Foreign Affairs

IDF General: War Clouds Gathering

Mark Noonan3 Comments

From Y Net:

Recent revolutions in the Arab world and the deteriorating ties with Turkey are raising the likelihood of a regional war in the Middle East, IDF Home Front Command Chief, Major General Eyal Eisenberg warned Monday.

“It looks like the Arab Spring, but it can also be a radical Islamic winter,” he said in a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv…

The “Islamic Winter” is pretty much what I expect.  We are about to reap an ill harvest…sown since 9/11 by our political inability to carry on the fight with sufficient determination.  As it turns out, our campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven strategic dead-ends – because we did not follow up with the next, logical steps.

Not being privy to strategy sessions of the Bush White House  – and none of us will be for at least 50 years – I don’t know if there was a plan for follow-up to Iraq…but I perceive that there was, at least, a desire to leverage the fall of Baghdad in to a general offensive against all the Islamists of  the middle east.  Syria likely the best post-Iraq target, but it could have been Iran, as well…but we didn’t do it.  There was that moment in the summer of 2003 when Islamism was tottering and ready to fall…but we allowed ourselves to get hamstrung in Iraq, giving the Islamists a breather where they could regain their confidence and bog us down in a  counter-insurgency campaign…a campaign which never would have been possible for the enemy to conduct in Baghdad if we were threatening Damascus and Tehran.

What hamstrung us immediately was not the Islamists, themselves, but the American left…fearful that a continuing series of American victories would cement American supremacy and worse (for the left) relegate the left to political irrelevancy, the left decided that procuring American defeat in the war was necessary…so they began to fire up the anti-war movement, nit-pick every military error and slander the men and women who were fighting the battle.  The rest, as they say, is history…President Bush, whatever his desires might have been, was capable in the end of only holding on…refusing to fold as Johnson did in Vietnam, but being unable to resume the offensive and bring the war to a victorious end.

And now the Islamists are on the march – certain that in President Obama we have a leader who will not strike at the heart of the problem, the Islamists have stepped up their terrorism and their subversion.  Countering our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Islamists are poised to gain control of Egypt; Turkey is slipping in to the Islamist camp, Libya’s Islamists are making a bid for power…and Iran continues to build towards a nuclear force.  As this virulent form of Islam strides from victory to victory, the number and confidence of the adherents grows…they are feeling their oats and thinking they only need keep fighting a bit longer and harder for total victory to be theirs.  This, I think, is where General Eisenberg’s fear comes from…these nuts might start to think they can beat Israel and/or the United States in a stand-up fight.

They misjudge – Israel is still immensely powerful and even President Obama, if forced by circumstances, will fight.  But it must be remembered that aggressive powers routinely miscalculate the balance of forces.  Time and time again they discount the reserves of strength in their opponents…especially if they are tyrants and their opponents are free people.  Always keep in mind that it was sheer impertinence for Imperial Japan to attack the United States…the total balance of forces between the two nations was such that for Japan it worked out to national suicide…as anyone thinking clearly in Japan would have figured out in an instant…but no one thought about it; they counted on our weakness and their supposed spiritual superiority to carry the day.  Our Islamist enemies are thinking like that…give them control of a couple more nations, and they might think that it is time for war…full scale, conventional war.

We might be heading or a bloody mess in the middle east – literal  millions of lives are at stake.  It is to be hoped that things will work out differently.  But their working out differently is mostly dependent upon people of the Moslem world deciding against Islamism…a cool, rational understanding that war cannot achieve Islamist ends, and so should not be tried.  I doubt there is that sort of sense building in the Moslem world.

Let this be yet another lesson for us – and one I pray we finally learn:  if we’re going to go to war, at all, go all the way to war.  Identify all the enemies and destroy all of them as swiftly as possible.  Leave no sanctuary…no place where the enemy can retreat to regain strength and strike us again.  American war can only be war to the knife…to the utter destruction and unconditional surrender of the enemy.  If we aren’t willing to do that, we’d better not fight, at all.  If another war comes, let it be the last war we have to fight against Islam…just as the war against Japan was fought to the point where it was clearly the last war we’d ever have to fight with that nation.

China’s Thug Government Armed Gaddafi

Mark Noonan11 Comments

From Strategy Page:

…During the recent fighting in Libya, the rebels complained of encountering government troops armed with new Chinese weapons. Accusations were made that China was selling weapons to the (Gaddafi) dictatorship despite a UN embargo. A little investigating found that this was indeed the case, and that Chinese arms merchants had approached the Libyan government earlier in the year, offering to sneak the weapons in via Algeria and South Africa. The last shipments appear to have arrived in July…

Why?  Because the Chinese government is a corrupt, inhuman dictatorship which simply does not care about human suffering.  If there was a dollar to be made and some influence to be bought, China is right there…acting the rogue while we pretend they are a rational member of the community of nations.

Until the Chinese government is destroyed, this sort of thing will just get worse and worse.  Remember that – and we must start demanding that our leaders treat China as the standing threat it is.

Dealing With China

Mark Noonan3 Comments

James Traub over at Foreign Policy has an interesting article about how the United States should deal with China.  While acknowledging that China is rapidly becoming powerful, Traub downplays any aggressive intent on China’s part, while also discounting any muscular, American response to China.  The only really good thing I can say about the article is that it at least is an acknowledgment that China has to be dealt with in some fashion…for too long we’ve been blinded by an idea that all China wishes to do is make money, or that they were in some manner a strategic partner of the United States.  But I do believe that Traub is not quite understanding what the Chinese government will do.

Tyrants cannot hold still – they must continually advance, or they will fall.  In Churchill’s trenchant phrase, they ride to and fro on the backs of tigers, and the tigers are getting hungry.  The tyrants of China made a de-facto deal with the Chinese people post-1989:  let us be in power, and we’ll let you get rich.  This has, in fact, worked out to only a select few getting rich, mostly by ripping off the broad mass of the Chinese people…but the growing prosperity has kept dissent down in the cities while the army and security forces have proven capable of keeping dissent down in the countryside (though there are plenty of tales of riot and rebellion in the backwaters of China).  The problem for China is that they have advanced about as far as they can under their current system.  They can advance further – but only by bringing rural China in to the economic mainstream, and by freeing up the political system so that corrupt (which eats like a cancer at the Chinese economy) can be fought.  Neither course of action appeals to China’s Ruling Class.

But they can’t stand still – they can’t do what is necessary to make the next step forward economically, but they also can’t just let things stagnate…what is already bound to be a Chinese recession will become a very hard landing unless China changes internally…or finds some external means of deflecting attention.  The recently aggressive behavior of China in foreign affairs is not a reflection of China’s actual might – they don’t have that sort of power as of yet.  Won’t have it, really, for 20-30 years, if ever (China’s coming demographic decline may rob China of the sinews of power just when the infrastructure if finally there).  They are blustering…hoping to grab what they can, and preparing for a foreign confrontation which will (in the Ruling Class’ view, at least) cement the loyalty of the Chinese people and serve as the excuse for the coming bad economic times.

The bottom line for us is to get prepared for this – by forging a rock-solid alliance with India, making a defense arrangement with Vietnam, and re-founding our alliances with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines.  It is a certainty that China will try something – what it will be remains to be seen.  I suspect a move against Taiwan in conjunction with a Chinese-inspired, North Korean attack on South Korea and/or Japan (ie, draw off American power to northeast Asia while China moves in the South China Sea…we can’t be everywhere at once, and Taiwan for most Americans would be a doubtful proposition for a full scale war…it shouldn’t be, but it would be).  But as we can’t know for certain, better to be prepared for all eventualities…and if this takes some increases in naval and aerial strength, then we’re going to have to bite the bullet and do it (as an aside, the really good thing about alliances and agreements with India and Vietnam is they provide ample land power without the United States having to deploy millions of troops).

The most important first step is to recognize that China is an enemy State…that we must not have close economic and military relationships with the Chinese.  That we must inform them that any attempt to change the status quo in Asia and the Pacific will be met with a forceful American response.

 

Islamists in Libya

Mark Noonan21 Comments

Not a good sign – from Barry Rubin over at Pajamas Media:

Finally, we have evidence that Islamists and even al-Qaeda supporters will play a central role in Libya’s new regime. Up to now there has been reasonable speculation that the U.S. government and NATO might be installing an anti-Western, Islamist government in Libya. Now there’s proof that this is so.

The actual government remains in the hands of non-Islamists, technocrats, ex-regime officials, and moderates. But the armed rebels who actually made the revolution have voted and their idol is…an al-Qaeda guy. Political power, said Mao Zedong, grows out of the barrel of a gun and in Libya’s case this seems a very reasonable expectation.

According to Al Jazeera, the network recommended by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as fair and balanced, Abdul al-Hakim al-Hasadi, also known as Abdelhakim Belhaj, has been named commander of the Tripoli Military Council. He was formerly head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Moderates are understandably nervous…

The guys with the guns do tend to call the shots – and there is just about zero chance that NATO or the United States will start bombing the al-Qaeda affiliated rebels to shore up the non-Islamists. We can still hope that the non-Islamists have enough military force to keep the Islamists in line, but there is one thing you can say about the Islamsits…they do have propaganda convincing to at least that segment of the Moslem population willing to take up arms.  The best bet to make in Libya is that those who fought the hardest are likely to be Islamists, or open to Islamist propaganda.

Another problem hamstringing the rise of decency in Libya is that a good portion of the population is still apparently tribal in outlook…this can work to the advantage of those wanting a free nation, but it can also work against them:  those who are divided up by tribes will be confronting people united across tribal lines in the name of extremist Islam.  In any revolutionary situation, the most determined and disciplined minority will take charge…it was such during our own revolution, and we just hit the jackpot in that the people running our side of the fight were Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and the like.  I haven’t seen any Washington-like person rising in any of the Moslem revolutions of late.

Once again I have to go back to my first views on Libyan intervention – we should have done it much sooner and much harder.  Had we acted swiftly to destroy the Gaddafi regime then it would have been gotten rid of before large bodies of dedicated, revolutionary soldiers were built up.  Before, that is, a large body of Islamist troops were created.  There would have been in reality no rebel army…and thus the chance for decent people to be in charge.  In any military action, there must be celerity of movement and maximum force…if you don’t want to move quickly and with enough power to over-kill the opposition, then it is best not to move at all.  We may get the worst of both worlds…a half-baked military intervention to be followed by a regime overtly hostile to the United States (Gaddafi’s Libya was hostile, but also wasn’t bothering anyone for the past 10 years or so).

Pray that the good guys win…but be prepared for quite a mess in Libya.

UPDATE:  Islamists plot to take over Libya.

UPDATE II:  Libyan rebels round up  blacks as enemies.

 

Turks Expel Israeli Ambassador

Mark Noonan17 Comments

From the Washington Post:

Turkey said Friday that it was expelling the Israeli ambassador and suspending military agreements with Israel, signaling a deepening rift between the former strategic allies in the aftermath of last year’s deadly Israeli raid on a Turkish ship leading an aid flotilla to Gaza.

The crisis with Turkey comes as Israel faces strained relations with another longtime regional ally, Egypt, over a deadly border incident last month, and it raises the prospect of Israel’s increasing isolation in the region at a time of tumultuous change.

Turkey announced its move ahead of the publication of a U.N. report that found that while Israel’s naval blockade of the Gaza Strip was legal, its commandos had used “excessive and unreasonable” force when they boarded the vessel, the Mavi Marmara, and killed nine Turks in clashes with activists…

That report is bound to be nothing more than another bit of UN Israel-bashing.  “Excessive and unreasonable” is a subjective judgment and, at the end of the day, Israel wouldn’t have had to use any force, at all, if the flotilla people had simply obeyed the law.  You go to break a blockade and you’re engaging in an act of war…Israel could have just torpedoed the flotilla and still would have been within the law.

But Turkey is taking this bogus incident as an excuse to expel the Israeli ambassador, and that means something.  Turkey, increasingly Islamist, is breaking its ties with Israel and lining on the side of the Jihadists.  This is a watershed moment – it is the end of any large, powerful Moslem nation even making an effort to be Western and civilized.  We can now expect increased pressure on Iraq to toe the Islamist line, especially if any sort of Moslem Brotherhood government emerges in Egypt.  We’re back to 1967 in middle eastern affairs but with a much more virulent strain of anti-Israel and anti-US sentiment in the area.

Our response should be to cut off all military ties with both Turkey and Egypt and refuse both nations any aid.  If we can keep Iraq in our camp that would be great…and we should offer strong inducements to the Iraqis to partner with us, lest they be swallowed up by Turkey, Iran or a combination of both.  But we have to be prepared for Iraq to cut ties with us, as well…they are placed in a difficult position and may decide that it is better to get along with everyone than count on an increasingly distant and distracted United States.

It could be that wiser heads will prevail and all this will blow over – but if the Islamic world really wants to fight, then there’s not much we can do about it, except to fight them.

Paved With Good Intentions

Mark Noonan6 Comments

You know the destination – from Strategy Page:

Complaints from the Congo are growing about the U.S. legislation intended to stop illegal mineral sales. The Dodd-Frank bill (also called the Obama Law) has a clause that prohibits the sale of so-called conflict minerals may have been well-intentioned but it was not well-thought out. Rather than run the risk of buying any minerals that might have been smuggled from the Congo, many major mining companies are simply refusing to buy minerals from central Africa. The result is a de facto embargo. There are few buyers for Congo’s valuable minerals, especially tantalum and tungsten which have many hi-tech uses. This has damaged the Congo’s economy, because the nation relies on mineral exports. According to some sources, China, which does not have to meet Dodd-Frank standards, is snapping up many minerals at very cheap prices.

Which, then, will eventually find their way in to products used by Americans because we import so much from China…and there is no way to separate out that bit of mineral inside your electronic gadget which was obtained in the Congo.  We have very much shot ourselves in the foot…as well as shot the poor people of the Congo, while at the same time given even more power and wealth to our enemies in China.  Good job, well-intentioned sob-sisters.

God gave us reason and He expect us to use it.  In a rather confusing world where there is always conflict, we are supposed to thread our way carefully.  Before we take a step we should be thinking about what may come after – will it have the effect we want?  If it does, will it also have some bad effects?  Will the good effects equal or outweigh the bad?  It is hard to get people to look even an inch in to the future…but it must be done.  If we go off half-cocked an allow emotion to rule our decisions, then we are bound to get it wrong…emotions have their place, but only as a spur to action…the action, itself, must always be in accord with the best reason we can muster.

We want to ensure that evil people do not profit off the sweat of poor, working people.  That is an admirable goal…a completely Christian goal.  But before we take an action designed to thwart evil we’d better be sure that it (a) thwarts evil and (b) doesn’t cause even more problems for the poor people we’re trying to help.  Some poor man in the Congo who breaks his back mining the goods of the earth deserves first priority on the benefit of those goods…how are we to get the benefit to him?  By cutting him off?  By making his primary customer the People’s Republic of China?  Come on, think clearly!

Perhaps instead of cutting off the Congolese mineral exports to the United States we should, instead, have put a tariff on it and plowed the proceeds back into to efforts to improve the lot of the miners?  Give them some schools and hospitals?  Just an idea…something to think about; and thinking is what we most need in the world…and it is what we have so little of these days.

I realize that thinking can be hard work – I further realize that the more we think, the less liberalism we’ll have.  This is why liberals are so opposed to thought and so insistent upon adherence to a party line.  Start thinking about what we want and what steps might get us there and all of a sudden there’s not much room for appeals to raw emotions which lead to stupid, counter-productive policies.  And just where would liberalism be then?  But I do believe it is a risk worth taking – we can become a rational world again.  We can recover the traditions of the Judeo-Christian West and start to think, and apply human reason to the problems of human life.  It has been done in the past, and it can be done again…just takes a little bit of courage.

Israeli-Egyptian Tensions Rise

Mark Noonan4 Comments

From Y-Net:

Large Egyptian army forces are battling Jihad operatives in the Sinai Peninsula Tuesday as Israel maintains its heightened alert on the tense southern border with Egypt.

Israel upped its military presence along the border, including the deployment of two navy war ships, following a terror warning that had been received indicating that a cell comprising of 10 operatives was in Sinai and was planning to attack Israeli targets. Earlier this month, terrorists killed eight Israelis after infiltrating the border from Sinai…

The peace treaty limits the number of soldiers Egypt can maintain in the Sinai – it must be remember that the Sinai provides Israel with strategic depth vis a vis Egypt (and, of course, Egypt vis a vis Israel).  For Israel’s security, the Sinai must either be Israeli, or it must be demilitarized so that in event of war, the IDF can swiftly seize all or most of it, thus protecting southern Israel.  The Egyptian troops being sent to the Sinai are going with Israeli consent…with Israel, I guess, hoping that the Egyptian army will curb the actions of the terrorists.

It is to be hoped this will work out – but I doubt the reliability of the Egyptian army as an anti-terrorist force.  Will the Egyptian army really go to work with a will against the terrorists?  Or will it make a few spectacular raids while tacitly allowing the terrorists to maintain their forces and launch attacks on Israel?  Time will tell – though Israel would at this point have been better off if they had never bargained land for peace in 1979.  Now that Egypt risks becoming Islamist, the Israelis will come to regret they gave up their excellent defensive positions along the Suez Canal.

The Need for a Nuclear Build Up

Mark Noonan24 Comments

Part of the problem with getting slip shod and thinking that the world has changed is that those who are determined and know it hasn’t changed can steal a march on you – China is doing this.  From the Washington Times:

China is expanding its nuclear forces with a new multiwarhead mobile missile and keeps its strategic stockpiles in deep underground bunkers, the Pentagon disclosed in its annual report to Congress on the Chinese military.

China is thought to have up to 75 long-range nuclear missiles, including hard-to-find, road-mobile DF-31 and DF-31A intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), according to the report, which was released Wednesday. China also has 120 intermediate- and medium-range missiles…

The additional information that China has developed a massive underground network to protect its nuclear force indicates that China is reaching for a first class nuclear force – something which will give China the strategic ability to start wars, and then retreat behind a nuclear umbrella if the war does not go in China’s favor.  While the United States maintains sufficient nuclear force to destroy the Chinese population, we may lack means to strike hard a China’s nuclear force.  And massacring Chinese is not making war – no decent American government would ever contemplate doing that except in the extremity of the Chinese government massacring the American people via nuclear war.

While China is building a 21st century nuclear force, the United States has not produced a nuclear weapon in 20 years – and recent (asinine) nuclear agreements require us to reduce our aging force to 2,200 warheads or less – none of which, I’ll bet, are capable of penetrating China’s very hardened nuclear sites.  While the Strategic Defense Initiative  will increasingly protect us from an “out of the blue” nuclear strike, the fact that we lack “first strike” capability  (ie, the ability to hit it so hard that any response would be suicidal on China’s part) gives China immense strategic flexibility.

They can use this flexibility to start wars – on their own or via proxies like North Korea – with impunity.  If we fight and lose, China is happy – if we fight and win, we can’t fight it to a finish because China can retreat behind a nuclear umbrella and threaten a massive attack against the United States if we go for total victory.  We must redress this strategic balance.

First and foremost must come the most aggressive possible deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative.  Technology is advancing so fast that we may soon have the capability even of thwarting a massed attack upon the United States.  This will go far towards curbing any Chinese nuclear-armed ambitions.  But crucial to a balanced nuclear strategy is the ability to wipe out all or most of China’s nuclear force in a first strike.  This will take new types of warheads designed for deep penetration, as well as the most advanced targeting systems to ensure we hit the target squarely.

It is time to wake up from the 1991 false hope that strategic nuclear thinking was obsolete.  We live in a world of nuclear weapons, and those weapons are simply going to spread, and more and more nations will develope the capability of hitting the United States.  As in all things military, the safety of the United States lays in maintaining an overwhelming qualitative edge.  In 1991, we easily had that over China – we very likely still do, but we won’t have it for long, if we don’t start rebuilding our nuclear force.  This is not a plea, necessarily, for more warheads than we have now but, instead, a plea that the warheads we have be of the latest technology, and fitting for our needs…and our need right now is to be able to destroy deeply buried nuclear sites (and not just in China – Iran and North Korea also deeply bury their nuclear forces).

The real world goes on, whether we will or no…time get back in to it as far as nuclear weapons are concerned.

 

UN Idiocy

Mark Noonan2 Comments

From the PJ Tatler:

Did someone secretly swap reality with what the Onion writes as a parody of reality? There’s this little story about Maxine Waters apologizing to Castro (but the Tea Party can still “go to hell” since they’re the real enemy), and now this story about the UN’s nuclear watchdog swapping hands from Kim Jong-Il to the the world’s other rogue Communist family dynasty.

A top House lawmaker ridiculed the United Nations after Cuba assumed the rotating presidency of a nuclear arms control panel, replacing North Korea at the helm of the group.

Cuba succeeded North Korea on the 65-member U.N. Disarmament Conference in Geneva.

“It’s hard to fathom a more ludicrous image than Kim Jong Il passing the chair of the Conference on Disarmament to the Castro brothers, but that’s what passes for change at the U.N.,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., chairwoman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee…

In reality there is no place in a global body for any nation not governed under American principals of government – most importantly that government obtains its power by the consent of the governed.  If a nation doesn’t have that, then it isn’t a real nation…the government isn’t a real government; such a ruling body is nothing more than a group of armed thugs latched upon a body of slaves.  Such ruling bodies have no moral authority whatsoever…not to even issue a parking ticket, let alone dealing with armament issues.

The whole concept of the UN is a fraud – cooked up by rather short-sighted bureaucrats in the waning days of World War Two where the four pillars of the global order were to be the United States, Great Britain, Chiang’s China and Stalin’s Russia – with France added in as an afterthought.  It was absurd from the get-go, and all that perpetuating it has done is create a gigantic amount of hypocrisy and lies regarding international affairs.  The actions of decent players in world affairs are hamstrung by a UN at the beck and call of tyrants.

That is not a world body for a nation with a sense of honor to belong to – get U.S. out of UN and have done with it.

Germany Increasingly Worried About Bailouts

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph:

German President Christian Wulff has accused the European Central Bank of violating its treaty mandate with the mass purchase of southern European bonds.

In a cannon shot across Europe’s bows, he warned that Germany is reaching bailout exhaustion and cannot allow its own democracy to be undermined by EU mayhem.

“I regard the huge buy-up of bonds of individual states by the ECB as legally and politically questionable. Article 123 of the Treaty on the EU’s workings prohibits the ECB from directly purchasing debt instruments, in order to safeguard the central bank’s independence,” he said…

Little late there, Wulff, old boy – the European Central Bank has been burying the European Union in bogus debt for three years.

This does, though, point to the end of German patience – after all, Germany can start printing Deutschmarks tomorrow and they would probably be at par with the British pound, and possibly higher.  European money would start to flood in to Germany as people seek a safe haven from the coming Euro-collapse.  It is time to call a halt to this before the entirety of Europe is brought down because the ECB wants to bail out banksters who idiotically loaned money to places like Greece, Italy and Spain.  It can’t be done – and either the PIIGS bondholders will go under, or everyone will.  If I were German, I’d be saying “bondholders go under”.

Will Germans discover a backbone and send the ECB packing, or will lingering guilt over WWII (to be sure, that is something to be guilty about) cause German’s to sacrifice their own prosperity in order to be “good Europeans”?   Time will tell…