The former CIA agent turned pundit, Reuel Marc Gerecht, offers a rambling defense of Sharia (sort of) in the New Republic website. He doesn’t like what his conservative colleagues say about Sharia (which he keeps calling “The Holy Law”), but he doesn’t say what it is. Kant said something about one man milking a he-goat while another held a sieve. I don’t want to think about what Gerecht might be milking.

His conclusion:

Contrary to what one regularly reads on conservative websites, we are not yet losing this war. Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon and the determined proselytizing of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Middle East and among Muslim immigrants in the West are efforts to turn back the tide. But modernity is relentless. The traumatic Westernization of Islam continues. That  Westernization led to the Islamic revolution in Iran and to Osama bin Laden, but it also leads, even more powerfully, to a world where Muslims—especially Muslim women—aspire to a more prosperous and democratic way of life. We have reasons to hope that Islam’s passage will be less bloody than our own, though we should prepare, as Gingrich constantly and wisely warns us, for its being worse.

But we shouldn’t see enemies where they are not. The Holy Law is, as it’s always been, what Muslims make of it. In the titanic struggle within Islam between those who fear modernity and those who embrace it, we would do well not to make the clergy our foes. They will go, as they always have done, where the majority of Muslims take them. Like Ayatollah Khomeini before him, bin Laden once thought that most Muslims would rise up to defend his cause. Both gentlemen were wrong. Westerners and most Muslims may not (yet) share with the same intensity and priority that many values, but we share enough to provide considerable hope that the “clash of civilizations” will end, as Grand Ayatollah Sistani no doubt wants it to, in a suspicious, at times tense, but peaceful and prosperous co-existence.

He objects in particular to Newt Gingrich and his warning about sharia:

….we still ought to be concerned when prominent American conservatives—and here I’m thinking first and foremost of Newt Gingrich—blur the line between militant Muslims and the everyday faithful. When Gingrich, whom I’ve long admired and had the pleasure of working with, gave a much-noted speech at the American Enterprise Institute in which he stated, “I believe Sharia is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it. … I think it’s that straightforward and that real,” I could only say in response, “String Theory is dangerous”: Gingrich was looking for an explanation for the Islamic terrorist threat, but, like many on the right, looking in the wrong places. Neatly tying it all together, Gingrich and others have alighted upon the Muslim Holy Law, the Sharia, as the source of all that bedevils the Middle East, and us.

But what is Sharia, and what distinguishes it from Jewish Halakha, or English Common Law, or Church Canon Law?

One only has to listen to what Muslim legal scholars have to say about Sharia to make clear why it is incompatible with what we might call society founded on covenant, a concept that embraces both Jewish law and the Social Contract theory of the Enlightenment–that is, the sort of society in which democracy has a chance to flourish.

I reviewed Islamic jurisprudence (including what American Muslim legal scholars say on the topic) recently with regard to the issue of wife beating in a recent Spengler essay:

More than the Koran’s sanction of wife-beating, the legal grounds on which the Koran sanctions it reveals an impassable gulf between Islamic and Western law. The sovereign grants inalienable rights to every individual in Western society, of which protection from violence is foremost. Every individual stands in direct relation to the state, which wields a monopoly of violence. Islam’s legal system is radically different: the father is a “governor” or “administrator” of the family, that is, a little sovereign within his domestic realm, with the right to employ violence to control his wife and children. That is the self-understanding of modern Islam spelled out by Muslim-American scholars – and it is incompatible with the Western concept of human rights.

There it is: a bright line that divides Islamic from Western law.  As I explained,

Decisive in the above analysis of Surah 4:32[which establishes the legal basis for wife-beating in Islam] is the analogy between the husband and the head of a political subdivision or organization. The state in traditional society devolves its authority to the cells from which it is composed, starting with the family, which is a state in miniature, whose patriarch is a “governor” or “administrator”. Traditional society is organized like a nested set of Russian

dolls: the clan is the family writ large, the tribe is an extension of the clan, the state is an alliance of the tribes, and the relationship of citizen and sovereign is reproduced at each level.

That is why traditional society is incompatible organically with the first principal of law in modern liberal democracy, namely that the state wields the monopoly of violence. Sharia in principle cannot be adapted to the laws of modern democratic states, for it is founded on the deeply-ingrained notion that the family is the state in miniature and that the head of family may employ violent compulsion just as does the state.

In other words, wife-beating (and by extension honor killings and so forth) derive from fundamental legal principles in Muslim, the pillars upon which Sharia stands. They are not leftovers of traditional society that can be jettisoned in an updated version. Remove them, and there is no reason for Sharia to exist in the first place.

What on earth is Gerecht talking about? Without addressing how Muslims understand Sharia, this sort of discussion becomes ill-informed opinion-mongering.

My friends at The Tablet, a Jewish-interest webzine, are running a week-long series on Turkey’s ominous shift to Islamism. The editors write:

The transformation of Turkey from close military and strategic ally to bitter public enemy may be the most consequential blow Israel has sustained in the past decade: Unlike the Second Lebanon war, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, or last summer’s flotilla incident, the recent shift in foreign relations is not just a public relations disaster but a fundamental change in the regional order, which has turned a powerful friend into a determined enemy.

Extracts from today’s Spengler essay at Asia Times Online:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LJ19Ak01.html

Why call not it a ‘Petraeus Village’?
By Spengler

“May his name be blotted out!” declares the most terrible Hebrew curse. History has devised a curse more terrible still, that is, to have one’s memory blotted out, all except for a name that popular usage links to disaster.

Schoolchildren no longer learn about King Pyrrhus of Epirus, who won battles against Rome at such heavy cost that he lost the war, but everyone knows that a “Pyrrhic victory” is to be avoided. Few remember Grigory Potyomkin (1739-1791), Catherine the Great’s statesman and lover, but everyone knows the idiom “Potemkin Village”, a facade constructed to deceive passing inspection.

Why not call it “Petraeus village”? General David Petraeus, now
America’s commander in Afghanistan, pacified Iraq by putting 100,000 fighters for the country’s Sunni minority on the American payroll. Now that America has withdrawn combat troops from Iraq and the Shi’ite-majority government in Baghdad has embraced Iran’s military arm, the Sunni fighters are quitting by the thousand, and joining the anti-government guerrilla movement associated with al-Qaeda. This we learn from the October 17 New York Times:

Although there are no firm figures, security and political officials say hundreds of the well-disciplined fighters – many of whom have gained extensive knowledge about the American military – appear to have rejoined al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Beyond that, officials say that even many of the Awakening fighters still on the Iraqi government payroll, possibly thousands of them, covertly aid the insurgency.

The defections have been driven in part by frustration with the Shi’ite-led government, which Awakening members say is intent on destroying them, as well as by pressure from al-Qaeda. The exodus has accelerated since Iraq’s inconclusive parliamentary elections in March, which have left Sunnis uncertain of retaining what little political influence they have and which appear to have provided al-Qaeda new opportunities to lure back fighters.

On September 27, the Washington Post reported that the Iraqi government had fired Sunni police officers in Anbar province.

When Petraeus held the Iraq command, he put over 100,000 Sunni gunmen on the American payroll, offering them money and weapons to lie low for the interim. That arrangement lasted until the government of Nuri al-Maliki invited the Iranian-backed party of Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to join his government – the same Muqtada whose Mahdi Army battled American forces for control of Sadr City in 2004. News reports on October 15 cited unnamed Washington sources saying that the Obama administration would end its support for Maliki if he allied with Muqtada, although it is not clear what that might entail.

Sectarian war is playing out in the predictable way, and America will have nothing to show for a trillion dollars’ worth of “nation-building” and several thousand dead soldiers except a civil war much bloodier than might have occurred without America’s provision of money and guns to the Sunni Awakening. In May, I reviewed this likelihood in an essay titled General Petraeus’ Thirty Years War (Asia Times Online, May 4, 2010.)

The “surge” turns out to be the facade of a Potemkin – or perhaps we should say Petraeus – village, a facade like the old Hollywood Western sets, behind which prospective combatants oil their weapons and refill their magazines.
…..

Organizations exist in order to protect their members from the consequences of error, and that is as true of the organs of the conservative movement as any other. Collectively and individually, the Republicans cannot easily admit that the whole business of nation-building was a gigantic blunder, not after a trillion dollars and four thousand dead.

The right-wing social engineers who planted the idea into the impressionable mind of Bush have their reputations to defend, and they will circle the wagons and fight to the death. Academics, journalists and think-tankers live hand to mouth, and have nothing to justify their next paycheck except for their street cred. No matter what the outcome, and no matter how deep the accumulation of facts, they will not admit error. If only Obama had continued the Bush policy, they insist, we would have triumphed in Iraq.

No one has excoriated Obama’s foreign policy more than I (Life and premature death of Pax Obamicana Asia Times Online, December 24, 2009). But it seems self-serving to blame the present administration for the vast expansion of Iran’s power.

Last week Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad toured Lebanon like a triumphant overlord and threatened Israel with destruction. How did Lebanon turn into an Iranian protectorate? The Bush administration bears a great deal of responsibility for promoting the delusion that Hezbollah could be enticed into Lebanon’s parliamentary system. Bush personally offered the idiotic thought that once Hezbollah officials had to fix potholes they would abandon their declared ambition to turn the Middle East into an Iranian-led Islamic Republic. On March 16, 2006, Bush told the press:

Our policy is this: We want there to be a thriving democracy in Lebanon. We believe that there will be a thriving democracy, but only if – but only if – Syria withdraws … her troops completely out of Lebanon … I like the idea of people running for office. There’s a positive effect when you run for office. Maybe some will run for office and say, vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America. I don’t know, I don’t know if that will be their platform or not. But it’s – I don’t think so. I think people who generally run for office say, vote for me, I’m looking forward to fixing your potholes, or making sure you got bread on the table.

The Bush administration failed to scotch the Persian serpent when the costs of doing so would have been limited. These costs, though, would have been borne first of all by American troops in Iraq in constant contact with a hostile population. If attacked, Iran – just as Mullen explained – would have used such proxies as Muqtada’s Mahdi Army to kill Americans. The Bush administration would have paid for it at the polls, which it did, despite the Potemkin, er, Petraeus Village success of the “surge”. To dig Iran out of Lebanon today would require drastic action. It will be ugly, and to some extent it will be the fault of the Bush administration.

American voters are in a mood to blame Obama, and rightly so; his economic policy has failed miserably and he has no cards left to play. Republicans will blame him for strategic disaster as well, and Obama surely deserves his share of the blame. After the mid-term elections, though, and the likely loss of a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress, Obama will demand of the Republicans: “What would you do?” The Republican answer cannot be to send American combat troops back to Iraq. They will try to blame Obama for the failure of a war that he inherited, and it will not wash with the voters.

At some point, the Republicans, if they wish to govern, will have to explain to the American public that America needs to fight fire with fire, asymmetric warfare against asymmetric warfare. There are many ways to do this, ranging from cyber-war to promotion of competing Islamic heresies, as I suggested in a September 14, 2010 essay (Terry Jones, asymmetrical warrior).

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things magazine.

The short answer is: Pelt Israel with unguided missiles from southern Lebanon. In today’s Spengler essay at Asia Times Online, I evaluate Iran’s susceptibility to cyberwar. The Islamic Republic pirates virtually all its software and almost all of its competent software engineers have emigrated, which suggests that the mullahs do not even have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from mere incompetence.

Iran has so few skilled programmers that it could be that the security services do not have the capacity to distinguish sabotage from incompetence. That may explain why Tehran blames foreign intelligence services for a recent succession of economic reverses, including the near-collapse of the local markets for gold and foreign exchange.

Iran’s economy has teetered towards disaster since early 2008, as I reported at the time (Worst of times for Iran Asia Times Online, June 24, 2008). Official data at the time reported that Iranian households spent 10% more per month than they earned, a rough gauge of the size of the underground economy (smuggled consumer goods, alcohol, opium, prostitution and so forth).

Iranians coped with inflation in the 20% range by fiddling. Tehran’s decision to lift fuel subsidies last month will put poorer households under water, and Iranian authorities have warned of possible riots. A run by foreign-exchange dealers on the Iranian rial reportedly led to street fighting between currency traders and police last week. After refusing to sell dollars to the market, Iranian banks on October 10 flooded the market with foreign currency to break the run.

How much of the country’s economic and financial chaos is due to incompetence and theft, and how much reflects economic sabotage, may never be known, if the Cold War is any guide.

That makes the Lebanese border — which Ahmadinejad is scheduled to visit this month — even more of a prospective flashpoint, for Iran likely will go with what it knows it has.

The purpose of organizations and associations is to protect insiders from the consequences of incompetence, which is why socialism is worse than big business, and the one-party system is worse than the two-party system. One of the drawbacks of the two-party system, though, is that once one of the parties commits itself to defending obvious stupidity, it cannot back itself out of the trap without sacrificing the reputation of some prominent members. It took the Republicans twenty years to recover from their commitment to Herbert Hoover’s stupid economics, and it took the Democrats twelve years to recover from Jimmy Carter’s defeatism.

The obvious, stupid error from which the Republicans cannot recover is the presumption that America could determine the political evolution of Iraq. Now that the Iranian-backed Sadrists have pushed their way into the Maliki government, American influence has fallen to a seven-year nadir. My friends at the National Review are alarmed at this, and want to blame the Obama administration for failing to take advantage of the wonderful position established by the last administration. It’s the sort of bloviating that the late William F. Buckley used to puncture with one pointed word.

NRO writes today:

If President Obama is “out of Afghanistan psychologically,” as Bob Woodward reports in his new book, one can only imagine how thoroughly detached he is from Iraq.

He should start paying some attention. The news last week that the Sadrists have thrown their weight behind Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, putting him on the verge of securing a governing coalition, isclose to the worst possible outcome of the Iraqi election and the aftermath.

First, it would marginalize Iraqiya, the party that won a plurality and has the most appeal to the Sunnis we want to feel vested in the new Iraqi state, lest they return to insurgency and al-Qaeda. Worse, it would do it on the strength of the support of Moqtada al-Sadr, a rabidly anti-American cleric closely allied with Iran, whose price for supporting Maliki is likely to include control of key ministries in the next government. The last time the Sadrists were given a measure of control over the instruments of state, they transformed them into tools to wage sectarian war against the Sunnis.

“There are obviously limits to our control of Iraqi politics,” NRO’s editors concede,  ”but we should be using every possible instrument of persuasion to forestall the creation of a government that could be the predicate for renewed ethnic conflict.”

I began writing the “Spengler” columns at Asia Times Online because my conservative friends were locked into a sort of right-wing social engineering, and authentically believed that Iraq could be transformed into a pro-American democracy. After a trillion dollars and 4,000 lives, it is difficult for conservatives to concede that the whole exercise was ill-advised to begin with. Better, they believe, to blame the outcome on Obama, on whose watch the ugly denouement will proceed. I doubt the voters will take this seriously; they voted for Obama in the first place in part because they didn’t believe in the Bush administration’s effort.

As my friend Daniel Pipes has argued for years, the best approach to contentious and threatening Muslim countries is containment. Shut them off. Control the movement of goods, money and people carefully (with a fraction of the resources required for occupation) and if they do something truly threatening, use military power–but without taking ownership of their political mess.

Except for one established fact — that it’s been done before — I wouldn’t touch the Iranian cyberwar story with a barge pole. Lies, half-truths and misinformation surround live intelligence operations like nested hedge-rows, and to ask anyone truly in the know about such things is the equivalent of saying, “Lie to me.” The Israeli spook site Debka (entirely unreliable) reports that the damage to Iranian industrial controls from the “Stuxnet” worm is serious, citing Iranian media threats that Iran will wage a “long-term war” on Israel and the United States–the presumed malefactors–in retaliation.

Iran admitted Monday, Sept. 27 it was under full-scale cyber terror attack. The official IRNA news agency quoted Hamid Alipour, deputy head of Iran’s government Information Technology Company, as saying that the Stuxnet computer worm “is mutating and wreaking further havoc on computerized industrial equipment.”

Stuxnet was no normal worm, he said: “The attack is still ongoing and new versions of this virus are spreading.”

Revolutionary Guards deputy commander Hossein Salami declared his force had all the defensive structures for fighting a long-term war against “the biggest and most powerful enemies” and was ready to defend the revolution with more advanced weapons than the past.  He stressed that defense systems have been designed for all points of the country, and a special plan devised for the Bushehr nuclear power plant. DEBKAfile’s military sources report that this indicates that the plant – and probably other nuclear facilities too – had been infected, although Iranian officials have insisted it has not, only the personal computers of its staff.

The first documented large-scale cyber attack produced one of America’s most stunning covert victories of the Cold War. In mid-1982, a Siberian natural gas pumping station exploded with the force of three kilotons of TNT. My old boss, Norman A. Bailey, was then head of plans at the Reagan National Security Council, and deeply involved in the operation:

The pipeline, as planned, would have a level of complexity that would require advanced automated control software (SCADA). The pipeline utilized plans for a sophisticated control system and its software that had been stolen from a Canadian firm by the KGB. The CIA allegedly had the company insert a logic bomb in the program for sabotage purposes, eventually resulting in an explosion with the power of three kilotons of TNT ^[1].

The CIA was tipped off to the Soviet intentions to steal the control system plans in documents in the Farewell Dossier and, seeking to derail their efforts, CIA directorWilliam J. Casey followed the counsel of economist Gus Weiss and a disinformation strategy was initiated to sell the Soviets deliberately flawed designs for stealth technology and space defense. The operation proceeded to deny the Soviets the technology they desired to purchase to automate the pipeline management, then, a KGB operation to steal the software from a Canadian company was anticipated, and, in June 1982, flaws in the stolen software led to a massive explosion of part of the pipeline.

At the time, I wasn’t near the loop, let alone in it; I was scampering around Germany with a business card from Lyndon LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence Review (which had just fired me as economics editor for disagreeing with LaRouche but kept me on as a stringer), sounding German politicians and business leaders for defeatist sympathies.  Bailey told me about the affair a decade later; most of the published accounts credit Dr. Gus Weiss, an economist on NSC staff, for the scheme.

The story sounds plausible, and it’s been done before. The US allowed the Russians to “steal” a number of pieces of technology, including a satellite camera that the technicians at Zeiss in East Germany couldn’t quite get to work properly.

No doubt there is an element of psy-ops. Computer controls are finicky at best, and if the Iranian systems are compromised in some way, they cannot know how many “logic bombs” will go off in the future, or which of their IT people might be wandering about with a USB drive containing additional worms. I have no way of sorting truth from psywar. How cool would it be if the story checked out?

My essay on Michael Wyschogrod, the great Orthodox Jewish theologian whose work has graced the pages of First Things twice this year. It is an honor to honor Michael at any time, but especially during the Yomim Tovim.

An extract:

Wo es sich christelt, da judelt es sich auch, in Heinrich Heine’s word-play: It says more or less, “Where Christians do something, Jews do the same,” but with the onomatopoetic sense in German of “tinkling” (christeln) versus “doodling” (judeln). A rationalized rather than a lived Judaism comes down to doodling. Judaism that emphasizes “ethical monotheism” against “ritual observance,” and rejects or qualifies the chosenness of Israel, really is mainline Protestantism with a tallis.

Judaism without commandments never made sense to me. If you observe the injunction to “love thy neighbor as thyself” because it comes from God, why not also observe the commandment in the next verse not to wear cloth woven of two kinds of material? And if these don’t come from God, where do they come from? No surviving school of philosophy claims to derive any system of ethics—let alone “love thy neighbor”—from reason. Even if we think that ethics can be deduced from reason, why do we need the Torah? Or if we believe that altruism is an evolutionary adaptation, why should ethics have anything to do with Judaism? If “love thy neighbor” is not a divine commandment, and if it is not a logical deduction, then what is it? For semi-affiliated Jews, it’s the residue of a faith to which formerly observant Jews of an older generation have a sentimental attachment.

There is a great gulf fixed between “ethical monotheism” and traditional Jewish observance, which demands that we accept God’s will rather than our own criteria of judgment. As Wyschogrod notes, just that was the sin of Eve and Adam, who ate the forbidden fruit in order to acquire autonomous knowledge of good and evil. Such knowledge is what the philosophers promised from Plato to Kant, but failed to deliver; philosophy walked out on ethics in the 19th century and never looked back.

The trouble is that Jews who grew up surrounded by Christian culture do not know any way to act except according to their own autonomous criteria of judgment, yet the exercise of autonomous choice undermines the spirit of Jewish observance. How do we get there from here?

Read the essay and find out.

Theologians for the most part are a placid and contemplative tribe. That is a shame, for practical theology can be exhilirating. No-one allow me into a PhD program in theology, one academic friend warns, much less give me a teaching position at any reputable (or even disreputable) institution of higher learning. That’s probably for the best. I probably would do things like this:

“Class, your final assignment for the semester is: Devise a heresy for someone else’s religion.”

In today’s Spengler essay at Asia Times Online, I suggest — just for purposes of argument, mind you — that certain intelligence services might have an interest in devising Islamic heresies.

Asymmetrical warfare was supposed to benefit the insurgents. For the price of a few flying lessons a gang of jihadis brought down the World Trade Center, a terrorist with a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and powdered Tang can blow up an airplane, and a few pounds of plutonium can cripple a major city.

Meet the Reverend Terry Jones, asymmetrical warrior. It appears that pinpricks can produce chain reactions in the Islamic world. The threat may be termed asymmetrical because Islam is more vulnerable to theological war than Christianity (or for that matter Judaism). 
 [snip]

Instead of trying to stabilize the Islamic world, suppose – just for the sake of argument – that one or two world powers set out to throw it into chaos. I am not advocating such a strategy, only evaluating its effectiveness.
[snip]

I cite a few candidate for instigators (including Russia and Turkey) and offer some examples of prospective heresies.

Not that I am actually proposing to do this — as Richard Nixon said to the tape recorder, “We could do this, but it would be wrong.”

Burning the Koran (or any book) is a bad thing, and the Rev. Terry Jones of something called the Dove World Outreach Center will violate basic standards of decency when he sets fire to the Muslim holy book on Sept. 11. But it is Constitutionally-protected free speech. Last year a North Carolina church observed Halloween by burning Bible translations it considered heretical, to nary a peep from the national media. Blasphemous treatment of Christian religious symbols is commonplace, from Andre Serrano’s crucifix-in-urine construction to Chris Ofili’s elephant dung Madonna.

Where does Gen. David Petraeus get off telling American civilians how to express their opinions? Serving American military officers are not supposed to poke their noses into such matters. Petraeus well may be correct that “extremists” will use the burning of the Koran to stir up anti-American sentiments. If an American commander finds it inconvenient when Americans express antipathy towards Islam, where will it end?

If the obnoxious and misguided Rev. Jones can be bullied into silence, who else will be told to shut up? “Extremists” well may express outrage when an American writer cites the opinion of the great German-Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig concerning Islam, namely that it is a “parody” of Judaism and Christianity, a “monistic paganism” in which Allah represents “the whole colorful panlopy of Olympus rolled up into one.”

Petraeus says that the planned Koran-burning “is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems — not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.” What about Americans who don’t believe that the US should be “engaged with the Islamic community?” What about the Rev. Pat Robertson, who has said for years that Allah is a pagan moon-god? Will Petraeus demand that he shut up?

Petraeus this year addressed the annual dinners of the American Enterprise Institute, Commentary Magazine, and the Hudson Institute. Are these organizations planning to suppress negative comments about Islam?

Unlike some of my conservative colleagues, I take a skeptical view of Petraeus success in the 2008 “surge” in Iraq.  As I wrote last April in the Tablet webzine, the Potemkin village of stability in Iraq required a hands-off policy towards Iran, which had the capability all along to make a dog’s breakfast of American efforts to stabilize the situation on the ground:

Iran has gained political ascendancy in Iraq through intensive subversion efforts. According to senior military sources cited by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius on February 25, “The Iranians allegedly are pumping $9 million a month in covert aid to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, a Shiite party that has the most seats in the Iraqi parliament, and $8 million a month to the militant Shiite movement headed by Moqtada al-Sadr.”

Petraeus’s opinions about the Middle East carry less weight than those of his boss, Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen, who has been warning against an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear capability for the past year. In a March 16, 2009, interview with Charlie Rose, Mullen said: “What I worry about in terms of an attack on Iran is, in addition to the immediate effect, the effect of the attack, it’s the unintended consequences. It’s the further destabilization in the region. It’s how they would respond. We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf. So, I worry about their responses and I worry about it escalating in ways that we couldn’t predict.”

A rough translation of Mullen’s remarks into civilian political language is that the quixotic notion of building democracy in the Middle East led the United States into an Iranian trap.

Petraeus put about 100,000 Sunni fighters on the payroll of the American army, a good way to postpone sectarian conflict until American troops are gone. His supposed “success” sets up a prospective Thirty Years War in the region.

Whatever criticisms I might have of Petraeus’ actions as a serving officer are beside the point, though. His intervention into civilian issues of free speech is outrageous. Islam does not demand equal treatment with other religions, which had to take their share of lumps from a hostile secular environment. Muslims are demanding special treatment. They have no right to do so, and Petraeus has no business demanding that Americans give special treatment to Muslims.