--- In
DSN_KLR650@yahoogroups.com, "Blake Sobiloff"
wrote:
>
> OK, the TSA has officially lost its mind.
SNIP
Hello Blake and other reading friends.
I love this list and what I learn here about the KLR and other
frustrations in general. For some time, (three-four years) I have been
talking privately that we are in WW III, and oddly enough, yesterday
and today, the talking heads are saying the same thing. Then this blog
comes across my desk.
Forgive me if this flows outside of the normal KLR rants, but the free
flow of information allows us to make informed decisions. If there was
a link I could send you to, I would (there might be, and I am not smart
enough, savvy enough to know how). It will take 4-5 minutes to read
rapidly, and deserves more than a glance.
I hope you find it as chilling as I did. This blogger (collects
articles and re-distributes them) is a retired USMC Colonel that
teaches safety at Penn State. His name/address is
Gregory J. Johnson gjj1@...
and he will put you on his distribution list at your request. I have
been on his list some 4 years now and found it highly helpful as he
collects editorials that I would never see otherwise.
Reading the frustrations of 5-6 replies to Blake's original post, we
are at a point in time that the things we know and love, will likely be
greatly affected in the near future. I for one am glad I live where I
do in South Dakota, even so, realizing from the content of this blog,
there is no safe place if there are determined people who want to harm
you.
revmaaatin.
THE BLOG FOLLOWS:
National Review Online
8 August 2006
Hawkish Gloom: Unfortunately you'll be joining me one of these days
by Stanley Kurtz
Call me a gloomy hawk. It's not just that I'm a hawk who's disappointed
with the course of fighting in the Middle East. My concern is that our
underlying foreign-policy dilemma calls for both hawkishness and gloom
and will for some time. The two worst-case scenarios are world-war
abroad and nuclear terror at home. I fear we're on a slow-motion track
to both.
No, I don't think our venture in Iraq has gotten us into this mess. I
think this mess has gotten us into Iraq. And the mess will not go away,
whatever we do. Our Islamist enemy has proven himself implacable
unwilling to relent in the face of either dovish or hawkish policies.
That means we're facing years maybe decades of inconclusive, on/off
(mostly on) hot war, unless and until a nuclear terror strike, a major
case of nuclear blackmail, or a nuclear clash among Middle Eastern
states ushers in a radical new phase.
Castro
Let's take a moment to think about Castro. Castro is the master and
pioneer of ornery third-world defiance. We need to appreciate the
immensity of Castro's achievement in preserving Cuba's Communist
dictatorship for 17 years after the collapse of his chief patron, the
Soviet Union. It's remarkable that, absent any great-power protection,
and even after becoming, without Soviet subsidies, a permanent economic
basket-case, Castro's regime has not collapsed.
Let that be a lesson to those who wait for the collapse of regimes in
Iran, North Korea, or Palestine because of long-term economic failure
and/or economic sanctions. Yes, popular uprisings happen (as in Iran
against the Shah). Yet it's also clear that a posture of anti-Western
defiance, combined with nationalism, ideology, and dictatorial rule is
perfectly capable of sustaining a miserable, poverty-stricken, failed
system far, far beyond the point that Westerners would consider
tolerable or believable.
If you are willing to kill yourself if you are willing even to
impoverish, immiserate, and let die much of your country, you can
accomplish a great deal. Hezbollah's gains in its war with Israel stem
from its ability to define success as mere survival, even as the
country around it is destroyed. This is no mere clever public-relations
spin, but the reflection of a profound reality: the growing
independence of terrorist organizations from states, and the
willingness of Islamist terrorists to sacrifice all in pursuit of
fundamentally non-material goals. With military success (accurately)
framed as the near-complete destruction of terrorist forces, decisive
military victory is virtually defined out of existence.
Democracy?
This is why the United States has turned to democratization. The stick
of military force combined with the carrot of democracy was supposed to
have provided a way out. Unfortunately, democratization of
fundamentally illiberal societies cannot happen quickly. Real
democratization requires a great deal of time and deep, painful,
expensive underlying cultural change, almost impossible to bring about
without an effectively permanent military occupation.
Even a long-term military occupation cannot promote democratization in
the absence of social peace. The Iraqi resistance's greatest victory
came with the very start of their campaign. By creating sufficient
insecurity to bar Western civilians from Iraq, the real key to
democratic change was blocked from the start. If advising an Iraqi
bureaucrat, working with an Iraqi entrepreneur, or teaching at an Iraqi
college had become career-making occupations for an ambitious
generation of young American civilians, we might have had a chance to
build genuine democracy in Iraq. Once the rebellion made that sort of
cultural exchange impossible, the democratization project was cut off
before it could begin.
I've made these points about the problems of democratization since
before the invasion of Iraq (See my "After the War" and "Democratic
Imperialism.") In those pieces, I even "predicted" the sort of trouble
we're seeing now. Yet, despite that gloom, I was, and remain, a hawk. I
am hawk because I believe that the danger of nuclear terror and nuclear
blackmail remain real, and because I am convinced that negotiations
from weakness, grand bargains, and unilateral retreats are powerless to
defuse these threats. In short, I am a gloomy hawk because I believe
that neither hawks nor doves have any viable near-term solutions to the
problem we now face.
Technology
Globalization, economic advance, and technology are at the root of our
dilemma. It is remarkable that 9/11 meant more civilian casualties from
a foreign foe than this country had ever experienced at a blow. Without
the movement of Middle Easterners to Europe (to learn our languages,
take our classes, etc.), without our modern mastery of building
technology and air travel, 9/11 could not have happened. Recall that
the plan of the first, failed blast in 1993 was to topple one World
Trade Center tower into the other, bringing both down on surrounding
buildings for a possible total of 200,000 dead. This was the
approximate combined total of dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The 1993
terrorists were consciously focused on that precedent, wanting to
inflict nuclear-level damage on the United States.
The destruction of the World Trade Center raised the possibility that a
rogue state might supply terrorists with a nuclear bomb, or enough
material to make such a bomb. Already, there was an alliance between a
state (Afghanistan) and a terrorist organization. But in the war
between Israel and Hezbollah, we've seen a further step toward the
feared pattern. Hezbollah rockets have already inflicted far more
damage and disruption on Israeli civilians than attacks in any previous
Middle Eastern war. That is because military technology is getting ever
cheaper, more advanced, and more available, and because of a military
alliance between a supplying state (Iran) and a terrorist organization.
So we are already seeing a terrorist-executed proxy war against the
West using advanced technology supplied by a rogue state. It only
remains for a nuclear device to replace the cheap rockets. Iran is
working on that. This is why Europe, led by France, is moving into the
American corner. The internal Islamist terror Europe had hoped to avoid
by distancing itself from the United States is happening anyway. And
Europe fears that a terrorist-supplied Iranian bomb, a nuclear-armed
Iranian missile, or an Iranian attempt to corner the world's oil supply
through nuclear blackmail, pose direct threats to the continent itself.
Iraq
Our attack on Saddam was the easiest way to create a credible threat of
force against Iran and North Korea, while also cutting out Saddam's own
capacity to build or buy (from Korea and/or the A.Q. Kahn network) his
own nuclear weapons. For this reason, it needed doing. Given the
immense dangers faced by the West, and compared to our sacrifices in
World War II and Korea, 3,000 casualties is not an excessive cost
(tragic as these losses are). Yet our domestic divisions, and our
inability to pacify Iraq have largely (although not, I believe,
entirely) canceled out the deterrent message of the invasion.
Without a credible threat of force (and maybe even with a credible
threat), there is simply no way that negotiations, "grand bargains," or
unilateral withdrawals will accomplish anything. Israel had about as
credible a threat as anyone could. Given its foes' rejection of a
reasonable American-brokered deal, Israel tried unilateral withdrawal
instead. Now look what's happened. The depth of the Moslem world's
failure to adjust to modernity, the profundity of its need for
scapegoats, the seeming boundlessness of its willingness to accept the
death and destruction of its own in exchange for the "honor"
of "revenge," are difficult for Americans to acknowledge. Read " A
Middle Way" (by David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen) and you will see
that the Western public is systematically sheltered from the sort of
news that turns people into gloomy hawks.
Wishful Thinking
At Newsday, typically dovish Middle East Studies professor Fawaz Gerges
says, "Hezbollah has risen to fill a social need." I find Gerges's
vision of a solution in the Middle East utterly naive. He pretends that
Hezbollah is not standing as a proxy for Iran, and acts as though a
little bit of forceful negotiating can prod Hezbollah into disarming,
and Israel and its Arab foes into a comprehensive settlement. But
Israel has already made the sort of gestures that ought to have created
momentum for peace. Instead, it's gotten more attacks, and the
persistent calls for its destruction so chillingly described by David
Warren.
On one critical point, however, Gerges is right. If liberals are lost
in wishful thinking about the prospects of negotiated settlements and
nuclear containment, conservatives are naive about the possibility of
ending terror by a decisive military blow. Gerges is right that
Hezbollah is not some finite terror force, but the expression of the
will and aspirations of a massive portion of the Lebanese people. As
such, it is unlikely to be bombed out of existence.
Gerges makes the doves' favorite point: bombing and war only breed more
terrorists. True enough, but only because the underlying cultural
dilemma of Muslim modernity has created a need for scapegoats. War
ought to produce the realization that peaceful compromise is the way
out. Instead it produces the opposite. Gestures for peace fare no
better. Withdraw or attack, the results are the same: more hatred, more
terror, more war. Compromise and settlement have been ruled out from
the start by a pervasive ideology, an ideology that is a product of the
underlying inability to reconcile Islam with modernity.
New Israel
This means that the entire Western world now stands in a position
roughly analogous to that of Israel: locked in an essentially permanent
struggle with a foe it is impossible either to placate, or to entirely
destroy a foe who demands our own destruction, and whose problems are
so deep they would not be solved even by victory.
We can leave Iraq, as the Israelis left Lebanon. But we'll likely be
back, there or somewhere else, before long. Some say our army should
wait among the Kurds, striking selectively in the rest of Iraq, only
when al Qaeda returns. That's a plan. Yet its likely to end up where
Israel is in Lebanon, especially if al Qaeda starts kidnapping American
soldiers with cross-border raids into the "Kurdish entity."
Meanwhile, short of a preemptive war, Iran is bound to get the bomb. No
grand bargain or set of economic sanctions can deter it especially now
that Iran is convinced of its success in creating havoc for the West,
and in consolidating popular support through its proxy attacks on
Western interests. As Ian Bremmer reports in "What the Israeli-
Hezbollah War Means for Iran,"
Iran is convinced it's winning, while America and Europe are
increasingly convinced that a nuclear-armed Iran would be an
intolerable danger to their interests. "Imagine...how much more
dangerous the war in Lebanon would be if Iran had a nuclear weapon."
Collision Course
The West is on a collision course with Iran. There will either be a
preemptive war against Iran's nuclear program, or an endless series of
hot-and-cold war crises following Iran's acquisition of a bomb. And an
Iranian bomb means further nuclear proliferation to Egypt and Saudi
Arabia, as a balancing move by the big Sunni states. With all those
Islamic bombs floating around, what are the chances the U.S. will avoid
a nuclear terrorist strike over the long-term?
You don't believe that dovishness and negotiations will fail? Just wait
till President Hillary tries to buy off the Iranians with a "grand
bargain." Just wait till a nuclear Iran is unleashed to make further
mischief. A seemingly futile and endless occupation of Lebanon once
split Israel down the middle, breeding an entire generation of Israeli
doves. Now Israel is a united nation of gloomy hawks, transformed by
the repeated failure of every gesture of peace, and by the reality of
their implacable foe. (See " Praying for Hummus, Getting Hamas.") I'm
betting that someday we'll all be gloomy hawks, too. As for me, I'm
already there.
[Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center.]
END OF BLOG
Those of you that took the time to read this far, thanks.
revmaaatin.