Israel and the nerd imperialists

The nerd imperialists and their feckless and pathologically
irresponsible MSM accomplices, claiming that Cairo will be “the new
Silicon Valley,” should be held accountable as Libya cracks in half and
Iranian warships approach Israel’s shores.

It is part of the American vanity that every tribe will be better off
without its queen or natural leader; what they really want, we were told
a few years back, is Cal Klein and Michael Jackson. iPads this time,
and smartphones.

America encouraged this unraveling from the beginning, which has
absurdly advanced even to Ohio and Indiana. We do so because we were
born without a sense of dominion ourselves; it leaves us neurotic; we
need to conquer and are compelled outward. But primary anthropology
tells us that when you remove the king from the tribe you are left only
with a horde. Barely a week on we are unnerved and unprepared. Everyone
is unprepared; Apple cracks, stocks crash, oil soars. Everyone except
Israel, which has been preparing for this for 60 years.

But this time The Washington Post’s columnist Anne Applebaum gets it right. In the Arab world, it is 1848 — not 1989:

“Each revolution must be assessed in its own context, each had a distinctive impact. The revolutions spread from one point to another. They interacted to a limited extent. … The drama of each revolution unfolded separately. Each had its own heroes, its own crises. Each therefore demands its own narrative.”

That could be the first paragraph from a future history of the Arab revolutions of 2011, she writes. In fact, it comes from the introduction to a book about the European revolutions of 1848.

Years ago, before we used memsahibs for the task, diplomats were actually expected to read thick books, like Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, to understand their opponents and their fields of orientation. To advance Applebaum’s thesis Secretary Hillary Clinton might renew her library card and look to Barbara W. Tuchman’s masterly The Proud Tower to see how Europe systematically unwound in the 1800s on the long march to its death in 1914. Ancient Islam is doing the same today and has been doing so for decades now. Even the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini was a death cough of that which awakened in Mecca in 570 AD. But I wouldn’t trust Vice President Biden to this task. He doesn’t look that smart.

The ability to catch on fire, though it is endlessly celebrated here by the press, is most every time not a sign of the phoenix, but a sign of weakness, decay and pending doom, whether it occurs in Cairo or Columbus, Ohio. Those who hold fast through the fire will be shown to be the rising powers. This time around it will be those born again to true dominion in the late 1940s, Israel and China in particular. These are real places of earth and not lines in the sand drawn almost a hundred years ago by Lt. Col. T.E. Lawrence to please his boy lover.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.