RUTHFULLY YOURS

A version of this column will be posted Monday, Nov. 17, 2014, on the website http://yeoldecrabb.com/

The Chinese Riddle

A servile media has again misrepresented the important if unproductive Asian tour of Pres. Barack Hussein Obama, most importantly the promised engagement with China which failed to materialize.

The ballyhooed U.S.-China climate change agreement, appealing to the fashionable, signed between the U.S and China was much less than meets the eye. It committed America – until it gets to a Congress which will have a different sense – to a rigorous cutback in industrial carbon emissions to be achieved at the price of economic growth and jobs.

It couldn’t be more bogus. Beijing, by far the world’s greatest polluter and not only through carbon emissions but through poisoning of its arable land and most of its water, only formally signed on for something ambiguous down the road. Worse still, as Japanese and South Korean consumers have found – and those Walmart customers may one day learn too at their peril — it exports its poisons through cheaper processed foods.

Recent history is littered with the evidence of failures of the Chinese Communist adherence to international agreements it has signed. Ironically, many of them were pushed through international forums by Washington administrations, both Republican and Democrat, anxious to bring “a rising China” into the world family. For example, none of China’s promises have been fulfilled after the U.S. shoehorned it against considerable opposition into the World Trade Organization with all its benefits.

As previous administrations, most notably the two Bush II terms, Washington did not take on China’s manipulation of its currency and its subsidized exports which have disemboweled American manufacturing. That Chinese thrust had to be met at the same time U.S. industry was trying to cope with the digital revolution, with its enormous increases in productivity but an absence of low and medium-skilled job creation.

One thread runs through all the miasma of the tribal and ideological jungle of contemporary Mideast politics. Through it all is interwoven the power and influence of Iran.

With its 80 million people, its vast territory – the world’s 17th largest country, about the size of Alaska – and its abundant resources, Iran towers over all the other Mideastern territories [except Egypt and Turkey]. Despite its sudden cataclysmic downturn in fertility – a drop-off much deeper than Europe, Japan and China are also experiencing – Iran currently still has a young population that will reach 100 million by 2050.

But more than anything, Tehran is heir – unlike Egypt’s largely historical and tourist attractions – to the traditions of the ancient Persian empires dating from 500 years before Christ. Contrary to the primitive intolerance of the current regime, the Persians through the ages built remarkably strong political entities simultaneously using various ethnicities. [Again what a contrast to the neighboring puny Arab sheikhdoms, however endowed with petrodollars.] That thrust toward power is again a central issue in the region.

There is no dearth of evidence for Tehran’s aggressive ambitions beginning with worldwide terrorism that punctuated recent decades. Whether in the Beirut military barracks bombing of Americans and French troops [1983] or the attacks on Jewish targets in Buenos Aires [1994] or the bitter IED offensive against American forces during the Iraq war, Tehran’s gloved hand was there.

However vulnerable the ties, today Tehran has jumped the security fences first set up post-World War I by Britain and France, and then the U.S.. Its alliances extend to the Mediterranean with the Assad regime [if under siege] in Syria, Hezbollah that dominates ethnic-chaotic Lebanon, and even the scion of the bitterly anti-Shia Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas in Gaza.

Moving toward weapons of mass destruction with the help of other rogue states headed by North Korea and greedy merchants in Russia, Germany, Tehran’s mullahs are reaching for great power status. One suspects even their bitterest domestic enemies do not vouchsafe their country this role.

One thread runs through all the tribal and ideological jungle of contemporary Mideast politics that few of us care to study much less follow.

But will it “deliberate”?

Americans like to believe as a culture they excel at detail. It’s not true. The Japanese, the Germans, and sometimes the French, may well do so. But the American forte is to reduce the complexity of big ideas – whether in politics or industry – and broaden their appeal or their functionality. The Brits invented TV, radar, discovered antibiotics – but Americans made them marketable and a commonplace.

Indeed, so-called popular culture, now a worldwide phenomenon, is a product of the American lifestyle which strives for universality. The ability to achieve a common denominator, sometimes at the risk of higher quality but wider acceptance, has characterized U.S. decision-making through its history and been the genius of the society.

Therefore, the devil remains in the details. And when they are lost sight of, among other things, there is the avalanche of continuing disasters which have befallen the Obama Administration. True, it is inspired by a 19th century ideology of progressivism that reduces all standards to relativism. But it also borrows heavily – what a comment on the history of ideas! – from the failed Communist and socialist theory that fell in on itself in 1990 with the sudden crash of one of the greatest and most cruel pipedreams in the history of governance.

But the self-evident nature of the Fast and Furious guns smuggling scandal, the Benghazi fiasco and martyrdoms, the IRS persecutions and their discrediting of government institutions, the NSA’s perceived overreach and threat of Big Brother, Eric Holder’s star-chamber pursuit of newsmen, the Secret Service’s corruption and mishaps, the Ebola muckup and threat of epidemic – all are in large part the failure to tend to detail.

One of the more inane criticisms, by Republicans as well as their opponents, is that the GOP did not offer large package proposals to solve all problems in the current midterm election campaign. In the first place there are no such remedies. Nothing has so led the Obama Administration into disasters as its so-called comprehensive solutions, whether Obamacare or its Mideast strategy. Their corollary of comprehensive solutions, that compromise is always best, is also belied by history – whether Dred Scott or the 1935 Neutrality Act.

The language of deception

Perhaps the glory of the English language is that it so expressive. Its remarkable heterogeneous origins have given it an almost limitless vocabulary. And American English, particularly, has used that tool with an enormous flexibility to make it the international means of communication. One is able with a minimum of linguistic dexterity to capture every meaning, or almost every nuance. That’s why it is so depressing to note that of late there is a growing tendency to do the opposite, that is, to camouflage real meanings with obfuscation.

It has become the fashion – and interestingly enough the tendency swells as one moves up the educational ladder – to mask real meanings with words or phrases that tell less than one could easily relate. At the moment my favorite bete noir in this regard is the phrase “to reach out to” which has become omnipresent.

What the hell does that mean? There are dozens of words which describe in precision relationships and communication among individuals, and which would lend authenticity and further meaning to any such statement. If you have to obfuscate, how about “contact”? Long ago [but in my time] we turned “contact” from a simple noun into a verb, much to the horror of strict grammarians. But it still, generally, has retained the meaning of a spoken communication.

But “to reach out to” now substitutes for a wide variety of unknowable meanings: written communication, a face to face exchange, a telephone conversation, an exchange of e-mails or “snailmail”, a connection through an emissary or other intermediary. Or you name it! In any case, I doubt that most of the time it means extending an arm or a leg to touch another person.

Why? If you want to say that information has been exchanged about a particular subject, why not use one of many verbs which tell us how it was done and thereby give us more information?

I am afraid that this horrible example is only one of hundreds of such bromides commonly used these days.

Pearl Harbor, 9/11, Ebola

When all the debris is cleared away from the present controversies concerning the possibility of an outbreak of the deadly virus Ebola in the U.S., an important geopolitical marker will be registered.

Epidemics have invaded U.S. shores before of course. There was the notable worldwide influenza epidemic [“Spanish ‘flu”] of 1918 which claimed 50 million lives worldwide. As World War I was ending, it laid low almost half of the then mobilized American soldiers, killing more than died in combat. In an era of poorer sanitation, long before antibiotics and the sulfa drugs and some of today’s routine emergency medical procedures, more than 375,000 died in the U.S. But it was also the world of steamships not of vast international air traffic.

Today on an annual basis the highly mutable influenza virus, often sweeping out of south China, claims an average of 200,000 victims in the U.S. with deaths often reaching 35,000 among the more vulnerable, especially the elderly.

Again with the prospect of an invasion of Ebola – against which there is not yet a cure with mortality in Africa running as high as 70% – Americans face a possibility, however remote, of a health catastrophe.

That the U.S. was not prepared is obvious; how could it be otherwise? That the Obama Administration did not take adequate measures when a threat was identified will be debated long after the November mid-term elections are decided and gone. At what level blame for the initial chaotic preparation for an onslaught should be assigned to the $3 trillion annual government and private health care establishment will also be a subject for discussion. Will the Ebola crisis focus the spotlight on hospital-acquired infections costing $30 billion annually and leading to nearly 100,000 patient deaths a year?

But what appears already clear is that the whole Ebola affair forces a turn on the political consciousness of the American electorate. It goes further than identifying the immediate culprits/scapegoats. Just as Pearl Harbor destroyed for all time the U.S. dogma that it was protected from foreign attack by two wide oceans, 9/11/2001 demonstrated how vulnerable the homeland – a word rarely employed before that time – was to clever if accident-prone fanatics. That both these episodes could have been prevented, that with 20-20 hindsight the most fundamental aspects of security were breached, is not a new phenomenon in the history of the U.S. and other great powers. Historical calamities, however destructive, most often are like personal disaster, are the result of pervasive stupidity — even in political circles.

It’s time for someone to write an update of Paul Hollander’s marvelously insightful and humorous [after a fashion] 1981 Political Pilgrims. For those kiddies for whom all this, and the environment in which it was written, is ancient history, may I remind you of Hollander’s hypothesis he fulfilled so well. It was to expose those Western intellectuals who flitted allegiance from one Marxist paradise to another.
That followed, of course, their final acceptance that their initial unassailable infatuation with the Soviet Union was a failed love affair however bitter sweet. Even their political naiveté could no longer take the strain between their hopes for a collectivized paradise on earth and the stark realities of one, if not the worst, of tyrannies the world had ever known. So they transferred their political affections to Communist China, then Castro’s Cuba, then to Sandinista Nicaragua, and so on, sometimes falling off the train even into North Korea, Albania, Romania, or Mozambique, along the way.
True, there was a basis in the excoriation of the ancien regimes: Tsarist Russia was an abomination, Nicaragua’s Somoza was the epitome of petty tyrants [even if FDR did say “he’s a SOB, but he’s our SOB” after weaning him from pro-Nazi sympathies], Batista’s Cuba was infinitely corrupt, etc., etc.
But the Political Pilgrims were willing to excuse almost anything in the hope that the new revolutionary regimes would deliver on the promised “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” in their hoped for utopias. Along the way, however, they picked up rationalizations for the absence of the rule of law and new, bitter human rights transgressions. And, so, on to the next candidate with the help, often, of a compliant media. [There was The New York Times’ Herbert Mathews famous infatuation with Fidel Castro, the Christian Science Monitor’s Moscow correspondent as a Soviet agent, etc.!]

If we must speak Gaelic, Amaideas!

All the media hype to the contrary notwithstanding, the referendum on independence for Scotland was very close to a farce. Ironic, too, that such political balderdash should have taken place in the historic home of a half dozen of the world’s most noted political thinkers.

That it was media-driven was made even more apparent in the closing hours after the victory of commonsense took over. CNN, unfortunately that worldwide purveyor of stylish rubbish, set the tone. Amanpour, who never met a cliché she couldn’t misappropriate, led the pack in the little inquest, with talk of “the great democratic process”. That, of course, despite the fact that not a single of the extremely difficult problems which would surface with “independence” from currency to defense had been debated in any real sense. Then there was a spokesman for facebook who nattered on for several minutes on how important the social media had been to “the process” without presenting one solitary fact. And bringing up the rear was a bimbo from a leftwing American thiMk-tank – the Scots didn’t have enough muddlers on their own, apparently – who supposedly advised the Scottish demagogic leader, Alex Salmond, on economic issues. But, as with every major concern in the whole proposed process of leaving the United Kingdom, neither she nor he – an economist and onetime banker – gave a clue as to how a new impoverished mini-state would organize its finances or its currency.

From its origins in 2012 when U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron acquiesced to the referendum, blithely assuming there was no question of the overwhelming strength of “unionist” support, the referendum was treated cavalierly. Cameron had rejected, by the way, Salmond’s offer to put a third option on the ballot, the very one which Cameron and other U.K. leaders of all the major parties have now promised the Scots, that is, an expanded self-government. So much for the political perspicacity of the British Conservative Party leadership which has little if any following among the Scots. [No one even mentions that the name “Cameron”, despite the PM’s very posh background, is of Scottish origin, widespread throughout “the Anglo-Saxon” world and typical of the many indivisible links that bind all the British isles’ peoples.]

“Okay, smart-a___, what is your strategy?”
In a [rather large] nutshell; here are the tactics which when pulled together make up a grand strategy:
Domestic
Make an “America is back!” speech from the Oval Office in the White House modeled on Harry Truman’s “Doctrine” speech of 1947. http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/harrystrumantrumandoctrine.html Its principal theme would be recognition that the U.S. and its allies are launched in an extended war — and still from being won — against the Islamic jihadists.
Immediately ask Congress for emergency lifting of all Sequestration applying to the Department of Defense, the CIA and other security agencies for five years. Halt and reverse with continuing extension and recruitment the personnel cutbacks now decimating the American armed forces.
Reverse energy policies to provide the U.S. economy and our allies with a noninflationay stimulus of cheaper fuel, simultaneously directly providing hundreds of thousands of new jobs, by:
Administratively, opening up all federal lands [including offshore Virginia, etc.] to fracking,
Administratively, waiving all EPA regs on fracking for five years.
Administratively, fast-track applications for the dozen or so outstanding applications for liquefied natural gas export facilities, putting on hold any Environmental Protection Agency regulations concerning them for a five-year period.
Ask Congress to lift all oil and gas export restrictions, including a waiver on EPA fossil fuel export regs for five years. [These exports would begin to supply allies in Europe and Asia and simultaneously help mend the balance of payments hemorrhage against the dollar.]
Immediately okay the XL Keystone Pipeline and other Canadian applications for pipelines into the U.S. directed at Houston refineries and their export facilities.
Cooperate with Detroit and foreign-owned auto companies to organize and subsidize a national network of filling stations for an expanded production and use of LNG-fueled vehicles.

A version of this column will be published Monday, Sept. 1, 2014, at yeoldecrabb.com

Saving NATO

It was one great historical irony that when NATO’s famous Article 5 – an attack on any member is an attack on all and demands their assistance – was invoked, it would be not in the aid of the European states for which the Treaty was designed but for the U.S. Nor did the 9/11 attack come from NATO’s anticipated enemy, the Soviet Union, but the new international jihadist terror network.

Thus history’s most successful alliance – it protected Western Europe at the highwater mark of Communism both without and within for a half century until the Soviet Union imploded — met a new challenge in far-off Afghanistan. Yes, the German contingent spent too much time drinking beer and refusing night warfare, most of the Europeans sent token forces, and “the Anglo-Saxons” [certainly not excluding the Australians!] as usual carried the weight to a quick military victory despite outrageous rules of engagement. And, with the current kind of political impasse in “nation building” in Kabul, the longest war in U.S. history might still come to less. But the Treaty obligations worked.

Now, almost two decades after Moscow seemed a convert to a new universalism of free elections, an independent judiciary and media, a civil society and market economics, the European leadership is back to square one. A lying, hypocritical Russian dictatorship in all but name – if basically weak — has challenged with naked aggression the whole benign concept of what the Obama Administration keeps preaching is a new universal morality. Somehow, Putin doesn’t seem to have heard that sermon.

No, the Russian threat it is not now against a member of NATO. Only now, belatedly, has Kyiv decided to press for admission. But with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin’s infamous remark that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, it doesn’t take much imagination to see what is his goal. It is the restitution of domination of the Soviets over the old Tsarist Empire including much of eastern and central Europe [and Central Asia].

Objectivity is one of the greatest assets in any human intellectual encounter. But no concept can be so easily abused in the white heat of crisis. And it can become a false front for a failure to come to grips with the issues at hand. For it can easily metamorphous into the belief that we are able to see beyond the current issues and put them in a broad historical perspective.
That is one of the conceits of the present pseudo-intellectuals of the Obama Administration. The fact is that politicians, even those who graduate to statesmen, are not historians except in some very rare instances. So it is better left to our progeny to determine the longer-term results of the current crises and their outcomes. In terms of national policy, we have enough on our hands in simply meeting the demands of the hour for what clearly can be seen in the here and now as a danger to national security. Even that essential concept is a difficult one to measure at any given moment.
To do otherwise has led, in part, to the current incapacity of American leadership to cope with half a dozen threatening geopolitical disasters around the world. It is expressed in the pomposity of the belief of policymakers in the White House that can always maintain sangfroid above the fray. It leads them to believe that because they all knowing about all the issues, viewed from the perspective of opponents or enemies, they are able to couch compromises which would satisfy all parties.As a corollary, they see the pursuit of methods of exchanging views, however contradictory and inconclusive, as the end-all of all international relations.
So, instead of devoting all our resources to coordinating our allies in reinforcing the ability of Ukraine to meet continuing Russian aggression, for example, the Obama Administration lectures Vladimir Putin on his failure to understand a new international morality and thereby jeopardizes his role in history. I can’t imagine the master of the Kremlin with all his ambitions and current problems arising from them cares much for this uninvited counsel on his legacy.
Objectivity in formulating a foreign policy requires above all knowing what our own national interests are and pursuing them to the full extent possible. True, that is easier said than done. But it is the height of arrogance – and stupidity – to believe that one knows the irreconcilable interests of both parties to a dispute; it is more than enough to have clearly defined and registered our own.