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.