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What might be called “transnational progressivism” is the ideology for an age once thought not to need one. President Obama, for example, was hailed as ‘not a doctinaire liberal’ and ‘centrist and pragmatic’. The truth, as eight sorry years have shown, is very different
For more than half a century leading global thinkers have heralded the death of ideology. Beginning with Daniel Bell’s famous 1962 book The End of Ideology, prominent scholars have repeatedly maintained that the role of ideology was diminishing and the exercise of pragmatism ascending throughout the Western world. In The End of Ideology (listed by the Times Literary Supplement as among the “100 most influential non-fiction books since World War II”), Bell declared that the “ideological age has ended” in the West (although it would intensify in the developing world).

Bell argued that the rise of affluence and the advance of social modernisation had led to a broad consensus on political values and an exhaustion with grand ideological debates in the developed world. Bell’s thesis was amplified by leading American social scientists including Edward Shils and Seymour Martin Lipset.

Decades later Francis Fukuyama declared that with the collapse of communism we had reached “the end of history”, meaning the great ideological issues of politics (who should govern and why) had been solved. Although (small h) history in the sense of wars and political upheavals might continue for hundreds of years, (capital H) History in the Hegelian sense was over, because liberal democracy had triumphed in the realm of ideas. Fukuyama maintained liberal democracy was the ideological endpoint of humankind’s age-old quest for the best regime. In the future, even autocratic rulers would claim to be democratic or cite democracy as their end goal.

In January 2009 as Barack Obama was being inaugurated as President of the United States, David Brooks wrote in the New York Times that “Obama aims to realize the end of ideology politics that Daniel Bell and others glimpsed in the early 1960s. He sees himself as a pragmatist, an empiricist.” Indeed, from the beginning of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign to the present, scores of books, essays and blogs have been marshalled to argue that Obama eschews ideology and embraces pragmatism. Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein (who served in the White House from 2009 to 2012) wrote that Obama was “not a doctrinaire liberal”, that “his skepticism about conventional ideological categories is principled”, and that, above all, he is an empirical pragmatist who understands that “real change requires consensus, learning, and accommodation”. The journalist Fareed Zakaria declared that “Obama is a centrist and a pragmatist”. Academics and public intellectuals compared Obama’s thought to the tradition of the pragmatist school of American philosophy embodied by Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430533/donald-trump-grow-up

“………It is amazing how many people have been oblivious to this middle-aged man’s spoiled-brat behavior, his childish boastfulness about things he says he is going to do, and his petulant response to every criticism with ad hominem replies. He has boasted that his followers would stick by him even if he committed murder. But is that something to boast about? Is it not an insult to his followers, if it is true?

Moreover, his cockiness is misplaced, because he still does not have a majority among Republican voters, while you need a majority of all the voters to win any state in the general election.

Trump has a showman’s talent for telling people what they want to hear. But you can listen in vain for a coherent argument from him, based on facts and logic, much less an understanding of the inherent limitations of the office of president. ….. In a world where the future of this country is threatened from within by increasingly angry polarization, and where external threats can become nuclear, are we really going to entrust the safety or this country to a man who still needs to grow up?

Is the fact that he loudly expressed our own disgust with the political establishment a sufficient reason to gamble the whole future of the country by putting him in the White House?”

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. – Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”

Chemical agents, by disrupting a military adversary and sowing terror among its civilian population, make for powerful psychological weapons. And, as attested by Bashar al-Assad’s ongoing suffocation of innocent Syrians, chemical weapons are also tools of torture. The National Institutes of Health describes how concentrated chlorine gas affects a human body: “respiratory failure, pulmonary edema, likely acute pulmonary hypertension, cardiomegaly, pulmonary vascular congestion, acute burns of the upper and especially the proximal lower airways, and death.”

For ISIS, weaponized chlorine is a perfect instrument. And ISIS is using it. Reports suggest that ISIS has employed mustard- and chlorine-gas–based weapons in Iraq and Syria. Unfortunately, far worse is likely to come. After all, it’s increasingly obvious that ISIS regards its chemical-weapons programs as a key strategic priority. Last October, for example, the Associated Press described how European organized-crime groups are offering radioactive material to ISIS. And just last week, the Independent reported on the disruption of a ten-person ISIS cell in Morocco — a cell masterminded by ISIS leaders in Libya. The connecting threads are clear: Morocco, a favored destination of Western tourists, offered ISIS an opportunity to follow up in 2016 on its 2015 massacre of 38 people — including 30 Britons — in Sousse, Tunisia. ISIS wants to scare Western tourist investment away from moderate-Muslim nations and implode those nations into chaos. ISIS chemical weapons also threaten U.S. personnel. As ISIS confronts higher stakes — as it does in the battle for its Iraqi capital, Mosul — U.S. personnel will face a growing threat of chemical attack.

This threat demands the strengthening of the U.S. deterrent posture against chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear threats. At present, that posture stands eviscerated because of the failure to punish Assad’s breach of President Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons. But that’s only half the story. Consider, too, that an AP report from October highlighted how senior figures in WMD conspiracies are escaping consequences for their actions. That must end. In future, those who enable ISIS WMD programs should face one of two simple repercussions: detention by Jordan’s GID intelligence service, or death. The special urgency of this threat is unique. From Morocco and France to Turkey and Indonesia, ISIS has proven its ability to launch attacks from separate bases in Iraq, Syria, and Libya — and to do so while evading detection by Western intelligence. ISIS chemical-weapons plots must not be underestimated.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/americas-new-libyan-war-1456448403

President Obama has been learning the hard lesson that, in war, you can’t declare premature victory and go home. That’s the story of Iraq, where the U.S. has returned thousands of troops to fight Islamic State long after the President declared the Iraq War over and done. It’s also true in Afghanistan, where he has quietly abandoned plans to withdraw all U.S. forces in the face of major gains by the Taliban.

The same story now seems to be unfolding in Libya. On Tuesday the Italian government acknowledged that it had given permission for armed U.S. drones based in Sicily to carry out operations against Islamic State in Libya. The Italians will grant approval on a “case-by-case” basis, and then only for what they deem “defensive operations.” On Tuesday the Journal cited U.S. officials saying that the drones would be used “to protect U.S. special-operations forces in Libya and beyond.”

That’s the closest we’ve heard to official confirmation that the U.S. has special forces operating in Libya, though in December an undercover team conducting “key leader engagements” was accidentally outed on social media, leading to their hasty departure. What isn’t a secret is that the U.S. last week hit an Islamic State training camp near the city of Sabratha in western Libya, killing dozens of terrorists. That follows November’s U.S. air strike that killed Islamic State leader Abu Nabil. READ MORE AT SITE

July 13, 2014, the storming of the Bastille was “re-enacted” by enraged mobs shouting Death to the Jews. Trampling the protest march tradition, they stomped down boulevard Beaumarchais, fanned out into the Marais, and massed in front of synagogues, armed with baseball bats, iron bars, rocks, and blood-curdling screams of Slaughter the Jews. They clashed with Jews defending the synagogue on rue de la Roquette and fought with the police that finally arrived to restore order. Six days later, the mobs occupied Place de la République in defiance of a ban against their demonstration. They climbed onto the pedestal of the Marianne statue, symbol of the French Republic and made a mockery of revolutionary iconography. “Pro-Palestinians” proclaimed love for Gaza and unconditional support for la Résistance, burned the Israeli flag, and waved the black flag of jihad.
Israel was fighting back against a constant barrage of rockets launched from Gaza, one more episode in a genocidal war disguised as a national liberation movement. Hamas résistance, Jihad résistance—that’s the program chanted in the heart of the French Republic in the summer of 2014. Demonstrations, banned or authorized, exploded in violence against Jewish shops, synagogues, citizens, and the French police, duty-bound to protect them.
Public opinion was modeled to perceive this unbridled rage as solidarity with civilians in Gaza, victims of “excessive force” and dying in unfair numbers compared to the Jews of Israel protected by an efficient civil defense system. Who thought to warn them of the ominous portent of the jihad flag brandished at the feet of Marianne?
Five months later, in January 2015, the word “jihad” finally took its rightful place in the vocabulary of current events. Jihadis decimated the staff of Charlie Hebdo, executed policemen, assassinated Jews in a kosher grocery store.
In Syria and Iraq, jihadis, more exactly mujahidin, raging under that black flag behead journalists, conquer territory, destroy treasures of humanity, persecute Christians, enslave Yazidi women. “Moderate” rebels armed and trained by Western forces defect to the Islamic State or other jihad factions. European Muslims join the ranks of Daesh, learn the skills of decapitation and plot against the lands of their birth. And the free world snuggles up to the Islamic Republic of Iran. The democracies fight their sworn enemies by pouring oil on the fire. Payback comes in the shape of millions of “refugees” poured into Europe, pounding on its borders, flooding its institutions.

The United States has targeted a lot of rogues and their regimes in recent decades: Moammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Mohamed Farrah Aidid, Manuel Noriega, and the Taliban.

As a general rule over the last 100 years, any time the U.S. has bombed or intervened and then abruptly left the targeted country, chaos has followed. But when America has followed up its use of force with unpopular peacekeeping, sometimes American interventions have led to something better.

The belated entry of the United States into World War I saved the sinking Allied cause in 1917. Yet after the November 1918 armistice, the United States abruptly went home, washed its hands of Europe’s perennial squabbling, and disarmed. A far bloodier World War II followed just two decades later.

It may have been wise or foolish for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson to have intervened in Vietnam in 1963–1964 to try to save the beleaguered non-Communist south. But after ten years of hard fighting and a costly stalemate, it was nihilistic for America to abandon a viable South Vietnam to invading Communist North Vietnam. Re-education camps, mass executions, and boat people followed — along with more than 40 years of Communist oppression.

The current presidential candidates are refighting the Iraq war of 2003. Yet the critical question 13 years later is not so much whether the United States should or should not have removed the genocidal Saddam Hussein, but whether our costly efforts at reconstruction ever offered any hope of a stable Iraq.

By 2011, Iraq certainly seemed viable. Only a few dozen American peacekeepers were killed in Iraq in 2011 — a total comparable to the number of U.S. soldiers who die in accidents in an average month.

The complete withdrawal of all U.S. troops in December 2011 abruptly turned what President Obama had dubbed a “sovereign, stable, and self-reliant” Iraq — and what Vice President Joe Biden had called one of the administration’s “greatest achievements” — into a nightmarish wasteland.

Russia is eager to arm the ayatollahs

Implementing President Obama’s nuclear weapons deal with Iran has provided about $150 billion for the ayatollahs’ coffers since international sanctions were lifted. By January, even Secretary of State John Kerry had to concede that some of the money would be used to sponsor terrorists.

That shouldn’t have come as a shock even to Mr. Kerry. Iran is the world’s principal state sponsor of terrorism. It also shouldn’t have shocked him that Iran is spending at least $8 billion on arms purchases designed to prevent any nation from successfully attacking its nuclear weapons facilities as well as to strengthen its conventional forces.

About two weeks ago, Gen. Hossein Dehqan, Iran’s defense minister, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin to arrange delivery of Russian S-300 missiles Iran purchased previously. Gen. Dehqan also sought to buy new Su-30 “Flanker” fighter jets and T-90 tanks, Russia’s most advanced tanks. (Mr. Putin had no qualms about dealing with Gen. Dehqan, believed to have been the architect of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed 220 Marines and 21 other servicemen.)

There’s no reason for Mr. Putin to deny these purchases, especially now that Iran has so much money to spend and because Iran has been a key Russian ally for decades. (There’s a U.N. Security Council resolution that supposedly bars Iran from purchasing weapons, such as military aircraft without U.N. approval. Good luck enforcing that.)

Stephen Kinzer’s 2008 book All the Shah’s Men traces the roots of today’s Middle East terror to when the United States and Great Britain engineered the return of the Shah of Iran to power in Iran in a 1953 “coup.”

The Iranian mullah leadership have embraced Kinzer’s view and repeatedly describe America as “The Great Arrogance.”

And since the mullahs seized power in 1979, the Iran “terror masters” have been the primary terror threat to the U.S., murdering thousands of Americans in Beirut, Lockerbie, Khobar Towers, the African Embassies, the World Trade Center on 9-11, and in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Iran is an Islamic revolutionary power seeking to expand its writ by terror. Obviously, the set of standards of international behavior established by the western powers upon the end of World War 2 stand in the way of Iran’s ambitions thus their anger at the U.S. and the West for such “great arrogance.”

It is not a coincidence that from 1945 through the end of the Cold War, the rise in prosperity around the world, along with the parallel spread of free and relatively democratic nations, was in historical terms breathtaking.

Especially as the West was simultaneously defending against the Soviet empire and its terrorist accomplices – from cross border invasions as on the Korean peninsula; to guerilla wars in Vietnam, Angola and Nicaragua; to terrorism from FARC, the FMLN, the Sandinistas, the Castro and Kim regimes in Cuba and North Korea, respectively, as well as from Iran and Syria and its ally Hezbollah.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-defense-of-snooping-1456184621 EXCERPTS FOR FULL REVIEW GO TO SITE

“Playing to the Edge” offers a full excursion through the contemporary challenges facing American intelligence, including cyber warfare, Russian aggression, and armed conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it also presents an intimate personal portrait—an account of how its author came to be the man he is, someone who entered the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps while in college in the late 1960s, who reveres his hometown of Pittsburgh (and its Steelers), and who prays weekly in church for the souls of his twin sisters, who died at birth when he was a boy of 10.

The lesson that Gen. Hayden takes from the Syrian affair is sobering. “We chalked this one up as intelligence success, after a fashion,” he writes. But he strongly intimates that it was really Israel’s success—and America’s failure. More broadly, he says, Syrian behavior “went beyond our understanding.” Extrapolating from this mixed record, Gen Hayden is pessimistic that American intelligence will fare well in tracking covert Iranian nuclear activity. If his pessimism is well-founded—and there are few people more qualified to judge—the surprise we experienced on 9/11 may be a prelude to a catastrophe of far greater dimensions.

“The radical transformation of America continues thank to all of you who voted for me, but above all, I want to thank the befuddled voters who abetted, enabled, and supported Donald Trump. I could not have won without you.”