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Health & Fitness

Attacking American Embassies – And Other Ugly Sides of Despotic Fanaticism

Dick Hubert, like the Obama Administration, is infuriated with the Syrian Government's organized attack on the American Embassy in Damascus. But his concerns have a wider geographical scope.

There’s something about a government sanctioned attack on a U.S. Embassy that brings my blood, and that of most Americans, to the proverbial boil.

As a country, we have yet to forgive nor forget the Iranian mullahs for their takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November of 1979 – the beginning of a decades long and ugly confrontation between militant Islam and the United States which continues to this day.

So you can imagine the visceral anger that is running through U.S. officialdom (and a lot of us with long memories) over the Syrian government’s sanctioned attack on the American (and the French) Embassy in Damascus.

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The Washington Post account of both the attack and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reaction that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is not “indispensible” is a must read if only to jog our memories about how quickly the “Arab Spring” has changed the direction of American foreign policy.

Our Ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, in visiting the famed Syrian city of Hama (which suffered brutally at the hands of Bashar al-Assad’s father, Hafez ) and expressing sympathy with the protestors there who have been beaten and slaughtered by the regime of Bashar, was marking a change in the Obama/Clinton policy in the area. It was, after all, only a few months ago that Secretary Clinton was trying to draw a distinction between the Gaddafi regime in Libya (which was attacking its citizens with warplanes) and the Assad regime in Damascus which was attacking its citizens with machine guns, tanks, and artillery. Assad the son, Clinton said in March, was a “reformer.”

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But as with Iran, our anger seems to be primarily verbal. We are not going to be invading Syria unless the Assad government is foolish enough to try to take the embassy and its U.S. employees hostage. No U.S. government, Democrat or Republican, wants to repeat the Carter administration’s Iranian angst, and will use our military assets for long range strikes into militant Islamic territory if provocative push comes to shove (see Abbottabad, Bin Laden Compound)

So, at a distance, we are proclaiming One World humanistic values, cheering on the fighters for human individualism and human freedom, wishing them well, but signaling that we have our hands full in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan (let alone keeping a watchful military eye on Libya, Somalia and Yemen, for starters. - Oh, and don’t forget the border between North and South Korea, or the South China Sea; but I digress.).

Which brings me, once again, to Pakistan. Since my last post on Pakistan (The Complications of an Afghan Withdrawal), the Obama Administration has withheld military aid to Pakistan to express its anger and frustration with Pakistan’s military and intelligence services not only protecting Al Qaeda and Taliban resources, but actively encouraging Taliban attacks on American forces in Afghanistan.

As with freedom fighters in Libya and Syria, the fighters for One World values in Pakistan are paying a terrible personal price. Columnist Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal pays tribute to those in Pakistan who are The Face of Pakistan's Courage.

Permit me to liberally quote from Mr. Stephens’ column (to read it in its entirety, please go to the link.) 

On Jan. 4, Salmaan Taseer, the liberal-minded governor of the Pakistani province Punjab, was shot 27 times at point-blank range by his bodyguard, an Islamic fanatic named Mumtaz Qadri. "The bullets pierced every organ in his body except his heart and his larynx," his daughter Shehrbano told me recently. "So, in the end, they weren't able to get him."

Qadri murdered Taseer outside of an Islamabad market in broad daylight and surrendered himself, smilingly, to the police. He freely confesses to the murder, saying he killed the governor on account of the latter's opposition to Pakistan's blasphemy laws. The governor had opposed the invidious ways in which those laws are used against religious minorities, and he had championed the case of a Christian woman named Asia Bibi who sits on death row for allegedly violating them.

It took the Taseer family well over a month to find a prosecutor who would agree to take the case, and only recently has a judge been secured to oversee the trial. What sympathy the family has received has been offered mainly behind closed doors.

As for Qadri, he was showered with rose petals on his way to court, and the head of the Rawalpindi bar association has offered his legal services pro bono. Tens of thousands of Islamists took to the streets of Karachi just days after the murder to oppose any changes to the blasphemy law. Ms. Bibi remains in prison.

Nearly a decade after 9/11, the West's exhaustion with the war on terror—at least in its more grandly conceived, nation-building and culture-shifting versions—can be traced to episodes like the Taseer killing and the underlying, politically incorrect question they prompt: What is it with these people? It's not an entirely unfair question. The U.S. has given Islamabad billions in military and civilian aid (some of which, as of this week, is suspended) and rescued thousands of desperate Pakistanis after the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. It does not seem to have produced a better or less fanatical country.

Then again, it's worth bearing in mind that "these people" also include the late Taseer and his no-less-remarkable daughter, who works as a reporter for Newsweek Pakistan. When I ask her why she doesn't leave the country where her own life is now under threat—she has the means and connections to live elsewhere—she says, very simply, that it would be "a terrible disservice to my father's life and work if I ran away."

Clearly, Americans support the beliefs of the late Salmaan Taseer and his brave surviving daughter. But as Mr. Stephens notes, the number of Pakistanis willing to openly support Shehrbano Taseer is minimal. They are living in fear behind closed doors as the threat of death by Islamic militants becomes ever more a reality.

We are, all of us, including the decent people of Pakistan, Iran, and the Arab Spring, in for a long ugly war, and the hoped-for end result – One World United and Virtuous, is still very much in doubt. 

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