Foreign Affairs

The Collapse of the Middle East

Mark Noonan24 Comments

Yes, I know it has been going on for some time, but I don’t think most people are fully aware of just how bad it is – Spengler writes about Turkey’s problems:

…Turkey is a mediocre economy at best with a poorly educated workforce, no high-tech capacity, and shrinking markets in depressed Europe and the unstable Arab world. Its future might well be as an economic tributary of China, as the “New Silk Road” extends high-speed rail lines to the Bosporus…

…The whole notion was flawed from top to bottom. Turkey was not in line to become an economic power of any kind: it lacked the people and skills to do anything better than medium-tech manufacturing. Its Islamists never were democrats. Worst of all, its demographics are as bad as Europe’s. Ethnic Turks have a fertility rate close to 1.5 children per family, while the Kurdish minority is having 4 children per family. Within a generation half of Turkey’s young men will come from families where Kurdish is the first language…

Spengler also notes that corruption is a big problem and, of course, that Turkey is honey-combed with bad debt, now coming due with little chance the Turks can pay.   Iran has the same sort of problem – declining birth rate, low-skilled labor force, corrupt, bad debt…its why they were so eager to cut a deal with Kerry in return for easing the sanctions: Iran’s economy teeters on the edge of complete collapse and the deal frees up money for the mullahs (and, of course, the Iranians were doubly delighted to do it as, having taken the measure of Obama, they knew that they could get the sanctions eased and still just go on sponsoring terrorism and making nukes).  So, add Turkey to Iran to Syria to Egypt to Libya to Sudan as failed States…and look warily at the corrupt monarchies of the Arabian peninsula which keep themselves alive only so long as the oil keeps flowing and they can bribe people to silence.  Meanwhile, Islamism continues to spread and even in Afghanistan – with American troops still there – the Afghan government works out how to implement laws allowing for the stoning to death of adulterers.

So, what of it?  What can we do about it?  Not much.  Suffice it to say that at some point, this mess will draw us back in militarily, but for now there is not much we can do.  First and foremost, because Barack Obama is President of the United States.  The level of ignorance of facts and unwillingness to face the truth about the Middle East entirely cripples any efforts made by the Obama Administration – and if we did get sucked in to active military operations, it is certain that the lack of courage and military knowledge of the Obama Administration would ensure an American defeat.  All we can do is watch in fascinated horror while this goes on.

In the longer term, when we hopefully have better leadership, when we are forced to again fight in that area, it is to be hoped that we will do so with a clear eye to the harsh realities.  For whatever reason, Islamic peoples are simply incapable, as such, of building and maintaining a civilization.  They can take over from others (as they did when they first conquered such areas as Turkey, Syria and Egypt), but they cannot maintain or build on their own.  There is something in Muslim theology which prevents rationality – which prevents a Muslim government from really exercising democracy, from really allowing people to be independent, from really allowing minorities to have rights.  When we have to go back in, our policies must be governed in this light.

To be sure, I don’t want us to have to govern large, Muslim populations – whatever else may be said about them, Muslims dislike intensely any foreign domination.  So, no attempt at nation building.  But when the next war in the Middle East comes to our door, we must ensure that at the end of it, we are firmly protected against the violent acts of Islamist extremists and that the minority peoples of the area are afforded independence from Muslim rule – or even from a Muslim minority within their territories.  This will require a significant reworking of the map of the Middle East.  As I’ve pointed out in the past, new nations will have to be created where non-Muslim minorities can live in peace and independence – in places like Lebanon, parts of Syria, parts of Iraq, parts of Egypt, land must be carved out so that non-Muslims can be safe, with the additional benefit of locking the Muslim nations, themselves, in to positions from which they cannot by offensive action influence the course of world events.

We all of us – right and left – have been living in a bit of a dream world as regards policy towards the Middle East.  It is time we woke up to reality and acted accordingly.

Making a Deal With Iran

Mark Noonan41 Comments

It is hard to say what the real goal here is – it is clear that no matter what Iran does, while Obama is President we won’t go to war to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.  Come what may, no amount of non-military pressure on Iran will succeed in convincing the Iranian government to give up their nuclear ambitions.  Given this, why make a deal, at all?  What is it that impels Obama and Kerry to seek a deal?

By making any sort of deal, all we do is increase Iranian legitimacy in the eyes of the world, alienate Israel and lower our prestige among both friends and enemies – the world will see that, in the event, we daren’t attack Iran…that we are, in some sense, afraid of them.  The Gulf States will either make the best deal they can with Iran, while Saudi Arabia and Turkey obtain nuclear weapons of their own to counter the Iranian force.  Can it be that Obama and Kerry, ignorant academics that they are, simply believe that a deal is better than a non-deal?  That the results don’t matter so much as the process, itself?

And here’s the bad news – an Iranian nuclear force is an existential threat to the life of Israel…just how long will the Israeli government hold off from saving themselves from extermination?

Thinking About Syria

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Does anyone in any position of responsibility realize that for the Alawites lead by Assad, this is a matter of life and death?  That if they don’t win the civil war, they are in for a round of murder and pillage at the hands of their enemies?  While they are Muslims, they are considered to be a sort of heretical Islam by the dominant Sunni Muslims and for centuries before Syria fell under French rule post-WWI, they were oppressed by their fellow Muslims.  To be sure, they have used cruelty and chicanery to gain and maintain mastery as a minority Ruling Class in Syria, but now the fat is in the fire – the Alawites are not expecting mercy and brotherhood from the other side if they lose, so they’ll fight on until destroyed or they have secured their own homes and families.  Lobbing a few missiles at them will not make them stop doing whatever they think proves necessary to, at minimum, maintain their control over predominantly Alawite ares of Syria.  Only an army more powerful than they can do the trick…and if you’re wondering why this minority of 12% of Syria’s population has maintained control for decades and has an even chance of winning the Civil War look no further than the fact that the Alawites retained for themselves the best weapons…and constituted a majority of the total Syrian armed forces pre-Civil War.

I bring this up because no one seems to be thinking along these lines – that people with their backs to the wall are not likely to be easily swayed.  We’re treating them as if they are concerned about the whole of Syria and its welfare.  In some theoretical sense, this might be true – but in the concrete, the Alawite soldiers are fighting for lives of their wives and children.  These people will not go down easily.  Of course, they are not the only minority group in Syria.  In fact, Syria is a grab-bag of minority groups.  Sure, its overwhelmingly Muslim – but there are nearly as many Christians as there are Alawites (and the Christians probably do favor the Alawites because, point blank, the more secular-minded Alawites have tended to live and let live with the Christians…meanwhile, the rebels are increasingly infected with Islamism, and so Christians are increasingly brutalized); Islam in Syria is broken up in to quite a lot of different sects.

Syria isn’t really a nation as we think of it – its just another one of those colonial left-overs.  Ruled for centuries by the Turks, taken over by the French post-WWI, the people there never thought of themselves as “Syrians” in the sense that we think of ourselves as “Americans”…people with a common history, a shared set of basic values and a willingness to sink sectarian differences for the good of the larger community.  Essentially, the Alawites have provided what the Ottomans provided until 1918 and the French until 1946 – a group of people who keep down everyone else, until just lately, when for a variety of reasons a rebellion broke out (not in any case the first), at a time when non-Syrian forces were willing to back the rebels (and not us, good people – quite a lot of Gulf State Muslim money has poured in to the rebels).  And don’t think the rebels are keen on establishing a republic in which all Syrians live in brotherhood.  There might be a few such trotted out to meet with a junketing Senator McCain, but most of them are primarily interested in securing their own particular interests…and, if things work out, grabbing the sort of power the Alawites have held on to since the 1970’s.  I almost hate to point this out, but the only thing which can be found in common among most Syrians is probably a loathing of Israel…but even that has been set aside so that they can kill each other in a mad scramble for power.

Crucial to any expectations of results is to understand the reality of things.  Syria is not just “Syria”.  Its a lot of different things and the people battling there with extreme cruelty have clear ideas of what they want.  If we don’t have a clear idea of what we want and how it relates to the reality on the ground in Syria, then whatever we do will fail.  This does not at all preclude a diplomatic solution to the problem, by the way – in fact, it opens up wide vistas of diplomatic action, if we will understand the facts and figure out what it is we want.

Furthermore, we do have the power to impose a solution – our weight thrown on to any particular side will allow that side to emerge victorious.  If, that is, we make it clear that if we decide to come in on a side that we’ll come all the way in with whatever level of force would prove necessary.  Half measure won’t do; lobbing a few missiles is absurd.  If we want to have any particular result in Syria, then we have to will the means as well as envision the ends.  We could, perhaps, use our overwhelming power to convince all sides that it is time to sit down and talk – to set up some sort of federal or cantonal system of government which will allow each major element its own absolute sphere, surrendering only enough power to the central government as is necessary to make Syria a functional, national unit.  Carrots for everyone – and a threat of the Big Stick for anyone who decides that they’d rather keep fighting instead of negotiating a settlement…and, yes, this does mean that in certain circumstances we throw our weight behind Assad’s Alawites (if not behind Assad, who probably could be eased out by Alawites convinced that we’ll ensure their lives and property against revenge).

But if we are not willing to envision an end and unwilling to provide the means to achieve the end, then it is best we stay out.  At this stage of the game, staying out is probably the best course of action – mostly because Obama has botched it so badly to this point. It is not because people are getting isolationist that intervention in Syria is unpopular, but because Obama has proven himself a fool and no one wants to dive in to a murky situation without some idea of what we hope to accomplish, what it might cost and how long it will take.  But good things can be done with American power – wisdom is not to be found in launching endless wars, nor in the twin follies of pacifism and isolationism.  Clear headed, rational thinking informed by the actual facts can get us out of this mess – and help the people of Syria, in to the bargain.  My prayer is that some how, some way even Obama will start to see things clearly and a reasonable, humane policy will emerge.

UPDATE:  I’ve pondered it some more and here’s a follow-on comment I left elsewhere:

…(we have) all the ingredients which cool headed diplomacy can make much hay with.  If we understood diplomacy (ie, if we didn’t have Obama and team in charge) we would long-ago have said that our interest is peace in Syria and to that end we will exert pressure on all sides to engage in talks to reform the government of Syria to secure absolutely minority rights.  Once that announcement is made, support can be rounded up in the world for the effort and support built at home for a forward policy – while backstairs negotiations let all and sundry know that we are determined upon a peace settlement to be imposed on the warring sides with the carrot being US and international help to rebuild and the stick being US force being thrown against whichever sides proves most resistant to compromise (in other words, we’re telling them that we’ll even fight on Assad’s side, if he proves most willing to compromise).  Once the preliminary work is done, we call a conference of all the interested parties to reach an agreement to embargo all arms and impose sanctions on the warring factions…Russia, China and Iran would strongly object to this (and thus no such thing could be done through the UN…which is why we’d ignore the UN and go for genuine diplomacy), and we’d lay down the marker:  we’re going to do this and we’re willing to fight…and if Russia, China and Iran want to fight us in order to maintain their particular clients in Syria, then let’s have at it.  They would back down in front of that as no one in the world wants to go to actual war with the United States of America.  Once a cease-fire agreement is hammered out it is presented to the Syrian factions and they are given 36 hours to comply or face sustained military action by the United States until they do agree.  More than likely, all but the Islamist fanatics would agree, and they could be swiftly exterminated.  We can then mid-wife in Syria a Cantonal form of government allowing each group to keep its own while cooperating to sustain the larger entity of Syria.

At any rate, that’s what I would do.

Democrats Who Are for Action in Syria Don’t Want the pResident Humiliated

tiredoflibbs20 Comments

Dem Congresswoman: Only Reason I’d Vote for Syria Attack Is Loyalty to Obama

It goes to show that Democrats can’t think for themselves and their actions are a result of partisanship.

HOLMES NORTON: So I think he’ll be in real trouble if he then does it anyway. No president has done that.

PRESS: It’s not an easy decision for any of you, Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.

HOLMES NORTON: Oh, and I’d like to say, Bill, that if he gets saved at all, I think it’ll be because, it’ll be because of loyalty of Democrats. They just don’t want to see him shamed and humiliated on the national stage.

PRESS: Yeah, right.

HOLMES NORTON: At the, at the moment, that’s the only reason I would vote for it if I could vote on it.

Wow, she has said it all.  It is a shame that a pResident who claimed to “restore our world image” is an utter failure at that as well.

UPDATE, by Mark Noonan

You want to know just how we got ourselves in to this mess?  Where, here’s the level of stupidity in the Obama Administration:

…Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, hoped that a team of UN investigators — many of whom, presumably, have a longstanding relationship with Iranian leaders — could write a report that would convince Iran to abandon its ally at the behest of the United States.

“We worked with the UN to create a group of inspectors and then worked for more than six months to get them access to the country on the logic that perhaps the presence of an investigative team in the country might deter future attacks,” Power said at the Center for American Progress as she made the case for intervening in Syria.

“Or, if not, at a minimum, we thought perhaps a shared evidentiary base could convince Russia or Iran — itself a victim of Saddam Hussein’s monstrous chemical weapons attacks in 1987-1988 — to cast loose a regime that was gassing it’s people,” she said…

So, here goes the “thinking” – if we can just get the Iranians to see that Assad is a bad guy, they’ll get on board with us against him!  Genius, I tell ya!  Just where to heck to we get such idiots?  Well, Tom Elia on his Facebook page details it:

Yale undergrad; journalist; Harvard Law School; Pulitzer Prize winner (non-fiction book); professor, Kennedy School; diplomat.

We get it from the Ruling Class – the privileged elite who are supposedly just oh, so well educated and oh, so much smarter than us knuckle-dragging teabaggers.  That’s where we get it from.  Ms. Powers, a little clue for ya from the dummies:  people who hang people for being gay and stone women to death because they were raped are unlikely to have an attack of conscience over gassing people.  Its just not that likely, ya see?  In fact, people who do that sort of thing might even be in favor of gassing people…I know, shocking; but there it is.  Some people are just like that.

Update:

Now anti-war Hollywood chimes in with the most unintelligent reason for not opposing action in Syria:

Ed Asner: “They don’t want to feel Anti-Black”

Wow.  Now I have heard it all.  I am 100% positive if the President was a African-American Republican, Hollywood would have no problem “feeling Anti-Black” in that case.  Again according to the left, if you criticize the pResident you are a racist…. a bigot…. a hater.

UPDATE III, by Mark Noonan:

In between bouts of blaming Bush, I guess someone over at Team Obama realized that Team Bush could at least drum up and sustain support for war – even when things got really rough.  And, so, Team Obama sent some former Bush people to lobby House GOPers:

Top Bush administration officials have mobilized to sway a skeptical Republican party to authorize military intervention in Syria. As National Review Online reported, former national security adviser Stephen Hadley and former undersecretary of defense for policy Eric Edelman this week led a briefing on Capitol Hill for Republican legislative directors and chiefs of staff…

…Their argument: If you hope to have a negotiated settlement with Iran, they only way you are going to get there is if the Iranians actually believe the use of force lies behind America’s efforts to negotiate. Hamstringing the president’s effort to use force against Syria now will “absolutely cripple and destroy” the chance to reach a diplomatic settlement with Iran…

The idea is that if we fail to sustain Obama on Syria, then when he does go to talk to the Iranians about their nuclear program, the Iranians will know in advance that there is no credible threat of US action if Iran refuses to forgo nuclear weapons.  Its a nice theory, but it is based upon a premise that to this moment Iran believes that we’ll do something about their nuclear program.  If they do, then they are too stupid to figure out how to build an atomic bomb…or even a firecracker, for that matter.

Obama’s credibility will not be destroyed by failure to sustain him on Syria – Obama’s credibility has been destroyed for ages.  If the Assad government did use chemical weapons it is because they were convinced that no great punishment would be meted out if they did.  And, they’re right – even if we sustain Obama, he’s just going to lob a few missiles in to Syria.  Twenty or thirty more large explosions added to the scores of large explosions happening there every day.  Not exactly the sort of thing to convince a bloodthirsty dictator fighting for his life that he’s in trouble.  No war in Syria – not now; not while Obama is President.

The Answer to the Syrian Question is “Lebanon”

Mark Noonan16 Comments

First off, Russia has released a report claiming that Syrian rebels used poison gas on March 19th. Whether or not the report is true, it does cast doubt on the Administration’s “Assad rat bastard against Freedom Fighters” narrative.  The Russian report, if proved correct, just adds one more bit of evidence that the rebels in Syria are just as nasty and inhuman as the Assad forces.  And this, in turn, makes it less and less wise for us to intervene in Syria.  But, there is a course of action the United States can take during this crisis which will help us, help our allies, weaken our enemies and leave us in a better position no matter who wins the Syrian Civil War – and that is to concentrate our efforts on Lebanon.

What is important is not necessarily what is in the newspapers.  In fact, what is making the headlines is as often as not the last thing we should be paying attention to.  This is because most reporters and editors are ignorant of things like history, strategy, military issues and such.  They are in the news business not to keep the citizenry informed, but to make bags of money and get rich and famous.  This Onion parody of why the MSM reported on Miley Cyrus actually explains the motivation of the  news business correctly.  Read it for the truth – and for the laughs, as its quite funny (language warning).  While reports showing the horrors of war and dead bodies will get people to tune it (especially if their are explosions!), what you’re seeing there isn’t what is at issue…it is the result of an issue.  The issue going on in the Muslim world right now is who gets to be in charge…all the battling and civil war and revolution and repression is all about who gets to be top dog.  Our leaders might think this, that or the other thing but the people there causing the trouble simply want power and are willing to go to horrific, anti-human lengths to obtain it.

Given this, we can be certain that whomever ruthlessly climbs to the top over a mountain of corpses probably won’t be a paragon of virtue.  In other words, whomever wins will be an enemy – actual or in prospect – of all we hold dear.  We can’t intervene on either side because both sides are simply after the same thing – ruthless, absolute power in order to perpetuate themselves (though, truth be told, the least dangerous outcome for us is an Assad victory…he doesn’t appear to have dreams of a global caliphate, as do many of the rebels).  So, our task then is to ensure that at the end of the bloody war, we and our allies are in the best possible position.  To me, this makes me turn to Lebanon.

Lebanon was wracked by civil war for years and then, essentially, came under Syrian and proxy-Iranian rule (the Iranian proxies are Hezbollah).  While this has made for peace in the sense of nobody immediately shooting each other, it has made for a lot of oppression as neither the Syrians nor Hezbollah are interested in the rights and desires of the people of Lebanon.  With Syria now locked in a death match and Iran expending energy keeping her ally Assad in power, the time is ripe for us to try and leverage Syria and Hezbollah (Iran) out of Lebanon.  The people there probably don’t like Syrian/Hezbollah rule, even if they don’t particularly like us, either.  There’s not much Syria can do if we decided to apply a little political pressure backed by covert military pressure to help the Lebanese push out the Syrians and then turn on Hezbollah. If we can get Syria/Hezbollah out of Lebanon then at the end of the Syrian Civil War we’ll have a weaker Syria, a weaker Iran, a free Lebanon and a more secure Israel – and if our efforts fail, we’ll be no worse off than we are now and we won’t have gotten ourselves involved in a Syrian Civil War which can do no good for us.

I don’t at all expect Obama to do anything like this.  He’s even more ignorant than a news reporter.  But I thought it worthwhile to demonstrate that there is an alternate policy for us to support – and thus put to rest the concept that some how or another because Obama screwed up and Assad is a bastard that we have to get directly involved.  The world doesn’t work like a machine – its run by human beings and thus can be quite confusing and the real issue can be off to the side while everyone is looking at the shiny object.  A true sense of our power and what our interests are clears things up a lot – pity that hardly anyone in a position of authority has any idea of either thing.

Obama Tosses Syria Ball to Congress – Congress Should Vote it Down

Mark Noonan24 Comments

Obama found out this last week that just setting a foreign policy isn’t the same as carrying it out.  Obama long ago said that use of chemical weapons by Syria would be a “red line” – and then he did precisely nothing to garner domestic and international support for a course of action should Syria cross that red line.  When it became alleged that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons (something I’m not at all convinced about – though, of course, the rat bastards who govern Syria are fully capable of such savagery), Obama found himself all alone.  After blustering a bit about how we can go it alone and he doesn’t need Congressional authorization, Obama backed down – and passed the buck to Congress.

On the left this is being lauded as a brilliant move – it puts the onus, so it is claimed, on Congress.  The idea is that Congress must authorize action – thus getting Obama off the hook for taking an ill-advised action – or bear the blame for refusing to act while Syria’s government murders children with poison gas (amazing how our liberals will still say its all “for the children” while they continue to back abortion which kills millions of children).  In the liberal mind, either way this works out for Obama – we’ll either get the military action and Obama is a hero, or the Congress will look like heartless bastards, and the Democrats will put full blame on the GOP for being the leading heartless bastards. I don’t see it that way.

What Obama is asking for is permission to pointlessly lob a few missiles at sites which will be long-since cleared out of valuable targets by the time we act.  Such strikes will not alter the course of the Syrian civil war, they will not stop the Syrian government from using chemical weapons and, indeed, will probably encourage further use (nothing encourages aggressors more than a weak response to aggression) and such strikes will do nothing to convince the world that America is a power to be feared.  I’d rather take the alleged heat for being a heartless bastard for not acting than bear the odium of participating in a perfectly useless action.  The Congressional GOP should vote this down.

If we vote for anything it should be an act which instructs the President to seek an international coalition for dealing with the Syrian crisis with a mind towards thwarting Iranian and al-Qaeda aims in Syria.  In short, pass a resolution which calls for a rational foreign policy.  In this resolution should be a general authority to use force in defense of the United States and our allies.  Throw the ball right back in Obama’s court – he’s the one who made this foreign policy failure, and he should be stuck with trying to clean it up.

UPDATE:  The case for war is made here – astonishingly at First Things, usually a place where first-rate thinking is displayed.  You can read it, if you like, but the nutshell is that we’d better get a-killing Syrians lest President Obama be shown to be completely ineffectual.  Heretofore, I had always rated The War of Jenkin’s Ear to be the most misbegotten war in human history, but this would displace it:  we’re to go to war to make the world safe for poltroonery.  Because Obama is afraid to lead and at his wit’s end (its a short walk, under the best of circumstances), we’re to send our best and bravest out to kill Syrians in an effort which is to be geared merely to avoid global mockery of Obama.

Sorry, ain’t buying – a great power can survive idiots being in charge, but we can’t survive going to war to cover up for an idiot.

Should We Go to War in Syria?

Mark Noonan25 Comments

As the Obama Administration lets on that it is planning US military action against Syria and our forces move in to position we do have to ask, is such a war necessary?

First and foremost, is there any vital US interest at state in Syria?  To a certain extent, yes.  Syria’s government has long been allied with Iran and has fostered the terrorist group Hezbollah.  Destroying the Syrian regime, though, would only be useful if the potential successor regime would no longer be allied with Iran or any other US enemy and/or if such a regime would cease supporting terrorism…given the grab-bag collection of Islamists who make up the bulk of the Syrian opposition, it is almost certain that if they gain power they will continue to support terrorism and if not allied with Iran, would ally with some other enemy country, or countries.  Indeed, a successor regime run by the Islamist opposition might even re-ignite Syria’s war with Israel (which has never officially ended).

Secondly, is there a moral demand that we act – some times a nation must go to war even without a vital, national interest at stake simply because there is a vital, moral issue at stake.  Given the very nasty brutality of the Syrian regime, there is a moral case to be made for war.  Though if we were to move on this, it would smack a bit of hypocrisy because the Syrian government isn’t doing anything it hasn’t been doing for decades, accompanied by a resounding silence on our part.  Additionally, the Islamist opposition to the Syrian regime has been engaging in routine brutality of its own – especially, it appears, against Syria’s Christian minority.  Given their nature, we can expect an Islamist regime to crack down even harder on Christians, and on any Muslims who don’t live up to the Islamist ideal.  Morally, there is no problem with targeting the Syrian regime, but the result of knocking off the Syrian regime is almost certain to be a regime even more horrific.

Overall, the result of a successful military operation against the Syrian regime appears to be something worse than we have now.  That Assad is a brute and his regime inhuman is beyond doubt, but given the nature of the opposition, a successor regime would be at least as bad and, perhaps, more destabilizing to the overall region.  A tenet of the Just War Doctrine is that the war must not cause a worse situation than currently exists – given the  strong arguments against a good result (ie, getting something better than we have now), an argument can be made that a war against Syria does not meet the Just War criteria.

I tend to come down on that side – in Syria, we can’t make a result better than the current state of affairs and our efforts will, indeed, very likely make a worse result.  We should, therefor, stay out of Syria.  Our goal in this mess should be, instead, to work against overall enemy forces – which include both the Syrian regime and those fighting it.  Right now, with Syria wracked by civil war, proper American policy should be to leverage Syria completely out of Lebanon and by so doing also get Hezbollah out.  We cannot fix the whole world, but we can take advantage of this situation to help fix a small part of it – Lebanon has been a stomping ground for Syrian imperialists and Islamist terrorists for decades.  It has become a standing threat to Israel and the non-Islamist population of Lebanon suffers grave injustice from the Syrians and the terrorist groups.  Getting Syria and the terrorists out of Lebanon won’t usher in global peace, but it will help out the Lebanese and the Israelis as well as strengthening the overall US position in the area.  We should be doing what we can – directly and indirectly, to clear out Lebanon while sealing off, as far as possible, the Syrian civil war.  Once a winner emerges, then steps can be taken depending upon the circumstances.

McCain’s Folly

Mark Noonan1 Comment

From PJ Media:

In the eyes of tens of millions of Egyptians, Senators John McCain’s and Lindsey Graham’s recent words and deeds in Egypt — which have the “blessing” of President Obama — have unequivocally proven that U.S. leadership is aligning with the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egyptian media is awash with stories of the growing anger regarding this policy…

…What did McCain do and say in Egypt to earn the ire of millions of Egyptians?

Most offensive to Egyptians — and helpful to the Brotherhood’s cause — is McCain’s insistence on calling the June 30 revolution a “military coup.” In reality, the revolution consisted of perhaps thirty million Egyptians taking to the streets to oust the Brotherhood. McCain is either deliberately misconstruing the event, or believes the story as told by Al Jazeera and Ambassador Anne Patterson. In this narrative, at least an equal amount of Egyptians did support Morsi, and the military simply overthrew him against popular will. Al Jazeera has actually broadcast images of the millions of anti-Morsi protesters and identified them as pro-Morsi protesters, disinformation which was quickly adopted by Western media…

I don’t know what is motivating McCain – lingering belief that “politics ends at the water’s edge” might be it…though you’d figure a man who spent years in the Hanoi Hilton and ended up a veteran of a lost war would understand that its been many decades since the American left (now led by Obama) believed that politics ends at the waters edge.  Continued ire at Rand Paul’s brand of foreign policy – which is considered by McCain to be a replay of the pre-WWII isolationism – is probably playing a role.  And, of course, there is McCain’s desire to shine in the Ruling Class – to be the “Maverick”, which in liberalese is “Republican who will do our bidding”; to be written up in glowing terms in the MSM; to be interviewed by sympathetic MSMers on TV who will give him a chance to take a swipe at fellow Republicans.  But whatever the motivation, it is complete folly.

It is, of course, secondary to Obama’s folly – but that we take as a given until January 20, 2017.  For Republicans the problem is that with McCain and others out there giving cover to Obama, it becomes harder for us to both distance ourselves from Obama’s failures and, more importantly, to craft the radically new approach to foreign policy which is necessary because of Obama’s follies and the rapidly changing conditions around the world.  This isn’t the Cold War (and yet Obama still negotiates arms control agreements with Russia as if it still were); this isn’t even the post-Cold War (a brief moment in time between 1989 and 2001 when we could have re-ordered the world to our heart’s content, but didn’t).  This is a new era – a new ear of international anarchy resultant upon the end of America’s complete predominance.  We are still, by very far, the most powerful nation in the world (any nation  going to war with us – absent Obama as President – would be committing national suicide) but we are no longer able to act as we wish and when we wish and we are confronted with the challenges of Islamism and rising Chinese imperialism.  These elements have the makings in them of World War Three and we need to craft policies which will head that off…or, if that can’t be done, ensure we are in the best possibly position to win the war.  Obama’s policies are working, blindly, towards such a war while at the same time putting us in an ever worse position…McCain coming along and giving Obama cover on this is disastrous.

My view about Egypt is slightly hopeful – I fully understand that a lot of the anti-Muslim Brotherhood people are really just the Even More Muslim Muslim Brotherhood types…people who make the MB look tame by comparison.  But, still slightly hopeful – the last thing we need right now is a policy where we blunder about in Egypt while the people there are working out their destiny.  Quiet support for genuinely secular parties in Egypt, silence on actual political developments, a curtailment of US military aid (though not a complete cut-off…we want to make certain the troops remain paid so that they are less likely to revolt; mostly, stop sending them planes, tanks and other sorts of weapons) and watch developments.  We’ll soon know who winds up on top in Egypt – and if we had played our cards right, we might even have started with good will from an anti-Islamist Egyptian government.  Now we’ve just pissed everyone off..the MB for not firmly backing Morsi; the More Muslim Muslim Brotherhood because they are just creeps; the democratic forces because we are undermining them.

No Republican should have anything to say about Obama foreign policy except criticism – because it is stupid and destructive policy.  But we should hardly spend much time on that – we should spend most of our time thinking about what really needs to be done and then arguing for the changes we want.  It is a pity that McCain has decided to cap his political career – I believe it unlikely he’ll run again – by doing one, last disservice to his nation.  Better to stay home and be silent, Senator McCain, then to bookend a hero’s life with the story of how he helped Obama ruin things.

Benghazi

Mark Noonan55 Comments

They say its not the crime, but the cover up – but with Benghazi, it might be the crime and the cover up:

At least four career officials at the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency have retained lawyers or are in the process of doing so, as they prepare to provide sensitive information about the Benghazi attacks to Congress, Fox News has learned.

Victoria Toensing, a former Justice Department official and Republican counsel to the Senate Intelligence Committee, is now representing one of the State Department employees. She told Fox News her client and some of the others, who consider themselves whistle-blowers, have been threatened by unnamed Obama administration officials.

“I’m not talking generally, I’m talking specifically about Benghazi – that people have been threatened,” Toensing said in an interview Monday. “And not just the State Department. People have been threatened at the CIA.”…

Good to keep in mind that Nixon was brought down because Dean managed to sucker him in to giving post-facto approval to Dean’s attempted cover up of Watergate – and no one died in Watergate.  Here we’ve got dead people and possible obstruction of justice…and potentially attempted cover ups of both events.

Now, will this topple Obama?  Not a chance.  As long as at least 34 Senators are Democrat, then there is absolutely nothing Obama can do which would result in his conviction by the Senate.  We might do pretty well in the 2014 mid-terms, but we’re not going to win a net of 22 seats.  So, Obama will get the stay on – but it is important that the truth come out for two reasons:

1.  Simple justice.  The dead deserve to have the truth told regarding what happened.  Also, in future Administrations, wise people will take to heart what happened and work against a repeat.

2.  Benghazi doesn’t just mean Obama, it means Hillary – she is, in my view, one of the lowest people we have engaged in politics today, and that is in world where Obama is President and her husband was President.  Keeping her out of the White House would be a patriotic service to our nation – and the truth about Benghazi will be devastating to Hillary as well as Obama (and, in fact, perhaps more devastating to Hillary).

The bottom line of what happened in Benghazi – regardless of criminal folly – is that a President, a world-view, was put to the test and found wanting.  The Islamists enemies hate us, all the time and every where and nothing we can do short of dying or surrendering will change them. To ignore the Islamist threat is plain and simple idiotic – to try and explain it away as the result of Israeli or American action is simply to ignore the fact that Islamists, acting as Islamists, have been around for many centuries…not just since before Israel became a nation, but before we became a nation.  One example – in a book written long before our current troubles – really struck home for me.  America existed at the time, but we weren’t in any way involved – in this case, the Great Mutiny in British India in the 1850’s.  A group of Muslim soldiers were being whipped up by an Imam – urged to fight and die for Islam – and at the end of the fiery sermon, the Imam shouted “and now I, too, will die for Islam” and went down in to the fight, where he was promptly killed.  These are the kind of people we fight today – they won’t quit and whether we are soft or hard, they will keep fighting us – because they believe that God commands them to do so and will reward them magnificently for fighting.  Unless our government keeps this fact firmly fixed in mind, we’ll never get anywhere – we have to decide to either fight them to the death or surrender entirely.  Pick one, because our enemies will allow no other choice.

Obama and his Administration believed that words of sweet reason would change things – and our ambassador in Libya (perhaps very voluntarily) was sacrificed to this absurd ideal.  It is to be hoped that once Obama leaves office, his successors will have a more realistic view of things.

What’s Next for Syria?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

There have been many reports recently that the Syrian government used chemical weapons against the rebels – and this action supposedly crossed Obama’s “red line”, which should have triggered a US response.  But, no response.  Why?  This article in the New York Times gives a pretty solid reason:

As Islamists increasingly fill the ranks of Syrian rebels, President Bashar al-Assad is waging an energized campaign to persuade the United States that it is on the wrong side of the civil war. Some government supporters and officials believe they are already coaxing — or at least frightening — the West into holding back stronger support for the opposition.

Confident they can sell their message, government officials have eased their reluctance to allow foreign reporters into Syria, paraded prisoners they described as extremist fighters and relied unofficially on a Syrian-American businessman to help tap into American fears of groups like Al Qaeda.

“We are partners in fighting terrorism,” Syria’s prime minister, Wael Nader al-Halqi, said.

Omran al-Zoubi, the information minister, said: “It’s a war for civilization, identity and culture. Syria, if you want, is the last real secular state in the Arab world.”…

Which statement is pretty close to the truth – but doesn’t change the fact that Assad’s regime has been an unrelieved series of rat-bastard actions since the days when his dad was in charge.  While I doubt recent claims of chemical weapons use, it is pretty sure that the Syrian regime has used poison gas in the past against rebels.  Additionally, while the Assad regime is officially secular it has been long allied with Islamist Iran and has provided vital support to Islamist Hezbollah in Lebanon.  Even as an allegedly secular State, Syria has been helping our Islamist enemies – in addition to being implacably opposed to the existence of the State of Israel.  There is, in short, not much for us to love there.  Of course, the rebels do appear dominated by Islamists, so if they do manage to topple the Assad regime, it also won’t work to our advantage.

And so I’ve always said we should stay out – no matter who wins in Syria, we lose.  But what we should have been doing is using Syria’s civil war as a means to pry Hezbollah out of Lebanon.  Right now, no one in Syria has much time or resources to be supporting Hezbollah – a concerted effort against Hezbollah will now ultimately bear fruit because all actions against them will weaken their power, which cannot be easily rebuilt without active Syrian support.  Partnering with Israel and those elements in Lebanon (which are substantial) which would prefer to see an end to the quasi-State run by Hezbollah in Lebanon, we could have secured genuine Lebanese independence – so that no matter who wins the Syrian civil war, Syria’s position in Lebanon is permanently destroyed.

But, we did nothing of the kind –  because Obama doesn’t see enemies over in the Muslim world, just alienated friends (alienated by us, of course).  Obama – and all his foreign policy team – probably never even thought about how to exploit the Syrian civil war to our strategic advantage.  We’ve dithered and blustered and threatened and half-armed the rebels – and we may yet be dragged in to direct participation in the war and the subsequent cost of pacification and rebuilding.  But we won’t secure a pro -US regime in Syria and we may well end up midwifing a new, virulently anti-US regime which also controls Lebanon.

Its a miserable situation and because our leaders are ignorant of the realities of the Middle East, it will likely just get worse.