Category Archives: Foreign Policy

UPDATE II: Egypt In Economic Context (‘A Wave of Global Inflation’)

America, Economy, Foreign Aid, Foreign Policy, Inflation, Middle East, Neoconservatism, Republicans

Speaking of boobs (http://barelyablog.com/?p=33995), Dana Perino, the Heidi Klum of the commentariat, wishes Iraq on the Egyptians. Perino, who was once a spokesperson to Bush, a man who was barely able to speak, prattled to a reserved Megyn Kelly on Fox News about the upheaval in Egypt.

Mentioning her boss’ achievements in Iraq made Ms. Mindless glow with pride. She pointed out that the bliss in Baghdad was brought about in response to the democratic urges of the Iraqis—yes, this was murder with majority approval, an American majority (http://www.ilanamercer.com/phprunner/public_article_list_view.php?editid1=363.) Perino also implied that glorious Iraq is a product of a well-thought out philosophy.

Airheads aside, serious analysts—the kind who also live in the region or visit it on occasion—say Iraq “is looking a lot like Lebanon,” violent and balkanized beyond repair. Its few remaining Christians are being systematically exterminated.

Perino gave another shout-out of sorts to Iranian interests. Without being asked, she dredged up the Gaza-strip elections her boss had agitated for and got, back in the day. If you recall, those gave us Hamas.

Another day, another dullard.

Even John Bolton, who’ll take any position in opposition to Obama’s less bellicose foreign policy, seemed to agree with the restraint of the State Department’s response to the riots roiling Egypt.

Contrast Bolton’s unusual retrain with the American Enterprise Institute’s formulaic demand that “President Obama’s administration … assert the U.S. government’s role as the preeminent defender of freedom in the world. … Now is not the time for equivocation.”

Ditto the Weekly Standard. The folks there hanker after a time “when the Bush White House was feeling its oats with victories for the freedom agenda in Iraq and then Lebanon.”

That’s the neoconservative parallel universe for you.

In response to Bush pressure, “Mubarak pushed back with the 2005 parliamentary elections when he awarded the Muslim Brotherhood some 20 percent of the seats—if you want democracy, the Egyptian president seemed to be warning the White House, I’ll stick Osama bin Laden’s friends in parliament.”

Justin Raimondo, at Antiwar.com (for which I once wrote a bi-weekly column), puts “the revolutionary wave now sweeping the world” in the context of catastrophic economic policies and attendant realities. This wave will not spare the US, despite “the myth of ‘American exceptionalism,’ which supposedly anoints us with a special destiny and gives us the right to order the world according to our uniquely acquired position of preeminence.”

Coming to a neighborhood near you?

UPDATE I: You bet. In Egypt, “The government must approve the formation of political parties, effectively assuring its monopoly on political power.” (Via Infoplease.com ) More to the point: “the country’s inefficient state-run industries, its bloated public sector, and its large military investments resulted in inflation, unemployment, a severe trade deficit, and heavy public debt.”

State-caused poverty and the attendant lack of opportunities are likely the catalysts that have sent Egyptians into the streets.

The emphasis, in the US, exclusively on politics and on Egypt’s democracy deficit is myopic. Nevertheless, this focus allows DC’s chattering classes to forget that we too, albeit to a lesser extent, are over-leveraged. Our moocher and looter classes might also riot once they can no longer live out the life to which they are accustomed.

UPDATE II (Jan. 29): “A Wave of Global Inflation” is the tipping point for Egypt. Jerry Bowyer, author of “Free Market Capitalist’s Survival Guide,” agrees about the role of inflation and the attendant spike in the prices of basic necessities in the crisis in Egypt.

UPDATE III: Why Do WASP Societies Wither? South Africa As A Case Study

America, Foreign Policy, Israel, Multiculturalism, Nationhood, Political Correctness, South-Africa, The West

“Why Do WASP Societies Wither? South Africa As A Case Study” was the title of my address to the 3rd Annual Meeting of the HL Mencken Club, on October 23, 2010. It is now up on VDARE.COM. (http://www.vdare.com/mercer/110126_south_africa.htm) Here is an excerpt:

“… Often called ‘The White Tribe of Africa’, Afrikaners are perhaps the toughest tribe in Africa. They had a 350-year history on the Continent—as long as their American cousins have been in North America. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes character, dubbed the modern Boer ‘the most formidable antagonist who ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.’

So why is it that the Afrikaners, unlike their Israeli allies, failed to endure as a nation-state? Why did the modern Boer burn bright for a relatively short while, and then, despite superior military prowess, simply, as Hermann Giliomee put it in a 1997 journal article, ‘surrender without defeat’?

I earlier mentioned General Viljoen, the former Chief of the South African Defense Force. ‘You and I and our men can take this country in an afternoon’, Viljoen famously said to the Army Chief, General George Meiring, as President De Klerk was preparing to cave into ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities.

Why on earth did the formidable SADF capitulate to Mandela’s ragtag ANC? And the very same people, in the very same spirit, went on to dismantle the six nuclear devices they had built at Pelindaba, west of Pretoria.

Why did the Afrikaner give up his birthright for a mess of pottage?

Since it all makes so little sense, my conclusions are more philosophical than factual” …

The complete address, “Why Do WASP Societies Wither? South Africa As A Case Study,” is now on VDARE.COM.

UPDATE I (Jan. 27): To “Sioux”: This address is hardly about race. Only crazy, race-obsessed people would construe it thus.

UPDATE II: JIM was not man enough to post his comment to the blog, so I will do it for him. It’s the “nudge nudge, wink wink” “Jewy” angle I’ve come to expect:

“Why no mention of Slovo and his handiwork behind the scenes that led to the collapse of SA? LOL, no need to answer that one.”

Joe Slovo is mentioned in the actual book with derision. There are many other culprits one doesn’t mention in an address lasting half an hour, and no allotted Q & A time.

“The Characters” chosen for the address were ones that inspired me; the “Culprits” selected comport with an analysis that focused on major, international movers-and-shakers that brought South Africa to it political knees. This reader implies that because I’m Jewish, I chose not to focus my address on a relatively minor figure in the grand scheme of things.

UPDATE III: From my address: “… as President De Klerk was preparing to cave into ANC demands, forgoing all checks and balances for South Africa’s Boer, British and Zulu minorities … ” For the idiots and ignoramuses who are blinded by race and ignorant of the South African landscape: who do the “Freepers,” who removed this address from their generally tedious threads, think the aforementioned Zulus are? Whites? One of my heroes (“Characters”) in this address is the Zulu chief Dr. Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, a conservative gentleman who wanted—and deserved—self-determination for his people. He got the deracinated communists of the ANC to call his lords and masters!

A Paul-Bachmann 2012 Ticket

Elections, Federal Reserve Bank, Foreign Policy, Politics, Republicans, Ron Paul, War

HOW FAR WE’VE COME. On February 20, 2010, I blogged about the reaction of the CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) regimists to a straw poll that placed libertarian Ron Paul in the lead. (http://barelyablog.com/?p=21977.) Granted, out of 10,000 conference attendees, approximately 2500, very motivated Paulites had voted. Still, I expressed my hopes that this informal gauge of the state-of-the GOP was significant, and that, finally, “the bums and their statist sycophants” would be tossed out and replaced with strict Constitutionalists such as Peter Schiff and Rand Paul. “The small Beltway Politburo that runs CPAC” was certainly worried.

With a smart strategy, this scenario is not implausible. As abcNews reports (http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2011/01/romney-wins-new-hampshire-republican-party-committee-straw-poll.html), “In the first ever ‘straw poll’ of New Hampshire Republican party committee members sponsored by ABC News and WMUR and sanctioned by the state Republican party, ex-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney took 35 percent of the 276 valid ballots cast. This is just 3 percent more than Romney took in the 2008 GOP primary, when he finished in second place behind Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Coming in a distant second was Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, with 11 percent. Paul took 8 percent in the 2008 GOP primary.”

Ron Paul can pull this off. But he needs the punch and the pizzazz of a Michelle Bachmann as second-in-command. Bachmann is cerebral (a quality poor Palin is without). She’s also beautiful, eloquent and is seldom fazed. Moreover, Bachmann is not wedded to the warfare state. She has officiated on enough panels with Paul, and is wise enough, to recognize the value of bringing moderate liberals into the fold by denouncing America’s forays abroad.

Hey, what do you know? On 09.28.09, I had already proposed a Ron Paul and Michele Bachmann ticket. The occasion? An address by Paul, introduced by Bachmann, about “The Ben Bernanke.” By that time, Bachmann had already beefed-up her knowledge of the Fed and was familiar with Tom Woods’ Meltdown.

Reps. Paul and Bachmann can neuter Mitt Romney politically, but they must unite to do so.

UPDATE III: Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense (Hu Vs. Harry)

Barack Obama, China, Debt, Democracy, Foreign Policy, Inflation

Read these interviews on PBS NewsHour with some remarkably astute students of international politics in Beijing, and you’ll conclude that these young Chinese are as patriotic as Americans, and pretty brilliant in their own right: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june11/chinayouth_01-20.html. Says the one student: “Democracy is an absolute value in U.S., but it might be not that absolute in other countries.”

Then read my new WND.COM column, “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” (http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=253617) in which I conclude, among other things, that President Obama need not be bashed for holding a state dinner in honor of the Chinese President Hu Jintao. “Civility is not a weakness,” said John F. Kennedy in his Inaugural Address fifty years ago. Obama was civil, not weak.

Here’s an excerpt from “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense” :

“… It so happens that China’s current financial difficulties are a consequence of a self-defeating devotion to the US dollar. America’s monetary policy, aimed at devaluing the dollar, is hurting China, whose currency is pegged to ours. ‘In order to maintain the peg,” explains financier Peter Schiff, ‘China must continually buy dollars on the open market. But the weaker the dollar gets, the more dollars China must buy.'”

So as to keep purchasing greenbacks, China is inflating its own money supply. However, inflation in China and the attendant price hikes — brought about because of the debased dollar — could threaten the stability of a country that has ‘moved more people out of poverty in the shortest amount of time in the history of the planet.'”

Diplomat that he is, China’s head of state refrained from raising this indelicate matter. For that alone, President Hu Jintao deserves dinner.” …

The complete column is “Sinophobia Trumps Common Sense,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (Jan. 22): As an outsider in American society—at least this is the way I’m often treated—I’m more sensitive to the way my fellow Americans treat certain Others, other than browns and blacks. If you are a brown or a black, you have it made. Americans generally feel good about themselves when they patronize needy minorities, into which category the Chinese do not neatly fit.

Our one reader, below, emblematic of most, describes Hu Jintao as the same as our politicians. I see this blanket statement as American chauvinism: an inability to look at other peoples and cultures except through the American prism. It pisses me off as much as that big fat mama pissed me off at the gym, when she spoke slowly at me, as she informed me I had done too many sets on a weight-pushing apparatus. Why did she speak to me as one would to a retarded child? Because I spoke back in a different accent to hers. In other words, if one differs from an American, one might as well be from Deep Space.

Has anyone bothered to read a bit about Hu Jintao? You could indeed argue that he is every bit as bad as our lot; but you’d be wrong to ignore how different are his life experience, work background, and education.

Imagine an American politician that isn’t a slimy lawyer, but a hydraulic engineering from “humble origins,” who excelled at school in singing and dancing? Imagine an American politician whose father “was denounced during the Cultural Revolution?

Why not analyze what these differences portend?

Read about the man before you resort to pat pabulum. Among the Chinese I’ve talked to in the US (American citizens who’ve lived through turmoil back in China), Hu Jintao is viewed as a reformer, slowly shepherding a billion people toward peaceful progress as best possible. Chinese, who tend to be statist, seem to think of Hu Jintao as capitalistic.

As observed in “US In The Red And Getting Redder”: “The picture of China to emerge from behind those pretty Chinese screens is complex. The embodiment of feng shui it is not. The trend, however, is unmistakable: China is becoming freer, America less free. The devil is in this detail”:

China has undergone considerable economic restructuring and market reforms, the consequence of which is a 300 million strong Chinese middle class. Poverty levels have receded from “53 percent in 1981 to 8 percent in 2001. Only about a third of the economy is now directly state-controlled. As of 2005, 70 percent of China’s GDP was in the private sector.” The Chinese financial system is duly being liberalized—banking is diversifying and stock markets are developing. Protections for private property rights are being strengthened as well.

UPDATE II: LOOK WHO’S TALKING. Via LewRockwell.com:

“From TSA feel-ups to ubiquitous surveillance cameras, from email and phone eavesdropping to assassination squads, from torture to secret prisons, from a massive expansion in the police state to bigger government in general, from illegal searches and seizures to illegal wars, President Hu questioned the US human rights record.

Oh, wait a minute. It wasn’t that at all. It was this. (Thanks to Ravindran Kuppusamy.)

UPDATE from Daniel Mahaffey:

Hu didn’t mention the US government’s human rights abuses because either a) he is a gentleman who did not wish to insult his host, b) given his own government’s predilections, he doesn’t see the actions of the US government as abusive, or c) as he said in his prepared remarks, governments should not meddle in the affairs of other governments. I don’t tend to quote Christian scripture often, but among the things Jesus of Nazareth said were these two relevant instructions: 1) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. John 8:7, and 2) Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye. Matt 7:5. Perhaps Mr. Obama is unfamiliar with these concepts.

UPDATE III (Jan. 23): Today, The Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard raises the issue I raised here yesterday (see “UPDATE I”):

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Mr Hu a ‘dictator’. Is this a remotely apposite term for a self-effacing man of Confucian leanings, whose father was a victim of the Cultural Revolution, who fights a daily struggle against his own hotheads at home, and who will hand over power in an orderly transition next year?”