RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Iran nuclear deal agreed in Vienna on July 14, 2015, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), will be the focus of furious debate for the remainder of President Barack Obama’s term in office and beyond. The White House and other proponents will argue its merits and proclaim it to be a “good deal” in the best interests of the United States and our allies and friends. They will also warn that the only alternative to the Vienna deal is war. Opponents will claim that if the deal goes into effect as it is currently structured, it will prove to be a catastrophic mistake and will make the Middle East and the world at large a far more dangerous place. They will argue that the alternative to this deal is a better deal.

Perhaps the underlying reason for this glaring disparity can be found in a phrase that often afflicts strategic thinkers and political decision-makers: We don’t believe the world we see; we see the world we believe. As the great liberal philosopher Karl Popper argued, the always-difficult search for truth is guided in part by “the gradual discovery of our prejudices.[1]

The Obama Administration has avoided such a voyage of discovery, signing a nuclear deal based on a belief system and a series of assumptions that, in the President’s own words, provide “a historic chance to pursue a safer and more secure world.” Hence, the fundamental question is this: “Does the President’s conclusion match up to the world as it is, or is the conclusion based on series of profoundly false assumptions?”

Have you noticed that men in frocks and women with whiskers are making the news all over the place? Well one thing you probably won’t read in all the adulatory coverage of Caitlyn Jenner’s “bravery” is that the US hospital which pioneered sex-change surgery now refuses to perform it
Among the issues guaranteed to draw a volcanic eruption from the politically correct is the free and open discussion than transgenderism. Indeed, to talk these days about transgenderism other than lavish and unqualified praise for those who abandon the gender of their births is to invite the label of mean-minded bigot.

Caitlyn Jenner’s apotheosis from suffering patriarch of the Kardashian clan to the newly inaugurated Queen of the trans movement marks a fresh high-water mark for trans-mania. At the start of April this year, Caitlyn was a father, former Olympian and sordid reality TV star. Now, just over eight months later, Caitlyn has been crowned ‘Woman of the Year.’ Should you want to offer anything other than gushing adulation for Caitlyn’s putative heroism, expect to be exiled from polite society.

This is why it was so amusing when last week Germaine Greer, normally a stalwart of the left, bluntly confront the First Commandment of transgenderism: Thous shalt not deny that gender is ‘fluid.’

Here’s what she said:

Just because you lop off your d— it doesn’t make you a woman… a man who get his d*** chopped off is actually inflicting an extraordinary act of violence on himself. I’ve asked my doctor to give me long ears and liver spots and I’m going to wear a brown coat, but that won’t turn me into a f***ing cocker spaniel.

“In the end, one can say this: Snyder’s obfuscating and half-baked “discoveries” about the Holocaust do further harm to a field of study already disfigured by the work of emissaries of one school or another, not to mention outright deniers. His book will not be the last such venture in misguided interpretation—the varieties are unlimited—but it will lengthen the time needed to repair the damage.”

No author of books on Eastern Europe during the period of World War II and the Holocaust has been more widely reviewed and discussed in recent years than Timothy Snyder, a professor of history at Yale. In Bloodlands (2010), Snyder presented what might be termed a Polish-Ukrainian version of the Holocaust, highlighting the brutality of Nazi rule over the countries of Eastern Europe—the “bloodlands” between Germany and Soviet Russia—and the horrific toll in lives, especially Polish lives, taken by the two battling powers.

Now, in Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Snyder deals mostly with the mass murder of Jews, ascribing greater responsibility than have other historians to the early work of the Nazi SS killing squads (Einsatzgruppen) operating in occupied Eastern Europe, but also memorializing those who helped to save Jewish lives in Poland after the 1939 invasion and partition of that country by the twin forces of Nazi Germany and the USSR. Indeed, the book, which is based to a considerable extent on the stories of individual survivors, centers like the previous one mainly on Poland, and to a lesser extent on the three Baltic states. There is little here on the fate of Jewish communities in other European countries, most of whom were transported to their deaths in Poland. Nor, despite its subtitle—“The Holocaust as History and Warning”—is Black Earth properly seen as another history of the Holocaust. It is instead a new interpretation, and one with some startling arguments to advance.

“Mr. Obama will do none of this. Instead he will send out Messrs. Kerry and Blinken to assert that U.S. retreat is really success, that Russian advances are really defeat, and that five years of war will soon yield to peace because Mr. Obama believes against all Syrian evidence that the arc of history bends his way.”

So the U.S. government that was surprised by Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Crimea, surprised by his invasion of eastern Ukraine, surprised by his plan to sell S-300 missiles to Iran, and surprised by his intervention in Syria now thinks the Russian strongman will sue for peace in Syria on U.S. terms and oust Bashar Assad.

“Russia’s intervention is a powerful example of the law of unintended consequences,” said Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken at a security conference in Bahrain this weekend. “It will have two primary effects. First, it will increase Russia’s leverage over Assad. But second, it will increase the conflict’s leverage over Russia. And that in turn creates a compelling incentive for Russia to work for, not against, a political transition.”

Secretary of State John Kerry’s right-hand man even used a Vietnam War-era word to describe Mr. Putin’s supposed predicament: “The quagmire will spread and deepen, drawing Russia further in.”

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s visit to Moscow last month appears born of the confidence that no one would depose him in his absence.

It completes Vladimir Putin’s cycle of Middle Eastern visitors: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plus Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, a NATO partner; Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, a long-time American partner; and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt, which has not had Russian interlocutors since the Yom Kippur War.

After his meeting with Assad, Putin called Erdogan, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, and el-Sisi, as well as King Abdullah II of Jordan to update them.

It is unsurprising that Arab leaders and Israel, traditional American allies, are listening carefully to Putin. Even Afghanistan and Pakistan are making overtures to the Kremlin and requesting military hardware.

It behooves the American government to understand Russia’s strategy – not to agree with it, not necessarily to cooperate with it or with him, but to understand the logic behind it, which is not altogether contrary to American interests.

Columbus Day and Halloween are in the past; Veteran’s Day and Thanksgiving are in our future. October is the subject at hand. While the month is renowned for financial debacles, it was human tragedies that took center stage this past month. October began with nine students shot at a community college in Oregon. Two other campuses, one in Texas and the other in Arizona, were the venues for two students being shot and killed. A car plowed into a homecoming parade in Stillwater, Oklahoma, killing four and injuring forty-seven. Nineteen people were killed when a doctors-without-borders hospital in Afghanistan was mistakenly hit by U.S. forces. Two suicide bombers at a peace rally in the Turkish capital of Ankara killed at least a hundred. The month ended with a Russian passenger airliner, an Airbus 221, crashing in the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people aboard.

Mother nature, not wanting to be out-done, did her own damage. Hurricane Joaquin, an Atlantic storm that missed mainland USA, sank the U.S. based cargo ship El Faro, drowning all 33 aboard, including 28 Americans. At least 17 people died in South Carolina, as drenching rains temporarily wiped out 75 miles of I-95. A mudslide in Guatemala killed at least 240, with dozens missing. Hurricane Patricia, the largest storm to ever hit the Western Hemisphere with winds of over 200 miles per hour, slammed into Southwestern Mexico with sustained winds of over 165 miles per hour. Luck and prior evacuation plans limited deaths and damage. Remnants caused intense flooding in Houston and Galveston a day or so later, with rainfalls of over an inch per hour. At least 340 people were known dead from a 7.5 earthquake that hit remote sections of Afghanistan and Pakistan. No matter hand-wringing claims of those on the Left, man has limited ability to prevent natural disasters. Nature heeds her own drummer.

The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau. What an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!

—Ludwig von Mises, as quoted in the preface to The Devil’s Pleasure Palace.

This is a book about how we got here. It is also a book about good and evil; about creation and destruction; about capitalism and socialism; about God, Satan, and the satanic in men; about myths and legends and the truths within them; about culture versus politics; about the difference between story and plot. It is about Milton versus Marx, the United States versus Germany, about redemptive truth versus Mephistophelean bands of illusion and the Devil’s jokes. It concerns itself with the interrelation of culture, religion, sex, and politics— in other words, something herein to offend nearly everybody.

And, I hope, to inspire. For the taboos of our culture are also its totems, and the political arguments that rage around them are symptomatic of both disease and good health, of infection and immunity. They are not simply battlefields in the larger contemporary culture war— they are the culture war, a war that has been raging since the Garden of Eden but that manifests itself today in the unceasing attack of cultural Marxism (which molts and masquerades under many names, including liberalism, progressivism, social justice, environmentalism, anti-racism, etc.) upon what used to be called the Christian West.

Barack Obama’s decision to send American special forces to Syria is not only hypocritical, but also a corrupt and immoral abuse of his powers as commander-in-chief.

This is not a comment on his circumvention of Congress, which is something that most modern American presidents have done at one time or another with respect to military engagements abroad. Rather, in Obama’s case – uniquely in American history – we have a president who puts Americans in harm’s way for no evident reason other than personal political calculations.

The insertion of fifty U.S. special-forces troops into Syrian peril, whether to serve as “non-combatant” advisors or something more, has been undertaken without any reasonable hope of meaningful military success or of advancing American interests. It is simply a political ploy, so obvious that no right-thinking American, on the right or the left, ought to countenance it, including the military officers charged with executing the mission.

Were this Obama’s only foray into meaningless and dangerous military policy, it might be excused as a rookie mistake or a well-meaning misapplication of power. But Obama has been president for seven years, and he has consistently abused the American military in ways that violate accepted principles of warfighting and application of power. In Afghanistan, Obama senselessly surged American forces and sent soldiers and Marines into some of the toughest fights of the war, with haphazardly selected force levels and without any plan or commitment to stick it out or produce a victory. The deaths and maiming of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan during Obama’s watch is a stain on his presidency.

According to a congressional commission report issued In April 2012, U.S. government and private analysts missed the emergence of significant military developments by China that caught intelligence agencies by surprise.One month later, then recently-retired admiral Peter Daly (who went on to head the prestigious US Naval Institute) warned that coping with China and Iran at the same time was stretching the Navy thin, which would soon have to choose which theater to prioritize.Nevertheless, the Obama administration dithered. And as Beijing remilitarized and became more bellicose, Washington clung to the hope that military-to-military relations would somehow relieve tensions.Obama’s so-called pivot to Asia-Pacific was turning out to be one big FAIL. China went on to confront American warships in the disputed South China Sea, and to build small artificial islands for the purpose of placing military bases – including airfields – on them.In one instance, a US surveillance plane flying over these islands was “dramatically confronted” by the Chinese navy. “This is the Chinese navy … You go!” warned a Chinese radio operator.And China continued to build.On Tuesday state-run media in China came out with belligerent statements after guided-missile destroyer USS Lassen sailed close to the disputed Spratly archipelago (see below).China is not afraid of fighting a war against the United States in the South China Sea, declared the Chinese media, while hurling a barrage of accusations at Washington. Foreign ministry spokesperson Lu Kang warned: “I advise the US not to make a fool out of themselves in trying to be smart.”

Too late, Mr. Lu. America already made a fool of itself when it elected Barack Obama as Commander-in-Chief. NATIONAL SECURITY ROUND TABLE. READ COLUMN BELOW

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry, before traveling to Vienna for meetings on Syria, on Wednesday said the planned talks are the most promising opportunity for a political settlement to the country’s 4½ year civil war.

The talks, to be held Friday, are expected to include Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, the European Union and France, State Department spokesman John Kirby said, adding that other nations are expected to announce they will attend as well.

Iran will participate in the political talks for the first time, after the U.S. and its Arab allies blocked Tehran from taking part in previous rounds citing Tehran’s support for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad.

Mr. Kerry, in a speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Wednesday, outlined U.S. policies across the Middle East, acknowledging the difficulties posed by Russia’s military buildup and bombing campaign and by brutal Islamic State tactics.