Jihadis Sell Out

Spengler at Asia Times looks at demographic collapse in Iran.

Wars are won by destroying the enemy's will to fight. A nation is never really beaten until it sells its women.

The French sold their women to the German occupiers in 1940, and the Germans and Japanese sold their women to the Americans after World War II. The women of the former Soviet Union are still selling themselves in huge numbers. Hundreds of thousands of female Ukrainian "tourists" entered Germany after the then-foreign minister Joschka Fischer loosened visa standards in 1999. That helps explain why Ukraine has the world's fastest rate of population decline. On a smaller scale, trafficking in Iranian women explains Iran's predicament.

To understand Iranian politics, cherchez les femmes: the fate of Iranian women sheds light on the eccentricity of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. By Spengler's Universal Law of Gender Parity, the men and women of every place and every time deserve each other. A corollary to this universal law states that the battered Iranian whore is the alter ego of the swaggering Iranian jihadi.

In the interest of balanced reporting, I cite the history of Jewish prostitution before delving into the Persian example. The Jews have lived long enough to be defeated more often than any other people. After Spain expelled them in 1492, the Jews sold their women so widely that the character of the Jewish prostitute figured prominently in 16th-century literature, notably in one of the earliest novels, La Lozana Andaluza (1528), a story of refugee Spanish-Jewish whores in Rome. After Russian pogroms drove Jews out of the Pale of Settlement in the late 19th century, Jewish women became the raw material of the white-slave traffic, supplying Argentina as well as Western Europe. Jewish prostitutes are almost unknown today, a measure of the revival of the Jewish nation.

These distasteful facts bear directly upon Iran's national decline, and the impulses that push the Iranian leadership toward strategic flight forward. Iran's plunging birth rate, I observed in essays past, will burden the country with an elderly population proportionately as large as Western Europe's within a generation, just at the point at which this impoverished country will have ceased to export oil. By 2030, Iranian society will collapse.

Bad Eagle gives us the "women are indicators of defeat" saying from an American Indian perspective.

The Cheyenne people have a saying: A nation is never conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.

Which reminds me of an old Jewish joke. A Jewish woman is standing before a judge asking for a name change. She told the judge her name was Nafkawitz and "nafka" means whore. So the judge asked her what she wanted to chage her name to. The woman replied "Horowitz". Bada boom. Bada bing. So much for jokes.

It has been my contention that we are in a war with the jihadis because this is their last chance. Oil is running out for them. Funny thing is that America and Canada have plenty of oil because of oil shale. In fact even the Israelis have a fair amount of it. In Canada the cost of extraction runs around $10 to $15 a bbl. Even the Americans are getting into the act with pilot plants in Colorado. There is easily enough oil shale in the Americas to support our transition to income energy (solar, wind, biomass etc.)

Jihad today is not the result of a vibrant Muslim culture. It is a sign of desperation. Just as the kamikaze attacks by the Japanese in WW2 were a sign of desperation.

Spengler goes on:

One does not have to destroy an opponent's military forces to defeat him. Russia collapsed without a single shot fired when Mikhail Gorbachev and his generals understood that they could not compete with Ronald Reagan's United States. The Islamic world also has been defeated, by a globalized economy in which the US dominates the top, and China blocks entry at the bottom. As the most urbane people of Western Asia, the Persians grasped the hopelessness of circumstances quicker than their Arab neighbors. That is why they have ceased to bear children. Iran's population today is concentrated at military age; by mid-century, today's soldiers will be pensioners, and there will be no one to replace them.

That is why it is folly to approach Iran as a prospective negotiating partner, and meaningless to offer the clerical government security guarantees, for the threat to its security arises from within. Once a people has determined to extinguish itself, nothing will prevent it from doing so. There is no doubt as to the demographic data, which come from the demographers of the United Nations. But it is one thing to read the statistics, and quite another to consider the millions of intimate decisions that together sum up to national suicide.

it is interesting to note that the Europeans are also in decline for the same reason. They have given up.

On a side note: there was an Iranian blog called "Faheshe" a few years back which means prostitute in Persian. It was about an Iranian prostitute's relations with the men in her life. It was a glimpse in to the corruption of Persian life. It was not complimentary to Iranian men. It had a very interesting graphic on the mast head. The authorities shut it down.

Spengler concludes with:

What is it that persuades women to employ their bodies as an instrument of commerce, rather than as a way of achieving motherhood? It is not just poverty, for poor women bear children everywhere. In the case of Iran, deracination and cultural despair impel millions of individual women to eschew motherhood. Prostitution is a form of psychic suicide; writ large, it is a manifestation of the national death-wish, the hideous recognition that the world no longer requires Ukrainians or Moldovans.

As Spengler points out but doesn't make explicit: the Islamics have lost. What we are involved with now is a mopping up operation. Iraq has proved that mopping up operations can be very costly. The Japanese kamikazes were a fearsome weapon. They caused a great number of casualties. However, by the time they were employed the outcome of the war was not in doubt.

What we need most is faith in ourselves and perseverance. It furthers.

H/T Israel Matzav

Update: 21 Nov '06 0758z

Clayton Cramer has some interesting things to say. You should visit him often.

Update: 21 Nov '06 1431z

Welcome Instapundit readers.

Update: 21 Nov '06 1537z

Sgt. Mom in the comments suggested ROP and ROP part 2

Update: 22 Nov '06 0320z

CIA Factbook on Iran.

Update: 27 Nov '06 1236z

This may be an even better technology for Energy Independence