- Reaction score
- 4,690
- Points
- 1,160
“Sleepwalking into a Nightmare” – great title! And, despite evidence of a seriously disjointed thought process (I hope they didn’t have to pay him too much – but he probably charges $50,000 per speech) he has some of the right answers.
His first mistake is in failing, utterly and miserably, to identify the enemy.
As much as almost every respectable politician in the West hates to admit it, Sam Huntington is right, although he made an unfortunate choice of words. It’s not a Clash of Civilizations, because, arguably, by any sensible standards, the enemy isn’t civilized. What is it? It’s a Clash of Cultures – all the higher mammals, even the rats, have some sore of culture. Huntington is right because his thesis explains what we see. No one likes it because it implies that we have to go to war with Islam. That’s not quite true. We have to go to war – no, we will be dragged into war with Afro-Arabian and Persian Islam. Now, that means a whole lot of it but we can, almost certainly, isolate and immunize the most populous and dynamic Islamic societies (in East Asia) and focus our attention (wrath) on the medieval, Afro-Arab/Persian branches.
His second failure is in suggesting that America has an important strategic interest in Israel’s survival. Lots of Americans (and Canadians), not just Jews by any means, have a very powerful moral interest in Israel’s survival and some of them have made Israel’s survival into an important political matter but, strategically Israel is not a big deal. There is an Islamic bomb, as Gingrich points out, already – it will fall into radical hands as soon as (not if) Pakistan falls into radical hands – Gingrich is right about ”Mushy”, too. Iran will have another soon enough, followed by heaven alone knows who else. Israel has a huge and growing strategic problem which, in my own (dark) view leads to only two options:
1. Israel falls to the Arabs – resulting another mass slaughter of the Jews; or
2. Israel strikes pre-emptively – resulting in a mass slaughter of the Arabs, which will be repaid, eventually, after they crawl out of the rubble.
He’s right that we have to fight and win a financial (oil revenue) war with the Arabs and Iranians. This war is between Barnett’s connected core – which needs lots and lots and then even more oil – and part of Barnett’s disconnected gap* which has too much of it. The problem is that oil is a fungible product. But, even so, we need to ensure that the core (including China and India) has (just) enough oil to meet its needs when (not if) the supplies from the Arabs are cut off – perhaps because the fields are burning away under a nuclear cloud. That means we need to get Russia’s considerable oil on line and into pipelines to China, Europe and India soon. We needn’t worry too much, I think, about Russia using our money to become powerful I have full confidence in Russian socio-political ineptitude and deeply rooted corruption to protect us for another generation, maybe, with a little bit of luck, even two.
We need to brace ourselves for a very long, very hard, very dirty war – one which we are culturally unprepared to wage.
One of the huge problems is that we may have to find ways to wage the war here, on our own soil, against our fellow-citizens. The Kadhr clan is only the tip of the iceberg, I think, and I have no idea how we differentiate between the hundreds of thousands of good, loyal, honest hard working people of Middle Eastern ethnicity/origin and the thousands (tens of thousands?) of enemy fifth columnists. But: we must meet and defeat the internal threats, too.
We want proxy combatants, if we can find them. I’m going back to what Thucydides calls the vulture strategy whereby we encourage civil wars and regional, internecine conflicts and the like. I understand his concern that, at the end, we have a smarter, tougher, braver enemy who hates us even more (survival of the fittest, and all that) but I think the risk is worth the effort if we can keep those internecine disputes running for a century or more.
Another front is financial. We have to disrupt the unregulated, nearly invisible system through which billions and billions of dollars from North America and Europe to heaven alone knows where.
Finally, there is a cultural front. We – liberals, democrats, intellectual and spiritual descendants of Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke, Mill and Berlin - must find ways to re-instil the ideals and ideas of liberalism into an intellectually overfed, complacent, lazy populace.
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* I disagree with Barnett’s map. I believe Russia is in the gap while Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam , Indonesia, the Pacific islands and even PNG have joined the core.
His first mistake is in failing, utterly and miserably, to identify the enemy.
As much as almost every respectable politician in the West hates to admit it, Sam Huntington is right, although he made an unfortunate choice of words. It’s not a Clash of Civilizations, because, arguably, by any sensible standards, the enemy isn’t civilized. What is it? It’s a Clash of Cultures – all the higher mammals, even the rats, have some sore of culture. Huntington is right because his thesis explains what we see. No one likes it because it implies that we have to go to war with Islam. That’s not quite true. We have to go to war – no, we will be dragged into war with Afro-Arabian and Persian Islam. Now, that means a whole lot of it but we can, almost certainly, isolate and immunize the most populous and dynamic Islamic societies (in East Asia) and focus our attention (wrath) on the medieval, Afro-Arab/Persian branches.
His second failure is in suggesting that America has an important strategic interest in Israel’s survival. Lots of Americans (and Canadians), not just Jews by any means, have a very powerful moral interest in Israel’s survival and some of them have made Israel’s survival into an important political matter but, strategically Israel is not a big deal. There is an Islamic bomb, as Gingrich points out, already – it will fall into radical hands as soon as (not if) Pakistan falls into radical hands – Gingrich is right about ”Mushy”, too. Iran will have another soon enough, followed by heaven alone knows who else. Israel has a huge and growing strategic problem which, in my own (dark) view leads to only two options:
1. Israel falls to the Arabs – resulting another mass slaughter of the Jews; or
2. Israel strikes pre-emptively – resulting in a mass slaughter of the Arabs, which will be repaid, eventually, after they crawl out of the rubble.
He’s right that we have to fight and win a financial (oil revenue) war with the Arabs and Iranians. This war is between Barnett’s connected core – which needs lots and lots and then even more oil – and part of Barnett’s disconnected gap* which has too much of it. The problem is that oil is a fungible product. But, even so, we need to ensure that the core (including China and India) has (just) enough oil to meet its needs when (not if) the supplies from the Arabs are cut off – perhaps because the fields are burning away under a nuclear cloud. That means we need to get Russia’s considerable oil on line and into pipelines to China, Europe and India soon. We needn’t worry too much, I think, about Russia using our money to become powerful I have full confidence in Russian socio-political ineptitude and deeply rooted corruption to protect us for another generation, maybe, with a little bit of luck, even two.
We need to brace ourselves for a very long, very hard, very dirty war – one which we are culturally unprepared to wage.
One of the huge problems is that we may have to find ways to wage the war here, on our own soil, against our fellow-citizens. The Kadhr clan is only the tip of the iceberg, I think, and I have no idea how we differentiate between the hundreds of thousands of good, loyal, honest hard working people of Middle Eastern ethnicity/origin and the thousands (tens of thousands?) of enemy fifth columnists. But: we must meet and defeat the internal threats, too.
We want proxy combatants, if we can find them. I’m going back to what Thucydides calls the vulture strategy whereby we encourage civil wars and regional, internecine conflicts and the like. I understand his concern that, at the end, we have a smarter, tougher, braver enemy who hates us even more (survival of the fittest, and all that) but I think the risk is worth the effort if we can keep those internecine disputes running for a century or more.
Another front is financial. We have to disrupt the unregulated, nearly invisible system through which billions and billions of dollars from North America and Europe to heaven alone knows where.
Finally, there is a cultural front. We – liberals, democrats, intellectual and spiritual descendants of Locke, Hume, Smith, Burke, Mill and Berlin - must find ways to re-instil the ideals and ideas of liberalism into an intellectually overfed, complacent, lazy populace.
----------
* I disagree with Barnett’s map. I believe Russia is in the gap while Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Vietnam , Indonesia, the Pacific islands and even PNG have joined the core.
