JUNE 16-17 UPDATE: The evidence is stacking up that Hillary Clinton’s fingerprints are as much on the epic fail that was Arab Spring as Barack Obama’s and that ISIS is a direct result of those series of catastrophic blunders, 2011-2012..
But it’s also no longer clear that Hillary and Obama worked in concert on Arab Spring, although they did seem to share a common client, the Muslim Brotherhood. MB not only had a swinging gate at the White House, they apparently had one, and a plant, at Foggy Bottom. There is much still to be revealed but I think historians would be wise to search far beyond government agencies, as explained below..
A story released only today (June 16) by retired Rear Admiral Charles Kubic has cast new light on Mrs Clinton’s role in the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, and the resulting chaos that would lead to the attacks in Benghazi a year later. It seems the “blood on her hands” theory is becoming more solid, for Admiral Kubic tells us that Secretary of State Clinton twice in 2011 scotched ceasefire agreements between Qaddafi and various rebel groups that would have allowed Qaddafi to go into exile and also would retain the civil (secular) orientation of the country and its economy. It seems Sec Clinton did this on behalf of Mahmoud Jabril of the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood, who she had consulted with in Paris in March, and who represented a more recent faction among the anti-Qaddafi parties, since no Islamist party has existed in Libya prior to 2011.
No libel ever accused Mrs Clinton of the kind of byzantine thinking required to design a modern caliphate along the southern and eastern rim of the Mediterranean, and which Arab Spring attempted to achieve. An absolute Lucretia Borgia in scheming ways to make money, I can’t conceive of Hillary Clinton conceiving of the kind of caliphate the Brotherhood had in mind. But growing revelations that Huma Abedin, with her own Islamist connections, was more than Hillary’s ankle-massager and blackhead popper has made that kind of geometry thinkable within Hillary’s circle..When it comes to acquiring power, Hillary and Huma do not dream the same dreams. To know even a small part of the Arab mind is to know that dreaming of limousines, a coterie of factotums, mo’ money, and upstairs maids is not among them. Huma was taught to see power in totally different terms. This is why, for a thousand years, the Arabs felt themselves superior to the self-adoring and lascivious French, who sadly comprised most of the Europeans they ever encountered and who today is still the Arab prototype of a “Crusader”.
Admiral Kubic magnifies a Clinton-Brotherhood nexus that may eventually tell us why the Obama Administration would reopen diplomatic relations with Assad in Syria in 2009, then simultaneously conspire to bring Assad down. A recent memo from US embassy staffers in the State Department, asking Obama to reopen bombing against Assad tells us that the White House and State Department (both Hillary’s; and Kerry’s) may have never been fully on board with Obama’s objectives in the region, much of that designed by his own internal foreign policy staff in the White House, people such as Samantha Powers.
Suddenly Libya, never considered to be a part of the Arab Spring formula, falls into place as an opportunistic catch for the Muslim Brotherhood (and which also failed). Perhaps the White House never knew of Hillary’s consult in Paris, so Arab Spring is more and more becoming as question of “who did what to whose what, and when and why”? It isn’t just what Obama knew and didn’t know on that fateful night, but what he approved or would have disapproved of had he known. All we know from the Benghazi killings, and then 2013 and the rise of ISIS, is that Arab Spring had been an epic, tragic failure, and no one is wiling to take the “credit” for it. When Congress’ Charlie Chan, Trey Gowdy asks, “Where were you on the night of September”?, no one is saying.
Although I’ve been paying attention, I haven’t written on the MB and Middle East since the Syrian civil war escalated, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, enemies of the Assad family for 45 years, suddenly were morphed by John McCain and Obama into the “moderate rebel faction”. Same war, just different name.
But I find myself always coming back to what I believed to be a seminal article on the genesis of Arab Spring in 2011 by LaborUnionReport at RedState.com in January, 2011. Read LUR’s article here, The American Left’s Role in Leading Middle East Regime Change) and you will see how the early genesis of Arab Spring was incubated. In it, dating back to the first days of the Obama administration in 2009, LUR lists people and organizations nowhere to be seen once Arab Spring began to fall apart in 2011. Prominent among them were Google and Facebook, explaining the title. So please read LUR”s article if you want a more complete understanding of the genesis of Arab Spring.
So, just what does Google and Facebook have to do with this expanding human tragedy?
Well, for one, they provided the Kumbaya.
What could cause such a gross miscalculation, and now a five year cover-up to protect the principal designers? At the outset, I doubt there was cynicism and indifference to human suffering. (But later, yes.) But naivete? For sure. Shortsightedness, unpreparedness? Of course. Individual vanities? By the carload. But also add flower-child innocence, a dash of Mao reverence, and an incredible sense of self that makes Donald Trump seem like a country boy visiting the county fair for the first time, by comparison.
All we can do is step back and calculate the devastation, still in progress..
Arab Spring has been a monstrous reality, a string of events that have not yet completely unfolded, magnified by the personal x-factors I just listed above. As a result, in just three years a string of benign authoritarian countries along the Mediterranean’s southern rim, run by rulers who, ironically, Hillary Clinton would have admired for they were only in it for the money and trappings of power, had been turned into a cauldron of genocide and brutality unknown since the Holocaust, with the whole world, including one more nuclear power than had existed before, sitting on the edge of a conflagration. Only there has not been anyone trying to defuse it these past four years, since all the parties, instead, have been seeking to shift their share of the blame…proving the one thing they all now share in common is an indifference to human life.
And Google and Facebook provided the tools of ignorance to make it all happen. kicking off Arab Spring on the shoulders of children…with cell phones and social media. For, you see, Google and Zuckerberg had created things, which like the A-bomb in the 1940s, shouldn’t have been so blithely entrusted to the hands of children not equipped to handle it, especially since Western society itself has not yet learned the long term effects of the obsessive qualities of Android’s and social media’s nicotine-like addiction. They hadn’t considered how these tools could be used by a medieval people who can recite a 100-page poem on the exploits of Saladin from memory yet kill with the slightest offense to personal honor. That most middle eastern mullahs are illiterate yet know the Quran by heart should have been a clue
Still, like the moonbeams they were, Google and Facebook, thinking it would be so coooool to bring about social and political change in the Middle East as if it were a Children’s Crusade in the 13th Century or Height-Ashbury and Woodstock in the 1960s.
They jumped in headfirst to provide their “military hardware” counting on, I’m sure, the one billion Muslims who won’t even allow the human image to be displayed in their holy places but who would buy their products, see their advertising, and enjoy the selfies, never thinking of the incongruities of a tribesman cleaning his AK with his left hand while scrolling his android with his right. Not exactly flower-children, still, reflecting a true innocence about the power of their creations in the hands of young, impressionable medieval minds who could access a kind of human cruelty Mark Zuckerburg and west coast Googlelanders, could never imagine in their very limited world of kumbaya.
And they were there from the very beginning of Arab Spring’s genesis in 2009
(To my knowledge, no scholar or journalist has bothered to collect and read the minutes, after-action reports, etc, of those several conferences and symposia held in many locales, but LUR’s article provides a list of names and places to start the research. But when Arab Spring began, these conferences produced the people waiting on the other side, androids in hand, waiting for go-signals.)
In hindsight, then, I can understand why Google and Facebook, and others, might want to cover up any involvement they may have had with the incubation of Arab Spring, and wipe from their minds any memory of their brief frolic in the hay with Hillary Clinton. (Shuddera all around.)
What has happened, as it always does, a new enemy who didn’t even exist in 2009, ISIS, has harnessed this power of social media, and taken it to new heights (depths) again which no one at FB or Google foresaw. ISIS can now mine with their platforms and technologiess, and recruit to their hearts content, and have become so good at it, you see, they have now made American soil the front lines of their war on America without ever having to launch a single landing craft aimed at Virginia.
The fallout is only now being realized, first San Bernadino, then Orlando and now witness this Craig’s List ad warning gays in San Diego they’re next, only this week. Obama (and Hilary) seem to say these are acceptable casualties to retain out freedoms, if we can only end these lone wolves access to guns.
While Arab Spring was a total bust, its tragedy is that cell phones and social media have turned criminal gangs into an army of sophisticated magicians and mind-benders with planted technologies that Google and Facebook had intended for young students named Moonbeam, Dusk and Holly. So yes, they will always stay one step ahead until we kill them.
The argument has been made that Google and FB have been shilling for Mrs Clinton, searching only favorable links and generally using terms-of-use rules to keep anti-Hillary pages minimized. I doubt it. I think they’d only like to forget they ever made her acquaintance.
