Category Archives: Foreign Policy

Senseless in Syria?

The tale of American hostage Kayla Mueller, who died recently while in the custody of ISIS, gets increasingly curious by the minute.

While a veteran intelligence reporter at CNN stated today that he very much doubted ISIS would have “given” Mueller to one of its fighters as some sort of a prize bride, this is indeed what “intelligence officials” are telling CNN.

Moreover, Ms. Mueller, it would appear, was not officially employed by any “serious organizations” such as “Doctors Without Borders” or the “Norwegian Refugee Council, UNHCR.” “Doctors Without Borders just doesn’t take anyone who turns up at the border. It’s a difficult thing to get a role like that,” explained Janine Di Giovanni, an award-winning, experienced correspondent.

During the Bosnian War, there were a lot of so-called freelance NGO people who showed up and wanted to help. Some of them did a lot of good. Some of them brought goods into the besieged cities, like Sarajevo and Mustar. And some of them, frankly, were nut jobs that were more hazardous on the ground than helpful.

Instead of hysterically romanticizing Ms. Mueller, as media have done (so far), Di Giovanni counters with a sober, sensible appraisal:

I thought she was incredibly young, incredibly naive, very inexperienced. I thought she was passionate and warm and well- meaning and well-intentioned. But to be honest, I left from meeting her incredibly worried. I thought, this is someone that’s going to get into trouble.

I’ve been working in war zones for more than 20 years and so my intuitions about when it’s right to cross into borders, when it’s not, are pretty well honed. That doesn’t prevent me from getting into trouble either. It’s just, I was very surprised at how naive she was, at how almost excited to be going into Syria.

I was with another colleague and she was with her Syrian friend, who’s also a friend of mine, an activist. And while it’s really touching to see people that are that devoted to a cause, as her mother said, peace and to try to bring peace to the world, I think it also has to be pointed out that war in places like Syria are not the place to go when you are very inexperienced, if you don’t have hostile environment training, if you’ve never been in war zones before.

Senseless in Syria? So it would appear.

UPDATED: Merkel’s Ironic Comment About European ‘Territorial Integrity’ (Ukraine)

EU, Europe, Federalism, Foreign Policy, Nationhood, The State

On the matter of the Ukraine crisis, and in particular, on whether to arm Ukraine, keeping in mind the dangers of “sparking a proxy war with Russia”—German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met with Barack Obama today, said something rather curious:

Merkel said that abandoning the principle of territorial integrity at the heart of the Ukraine crisis posed a threat to the “peaceful order of Europe”.
“For somebody who comes from Europe, I can only say, if we give up this principle of territorial integrity, we will not be able to maintain the peaceful order of Europe,” she said. “It’s essential.”

Territorial integrity is just about all that remains of European national sovereignty under the Bismarckian suprastate that is the EU.

In the quest to engineer a single European identity, Eurocrats have substituted the nation-state with deracinated, supranational institutions. “The EU already has rights to legislate over external trade and customs policy, the internal market, the monetary policy of countries in the eurozone, agriculture and fisheries and many areas of domestic law including the environment and health and safety at work.” And the EU intends to “extend its rights into … justice policy, especially asylum and immigration,” and harmonize judicial practices.

The rhetoric about the free flow of goods, labor, and capital across borders is as credible as the verbiage about union for peace. The EU has mandated strictly regulated markets, privileging labor interests over those of capital, and instituted oppressive socialist labor laws and “unfair-competition” regulations that have hiked labor costs and resulted in structural unemployment.

Take The Czech Republic. Joseph Sima, associate professor at the Prague School of Economics, described the fate of his country since joining the EU as having gone “From the Bosom of Communism to the Central Control of EU Planners”: There’s the added dead weight of thousands of meddling mandarins, there’s the imperative to change local laws to fit EU decrees; to hike taxes, even liquidate duty free shops. There’s the burden on nascent businesses of prohibitive health and safety standards. (The right to work is not an EU-approved birthright.) There are subsidies and grants of monopoly to farmers. A regime of licenses now restricts entrepreneurial activity and blocks entry into assorted occupations. On hand to subdue any Czechoslovakian Martha Stewart is an army of SEC gendarmes, also by EU edict. As he photocopies his paper, Sima is reminded of the Association of Authors’ special copyright shakedown fee he must shell out at the copier—EU orders! (Corporeal property rights are barely protected under EU reign.)

A process of centralization has seen the people of Europe come under the control of the institutions of the European Union. The European Commission now proposes more than half of any given country’s laws, explained a Euroskeptic on RT’s Crosstalk. Eighty seven percent of Germany’s laws are handed down by the EU and 50 percent of the UK’s laws.

Liberty, of course, is associated with a dispersion of political power, never its concentration and centralization.

MORE.

UPDATE: According to Justin Raimondo, @Antiwar.com, Kiev refuses to tolerate the,

describing the conflict as a civil war rather than a Russian “invasion.” This is a point the authorities cannot tolerate: the same meme being relentlessly broadcast by the Western media – that an indigenous rebellion with substantial support is really a Russian plot to “subvert” Ukraine and reestablish the Warsaw Pact – now has the force of law in Ukraine. Anyone who contradicts it is subject to arrest.

And even

a dissident within [the Brookings Institution], former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro, … argues that the Ukrainian conflict is a civil war that cannot have a military solution, and is more than likely to provoke a dangerous military confrontation with Russia …

… The US has no business interfering in Ukraine’s civil war, and no legitimate security interest in the question of who gets to administer Crimea – which has been Russian since the days of Catherine the Great. The idea that we are going to confront Russia over this issue is dangerous nonsense – and, unfortunately, it is just the sort of nonsense politicians of both parties find hard to resist.

There are even some ostensible “libertarians” who can’t resist the temptation to refight the cold war, notably the voluble and well-placed NATO-tarian faction of “Students for Liberty” (SFL), who denounced Ron Paul for his supposedly “pro-Putin” (i.e. anti-interventionist) statements on Ukraine. Ron is appearing at their upcoming “International Conference,” with several of the loudest NATO-tarians in attendance: one hopes he’ll give them a good talking to, although perhaps a spanking is more appropriate for these noisy brats. These juvenile blatherskites claim “Compelling arguments can be made for both advocates of globalist and noninterventionist foreign policy positions,” but aver that “Ron Paul has crossed the line.” It is they who have crossed the line: no libertarian is or can be an advocate of a “globalist” foreign policy – because conquering the globe is, you know, a statist thing.

MORE.

Why ISIS Exists Today

Bush, Foreign Policy, Iraq, Terrorism

“Why Isis Exists Today” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

For the neoconservatives, ground zero in the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) is the departure of the American occupying forces without a Status of Force Agreement (SOFA). At the behest of President Barack Obama, or so the allegation goes, the American military decamped, in December of 2011, without securing an SOFA. A residual American military force in Iraq was to be the thing that would have safeguarded the peace in Iraq. Broadcaster Mark Levin regularly rails about the SOFA amulet. Most Republicans lambaste Obama for failing to secure the elusive SOFA.

So high is Barack Obama’s cringe-factor that conservatives have been emboldened to dust-off an equally awful man and present him, his policies and his dynastic clan to the public for another round.

The man, President George W. Bush, did indeed sign a security pact with his satrap, Nuri al-Maliki, much to the dismay of very many Iraqis. Although the agreement was ratified behind the barricades of the Green Zone, journalist Muntadhar al-Zeidi “spoke” on behalf of his battered Iraqi brothers and sister: He lobbed a loafer at Bush shouting, “This is a farewell… you dog! This is for the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!”

Saddam Hussein—both dictator and peace maker—had no Status of Force Agreement with the U.S. He did, however, use plenty of force to successfully control his fractious country. Highly attuned to the slightest Islamist rumbling, Saddam squashed these ruthlessly. When the shah of Iran was overthrown by the Khomeini Islamist revolutionaries, the secular Saddam feared the fever of fanaticism would infect Iraq. He thus extinguished any sympathetic Shiite “political activism” and “guerrilla activity” by imprisoning, executing and driving rebels across the border, into Iran. It wasn’t due process, but it wasn’t ISIS. This “principle” was articulated charmingly and ever-so politely to emissaries of another empire, in 1878: “My people will not listen unless they are killed,” explained Zulu King Cetshwayo to the British imperial meddlers, who disapproved of Zulu justice. They nevertheless went ahead and destroyed the mighty Zulu kingdom in the Anglo-Zulu War (1879), exiling its proud king. …

… Read the rest. “Why Isis Exists Today” is the current column, now on WND.

The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability

Britain, Crime, Europe, Foreign Policy, Free Will Vs. Determinism, Islam, Jihad, Judaism & Jews, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Media

“The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

… Disaffected, disadvantaged, disenfranchised is how progressives prefer to depict the Muslim murderers in their midst. After all, progressives hail from the school of therapeutic “thought” that considers crime to have been caused, not committed. Misbehavior is either medicalized and outsourced to state-approved experts, or reduced to the fault of the amorphous thing called society.

The most famous advocate of the-Camel-Ate-My Homework theory of criminal culpability is Barack Obama. Obama’s flabby assumption has it that the poor barbarians of France’s burbs have been deprived of fraternité. “Europe needs to better integrate its Muslim communities,” lectured the president.

Also guilty of a social determinism that flouts their philosophy of individual freedom are libertarians. For the sins of man, hard leftists blame society and libertarian saddle the state: U.S. foreign policy, in particular. A war of aggression, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and torture are thus “principal catalysts for this kind of non-state terrorism,” argued Ray McGovern.

“The-state-made-me-do-it” argumentation apes that of the left’s “society-made-me-do-it” argumentation. Both philosophical factions, left and blowback-libertarian, are social determinists, in as much as they implicate forces outside the individual for individual dysfunction.

Myself, I despise U.S. foreign policy as deeply as any Muslim. But it would never-ever occur to me to take it out on my American countrymen.

In the context of free will, and in a week in which we remember the Holocaust, Viktor E. Frankl rates a mention.

Dr. Frankl came out of Auschwitz to found the Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy. The philosopher and distinguished psychiatrist said this of his experience in the industrial killing complex of Auschwitz-Birkenau: “In the camps one lost everything, except the last of the human freedoms, to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

To plagiarize another Jews (myself): “You can see why liberals have always preferred Freud to Frankl [my family included]. They retain a totemic attachment to the Freudian fiction that traumatic toilet training is destiny.”

Dr. Frankl lost his beloved young wife in Auschwitz, yet told poignantly of finding her, if figuratively, in a tiny bird that flitted close by. If this man was able to discovered the reality of free will and human agency in a laboratory like Auschwitz; so too can Muslims find the will to respond adaptively to events that enrage them and are indeed unjust: Western foreign policy.

The idea that the Brothers Kouachi and thousands of their coreligionists in the West who’ve joined ISIS were driven by “disaffection” to do their diabolic deeds conjures a skit from the “Life of Brian,” John Cleese’s parody of Judea under Rome. …

… The complete column is “The-Camel-Ate-My Homework Theory Of Culpability.” Read the rest on WND.