I haven’t had much time to post this week, as I’ve been very busy with work, but did finally got around to bashing out some quick posts yesterday (by doubling the caffeine quota). This one is a bit of a collage of what remains, that was originally going to be broken up into several posts. Some good reading in there, enjoy, I am pretty much offline again ’til next week, when hopefully things should clear up a little. Have a great weekend!

First up, a brilliant presentation by Melanie Phillips on the worldwide struggle between modernity and medievalism (via LGF):

First of all, let me define my terms and say what I mean by Islamism and liberalism. Islamism is the politicised version of Islam which mandates jihad, or holy war against the infidel and conquest of the non-Islamic world for Islam. I’m well aware of the argument that there’s no difference between Islamism and Islam: that’s a theological argument for others to have.

By liberalism I mean the commitment to a free society, founded above all on the separation of secular government from religious worship — from which follow the concepts of equal respect for all people, freedom of conscience, tolerance and the rule of law.

These two concepts, Islamism and liberalism, are currently engaged in a fight to the death. My argument is that liberalism is in danger of losing this fight because it has so badly undermined itself and departed from its own core concepts that it is now paralysed by moral and intellectual muddle.

[..]

The Islamist goal is to destroy the virus of freedom and modernity before it infects the Islamic world, and to replace it with Islam. That is the core of the profound threat it poses to the west, a threat mounted through the pincer movement of both terrorism and cultural takeover.

This cultural takeover, or the aim to Islamise the west, was explicitly laid out in a programme of subversion for Europe by the Wahabbi Muslim Brotherhood almost 30 years ago. In 1978, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference sponsored a seminar in London which said Muslim communities in western countries must establish autonomous institutions with help from Muslim states, and lobby the host country to grant Muslims recognition as a separate religious community as a step towards eventual political domination.

In Britain in 1980, a book called ‘The Islamic Movement in the West’ by Khuram Murad advocated an ‘organised struggle to change the existing society into an Islamic society…and make Islam…supreme and dominant especially in the socio-political spheres…’ A Muslim Brotherhood document seized in Switzerland in 2001, known as ‘The Project’, outlined a twelve-point strategy to ‘establish an Islamic government on earth’. And the Brotherhood has now set up an intricate network of bodies across Europe to put all this into action.

Many Muslims in Britain and around the world are deeply opposed to this; indeed Muslims are the most numerous victims of the jihad. That’s why I use the term Islamism, to distinguish those who believe in Islamic conquest from those who merely draw upon Islam for spiritual sustenance. But at the same time, it is false to deny that Islamism is the dominant force in the Muslim and Arab world, false to deny that it is radicalising millions of Muslims in the west, and false to deny the huge inroads it has made into western society through this pincer movement of terrorism and cultural pressure.

But many in the west do deny it. They ignore the clear evidence of the goal of Islamising the west.

Read the whole thing, its excellent.

At the core of Melanie’s presentation is the following dire indictment of Western civilization:

Our corrupted liberal culture has torn up the key precepts of liberalism so that it no longer knows what they are, let alone stands ready to defend them to the death. Authentic liberalism was a doctrine of social progress based on maximising the good in people’s behaviour and minimising the bad. It thus depended upon making moral distinctions between good and bad.

But these distinctions have been destroyed by a combination of hyper-individualism —which grew out of liberalism — and a form of cultural Marxism whose agenda is to destroy liberal values. Between them, these trends tore up the concepts of objectivity, authority and the Judeo-Christian moral codes underpinning western values and substituted emotion, subjectivity, and moral and cultural relativism. [..]

Under the banner of liberal values, this actually destroyed the core precept of liberalism — the distinction between right and wrong, good and bad, truth and lies. Instead, feelings and emotion became most important. The particulars of a culture were deemed hurtful and thus illegitimate because by definition they divided one culture from another. The nation, rooted as it is in the particulars of history, religion, law, language and tradition, became seen as the cause of all the ills of the world from prejudice to war. And the culture of a nation had to be replaced by multiculturalism.

In this interview in “Reset – Dialogues on Civilizations” Ayaan Hirsi Ali raises similar points and suggest how to proceed in the battle against the Islamists, citing confronting people like Tariq Ramadan in open debate as an example:

I am a liberal in the classical liberal sense, so I do not like what Tariq Ramadan says. In fact, I think his message is the worst kind of message against liberalism, but in a free society, we have to give even those who have ideas that we do not like the freedom to debate them with us. I think this is a characteristic of this civilization. The European and Western civilization relies on that idea. So for him and me to debate, and for him to come to Rome, the US or France is fine. But what he is saying and campaigning for is against liberal and liberalism. Let Ramadan speak, and let us refute what he says, because the message that he wants to convey is more embarrassing than his presence. I have been in debate with him, and seen that he gets very angry when I touched on the core issue of what he says. He wants to take away fundamental freedoms from you and from me, and put them in the hands of God. And when I told him “If you do that for yourself it is fine, but why are you propagating it?”, then he got very angry.

[..]

When fathers remove girls from schools, when they force them into marriage, when genital mutilation is taking place and when the Socialist or the Social-democratic party says “this is their culture, this is multiculturalism, let us protect it and rule like this”, then I think they are not being left-wing. If left-wing were about individual rights as in classical 19th-century liberalism, I would define myself as leftwing. But left-wing these days is all about groups: workers, men and women, poor and rich, and that sort of thing. It is not about just human individuals.

On Pyjamas Media the Pastor of Comunidad de Gracia A.C. in Mexico City, Bruce Moon gets a little carried away with words expressing his frustration of the West’s insanity in the face of the Islamist threat:

Even a population hopelessly blinkered from national obsession with food and sex, with entertainment and health, with self-esteem and self-promoting ‘spirituality,’ cannot begin to explain why, as it adores its excesses, it seems not to give a flip for its own very survival. Lack of oxygen to the brain because of frequent overdoses of “Sex and the City”, Dr. Dre, or Krispy Kremes can only go so far to explain the massive synaptic misfires we are increasingly seeing. Something deeper and more sinister must be at work.

Some viral idea has crept into our collective national consciousness, offering us a false wisdom and a feigned hope, while it meanwhile shuts down vital parts of our mental operational systems designed to initiate self-survival programs. We are fast approaching the point where either we must reject the pterodactyl-like hallucinations of irrational humanistic constructs that only produce mind-boggling complacent stupor, political correctness contrivances, and cowardice, or we will become a pitiful specter of our former selves through our utter stupidity.

Laura Mansfield gets to the point with a frightening example of political correctness that may have had tragic conquences:

“Dude, I just saw some really weird s-. I don’t know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?”

Anton Efendi at Across the Bay slams American academic apologists and appeasers of Middle Eastern thugs (I recommend visiting his blog for excellent insights into the developing situation in Lebanon):

But I should make another comment here, just to clarify things. I mean, we shouldn’t really be shocked at the Syrian regime’s behavior. Here, let Bashar Assad’s apologist in American academia explain things to us simpletons: “America, I think, is going to be forced to bend to [Syria's extortionist demands]. If it continues to resist [giving Lebanon back to Damascus], we’re going to see more violence.”

It’s quite simple really. I mean, Washington is refusing to “abandon the Seniora government.” So what do you expect!? I mean, come on! After all, the problem is simple. You see, Syria “makes American allies pay a high price!” And as long as we pursue a tribunal to stop Assad from killing people, he will continue to kill people until we say he can continue killing people unmolested! I mean, as that academic recently said, “This Hariri court stands in the way”! I know, what a drag…

And finally Judith Apter Klinghoffer notes something that those academics can’t seem to understand, quoting Barry Rubin, the author of “The Truth About Syria”:

The lessons about these regimes’ extremist behavior should be clear by now. When someone extends its hand in offered friendship, they interpret this as hands raised in surrender.

I do wonder what Nancy Pelosi is thinking just about now in regards to what Syria is orchestrating in Lebanon. Although I am assure I’d be disappointed if I found out. I see someone has gone and created a reading list just for her. And there’s Barry Rubin again.

George Will explains the conundrum of welfare states:

Two decades ago, the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote about “the cultural contradictions of capitalism” to express this worry: Capitalism flourishes because of virtues that its flourishing undermines. Its success requires thrift, industriousness and deferral of gratifications, but that success produces abundance, expanding leisure and the emancipation of appetites, all of which weaken capitalism’s moral prerequisites.

The cultural contradictions of welfare states are comparable. Such states presuppose economic dynamism sufficient to generate investments, job creation, corporate profits and individuals’ incomes from which comes tax revenue needed to fund entitlements.

But welfare states produce in citizens an entitlement mentality and a low pain threshold. That mentality inflames appetites for more entitlements, broadly construed to include all government benefits and protections that contribute to welfare understood as material well-being, enhanced security and enlarged leisure.

The low pain threshold causes a ruinous flinch from the rigors, insecurities, uncertainties and dislocations inherent in the creative destruction of dynamic capitalism. The flinch takes the form of protectionism, regulations and other government-imposed inefficiencies that impede the economic growth that the welfare state requires.

So welfare states are, paradoxically, both enervating and energizing — and infantilizing. They are enervating because they foster dependency; they are energizing because they aggravate an aggressive (think of burning Peugeots) sense of entitlement; they are infantilizing because it is infantile to will an end without willing the means to that end, and people who desire welfare states increasingly desire relief from the rigors necessary to finance them.

Read the whole thing for ample illustration of the process in the current French Republic.

Will also nicely sums up Sarkozy’s task in the French Culture Wars (a phrase used by Greg Sheridan in The Australian a couple of weeks ago, that appeared here a two days prior) he will have to win to reverse the above:

During the 25 years that the French left and some right-wing nationalists have spent reviling “cold, heartless impoverishing Anglo-American capitalism,” France’s per capita gross domestic product has slumped from seventh in the world to 17th. Sarkozy’s task is to convince the French that their government’s solicitousness on behalf of their security and leisure explains the work they must now do to reduce their insecurity.

Paul Greenburg expands and concurs:

It won’t be easy rousing France out of its own version of Carterism. The symptoms are all there—the 9 percent unemployment rate (22 percent for able-bodied persons under the age of 24), the welfare programs the state can less and less afford even as they sap individual initiative, the cultural miasma styled multiculturalism, the growing ring of slums reserved for Muslim immigrants around every big city, the rising crime rate and sporadic rioting … to all of which the powers that be responded with little more than a Gallic shrug.

At the center of the French slide has been the disintegration of the family: From 1970 to 2005, the divorce rate in France went from 12 percent to almost 40 percent; 20 percent of all French couples are unwed; a third of all French mothers live alone; 40 percent of all French children are born to unmarried couples … and so sadly on. (Sound familiar?)
….
By their votes, the French have said they’re ready to reverse course, but being ready for change and actually changing are two different things. It’s one thing to prescribe strong medicine, another to take it.

Just wanted to extend a belated welcome back to the sun burnt country to our wayward adventurer Davie! I am sure he is rather keen to realise his plans for the future, that he had so long to think about over at Club Gitmo, so I thought I’d help. I wouldn’t want to be misrepresentin’, so here are his requests for assistance in his most urgently desired endeavours, word for word, just as he wrote them to his old flattie Louise:

LISTEN, have you got any friends I can f– when I get home? They have to be good-looking and I prefer big tits as well. Well, send their photos with the letters so I can check them out.

(Responding to Fletcher’s suggestion that she might write a book about him): Don’t try to write about my adventures because you don’t know that information.

Nobody does, so it would be inaccurate. I would prefer if you wrote nothing about anybody, for that matter. Shit, I would have no chance to make any money when I got home, otherwise.

So best of luck with the chicks and the… moolah. Just go easy on the Jew-hating now, fattie (bastards)!

UPDATE: Looks like I am not alone in wanting to help. Down Under we call this mateship.

Andrew Bolt has a selection of insanity from a thread on the Australian Muslim Village Forum, discussing Hamas’ warmongering Mickey Mouse. Some of the gems included are “Why cant Muslim kids be taught to arm themselves up with AK-47’s and strive for world domination under Islamic leadership” and “Islam is based on TOTAL SUBMISSION, not on logic and destructive reasoning”, along with numerous permutations thereof.

Muslim Village is a fascinating microcosm of “soft” Islamo-Fascism that I recommend visiting to get a bit of insight into Islamic views on all and sundry. Beware though, about 90% of non-Muslims that join end up getting banned (no difference of opinion, uncomfortable questions or criticism will be tolerated), as well as probably about 20% of Muslims. The latter because they are keen to present a nice image and do their bit of Dawah, so anyone (and particularly the more rabid Salafists) showing too much psychosis, “secularization” or keenness for violence is removed. Plenty of Caliphate-striving, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Victims-R-Us types though. Just keep in mind you’re getting a highly filtered and severely moderated cross section of views. You don’t need to join to view. I wonder what form “banning” would take if these people actually had political power over a population.

LGF has this astounding video of some “expert” maggot in a suit, on Iranian television saying that “Hitler was falsely accused of committing genocide against the Jews.” Unbelievable. He continues: “This is a lie, and we know full well that Hitler never did such a thing. It was a premeditated lie by the Zionist regime.”

Over in the comments here a visitor with a Dutch IP, calling him/herself “Domination” had the following to say:

Fuck serbs. fuck HellASS
Long live 2 USAlbania

USAlbania? Sounds like a fun place. Don’t leave the Macedonians out now.

Aussie Dave has been doing a great job live-blogging the current conflict in Israel, check it out.

Tomorrow, 19th of May, is Pontian Greek Genocide Remembrance Day.

I highly recommend you read this exceptional post by Stavros at My Greek Odyssey. Here are some extracts, but do read the whole thing:

May 19 has been recognized by the Greek parliament as the day of remembrance of the Pontian Greek Genocide by the Turks. There are various estimates of the toll. Records kept mainly by priests show a minimum 350,000 Pontian Greeks exterminated through systematic slaughter by Turkish troops and Kurdish irregulars. Other estimates, including those of foreign missionaries, spoke of 500,000 deaths, most through deportation and forced marches into the Anatolian desert interior. Thriving Greek cities like Bafra, Samsous, Kerasous, and Trapezous, at the heart of Pontian Hellenism on the coast of the Black Sea, endured recurring massacres and deportations that eventually destroyed their Greek population. The genocide started with the order in 1914 for all Pontian men between the ages of 18 and 50 to report for military duty. Those who “refused” or “failed” to appear, the order provided, were to be summarily shot. The immediate result of this decree was the murder of thousands of the more prominent Pontians, whose names appeared on lists of “undesirables” already prepared by the Young Turk regime.

[..]

U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau accused the “Turkish government” of a campaign of “outrageous terrorizing, cruel torturing, driving of women into harems, debauchery of innocent girls, the sale of many of them at 80 cents each, the murdering of hundreds of thousands and the deportation to and starvation in the desert of other hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of hundreds of villages and many cities,” all part of “the willful execution” of a “scheme to annihilate the Armenian, Greek and Syrian Christians of Turkey.” US Consul-General George Horton reported that “one of the cleverest statements circulated by the Turkish propagandists is to the effect that the massacred Christians were as bad as their executioners, that it was “50-50.”” On this issue he clarifies that “had the Greeks, after the massacres in the Pon­tus and at Smyrna, massacred all the Turks in Greece, the record would have been 50-50—almost.” As an eye-witness, he also praises Greeks for their “conduct toward the thousands of Turks residing in Greece, while the ferocious massacres were going on.”, which, according to his opinion, was “one of the most inspiring and beautiful chapters in all that country’s history.”

Stavros also includes in his post a graphic eyewitness account of the destruction of a Greek village, one of hundreds that met the same horrific fate:

The mothers, stood pale and disheveled in the bitter cold, trembling with fear while holding their clinging infants in close embrace. The young girls, some with their old parents and others with old women or holding up the sick, were herded like sheep, ready for slaughter, into the middle of a pandemonium punctuated by heart-breaking cries and lamentations. Then they ordered their victims to enter two pre-selected houses in the vicinity of the square where they could complete their crime. They herded this unwilling flock into the houses with kicks and shouts. There was no doubt now about the fate that awaited them. The Tsets crammed over three hundred into those houses, anxious to finish their macabre enterprise. When they were sure that no one remained outside, they locked the doors oblivious to the cacophony of cries and supplications for mercy that reverberated in the surrounding mountains and forests.

The final phase of this tragic event needed only a few handfuls of dry grass set alight to create a firestorm that engulfed the two houses in bloodcurdling screams through the pungent black smoke. What followed during the next hour cannot be adequately described…

Crazed mothers clutched tightly, with the all the force of their souls, their crying babies to their bosom. Children cried for their mothers. The girls and the other women with the elderly, the children and the sick, screamed and seized each other as if they wanted to take and give the other courage and help until their hair, clothes and bodies were engulfed by the flames. Piercing cries, maniacal screams and thunderous, wild howls of people, overcome by terror and pain. They beat and flayed the air and the walls to no avail. Hell on earth!

Some women and girls, in their despair and pain, threw themselves out of windows, preferring death from the bullets to the blazing inferno. Osman’s men who looked on smiling, enjoying the spectacle before them, were more than happy to accommodate these poor women by shooting them dead. The screaming began to dwindle, replaced by the noise of the crackling timbers and the crumbling walls falling on the smoldering bodies. Nothing remained but the ash and ruins of what used to be two homes in the town of Beyialan.

I’ve quoted quite a lot there, but please go and read the whole post, “Bitter Homage”.

You can also read another excellent article/post on the subject here, written by a young Pontian Greek girl called Olga, born in Russia and now living in South Africa. She also has a version of it in Russian.

Ted Laskaris comments on the current situation between Greece and Turkey on his blog Augean Central.

The Remembrance Day is currently recognised only by Greece and Cyprus and a half a dozen US states. Armenia also recognizes that the genocide occurred. Last year Jenny Mikakos raised the issue in the Victorian Parliament, seeking acknowledgement from the Turkish Government that the genocide took place. A minor scandal followed, with Jenny Mikakos being called racist and being accused of “inter-ethnic hate speech”. Here are extracts from her speech, from an article in The Age:

[..] On May 19 the Pontian community in Victoria and around the world will commemorate the 87th anniversary of the Pontian genocide that occurred in present-day Turkey.

“Between 1916 and 1923, over 353,000 Pontic Greeks living in Asia Minor and in Pontus, which is near the Black Sea, died as a result of the 20th century’s first but less-known genocide. Over a million Pontic Greeks were forced into exile. In the preceding years, 1.5 million Armenians and 750,000 Assyrians in various parts of Turkey also perished.

[..] The Turkish Government must begin the reconciliation process by acknowledging these crimes against humanity. The suffering of the victims of the Pontian genocide cannot and will not be forgotten.

[..] The Pontic people lived in Asia Minor and in Pontus from ancient times. When the Turkish nationalists took power after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a deliberate policy of creating ‘Turkey for the Turks’ was adopted, essentially to rid Turkey of its Pontian, Armenian and Assyrian Christians.

The process began with Christian businesses being boycotted, leading to bankruptcies and property being confiscated. Eventually, intellectuals and community leaders were rounded up and executed; women were raped and enslaved. Most victims died from exhaustion or dehydration on forced marches or work in the so-called labour battalions.

[..] Unlike Germany, which has taken responsibility for the Jewish holocaust, Turkey has never apologised to its victims.

Turkey of course won’t be apologizing anytime soon, but I wonder if a way forward may be to ask the Government of Kurdistan to apologize for the involvement of the Kurds. That would certainly put pressure on Turkey, to put it mildly. Although realistically it is unlikely, the Kurds may find reason to agree, given the recent war of words between them and Turkey over the PKK and the upcoming Kirkuk referendum.

Thomas Sowell writing on “The Anger of the Left”:

That people on the political left have a certain set of opinions, just as people do in other parts of the ideological spectrum, is not surprising. What is surprising, however, is how often the opinions of those on the left are accompanied by hostility and even hatred.

Particular issues can arouse passions here and there for anyone with any political views. But, for many on the left, indignation is not a sometime thing. It is a way of life.

How often have you seen conservatives or libertarians take to the streets, shouting angry slogans? How often have conservative students on campus shouted down a visiting speaker or rioted to prevent the visitor from speaking at all?

Or beat their teacher to death with sticks, for that matter. Here’s an example from China’s Cultural Revolution of what results when that anger is taken to its pathological conclusion and made into state policy:

“What is your name?” the Great Helmsman asked a young student as she pinned a Red Guard armband on him in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. “Song Binbin,” she responded enthusiastically. The name her parents chose meant “properly raised” and “polite,” qualities that Mao Zedong found unappealing. “Be violent!” he ordered the girl. A short time later she changed her first name to Yaowu, or “Be Violent.”

It was Aug. 18, 1966 and the 72-year-old Chinese leader had called male and female students to assemble on Beijing’s Square of Heavenly Peace to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hundreds of thousands waved Mao’s little red book and cheered the old man.

Mao’s call to violence fell on willing ears among many young people. Thirteen days earlier Song, 19 at the time, was presumably present when the female students at her school, which was part of the Beijing Teachers University, killed their teacher, Bian Zhongyun. The girls brutally beat the 50-year-old woman to death using wooden sticks spiked with nails. On the day before the killing, members of the Red Guard had already maltreated the teacher, who was the party leader at the school — they suddenly viewed her as a “counter-revolutionary revisionist” who they believed had gambled away her life.

Bian went down in history as the first victim of the Cultural Revolution — the bloody mass movement Mao used to eliminate his enemies within the party. The teacher’s murder was followed by the killings of millions of Chinese people. The ten-year campaign destroyed entire families, irreplaceable cultural treasures and centuries-old traditions. In August 1966 alone, about 100 teachers were murdered by their own students in the western section of Beijing.

Thomas Sowell sums up his point:

If it is hard to find a principle behind what angers the left, it is not equally hard to find an attitude.

Their greatest anger seems to be directed at people and things that thwart or undermine the social vision of the left, the political melodrama starring the left as saviors of the poor, the environment, and other busybody tasks that they have taken on.

It seems to be the threat to their egos that they hate. And nothing is more of a threat to their desire to run other people’s lives than the free market and its defenders.

And here’s an example of what free market capitalism has been teaching the children of China’s great Asian competitor, India:

During the mid-1990s, the first Internet cafes began opening up in Bangalore, with one going into operation nextdoor to Gopinath’s house. “My brother Shreyas took me there. I was fascinated. The Internet changed my life,” he says. He spent every spare minute online.

He taught himself how to build Web sites. “He spent every rupee he had in the Internet Café,” says his mother, disapproval still evident in her voice. Gopinath admits, “I had been a good student up until then. After I discovered the Internet, I was an average student.” Before finding cyberspace, he had dreams of becoming a veterinarian.

So what did he become instead? How about this:

Suhas Gopinath started a software company at age 14 and has since become one of the most remarkable success stories of the Indian IT boom. Now he’s 21 and runs a world-class business with 400 employees.

Nice one, Suhas!

From the Malaysia Sun:

‘The crises confronting the Islamic world are not only external but also internal, flowing from our own weaknesses, our own vulnerabilities, our own divisions within,’ he said. ‘The Islamic world is on a downward slide and we must face this.’

General Musharraf said Islamic countries have failed to invest in education and lag far behind the rest of the world in literacy and economic growth.

The president also lashed out at Muslim hardliners who he blamed for fueling Western fears of the Islamic world.

‘While the world views Islam as a militant, intolerant religion, this thought is reinforced by our own extremist forces,’ he said. ‘We are in a state where these semi-literate clerics are closing the minds of people.’

Unfortunately when someone is on a “downward slide” you often need to allow them to hit rock bottom before the lesson is really learnt.

And talk about creating a monster. Pakistani intelligence agencies and military have been encouraging a zombie army of “semi-literate clerics” and Islamist militants at home and abroad for decades, from Afghanistan to Bangladesh and continued to do so even as the above lecture was being given. So best of luck facing a problem you yourselves helped create and should have faced a long time ago. Ironically at the same Musharraf has actually made some decent progress in modernising Pakistan’s economy and education system. Can’t have it both ways though – either you build medieval Deobandi madrassahs or you build modern liberal universities.

(H/t Saint)

The people that gave the world Clonaid are back with a new project: Clitoraid. The aim of the project is to provide surgery that “restores sexual sensibility” to victims of Female Genital Mutilation.

Go to the Clitoraid website to “Adopt a Clitoris”, read some “touching testimonies” or make a donation for the construction of their “pleasure hospital” in Burkina Faso, which is due to start next week.

I reckon you’d have to be pretty brave to let these people anaesthesize you. But then, who in Burkina Faso has even heard of Raelism?

(h/t Right Truth)

Below are excerpts from an interview with a very interesting fellow called Rory Stewart. Here’s a bit about him:

Rory Stewart is chief executive of the Turquoise Mountain Foundation, a non-profit organization in Kabul devoted to social and urban redevelopment in Afghanistan. A former member of the British Foreign Office, he served, from 2003 to 2004, the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq as Deputy Governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar, an experience he described in the book The Prince of the Marshes.[*] The following text is based on Stewart’s dialogue about Iraq with audience members, after his discussion with broadcast journalist Dan Harris, at the Asia Society in New York on April 20, 2007.

Rory on the reconstruction effort:

Woman in audience: I wanted to know since you were in Afghanistan in 2002, and then had left and gone to Iraq in 2003–2004, what made you want to go back and live there?

Rory Stewart: The experience that I had in Iraq was a disillusioning one. Originally I supported the invasion because I had served in Indonesia, the Balkans, and Afghanistan and I thought Iraq could be more stable and humane than it had been under Saddam. I realized in Iraq that I had been wrong. I was working for the British government as coalition deputy governor of the southern provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar and I had by April 2004 $10 million a month delivered to me in vacuum-sealed packets which we were supposed to be dispensing in order to get programs going. And almost none of the programs caught the imagination of the local population; and then I was facing hundreds of people demonstrating outside my office day after day, saying, “What has the coalition ever done for us?” And we restored 240 out of 400 schools; we restored all the clinics and hospitals; but nobody seemed interested or remotely engaged with the process.

There were only two projects we did that I thought had some kind of impact: one of them was the restoration of the bazaar in al-Amara, the capital of Maysan province, and the other was the creation of a carpentry school for street children in Nasiriyah. The carpentry school took two hundred children and had them go through a pretty good training course in carpentry and then found them jobs. It was the one project where suddenly we had the Iraqi police chief and the Iraqi mayor of Nasiriyah visiting it, and Iraqi television stations and al-Jazeera covering it, and people seemed gripped by it.

So coming to Afghanistan again in 2005, I saw that a quarter of the historic city of Kabul was due to be demolished again. They had resurrected the 1976 East German master plan under which it was to be flattened and replaced with East German–style concrete blocks. And I discovered that people like Ustad Abdul Hadi, who had been among the most famous craftsmen in the country, were selling fruit in the marketplace, the historic buildings were collapsing, and the garbage was seven feet deep in the street. Afghans wanted jobs, incomes, and a renewed sense of national identity. I sensed that restoring the traditional commercial center of the city and creating a crafts center that would make furniture, ceramics, and textiles would not only be good for the economy but would also catch imaginations. I could not undertake this kind of project in Baghdad. Those are some of the things that came together to make me do it. [..]

Moderator: Does the carpentry school still exist in Nasiriyah?

The carpentry school in Nasiriyah does not still exist, unfortunately. The funding stopped. It ran out of money.

I’d like to hear his thoughts on why “nobody in Iraq was interested or remotely engaged with the process” or reconstruction. Resentment, cultural differences, fear, stubbornness, prejudice, all of the above?

And his thoughts on withdrawal:

[.] I believe that the time has come to withdraw, that our presence is infantilizing the Iraqi political system. That we’re like an inadequate antibiotic. We are sufficiently strong to have turned what might have been a conventional civil war into a highly unconventional neighborhood conflict. But we’re not strong enough to eliminate it entirely. At the same time I fear that, without intending to, we have discredited democracy in the eyes of many Iraqis. We have created a situation in which many Iraqis now feel that the only way to keep security is to bring back a strongman. They are extremely skeptical of our programs and suggestions for development.

I think that Iraqi politicians are considerably more competent, canny, and capable of compromise than we acknowledge. Iraqi nationalism, in my view, can trump the Shiite–Sunni divisions. Our continuing presence is encouraging Iraqi politicians to play hard-ball with each other. Were we to leave, they would be weaker and under more pressure to compromise. In our relations with the Iraqis we often blocked negotiations with Moqtada al-Sadr or Sunni insurgency leaders, or the offer of troop withdrawals and amnesties for former Baathists and insurgents, among others. Yet these will probably be elements in any kind of settlement.

And therefore, my belief—and I emphasize this is my belief, not a certainty—is that were we to withdraw, things would improve

He goes on to further explain his reasoning and why he believes even the prospect of region-wide escalation or intervention by neghbouring states do not trump the reasons for withdrawal. I think he perhaps underestimates the ruthless determination of the Iranians and the extent to which they have already penetrated Iraqi society and the implications of this for the long term stability of the whole region. Iraq’s future is no longer a matter between the US and the various Iraqi factions. On a strategic level it is largely a matter between the US and Iran. Steward addresses the possibility of Iranian invasion or Iranian destabilisation of Iraq with covert operations. The problem is they may have already consolidated their power base in the Shiite regions too far for either option to be necessary. And then there is the question of what would happen to Kurdistan in the event of an complete withdrawal.