Tag: war

Doubling down

Nicolas Kristof has learned absolutely nothing from the reaction of Boko Haram:

Women’s rights advocates in Nigeria noisily demanded action, and social media mavens around the world spread word on Twitter, Facebook and online petitions — and a movement grew.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag, started on Twitter by a Nigerian lawyer, has now been shared more than one million times. A Nigerian started a petition on Change.org, calling for more efforts to find the girls, and more than 450,000 people around the world have signed it.

Nigerian women embarrassed the government by announcing that they would strip off their clothes and march naked into the Sambisa forest to confront the militants and recover the girls….

All of us can respond more directly. Boko Haram, whose name means roughly “Western education is a sin,” is keeping women and girls marginalized; conversely, we can help educate and empower women. Ultimately, the greatest threat to extremism isn’t a drone overhead but a girl with a book.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday, and, by all means, let’s use it to celebrate the moms in our lives with flowers and brunches. But let’s also use the occasion to honor the girls still missing in Nigeria.

One way is a donation to support girls going to school around Africa through the Campaign for Female Education, Camfed.org; a $40 gift pays for a girl’s school uniform.

Kristof is acting as if the young women are not legitimate military targets. But that is the entire point. He, and many others like him, have made them legitimate military targets by intentionally turning them into weapons in a cultural war. And he had better pray that Boko Haram does not follow al Qaeda’s lead in bringing the West’s cultural war on the South and East back to the West.

At Virginia Tech, one mentally disturbed immigrant managed to kill 33 college students. A small team of Boko Haram activists could probably manage to kill at least five times that number should they target an American university. And the latest news out of Nigeria makes it clear that they are at least one step ahead of the likes of Kristof et al.

Islamist insurgents have killed hundreds in a town in Nigeria’s northeast this week, the area’s senator, a resident and the Nigerian news media reported on Wednesday, as more than 200 schoolgirls abducted by the militants, known as Boko Haram, remained missing.

The latest attack, on Monday, followed a classic Boko Haram pattern: Dozens of militants wearing fatigues and wielding AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenade launchers descended on the town of Gamboru Ngala, chanting “Allahu akbar,” firing indiscriminately and torching houses. When it was over, at least 336 people had been killed and hundreds of houses and cars had been set on fire, said Waziri Hassan, who lives there, and Senator Ahmed Zanna….

Gamboru, a town of perhaps 3,000 people, “is now burned into ashes,” Mr. Hassan said. “I saw it with my own eyes, 171 dead bodies, scattered around.” At least 18 police officers were killed, but Mr. Zanna said there were no military forces in the town because all had been drafted in the search for the schoolgirls.

Perhaps the Nigerian government actually knew what it was doing when it didn’t drop everything to engage in a fruitless search for the young women, who may not even be inside the country’s borders anyhow. Regardless, in the end, there can only ever be one result between those who “fight” by public posturing and those who fight by taking arms.

UPDATE: The US military cannot get involved as it is prohibited by law from collaboration with Nigerian security forces.

Perhaps a ribbon is in order

Strangely enough, all the Senatorial tears and Nicolas Kristof columns don’t appear to have convinced Boko Haram to stop targeting girls:

Suspected Boko Haram gunmen kidnapped eight girls from a village near one of the Islamists’ strongholds in northeastern Nigeria overnight, police and residents said on Tuesday. The abduction of the girls, aged 12 to 15, followed the kidnapping of more than 200 other schoolgirls by the militant group last month, whom it has threatened to sell into slavery.

Lazarus Musa, a resident of the village of Warabe, told Reuters that armed men had opened fire during the raid.

“They were many, and all of them carried guns. They came in two vehicles painted in army color. They started shooting in our village,” Musa said by telephone from the village in the hilly Gwoza area, Boko Haram’s main base.

A police source, who asked not to be identified, said the girls were taken away on trucks, along with looted livestock and food.

This can only mean one thing: a ribbon campaign. That will show the anti-educationists!

Tom Kratman, columnist

This should strike fear into Tranzi hearts everywhere. Tom Kratman has a new column, which he inaugurates with an argument for better service rifles:

In the last 40 years there have been a number of attempts at replacing the M16 family. All, prior to 2008, have failed or been rejected. All were too ambitious. For example, the rifle project for the 1980s, the Advanced Combat Rifle, demanded a 100% improvement over the M16. A 100% improvement? That means that we will never have a rifle that’s 99% better. I’ve read that it only cost $300 million by the time it was canceled. What a bargain.

A little aside here, when something calls for nothing less than a 100% improvement in a weapon, be very skeptical. Does that mean 25% more accurate, 25% lighter, 25% cheaper, and with 25% better aesthetics for public relations?

Would 100% better PR be enough? Or is 100% more accurate necessary? What if it were 100% more accurate, but twice as heavy? And if it cost a hundred times more? All in all, wasn’t it really just an attempt to set a goal nobody could measure? I suspect so.

In any case, in killing the ACR, the Infantry School reported that rifles had reached their peak and only exploding bullets could improve matters. Never mind, of course, that this begged the question of whether the M16 family was that peak. Also, Fort Benning wasn’t serious about the exploding bullets, actually; they’re illegal. As for rifles having reached their peak, no, they haven’t and the only way someone could claim they had was by discounting any improvement that was less than a doubling. More on that a bit later.

Someone, however, apparently took that exploding bullet idea to heart. The next attempt was the OICW, the Objective Infantry Combat Weapon, a combined rifle and (semi) smart, fairly flat shooting, 20mm grenade launcher. This effort, while not reaching the previous attempt’s stated goal of 100% improvement in the rifle, still managed to chop the length of the rifle barrel down to something that even an M4 could sneer at, while allowing for the launching an utterly and preposterously inadequate 20mm grenade, albeit with great accuracy.

On the other hand, OICW did at least manage a more that 200% increase… in the weight… before being killed… after spending… well… nobody seems willing to admit what was spent. One suspects that the sunk and lost cost of OICW was just staggering, beyond belief.

And you know what’s really scary there? This is scary: The French PAPOP-2 seems to actually do most of what OICW was supposed to, without either castrating the rifle or making it a joke in poor taste, and while tossing a 35mm grenade that is actually pretty lethal, while keeping the weight within something more or less tolerable. That’s right, the French. Savor the taste of that one for a while.

It’s just as well DoD hasn’t hired John C. Wright as a consultant. Forget exploding bullets, they’d be blowing billions on AI bullets smart enough to argue with the shooter over the windage.

Weaponizing girls

It astonishes me that liberals such as Nicholas Kristof can’t seem to understand that they are metaphorically painting targets on the very young women they wish to proclaim off-bounds when they openly advocate female education as the most effective means of destroying rival cultures.

DOZENS
of heavily armed terrorists rolled into the sleepy little town one
night in a convoy of trucks, buses and vans. They made their way to the
girls’ boarding school. The
high school girls, asleep in their dormitory, awoke to gunfire. The
attackers stormed the school, set it on fire, and, residents said, then
herded several hundred terrified girls into the vehicles — and drove off
and vanished.

That
was April 15 in northern Nigeria. The girls were kidnapped by an
extremist Muslim group called Boko Haram, whose name in the Hausa
language means “Western education is a sin.”

The attack in Nigeria is part of a global backlash against girls’ education by extremists. The Pakistani Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai in the head at age 15 because she advocated for girls’ education. Extremists threw acid in the faces of girls walking to school in Afghanistan. And in Nigeria, militants destroyed 50 schools last year alone.

If the girls aren’t rescued, “no parent will allow their female child to go to school,” Hadiza Bala Usman, who has led protests in Nigeria on behalf of the missing girls, warned in a telephone interview….

The
best tool to fight extremism is education, especially of girls — and
that means ensuring that it is safe to study. The greatest threat to
militancy in the long run comes not from drones but from girls with
schoolbooks.

“These
abducted schoolgirls are my sisters,” Malala told me in an email from
Britain, where she is recovering from the Taliban attack, “and I call on
the international community and the government of Nigeria to take
action and save my sisters.” She added: “It should be our duty to speak
up for our brothers and sisters in Nigeria who are in a very difficult
situation.”

It is apparent that the cunning plan of Western liberals to destroy the Dar al-Islam  by pushing secularized Western education on Islamic women has been comprehended by the strategists of the global Caliphate. The jihadists are responding in two ways, by infiltrating and taking over educational facilities in the West and by destroying Western educational facilities in the South and East. The very name of the Nigerian group illustrates that they grasp the Western tactic.

Now liberals like Kristof are aghast at the fact that the very young women they intentionally turned into cultural weapons on behalf of their secular ideals are being targeted for enslavement and destruction. But what else did they expect? It would appear they were misled by the widespread failure of the Christians of the West to respond to the successful capture of their daughters by the secular establishment into thinking that the Muslims of the South and East would be similarly complacent.

If Western secularists actually gave a damn about women, (and the tens of millions of aborted young girls around the world strongly suggests they don’t), then they should have thought twice before weaponizing young women and turning them into legitimate targets in the violent clash of rival cultures.

Some of my dimmer critics have been foolish enough to claim that I support the actions of the Islamic militants in targeting young women. I do not. In fact, I am a far more staunch opponent of the militants’ objectives than those secular would-be dimmis will ever be. Unlike them, I will never submit. Unlike them, I have a rational perspective on strategy. I understand that if you make something a weapon, your enemy will have to be cowardly, self-defeating, or a fool to refrain from destroying it.

And Islam was weakening its enemies by capturing its youth long before Western secularists had the bright idea of taking over the school systems. But at least the equalitarians should be pleased to know that it is not only boys who are now able to pursue a career as a janissary catamite.

Once broken, the rules are a dead letter

The illegitimate US-backed government of Ukraine doesn’t seem to grasp that it can’t appeal to a nonexistent government authority:

Separatists, many of them of Russian descent, believe that the government in Kiev is illegitimate since it formed after what they call the illegal ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych in February. They have demanded that no one in Kiev should control their territory, saying that power and responsibility should rest with them or their Russian ally.

Officials in Kiev have the opposite view. They accuse Moscow of meddling, in its support of separatists and more, trying to break up Ukraine and, perhaps, take over parts or all of it. The government explains their military and security actions in the east and south are aimed at a common goal: to keep their Eastern European nation whole and united.

Referring to his call with Lavrov on Saturday, Kerry said he stressed the United States and allies’ desire “for Russia to withdraw support from the separatists, … assist in removing people from the buildings (and begin) to de-escalate the situation.”

Now, if the West backed the Ukrainian coup because it wants a war with Russia for one reason or another, their actions make sense. But if they simply wanted to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit while avoiding military action, they appear to have badly miscalculated.

No one, in Eastern or Western Ukraine, views the current government as legitimate, for the very good reason that it is not. The separatists are in the legal right, and Russia has as much right to govern their territory as the officials in Kiev do. Since they prefer the Russians, under the right of self-determination, the USA should, by rights, be backing Russian intervention.

It is not, obviously, because it supported the coup in the first place, and that’s giving the USA the benefit of the doubt, and assuming, contra some indications, that it was not primarily responsible for the coup in the first place. But regardless, making a public appeal to a nonexistent government authority that no one recognizes isn’t fooling anyone and it isn’t clever, it simply makes US diplomacy look as if it is being run by low-IQ amateurs.

Perhaps that is the idea and there are much larger plans within plans being played out here. I’m not privy to such lofty discussions. But if I lived in Taiwan, I’d be leaving right around now. And if I lived in Japan, I’d be looking to move to the countryside. Trusting these masters of geopolitics to provide protection from China, even if war in Ukraine is somehow avoided, seems like a bad idea.

UPDATE: The Russian warning could not be much more overt:

Speaking in Moscow yesterday, Mr Peskov said: “People are calling in despair, asking for help. The overwhelming majority demand Russian help. All these calls are reported to [President] Vladimir Putin.” He made clear that the Russian government blamed the West for the worsening situation, while stressing the need for “dialogue” towards a peaceful resolution. “Kiev and its Western sponsors are practically provoking the bloodshed and bear direct responsibility for it. Those who recognise this junta as a legal power become an accomplice to this crime.”

The Ukraine “government” in Kiev isn’t legitimate by any standard of which I am aware, and those supporting it are, as the Russians have correctly pointed out, going to be seen as responsible for provoking the ongoing bloodshed.

UPDATE 2: This bodes well:

Citing unnamed German security sources, Bild am Sonntag said the CIA
and FBI agents were helping Kiev end the rebellion in the east of
Ukraine and set up a functioning security structure. It said the agents were not directly involved in fighting with
pro-Russian militants. “Their activity is limited to the capital Kiev,”
the paper said.

I imagine the White House doesn’t want to see CIA and FBI agents captured and paraded before the global media. They had better hope the Russians don’t have anyone in Kiev.

Secrets under the sea

Keep this historical justification for American involvement in WWI in mind when you are tempted to buy into the Official Story of 9/11, the use of gas weapons by the Syrian government, and the perfidious behavior of the Russians in Ukraine:

It became a symbol of brutal German aggression – an unprovoked torpedo attack on a passenger cruise liner during the First World War.

The infamous sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, killing more than 1,000 innocent victims, sparked outrage in Britain and America. Public opinion in the States swung against the Kaiser – eventually helping President Woodrow Wilson take the country into the war in 1917.

But 70 years after the ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat eight miles off the coast of Ireland, British Government officials feared the secret of the tragedy would ‘blow up on us’ when a group of divers planned to search the wreck.

The German high command always maintained the steam liner, traveling between New York and Liverpool, was carrying explosives destined for the Western Front concealed as cheese or casks of beef. But ministers at the time rejected the claim and used the attack to whip up public anger against the Germans….

In a secret memo, Noel Marshall, from the Foreign Office’s North American department, said: ‘Successive British governments have always maintained that there was no munitions on board the Lusitania (and that the Germans were therefore in the wrong to claim to the contrary as an excuse for sinking the ship).

‘The facts are that there is a large amount of ammunition in the wreck, some of which is highly dangerous.’ He added: ‘I am left with the uneasy feeling that this subject may yet – literally – blow up on us.’

The more that history reveals, the more it becomes clear that there has likely never been a foreign intervention that can be justified by its historical justification. Not the Spanish-American War, not World War I, not World War II, and not whatever inventive justification will be served up for World War III.

The wider context

On Zerohedge, a Russian academic explains the roots of the conflict in Ukraine in terms of the long term objectives of the rival global elites:

Let’s look at the situation in and around Ukraine in a wider, global context, considering the role which the West collectively, by their various games, has assigned to Ukraine.

  •     Firstly – the battle against Russia.
  •     secondly – the clash with China, and
  •     thirdly – concerning the unleashing of war in the Middle East.

Let me repeat, By no means is it all groups in the West who want to unleash war in the Middle East. But quite a few of them are interested in it. Likewise Saudi Arabia and Israel are interested, for a whole series of reasons. And these three vectors converge in Ukraine – all three plans unite into one.

That is, the global geo-economic and geo-political re-distribution of assets in the course of the global economic crisis.

The “Yellowstone Threat”

Of course, there is this Yellowstone threat – I mean the super-volcano. That could completely change the rules of play at any time. The super-volcano could solve for the Western elite the very problems which they’ve been trying to solve for the last 50-60 years and have been unable to. An eruption of the volcano could solve those problems. But that’s another subject.

The origin of the current situation

Let’s look at how the situation came about that preceded the current situation, namely: It’s 1991. The USSR has collapsed. After 10 years of robbery the Americans are wondering “should we go for more?” Evidently they decided not to, as it would have fallen to the Chinese. Besides, Yeltsin’s team seemed to be running the country into the ground. Then suddenly in 2001 came the attacks in New York. The Americans’ political vector shifted to the Middle East. They became occupied with the Middle East. i.e. they got distracted from the goals.

Then we had Iraq, Afghanistan. During this time the Russian Federation got room to breathe, rise onto its feet again. Then there was the war of 08.08.08, which showed the West they had somewhat let go of Russia.

After that the Medvedev episode, when we didn’t react on Libya. Evidently, 08.08.08, Putin’s coming to power, and our position on Syria, in spite of the West’s pressure, changed the approach toward Russia of those who brought Obama to power.

Two points to note:

  •     Obama established his military doctrine during his address to the Australian parliament on 17 Nov 2011, and
  •     And a new military doctrine of the US, established by Obama on 05 Jan 2012.

In the new doctrine of 05 Jan 2012 is established that the US can wage one war and some other indirect actions in other parts of the world. Previously it said two wars – meaning they’re not up to that any more. More interesting statements made by Obama in the Australian parliament 17 Nov 2011: This was said in Obama’s vague style. But if we call a spade a spade, it means:

Firstly: in this doctrine: political-economic encirclement of China. Control over the flow of energy into China. That’s why we have seen their naval power being moved to the straits between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. This is why land-based energy supply routes are so important for China. Sea-based supply routes can be easily interrupted by the Americans.

Secondly: applying pressure on the Russian Federation, as a partner of China, and as a country beginning to rise up.

Really, Obama didn’t say anything new here.

There’s an organization Stratfor -(Strategic Forecasting Inc), a kind of private CIA. Their founder and chairman, George Friedman, said openly that the primary task of the United States is the destabilization of Eurasia, in order that there could never be a state or group of states able to challenge the US.

I find the point about Yellowstone to be intriguing, especially considering the source.  What are “the very problems which they’ve been trying to solve for the last 50-60 years and have been unable to?” I imagine they are the limitations imposed by the remnants of the US Constitutional system and the fact that the traditional American population is armed and therefore must be deceived and persuaded and ruled indirectly rather than directly by dictate.

If you find it hard to understand why rich and intelligent men not only seek wars, but work very diligently to start them, you have to stop thinking of war as intrinsically bad and see it as a tool. It is like dynamite; if you want to move large quantities of earth, you are going to need a powerful destructive force.

Large-scale wars happen when multiple parties reach the conclusion that the only way they can obtain their objectives is through a war involving other parties that increase their leverage. World War I happened mostly because French politician Raymond Poincaré was obsessed with recovering Alsace-Lorraine, the Russians sought to regain their position on the Black Sea they had lost in the Crimean War, and the Serbs sought to reclaim Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Austro-Hungarian empire. As it happened, both the French and the Russians were successful in their objectives; despite being the ones to set the match for the winning side, the Serbs ended up losing everything.

Faith and trust and pixie dust

David Brooks asks a grand strategic expert to help him make sense of his impression that the international system is collapsing:

All around, the fabric of peace and order is fraying. The leaders of Russia and Ukraine escalate their apocalyptic rhetoric. The Sunni-Shiite split worsens as Syria and Iraq slide into chaos. China pushes its weight around in the Pacific. I help teach a grand strategy course at Yale, and I asked my colleagues to make sense of what’s going on. Charles Hill, who was a legendary State Department officer before going to Yale, wrote back:

“The ‘category error’ of our experts is to tell us that our system is doing just fine and proceeding on its eternal course toward ever-greater progress and global goodness. This is whistling past the graveyard.

“The lesson-category within grand strategic history is that when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration, many leaders nonetheless respond with insouciance, obliviousness, and self-congratulation. When the wolves of the world sense this, they, of course, will begin to make their moves to probe the ambiguities of the aging system and pick off choice pieces to devour at their leisure.

“This is what Putin is doing; this is what China has been moving toward doing in the maritime waters of Asia; this is what in the largest sense the upheavals of the Middle East are all about: i.e., who and what politico-ideological force will emerge as hegemon over the region in the new order to come. The old order, once known as ‘the American Century’ has been situated within ‘the modern era,’ an era which appears to be stalling out after some 300-plus years. The replacement era will not be modern and will not be a nice one.”

This is correct. Notice in particular the phrase “when an established international system enters its phase of deterioration”. Emphasis on “its phase” rather than “a phase”. The phase is terminal. It is not part of a gentle cycle. And it usually ends in a considerable amount of war before its successor system is established.

Brooks more or less accurately describes the establishment of modern nationalist civilization, although he neglects to observe that this was a Christian civilization that imposed the modern order. The combination of religious homogeneity and technogical dominance is what made the establishment of the order both desirable and possible.

When Hill talks about the modern order he is referring to a state system that restrained the two great vices of foreign affairs: the desire for regional dominance and the desire to eliminate diversity. Throughout recorded history, large regional powers have generally gobbled up little nations. Powerful people have generally tried to impose their version of the Truth on less powerful people.

But, over these centuries, civilized leaders have banded together to restrain these vices. As far back as the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, dominant powers tried to establish procedures and norms to secure national borders and protect diversity. Hegemons like the Nazis or the Communists tried to challenge this system, but the other powers fought back.

However, Brooks goes awry and leaves out two of the primary threats to the system when he considers the opponents of what he calls “liberal pluralism”:

Today that system is under assault not by a single empire but by a hundred big and little foes. As Walter Russell Mead argues in a superb article in Foreign Affairs, geopolitics is back with a vengeance. Whether it’s Russia seizing Crimea or China asserting itself, old-fashioned power plays are back in vogue. Meanwhile, pre-modern movements and people try to eliminate ethnic and religious diversity in Egypt, Ukraine and beyond.

China, Russia and Iran have different values, but all oppose this system of liberal pluralism. The U.S. faces a death by a thousand cuts dilemma. No individual problem is worth devoting giant resources to. It’s not worth it to spend huge amounts of treasure to establish stability in Syria or defend a Western-oriented Ukraine. But, collectively, all the little problems can undermine the modern system. No individual ailment is worth the expense of treating it, but, collectively, they can kill you.

These two additional threats are globalism and multiculturalism. Both are also attempts to eliminate ethnic and religious diversity at the national level. But nations exist for a very important reason: to provide sufficient homogeneity within a political entity to prevent tribal power struggles by reducing violent conflict to mere political conflict. Attempting to spread the nations externally (globalism) while mixing them internally (multiculturalism), puts even more pressure on liberal pluralism than pre-modern movements. Indeed, it is mass immigration, which is the bastard child of globalism and multiculturalism, that has injected these poisonous pre-modern movements into Western civilization.

John Gaddis, another grand strategy professor, directs us to George Kennan’s insights from the early Cold War, which he feels are still relevant as a corrective to the death-by-a-thousand-cuts mentality. He argues that we should contain these menaces until they collapse internally. The Moscow regime requires a hostile outside world to maintain its own internal stability. That’s a weakness. By not behaving stupidly, by not overextending ourselves for example, we can, Gaddis argues, “make sure Putin’s seeds of self-destruction are more deeply rooted than our own.”

That’s smart, but I think I’m less sure that time is on our side. The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats.

Gaddis’s answer is a complete non-starter, which Brooks would have realized if he had properly taken the two additional threats I have mentioned into account. How can the West “contain these menaces until they collapse internally” when the West has taken those menaces into itself? The Moscow regime and the Muslim world may both require their Dar al-Harbs to maintain their internal stability, but at least they have an internal stability. The West has little more than termites in its foundations, clogged arteries in its heart, and parasitic cysts in its brain.

The
Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the
fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget
that undergirds it. Moreover,
people will die for Mother Russia or Allah. But it is harder to get
people to die for a set of pluralistic procedures to protect faraway
places. It’s been pulling teeth to get people to accept commercial pain
and impose sanctions.
The
liberal pluralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing.
Preserving that hard-earned ecosystem requires an ever-advancing fabric
of alliances, clear lines about what behavior is unacceptably
system-disrupting, and the credible threat of political, financial and
hard power enforcement.

It is true that liberal pluralism is not a spontaneous natural thing. The rest is meaningless gobbledy-gook. The globalist, multiculturalist West is no longer liberal or pluralistic, so it should be no surprise that the system of liberal pluralism is on the verge of collapse and that its rivals are increasingly confident that they need neither fear nor respect it. There will be no “saving the system”, not when its self-appointed defenders neither understand the extent of the problem and are more than a little sympathetic towards some of the threats posed.

Amateur hour

I haven’t written much about the prospective war in Ukraine because it is mostly a military farce:

Standing on the hood of an armored personnel carrier as his ashen-faced
paratroopers slumped behind him, Col. Alexander Shvets of Ukraine’s
25th Airborne reported back to command on a cheap cell phone.

“We’ve been taken captive. They used dirty tricks,” he said. The
hundreds of local residents and ragtag militiamen that had surrounded
his column of 13 APCs throughout Wednesday bayed. “Look,” he continued,
losing his patience. “I’ve been surrounded by a human shield of 500
people all day. You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.”

As the sun set, Shvets and his men — many of whom were reservists
called up to help Ukraine regain control of the eastern province of
Donetsk from anti-government rebel groups — were allowed to drive back
to their base in neighboring Dnipropetrovsk. The day they spent here
outside the small town of Kramatorsk, hemmed in by angry residents, was
emblematic of the Ukrainian central government’s withering attempt to
assert control in the East, now in tatters….

Ukraine’s “anti-terrorist operation” against
anti-government rebels has proved a spectacular debacle. Soldiers
refused to move in on rebel-held positions. The rebels captured six
APCs, drove the soldiers into Slovyansk flying the Russian flag, and
sent them back on dingy buses, dejected, disarmed, and defeated.
Self-appointed “self-defense” commanders who couldn’t even agree on
which one of them was in charge disarmed and defeated Ukraine’s army.

This government ineptitude is a common theme of late. An elderly rancher forced hundreds of federal agents into retreat. A few hundred civilians captured multiple armored personal carriers. The USA has been pursuing an obviously futile occupation in Afghanistan for 13 years now to little purpose and no avail. Mexico is a failed state where cartels rule entire regions.

The central governments are exhausted and bankrupt. They’re turning up the tax and regulatory heat around the world even as their corruption becomes ever more apparent. Meanwhile, they are afraid to utilize their heavily militarized agencies because they fear the inevitable backlash that will threaten to destabilize their pretenses to legitimacy. The people over which they nominally rule are fat, decadent, weak, and fearful.

Fraud and empty gestures are the order of the day. A battalion of troops have been sent to Poland, of all places? A whole battalion to intimidate the Russians, who sent both Napoleon and Hitler running? This would be comical if it wasn’t an obvious harbinger of much more difficult times to come.

Neoconnery is anti-American

A Pakistani neocon explains why it is vital for American troops to remain at the disposal of Pakistani interests:

We neocons have fallen out of favor, not just on the left, where “neocon” is routinely used as a term of abuse, but also on the right, where libertarian-minded conservatives who favor a smaller (and cheaper) military have seized the initiative. Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, is just one of many Tea Party conservatives who has defined his foreign policy views in opposition to the neocons. And it’s easy to see why….

Given all of this, why am I still a neocon? Why do I still believe that the U.S. should maintain an overwhelming military edge over all potential rivals, and that we as a country ought to be willing to use our military power in defense of our ideals as well as our interests narrowly defined? There are two reasons: The first is that American strength is the linchpin of a peaceful, economically integrating world; and the second is that we know what it looks like when America embraces amoral realpolitik, and it’s not pretty.

Like it or not, America’s failure in Iraq does not change the fact that global stability depends on American global leadership, and American global leadership costs money. The United States is at the heart of a dense web of alliances. We extend formal security guarantees to more than 50 countries. Some see these alliances and guarantees as little more than a burden the U.S. can no longer afford. Yet what they actually do is dampen security competition. They reassure partner countries that they needn’t build up their militaries to defend themselves against their neighbors, which then reassures their neighbors that they needn’t build up their militaries. This virtuous cycle is one of the central reasons Western Europe and Japan recovered so quickly after the devastation of World War II, and why globalization has helped ease poverty around the world. For this virtuous cycle to be maintained, however, U.S. security guarantees must be considered credible. It must be clear that when the U.S. makes a security commitment to another country, that commitment will be met. This in turn means that the U.S. military must have the power and the reach to defend countries far from our borders.

It’s not an accident that most of the necons complaining that American isolationists ” don’t understand about American military power—and American morality” are second- and third-generation immigrants. They may be U.S. citizens but they are not Americans and they simply do not understand, at all, George Washington’s warning about entangling alliances.

Quite to the contrary, they demand more and more entanglement, preferably with their true homelands. As the Baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie-named Reihan Salam admits:

Why insist on moralistic crusades, as neocons are wont to do? I suppose I have a personal reason for doing so. It turns out that this week isn’t just the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad. It is also the 43rd anniversary of a telegram which an American consul general, Archer Blood, took the unusual
step of condemning his own government. As Gary Bass recounts in his chilling book The Blood Telegram, Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy consigliere, Henry Kissinger, enthusiastically backed Pakistan’s military junta in its efforts to not only overturn the results of its country’s first free and fair election, but to massacre hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in an effort to teach what was then a rebellious province a lesson. One of the men who died, as it happens, was my uncle.

Knowing fully well that he was endangering his career, Blood decried
the American failure to defend democracy or to denounce Pakistani
atrocities. He also knew that had President Nixon decided to lift a
finger, he could have forced Pakistan to stay its hand. Yet it seems
that humanitarian considerations never entered the picture for Nixon and
Kissinger. They were apparently too taken with treating the world as a
chessboard to bother reckoning with the monstrous crimes they were
aiding and abetting. Though Pakistan was unable to prevent the emergence
of an independent Bangladesh, thanks in large part to India’s decision
to intervene, the country remains scarred by the bloodletting. Imagine
if a different president hadn’t cheered on Pakistan’s military rulers
but rather threatened to use U.S. power in defense of Bengali civilians.

Neocons are, for the most part, non-Americans who use the United States as a base in order to subvert American national interest in favor of Pakistani, or Israeli, or Iraqi, or Ukrainian national interests. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of barbarians by another group of barbarians is of no concern whatsoever to the American people. And clearly it is a mistake to have allowed men like Mr. Salem to enter the country, because he has repaid his hosts by attempting to involve them in the very violence he fled Pakistan to escape!

One can’t even properly describe these neocons as traitors, because they are loyal to their nations. The problem is that their nation is not the American nation. What Mr. Salem does not realize is that Rand Paul and most American isolationists understands very well what Mr. Salem and his fellow neocons want. They simply believe in putting American interests first.