Category Archives: Politics – international

Learned ignorance page after page

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Went into a bookshop today and went to the politics section and this was a part of the selection of what I found. There must have been around a dozen books on American politics, that were all were desperately anti-Trump and with many of them turned towards us potential readers to ensure we saw what there was.

Nothing will apparently educate the “educated”. Their ignorance is invincible. Their shallowness knows no depths. The incapacity to learn from actual real world experience is capacious. It is truly frightening how much they don’t know about so much, but worse, the extent to which they will close their ears and eyes to alternatives.

I find it the same in discussing economics with many of these so-called experts. The American economy may never have prospered as it now is. Jobs numbers are increasing while real wages at the bottom of the income distribution are rising for the first time in decades.

PDT foreign policy is another area where one success follows another. I am sickened at the thought that Iran could just blow an airliner out of the sky. Seriously, whose side are they on? It’s not yours.

The consistency of the left

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No one can be more consistent than the leaders of a modern left-side party. Policies are irrelevant – they just do or say whatever will lead them to power. Take this for an example: Oppose Iran sanctions, but support BDS against Israel?

Contrary to the claims of some of its apologists, the purpose of BDS is not to pressure Israel’s government to change its policies. As the founders of the movement and its leading advocates in the United States have repeatedly made clear, its goal is to eliminate Israel.

So if you support BDS against Israel but oppose sanctions against Iran—a brutal theocracy that oppresses its own people, seeks to impose its brand of Islamist tyranny on others via terrorism, and is dedicated to the goal of destroying Israel—then you are not merely being hypocritical. Singling out Jews for treatment that you think not even one of the worst governments on earth deserves is a form of bias that is indistinguishable from anti-Semitism.

Then there’s this:

Donald Trump and the mythmakers from Caroline Glick.

For the past 40-odd years, two narratives have guided American Middle East policy. Both were invented by the Carter administration. One relates to Iran. One relates to Israel.

Both narratives reject reality as the basis for foreign policy decision-making in favor of delusion. Over the past two months, President Donald Trump has rejected and disavowed them both. His opponents are apoplectic.

As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian “students” seized the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the US would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that.

So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages.

 At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy to reality in regards to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his “students” would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh and wouldn’t cause Washington too many other problems.

So too, as Smith noted, the Carter administration was propelled by guilt. The worldviews of many members of the administration had been shaped on radical university campuses in the 1960s. They agreed with the Iranian revolutionaries who cursed Americans as imperialists. They perceived Khomeini and his followers as “authentic” Third World actors who were giving the Americans their comeuppance.

Khomeini and his “Death to America” shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies.

Which continues:

This then brings us to President Trump. Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran’s regional and global terror apparatuses – destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative.

Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shiite militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran’s control over their government since last October claim that Soleimani was the one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three months.

By killing the two together, the Americans exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of American deliberate blindness to the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies.

By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on US policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism.

At least from now on until the next post-modernist clown, looking to preserve every possible constituency, takes over, which must happen eventually.

There are many fronts in the wars to defend Western Civilisation from its enemies

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The political leaders in China, North Korea and Iran can oppress their people to their heart’s content. It is a tragedy, and one wishes it were otherwise, but no one’s going to go to war to save them. But if the leaders of these regimes want to impose their way of life on us by force, then that’s different.

I do not wish to live in a theocracy, whether religious or socialist. What I do hope and wish for is that American power will continue to protect the rest of us – along with our own active support and participation – from the kinds of tyranny that runs rampant across the world. Donald Trump gets it.

As discussed here: DONALD TRUMP POLITICS ROGER KIMBALL US POLITICS Eliminating Qasem Soleimani was Donald Trump’s Middle East farewell letter. I will just quote the opening.

In July 55 BC, in the midst of his campaigns to civilize Gaul, Julius Caesar was troubled by the Germans. They would cross the Rhine, wreak havoc, and then disappear back across the mighty river, whose depth and swift currents made the Germans regard it as an impregnable barrier.

To teach them that it wasn’t, Caesar had his engineers construct a bridge across the Rhine. As Caesar recounts in Book IV of his commentaries on the Gallic War, they did this in an astonishing 10 days. Caesar and his troops crossed over, stayed for a few days in German territory, ‘burned all their villages and other buildings, and cut down the grain in their fields’. They then crossed back over and destroyed the bridge.

The point, which was not lost on the Germans, was that the Romans could go anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, and there was nothing the Germans could do about it.

Western Civilisation has enemies, some within and some without. Thankfully it also has its defenders. There are many political fools around but at the moment, our side is ahead, even if it’s only slightly.

NOW ADDING THIS FROM INSTAPUNDIT: FOUND HERE

Susan Hennessey is Executive Editor of the Lawfare Blog, a Brookings Senior Fellow, and a CNN National Security Legal Analyst and former Intelligence Community lawyer. She’s also, as you can see, a dishonest idiot. These are the “experts” Trump is supposed to have deferred to. Disgraceful, and a pretty good explanation of why our foreign policy has been a dumpster fire for the last three decades.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

Plus:

Yet the more we learn — about the deliberations preceding the strike, about the chain of events leading to it, about the prior and subsequent moves by CENTCOM to harden the American position in the region — the more it seems that the President acted with deliberate aforethought, that he does in fact have a plan, and therefore likely is capable of envisioning and handling what happens next. That much is only fair, whether or not one agrees with the decision as such.

What nearly the entire DC / academia / journo natsec/forpol commentariat actually means by its critique, though, is that they weren’t included in any of this. Ben Rhodes took the time to rally them together, get their talking points aligned, illuminate a pathway to social and professional advancement: that’s their preferred template for Iran-related policymaking.

Donald Trump’s template for Iran-related policymaking is the smoking wreckage of a terror mastermind’s vehicle. The courtiers see it, and want to know what’s in it for them.

Americans see it, and they know.

What the foreign policy apparatchiks fear isn’t that Trump might fail — they pray for that. What they fear is that he is likely to succeed.

UPDATE:

Well, I’m doing my part on the mockery front. Feel free to join me.

64

The level of traitorous stupidity is breathtaking.

The Battle of Warsaw 1920

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From The war that saved Europe from Communism, from a hundred years ago. Here’s the conclusion from a book written by the English ambassador to Poland at the time the battle took place.

Had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Euro
had the Poles “failed to arrest the triumphant advance of the Soviet Army at the Battle of Warsaw, not only would Christianity have experienced a dangerous reverse, but the very existence of western civilisation would have been imperilled.”

Just as the Battle of Tours “saved our ancestors from the Yoke of the Koran”, he concluded, so the Battle of Warsaw saved Western Europe from “a far more subversive danger – the fanatical tyranny of the Soviet.”

Here’s the movie with subtitles:

Not to mention the Battle of Vienna, 1683.

International confidence in the American president

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Confidence in Trump remains low internationally

I would take a sceptical attitude as reasonable except these parts of the Anglosphere and the former members of the nation states that once comprised Western Civilisation are filled with people who are saturated in ignorance and lacking in common sense. They are impervious to the dangers they were led into by Obama and the left in general, and are fearful of the actions taken by Donald Trump. This  in fact goes beyond mere ignorance into a kind of cultish stupidity that makes no sense on any level.

The ABC, and the media overall, are filled with people whose only stock in trade are their opinions. They support mass murderers who would snuff out their lives without hesitation, and snuff out their culture as well if they could.

If not Donald Trump, who do they think would do better? Hillary? Bernie? Calling them clueless is too good for them.

Here by the way is the source of the chart. And here is the president’s address this morning on Iran.

“Obama likes Suleimani, and admires his work”

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This is from 2015: Obama Strikes a Deal–With Qassem Suleimani. It’s by Lee Smith from the Hudson Institute.

According to the terms of the Iran deal announced in Vienna on Tuesday, U.N. Security Council sanctions regarding nuclear-related issues will be lifted on a number of entities and individuals—from Iranian banks to Lebanese assassins, like Anis Nacacche. The name that most sticks out is IRGC-Quds Force commander Qassem Suleimani. Administration officials counsel calm, and explain that Suleimani is still on the U.S. terror list and will remain on the terror list. But that’s irrelevant. The reality is that Suleimani is the key to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

It is all incredible, but this is extraordinary.

Obama likes Suleimani, and admires his work. As the president reportedly told a group of Arab officials in May, the Arabs “need to learn from Iran’s example.”

In fact, they need to take a page out of the playbook of the Qods Force — by which [Obama] meant developing their own local proxies capable of going toe-to-toe with Iran’s agents and defeating them. The president seemed to marvel at the fact that from Hezbollah to the Houthis to the Iraqi militias, Iran has such a deep bench of effective proxies willing to advance its interests. Where, he asked, are their equivalent on the Sunni side? Why, he wanted to know in particular, have the Saudis and their partners not been able to cultivate enough Yemenis to carry the burden of the fight against the Houthis? The Arabs, Obama suggested, badly need to develop a toolbox that goes beyond the brute force of direct intervention. Instead, they need to, be subtler, sneakier, more effective — well, just more like Iran.

Is it stupidity, incompetence or duplicity? Who can tell, but we should be very grateful it is gone for now. With foreign policy such a low-grade issue to at least half the American population, you never know who they will elect for president next. In the meantime, we have to hope they keep the one they now have for the next four years.

But where you will never unravel any of these questions is by reading the daily papers or watching the ABC. This is from the Australian Financial Review today, with this the heading in the paper, but not online: Trump scraps Obama legacy. This is the sub-head in the paper, but again, not the one used online.

“In confronting Iran, the president, driven by a desire to trash his predecessor’s foreign policy record, is determined to prove himself a superior commander-in-chief.”

And in the very middle of the page, the inset quote reads:

“I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say the root of much of this is Obama envy.”

It would be nice if these people would stick to foreign policy and lay off the pop-psychology. For what it’s worth, in my view Obama was the worst president in American history, both for domestic and foreign policy. Anyone who cannot at least understand why someone might come to this conclusion should be prevented from commenting on current events.

Progressives and the meaning of progress

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https://twitter.com/AlinejadMasih/status/1150105699097161728

Positively incredible. Only “progressives” could believe in the certainty of progress. And of course, for some what exists in 2020 is an improvement on the past. You never know your own future in how the world is built. There are many worse fates than having Donald Trump as president. Many!

And let me draw your attention to a quite good article in The Oz today: Soleimani: For once the virtuous have not been meek. This is how it ends:

For the long term, the challenge for Western governments is how we defend our foreign and domestic interests from these growing networks of state and non-state terrorists. A silent risk is the growing number of people in the West who admire the likes of Soleimani.

As the British geopolitical theorist Halford Mackinder stated: “Democracy refuses to think strategically unless and until compelled to do so for purposes of defence.”

Today that is too slow. We need to wake up to the game being played against our system.

Not just by Iran but Russia and China.

Not to mention all of the “progressives” in our midst.

Perspectives on the US v Iran

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And here’s another perspective!

___________________________Below is the original post
Politics may be the art of the possible, but knowing what’s possible requires calculation and judgement. A bit of the analytics going on in public. The divide over whether the killing of Suleimani should or should not have been done is for the Monday-morning quarterbacks. What is the strategy going forward, and on both sides. Here are some thoughts from others.

From War With Iran?:

Were the United States to place secondary sanctions on all manner of goods, especially food, the effect would be far greater than an invasion by the entire U.S. army. How the Iranian people would deal with the choice between starving and ending their government’s war on America would be their business.

From Iranian Analytics:

Trump’s base accepts that he is backing out of the Middle East firing, not firing to get in…. The current Iranian crisis is complex and dangerous. And by all means retaliation must be designed to prevent more Iranian violence and aggression rather than aimed at a grandiose agenda of regime change or national liberation. But so far the Iranians, not the U.S., are making all the blunders.

From Attack on Qassem Soleimani was deterrence, not escalation:

Iran knows it faces a choice it didn’t think it faced before. It can vow hellish revenge, but now it has had a taste of the hell the United States can rain down in response. And while the mullahs are extreme, they do not appear to be imprudent. Ruthless self-interest might have gotten them going in the first place, and it is what might restrain them in the end. That is how deterrence works. And that is the bet Trump and the United States made by letting the Iranians know we were not going to take their aggression lying down.

From Targeting Soleimani: Trump was justified, legally and strategically:

A congressional authorization of military force would strengthen the president’s hand. It would not require that force be used (or at least used to the full extent of the authorization), but it would show our enemies that our nation is ready to act in our defense. The strategies of Trump’s predecessors were to hope that a committed jihadist enemy would come to its senses; hope that it would realize its purported interest in regional stability; and hope that by bribing it with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, ransom, and an industrial-strength nuclear program, we could de-escalate the conflict. President Trump’s strategy is to remove the enemy’s most effective military asset (who will not be easily replaceable), to demonstrate to the mullahs what can happen when resolve backs our exponentially superior capabilities, and to continue squeezing the regime with punishing economic sanctions — as it is pressured by the increasingly restive Iranian people. Peace through strength is the better plan.

From Trump Calls the Ayatollah’s Bluff:

Deterrence, says Fred Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, is credibly holding at risk something your adversary holds dear. If the reports out of Iraq are true, President Trump has put at risk the entirety of the Iranian imperial enterprise even as his maximum-pressure campaign strangles the Iranian economy and fosters domestic unrest. That will get the ayatollah’s attention. And now the United States must prepare for his answer. The bombs over Baghdad? That was Trump calling Khamenei’s bluff. The game has changed. But it isn’t over.

From Iranian Revenge Will Be A Dish Best Served Cold:

For many analysts and observers, Iran and the U.S. are on the cusp of a major confrontation. While such an outcome is possible, the reality is that the Iranian policy of asymmetrical response to American aggression that had been put in place by Qassem Suleimani when he was alive is still in place today. While emotions run high in the streets of Iranian cities, with angry crowds demanding action, the Iranian leadership, of which Suleimani was a trusted insider, recognizes that any precipitous action on its part only plays into the hands of the United States. In seeking revenge for the assassination of Qassem Suleimani, Iran will most likely play the long game, putting into action the old maxim that revenge is a dish best served cold….
Trump started this fight by recklessly ordering the assassination of a senior Iranian government official. The Trump administration now seeks to shape events in the region to best support a direct confrontation with Iran. Such an outcome is not in Iran’s best interests. Instead, they will erode Trump’s political base by embarrassing him in Iraq and with ISIS. Iran will respond, that much can be assured. But the time and place will be of their choosing, when the U.S. expects it least.

For myself, I see no point in absorbing punishment to show good will. But that is only a first approximation. We here know virtually nothing of what is known both in Washington and Teheran. This is where we are and this is what these analysts think, but the future remains unknown as it always is. The only certainty is that whatever Trump does the Democrats, and the media, will insist it was the wrong thing to have done.

Plus this: PETRAEUS ON SOLEIMANI:

Two short questions for what’s next, Gen. Petraeus — US remaining in Iraq, and war with Iran. What’s your best guess?

Well, I think one of the questions is, “What will the diplomatic ramifications of this be?” And again, there have been celebrations in some places in Iraq at the loss of Qasem Soleimani. So, again, there’s no tears being shed in certain parts of the country. And one has to ask what happens in the wake of the killing of the individual who had a veto, virtually, over the leadership of Iraq. What transpires now depends on the calculations of all these different elements. And certainly the US, I would assume, is considering diplomatic initiatives as well, reaching out and saying, “Okay. Does that send a sufficient message of our seriousness? Now, would you like to return to the table?” Or does Iran accelerate the nuclear program, which would, of course, precipitate something further from the United States? Very likely. So lots of calculations here. And I think we’re still very early in the deliberations on all the different ramifications of this very significant action.

And this: Lindsey Graham Has a Message for Iran: If They Retaliate, We Will Hit What They Can’t Afford to Lose:

“To the Iranian government: If you want to stay in the oil business leave America and our allies alone and stop being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world,” he continued. Boom. If they lose that, they know they will completely collapse and their own people will run over them.