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Obama’s greatest foreign policy mistake

by Mojambo Comments Off on Obama’s greatest foreign policy mistake
Filed under Egypt, Europe, Iran, Islam, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, Islamists, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, September 11, Sharia (Islamic Law), Terrorism at October 24th, 2012 - 8:00 am

Whilst I agree with the Knish, the foreign policy error that Obama committed,  has been committed by all U.S. Presidents since the end of World War II.  It has been a default position of all U.S. administrations to kiss the ring of Arab despots. Let us not forget who was the first president to mouth the sentence “Islam is a religion of peace”.

by Daniel Greenfield

Obama’s greatest Foreign Policy error was the same one that had been made by Bush and by numerous past administrations. The error was that the problem was not Islam, but Islamic violence. It was Obama however who took that error to its logical conclusion by pursuing a foreign policy meant to part Islamists from their violent tendencies by allowing them to win without the need for terrorism.

Violence, the thinking in diplomatic circles went, was inherently alarming and destabilizing. When Islamists don’t take over, they move to the West, preach radical theology, gather up followers and begin blowing things up. But let them take over their own home countries and they’ll no longer have any reason to draw up maps of London and New York, not when they’re beheading adulterers and burning churches back home.

The Arab Spring was to the Middle East what the betrayal of Czechoslovakia to the Nazis and the betrayal of the rest of Eastern Europe to the Communists was to 20th Century European history. It was the moment when all the diplomatic folly that had come before it came together in one great historical instant of national and international betrayal.

The diplomatic wunderkinds had never taken Islamist theology seriously, just as their predecessors had not considered the possibility that the Bolsheviks might be serious about their world revolution. And they had also failed to recognize that Islamic terrorism was not only a means to power, but also an end in and of itself, a way of harnessing the endless violence and instability in desert societies and turning them into power and profit.

Islam is a religion built around that violence, sanctifying it as a religious principle

What every Middle Eastern leader has always understood is that the violence, call it raids, terrorism, guerrilla warfare, gang activity, sectarian militias, military coups, desert banditry, was never going away. It was the tiger and the clever leader rides the tiger, rather than ending up inside it, harnessing and directing the violence, to remain in power.

Islam is a religion built around that violence, sanctifying it as a religious principle, and thus taking it out of the realm of Fitna and into the realm of Jihad. The difference between the two is a matter of theology and that theology is a matter of perspective. What is banditry and what is a holy war is a matter of where you’re standing and which way the bullets are flying.

[……..]

Even if their violence were only a means to an end, the end would not come when every Middle Eastern country was run by Islamist governments. For one thing there would never be a means of agreeing on what a truly Islamist government was. The reactionary impetus of Wahhabism leads to an endless series of reforms meant to recreate a lost 7th Century theological paradise by purging those damnable 8th Century theological innovators.

To many Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood is just Mubarak with a beard

To many Salafists, the Muslim Brotherhood is just Mubarak with a beard. To other Salafists, those Salafists are just the Muslim Brotherhood with an untrimmed beard. After overthrowing Mubarak to end the perception that the United States supports UnIslamic dictators, maintaining ties with the Muslim Brotherhood would invite attacks from those Salafists in the hopes of ending US support for the Brotherhood, resetting that foreign policy accomplishment to zero. And the Brotherhood would wink and nod at those attacks to maintain its Islamist street cred and keep the violence going in the other direction.

As the attacks of September 11, 2012 showed us, the effect of putting the Islamists in charge of the Arab Spring countries was not to relieve tensions or improve America’s image, but to make it easier for Jihadists to launch attacks on America. And the argument advanced by Obma and so many others, that it was our support for dictators that inspired terrorists, had come to nothing. As Carter had done in Iran, Obama had stood behind the Islamists and against the “dictators”, only to have the newly Islamist dictators kick him in the face, first through mobs carrying out attacks against American diplomatic facilities under the guise of plausible deniability, and then through bolder confrontations.

But finally, the seizure of one Muslim country or two of them or a dozen of them is not the end of the Islamists. Islamists don’t recognize borders or national identities, no more than the Communists did. Their objective is not a flag of their own, but the territorial expansion of their ideology. This expansion is not measured in miles, but in populations. It persists regardless of lines on a map or country names. It measures its power in people, because people are the region’s only resource.

Territory alone is useless. The Middle East doesn’t produce much agriculturally and what it does produce is done with primitive, often near-feudal labor. About the only territorial worth comes from oil and the worth of the oil comes from the money that foreigners are willing to pay for it. Having the foreigners come to their country to pump the oil for them so that they can then sell the oil back to the foreigners has built the wealth of a dozen emirs, kings and dictators. And that wealth has been used to buy the services of Islamist militias in an arrangement that we know as terrorism, but that the locals know as the raid.

Islam has turned the raid into a crusade, but at its core it is still a tribal expansion, an outing to seize land, loot and women from neighboring tribes. And the neighboring tribes with the most appealing land, loot and women are the ones living across the Mediterranean in Europe. Getting there requires a boat or a plane ticket, a claim of refugee status and then the No-Go-Zones, the gangs and the rapes begin. And amid that violence, the preachers come and attract the more religiously-minded to the formal Jihad, as opposed to the informal violent persecution of non-Muslim tribes through robbery, rape and murder that was routine in their old region and has now been carried over into the West..

[……..]

When Western leaders try to curry favor with Muslim leaders by talking about how many Muslims live in their countries, they are providing the same cause for war that the Czechs did to the Germans. Muslim immigration to the West creates a mandate to impose Islamic law on the West. Western leaders react to that by offering to accept some elements of Sharia into their legal system. This moves the process into the second stage, the one that the Arab Spring countries were under, practicing an imperfect version of Islamic law that the Islamists were then compelled to “perfect.”

Everything that the West has done to appease Muslims has worked as well as a man jumping into a tiger cage and pouring meat sauce all over his body. Each act of appeasement only makes Muslim violence necessary and inevitable. Every increase in the Islamic footprint in the West attracts Islamists intent on expanding and purifying that footprint, as they have done in their own countries. The more the West takes in Islamic populations and laws, the more Islamists are compelled to bring diaspora Muslim populations and laws into full compliance with their theology.

Obama’s foreign policy aimed at allowing the Islamists to win

Obama’s foreign policy aimed at allowing the Islamists to win. He ignored the Iranian protesters against an Islamist state, while rushing to support the Islamist protesters in Egypt and Tunisia. The Islamists won and September 11, 2012 was a consequence of those victories. And it won’t be the last consequence.

As Chamberlain learned of Hitler and as the Democrats learned of the Commies, there is no finite amount of concessions, no set range of territories that can be traded in exchange for peace. The Nazis and Communists wanted the world because their goals were not confined to mere territories, but to the enslavement of billions to create an ideal world for the benefit of their chosen elites. Islam is interested in the same thing.

Islamists don’t want Egypt, Syria or Palestine. And they certainly won’t settle for them. No more than Hitler settled for Czechoslovakia or Stalin settled for Poland. They will accept their conquests in bites, but they will never stop biting, chewing and swallowing until they run up against a force that will not allow them to advance and expand further.

[………]

Read the rest – Obama’s greatest foreign policy error

 

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Posted in Egypt, Europe, Iran, Islam, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, Islamists, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, September 11, Sharia (Islamic Law), Terrorism | Comments Off on Obama’s greatest foreign policy mistake

Conquests are rarely one way

by Mojambo ( 147 Comments › )
Filed under History, Islam, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, September 11 at October 23rd, 2012 - 8:00 am

The Knish makes some great points here. The most prescient being that religious warfare in the Islamic world is a result of their own imperialism.

by Daniel Greenfield

The British Empire may have made a mess of the Middle East but at least it knew what it wanted to do with it. That is more than can be said for our latest round of aimless fumblings in the region. Our latest project to flip Syria from the Shiite into the Sunni column might at best balance out the time we flipped Iraq from the Sunni into the Shiite column, but that just means we’re moving territories back and forth between two groups that hate us equally.

Our accidental empire was built on 20th century rhetoric that depicted a world caught between the forces of freedom and tyranny. Naturally we were on the side of freedom. And we are still on the side of freedom, even if it’s the freedom of Egyptian and Syrian Islamists to persecute Christians. Over the years our freedom crusade has worn thin and now we are left with the tawdry task of liberating the majority to persecute the minority. A majority that will thank us for it with more terrorist attacks.

The idea that introducing free and open elections to the Muslim world will restructure its governments in alignment with our freedom agenda is naive. More naive than the British thinking that processing a few future Arab monarchs through Sandhurst and Oxford would accomplish the same thing.

The British were at least following in the footsteps of the Romans, even if they forgot that what happened to the Romans was that a religion from one of the annoyingly combative parts of their empire overran them and displaced their native belief systems. Islam seems on track to do to Britain what Judaism and Christianity did to the Roman Empire. But the end result will likely be a lot less civilized.

The Romans assumed that destroying the Jews as a nation, destroying their Temple, massacring large numbers of them and using population replacement to fill the country with foreigners while deporting the native population as slaves would solve their Judean Problem. What they actually did was import two religions into their own cities that were unlinked from temple or nation. The rest is history.

Most religious warfare among Muslims is taking place because of their own past imperialism

Conquests are rarely one way. The invaders may force their culture and laws down the throats of the invaded, but the invaded end up returning the favor. Wahhabi Islam has been working strenuously to purify Islam of all the extras that the non-Arab peoples they incorporated into Islam, particularly the Mongols, added to it. And incorporating the Persians has burdened them with a bulwark of Shiite Islam. Most religious warfare among Muslims is taking place because of their own past imperialism.

It has not yet occurred to the scimitar waving Salafis that their mission of conquest and their dedication to Islamic purity are at odds with one another. That if the Muslim Brotherhood ever succeeded in bringing about Eurabia and Amerabia, that would be the Mongol wars all over again. It also hasn’t occurred to the Saudi bandits that a Muslim America and a Muslim Europe would have as little compunction about taking their oil along with Mecca and Medina as the Ottoman Empire did.

[……..]

Americans will make bad Muslims and Muslims will make bad Americans

Americans will make bad Muslims and Muslims will make bad Americans. The only restraint on the use of American power is a cultural tolerance that Islam would sweep away. And the only limit on the abuses of the Arab Street are its tyrants. The fate of Coptic Christians and women in Tahrir Square should be adequate reminders that importing democracy will unleash the worst instincts of the mob without any of the cultural tolerance that prevents Americans from behaving like Egyptian Muslims.

The Muslim conquest of the West is senseless as success would only lead to a new Ottoman Empire and a new Mongol horde carving up the dysfunctional Arab world. In a very literal sense, the efforts of the Arab Muslim world to export Islamic violence and theology is bound to lead to their conquest and destruction one way or another.

But the Western attempts to integrate Islam on any terms are equally senseless. The British Empire began the import of Islam into Britain with its imperialism in the Middle East. H. St. John Philby, Lawrence of Arabia’s successor on the imperial front, converted to Islam (while his son converted to Communism) followed by a number of prominent upper class personalities who had spent time in the Muslim world.

[…………]

The great fallacy of the Pax Americana is to think of the Middle East as a problem to be solved

The great fallacy of the Pax Americana is to think of the Middle East as a problem to be solved. In the Cold War, American Middle Eastern policy picked up where the British had left off, finding rulers we could work and propping them up to keep the Commies out of the oil wells. But the Commies are gone now. There are commercial empires in Russia and China looking to dip their trade tentacles everywhere without regard to ideology. And there are developing Islamist empires looking to export their ideology the way that the Commies used to.

It might make a sense of amount of practical sense to stomp on those, but instead we have been aiding and abetting them on the theory that they will bring stability to the region. Because Islam is nothing if not a great stabilizer, as the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq could tell you if they weren’t busy shooting each other.

The tempting illusion that the American policymakers fell into after September 11 was the belief that our practical and moral goals would be one and the same. That we would act as liberators bringing freedom and stability, overthrowing dictators and leaving behind countries that would aligned our way because they were democracies with human rights and fast food franchises. Instead our interests have taken a back seat to the romance of liberation. Like Lawrence of Arabia, we have fallen in love with a myth of liberation while ignoring its tawdry reality.

Very little of what we have done since September 11 has served American interests. And all that we have really been doing is cleaning up old messes by creating new messes. It hasn’t been entirely ineffective.

There is a reason that no major terrorist attack has hit the United States since 9/11 and it isn’t because of our security alerts or our random airline groping programs. The opportunities we created diverted the resources of the terrorists, but not so they couldn’t plan and carry out major terrorist attacks elsewhere. What we did, flawed as it was, did frighten the hell out of our enemies, with its sheer scale. The Saudis aren’t willing to put up the money for a major attack that might lead us to do something damaging to their interests. Neither will any of the other Gulf states. And that just leaves smaller attacks outsourced to third parties who recruit terrorists without proper training or experience.

[……….]

While we expect Muslims to think like us, to want nothing more than peace and prosperity through democracy and freedom, they expect us to think like them. And they know what they would do if they had our power. So they assume that we are doing it to them. We assume that the Muslim world is much less subtle than it is and the Muslim world assumes that we are much more subtle than we are.

Both the Pax Americana and the Pax Islamica are behaving in ways contrary to their interests for ideological reasons. We think that it is in our interest to turn Muslims into Americans. The Arab Spring should have dissuaded us of that. They think that it is in their interest to turn us into Muslims, the Mongols, the Ottoman Empire and Persia should have dissuaded them of that. But neither of us is very good at learning from history.

There is no sense in trying to impose a global order on a billion Muslims for their own good. Their own good is their problem. Our own good is our problem. We are not an empire, nor do we need to act like one except in temporary emergencies. Our interests lie not with a global order, but with our own domestic security.

Empire is the surest path to Islamization

Empire is the surest path to Islamization. It isn’t an empire that we need, certainly not an ideological crusade to liberate Arab Muslims from the cultural consequences of being Arab Muslims. What we need is to return our focus to the nation, to the fundamentally unilateral prerogatives of putting ourselves, our borders, our freedoms and our security first. When we can do that, then we can meet the Islamic empire, as we have met all the other empires, on the right side of a secure border that we can protect and defend against Islamization and the armies of Islam.

Read the rest – The illogic of empire

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Posted in History, Islam, Islamic Invasion, Islamic Supremacism, September 11 | 147 Comments »

The fourth branch of government is the “mediacracy”

by Mojambo ( 158 Comments › )
Filed under Media at October 18th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

In  a way, American democracy died in 2008 when the media colluded in  foisting a completely unprepared and incompetent fellow from Illinois on the nation.

by Daniel Greenfield

A nation where governments are elected by the people is most vulnerable at the interface between the politicians and the people. The interface is where the people learn what the politicians stand for and where the politicians learn what the people want. The bigger a country gets, the harder it is to pick up on that consensus by stopping by a coffee shop or an auto repair store. That’s where the Medicracy steps in to control the consensus.

The media is no longer informative, it is conformative. It is not interested in broadcasting events unless it can also script them. It does not want to know what you think, it wants to tell you what to think. The consensus is the voice of the people and the Mediacrats are cutting its throat, dumping its body in a back alley and turning democracy into their own puppet show.

Media bias was over decades ago. The media isn’t biased anymore, it’s a player, its goal is turn its Fourth Estate into a fourth branch of government, the one that squats below the three branches and blocks their access to the people and blocks the people’s access to them. Under the Medicracy there will still be elections, they will even be mostly free, they just won’t matter so long as its upper ranks determine the dialogue on both sides of the media wall.

[………]

In 2008, the Medicracy elevated an Illinois State Senator who had briefly showed up in the Federal Senate to the highest office in the land. They did it even though he had no skills for the job and no serious plan for fixing any of the country’s problems. They did it to show that they could. They did it because they wanted to tell a compelling story and inflict radical change on a country that would have never voted for it, if it had not been lied and guilted into making the single worst decision in its entire history.

Propaganda is a powerful weapon and seizing control of the newspapers, radio and television stations is one of the first things that tyrants do

Propaganda is a powerful weapon and seizing control of the newspapers, radio and television stations is one of the first things that tyrants do. That wasn’t supposed to be an issue in a country where anyone could open their own newspaper. But that changed with the transformation of journalism into the media. The media, plural, embraces multiple mediums, most of them expensive and requiring a license and often, government approval.

Two hundreds years ago, a few friends could open a printing press and take on the big behemoths and often did. Today the only place they can do that is on the internet. Radio and television are walled cities controlled by a small number of interlinked corporations that keep merging together. Their staffers come out of carefully controlled environments, where with the pyramid of indoctrination, political gurus pass down their wisdom to professors who program students with its doctrines, to create the Medicracy.

FOX News, for all its faults, is under constant attack by the Medicracy because it is independent of that same rigid coercion

FOX News, for all its faults, is under constant attack by the Medicracy because it is independent of that same rigid coercion. Wrong or right, it represents a view that is fundamentally different from the same mind-numbing conformity to be found everywhere from the weekly news magazine in your dentist’s office to the talking heads on your cable channel to the honeyed voices of the anchors giving you the news every 5, 10 or 50 minutes over the radio while you’re driving to work.

The real crime of FOX News is not that it’s especially right-wing, it isn’t. It is far less conservative than CNN is liberal. But FOX News’ existence, its patriotic color scheme and attempts at appealing to the heartland while putting a conservative spin on issues, forces viewers to notice how conformist and identical the rest of the media landscape. And that is what makes FOX News truly dangerous. Like a goat among the sheep, it makes you realize the sameness of their generic competitors who all cheer for the same team, shop at the same stores and dream of the day when everyone thinks like them.

[…….]

The Memorandum of Understanding for the Town Hall debate was that the moderator would relay questions from the audience, but would not ask the candidates any questions or comment on what they say. Candy Crowley made it clear before the debate that she would not abide by those rules and liberal organizations piled on, deploying a petition against the silencing of Candy Crowley. And so Candy Crowley wasn’t silenced, in true Mediacrat fashion, she silenced others.

The Mediacracy’s insistence on being the third candidate at every debate, its outrage, reflects its power and arrogance.

The Mediacracy’s insistence on being the third candidate at every debate, its outrage that anyone would expect it to be silent and let the actual candidates speak, reflects its power and arrogance. Its elites are not interested in the conversation except as a means of controlling its outcome. They are not here to let other people talk, except as vehicles for making their own points.

Candy Crowley, in true Mediacrat style, was not there to facilitate a conversation, but to tell us what to think. Unlike Obama or Romney, Crowley had no legitimate reason for being there. She was not a political candidate and had not passed any of the democratic tests that Obama and Romney had to be able to sit there. Her influence had no basis of any kind in the voice of the people. Instead she was there as a representative of the powerful and unelected Mediacracy which was determined to have its say. She was there to remind the pols that even in a Two Party system, the Third Estate acts as the third candidate, never running for office but always winning by controlling the conversation.

[……..]

Mediacrats fill the airwaves with rantings about corporate influence on politics. The 800 pound gorilla of corporate influence on politics is the media. Candy Crowley’s employer, CNN, is owned by Time Warner, the second largest media conglomerate on the planet. Not the country, the planet. The only media conglomerate bigger than it is the one that owns ABC News. But the Mediacrats never report on their own influence, never turn the camera back into the studio while warning about the danger of corporate lobbyists. But the corporate lobbyists sitting in the CNN studio don’t just to a few politicians in a closed room, they do their best to dictate the outcome of elections.

[………]

The media, with its expensive equipment and its licenses, is confronting an era when everything is being reduced to a single medium, print, voice and visuals falling into the internet singularity and leaving them with some expensive equipment, exclusive rights to broadcast on frequencies that no one watches anymore and the ability to print millions of papers, when they can hardly move a tenth of them. And like all imploding tyrannies, they are confronting the crisis by grasping for power. They know that they will either be a Medicracy or they will be nothing.

The greatest challenge to the integrity of our democracy may be the coup of the media corporations. Information is the lifeblood of a free society and the consolidation of information outlets in the hands of a small and powerful elite with no ethics and no boundaries is leading us down the road to a virtual tyranny that will maintain the illusory workings of a democratic society without any of the substance.

The old institutions of elections are becoming a charade, a formal routine where the outcome is determined by the employees of a handful of major media corporations that present the public with the inevitable result. And America is falling into the hands of the Government-Media Complex.

America can be a Democracy or a Mediacracy. It cannot and will not be both

The Mediacracy has directed all its efforts into hijacking the public dialogue, turning elections into a cheap sideshow accompanied by sneering commentary. It has insisted on being the third candidate in every election and turned its corporate shills into the pretend voice of the people. It has stomped all over the traditions of this country, its independent institutions and its freedoms with thousand dollar shoes while wrapping itself in any available flag. And it cannot be allowed to get away with it.

A free society does not only become unfree at the point of a gun. It becomes unfree when its mechanisms of freedom are jammed, when the institutions that are meant to provide power to the people are taken over by unelected forces and twisted into the apparatus of a new tyranny. When undemocratic institutions seize control of democratic institutions then democracy dies, strangled by men and women who keep on smiling while they tighten their grip.

America can be a Democracy or a Mediacracy. It cannot and will not be both. And the only way to preserve democracy is to challenge the Mediacrats and force them out of the public space that they have usurped and back into the private sphere of their financial interests where they belong.

Read the rest – Rise of the mediacracy

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Posted in Media | 158 Comments »

The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns; Addendum: Romney abandons The Bush Doctrine

by Mojambo ( 140 Comments › )
Filed under Afghanistan, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Taliban, Terrorism at October 16th, 2012 - 12:00 pm

The Knish rightly puts the blame for the failure in Afghanistan where it belongs, on the morons who thought that they could civilize the savages (whom President bush ridiculously referred to as “Afghanis” lol) and the antiquated politically correct Rules of Engagement.  For this both George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are responsible.  As long as the Taliban could regroup in Pakistan, their ultimate return was inevitable.

by Daniel Greenfield

Regardless of who wins this election in a few years the final planes carrying the last soldiers will shake off Afghanistan’s dust and take to the sky. They will leave behind a limited number of advisers, ex-military civilian contractors and a whole bunch of diplomats running out the clock in Kabul. A few years later when Islamist mobs are roaming the streets and rocket attacks on the US embassy have become routine, the helicopters on the roof will be back and the surviving diplomats will be on their way to new assignments in more peaceful parts of the world like Baghdad and Cairo.

The war in Afghanistan is lost and that loss is mostly unspoken. Had Obama never been elected then the left, in coordination with their Democratic big brothers, might have elevated the defeat to the level of another Vietnam. But that dream, nurtured in the early years of the Bush Administration, is a done deal after the Son of Jimmy Carter who ran on a platform of beating the Taliban. Instead of another Vietnam, the long war will be an unremarked defeat.

Neither side wants to talk about it and the American people just want to leave. The ending is written the cemeteries are full and all that’s left is to shake off the dust and go home.

Defeats however have to be learned from and no one intends to learn the lessons of Afghanistan. The people responsible for 1,500 deaths in implementing a directive to beat the Taliban without breaking a single fingernail on an Afghan civilian, even if he’s a Taliban gunman hiding behind a Burqa, will not pay the price for this. They will go on to lucrative gigs as lobbyists or leadership trainers, herding corporate executives around golf courses and trading on anecdotes about the time they almost came under fire.

They will not be held accountable, because when they sacrificed 1,500 American soldiers they were just following orders and the orders came from generals and the generals were following orders from Valerie Jarrett and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and the entire diploarchy on a desperate quest to win the war and end the occupation by getting the Taliban to the negotiating table and getting Obama to the Mission Accomplished jet in time for the election.

There’s no General Westmoreland to hang here. The closest thing to him is General McChrystal, a man who badly wanted to be the hip cool general, the Obama of Afghanistan, and cost far more lives than General Custer did in the process. McChrystal was just following the new trend that said that wars aren’t won by violence, but by winning hearts and minds changing social conditions. The new warrior was no longer a soldier, but a social worker, a diplomat and a comparative religions scholar. And if 1,500 social workers had to die so that the Afghans would come to love us… then so be it.

The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns, a social welfare agency with heavy artillery

The war in Afghanistan was lost because it became a kindergarten with guns, a social welfare agency with heavy artillery that couldn’t be used in the proximity of civilians. And it was run by the same type of people who turned domestic urban centers into hellholes by pandering to criminals while making it impossible for law enforcement to do their job.

Don’t think of Afghanistan as a distant country. Think of it as New York in the 80s. Think of it as Detroit or Chicago. Think of all the social workers constantly shouting about justice and demanding an end to police brutality. Think of the lawyers helping grinning thugs out of prison. Think of the slimy pols pressing the flesh with neighborhood gang leaders and paying homage to them. That’s what happened in Afghanistan.

[……….]

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. When we went in the Taliban were crushed, driven out and broken down. It took them years to recover, but they were always bound to recover so long as there were neighboring Muslim countries like Pakistan and Iran who were invested in their recovery. The futility of fighting a proxy war against an insurgency in a country with a high population and a low income was known before Vietnam. It was certainly known before we tried to secure Afghanistan.

Ten years ago we didn’t beat the Taliban by patrolling roads and having tea with the local elders

Ten years ago we didn’t beat the Taliban by patrolling roads and having tea with the local elders. We did it by finding people who wanted to beat the Taliban and providing them with supply lines and air support. We didn’t do it by winning hearts and minds, we did it by dropping bombs and more bombs. We won by winning.

The idea of winning by winning has become antiquated. The post-everything sensibility is to win by losing. To win by making so many concessions and bending over so far backward that the enemy either comes to love us or is completely discredited. This never works, but it’s the properly liberal war to approach any conflict with people who aren’t rich white men.

Winning by winning, a deep thinker will tell us, is futile. Trying to win by winning is the road to defeat. You may kill one terrorist, but a thousand will take his place. You may win a battle but by going to war you have already lost the war.

Don’t laugh. Such deep thoughts are the intellectual DNA of the diplomats and the generals, the experts in regional studies who sneer at the idea of winning wars instead of lining up all the stakeholders in a conflict and convincing them to build a working society, instead of blowing themselves up outside police stations.

So we didn’t try to win by winning. We tried to win by convincing that it was in everyone’s interest to let us help them win by living in peace. This has worked out about as well as expected in a society where winning is a zero sum game and cooperation is a temporary truce in which each party waits to stab the other in the back. Instead of winning by winning, we lost by losing. It’s the Post-American way.

[……..]

Before these pernicious doctrines took hold, we had already adopted a nation building model that relied on restoring stability through occupation, rather than shattering the enemy’s main strength and moving on.

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. We lost the nation building

We didn’t lose the war in Afghanistan. We lost the nation building. We lost the hopeless effort to cobble together coalitions of the corrupt and to patrol the resulting territories while pretending that a democratic election in a country with no concept of legal equality or civil rights meant that we were making progress because the savage lands were now turning out to be just like us.

American soldiers became Karzai’s security guards. American soldiers became Afghanistan’s army. American soldiers were tasked with trying to keep the peace in a society where peace is alien and life is cheap. We lost that war to stabilize and democratic the land, but there isn’t anyone who could have won it. Even the Russians proved not to have the stomach for the kind of massive bloodshed that it would have taken to stabilize Afghanistan under their kind of government. We certainly don’t.

Our mistake was resetting our victory condition from inflicting massive damage on the Taliban and Al Qaeda

Our mistake was resetting our victory condition from inflicting massive damage on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, while empowering their enemies, to turning Afghanistan into a stable and healthy society. We had drunk the stability snake oil and come to believe that Afghanistan was just like Germany and Japan, that if we could teach the natives to build healthy democratic institutions, stability would follow. We were wrong.

[………] We lost the war because we could no longer justify a war to ourselves in the interests of our own defense, only in the interests of saving another people and another society from themselves. We lost Afghanistan because we still knew how to fight, but we no longer remember why we fought.

Read the rest – Why we lost Afghanistan

Rodan Addendum:

In realated news, aides close to Mitt Romney claims he will abandon the failed Bush Doctrine. This concept of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun doe not work in the Islamic world. The Bush foreign policy destroyed the credibility Republicans had in this arena. Romney realizes this and has thankfully ditched it.

WASHINGTON — As he seeks to appeal more to moderates, Mitt Romney is putting new distance between his campaign and some prominent Republican allies who are pressing him to adopt the rousing but politically risky foreign policy principles of former President George W. Bush.

The battle to set Romney’s foreign policy has raged all year inside his presidential campaign, but has intensified in recent weeks as Republicans have sensed a political opportunity in the Obama administration’s shifting characterizations of the terrorist attack that killed four Americans at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.

A senior Republican strategist close to the campaign said Romney was groping for a “version 2.0” of the foreign policy of the Bush era, but one that would more resemble President Reagan’s in the Cold War. It would seek to assert American leadership and values with a powerful military and bold rhetoric, but “with a more cautious view of where and when we use force.”

The imperative is to avoid “the mistakes and miscalculations of the last decade,” said the strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak about internal deliberations. “The Bush foreign policy is a terrible brand.”

The Bush Doctrine was not a conservative concept.  It was based on Jacobin and Trotskyite ideas of exporting revolution to other nations.  Mitt Romney will embrace the traditional Republican foreign policy of cautious involvement in world affairs. At a time of a $16 trillion debt, this nation cannot afford some delusional Progressive nation building as our nation and military deserve better. I salute Romney for abandoning this failed policy which  is not now or ever  was conservative!

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Posted in Afghanistan, Jihad, Leftist-Islamic Alliance, Mitt Romney, Taliban, Terrorism | 140 Comments »

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