History And Consequence

Daniel's Reponse:


You present nothing more than finger waving and "just so" stories. You are conjuring doomsday bogeyman to justify poor policy and rationalize incompetence.

I don't know the "Islamics" of whom you speak. I know who the Kurds are, I know who the Malaysians are, I know who the Palestinians are, the Egyptians, the Pakistanis. I know Hezbollah, Al Quaedi, and Al Jazeera. All "Islamic" but hardly identical.

Maybe we would have advanced our cause in World War Two if instead of concentrating on Germany, we also declared war on the Swiss, Poles, and Czechs. I mean, they do bear a certain cultural and religious similarity to one another, they must all have been in league to plot the complete and utter annihilation of the United States, right? I don't see how attacking those countries, stationing troops, expending resources could have interfered with defeating Hitler? And if we ended up being wrong in that assessment, well at least we were trying to do the right thing?

There are no coincidences, there are only the logical consequences of policy and practice unfolding over years and decades.

It's not a coincidence that Al Quaedi seized planes with box cutters. Stone age tactics for a stone age organization. If they had the capacity to target Washington with conventional weapons, or to shoot planes from the sky, without boarding them, they would do it. The height of their technological and organization capacity amounts to promising some disaffected 18 year old 100 virgins if he blows himself up on an airplane. And half the time, the primitive bombs explode before he gets there.

The isn't a shred of evidence that this organization has the capacity to develop nuclear weapons much less ability to fling them 18,000 miles across the globe. At most it is a potential long term threat. I am not attempting to minimize the danger, I recognize the seriousness of the threat, but I see no reason to believe that if we use our technical, organizational, financial, and military superiority judiciously, competently and wisely, that we can't conquer or contain this problem long before it reaches the total destruction of the world as we know it. Yet, that is exactly what you claim.

And if Americans have grown fat and lazy, we have far more to fear from India or China than "Araby". If China and India ascend to greatness, becoming military and economic superpowers, leaving us in their wake, then they will inherit the world's problems, including the Middle East, just as we inherited them from the British and French. And they will have the opportunity to use their power and influence to make those problems better or worse, just as we have.

And while your concern for the feminists, gays, and pornographers is touching, I think you are raising another straw man. No one is arguing that the human rights conditions in Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia are acceptable, but invading Iraq in some half-baked attempt to install a "model democracy" was a bone-headed, counter productive way to improve human rights conditions in these countries.

You are very dismissive of "tactics". What you call tactics, the construction and implementation of policy, is the engine of creation behind those "historic moments" you seem to care so much about. Historic moments don't spring from the ether, they are the predictable outgrowth of tactics.

You suggest that no one else has proposed alternative strategies, but this is simply not true. It seems that way because you are so agitated by apocalyptic prophesying you are deaf to moderation and reason.

Historic Moments

Jim's Response:

Here's where I have to comment because I completely disagree on what is the big problem. I think we are at or near one of those historical moments that occurs periodically in history. The ascendancy of the Mongols. The fall of the Greeks. The fall of Rome. The rise of Fascism. The rise of Communism. Like that.

I believe that due to the West's success it is quite likely that it has become soft, fat, and lazy, and forgotten what made it strong. I think our very ascendancy is giving rise to our fall. Europe is exhausted. Demographically it, Eastern Europe, Russia, and Japan are in unprecedented decline. Meanwhile the unassimilated Islamics in their countries are prolific. This is a simple numbers game which simple math can solve.

The US is in disarray. Half of the country is fighting any attempt to right things. It's like watching a quarterback try to throw a touchdown while a couple of his lineman are falling on him. The press, the bar, the ngos are like a leach on the people who are trying to actually do anything.

As for the people who are trying to do things there is the usual mix. Some are incompetent. Some make mistakes. Some are fakes. But at least here most are trying to do the right thing, and they could use more teammates and less sports announcers. Between Mr Bush and Kerry/Gore I'd take the former any time. If a Patton or MacArthur stood up I might have a different notion.

I believe that the decline of the West is occurring at the same time that oil and powerful weapons make people who otherwise be camel jockeys into dangerous enemies. Meanwhile the Left finds them an ally of convenience in the same way as the Nazis did the Communists, likely with a similar outcome. It wouldn't take much imagination to consider what the Islamists in their ascendancy would do with feminists, gays, and pornographers since we can see how they treat them in their own countries.

Here's a scenario I could easily see. Five, ten, fifteen years from now after a tired US tries to withdraw from the Arabian scene some group of Islamists succeeds in what they attempted on 9/11 (huge hits on US political, military, and business strongholds). They level DC and parts of NYC and LA with tactical nukes. The government hierarchy is killed, the communication infrastructure is broken, and trade stops. At this point Americans are willing to sign up with the strongest conceivable military leader and our 200+ year experiment with democracy is over. In fact I could see the country breaking into parts for self-defense purposes. The South for example may lose interest in defending CA and NY, and the latter two are incapable of defending themselves. Our military of course is rather too strong to be defeated in military terms because there would always be submarines and silos untouched. Araby would be glass at that point, but too late to keep America as it was.

They don't call it "Islam's Bloody Borders" for nothing.

What you speak of below is tactics, all of which could be done better. The Left not only doesn't have better suggestions, they mean just the opposite to reach power just like their Communist and Socialist forebears. The Left has never been skittish about their enemy's blood.