Recommended: Nothing is True and Everything is Possible

I have mentioned before Angelo Codevilla’s persuasive argument that the central problem with all of the various schools of American foreign policy is that they all assume that other nations and other cultures think much as we do, have similar expectations and values, and will react as we would to threats and incentives. That is certainly clearly not true of Russia, which as Churchill once famously said “is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”.

Peter Pomerantsev, who now lives in London, is of Russian extraction and spent a decade in Russia working as a writer and producer. His new book Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia, is a revealing look into Putin’s new Russia, part Tsarist empire, part Mafia gang, part surreal PR construct.  It is a well written book, almost lyrical in parts, but it is a very important book in light of Russia’s new aggressive stance in the world.

Russia, of course, is a wounded bear, perhaps even a mortally wounded bear. Its economy and its infrastructure are in shambles, massive corruption is endemic at all levels from the President himself to the lowest bureaucrat or policemen, and it faces a serious demographic decline with a rapidly aging population. President Putin or whomever replaces him will have to use extreme measures to maintain power amidst the decay and decline, and aggression toward the West will no doubt be a central feature for years or decades to come. Russia lacks the economic power to support a major war, but it is still quite capable of causing endless troubles along its own borders, and given its (historically understandable) paranoia about the West, will no doubt do so.

In the light of that, anything which helps us understand the differing world view of Russians is important, and that is why this book is important.

The mote in your eye…..

I have been thinking about the peoples of the world who have been sold unrealistic visions, mostly to their detriment. The Russian people, sold the idea that Putin is their great savior. The Jihadists sold the dream of dominating the world. The ludicrousness of some of these visions is so clear to those of us outside their influence. And yet…..and yet……

It makes me wonder what foolishness we Americans have bought; what Cool-Aid we have drunk.  What would an uninvolved outsider see about our visions?

We fancy ourselves a democracy, but really, if you think about it, our elections are a bit of a farce. Most voters don’t understand most of the issues, and many don’t even care. We never seem to vote for the real candidate, but rather vote for a gussied-up image created by professional image-makers, with media exposure financed by wealthy corporations, unions and/or special interest groups.  And as a result, we get fairly unimpressive leaders – ideological fanatics of the left or  right, or people who don’t even believe evidence (think the climate-change deniers). Why, for example, did we get convinced (and I fell for it too!) that a junior senator who never sponsored a single piece of legislation either in Congress or in his home state legislature, who never met a payroll or ran a business, who had no experience whatsoever in managing a legislature or even a small business, would be a good president? Because we bought the image.

We fancy ourselves the land of opportunity, but really, if you think about it, the country is essentially run by a small, wealthy, elite group of business leaders, Wall Street wheelers-and-dealers, politicians, and union bosses. The statistics on income inequality make that pretty clear. Some CEOs make 400+ times as much as their average employees. Some unions (such as some  teachers unions and police unions) are able to absolutely block any attempts at reform. Some big companies are able to get (buy) legislation and regulations and laws in place that absolutely shut out any competition (think Monsanto with its war on soybean seed producers – if the wind blows in pollen from their GMO plants in nearby fields, the law allows them to shut down an independent farmer and force him to buy their seed).

We fancy ourselves a land of laws, but really, if you think about it, in America the wealthy often get off with major crimes (because they can afford good lawyers), while the poor get jailed for minor crimes. We have more people in jail, per capita, than the authoritarian regimes like Russia and China and North Korea that we claim to despise. And our police, it has recently been revealed, have the power in many states to seize assets “on suspicion” without proof or even warrants, and have been using those seized assets to buy themselves equipment. Not to mention the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that have made the news recently.  Or the fact that we are using drones to kill militants in nations we are not even formally at war with.

It seems to me we need to do a bit of self-examination and soul-searching before we get so disdainful of those other poor fools who have been sold such a bill of goods.   

The CIA Interrogation Report

Some years ago the National Reconnaissance Office started to build a new headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia. After a while it was revealed that the building was going to overrun its cost estimate by $2-$3 billion.  A couple of Senators made a big public deal of how this was outrageous, and how if they had known the NRO was going to build such a building they would have objected. BUT I happen to know that these very same Senators had been given a private tour of the half-finished building only a few months before (during which they admired the design), so in fact they had known about the building, and its cost overruns, all along. So their “outrage” was just public posturing.

The story comes to mind now because of the phony outrage from politicians (mostly Democrats) about the newly-released report from the Senate Intelligence Committee about CIA interrogation techniques. I say “phony” because just about everyone in Washington, and most people around the country,  have known about these techniques for some years now.  There have been numerous articles about it over the past decade, and a good bit of public debate about the morality of “enhanced interrogation techniques”.  So to suddenly get outraged about it now is just more public posturing – and perhaps an attempt from some politicians to distance themselves from the issue now that it is more public, though they kept quiet, or even supported the CIA, before all this got so much publicity.

There is no question that these techniques are immoral, and even more to the point, the evidence suggests that they didn’t produce much of any useful information. Professional interrogators (which these people apparently were not) know that the best results generally come from building a trusting relationship with the suspect, not from waterboarding them.  But they did probably generate more enemies for America, and lower our standing around the world.  We are hardly in a position to lecture authoritarian regimes on their human rights issues in the light of our own actions.

But this new public outrage over what everyone has known for years is just another disgusting case of hypocritical political theater - something we see far too much of from Washington these days.

Recommended: Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain

Paul Rosenberg has written a wonderful piece in Salon entitled Why are these clowns winning? Secrets of the right-wing brain. This fascinating piece begins:

When George W. Bush became president in 2001, it marked the first time in 70 years that conservative Republicans controlled all three branches of government. By the time Bush left office, we were all reminded why. The financial crisis and resulting global economic meltdown Bush left us with were eerily reminiscent of the Great Depression, but there was also 9/11, the Iraq War and Katrina—a multifaceted record of spectacular failure so stunning that it should have disqualified conservative Republicans from holding power for at least another seven decades.  Yet, the Democrats’ political response to the many messes Bush left behind has been so spectacularly inept that they’ve not only lost both houses of Congress, they’ve also lost more state legislative seats than any time since before the Great Recession.

The answer he offers is complex - this is not a easy, partisan, sound-bite piece to understand, but it is worth it.

Recommended: What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel

I have noted repeatedly in recent months the obvious anti-Semitic bias of the world press and the UN, especially during the last Israel-Hamas war.  But perhaps there is more operating here than just antisemitism. Matti Friedman is a journalist (no doubt sympathetic to Israel), and his piece in the Atlantic Monthly What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel is a fascinating insight into how the world press gets its stories, and often gets them wrong.

It is worth reading this piece and pondering whether similar distortions are occurring in stories from elsewhere in the world..

Recommended: On Obama and the Nature of Failed Presidencies

George Friedman of STRATFOR has posted another incisive article today: On Obama and the Nature of Failed Presidencies.  Friedman defines a "failed" presidency as one where the President has begun to lose support from his/her base, and so is no longer trying to garner support from the undecided middle but just trying to keep support from the base (though in Obama's case, it is not clear to me that he has ever really tried to court the middle). President Obama's approval ratings have been in the mid to high 30% level from many months now, indicating that a significant proportion of his base is now disenchanted with him.

As Friedman says, STRATFOR doesn't generally comment on domestic politics, but in the case of a lame-duck "failed" presidency with both the Senate and the House now in opposition hands, there are significant implications for US foreign policy, for what the president now can and can't do, and for how international opponents like Putin or Iran are likely to react to him, which is what Friedman examines.

Another thoughtful article.

Isn't it remarkable....?

Isn't it remarkable that during the recent Israel-Hamas battle there was daily hand-wringing at the UN and in the world press about the dozen or so Palestinian women and children civilians killed each day by accident by the Israeli forces, but there is little or no equivalent fuss made by the UN or the world press while ISIS deliberately and brutally and with malice aforethought kills, rapes, tortures and exterminates whole villages each day. While the Israeli-Hamas battle raged the Obama administration pressured Israel every day.  Funny how the administration is much more laid back about the ISIS threat, which is killing hundreds of times more people.

Is it because there aren't Jews involved?  Is it because the world cares less about  the Iraqi and Syrian people being murdered than it does about Palestinians? Or is it because, unlike Hamas, these poor Iraqi and Syrian villages don't have a sophisticated media presence to feed the world press neat, gripping, ready-made (and often contrived) headline stories?

The blatant hypocrisy and double standard sickens me.

Recommended: White House Netanyahu insults: What a 'chickens***' knows about lame ducks

The reported comment from a senior White House official that Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a "chickenshit" marks a new low in an administration that has been remarkably incompetent recently in foreign affairs. But beyond that, it reflects an unrealistic policy toward Israel that has spanned decades and many administrations, in which American politicians, from the safe comfort of America, have tried to tell an embattled Israel what it ought to do.  The advice has mostly been bad - aimed more at supporting American interests than Israeli interests.  And to their credit, the Israelis have often ignored the bad advice.

  Zev Chafets' recent article in Fox News: White House Netanyahu insults: What a 'chickens***' knows about lame ducks is very good. In particular, the five "realities" listed at the bottom of the article that Zev claims Netanyahu knows are a breath of fresh air in a debate that has too long been dominated by unrealistic expectations.

American wars since World War II

We have been watching the PBS special “The Sixties”, and tonight we watched the episode about the Vietnam War.  It made me think about all the American Wars since World War II.

The Korean War was at least a draw, in that when the fighting stopped the North Koreans and their Chinese allies had at least been pushed back more or less to the original dividing line.

Vietnam was a disaster. We essentially never found a workable strategy for winning, we lost 58,300 American lives with another 153,300 wounded, killed over a million civilians, spent about $173 billion (about $800 billion is 2014 dollars), and eventually withdrew and let the North Vietnamese take the whole county. Oh, and records now show our government lied to us repeatedly about the war, starting with the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident.

The first Gulf war a disaster. We spent about $30 billion of American taxpayer money (other nations contributed the rest) and beat Saddam’s forces in Kuwait in 100 hours, and then stopped without finishing the job, and then allowed Saddam to kill tens of thousands of his own people who thought we were going to help them.

Afghanistan was and still is a disaster. After 13 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss of 2200 American lives thus far with another 20,000 wounded, and perhaps around 20,000 civilians killed, and about $750 billion in America taxpayer money spent, the Taliban are reclaiming territory as fast as we withdraw from it. Once again, we never found a workable strategy for winning, and a student of history might have known from the beginning (or at least from the Soviet’s recent example) that it was an impossible war to win.

Iraq was and still is a disaster. After 11 years of inconclusive fighting, the loss more than 4500 Americans killed and something over 32,000 wounded, and between 130,000 and 150,000 more civilians killed and another $1.7 trillion in American Taxpayer money thus far (not counting another $500 billion in veterans’ benefits), the newly-trained Iraqi army fled in terror from the ISIS fanatics, leaving much of their expensive American-supplied weapons behind, and now the northern part of the country is in the hands of the most brutal thugs imaginable. Once again, our ruling elites never figured out a workable strategy to win – or even decided what would constitute winning. Oh, and once again our government gave us misinformation about the war - the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction that were never found.,

Is there a disturbing pattern here? Our military are doing their job superbly, often under impossible conditions.  Our politicians, on the other hand, have fumbled repeatedly.

Encryption and the feds

I see that the federal law enforcement agencies are quite perturbed about the new default encryption appearing in Apple's new iPhones and Google's Android phones, which will make it much harder, perhaps even impossible, to listen in on everyone's phone calls and e-mails. It will, they say, seriously impede the tracking of drug dealers, pedophiles, terrorists and other criminals. And no doubt they are right. Such measures have already been shown to be very effective in other systems - we call those systems "police states" - like Russia and North Korea.

Most of us already appear many times a day on surveillance cameras in big stores and on street corners in many towns. Our auto license plates are read and tracked automatically in many jurisdictions. The NSA already sweeps up all our phone calls, and perhaps most of our web visits and emails as well. Our credit card transactions can be tracked, as well as our air travel. No doubt a police-linked surveillance camera in every bedroom would further help the police deal with rapes and domestic violence, but do we really want to go that far?

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies always want more, and more intrusive, powers - of course it makes their job easier. It also makes abuses of power easier, and the history of federal agency abuses, from the Nixon years to the Obama administration's IRS scandal, ought to alert us to the dangers to our freedom and privacy that this constant federal overreach offers.

The feds are annoyed about the encryption. My response is "tough - get used to it". This is supposed to be the land of the free - if the feds can listen in to every telephone call I make and and every email I send, we are hardly free.

More from Angelo Codvilla

Angelo Codvilla’s summary of the Iraq war, pg 190 in his book Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft:

In fact our statesmen never decided among themselves what part of the terrorist problem Iraq posed, hence how invading Iraq would solve it, hence who our enemy was, and therefore what victory would mean.  Much less did they decide why they were occupying the country.  They did not choose among competing analyses of the problem, and then settle on a coherent plan for victory against concrete enemies. They compromised with one another, adjusted their definition of enemies and of victory to fit what they happened to be doing at any given time, and claimed that it was all so complex.

But victory in our time is as self-evident as ever.  If you can’t celebrate it in peace and safety, with flag flying, bands blaring, and enemies dead or cringing, chances are it’s not the real thing. Among other things, victory means being unencumbered to deal with tomorrow’s problems. Remember that the natural objective of any fight is to win, to get it over with – not to pass the troubles on to your grandchildren……

Now think about our current adventure against the Islamic State.

1. Do we know who the enemy is? Not really, certainly not once they melt back into populated centers, and especially since many of them are members of the indigenous population.

2. Do we have a plan to completely defeat them? Not really, since we don’t even really know how to identify them, let alone how to kill them without killing the civilians around them, thereby recruiting even more of the population to their cause.

3. Is that plan achievable realistically? Since we don’t have a plan, by definition it is not achievable

Statecraft and the Islamic State

Hard-headed, clear, unambiguous language from Angelo Codevilla’s book “Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft", pg 96:

…statecrafts primoidal questions: What exactly are we after? What does it take to persuade whom of what? What means are sufficient to what ends?

So think about the Syria/Iraq conflict, and America’s current responses to it, in the context of those simple, clear questions:

With the Islamic State what, exactly, is our objective?

To exterminate them entirely? What realistically would it take to do that, considering how little success we had suppressing insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan after a decade of trying? Once they melt back into the populations in the cities, how do we identify them to kill them?

To “degrade” them to the point where they no longer threaten Iraq? What, realistically, would it take to do that, considering the number of disenchanted Sunni tribes in Iraq who have joined the Islamic State?

To strengthen local forces enough that they can defeat the Islamic State? We spent a decade and who knows how many millions of dollars building up and training the Iraqi army, and they fled in panic when faced with the Islamic State fighters. The Kurds, with our support, may fight well enough to preserve their own territory, but they are in no position to move out and reconquer the rest of Iraq. What other local forces are there that haven’t already joined the Islamic State?

What would it take to persuade whom of what?

What, realistically, would it take to persuade all these Islamic State fighters to stop fighting, and to persuade potential new recruits to not join? Considering that opposing us and recapturing territory is a religious imperative for them, what possible incentive or threat could we offer that would deter them? Do we have any means at all at our disposal to deter them?

What means are sufficient to what ends?

It seems to me perfectly clear what it would take realistically – a massive US ground force (because no one else in the Middle East or the European Union is either willing to do it, or militarily capable of doing it), sweeping through and conquering the whole territory, and then remaining and administering it as brutally as Saddam Hussain did when he ruled. Are we willing to do that?  Of course not.  Our troops would refuse to be as brutal as it would take to suppress ISIS and keep them suppressed, and the American public would refuse to let them be so brutal. Beyond that, there is no pressing American interest that would justify the cost on dollars, equipment and lives to conquer and administer a far-away piece of desert.

So in fact we are unwilling to do what it would take to achieve the ends we want.  So then why are we there at all, wasting American money on a lost cause?

Recommended: Advice To War Presidents

Having recently discovered Angelo Codevilla’s books, I have been reading my way through a number of them, including two recommended in recent posts.  Today I am recommending his book Advice to War Presidents: A Remedial Course in Statecraft (2009). The title might sound a bit condescending if we didn’t currently have a president who looks like he badly needs a remedial course in statecraft.

Codevilla presents a detailed and pointed criticism of American statecraft all across the spectrum, from the Liberal Internationalism launched by Woodrow Wilson, through Realists to Neoconservatives.  Each of these academic dogmas has its peculiar beliefs and agendas, but Codeville argues that at root they all share the same naïve and fundamental flaw – they all assume that other nations and peoples think more or less like we do, aspire to more or less the same things as we do, value more or less the same things we do, and therefore would respond to threats and incentives more or less as we would. Clearly that is not the case, and he details American foreign policy failures from Woodrow Wilson to the present day, across both political parties, to make his case.

This is not as easy a book to read as the previous two.  It takes some work to really understand the complexities, but it is worth the effort.  I don’t agree with everything he writes, but I think on balance his arguments are persuasive. He certainly won’t ever be the darling of the ruling elite in this country, because he thinks most of them are naïve about the wider world, and their dearest policies completely unrealistic. But then, I am coming to believe that too.

The Scotland vote

The people of Scotland vote on Thursday on whether or not to split from the United Kingdom and become an independent country. It doesn't take rocket science to see that splitting from England would be a very dumb move, leaving Scotland as a very small, insignificant nation, almost entirely depended on the dwindling North Sea oil reserves to keep fiscally solvent.

But in fact the polls show the race too close to call at the moment, so nationalism and emotion may well trump reason in this case. Well, people make their bed so they get to lie in it. If the Scots vote to leave the UK, they will have generations to regret their decision.

The President’s speech last night

I read the text of the speech to the nation that President Obama gave last night.  I couldn’t bring myself to listen to it live, because I am tired of his rhetoric (but to be fair, by this point in the Bush presidency I couldn’t stand to listen to Bush any more either).  If I were to paraphrase the speech, it would run like this:

Introduction:

Hey, I know I have been getting a lot of flak lately for being a do-nothing, indecisive, lead-from-behind, golf-playing president in foreign policy, but we have managed to do a few minor things, like find Bin Laden and waste him.  Give me a little credit here.

Central Point:

We still have no idea what to do about Syria, Iraq, or the Islamic State, so we are going to continue to do the only thing we can think of, which is to drop a few bombs on them any time we can find a worthwhile target, and maybe pass out a few MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat) to a few of the Syrian rebels. We certainly don’t intend to do anything really effective, like putting American troops on the ground. By some hard arm-twisting over the past few days we have managed to assemble a coalition of nations who are willing to at least give lip service to the idea of helping us (though of course they see that we don’t intend to invest much in the effort, so they won’t either). This effort will be a long one (meaning that I intend to dump this whole problem off on my successor just as soon as I can).

Conclusion:

Lots of meaningless platitudes about how great we are.

Is this really the best the administration can do?

Realism in foreign policy

Everybody has their own diagnosis for why American foreign policy seems to be failing: here is mine – we need a lot less utopian idealism and a lot more hard-headed realism!

Here are my top 5 principles that it seems to me our ruling class have lost sight of:

1. American-style democratic government is not exportable. It requires a particular set of cultural and institutional and historical underpinnings which simply don’t exist in many of the nations and cultures we keep trying to “nation-build” into replicas of America.  Realistically it just doesn’t work, and by now we have had enough failed attempts that one would think even the densest ideologues would be beginning to get the message. We need to drop this persistent dream of turning the whole world into a democratic utopia – it just isn’t going to happen. Countries that choose themselves to move toward democracy will do it in their own way, in their own time, and will probably develop a form of democracy of their own, reflecting the peculiarities of their own culture and history – and it probably won’t look like American democracy.

2. We can’t right all the wrongs in the world, and we shouldn’t try to. Lots of very nasty things go on around the world all the time – massive poverty, brutal dictatorships, plagues, famines, wars, genocides, etc, etc.  They always have and they always will. There is no way America can “fix” all of them. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do what we can to improve the world in the long term, but this business of picking the odd injustice here and there (based largely on the whims of what the news media happens to choose to report in the nightly news) and basing our foreign policy on it is ineffective, counterproductive, and frankly just plain stupid.

3. Any government’s first duty is to keep its own people safe and prosperous.  As I have written before, “it’s the economy, stupid”.  American power – hard and soft – flows entirely from its economic strength.  Not from its moral posturing or religious base, not from its supposed ”exceptionalism”, certainly not from the brilliance of its statesmen and politicians, not even from its fortunate geographic position – but only from its massive economic strength, which means we can afford a powerful well-trained and well-equipped military, a good  national infrastructure, good public health services, good public education, with enough money left over to buy goodwill from our allies. If our economy went south, our influence in the world would follow it right down the drain. A wise government would, as a matter of foreign policy and national security,  look first and foremost toward keeping our own economy as vibrant and powerful as possible.

4. A rational foreign policy for a superpower like America would seek first and foremost to try to keep any other hostile nation, or coalition of hostile nations, from becoming powerful enough to become an existential threat to America. We did that successfully through the post-war Soviet era. It ought to remain the central guiding principle of our foreign policy. This requires (a) that we keep ourselves strong economically and militarily, and (b) that we build and maintain an effective coalition of nations who see it in their own clear self-interest to support us.

5. Current public sentiment is not a reliable guide to effective foreign policy. It is an effective leader’s job to lead his/her people where they need to go, not to just follow the polls and try to tell them what they want to hear (and will get her/him re-elected). An effective foreign policy in a democracy requires that the government educate and lead the people toward rational policies, rather than just reacting to the passing whims of the public (or, more likely, the news media that shapes the public whims).

I wonder if the Nobel Prize committee....

The Nobel Prize committee awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama, apparently on the basis of his soaring rhetoric about ending wars, since he hadn't actually done anything yet at that point. I wonder how they feel about their choice this morning?

Recommended: Informing Statecraft

The previous post recommended Angelo Codevilla’s book War: Ends and Means, in my opinion as good a book, and as important a book for students of history and foreign affairs as such classics as von Clausewitz’s On War and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.  This post recommends another of his books, the 1992 book Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century.

The US intelligence system is massive and exorbitantly expensive, employing well over 100,000 people, plus tens of thousands more as contractors. Of course much of the annual cost is invisible, hidden in “black” budgets, but informed estimates put it at more than $50 billion per year.

Yet despite all that money and all those people and all the expensive equipment, US intelligence has failed to anticipate almost every significant world event since the end of World War II, starting with the Soviet Union’s postwar plans in Eastern Europe, including the Korean invasion, both major Arab-Israeli wars, the Eastern European “color revolutions”, the fall of the Communist party in Russia, Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, and most recently the so-called “Arab Spring”, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the rise of the Islamic State.  US intelligence efforts have, for the most part, been a failure.  There have no doubt been successes (which understandably are seldom publicized), but on the major events, there have been a lot of failures.

There are many reasons for the ineffectiveness of America intelligence services. There are too many competing services, and because of bureaucratic turf battles and jalousies they don’t share information easily. They are too big, so that communication paths are too long and too tortuous. They have become too bureaucratic, with more of a focus on budget politics and career preservation than on their primary tasks. They have a fascination with technical tools and have neglected to develop enough human sources in other nations. They are too insular in outlook; too wedded to American concepts to think out of the box. They are short not only linguists who can read or translate the intelligence they collect, but more critically they are short of experts who truly understand the cultures they are trying to collect information on.

And of course, the politicians who get the intelligence products they produce are mostly too poorly educated in history, comparative cultures, and statecraft, and often too blinded by their own preconceptions, ideologies and biases to make effective use of what they do get.

Codeville tallks at length about how to do intelligence work correctly, with many real-world examples from both American experiences and other nation’s intelligence services experiences of what worked and what didn’t work, and why. He has a background in intelligence work, so he knows what he is talking about.  This is a very good book.

Recommended: War: Ends and Means

I have written before that the well-educated, comfortable middle class political, academic and business elites who run this country apparently have a far less realistic view of the world than the poor who live in tough neighborhoods dominated by gangs. The poor understand first hand that force and the threat of force matters, and that some people can’t just be reasoned out of conflicts.

And recent events have shown, once again, that liberal American Utopian views of a peaceful, orderly world are not shared by the brutal Islamic State, nor Hamas in Gaza, nor any of the many, many other armed militias, jihadist groups, pseudo-communist insurgents, or pirates in Africa or the Middle East or even in parts of Latin America. And now we can see that they aren’t shared by Russia and President Putin either.  In fact, the world produces a steady, reliable stream of brutal dictators and ambitious leaders in the mold of Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussain, Napoleon, Bashar Assad, Vladimir Putin, and their ilk, who are only contained or defeated by force.

Paul Seabury (Prof of Political Science , Berkeley) and Angelo Codevilla (Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institute, Stanford) wrote War: Ends and Means (1989) as an attempt to educate a new American generation, who did not live through World War I or World War II, about the importance of understanding wars – why they are sometimes necessary (because bad as they are , the alternative is sometimes worse), how they start, how they are prosecuted, and how they end - instead of just naively pretending it will never happen again.

This excerpt from the introduction makes their point:

This book is not written for strategic theorists, military professionals, or historians who devote themselves to the nature of organized violence and its relation to politics. It is written for a generation of Americans whom the absence of the military draft has trained to live as if military matters were a spectator sport, whose popular culture gives the impression that violence belongs exclusively to the past or to lower forms of life, and whose university curriculum make it well-night impossible to put one’s self in the shoes of history’s protagonists – or of those caught in the middle. This book would not be understood in the Communist world or in much of the Third World, where violence is endemic and discourse on this subject is deformed or nonexistent.  It would be superfluous in, say, Switzerland or Israel, where personal involvement in military matters  goes hand-in-hand with sober discourse, as it would have been superfluous in America  prior to the 1950s.  But in the magic kingdom of modern upper-middle-class American life, it is as necessary as it was two thousand years ago for the slave who sat behind the conquering hero in Rome’s triumphal processions and whispered in his ear: “All glory is fleeting”.  Hubris and ignorance are equally narcotic.  We write to break the spell of ignorance about war and to bring some of the least palatable aspects of reality into contemporary American minds though the gentle medium of the printed page lest someday these aspects intrude of their own accord.

In a time when the world is aflame in violence, from the Middle East to the Ukraine, and our government appears unable to settle on a coherent strategy to manage our responses, if any, to these crises, this book seems to me particularly relevant and important.

PS - Get the 1990 paperback reprint, if possible.  It includes a new forward analyzing the first Gulf war in the context of this discussion - and the analysis is very revealing indeed!

PPS - Better yet, get the second edition (2006), which adds a new extensive discussion of the American "war on terror".

Recommended: Kissinger OpEd

Henry Kissinger has a good short essay in yesterday's Wall Street Journal: Henry Kissinger on the Assembly of a New World Order. In particular, I am drawn to the following excerpt:

 To play a responsible role in the evolution of a 21st-century world order, the U.S. must be prepared to answer a number of questions for itself: What do we seek to prevent, no matter how it happens, and if necessary alone? What do we seek to achieve, even if not supported by any multilateral effort? What do we seek to achieve, or prevent, only if supported by an alliance? What should we not engage in, even if urged on by a multilateral group or an alliance? What is the nature of the values that we seek to advance? And how much does the application of these values depend on circumstance?

For the U.S., this will require thinking on two seemingly contradictory levels. The celebration of universal principles needs to be paired with recognition of the reality of other regions' histories, cultures and views of their security. Even as the lessons of challenging decades are examined, the affirmation of America's exceptional nature must be sustained. History offers no respite to countries that set aside their sense of identity in favor of a seemingly less arduous course. But nor does it assure success for the most elevated convictions in the absence of a comprehensive geopolitical strategy. (emphasis mine)

"We don't have a strategy....."

President Obama’s recent “We don’t have a strategy in Syria” gaffe has of course gone viral on the web.  I don’t know why, since it is simply an admission of what has been obvious for months now. Of course the White House staff have been trying to do damage control ever since, but not very convincingly.  Clearly we don’t have a strategy for Syria or the Islamic State – apparently the president couldn’t think of one while he was golfing.

But in fact the real issue to worry about is not that we don’t have a strategy in Syria – the real issue is that the administration seems not to have a strategy to counter the blatant Russian aggression in the Ukraine, which is a much, much bigger threat to Europe and the US than the Syrian civil war, bad as that is.  Indeed, for once the Europeans seem to be the ones talking tough (though we will see if they follow through), while President Obama has said almost nothing about the whole crisis, and what little he has said is meaningless.

Those who know the history of World War II will recall much the same unrealistic attitude toward Hitler’s initial invasion of Poland in 1939 as we seem to be seeing today in the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. And they will recall Chamberlain’s infamous “peace in our time” gaffe.

At a time when strong America leadership is desperately needed, our President seems to have gone AWOL. We played and still play no effective role in the Israel-Hamas conflict.  We declined to do anything about Syria.  Obama has now publicly admitted we have no strategy for the Syrian civil war, or for the Islamic State brutality. We have been largely ineffective in Iraq. Large sections of Afghanistan are reverting to Taliban control with no effective response from the US. And now Russia is openly invading the Ukraine (who we promised to defend back in 1994 when they gave up their nuclear weapons – see the Budapest Memorandums of December 5, 1994), and apparently President Obama doesn’t think that requires much response from us, other than a few clearly ineffective “wet-noodle” economic sanctions.

Well, many of us (including myself) voted for this untried junior senator and community organizer back in 2008 on the basis of his lofty rhetoric and glowing promises.  And apparently we got exactly what we voted for - lofty rhetoric and a lot of promises (such as “if you like your health plan you can keep it”).  Unfortunately that isn’t what we really needed to manage the complexities of this world – we needed a strong, wise leader.

So are we going to continue to pretend....?

The evidence is pretty clear by now that Russia is not only supplying and reinforcing the Ukrainian rebels, but that in fact Russian regular troops are engaged on Ukrainian soil. Intelligence photographs, some available on the web, show convoys of Russian tanks, mobile artillery and armored vehicles moving within the Ukraine. But of course Russia continues to deny that they are there.

A few days ago ten Russian regular army soldiers were captured in the Ukraine. Russia says that they were on border patrol and just strayed across into the Ukraine by accident -- BUT in fact they were captured 20 km inside the Ukraine, hardly an accidental crossing.

Yesterday a Russian armored column captured the seaside town of Novoazovsk in the Ukrainian, so now the pretense is even thinner than before.

So this is the question: are the US and Europe going to continue to pretend to believe that Russia is telling the truth, even though the evidence is now overwhelming that Russia is lying and is actively involved in the Ukraine? And if so, why is this? President Obama promised more stringent sanctions if Russia went further. So now they have gone further, while of course still denying everything. Is the president once again going to ignore the red line he himself drew? And if so, what does that tell other nations about US willingness to follow through on its threats?

Is Europe, always fairly feckless anyway, going to ignore this? What does that tell the newly-liberated Eastern European nations about NATO willingness to defend them? It seems to me the US administration is floundering here, with no clear strategy. If so, this could be pretty dangerous. Those who know the history leading up to World War II will recognize the similarities.

Recommended: The Race to be Wrong in Ferguson

In a world full of rabidly partisan talking heads – both liberal and conservative – it is refreshing to find the occasional cooler, thoughtful writer.  Jonah Goldberg, writing in RealClearPolitrics, is one of those.

I recommend his piece today The Race to be Wrong in Ferguson. I too have been amazed at how readily the press comes to firm conclusions on a matter for which there is so little evidence and none of it consistent.  And how quickly the usual professional racists, like the Rev Al Sharpton, are to claim white guilt and police brutality even before the facts are established.

Also worth reading are his recent piece The West's Gaza, in which he argues that the worldwide   jihadist movement may be to the West what Gaza is to Israel, a persistent threat with no easy or popular resolution.

Recommended: America wants the Impossible

Along the same lines as the preceding post, Spengler's June 16, 2014 article America wants the Impossible is also worth reading and pondering.

His argument is that where America went wrong was not to take out Iran's nuclear facilities early, finance the opposition and essentially neutralize Iran's influence in the region, perhaps also leaving Iraq under a new anti-Iranian strongman after we had toppled Saddam.  This sounds like a radical argument, but really, is it any more radical than what we actually did, which was to engage in two simultaneous wildly expansive decades-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving them in total shambles and host to innumerable radicalized jihadist terror groups, and as a result leaving the Iranian theocracy as a leading troublemaker in the region?  

His indictments of America policy, and of the prevailing America public mindset, are not comfortable to read.  But read it we all should, and ponder whether he may not have some valid points.

Recommended: Sherman's 300,000 and the Caliphate's 3 million

It is important to listen to people who have perspectives different than our own. The Asian Times Spengler columnist (actually David P Goldman, Senior Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research and the Was Family Fellow at the Middle East Forum) is one of those people we ought to listen to, because he comes at the world from a different perspective - not one we might find comfortable, but quite possibly one which is more in tune with reality than the common America views.

His recent piece Sherman's 300,000 and the Caliphate's 3 million is a good example.  While the administration and the UN struggle, largely ineffectually, to find a a way to contain the violence in the Middle East, he reminds us of General Sherman's comment in the Civil War, that it simply wouldn't be over until 300,000 more Southern soldiers died and the South simply couldn't find enough new volunteers to continue. Much the same is true, he argues, of the Middle East, except that the populations are larger so the number that need to die before the madness peters out is more like 3 million.

This sounds cruel and heartless, at least from the liberal America point of view (and certainly provoked a lot of nasty comments from readers who simply don't want to see the world that way), but it may well be reality, whether we like it or not. The problem, he argues, is rooted in the vast mass of young people born over the past few decades in a region that is simply incapable of supporting them or giving them meaningful jobs. The fighting, he predicts, will simply go on as long as there are enough young people left alive whose lives have no meaning outside of fighting and who have nothing to go back to if fighting ends - another thirty years war.

Certainly nothing we or our allies or the UN has done to date has addressed this root problem, and it is not clear that there is anything anyone could do to address it effectively, however much we wish we could do something.  A decade of American military interference in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly hasn't done anything to the help the cause; in fact, it seems to have made it worse. The fanatics of the Islamic State are now all well armed with good America weapons as a result of our well-meaning meddling.

It is worth reading this piece, somber as it is, and pondering if he isn't perhaps right.

What is in our national interest?

The Middle East and Eastern Europe are both in chaos these days, and the administration is clearly struggling, apparently without a coherent  overall strategy, to figure out what America should do.  Reacting to humanitarian crises, as we have done over the past few days, is not an overall strategy. I would suggest that we ought to build an overall strategy based exclusively on American long-term interests, not on whatever local humanitarian crises the world media chooses to headline each day.

In the Middle East, while bleeding hearts blather about Palestinian “rights”, a pragmatist would ask, who are our real friends and supporters in the area?  Israel is certainly one, and a bastion of democracy and political stability in the midst of a very bad neighborhood.  Saudi Arabia and Jorden, while not democracies, are stable governments with many interests in common with America (notably counterbalancing Iran’s influence and suppressing Jihadist groups) .  And Egypt and Turkey, while not exactly friends right now, certainly have been in the past and could be in the future good allies.

The Palestinians, by contrast, danced in the streets on 9/11, and seem incapable of getting their act together and supporting a non-extremist government. They are not now and probably never will be America’s friends, nor will they ever be effective allies. Iraq and Afghanistan are riven by sectarian divides, and will be weak and ineffective governments for the foreseeable future.  The Kurds in Iraq, by contract, are effective, progressive, democratic and tolerant, and currently strongly pro-American.

That would argue that America national interests are best served by supporting our friends in the neighborhood, which means helping the Kurds repel the Islamic State fanatics, and perhaps even helping them become an independent nation.  It also means helping Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt and Lebanon resist the incursion of the Islamic State jihadists.  And it means supporting Israel in rooting out Hamas in Gaza, even if it is a bloody and unpleasant business.

Frankly, I suspect the much mooted “two state” solution is unworkable.  It would certainly be workable if the Palestinians could put together and maintain a government strong enough and willing to suppress the more extreme jihadist elements in their society, but there is no evidence whatsoever that they are or ever will be capable of doing that. So long as the Palestinian government either supports or at least is incapable of restraining the jihadists, Israel would be foolish to allow a hostile Palestinian state to come into being within its borders.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, Colen Powell’s “Pottery Barn Rule” clearly applies:  “If you break it, you own it”. Well, wisely or unwisely we broke both of those nations, so now we own them.  What can we do about their situation?  In Afghanistan tribal rule will always be stronger than the central government, so it is probably useless to keep trying to get a strong central government in place.  At best we can pursue a long-term policy (probably largely though NGOs) of moving the tribes into the modern age, and helping them enough that we come (eventually) to be seen as friends rather than occupiers.

Iraq is an unnatural state anyway, put together arbitrarily by British colonials in 1932 by simply drawing lines on a map, without any reference to who lived where.  It looks like it is on the verge of fragmenting back to its “natural” sectarian cultures, and it probably ought to simply be allowed to do that.  That would end a lot of the current Sunni-Shia strife. Certainly American national interests are not furthered by continuing to try to force this unnatural merging of disparate, and even hostile, cultures and religions.  If Iraqis ever become tolerant of their cultural differences, it will come about from their own efforts, and probably over generations,  not from America pressure and not quickly.

In the far East, the Ukraine would like to become more European and we ought to actively support that for two reasons: (1) a more Europe-facing Ukraine would in the long term probably help Russia itself move away from its undemocratic and corrupt Soviet heritage and toward a more normal place in the world, and (2) a failure to support the Ukraine against Russian aggression will make other newly-freed Eastern European nations, like Poland, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, etc. question the security and usefulness of their current  alliance with the West.

These are my suggestions. There are no doubt other views.  But in any case we need SOME SORT of coherent long-term American foreign policy toward these regions, not this endless reaction to local events, often with little or no thought to next steps or the “then what” question?

We badly need another Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski in our government – a clever, well educated, history-conscious foreign policy pragmatist with a sense of overall strategy.  Hillary Clinton, for all that she was relatively competent at the day-to-day work, was not that. John Kerry, for all that he works very hard, is not that either

Recommended: The Media's Role in Hamas' War Strategy

Another very good recent piece from The National Interest, this one by Richard Landes: The Media's Role in Hamas' War Strategy. I would have put it more bluntly: the world media are killing the children in Gaza.

How?  Simple. Hamas' rockets aren't at all effective at killing Israelis. What they are effective at is inviting retaliatory air strikes against the launching sites, and since these are deliberately placed among civilians, they cause the civilian deaths. Now the civilian deaths only work if the world press follows Hamas' script and makes a big deal about how Israel is killing innocent civilians.  If the press didn't follow that script (but instead, for example, made a big deal about how Hamas deliberately uses civilians), the tactic wouldn't be worth following.

It's like paying ransom to kidnappers.  Kidnapping is a great business if people will pay ransom, and in the parts of the world where they pay ransom regularly, kidnapping thrives.  Where people refuse to pay ransom, kidnapping (at least for profit) dies out because it simply doesn't work.

Just the same with Hamas.  If the world press didn't fall for the bait and make a big fuss about women and children begin killed, then Hamas wouldn't find it attractive to pursue a strategy that gets them killed. That's why I would say it is the world press that is partly responsible for these deaths.

Press people aren't stupid. One would think they could see how they are being used. Either they are too blinded by their prejudices (and anti-Sematism), or they know perfectly well what they are doing and are doing it anyway because it sells news and brings in advertising revenue.   Either way, the press doesn't look very good in this.

Recommended: When Strategies Collide

Walter Russel Mead has written a good piece in The American Interest about the Israel-Gaza conflict: When Strategies Collide.  Mead argues that both Israel and Hamas see this as an existential battle, and are therefore not likely to reach a truce easily or soon.  Events today support that perceptive conclusion, published a week or so ago.

Mead notes that while the American press and the UN are horrified at the carnage, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are delighted to see Israel take on Hamas, which they see as a serious threat to their own regimes, and are giving quiet but tacit support to Israel in this battle. In fact, some would argue, this isn't really a battle primarily between Israel and Hamas - it is a proxy war between Iran and the more orthodox Sunni regimes in the Middle East.

Mead also notes that America's passive withdrawal from the region under the current administration has seriously weakened any influence we might have had in this affair, and that the major players in the Middle East have pretty much decided to ignore us. This matches what some others have argued recently, which is that a world without strong American influence is likely to be a much nastier and more dangerous place.

My own view is that the Palestinian people will never have a reasonable life until Hamas is defeated and gone, whether or not they get a separate state or the blockade is ever lifted. However good they are at playing the media game with the world press, at root Hamas is just another fanatical terror organization, bent on killing Jews and maintaining power at any cost, including especially the cost of civilian lives - Jewish or Muslim alike. Nothing is going to change that.  If they stay in power, they will continue to skim millions from whatever international donors give to Gaza, they will continue to use that skimmed money to arm themselves and build rockets and tunnels and buy whatever weapons they can, they will continue to try to kill Jews any way they can, and they will continue to brutally suppress any opposition among Palestinians.

Anyway, this is a good, informative, thoughtful piece, well worth reading.

Typical !

From this evening's news:

The UN children's agency has expressed "extreme concern" over reports that 40 children from Iraq's Yazidi minority died after an offensive by jihadists.

If it had been Israelis who had mounted this offensive, the UN would have called it a war crime.  But since it isn't Jews who were responsible, but Muslims, the UN only has "extreme concern" over the deaths of these children. Typical. The blatant hypocrisy of the UN really sickens me.

The challenge of asymmetric warfare

America has by far the largest conventional military force in the world, maintained at a huge cost, but probably mostly worth it, because the wars it prevents would probably cost far more.  BUT the world is changing, and we are faced more and more often with asymmetric warfare, for which we are not yet really prepared. Two good current examples are the Israeli-Gaza conflict and the Ukrainian conflict.

In the Israeli-Gaza conflict that seems to be winding down now, what is asymmetric is first the fact that Israel wins only if it completely eliminates Hamas, while Hamas wins if it just manages to survive.  Of course antisemitism is in play here – the world press and the UN anguishes over perhaps 1000 Palestinians civilian deaths (many of the 1800+ claimed “civilian” deaths were actually Hamas fighters) from Jewish forces, while conveniently ignoring tens of thousands of civilian deaths occurring from Muslim forces during the same period in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc, etc.  The UN has been quick enough to label some of Israel’s military mistakes “criminal”, but has yet to condemn in equally strong terms any of the deliberate atrocities of Hamas or Boco Haram or the Islamic State or any of the other Muslim jihadist terror groups.

Second, it is asymmetric because the media battle for world public opinion matters just as much as the actual fighting, and while Hamas can’t begin to match the military power of Israel, it takes much less investment to match the social media power, especially if one plays on the media’s inherent antisemitism and tendency to favor the underdog.

Of course Israel is in an almost impossible position here. If they do nothing they get barraged with rockets and suicide bombers.  If they respond in any effective way they get world criticism, magnified because Hamas has deliberately arranged to maximize civilian casualties. If they prevent Hamas from rearming by blockading Gaza, they get world criticism. If they drop the blockade, Hamas is promptly rearmed by its supporters in the Arab world. If Israel kills Palestinian civilians by accident, they get world criticism.  If Hamas kills Palestinians deliberately as it frequently does  (remember that when Hamas took over Gaza, they killed 100+ Palestinian Authority officials), it’s not even widely reported. It’s a no-win situation.

In the Ukraine we are faced with a so-called “rebel” group fighting a proxy war for Russia, apparently with Russian special forces troops out of uniform playing key roles.  This is asymmetric again because the perception can be manipulated so easily. Certainly within Russia the state media seems to have convinced the majority of Russians that this is a small band of brave Russian rebels fighting a fascist regime.  This fiction seems to have been maintained even while Russia provided heavy weapons to the rebels across the border, and even fired artillery and rockets from Russian soil to support the rebel positions.

The lesson for America, I think, is that we need to pay more attention to these asymmetric conflicts and learn from them.  In today’s highly-connected social media world, world public opinion matters because it directly affects politician’s stands, and therefore our ability to get and keep allies.  Strangely enough, for a nation that has perfected the art of product advertising, we are not yet very good at managing our nation’s social media image. Of course we do have a handicap – a free press means we can’t so easily suppress unflattering material and inconvenient truths the way authoritarian governments can.  Still, we need to learn to wage the media warfare as well as we manage conventional warfare.

What is there to say…?

If there was any doubt in the world’s mind about the ruthlessness and immorality of Hamas, it ought to be put to rest now that they deliberately broke a humanitarian cease fire with what appears to have been a well-planned attack.  If they really cared about the Palestinian people, they would have respected a 72 hour cease fire to allow them to get food and bury their dead, but then if they really cared about the Palestinian people they wouldn’t use them as human shields, and deliberately fire rockets and mortars from densely-populated neighborhoods and schoolyards and hospital grounds. Of course the anti-Semites of the world will still find an excuse for them, and believe their propaganda.  Those people probably also believe the Russians have nothing to do with the Ukrainian rebels, and perhaps they believe in a flat earth as well…!

The UN and Secretary Kerry and President Obama can hand-wring all they like – nothing is going to stop this Hamas brutality until they are exterminated.  Yes, it will be bloody.  Yes, a lot of civilians (who, by the way, voted Hamas into power in 2005 in the first place) will die, just as we killed a lot of innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Korea, and in World Wars I and II.  War is bloody and unfair and unpredictable, and however hard one tries, innocents get killed and maimed.  But until the brutal cancer that is Hamas is eradicated this killing on both sides will continue.

What is perhaps more significant is that Kerry and Obama strong-armed Israel into this truce over the Israeli cabinet's better judgment, and it turned out to be a Hamas trap.  I would expect that whatever residual influence Washington might have had with Israel is probably gone now. We never had any influence with Hamas, of course.  If I were an Israeli, I would draw from this the lesson that Israel is on its own, and Washington is neither a help nor a friend to us in this affair.  Indeed, many of the Arab countries who would dearly like to see Hamas crushed for their own safety are probably better allies of Israel today than the Obama administration.

In the end Israel may have to take the unpleasant step of re-occupying the Gaza strip in order to fully root out and suppress this gang of thugs. They dismantled all the Jewish settlements and left the Gaza strip voluntarily in 2005, hoping that Gaza would become a normal country.  Instead it has become a hideout and base for a vicious and fanatical Hamas.  I suspect they may have no alternative in the end but to reoccupy it for their own safety.  It certainly puts a damper on the much-touted two-state solution, since it appears that any Palestinian state is likely to be taken over and run by one or more of the fanatical jihadist groups dedicated to eliminating Israel, probably with the acquiescence if not the full support of the population, just as Gaza has been.  It's not a solution I would accept if I were an Israeli.

The importance of our next presidential election

I would argue that the upcoming 2016 presidential election is critical not only for our nation, but for the world as a whole.  We have had two two-term presidents in a row who have badly fumbled the ball – President Bush with his foreign policy overreach (principally the long, expensive, bloody and ultimately futile Iraq adventure), and now President Obama with his feckless  “lead-from-behind” inactivity. The result has been a serious decline in America’s influence in critical places in the world.  From a historical perspective, it has been American influence and power that has kept the relative peace in the world since the end of World War II, despite the endless carping from the left.  If that power wanes significantly, I would expect the world to become a much less pleasant place in the future.

The world faces some serious problems now: Africa and the Middle East are both aflame with lawless jihadist groups, armed sectarian militias, and plain criminal gangs. Thousands of people are being murdered every week in Nigeria, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, and in Pakistan to name just a few of the trouble spots (murdered largely, by the way, by Muslims, not by Jews, though the UN and the world press are conveniently ignoring this these days). Hamas is clearly a threat, not only to Israel, but also to other Arab regimes in the area, including especially Egypt, which is why many of the Arab governments have tacitly and quietly backed Israel in this attempt to destroy Hamas. The brutal fanatics in Iraq and Syria now calling themselves “The Islamic State” have plans to expand (violently) everywhere.

In the Ukraine I think it highly likely that President Putin has backed himself into a corner where he will be forced by the very hawkish domestic forces he himself has been whipping up to invade to save his so-called “rebels”.   That will pose a very, very serious dilemma for America, NATO and Western Europe.  If we let him get away with it, why should he stop there (shades of Hitler and World War II)?  If we oppose him with military force, we are in a war with Russia. It will take a better president than we have had recently to find a relatively safe way through this thicket.

So while domestic politics – the immigration crisis, Obamacare and the like - may dominate the mid-term elections, America’s national security issues may well be the core issue for the 2016 presidential election.  I would be a lot happier if I saw any potential presidential candidates in either party who looked up to managing these crises wisely.

Recommended: 7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict

My daughter just pointed me to a current Huffington Post article that is probably the best and most balanced analysis of the current Israel-Hamas war I have seen, written incidentally by someone who grew up in Pakistan in the Muslim culture: 7 Things to Consider Before Choosing Sides in the Middle East Conflict.

I would only add this to his excellent piece - there are constant complaints that while Israel certainly has the right to respond to Hamas rocket attacks, kidnappings and murders, and suicide bombers, its response has been disproportionate.  So think about this. An exactly proportional response would be for Israel to go into Gaza every time an Israeli was killed, and pick at random a man or woman or child off the street and shoot them on the spot. That would be exactly proportional.  Would the world think that was fair, or civilized?  I don't think so.  It's hard to think of what the world would consider a "proportional" Jewish response, but whatever it is it almost certainly wouldn't be enough to deter vicious thugs like Hamas.

So do we want Jews to just acquiesce to brutality, like they did in the Holocaust?  I think what Jews learned from the Holocaust was that Europe (and America for that matter) are not dependable allies, and they had better look out for themselves.  And I think they are right. Now their political choices for handling the enemies around them haven't always been the wisest, but what nation can you point to that has always picked the wisest course - certainly not ours! (As Churchill said -"You can always count on Americans to do the right thing - after they've tried everything else".)