Civil War as the Second-Best Option
The best is the enemy of the good, Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. liked to say. The best option for the Muslim states of the Middle East and Western and Central Asia is liberal democracy. That, I have argued for years, is unattainable. For years, the second-best option was a dictatorship friendly to American interests. That option collapsed with the Tunisia uprising a year ago, when it became clear that the dictatorships could not even reward subservience with nutritional security (as I wrote last Feb. 2 under the title, “Food and Failed Arab States“). Sixty years of Nasserite dictatorship left Egypt with 45% illiteracy, unemployed and unemployable youth, and 50% dependency on food imports.
Now the options in Egypt appear to be stable rule by the Muslim Brotherhood, or disintegration. Which benefits American interests more?
The options in Syria are similar: continuing civil war between Muslim Brotherhood-led Sunnis and the Alawite Assad regime. Which do we prefer — a stable ally of Iran, or chaos?
The options in Iraq may come down to a pro-Iranian Shi’ite dictatorship, or a permanent multi-sided ethnic and sectarian civil war. I forecast this outcome (“General Petraeus’ Thirty Years War”) after the United States funded and armed the Sunni Awakening. Again, which is better for the United States: a stable Iranian ally, or perpetual civil war? Outside of the Salafist theme park known as Saudi Arabia, where oil revenues sustain a caricature of traditional society, and a couple of other oil states, that is the question to be asked from North Africa to Afghanistan.
Would you tell Natan Sharansky that he was naive?
He wrote a persuasively in his book “The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror”, but sadly, seeing the way things are shaping up, you sound more realistic.
I don’t believe Sharansky was naive; freedom and democracy remain compelling ideas but seeds don’t take root in barren ground. Islam is chauvinist and primitive, and I am being restrained in that description, and hostile to all things not Islam. It cannot assimilate ideas that were not dictated by Allah to the bandit, autocrat and scavenger chosen as Messenger.
I think the world of Natan Sharansky, but I disagree with some of what he has said on the subject. See:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JJ21Ak02.html
Showing those population stats for Eastern Europe is like showing crime dropping after achieving record levels. Far from heading for extinction, those countries are heading for a manageable population in terms of gov’t and environment. India, Nigeria and many others are headed for disaster and the writing is already on the wall if one cares to look.
So having children is a crime. Interesting.
It’s not the depopulation that’s the worst part. It’s the fact that the functions of government can no longer be paid for (eroding tax base), any pension systems they have will be overtaxed (see Japan and even the US), and arresting the decline if it goes too far.
An extremely low birthrate is the opposite side of the coin; it is just as unsustainable as an extremely high birthrate. The only problem is that a high birthrate is easy to lower, but a low birthrate is hard to bring back up when you’ve gone too far.
Having children is not a crime, no matter what misanthropic environmentalists say.
Go to India and try to walk around Mumbai if you are a claustrophobe: you can’t. India is about to overtake China as the world’s most populated country. Having children you cannot feed is a crime. An estimated quarter of a million farmers in India have committed suicide in the last 10 years over money. Even if the statistic is wildly wrong, it is a crime. We’ve been living a dream and it’s about to be shattered. That has been happening a long time already in East Africa.
Regarding Athens and Sparta, weren’t 90% of each slaves, or am I misinformed? That would mean at most 5% of the adult population could vote, no?
Spengler: “Now that we are stuck with humanitarian catastrophes of biblical proportions, we had better make the best use of them.”
I am a little unclear on how we can “make the best use of them.” Do you have any suggestions or proposals?
I thought the point was obvious: we should do everything possible to prevent the consolidation of anti-American Islamist regimes even if it means prolonging civil conflict.
(Note: I am not in New York, and it is not yet Shabbat where I am).
Thank you for the clarification. I freely admit that I don’t have any better ideas. But it does look like things will be truely horrible no matter what, and there are no good options.
Food-bomb the starving Arab populations with Gefilte Fish and Matzo,
in packages prominently marked with the Star of David; Those who eat
to survive will be pragmatic enough to form their own government.
Mr. Goldman:
All civil conflicts end eventually. What, if anything, do you suggest America do to ensure, or at least increase the chances, that whoever intentionally triumphs is friendly to us? My personal suggestion would be to pick a side, supply it with whatever materiel and/or training and/or intelligence we can, on the condition that that they be friendly to us and provide the foregoing in such a way that they cannot renege. For example, make the new leaders dependent on U.S. domestic and military aid.
In that light, I will never understand why, when we still had a massive troop presence in Iraq, and Iran and Syrian were allowing Jihadists to cross their borders into Iran to kill Americans, that we did not invite Iranian and Syrian patriots to cross, too, to be supplied with training and weapons. The weapons I would have supplied would have been either captured Iranian weapons or U.S. manufactured duplicates, to prevent, as much as possible, verifiable evidence of our involvement – and if there were such evidence, we would simply deny it, say the weapons were stolen from us, etc. And when, inevitably, Iran and Syria complained about infiltrators crossing into their countries from Iraq, I would say, “Hey, we have the very same problem and would be happy to work with you to seal your borders with Iraq.”
In other words, make them choose between allowing the free flow of Jihadists AND Iranian/Syrian patriots across their borders, or work with us to stop the flow of BOTH. Or not. I think armed, trained Iranian/Syrian patriots infiltrating their countries, would have been a much bigger problem for them, then the Jihadists infiltrating Iraq were for us.
Overall, I am disappointed that the Great Minds in our government have not devised and implemented a strategy for replacing hostile regimes with friendly ones.
Muslims are not our friends. They are at best the enemy of our enemy. It’s better for us that whatever comes out of a civil war is in no shape to fight another war any time soon than that whomever we back wins.
a strategy for replacing hostile regimes with friendly ones…WWII ?
If regime change, substituting one dictator for another, is enough,
then assassination of unsatisfactory dictators is the way to go.
If a state has failed into anarchy, with what few competent people
it has drowning in mob violence, a filtration process is in order;
Establish, by force of arms (preferably unmanned) a safe haven
in an unpopulated part of the failed state to which only those
willing and able to live together in peace are admitted; In the
case of Egypt, one haven for the Copts, and perhaps a second for
the secular Muslims. Let the mobs auto destruct, and repopulate
from the havens.
“We must not disguise from ourselves that we go to found a city among strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise should be prepared to become master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to find everything hostile to him…” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book Six, Chapter Eighteen.
Is this not how the West waged war, once? In living memory? Now we try to “win hearts and minds.” How’d that work out, Generals Westmoreland and Petraeus?
“Put their Thucydides aside,” indeed. Jesus wept.
“All forms of social engineering from Marxism the Social Gospel presume that man determines his own fate; compare that to Lincoln’s Second Inaugural (and his famous letter to Thurlow Weed) saying that “the judgments of the Almighty are true and righteous altogether” despite the fact that they go contrary to our desires. Some of the neo-conservatives indulge in a sort of right-wing social engineering, to be sure. And the old Isolationism bespoke a kind of Anglo-Saxon racism.”
The latter is why despite the formidable intellect of Pat Buchanan and many of his fellow AmConMag authors I could never quite sign on to their whole doomed anti-immigration platform — before Buchanan wrote Hitler and the Unnecessary War. WWII, at least once the die was cast by WWI, was probably one of the most inevitable wars to ever befall mankind, as the French Field Marshal said right after Versailles about it only being a twenty year armistice. The key rather was to push more for assimulation so that our civilization could survive with a more Latin face in much the same way Byzantium survived for centuries with emperors of Slavic, Arab, and Armenian/Persian blood despite being founded on the Orthodox Christianity first expounded by Hebrews and Greeks and having Greek as its common language, like English is for the U.S. today.
The former, of course, needs no elaboration, save for I pray some neocons like Mark Steyn stop viewing Ron Paul as some sort of bizarre exotic disease and rather finally admit that his recent success is a symptom of millions of Republicans and conservative-leaning independents being sick of our nation building abroad — nation building the neocons have enthusiastically promoted since before 9/11, particularly in the Balkans (which also involved needlessly humiliating Russia by bombing and occupying its Slavic little brother Serbia).
I agree that support for Ron Paul is in part a symptom of American frustration at nation-building, but that does not mean that it is a good response. It is an ignorant, angry and stupid response. Ron Paul is a dangerous nutball who thinks that it is not so terrible for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Some of those nuclear weapons well might go off in American cities. He is a neo-isolationist, paranoid throwback. If he were nominated — God forbid — I am not sure whether I would vote for him, Obama, or no-one. Obama would be re-elected in any event and the Republican Party would cease to exist in its present form. Ron Paul thinks that the Federal Reserve, Wall Street and the internationalists got us into our present mess and if we just got rid of them, everything would return to blissful normality. That’s just plain nuts. Our problem is that the world gave us a free ride from the middle of the 1980s, when Reagan restored the economy and cornered the Communists, until the middle of the 2000s, when the bubble created by $6 trillion of capital inflows popped.
Ron Paul also does not factor in that smart phones and the internet make it impossible for us to isolate ourselves today. Part of the problem in the Islamic world is generational, with many of the younger being aware that their culture offers them less than Western culture and yet lacking the introspective skills to understand why. We are a perfect scapegoat for their own cognitive dissonance.
The US does nothing about Israel’s nukes (or North Korea, Pakistan, China, France, etc), and it remains the only nation ever to have used them, and on civilians at that. Iran simply holds the moral high ground in this area, and Ron Paul has seized upon it instead of realpolitik. Hypocritical victories eventually kill a nation in the long term; voters are beginning to wake up to this reality, and stand before the eternity of history’s judgement instead of passing impulses. This is a poetic time, a change in the perception of politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Retaliation
And yet, Soviets at times restrained themselves from using nuclear weapons, even when there was a false alarm of a nuclear first strike! America’s aggressive behavior in the Cold War was absolutely, vastly inferior to Communist infiltration of the institutions, and it was more evil to boot, literally endangering all of humanity. The chickens come home to roost at some point (now).
When was the last time Iran invaded another country? Is it more likely they want to use nuclear weapons on offense, or just to defend themselves from a nation eager and willing to use them?
And, why would Iran attack Israel instead of trying to retake its stolen, ancient lands (and why would we care if it did?)? Much of their demographic collapse might just be from a lack of living space. How does this affect a machinist in Indiana or a farmer in Iowa?
In any and all cases, Ron Paul has the most discipline and restraint of any candidate. Someone like Bachmann or Gingrich could have landed America into a nuclear war in a different era. Americans can be held collectively responsible for aggression if one of those fools starts yet another pointless war, because we choose our leaders.
“The US does nothing about Israel’s nukes or North Korea, Pakistan, China, France, etc.)”
How interesting, and revealing, that Higher Game conflates Israel and France with North Korea, China and France – as if they are all, equally, threats to the U.S. We don’t need to worry about Israel, or France, or England’s nuclear weapons. North Korea, Pakistan and China obviously – repeat, obviously – are different and if someone has a plausible plan for capturing or destroying those countries’ nuclear weapons, I would love to hear it – and so, I’m sure, would the Pentagon and State Department. And it would not surprise me at all if, ultimately, we do not take away Pakistan’s.
Iran is a special problem as the mullahs are neither motivated nor constrained by logic – that is, not as the West understands it: (1) a nuclear war will create the chaos that will cause the Twelfth (“Hidden”) Imam to emerge from the well behind which he is hiding and bring peace, order and Allah’s religion to the entire world; (2) the foregoing are all good things and therefore, (3) it is logical (and good) to detonate a nuclear device in an infidel country as soon as practicable.
The US has not upheld any universal principle about nuclear weapons. So far, it has pressed for illegal preemptive wars instead of being satisfied with the right to self defense. And so far, there are more terrorist bombings coming from Western spies than Iranian aggression.
If there were a fundamentalist element of significant strength in Iran, where are the non-nuclear attacks? They must be spectacularly patient to wait just for nukes, and after 30+ years of being in power (and nuclear rumors the whole time)! And, Iran is a more modern nation today than it was then.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2011/1108/Imminent-Iran-nuclear-threat-A-timeline-of-warnings-since-1979/Earliest-warnings-1979-84
Warnings going back to the Carter administration. Nothing to show for it. Global warming has nothing on this. Ron Paul is the only sound candidate running, and people who get their vote out for him can say they did their part to uphold peace.
Higher Game (HG) wrote: “The US has not upheld any universal principle about nuclear weapons” – A good universal principal would have been: “we will not let the world’s worst leaders acquire the world’s worst weapons”. HG’s problem is that he can’t distinguish between Israel/France and N. Korea/Iran.
HG:” ..so far, there are more terrorist bombings coming from Western spies than Iranian aggression” – I really hope you are not an American. Given the demonstrated Iranian involvement in EFP and other lethal terrorist attacks on American soldiers in Iraq your statement is grotesque, whatever your nationality. If you are an American it is especially contemptible.
Higher Game
“The US does nothing about Israel’s nukes (or North Korea, Pakistan, China, France, etc), and it remains the only nation ever to have used them, and on civilians at that.”
Huh?
“Higher Game” is high, alright.
Like all ideologues and fundamentalists, Paul adheres to a list of ‘golden rules’ – in his case loonie-left ones: tolerate everything (including intolerance); never use violence (even in self defence); everyone has a right to peaceful nukes – which absolve them of thinking, especially about ethics. The result is that they can think highly of themselves for being ‘principled’ and ignore the injustice and harm this actually produces, while villifying those who know life is a maze of grey shades that needs individual attention to real events, based on something deeper than rules.
despite being founded on the Orthodox Christianity first expounded by Hebrews and Greeks… I meant by this line, of course, that the Hellenized disciple of Rabbi Gamaliel St. Paul was the true founder of Byzantium when you think about it — since more than half the New Testament is Paul’s letters to churches predominantly in Asia Minor, or what is now Turkey today.
12/27<50%, and that's just by number of books. By pages, Paul wrote a smaller fraction of the New Testament.
And there’s Luke, who authored one of the four gospels and the Book of Acts. (Luke was a Hellenistically trained physician and a disciple of St Paul.)
Mr. Goldman:
“Sixty years of Nasserite dictatorship left Egypt with 45% illiteracy.”
Slightly fewer years of liberalism have left my home town of Detroit with 47% illiteracy!
Love it, best point made this year.
Gene,
I agree that Detroit has been a test tube for Great Society and big government solutions, but why is Detroit so much worse off than Cleveland, Chicago, and Milwaukee? I’ll tell you one major difference, Coleman Young. When there was a flurry of news about Detroit losing 25% of its population since the last census, only Thomas Sowell blamed the right person, Hizzoner, the HMFIC, Coleman Young. He tore down a viable neighborhood to build the Poletown GM plant, let the city burn on Devil’s Night and virtually chased remaining whites into the suburb. He ignored the decline of the Detroit public schools and instead built monuments to himself, like the People Mover, that goes in circles.
The CIA World Facbook states that adult (over 15) literacy is 71.4%.
…”Slightly fewer years of liberalism have left my home town of Detroit with 47% illiteracy.”
This line of Gene Schwimmer’s just above deserves detailed examination for what it shows can happen in one formerly very significant, prosperous city in the name of that specious “multiculturalism” and its resultant re-emerging self-segregating enclaves…..what an odious, empty but at the same time threatening development to have so many permently unemployable but able bodied folks on welfare, at an ever increasing cost to a simultaneously shrinking tax base. It’s self perpetuating disaster.
Don’t forget the contributions that unionization made in laying low that industrial powerhouse.
Thanks, Randy….I’d left that one out….and while we’re at it, I might add that Detroit and Dearbornistan taken together point out the “perfect storm” of what to avoid in an industrialized area….all of the elements fed on each other here…Muslim immigration, poor public education, unionization, and not least…a cultivated “entitlement attitude” trumping all. “I’m All Right Jack”. Look up the lyrics…a biting 1960 film, also.
Whos’s to PAY for all that without contributing anything? It’s Orwellian….even Karl Marx declared that …”each takes according to his needs, and contributes according to his abilities”….anybody out there remember ol’ Karl Marx?
A PerfectStorm.
Funny how the Left operates on the principle that it takes generations to establish relationships to succeed and thus Affirmative Action. Meanwhile immigrant Muslims with little ability to compete are nevertheless not committing crime out of proportion to their numbers and are more successful than black Americans in the same general area. It’s about a value system, in this example a failed one being better than a depraved one.
You are exactly right. We have to weigh what is desirable against what is possible to achieve. The wise investor does not allocate all his capital to the penny stock with a new drug that “might” cure a terrible disease. The successful blackjack player doesn’t take a hit with 17 when a whole bunch of low cards are showing and few picture cards are. It’s a probabalistic universe and we have to place the odds on our side or else we’re just pissing in the wind. Either that, or we’re the Obama administration.
I fail to see why a (very likely) Iraqi civil war will be perpetual, or even longterm. After all, the three factions (Sunni, Shi and Kurd) each have their geographic stronghold. It’s easy to envision a Kurdish state in the north, a Shiite state in the south, and a Sunni entity in the middle. Yes, there’ll be some fighting along these respective new borders–especially in and around Kirkuk, but that kind of strife usually ends in split-the-difference compromise.
As to US interests, the Kurds are passionately pro-American already. The Shia have no real desire to become a province of Iran (just ask the Arabic-speaking Shiites of Ahwaz how well they like Iranian rule). The Sunni will need us, or the Saudis, or somebody to keep the Shia from devouring them; their Saddamite and al-Qaesa days are done. The sooner Iraq is partitioned, the better.
Hey, I read that Aldous Huxley book, abut the Grey Eminence… but many years ago. And at the time, my grasp of history was much weaker than it is now. So, maybe I will hunt down another copy for another read.
The 30 years war bred 2 generations of well trained thuggish soldiers, some of which went home to Scotland, where they introduced the term ‘plunder’ to the citizenry.
Well David, fortunately for your point of view the Establishment RINOs will probably succeed in derailing Paul’s nomination bid, but not before showing where their bread is buttered — i.e. they are just as desperately addicted to trillions printed out of thin air (as opposed to being lent to us by those generous foreigners you mentioned) just as badly as the Democrats, just for slightly different ends. And Obama may very well go ahead and attack Iran before losing the election, though if he does so in Oct 2012 and Paul is in the race as a third party candidate don’t be surprised if even crazy old uncle Ron draws 20% in disgust with Obama barely defeating the RINO Romney with one of the lowest pluralities since Truman won a three way race in 1948.
And we’ll just have to agree to disagree about the Federal Reserve, as an indication of which TBTFs were saved despite having almost as much or more garbage on their books than Lehman and Bear Stearns gives a pretty good idea of who runs that hopelessly corrupted institution.
Unlike Paul’s hardcore supporters, as a mere sympathizer I can take the Establishment coming down on him with everything its got calmly. What else can the bastards do? No fiat money and they’re finished.
No, it will take four more years of eventual hyperinflation, a useless war with Iran driving gas to $7.75 a gallon at the pump (that’s being optimistic, I’m counting on North American, African and Russian spigots opening up) and more blatant criminality ala MF Global to be exposed before Rand rises in 2016, slapping down all the yammering endless interventionists with a simple refrain of ‘We can’t afford it.’ But, but but if we don’t try to police the world they’ll stop accepting our dollars! And then how will we pay for the 35% of the country on food stamps not to burn down their own neighborhood then?’
And unlike his father, the neocons won’t be able to slam Rand as always apologizing to the Iranians for overthrowing Mossadeq in 1953.
I intend not to be in a major U.S. city by the time that scenario plays out, and cast my vote for Rand in absentee from overseas.
Last thought — it will not have been Ron Paul that destroyed the GOP to the point that it failed to oust one of the most unpopular and incompetent presidents in history, but the fat, stupid, happy Republican Establishment personified by John Boehner inside the Beltway. The foreign policy doyens of this Establishment (i.e. Frank Gaffney and others) would likely respond to essays like ‘Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Play Chess’ in their inbox with a stream of obscenities hurled back at the author.
End of thread for me. Have a Happy Holiday weekend Spengler fans!
If we target the thousand or so individuals who make up the Iranian nazi ruling clique, it won’t have to be a long war. These guys all put their pants on one leg at a time just like anyone else; none of them are immortal.
As for Ron Paul, the sooner I no longer have to hear that little quisling garden gnome’s name mentioned, the happier I’ll be.
His freelordship is a sad specimen of a wannabe slacker, looks like, hopin’ rather than schemin’ that he an’ his ideobuddies can be spared havin’ to do much in the way of Native Management themselves because the proposed managees will be too busy fighting one another to bother the grown-ups.
The freelordly notion of 1629 And All That is not altogether clear, but any resemblance to that of M. de Richelieu is likely to be coincidental.
Ah, well, History is a pack of tricks one plays on dead Cardinals.
Happy days.
Let’s be clear about this: No-one in any responsible position in the US government seriously considered the idea of provoking civil conflict in the Muslim world. If I had been in a responsible position, I surely would have given it some thought, but I wasn’t, so that’s of no concern. The civil wars in Libya, Syria, Yemen and possibly Iraq erupted sui generis. The fact that the potential for civil war was so great suggests IMHO that we should have been giving it more thought. But that’s blood under the bridge. We play the hand of cards we are dealt.
I maintain that we’ve lost he peace in Iraq and did so a long time ago. After WWII, US forces were present in Germany for many years. That presence provided stability so the society could rebuild itself in an orderly manner. Our biggest failure in Iraq was the failure to recognize this same long-term commitment would be required.
I agree with you, in part, about the need for a continuing US presence in Iraq.
I believe that your analogy is a bit of a poor fit because the situation in Iraq 2003 to 2009, was different from West Germany post-WWII. The critical factor was that the behavior of Iran was different from that of the USSR. While the USSR was pressuring the FRG, there was nothing like Iran’s direct and indirect involvement in terrorism targeting US forces and the people of Iraq.
I expand on this point at #35, below.
I think you need to check your keyboard…based on everything I’ve seen you type at PJM your statement should have read: we should do everything possible to prevent the consolidation of anti-Israel Islamist regimes even if it means prolonging civil conflict.
A redundant phrase, surely.
Oops… I thought this was an article about our upcming civil war……..
The more the mooselimbs fight with each other and kill each other, the less they will be able to pursue their dream of a worldwide caliphate.
To them, I say, “HAVE AT IT!”
We need to get a few things straight:
1. A religous state, led by priests, will always result in poverty, squalor, ignorance, decadence, bigotry and corruption. This is what Arabs are choosing across North Africa and the ME.
2. There is no political party in Iran who would not pursue nuclear weapons. The reason for this is that, from their perspective, they are surrounded by predator nations who have nuclear weapons; Russia to the North, Sunni Pakistan to the East and effectively Saudi Arabia via their client state, the USA, to the West.
3. The reason we are in this situation is obviously oil, just as obviously the way out is to exploit our own hydrocarbon resources while embarking on a program to develop effective alternate energy supplies (not wind!)
4. The USA will not do this because the Federal Govt. of the USA is essentially a Saudi puppet. It would be an interesting project to find out how much of the funding spent to prevent the Keystone pipeline is coming from Saudi sources.
5. The Arab/Iranian world needs to be crippled in order to ensure the survival of Israel, we should all we can to promote chaos in these states and if that means long civil wars resulting in total societal breakdown in the Arab islamic world, so much the better.
Ron Paul is the only person running for president who is actually qualified to hold that office, because he’s the only one who does not fully consciously intend to break his oath of office (to uphold the Constitution) the moment he swears it.
That said, the question becomes whether he’d be a good president. Obviously, the answer to that question depends on what makes a president “good.” If adherence to the Constitution is the chief criterion, I’d say the last one we had was Calvin Coolidge. But the nature of the now thoroughly unconstitutional presidency has changed, and so a better question is whether a president can be deemed “successful.” Most presidential success nowadays can’t be squared with the Constitution.
Could Ron Paul put that toothpaste back into the tube? Would the American people stand for it if he did? Would any but a tiny percentage wish to return to a world where the only contact almost anyone ever had with the federal government is mail delivery? (Count me in that tiny percentage, by the way, although I’d deny the Postal Service its monopoly on first class delivery, so it’s possible I’d soon have zero contact with the federal government. What a happy thought.)
Jonah Goldberg, in a recent column, pointed out that presidents are not dictators, and Congress would block him at every turn. A valid point. Gridlock is a great way to make an idealist a pragmatist.
Mark Steyn makes a wonderful point, too, when he says that 19th century America could only afford to not meddle in foreign imbroglios because the Royal Navy was policing the seas–a fact Paul never references. It is we who maintain global order today, and if Paul got his way, a vacuum would be created because there is no one else capable–or willing–to do the job. And thus, the happy foreign affairs quietude of the 19th century would not reappear. It would be chaos and economic depression too severe to contemplate. Spengler pointed out in an article titled When the Cat’s Away, the Mice Slaughter Each Other that it’s only because our aircraft carriers can sail along any coast in the world without fear of attack that the sea lanes remain open (I’m working from memory). He’s right, as usual.
In other words, as much as I like Ron Paul’s theoretical outlook, if he became president I’d like to think he’s smart enough to ask Dave Goldman for advice and council as concerns foreign affairs, to bring him down to earth. This article we are commenting on is a perfect example. There is no good solution to the problems that the Moslem world is marinating in, and not facing that fact would be WAY worse than the unseemly task of encouraging a least worse outcome. This is not America in 1820, or even 1890, any more; it’s Britain in those times, and empire carries a terrible weight of responsibility.
The world is messy, and getting more dangerous, and fortunately or unfortunately, the United States is the key player in the unfolding future. We make blundering, stupid mistakes and make things much worse much of the time, but we can’t simply stop being involved.
That said, Spengler is spectacularly wrong about the Fed. Ron Paul understands what’s wrong domestically better than practically anyone. The Fed is a cartel. Its primary mission is to protect the largest banks, whatever the cost, and it never fails to act accordingly. It is un-American in the deepest way, and should be exterminated like a pestilential disease. Too bad Murray Rothbard died, because he’d be the man to call (read What Government Has Done to our Money).
I know a few things about banking. I left a top job (I had 140 professionals working for me, not counting programmers, and a budget in mid-nine-figures) in the industry at the peak of the bubble, because of “philosophical disagreements” with the management of Bank of America. In July 2007, a year before the Lehman crash, I went on CNBC and warned of a “trillion-dollar asset bubble” about to pop. I’ve been pretty up front in my criticism of the Fed and the banks. And I’ve written dozens of essays on the topic, all of which are still accessible at the “Complete Spengler” page at Asia TImes or the First Things web site.
Ron Paul is talking rubbish. The Fed and the banks were the enablers; the American people were the addicts. Who held a gun to their heads and told them to lever their homes to the max and use their home equity loan as an ATM? The banks are getting sued for accepting “liar’s loans,” but who did all the lying? Ranting and raving about evil Wall Street bankers is a stupid and destructive stance, because it takes the American public off the hook. If we want to compete with China, we had better be clear that we will no longer get paid just for being Americans! Asians are the majority of the students at our best graduate schools in quantitative fields. Is that the fault of the Fed or Wall Street? There are plenty of things wrong with Wall Street, and I’ve proposed some ways to fix things. But you need banks, because you need professionals who know how to evaluate risks and make loans. And you need global banks, because savings and investment need to be balanced globally. And you need the Fed, for a bunch of reasons. Ron Paul wants to wave a magic wand and make things go back to the way it all used to be. In short, he’s a romantic, reactionary throwback. The world’s changed. We have to compete globally. We have to defend ourselves from risks. To support Ron Paul is to say, in effect, that a few bad people far away are to blame for our troubles, and if we made them go away, the problems would go away. That’s worse than wrong: that’s immoral and self-serving fantasy.
What about agencies that knowingly overrated those bad loans which enabled the banks to package them and also knowingly sell bad product around the world? I guess that balanced things globally.
I’ve been screaming about the agencies for years. Everyone is terrified of going after them because they are the standard for risk measurement. There are alternatives, although the process would not be simple. See:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/MK08Dj05.html
Paul is a nut !
but the problem of the FED …banks etc is a symptom. the fact that we have become lazy and stopped thinking and learning and educating ourselves is what got us here.
we have abdicated our duties to the elitists ..we have stopped thinking for ourselves.
the true enablers are in the education system. if that is not fixed it is over.
“And you need global banks, because savings and investment need to be balanced globally.”
Why does a nation of 300 million people want even more globalization? Ron Paul would shut off hard competition and unnecessary immigration to just plain give the common American worker a break for once, get unemployment down to the low single digits, and then we can think about opening up again.
The churn of history simply demands an occasional reorganization to help the man on the street. A reform, not a revolution. A temporary suspension of The Elite Machine would just be a healthy bump in the road, much better than the crash we’re heading for. America needs Ron Paul now, probably just for 4 years, but that should do it. Romney simply wouldn’t repair all of Obama’s damage.
The American worker drew monopoly rents for years simply for being American, because America was the only secure venue for capital investment, and also for skilled immigrants. A smart Indian or Chinese who wanted to start a high-tech firm had to come here to do it in 1990–hence the tech boom of the 1990s. That was then. As I mentioned elsewhere, a physics professor at MIT informs me that his Chinese students are offered higher starting salaries back in China. America’s monopoly is finished: an American worker making low-value-added products is competing with a Chinese worker earning a tenth as much, with no health and retirement benefits. That also allowed American workers to stretch their paycheck buying cheap Chinese imports at Wal-Mart. You want to wall the country off, so the American worker continues to make a high wage? The price of a t-shirt would have to increase by five or ten times to pay that wage. If you work out the logic, the idea is completely insane. America needs to restore its pre-eminence in high-value-added manufacturing. That’s not easy: we don’t have the skills to do it, although we could get them. There’s an even bigger problem: Americans need to save more. If you save, you don’t consume. In a closed economy such as you propose, less consumer spending means higher unemployment. But you can export and save the proceeds, and have both high savings and high employment. If we wall the country off from the world, we collapse, more or less immediately. Once again: Ron Paul is a dangerous nutball who wants to roll the film back to 1958. That world is gone. We have to compete in the world that exists.
Mr. Goldman, I am fully aware of your deep knowledge of Wall Street. I read essentially everything you write–even the 30 years’ War columns (incidentally, your treatment of that subject in your book is truly a revelation).
This is a philosophical disagreement. I am persuaded that the Austrian position is the correct one, both morally and practically. I believe that banks are vital, indeed essential to a good society, but that fractional reserve banking is an unmitigated evil, because it’s based on fraud. I don’t just believe that, I think it as well, because it is logic that produces that conclusion.
The Fed is a banking cartel. A secretive cabal of impossibly huge private banks. It creates trillions of dollars with absolutely no authority higher than itself, and without disclosing its actions, but puts the general public on the hook for whatever results. In the century since it was created, the dollar has lost 98% of its value. By contrast, cumulative inflation in the century prior to that was essentially zero. Which is a better model?
God hates cheating monetary systems (Deut 25:13). Inflation is an evil. In a growing economy, prices naturally decline. This boon has been stolen from us, and the Federal Reserve system is the culprit.
You may assume that we can’t go back to a gold coin standard (honest money). You may consider it, what’s that word you keep using to describe Dr. Paul…ah, yes, “nutball.” Well I hold you in the highest esteem, and agree with you in most areas, and understand your entrenched prejudice here, but philosophically, you are wrong to defend the banking cartel that has destroyed the dollar. A paper dollar buried in 1815 and dug up in 1915 would buy more than it did when it was buried. A paper dollar buried in 1915 and dug up today wouldn’t buy a gum ball. Defend that.
Sure, real money, a gold coin standard with no fractional reserve lending, would mean much slower economic development than we’ve become used to. But the speed of change we accept as normative today is unhealthy in almost every aspect. We’d be better off, doing the morally correct thing. Maybe it would even trickle down to the family level; causing a human scale reassessment of what truly is valuable, and slowing every aspect of life down.
I think the CME’s refusal to keep its foundational promise in the MFGlobal bankruptcy is revelatory of the whole Fed/fractional reserve/fiat money fraud. When MFGlobal stole its client money, and declared bankruptcy, and the CME did not make the customers whole–indeed, laughed in their faces–the corruption that began in 1913 came to full fruition.
It it time that it ended. And Dr. Paul is the only one with the courage to try to end it.
Oops! I said a hundred year old dollar note wouldn’t buy a gum ball today. Obviously, gum balls cost less than a 2011 dollar. Bad way of expressing an important point. Sorry about that.
Suffice to say that no one should want to see the value of their money evaporate. And 98% in a hundred years should bring on cold sweats.
The CME failed? How so? They have likely interpreted the contract regarding (re)hypothecation correctly. If people want the security of a market basket of one or more commodities, they had better have physical possession, not just a note that might be encumbered by other obligations. Even gold denominated dollar bills can only work until they don’t. There’s no free lunch, and seldom a mechanism for people to operate (feasibly) outside of the larger system. One method used to stop runs in the early 20th century was to give people actual gold rather than paper upon withdrawal – to make the customer realize that physical possession poses dangers and risks of its own.
Goldman has it right – those who believed that the returns on homes and real-estate would beat conservative bank returns forever were speculators who were both aggressors and victims. We meet ourselves in this drama, a true Grecian tragedy – those things we do to ourselves, wittingly. The fact we demand our politicians remedy our suffering just prolongs it.
“The fact we demand our politicians remedy our suffering just prolongs it.”
That is true.
“One method used to stop runs in the early 20th century was to give people actual gold rather than paper upon withdrawal – to make the customer realize that physical possession poses dangers and risks of its own.”
That is gibberish.
Bank runs are the greatest thing in the world. What Europe needs, in fact, is lots and lots of bank runs. Just as do many municipalities in America. Interest is (theoretically) payed on loans with two things in mind: central bank inflation (the future value of the money) and risk (the possibility the borrower will default). If I’m going to lend money to some government, I’m going to calculate these things before I agree to a price. But in recent years, it seems, no one cares about that. Interest rates on government debt, generally, don’t seem to factor in the possibility of default, because everyone assumes that taxpayers will make stupid lenders whole.
A run on a bank is the recognition that an entity you trusted your money with is untrustworthy; everyone at once rushes to withdraw their funds. If the bank wasn’t actually lying, and has all the money on hand, there’s no problem. But if not, there is no better regulation than genuine bankruptcy. Everyone who loses their money because they let a crook hang on to it learns their lesson, and so do lots of outside observers. Bankruptcies of banks (and governments) teaches an invaluable lesson to the market.
People and entities who fund ridiculous government schemes need to lose their money, Risk needs to be a real factor once again in setting interest rates. This implicit guarantee that taxpayers will always make every lender whole is crazy.
As for the CME crime in progress, they claimed, for years, that any entity under their umbrella could go bankrupt and the customers of that entity need never fear, because the CME would make them whole. They boasted about how they always have made good on that promise and that’s why they could be trusted well into the future. Well, they lied.
Mr Goldman,
Civil war is not the second-best option. It is the only option, the whole middle east map was put together by the western powers -primarily England- to serve their economic interest i.e oil. Everyone in The ME hate each other since time immemorial. Putting together a country like Iraq with tree different group of people and expecting them to live together in harmony
was and still is a pipe-dream. Sooner rather than latter the current ME map will change regardless what America or the rest of the wold wants. The question is how? by a peaceful agreements like Czech and Slovakia or more like explosive Yugoslavia. Or even worst -WW3- if the western powers tries to interfere. Right now we are seeing the beginning of the incoming mayhem. Iraq’s car bombs, Assad’s crackdown in Syria or Egypt soo called Arab spring all those are the early sign of the future of The ME.
The best America can do is facilitate peaceful breakup, or stay out of the way and develop domestic energy resources.
Agreed.
I’m an advocate of our former very effective Soviet-era containmnet policy applied in principle against our Islamic enemy. The main obstacle to that nifty idea is the national reluctance to admit to ourselves that Islam is indeed our enemy. I’ve posted elsewhere that that lethargy is lethal, but you can’t tell the politicians that…those guys need the Muslim votes inside America….which actually is a Fifth Column…..but that’s another subject. The wide geographgic area is no excuse to evade containment. Anyone remember the size of the Soviet Empire?
Once we develop our energy reserves, frogs, fish and birds should be secondary, then these Arab and Persian worlds will be sweeping sand from thir unmaintained high rises and they’ll be racing camels again rather than Lamboghinis.
Yeah, a policy of containment is where we are going to end up by default. Probably with a religion cleansing population exchange.
I thought you were writing about our country when I read that headline.
Well,short of “total war” meaning killing all their men and taking all their women, you’re probably right. The “Greatest Generation” of baby killers and the culture that produced them is dying off, so that kind of nixes the going old testament Biblical or Roman or medieval Mongol solution. However, you might want to plan on a three hundred year “police action,” although there is a definite attention span deficit in the live in the here and now West that could be a problem. I would only point out that the history of successful police actions leaves much to be desired.
There are 300 years of oil left?
Seems like every ten years the proven oil reserves stay at 40 years at present consumption levels due to new discoveries. On the other hand, Muslims have been being Muslim for fourteen hundred years, and regardless of new developments in science, technology, and the interesting discoveries of other cultures and their art forms.
Ha,ha, there’s probably 3000 left at least.
Happy Holidays to the Politically Correct.
Happy Hanukkah to Mr. Goldman, his Family, Israel and Spengler’s Jewish readers.
Merry Christmas to Spengler’s Christian readers.
Excellent thread.
Disintegration.
Should have left Iraq in chaos years ago, after massively arming the Kurds. Would have had the entire Middle East including Turkey, Iran, and Saudi Arabia preoccupied with killing each other (and buying US weapons) for quite some time.
Exactly! Especially the “massively arming the Kurds” – the USA should have let them take that airfield outside of Kirkuk instead of the ‘proper handover to Iraq’, but, I digress.
I was just about ready to return to reading Christopher Clark’s “Iron Kingdom: the Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947″, but better to start at the beginning to re-read the 30 years war.
The world’s 60-year experiment with limited war and frozen conflicts has failed.
The final no-nuke battle between Shi’a and Sunni to again be on the plains of Karbala.
While the UN, and Ron Paul blame the “AIPAC/Zionist/Israel conspiracy”
Spengler:
You are right that we should be encouraging civil war in the Arab world. In fact, perpetual civil war.
If they are busy killing each other, they are then not focusing their fanatic hatred (or at least not most of it) on killing Jews.
As somebody once said about a potential war between Fatah and Hamas – let them fight a battle to the death that ends in a tie.
Perhaps reading about the East India Company and Cortes in Mexico would be helpful. Third parties are welcome in political chaos and that can benefit that Third Party. What is the difference between a stable OPEC and one that needs its sepoys and Tlascalans properly led?
“Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” Edmund Burke
Mankind is now evolving thousands of times faster culturally than genetically, and Cultures advance at glacial speed. To expect the backward Islamic cultures to make huge evolutionary leaps, without first taking all the little steps in between, is unreasonable. It was always going to have to be this way, now the Islamic cultures will learn the value of separation of Mosque and State, as the Moslem Brotherhood will fail as badly as the Theocracy in Iran at providing for the needs of its people.
Everyone now knows how the people of the western cultures live; they see it every day on TV, and they want it for themselves and their families. Everyone is now being steeped in the western cultural values of “The Right of Free Speech”, “The Right to Carry a Gun”, “The Right to a Jury of your Peers”, “Capitalism works better than Communism, or Socialism”, “Only Democracy can Confer Legitimacy on a Government”, etc… this should speed the evolution of the Islamic cultures, but they must still learn all the lessons in between, from where they are now, and the culturally superior west.
It’s hard to hide from a starving Egyptian the simple fact, that even the poor in America are FAT, I doubt they will be patient with the Moslem Brotherhood.
Anywhere Islam reigns, civil war IS the best option for all lovers of freedom. That is short of destroying that supreme evil first.
One can only hope that the US and Europe dont fund the smooth transition to Islamist rule via the IMF and World Bank.
Let them reap the benefits of the Islam that they voted for.
Dear Spengler,
“Grey Eminence” by Aldous is available on Kindle. Praise be to Amazon.
David,
I’m surprised that the AT Spengler columns on the 30 Years War are not popular. I learned a lot from “Europe’s Heart of Darkness, etc.” and thought they were some of your best stuff. I would be grateful if you’d provide some 30 Years War recommended reading (in addition to Grey Eminence and Wallenstein).
Thanks. The trouble with the standard histories is that they focus too narrowly on military and diplomatic events and ignore the religious dimension. You might look at the works I footnoted in my chapter on the 30 Years War in “How Civilizations Die.”
Wrong.
The war of Islam against the world is nothing like the Thirty Years’ War.
It is a millenial war, and counting. I expect it to go on until the end of time.
“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” Eph. 6:12
And that is why we blog.
There is a reason that certain kinds of wars last for Thirty Years (the Peloponnesian War, World War I/World War II). You kill off two generations–the fathers, and then their sons, when they are old enough to fight. The next generation is too small to continue the fighting.
I offer a dissent to this column on two points:
First, I don’t believe it was inevitable for Iraq to descend into chaos. The US goal was never for Iraq to become a Vermont style democracy. In fact, GEN Petraeus used to say that his goal was “Iraqacy”, not “democracy”. I think he was on the same wavelength as Sen. Lieberman, who used to say that the goal was a “Jordan (a moderate, pro-US Arab country) with oil wells”. A coalition of Kurds, pro-Allawi Sunnis and other “moderate” Shia of the sort currently grouped around Al-Maliki was possible. All sides would have had the shared goals of harvesting the oil revenue, avoiding civil war, enjoying a relatively moderate regime, and keeping out the Turks, KSA and Iranians. We never arrived at this result (and it may not now be possible) because Iraq was cursed with a source of massive and aggressive instability next door, the Islamic Republic of Iran. Both Bush and Obama failed to act in any decisive way against either Iranian agents in Iraq or directly against Iran. If we had, we would have removed this source of instability and created breathing from for “Iraqacy”.
I offer two real world proofs of this potential: 1. Al-Maliki’s aggressive and successful campaign by the (significantly Sunni and Kurd officered) Iraqi Army against pro-Iranian Shia militias in and around Basra in Spring 2008; and, 2. The enthusiasm expressed by the Iranian protesters for Ayatollah Sistani –style (rather than Khomeni-Khameni style) Islamic democracy in Iran and the reported participation of senior Sistani advisers in the 2009 Iran protests).
Second, our hands are not clean regarding recent events in Iraq in two particulars: 1. there are hundreds (probably thousands) of Iraqi leaders who, with great bravery, threw in their lot with us to build “Iraqacy”. They (naively) trusted us to maintain a significant presence in Iraq and, in some way, deal with the threat from Iran. We started betraying these folks in 2009 when the predominantly Shia (and reportedly Iran affiliated) Iraq Police began hauling off Suni leaders, starting with the Sons of Iraq, from the streets of Baghdad. Our mid-level military leaders on the ground were reduced to impotent spluttering; and, 2. There were hundreds of American soldiers killed and maimed in Iraq directly and indirectly by the government of Iran, partially the IRGC and Quds Force. That is a bill that is unpaid.
On a personal note, as anxious as individual US soldiers were to leave Iraq and are to leave Afghanistan, there is widespread feeling that accounts are unsettled with Iran. I know many veterans of Iraq who would “re-up” for a serious and decisive campaign with Iran.
Ron Radosh’s column elsewhere on PJM (http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2011/12/20/ron-pauls-dangerous-campaign/#comments) as well as the Hotair video of Paul from the 1990s (http://hotair.com/archives/2011/12/22/paul-in-1995-say-have-you-read-my-newsletters/) make it impossible to believe that Paul was unaware of the racist and anti-Semitic tripe offered in his newsletters, those newsletters which apparently earned a great deal of money for him.
He either is a racist and anti-Semite or an absolutely unprincipled money-grubber. In either case, he’s a coward for his denials.
It’s amazing that the Paul-bots are ready to anoint Paul as the second coming of Jefferson, but in most cases they won’t discuss what the newsletters say about Paul’s character. PJM should install some software to tag any pro-Paul comment which doesn’t discuss the newsletters with a danger-to-sanity warning label.
Jefferon’s character was completely in the toilet. He knew all the saintly ideas because he was a devil.
And sometimes the religious dimension of war is overrated. While the 30 Years War was started over religious tensions it is also true that many of the main players were little more than pirates.
In the case of Syria you say it is Muslim Brotherhood versus Alawite; but how can this be. People never fail to point out that Hamas is a wing of the MB. Hamas is headquartered in Damascus. Alawites may have power but they are a small percentage of the populace. Unless you think Aleppo and Damascus are populated by Alawites, there has to be a larger reason those cities have not become a Tahrir Square.
It seems to always be predicated that such conflicts mean Muslims want more Islam but how can that always be? It ignores the lack of freedom and economic opportunity in Syria in favor of a religious take. I think what is happening in the Middle East is a little simpler than it is portrayed. One cannot have large families in unproductive societies forever. There are consequences, especially when the elite is corrupt.
Land in Syria is not infinite and a larger population means less farmland and what is left is divided and divided again by inheritance. The differences between the revolution in Egypt and that in Syria are many but one crucial one is that the protesters in Syria armed themselves. There is a great debate within Syria as to the means of change or even if the gov’t should go as a corrupt gov’t is better than none. Assad is far from finished.
“In the case of Syria you say it is Muslim Brotherhood versus Alawite; but how can this be. People never fail to point out that Hamas is a wing of the MB. Hamas is headquartered in Damascus”.
The Hamas leadership seems to by bugging out of Damascus and heading for Gaza:
http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=442&PID=0&IID=10714&TTL=Hard_Choices_for_Hamas_with_the_Rise_of_the_Muslim_Brotherhood.
Hamas has not yet left Damascus and their leadership was in Cairo this past week discussing where to relocate to, possibly Cairo or Qatar. If Hamas was siding with the rebels in Syria they wouldn’t be casually pondering a move but be in prison or at least expelled.
People misunderstand the religious dimension of the 30 Years War. It was a Catholic/Protestant war inside the German Empire, but more broadly a Franco-Spanish War fought by religious fanatics (Richelieu and Olivares) each of whom believed he represented God’s chosen nation — closer to Hitler’s master race idea than, say, St. Dominic. Read my book. Or read Huxley’s “The Gray Eminence.”
The idea that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons as a defence is absurd. They have greatly weakened their defenses purely as a result of their nuclear program and aggressive stance.
Defend against what? Israel would love to go back to the days of the Shah. They could care less about Iran even without him if they were not blatantly announcing the apocolyptic agenda they intend to pursue. They have gutted their economy, political standing and conventional military to acquire weapons of mass destruction and have repeatedly announced the target and purpose.
I do not want to see American soldiers at risk. All Israel needs is political backing and the tools. The rest is up to them.
You are willfully blind: having a bomb gives Iran protection against the West. Iran has no interest in using a bomb in an offensive fashion. Who are the going to attack and why? Israel? Of what benefit would that be? You think Iran will bomb Israel over Sunnis in the West Bank and Gaza and risk the very existence of Iran?
Iran is a dying country. Its fertility rate has fallen from 7 to 1.5 in a single generation. It is running of out oil. In 25 years it will have the same proportion of elderly depends as the US with less than a tenth of the national income. Its leaders know they have a brief window with which to restore Shi’ite power after a thousand years of humiliation at the hands of the Sunnis, and they are looking at northern Saudi Arabia (which has most of the oil as well as a Sh’ia majority), Azerbaijan, and so forth. Their intent is to use terrorism, rocket attacks vs. Israel, and so forth, under a nuclear umbrella. If Hizbollah misbehaves too much, the Israelis can sent in the army and crush them (much easier with Syria in chaos) — not so easy if Iran has nuclear weapons and makes it a tripwire issue. Then there is the danger of nuclear terrorism. You’ll find it all in my book.
There is also the danger that, once Iran fields nuclear weapons, the various feuding, corrupt, fanatic and desperate elements of the political and security establishment might transfer a few of them to even less predictable and less deter-able parties.
There have been several suicide bombings in just the past few days. Ron Paul and his supporters need to explain (a) why a suicide bomber, willing to sacrifice his life for Allah and a ticket to Paradise, intent on taking as many people with him as possible, would not do so with a nuclear weapon if he could get his hands on one and (b) why they are so confident, as they apparently are, that the mullahs’ mentality differs from that of the Jihadist-on-the-street.
Consider also that, contrary to conventional wisdom, and as Mr. Goldman has pointed out, on numerous occasions, Israel’s population is increasing much faster than Iran’s and is an economic and technology powerhouse to boot. As time passes and Israel continues to get stronger, while Iran simultaneously gets weaker, the mullahs will either accept a permanently diminished status subordinate to the hated Jews; or decide that such status is unacceptable, that they have nothing to lose and launch their entire nuclear arsenal if we’re foolish enough to let them acquire one. How many innocent lives are Paul and his supporters willing to bet on the mullahs choosing the former?
If Der Fuehrer had had a nuclear weapon instead of a Luger in his bunker as the Russians entered Berlin and he knew the War was lost, can anyone seriously doubt that he would have used it?
I suspect the logic behind the Ron Paul supporters is that if Iran gets the bomb, they will use it on Israel and so the U.S. has nothing to worry about. But as Mr. Goldman points out, nothing is predictable. The Iranian regime may calculate differently that using the bomb on Israel will not be worth the response. A terrorist bomb with no return address exploding in an American, European or Saudi Arabian city might just be the wiser path for them.
Nukes have “return addresses”: their design, construction and source of fissionables results in a unique mix of isotopes after they go off.
“If Der Fuehrer had had a nuclear weapon instead of a Luger in his bunker as the Russians entered Berlin and he knew the War was lost, can anyone seriously doubt that he would have used it”?
That sums it up in very succinct fashion.
What he said.
Lina Inverse wrote: “Nukes have “return addresses”: their design, construction and source of fissionables results in a unique mix of isotopes after they go off”.
If Lina had access to highly classified techniques and procedures, then Lina could state with some certainty whether or not the US believes it has the capability to conduct such a forensic examination, how long it would take to conduct the examination, and how reliable the results might be (probable cause anyone?).
In any case, I’m not aware of any senior USG official stating on-the-record that we have such capability, even if folks speculate about it in the media and write about possibly related procedures in scientific journals. Even if such a program is in place, the ability to successfully conduct such a post-blast analysis and to provide results which could be the basis of action w/in a relatively short time (before events spin out of control)is unproven and a major crap shoot.
MarcH, above: “whether or not the US believes it has the capability to conduct such a forensic examination, how long it would take to conduct the examination, and how reliable the results might be”
Richard Rhodes, “Dark Sun”, p. 524, regarding the USA’s analysis of the first Soviet hydrogen bomb, aka “Joe 4″:
“I remember our being very intensely involved in trying to reconstruct Joe 4″, Carson Mark says, “to figure out what they had done on the basis of the debris evidence we had. That was quite an intensive effort …”
[By implication, the analysis took a minimum of several weeks, but the timeframe is never explicitly stated.]
“… [Hans] Bethe remembers the analysis revealing that Joe 4 “was compressed by high explosives. It was alternating layers of uranium and lithium deuteride, like our Alarm Clock design. All that we figured out just from seeing the debris. We also figured out from the debris that it was a single-stage device.”
One can conclude that the capability to do this sort of analysis existed in 1953. Presumably it still exists. Sixty years of technological progress has presumably improved the speed, sensitivity, and/or accuracy of this capability, but I don’t have an open-source citation.
PS: Thank you, Mr. Goldman, for sharing your insights with us.
Reply to Name (required) – The quotes you offer from the book “Dark Sun” seem to concern one of the first USSR nuclear explosions. Therefore the origin of the device was not in question. It seems the analysts were just trying to determine the design of that device.
If you can cite a USG official publically stating that we have the capability to RELIABLY determine the manufacturer of a nuclear device used in terrorist mode, especially if steps have been taken to conceal same, I’d be grateful to see it. I would think that USG would want to advertise such capability, if it existed, for its deterrent effect.
Neither Israel or a single country in the West is going to let Pakistan or Iran conduct terrorist operations under a threat of going postal with a nuke. Obviously other people have nukes too and with far better delivery systems as well as a certainty a Stuxnet won’t make a missile crash into Tehran. Even the Iranians don’t believe they can get away with nuke-protected aggression. They just want a big stick for just in case.
Iran has seen what happened to Saddam going into Kuwait and they know the same thing would happen to them in Bahrain, nuke or no nukes. And remember what U.S. naval vessels happily did to Iranian oil assets during the Iran-Iraq War.
I think we are forgetting what civil wars would mean: immigration is the only real weapon and threat Islam has against the West; civil war would accelerate this process and it is depraved as is. America self-censors itself over fears of a few million Muslims already.
Wow! Another outstanding thread. Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all. I am asking my private Santa Claus ambassador to ask Santa Claus to negotiate with Mr. Amazon to get me some Huxley in my digital stockings.
Peter Wilson’s award-winning recent book, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (2009) places the blame for the 30 Years War for the most part on the rapacious German Protestant Princes, their naïve followers and the French royal schemers who profited by it. Wilson writes:
“… it was not primarily a religious war. Religion certainly provided a powerful focus for identity, but it had to compete with political, social, linguistic, gender and other distinctions. Most contemporary observers [N.B., not later commentators or propagandists] spoke of imperial, Bavarian, Swedish or Bohemian troops, not Catholic or Protestant, which are anachronistic labels used for convenience since the 19th century to simplify accounts. The war was religious only to the extent that faith guided all early modern public policy and private behaviour. To understand the conflict’s true relationship to the disputes within Christianity, we need to distinguish between militant and moderate believers. All were religious and we should not see moderates as necessarily more rational, reasonable or secular. The difference lay not in their religious zeal, but in how they related faith and action” (p. 9 my emphasis throughout).
Spengler’s view that there are parallels between that European war and today’s Iranian-Arab Spring/Winter makes sense if we see the struggle as a complex one involving not just Islam, but all the smaller Islams, the religio-tribal groups, Christian minorities, collapsed governmental forces, left-over Pan-Arabists, Pan-Islamists, the variety of Sunni sects and even greater variety of Shia sects, etc., fighting each other for control over their patch or to extend control of their patch to another groups patch. It also fits with the larger demographic arguments that Spengler has been making for several years, since many of these small groups forbid extra-group marriage, leading to disastrous micro-demographics for these groups. For many observers from the West or the Far East, Islam seems like an extended solid with perhaps one or two articulations. In reality it is a complex mass of wriggling, unassimilated, competitive legions ready to go at each other when time and tide are right. Held in check by colonial institutions for centuries [first Turkish, then European], they can’t stop the disintegration at this point. We should only intervene in the case of Israel and for our own compelling national interest (and only in a limited way).
Now as for Ron Paul, read Dorothy Rabinowitz editorial at the WSJ. Most conservatives agree with the absolute necessity of fewer and more intelligent government agencies and programs, a thorough rethinking of how the U.S. manages monetary policy, and more care in foreign policy than under the Bushes or Obama-Clinton. But Ron Paul has an entirely perverse take on the facts of world history, in both recent events and the “deep past”. That’s why he can speak lies with a straight face (just a recent example from Jay Leno, “Michelle Bachmann hates muslims. She hates them!”) and probably a clear conscience. Paul’s newsletters track the depth of his lies over the decades (oh yes, his disavowal … liars tell more lies to cover up for their earlier lies, don’t they?). I quote Spengler again, “Once again: Ron Paul is a dangerous nutball …”
Merry Christmas!
I think it would be accurate to suggest that the comparison to The Thirty Years War and Arab Spring are each more lacking in a religious dimension than is thought. These Middle Eastern protesters are not happy, productive and employed people making a gratuitous middle-class decision like a more violent version of the Culture War in the U.S. – this is economic. The people see no access to living even part of the good life of the rich elite – good times for the rich are not trickling down.
If the people in Egypt voted for Muslim parties it is because they trust those parties and for them Mubarak’s dictatorship, not conspicuously religious, is not a paradigm to turn to but away from. That vote was not about Sharia but jobs and the Egyptians trust their own to do the right thing and their own are not secular businessmen living the high life but people they at least think put values before money.
The trouble is that the “religious dimension” is understood formally rather than existentially. Sunni and Sh’ia (and some of their various subdivisions) are willing to kill themselves and others in huge numbers because of an apocalyptic sense of social failure which is understood in religious terms. The proof of the “religious” character of the conflict is the unprecedented incidence of suicide attacks. People fighting for economic interests don’t typically blow themselves up.
I disagree David: I see it as the other way around and conspicuous radical, Islamic dogma that leads to suicidal fanaticism the exception to the rule otherwise hoards of Muslims would be throwing themselves at all sorts of things they’re angry about.
I think Islam is mostly just part of the scenery in the Middle East and in that sense is very conservative but each country is different in this respect. Shia are noted fanatics given the self-whippings of Muharram and their more mystical almost Sufi-like devotion to Islam compared to Sunnis. Only the most radical Sunnis indulge in violence and that is almost entirely inspired by Saudi Wahabbism.
Take away the Saudi hand and the Middle East is a calmer place. The worst fanatics in Egypt practice a version of Wahabbism brought back from the Gulf states by immigrant workers.
I don’t see the world the way you do. Most of what passes as study of religion and theology is misleading. People don’t kill themselves over doctrines, but over failed lives. That is why the existential approach to religion that begins with Kierkegaard is so essential to understanding strategy. Muslims don’t kill themselves to get 72 virgins in paradise, but because the life that informs their religion is failing and they feel that they have nothing to lose.
“We should only intervene in the case of Israel and for our own compelling national interest (and only in a limited way).”
Dont forget the MENA Christians.
Amen.
You’re right, of course. I didn’t mean to leave them out. And I should have wished for a continuing Hanukkah blessing for those celebrating it.
I think most Conservative Jews know that when a fellow American Christian wishes them a Merry Christmas, that it is a positive greeting and not meant to be exclusionary or hostile.
Shalom!
Paul is like the cartoonist Bill Griffith. He won’t give up his Dingburg:
http://www.zippythepinhead.com/
May they and their accursed societies stumble into this like a blind horse stumbles into a ditch. With enough murder and mayhem to hold the interest of the West.
Dr. Shalit
Hi Mr. Higher Game, (in response to Mr. X at #4 et al), greetings from Buenos Aires, where Iran’s proxy Hezbollah murdered over a hundred innocents in two terror attacks in 1993 and 1994, including the sister of a friend of mine. An Argentinian judge has had Interpol warrants issued for Iranian officials for this crime, its defense minister among them. Anyone stupid enough to be fooled by proxy attacks and go on parroting, like Ron Paul and Patrick Buchanan do, that ‘When was the last time Iran attacked another country?’ (even leaving out the murder of Americans in uniform by proxy by Iran in Lebanon, Iraq and other places), is a certifiable imbecile and I’m willing to provide them free of charge with an Argentinean leather certificate of imbecility to show off to their friends. And while I always refrain from using terms of abuse in forums, I’m using the word ‘imbecile’ here strictly as an objective description in its exact meaning in Latin of ‘unfit for war’. Iran has attacked many countries, many times, recently. And you can only claim the opposite at the cost of the complete loss of your own reputation as a thinking entity.
There is no need to shrink the English dictionary to make a point, a favorite tactic of liberals. There are military attacks and assassinations and terrorists. Do I need to point out they are not the same?
“Again, which is better for the United States: a stable Iranian ally, or perpetual civil war? ”
Easy answer: perpetual civil war. Why interrupt our political and religious enemies while they are destroying themselves? If they can find stability with one dollar or one American solider (NGOs volunteers and other mercenaries are free to work for pay), Insha Allah.
When asked about the Iran-Iraq war, Golda Meir responded “I wish them both success”.
Mr. Goldman;
Do you have links to your essays on the Thirty Year’s War or are they all in your book (“It’s Not the End of the World”)?
I have some essays on the Thirty Years War at the Complete Spengler page at Asia TImes Online, but the book contains material not previously published.
In the spring of 1914 if you had told a German, a Japanese, and a Russian what horrors their respective nations would endure and perpetrate in the next three decades they would have regarded you as a mad man and a fool. Americans because of the relatively benign and ever upward course of our history do not appreciate or anticipate the terrible depths events can take a people. I hope we are not on the approaching edge of another round of horrors.
I wrote “How Civilizations Die” to horrify readers and inoculate them against what is likely to come.
The entire point is that you couldn’t have possibly told anyone such a thing.
Hi David:
Below link the latest from the always insightful Kagans regarding Iraq.
“The reemergence of civil war in Iraq would be disastrous for the United States and its allies. It would be an enormous political and moral defeat for the United States and could rapidly expand to spark a regional conflict with the Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia confronting Iran and its proxies in Mesopotamia.”
Not mentioned, is it might so internally roil the region , totally bring Syria to civil war, and have the whole middle east so fighting each other as to leave outside concerns ignored. End the adventurism of Iran in Hamas and Hsb’allah and their Taliban support, as it focused on its immediate neighbors and regional defense, and end their nuke desires by military actions against them both from within and without thier borders.
Oil prices go through the roof, spurring a widespread political concensus to speed oil and gas production worldwide and especially in the USA which so eventually floods the market supply that prices in a decade plunge to the lowest historical levels ever and stay there, and forever remove any major stranglehold by middle eastern sources from the power they presently have.
So maybe we as the USA do a “Stalky & Co.” ( see Kipling) and let the bastards kill each other for another generation or two as they jihad against each other, let oil prices climb, the US stay out of the whole tar-baby, and we and the rest of the world comes out just fine eventually as a result.
Or not…
Aloha
Ed
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/iraq-lost_614757.html?nopager=1
“I haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate my kid brother.”
The Continental Op, in Dashiell Hammett’s “The Red Harvest.”
I never read “Stalky & Co”. Perhaps “My Boy Jack (http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_jack.htm)” is the Kipling work most on-point for predicting our future?
I expect the bad guys in “Stalky and Company didn’t have access to nuclear/bio weapons and suicide bombers, as well a penchant for exporting their problems to places where we have greater concerns. As the Middle East heats up, we may not have the luxury of sitting back and watching, “(N)ot with this wind blowing, and this tide”.
Grey Eminence, in e-book form, can be found here: http://www.unz.org/Publication/HuxleyAldous-1941?View=PDF
Mr Spengler: your book, “How Civilizations Die” is excellent, of course, and very helpful, too. I author a site about a small part of Argyll, http://www.knapdalepeople.com, and have mulling over a new section, on Argyll and Religion. At the centre of the story should be the Great Disruption of the mid 19th Century, when a very large part of the Church of Scotland broke away to form what is now popularly known as “The Wee Free.” The great wave of secularism and socialism has driven the Wee Free to the Hebrides, and the Church of Scotland is dying a quiet death (or so it seems to me).
Your diagnosis of the “death of Christianity” as its conflation with the self identification of being a “Chosen Nation” with a national “Church” is very interesting, as the National Covenant of 1638 was explicit on this point: that the people of Scotland would, by signing this covenant with God, would thereby be Chosen (as opposed to the godless but more powerful English). There is a lot missing from this analysis, of course, but it is a start.
And for anyone following this thread, I would urge you to purchase Spengler’s book, as it really defines Islam’s basis problem with modernity. And he draws our attention to that awful 30 Years’ War… a time so ugly that most people just don’t want to think about it. Perhaps the Enlightenment and Secularism was a reaction to that time…
The problem is, trying to follow the arguments through the mad thickets of Victorian sentences.
Heathermc,
Thanks for your encouragement and good luck with your website. The 1638 covenant is interesting; all of these case histories deserve serious attention.
Mr. Goldman,
If you can provide links to your essays on french intelligence gathering, I will be more than happy to read them all. I can think of at least one other person studying that period of history who would also be interested, I think.