Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Afghan GDP Equals US Military Spending There

Drug War, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Military, Neoconservatism, War, Welfare

Belatedly, and after spilling much blood and treasure for nothing at all in Afghanistan, mainstream opinion makers have concluded what we non-interventionists concluded a decade ago. Making Afghans (and Iraqis) wards of the American state will increase their impotence (to say nothing of violating their negative, leave-me-alone rights and ours, as we’ve paid for the adventure in lost lives and livelihoods). “Ultimately, philanthropic wars are transfer programs—the quintessential big-government projects.”

A “two-year congressional investigation from Senate Democrats” gives details of the defeat. Via the National Journal:

“World Bank data estimates that 97 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product comes from spending related to the military and donor community presence, according the report, which warns that a withdrawal could pull the rug out from under the Afghan economy.” …

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I suspect that slashing and burning the Afghans’ poppy fields hasn’t helped them either. “In a country with a poor infrastructure, the ‘relatively stable value of opium and its nonperishability means that it can also serve as an important source of savings and investment among traders and cultivators.'” (From “Tokers Are Terrorists Now”)

“Kosher Butchers”

Europe, Foreign Policy, Islam, Israel, Jihad, Nationhood, Propaganda, Pseudo-history, South-Africa, Terrorism, The West

The International Criminal Tribunal sure honored Slobodan Miloševic’s right to a speedy trial, didn’t it? The President of Serbia and Yugoslavia languished in jail for years during which he conducted his own defense. Eventually, Miloševic expired in his cell from a heart attack. A similar—if not worse—fate awaits Ratko Mladic. Once a Serbian general, Mladic is now an aging, ailing fugitive, whom the impartial western media describes as a “war criminal.”

Writes Julia Gorin: The crimes “Karadzic and the abducted-by-night Milosevic, not to mention all the lesser-known Serbs currently serving multi-decade terms” are guilty of: “daring to fight back when Muslims attacked. They are guilty of being Serbian officials during war. Of daring to answer war with war.”

[T]he Mladic arrest is meant to overshadow all the bad news coming from our Great Islamic Hope in Kosovo. As if Mladic did anything approaching the crimes that the ‘legitimate’ rulers of Kosovo committed against non-Albanians and Albanians alike — and by their own hand. As if 1500 Muslim soldiers — not “8000? — dying from a combination of combat, landmines, infighting and — yes — criminal execution of POWs compares to kidnapping and torturing civilians and selling their organs, to name just one slice of what these apparently more ‘kosher’ butchers are guilty of.

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It goes a little deeper than that. What western powers have done to Serbia and South Africa, and are in the process of doing to Israel, is not terribly mystifying. To “get it,” you need to grasp the left-liberal urge to deracinate historic communities, and strip flesh-and blood human beings of the fellow feelings all human beings harbor, but some are better at hiding: the affinity for one’s own kind.

kin, clan, Koran: This is what Muslims are fighting for in Afghanistan and Iraq. Driven by left-liberal urges, the US wants to replace their community with our kind of centralized bureaucracy. Muslims will never give up. I secretly admire them for that. But Western communities can be made to roll over with ease.

In my my new book, and in the 2010 address, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither?”—it borrows heavily from Into the Cannibal’s Pot—I give a good sense of the extent of the West’s culpability in the demise of one such western outpost.

The dynamics of Serbia’s demise are similar—at least from the vantage point of the scheming West.

Monarch Is Not Such A Mensch

Barack Obama, Britain, English, Etiquette, Foreign Policy

Conservatives all trashed the president for breaching etiquette with the Queen of England. In a painfully embarrassing moment, poor Barack Obama continued speaking and toasting the old girl as the British national anthem played. He was supposed to zip up his mouth. But when the poor guy turned to Elizabeth II and raised his glass, she glanced at him icily and averted her gaze. How ungracious! I’m all for etiquette. (And I’m all for the Queen.) But when manners come at the cost of kindness and hospitality—forget about it. Making your guest feel at home trumps standing on ceremony. The Queen ought to have broken protocol, smiled, and raised her glass to the glass of our poor oaf of a president. Had the old girl done that small thing she would have shown that she is a monarch and a mensch.

[The weekly, WND.COM column will be back next week. I’ve been under the weather.]

UPDATED: The American People’s House? (Telling Juxtaposition)

America, Constitution, Elections, Foreign Policy, Israel, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, libertarianism, Middle East, Nationhood

It was an abomination when Mexican President Felipe Calderon was allowed to address the Congress in May of 2010, and it is an abomination for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have been permitted to issue forth before a joint session of the American Congress. Calderon, you recall, was toiling tirelessly for the benefit of millions of Mexicans living in the US illegally. From the White House Rose Garden, and then again in an address to Congress, he chastised overrun Arizonans for “forcing our people to face discrimination.”

Netanyahu is not as bad as all that. And both these respective foreign leaders are patriots, looking out for their countrymen.

The American people’s representatives are the traitors here, for it is they who’ve permitted this reoccurring spectacle; it is they who’ve turned the American People’s House into a one-way exchange program for foreign dignitaries.

Whose House is it, anyway?

UPDATE (May 25): Bibi vs. “O’sissy,” via Pajama Media.

Bibi vs. "Osissy"

My Facebook comment in response to the predictable:

“Please quit the tinny robotic, liberal, moral equivalence about the mettle of men: Bibi vs. Obama; Bibi vs. socialist (alleged) rapist. The libertarian non-aggression axiom does not have to turn one into a sissy detached from reality. Or make one a moral relativist. The above image, via a facebook friend, says it all.”