100 Wars
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog 6 Comments

"The French are in Mali now, being shot at by Islamists armed with the very same weapons that France airdropped into Libya. Either those or the weapons that France sold to Gaddafi in the preceding period when European countries were competing to be his arms dealers. The joke is equally bleak, either way.

It used to be that decades would have to pass before a bad policy unraveled, but these days it only takes a few years to go from arming a tyrant to arming the rebels to shooting at the rebels.

In less time than it takes a pop star to go from fresh faced to train wrecked, Saif Gaddafi went from the toast of European academics to a mass murderer, Gaddafi's opposition went from Al Qaeda terrorists to brave rebels, then the brave rebels, many of whom were actually Iraqis, Tunisians and Jordanians, shot up an American diplomatic mission, hooked up with some of Gaddafi's Tuaregs to take over Northern Mali, shot them up and began carving out their own Islamist Emirate.
. . .
The West is trying to impose its moral norms on the Muslim world with bribes and interventions, while the Muslim world imposes its norms on the West by settling and blowing up Western cities. Within that chaos, the passenger planes depositing their cargoes of Pakistanis, Jordanians and Somalis at Heathrow, JFK and Charles de Gaulle Airport (the latter two names being quite fitting considering JFK's impact on immigration policy and de Gaulle's impact on North Africa) and the fighter jets and drones flying over North Africa and the Middle East, are a hundred small wars.

Those wars occupy our attention, but they are symptoms, not causes. The conflicts that we have seen are all the outcome of a prolonged process of political decay in the West. They are flares warning that power abhors a vacuum and fills it with bullets and bombs, with small wars that get bigger and bigger until they become the war. The big war whose battles will decide who rules and who is ruled. . . . "

More at:
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2013/01/100-wars.html