Much U.S. foreign policy follows this dogma.  Now Obama wants $500 million—that’s point five billion, in American’s crazy accounting—to help out the Syrian rebels.  Not only is this a 180-degree turn in policy with respect to the civil war there, it’s a bad mistake.  Clearly, Obama is trying to appease hawks in Congress who accuse him of dropping the ball in Iraq—oh yes, the old neocon contingent is piping up there too—and maybe trying to do something in a situation where there is no easy solution.  And Kerry, the ketchup lover of Foggy Bottom, is telling Maliki to hold the country together or else.  Or else, what?

First, the $500 million is too little, too late.  The Syrian civil war has led to radicalization of many rebels so bloodthirsty and murderous that even old al Qaeda wise men denounce them.  Shi’ites are slaughtered.  Civilians—men, women, and children—are slaughtered.  If you want a glimpse of want a Sunni-Muslim caliphate would be like, just look to ISIS.  It would be a bloody theocracy that makes Iran’s Islamic Revolution seem tame.  Throwing a few dollars at the “tame rebels” in Syria will accomplish nothing.

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Let me start by stating a wee bit of political taxonomy for those readers who desperately want to pigeonhole me: I’m socially progressive, fiscally conservative, and a hawk about terrorism.  Note that I qualify my hawkishness.  We don’t need more Irans (overthrow of one democratically elected government), Iraqs (neo-conservative world building), or Vietnams and Afghanistans (supporting corrupt regimes in a long war for little gain).  I don’t think we need to kill more young men and women with surges, boots-on-the-ground, and other early 20^th century Pentagon ways of doing business.  Our first priority in national defense right now is counter terrorism, whether the nuclear kind (India, Iran, Israel, North Korea, and Pakistan) or bombing-public-places kind, home grown or otherwise.  Terrorism is a killer disease that must be eliminated.

That said, I have to wonder: what is Obama doing?  The only way I’d send five murdering terrorists back to the Middle East is in body bags.  These people aren’t U.S. citizens; they kill U.S. citizens.  I don’t doubt the family and friends of that Idaho soldier are happy right now, but he wore one set of those boots on the ground.  I’d wager we just traded his life for at least twenty other American or European lives.  That’s the problem with terrorism.  The soldier volunteered to fight.  Innocent men, women, and children, the usual victims of terrorists, don’t volunteer to die.  We pay Obama to make those hard decisions.  He f$%&#ed it up royally!

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Maybe their bad rep is due to the fact that they’re second-rate citizens in the bee hive, but drones are under attack recently.  The more vociferous attacks come from people who decry how deadly they are in attacking terrorists.  They kill all those innocent people, don’t you know?  I’ve rebutted that in these posts, but I can’t refrain from summarizing: (1) Drones and Special Ops are our most effective weapons against terrorists, a battle that must be fought unless you want to return to the Dark Ages of a radical Islamic Caliphate; and (2) drones and Special Ops avoid thousands of battlefield casualties, among our own troops as well as innocent civilians.  Here stats don’t lie.

A recent editorial in the NY Times (5/21) titled “The Limits of Armchair Warfare” basically ignores both points in a Ramboesque plea about returning to a conventional boots-on-the-ground mentality championed by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team of brilliant strategists.  Our troops fought valiantly, but Iraq is still an ethnic battleground.  Wrong in so many things, Biden was right with this one: Iraq should have been divided into at least three countries.  That worked in Yugoslavia and will end up being the right solution in Iraq.  McCain, that vengeful champion of the surge, also favors boots on the ground.  And Mr. Obama’s mistakes in Afghanistan can be summarized succinctly: he listened to that old Pentagon doggerel, although he knew from experimental evidence that drones and Special Ops are the solution.

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[Note to readers: If you notice problems with fonts, spacings, etc, in the next few posts, be assured that it’s neither your eyes nor your computer.  WordPress geeks in their infinite wisdom eliminated the W-button I used to employ to insert post rough drafts from MS Word.  I’ve found a temporary fix, but I’m still exploring work-arounds.  Apparently, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” isn’t a workplace motto at WordPress where they’ve adopted a policy that users are beta-testers, just like Microsoft, the company they hate.  I won’t apologize–they should.]

This question is appropriate when considering Afghanistan.  The good Afghans don’t seem capable of standing up to the Taliban.  The bad Afghans—and these aren’t the Taliban, who are worse than bad—are poppy farmers and the people like Karzai, who, through graft and corruption, exploit everyone and everything.  Karzai bites the hand that feeds him too: he has to know that his life wouldn’t be worth a Russian ruble if the Taliban take over again.  And, let’s face it, the Afghan landscape is more desolate than the moon’s; only Iceland’s is worse.

The recent murders of three doctors is but another instance of why we should write Afghanistan off.  There are good people there.  These doctors were on a mission to help them.  One, I believe, had been doing so for seven years.  The Taliban don’t care.  These doctors were Christians, foreigners, and not supporters of the Taliban’s vicious brand of radical Islam.  The Taliban’s ideology is one of death.  Doctors, a little girl making appeals for the right of women to educate themselves, and many others who dare to work for peace and a better life and naysay Taliban fanaticism, are targets.  They are now claiming they shot down a NATO helicopter (the Pentagon claims this is false—I’m not surprised, because the Taliban would probably take credit if Karzai got a cold).

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Even in this age when “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is our foreign policy mantra (maybe it always was?) and Putin seems hell bent on returning everyone to the Cold War (or World War III?), Pakistan lurks as not a true friend and probably a die-hard enemy.  I’ve said this many times before in these blog posts, but let me list the reasons yet again.  You will see that I’m not just being paranoid.  This country takes our aid and military help and basically uses it against us.  Its duplicitous actions have a long history.

The most obvious and egregious sin of the Pakistani government (being Muslims, they should understand sin, right?) is how they support both al Qaeda and the Taliban.  In an article in the Sunday (March 23) NY Times magazine, adapted from The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001-2014 (scheduled to be released next month) and titled “What Pakistan Knew About bin Laden,” author and reporter Carlotta Gall presents damning evidence that ISI, the nefarious Pakistani intelligence agency, had a desk whose occupant was bin Laden’s handler.  This confirms suspicions I’ve always had.  No wonder bin Laden felt comfortable living only a few hundred yards from Pakistan’s top military academy.

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I’ve heard that phrase from various media pundits.  It’s comical.  Resurgence is what Godfather Putin would like Sochi to signify, but the only thing resurging in Russia is this narcissist strongman’s egotistical delusion.  Russia is spiraling down to insignificance.  For nearly a century, it has been ruled by mafiosos whose only interest is to ensure that Russian workers make them rich.  In the Soviet era, they hid all this under the cloak of ideology.  Now it’s clear that the only ideology is greed and exploitation.

Russian people are worn out and angry, except for those who participate in the corruption, of course.  A recent Sixty Minutes episode showed how extensive and lethal this can be, and that’s probably only the tip of the iceberg.  Persecution of singing groups and other protestors make the news here, but you can be sure that what goes on behind the scenes is worse.  Journalists, industrialists, and opposition leaders who don’t play by Putin’s rules are jailed on trumped-up charges, or simply killed.  A Russian gangster, a confident of Putin, bribes and threatens to bring the Olympics to Sochi and then scams the Russian people.

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Nuclear technology is with us to stay…well, as long as we don’t destroy the Earth!  On one hand, we have the frightening scenario of a nuclear exchange; on the other, we have the possibility that nuclear power plants can contribute as alternate energy sources.  Somewhere between these polar opposites, one finds nuclear medicine.  I’m a person that believes that nuclear technology is not inherently good or bad, but human scientists and engineers who handle it need to ensure its safety.  More than most technologies, human error can have devastating consequences.

The reactor problem in Japan is one egregious example.  That region might require millennia to recover.  The same can be said for Chernobyl.  Estimates are all over the board.  Both cases are examples of human complacency, stupidity, and terrible miscalculations.  For Japan’s case, one can ask: Who would build a reactor close to a fault line?  We do!  California is one of the most active earthquake areas in the world, yet there are reactors on the California coast.  The one on the Hudson in New York State only seemed to have the problem that the river provides an easy access.  I rode by it on a tour to West Point—I didn’t see any special security arrangements.  Moreover, an earthquake did occur not long ago.  I was writing when the room started swaying and felt like I had returned to my youth in Santa Barbara.

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[TANSTAAFL: Do you read this blog?  I’m not asking if you like the posts, just whether you read them!  If so, don’t be passive.  React.  Write a comment—chew me out if you like (no foul language, please).  You can even receive a free ebook—see the bottom of the “Free Stuff and Contests” webpage; or write an honest review of one of my ebooks in exchange for the ebook.  In general, buy, read, and review some of my books.  Your participation motivates me and helps defray the costs of this website and my ebook releases.  Be active.  Help indie authors provide you with inexpensive entertainment.  It’s a two-way street, folks!]

After two lengthy wars in these countries, it’s time to step back and analyze what we’ve gained.  It’s clear what we lost: war casualties—our combatants, their combatants, and innocent civilians; national wealth—billions and billions of dollars; good will in the Middle East; and good feelings among present and former allies.  Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo showed an ugly side of the war on terror that seems to contradict our worship of democracy and democratic institutions—whether you think that non-U.S. enemy combatants can be tortured or not, the fact that we did doesn’t sit well everywhere in the world.

Many Marines who participated in the battles of Fallujah were distraught when al Qaeda in Iraq (or are they from Syria?) captured the city.  They saw compatriots fall there.  The survivors brought home physical and mental wounds from the battles.  They have a reason to ask, “What did we do that for?”  This is a common theme in the Middle East.  No matter the national sacrifice in personnel and wealth, no matter the diplomatic overtures, and no matter the good will of many civilians living in the region, extreme elements come back to haunt us like antibiotic-resistant bacteria reinvading the body politic of the region.

Karzai in Afghanistan is showing his true stripes.  He and his corrupt family and friends have no real interest in turning that country into something beyond an opium-producing state.  Noises are being made about deals with the Taliban.  You can expect that any advances made during our time there will disappear, leading to the horrendous treatment of women and the slavish following of sharia law once again.  This is a tribal society—a collection of warlords and their fiefdoms, not a modern state.  There’s little chance it will ever become one.  Moreover, we might see this relic of the Dark Ages corrupting Pakistan in the future in a major way, leading to terrorists with nukes.

Whatever you have against Joe Biden (ex-SecDef Gates in his new book expresses no love for the man), you’ll have to admit he was right about Iraq (Gates is too stupid to do so).  There are three Iraqi states at least—Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd—and possibly four now with the incursion of al Qaeda from Syria.  The absurdity of this situation is that the Shiite Iranis possibly feel threatened by the al Qaeda Sunnis and other Sunnis in Iraq, which might explain somewhat their recent diplomatic overtures.  But, like in Afghanistan, Iraq’s central government is corrupt and inept and completely incapable of holding all the different factions together.  Syria, Iraq, and Kurdish Turkey are like the old Yugoslavia.  To hold them together, you need a tyrant.  With the tyrant gone, you need multiple nations, one for each ethnic group.

The whole Middle East is like quicksand—even when the situation seems favorable, you can start to sink.  Israel isn’t helping either.  Their resistance to a Palestinian state is always a sore point for the most tolerant of Muslims and offers a rallying point for the most bellicose.  Pakistan, long at odds with India, has gone its own way, and the Indian government is showing its backward ways in their unreasonable support of an exploitative diplomat.  Turkey, the only NATO member in the area, isn’t stable and also a fair-weather friend, for both EU and US.  From Istanbul and the SSR Muslim republics to Sri Lanka, the Middle East and from Morocco to Bangladesh, you have unstable governments whipping up ethnic and anti-US sentiments.  It’s hard to find a friend anywhere.  No wonder “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” has been the corner-stone of American foreign policy in the region.

Europe doesn’t help.  European governments love to see the US spending money fighting terrorism that they don’t have to spend.  They love to see the US take the foreign policy hits.  The US is the EU’s biggest competitor, of course.  What Europe doesn’t see is that their myopic policies for treating the ethnic minorities providing their cheap labor will become their Achilles heel in the future.  Many of these minorities are poor Muslims—they have no love for the rich Europeans in charge of the economies throughout the EU.  They will place demands on the great socialist democracies of Europe and, if not met, there’ll be hell to pay.

Putin’s Russia is a loose cannon.  While the US and EU are debating same-sex marriage and human rights, homophobic Russia is heading in the opposite direction.  Led by Putin, that dark nation is returning to Stalinism, making a farce out of any democratic inclinations.  There are worse tyrants (the spoiled brat in North Korea is one), but narcissistic Vladimir rules the old land of the czars with an iron hand too.  He’s like the Godfather.  He and his friends form a mafia that is much stronger than any found in the old USSR, and they hide under the cloak of democracy.  Putin and therefore Russia deal with the Middle East erratically, as the contradictions between their support of Syria and their criticism of Iran show.  Again, there’ll be hell to pay because those former SSR Muslim republics haven’t forgotten the heavy boot of Stalin and his successors.

Given that the Middle East is so problematic in general and Afghanistan and Iraq in particular, what are we doing there?  The region won’t ever amount to anything.  Taking the region as a whole, you have a huge, mostly uneducated population that has never learned to get along.  I’m counting Israel here—if not the former (Bibi’s emotional responses don’t show much education, in my opinion), at least the latter.  It’s a strong argument for isolationism, by which I mean isolating the region and letting them settle their differences without our interference.  Becoming embroiled in the disputes in the region hasn’t proven to be a good idea historically.  One can say that “hands off!” should be our foreign policy mantra.

On the other hand, that huge population is a huge market and certain countries in the region provide oil, more to the EU than the US.  I’d suggest that we let the European countries assume the peace-making role.  Let them try to broker the diplomatic deals that might win peace in the Middle East.  They have more to lose.  Unfortunately, Europe has shown that they’re inept in most things diplomatic.  We’ve more or less taken the attitude that it’s a dirty job, but someone has to try to make the different parties sit down and make peace.  I don’t see that ending well.

And so it goes….

[TANSTAAFL: Do you read this blog?  I’m not asking if you like the posts, just whether you read them!  If so, don’t be passive.  React.  Write a comment—chew me out if you like (no foul language, please).  You can even receive a free ebook—see the bottom of the “Free Stuff and Contests” webpage; or write an honest review of one of my ebooks in exchange for the ebook.  In general, buy, read, and review some of my books.  Your participation motivates me and helps defray the costs of this website and my ebook releases.  Be active.  Help indie authors provide you with inexpensive entertainment.  It’s a two-way street, folks!]

The evil one who shall not be named decided Uncle Jang (Jang Song-thaek), his mentor, was a threat to solidifying his power in this oppressive, dark, and paranoid country.  Exit Uncle Jang.  Hanging…poison…ten thousand lashes…does it matter?  While some people in Washington might think this is just a distraction from their negotiations with the Persian nutniks in Iran, I call on them to remember that, in contrast to Allah’s warriors, he who shall not be named already has nukes and missiles to carry them—if not to the U.S., at least to South Korea, Japan, Vladivostok, and Beijing.  Any of his neighbors that pisses him off and sends him into a spoiled brat’s tantrum better be prepared for a nuclear attack.  And, as the case of Uncle Jang shows, it doesn’t take much to piss him off.  Talk about dysfunctional families.

Like Grandpa and Daddy, the North Korean leader doesn’t give a rat’s ass that his people are starving, that North Korean children are turning into low IQ zombies from malnutrition, that his prisons are just thinly disguised torture camps, and that his economy is the laughing stock of the Asian world.  He’s a sociopathic psychopath so much into establishing his own cult of personality—he wants to become God—that psychiatrists wouldn’t know what to do with him, except put him in a strait jacket and lock him up in a padded cell.  He makes Kaddafi, Pinochet, Amin, and even Hitler look like angels.  Given the state of his economy, he probably smoke-cured Uncle Jang and is slicing ham from the carcass for his breakfast.

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We often talk about the flip-side of the coin.  In Thursday’s NY Times editorial, the Times editors, like many people ignoring the flip-side of one particular coin, lamented the civilian lives lost in drone attacks in the Middle East.  The two sides of the coin—at least, in recent experience—are drone and special forces versus “boots on the ground,” lots of boots!  The Times editors either suffered a lobotomy, or, like many pacifist activists with blinders on, have forgotten the perils of massive invasions and nation building.  Many more innocents were killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq when the massive U.S. war machine was launched against terrorists, a small minority hidden among a much larger majority.

Like many people, I think war is hell and would like to see the end of it, but, with respect to terrorism, we didn’t start it…and we have to finish it!  The real choice—and I don’t have a coin for this—is to decide whether we’re going to practice Old Testament policies or New Testament ones.  The problem is that the terrorists don’t give a rat’s ass which one we choose.  If we turn the other cheek, they’ll lop off our heads.  They’ll do that too if we fight—as long as there are terrorists left breathing.  I remember—do you?—an interview where a reporter asks a grinning and dentally challenged Taliban if the fanatic would kill him if he suddenly found himself free.  Remember what the Taliban said?  That sounds like it should be in a fighting song to the tune of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”—we should always remember what that Taliban said!  Off with his head, he said!

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