21st American century is about to end

[Awesome]

Barely six years have elapsed since President Bush took office and the much coveted 21st century belongs to America is about to come to an abrupt end. America’s pre-eminence in four corners of the world is being challenged by friends and foes alike.

In America’s own backyard— Latin America—Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is spear heading a crusade to undermine US interests across the region. He has successfully garnered the support of the leaders of Cuba, Bolivia and Ecuador to propagate his cause. Together they have challenged American supremacy by embarking on a campaign to reclaim oil and gas fields from western companies and put them directly under state control.

Across the Atlantic, Europe smitten by the Iraq war and deeply hostile to the unilateralist agenda of the Bush administration has at best offered nominal assistance. Rather, given the opportunity the Europeans—notably the French, the Germans and the British have behaved more as foes than American allies. French intransigence in Lebanon, Europe’s refusal to commit significant troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain’s interference in Palestine, and French and British hostility towards a Darfur settlement have damaged America’s standing in the world and eroded her legitimacy.

Russia and China subdued by twenty or so years of American power have reawakened to counter American inspired revolutions sweeping Central Asia. Uzbekistan returned to Moscow’s sphere of influence, Kyrgyzstan and Belarus successfully thwarted US backed uprisings; America failed to press home the political gains made in Ukraine, and Georgia witnessed a severe backlash from Russia over its ties with Washington.

Furthermore, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan the minnow states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) have become emboldened enough to demand withdrawal of American bases. America’s gains in this region almost stand to naught.

Worse still is that the war on terror has inadvertently solidified China’s relationship with Russia—undoing years of American strategic planning to keep the two erstwhile enemies apart. The China-Russian alliance reinvigorated with economic growth and a common desire to see a bipolar world has spread its tentacles across the globe harming US interests.

Russia unfazed by American threats is equipping Venezuela and Iran with modern weaponry. Chinese energy companies are signing oil deals in places that have traditionally been the preserve of American oil giants. In the Middle East, both Russian and China have taken strong objection to America’s position over Iran. On the Korean peninsula, Beijing’s unfettered support for Pyongyang has exposed Washington’s inability to prevent North Korea from becoming nuclear.

Throughout the Muslim world America’s credibility has plummeted to an all-time low. The ferocity of the resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan has broken the back of the US army and forced President Bush to abandon his plans to advance democracy. Bush unable to extricate America from Iraq and Afghanistan has had to revert to the ‘Truman Doctrine’ and seek the help of secular autocracies like Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Instead of reshaping the Muslim world in America’s image, the nefarious policies of the Bush administration has Islamised the region, politicized the Muslim masses to awaken from their spiritual slumber and galvanized the Muslim intelligentsia into a powerful force for political Islam— to sum up the last six years— it is suffice to say that America is precipitating the birth of the Caliphate.

After two decades of dominating world affairs, America finds itself at the mercy of her friends and enemies. Graham Fuller former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council described America’s predicament correctly when he wrote in the latest issue of the National Interest, “diverse countries have deployed a multiplicity of strategies and tactics designed to weaken, divert, alter, complicate, limit delay or block the Bush agenda through death by a thousand cuts.”

So what happens after America has fallen from its perch as the world’s sole super power? Europe is too divided to take up the mantle of the leading state. Russia has yet to translate her economic strength into political capital to position herself as the pre-eminent power. Both China and India lack the political will and the experience to affect world politics. For the foreseeable future, both countries will be confined to their respective spheres of influence.

The country that wishes to supplant America must possess a huge population, abundant resources, a universal ideology and the political will to succeed. The most obvious candidate is the Muslim world under the Caliphate, which Bush has often spoken about.

http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/38357

This article's so crazy.

 

[Thunder]

Throughout the Muslim world America’s credibility has plummeted to an all-time low. The ferocity of the resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan has broken the back of the US army and forced President Bush to abandon his plans to advance democracy. Bush unable to extricate America from Iraq and Afghanistan has had to revert to the ‘Truman Doctrine’ and seek the help of secular autocracies like Syria, Iran and Pakistan. Instead of reshaping the Muslim world in America’s image, the nefarious policies of the Bush administration has Islamised the region, politicized the Muslim masses to awaken from their spiritual slumber and galvanized the Muslim intelligentsia into a powerful force for political Islam— to sum up the last six years— it is suffice to say that America is precipitating the birth of the Caliphate.

The country that wishes to supplant America must possess a huge population, abundant resources, a universal ideology and the political will to succeed. The most obvious candidate is the Muslim world under the Caliphate, which Bush has often spoken about.

Allah-u-akaber

Finally the muslims have woken up, but we were never asleep in the first place, it was over curropted leaders, we still have such leaders. But the number of muslims wanting a united ummah is litterly countless. But we must'nt get to exticed, we still have a long way to go. It was abouvis from day one that it'll be the ummah leading, beacuse our population exceeds that of the chinese and the indians. Our man power too, we have all the natural rescources espically oil.

This article even though not from sources like the "washingtion post" still tells alot.

 

[Awesome]

It won't just happen.

We'd have to eliminate mullah giri and adopt a truer flavor of Islam. One that's spread by freewill amongst unbelievers. One that includes women into society not excludes them to the house-wife role.

One where we are allowed to vote in our leaders, one where no one can bogged down by governing our religion but govern our nation.

If the US has it bad, Muslims have it worse.

 

[KashifAsrar]

Asim,
It is a definitely a crazy analysis for people like you! Agreed!
Secularists, till date, have never justified thier secular values through a working example. With secularism there are only corruption, cheating, wars, moral bankruptcy, nepotism, materialism, chaos and dominance of all resources by selected few. Relgion advocates have many better examples to qoute, live and die for.
Enjoy !
Kashif

 

[Awesome]

Islam's always been pretty much secular in a very basic as well.

Islam the governance, that is.

One of the first things that rising Muslim societies spoke about were t he rights of the minorities. To met out equality between them and the others.

These were things that we should've picked up better.

Secularism is just a tool to be a better human.

Keep religion out of the business of the state, does not by any way mean take bribes.

But, keep mullah giri into governance DOES mean to put good citizens of our nation but of different faith into a second class.

Unity means strength and I want Pakistan to be united.

 

[KashifAsrar]

Pakistan's foundation is on one issue: 'ISLAM' this is what was claimed when a partition of India was asked for. There was only one slogan at that time,'PAKISTAN KA MATLAB KIYA? LA-ILLAHA-ILAL-ALLAH'. If Pakistan deviates from its root cause then its doom and complete destruction is certain. No power on earth can STOP it.
Kashif

 

[white_pawn]

A simple Quote can be applied in this post and that is "What goes up has to come down sooner or later"

Now's the time for developing countries to counter balance developed countries. Because of the developing countries the world economy is saved from going into the dumpster.

 

[Awesome]

Thread re-incarnation!!

 

[ajtr]

The American 21st Century​

American Rivals have no culture of greatness
Victor Davis Hanson

The current debt, recession, wars, and political infighting have depressed Americans into thinking their country soon will be overtaken by more vigorous rivals abroad. Yet this is an American fear as old as it is improbable.

In the 1930s, the Great Depression supposedly marked the end of freewheeling American capitalism. The 1950s were caricatured as a period of mindless American conformity, McCarthyism, and obsequious company men.

By the late 1960s, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., along with the Vietnam War, had fueled a hippie counterculture that purportedly was going to replace a toxic American establishment. In the 1970s, oil shocks, gas lines, Watergate, and new rustbelts were said to be symptomatic of a post-industrial, has-been America.

At the same time, other nations, we were typically told, were doing far better.

In the late 1940s, with the rise of a postwar Soviet Union that had crushed Hitler’s Wehrmacht on the eastern front during World War II, Communism promised a New Man as it swept through Eastern Europe.

Mao Zedong took power in China and inspired Communist revolutions from North Korea to Cuba. Statist central planning was going to replace the unfairness and inefficiency of Western-style capitalism. Yet just a half-century later, Communism had either imploded or been superseded in most of the world.

By the early 1980s, Japan’s state capitalism along with emphasis on the group rather than the individual was being touted as the ideal balance between the public and private sectors. Japan Inc. continually outpaced the growth of the American economy. Then, in the 1990s, a real-estate bubble and a lack of fiscal transparency led to a collapse of property prices and a general recession. A shrinking and aging Japanese population, led by a secretive government, has been struggling ever since to recover the old magic.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the European Union was hailed as the proper Western paradigm of the future. The euro soared over the dollar. Europe practiced a sophisticated “soft power,” while American cowboyism was derided for getting us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Civilized cradle-to-grave benefits were contrasted with the frontier, every-man-for-himself American system.

Now Europe limps from crisis to crisis. Its undemocratic union, coupled with socialist entitlements, is proving unsustainable. Symptoms of the ossified European system appear in everything from a shrinking population and a growing atheism to an inability to integrate Muslim immigrants or field a credible military.

As we enter this new decade, we are being lectured that China is soon to be the global colossus. Its economy is now second only to America’s, but with a far faster rate of growth and with budget surpluses rather than debt. Few seem to mention that China’s mounting social tensions, mercantilism, environmental degradation, and state bosses belong more to a 19th- than a 21st-century nation.

Amid all this doom and gloom, two factors are constant over the decades. First, America goes through periodic bouts of neurotic self-doubt, only to wake up and snap out of it. Indeed, indebted Americans are already bracing for fiscal restraint and parsimony as an antidote to past profligacy.

Second, decline is relative and does not occur in a vacuum. As Western economic and scientific values ripple out from Europe and the United States, it is understandable that developing countries like China, India, and Brazil can catapult right into the 21st century. But that said, national strength is still measured by the underlying hardiness of the patient — its demography, culture, and institutions — rather than by occasional symptoms of ill health.

In that regard, America integrates immigrants and assimilates races and ethnicities in a way Europe cannot. Russia, China, and Japan are simply not culturally equipped to deal with millions who do not look Slavic, Chinese, or Japanese. The Islamic world cannot ensure religious parity to Christians, Jews, or Hindus — or political equality to women.

The American Constitution has been tested over 223 years. In contrast, China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, and South Korea have constitutional pedigrees of not much more than 60 years. The last time Americans killed each other in large numbers was nearly a century and a half ago; most of our rivals have seen millions of their own destroyed in civil strife and internecine warring just this past century.

In short, a nation’s health is gauged not by bouts of recession and self-doubt, but by the durability of its political, economic, military, and social foundations. A temporarily ill-seeming America is nevertheless still growing, stable, multiethnic, transparent, individualistic, self-critical, and meritocratic; almost all of its apparently healthy rivals, by contrast, are not.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

 

[CardSharp]

Victor Davis Hansen.... the neocon's academic cheerleader. He also thought that the Iraq war was going to be the American opportunity to reassert its greatness. Well here we are. A different season a different spin.

The man is a political animal who studies history as a means to an end. The study of history is a wonderful thing, and what he does with it is unforgivable.

 

[CardSharp]

Victor Hanson: Portrait of an American Traitor

I've survived some terrible summers, but this is the worst. Somebody kill me. Fresno's been putting on a show, crunching a whole lifetime of stupid misery into a few hot months. And I mean hot. We've been setting records down here. Today it hit 107 degrees. Tomorrow we're due to reach 109. Luckily, Thursday should be a cool, breezy 103.

I had figured this summer would be a little easier to handle now that I've shucked off a layer of blubber (I slimmed down a bit to try to ease my kidney situation). But no, God just made it a few degrees hotter to make sure I stay as sweaty and miserable as ever, cooking in my own fat.

People here have been going crazy since it started heating up. The Fresno PD managed to get our fine city some international press with a new approach to fighting crime: cracking down on 11-year-olds. In case you didn't read about it, what happened was this 11-year-old girl threw a rock at some kids who were splattering her with water balloons, so the Fresno cops swooped down with three squad cars and a chopper. They wrestled her down, cuffed her and charged her with felony assault. She did a week in juvie isolation, with no access to even her parents, before they let her go.


Naturally her lawyers yelled racism, because she's Mexican. I don't buy that. It's not racism, it's plain cowardice. That's the key to understanding what's happening in the world today: plain old cowardice. Somewhere along the line we lost all the brave people. Now we've just got a lot of phony blowhards. The cops who wrestled that little girl around were just like the cops you see on Reno 911, playing tough once they were sure the suspect couldn't fight back. I drive past gang corners every damn day, and I never see the Fresno PD giving those bastards any trouble-they're too scary. So they wait till it's a little girl who defended herself against a bunch of bullies, then they swarm her like a SWAT team.

We've got this Fresno intellectual who likes to strut the same way in the local paper. He's one of these snotty assholes with three names: Victor Davis Hanson. Oh, sorry: Doctor Victor David Hanson. He's got a Ph.D. and he teaches at Fresno State.

This fool passes himself off as a military historian, writing columns about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else he feels like babbling about, but he doesn't have a clue about contemporary warfare. Every war nerd on the net knows more about what's happening in Iraq than he does. But that doesn't stop him. He teaches Classics, he's written a half dozen books on ancient warfare, and he never lets you forget that he's a professor and you're not.

In his last column for the Fresno Bee, he sneered at people who don't have Ph.D.'s for daring to have opinions about the war in Iraq: "What do a talented Richard Gere, Robert Redford and Madonna all have in common besides loudly blasting the current administration? They either dropped out of, or never started, college. Cher may think George Bush is 'stupid,' but she-not he-didn't finish high school."

Since I never even finished my AA degree, I took that kind of personally. I guess it's my fault for not getting into Yale on pure merit like Bush did. That column got me so furious I daydreamed about driving down Highway 99 to Hanson's farm and setting all his orchards and vineyards on fire. I kept thinking of what the Spartans said when one of their neighbors threatened them: "Your cicadas will chirp from the ground," meaning, "We'll burn your ******* olive orchards if you mouth off again."

Professor Hanson is one of these "back to the land" assholes who can afford to live on a farm because he's got tenure for life at Fresno State-they can't fire him for anything less than a major felony. It's classic welfare state socialism that funds his estate, but that doesn't stop him from moralizing about the benefits of free market solutions. So he writes these columns from his farm in Selma, a few miles down the road from Fresno, about the sanctity of private land and private enterprise and the life lessons of farming.

He doesn't even suspect what a total hypocrite he is. According to his official online bio, Hanson graduated from UC Santa Cruz in 1975. I don't know if you non-Californians understand what that means. UC Santa Cruz is the official sex-and-drugs campus of the whole UC system. It's so hippie-cool and mellow it doesn't even give grades, which are just too bourgeois. You just get little notes from your teachers. The kids who go there are rich brats who don't have to worry about getting a job-because graduating from there is like telling your future employers you were stoned for four straight years.

And Hanson graduated from there in 1975. I can only dream about what it must've been like to be a student at Santa Cruz back then, at the climax of the hippie days. I seriously doubt if anybody on that campus was un-stoned from enrollment to graduation, or un-laid for more than a week.

So here's a question for you, Professor Hanson, Mister Morality: how many coeds did you screw when you were at UC Santa Cruz? And how many drugs did you take?

But you know, I could take all Hanson's hypocritical pompous bullshit if he only knew something about contemporary warfare. He doesn't. All he knows is that he's in favor of Gulf War II, and to defend that mess he's willing to slander Bush Sr's magnificent victory in Gulf War I. This is insane, really insane-taking America's only outright strategic victory since 1945, our most glorious campaign since Inchon, and turning it into a defeat just so you can make Bush Jr's fiasco look a little better. Here's Hanson's treasonous account of Gulf War I:

"War I (January 17 to March 3, 1991)

"The First Iraqi War : started over Saddam Hussein's August 2, 1990, invasion of Kuwait. His occupation precipitated the American-led coalition's efforts to reclaim Kuwait through land and air attacks. Saddam's complete capitulation was seen as satisfying the war's professed claim of restoring the sovereignty of Kuwait.

"But despite retreating from Kuwait and suffering terrible damage to his armed forces, Saddam, like the Germans in 1918, claimed that his armies had been repelled while on the offensive. So he passed off a setback as a draw against the world's superpower - and thus a win by virtue of his own survival against overwhelming odds.

"In any case, we called off our forces before the destruction of the Republican Guard. We also refused to go to Baghdad; we let rebellious Shiites and Kurds be tragically butchered; and we failed to enforce all the surrender agreements. Apparently the U.S. wished to bow to the U.N. mandates only to expel Saddam from Kuwait, or was worried about our Sunni partners who wanted a lid on Kurdish tribalism and Shiite fervor inside Iraq."

There are so many evil lies here, I don't know where to start. First there's the phony comparison to Germany after WW I. There's no comparison at all. Saddam's Kuwait invasion wasn't a nationalist war like WW I, and no matter what Saddam said, every dog in the street in Baghdad knew perfectly well that the Iraqi army had been outclassed and savaged. Moreover, the Germans fought for four years and nearly won, whereas Saddam got his *** completely whipped in a three-day land war. Fact is, we did it right in Gulf War I. We neutered Saddam, destroyed his ability to threaten anybody, and left him in charge of his hellhole country. It was American diplomacy combined with military power at its finest. And this pig tries to say it was a defeat!

Hanson goes on to say that we "refused to go to Baghdad" because we wanted to please the UN. Bullshit. We used the UN to build a huge alliance (something Bush's idiotic son didn't think was necessary), and we stayed out of Baghdad because Powell and Bush Sr. knew what would happen if we tried to occupy Iraqi cities. We're going through the consequences of that mistake right now; how can anybody pretend not to understand, by now, why it was a bad idea, and why Bush Sr. was right the first time?

What's amazing is that Hanson is actually trying to blame Bush Sr. for not jumping off the cliff first, before his idiotic son did. Like I said, it's insane-until you realize it's being done just to make Junior's disaster look good, which Hanson needs to do because he's been shilling for Bush Jr.'s war from day one. Hanson isn't just insane. He's one sleazy dude.

He proves his sleaze when he moves on to Gulf War II:

"War IV. (April 2003 to present)

"The Fourth Iraqi War ("The Insurrection," "The Occupation") began immediately after the end of the conventional fighting and continues today. It was framed by the fact that the United States would not simply leave after toppling Saddam yet had never really gone into the Sunni Triangle in force during the three-week victory. War IV was waged by a loose alliance of Wahhabi fundamentalists, foreign jihadists, and former Baathists against the American efforts to fashion an indigenous Iraqi democratic government."

Here again, there's so many lies it's hard to know where to start. Like, what the hell does Hanson mean by saying we never attacked the Sunni Triangle? As military history, that's pure nonsense. The only reason he says it is because he has to explain to himself how come the insurgency was able to come on so strong after we kicked *** in the conventional war. And see, Hanson can't admit to himself that there was a difference in the kind of war being waged, a transition from conventional to urban-guerrilla warfare. If he once admitted that we're dealing with an urban guerrilla war now, he'd have to face the historical fact that modern armies still don't have an effective counter for that mode of warfare.


And all that ancient Greek stuff won't help Hanson deal with urban guerrilla war, because there was nothing like it in the ancient world. In those days conquerors wiped out cities the second they showed any sign of uppity behavior. Urban guerrilla wars were pretty quick and pretty unsuccessful: rise up against the occupier, and literally every man, woman and child gets slaughtered, and the offending city covered in salt. End of story.

One of my favorite examples of Roman "pacification" policy was what happened to the Helvetii, a Celtic tribe that used to live where Switzerland is now. Europe was a feisty, tricky place in those days, like Africa is now. Tribes were always on the move.

The Helvetii decided they'd make a move on Northeastern Gaul, grabbing the land and wiping out the Roman-vassal tribes occupying the land. The entire Helvetii tribe numbered about 370,000, and from that they could field about 110,000 fighting men-every male who could hold a spear. They smashed into the settled Gaul tribes easily, grabbed a swathe of territory and prepared to keep advancing until they had enough good land to support the whole tribe.

What the Helvetii hadn't factored into their big move was the Romans. Julius Caesar got a message from his Gaul vassals pleading for help against the Helvetii. At this point he had six legions under him in Gaul, almost 300,000 men. But he wanted more, because he had something a little more drastic in mind than just defeating the Helvetii. He was out to exterminate them. So he called up another two legions, which meant he had 400,000 trained soldiers against 110,000 part-time tribal warriors.

It was no contest. The Romans surrounded the Helvetii and started stabbing their way through the mass of warriors, then the civilians. As they advanced, the legions would herd a few saleable-looking women and children away from the killing. They were sent to holding pens in the rear to be sold as slaves. The main body of Roman soldiers kept working through the mass of Helvetii, stabbing and stabbing. Roman soldiers were taught to use the short sword-"gladius," which is where "gladiator" comes from-to stab, not slash. Stabbing made a deeper wound, more likely to tear up a guy's guts and give him a fatal infection. The stab was also quicker than the big dramatic downward smash those hammy heavy-metal barbarians were addicted to.

At the end of the battle, they had slaughtered 220,000 men, women and children-60% of the whole tribe. Must have been exhausting too. Imagine the sheer hard work it took to kill that many screaming, scrambling people with the Roman short sword, not much bigger than a Bowie knife.

We could do it, way more easily than the Romans. We'd burn only as many calories as it takes to press a button. If we had the will, we could wipe out the whole population of the Sunni Triangle in a few days. If we used neutron bombs, we could do it without even messing up the area too badly. It would sure stop the insurgency.

Trouble is, that kind of genocide just isn't popular these days, and nobody, not even Professor Hanson, is ready to argue for it. It's hard to argue you want to bring democracy to the Sunnis by making them extinct. And what Hanson and morons like him won't admit is that short of genocide, there is no military solution to urban guerrilla warfare.

So Hanson cheats like a ninth grader, trying to avoid facing the urban-guerrilla problem. He makes fake lists like this one: "From the various insurgencies of the Peloponnesian War to the British victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, there remain constants across 2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat."

Oh, like we're supposed to believe he chose that Malaya example just by chance, huh? It so happens that the Malayan insurgency of the 1950s is the ONLY guerrilla war that was won by the occupying army, in this case the Brits, and that's why Bush's spinners like to cite It. You know why the Brits "succeeded"? It's real simple: the insurgents were all ethnic Chinese, and the Malays hated their guts. They were a small, easily identified ethnic minority. The Malays never needed much of an excuse to start chopping up Chinese people, and when the Brits gave them license to kill they went at it full time. Then the Brits up and left.

It was a relatively small affair: over 12 years, some 7,000 MRLA guerrillas were killed. Just to give you a real comparison, one American general recently said that in the last year alone, we've killed or captured 50,000 Iraqi insurgents, yet, this same general admitted that the insurgency is only gaining strength.

If Hanson thinks we can chop up millions of heavily armed, aggressive Sunni Iraqis the way the Brits mopped up a few thousand Red Chinese in Malaysia, he's insane. And maybe he is-all those years of the state subsidizing his phony "farm" and students sucking up to him for a good grade have driven him into a psychotic delusional state.

But I don't really think he's insane-just a traitor, a liar willing to keep shoving American troops and money into a meatgrinder just so he doesn't have to admit he was wrong. Sooner or later we're going to have to face it: these NeoCons don't care about America any more than Stalin cared about Russia. They're not just wrong. They're traitors.

 

[nightcrawler]

nothing gonna happen in next ~20years; damn sure about it

 

[AZADPAKISTAN2009]

hmm what ever I still want to place in Miami beach

 

[Farooq]

Asim,
It is a definitely a crazy analysis for people like you! Agreed!
Secularists, till date, have never justified thier secular values through a working example. With secularism there are only corruption, cheating, wars, moral bankruptcy, nepotism, materialism, chaos and dominance of all resources by selected few. Relgion advocates have many better examples to qoute, live and die for.
Enjoy !
Kashif

Brother Kashif,

The secularists are so blinded by hatred for religion, especially Islam that even though within their heart of hearts they know that Islamic system of governance is the only system of prosperity, they will oppose it. Hence, this explains their deep seeded hatred for Ulema, Mullahs, religious people or anything or anyone associated with Islam.

Had these clowns lived in the time of the Sahaba -e- Ikram (Radi Allah unho) they would have opposed them and sided with the enemies of Islam as they have done today. There is no point in arguing with or convincing these twisted and demented people.

 

[lonelyone]

Yes, there are some people who like the West so much that they would sell their own mothers to them. However, our own mullahs with their extremism and habit of calling for the death of someone every few days also makes Islam look bad. A caliphate does not have to include any Mullahs. It can be a federation, where people elect representatives to. There does not need to be any discrimination between Christians/Hindus or women. Like there is no discrimination in Turkey, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia. Joining together in a (democratic) Caliphate would bring enormous economic and stability benefits.