No surprise that the intel guys, like their political bosses, reassured themselves that Russia wouldn’t invade. Even though they made the same mistake just a few years ago when the morsel was Georgia. Indeed, that kind of error, revolving around the phrase “rational actor,” is the trademark of Western confusion about the world. They refuse to see that our enemies are waging war against us, thus refuse to think about winning that war, thus lose many battles, and happily retreat. After all, if our enemies are rational actors, what could go wrong? We could even slash and burn our own military. Not to worry.
It’s not as if we’re at war, after all.
And we’re not. Only our enemies are. It’s like target practice for them. Fortunately, they’re not very good at it, and so they miss a lot. When they win, they find ways to screw it up. They took over Egypt, remember? Then lost it in the “biggest demonstration in human history” (thus sayeth the BBC). They were on the verge of taking over Tunisia, but no more. They made a hash out of Ukraine and Venezuela, then lost the first and are facing the people’s wrath in the second. They keep trying to organize lethal rocket and missile attacks on Israel, only to get destroyed.
They are hard at work over here, too, trying to blow us up, but they’re dismissed, their plain meaning written off, just as the global war against us is written off. Did you notice that remarkable story out of Georgia Tech? An Iranian grad student was carted off to the hospital with severe burns over most of his body, apparently because he blew himself up with a Molotov cocktail. The usual keen-eyed anti-jihadi bloggers were all over it, and both local Fox and CBS reported the event (misidentifying the victim’s home country, but no matter), but as usual one would like to know more, and as usual one doesn’t. Perhaps this will be added to the list of mythological “home-grown terrorist events,” even though the guy got his undergraduate degree at Tehran University.
For those who actually want to see the world plain, the global network is luminously clear, from North Korea and China to Russia, Iran and Syria, to Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. Those are the nations aligned against us. They support a variety of terror groups, from al-Qaeda to Islamic Jihad to the various Latin American guerrillas, and they work in cahoots with the narcotics mafiosi.
There are two keystones in this global network: Iran and Venezuela, with Russia manipulating them both as best Putin can. If we see the world plain, the current revolutionary turmoil in Venezuela is enormously important, arguably the most important hot spot on earth today. For if the Castroite tyranny in Caracas were to fall, it would be a devastating blow to the Axis of Evil. The bad guys know it; that’s why, in addition to Cuban intel officers and special forces, Hezbollahis are moving from Damascus to Caracas. Khamenei knows there’s an intimate connection between what happens in Venezuela and what happens in Syria.
What to do? The savants, most of whom are pidgin Marxists, are talking about sanctions of various sorts. But the big weapons in this war are political, not economic. If we had the sort of government we need, we’d be supporting the democratic revolutionaries within our enemies’ home states. We’d be doing it openly and enthusiastically. We’d encourage Iranian, Venezuelan, Ukrainian and Russian democrats; we’d denounce the tyrants in Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, Havana, Damascus and Caracas. We’d be talking to the revolutionaries, asking them what they need, and then trying to get it for them.
The White House crowd and the president himself fancy themselves progressives, but they act like the worst sort of reactionary counter-revolutionaries. Many peoples around the world assumed they would be assisted by America if they fought their oppressors. Now they know otherwise. They’re on their own.
As I’ve asked many times, if Obama were determined to weaken America, to favor the cause of our enemies and put our friends and allies at maximum risk, how would those policies differ from the ones he has adopted?
Well? Maybe someone will ask Prime Minister Netanyahu, whose arrival in America today was greeted with an ultimatum from Obama: do what I say, turn over more land to the Palestinians, or we’ll abandon you to your enemies.
But the war is on. We’re the prime target. If we don’t defeat our enemies politically, we’ll end up on the battlefield. With the mutilated military Obama is creating.
There is one thing that might help. If senior military officers, who know full well what’s going on, were to resign on principle–“I’m not prepared to cooperate with this deliberate decimation of America’s military power”–it might have a real impact. Mattis should have done it, but in the end went fairly quietly. Gates didn’t resign on such grounds. But General Odierno, who commands the Army-about-to-get-smaller-than-it-was-before-WWII, could. And Dempsey could. And others.
Maybe some emails would encourage them…
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