Nothing Wrong With a Little Torture

If It Works, It Has to Be Right

Torture has its apologists.  A US Senate committee released a report about CIA interrogation methods following the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon exposing and condemning the CIA’s use of torture to get information from enemy (Al Qaeda) combatants. 

Its opponents have condemned the Senate report as misleading, inaccurate, and wrong.  Blogger Patterico provides a summary of their objections:

Three former CIA directors — George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden — as well as three Deputy CIA Directors, took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to dispute the Democrat-penned torture report released yesterday:

What is wrong with the committee’s report?
First, its claim that the CIA’s interrogation program was ineffective in producing intelligence that helped us disrupt, capture, or kill terrorists is just not accurate. The program was invaluable in three critical ways:
• It led to the capture of senior al Qaeda operatives, thereby removing them from the battlefield.
• It led to the disruption of terrorist plots and prevented mass casualty attacks, saving American and Allied lives.
• It added enormously to what we knew about al Qaeda as an organization and therefore informed our approaches on how best to attack, thwart and degrade it.

The current CIA Director is reversing his previous declarations of agnosticism on the subject to agree that torture provided critical information.

Who is telling the truth?

The Senate report claimed that the information  gained under duress was of little worth, implying that if torture were useful in providing vital information it would somehow have been acceptable.  The supporters of the programme point out, on the contrary, how successful it was in providing information to combat the Islamist terrorists.

Both the detractors and supporters of torture are operating out of a profoundly degenerate moral abyss.
  The ethics on display are utilitarian: if a particular strategy or technique works it is condoned, even commended.  If it does not, then torture is immoral.  In other words, the end justifies the means to achieve it.  Anything which works in winning the fight is justifiable and moral.  At this point there is no ideological or philosophical distinction between the United States and Communist regimes; or between the United States and ISIS.   There is no just war here–only winning at any cost. 

Senator Ted Cruz was absolutely correct (and Christian) when he declared: ““Torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end.”

Texas Senator Ted Cruz is reminding Americans that no civilized nation should ever torture prisoners.  “Torture is wrong, unambiguously. Period. The end. Civilized nations do not engage in torture and Congress has rightly acted to make absolutely clear that the United States will not engage in torture,” Cruz said during the Q-and-A portion of a speech at the Heritage Foundation.  BreitbartNews

Thank God that some still believe in an absolute standard of right and wrong, and an eternal law to which all men and nations are bound and to which they will be held to account.  Otherwise we might come to believe that dropping two atomic bombs upon helpless non-combatant men, women, and children in Japan was a righteous thing to do.  After all, it worked. 

The Gods of War

Winning the War, Losing the Faith

One of the more interesting conundrums of recent history is the rapid decline of the Christian faith throughout the West.  Our view is that the time frame is roughly equivalent to the decline from true faith in Israel from King David’s reign down to the invasion and destruction of Israel, first by Assyria (722 BC), then subsequently by Babylon (605 through to 586BC). But these were the final acts.  The scripture records a thorough-going, comprehensive rejection of God and His covenant throughout Israel and Judah, preceding these final (military) denouements.  

While the collapse of Christendom in the United Kingdom and its WASP colonies (Canada, Australia and New Zealand) was precipitous, its gradual precursors were not.  From the time of the Enlightenment, the poison of idolatry had been quietly killing off true faithfulness.  Peter Hitchens argues that the final collapse and capitulation was also due to war, as happened in ancient Israel, together with the nationalistic, jingoistic idolatry that mixed the Christian faith with nationalism.  The West won the war, but lost the Faith.  The “state religion” became perverted to the cause of the nation, not Messiah.

. . . the wars in which they were asked to die do not, once examined, seem as noble and pure as they did when I first learned about them.  And the proper remembering of dead warriors, though right and fitting, is a very different thing from the Christian religion.  The Christian church has been powerfully damaged by letting itself be confused with love of country and the making of great wars.  Wars–which can only ever be won by ruthless violence–are seldom fought for good reasons, even if such reasons are invented for them afterward.

Civilized countries become less civilized when they go to war.  And they hardly ever have good outcomes.  In fact, I think it safe to say that the two great victorious wars of the twentieth century did more damage to Christianity in my own country than any other single force.  The churches were full before 1914, half-empty after 1919, and three quarters empty after 1945.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 79f.]

We may add in passing the general tendency, so evident in American evangelical circles, to conflate Christian faith (undoubtedly genuine in most cases) with the various, multitudinous military misadventures of the United States.  One thinks, for example of the passion for all things military–and all that the US military attempts–reflected in folk like Sarah Palin and the Tea Party generally.  This, we believe, represents a dangerous idolatry that will eventually bear pernicious, rotten fruit.   We admire folk like Palin on many counts.  This is not one of them.  The position of someone like Rand Paul we suspect, on these matters, is much closer to the Bible’s requirement to avoid idolatry in conformity with the First Commandment–“Thou shalt have no other gods in My presence.”

Hitchen’s words are a sober warning:

I would add that, by all but destroying British Christianity, these wars may come to destroy the spirit of the country.  Those who fought so hard to defend Britain against its material enemies did so at a terrible spiritual cost.  The memory of the great slaughter of 1914-18 was carried back into their daily lives by millions who had set out from quiet homes as gentle, innocent, and kind and returned cynical, brutalized, and used to cruelty.  Then it happened again, except that the second time, the mass-murder was inflicted on–and directed against–women and children in their houses.  [Here, Hitchens is referring to the mass bombing of German cities, not military targets.]

Perhaps worse than the deliberate, scientific killing of civilians was the sad, desperate attempt to pretend to ourselves later that it was right and justified.  In this way, the pain and damage were passed on to new generations who had no hand in the killing.

War does terrible harm to civilization, to morals, to families, and to innocence.  It tramples on patience, gentleness, charity, constancy, and honesty.  How strange that we should make it the heart of a national cult. [Ibid., p.80.]

Hitchens argues that this numbing, blighting of the national conscience, the calling evil good, this glorifying the nation, and justifying of wickedness was responsible for the growing general disregard, and even disgust, with the Christian Church, and, therefore, its Head–Jesus Christ. When the Church and the Nation are inseparable, and when the Nation does terrible things, and the Church claps its support, the Church becomes a superfluous irrelevance, a quaint relic from a bye-gone superstitious age.  It no longer appears to have the Lord of Glory at its Head.  (Which, incidentally, is why having the British monarch as head of the Church is such a wretched idolatry.  It is a position which only our Lord in Heaven is entitled to have and hold.  And He does.  And He will tolerate no pretenders upon earth, no stupid rivals.)

In ancient Israel, tolerating a few idols on the side eventually matured into the most horrendous rejections of God by His people ever seen.  Anyone who doubts this should read the first twenty chapters of Jeremiah.  In the UK (and the West in general) a similar tolerance of a few harmless idols has matured into a similar grotesque narcissistic culture evident today.  The great wars of the twentieth century, and their aftermath, precipitated the capture of the Church by formalism, nominalism, and Unbelief.

Of course we know that this is not the end of the story.  He who sits above the heavens laughs at the attempts of men to cast off God.  The Living God has taken an oath–He will see His Son glorified everywhere upon the earth.  In the meantime, our duty is to learn the lessons of the collapse of  the First Christendom. One of those lessons is to eschew and reject utterly the false god of nationalism and its attendant war-mongering priests and devotees.

Letter From America (About the Imperial Presidency)

The War-Time Constitution Swap

How did we get to where a British executive goes to the legislature and an American does not?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

September 26, 2014 4:40 PM

National Review Online 

 

[This piece was written shortly after the British Parliament voted to approve the UK going to war against ISIS.  President Obama had already declared war, without the approval of Congress–an explicit violation of the Constitution of the United States.]

By now, President Obama will have been made happily aware that the British parliament has voted to bomb Iraq. Serving as it does to broaden his coalition and to increase the number of voices singing in harmony with his own, one can only presume that the news will have put the president in a good humor. Good tidings, these days, are rarely attracted to Pennsylvania Avenue. And yet, having learned of the manner in which the British have come aboard, a certain unease should have crept in to puncture the delight. After a robust and fractious debate, the BBC reports, the British parliament consented to join America in Iraq by 524 votes to 43, legislators choosing by an overwhelming majority to provide Prime Minister Cameron with the mandate that he had sought. America’s Congress, meanwhile, has still not been consulted on the question at all. Something here is seriously wrong.

Earlier this week, when Obama announced that the United States would be joined in its bombing of Syria by Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, a few wags joked bitterly that the governments of those nations did not need to secure the assent of their legislatures because, unlike the United States, they are monarchies. The jab landed, and today, in light of the news from London, it has been rendered even more cutting.

For those of us who remain jealous of the rule of law, it has been little short of grotesque to watch just how differently the British and the Americans have dealt with this most weighty of questions.
In the United States — which country’s constitution explicitly prohibits the chief executive from declaring war without congressional acquiescence — the incumbent president has not only taken to insisting that he may act abroad as he sees fit, but on more than one occasion he has done just that — first, in Libya, in 2011; and now in the mess we call Iraq and Syria. Neither action was insignificant, the former decision having effected regime change; the latter, per his own Department of Defense, being likely to rage for years to come. In Britain, by contrast, the legislature today debated in full whether or not the military should strike Iraq, even though that country’s constitution explicitly accords to the executive the power to send the armed forces into combat. Thus have we been treated to the preposterous sight of a man who enjoys absolute discretion over military matters requesting permission to join a war, while a man who is bound by law to seek consent from the legislature goes it alone.

The British Parliament’s involvement was by no means superficial. Last year, much to David Cameron’s embarrassment, a majority of MPs voted down a proposal that would have seen Britain join any American action against Bashar Assad. Deeply chastened, Cameron nonetheless stood by the verdict, telling reporters that the legislature had spoken and that he would not be seeking a second tally. Having perhaps learned his lesson, Cameron today asked MPs only for permission to hit Iraq, declining to expand the question to cover Syria as well for fear that a broader request would be rejected. Watching the debate, I was struck by how open the whole thing was. “Let me be frank,” the prime minister said, “we should not expect this to happen quickly.” Instead, he conceded, “the hallmarks of this campaign will be patience and persistence, not shock and awe,” and the action will likely last “not months but years.” There is much that is wrong with the Mother of Parliaments, but today it served as an exemplar. The opposition was tenacious and incisive; the executive was engaged and direct. Both parties seemed aware of their role and of their responsibilities. Are you watching, John Boehner?

What can explain the difference between Cameron’s approach and Obama’s? Certainly, it is not that Cameron considers the Islamic State to be less of a threat than does Obama and that, in consequence, he was happy to risk a loss. “Left unchecked,” Cameron warned gravely at one point, “we will face a terrorist caliphate on the shores of the Mediterranean, bordering a NATO member, with a declared and proven determination to attack our country and our people.” Nor can it be the case that Obama can be trusted where Cameron cannot, or that legislatures are in some way less important on one side of the Atlantic than the other.

Whatever the explanation, Obama’s failure to follow the rules is made all the more execrable when one considers just how explicit the American Founders were in their desire to eliminate the caprice and informality that marks the British model. James Madison, who considered the legislature’s control over the war-making powers as the “wisest” measure within his Constitution, explained in no uncertain terms that the document “confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.”

Why? Because, “beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man.” That temptation, Madison would later write, was well established, the Constitution presuming “what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” and that it was only prudent therefore to have “vested the question of war to the Legislature.” As David Freddoso noted last year, even the more hawkish Alexander Hamilton concurred with Madison’s assessment, explaining that while the power “of the British king extends to the declaring of war and the raising and regulating of fleets and armies,” these powers, “by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.”

When Hamilton wrote those words, the constitution had not yet been ratified and the rules had not yet been set. Now, however, they are in full force. How peculiar it would be for America’s architects to witness our present predicament, in which a representative of the Queen of England submits his desires to the assent of parliament, while the president of the United States folds Article II into a paper crown and mounts it calmly upon his head.

— Charles C. W. Cooke is a staff writer at National Review.

Clear and Present Danger It Ain’t

 Degrade and Destroy–But Whom?

Is anyone getting a sense of deja-vu over what is unfolding in the Caliphate?  We have a vague memory of the sixties as President Kennedy was mulling over what to do with a tiny “country” in South East Asia called Vietnam.  Initial attempts to neutralise communist armed forces were failing dismally.  Should the US commit ground troops?  Yes, it should.  Thus began the Vietnam war in earnest.  Disaster for the US beckoned–and eventually came to pass.

Fast forward to 2014.  Isis proclaims a Caliphate.  It captures some civilians and turns them into gruesome political theatre.  How dare they!  Ever a “can do” people, the United States demand action of their ineffectual President.  He admits that he does not have a strategy for ISIS.  But he needs something.  Nation-building is so overrated–and in any event that was the last term’s policy.  He decides upon air-strikes–the preferred weapon of armchair, left-wing Commanders-in-Chief.  (The preferred option of Republican Presidents tends to be “boots-on-the-ground” but only because they usually have more respect for the Joint-Chiefs of Staff, who know what it takes to win wars.  But that, too, has its pitfalls and beckoning disasters for a war-weary nation–like body bags.)

Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

So, air-strikes it is.  How is it going?  Here is an assessment from Patrick Cockburn:

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad. The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

Did you get that last bit?  Apparently ISIS commanders and fighters believe their own religious ideology.   Who would have thought?  What a total surprise.  And when folk believe there is a divine wind at their back they can often achieve remarkable military victories.  Muhammad and his immediate successors demonstrated that way back in the seventh century AD. Some things never change. 

But ISIS has also been making gains against the rest of “sunni Iraq”:

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

It does not look good.  It’s “degrade and destroy” all right, but not as we knew it.

What should the West do?  Western countries should respectively focus upon what, if any, clear and present danger exists for them.  It is lamentable that citizens of Western countries have been captured by ISIS and turned into political theatre by means of public executions.  But such does not represent a clear and present danger to the UK or the US or France, etc.  An appropriate response would be to issue an advisory warning to all citizens travelling or intending to travel in that part of the world.

It is equally lamentable that citizens are becoming seduced by Islamic millennialism and are travelling to sign-up as jihadis for ISIS.  Western government should respond with measured urbanity: if citizens wish to die a martyr’s death in holy jihad to get their seventy-two virgins, if they wish to subject themselves to Islamic rape or forced marriage, and if they wish to swear allegiance to the armies of Allah, then it is their choice.  By so acting, the government ought to revoke citizenship and passports.  In fact, in these days of state funding for everything, Western governments could do a lot worse than making a travel subsidy available for those so inclined.  But thus far, no clear and present danger.

Not that one won’t emerge some time in the future.  But it is an old foe–terrorist acts perpetrated by Islamic jihadis on home soil is a familiar threat.  It does represent a clear and present danger in general, requiring appropriate intelligence and vigilance.  But in this there is nothing new. And it certainly does not require bombing runs in Anbar province, or missile strikes on Kobani.

Another Military Misadventure Coming Up

How to Put Stars on the Banner of ISIS

There are few things more dangerous than when politicians get smitten with nationalistic hubris, replete with lumps in throats and tears on cheeks, whilst they are deciding or voting on military affairs.

In the US House of Representatives a recent vote was taken as to whether the Congress would approve the arming of “moderate” Syrian rebels.  Despite all the evidence and experience of disastrous outcomes of decisions to arm such groups in the past, the House duly voted to approve the action.  Can politicians really be this dumb?  Yes they can.

But not all.  Some of those who voted “no” explained their reasons.  Their justification for voting against the resolution to arm the “moderate” Syrian rebels shows up their yea-saying colleagues to be dumb, dumber and dumbest.  Here are the words of Justin Amash, a so-called Tea-partying congressman:

What have we learned from the last decade of war?

Those years should have taught us that when going to war, our government must:

(1) be careful when defining a military mission,
(2) speak forthrightly with the American people about the sacrifices they will be called to make,
(3) plan more than one satisfactory end to the conflict, and
(4) be humble about what we think we know.

These lessons should be at the front of our minds when Congress votes today on whether to arm groups in Syria.

Today’s amendment ostensibly is aimed at destroying ISIS—yet you’d hardly know it from reading the amendment’s text. The world has witnessed with horror the evil of ISIS: the public beheading of innocents, the killing of Christians, Muslims, and others.  The amendment’s focus—arming groups fighting the Assad government in Syria—has little to do with defeating ISIS. The mission that the amendment advances plainly isn’t the defeat of ISIS; it’s the defeat of Assad.

Americans stood overwhelmingly against entangling our Armed Forces in the Syrian civil war a year ago. If Congress chooses to arm groups in Syria, it must explain to the American people not only why that mission is necessary but also the sacrifices that that mission entails.

The Obama administration has tried to rally support for U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war by implying that our help would be at arm’s length. The amendment Congress will vote on broadly authorizes “assistance” to groups in Syria. It does not specify what types of weapons our government will give the groups. It does not prohibit boots on the ground. (The amendment is silent on the president’s power to order our troops to fight in the civil war; it states only that Congress doesn’t provide “specific statutory authorization” for such escalation.) It does not state the financial cost of the war.

As we should have learned from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we must plan for multiple satisfactory ends to military conflicts before we commence them.

If the Syrian groups that are “appropriately vetted” (the amendment’s language) succeed and oust Assad, what would result? Would the groups assemble a coalition government of anti-Assad fighters, and would that coalition include ISIS? What would happen to the Alawites and Christians who stood with Assad? To what extent would the U.S. government be obligated to occupy Syria to rebuild the government? If each of the groups went its own way, would Syria’s territory be broken apart, and if so, would ISIS control one of the resulting countries?

If the Syrian groups that we support begin to lose, would we let them be defeated? If not, is there any limit to American involvement in the war?

Perhaps some in the administration or Congress have answers to these questions. But the amendment we’ll vote on today contains none of them. [Emphasis, ours.]

Above all, when Congress considers serious actions—especially war—we must be humble about what we think we know. We don’t know very much about the groups we propose to support or even how we intend to vet those groups. Reports in the last week suggest that some of the “appropriately vetted” groups have struck deals with ISIS, although the groups dispute the claim. The amendment requires the administration to report on its efforts to prevent our arms and resources from ending up in the wrong hands, but we know little about those precautions or their effectiveness.

Today, I will vote against the amendment to arm groups in Syria. There is a wide misalignment between the rhetoric of defeating ISIS and the amendment’s actual mission of arming certain groups in the Syrian civil war. The amendment provides few limits on the type of assistance that our government may commit, and the exit out of the civil war is undefined. And given what’s happened in our country’s most recent wars, our leaders seem to have unjustified confidence in their own ability to execute a plan with so many unknowns.

Some of my colleagues no doubt will come to different judgments on these questions. But it’s essential that they consider the questions carefully. That the president wants the authority to intervene in the Syrian civil war is not a sufficient reason to give him that power. Under the Constitution, it is Congress’s independent responsibility to commence war.

We are the representatives of the American people. The government is proposing to take their resources and to put their children’s lives at risk. I encourage all my colleagues to give the decision the weight it is due.

The desperation to be doing something usually results in the worst unintended outcomes.  The bellicose United States goes to war at the drop of a hat.  It is “led” by a pacifist-orientated Commander-in-Chief whose liberal world-view sees all wars as unnecessary and preventable because all human beings are really creatures of enlightened good-will.  When this has not not worked out, he has lurched from one military misadventure to another with both his eyes firmly fixated on his own polling numbers.  He has no strategy, no doctrines, no guiding principles.  It’s all about him. 

Congress is no better.  It has not grown up and matured to the point where it understands that when it comes to sending the military to war, overwhelmingly, far more often than not, the best and right decision is to do nothing.  The phrase “clear and present danger” has been inflated to where it is a meaningless concept.  An ant walking upon a sidewalk in Outer Mongolia would constitute a “clear and present danger” to the United States in the minds of most of the current crop of Congressmen.

Evil exists.  People die at the hands of unimaginably evil predators.  But need does not constitute a duty–or a right–to intervene so that “good guys” get to kill “bad guys”.  The world is just not that simple.  It is not a narrative of cowboys and Indians. 

We make a prediction which doubtless many will consider so extreme and unlikely they will write us off as complete idiots: as a result of arming “moderate” groups in Syria, the civil war will intensify, more people will be killed than otherwise, and US armaments and military weapons will end up in the hands of the most brutal and ruthless of the fighting cliques.  Our critics will have conveniently forgotten  that it is the US which has indirectly armed ISIS, thereby enabling it to expand rapidly into Iraq and western Syria.  Will such things happen again?  Inevitably.  But the militaristic heart which beats throughout the land in the United States runs on the high octane fuel of patriotism, nationalism, and exceptionalist hubris.  This time . . . this time it will be different.  We swear.

Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

The star spangled banner of ISIS, that is.  Enabled and facilitated by the unintended consequences of foolish US military misadventure. 

The world would be a very much safer and saner place, if the US Congress were populated throughout by more Congressmen like Justin Amash. 

Western Double Standards

Siege Warfare and Urban Assaults

There are few military actions more difficult, more deadly, more dangerous, and more risky for non-combatants than house to house, urban assaults.  It is thus inevitable that whenever Israel invades Gaza, as it  recently has, civilians (that is, non-Hamas fighters) would be caught up in the violence of war, and would lose their lives.  To our knowledge there has never been an urban military assault that managed to prevent all harm to civilians living in the city.  This does not make the death of any civilian less tragic.  It is simply a statement about reality. 

In former times, when armies laid siege to a city, they usually followed the laws of siege warfare.  They first of all offered terms of peace to the city.  Surrender the city, or face a long siege.  Everyone knew this was the right thing to do.  It was right for the besieging army, since sieges were usually long, complex, and very costly affairs both in terms of materiel and lives.  It was also the right thing to do for the city, since sieges were most often deadly to the general population.  They usually did not end before thousands died of malnutrition, hunger, and disease.  The final reason for offering terms was that the laws of siege warfare permitted a general slaughter, enslavement, looting all of value, and razing the city to the ground once the city walls had been breached. It was regarded as a just reparation for the costs borne by the besieging army.

Against this background, Israel’s activities in Gaza seem excessively moral and highly ethical–the shrieks of outrage in the Western media and Commentariat notwithstanding.
  E-mailing, texting, and phoning civilians in advance to warn of a coming bombardment so they can seek refuge would appear to be excessively solicitous of non-combatants and civilians to the ears of our military forbears.  Imagine during the siege of Troy the Greeks announcing to the Trojan civilians, “Stay away from this part of the wall, Trojies.  We are going to be hurling some projectiles there tomorrow.”

Of course all of the efforts made to protect Gazan non-combatants could not be expected to protect everyone.  Collateral civilian deaths are sadly inevitable in urban warfare.   The key question is this: have all reasonable steps been taken to avoid or minimise civilian deaths to the best of one’s ability?  It seems that Israel has reasonable grounds to make such claims.

But to many in the West, Israel appears evil no matter what.  The stench of hypocrisy and double standards is noisome and offensive.  Here are three of the most offensive aspects of the West’s response.

1. The outrage expressed when civilians huddling in schools and mosques were wounded and killed, while not having similar outrage at Hamas using such places as armouries and storage dumps for their rockets and other weapons of war.  The UN has been a stentorian critic of UN schools being attacked, but strangely silent about or professedly ignorant of UN facilities being used as armouries by Hamas.  Similar criticisms can be made of those running mosques permitting their facilities to be so used.

2. The deafening silence from many quarters at the Hamas attack tunnels, built at a cost of millions of dollars, and some stocked with sophisticated weapons, geared up for bombing and taking copious prisoners (to be later used for Hamas political and fiscal purposes).  Over forty attack tunnels have been discovered, most terminating under Israeli civilian installations such as kindergartens.  Surely the Western Commentariat would be wondering where Hamas got the funds to engage in building such an expensive military complex and asking how must Western aid monies had been diverted from Palestinian relief to fund Hamas’s war preparations.

 

A map of a small portion of the tunnels meant to be used 9 weeks from now.

We defy any leader (or people) to announce to the world that they would permit the existence of such underground military incursions into their sovereign territory and would take no military action against them.  Would the United States?  Would Germany?  Would the UK permit such tunnelling activity into Britain, were Scotland to become independent? 

3.  The wilful ignoring of Hamas’s repeatedly stated objective of completely obliterating Israel, removing its very existence from the world, along with the killing of all Jews.  The West has such cognitive dissonance in this instance that it simply cannot hear or register what Hamas is saying, let alone comprehend its implications. 

Most risible has been the spurious moral equivalence deployed by Western harridans comparing what Israel has done with some of the most evil regimes in recent history.  Here are some examples, all found in just one letter to the NZ Prime Minister–

1. genocidal practices  (moral equivalence to the Nazis, the Pol Pot regime, the Isis Caliphate)
2. calculated murder (moral equivalence to actions like the 9/11 attacks and suicide bombers)
3. killing fields of Gaza (specific moral equivalence to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge)
4. unimaginable terror (moral equivalence to terrorist actions)
5. Israeli butchers (moral equivalence to Nazi death camps)

Such moral equivalences are so bizarre and stupid they inevitably raise questions about the sanity of those who make them.  After all, the possession of a reasonable moral compass is one of the classical tests of sanity.  The moral equivalences above are so extremely unreasonable they must call into question the sanity of the one who makes them. 

The bottom line is this: defensive wars are just wars. The unintended deaths of innocent civilians during the conduct of defensive actions against an implacable enemy’s attempts to kill one’s citizens is inevitable and does not, in any way, undermine the claim to be fighting a just war. 

Hades, Fury, and Bullies

Manhood Problem

New York Times columnist David Brooks said Sunday that President Barack Obama has a “manhood problem” in the Middle East.  “[L]et’s face it,” he said. “Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a — I’ll say it crudely, but a manhood problem in the Middle East. Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad, somebody like Putin?”

“I think a lot of the rap is unfair, but certainly in the Middle East, there’s an assumption that he’s not tough,” Brooks added during a roundtable discussion on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”  Chuck Todd, NBC’s chief White House correspondent, added that “internally they (the Obama Admin.) fear this.”

(H/T: TheBlaze,  Mediaite)

Look, dealing with this is literally easier said than done.  Just get the President to mount the podium once again, adopt that haughty proud look, waggle his finger in that professorial hectoring mien, and speechify.  Carpet bomb the Middle East and Russia with lofty language, soaring rhetoric, and finger wagging threats.  Internally, the Russians fear this.  Its dread keeps them awake over in the Kremlin into the wee small hours–until Comrade Vodka takes over the watch. 

But, on a sober note, it is disconcerting.  It is precisely this kind of situation which, when combined with this make of man, will produce a “display” to prove a point.  Some theatrical move on Obama’s part to demonstrate just how much of a man he really is.  Hades hath no fury like a venal politician scorned.  The bluster of bullies sounds the loudest.  Wars have begun this way. 

Triumphant Irrelevance

The West Does Not “Get” Islam

The usual world-view applied to the Islamic wars in the West  is, unsurprisingly, Western.  Wars such as the Syrian civil war are understood through Western glasses, which see the “real” conflict as fundamentally secular, non-religious, focused upon political struggles over power and of who is going to rule, and not infrequently with a Marxist chaser thrown in–poor versus rich, possessed versus dispossessed.  It is assumed that issues of freedom, democracy, free elections, the rule of law, and so forth, are intrinsic to the struggle.

Western diplomacy presupposes that all these Western pre-occupations are the “real issues” and seeks to persuade, cajole, bribe, and threaten accordingly.  If the Sunni rebels are “freedom fighters” they have our support.  If the Shi’ite Alawites are authoritarian tyrants, they become a Western opponent, if not an enemy.

Rarely does the role and critical contribution of Islam come into consideration.  The explanation for such a glaring omission is straightforward.  In the West’s worldview, religion is an irrelevance.
  All religions are  erroneous and false, concerned with unreal matters, with fantasy, and whilst the Western humanistic doctrines of liberty whilst professing  to respect religion, only tolerates a religion which stays within the confines of one’s home. 

But there is an exception.  The only time the West will give a fig for religious belief is when it can be co-joined with a deeper Western narrative of neo-Marxist oppression.  If devotees of  a religion can be fitted into a narrative of exploitation by Western capitalist and imperialist forces, then suddenly their religion becomes something to respect, nurture, and even celebrate in the face of Western hegemonism.

Hence the wide-spread kowtowing to Islam amongst the chattering classes and the Commentariat.  Islam is the religion of the poor and the exploited, of the oppressed and the downtrodden.  Therefore, the West must not join with the oppression of Islam.  It must seek to lift it up, respect it.  Eventually, or so runs the eschatology of the neo-Marxists, Islamic religion will wither away, to be replaced by “scientific” Darwinian secularism, even as it has in the West.   The West’s “respect” for Islam is, thus,  paternalistic and condescending at best.  

Herein lies the reason why Western “policy” towards Islam and Islamic nations has been an abysmal failure in recent decades.  It fails to see the elephant of Islam sitting in the room, because the ruling paradigm of the West is secular, which means that the religion of Islam is not in any sense an elephant, but a mouse, or a cockroach–an irrelevance.  But as for free elections, and human rights, that’s another matter entirely.  We doubt not that the most perplexing question furrowing the brows of Western leaders and Foggy Bottom bureaucrats is whether Syrian Sunni “freedom fighters” can be persuaded to hold free and fair elections sooner rather than later, in exchange for more Western support. 

But let’s move outside the suffocating myopia of the West to reality on the streets of Damascus.  Mariam Karouny, has been published in Yahoo News! explaining what is going down on the on the ground. 

Conflict in Syria kills hundreds of thousands of people and spreads unrest across the Middle East. Iranian forces battle anti-Shi’ite fighters in Damascus, and the region braces for an ultimate showdown.  If the scenario sounds familiar to an anxious world watching Syria’s devastating civil war, it resonates even more with Sunni and Shi’ite fighters on the frontlines – who believe it was all foretold in 7th Century prophecies.

From the first outbreak of the crisis in the southern city of Deraa to apocalyptic forecasts of a Middle East soaked in blood, many combatants on both sides of the conflict say its path was set 1,400 years ago in the sayings of the Prophet Mohammad and his followers.  Among those many thousands of sayings, or hadith, are accounts which refer to the confrontation of two huge Islamic armies in Syria, a great battle near Damascus, and intervention from the north and west of the country.  The power of those prophecies for many fighters on the ground means that the three-year-old conflict is more deeply rooted – and far tougher to resolve – than a simple power struggle between President Bashar al-Assad and his rebel foes.

You don’t say.  At least Karouny gets it, whilst most in the West don’t.  At least Karouny takes the Islamic narrative seriously, and thus gets far closer to reality than most.

“If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you’re mistaken,” said a Sunni Muslim jihadi who uses the name Abu Omar and fights in one of the many anti-Assad Islamist brigades in Aleppo.  “They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised – it is the Grand Battle,” he told Reuters, using a word which can also be translated as slaughter.

On the other side, many Shi’ites from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran are drawn to the war because they believe it paves the way for the return of Imam Mahdi – a descendent of the Prophet who vanished 1,000 years ago and who will re-emerge at a time of war to establish global Islamic rule before the end of the world.  According to Shi’ite tradition, an early sign of his return came with the 1979 Iranian revolution, which set up an Islamic state to provide fighters for an army led by the Mahdi to wage war in Syria after sweeping through the Middle East.  “This Islamic Revolution, based on the narratives that we have received from the prophet and imams, is the prelude to the appearance of the Mahdi,” Iranian cleric and parliamentarian Ruhollah Hosseinian said last year.

This apocalyptic tradition teaches that there will be universal war in the Middle East, leading to such destruction that blood will flow knee-deep.  The protagonists believe that now is the hour foretold and promised by Muhammad.  In the face of this narrative, the world-view of the West might as well be from Mars.  It is a complete irrelevance.

Into the room the diplomats come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. 

The West’s grasp of what is actually driving the Syrian conflict is Prufrockian in its simplistic, irrelevant, naive inconsequence.

Syria’s civil war grew out of the “Arab Spring” of pro-democracy revolts in the Middle East and North Africa in 2011 after Assad’s forces cracked down hard on peaceful protests.  But because Assad is a member of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shii’ism, and most of his opponents are Sunni Muslims, the fighting quickly took on a sectarian character, which has largely overwhelmed the political issues.

“These hadith are what the Mujahideen are guided by to come to Syria, we are fighting for this. With every passing day we know that we are living the days that the Prophet talked about,” said Mussab, a fighter from the Nusra Front, a Sunni hardline group linked to al Qaeda, speaking from Syria.

Murtada, a 27-year-old Lebanese Shi’ite who regularly goes to Syria to battle against the rebels, says he is not fighting for Assad, but for the Mahdi, also known as the Imam.  “Even if I am martyred now, when he appears I will be reborn to fight among his army, I will be his soldier,” he told Reuters in Lebanon.  Murtada, who has fought in Damascus and in the decisive battle last year for the border town of Qusair, leaves his wife and two children when he goes to fight in Syria: “Nothing is more precious than the Imam, even my family. It is our duty.” . . . .

Abbas, a 24-year-old Iraqi Shi’ite fighter, said he knew he was living in the era of the Mahdi’s return when the United States and Britain invaded Iraq in 2003.  “That was the first sign and then everything else followed,” he told Reuters from Baghdad, where he said was resting before heading to Syria for a fourth time.  “I was waiting for the day when I will fight in Syria. Thank God he chose me to be one of the Imam’s soldiers.”

Abu Hsaasan, a 65 year old pensioner from south Lebanon, said he once thought the prophecies of the end of days would take centuries to come about.  “Things are moving fast. I never thought that I would be living the days of the Imam. Now, with every passing day I am more and more convinced that it is only a matter of few years before he appears.”

Peace?  Not a chance.  At least not until Islam in the Middle East becomes so weary of bloodshed it is prepared to look for another way.  But hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of people will likely die before that day.

But in the meantime there is one thing to be done–humanitarian aid, as much of it as possible, delivered as effectively as possible, to whomever seeks it.  The more Christian charities that can become involved the better.  They will be far more likely to deliver aid without Western political strings attached. They will deliver aid out of genuine compassion for those who suffer, all in the Name of the Prince of Peace.  In the long term, He is our last and only hope.

 

The Magic of Free Trade

Mutual Understanding Not Enough

What causes wars?  An almost universal consensus (in the West) is that wars are the result of misunderstandings.  When wars break out it is widely believed that they could have been avoided if only the protagonists had a better understanding of each other.  Why do Muslim imams and religious leaders label the West with the sobriquet Great Satan?  It’s because they do not understand us.  If they did, they would like us better and would not say such things.  A suppressed snide corollary usually goes with this cliche: Islamic misunderstanding is due to ignorance.  If they knew more, if they were better educated, they would like us Westerners better. 

As Jonah Goldberg put it

It’s a staple of the liberal view of the world that peace comes with mutual understanding; when people get to know each other, they don’t kill each other.  “If we could just get both sides in a room to talk this out . . . ” is the beginning (and end) of wisdom for this crowd.  Meanwhile, . . . the corollary to all of this is that violence only begats more violence.  It’s almost as if the Pax Romana, the Pax Britannia, and the Pax Americana were all the results of intensive group therapy sessions in which the leader of these regimes simply hugged out all their differences. [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 262.]

It is undeniably true that some of the most intractable conflicts have been internecine ones.  We cannot avoid thinking about the situation in the “former Yugoslavia” where people of different ethnic and religious traditions lived peacefully together for decades–and, as former neighbours, became embroiled in a ruthless, bloody conflict of ethnic cleansing.  Neighbour killed neighbour.  They all understood each other.  In most cases they knew each other very well, but in the end, it mattered not a whit.  The same is true of the horrific conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu in Rwanda, the of Troubles in Northern Ireland, or the of North and South Koreans, or the European nations engaged in the horrors of the Great War. 

In all of these cases the protagonists understood very well the arguments, grievances, and shared history of their neighbours.  It turns out that war is rarely a matter of mere misunderstandings. 

This, of course, has been President Obama’s naive folly.  He appears genuinely to believe his pursuit of mutual understanding would ensure global peace would break out to the joy of all mankind.  But if Obama and the liberal tradition he represents are wrong, and that mutual understanding does not contribute to “world peace”, what might?  Decentralised, vested interests–otherwise known as free trade.  Goldberg again:

In modern times the most reliable–not foolproof, just reliable–engine of peace is not lofty dialogue or religion, or frilly exhortations but lowly, mercenary trade. . . . From time immemorial the most bloodthirsty people in the world have been willing to put aside their differences in the cause of commerce.  Mobsters tolerate those they find intolerable in the name of business.  Modern democracies do not declare war on each other for numerous reasons, but near the top of the list is the fact that citizens recognize their interconnected economic interests. . . .

Montesquieu had it right: “Peace is the natural effect of trade.  Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.” [Ibid., p. 266]

In our neck of the woods we have had the point illustrated in recent days.  This year’s Heads of Commonwealth meeting was held in Sri Lanka.  Various civil rights folk were raising hue and cry in the media over the civil rights record of the Sri Lankan government, trying to pressure the respective Commonwealth prime ministers to beat the Sri Lankan government with a big stick.  Pretty forthright was David Cameron, Prime Minister of the UK.  Much less publicly forthright (albeit privately active) was our own Prime Minister, John Key.  Why the difference?  The fact is that Sri Lanka is becoming a very strong trading partner with New Zealand.  We need them; they need us.  The mutual trading interests help compel the two nations to work together.  Britain, however, has nowhere near the same incentive, nor constraint.  We believe that Key would have made the much more constructive impact on the matter with Sri Lanka.  He ended up encouraging them in certain directions, not hectoring like a harridan.  Mutual trade interests do that kind of thing. 

A similar thing is at play right now between Australia and Indonesia.  The latter is all riled up at discovering that Australia has been spying on the phone conversations of the Indonesian president and his wife–as well they might.  The Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott has been dismissive of the offence taken.  Tensions are escalating.  It is almost certain, however, that the mutual interests of trade between the two nations will force both governments into more conciliatory postures.  Were those mutual interests not there–were not strong commercial interests in both countries pressuring their respective governments to “cool it” things might quickly spiral out of control. 

If, along with platitudinous beauty contestants, we truly love world peace, we will promote globalised free trade. With a passion. 

Marketing

Oh What a Lovely War

In 2012 the UK Ministry of Defence produced a paper giving advice on how to “market” war to the public.  The intention was to work out how to increase public support for the various wars the UK was engaged in at the time.  One suggestion made was to make less of repatriation and funeral ceremonies of those who had died.  Downplay the negative.  Accentuate the positive.  That sort of stuff.  Typical marketing fluff.

The document, written in November 2012 and obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, discusses how public reaction to casualties can be influenced and recommends that the armed forces should have “a clear and constant information campaign in order to influence the major areas of press and public opinion”. (The Guardian)

The folk don’t like hearing and seeing that soldiers and airmen have been killed.  It is a negative.  It ought to be downplayed.  Don’t regard these people as heroes who have laid down their lives for the protection of their loved ones, their neighbours, and their nation.   That ends up accentuating the negative, which will reduce “market” appetite and demand for war.

But wait a minute.  This is war we are talking about.
  It is not the release of the latest smart phone.  The very fact that the UK government is having to consider marketing strategies to make war more publicly supported indicates that the war is most likely an illicit enterprise.  War can only be justified in the face of clear and present danger.  Clearly, if a war lacks the support of the population, the implication is that there is no danger to the population clearly to be seen.  Neither is it present. 

The Ministry of Defence paper recognises the problem.  There are wars which have high public support.  There are other wars which do not.  Maybe the UK government and politicians should consider where the difference lies.  It might mean that a much more restrained doctrine of war would emerge, instead of going halfway around the globe to participate in internationalist follies, whether as part of NATO commitments, or to play second, supporting fiddle to President Obama who infamously campaigned on the notion that Iraq was a “bad” war, but Afghanistan was a “good” war that the US should really, really fight because it involved good old fashioned “nation building”.  How sad–and wicked–that so many lives would be sacrificed for something so fatuously  idealistic and completely unrelated to anything vaguely resembling “clear and present danger”. 

It is arguable that a nation may face clear and present danger and going to war would be resisted by the population.  Maybe doctrines of pacifism have garnered widespread support.  Maybe the population has concluded that life under the invader would be preferable to their current lives.  But these would be extreme and unusual circumstances.  They certainly don’t apply in the UK at present–or to any Western nation as far as we can tell.  In fact, the MOD paper acknowledged just this point.

The eight-page paper argues that the military may have come to wrongly believe that the public, and as a result the government, has become more “risk averse” on the basis of recent campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. “However, this assertion is based on recent, post-2000 experience and we are in danger of learning false lessons concerning the public’s attitude to military operations,” the paper, which has no named author, adds.

“Historically, once the public are convinced that they have a stake in the conflict they are prepared to endorse military risks and will accept casualties as the necessary consequence of the use of military force.”  To back this up, it cites “robust” public support for earlier conflicts – the Falklands war and operations in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 2007. “In those cases where the public is unconvinced of the relevance of the campaign to their wellbeing they are not prepared to condone military risk and are acutely sensitive to the level of casualties incurred.  “Neither the action in Iraq nor the operations in Afghanistan have enjoyed public support and we are in danger of learning a false lesson from the experience of the last 10 years.”  (Emphasis, ours)

That this argues (from experience) is that the UK population operates with a war doctrine which justifies war on the basis of “clear and present danger” and is cynical about and even contemptuous toward wars which do not. 

The bottom line is this: in the UK the general population does not see a clear and present danger from the mujahideen in Afghanistan, half a world away.  To be sure, the UK has faced a clear and present danger from (UK citizen) terrorists.  No-one complains about the actions of the police, intelligence and security services to detect and apprehend and punish such miscreants.  But to suggest–as has been suggested–that there is a direct danger from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the UK is to draw forth a long, tenuous bow.  Hence, the UK warring in that place lacks public support.  This becomes a clear indicator that the war itself is illegitimate.  You cannot, after all, fool all of the people all of the time. 

But there is a danger.  The more illegitimate and illicit wars undertaken, the more cynical and war-weary a population becomes.  When an actual clear and present danger emerges, the risk is that the boy will have cried “Wolf!” once too often, sapping the resolve and will to fight when it is vital.  This leads to a paradox: the more warlike and belligerent a nation, the more it is likely to collapse.  The more illegitimate and unjustified wars a nation fights, the more vulnerable it becomes to general capitulation amongst the population, should a clear and present danger emerge.  Politicians and governments which uselessly expend the lives and materiel of its armed forces are weakening and putting at risk the sovereignty and defence of the nation. They are like a Fifth Column in our midst.

It is not accidental that the post-script to World War I in the UK was three decades of strong pacifist sentiment that left the UK exposed and vulnerable in the face of the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich.  And what generated pacifist sentiment?  It was the widespread public revulsion of the War which many came to see as having no meaning, no justification, and in no way representing a clear and present danger. 

Let the bellicose and the war-mongers amongst us take note.  Your illicit militancy is actually weakening the nation, sapping its will to defend itself.  Ah, but who cares?  We can always have recourse to the marketing department of the Ministry of Defence.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Making It Flow to the End

Posted on Sunday, September 8, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

In the Syria saga, we are getting a good glimpse of how political decisions are made in a gargantuan democracy, and we are also getting quite a cash payout — worth a great deal to me at any rate — of Ron Paul’s apparently quixotic presidential runs.

Let me state the conclusion first. I am convinced that – despite the blinkered limitations of pure libertarianism when it comes to foreign-policy in the Middle East – the presence of a  significant libertarian mindset in the Republican Party has been beyond helpful in this situation. I think an ideologically pure libertarian foreign policy would be a disaster. But I also think the current endless war policy is a disaster, and I like very much the fact a good portion of our population — for whatever reasons — has gotten kind of surly about it.

Let us be frank.
There are many in the GOP who tend to give reflexive deference to the president when it comes to military actions like this, in which phrases like “in harm’s way,” “our men and women in uniform,” and so on can be used, but the presence of the libertarian faction within the party has meant an argument needed to have been made. In order to do something like this now, you actually have to persuade somebody.

In this case, because there wasn’t a good argument, we have had a surprising turn against Syrian military action among mainstream conservatives. Obama’s dithering gave that opposition time to think for minute and coalesce.

I mean, think about it. What are the odds of every war being a good idea?

Second, this whole fiasco, combined with Obama’s wafted-way-above-his-pay-grade-hubris, has apparently given us the great gift of Obama’s second term being lived out in lame-duck city for perhaps a full three years. The president has beyond bungled this whole thing, and is pretty miffed that the Syrians on both side of their conflict have not given him the affirmative action waiver that he has repeatedly requested. They won’t even return the State Department’s calls anymore.

In short, the president is now manifestly in that realm where his paradigm and self-identity are being completely overwhelmed by things like “experiences,” “events,” “exigencies,” “emergencies,” and “eggs.” I only said eggs because I needed another e to make it flow to the end.

The president is in a bad jam, pretty much of his own making, and pretty much everybody knows it. I am anticipating things getting, simultaneously, much muddier and much clearer, by which I mean that it will be very clear how muddy it is.

Perpetual War

The Injustice of Even Contemplating War in Syria

As the war drums beat over Syria the controversy about casus belli rises again.  What are the just causes for going to war?  In the Western tradition what constitutes a just cause for war has become inflated significantly in the past two hundred years.  We see the fruits of that inflation in the debates swirling in the United States at present over Syria. 

The notion of a just war is rooted in Christian doctrine and in the first Christendom.  Whilst the idea of a just war is inherently right, the details can be diabolical.  Who or what determines what is just?  When you have medieval and post-medieval rulers fixated upon their own vanities the concept of justice can be stretched to cover a mountain of vainglory.  Any insult to the Sun-King of the day becomes intolerable; to punish the malefactors becomes cast as an act of retributive justice.  Therefore, to be genuinely so, the doctrine of a just war must be grounded in a higher law which defines wherein justice actually lies, not in the vanity of vainglorious rulers or nations. 

The situation got noticeably worse during the time of doctrines of the divine right of kings.
  King Henry VIII, for example, was an absolutist tyrant–his malefaction justified by the pernicious idea that he was God’s highest representative upon earth, and therefore the absolute ruler over church and state.  Wars under such misconceptions become manifestly unjust, and that very quickly.

The Christian concept of a just war can be neatly summarised, on the one hand, and tied to the teachings of Holy Scripture, on the other, by the doctrine of “clear and present danger”.  The phrase is regnant with significance.  A clear danger is one which is beyond doubt.  It is a danger not hypothetical, contingent, or theoretical.  It is self-evident.  It is a danger which threatens life and limb of citizens. It is a danger that even the cats and dogs can see. A present danger is one which is confronting a nation immediately, not contingently or potentially. 

The concept of a just war being tied to the doctrine of a clear and present danger means that wars ought  always to be defensive in nature. 

In modern and post-modern times the justification for war has expanded way beyond the strictures of a just war based upon a clear and present danger.  There are two additional doctrines which have overtaken the restrictive, yet inherently just, concept of defensive war.  The first is a war to defend national interests.  The second is a war in the name of humanity or human rights (that is, a humanitarian war). 

Many wars in recent times have been waged to defend US interests.  Since the US is the only remaining superpower, it has interests all over the show; consequently, under the doctrine of warring to protect national interests, one can expect that the US will be at war somewhere in the world all the time.  And so it has proved to be.  The doctrine of warring to protect national interests is really a continuation of the nineteenth century nationalistic imperialist doctrines.  It is also inherently corrupt.  Who, pray tell, determines where the national interests really lie?  National interests of the many immediately parley into the commercial interests of some.  The war powers of the state become applied to defend the commercial interests of the nation’s plutocrats. 

Hence, in the case of the recent wars in Iraq there was plenty of evidence that the West was thinking of its commercial interests in protecting its supplies of oil as the fundamental driver of war.  The fact that senior members of government had long-standing commercial interests in the region made the optics much, much worse.  Justifying war to defend (or promote) national interests is a pernicious concept.  It is a ghastly hangover from the period of Western imperialism where might made right and where pride was to be protected.  Wars waged to defend national interests are inherently immoral and unjust. 

The second modern justification is going to war to defend human rights, or in the name of humanitarian ideals.  This pernicious doctrine has been the stock-in-trade of the progressive movement in the West; it is regnant in the United Nations, and it now rules the war doctrine of the United States.  It turns the US into an international policeman, a Redeemer of mankind.  It is the most useless and empty justification for war imaginable.  For, in almost every case, it leaves the particular nation unfortunate enough to suffer the depredations of a humanitarian war far, far worse off. Wars in the name of humanity can destroy; they are powerless to build, restore, and reclaim.  They can tear down, but fail to built up.

Moreover, wars waged in the name of humanitarian concerns and human rights are always erratic and hypocritical.   A classic example is the current intention of the United States government to go to war in Syria.  Why Syria, and why now?  The purported provocation is the use of poisonous gas.  Apparently killing children with poison gas is beyond the pale.  Terrible as it has been, why now?  The civil war being brutally waged in Syria has killed north of  100,000 people, many of them non-combatant women and children.  Do they not count?  Are they not just as dead?  Are their human rights nothing?  Why does 400 children killed by poison gas become a cause c’elebre for human rights to be protected and avenged, but many thousands slaughtered in an ongoing civil war be regarded as “see no evil, hear no evil”.  Hypocrisies necessarily abound because man cannot remove evil from this fallen world.  Evil is ubiquitous, and mankind is not the redeemer: he is the problem. 

Wars in the name of human rights are riddled with inconsistencies, cant, and hypocrisy.  Therefore, they themselves are inherently unjust. 

As long as the war doctrines of defending national interests and protecting human rights are clutched to the bosoms of nations there will be no ending of wars and rumours of wars.  And the US, being the last super-power, will be at war all the time. 

If the question is asked, Does the situation in Syria represent a clear and present danger to the United States? the answer is self-evidently negative.  To consider war for a moment in such a case is wrong and unjust.  But if it were asked, Does the Syrian situation represent a threat to American interests?, or Does it represent a violation of humanitarian ethics? the answer can always be made affirmatively on both counts. 

When these doctrines are applied, the United States becomes like Sauron who would always have his wars.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Syria in a Sentence

Posted on Wednesday, September 4, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

Blog and Mablog 

I want Congress to authorize something I don’t believe they need to authorize, and which I reserve the right to do anyway whether or not they authorize it, in order that I might defend the credibility of a red line I didn’t actually draw, so that I may take decisive action that will not in any way affect the momentum of the Syrian civil war or, if it accidentally does, al-Qaeda will the stronger for it, in order that I might have a chance to do what I have spent a decade yelling about other people doing.

Bringing the A-Game to the Table

Russian Grand Master

Vlad the Impaler is making Obama look more and more foolish.  We are not sure whether this reflects a much more experienced “old hand” running the Russian government, or whether the Russian authorities have decided that Obama’s suit is filled with an effete mixture of hot air, hubris, and little else and they are mischievously delighting in exposing the emptiness to the world, or whether they are just far more sophisticated and clever than the inexperienced two-bit community organiser from Chicago.  Whatever–but the reality is that Vlad knows how to play a very sophisticated game of chess.  He also shows signs of having sized up his opponent all too well. 

Firstly, tactical move number #1: keep the whole Syrian thing boiling in the UN pot.
  This, in turn, keeps Obama in a vice of his own making.  He has been (up until now) the champion of humanitarianism and internationalism–and therefore of the UN–especially in matter of war.  There is not a hope that the UN Security Council will endorse military action against Syria.  Russia and China will effectively block it.  But it is helpful to the Russian/Syrian cause if the rest of the world can maintain some semblance of respect for the UN with a straight face and follow its lead. 

So, Vlad has acted masterfully to keep the whole thing in the hands of the UN, by getting Syria to agree to the handing over and destruction of its chemical weapon stockpile.  Count the months and months it will take to get the stockpile inspected, removed, and destroyed.  If Obama goes to war now, he will likely do so unilaterally and with the attendant brimstone stench of a warmonger.  All his previous trumpeting about internationalism and humanitarianism will be judged to be the empty braying of a donkey.  He will have lost all moral authority and respect. 

Tactical move number #2: having gained control of international sentiment, Vlad has left Obama out in the cold, having to make arguments to a sceptical US public–already stretched, disbelieving, and cynical–even while the casus belli has been surgically removed.  If it was going to be hard to get congressional approval before the dramatic Russian/Syrian move, it would be next to impossible after.

In addition, the US has been poorly served by an idiotic Secretary of State who has used the following to justify US military action (as quoted in the Guardian):

Kerry said the Americans were planning an “unbelievably small” attack on Syria. “We will be able to hold Bashar al-Assad accountable without engaging in troops on the ground or any other prolonged kind of effort in a very limited, very targeted, short-term effort that degrades his capacity to deliver chemical weapons without assuming responsibility for Syria’s civil war. That is exactly what we are talking about doing – unbelievably small, limited kind of effort.”

So, US military action is now a mere token–“unbelievably small”.   Here is Obama in high moral dudgeon and all a-bluster telling us that terrible bright red lines have been crossed and that Syria must be called to account.  This is the Obama moral imperative, that was not his really but (he tells us) the whole world’s.  But at the same time his Secretary of State, John Kerry is also busy telling the world the US response will be “unbelievably small”, so don’t worry about it.  And, by the way, Syria can avoid suffering this “unbelievably small” military punishment if it hands over its chemical weapon arsenal.

No sooner had the words come out of his mouth, the Russians and the Syrians (having set the trap) said, “No problemo”, leaving Obama flapping in a receding tide, beached on the seashore.

That’s what happens when a consummate chess player sits down across the table with a blustering community organiser from Chicago.  It’s called checkmate.

Different Endings and Unpalatable Outcomes

Postscripts to Western Arrogance

As the war drums sound over Syria, it may be prudent to stop and reflect upon Libya.  Remember Libya?  The United States (along with NATO) decided that it had to get involved to support Libyan rebels attempting to overthrown dictator, Colonel Qaddafi.  The mission was eventually accomplished.  Poor old Muammar ended up in a culvert and was shot to pieces by vengeful rebels.

The US felt good.  Mission accomplished.  The US President and congressional hawks looked in the mirror and raised a few toasts.  The Lone Ranger and the Invincibles and the Super Heroes had ridden forth again, vanquished the evil one, and retired from the theatre.  They, no doubt, in raising the toast saw in the mirror adumbrations of one of the great fictional heroes of the West: “He was the man who rode into our little valley, out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done, rode back whence he had come.  And he was Shane.”  Whoop-de-do.  Yeeeee hah.

But what of Libya?
  Stupid question.  It would naturally now rise to a better place–“up, up, up past the Russell Hotel.”  Actually, Libya has already disintegrated, into a lawless morass.  This, from The Independent:

As world attention focused on the coup in Egypt and the poison gas attack in Syria over the past two months, Libya has plunged unnoticed into its worst political and economic crisis since the defeat of Gaddafi two years ago. Government authority is disintegrating in all parts of the country putting in doubt claims by American, British and French politicians that Nato’s military action in Libya in 2011 was an outstanding example of a successful foreign military intervention which should be repeated in Syria.

In an escalating crisis little regarded hitherto outside the oil markets, output of Libya’s prized high-quality crude oil has plunged from 1.4 million barrels a day earlier this year to just 160,000 barrels a day now. Despite threats to use military force to retake the oil ports, the government in Tripoli has been unable to move effectively against striking guards and mutinous military units that are linked to secessionist forces in the east of the country.

Libyans are increasingly at the mercy of militias which act outside the law. Popular protests against militiamen have been met with gunfire; 31 demonstrators were shot dead and many others wounded as they protested outside the barracks of “the Libyan Shield Brigade” in the eastern capital Benghazi in June.

Time and time again stupid Western ideologues use the pretext of horrors being perpetrated elsewhere in the world as a reason for military engagement–to sort it all out.  Fast forward a couple of years, and things in that place end up worse than ever.  Except now nothing can be done.

Where is that sense of humility which, at the outset, concludes that nothing helpful can actually be achieved by wars and that getting involved will most likely (if history is any guide) result in far worse outcomes?  Unfortunately such a mindset would deny the vaunted arrogance and ambition, the pride of rulers and political leaders.  Not to push the buttons and order the bombing, whilst acknowledging weakness and limits and impotence,  would be conduct unbecoming great leaders of great nations, don’t you know.

Though the Nato intervention against Gaddafi was justified as a humanitarian response to the threat that Gaddafi’s tanks would slaughter dissidents in Benghazi, the international community has ignored the escalating violence. The foreign media, which once filled the hotels of Benghazi and Tripoli, have likewise paid little attention to the near collapse of the central government.

The reality in Libya today is the dirty truth which self-important Western leaders (and the nations they lead) refuse to face.  Just move on to the next “crisis” which can be used as the next pretext to display our wondrous war-making capacities and powers to “set things right”. 

Libya is descending into multi-tribal warfare.  It will likely cease to be a country in any meaningful sense.  Ironically, prudent people warned that this would be the likely outcome well before US and NATO bombing started.  But they were ignored by the Western warmongers at the time.

Rule by local militias is also spreading anarchy around the capital. Ethnic Berbers, whose militia led the assault on Tripoli in 2011, temporarily took over the parliament building in Tripoli. . . . The Interior Minister, Mohammed al-Sheikh, resigned last month in frustration at being unable to do his job, saying in a memo sent to Mr Zeidan that he blamed him for failing to build up the army and the police. He accused the government, which is largely dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, of being weak and dependent on tribal support.

Other critics point out that a war between two Libyan tribes, the Zawiya and the Wirrshifana, is going on just 15 miles from the Prime Minister’s office.

Imagine a post-script to Schaeffer’s classic, Shane.  

He was the man who rode into our little valley, out of the heart of the great glowing West and when his work was done, rode back whence he had come.  And he was Shane.

Two months later the big ranchers banded together, hired some thugs, and systematically rode through the valley slaughtering the small-holders, before they turned their guns on one another.  

So it is turning out in Libya.  So, we predict, it will likewise turn out in Syria.  We would offer a humble proposition: the United States is not the Saviour of the world.  The Saviour of the world does not share His glory with the United States. Neither with NATO.  Nor with the West.  To which we would add this admonition: cease your arrogant and vainglorious pre-emptions.  Clothe yourself with humility.  Kiss the feet of the Saviour before His anger is kindled and He turns upon you and yours. 

Obama’s Relgious War

Perverse Vanity

The days of the Crusades are long gone.  But Islamists have so reconstructed history that they believe they are living amidst another Western Crusader campaign.  So, let’s leave them to that particular distortion and self-deceit.  What needs concern us in the West is the religious war about to be waged by President Obama.  It is our duty to think carefully through, not from Islamist eyes, but from clear sighted objective perception.  For many in the West amongst the Commentariat this would be painful indeed.

We would begin by observing that going to war, as Obama has declared himself bent to do, is always a religious act.  It always involves the imposition of a religion to one degree or other, because it necessarily involves the use of force–deadly force–justified by the beliefs of the aggressors, regardless of the non-belief of the targets.  “You rulers of Syria have done something wrong in our eyes.  We will wage war upon you for vengeance, because you have breached some principles (ethics, morals, fundamental beliefs) we believe are ultimate verities.” 

When Obama goes to war, we need to ask, In the name of what religion is he going to kill?
  To be justified the religion ought to be true, at the least.  Obama is not a religious man in a formal, creedal sense.  He is an Unbeliever, a secularist.  But, like all men, he is nevertheless deeply religious.  He has ultimate beliefs that he holds true, no matter what.  He believes that these truths are self-evident and binding upon all human beings.  He believes that violation of these truths is sufficiently blasphemous to warrant the use of deadly force upon the guilty.

This is becoming more clear as debate swirls about the US going to war in Syria.  Obama cannot point to a clear and present danger to the US as justification.  Neither can he point to a clear and present danger to the Sunni supported forces opposing the government in Syria as justification.  After all, over 100,000 people (warriors, women, and children, and other non-combatants) have already been killed in that conflict over a period of two years and Obama has not gone to war. And even if he could find a clear and present danger to Sunni insurgents, why does the United States have an obligation to go to war in their behalf?  And if it does, why just Sunni insurgents.  There are thousands of similar evils being perpetrated upon the globe at this very moment.  Why would not Obama have his wars defending them all?

But the president has revealed his mind in the matter.  He has declared that it is the moral obligation of the United States to go to war against the Syrian government and use deadly force, killing even non-combatants (what the American military euphemistically refer to as “collateral damage”).  How, moral?  What morality is this?  One nation is going to go to war against another in the name of a moral principle.  What is it?  Fortunately, Obama has been forthright: it is the moral principle of “humanity”–by which one presumes he means acting humanely, or acting for the greater good of all humanity on the planet, or something.  Who knows.  It is a swirling mist.

The particular occasion or provocation is the Syrian government’s use of poison gas (alleged at this point, but let’s grant it for the present).  That violates the moral principles of Obama and the entire United States (he reckons).  He no doubt wishes he could invoke the conscience of the entire world, but the UN–being made up of the entire world as represented through their respective governments–disagrees.  So now, Obama is manifest as one who believes (no doubt religiously) that the entire world’s conscience can be discerned by just one nation (the United States)–and more than that, by just one person within that nation, its president.  (It is true that Obama has sought the imprimatur of  Congress upon this decision, but he has also declared that whether Congress agrees or not, he will go to war.)  This one person, on behalf of just one nation, can declare transcendental truths on behalf of all other human beings.  More, he can buttress those truths by deadly force.  He can command his nation go to war in their defence. 

Behold Obama’s religion.  He would impose it upon all others.  He alone is so sure of these religious truths, so adamant in their verity, that in the name of the nation he leads, he will invoke his god and go to war.  The Syrian government will be punished and held to account before the countenance of Obama’s god. 

The Islamists are right to a point.  They are confronted with another crusade.  Different religion, but a Western Crusade, nonetheless, to invade and wreak vengeance, and kill in the name of a god.  But this time the name of the god is Man, and Obama is his prophet. 

How ashamed we are to be human and how loathsome is the false prophet.  How we detest such perverse idolatry. 

We expect that Obama will go to war.  He will bomb a few chemical weapon sites–now ensconced amongst civilians.  Men, women and children and materials will be destroyed.  Nothing will be gained.  The Syrian government will grow more determined, more deadly.  Many more lives will be lost.  The whole exercise will extol the perverse vanity of  the religion of humanitarianism.  Man as god always was, and always will be, a deadly doctrine.

Show Pony

 Reckless, Cynical, And Amoral

We don’t put much stock in predictions.  But sometimes tea leaves are easier to read than at others.  It is our expectation that President Obama will have his “military action” in Syria.  He will have failed to get UN endorsement of his recklessness.  He will go to war against one side in a civil war without any formal declaration of war.  He will act imperially, without Congressional approval, making the action unconstitutional.  But Obama has never been one to hold much respect for the Constitution of the United States. 

He will order missile strikes on Syrian government targets.  A few aircraft will do bombing runs.  A few civilian (collateral damage) casualties will be pronounced.
  There will be lots of smoke, noise, and a bit of “shock and awe”.  It will do nothing to stop the Syrian government using more chemical weapons.  In fact, it will probably make them a bit more reckless.  The Muslim world will strengthen its hatred of the United States.  The Great Satan will grow bigger horns in their eyes. 

We predict there will be no gains, and no resolution of the conflict–which, we repeat, is a civil war. It is unlikely that Iran will open a second front up against Israel.  The American action will be seen for what it is: temporary, grandstanding, a bit of failed gun-boat diplomacy.  It will be waited out.  Obama will be playing to his own galleries, trying to score a few domestic political points. 

According to the LA Times,

One U.S. official who has been briefed on the options on Syria said he believed the White House would seek a level of intensity “just muscular enough not to get mocked” but not so devastating that it would prompt a response from Syrian allies Iran and Russia.  “They are looking at what is just enough to mean something, just enough to be more than symbolic,” he said.

In other words–it’s all a propaganda stunt.  

Where next?  Well, there is a bit of unrest beginning to bubble up in Nigeria.  How about rattling a few sabres down there? 

Letter From the UK (About US Citizen Surveillance)

The “War on Terror” is Proving to be a War on Citizens

In wartime it is common for civil liberties to erode.  The exigencies of war mean that extraordinary and emergency measures are required to prosecute the conflict.  Often civil liberties are attenuated.  At the very least, the resistance to the state exerting emergency powers over its citizens becomes muted.

Hopefully (and hope is the operative word) at the end of the conflict the greater powers of the state prove to have truly been emergency powers and temporary only.  They are revoked, and civil liberties are restored.  But what happens when the state moves to a permanent state-of-war footing?  George Orwell’s dystopian 1984 shows us one consequence: an alleged state of perpetual war was used as a pretext for totalitarian controls over all citizens (in the name of freedom and liberty, naturally).

The United States has been at war now for decades. 
  It is as close to being in a state of perpetual war that we have seen in the modern period.   The War on Terror is the latest morph.  This gets the United States pretty much into a state of perpetual war for the country.  Terrorists need to be fought, both abroad and at home.  During war, it is the risk of enemy spies in the land which normally provides the justification for greater controls and restrictions of citizens, on the one hand, and of much greater powers of state surveillance, on the other.  Because terrorism is a tactic, not a defined enemy nation against whom Congress has declared war, the possibilities of domestic terrorism and of “combatants” being one’s next door neighbour increase exponentially.  Enemy operatives could be anywhere.  Naturally, the drive to attenuate and remove civil liberties ratchets up considerably.  Naturally, the state surveils its citizens far more comprehensively.

In this regard, The Guardian ran the following piece on US government surveillance of its own citizens.  What was fantastical and unthinkable ten years ago is now normal.  Welcome to the wonderful world of perpetual war.  The US is proving to be an exceptional nation after all.  Well outside the common understanding of what constitutes a free society. 

Are all telephone calls recorded and accessible to the US government?

A former FBI counterterrorism agent claims on CNN that this is the case

Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 4 May 2013

The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.

Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”

“All of that stuff” – meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant – “is being captured as we speak”.

On Thursday night, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored. 

Let’s repeat that last part: “no digital communication is secure”, by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications – meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like – are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is.

There have been some previous indications that this is true. Former AT&T engineer Mark Klein revealed that AT&T and other telecoms had built a special network that allowed the National Security Agency full and unfettered access to data about the telephone calls and the content of email communications for all of their customers. Specifically, Klein explained “that the NSA set up a system that vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T” and that “contrary to the government’s depiction of its surveillance program as aimed at overseas terrorists . . . much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic.” But his amazing revelations were mostly ignored and, when Congress retroactively immunized the nation’s telecom giants for their participation in the illegal Bush spying programs, Klein’s claims (by design) were prevented from being adjudicated in court.

That every single telephone call is recorded and stored would also explain this extraordinary revelation by the Washington Post in 2010:

Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

It would also help explain the revelations of former NSA official William Binney, who resigned from the agency in protest over its systemic spying on the domestic communications of US citizens, that the US government has “assembled on the order of 20 trillion transactions about US citizens with other US citizens” (which counts only communications transactions and not financial and other transactions), and that “the data that’s being assembled is about everybody. And from that data, then they can target anyone they want.”

Despite the extreme secrecy behind which these surveillance programs operate, there have been periodic reports of serious abuse. Two Democratic Senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have been warning for years that Americans would be “stunned” to learn what the US government is doing in terms of secret surveillance.
Strangely, back in 2002 – when hysteria over the 9/11 attacks (and thus acquiescence to government power) was at its peak – the Pentagon’s attempt to implement what it called the “Total Information Awareness” program (TIA) sparked so much public controversy that it had to be official scrapped. But it has been incrementally re-instituted – without the creepy (though honest) name and all-seeing-eye logo – with little controversy or even notice.

Back in 2010, worldwide controversy erupted when the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates banned the use of Blackberries because some communications were inaccessible to government intelligence agencies, and that could not be tolerated. The Obama administration condemned this move on the ground that it threatened core freedoms, only to turn around six weeks later and demand that all forms of digital communications allow the US government backdoor access to intercept them. Put another way, the US government embraced exactly the same rationale invoked by the UAE and Saudi agencies: that no communications can be off limits. Indeed, the UAE, when responding to condemnations from the Obama administration, noted that it was simply doing exactly that which the US government does:

“‘In fact, the UAE is exercising its sovereign right and is asking for exactly the same regulatory compliance – and with the same principles of judicial and regulatory oversight – that Blackberry grants the US and other governments and nothing more,’ [UAE Ambassador to the US Yousef Al] Otaiba said. ‘Importantly, the UAE requires the same compliance as the US for the very same reasons: to protect national security and to assist in law enforcement.'”

That no human communications can be allowed to take place without the scrutinizing eye of the US government is indeed the animating principle of the US Surveillance State. Still, this revelation, made in passing on CNN, that every single telephone call made by and among Americans is recorded and stored is something which most people undoubtedly do not know, even if the small group of people who focus on surveillance issues believed it to be true (clearly, both Burnett and Costello were shocked to hear this).

Some new polling suggests that Americans, even after the Boston attack, are growing increasingly concerned about erosions of civil liberties in the name of Terrorism. Even those people who claim it does not matter instinctively understand the value of personal privacy: they put locks on their bedroom doors and vigilantly safeguard their email passwords. That’s why the US government so desperately maintains a wall of secrecy around their surveillance capabilities: because they fear that people will find their behavior unacceptably intrusive and threatening, as they did even back in 2002 when John Poindexter’s TIA was unveiled.

Mass surveillance is the hallmark of a tyrannical political culture. But whatever one’s views on that, the more that is known about what the US government and its surveillance agencies are doing, the better. This admission by this former FBI agent on CNN gives a very good sense for just how limitless these activities are.

. . . But Not As We Know It, Jim

 A Strange Kind of Nation Building

It was going to take over twenty-five years, we were told.  But Afghanistan would be a different kind of war.  Sure, there would be the usual conflict with insurgents, campaigns against the Taliban and those seeking to overthrow the corrupt government in Kabul.  But, more importantly, it would be a war with a human face, a face moulded around an idealist, even utopian belief in human rights. 

This war would be unlike dirty wars, fought over filthy lucre and oil.  This was to be a pure war.  A war worth fighting.  This war would lead to better things.  Out of it all, over the long term, over a quarter of a century’s ministrations by the idealistic humanitarianism of the West, a new nation would emerge.

Consequently, President Obama grandiloquently intoned, it was the war we had to have.
  It was the important war.  It was a moral war.  It was not over oil (there was none to be had); it was not a war to line the pockets of monied interests and rapacious Western capitalists.  It was, instead, an idealistic war.  It was a humanitarian conflict.  It would be a war that would provide, firstly protection for Afghanis from insurgent attacks.  Then it would provide lots of aid and assistance to civilize Afghanis and begin to provide the “good things” of life.  Then, being freed, a new democratic, rights honouring, peace loving nation would emerge to the ultimate betterment of us all.  Or so the naive patter ran. 

So, how’s it going then?  We are reliably informed that some betting agencies are now offering odds on how long it will the current corrupt Afghani government will last once NATO has withdrawn its strike capability and the insurgency gains strength and territory.  How many warlords will quickly change sides?  How long before Kabul falls?  A year? Two years? 

If you were to want a leading indicator you could do no better than look to Afghani agriculture.  This year will see record agricultural production–which is a good thing, right.  Poverty is waning because crops are being planted and harvested.  This will doubtless reduce the attraction of the insurgency and will persuade your average Afghani peasant that things are looking up.  As indeed they are, according to this report from The Guardian.

Twelve years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is heading for a near-record opium crop as instability pushes up the amount of land planted with illegal but lucrative poppies, according to a bleak UN report. . . .  “Poppy cultivation is not only expected to expand in areas where it already existed in 2012 … but also in new areas or areas where poppy cultivation was stopped,” the Afghanistan Opium Winter Risk Assessment found.  The growth in opium cultivation reflects both spreading instability and concerns about the future. Farmers are more likely to plant the deadly crop in areas of high violence or where they have not received any agricultural aid, the report said. 

“Opium cultivation is up for the third successive year, and production is heading towards record levels,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, Afghanistan head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime. “People are hedging against an insecure future both politically and economically.” . . . If this year’s poppy fields are harvested without disruption, the country would likely regain its status as producer of 90% of the world’s opium. Afghanistan’s share of the deadly market slipped to around 75% after bad weather and a blight slashed production over the past two years.  But the decline in opium production also drove up prices, to a record $300 a kilogramme. Prices have now slipped by over $100 but are still far above historic levels, helping tempt more farmers to turn land over to poppy.

The world is an extremely messy place.  Human cultures are exceedingly thick and complex.  The US and Nato and Western powers are on their way to failing miserably–as we always knew they would.   Much, much better for the naive, foolish Western nations to lay aside their vaunting pride, dismember their idols of secular human rights and unprincipled representative governments, reject their false religion of secular humanism and commence clothing themselves with humility.  There is only one Redeemer and He does not share His glory with another.

But, here’s the thing.  If the West continues to reject and dismiss the King of kings, it will never have the requisite humility to accept limitations upon its power, efficacy, and influence with true humility.  Western peoples demand far too much of their governments, verging on an expectation of omni-competence.  They all too often both expect and applaud their governments’ driven recklessness to prove the superiority and rectitude of  Western Baalism before the watching world.  Afghani nation building is just one application of this prevailing idolatry.  

And the fruit of this idolatrous arrogance?  Opium.  Lots of it.  And more beside.  Doubtless there will be lots more beside.    

Unnecessary Sacrifice

A Spot of Nation Building

The NZ Army is finally returning from Afghanistan.  Ten soldiers died over that time.  They deserve to be remembered, although it is a very long bow to relate their effort to our own national security.  Essentially, the NZ effort was part of the US/UN inspired global war for democracy, peace and justice. It has had nothing to do with defending New Zealand and its citizens from armed aggression.

Consequently, the politicians have lauded the socio-economic contribution of the NZ Army to Bamiyan province in Afghanistan where it served.  Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President lauded the NZ Army effort, we are told, in terms of its contribution to nation building and to genuine assistance of the Afghan people.  Our Minister of Defence took a similar tack:

Dr Coleman said Bamiyan had come a long way since New Zealand had been in the province.  “When we look at the gains here in health, in education, in infrastructure, in agriculture, in the betterment of the living status of women and children, New Zealand is leaving behind a massive legacy here which people back home should be very proud of.  I think our 10 years here has made a very real difference in this part of the world and it’s something that we should look back on. It is a tragedy that we lost people, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s time to look back and commemorate.”

Commendable as this might be in its own way, it makes the death of  NZ soldiers all the more tragic and unnecessary.  What on earth were we thinking as a nation that we committed soldiers to “nation-build” on the high country of northern Asia?  What on earth has that to do with our national defence? 

Putting the question inevitably means that if it were to be answered a very, very long bow would have to be drawn out of the closet and flourished about.  Maybe a spot of nation-building in North Korea will be next.