The Common Core Straight Jacket

 

By Alan Caruba

American education was based on some very fundamental principles and, from the 1640s until the 1840s, they were, in the words of Joseph Bast, the president of The Heartland Institute, “real civics, real economics, and real virtues.”

Bast is the co-author of “Education and Capitalism” and in a recent speech at the Eighth annual Wisconsin Conservative Conference took a look at the way an education system that produced citizens who understood the values that existed before “progressives” took over the nation’s school system, turning it into a one-size-fits-all system of indoctrination.

“One-size-fits-all is easier for bureaucracies, but it’s not good for kids. No two kids learn the same way, and no two teachers teach the same way”, but Common Core not only makes this assumption, but enforces it.

The good news is, as Bast notes, that “since the early 1960s, parents and activists have been fighting to return to the country’s education system to what had worked so well for 200 years.”

In a Wall Street Journal commentary by Jamie Gass and Charles Chieppo, they called Common Core “uncommonly inadequate” and documented the way it destroys student academic achievement. Gass directs the Center for School Reform at the Boston-based Pioneer Institute where Chieppo is a senior fellow.

The brain child of Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education, and spelled out in a letter to Hillary Clinton following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Gass and Chieppo quoted its stated intention “to remold the entire American system” into “a system of labor-market boards at the local, state, and federal levels” where curriculum and ‘job matching’ will be handled by government functionaries.”

Gass and Chieppo cited the way in Massachusetts Common Core’s English standards “reduce by 60% the amount of classic literature, poetry, and drama that students will read. For example, the Common core ignores the novels of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Mark Twain’s ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It also delays the point at which Bay State students reach Algerbra I—the gateway to higher math study—from eighth to ninth grade or later.”

Common Core is not a plan to produce a new generation of citizens who understand the values on which the nation was based and built, but rather one that focuses on job skills to the detriment of civics, economics, history, the arts, and traditional values. It is a system for serfs, not citizens. It is yet another example of  how progressives view people as mere instruments of the state and how they have used the schools to indoctrinate and train them for that purpose.

“We have a president,” says Bast, “who thinks wealth is created by redistribution, that the producers of the world will continue to produce no matter how high the taxes or how heavy the regulations. High school and college students are taught to think the same way” to the detriment of “honesty, hard work, self-responsibility, faith, hope, and love. Are these things being taught in public schools today?” asked Bast. “Maybe in some, but not in many.”

“As long as government owns and operates ninety percent of the schools in the United States,” Bast warns, “we have no right to expect that fewer than ninety percent of students who graduate will be socialists.” The result of the two Obama elections are testimony to that.

In a commentary on leftist school indoctrination, Bruce Thornton, a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor of classics and humanities at the California State University, described the distortions today’s students are being taught in K-12.

“The founding of the United States, then, was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property owners.”

“The civil war wasn’t about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south.”

“The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in the wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalism exploitation.”

This is not what students who attended American schools in the 1940’s and 1950’s learned, but starting in the 1960s these distortions were, as Thornton noted, “married to identity politics, the defining of ethnic minorities and Third World peoples on the basis of their status as victims of capitalist hegemony and its imperialist and colonialist mechanisms.” Feminism added women to the list of victims “sacrificed to the white male structure.”

The result, said Thornton was “a student population ignorant of the basic facts of history, the vacuum filled with melodramas of victimization, racism, oppression, and violence that cast the United States as the global villain guilty of crimes against humanity.”

It’s a noticeable, though small, trend as parents homeschool their children. A report in Education News states that, since 1999, the number of children who are homeschooled has increased 75%, however that still represents only 4% of school-age children nationwide. These children do far better on standardized assessment exams than those in government schools.

The good news is that parents and activists across the nation are fighting back to ensure that school choice, based on a voucher system, and other options that include tuition tax credits, special needs scholarships, and education savings accounts. These empower parents to enroll their children in schools that have demonstrated higher standards and traditional values.

“If we can return to a free-market education system,” says Bast, “we can solve most of our political problems.”

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Big Government is Stupid Government

Obama Cabinet Meeting

By Alan Caruba

Nothing enhances a president’s reputation than to be seen in the company of other world leaders and Obama will have an abundance of photo-ops as he meets in Ireland with the G8 to address the many woes of the world. Too bad they think he is a dunce.

Given the unrelenting headlines about the Obama administration, it is worth worrying that Big Government is Stupid Government. It is inherently a danger to freedom. Just ask anyone who ever lived under communism.

While there are many fine people in government, those at the top of the current roster seem to be a collection of the most incompetent, inept, naïve, ignorant, and uninformed morons to have ever gathered around that big table where the cabinet meets. If, in fact, they really do get together except for the occasional photo-op.

The last Secretary of State and President-in-Waiting, Hillary Clinton, flew a million miles in the job, but no one can point to anything she actually accomplished and she, apparently, had no idea what was going on at State. The present Secretary, John Kerry, is convinced that global warming is the greatest threat to, well, everything and is still trying to get the Palestinians to agree to peace terms with Israel; something they have refused to do since it opened doors for business in 1948.

Eric Holder, the Attorney General, cannot seem to remember anything. Usually you expect a lawyer to keep a few facts in mind such as the contents of the U.S. Constitution, but Holder is an exception or, like Obama, he read it and didn’t like it.

Other than Valerie Jarrett, only the White House reporters seem to know the names of his closest advisors. Jay Carney, the spokesman for Obama, has carved out a place in history as the biggest, lying weasel to ever hold that job. Oh how I miss the beautiful and intelligent Dana Parino, Bush43’s spokesperson. Happily I get to see her on “The Five”, a Fox News daily gab fest.

After Rahm Emanuel left the job as Obama’s chief of staff to become the Mayor of Chicago, the city has turned into a killing ground the equal of downtown Baghdad.

Obama is utterly devoted to Big Government and, thanks to Obamacare, the IRS is trying to hire the equivalent of an armed forces division to administer it. The popularity of Obamacare, plus the scandals, currently is plunging to depths that even the pollsters are beginning to measure in single digits. The President’s numbers are reaching new lows as well.

A notable aspect of Big Government is the increasing size of various pieces of legislation such as the so-called immigration reform and the Common Core education bills. Beginning life as No Child Left Behind under Bush43, this latter bill is not likely to be reauthorized. Any piece of legislation that exceeds a thousand or more pages in a one-size-fits-all is doomed to failure.

At this writing, the House is getting ready to vote for a trillion-dollar food stamp and farm bill about which few Americans are even aware. It’s a huge giveaway for a nation that is essentially broke. As Congress gets close to its summer break, all manner of comparable mischief will occur. Recall that Obamacare was passed on Christmas Eve 2009!

For the same reason, the ever-expanding surveillance of everyone’s electronic communications comes with the built-in limitation that the more signals intelligence it gathers, the less likely it will produce any results, except after the next attack. The NSA employs tens of thousands of analysts to deal with all the “signent” is acquires and, other than that which focuses on places like Yemen, the rest is not likely to yield much of value.

A government big enough to access every phone call and email from 310 million Americans is also failed to take serious action when the Russians

warned that two jihadists were living in Boston.

The other aspect of Big Government is the way the Obama administration has enlarged the numbers of Americans receiving food stamps, disability payments, and other “free” stuff that is not free, but dependent on those who still have a job. Social Security and Medicare are barely solvent and Medicaid is bankrupting the states that must contribute to it.

According to the American Enterprise Institute, “The number of federal employees has risen under President Obama. There were 2,790,000 federal workers in January 2009 when the president took office, and now there are 2,804,000 workers. The fact is that there is no month during President Obama’s term when the federal workforce was smaller than it was in the first month of Mr. Obama’s presidency. The president took over in January 2009. Every month after January 2009 has seen more federal workers than were employed in January 2009.

It would be wrong to suggest that federal workers are not productive, but the sheer size of this workforce suggests that Big Government takes a lot of people out of the private sector and provides them with employment that comes with a multitude of perks that adds to the federal debt for which everyone must be taxed.

“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is big enough to take away everything you have,” is attributed to Thomas Jefferson, as is “Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” This was true in the 1700s and is true today.

With considerable foresight, the Founders wanted a central government that was intended to remain limited in size, scope, and power. The Department of Homeland Security—the hasty reaction to 9/11—has metastasized into an Orwellian giant that should, at the earliest moment possible, be disassembled into its component parts.

The nation would no doubt benefit from putting an end to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education, the government mortgage companies of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and comparable entities that are mostly the result of government’s vast expansion in the latter half of the last century and this new one.

Term limits is another idea worth considering. I sometimes think that the longer a Senator or Representative stays in Congress, the more senile, incompetent, and indifferent they become to the voters.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Conservatives, Depressed, Angry, and Otherwise

By Alan Caruba

File this under random musings.

From what I can determine as I visit various blogs, forums, and websites intended to be read by conservatives, as a group we are very depressed, very angry, or moderately gleeful over the travails of a certain Mr. B.H. Obama. Or all three.

Obama has been the most unifying force for conservatism since the days of Ronald Reagan; only Reagan did it in a positive, uplifting fashion whereas Obama is seen as evil incarnate; incompetent; arrogant; ignorant of history, science, and economics; a Leftist ideologue; a man whose birth certificate and Social Security number appear to be fraudulent, and who is a liar on a daily basis.

Obama has probably caused more guns and ammunition to be purchased by Americans since the British invaded again in 1812.

The revelations about NSA surveillance have caused a number of liberal activists such as Michael Moore and actor John Cusack to revise their opinion of Obama. The revelations about the IRS reinforced everyone’s fears of about this very scary agency. The questions about Benghazi remain unanswered by as the event fades into the past, there is concern they will disappear entirely.

There is increasing pushback against Obamacare which is turning out to be a bureaucratic monstrosity and one that will be administered by that most beloved agency, the Internal Revenue Service. This is already a Democratic Party nightmare and one that will impact the 2014 midterm elections. Everything Obama told us about it has turned out to be a lie. It is causing people to be laid off or just not hired. It is driving up insurance rates. It is filled with hidden taxes. And yet, it is precisely because of the pain it is inflicting that should be a cause of celebration among conservatives. This and future generations will refer back to the “the horror, the horror, the horror” of Obamacare.

A lot of people are among the unemployed and those numbers have not improved since Obama took office in 2009. Despite the multi-billion dollar “stimulus” and various bailouts the economy is barely showing any improvement.

Obama suffered a political setback in 2010 when the Republicans regained control of the House of Representatives. They have, in varying fits and spurts, managed to stall his ambition to “transform” America from the happy, prosperous nation it once was to a pit of despondency rivaled only by the former Soviet Union. He has withdrawn the nation from the leadership it exercised since the end of World War II and weakened our influence in the world.

After the 2012 elections, the Republican Party issued an “autopsy” of what went wrong. Only the GOP was not dead. Essentially it got mugged, but it is also true that lots of white people who might normally vote Republican stayed home. Data from the Center for Immigration Studies found that 4.7 million stayed home, of whom 4.2 million of them lacked a college education.

Conservatives do not want to hear Republicans in Congress talk about amnesty, but it is claimed that Hispanics could become Republicans by virtue of their conservative values. Meanwhile the immigration reform bill becomes more unpopular by the hour. Forty-four amendments were offered the day it was introduced in the Senate. It is a legislative monstrosity with so many waivers and vague language that it will stop no one from coming here illegally and will deport the many who will head north. If the 1986 amnesty bill was so great, how come we have eleven million illegals? Or probably twice that many.

No conservative wants to let the President raise taxes on anything for any reason. This is, after all, a man who added three trillion dollars to the national debt in just his first term. Obamacare is a huge tax and hugely unpopular.

There is increasing alarm over a government that is accessing the phone records of millions of Verizon customers, whose Department of Home Security is stockpiling ammunition against civil unrest, whose IRS is targeting conservative groups, whose EPA favors environmental groups, and whose Department of Justice has targeted journalists for investigation.

In general there is a hard core of thirty percent of voters who have difficulty tying their shoe laces or grasping the meaning of a stop sign. Another twenty percent of liberals give no indication of thinking about the issues in a rational fashion. That leaves a disparate coalition of half the voters and disenchanted former Obama supporters to save us from further decline.

All this liberalism didn’t happen overnight. Starting in 1913, the income tax was introduced, the same year the Federal Reserve was created. This was followed, from the 1930s to the 1960s, by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. In the 1960s we got the War on Poverty. If we adopted a Fair Tax, we would not need an IRS. Presumably, if the “entitlement” programs were administered as intended, they would be solvent. And if Santa Claus was real we would all get the presents we want on Christmas.

Rasmussen polling is showing that trends lines are all moving against Obama. On June 5 a poll demonstrated that 56% of likely voters “now consider the federal government a threat to individual rights rather than a protector of those rights.” That’s up 10 points since December. Other polling found that 57% want IRS offenders jailed or fired. 68% consider freedom of the press very important, and 42% think Eric Holder should resign.

If history is any guide the scandals afflicting Obama will gain sufficient momentum and mass to crush his messianic dreams and leave him looking a lot like Jimmy Carter. Or worse! The scandals all lead to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So, if conservatives can be patient while also keeping the pressure on the Democrats and their Dear Leader, we may well be just a year and a few months away from a turnaround in the 2014 midterm elections.

We have a full bench warming up for 2016; Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Paul Ryan and Alan West, to name a few. A number of Democrats in Congress may well decide not to run for office again.

Obama will not be impeached. He will not resign. And, oddly enough, that is good news for conservatives when it comes to the forthcoming elections.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

The Continuing Collapse of the Global Warming Hoax

By Alan Caruba

While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.

Directed from within the bowels of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.

As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris. Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.

The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty. 

There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur. In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!

Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences—50,000 members strong—recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.

In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.

“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim—from A-Z—the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”

“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.”  Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.

In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic...

“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.

The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.

The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.

It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.

Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Cartoon Round Up

Iran's Meaningless Elections

By Alan Caruba

Khamenei

Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, no doubt knows the outcome of Friday’s, June 14 elections. My money is on Saeed Jalili, Iran’s nuclear negotiator whose job it has been to talk the other negotiators into a stupor while work toward the creation of Iran’s nuclear weapons program continues.

Meanwhile, Gulf States are rather nervous about word that Iran’s nuclear reactor is said to have cracks in its structure due to a recent earthquake. Chernobyl anyone?

This will be the eleventh presidential election in the history of Iran since Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seized control of the nation in 1979, forcing the Shah to flee. When he died, Khomeini’s coffin was treated like a piñata by the adoring crowd who jostled to touch it.  

It doesn’t matter who wins the predictably rigged elections. Recall that in 2009 the reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad led to eleven days of protests in Tehran that were brutally suppressed. They were shouting “Death to the dictator.” Asked to comment at the time, President Obama said "It is not productive, given the history of US-Iranian relations to be seen as meddling—the U.S. president, meddling in Iranian elections."

The U.S. would like it known that we are not “meddling” in the Syrian civil war in which an estimated 93,000 have died at this point and 1.5 million have fled. Or that sending a billion dollars to Egypt—whose leaders hate us—plus fighter jets is not meddling, and with the exception of the occasional drone attack, we are to believe that the U.S. is not meddling anywhere in the Middle East...but I digress.

Clifford D. May, president of the Foundation of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security, said it best when he called the elections “meaningless” and reminded us that “The Supreme Leader will still reign supreme. Like his predecessor, he believes Muslims have a religious duty to wage war against infidels, in particular America, the ‘Great Satan’, and Israel, the closer to home ‘Little Satan.’ Iran’s constitution is quite clear; it calls for jihad ‘against the arrogant in every corner of the globe.’ That would be us.”

May points out that the ability of U.S. diplomats to grasp the simple truth that Iranian elections are a farce is pockmarked with statements by men like Richard Armitage, then deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush, who called Iran a democracy. More recently, both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel have said that Iran has an “elected” government and Hagel added that it was “legitimate.”

The elected representatives to Iran’s parliament have no real power. That remains in the hands of the Supreme Leader.

Kerry is apparently enough of a realist to know that the election’s outcome will have no effect on Iran’s nuclear weapons program. “I do not have high expectations that the election is going to change the fundamental calculus of Iran,” said Kerry.

As for the Supreme Leader, Khamenei, the elections are just a charade. A May 3rd report in the International Business Times by Palash Ghosh noted that Khamenei “apparently has a number of surprising side ventures apart from running the Islamic Republic.” An investment firm that he controls reportedly took over the nation’s biggest dealer of German automobiles with tactics reminiscent of the Mafia.

“Khamenei,” wrote Ghosh, “who seeks to propagate an image of austerity and self-denial, reportedly receives substantial payments from Iran’s arms and petroleum industries, while claiming he receives a small salary from the government. Khamenei’s true wealth is estimated to be immense, perhaps in the territory of tens of billions of dollars.”

For the ordinary Iranian citizen and voter, the story is very different. Writing in EuroNews in early June, Shaheen Fatemi asked if the Iranian economy holds any prospect of improvement after eight years of Ahmadinejad’s presidency. “Falling economic indicators, more poverty and unemployment and the fall in the value of Iran’s currency, the rial—these are just part of the negative economic record…”  Oops, for a moment there I thought he was writing about the U.S.

No doubt a phalanx of analysts, columnists, and others will be commenting on Friday’s elections in Iran, but the only thing you need to keep in mind is that they will change nothing.

 

Real change will only happen when Iranians once again seize control of their government, but that is not going to be easy given the loyalty of Khamenei’s Republican Guard Corps and the bully-boys in his militia known as the Basij.

Like a cop at the scene of an accident, I am inclined to say, “Move along. Nothing to be seen here.”

© Alan Caruba, 2013

Muslims Killing Muslims

 

By Alan Caruba

Don’t feel bad if you can’t tell a Sunni Muslim from a Shiite Muslim. It has been a source of confusion for many people outside the world of Islam. If Bret Stephens, a Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for The Wall Street Journal is right, we are witnessing “The Muslim Civil War.”

Here’s a quick lesson regarding the two sects within Islam. Suffice to say that the Sunnis are the vast majority throughout the Middle East and in nations where Islam is the predominant religion. The greatest concentration of Shiites is found in Iran and Iraq. Both Hezbollah and Hamas, Palestinians, are pledged to destroy Israel, are Shiite.

Islam was invented by Mohammed in the seventh century, an amalgam of pagan beliefs common to Arab tribes in Arabia and a light overlay of Judaism with practices such as the prohibition against eating the meat of pigs. In its earliest years, Mohammed instructed converts to face toward Jerusalem when praying. After Jewish tribes in Arabia refused to accept him as the new prophet of God, he slaughtered them and Mecca became the center of Islam. He had some knowledge of Christianity but disparaged it and, in time, embraced a hatred for all “infidels” (unbelievers) unless they too converted.

Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D. led to what could be called a family fight because a branch of the family, his direct heirs—now known as Sunnis—became the first four caliphs, taking over the leadership of Islam and ruling continuously in the Arab world until the breakup of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I. The Sunnis saw this as a devastating loss. The Sunnis comprised an estimated ninety percent of all Muslims at the time and remain the majority.

The conflict within Islam began when those called Shiites, the heirs of the fourth caliph, Ali, began to insist that only his branch of the family were legitimate. Without getting too deep in the weeds, when a mythical “Twelfth Imam” disappeared in 931 A.D., Shiites located largely in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon, insisted that they had been deprived of a divinely inspired leader. Not until Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led the movement to overthrow the Shah of Iran did the Shiites believe that a legitimate religious figure had emerged.

To give you an idea how deeply ingrained the schism between Sunni and Shiite is, Stephens began his commentary noting that “Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the prominent Sunni cleric, said Friday that Hezbollah and Iran are ‘more infidel than Jews and Christians.’” Suffice to say that, among the faithful, it’s a toss-up whether they hate each other more than they hate infidels.

“That a sectarian war in Syria would stir similar religious furies in Iraq and Lebanon was obvious more than a year ago, despite wishful administration thinking that staying out of Syria would contain the war to Syria alone,” said Stephens. “What should be obvious today is that we are at the down of a much wider Shiite-Sunni war, the one that nearly materialized in Iraq in 2006, but didn’t because the U.S. was there, militarily and diplomatically, to stop it.

One example is the decision by members of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Jeddah to punish Hezbollah for its “flagrant intervention in Syrian” against “freedom fighters.” In Kuwait some 2,000 Lebanese Shiite residents will be deported. It is expected that all six of the Sunni nations will follow suit. Hezbollah is an Iranian proxy organization. Iran is a Shiite nation.

Americans, sick of the wars we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, are likely content to let Muslims kill Muslims and doubtless want to stay out of the Syrian conflict. The problem is that what are often called “extremist” Muslims have exported their internal conflicts.

Osama bin Laden was a Sunni and he declared war on the U.S. in 1986. By 2001 it arrived dramatically in the form of 9/11 and most recently in Boston. Throughout Europe comparable acts of terrorism have been occurring for decades. The realization is slowly sinking in that we cannot sit on the sidelines and watch Muslims kill each other because their internal wars have become our domestic threats. They are shaping global power games. Where to intervene is the problem at a time when the West is mired in its own financial woes.

Writing of the U.S. reluctance to get sucked into the Syrian civil war, Stephens warned that Americans may feel that, “if Vladimir Putin or Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei want to play in the Syrian dung heap they’re welcome to it. But these guys aren’t dupes getting fleeced at a Damascene carpet shop. They are geopolitical entrepreneurs who sense an opportunity in the wake of America’s retreat.”

Syria is a humanitarian nightmare thanks to the slaughter of innocents and the more than a million who have fled for refuge in Turkey and Jordan. In Turkey, a nation with a proud secular tradition, one foot in the Middle East and one in Europe, the efforts of its current government to impose Sharia law have tens of thousands protesting in the streets opposing an elected but increasingly authoritarian regime.

Daniel Pipes, the president of the Middle East Forum, took some issue with Stephens saying, “The civil war in Syria has also benefited the West until now: It set Sunni extremist against Shiite extremist, weakened the governments of Iran and Syria, harmed the Hezbollah and Hamas terror organizations, caused the malign AKP government of Turkey to stumble badly for the first time in its ten-year reign, and created troubles for Moscow in the Middle East.”

“More broadly, a region that constantly threatens the outside world has become so focused on its own travails that its capacity to make trouble for others for others is reduced,” says Pipes.

There is much to be said for Pipes’ point of view. And for Stephens’ as well. From where I sit, the conflicts in the Middle East are likely to be around for a very long time to come. Islam is a failed religion despite being the faith of more than a billion people. In the way Christianity split between East and West, and then experienced the Reformation, Islam is experiencing significant internal deterioration and external resistance.

Islam veers between arrogant spiritual certitude and the constant evidence of its failure to produce democratic governments with healthy economies, let along societies in which justice and personal security exists. We may well be witnessing the beginning of its demise, but none of us will be around when that finally comes to pass.

© Alan Caruba, 2013