RUTHFULLY YOURS

Afghanistan’s chief executive says it was clear Kunduz would fall, for lack of military resources.

It was May 2014, and the war in Afghanistan would soon be over. Or so said Barack Obama.

“This is how wars end in the 21st century,” the president explained in a Rose Garden address. “Not through signing ceremonies, but through decisive blows against our adversaries, transitions to elected governments, security forces who are trained to take the lead and ultimately full responsibility.” Also prisoner exchanges, which is how the U.S. swapped Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five senior Taliban commanders long held at Guantanamo.

As with so many of Mr. Obama’s foreign-policy promises, things have not worked out that way. Sgt. Bergdahl, hailed by the White House for serving with “honor and distinction,” was charged last month with desertion and misbehavior before the enemy. Afghanistan’s political system nearly came undone last summer amid bitter allegations of electoral fraud in the second-round presidential contest between Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah. The Afghan army has been beset by high desertion rates, record casualties, poor logistics, and inadequate air and intelligence capabilities. The Taliban is resurgent under its new supreme leader, Mullah Akhtar Mansour.

And Americans are still fighting. This week, U.S. Special Forces advisers and pilots fought alongside the Afghan army to reclaim the northern city of Kunduz, which had fallen to the Taliban in a predawn attack on Monday. It was the first time since 2001 that the insurgents had gained control of a major Afghan city.

Nadya Savchenko, a Ukrainian officer, had finished tending to soldiers wounded in a firefight with pro-Russian separatists when her yellow scarf caught the eye of an enemy patrol in eastern Ukraine.

Lt. Savchenko, the first woman trained as a fighter pilot in Ukraine, surrendered at gunpoint. “Here she is,” one separatist said, “a woman sniper.”

The pro-Russian rebels yelled taunts, blindfolded her and forced her to her knees, according to a video from June 17, 2014, the day Lt. Savchenko began her perilous journey into Russia’s justice system.

She is accused of guiding a mortar attack that killed two Russian TV journalists that day in a criminal case that spans 39 volumes of evidence and testimony. Lt. Savchenko, who has been held in Russia for more than a year, is now on trial. She has denied the charges against her, but even her lawyers expect guilty verdicts and a lengthy prison term.

Her case illuminates the war in Ukraine—including the role of TV propaganda and the apparent involvement of Russian agents. To Kremlin critics, it also brings to light the revival of an old Soviet institution: the show trial, intended not to establish innocence or guilt, but to reinforce the party line and punish dissent. While Russia’s domestic opponents have faced such prosecutions for years, the war in Ukraine has added an extraterritorial dimension.

German-speaking emigres like Frank Auerbach dragged British culture into the 20th century. But that didn’t go down well in Stepney or Stevenage.

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem.

Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach is a one-off, a unique painter with a unique vision. However he’s also part of a vast wave of Germanic immigration that has transformed British cultural life — mainly for the better, but at a price.

During the 1930s, 100,000 refugees fled to Britain from the Third Reich. Britain had weathered other migrations, but this one was entirely different. Nazism had transformed a liberal democracy into a violent, superstitious tyranny. These refugees weren’t only fleeing from anti-Semitism. They were fleeing from a pogrom against western civilisation. This wave of immigrants wasn’t just another huddled mass — it was the cultural élite of Central Europe, the best and brightest from every avenue of academia and the arts.

Dictator – the last in Robert Harris trilogy on ancient Rome – focuses on Cicero and his secretary Tiro and ‘the most tumultuous era in human history’Marcus Tullius Cicero was the ancient master of the ‘save’ key. He composed more letters, speeches and philosophy books than most writers of any epoch; but more important than any particular work was that so much survived to define his time. He had a secretary, Tiro, who can reasonably be given the credit for researching, correcting, copying and casting out his master’s words. In Robert Harris’s three novels of Cicero’s life, Marcus Tullius Tiro, the freed slave who took his name as well as dictation from his boss, gets his full reward. Over more than 1,000 pages, the secretary is the narrator of how the world’s first great republic slipped into empire, a story that, thanks to the luck of literary survival, centres on Cicero as so many histories have before.

Dictator draws on the final 14 years of Cicero’s writings, beginning in the year 58 bc when, still famed and shamed for killing the Catilinarian conspirators in his consulship five years before, he chooses exile rather than an open fight with bigger, fiercer and suddenly united beasts, the plutocrat Marcus Crassus, the butcher-turned-constitutionalist Gnaius Pompeius and the genius of war and prose, Julius Caesar. How honest is Cicero — in public and in private — about why he is going? Compromise clashes with principle, events with expectations, until a triumphant return, and one by one the murders of all those beasts and his own murder.

The Syrian conflict has taken many unpredictable turns over its terrible four years. But the developments this week are some of the most concerning so far.

Syria has always been not only a domestic civil war but also a place where regional powers have struggled with each other to promote and prop up their own interests. This seemed to be tolerable to much of the West when the countries vying with each other in Syria were Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the Gulf States and others. But the arrival of Russia in an open, rather than covert, manner changes things completely.

Because Russia is now openly involved and engaged in seeing the civil war to the end they have always wanted, and just as Turkey has used air strikes purportedly against Isis to in fact engage in their war against the Kurdish PKK, so Russia, under the guise of pursuing Isis, has clearly been carrying out its own sectarian, pro-Assad business.

The United States, President Obama said at the U.N. General Assembly last week, “worked with many nations in this assembly to prevent a third world war—by forging alliances with old adversaries.” Presumably, the president was not referring to his deeply flawed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the recent agreement that the White House has marketed as the only alternative to war with a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. Rather, it seems he was referring to the post-World War II period, when the United States created and presided over an international order that prevented an even larger, potentially nuclear, conflict with the Soviet Union. Now, that Pax Americana may be ending.
Indeed, Russia’s airstrikes against CIA-vetted Syrian rebels last week looked like a punctuation mark. When the secretary of state holds a joint press conference with Moscow’s foreign minister after Russia has decimated American proxies bearing American arms, we are not witnessing anything like a return to the Cold War. Rather, we’re witnessing a new order being born. It is an order that is being designed by others, without any concern for American interests.

My e-pal Ed Cline is author of innumerable great columns posted on his blog, on Family Security Matters and on Ruthfully. He is also author of dozens of books listed here…for your choice and reading pleasure….rsk

I received a request from a fan for a chronology of my works, especially of the novels. I have already replied to that request, but, for the enlightenment of other readers here, and for their convenience, I include my answer below.

This is a copy and paste of my Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Cline). The only titles with double publication dates are the Sparrowhawks (The only exceptions are First Prize and Whisper the Guns), which include the original MacAdam/Cage dates, followed by the Patrick Henry Press pub dates. I had to republish the Sparrowhawks after MacAdam/Cage ceased paying me earned royalties and stopped printing those titles, and then the publisher declared bankruptcy. Including them in the publication list or on my Wikipedia page was necessary because those were actual events. (The only exceptions are First Prize and Whisper the Guns.) These editions precede the Patrick Henry Press editions in the listing here. The only Sparrowhawk titles I wish people to purchase are the Patrick Henry Press republications; I no longer am paid royalties from purchases of the MacAdam/Cage editions. Also, Amazon and the Library of Congress would require the inclusion of the MacAdam/Cage publication dates, as well, in any biographical account that included my publishing credits.

Perfect Crime Books publishes the Chess Hanrahan detective series. My Patrick Henry Press publishes (through Create Space and Kindle) the Cyrus Skeen and Merritt Fury series (as well as my nonfiction). You will notice that the Kindle and Audible Amazon numbers assigned to all these titles are missing; including them would have made the Wikipedia page unwieldy and repetitive. It is assumed that anyone searching for one of the Patrick Henry Press printed editions of the Sparrowhawks or the Skeen detective novels would also encounter on Amazon the Kindle and Audio Book options. E-book editions of the titles are carried exclusively by Amazon; the print editions of the titles are also carried by Barnes & Noble and other sales venues, but not the Kindle editions.

The radicalization of Muslims in Belgium provides ominous lessons for the rest of Europe
At the turn of the 21st century, a parade of books and articles declared that the American century had ended, and that the new century would be a European century. Matthew Kaminski of Politico wrote recently that in 2000, many believed that “a continent free, whole, prosperous looked within reach” and that “the new century promised pooled sovereignty, peaceful cooperation, soft power, and social justice.” As Kaminski notes, futurologist Jeremy Rifkin wrote that Europe’s “vision of the future is quietly eclipsing the American dream” and that “Europe will run the 21st century.” Washington Post correspondent T.R. Reid predicted that the Euro would replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The Euro, he wrote, “is more than money. It is also a political statement—a daily message in every pocket that cooperation has replaced conflict across the continent.”
Brussels represented the kind of post-national, multicultural city that European bureaucrats hoped the continent would become. In a 2001 report entitled “Brussels: The Capital of Europe”, Italian philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote, “In the presence of a multi-lingual, multi-religious, multi-ethnic Europe, Brussels [is] the center where diversities are not eliminated, but rather exalted and harmonized.” In May 2001, British historian Timothy Garton Ash described Brussels as “a place where highly sophisticated, multilingual men and women from the most diverse backgrounds . . . reconcile national interests and national ways of thinking with the pursuit of larger, common interests.”

This tenth anniversary of the Mohammed cartoons is a glum day for free speech. But that’s no reason for some “social media” billionaire not to make it worse. During her visit to New York for the grand UN dictators’ ball, Angela Merkel was overheard rebuking Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for permitting people to post “anti-immigrant” sentiments on social media:

On the sidelines of a United Nations luncheon on Saturday, Merkel was caught on a hot mic pressing Zuckerberg about social media posts about the wave of Syrian refugees entering Germany, the publication reported.

The Facebook CEO was overheard responding that “we need to do some work” on curtailing anti-immigrant posts about the refugee crisis. “Are you working on this?” Merkel asked in English, to which Zuckerberg replied in the affirmative before the transmission was disrupted.

The very small cartel that run “social media” worldwide are increasingly hostile to free speech outside of a limited and largely trivial number of subjects. Ours will be the first civilization to slide off the cliff while watching cat videos.

~I wonder if, by the time Zuckerberg’s “done some work” on this, we’ll still be able to quote Henryk Broder on Facebook. The author of The Last Days of Europe, Broder was one of the speakers in Copenhagen joining me to mark the tenth anniversary of the Motoons. (You can hear my remarks here, and Douglas Murray’s here.) As befits his book title, he was something of a pessimist, especially when it came to Chancellor Merkel and her perplexing enthusiasm for unassimilable “refugees”:

So — who had the Russians bombing Syria and the Palestinians voiding all deals with Israel in the pool on Tuesday night before going to bed?

“News,” a coinage of the late Middle Ages, is a shortened version of the phrase “new things.” And these two pieces of news genuinely define the word. They’re events that hadn’t happened before and immediately changed what will happen going forward.

What’s amazing is that they came as a surprise, since both have been foreshadowed for weeks in the case of Russia and a couple of years in the case of the Palestinian Authority. And yet they did.

Presidential candidate Marco Rubio literally predicted the former during the Sept. 16 GOP debate.