The Razor

Arm both sides.

The optimal goal is stalemate, to create a quagmire that bogs down both sides, sucking up resources and destroying men and material for however long this state can be maintained. The idea is to encourage both sides to use up what they have against each other so that neither can threaten you after the conflict is resolved.

In a conflict where there are no good guys, where the civilians have been brainwashed through their religion to hate us and suspect us as being the cause of their suffering, there is nothing to be lost by actually making it so. In Syria we have an Iranian-backed Shiite regime fighting a Saudi funded, al Qaeda manned Sunni insurgency. None of the players in the conflict are freedom fighters believing in the establishment of a secular based, peaceful regime in Syria, and nothing will be gained by the United States committing itself to one side or the other.

Obama’s indecisiveness is actually accomplishing this goal. Iraq, a country whose government the US established, is allowing overflights of weapons and munitions from Iran to resupply the Assad regime in Syria. At the same time the US encourages the Saudis and Gulf states to provide arms and material to the insurgents attempting to overthrow the Assad regime.

To put it bluntly, every dead insurgent or Syrian regime soldier is one less insurgent or soldier dedicated to fighting the United States and its allies. The suicide bombers that attack Assad’s regime will not kill American soldiers at checkpoints in Afghanistan, just as the Iranian special forces captured and executed by jihadis will not kill Israeli soldiers in the West Bank.

While this may strike some Westerners as morally repugnant at first, consider the alternatives. If the Assad regime emerges from the civil war victorious, the hand of Iran will be much stronger throughout the region. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Syria would be in a much better position to threaten America’s only true ally in the region, Israel. A positive conclusion to the conflict would embolden Iran and provide an end to the drain of resources the current conflict draws from the regime, allowing it to refocus on its nuclear program which not only threatens Israel but Europe and in the long term, the United States. On the other hand, if the Alawite Assad regime is overthrown in Syria, what follows will make the Libyan Afterparty in north Africa look like a juice party at a geek fraternity by comparison. The victorious rebels would make Syria into a terrorist training camp, exporting instability and violent attacks throughout the Middle East, but particularly against Israel and Europe. Syria would become the new Afghanistan, run by Wahhabi fanatics dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the assimilation of the West. When viewed from a purely utilitarian American perspective, a successful overthrow of the regime may in fact be worse, forcing the US to intervene militarily with boots on the ground and repeating the errors of the Iraqi occupation.

Neither situation is palatable from the American perspective, so the only option is to support both sides indirectly until they are thoroughly weakened to the point where they cannot threaten the United States or its allies. Turning Syria into a Vietnam-like quagmire for both Iran and al Qaeda is an opportunity that has fallen into Obama’s lap, which when combined with his terrible leadership skills, may be the best luck America has had in its foreign affairs since Mikhail Gorbachev became the premier of the Soviet Union.

So contrary to the hopes of some on the Left, the bombers of the Boston Marathon are not white tea party types like myself but Muslims from Chechnya. Dzhokar A. Tsarnaev, 19, and his brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, had been in the country for several years. One of the assumptions made by liberals about Islamists is that they misunderstand us, that if they only got to know us better (and if we stopped blowing them up in their homeland and supporting the evil Jews) they’d like us and wouldn’t want to harm us. Attacks like 9-11, the thwarted Time Square bombing, and the Fort Hood Shooting are in the eyes of liberals based on ignorance just as much as they are on misguided foreign policy.

This thinking has its roots in the writings of Erasmus, something that I covered here a few years back.

From the Machiavellian perspective, the struggle between Islamic terrorists and the Free World is a zero-sum game of winners and losers whereas Erasmus’s humanists view it as a game where everyone can win. Once the Islamic terrorists are educated to understand that America isn’t anti-Islamic, they won’t seek to destroy it. Terrorists and Americans can coexist in peace – all that’s necessary is a few apologies and a worldwide media campaign showing the terrorists how much we love Muslims.

Cases like the Tsarnaev brothers undermine the “they don’t understand us” argument originally put forward by Erasmus 500 years ago, as do the inconvenient facts that all of the 9-11 hijackers as well as the plotters including Osama bin Laden himself spent years studying in the United States and the West. These men are not ignorant, and to imply that they are shows an elitist and racist arrogance that liberals would abhor if they could see themselves from a perspective other than their own. A photo narrative by Johannes Hirn notes,

Tamerlan says he doesn’t drink or smoke anymore: “God said no alcohol.” A muslim, he says: “There are no values anymore,” and worries that “people can’t control themselves.”

Let’s consider that a moment. I don’t believe I am stuffing a straw man when I write that to a greater degree an American liberal believes the following:

1. Atheism is the sign of an enlightened mind.
2. All religions are the same, based on ignorance, and the enemies of knowledge.
3. Women are the equal of men and should be treated as such in all spheres both public and private.
4. Western culture is inferior to other cultures, or at best, equivalent.
5. Sexual freedom is the only expression of freedom that must be protected at all costs.

In the US there are no doubt several protestant denominations of Christianity that would agree with at least some of these propositions. The most liberal sect of Islam I know of is the Ismaili sect, and even that sect would disagree with all of the propositions. Do you think Tamarlan Tsarnaev believed in any of those propositions with the possible exception of western inferiority (or rather did, evidently blowing himself up before capture)?

My abhorrence of Islam isn’t based on fear or ignorance. I’ve read the Koran and more importantly, the Hadith, or interpretations of the Koran in the centuries following Muhammad’s death. I’ve lived in a Muslim country, eaten halal food and have celebrated Muslim holidays. I have studied Islam and its history and although do not consider myself an expert on either I know my way around the religion well enough so that I can confidently say that I know what I don’t know. How many liberals have done the same? A liberal looks at the Muslim community and blames American conservatives for Islamic extremism. I look at the Umma and wonder why, based on the teachings of Muhammad and the interpretations found in the Hadith, all Muslims aren’t Islamic extremists. Muslims have a pretty good idea of what American life and life in general in the West is like, and the truth is that a sizeable minority of them don’t like it.

These Muslims find the idea of a government without G-d just as abhorrent as liberals find a government with G-d. Islam makes it clear that all law derives ultimately from Allah through his prophet Muhammad, which is why the Hadith sprung up to handle legal questions that Muhammad himself didn’t address while alive. By this logic Western society and the Shi’a heretics who accept a limited separation between religion and state is heretical by its very existence, and lacking Allah’s support, weak and Evil. In Islam there is no freedom in the Western sense of the word; instead there is a freedom that comes through submission, a type which any pre-Enlightenment European, fundamentalist Christian married woman or perhaps any dedicated servant or slave could relate to, but a concept which would be completely alien to most raised in the post-Enlightenment West. What liberals refuse to understand is that the message of Islam, of complete submission to Allah, can be appealing on its own. The idea that a man like Osama bin Laden, born of wealth, educated in the finest schools in the West would choose a philosophy where women have few rights, homosexuality does not exist, and unbelievers are allowed to live only as future converts to Islam over the Leftist paradise of sexual and economic equality must rankle the liberal, if she would only allow herself to be rankled. I suppose it is possible. After all, Charles Krauthammer, David Horowitz and are ex-liberals as am I.

Charles Krauthammer once wrote Conservatives think Liberals are stupid, whereas Liberals think Conservatives are Evil. What’s ironic is that libertarians and their conservative allies feel towards Liberals the same way Liberals feel about Muslims, that they are ignorant and misguided, that if they just understood us better they’d like us. But unfortunately Liberals see us the way we see jihadists, as enemies meant to be crushed. How else to explain the vain hope by the Left that the bombers turned out to be white men from the Right? And how sad?

Because it seems to me the only thing the bombings at the Boston Marathon have provoked is anger.
Maybe we need a new word for such acts, furyism, because I’m not seeing any terror or fear, just pure white-hot anger.

Premier Li
Thanks for taking my call so early in your morning. I hope Hong forgives me for dragging you out of bed, but I felt it necessary given the circumstances.

As you know our two nations have had our difficulties over the years. I understand that there is a lot of history between us, and I don’t expect bygones to be forgotten on your side any time soon. But the recent history of our two nations should be cause for optimism. I would like to think that you see things have improved between our two great nations since I took office. I have personally worked very hard to give your nation the space it needs to take its place as a true world power. I am not worried that doing so weakens my country, and I have done my best to marginalize those who do. I see a great future between our two countries based on shared responses to common problems such as environmental degradation, rising income inequality and the common prosperity that our two nations can share by working closely together.

But I must speak clearly and forthrightly about the North Korean situation. Here in America we have a saying coined by former Secretary of State Colin Powell called the Pottery Barn Rule. Pottery Barn is a shop common at indoor shopping malls that sells decorative glass and pottery items for around the house, much of which I might add come from factories in your country. If a customer mishandles an item in the store and breaks it, the store has a rule that he or she must buy it. In short, the Pottery Barn rule is if you break it you’ve bought it. Secretary of State Powell spoke in reference to US intervention in Iraq, but I believe the pottery barn rule applies equally to North Korea.

Mr. Premier, make no mistake that everyone knows China owns North Korea. Every American president since Truman understands this, as does every Russian president and Japanese prime minister. We might play along with the notion that North Korea is an independent state in public, but we learned our lesson who owns what there when the Chinese Red Army spilled over the Yalu River some 60 years ago. Some may advise you that our goal is to regain what we lost on the battlefield back then, that we seek a united Korea firmly allied to the United States. Let me reassure you that nothing is further from the truth. I know that the South Koreans have told you the same thing they’ve told us – that they do not wish to do what Germany did in the 1990’s when it reunified. It has taken the Germans over two decades to make reunification work, and it still has a way to go before the living standards are equitable on both sides of the former Berlin Wall. The South Koreans see the disparities between the living standards between North and South as even greater than that between East and West Germany, and know that reunification would bankrupt them and possibly wreck their economy for generations. The South Koreans simply do not want reunification in the foreseeable future, and would much prefer to see North Korea follow your nation’s path to prosperity. Their argument against reunification seems very sensible to me and I see no reason not to believe them.

For decades the North has played a game in which it has threatened my nation and its allies in exchange for this or that. This game was played masterfully by Kim Jung Il, allowing him to acquire nuclear weapons while under UN sanctions.  But Kim Jung Un is not his father. I am very concerned that the young Un truly believes the propaganda dished out to his people by the State, and trusts the views of his advisers who do not understand my position. We have given North Korea as much as we possibly could under my administration, and I simply do not have anything left to give.

I must make this clear: in the event North Korea attacks the United States or its allies, I will personally hold you and your nation accountable. Premier Li, I am a peacemaker as proven by my Nobel Prize. Unlike my immediate predecessor I don’t start wars, I end them. Although I have no interest in a war between our two great nations, an attack by Kim Jung Un will leave me with no choice but to retaliate against China. This will not be a battle of proxies, but one directly between the United States and China. Such a war would be calamitous for our countries. It would result in thousands of deaths on both sides, and send the entire world into distress. And over what? The deluded scion of a hermit kingdom?

Following the Pottery Barn Rule, North Korea is broken and you own it. Therefore you must fix the situation in a manner that you see fit but one that calms the region. It is up to you to handle the North Koreans. There is nothing more that I can do on my side to prevent war. If Kim attacks, I must respond and in a way that you will likely not approve of.

这是谁？

Aw crap. The translator is not working? G-d D*** it! Denis! Get Brin on the line 2 NOW, and while you’re at it give Eric a call and tell him Google is his b***h.

Ranked from most likely to least likely:

1. NK continues saber rattling during month of wargames before regime stands down, claiming some imagined diplomatic victory.
2. NK attacks a SK ship or shells islands as it did in 2011. US pulls out all stops to prevent SK from escalating.
3. NK attacks a Japanese target using conventional weaponry.
4. China responds to “call for assistance” by NK leader Kim Jung Un, Chinese forces in NK calm.
5. NK attacks the Japanese using nukes.
6. NK invades SK.
7. Black Swan.

Update: 1 more likely given US fear of upsetting the young Un. “We accused the North Koreans of amping things up, now we are worried we did the same thing,” one Defense Department official said.

Today making good on its threats the North Koreans cancelled the 1953 armistice ending the Korean war. It has also threatened a nuclear attack against the United States.

Despite the strong language, analysts say North Korea is years away from having the technology necessary to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile and aim it accurately at a target.
And, analysts say, North Korea is unlikely to seek a direct military conflict with the United States, preferring instead to try to gain traction through threats and the buildup of its military deterrent.

What if the analysts are wrong?

A 2006 article in the Asia Times states North Korea has some of the most developed missile systems in the world. According to a 2009 report by the International Crisis Group, North Korea has 6-12 nuclear weapons. Experts remain divided as to whether North Korea has the capability of weaponizing these nuclear warheads, or fitting them to a missile. This is a nice way of saying 50% of experts believe the North has this capability.

The truth is the Hermit Kingdom is living up to its moniker and our intelligence there isn’t very good. The Chinese have the best intelligence, but they aren’t willing to share it with us. But Chinese support of new sanctions says a lot. If the Chinese know the North is bluffing again, they would have resisted additional UN pressure because a belligerent North suits their foreign policy interests. If they know that North Korea has both the weapons and the means to deliver them and is considering attacking the US and its allies, supporting sanctions would be the final act in the hopes of leashing the regime before sending in Chinese troops and taking the country over. By supporting the sanctions China may be giving a sign that the regime is serious, and the danger it presents is real.

There are three likely targets if North Korea used a nuke. The first is Seoul, South Korea. Being only 60 km from the border with the North attacking this city would be the easiest. It is well within range of its missiles, and the short flight time and low trajectory would make shooting down the missile more difficult. The downside of such an attack is that it would pretty much guarantee a conventional invasion from the South as well as invite a retaliatory response from the US. In such a case it’s unlikely the Chinese would come to the aid of the North Koreans, and the North Koreans probably know that. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of South Koreans also would not go down well in the North either, and would shock the regime internally increasing the likelihood of an internal coup, possibly one backed by Chinese intelligence and special forces units.

The North Korean regime would really like to hurt the United States. An attack on the US would contain the element of surprise, and is ideologically the best target. But it’s also the hardest to hit. The continental US is over 9000 km away, meaning the North would have to rely upon its longest range missile to fly in a suborbital trajectory, providing ample time for the US to determine its trajectory and likely target and to employ its anti-missile defense systems. It has tested such a missile twice, and neither test was a complete success as far as our intelligence has learned, so not only would the missile have to survive US countermeasures, it would also have to avoid falling apart.

If the North Koreans are rational even in their apparent craziness, the only target is Japan – likely a sprawling metropolis such as the Kanto containing Tokyo and Yokohama or the Kansai area where Nara, Kobe, Kyoto and Osaka sit. These areas would not require precision guidance systems beyond current North Korean capabilities and fall well within range of its Taepodong 1 missile that North Korea fired over Japan in 1998. An attack on Japan would temper the response by both China and South Korea: China would be hard pressed to punish the regime for attacking a foe China itself is threatening war against over the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands, and both North and South Koreas hold deep historical animosities towards Japan for its treatment as a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945.

If Japan was nuked by North Korea it cannot retaliate. It lacks nuclear weapons and its conventional forces do not have the capability for an invasion. Japan would therefore have to rely upon the United States. Would the US launch a nuclear attack against North Korea on Japan’s behalf? It’s not a given, and such uncertainty increases the risk of an attack on Japan.

How would the United States respond, and more importantly, how do the North Koreans believe the United States would respond? Unfortunately it’s impossible to know what the decisionmakers in the regime are thinking about the Obama administration, but monolithic regimes tend to see the world much differently than those living and working in Democracies. The arguments and contrasting opinions within a Democratic government tend to be ignored by those living under democracy or discounted as “coalition building” or “policy formulation.” A North Korean general, having never lived under such a regime and seen any dissenting opinions end in front of a firing squad, cannot understand how such behavior could present anything but the inherent weakness of Democratic regime. Like a large stone riven with cracks and fissures, a single, solid blow can reduce it to a pile of gravel. It wouldn’t be the first time an authoritarian regime misunderstood the United States; Japan made the same mistake at Pearl Harbor, believing a single decisive strike that destroyed the Pacific fleet would fracture the will of Americans and force it out of the Pacific. While we in the United States have been taught the lesson of History that this was a grave miscalculation by the Japanese and the attack united Americans behind the war effort, a North Korean general likely sees the history of World War 2 very differently.

It is the job the State Department to translate these cultural differences that could encourage North Korean bellicosity into ideas and language that the North Korean leadership can understand. The way to do that is to provide a simple, clear and consistent message to the North Koreans: any attack on South Korea, Japan or the United States will mean the end of the North Korean regime. Period. Have the North Koreans gotten that message?

Perceptions are reality in diplomacy and the perception in East Asia is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe received a cool reception in Washington DC last month by an administration displeased with Abe’s hawkish behavior towards China. Such perception could contribute to a belief in North Korea that an attack against Japan would not trigger immediate retaliation by the United States, and without retaliation North Korea has nothing to lose by attacking Japan. The US held back the South Koreans from retaliating for North Korea shelling of Yeonpyeong Island near the border, and a year earlier the loss of the South Korean warship Cheonan killing 46 crewmen. Such patience shows as weakness to an authoritarian regime and encourages it to undertake more extreme action.

If Japan were struck with a nuclear weapon, would the US retaliate on its behalf? What if China said doing so would result in war between the US and China? Would President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel risk a wider war over the deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese? Retaliation would kill hundreds of thousands of North Korean civilians, people who are too weak from starvation to overthrow their dictator and innocent of his crimes. Would the Obama Administration countenance such a retaliatory attack knowing that even more would suffer needlessly? To a North Korean general, it is quite possible that the regime could indeed get away with it and the Obama administration would not retaliate for fear of igniting a wider war with China or killing innocent civilians.

A successful attack on Japan would boost North Korean credibility in China. It would undermine the arguments voiced recently within China that North Korea was more of a liability than asset to China. It would also force the United States to take its threats seriously, something that decades of making them without action have taught otherwise. Internally it would also raise the popularity of those who backed such aggressive action at the expense of those who supported more of an accommodation with the West. And the pain felt by Japan would also be felt in South Korea, making its neighbors much more antagonistic towards US imperialism in the region. It may be easy for us to see the exact opposite happening, but we have to place ourselves in the ill-fitting shoes of the North Korean general to understand the world from his perspective, and such a perspective would likely include a bold military gesture that would leave America and its allies reeling.

It is difficult for anyone in the West who has paid attention to the bombast coming out of Pyongyang for decades to take recent threats seriously. Like Aesop’s Fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” Pyongyang has cried “wolf!” so many times that ignoring the new threats seem the only sensible move. But it’s worth remembering that in the fable in the end a wolf does appear.

The household is in grief over the death of our alpha dog, a chihuahua we rescued almost six years ago. He was old and epileptic when we found him, but he packed a lot of personality in that little body of his. He was loyal to everyone but like most chi’s he devoted most of his time to a single individual, and for us that was the Wife, usually sleeping behind behind her knees. He was extremely active and playful, running with us as we walked the upper field in the cold air yesterday evening. He was fearless, and crept off into the night while we weren’t looking after dinner, traveling an eighth of a mile for reasons unknown in the cold and dark to the road where he was hit by a car. I found him laying beside the road, alive but severely injured. A hair-raising drive to the emergency vet was for naught, and we had to put him to sleep.

2012 was a year of brutality. It started for us with the execution style slaying of a man nearby, followed by the killing of a rescued dog that had somehow had slipped our protection and was leapt upon by some of my upper-ranking females and died at the vet. The Wife’s sister was found dead in a Las Vegas parking lot. And now this. Friends have also suffered similar tragedies this year with pets and loved ones. Then there’s the local tragedy where a woman moved into a home and ran a portable generator in the house, killing her two children and almost dying herself. Expanding outward there is Sandy Hook of course and Aurora, and abroad the horrors of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and Syria. The Buddha taught that Life means suffering, and for some reason 2012 demanded more suffering both great and small than most years. I am amazed, stunned, horrified, disappointed and disgusted with the world, and I only wish the New Age Doomers had been right about the Apocalypse last week.

With my last breath of the year I am left speechless except to say, “2012: F*** You.”

I am a proud parent and devoted husband. I rescue animals – dogs, cats and even chickens. Although I am not a vegan I sympathize with those who are because it’s hard to deny that meat involves murder. I respect life so I am against abortion but do not believe the Law should be used to prevent it making me both pro-life and pro-choice. I have no problem with gay marriage and have been blessed in my life with friends some of whom are gay.  I founded this journal because I needed to speak out against the slaughter of innocents, the men and women of all races and economic backgrounds  that died on Tuesday September 11, 2001. The events in Newtown, Aurora, and other massacres over the years as well as the thousands killed everyday around the world in the name of G-d sicken me.

I am also a member of the NRA. Now some people want to kill me because I own guns and believe that self-protection is a human right.

All I can say is one word:

Try.

A friend sent me a link to this story about a drone operator killing a child on one of his missions and having trouble coming to terms with his actions. He wanted to know my reaction, and this is what I wrote back.

There’s nothing here that hasn’t been felt by bomber pilots over the past 80 years. In the 1940s allied bombers killed millions of Japanese and German civilians. They were viewed as unavoidable casualties in a war against regimes that chose to put them in harms way, not unlike the way Hezbollah and other terror organizations use civilians as human shields today. In 1945 while fighting in the Philippines my own father shot and killed a 12 year old Filipino boy who had been forced to carry ammunition for the Japanese. He had no choice because he knew that if the Japanese got the ammo the boy was carrying his friends would be finding that ammunition in their own bodies. It sickened him before, during and afterward. At the time he had 2 kids himself but he pulled the trigger because the enemy gave him no choice. It turns out it was a regular policy of the Japanese to use civilians as slaves whenever possible because they knew American soldiers would hesitate firing on them. They also baked it into their plans of homeland defense. While teaching in Japan I met people who had seen kids taught to carry backpacks and run towards pictures of Cary Grant and other western film stars to overcome their innate fear of the foreign face. The idea was that they would be used as suicide bombers, carrying backpacks full of explosives, but the kids were scared to death of foreigners. That’s Pure Evil if you ask me.

Today we don’t carpet bomb anymore. Instead we use precision to kill our enemies, and far fewer civilians die today than would otherwise. I personally take issue with the statement that our foreign policy “regularly murders innocents overseas,” as if the point of our actions is to kill civilians. I’ve seen the same crap levied against the Israelis by the Leftists and Libertarians, who then conveniently justify the terror attacks by jihadis against civilians or the unguided missiles they fire into Israel. So you have one side trying to kill civilians and the other side doing its best to minimize civilian casualties yet some people morally equate both as the same. I guess that’s what happens when you’ve lost your own moral bearings in life. If the US or Israeli governments wanted to kill civilians, they could kill millions at a time. But they don’t.

I usually don’t waste my time arguing with people who believe this stuff because honestly their bearings are so off I don’t see the point. I would ask though, “What would you have us do? Should we carpet bomb the village, send in Seal Team 6, or simply let the terrorists go?” We tried that last option in 1998 when Clinton fired a few cruise missiles into Afghanistan after a dozen Americans and hundreds of innocent Africans died in the embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and what happened? 9-11. Seal Team 6 puts more American lives in jeopardy without decreasing the likelihood of casualties. So what’s left? Sending in the B-52s?

Leftists and Isolationists cannot accept that we are in an existential war with radical Islam. The Lefties believe we deserve retribution for our treatment of the Indians, the Soviets, the Vietnamese and even America’s raping of the planet (immediately after 9-11 I saw an environmental group claim the attack was due to just that). They want us to suffer the way some Calvinists believe we must to atone for our sins; substitute “the planet” or “the environment” for God and there’s not much differences between two. Libertarians think we can exit the world’s stage and not suffer the consequences. They cannot accept it’s not 1492 anymore. Hell even Jefferson realized we couldn’t avoid interacting with the world when the Barbary Pirates raided American ships and sold American sailors into slavery in the early 1800s. He ended up shelling Tripoli, and no doubt killed many more civilians than this drone pilot did.

When my father shot the 12 year old he knew that if he didn’t the ammunition he carried would kill others. By killing he saved lives. Yeah, it’s difficult for some to believe but killing can save lives (think about the lives saved had someone put a bullet into Lanza’s brains before he stepped into that school.) Does this drone pilot consider the lives he may be saving by taking out the jihadist along with the child? It’s not clear because the way the story is written it appears as if he’s firing on an empty hut. From my understanding of the military, blowing up empty huts isn’t really the point of our engagement in Afghanistan. The jihadis tend to kill more Muslims than infidel, so it’s likely that he’s saving other children’s lives in the area. It’s also possible that the jihadi is plotting innocents outside of Afghanistan. He might feel better if he knew that by killing that child he saved other lives, but he doesn’t seem to consider that.

Oh, and I also find it a hoot that the German media is moralizing about this (the story appears in Der Speigel). Sorry but I haven’t forgotten what happened in the recent past there, and call me a bigot but I don’t think the Germans have earned the right to moralize about anything just yet. Get back to me in a few hundred years.

In the final weeks before the election I’ve been thinking long and hard about what the outcome could mean for the future of my country. Regardless of who wins, he will face a China that is bullying its neighbors into American arms, a Middle East that has become more radicalized not less, an Iranian nuke or a war started by Israel or the United States but blamed on the Great Satan regardless of which flag is painted on the bunker busters. The November winner will face a crumbling Europe, a soaring American debt that has become so big no one knows how to tame it, and a catatonic domestic economy. American education spends more than any nation in the world on its students yet they learn less. The weight of the pensions of Baby Boomers threatens to crush public spending, turning cities and states into mob enforcers who shake down the working, relatively poor young and pass the cash to the retiring relatively wealthy elderly.

I will leave the economic issues aside for the moment to focus on foreign policy. In my view with the exception of China, Obama has made all of these problems worse. But looking at these issues over the long-term, say through the remainder of this decade, would an Obama loss be really a victory for those of us who have opposed him every step of his way to the office he now holds?

China stands as perhaps the only issue I agree with the administration on. I’ve studied China and East Asia for decades, and recognize that handling a rising superpower is never easy, especially one with a 4,500 year history and cursed by a long, often twisted, memory. The Obama administration has attempted to encourage the rise of a peaceful, prosperous China that would take its place as an equal partner in the Pacific, but at the same time has worked to support our allies such as Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. It is an art more than a science, and while mistakes have been made by the Obama administration, they are to be expected in such a long-term important endeavor. The Chinese cannot understand why the United States would welcome a peaceful, prosperous and powerful China that is integrated with the rest of the world, and instead sees every American move through paranoid eyes and zero-sum calculations. We can’t do much to change this view of American policy in the Pacific, except by doing what this administration has done, setting policies that reassure our allies while encouraging the Chinese to play nice with others in the Pacific’s playground.

Unfortunately the tact, intelligence and real-politic shown by the Obama administration towards China has not been manifested anywhere else in the world. In the same way the reality of Iraq showed the folly of the neocon dream, the murder of our diplomat in Libya and the virulent anti-American nature of the “Arab Spring” has put paid to the dreams of Obama and his liberal eggheads. Obama believed that he alone could solve the Middle East problem with a grand speech in Cairo and apologies and bows to Arab leaders. He thought he could strong-arm Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, and that the Muslim world would see the wisdom of the Nobel committee’s awarding him his Peace Prize. He believed that once free from Iraq, he would be able to exit Afghanistan gracefully without fear of the Taliban taking it over and turning back the clock to 2000.

Nearly four years later America is even more hated than it was under the Bush administration. Iraq is becoming a satellite of Iran, allowing its Shiite neighbor unrestricted flights over its territory to resupply the Assad regime. Pakistan has degenerated into a pit of vipers that protected a man personally responsible for more American deaths than anyone since Ho Chi Minh and allowed Chinese to test a piece of top secret American gear left behind after its forces aired out his skull. Vast swathes of North Africa have been lost to al-Qaeda affiliated radicals including half of its most populous nation, Nigeria. Women are being secreted behind closed doors in Cairo and Tunis, as Egyptians copts are raped and terrorized out of their homes, putting an end to communities that date almost to the time of Christ. Liberals laughed when a man threw shoes at George W. Bush; they are oddly silent as they see Obama burned in effigy by crowds throughout the Middle East. Americans once were able to visit the Pyramids and Valley of the Kings; today members of the Egyptian government call for the destruction of the Pyramids and the State Dept warns Americans to avoid Egypt.

Hope and change.

The murder of the Libyan ambassador proves the Obama administration has failed to learn the lessons of 9-11. The average rapper has better security in Los Angeles than the Libyan ambassador. Threats against American interests there were ignored just as Bin Laden’s declaration of war against the US was in 1998. Many on the right including myself have given a pass to the Clinton administration for failing to imagine the attacks of 9-11 and stop them; today the Obama administration has no such excuses.

And speaking of silence, where is Code Pink, Cindy Sheehan and the other anti-war Left? Where are the anti-war drums that sounded for every dead Muslim civilian or American soldier arriving at Dover Air Force base in Delaware in the middle of the night? Where is the anger, the spiteful commentary of lost wars, the Vietnam comparisons that flowed thick through every mainstream news outlet during the Bush administration? As Walter Russell Mead notes, “If George W. Bush were president now, and had ordered the surge and was responsible for the strategic decisions taken and not taken in Afghanistan over the last four years, the mainstream press would be rubbing our noses in his miserable failures and inexcusable blunders 24/7. The New York Times and the Washington Post would be treating us to pictures of every fallen soldier. The PBS Newshour would feature nightly post-mortems on “America’s failed strategies in the Afghan War” and every arm-chair strategist in America would be filling the op-ed pages with the brilliant 20/20 hindsight ideas that our pathetic, clueless, failed president was too dumb and too cocky to have had.”

After his election I feared that Obama would weaken the position of the United States in the world. I envisioned Obama to be a pacifist who would gut our military, anger our friends and embolden our enemies. I was wrong about Obama’s pacifism; he may be a pacifist at heart but he has shown a willingness to kill America’s enemies that would make Dick Cheney offer him a high-five. Unfortunately he has succeeded in doing what I feared. Our alliances with our closest friends Australia, Canada and Great Britain are ignored. Our long-standing friendship with Israel rebuffed. A deep relationship with Egypt lost. Meanwhile Iran, North Korea and the socialist states in South America continue on as before, confident that the US lacks the resources to challenge them. As Machiavelli wrote “if one cannot be both, it is better to be feared than loved.” Obama should play less golf and read more because he has failed to do either.

The only solace I can take is that the Obama administration has shown a willingness to kill our enemies. Bin Laden is crab food, and drone strikes and special operations continue worldwide. The administration avoids calling it by its name, but the Global War on Terrorism continues using the same methods and tactics that the Bush administration developed and supported. What Obama has not done is use his speech giving abilities to provide an explanation to the American people why the war continues, and show that he and his administration understand the existential threat posed by radical Islam. It is a shame because it is possible that a liberal like Obama could do more to protect and advance freedom in the world for the same reason that a cold warrior like President Nixon could open up to China: his base trusts him.

And this is what concerns me about a Romney victory. If Romney wins I would expect that the Democrats would stoke the flames of their anti-war brothers at a critical time in our history. War is Not the Answer bumperstickers would sprout on foreign cars. Colleges would be wracked by anti-war protests. We need a coherent strategy explained to the American people while continuing the fight against terrorists around the world. There is the potential for Obama to do that, and for his allies to keep their anti-war instincts at bay. Likewise I suppose it’s possible that Obama, having achieved his goal of reelection would simply allow his own pacifist instincts to rule the day, putting American in even more danger. But I would hope that four years of at least occasional Angry Birds free Intelligence Briefings would have convinced Obama the threat to our nation is real.

So it is possible that the best outcome is an Obama victory for those of us who believe in the primacy of the war against radical Islam. The continued media silence at dead terrorists may be worth the price of four more years of Obama. This of course will not change my vote in November, but it has given me something to think about.

US Identifies Anti-Muslim Filmmaker

not

US Identifies Murderers of Diplomats and Instigators of Embassy Attacks.

Islamic radicals storming an American embassy. A feckless, out-of-touch liberal in the White House. A crumbling economy.

At least in 1979 the music was better. Oh, if you live in a country bordering on Russia you might want to pack your bags.

The savages are at it again.

To my friends overseas…

Stay frosty.

I’m often amazed at how ignorant journalists are of history. I get frustrated when one shows his or her ignorance for a complex issue, falling back on conventional wisdom instead of historical truth to provide the background for a story. Case in point is this New York Times piece. I’m not sure how old the writer is, but he should Google “1979” and “Iranian Revolution.”

In late 1978 and early 1979 the Shah had ceded power to Prime Minister Shapour Bakhtiar, a member of the liberal opposition. Bakhtiar hoped to share power with the Ayatollah Khomeini and allowed the Ayatollah to return to Iran from exile. Khomeini arrived in Teheran to a crowd of millions and promised to “kick their (liberal regime’s) teeth in.” He appointed his own government and drained support away from the liberal opposition movement. Iran then sought to export its Islamic revolution throughout the Middle East, and spread terrorism around the world.

“I would say people should not be too alarmed by the anti-American rhetoric,” said Stephen McInerney, executive director of the Project on Middle East Democracy, based in Washington. The end last year of the Mubarak rule in Egypt, he said, “is an important step in combating terrorism in the region and undermining its appeal.” “People can freely vent their frustrations and go to the polls to vote,” he added.

By this logic Bakhtiar should have succeeded in Iran, and the Palestinian Authority would still be running Gaza. The problem with this thinking is that it assumes the causes of terrorism are due to the lack of democracy and a say in a people’s own governance. This is looking at Islamic terrorism through the lens of leftist and nationalist terrorism as conducted by guerrilla movements such as the IRA, Red Army, and FARC. Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with people’s frustration of not being in control of their own destiny. If it did they wouldn’t replace secular dictators with religious dictators as the Iranians, Lebanese Shi’a, and Palestinians in Gaza have, and Iran wouldn’t be sponsoring Hezballah, Islamic Jihad and a dozen other Israeli and American-killing outfits.

Islam is not a nationalist movement, it is a religious one. While executive directors of projects and their New York Times’ interviewers might see the world as nation states whose citizens dream of controlling them, a Muslim sees the community of believers (umma) and non-believers. Earthly power derives from God, and only those He has appointed are able to lead. It’s a simple concept that is even baked into the meaning of the term “Islam.” It means “submission” to God’s will, and democracy where people lead themselves is as heretical to Islam as Scientology is to Roman Catholicism. New York Times reporters and their think-tank sources don’t get that because they haven’t studied Islam except through the narrow lens of their own political and philosophical assumptions.

They will be shocked when Egypt follows in the footsteps of Iran and travel to visit the Valley of the Kings and the Great Pyramids become a distant memory for American passport holders just as trips to Teheran and Qom are to older American Asia-hands. Already the calls have begun for the destruction of the Pyramids, just as the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist statues in Afghanistan and Egypt’s first Muslim rulers destroyed the Great Library in Alexandria.

Throwing Snowballs at the Arab Spring

In 2002 the Turkish people elected an Islamist party to power, Justice and Development Party. In 2006 Palestinians held elections and Hamas won. In 2008 Pakistani Islamists drove Pervez Musharraf out of power. The Arab Spring of 2011 has seen Tunisia conduct its first free and fair election in decades, and the winner is the Islamist party. Just this month Islamists have stormed a university for enacting a veil ban on campus and planned an attack on a TV station after attacking a theater in July for screening a film about secularism. The Muslim Brotherhood is expected to win Egypt’s November 2011’s elections, the first since deposing Hosni Mubarak. And just over the weekend of October 22, 2011, Iraq kicked out all US troops from the country, Afghan president Hamid Karzai promised Pakistan that Afghanistan would side with Pakistan in any armed conflict between that nation and the United States, and Mustafa Abdul-Jalil, the chairman of the National Transitional Council and de fact president of the new Libya, declared Sharia is the basis of law in Libya and immediately lifted the ban on polygamy to prove it.

Neocons supporting the liberation of Iraq believed that people would always choose freedom when given the choice between freedom and dictatorship. All year people on both sides of the political divide have spoken hopefully about the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the Middle East, expecting the Egyptians and Libyans to embrace liberty after dropping their shackles of tyranny. This belief is rooted in the Enlightenment which assumed Man was rational, and that when presented with the choice would always choose freedom over tyranny. The Founding Fathers of the American republic wrote at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Are these inalienable rights always self-evident? How do we explain the statement “I am the enemy of democracy,” by Egyptian Salafist leader and tailor Hesham al Ashry? Al Ashry knows how to make a man look his best yet is blind to the value of liberty?

We live with the conceit that everyone in the world is like us, they just have different colored skin, wear different dress, pray differently, and speak different languages. It is a fanciful notion based on our superficial knowledge of the world. Some people may be like us, if by “us” you mean Americans who value liberty. Canadians are like us, as are Australians, Brits, Germans, and anyone who traces their intellectual foundation to the Enlightenment philosophers, particularly the ideas of Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Everyone else, however is different. Their values aren’t the same as ours, and some even prefer it that way. Think everybody loves their children like you do? Ask a Palestinian in Gaza how they feel about their son or daughter strapping on a suicide bomb vest. Osama Bin Laden expressed a common belief among Islamists that they would eventually defeat the West because the West embraced life while they chose death. It wasn’t for lack of education that he and elites of the Jihadist groups believe this. Many have been educated in the West and understand our values; they just don’t accept them. It doesn’t matter whether liberty and freedom are self-evident to men who believe that God’s will requires submission. In fact in their view these values are heresy since they were accepted by the Koran nor by the Ideal Man, Mohammed.

After being defeated in World War 2 the Japanese people had no tradition that included Enlightenment ideals like freedom and liberty, but instead of recognizing Japanese culture as superior to Western culture in some ways equal in all the rest, the leaders of the occupation forced freedom and liberty onto the population. The Japanese took the opportunity and immediately ran with it, forming trade unions and political parties that were immediately infiltrated by Communist groups supported by the KGB. By 1948 trade unionists were striking and rioting against the occupation authorities as Europeans were doing in central Europe. The Truman administration could have said “We have to listen to the will of the Japanese people,” and allowed the protests to undermine the occupation. Instead the Americans colluded with the Japanese government to ban the trade unions, jail the unionists and enact parliamentary rules that prevented the communist party from winning seats in the Diet. Within three years the Japanese people had gone from tyranny, to liberty, and were on the verge of returning to tyranny albeit of a new type, forcing authorities to use undemocratic means to protect the nascent democracy. The Japanese were given liberty, just within limits. Eventually even the communists were allowed back into the Diet but only after the Liberal Democratic Party had established itself as most powerful party in the country.

So if liberty wasn’t self-evident to the Japanese after the War, why do we expect it to be to the Palestinians in Gaza, the Iraqis in Iraq or the Libyans in Libya? We can’t expect people to be liberated by our actions or through our support and expect them to suddenly begin to respect the rights of women when their culture lacks such a tradition. Neocons seem to think that such a right is self-evident, while liberals blinded by political correctness might not even believe that any culture could lack such a basic, fundamental human right. They will claim Islamic law does grant rights to women, yet women are not equal with men according to the Koran nor under Sharia law. And religious freedom or equal rights for minorities? Ask an Egyptian Copt.

The US State Department has followed a program of cultural non-interference and has gone from promoting universal human values to exposing others to “American values” and hoping that the values will speak for themselves and that other will adopt them on their own merit. This cultural equivalence has spread to the US military which has been tasked with nation-building but without the replacement of core values that undermine its mission. How successful has the anti-corruption effort been in Afghanistan, where corruption is as endemic to Pashtun culture as the chain-of-command is in US military culture? How can you expect to develop a professional military, police or civil service when everyone believes that power gives one a license to steal? The only way to stop corruption is to teach that it is wrong, but that requires a moral judgement that could be interpreted as cultural imperialism, so nothing is done. We just teach and hope that the locals will see the benefits of clean government – that these benefits are self-evident.

It’s a hell of a way to run foreign policy, and it wouldn’t make sense to our fathers and grandfathers who fought in Japan or Germany. We made it clear with our victory over those nations that their values were abhorrent, and we had the confidence in our own values to occupy these countries and force our values upon them. Today we show none of that confidence; instead we ring our hands and hope for the best but the best that happens is that the governments are no longer threats to us or their neighbors even as their people are worse off than before.

The American Left, drowning in a morass of moral equivalence, would bristle at these suggestions, but there are some absolutes in its philosophies; it just hasn’t figured out how to respond to them. Back to the Japanese. Whaling is has been embedded in its culture for at least a thousand years. Immediately after the War, the occupation authorities struggled with feeding the Japanese people and specifically, with providing them with enough protein. So the authorities turned to whaling, and whale meat was a common dish served to school children until the early 1960s. Since then whale meat consumption has been in decline, although the Japanese government has been continually pushed by the domestic whaling industry to expand the practice. The cultural tradition of Whaling in Japan hasn’t stopped the Left from forcing its own value that whaling is bad on the Japanese. Is the protection of whales a universal value? If not then what is the Sea Shepherd doing in the ocean around Antarctica? Are the Left cultural imperialists? And if so, is it such a bad thing if imperialism means spreading freedom, women’s rights, gay rights, religious tolerance and respect for minorities around the planet?

The West needs to shake off the moral relativism that leads to the tolerance of human rights abuses around the planet. Freedom, liberty, equality – all these values of the Enlightenment shouldn’t be limited to those of us in the West; they are universals that apply to everyone. If we are willing to spend our money and risk our lives to help others, we should be just as willing to impose our values on them. Yes, impose; they shouldn’t have a choice when it comes to female circumcision, the separation of religion from politics, killing homosexuals, allowing slavery or persecuting Christians and Jews no matter what holy book says it’s okay.

We in the West must decide whether these values are indeed universal. If we decide that they are, then we must act when people in other societies disrespect them. Either women are equal, or they are not. Either religious freedom applies in Riyadh Saudi Arabia as it does in Cairo, Illinois, or it’s not a universal and the Enlightenment philosophers were wrong.

Simply stated the choice is between personal liberty versus submission to God. This choice reverberates throughout our society and the West’s relations with Islam, presenting it with an unsolvable dilemma laying at the core of its relations with Islam, whether the Islamic nations in the Middle East, Africa and Asia or the integration of Muslims within Western society.