FLIMSY FOREIGN POLICY
Our government continues to freeze out the Muslim perspective
BY MIKE ZIGLER

Mike Zigler is editor of Liberty Watch: The Magazine. After serving as news editor at Las Vegas CityLife and editor-in-chief at the UNLV Rebel Yell, he currently directs internal communications on the Las Vegas Strip. Feel free to reach him at mikezigler@cox.net  Other stories by Mike Zigler

Liberty Watch readers know George Harris. He speaks his mind no matter where he is and who’s in the room with him. It’s the reason why I let him push me around every month while putting together each issue of the magazine. (Kidding, George.) So when Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently addressed a group of a prominent local conservatives at a Las Vegas fundraiser, George lobbed the first question: “If you are elected President,” he asked, “will you include any Muslim members in your cabinet?”

In the seconds before former Massachusetts Governor Romney responded, you could have heard a pin drop.

His (admittedly, very smooth) answer in a nutshell? “Not likely.”

Now, my fellow Nevada conservatives are not stupid. The reason a hush fell over the room was not so much due to the boldness of George’s question. They think the same way he does, and they worry about the consequences of an expanded war in the Middle East, which will inevitably lead to increased taxes, increased fuel prices and an even higher deficit that, sooner or later, American taxpayers will be forced to pay. More significantly, we wonder: “How can we claim to be fighting a war solely against violent Islamofacism and not the entire Arab world if the White House doesn’t contain a single member of the Arab-American or Muslim community?”

News flash: More than half of the world is Muslim, not Christian. And as the Muslim faith expands, so does, it appears, the U.S. conflict against people of that faith. Mind you, George didn’t ask Romney if he planned to include any handicapped half-Eskimo lesbian welfare-receiving cabinet members for the pointless sake of liberal “diversity.” George was merely curious to know if Romney — who, incidentally, announced in a televised debate that he believes the U.S. government should open more Camp Guantanamo-type detention camps around the world — had any plans to bring an Arab perspective to our foreign policy. That’s all.

In short, George and many other Nevada conservatives aren’t too thrilled with Romney’s exclusion of mainstream Arab-Americans and Muslims from important positions. Furthermore, we are witnessing military socialism and boneheaded foreign policy worm their way through our government, creating political mountains out of what should only be molehills.

Case in point: When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was recently in New York to address the United Nations General Assembly, he asked the city and the Secret Service for permission to lay a wreath at Ground Zero. The response, like the one given by Romney, was regrettable. First, the city said that the ongoing construction has created too many security concerns for such an event.

Leave it to liberal New York City to apply enough red tape so that laying down a wreath becomes tantamount to digging the Suez Canal.

Second, a White House spokesman cracked that it is “odd that the president of a country that is a state sponsor of terror would visit Ground Zero.”

It is also odd that, given a brewing conflict with Iran, the government refuses to allow a moment for an Iranian representative to acknowledge the senseless murder of more than 3,000 Americans, an act (supposedly) fueled by the kind of militant Islam we are fighting against. But no, the current neoconservative view (which I’m not sure if Romney subscribes to) prohibits any Arab or Muslim gesture. This is sheer folly. Just think for a moment about how this refusal looks to mainstream Arabs and Muslims. We want these people on the side of freedom — including the freedom to recognize the homicidal insanity of extreme Islam. We don’t want them thinking America will never have anything to do with Iran, and we don’t want them thinking that America is the kind place where a simple wreath-laying is made impossible by construction.

What is the federal government really worried about? That Ahmadinejad would sneak a WMD into the wreath? Piss on the ashes of the dead? Demonstrate Iran actually is compassionate?

Another thing that has me worried: Blackwater, a private security firm that the Iraqi government wants to kick out of their country. I’m all for privatization and deregulation, but how completely broken must our army be if we need to rely on the private sector to protect our U.S. Embassy representatives and other civilian workers from moving around the country? (I’ve been flipping through some history books, and can’t find a single mention of the Pinkertons escorting Gen. Patton around Europe.) Again, it looks like the U.S. government will ignore Arab concerns.

Unless the Republican presidential candidates come to terms with and properly address the issue of Arab-American and Muslim participation in our foreign-policy decisions, I fear that the 2008 election will be a blowout — and not in conservatives’ favor. This is bad news for America.