9/11 is the moment to commemorate the victims and those who answered the call and made sacrifices to combat the threat. It is also a reminder of the decline of ardor not long after.
George W. Bush had approvals of 99% and then the bottom fell out. The peaceniks returned with a vengeance – “Bush lied, people died.” The Democratic Party resumed its bash-America stance. The next number of presidential elections cycles produced commanders-in-chief who would spend their tenures repudiating W.
Protesters march in San Francisco Thursday, March 20, 2003. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Even Republicans joined in the mudfest. Trump would spend the 2016 campaign bashing the Bushes and continue the pounding in the years after the inaugural. He teeters on the edge of the isolationism rabbit hole.
Not surprisingly, Trump goes through national security people like a pothead does reefers. Remember McMaster, Bolton, Mattis? It’s hard meshing “America first” with obvious national interests that stretch beyond the two oceans. I’ve got to give Trump credit, though, for persistence in forcing that square peg into a round hole. But it’s hard on the worker bees.
Part of the problem in stoking the enthusiasm to keep up the fight against terrorism is disoriented expectations. All conflicts are compared to WWII. It’s the gold standard for wars for the historically illiterate. All American wars, including the Revolution, were divisive affairs, with the lone exception of WWII.
Female delegates to the 1915 Women’s Peace Conference in The Hague, aboard the MS Noordam. April 1915.
WWII is an island in history’s landscape. The evil was easy to identify, had uniformed people to kill, and a capital to conquer. What’s the capital of terrorism? Terrorists don’t fight “fair”, like the 1950’s communist Malay National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, the Pathet Lao in Laos, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Castro-inspired killers in Latin America, …. The enemy looks like Malay peasant farmers and Afghan peasant farmers.
Guerrilla forces from North Vietnam’s Vietcong movement cross a river in 1966 during the Vietnam War.
The violence burns for a long time. For our enemies, the strategy is simple: keep it burning and America will eventually quit. Vietnam invited that conclusion. These are likely to be the only kinds of wars that the world’s lone superpower will get. The Iraqi insurgency followed and Afghan Taliban are following the script to a T.
And lo and behold, we get presidents whose endgame is withdrawal. Translation: the enemy wins.
This challenge doesn’t have to end that way. We have to be as relentless as our foes, if we can rediscover fortitude. All the while, never forgetting 9/11.
President Obama: “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
“That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”
* Barack Obama from Aug. 20, 2012 press conference as reported by CNN.
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Here we go again down the same road paved by Obama. On Thursday Iran shoots down one of our drones. Trump threatens action, speculates that the action might have been that of a lone wolf officer, issues the threat of retaliation, then couples the threat with a request for talks, and finally announces that he’ll do … nothing. What does this sound like to you? It’s worse than an unenforced red line. It’s open season on American surveillance of the Persian Gulf.
What accounts for the spastic reply to an Iranian provocation? I may be way off base but I think that he has a kitchen cabinet of a couple of Fox News celebrities: Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Both make noises that they would like the U.S. to return to being a regional power. In broadcasts after the shootdown, Carlson and Ingraham rhetorically questioned the vital U.S. interest at stake in the Middle East. Call them the Rand Paul wing of cable news. The result is that the rest of Trump’s foreign policy team is left to compete with flashy cable TV personalities for influence.
Tonight, Tucker was at it again. A fire hose of hyperbole ensued about the evil influence of “neocons”, meaning John Bolton, who in Tucker’s mind, along with Bill Kristol, “planned” the Iraq invasion. Leaving aside the insult to fact and logic, Tucker appears to be channeling Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee of 1940-1. Lindbergh fit into the overall climate of revulsion after World War I just like Tucker and a few others in the neo-isolationist right were repulsed by Bush’s messy Iraq adventure. Lindbergh and his group lasted until Japanese bombs starting dropping on our servicemen in Hawaii. What’ll happen to Tucker and Laura if American blood is shed because we failed to act when it was a drone?
Oh, I forgot. These types always have an easy out. They will claim that we should have never been there in the first place. Of course, the same logic would hold true wherever in the world that we happen to plant the flag. Soon our navy will be relegated to coastal patrol duty. Only in those places will neo-isolationists accept our interests to be “vital”.
Is this any way to run a foreign policy? You’ve got to wonder. At times, Trump’s foreign policy path resembles a user of LSD.
First, Trump thought he could charm the leader of a brutal thugocracy – North Korea – and came away with __?__ . He probably thought that he was engaging the equivalent of a city planning commission. The Kim clan, like many littering the world since the dawn of hominids, has so much blood on their hands that you’d mistake their fiefdom for the old Union Stockyards in Chicago. Underlings who fail Kim die, which was the fate of the unlucky chap who was Kim’s main functionary at the Hanoi soiree. Apparently, there’s no such thing as severance pay in North Korea.
And Trump actually thought that he was going to charm this guy?
Trump came out of both meetings talking up North Korea’s prospects as something like the next Atlantic City. Come to think of it, the current reality of Atlantic City comes close to matching the current reality of North Korea.
Trump campaigned as the anti-Bush and the anti-Obama. Trump personalizes issues such that policies and actions taken by these two bogeymen must be bad because … Bush and Obama did them. It’s not due to some grand strategic vision. Vision shmavision. His comes close to the hallucinations of the aforementioned LSD user. It took TV images of children being gassed to force Trump into his anti-Obama personality and enforce Obama’s rhetorical red line. TV works for Trump when “peace through strength” doesn’t. Absent a TV image for Trump, “peace through strength” has all the wallop of wet toilet paper.
Now we’re back to TV taking center stage with “sage” advice on dealing with Iran offered up by the Tucker and Laura gang. For them, so what if Iran’s proxies are tramping all over the Middle East firing rockets into Israel, propping up thugs, threatening our alliances, and turning the Persian Gulf into a minefield. For them, so what if the Middle East is a crescent of terror that’ll make another part of the world off limits to the United States, and a staging base for crazies with box cutters and pressure-cooker bombs. For them, so what if our regional allies feel abandoned and look elsewhere. China and Russia are waiting in the wings. For Tucker and Laura, so what.
For the rest of us, it smells like Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of the 1970’s, or maybe Lindbergh’s of 1940-1, or the fallout of Obama’s apology tour. Are you sure we didn’t elect Barack Hussein Trump in 2016?
Californians in November meekly went to the polls to shoot down an attempt to lower their gas taxes. Over the recent number of days, rural and blue-collar French hit the streets of Paris to riot against a 5% increase in taxes on gasoline prices already exceeding $6/gal. The contrast is striking (no pun intended).
Why the outburst in Paris? The citizens in the countryside and the blue-collar middle class are tired of shouldering the burden of the climate-change fixations of their urban and wealthier “betters”. “Climate change” is more than a scientific matter. It’s code for the fixers in the nomenklatura/academy alliance, buttressed by the upscale elect and their fashionable beliefs, to manipulate the lives of those not so privileged.
So, we get with the French a replay of 1789; while in California, docility. Interesting. Will the meek inherit the earth, or will it be adult firmness? My bet is on “meekness” till it becomes unbearable.
Viva la gilets jaunes (yellow vests)! But put a hold on the violence.
The “Society” in the title refers to a loose body of people and organizations who have similar backgrounds and enough of a common orthodoxy to distinguish as an identifiable social element, like, for instance, Protestants. In this case, it’s the background identifiers of degreed/middle-to-upper-class/urban/seemingly-professional and progressive/left in their philosophical orthodoxy. The “Puff Piece” in the title is the all-too-familiar journalistic softball interview with overtones of saccharine flattery that’s reserved for prominent people in the news who confirm the Society’s biases.
Case in point: “Seeking a Safe, Green Colombia” in National Geographic Magazine of January 2018 about Colombia’s ex-president, Juan Manuel Santos. He gets the treatment because he’s said to be about “peace” and he chants the clerisy’s doctrines on “climate change”. He knows the lingo and says all the right things. Thus, he’s beatified. Look at the magazine’s saintly photo from the article.
Saint Juan Santos
The “peace” part of his beatification has to do with his cramming down the throats of Colombians a detested agreement with FARC, the narco-terrorist organization. When put on the ballot, Colombians rejected it despite the weight of the world coming down on them to approve it. So, Santos got around those pesky voters with a jam-down in the legislature.
And what of the agreement? First off, Colombians hate FARC. Next, the settlement gave amnesty to murderers, bribed the killers to stop the killing and mayhem, and rewarded them with seats in parliament. For millions of FARC’s victims, what’s not to like?
Victims of FARC protest in Colombia during the peace talks with FARC.
And for that, the guy wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But what really earns his elevation to sainthood is his expressed worship of the clerisy’s iconography of “climate change” with statements like “… we are destroying Mother Earth”. For the Society’s parishioners, that’ll do it.
No such treatment was accorded the previous president, Alvaro Uribe, the winner of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. But he doesn’t sing the Society’s doctrines and he opposed the terrorist cave-in. What a flawed world we live in.
Ex-Colombian President Alvaro Uribe receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Pres. George W. Bush in 2009.
Demagoguing high pharmaceutical prices by our president and lefties of all stripes obscures the fact that foreigners are given a free ride on American R & D. Exercising gangsterism in a manner to make Scarface blush, foreign governments threaten the production of cheap knock-offs if our companies don’t cave on prices.
It’s easy for them to do: buy a pill and take it apart in the lab. Don’t worry, the theft is protected by these governments. Trump, yes, bash China for their unfair trade practices, but also let’s put some muscle behind a campaign to end this extortion racket.
Joining the economic-kiss-of-death crowd led by Bernie Sanders, et al, is hardly an adult response to high prices. It typically takes 12 years and $2.4 billion to bring a new medicine to market. Industrialized methods brings down production costs, but what about recouping the $2.4 billion? If not countered, Trump and lefties, alongside the international extortion racket, will become coffin-makers for an entire American industry. Now, what about all those tweets about “Jobs!, Jobs!, Jobs!”?
Appeals to economic illiteracy and popular venality should be rejected in favor of a little common sense.
** Thanks to Steve Forbes, “Great Medicine for Trade”, Forbes, March 31, 2018, p. 15.
First Lady Melania Trump, China’s President Xi Jinping, and US President Donald Trump attend a state dinner at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, 11/9/2017.
The following is a comment to an American Enterprise Institute report, “America’s inconvenient trillions”, by Derek Scissors, November 27, 2017, http://www.aei.org/publication/americas-inconvenient-trillions/.
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We’ve become so self-critical that we flagellate ourselves over the slightest thing. It doesn’t take much. Crude numbers often send us into a tizzy. There’s few things more crude than “GDP” and the “Trade Deficit”. The “Trade Deficit” has little to do with accurately measuring what we contribute to the international economy. It’s essentially meaningless. But in the mouths of our demagogues, it’s gold for their personal political fortunes.
As for “GDP”, it excludes and ham-handedly misstates much. Plus, the thing is at the mercy of a country’s politics. In communist/totalitarian countries, all numbers are creations of the state. Those states have as their prime existential motive a secular evangelism for a socialist utopia. Everything is warped, including numbers, in service to that ultimate end. So, comparing numbers between a closed and open society is lunacy.
Honest evaluations of national wealth are more helpful. Read the article, take some time to digest it, and see if you don’t agree.
The world may not be as our visible, popular, semi-literate elites – right, center, and left – would have us believe.
