RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans like their history linear and their enemies well-defined. But it isn’t, and they aren’t.
In his prescient book Balkan Ghosts, Robert Kaplan explains the vicious Balkan wars of the early 20th Century as an attempt by various groups to claim what territory rightfully belonged to them. But Hungarians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and others each defined their patrimony as the area it controlled at the peak of its power. It is easy to see the potential for endless warfare absent a Great Power or occupation authority to enforce the quiet that sometimes passes for peace. History is an overlapping series of claims and grievances; victory is never permanent, loss is never permanent, and chaos is common.

Consider the crumbling — collapsing — area running south from Ukraine through Turkey; down and east across the Middle East from Syria through Iraq, Iran, and Yemen; Africa from Libya to Nigeria, Mali, Sudan, and South Sudan; and farther east to Afghanistan. The fallout from fighting in those places wreaks havoc on them and undermines countries including Pakistan, Tunisia, Lebanon, and Jordan. And it produces enormous waves of refugees.

Behind the tremors and shock waves are the United States, Iran, Turkey, Qatar, al Qaeda, and ISIS in various permutations, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Russia. All of which are or have provided arms, funds, territory, fighting forces, and ideological/political support for vicious cadres bent on pursuing wars grounded in regional/religious grievance. Holding the fort against the earthquake are the United States, Israel, the Kurds, Egypt, and a variety of brave and lonely individuals and small groups.

How can the U.S. be in both camps?

For forty-four seconds Benjamin Netanyahu interrupted his September 29th speech at the United Nations, and stared out at the members. His purpose was to make them feel uncomfortable, to squirm at the silence. His silence was symbolic of that which Jews have endured for centuries. It was the silence of the allies before and after World War II. And it is the silence Israel is now abiding from their partners and friends. Silence is discriminatory when heads turn in avoidance of unpleasant truths, when evasion substitutes for aid.

Israel is a small, but politically and economically successful, nation. It is a secular democracy amid theocratic, despotic neighbors. Mahmoud Al-Zahha, co-founder of Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas’ coalition partner in the Palestinian Authority, once said “Jews have no future among the nations of the world,” adding: “They are headed to annihilation.” Iran has promised to “eradicate Israel.” The desire of Islamic jihadists is to intimidate the West into subservience and to destroy the state of Israel and the Jewish people. Robert Frost once wrote that good fences make good neighbors. That aphorism may apply in New England, but it does not in the Middle East.

There are an estimated 16.5 million Jews in the world today, roughly the same number as before the Holocaust. A little over six million live in Israel, about one fiftieth the number of Muslims in the Middle East. Around the world, there are a hundred more Muslims than Jews. Israel is the only nation where Jews represent the dominant population. (They make up about 76% of the population. Most of the others are Muslims who live peacefully within her borders.)

A couple of days ago, James Kitfield published in Politico an interview with the outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Martin Dempsey. The title sums it up: Martin Dempsey’s World Is Falling Apart. Never have I read such a pathetic – and chilling – document.

After all, the United States is – still – the biggest military and strategic power in the world. It possesses the biggest army, the most advanced weapons, and the biggest and most advanced armament industry. In addition, it commands the largest network of alliances and security pacts, from NATO, the American-European alliance and integrated military organization, to many bilateral pacts in the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and Latin America.

But the image that General Dempsey is conjuring up is one of powerlessness and doom. According to him, American might is compromised by declining resources on the one hand, and by a growing unclarity about goals and strategies on the other. Regarding Syria, for instance, he remarks: It’s inconceivable to me that anyone would agree to allow Assad to continue governing Syria after what he’s done. In fact, the Joint Chiefs of Staff provided the American elected officials with military options, but the decision was made… not to select a military line of attack concerning the Assad regime and instead to let in the Russians, who seem interested, above all, in shoring up a regime that has essentially attacked the majority of its population.

When two devout Muslims opened fire on a picnic train outside Broken Hill in 1915, officialdom took just a few days to reach the conclusion that the attack had been inspired by Islamic fanaticism. Today, defenders of public safety are somewhat more tardy in recognising the obvious
Things were certainly different 100 years ago. Officialdom moved a lot faster in identifying the obvious.

On January 1, 1915, for example, a disaffected Pakistani, Badsha Mahommed Gool, and an halal butcher and cleric, Mullah Abdullah, opened fire on a picnic train leaving Broken Hill, killing four and wounding seven others. In a note found on Gool’s body all was explained:

“I must kill your men and give my life for my faith….”

Twelve days later, the inquest was done and dusted, with the official finding making no bones about what inspired the murder of innocents. From The Australasian‘s report of the coronial hearing:

In reply to the corner (sic), Captain Hardie said … Gool was evidently a warlike and a very religious man. The case seemed to have been one of Moslem fanaticism….

Inspector’ Miller: Such cases happen in India.

Witness: They frequently occur on-the north-west of India on the frontier. The Mahommedans frequently come out and kill the Christians…

A century later, investigators seem to have lost that sharp focus on religion as a possible motivation for murder. From Andrew Bolt’s interview with a remarkably vague Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Assistant Minister for Multicultural Affairs:

A few thoughts on a futile project.
One of the weird little facts of life that we don’t think about or talk about very much — and really should when we’re talking about taxes, the minimum wage, welfare spending, and other things related to inequality of income and wealth (and go ahead and picture me here manfully resisting the urge to put sneer quotes around “inequality,” as if a uniform distribution of material resources were the natural state of things and not some daft dorm-room fantasy) — is that we pay for everything (really, everything) collectively.

Let me show you what I mean.

Housing is famously expensive in New York City, especially in Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn where college-educated young white people live, a fact about which people in Muleshoe, Tex., don’t much care. But they should, because they pay for it. You might think that the people who pay for those $5,000-a-month apartments are all Wall Street jerks or highly paid publishing executives (all the highly paid publishing executives in New York put together wouldn’t fill one medium-sized apartment building) or celebrities who are too cool to live in Los Angeles, but you — you, sucker — you pay for them.

Costs get shifted around.

Unable to address Texas senator Ted Cruz’s questions about “the Pause” — the apparent global-warming standstill, now almost 19 years long — at Tuesday’s meeting of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair, after an uncomfortable pause of his own, appealed to authority: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists concur and agree that there is global warming and anthropogenic impact,” he stated multiple times.

The relevant exchange begins at 1:39 (though the whole segment is worth watching):The myth of an almost-unanimous climate-change consensus is pervasive. Last May, the White House tweeted: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.” A few days later, Secretary of State John Kerry announced, “Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists tell us this is urgent.”

“Ninety-seven percent of the world’s scientists” say no such thing.

There are multiple relevant questions: (1) Has the earth generally warmed since 1800? (An overwhelming majority of scientists assent to this.) (2) Has that warming been caused primarily by human activity? And, if (1) and (2), is anthropogenic global warming a problem so significant that we ought to take action?

Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to “help” monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relatively quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 — and soon abandoned.

Russian president Vladimir Putin liked the American invitation so much that he now has decided to move in permanently. Marshal Putin now wants the West to join his new Syria-Iran-Hezbollah-Iraq axis against the Islamic State — or to at least sit back and allow Russia to straighten out the Middle East as it sees fit.

To fight the Islamic State, Putin has called for something similar to the “anti-Hitler coalition” of World War II that saw the Soviet Union and the West unite to defeat Nazi Germany.

Certainly, the Islamic State, like Nazi Germany, is a savage regime. So far, it has grown unchecked at the very center of the Middle East. Yet under the cloak of fighting the Islamic State, Putin has two greater visions.

Of all the Alinsky rules, the most relevant one is, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” But he simply codified and made pragmatic the most destructive of the left’s rules which is, “Make the enemy live up to his ideals.” Even if those ideals are often the invention of the left.

Ideals are by definition impossible to live up to. Human societies aren’t ideal, they’re real. Ideals are absolutes and an unfliching attempt to live up to them destroys individuals and societies. More subtly, the failure to live up to them justifies hatred and self-hatred toward nations and peoples.

People naturally want to think the best of their creeds and cultures, their societies and their states. This is both the best weapon and the best breeding ground of the left. There is nothing that creates leftists and draws them like the accusation that a nation is failing to live up to its ideals.

The Christian Orthodox Church, which holds an important place in an insurgent Russia, has described its government’s fight against the Islamic State and other jihadi opposition groups in Syria as a “holy war.”

According to Vsevolod Chaplin, head of the Church’s Public Affairs Department:

The fight with terrorism is a holy battle and today our country is perhaps the most active force in the world fighting it. The Russian Federation has made a responsible decision on the use of armed forces to defend the People of Syria from the sorrows caused by the arbitrariness of terrorists. Christians are suffering in the region with the kidnapping of clerics and the destruction of churches. Muslims are suffering no less.

This is not some new gimmick to justify intervention in Syria. For years, Russia’s Orthodox leaders have been voicing their concern for persecuted Christians. Back in February 2012, Vladimir Putin met with representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church. They described to him the horrific treatment Christians are experiencing around the world, especially the Muslim world:

The head of External Church Relations, Metropolitan Illarion, said that every five minutes one Christian was dying for his or her faith in some part of the world, specifying that he was talking about such countries as Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and India. The cleric asked Putin to make the protection of Christians one of the foreign policy directions in future.

“This is how it will be, have no doubt,” Putin answered.

Vladimir Putin’s air forces are deliberately targeting U.S.-backed Syrian rebels. China is building islands in disputed waters in the South China Sea and militarizing them with airfields, ports and antiaircraft and radar sites. This is what escalation looks like. Either the Obama administration responds to the danger of aggressive powers undermining or directly attacking U.S. interests, or it will risk the erosion of America’s position abroad and invite conflict with Moscow and Beijing.

Escalation takes many forms. In the 1930s, Hitler nibbled and carved away parts of Central Europe for several years before invading Poland. The Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931 and China proper in 1937 before deciding on a coordinated attack on Southeast Asia and Pearl Harbor. During the 1990s, al Qaeda escalated from bombing U.S. naval vessels and embassies to preparing for 9/11. What these cases have in common is that the great powers failed to deter the aggressors, emboldening them to ever larger actions.