Reboot What?

So, President Elect Barack Obama says that he's hoping to reboot America's image abroad, particularly among the world's Muslims.

What should anyone make of this nonsensical statement. How exactly is he going to do this?

Obama, for all of his keen intellect, is a poor student of history, but a great student of propaganda.

The Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, has suffered at the hands of dictators, despots, and totalitarian regimes for decades. In fact, many are little older than Israel. All were formed in the aftermath of World War I when the Ottoman Empire was carved up by the victorious British and French. They doled out power and prestige to a couple of major tribes, among them the Sauds and Husseins. You might have heard of them. Those are the modern day Saudi Arabian and Jordanian regimes. Other countries became dominated by dictators who rose to power through military coups or subverted a democratic process (one election, one vote, one time).

These regimes, the terrorist groups they've spawned, and Islamists the world over have staked their reputations and continued power on blaming Israel as the cause of and its destruction as the solution to all of life's problems. You can see it practically every day with the propaganda spewed from their official media outlets blaming the lack of peace on Israel, a tiny speck of land in comparison to the tens of thousands of square miles under Arab/Muslim control. Their solution isn't a two-state solution, but rather to eliminate Israel altogether and all that it represents.

So, what exactly is the US going to give to Muslims to reboot their image? The US has been considered the Great Satan in Iran for 30 years - since Jimmy Carter was in office and enabled the rise of the Islamists in Tehran through his fecklessness in handling the Shah's situation. Iran has been at war with the US ever since. Iran now seeks nuclear weapons and missile technology with which it could strike at US interests throughout the region, and could hit Europe or Israel just as easily.

The last four major conflicts that the US has entered into have been to free Muslims from fellow Muslims. The US forced Saddam Hussein to relinquish Kuwait after its invasion in 1990; the Serbian conflict was to stop genocide and ethnic cleansing of Muslim populations; the 2001 Afghan conflict was to oust the Taliban from power after refusing to hand over al Qaeda; and the 2003 Iraq campaign was to oust Saddam Hussein after his steadfast refusal to submit to UN resolutions and after he engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide and obfuscated on the issue of his possession of WMD.

What Obama also forgets is that the Bush Administration has freed 50 million Muslims from the yoke of tyranny in Iraq and Islamists who not only subjugated and harshly treated anyone who wasn't nearly as Muslim as they were, but who supported, defended, and harbored al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 attacks. Those are 50 million Muslims who have a taste of freedom and the rights that many people the world over take for granted. They have an opportunity to now vote for their government in a consensual manner, rather than see it imposed by coup, dictators who steal power from the people, or otherwise rule by fiat.

This doesn't mean that US policy is perfect in this realm. It isn't. We've had to cut deals with regimes like Pakistan, which suppress Muslims and engage in human rights abuses, to say nothing of fostering the Islamist terrorist groups by harboring them, aiding and abetting them in their terror operations, and which talk out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to cracking down on the jihadis who kill in the name of Islam.

No, what's needed is for a stark realization that there are people around the world who kill in the name of Islam and that for relations to improve with the US, the Muslim world must put those jihadis out of business. The US should do what it can to make that happen, not kowtowing to totalitarian regimes that have fostered this situation in the first place.