Afghan Taliban Gains — America needs to know that?

 
 

 
 

Thursday

 
 

April 29, 2010

 
 

 
 

 

 

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America needs to know

that the Taliban is gaining?

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In the Los Angeles Times today, the main article gravely informs us that the “sobering” new assessment from the Pentagon is that the Taliban and its insurgency are making inroads against the “Western-backed government” in Kabul of President Hamid Karzai.

 
 

 

So America should care about that? We really care about the irrelevance of Afghanistan to the War on Terror? Drawing upon the work of Angelo Codevilla (Advice to War Presidents), we now know that all the valor of our fighting men and women notwithstanding, Afghanistan has nothing to do with the War on Terror. Nothing. Afghanistan is fundamentally irrelevant to that war — the al Qaida training camps, yes, they are indeed relevant, but once the house-cleaning has been done and the rat’s nest purified, it’s time to get out and move on.

 

 

Putting a Western-style government in Kabul will not help make America safer — first, it’s a sham to think that Pashtun people would care about the European Age of Enlightenment principles of democracy, and second, the reality is we will get bogged-down in the idiocy of their local politics. The Taliban are not involved in terrorism – they are merely local thugs – it is actually the Arab regimes and their henchmen in Hamas, al Qaida, and in the mosques who are in truth the ones who propagate the fear and terror that led to the 9/11 attacks.

 

 
 

We are wasting American lives in Afghanistan, all to the purpose of a project that cannot work. What we should be doing in the War on Terror is undoing the Arab regimes that are most responsible for the propaganda behind the attacks: Saddam’s Iraq, Assad’s Syria, and the Palestinian Authority, a sham government if ever there was one. We must pull down the Baath party that we helped come to power in the 50s and 60s, and we must destroy those regimes utterly, while not permitting the U. S. Department of State to allow the upended elites in those countries to crawl back into the new power structure after the fall (one foreign service officer to another, eh?).

 
 

 

The idea that nation-building in Afghanistan is essential to the War on Terror has a very slight legitimacy to it that unfortunately blinds us to the overarching red-herring that nation-building there, and as a whole, is a crock: that is, the Democrats in D.C. want to appear as though they know what the real issues are in fighting terror, and that Bush was wrong about everything. But Bush got one thing right — he got rid of Saddam and his vile sons, and a good part of the Baath regime there. The CIA and DOS, however, undid a good part of that accomplishment by letting former Sunni elites back into the new scheme of things.

 
 

 

In sum, we need to be more accurate – if we are going to spend American lives abroad to make us all safer here stateside, then let’s do it in such a way as to yield real results. Let’s not engage in appearances for the sake of the next election cycle. Those Americans who stop the bullets to ensure freedom deserve a lot better than that.

 
 

 
 

 

 

 

 

New Poem

 

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Saturday 

 

April 24, 2010

 

New Poem

 

Depredations past and present

Stalk the path to peace –

Then these undone,

The pained heart will find

Its true release

 

 

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a poem

 
 

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Thursday

April 22, 2010

 
 

 
 

A Poem of the Sea

 
 

 
 

 
 

A foghorn sighs far out on the lonely sea –

A buoy anchored in the misty swell,

Forlorn and steadfast,

Answers with a jangle.

 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 

Poem

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Poem 

Wednesday

April 21, 2010

   
 

   
 

 

Lovebirds always fly towards

The nest of their beloved –

They like the tenderness

And the chirping there best.

 

   
 

   
 

   
 

   
 

   
 

   
 

   

Haiku 31 and Poem

 

 

 

HAIKU THIRTY-ONE AND POEM

 

April 15, 2010 

 

Haiku Thirty-One

 

Lovers need to be

Alone — they need to hear the

First secret once more

 

 

Poem

 

Spring flowers bloom on the hillside,

Just like the blossoms of love

I have for you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Review: “Intellectuals and Society” by Thomas Sowell

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Tuesday

April 13, 2010

     
 

 

     
 

Book Review:

       
 

Intellectuals and Society

by

Thomas Sowell

       
 

Published 2009

398 pages with references and index

Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow

of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

       
 

 

     
 

 

 

Intellectuals and Society

       
 

 

This magnificent book is the product
of a lifetime of learning, dedication to truth, and passion for rectitude. It is an absolutely devastating account of the political left, the intelligentsia, that is, and the Ivory Tower of self-congratulation in which it lives.

       
 

Sowell’s task in this book is to illustrate the ideological conflict of visions in our intellectual world and to demonstrate the deleterious effect that one side in that conflict renders to society. He names the two sides by their chief characteristic: the Left is governed by “the vision of the anointed,” and Conservatives by “the tragic vision.”

       
 

He posits that the Left cannot see antecedents, and practices a “one day at a time rationalism.” The problem here, for Sowell, is that the past is never a guide to the present, and consequently blindness rules the faculty of judgment. The result is quite destructive. An example in this is the attitude of Neville Chamberlain and other intellectuals in the 1930s (such as Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and more), about Hitler. War-weary Europe would not consider the possibility of seeing him as he was until it was too late.

       
 

The tragic vision, on the other hand, sees human nature as fallen fundamentally, and that we need to assume that fallenness in our judgments. The U.S. Constitution, for example, is well-informed by this attitude, and rightly so. The tragic vision might be called Hobbesian, in that Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, asserts that man will engage in “a war of all against all,” if not prevented. But the vision of the anointed would advance the proposition, with Leon Blum, that “disarming leads to a moral prestige which renders a nation invulnerable to attack.” This is, of course, crazy. The differences with the tragic vision are obvious. In reality, aggressor nations will have a field day with the pacifist intelligentsia, which will not change its opinion, even if experience counsels strongly so to do. The vision of the anointed amounts to an eschewal of the responsibilities of statesmanship.

     
 

For Sowell, intellectuals are people the ideas of whom are validated only by the approval of their peers, and not by empirical tests. The world “must present a tableau” matching the preconceptions of intellectuals, or else something is wrong with the world, in Sowell’s summation of their mistaken view. Their theories can’t be questioned, in other words. They represent axioms to be followed rather than hypotheses to test. Sowell convicts the Left here of malpractice.

     
 

Sowell has given us the definitive biography of leftist intellectuals and of the danger there is in their penchant to visions that have little or nothing to do with the exigencies of reality. In other words, one of the problems with leftist political philosophy is that it is based on axioms. The Believer then is under the impression that these axioms are infallible, and no matter how much the school of reality teaches differently, the Believer will not give up the axioms. Thus the damage of this political philosophy.

   
 

In the end, this valuable book will have stood the test of time, I’m sure, since the observations in it are appropriate as descriptions of even some of the ancient thinkers. When ideologues impose their theories on civilization, trouble is sure to ensue – they wish to obtain the glamorous cachet of fixing the world, but merely succeed in harming it.

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

     
 

       
 

       
 

     

The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, Ironically

 

Thursday

April 8, 2010

 

 

The Tragedy

of

American Diplomacy, Ironically

 

 
 

In the 1960s, William Appleman Williams published a misguided book called The Tragedy of American Diplomacy. In it, he excoriates America and asserts that we are simply on the wrong side of history. Henceforth, any pride in America, any defense of America or of her friends, is morally culpable in the extreme.

 

The real tragedy of the book, however, is that subsequently the American Left took it to heart as an iconic tome, and have used it as a prime authority ever since, as justification for their sad, dysfunctional anti-Americanism. In addition, that American Left has by now become the elite in America, housed comfortably with tenure in offices and bureaucracies in the media, in academe, in the judiciary, and now, finally, in the sciences.

 

That tragic book, in its own turn,
has remained the philosophical
underpinning of that elite’s worldview and wisdom on foreign affairs. Barack Obama is the current leading light thereof, with Jimmy Carter, Zibigniew Brzezinski, and Fareed Zakaria as some of the more revered background sources. But to put the real tragedy of American diplomacy in concrete terms, outside the pages of a silly, clueless book of axioms, we can discuss the New Start Agreement that was signed today by President Obama and by President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia.

 

This agreement will reduce nuclear arms
over the course of the next several years, leading Obama to declare, “This ceremony is a testament to the truth that old adversaries can forge new partnerships.” But nothing could be more disingenuous than that statement. Obama is actually sending Russia a message that America will not do anything to thwart Russia’s plans to bring back its former sphere of influence in the Old World. This agreement is an act of unequivocal, disgraceful capitulation to Vladimir Putin’s Soviet-style depredations in Georgia, in the Ukraine, in the Central Asian countries, and anywhere else he can manage.

 

Obama has already appeased Russia once before in scrapping plans for missile defense in Poland and in the Czech Republic (ironically, or maybe not, this is where today’s agreement was signed, rubbing salt in the wounds we inflicted on an admirable friend by making that friend the witness and host to the capitulation). To hail this agreement as something good is to purposely and shamelessly mislead the public. It is to live in a world of axioms tragically removed from reality, to the detriment of reality. The tragedy of American diplomacy is The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.

 

 

 

 

Haiku 30 and Poem

 
 

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Saturday

April 3, 2010

 
 

 
 

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Haiku 30 and Poem

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Haiku 30

 
 

Journey of the storm –

The wind and waves will have their

Salty attrition

 
 

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Poem

 

 

The remorseless minutes unresting –

Mischievous, convey you

they to the tomb,

Unobtrusive, comprehend you

Not their doom

 
 

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