RUTHFULLY YOURS

The approval of former MI6 agent John le Carré has not guaranteed the authenticity of the BBC’s dramatisation of The Night Manager. Those who know about the Middle East could barely make it through the first episode.

My colleague Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent, was in Tahrir Square during the revolution. He turned off The Night Manager when a murderous member of the Mubarak oligarchy ordered an improbably large assortment of weapons from a villainous English arms dealer. Mubarak had no shortage of weapons in 2011; he just could not persuade his forces to use them. The notion that his cronies would be trying to buy more rather than trying to persuade the army to fight comes from a definition of “realism” so capacious it includes Eurofighters on sale on the black market, and governments so unconcerned by weapons proliferation that they keep their inspectorates in cold, understaffed offices.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Le Carré’s post-Cold-War politics are best described as more Pilgerish than Pilger. Connoisseurs of his public statements can tick every space on the bingo card. Le Carré believes that corporations brainwash the bovine masses (check) on behalf of the imperial American hegemon (check) which is itself controlled by a conspiracy of right-wingers (check) who are pulling our puppet strings at the behest of — guess who? — the Jews (full house!). Or as le Carré explained, the neoconservatives are “appointing the state of Israel as the purpose of all Middle Eastern and practically all global policy”.

Then there is the self-pity, that most deplorable affectation of Western intellectuals, who have never once faced the smallest threat of persecution or punishment for their writing. At one point during the last decade, le Carré compared himself to the German-Jewish diarist Victor Klemperer, who miraculously survived life under the Nazis. Liberals of a certain age remember that when the Ayatollah Khomeini’s assassins imitated the Nazis and threatened Salman Rushdie’s life the Klemperer de nos jours opined that Rushdie had brought death on himself by insulting the great religion of Islam.

We are looking at a permanent structural change in the American armed forces that will not only weaken the nation’s ability to defend itself, but endanger constitutional principles. A year ago in an article titled “Obama’s Generals,” I described an American military increasingly politicized under the current administration. The evidence at the time was already abundant: the military’s refusal to identify the Fort Hood shootings as terrorism, the coddling of Bowe Bergdahl, the relief or prosecution of politically unreliable generals, and unrealistically rosy appreciations of the campaign against ISIS being the major points. If anything, things have worsened since, most especially with the purely political decision to remove all restriction on women in combat, and as noted in a recent AT posts the mostly symbolic but still significant decisions by the Navy to issue “gender neutral” uniforms and to ignore regulations regarding naming ships to honor Democrat politicians and leftwing social activists. Add to this, ongoing and increasingly aggressive recruiting policies that mandate “diversity” and the situation becomes scary.

Arguably there has been some good news here and there, but even that must be taken with a large grain of salt. Last year Congress passed legislation allowing for the soldiers wounded at Fort Hood to receive Purple Hearts, and the Army belatedly acknowledged former Major Nidal Hassan’s terrorist ties, though has yet (to my knowledge) formally remove the “workplace violence” moniker it attached to the shooting, despite the fact that Obama late last year reluctantly acknowledged the Fort Hood shooting as a terror attack.

Similarly, in the Bergdahl case, also after incredibly long delays, the Army decided to try the soldier at a General Courts Martial. This is seen by some as the “old Army” reasserting itself in a case that reeks of liberal political influence. Perhaps this is so. However, the decision to try Bergdahl only came after he badly embarrassed the Army by going public with his account of his desertion and capture on NPR, practically forcing the hand of convening officer, General Robert B. Abrams. Moreover, though the decision to try Bergdahl was made last December (four days after the first NPR appearance), the trial will not take place until August, scarcely demonstrating a hard charging prosecution in a relatively simple case. Even assuming Bergdahl is convicted, his attorneys will argue that Bergdahl has successfully served on active duty for over two years since his release by the Taliban in May 2014, and thus deserving of leniency, undermining the contention he is a bad soldier. This might sound ridiculous to some, but the jury will have to consider it, and it is part of the reason why military prosecutions are usually expeditious, though the Army has not demonstrated any sense of urgency in the case.

Those who harp about “inequality” will talk themselves hoarse over the election season to come, insisting that the gaming of our economic system is the only explanation why some grow very rich and many do not. Just like the poor, class envy will be with us always
According to “Labor’s agenda for tackling inequality,” the Growing Together report, “inequality is at a 75-year high.” Nonsense is immortal in the hands of the left. A fundamental law of capitalism which, heretofore, has received little recognition or exposure is the antidote.

I flirted with calling it Smith’s Law but if it were any good no doubt a somewhat better-know Smith, Adam, would be mis-assigned the credit. Mind you, Smith is such a commonplace name that pseudonymity would probably be suspected. Some years’ ago I got into a heated wrangle on the Liverpool FC website about the worth of the then-coach and was accused by one of my antagonists of hiding behind the obvious pen name of Peter Smith. He clearly regarded my name as akin to Joseph Blow or Donald Duck. So modest sensibly prevails and I will just call it ‘the fundamental or inbuilt law’.

There is a heap of talk these days about rising inequality. It will no doubt be a central issue in the US elections and would be the only issue of note for socialist Bernie Sanders in the highly unlikely event he were to win the Democratic nomination. Jeremy Corbyn is on board the Bernie bandwagon as, without a shadow of doubt, is Labor’s Andrew Leigh (Battlers and Billionaires).

Thomas Piketty, Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century, gave the issue (as specious as it is) a literary boost. My review, “The Questionable Equations of Thomas Piketty” in the June, 2014, issue of Quadrant, did a fair job (British understatement) of exposing the flaws in his arguments.

Recall that the Occupy Wall Street movement began in 2011; inspired, in part, by the focus that Piketty and a colleague, Emmanuel Saez, had earlier given to the wealth and income of the so-called “one per cent”. Piketty and Saez were by no means alone. For example, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz (“Of the 1%, by the1%, for the 1%”) is one among a number of prominent ‘socialist economists’ (in itself, by the way, a contradiction in terms) who gave the issue a kick-along.

Obama is weakening U.S. defenses and credibility, but there’s little debate about the growing risk of war.
In this powerful nation with founding principles and latent capacities second to none, politics have become fit for the fall of Rome, the culture is sick with self-destruction, and the rule of law is routinely perverted. Though politics, culture and law are the arch of the nation, the keystone without which they cannot hold is defense. For war transforms whole peoples and threatens their sovereignty and national existence more decisively than any other force.

You would hardly know this from the current presidential campaign. Most candidates seem unaware that the prospects of catastrophic war in the not-so-distant future are burgeoning because of a fundamental change in the international system, driven by accelerating adjustments in relative military power.

Russia, China and Iran have been racing ahead, stimulated by a disintegrating Europe that neither spends sufficiently on its defense nor defends its borders; and by an America, strategically blind in the Middle East, that failed to replenish and keep current its military under President George W. Bush, and now surrenders, apologizes, bluffs, “leads from behind,” and denigrates its military capacities and morale as President Obama either embraces enemies or opposes them only with exquisite delicacy.

As the U.S. allows its nuclear forces to stagnate and decay into de facto unilateral disarmament, Russia has been modernizing its own. The Kremlin has added systems, such as road-mobile, intercontinental ballistic missiles with independently targetable re-entry warheads, that we neither have nor envision. In the absence of “soft-power” parity with the U.S., Russia dangerously relies on a permissive nuclear doctrine and promiscuously rattles its atomic sabers. Its nuclear adventurism, naval and land force modernization, unopposed reintroduction into the Middle East, invasion and annexation in Ukraine, and the ability to recapture the Baltic states in an afternoon, are yet another impeachment of “the end of history.”

With little resistance, China incrementally annexes the South China Sea while embarked on a naval buildup inversely proportional to the smallest U.S. fleet since 1916, and further aggravated by China’s ability, once its naval technology matures, to surge production in its 106 major shipyards as opposed to America’s six. More importantly, China is expanding its nuclear forces to what extent we do not know, because the Chinese program’s infrastructure is hidden within 3,000 miles of tunnels largely opaque to U.S. intelligence. As if China were not a major rival, the Obama administration, ever infatuated with accords, has made no effort to include Beijing in a nuclear arms-control regime. Why not? CONTINUE AT SITE

Former Ambassador John Bolton expressed hope today that President Obama would not apologize to the Russians following their dangerous military provocation on the Baltic Sea earlier this week. Russian attack planes buzzed dangerously close to a U.S. Navy destroyer on Monday and Tuesday in what the U.S. described as a “simulated attack.”

During an appearance on Fox News Friday morning, Bolton also predicted “there’s more” Russian aggression to come. “If that airplane had caught a gust of wind, it could have been right up against that destroyer,” he said.

“Russia’s latest stint in the Baltic Sea signals to our NATO allies that the U.S. can’t take care of itself,” he continued.

“I just hope Obama doesn’t apologize for [our] destroyer getting in the way of that airplane.”

It’s not an unfair barb given the Obama administration’s culture of weakness, apology, and moral equivalence on the world stage.

Via Cortney O’Brien at Townhall:

Before the Russian airplane flew near our destroyer, Iran captured 10 of our American sailors and celebrated it. Secretary of State John Kerry actually thanked Iran for their compassion during the ordeal. President Obama, meanwhile, continues to defend his nuclear deal with the nation, which has basically given Iran a pass for its bad behavior. A Middle East expert who is very critical of that agreement argues it has severely damaged America’s image as a superpower.

You think Kerry is a dunce?….rsk
Albright: ‘War on Terror’ Bad Term for ‘Just Murderers’ By Nicholas Ballasy

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said she dislikes the use of the phrase “war on terror,” arguing that it makes terrorists look like warriors.

“For me, I’ve had a very hard time with the vocabulary of all of this and I have not liked the words ‘war on terror’ because it makes those that are fighting us warriors when they are actually just murderers and they get a greater kind of reverence in their societies if we make warriors out of them. They are murderers, plain and simple,” Albright said during a discussion about religion, peace and world affairs at Georgetown University.

While she did not mention any presidential candidates by name, Albright criticized Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump’s call for a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. as a way to combat Islamic extremism.

“The challenge for us is to harness the unifying potential of faith while containing its capacity to divide. Now this is not easy to do, particularly in a political season where candidates are vilifying Muslims and exploiting the fear factor. The irony with all of this is that Daesh [ISIS] is the one that wants to divide the world along religious lines,” she said.

“We should not play into their game by provoking a clash of civilizations or leading Muslims to believe they are under attack by the West, but that is what happens when we suggest that our country should shut our borders to Muslims or patrol the streets of Muslim-American neighborhoods,” she added.

Albright said Americans must remember that the first rule in public life is to “frame the choice.”

“We will win if people believe the great divide in the world is between those who believe it is OK to murder innocent people and those who think it is wrong – between terrorists and those who are not terrorists,” Albright said.

“We will be in for a very long struggle if people believe the choice is between the supporters and defenders of Islam. This is precisely the fight that Daesh wants to have, but the truth is when Muslims commit terrorist attacks they are not practicing their faith – they are betraying it,” she added.

Albright repeated a message she conveyed in the past at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on engaging Muslims.

“In the end, both the Bible and the Quran include enough rhetorical ammunition to start a war and enough moral uplift to engender permanent peace,” she said.

In his study of the Roman historian Sallust (86-35 B.C.), Ronald Syme writes that “historians are selective, dramatic, impressionistic.” Later in the same work he notes that “systems and doctrines decay or ossify, whereas poetry and drama live on, also style and narrative.” These words apply to Syme himself, a man generally considered the greatest modern historian of Rome. Syme wrote biographies of Sallust and Tacitus and much else, but his reputation rests on “The Roman Revolution.” Published in 1939 when the specter of fascism clouded Europe, it was soon recognized as the magnificent book it is.

Syme (1903-1989) was a New Zealander who studied at and settled in Oxford. His specialty was prosopography, or the study of collective biographies to find common characteristics of historical social classes or groups. This was invaluable for “The Roman Revolution,” which is a compelling account of the decline of the Roman oligarchy in favor of a principate, or monarchy, quietly but implacably put in place by Augustus, the first of the Roman emperors. If historians had Rolodexes, none could be more complete than Syme’s on the Romans in the last years of the Republic. “In any age in the history of the Roman Republic,” he notes, “about twenty or thirty men, drawn from a dozen dominant families, hold a monopoly of office and power.” An intramural, nearly incestuous, affair was Roman political life; consider alone Servilia, “Cato’s half-sister, Brutus’s mother, Caesar’s mistress.”

A man who sees beneath every surface, demolishing all pretenses, Syme, early in his great book, writes: “The Roman constitution was a screen and a sham.” Of the idealism of the Republic, he notes: “Liberty and law are high-sounding words. They will often be rendered, on a cool estimate, as privilege and vested interest.” No cooler estimator existed than Syme. “The career of Pompeius,” he writes, “opened in fraud and violence. It was prosecuted, in war and peace, through illegality and treachery.”

Once the Triumvirs—Julius Caesar, Pompeius, Lepidus—were in ascendance, the Roman Republic’s day was done. “From a triumvirate it was but a short step to a dictatorship,” Syme writes. Julius Caesar, who emerged as dictator, before his assassination adopted Octavianus, whom Syme regularly refers to as “Caesar’s heir.” Octavianus would subsequently become Augustus, who, after his victories over Caesar’s assassins and later Marcus Antonius, ruled for 40 years. Augustus, Syme writes, possessed “an inborn and Roman distrust of theory, and an acute sense of the difference between words and facts.”

Syme was a master of the brief character sketch, not infrequently followed by a sharp observation. The mixture of good and evil in the same people fascinated him. CONTINUE AT SITE

Secretary of State John Kerry toured the Hiroshima Peace Memorial and Museum in Japan this week, a month before he and President Obama will meet foreign ministers at the G-7 Summit in that country. Reuters reported that he witnessed “haunting displays [of] photographs of badly burned victims, the tattered and stained clothes they wore, and statues depicting them with flesh melting from their limbs.”

“It is a stunning display. It is a gut-wrenching display,” explained Kerry. “It is a reminder of the depth of the obligation every one of us in public life carries . . . to create and pursue a world free from nuclear weapons.” Iran would exempt itself, of course.

But is this really the lesson of Hiroshima — that those in public life have an obligation to do away with nuclear weapons? A lot of people might argue that the existence of those weapons has saved lives from broader world conflicts and conventional warfare. That includes ending World War II sooner.

Last week, the Washington Post dutifully reported: “In Hiroshima, Kerry won’t apologize for atomic bombs dropped on Japan.” Technically, he didn’t. What we witnessed was one of the administration’s inverted non-apology apologies.

There’s a lot of speculation Obama will visit Hiroshima during the summit and offer some sort of apology. (If we’re to believe WikiLeaks, U.S. officials have been wrestling with the idea of having Obama apologize for the Hiroshima attacks for a while now.)

Doing so would comport well with his history, and it would not be a great leap for Obama. Having a high-ranking American official visit the museum already lends credibility to the Japanese notion that the U.S. bombing was gratuitous. On top of that, Kerry blames nuclear weapons — rather than Japan’s fanaticism and nihilism — for Hiroshima.

A spokesman for U.S. operations in Afghanistan said the ISIS threat there seems to be under control for now, but al-Qaeda has struck up an unsettling “increased relationship” with the Taliban.

There are six groups recognized as foreign terrorist organizations operating out of Afghanistan today, Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, deputy chief of staff for communications for Resolute Support Mission, told reporters today via teleconference from Kabul.

The U.S. military “continues to have a mission to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qaeda, and so we do have the authority to target any al-Qaeda member,” Cleveland noted. The authority for U.S. forces to begin targeting ISIS fighters in Afghanistan was added in January.

ISIS refers to the area as their Khorasan Province and has been trying to poach fighters from the Taliban ranks.

Seventy to 80 percent of counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan this year have targeted ISIS, Cleveland said.

“About three months or so ago, we thought that Daesh was probably in about six to eight districts. Today, we think they’re probably in about two to three districts,” he said.

“And I always hesitate to really kind of give a specific number like that because as soon as I say three districts, somebody pops up someplace else and now they’re in four or five. But at the end of the day, we think that we have significantly decreased the footprint that they have in Afghanistan.”