NEEEEEEXXXT! In Slap at Syria, Turkey Shelters Anti-Assad Fighters ANTAKYA, Turkey — Once one of Syria’s closest allies, Turkey is hosting an armed opposition group waging an insurgency against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, providing shelter to the commander and dozens of members of the group, the Free Syrian Army, and allowing them to orchestrate attacks across the border from inside a camp guarded by the Turkish military. The support for the insurgents comes amid a broader Turkish campaign to undermine Mr. Assad’s government. Turkey is expected to impose sanctions soon on Syria, and it has deepened its support for an umbrella political opposition group known as the Syrian National Council, which announced its formation in Istanbul. But its harboring of leaders in the Free Syrian Army, a militia composed of defectors from the Syrian armed forces, may be its most striking challenge so far to Damascus. tp://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/world/europe/turkey-is-sheltering-antigovernment-syrian-militia.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss&src=igw
Simple: still worth it. In a dictatorial state, you expect little to no change of values and belief system over time, because the dictator is controlling those things. In a free, or free-er, country, those things tend develop, as you have seen all over the world. Unless you think Germans came into existance as secular democratic nuclear physicists? I assure you that just 70 years ago many many many of them were Nazi terrorist war mongers. I assure you, there are still many Nazi war mongers in Germany, but that doesn't mean we ask that a dictator be put in place to ensure that those parts of German society don't come to the fore? That means, for example, we tell Germany they can't have a real army. So if Libya affects your life, I'm sure it won't be as bad as causing a World War, and therefore we'll find a solution as reasonable as those found for Germany some decades ago, and logically they should be less harsh since they are unlikely to cause world war by immorally abusing technology to achieve world dominance. They have their own problems to deal with. Non-Libyans worried about the state of affairs in Libya: don't go there for a while. Libyans are happy to endure this UNAVOIDABLE period of instability. This was going to happen the moment it was determined that Gaddhafi will not step down. So tell us what you think ATW. Given the two options, do you keep Gaddhafi in place or do you take the risk of political instability in order to achieve freedom for people who have been starving for it since before you were born a free child?
That's a real mockery of Iraqi culture. Iraqi culture has Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Arabian and Mediterannean pockets. They speak a variety of languages and eat a variety of foods. There are a variety of ethnicities, races, etc. They follow a variety of religions, though that was massively diminished during Saddam's time. Regardless, there are massive amounts of atheists, agnostics, shiite muslims, sunni muslims, christians, Jews, etc. The only reason Islam is explicitly mentioned in the constitution is because Maliki risks being overthrown if the constitution appears as though it was drafted (or approved) by the US. If you read the constitution thoroughly, you will see that there is plenty of room to completely igore Islam's role in the constitution. It seems more like something people can opt into. Furthermore, stating that Sharia supercedes all other laws is generally a misunderstood statement. Dubai claims to be a sharia based system but serves alcohol (people need a license to consumer, companies need a license to serve). Saudi claims to be the mother of Sharia, but allegedly discriminates against Saudi Shiite Muslims inside the kingdom. To call their culture Islamic is like me calling your culture Hollywood.
Depends on how the country develops. I am not shedding any tears for Gaddafi, but I think even Libya under Gaddafi was better than Saudi-Arabia or Pakistan. So if Libya were to become like Turkey, even after a period of instability, then I would say well done. But if Libya were to become like Pakistan or Saudi-Arabia, I would say people in Libya were arguably better off on average even with Gaddafi. And their first steps seem to indicate it's more likely to become like Pakistan or Saudi-Arabia. But we will see. Don't forget, at the root of Turkey's current system which is relatively successful compared to all the Arab countries was the separation of church and state. The "Arab spring" countries need Atatürks right now, not Erdogans or Sauds.
Pakistan and Saudi didn't degrade into those states, they simply never developed. Perhaps the parallel you can draw is the Iranian government, and we are all aware that the key factor in that situation is that the Iranian government is not a legitimately elected government of the people of Iran. But your lesson learned from this is - better to hang on to an illegitimately elected government that opresses its people and is suspected of engaging in global terrorism than risk ending up with something actually worse than that? But it's clear you're not in the business of judging this revolution fairly. Rather, it's clear you will sit back and pass your judgement in hindsight, a comfort that Libyans don't have. How convenient. Hopefully this leads to a robust government which does not nod like a moron to every request from the "West". That may not suit your position, but that's what every country should strive for, even if with baby steps: sovereignty, independence. Libya will spend the better part of the next decade re-building itself, at which point it will have little to no interest in Islamic conservatism IMO. The elements of Islamic conservatism were/are foreign to Libya, and they'll quickly fade now that their support infrastructure is gone (Gaddhafi). A free country full of resources turning rogue terrorist - when was the last time that happened? As long as other countries keep their grubby hands to themselves and don't interfere uninvited, Libya will be fine, just like every other country would be fine in those circumstances. It might even be somewhat discriminatory to assume that Libya would react differently to being a free, well-off country than other countries historically in that situation. Why Libya? If you want terror to stop, it's very easy, completely stop co-operating with governments which place lax laws on terrorism and hide behind a vaguely-conservative Islam to achieve their political agendas. If there's anything to worry about in Libya, it's not the election of a worse government than before (laughable I swear), rather it's the glorification of traditional Arab tribalism, which has strong roots in Libya, and is responsible for the catastrophic state of affairs in the countries you mentioned. IMO it has also been responsible for the degradation of Islam, technological development and politics in the region. It encourages a total disinterest in the development of society and strongly encourages rigid assimilation into local Arab culture, which was was fundamentally based on Islam for a brief period of time between 1,400 and 1,500 years ago. Obviously, this culture has existed for thousands of years before that (legal rape, burying female children at birth, no work/political participation for women, no public visibility for women, no male-female interaction whatsoever) and will exist in some form for thousands of years after. To summarize in a sentence: Arab tribalism rather than Islam is, IMO, the active ingredient in the mixture which leads to violent Islamic behavior.
I never said that. Stop putting words in my mouth. The reason would be the Islamist influence and the tribal structure. But that's speculation. Let's give it time and let's see. I don't disagree with that part, but you cannot separate Arab tribalism from Islam, Islam developed in an area where Arab tribalism was in place, so, naturally, parts of that culture are embedded in Islam.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011/10/28/arab-spring-optimism-gives-way-to-fear-islamic-rise/ Arab Spring Optimism Gives Way to Fear of Islamic Rise From the first stirrings of change in the Middle East nine months ago, optimism at the prospect of 100 million young people rising up to seize their democratic freedoms has been tempered by fear in Western capitals that radical Islamists might also rise up and try to hijack the so-called Arab Spring. And now, many analysts say, that fear has been realized. In Tunisia, where the epic season of unrest began, last Sunday’s historic elections appear to have resulted in an Islamist group winning a governing majority. In Libya, an ex-terrorist once jailed by the Central Intelligence Agency now runs the country’s foremost military organization, and new political leaders speak openly of enacting Sharia, the ultra-harsh code of Islamic law. And in Egypt, where the world’s oldest civilization is bracing for elections next month, rioters have recently forced the evacuation of the Israeli embassy and waged vicious attacks on Coptic Christians. Worrisome in their own right, these developments also raise difficult questions, in an already contentious political season, about the conduct of President Obama and his national security team: Has the White House done all it could to steer the Arab Spring in the right direction? Have events to date strengthened U.S. security – or left America weakened abroad, with Islamic fundamentalism ascendant? At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., told Secretary of State Hillary Clinton the Mideast “really worries me,” and asked what the Obama administration “plans to do to make sure that we don't have a radical government taking over those places.” “Revolutions are unpredictable phenomena,” Clinton replied. “I think a lot of the leaders are saying the right things and some are saying things that do give pause to us….We're going to do all that we can within our power to basically try to influence outcomes. But, you know, the historic wind sweeping the Middle East and North Africa were not of our making.” Jamie Smith, a former CIA officer who has made three fact-finding trips to Libya this year, warns that the sense of unity that bound the country’s disparate rebel groups during their eight-month revolt has evaporated since Muammar Qaddafi fell from power. In the dictator’s place, Smith says, the oil-rich but woefully mismanaged North African state is relying on the Transitional National Council, made up of inexperienced ex-rebels, and the Tripoli Military Council, headed by Abdel Hakim Belhaj. The latter was once head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which the U.S. State Department classifies as a foreign terrorist organization. It is unlikely that Belhaj’s loyalties to the United States run strong: Smith notes that the CIA captured Belhaj in 2004, briefly held him in Thailand, and ultimately returned him to the custody of Qaddafi in Libya, where the former LIFG fighter languished in prison until his release last year. “So now you’ve got a radical Islamist terrorist leader who is running the most powerful military group in Libya,” said Smith, a veteran of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “In that area of the world, the people with the biggest guns make the rules. And this guy has got the guns. And he’s going to make the rules.” Not all veteran analysts of the Mideast see the TNC’s embrace of Sharia as an imminent threat, nor the broader trend in the Arab Spring as hopelessly dark for American interests. Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy draws encouragement from the fact that the region’s revolutions, by and large, have not been marked by strong expressions of anti-Western or anti-Israel sentiment. And he suggested that Washington can work reasonably well with governments whose legal codes do not mirror our own. “The Saudi government has been perhaps the most vigorous applier of Sharia law throughout the Muslim world for decades, and yet Saudi Arabia and the United States have had a pretty close relationship on national security issues,” Clawson told Fox News. “And that's very different than a secular revolutionary government like that in Syria, which certainly doesn't apply Sharia law, but which has been happy to sponsor terrorist attacks against Americans.” Some conservatives, however, are inclined to blame the Obama administration for mishandling the Mideast upheaval. Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-era Defense Department official who now leads the Washington-based Center for Security Policy, expands his definition of the Arab Spring to include the Iranian uprising of June 2009, which the regime in Tehran used lethal force to suppress. Gaffney contrasts the Obama administration’s fairly cautious response to that event – framed, at the time, as part of the president’s attempt to “engage” Iran – with Obama’s swift call for the resignation of Hosni Mubarak during the Egyptian revolution this year. “The president of the United States in both cases did the bidding of the Islamists, who wanted to preserve the regime in Iran and who wanted to remove the regime in Egypt,” Gaffney told Fox News. “And I think that quite apart from what his intentions were, in so doing, he made all the more predictable this very unhappy outcome that I think is playing out before our eyes.” The next shoe to drop in the region will likely be the Nov. 28 elections in Egypt. U.S. officials are bracing for a strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist group that boasts a long history of organized opposition to the Mubarak regime, and whose foreign offshoots include Hamas. ________________________________ In other news, Islamist terrorists just killed several people with bombs in the south of Thailand. No Arab tribalism directly involved there.
