The Caliphate Scare

For a change, Elisabeth Bumiller has a pretty good piece out in today's NY Times. (Credit where credit is due) In it she describes how the White House and the Pentagon are trying to gin up a new threat to scare the American public. It's the threat of al Qaida taking over Iraq and the rest of the muslim world and creating a new caliphate. Bumiller reports that:

Specialists on Islam say the word is a mysterious and ominous one for many Americans, and that the administration knows it. "They recognize that there's a lot of resonance when they use the term 'caliphate,' " said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said that the word had an "almost instinctive fearful impact."

She goes on to point out that most experts believe there is no chance that this could occur. But, despite that, the administration hopes to fool the public into a new fear in order to justify whatever idiocies they wish to pursue. I guess raising the threat level to orange has worn thin.

Frankly, if you look at how things were run during the caliphate, it might not be a bad idea to have a new one. That period was characterized by the rise of science, religious tolerance, scholarship, and creativity -- all things that were destroyed when the Christians took over.