of Russia. There was a few years of an extremely confident CIA until it finally sunk in that the major purpose was gone. Without purpose, pride honor and duty tend to erode and we eventually get what we have now. A typical Gov't beaurocracy.
To a lot of people at the CIA keeping a job is the most imortant thing going because they have lost that strong feeling of needing to protect the country like they once had.
He also concurs that the leaks will continue as they adjust to the new director. Hayden will rub a lot of people the wrong way, which is the right thing to do.
Unfortunately, no fires or jailings are likely.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
05/12/2006 14:51 Comments ||
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#8
I do agree the the 'spook about breaking up the CIA.
At least separate the clandestine and paramilitary ops from the analasys and move them to someplace where people like having a CIA. Like my house for example. If that's not big enough build them an HQ in Texas or someplace where less B.S. surrounds them.
Lets be honest, the paramilitary part should work closely with U.S. Special Forces and should therefore be on a military base. Good place for the clandestine to be too if you ask me.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
05/12/2006 15:06 Comments ||
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President Bush, while talking about the new movie Flight 93 on CNBC last week, described the actions of those brave passengers as the first counterattack to World War III. Nice.
Describing the military action currently underway against radical Islamist terrorism around the globe as a World War whether it is III or IV is a designation that is long overdue. So why then are many politicians and bureaucrats in Washington DC acting as if it is just another day in political paradise?
Anyone paying attention to what is happening around the world can (and should) be able to make a convincing argument that the current conflict between most of the Western world and radical Islam and its associated terrorist organizations, is indeed a World War. The fact that this war was officially declared against the United States and its allies by Osama bin Laden on May 26, 1998 should be the determining factor in defining what the conflict actually is.
True, the mainstream media and the progressive anti-war left have done a spectacular job of blurring the truth about the war, but that doesnt change the fact that the enemy will continue to come after us regardless of whether we bring the troops home now, or not.
Those who call for us to cease hostilities, who condemn the actions in Iraq and the reasons for being their in the first place prove themselves to be without the vision and/or the capability to understand the very real threat that our country and the entire Western culture face today. They have not been responsible enough to search out all of the information (history, facts and educated opinions from both sides of the aisle sans the propaganda) needed to make an intelligent decision.
It is also true that the professional politicians in Congress many from both sides of the aisle are guilty of playing politics where this global conflict is concerned.
The gratuitous alarmism over the intelligence gathering by the National Security Agency by the likes of Ted Kennedy, Arlen Specter, Patrick Leahy, Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer is strictly for political purposes. While the initial surveillance conducted by the NSA centered exclusively on phone calls between suspected terrorists inside the United States and known terrorists outside the country (an action condoned by members of the FISA court) the most current outrage doesnt have anything to do with listening in to any conversations anywhere. Instead, the newly exposed NSA initiative utilizes lists of calls between telephone numbers compiled by phone companies to search for patterns that may indicate terrorist activity.
Congressional inaction over securing the US border is another indication that many in Washington DC dont consider our current conflict a legitimate war. As Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton take the stages at pro-illegal immigration/pro-amnesty rallies meant to excuse the open-border policies of the past and rallies produced and supported by groups like A.N.S.W.E.R, La Raza, the Service Employees International Union and MEChA, known al Qaeda terrorists have targeted the gateway between Mexico and the United States as their preferred point of entry.
Currently, the FBI lists Adnan el Shukrijumah and Amer el Maati among their most wanted terrorists. It has been verified by US and Mexican authorities that El Shukrijumah, Osama bin Ladens designated point man for terrorist operations against American targets inside the United States, has been active in Mexico. This is reason enough to secure the borders of the United States, yet politicians position for political gain while our borders remain without physical barriers in many places, guarded by an insufficient number of border patrol agents and unarmed Americans volunteering for the Minutemen Project.
FBI Director Robert Mueller recently testified before Congress that although "significant progress" has been made in the development of a domestic intelligence division at the FBI, "some harbor doubts about the FBI's ability to transform itself into a leading intelligence agency."
Former senior CIA analyst John Gannon suggested that Congress charge the Department of Homeland Security with gathering domestic intelligence on looming terrorist threats. "Approaching five years after 9/11, we still do not have a domestic intelligence service that can collect effectively against the terrorist threat to the homeland," he said.
It is more than clear that many of those elected to federal government have put party politics and their own political well-being before the act of effectively governing our nation; that includes keeping Americans safe from those who would do us harm. Why else would they listen to a declaration of war from a savage enemy with a tin ear?
The politicians in Washington DC, the mainstream media and the progressive left need to stop their incessant Bush/Republican/Conservative-bashing, they need to stop replaying the 2000 and 2004 elections on their pathetic radio shows and blogs and start replaying the films of the World Trade Center being destroyed and people jumping to their deaths from those towers on that fateful day. They need to see and then re-see Flight 93. They need to realize that war has been declared on our country literally and that the enemy intends to win.
No accurate terrorist watch list? Hey Washington, quit with the politics and get to work!
Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal.us.
We used to live in simpler times. From 1950 to 1991, America's enemy took the form of a country with hundreds of ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads aimed at the U.S. mainland, and a global espionage force called the KGB with a single address, Moscow. This was the Cold War, and in those days the U.S. intelligence community had a common worldview. That ideology was laid out in the now-famous National Security Council document 68, delivered in April 1950 to President Harry Truman. The Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb the previous August.
NSC-68's first page--"Background of the Current Crisis"--describes a Soviet Union that is "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own, and seeks to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world." NSC-68's chapter headings were not about mere policy but the basics, describing "The Fundamental Purpose of the United States" and "The Underlying Conflict in the Realm of Ideas and Values Between the U.S. Purpose and the Kremlin Design."
Who could disagree? Well, many did--ceaselessly outside the government, mostly in academic centers and policy journals. It was a lively, titanic debate. But not inside the government, or at least nothing that compares to what has been leaking out about the war on terror. The most serious bureaucratic disputes within the government's Cold War intelligence agencies involved disagreements over arms-reduction proposals in the SALT talks and the like. But there was no serious disagreement with the ideology or threat described in NSC-68.
Today we have neither institutional discipline nor a shared ideology. The foundational U.S. document in the war on terror is the June 2002 Bush Doctrine, a response to September 11. But here the threat itself is debated endlessly. Islamic terror has no address. Obviously swaths of the national security bureaucracy--the Pillars, Wilsons and McCarthys--not only don't buy into the Bush Doctrine but feel obliged to take their disagreements with it outside the government. Since Vietnam, a war as in Iraq is no longer a national commitment but a policy matter.
As a result, the security bureaucracies have become a confused tangle of oppositional ideas over the war in Iraq, discrete policies such as the warrantless wiretaps, and the nature of the threat from Islamic terror. Out of this confusion of policy and purpose have fallen leaks as sensitive as the al Qaeda secret prisons and as oh-golly-gee as yesterday's "leak" about the government analyzing billions of phone-call patterns to pick up terrorist activity.
If confirmed, Gen. Michael Hayden's biggest problem at the CIA will be that some of his employees are the products of a culture that no longer understands or respects the sense of purpose, discipline and honor of the best Cold Warriors, who understood that the government is an elected hierarchy of constitutional responsibility and not a faculty senate free to undermine mere presidents. He will have to make clear that any official who finds internal dissent procedures inadequate to his or her "moral obligation" to overturn strategic doctrine, affect election outcomes or destroy an intelligence operation should get out or be willing to risk criminal prosecution. And it would help this country's sense of purpose if he made that clear not only to the CIA but in public to the American people.
#1
When confirmed gen Hayden needs to haved a couple dozen leakers perp-walked the front doors of Langley. Not all at once draw it out for a couple of weeks. After that, the NYT et al won't have anybody willing to talk to them. A matter of fact why haven't we heard of someone facing charges about the string of leaks?
#2
"Gen. Michael Hayden's biggest problem at the CIA will be that some of his employees are the products of a culture that no longer understands or respects the sense of purpose, discipline and honor of the best Cold Warriors, who understood that the government is an elected hierarchy of constitutional responsibility and not a faculty senate free to undermine mere presidents."
These kinds of peopleahve poisoned the Intelligence Community. They don't take their oath seriously, and were more loyal to themselves and political affiliation than they were the safety of our nation. More interested in emprie building within the agency than protecting the nation. More interested in how they could spin something instead of how to convince and alert people who needed to know.
And this is why I am no longer working directly for the government. The Intelligence Community I knew rotted from within in the 1990's under political CYA appointees and the people they promoted who were like themselves. From what I hear, Hayden did a wonderful job rooting out this crap at NSA, and he desperately needs to be given the whip hand and tear it out by its roots at CIA, civil service rules be damned.
#3
It's very tricky prosecuting spies. Their whole knowledge base becomes vulnerable to public exposure during trial. The prosecution would have to reveal even more information to make its case than the defendant had already leaked or sold. It's not legal to just 'disappear' them in this country (though I suspect in an extreme case that is exactly what would happen.)
#4
There is a solution -and its in the Constitution:
A Jury of their peers.
Get a judge and prosecuter and defense attnys that can get the requisite clearance, and draw the jury pool from cleared people at other agencies and the DoD.
#5
When you get Cleared for Weird you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement. It states that you can be prosecuted for violating this agreement. Clearly some people have broken that agreement or we would not have heard about this program. File charges and let the chips fall where they may. I guarantee you that after the first couple of leakers/traitors get frog marched past credit union, very few people will want to come within 10 miles of a reporter.
#6
When a public agency is no longer willing to prosecute its own for even heinious crimes or malice, it starts becoming a bureaucratic/
institutional "useful idiot" or idiots for the very enemy(s) or antagonists it is supposed to be protecting American from. BILL CLINTON'S "MONICA" DEFENSE - Bill really Really REALLY R-E-A-L-L-Y BELIEVED, D*** IT, HE TOLD THE AMERICAN PEOPLE THE "STRAIGHT ARROW = DAMN THE TORPEDOES" TRUTH WHEN HE KNOWINGLY AND WILFULLY LIED TO THEM. DID HE!? A Fascist = Communist ,America = Russia-China, a GOP-Conservative = Dem-Leftist, Socialist = Capitalist/Federalist, Cops/Judges
/the Law = Crooks-Mafiosi, Laissez Faire-Libertarianism = Regulation/Governmentism
/Centralism, etc. ..............@. WHETHER AMERICANS-ALLIES WANT TO OR NOT, LIKE IT OR NOT, AMERICA-ALLIES MUST NOW EITHER DE FACTO, PUBLICLY OFFICIALLY FORMALLY AND OVERTLY, RULE THE WORLD, OR ELSE BE DESTROYED. The "Serve and Protect" Public Sector just becomes a subjective or pseudo-Mafia-Crime syndicate. *SHANGHAI COOP ORG Milex > CONTROL ANY AND ALL SIDES AND DESTROY YOUR TARGET FROM ANY AND ALL SIDES, FROM WITHIN AND WITHOUT, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. What does mainstream America get, or even the US Left > Chicoms/Commies = 200Milyuhn-plus of America's 300Milyuhn population get the death camp/gulag or both anyways! Our national holocaust + loss of 1/2-plus of CONUS-NORAM territory is good for everybody, even for us.
I am no great fan of the death penalty. I oppose it in almost all cases, though not on principle. There are crimes -- high, monstrous and rare -- that warrant the ultimate sanction.
Not because it is a deterrent; the evidence for deterrence is very equivocal. And not, as our Oprah-soaked sentimentalism suggests, in order bring closure to the victim's family. Family has nothing to do with it. It is The State v. The Miscreant, not the family v. the miscreant. And punishment is meant to do more than just bring order to the state; it brings moral order to the universe. Some crimes are so terrible that the moral balance of the universe remains disturbed so long as the perpetrator walks the earth.
Eichmann, for example. Or, at the lower end of the scale, Timothy McVeigh. Goering was an excellent candidate until he cheated the hangman by poisoning himself in prison. So is Saddam Hussein, champion mass murderer of our time, whose execution will bring a modicum of rebalance to the universe.
But a civilized society should be loath to invoke the death penalty for anything short of that. There's a remarkable passage in the Talmud that says that ``a Sanhedrin (high court) that executes a person once in seven years is considered murderous." One sage says, ``once every seventy years."
Does Zacarias Moussaoui meet that kind of high standard? I think not. Had I been on the jury, I too would have voted for life in the Colorado Supermax. But not for the reasons most of the jury cited.
In the Moussaoui case, there were three plausible grounds for mitigation: insignificance, lunacy or deprivation. Insignificance would have been my choice. Moussaoui was hardly even a cog. If he had any role in 9/11, which is doubtful, it was very peripheral. He was a foot soldier in an army of evil, but he never got a chance to practice his craft. That warrants life, not hanging.
The government tried to argue that if he hadn't lied to the FBI, the 9/11 plot would have been discovered and lives would have been saved. But if you're going to execute someone, you ought to prove commission, rather than omission. Albert Speer knew a lot more about a lot more killing, and yet the Nuremberg court spared him execution. It's hard to argue that Moussaoui was a greater monster than Speer.
Yet the bit-player argument seems to have been a mitigating circumstance for only three of the 12 jurors. And none cited a second possible factor, weaker than the first but still plausible: psychosis.
As one of the few who favored John Hinckley's acquittal on grounds of insanity, I take delusions and paranoia pretty seriously. Hinckley was a marginal insanity case, as was Moussaoui. The extreme case is the guy who is delusionally convinced that your head is a pumpkin before he proceeds to open it with a machete. The harder case is the guy who is delusionally convinced that Jodie Foster is in love with him and that to consummate the romance he must shoot the president.
Moussaoui is more in that equivocal Hinckley category. He clearly is delusional, but he is also clever, aware, and savagely cruel, as he demonstrated in taunting the 9/11 families. Nonetheless, he seemed to me just deranged enough to be spared execution on an admittedly close insanity call.
But that appears not to be why the jury spared him. Instead, fully nine of 12 jurors found mitigation in his ``unstable early childhood and dysfunctional family,'' lack of ``structure and emotional and financial support'' and ``hostile relationship with his mother.'' Plus the father with the ``violent temper.''
You read that jury form and you despair for your country. Have we sunk so low? So Moussaoui had a tough childhood. I'm sure Pol Pot's was no bed of roses either. Who gives a damn? On those grounds, there is not a killer in history who cannot escape judgment. What next? The Twinkie defense -- the junk food made me do it -- for Khalid Sheik Mohammed?
The Moussaoui verdict came out right, but the process was atrocious. The jury's reasons for mitigation were risible. And the entire process was farcical, a four-and-a-half-year charade manipulated by a self-declared terrorist gratuitously given a world platform by those he was working to destroy. We need no more lessons in the obvious: Civilian court -- with civilian procedures, civilian juries and civilian sensibilities -- is not the place for those who make war upon us.
#1
I disagree with The hammer to an extent--I'd've voted to string Moussaoui up by a pig-leather noose--but he makes an honorable argument against the death penalty.
As to the unsuitability of civillian courts for this sort of thing, he's dead on.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/12/2006 6:37 Comments ||
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#2
Albert Speer knew a lot more about a lot more killing, and yet the Nuremberg court spared him execution. It's hard to argue that Moussaoui was a greater monster than Speer.
Keep in mind though WHY the Nuremberg jury spared Speer: he showed genuine remorse for what he did. Moussaoui will go to his grave unrepentant, screaming insanity and malediction to the last.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
05/12/2006 6:57 Comments ||
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#3
Speer took dangerous steps at the near the end of WWII that mitigated his prior offenses.
#4
We need no more lessons in the obvious: Civilian court -- with civilian procedures, civilian juries and civilian sensibilities -- is not the place for those who make war upon us.
Abolutely correct. And we may well lose this war exactly because most people don't believe this to be true.
#5
"But if you're going to execute someone, you ought to prove commission, rather than omission."
And even if Moussaoui had completly spilled his guts; do you beleive the FBI and TSA would have had the wherewithall to have prevented the attack? The prosecutions misconduct in this case suggests they were'nt confident they could prove that. I have serious doubts myself.
#6
Don't forget, too, that pre-9/11 there was no TSA.
Posted by: Mike ||
05/12/2006 10:36 Comments ||
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#7
The real, sweet irony of it all is that Moussaoui didn't think he could get a fair trial. He thought he was in a kangaroo court and they'd string him up no matter what. But he did get a fair trial. And now, knowing that, he wants a do-over. Especially because he'll be in solitary confinement 23 hours a day for the rest of his life. Sweet. Better than the death penalty.
Posted by: Mike N. ||
05/12/2006 11:22 Comments ||
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#11
I'm usually a Cap Punishment advocate. In this case, should he REALLY (no slashing sentences, judiciary!) have to serve life in that hell hole solitary confinement...then I'm OK.. I imagine him screaming, crying, and whimpering to a spasmodic end, not unlike Islam in this century
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/12/2006 18:01 Comments ||
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#12
He stands a fair chance of being the Last Living Islamist. One way of saying I hope he "lives" another 40 years.
Despite much-touted public claims by President General Pervez Musharraf to have changed the countrys direction by uprooting its network of extremists, a cursory glance at the activities of the outlawed militant and sectarian groups and their leaders shows that most of them are back in business and operating freely in the country.
For those who need a ready reckoning of Musharrafs performance, a glance at his record on handling the jehadi kingpins will prove instructive. When the President of Pakistan banned six of the countrys top jehadi and sectarian groups in two phases on January 5, 2002 and November 14, 2003 he declared that no militant or sectarian organization would be allowed to indulge in terrorism to further its cause. Yet, none of the key jehadi leaders has been either arrested or prosecuted on terrorism charges.
After the initial crackdown, the four major jehadi organizations the Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Harkatul Mujahideen, and Hizbul Mujahideen resurfaced and regrouped to run their respective networks with different names and identities. The respective leaders of these organizations, Prof Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, Maulana Masood Azhar, Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil, and Pir Syed Salahuddin, remain at large, and the pattern of treatment being meted out to them by the military-led so-called civilian administration suggests they are being kept on a leash, ready to wage a controlled jehad in Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir.
These militants largely depend on Pakistan for training, logistics, arms, ammunition and, most of all, sanctuary, a dependence that has been exploited by Pakistans intelligence establishment. Not only does its intelligence establishment decide which jehadi group will play what role in fuelling the Kashmir insurgency, but it also launches new militant outfits at regular intervals to ensure that none of them ever get so big or powerful that they start posing a threat to their creators.
Musharrafs claims of having taken concrete measures to clip the wings of jehadi groups and reform their religious seminaries across Pakistan were nothing more than rhetoric, proved in the recent past when his own administration admitted that three out of the four London suicide bombers had been visiting madrassahs in the provincial capitals of Sindh and Punjab in November 2004, before returning to England in February 2005, only to carry out deadly bombings there. Since then, Musharrafs policy of enlightened moderation has come under sharp criticism, both from within and outside Pakistan.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, the four key jehadi leaders, who were becoming increasingly vocal in their condemnation of Musharrafs policy of slavery to the Americans, were placed under house arrest in their respective home towns in the Punjab province. A countrywide crackdown was launched against activists of the jehadi organizations, who were furious over General Musharrafs U-turn on support for jehad in Afghanistan. Groaning under US pressure, Islamabad had to temporarily stop cross-border infiltration into Jammu and Kashmir, which eventually reduced violence in the Valley.
As things stand, one can notice that most of the militant leaders and their respective groups, which were made to adopt a lie-low and wait-and-see policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks, are once again on the loose. Some of these groups have assumed new identities: Jaish-e-Mohammad has been renamed as Khudamul Islam, and Harkatul Mujahideen is called Jamiatul Ansar. Almost all the major jehadi organisations have re-launched campaigns to recruit volunteers, utilising websites etc., to promote the jehadi culture and attract youngsters. The most effective instruments of these groups to freely propagate jehad are their publications (Ghazwa, Majalla, Zarb-e-Taiba, Shamsheer, Zarb-e-Momin, etc) which together boast a circulation of millions and are distributed free of cost.
In his televised address to the nation on July 21, 2005, a few hours after the failed London bombings, Musharraf renewed his January 2002 commitment to root out the evils of extremism and terrorism from the country. There was nothing new in his speech. The administrative measures for combating terrorism and extremism that he announced were no different from his earlier assurances. Indeed, in his televised interaction with journalists on July 25, 2005, Musharraf declared that the fresh crackdown would not be like the last one, where people were picked up and held for 10-15 days and then released; an open admission that the earlier crackdowns he had ordered were just an eyewash. This raised a basic question if the previous declarations were not followed up with effective action, how would the regime do a better job this time round?
While addressing a crowded press conference in Rawalpindi on July 29, 2005, Musharraf confronted such scepticism, conceding that he had not taken a firm action against the militants since 2002 because he did not have a free hand at that time as a result of an unstable economy, confrontation with India over Kashmir, and insufficient international support for his presidency. He claimed he was now in a much stronger position to campaign against religious militants. I am in a totally different environment. Today, I am very strong. We need to act against the bigwigs of all the extremist organizations. We are not going as fast as I would like to go, the General said.
In response to specific questions on the difference between the crackdowns in 2002 and now, Musharraf said the world and media should not judge the performance of his government through the eyes of the past. Replying to a Western journalists query why he had not been serious in his earlier attempts to curb militancy, General Musharraf retorted, You have to be realistic and take cognizance of the ground situation. By taking stringent action against Islamic fundamentalists, I would have risked the prospect of a million Taliban on the streets of Pakistan.
To judge the general through the eyes of the present, it is useful to note that in the aftermath of the 7/7 attacks, he had once again directed the law enforcement agencies to deal with extremist organisations and the threat of terrorism with their full might. His first declaration was that none of the sectarian and militant groups banned on account of terrorism and extremism would be allowed to operate under any name and those poisoning young minds would be arrested and tried under Anti-Terrorism Laws. By saying so, Musharraf actually repeated his resolve for the third time since 9/11, but without doing anything practical to implement the same.
As far as his declaration to arrest those poisoning young minds is concerned, not even a single key jehadi leader was arrested after the 7/7 attacks in the so-called anti-jehadi crackdown. This included, among others, two Most Wanted militants of the CBI who had allegedly orchestrated major acts of terrorism in India: Prof Hafiz Mohammad Saeed of the Jamaatul Daawa, and Pir Syed Salahuddin of the Hizbul Mujahideen. Similarly, the American Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to interrogate two more jehadi leaders including the Harkatul Mujahideen (now Jamiatul Ansaar) leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman Khalil and the Jaish-e-Mohammad (now Khudamul Islam) chief Maulana Masood Azhar. As things stand, Hafiz Saeed, Masood Azhar, Fazlur Rehman Khalil and Syed Salahuddin are on the loose and most of the extremist infrastructure their groups used to maintain before 9/11 to wage jehad in Afghanistan and Jammu and Kashmir remains intact. The kid glove approach of the Pakistani establishment towards the leaders of the banned jehadi outfits can be gauged from the fact that the Jamaatul Daawa led by Hafiz Saeed was allowed to hold a 25,000 strong public meeting at the Minar-e-Pakistan in Lahore on March 18, 2006.
The second instance is that of Syed Salahuddin, the leader of Hizbul Mujahideen who was shown on television on March 26, 2006, addressing an international conference organised by the Jamaat-e-Islami in Peshawar and attended by a leading Hamas figure, Sheikh Muhammad Sayam and top leaders of the MMA. The third instance is that of a proscribed Sunni sectarian organization Sipah-e-Sahaba (Army of Companions of Prophet Mohammad PBUH) or its reincarnation Millat-i-Islamia, which has been allowed to resume activities in the country. The SSP is one of the five outfits banned by General Musharraf on January 12, 2002. This pro-Taliban organisation whose leadership eulogizes Osama bin Laden, has been allegedly involved in bloody violence. Thousands of the SSP activists took out a rally in Islamabad on April 7, 2006 and distributed pamphlets preaching jehad and hatred against Shias. One of the organisers even thanked the government for allowing the rally.
Analysts give varying explanations why the Musharraf-led administration keeps hobnobbing with these jehadi and sectarian groups. However, the root cause of the problem seems to be the jehadi orientation of the Pakistani military leadership and its continued alliance with fundamentalists. As the head of the Pakistan Army an institution credited with crafting and carrying Pakistans pro-jehad policy in Afghanistan few know more about what goes on in Pakistan than General Musharraf himself. And the fact remains that despite his repeated rhetoric to promote enlightened moderation in the country, Jehad Fi Sabilillah (Jehad in the name of Allah Almighty) continues to be the motto of the Pakistan Army.
To sum up, despite enthusiastic applause from the West for the anti-militancy efforts of Pakistans visionary military ruler, it is evident that much remains to be done on the ground before these efforts actually bear fruit. With changing scenarios all over the world, there has been a change of minds, yet what is required is a change of hearts.
The writer is the former editor of Weekly Independent, currently affiliated with Reuters and the Gulf News
Posted by: john ||
05/12/2006 21:23 ||
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#1
However, the root cause of the problem seems to be the jehadi orientation of the Pakistani military leadership
...
And the fact remains that despite his repeated rhetoric to promote enlightened moderation in the country, Jehad Fi Sabilillah (Jehad in the name of Allah Almighty) continues to be the motto of the Pakistan Army.
Posted by: john ||
05/12/2006 21:27 Comments ||
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Very long, needs to be p.49-ed or edited, as mods see fit. First time I hear about this in english.
Btw, IIRC, the al taqwa bank involved among others hani ramadan, the brother of tarik ramadan, the figurehead of the Mythical Moderate European Muslim(tm) and mouthpiece of the MB in Europe, and ahmed hubert, converted swiss neonazi and long-time pal of the late françois genoud (the historical link between hitler-the algerian fln-Carlos-the paleos), who's advocating the merger of all the anti-western ideologies with islam.
By Patrick Poole
One might be led to think that if international law enforcement authorities and Western intelligence agencies had discovered a twenty-year old document revealing a top-secret plan developed by the oldest Islamist organization with one of the most extensive terror networks in the world to launch a program of cultural invasion and eventual conquest of the West that virtually mirrors the tactics used by Islamists for more than two decades, that such news would scream from headlines published on the front pages and above the fold of the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Le Monde, Bild, and La Repubblica.
If thats what you might think, you would be wrong.
In fact, such a document was recovered in a raid by Swiss authorities in November 2001, two months after the horror of 9/11. Since that time information about this document, known in counterterrorism circles as The Project, and discussion regarding its content has been limited to the top-secret world of Western intelligence communities. Only through the work of an intrepid Swiss journalist, Sylvain Besson of Le Temps, and his book published in October 2005 in France, La conquête de l'Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists' Secret Project), has information regarding The Project finally been made public. One Western official cited by Besson has described The Project as a totalitarian ideology of infiltration which represents, in the end, the greatest danger for European societies.
Now FrontPage readers will be the first to be able to read the complete English translation of The Project.
What Western intelligence authorities know about The Project begins with the raid of a luxurious villa in Campione, Switzerland on November 7, 2001. The target of the raid was Youssef Nada, director of the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, who has had active association with the Muslim Brotherhood for more than 50 years and who admitted to being one of the organizations international leaders. The Muslim Brotherhood, regarded as the oldest and one of the most important Islamist movements in the world, was founded by Hasan al-Banna in 1928 and dedicated to the credo, Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
The raid was conducted by Swiss law enforcement at the request of the White House in the initial crackdown on terrorist finances in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. US and Swiss investigators had been looking at Al-Taqwas involvement in money laundering and funding a wide range of Islamic terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda, HAMAS (the Palestinian affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood), the Algerian GIA, and the Tunisian Ennahdah.
Included in the documents seized during the raid of Nadas Swiss villa was a 14-page plan written in Arabic and dated December 1, 1982, which outlines a 12-point strategy to establish an Islamic government on earth identified as The Project. According to testimony given to Swiss authorities by Nada, the unsigned document was prepared by Islamic researchers associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.
What makes The Project so different from the standard Death of America! Death to Israel! and Establish the global caliphate! Islamist rhetoric is that it represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the cultural invasion of the West. Calling for the utilization of various tactics, ranging from immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy and terrorism, The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood master plan. As can be seen in a number of examples throughout Europe including the political recognition of parallel Islamist government organizations in Sweden, the recent cartoon jihad in Denmark, the Parisian car-burning intifada last November, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London the plan outlined in The Project has been overwhelmingly successful.
Rather than focusing on terrorism as the sole method of group action, as is the case with Al-Qaeda, in perfect postmodern fashion the use of terror falls into a multiplicity of options available to progressively infiltrate, confront, and eventually establish Islamic domination over the West. The following tactics and techniques are among the many recommendations made in The Project:
Networking and coordinating actions between likeminded Islamist organizations;
Avoiding open alliances with known terrorist organizations and individuals to maintain the appearance of moderation;
Infiltrating and taking over existing Muslim organizations to realign them towards the Muslim Brotherhoods collective goals;
Using deception to mask the intended goals of Islamist actions, as long as it doesnt conflict with sharia law;
Avoiding social conflicts with Westerners locally, nationally or globally, that might damage the long-term ability to expand the Islamist powerbase in the West or provoke a lash back against Muslims;
Establishing financial networks to fund the work of conversion of the West, including the support of full-time administrators and workers;
Conducting surveillance, obtaining data, and establishing collection and data storage capabilities;
Putting into place a watchdog system for monitoring Western media to warn Muslims of international plots fomented against them;
Cultivating an Islamist intellectual community, including the establishment of think-tanks and advocacy groups, and publishing academic studies, to legitimize Islamist positions and to chronicle the history of Islamist movements;
Developing a comprehensive 100-year plan to advance Islamist ideology throughout the world;
Balancing international objectives with local flexibility;
Building extensive social networks of schools, hospitals and charitable organizations dedicated to Islamist ideals so that contact with the movement for Muslims in the West is constant;
Involving ideologically committed Muslims in democratically-elected institutions on all levels in the West, including government, NGOs, private organizations and labor unions;
Instrumentally using existing Western institutions until they can be converted and put into service of Islam;
Drafting Islamic constitutions, laws and policies for eventual implementation;
Avoiding conflict within the Islamist movements on all levels, including the development of processes for conflict resolution;
Instituting alliances with Western progressive organizations that share similar goals;
Creating autonomous security forces to protect Muslims in the West;
Inflaming violence and keeping Muslims living in the West in a jihad frame of mind;
Supporting jihad movements across the Muslim world through preaching, propaganda, personnel, funding, and technical and operational support;
Making the Palestinian cause a global wedge issue for Muslims;
Adopting the total liberation of Palestine from Israel and the creation of an Islamic state as a keystone in the plan for global Islamic domination;
Instigating a constant campaign to incite hatred by Muslims against Jews and rejecting any discussions of conciliation or coexistence with them;
Actively creating jihad terror cells within Palestine;
Linking the terrorist activities in Palestine with the global terror movement;
Collecting sufficient funds to indefinitely perpetuate and support jihad around the world;
In reading The Project, it should be kept in mind that it was drafted in 1982 when current tensions and terrorist activities in the Middle East were still very nascent. In many respects, The Project is extremely prescient for outlining the bulk of Islamist action, whether by moderate Islamist organizations or outright terror groups, over the past two decades.
At present, most of what is publicly known about The Project is the result of Sylvain Bessons investigative work, including his book and a related article published last October in the Swiss daily, Le Temps, L'islamisme à la conquête du monde (Islamism and the Conquest of the World), profiling his book, which is only available in a French-language edition. At least one Egyptian newspaper, Al-Mussawar, published the entire Arabic text of The Project last November.
In the English-language press, the attention paid to Bessons revelation of The Project has been almost non-existent. The only mention found in a mainstream media publication in the US has been as a secondary item in an article in the Weekly Standard (February 20, 2006) by Olivier Guitta, The Cartoon Jihad. The most extensive commentary on The Project has been by an American researcher and journalist living in London, Scott Burgess, who has posted his analysis of the document on his blog, The Daily Ablution. Along with his commentary, an English translation of the French text of The Project was serialized in December (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, Conclusion). The complete English translation prepared by Mr. Burgess is presented in its entirety here with his permission.
The lack of public discussion about The Project notwithstanding, the document and the plan it outlines has been the subject of considerable discussion amongst the Western intelligence agencies. One US counterterrorism official who spoke with Besson about The Project, and who is cited in Guittas Weekly Standard article, is current White House terrorism czar, Juan Zarate. Calling The Project a Muslim Brotherhood master plan for spreading their political ideology, Zarate expressed concerns to Besson because the Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.
One renowned international scholar of Islamist movements who also spoke with Besson, Reuven Paz, talked about The Project in its historical context:
The Project was part of the charter of the international organization of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was official established on July 29, 1982. It reflects a vast plan which was revived in the 1960s, with the immigration of Brotherhood intellectuals, principally Syrian and Egyptians, into Europe.
As Paz notes, The Project was drafted by the Muslim Brotherhood as part of its rechartering process in 1982, a time that marks an upswing in its organizational expansion internationally, as well as a turning point in the alternating periods of repression and toleration by the Egyptian government. In 1952, the organization played a critical support role to the Free Officers Movement led by Gamal Abdul Nasser, which overthrew King Faruq, but quickly fell out of favor with the new revolutionary regime because of Nassers refusal to follow the Muslim Brotherhoods call to institute an ideologically committed Islamic state. At various times since the July Revolution in 1952, the Brotherhood has regularly been banned and its leaders killed and imprisoned by Egyptian authorities.
Since it was rechartered in 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood has spread its network across the Middle East, Europe, and even America. At home in Egypt, parliamentary elections in 2005 saw the Muslim Brotherhood winning 20 percent of the available legislative seats, comprising the largest opposition party block. Its Palestinian affiliate, known to the world as HAMAS, recently gained control of the Palestinian Authority after elections secured for them 74 of 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Its Syrian branch has historically been the largest organized group opposing the Assad regime, and the organization also has affiliates in Jordan, Sudan, and Iraq. In the US, the Muslim Brotherhood is primarily represented by the Muslim American Society (MAS).
Since its formation, the Muslim Brotherhood has advocated the use of terrorism as a means of advancing its agenda of global Islamic domination. But as the largest popular radical movement in the Islamic world, it has attracted many leading Islamist intellectuals. Included among this group of Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals is Youssef Qaradawi, an Egyptian-born, Qatar-based Islamist cleric.
As one of the leading Muslim Brotherhood spiritual figures and radical Islamic preachers (who has his own weekly program on Al-Jazeera), Qaradawi has been one of the leading apologists of suicide bombings in Israel and terrorism against Western interests in the Middle East. Both Sylvain Besson and Scott Burgess provide extensive comparisons between Qaradawis publication, Priorities of the Islamic Movement in the Coming Phase, published in 1990, and The Project, which predates Qaradawis Priorities by eight years. They note the striking similarities in the language used and the plans and methods both documents advocate. It is speculated that The Project was either used by Qaradawi as a template for his own work, or that he had a hand in its drafting in 1982. Perhaps coincidentally, Qaradawi was the fourth largest shareholder in the Al-Taqwa Bank of Lugano, the director of which, Youssef Nada, was the individual in whose possession The Project was found. Since 1999, Qaradawi has been banned from entering the US as a result of his connections to terrorist organizations and his outspoken advocacy of terrorism.
For those who have read The Project, what is most troubling is not that Islamists have developed a plan for global dominance; it has been assumed by experts that Islamist organizations and terrorist groups have been operating off an agreed-upon set of general principles, networks and methodology. What is startling is how effectively the Islamist plan for conquest outlined in The Project has been implemented by Muslims in the West for more than two decades. Equally troubling is the ideology that lies behind the plan: inciting hatred and violence against Jewish populations around the world; the deliberate co-opting and subversion of Western public and private institutions; its recommendation of a policy of deliberate escalating confrontation by Muslims living in the West against their neighbors and fellow-citizens; the acceptance of terrorism as a legitimate option for achieving their ends and the inevitable reality of jihad against non-Muslims; and its ultimate goal of forcibly instituting the Islamic rule of the caliphate by sharia in the West, and eventually the whole world.
If the experience over the past quarter of a century seen in Europe and the US is any indication, the Islamic researchers who drafted The Project more than two decades ago must be pleased to see their long-term plan to conquer the West and to see the Green flag of Islam raised over its citizens realized so rapidly, efficiently and completely. If Islamists are equally successful in the years to come, Westerners ought to enjoy their personal and political freedoms while they last.
To read the English translation of The Project, click here.
#2
This fits nicely with Bat Yeor's writings about Europe's elites (particularly the French) conniving to establish Eurabia, so long as the terrorists do not attack on European soil, and the Arabs do not cut off the flow of oil. A neat little plan for the expansion of the Ummah, aided and abbetted by those set to be conquered.
Any student of history knows the failure to learn its lessons leaves a nation likely to repeat its mistakes.
On Feb. 23, 1998, an event occurred that went ignored by the United States. Not until September 11, 2001 would its importance become clear -- and, thus, from the vantage point of hindsight, a "lesson learned." For it was then that a little-known terrorist named Osama bin Laden declared war against the U.S. For those who heard it, the declaration must have sounded as ludicrous and nonthreatening as Prime Minister Count Mountjoy's declaration of war against the U.S. in the movie comedy "The Mouse That Roared." But unlike Mountjoy's declaration, bin Laden's was no laughing matter. He roared -- its echo to reverberate for generations to come.
The lesson learned from bin Laden's February 1998 declaration is this: When an Islamic extremist leader speaks, we need to listen -- for what is said may well contain an ominous threat of action to follow. In Osama's mind, he was giving advance notice of his intent to attack. Had we listened, September 11 might well have been avoided.
Sadly, bin Laden's threat to harm us was not the only time we have failed to heed such warnings. One need only look back to Adolf Hitler's pre-World War II rantings to see we failed to listen and act to prevent him from embarking upon his murderous rampage throughout Europe. Unfortunately, we have not been very good students of history's lessons.
Another threat to do the world harm was issued last year. It remains to be seen what the world community will do to prevent that threat from becoming a reality.
In October 2005, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly called for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and for the destruction of the United States. These statements must be given full weight as to intent: i.e., they are Iran's advance notice that Israel and the U.S. need to be destroyed. The obvious way to do so is with nuclear weapons.
In 2001, former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani suggested as much, speculating that when a Muslim state developed a nuclear weapon it might be used to destroy Israel. Mr. Rafsanjani knew then what the international community suspects now -- Iran is developing such a capability. He also speculated that, armed with a nuclear weapon, such a Muslim country could destroy all Israel, which would be unable to retaliate in kind to destroy the entire Muslim world.
Mr. Rafsanjani's comments need to be weighed alongside Mr. Ahmadinejad's beliefs on the coming of Islam's 12th imam. Mr. Ahmadinejad is a Shi'ite who believes in the return of Muhammad al-Mahdi as the 12th imam, who supposedly will come to save the world and make Islam supreme, but only after the world has first descended into chaos. While orthodox Shi'ites believe man is not permitted to initiate the chaos precipitating the imam's return, it is reported Mr. Ahmadinejad is/was a member of a group believing otherwise -- a group including four current Iranian Cabinet ministers who have signed a formal pledge to support the 12th imam. The tea leaves suggest Mr. Ahmadinejad may well envision himself as a self-appointed facilitator in effecting such chaos, thus preparing the world for the 12th imam's arrival. Letting loose with a nuclear weapon would be an ideal way to do so.
During the Cold War, to deter nuclear conflict, the U.S. and the Soviet Union adopted the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) -- the effectiveness of which turned on the logic that if each side possesses enough weapons to destroy the other following one side's first strike, neither will initiate such an exchange. It also recognized that while millions would be killed outright in a nuclear exchange, millions more would succumb later to radiation exposure.
This logic seems to be totally lost on the Iranian leadership. The Israelis already are developing a submarine fleet armed with nuclear missiles so any first strike by Iran against Israeli land targets will still leave Israel able to retaliate from the sea. Radiation generated in an Iranian first strike would be spread by prevailing westerly winds back across Middle East states with major Muslim/Arab populations -- including Iran.
In Iranian President Ahmadinejad we have a mad leader, untethered by the MAD deterrent, hell-bent on creating the required chaos by paving the road for the 12th imam's return with the dead, and without concern as to whether the victims are Jews or Muslims.
James G. Zumwalt, a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf and Vietnam wars, is a contributor to The Washington Times.
#2
I don't buy that he's crazy. On the contrary, I think he's completely lucid and in control of his faculties. Our post-modernist world has forgotten the reality of evil. The devil is completely sane, but completely evil. Same for this asshole.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
