Motus Mentis

In its most recent posting, NightWatch has issued extensive and pertinent comments on the attacks in Egypt and Libya. I reproduce them here:

Egypt-US: The day after the storming of the US Embassy, all day and night on 12 and 13 September, mainstream media aired footage of obviously unemployed Egyptian young men gathering and milling near the US Embassy in Cairo. A single security vehicle was imaged making an occasional and completely feckless foray through the gathering area, during the early morning of 13 September in Cairo. No Egyptian police or military or other security personnel were present.

Comment: The normal time for organized, violent Muslim protests is Friday afternoon, after prayers. Muslim Brotherhood leaders already have called for “non-violent”, anti-US protests on Friday after prayers. Readers should expect more anti-US protests and no Egyptian security forces.

The unemployed and the underemployed in Cairo are amusing themselves by protesting in the name of Islam over just about anything they think is offensive. Much larger and dangerous protests are likely after the miscreants are infused with Islamic fervor after Friday prayers.

Had the Mursi government begun to deliver on its promises of more jobs, theoretically, the unemployed and under-employed youth would have been asleep in anticipation of going to work. The unemployment rate for men under 35 is about 50%.

It is a negative commentary about the job creation accomplishments of the Mursi government to date that so many men have nothing to do in Cairo but vent their frustrations. In Egypt there is no penalty for destroying a foreign embassy, but criticism of President Mursi is a criminal offence. That explains why Egyptian men would judge they could attack the US embassy, when their real target should have been the Mursi government.

The protestors said, in paraphrase, that they understand the US has freedom of speech; the US needs to understand that they have freedom of action. Theirs is a claim to justify lawlessness granted by the Mursi government as long as the violence is not turned against Mursi.

What is important is that the Mursi government has not denounced the violence. [MP adds: Not exactly true. Mursi, who no doubt would like to keep the U.S. foreign-aid spigot open as long as possible, did issue a feeble, pro-forma statement yesterday, one that fell far short of an apology.] The US and the US president are vowing to bring justice to the killers in Libya, but the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood government has made no comment or apology. Instead, Mursi’s reaction is to urge the US to punish the US filmmaker.

Comment: There is only a trailer of the film, no film yet, Mursi has not seen it nor have most of the protestors in Egypt and Libya. The riots are flash mobs, arranged and manipulated by others.

NightWatch Special Comment: Ambassador Anne Patterson’s April Glaspie moment.

Ambassador Anne Patterson, the US Ambassador to Egypt, experienced her ‘April Glaspie’ moment yesterday when she blamed Americans instead of Egyptians for attacking, storming and desecrating the US Embassy in Cairo and the US Flag.

Old hands will remember, April Glaspie, who was a rising star in the State Department’s constellation of diplomats. Her notorious conversation with Saddam Hussein in early 1990 led Saddam to believe that the US encouraged and condoned an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

Having worked closely with US officials for a decade in the struggle and war against Iran, Saddam understood that everything after the Glaspie talk was plausible deniability by US President Bush, 41.

Glaspie misunderstood and misjudged the Iraqi leadership and the situation in Iraq. Patterson’s operations at the US Embassy in Cairo bespeak a comparable misjudgment of the Egyptian Arab situation, its volatility and the depth of anti-American sentiment.

She did not permit US Marine guards to carry live ammunition, according to USMC blogs. [emphasis: MP] Thus she neutralized any US military capability that was dedicated to preserve her life and protect the US Embassy.

In this respect, she did not defend US sovereign territory and betrayed her oath of office. She neutered the Marines posted to defend the embassy, trusting the Egyptians over the Marines.

She apparently judges that Egyptian President Mursi spearheads a democracy and a new civil order, despite the mounting evidence that Mursi disregards US interests, cavorts with US enemies, is a budding authoritarian ruler who disdains parliament and does not honor the basic obligations of diplomatic agreements and the Geneva conventions.

Readers, by definition, whenever an embassy of any country is overrun by locals in any country, everyone knows that the ambassador and senior staff must be replaced.

Timing

Readers also should remember that by definition the time for an official government protest for an attack on a US embassy is always when rioters attack or deface the embassy compound itself, long before they violate or penetrate the US sovereign territory or deface the US Flag. Not nine hours later and not when the details become clear. Then it is too late to take action to keep an embassy from burning or to protect American diplomats. The objective is safety, more than knowledge.

When foreign TV videos showed rioters on the walls of the US Embassy and tearing apart the US Flag on the early evening of 11 September, the time for a strong US official protest and angry telephone calls to Mursi had already passed.

Every student of international affairs and international diplomacy knows this. Every experienced foreign policy staff and every competent journalist knows this. But not this State Department and not this US administration and not mainstream US news services. The US simply failed to defend itself.

It bears repeating: apologies never mollify criminals. Only law abiding citizens believe such baloney. Criminals consider apologies to be acts of submission, especially in foreign cultures.

O’Reilly at Fox needs to wise up!

The NightWatch Chronology

When NightWatch wrote last night, every news channel carried video footage of the violation of the US Embassy; the destruction of the Embassy’s US flag; the raising of the Islamic flag – not the al Qaida flag, mind you – and the burning of the US flag.

AFTER those events, the news services carried Ambassador Patterson’s denunciation of Americans at fault. Ambassador Patterson at no time denounced in public the Islamists who violated her Embassy.

When the NightWatch ended, details about the Benghazi atrocity had not yet been reported by any major news services.

Subsequently, Twitter and Facebook postings by the Cairo embassy, after the Libyan catastrophe was reported in the press, insisted that the Americans were wrong for hurting the feelings of the Muslims, despite the loss of life in Benghazi. Patterson’s embassy astonishingly continued to try to minimize the loss of American life and to justify the acts of the Egyptian and Libyan crazies by blaming Americans.

In an earlier era, less politically correct, old time professionals would have called this clientisis – falling in love with one’s client. It is similar to Stockholm syndrome and is an occupational hazard of US diplomats. The US Embassy staff in Cairo has it, based on public, twitter and facebook postings.

The bottom line is that some deferential, weak US diplomats have done more to encourage anti-American outbursts and to promote the perception of US weakness and subservience to Muslims than US citizens exercising free speech. They need to be vetted and replaced because they do not speak for us.

Final note, in most less-developed countries of the world, from Morocco to Indonesia, no one believes the press is free of government control. There is no free press in any of those countries. Thus their leaders, analysts and others disbelieve the US press is free of government control. They mirror-image their own conditions and project them onto the US.

NightWatch has talked with senior foreign officials who simply refuse to believe the American press is free of US government control and manipulation. US official apologies for the actions of private citizens reinforce this astonishing misperception, around the world.

Libya: Multiple sources have reported more details on the events that led to the death of Ambassador Stevens. The details suggest this was another case of well-intentioned but misguided hubris by Americans, as to their own safety, and well-aimed and well- targeted attacks by the Muslim attackers. This appears, in fact, to have been a deliberate assassination of an effective diplomat, within the cover of an anti-US demonstration in Benghazi.

The reporting indicates that the number of fundamental US security and intelligence lapses, blunders and examples of ineptitude make the efforts of Libyan security and of a local, loyal militia force to protect the US Consulate look heroic by comparison.

Comment: The State Department admitted that the Ambassador and an information management officer – an ex-US Air Force veteran – were killed. Foreign media reported two US Marines also were killed.

The website for Gateway Pundit carries video images of US Ambassador Stevens’ body being dragged through the streets of Benghazi by his Muslims miscreant murderers. All mainstream US media failed to report that the Muslim miscreants not only killed the US ambassador, they defiled his body.

Note to analysts: It is important for intelligence analysts to never forget that the fundamental purpose of US intelligence, as stated in the legislative history of the US National Security Act of 1947, is to keep the US, its persons, property and its interests safe. Yesterday, US intelligence apparently did none of them.

Writing at Via Meadia, Walter Russell Meade comments on Europe’s accelerating slide into toothless decrepitude. As an example, he gives us France, who would like very much to intervene in Syria, but lacks the military oomph to do so. This is of course due to Europe’s having had, under the postwar U.S. security umbrella, the enfeebling luxury to ignore the cost of its own national defense in favor of extravagant social programs. (There’s some irony there: while it was fostering the degenerative and etiolating effects of dependence on its own people, Europe’s general dependency as a security client of the U.S. has in turn weakened that once-great array of nations to the point of global impotence. We could call it “trickle-down debilitation”.)

You can read Meade’s piece here. One quibble — he writes:

Project some trends out a bit and interesting changes appear. Not since the 1600s has Turkey been able to claim a place as the leading military power in Europe. On the present course, the Turks could become the most populous country with the most powerful military on the continent well before the end of the current century.

I’m not sure what trends Meade is referring to here (other than the general decline of Europe); Turkey, at least as an ethnonation, is itself facing a general demographic collapse. As David “Spengler” Goldman writes in How Civilizations Die:

Turkey is locked in a demographic trap: to compete in the world economy, it must educate and employ its women. The more years of education a Turkish woman receives, however, the fewer children she is likely to bear. According to demographer Sutay Yavuz, improvements in female education have suppressed fertility. “The proportion of women aged 15 to 49 that have completed at least the second level of primary school increased from 15 percent in 1993 to 24 percent in 2003,’ he wrote in a recent study. As in Iran and the rest of the Muslim world, the consequence is a sharp decline in the birth rate: “Fertility differentials among women with different educational backgrounds are striking; the mean number of children ever born (a measure of completed fertility) among women aged 40 to 49 without formal education is 5, while the same figure is only 2 for women at the same ages who have completed high school or higher level education.’5

That’s half the problem. During the period 1995”“1998, overall Turkish fertility was 2.29 children per woman, while Kurdish fertility was 4.27 children per woman.6 The Kurds comprise 18 percent of the Turkish population by the narrowest definition (Kurdish rather than Turkish as a mother tongue), which means that the Turkish fertility rate excluding the Kurds during the late 1990s was only 1.5, as low as Europe’s. For native Turkish-speakers in Turkey, fertility has been in a death-spiral for the past fifteen years. Erdogan is right: if the trend continues until 2038, the Turkish economy will collapse under the strain of caring for its dependent elderly, while the country’s young people will be concentrated among minorities demanding independence from the hard hand of the Turkish state. According to a recent study in Population Policy Review: “Fertility levels of Turks and Kurds are significantly different. At current fertility rates, Turkish-speaking women will give birth to an average of 1.88 children during their reproductive years. The corresponding figure is 4.07 children for Kurdish women. Kurdish women will have almost 2 children more than Turkish women.’7 The study adds, “Results show that despite intensive internal migration movements in the last 50 years, strong demographic differentials exist between Turkish and Kurdish-speaking populations, and that the convergence of the two groups does not appear to be a process under way. Turks and Kurds do indeed appear to be actors of different demographic regimes, at different stages of demographic and health transition processes.’

The Kurds of Turkey’s undeveloped east, in short, continue to bear four children while Turkish citizens whose cradle tongue is Turkish have one or two.

Europe’s decline is farther along, of course. Perhaps Meade just sees Turkey as becoming the “last man standing” for a while, before its own troubles get the better of it.