Category Archives: Foreign Policy

UPDATED: Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim (Annals of Pillage In Afghanistan)

Feminism, Foreign Policy, Gender, Islam, Jihad, Middle East, Military, Multiculturalism

The following is an excerpt from my new column, “Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim,” in which I “hit both sides of aisle for reactions to Quran-burning incident”:

“Just the other day, America was debating whether it was OK for our soldiers to pee on people they had killed in Afghanistan. There was no quarrel over whether it was OK to kill the peed-upon, in the first place.

Building on the skewed, To-Pee-Or-Not-To-Pee diversion, the question du jour is whether the same soldiers should say sorry for incinerating Qurans on a bonfire in the Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul.

Built by Kellogg Brown & Root, which was ‘until recently a subsidiary of Halliburton,’ the Bagram Base ‘is located on a sere plain beneath snowcapped spurs of the Hindu Kush,’ writes author Cullen Murphy in ‘Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of Rome.’

‘In the Past, Bagram has yielded glassware and bronzes from as far away as imperial Rome.’ But,

Bagram today is an outpost of American, not Hellenic, civilization. … Bagram Air Base supports a population of more than 5000. The base perimeter, nine miles around, is ringed not with walls of stone or mud but with chain-link fencing and concertina wire and arrays of bright lights and electronic sensors.

With its rows of ‘prefabricated dwellings,’ stacked ‘shipping containers’ (‘giant bladders of water and fuel’), ‘American-style stores’ and hospitals; with, precincts packed with hundreds of contractors who cater to the troops, with checkpoints, multi-denominational chapels, which double-up as Vegas-style, quickie naturalization centers for Afghan recruits—Bagram embodies ‘imperial overstretch’: “The idea that one’s security needs, military obligations, and globalist desires increasingly outstrip resources available to satisfy them.’ (‘Are We Rome,’ p. 71.)

The dilemma over an apology is only the froth on the top. It is the elephantine character of the American entanglement in Afghanistan that underpins the fury. …”

The complete column is“Grunts, Get In Touch With Your Inner-Muslim.”

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UPDATED (March 5): Annals of pillage in Afghanistan, via RT, which is honest about Russia’s role in the destruction.

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?

BAB's A List, Europe, Foreign Policy, History, Islam, Jihad, The West

My good friend Nebojsa Malic has been the Balkans columnist for Antiwar.com since 2000, and blogs at grayfalcon.blogspot.com. I am always thrilled when Nebojsa finds the time to pen an exclusive editorial for Barely A Blog. (Click on “BAB’s A List” for Nebojsa’s articles archive.)

US Abroad: ‘White Knighting’ Or White-Hot Hatred?
BY NEBOJSA MALIC

In my Antiwar.com article last week, I mentioned the call to war in Syria sounded by WSJ contributor  Fouad Ajami in early February. According to Ajami, B. Hussein Obama should follow the example of his Democratic predecessor, who launched proxy and air wars to “save” the “Bosnians” and “Kosovars.”

The quotation marks are absolutely necessary here. Because all three factions that fought in Bosnia were actually native Bosnians, the Western media applied the name solely to the Bosnian Muslims, who in 1993 deliberately adopted the name “Bosniak” to stake a claim on the country. At least they use that name for themselves; denizens of the occupied Serbian province of Kosovo don’t even bother with “Kosovar” – a nice, sanitized name bestowed upon them by sympathetic NATO propaganda – and identify themselves simply as Albanian.

Last, but not least, neither were actually “saved” by Clinton. The Bosnian Muslims started a civil war after being given assurances of U.S. support, but in the end settled for an arrangement worse than the one they rejected at Washington’s urging. In Kosovo, Washington embraced a terrorist, drug-running, organ-harvesting cabal of Nazi sympathizers, responsible for killing many more fellow Albanians than the Serb “oppressors,” who used the NATO air war to purge all rivals and set up a mafia “state” thereafter. Both the Bosnian Muslim leadership and the “Kosovo Liberation Army” have shown the most callous disregard for the lives of their kin, so long as their deaths furthered the cause. Whatever was required to mobilize the world opinion, it was provided: fake death camps, fabricated stories of mass rapes, marketplace massacres or “genocides”.

Horrific as it was, such behavior at least had some degree of logic behind it. If you are a weak local actor, the best way to reach power is to get a strong outside power to fight and win your wars; fourth-generation warfare at its most effective. But what had possessed the American Empire to go along? Brendan O’Neill explained it as a quest for meaning following the Cold War: by “saving” the fictitious damsels in distress in Bosnia and Kosovo, the U.S. could present itself as the White Knight, thus earning the everlasting gratitude of Muslims worldwide.

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-KLA), a noted interventionist, validated this analysis in 2007, when he called on “jihadists of all color and hue” to take note of the U.S. creating another Islamic state in Europe. By that he meant Kosovo, Bosnia presumably being the first (though over half of its population is Christian). 

Trouble is, the expected gratitude of worldwide jihadists manifestly failed to materialize. Washington’s white-knighting in the Balkans was followed by 9/11. “Bosnians” mocked international humanitarian aid efforts with a kitschy monument to canned beef. Albanians may have erected a gilded statue of Bill Clinton, but what is one to make of a stream of Albanian jihadists since the “liberation”? Meanwhile, the “nation-building” programs in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a complete fiasco. U.S. activists may have helped steer the Egyptian “revolution” but now find themselves on trial.

None of this is going to make the slightest dent in Washington’s reality-distortion field, unfortunately. Odds are there will be an intervention of some kind in Syria, on the pretext of “saving lives”, but definitely with the expectation of Muslim gratitude.

Ajami and his fellow interventionists are missing a key difference between Clinton and Obama. While Clinton embarked on white-knighting wars to cover up scandals at home and would do anything to be loved, Obama is a paragon of virtue in comparison, and treats adulation as his due. Remember, he got a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up, and a statue in Indonesia just for being a schoolboy there once. In other words, he has no need to prove himself now – not with the Republican establishment candidates being so absolutely inept, that Obama’s second Imperial mandate is all but guaranteed.

Then again, Obama didn’t really care about Libya, either. The three Valkyries ran that operation. They may yet do the same in Syria, hoping perhaps for statues of their own – and gratitude that will never come.

UPDATE II: ‘Absolute Invulnerability for America Means Absolute Vulnerability For Others’

Foreign Policy, Homeland Security, Middle East, Propaganda, Republicans, Russia, Terrorism

Truth is truth no matter who propounds it (and why, pray tell, am I forced to repeat this no-brainer year-in and year-out?). The next statement is immutably true—even profound—although Americans will first look at the man who uttered it, and will denounce his wise words, given that he is not a member of the DC duopoly and the comitatus that props these Demopublicans up (i.e., the “the sprawling apparatus … that encompasses not only the emperor’s household and its personnel … but also the ministries of government, the lawyers, the diplomats, the adjutants, the messengers, the interpreters, the intellectuals”).

Via Eurasia Review:

“’The Americans are obsessed with the idea of ensuring their absolute invulnerability – a thing, I would point out, that is utopian and achievable neither from a technological nor a geopolitical standpoint.
And herein lies the problem. Absolute invulnerability for one means absolute vulnerability for all the others. It is impossible to agree with this perspective.’
Addressing the unrest in the Arab world, Putin said Russia would not permit a ‘Libyan scenario’ to take place in Syria, where he said Moscow wanted to see an immediate halt in violence and a national dialogue to resolve the crisis.
He defended the decision by Russia and China to veto a resolution earlier this month pushed by Washington and its European and Arab allies that Moscow said would have opened the door to foreign military intervention in Syria.
Russia in particular faced blistering criticism that ‘bordered on hysterical’ from Western countries for its decision, Putin said, adding that Moscow strongly hoped the United States and others would not resort to force in Syria without UN approval.
Referring more widely to the Arab Spring, Putin said that efforts backed by the United States and the West to bring about ‘democracy with the help of violent methods’ were unpredictable and often led to precisely the opposite result.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): Finally, China stands up to the ludicrous Hildebeest:

“The United States’ motive in parading as a ‘protector’ of the Arab peoples is not difficult to imagine,” it said in a commentary. “The problem is, what moral basis does it have for this patronising and egotistical super-arrogance and self-confidence?”
“Even now, violence continues unabated in Iraq and ordinary people enjoy no security. This alone is enough for us to draw a huge question mark over the sincerity and efficacy of US policy,” it added.

UPDATE II (March 4): “Putin [has] said the main problem is that the United States wants ‘to acquire complete invulnerability’ through missile defense. He also mentioned Washington’s refusal to provide written guarantees that the system will never be aimed at Russian territory.” [RT]

Save the People; Kill the European Superstate

Barack Obama, Debt, EU, Europe, Federalism, Foreign Policy, The State

The following excerpt is from this week’s column, “Save the People; Kill the European Superstate”:

“An honest man,” wrote Ayn Rand in “Atlas Shrugged,” “is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.” Where does this leave the Greeks?

For the second time since 2010, Eurozone finance ministers threw Greece a “financial lifeline,” this time to the tune of $172 billion. The European banks have agreed to write-off more than 50 percent of the money owed by Greece, forgiving a $100 billion in debt.

Still, Athens, like Washington, is corrupt to the core. It continues to spend more than it takes in. Greek labor markets have yet to be liberalized. A high minimum wage impedes hiring. And, by BBC News’s accounting, “a habit of paying a ‘holiday bonus’ equal to one or two months’ extra pay” persists. One need not be a Delphic oracle to divine the next stage in Greece’s unraveling: a downgrading of the country’s credit rating to junk status.

“Austerity,” however, is a euphemism among politicians and their media pack animals for “long term retrenchment and reform” in the public sector. Implicit in their critique of “austerity” is that inflicting pain on the Greek state apparatus will inevitably destroy Greek society.

Au Contraire. State and society should never be conflated.

Try explaining to our president that the bigger the state, the smaller the civil society. …

Read the complete column, “Save the People; Kill the European Superstate.”

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