Crusade

In Bush's "Forever War" crusade against Islam, one of the nations he has touted as a strong ally has be Bahrain, the oil-rich nation that has long balanced Shiite and Sunni Islam in relative stability. Bush's failed foreign policy has destabilized huge swaths of the Middle East, creating conditions that I have been predicting are ripe for a rising, religious extremist caliphate, a united, fundamentalist Islamic movement that will rise from the Republican failures to dominate the Middle East for decades to come.

Muslim extremists are rising in Iraq, a nation that before our invasion was predominantly secular and modern. The Taliban and al-Qaeda is resurgent in Afghanistan and Pakistan, becoming powerful enough that Republican Senate FORMER-Majority Leader Bill Frist is talking of cooperating with the Taliban to save our asses in Afghanistan. Somalia has now been taken over by a new, Somali Taliban.

Now, our ally Bahrain is slipping into the extremist camp. This, more than anything previous, is proof that we are losing badly to extremists...as our moderate Muslims world wide.

In the Sudan, members of a fundamentalist Islamic movement took control. As that new fundamentalist government tried to consolidate its control, in the south anti-fundamentalist forces, led by a non-Muslim, held out against the wave of Jihadists.

Europe, swept by anti-Muslim sentiments and a sense of their own righteousness and self-importance, sends a multi-national force to relieve the beleaguered holdouts in Southern Sudan. The Jihadists fuel the flames of mutual hatred by demanding that a leading European leader come to the Sudan to submit and convert to Islam.

As the multi-national force was dispatched, it was beset from the beginning by poor management and greed. The very route they took to reach the Sudan was determined not by military strategy, but by the desire for certain vested interests to profit from the military action. Even as private individuals profited, the military expedition proved a disaster. The multi-national force was poorly supplied and took their anger out on the natives, slaughtering innocent lives, turning the natives against them almost immediately. Atrocities were committed by BOTH sides, making both side's claims to moral superiority a farce.

This is not today. This was in the mid-1880's when Mahdist rebels took over in the Sudan, then jointly mismanaged by Egypt and Britain. The southern holdouts were led by the Emin Pasha, who was actually a German Jew, originally named Eduard Schitzer. The European nations sent a relief force, but the greed of people like Belgian and Congolese King Leopold II (who later presided over one of the worst holocausts in history), British merchants hoping to get their greedy hands on ivory, and various newspapers who wanted some good stories, led to the relief effort going through the Belgian Congo (then called the "Congo Free State" but was actually a private domain of King Leopold). Look on a map. This route makes no sense militarily and by the time the relief effort reached the Sudan, half its members had died of disease and starvation and needed to be helped by the Emin Pasha. In the meantime, the Mahdist threat had retreated...until the abuses by the European relief expedition stirred up native anger again, giving the Emin Pasha a new situation to deal with.