RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/afghanistan-comes-america-eric-rozenman/

Conventional wisdom—correct this time—asserts that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan makes the world a more dangerous place. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and Islamic triumphalists everywhere are emboldened. Fuses burning over Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine and other hot spots grow shorter.

Less recognized is how our self-inflicted Afghanistan catastrophe may create or increase threats at home. Consider four, three military, one political:

*Suppose you are a general or admiral in the U.S. armed forces. You’ve just been required by your constitutionally superior civilian leaders to head the biggest American military debacle since the fall of South Vietnam. You’ve rescued more than 120,000 but abandoned somewhere between 60,000 and 200,000 more Afghan partners and their family members.

You know that as U.S. ground forces withdrew, the South Vietnamese army fought on, with massive U.S. air support defeating the North’s 1972 Easter invasion. Then a Democratic-controlled Congress cut off funds, fuel, ammunition and air support. You also recall the United States, during the Carter administration, restrained the Iranian military to ease out the Shah. That helped ease in Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

And now, Kabul. If you’re still in uniform the next time civilians not just override your best advice, as is their constitutional prerogative, but do so in capricious arrogance, then attempt to deflect blame onto you, how likely will you be to snap to and salute? When President Harry Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Jr. for insubordination over the latter’s conduct of the Korean War, MacArthur choose theatrically to “just fade away.” In a more ambiguous situation, fraught with national danger, will you?

*Suppose you’re not a flag officer but rather a colonel, lieutenant colonel or major. Imagine you implemented the orders to abandon Bagram air base at night and without notice to our Afghan allies, as well as to cut off air support for Kabul’s forces and even halt maintenance contracts for its planes and helicopters.

Further, assume you know about private efforts, like the Commercial Task Force of veterans, ex-diplomats and others that rescued a reported 5,000 or more Afghans from Taliban control. Private Americans, on short notice and from scratch, began doing what civilian leaders—with personnel, months of time and billions of dollars to prepare—proved either unserious or incompetent about doing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/suicide-replacement-migration-bruce-thornton/

The Biden administration’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan is also worsening our already dangerous immigration crisis. Tens of thousands Afghans are being brought into the country, with little serious vetting to discriminate between those who served loyally with our troops and intelligence agencies; and those who just want a better life or have more sinister motives. This new influx comes on top of the one million migrants who have crossed our southern border just since Biden’s inauguration. All these new migrants are being dispersed throughout the country at taxpayer expense.

This process of transforming American identity and its defining political principles and virtues has been going on since the feckless 1965 immigration bill, which provided entrance to family members of immigrants, multiplying their numbers by as much as a factor of 8. The political and economic motives for this weakening of our border have likewise long been obvious––voters for progressives, cheap labor for free marketeers.

But another dubious idea has developed to justify our and Europe’s porous borders: Replacement Migrations. Pursuing this short-sighted idea will accelerate the dilution of national identity, an outcome progressives fervently desire as a mechanism for transforming our Constitutional order of divided government, federalism, and unalienable rights into technocratic rule by a “managerial elite.” Those technocrats’ utopian ideals like “equity” an “social justice” will further compromise the rights and freedoms of others.

The pretextual rationale for Replacement Migration is pragmatic: Europe and, in recent years, the U.S. are not reproducing at a rate sufficient to maintain populations through internal growth. The U.S. rate, for example, has declined to 1.64 child per woman from the 2.1 child needed to maintain the population. Combined with medical treatments that extend longevity, this decline in reproduction means fewer younger workers contributing payroll taxes to support greater numbers of those receiving public subsidies. These trends have put programs like Medicare and Social Security on track to run out of money. The UN’s solution is Replacement Migration––importing more-fecund young immigrants, legal or otherwise, to make up the worker deficit.

Hence the erosion of our immigration laws, despite the dangers of lax immigration policies that take in peoples from less advanced regions with cultural, social, and religious customs hostile to the host countries’. In Europe, for example, generous welfare subsidies to migrants combined with restrictions on employment have created a sullen generation of Muslim immigrants exploited by jihadist recruiters working out of some of the many mosques that have arisen across Europe. In addition to the terrorist attacks that follow, migrant participation in crime, especially rape, is much greater than their share of the total population.

Moreover, in many countries, significant numbers of Muslim immigrants are segregated into “no go” neighborhoods or towns where they indulge their cultural and religious practices, such as honor-killing and polygamy, inimical to the liberal democratic principles of their host governments. These developments are the wages of failing to demand assimilation to the host country and its social and political culture.