Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader (or has he thinks he is prefering to be called “His Most Exhalted Worshipful Grand Villain Enthroned in the East” - a title that has a great Asiatic Potentate ring to it; or if not Asiatic Potentate then some sort of Crusader King…) has decided to stray from the meaningless (if entertaining) drivel he’s been posting recently to start to lay down some thoughts that keep going through his mind. You will, perhaps, forgive him if the thoughts seem rather bleak and melancholy.

It is common for parents to worry about the future of their children. Your Maximum Leader, as you may know, has procreated three wonderful children with Mrs Villain.* And over the past few days his hopefulness for the future has diminished greatly. The news today of the apprehension of Islamic terrorists in Britain (and the unconfirmed reports that these terrorists were “grown in Britain”) doesn’t do much to improve your Maximum Leader’s mood. Indeed, as your Maximum Leader types these words the front page of the Washington Post captures the essence of his thoughts at a glance. Headlines like “Making a liquid bomb is not hard experts say.” or “Israel Hits Tower, Warns of more Bombing.” or “Lebanon can lead to World War.”

Gloomy stuff, n’est-ce pas?

Your Maximum Leader, in looking for a book to take to the beach with hi (in case he finished Flashman and the Mountain of Light) was a travelogue. Your Maximum Leader has been taken by good travelogues for a while. Alas, real good ones are hard to find. But one that he could commend to you all is Wilfred Theisger’s Arabian Sands.

Your Maximum Leader finished Flashy and started to read, again, Arabian Sands. It is an account of Theisger’s travels through the Empty Quarter of the Arabian penninsula immediately after World War II - but before the great discovery of oil. Your Maximum Leader read the book in 2003, just after Thesiger’s death. At the time it read it rather uncritically. Uncritically from the perspective of thinking that what he was reading was reality only 60 years before. Nomadic Bedu wandering the deserts of Arabia. Living as they had for centuries. Living on the edge of starvation. Living on the edge of what anyone would call civilization.** It was a brutal life. It was a life that we’d not seen ever in the West. A life whose closest Western antecedent was likely Medieval or even Pre-Roman.

Your Maximum Leader couldn’t get out of his head that these primative (and they were primatives) Bedu are the grandparents of the modern Saudis, Yemeni, Bahranis, Qutarese, Kuwaitis, and others. These uneducated, unsophisticated, unenlightened people are now awash in the oppression of oil money.

Now before you get your Maximum Leader wrong on this point, the Bedu didn’t have the luxury of education (at least education beyond the school of life that you had to pass out of to live the Bedu way), or sophistication (in terms of what we can call “high culture”) or enlightenment. Those things, which have - one hopes - value in the West didn’t have value to those eaking out an existance in the desert.

Now those people are oppressed by oil money. Money that doesn’t flow to them, but flows around them through the hands of royal benefactors. Life may have become easier from the point of view of creature comfort, but you can’t grow a civilization in 60 years.

And so we have the problem of radical Islam… Simple people with faith living a subsistence life in the desert have become angry people lashing out at the modern world.

Your Maximum Leader will not spend the time now going over the same - some would say tired - points of the past. Undereducation. Lack of a religious reformation. Poverty. Corruption. All the things that contribute to the problem. But he is reading Thiesger and thinking to himself, “Islam is a pillar in the desert when you have nothing. But what does it support when you have been given the material progress of hundreds of years but not the intellectual progress of that period.”

Your Maximum Leader does not believe that all Muslims are terrorists. Nor does he believe that all Muslims are prone to violence against non-Muslims. But in that great cresent of the world stretching from North Africa, through the Middle East, the Indian Subcontinent, and into Southeast Asia, the majority of Muslims would just as soon see ill befall the Western World as see their lot improved. The “Muslim Street” regardless of the street’s location (be it Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, or Indonesia) doesn’t care more for life on the street to improve than it cares about seeing the West suffer. So long as they can blame Israel, Britain, Austrailia, and the US for their problems - and see harm befall us in wars; they are happy.

That is a pretty sad idea to have settle in your mind. Pretty sad indeed.

Your Maximum Leader believes that Israel should continue its war against Hezbollah. Indeed, he’d even say that Israel should be more ruthless in its prosecution of the war. But he wonders if any good will come of it. This is not to say that laying down your arms and turning the other cheek is the answer eiter. Because no good will come of that. At least no good if you are an Israeli.

At some level, the enemies of the West are so base that one has to wonder if anything short of barbaric force will get your point across. Your Maximum Leader wonders about his own humanity and compassion when he realizes that he feels very little or no sympathy for the “people of Lebanon.” It seems to him as though the “people of Lebanon” let Hezbollah move in among them. They let Hezbollah arm their villages and towns. They felt some pride when Hezbollah sniped at Israelis and started to fire rockets across the border. Now they call Israel barbaric for striking back. Those people, in your Maximum Leader’s mind - if not fully his heart - are reaping the whirlwind.

A whirlwind that he doesn’t think should abate just yet.

In the above linked article by Richard Holbrooke, the former UN Ambassador says that the current Lebanon conflict can rapidly spiral out of control and spread across Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. What is needed is engagment by the United States. The Bush Administration has to roll up their shirtsleeves and get busy talking. Your Maximum Leader agrees. Indeed, he agrees that the situation might not be quite as bad as it is if the US had a more hands-on approach. But, the situation is what it is. The US should try and broker some sort of deal.

But if we are brokering, we need to let the killing continue while we talk. Why let up the pressure? Tell Hezbollah that if they can go 48 hours without a rocket attack against Israel, then we’ll tell the Israelis to stop. Tell Syria that they have to shut down the flow of arms to Lebanon, and allow verification; then we’ll stop. Tell the “Street” that if they want the bombings to stop, if they want their farms back, if they want to see the bloodshed end; then they can turn over the Hezbollah in their neighborhoods. They can tell an Israeli where the weapons caches are.

Up to this point every ceasefire has lead to a status quo ante. The ceasefire, whatever the duration, is used to rearm, refuel, and redeploy. This time, perhaps, we should let the fighting go on while we talk. See where that gets us.

Your Maximum Leader fears for the future. Indeed, in this very post he’s written some terrible things that may not make the future any easier. But sometimes one has to face the fact that the enemy of the West is not a rational actor. You cannot reason with irrational actors. They only understand base reactions. Fight or flight. Perhaps it is time to give them a base reaction. A base reaction only barely restrained by a thin veneer of Western Civilization. Then perhaps we can prove our resolve. Resolve which is a quality the enemy doesn’t believe we have.

Of course, we have yet to prove to ourselves that we DO actually have resolve…

Carry on.

* - He’d like to add the funny, yet false, line “And bastards who’s name are Legion…” But, however amusing that might be, it is not true. Your Maximum Leader is a one woman (and one platonic fascination) type of guy…

** - That is to say civilization in the classical sense. A society of the city. There were few cities to speak of and they were waypoints on the Bedu’s journey.