RUTHFULLY YOURS

The world equates American military power with the maintenance of the postwar global order of free commerce, communications, and travel.

Sometimes American power leads to costly, indecisive interventions like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya that were not able to translate superiority on the battlefield into lasting peace.

But amid the frustrations of American foreign policy, it is forgotten that the United States also plays a critical but more silent role in ensuring the survival of small, at-risk nations. The majority of them are democratic and pro-Western. But they all share the misfortune of living in dangerous neighborhoods full of bullies.

These small nations are a far cry from rogue clients of China and Russia — theocratic Iran, autocratic North Korea, and totalitarian Venezuela — that oppress their own people and threaten their regions.

In the Middle East, there are two places that consistently remain pro-American: the nation of Israel and the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. Both show a spirit and tenacity that so far have ensured their survival against aggressive and far larger neighbors. Both have few friends other than the United States. And both are anomalies. Israel is surrounded by Islamic neighbors. The ethnic Kurds live in the heart of the Arab Middle East. Quite admirably, the U.S. continues to be a patron of both.

For some 500 years, the Ottoman Empire terrified the Christian Middle East and Mediterranean world. Almost every country in its swath was Islamicized. Two tiny unique places were conquered but not transformed: Armenia and Greece. Both suffered terribly at the hands of the Ottomans and their successors, the early-20th-century Turkish state.

Yet both Armenia and Greece remained Christian and kept their languages and cultures. Today, both are still quite vulnerable to renewed neo-Ottoman Turkish pressures.

America has been a friend to both Armenia and Greece, although their histories with the U.S. were often controversial. In turn, they have sent millions of talented and skilled immigrants to the U.S. The world is a far better place because there are 11 million Greeks who keep the legacy of Hellenism alive. Armenia still remains a Western outpost — the first country to formally adopt Christianity as a state religion, and a nation that has preserved its faith under centuries of cruel foreign persecutions.

After a humiliating defeat in Syria and Iraq, thousands of European jihadis are set to return home. Western governments seem set to roll out the red-carpet for them as if they were heroes rather than turncoats.

The UK has launched an integration program, Operation Constrain, for its homecoming jihadis to provide them with assistance in finding a job and living a “normal” life.

Such theatrics, however, are not expected to deter determined terrorists, unless the authorities are equally determined with brutal honesty to see what is being said extremist mosques and seminaries and know their sources of funding.

When a minister from the Gulf warns European countries that their mosques or imams should be licensed, you know you have a problem on your hands.

While France and Germany marked memorial days for the 2015 Paris and 2016 Berlin terrorist attacks, many Islamists seem to remain undeterred. The October 31 terror attack in New York and the arrest of three suspected ISIS militants in Germany are merely reminders of how determined many Islamists are to rattle the foundations of modern civilization and move their plans forward inch by inch.

As ISIS retreats in Syria and Iraq, its adherents show up in the West as “inspired” home-grown or would-be terrorists. Anyone believing that these homecoming terrorists were merely hostages of ISIS or were only given air-guns is misinformed.

So many terrorist attacks this year have made people in the West doubt the ability of governments to counter terrorist aggression. Some political leaders, such as London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, have said that people will just have to get used to terror attacks — a response the public might understandably find less than satisfactory.

Meanwhile, President Trump’s tweet after the October 31 attack in New York — “We must not allow ISIS to return, or enter, our country after defeating them in the Middle East and elsewhere. Enough!” — resurfaced skepticism about how terrorism is being handled.

Zimbabwe was once Rhodesia-called the “breadbasket of Africa”- the most productive nation with an infrastructure, judicial system, and gifted with natural beauty, thriving agriculture and a growing middle class of White and Black citizens. Post-colonial independence brought corruption, destruction, epidemics, and a loss of all basic human rights…..It appears that nothing will change for the better….rsk
Zimbabwe’s generals swear what they started doing in the early hours of Wednesday morning isn’t a coup, but it sure looks like one. By the end of the day, long-time strongman Robert Mugabe was under house arrest, his wife Grace was rumored to have fled the country, and state media and the main airport were under military control.

It would be nice to think the military is belatedly punishing the Mugabe regime for the economic and political misery it has inflicted on Zimbabwe’s people for the 37 years the Old Man has been in power. But the coup’s motives are more venal and arise from a power struggle within the ruling Zanu-PF party.

The generals who have long been silent partners in the Zanu-PF government worried that the 93-year-old Mr. Mugabe’s moves to position his 52-year-old wife as his successor imperiled their own influence. The main goal of the coup may be to push Mr. Mugabe out before he could realize his dynastic ambitions. To that end, the military might bring back recently deposed Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom Mr. Mugabe fired last week for becoming an alternate center of power within the party.

As gratifying as it is to watch the scorpions fight, the victims as always will be Zimbabwe’s people. Mr. Mugabe’s misrule has left them lurching from one bout of starvation, disease and hyperinflation to another, while the country’s rulers enrich themselves.

This coup offers little hope of immediate improvement. After the crisis in Harare dies down, the government still will be focused mainly on patronage politics coupled with often violent suppression of political dissent. Mr. Mnangagwa allegedly was responsible for his share of the repression as Mr. Mugabe’s security chief in the 1980s.

Zimbabwe may escape one trap by avoiding a ruling family dynasty, and that’s a precondition for the political and economic reforms Zimbabwe needs to have any shot at prosperity. But the country that once was Africa’s bread basket needs a total overhaul of its governance, not merely a coup, and that day is not here.