ARAB WINTER

If this is the Arab Spring, why is it snowing so hard?

His election would spread democracy and respect for the United States throughout the Middle East, President Barack Hussein Obama believed.

"I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Moslems around the world, one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect," the president said in his much ballyhooed speech in Cairo in 2009.

It hasn’t worked out that way.  Middle Easterners who have a favorable opinion of America have declined by 40 percent since then, according to Pew’s annual poll.

The "Arab Spring" has produced new breeding grounds for terrorists, said the head of MI5, Britain’s counterintelligence service.

*On Sunday (6/24), the candidate of the Moslem Brotherhood won in what was the first — and may be the last — democratic presidential election in Egyptian history.  The Moslem Brotherhood (Ikhwan Moslemi) are Islamists who advocate the worldwide imposition of Islamic law.

"Amid the euphoria of the Tahrir Square revolution last year," there were two sets of pessimists, wrote Richard Spencer, a Cairo-based correspondent for the London Telegraph.  "The first said the  Moslem world was unsuited to democracy, and some form of dictatorship would reassert itself. The second said that democracy would sweep in the Islamists."

"I don’t suppose even the worst pessimists thought Egypt would end up with both, but that, on the face of it, is what we have now," Mr. Spencer said.

*NATO waged war last year in Libya to oust dictator Muammar Khadafy.  The result, said StrategyPage, is chaos.

"The situation in the country gets worse by the day," wrote Con Coughlin, foreign editor of the London Telegraph.  "A return to democracy and the return of law (is) nothing but a distant dream."

Islamists were expected to win parliamentary elections scheduled for June, but the elections have been postponed.

*Nearly 15,000 have been killed in a brutal civil war in Syria that pits forces loyal to dictator Bashir Assad against at least 20 rebel groups.

The war is going badly for Assad.  There’ve been mass defections from the Syrian army — including at least one general — the London Daily Mail reported Sunday (6/25).

Since Syria is Iran’s foremost ally, this should be good news for the U.S.  But Islamists dominate among the rebels, who can be just as cruel as Assad.

Often the only choices we have in the Moslem world are between bad and worse.  Khadafy was and Assad is a supporter of terrorism against America.  But they’re secular dictators who aligned with the Soviet Union.  They accepted limits ignored by ardent jihadists.

The Ayatollah Khomeini was a reformer whose  "entourage of close advisers is composed of moderate, progressive individuals," wrote  Princeton Prof. Richard Falk in the New York Times in 1979. President Jimmy Carter believed that, too.  So he helped push the Shah of Iran off the Peacock Throne.

Once he consolidated power, Khomeini took his mask off.  Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s president-elect, is still wearing his.  He will protect the rights of Christians, and will respect Egypt’s international agreements, he promised.  That was prudent, because he hasn’t assumed office yet. During the campaign, Mr. Morsi told supporters: "Jihad is our path, and death for the sake of Allah is our most lofty aspiration."

The Moslem Brotherhood was mentored by Adolf Hitler, who knew it was easier to mount a coup from the inside.  The Nazis got inside via the ballot box, during a campaign in which Hitler made promises he had no intention of keeping.  He believed in one man, one vote, one time.

"The Moslem Brotherhood has not changed; only Western opinion of it has," said Raymond Ibrahim, whose parents emigrated from Egypt.

Islamists believe it’s no sin — that it is, in fact, a duty called taqiyyah, religious dissimulation — to lie to unbelievers.  President Carter learned this the hard way.  There is little indication Mr. Obama has learned anything from the events of the last three years.

The Moslem Brotherhood has broken most of the promises it made during the Egyptian campaign — but our president takes Mr. Morsi’s honeyed words at face value.  Mr. Obama’s confidence the force of his personality will convert Islamists into Democrats has been unshaken by the utter failure of his outreach efforts to date.

 "The time has come for the United States to give up on the notion of democracy in the Middle East," wrote Robert Merry in the National Interest.  "The country is starting to look silly with so many of its intellectuals clinging to a notion that has no basis in reality."

"Looking silly" is the least of the consequences for Americans if the delusions of our feckless leaders keep facilitating the spread of Islamism.

"If trends continue, we may see an arc of Islamic ‘republics’ from Turkey all the way through the Middle East to the Atlantic Ocean, all brought to power through the toppling of corrupt authoritarians, followed by ‘free elections,’ followed by subversion of the revolution, Iranian-style," said the military historian Victor Davis Hanson.

Mark Twain once said that the coldest winter he ever endured was one summer in San Francisco.  You wonder what his witticism would be about Arab Springs and Winters.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.