What are we even doing blundering around the Islamic world, stirring up hornets nests, and providing fodder for wild-eyed demagogues?

From:
Who Are We Fighting For?
(The American Conservative) -- by Patrick J. Buchanan

On March 20, Pastor Terry Jones, who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran “for crimes against humanity.”

Pronouncing Islam’s sacred book guilty, Jones soaked a Quran in kerosene and set it ablaze in a portable fire pit.

Few noticed. But Hamid Karzai did.

On March 24, the president of Afghanistan, our presumed ally in the war with al-Qaida and the Taliban, condemned this “crime against the religion and the entire Muslim nation,” called on the United States to bring Jones to justice and demanded “a satisfactory response to the resentment and anger of over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.”

Thus the firebrand here is not just Jones, who perpetrated the sacrilege, but Karzai, who made certain his countrymen knew what happened 10,000 miles away and four days before.
Friday, after prayers in Mazer-e-Sharif, a mob, inflamed by imams denouncing Jones, descended on the U.N. compound. When they left, seven U.N. employees lay dead, two reportedly beheaded.

President Obama denounced Jones’ “act of extreme intolerance and bigotry,” and added that “to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous and an affront to human dignity and decency.”

Gen. David Petraeus deplored the Quran-burning as “hateful, disrespectful and enormously intolerant.”

Still, on Saturday, rioters waving Taliban flags and shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Karzai” went on a rampage in Kandahar that ended with nine Afghans dead and 80 injured when they tried to march on the U.N. compound and security troops fired on them.

Three more were killed Sunday as riots continued in Kandahar and spread to Jalalabad. Forty more suffered gunshot wounds.

Petraeus then met with Karzai, who issued a new statement demanding that “the U.S. government, Senate and Congress clearly condemn (the Rev. Jones’) dire action and avoid such incidents in the future.”

In short, our ally seized this opportunity to rub America’s nose in what the Rev. Jones did, as though the U.S. government, whose highest civilian and military officials had condemned Jones, is morally culpable for not preventing his Quran-burning and not punishing him for it.

Nor is this sufficient. Henceforth, the U.S. government is to police its citizenry to ensure no such anti-Islamic sacrilege takes place again...

In the last two years, Christians have been burned alive by Muslims in Gorja, Pakistan, and by Hindu extremists in Orissa, India. Christian churches have been torched and scores of the faithful massacred on holy days in Iraq and Egypt. Few of these atrocities have received the media attention of the Rev. Jones’ stupid stunt or the Danish cartoonist’s irreverent scribbles.

Before America sends more of her sons to die for the freedom of Arabs and Muslims, perhaps we ought to have a better idea of what these folks intend to do with that freedom. For across that Muslim world, the faith that created our world, Christianity, is being persecuted and in some sectors annihilated.

To neocons and liberal interventionists, the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to use our wealth and power to advance freedom until the whole world is democratic. Only then can we be secure.

But if democracy means rule by the people, ought we not to inquire a little more closely what it is these people, down deep, really want, before we bleed and bankrupt ourselves to win it for them?...MORE...LINK
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Chris Moore comments:

Buchanan: “To neocons and liberal interventionists, the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to use our wealth and power to advance freedom until the whole world is democratic.”

If you take what they say at face value. I don’t. These people are pathological liars.

The real reasons we are in the Mideast:

#1) Israel, and to impose the politically correct concepts of “tolerance” and “pluralism” that it supposedly stands for (even though the Zionist state itself is intolerant and outright racist).

#2) To maintain dollar hegemony/reserve currency in order to underpin perpetual Keynesian Big Government, statist-liberal spending. Because the geniuses that have been running this country for the last 30 years have eroded, plundered and exported our industrial and production base, all we have to sustain the spending is Big Military to prop up the dollar at gunpoint.

#3) To pursue and impose the ideological Globalism of open borders, liberal capitalist progressivism and Western integrated markets so wild-eyed schizophrenic liberals, money-worshipping corporatist rats and military-industrial complex apes can get their jollies.

Let’s stop pretending these Establishment clowns, crooks, swindlers and murderous psychopaths running the country today and for the last few decades are driven by anything other than base, ignoble, self-serving motives and primitive, arrested development "creative destruction" impulses.

Naïve Americans need to wise up about the truly malign nature and low cunning character of their so-called "elites" and “leaders.”

***

Karl Rove [2004]: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

These people honestly seem to believe they are magical, and can get away with their financial swindles and warmongering folly forever. It's one part Big Government magical Marxism, one part Judeo-Christian Zionism, one part blind faith in hyper capitalist plunder and "creative destruction," all matched by an equal measure of mental illness or outright insanity.

That such low grade opportunists and delusional psychopaths were able to worm their way to the top across the entire mainstream political spectrum and much of the elite either means we've had the epic bad luck of a couple of extremely morally defective generations in a row, or we've got a systemic problem across society that is going to require radical corrective measures.

I vote for the latter.