Thomas Friedman is among the few intelligent and thoughtful writers who understand the cerebral Obama well. I have said so before and this latest piece by Friedman only adds to that impression.
For now everyone's common enemy is ISIS. This is stopping everyone from engaging or combating each others like before. So they want to cut down the ISIS to the size that it is no longer an existential threat to current Arab, Persian and Turkish rulers. They borrow US air power even as the six participating Arab states supply token participation blasting away at ISIS in Syria.
America cannot be seen to blithely walk away from Iraq and so much return to enable and empower the people in the region to help them set the house in order.
The present circumstances will not last and it is uninteresting to study. What is both tragic and interesting is the irreversible decline of the Arab civilization. That it must get a lot worse before it has any chance to get better. That is nobody can help them save themselves and America will wait for Arab troops to be ready however long it takes to take the land war to ISIS themselves. Meanwhile the media will only spin simple and wrong stories of good guys kicking the butt of the baddies. Nothing is so simple.
The big idea? Islam is in crisis. As competing groups fight for the soul of the religion (I didn't say faith) things will get messy. In the essence the fights will be about power and not religion or faith. Religion will be used to legitimized victorious power. The faithful must snatch back their hijacked religion. This is a stretch but I hope Indonesia as the most populous and multi-religious Muslim country can make a big contribution. If we succeed at least the risk of terrorism in our local backyard will be minimized.
"This is a stretch but I hope Indonesia as the most populous and multi-religious Muslim country can make a big contribution."
ReplyDeleteThis is what previously I hope Prabowo can do, but
I simply wrong
On paper Turkey is better placed but that Erdogan fellow is the wrong guy. As for Probowo I don't trust him. In fact I think he is dangerous and disruptive. Fortunately Jokowi won and that is to the voters' credit.
DeleteThose leaders in the ME region have no conviction or imagination except big egos and hunger for power and privilege. Their idea of an Islamic renaissance is to return to the past golden age which ought to be left behind. It ain't going to happen and instead that they Al Qaeda and ISIL. They never grasped the special sauce to make it work. I suspect they never studied their history honestly enough.
http://blog.markdurie.com/2014/02/islams-second-crisis-troubles-to-come.html
ReplyDeleteI think you're right
the beast is dying and a dying beast, is
a dangerous one
Well the spiritual solution is unfortunately
ReplyDeleteto let the game play by that book to very end
it's a "jumanji" moment
such an interesting moment in time