“Surrender Is Not An Option”—Perhaps, Perhaps Not

By Prof Paul Eidelberg

When I started blogging about eight years ago one of the people I most learned from was Prof Paul Eidelberg. Over the years, I have read much of what he has written to my great benefit. I have also gotten to know him and we correspond often. Don’t miss this great article. Ted Belman

Two Munichs occurred in 2007: (1) the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate, and (2) the U.S-sponsored Annapolis Conference. The two Munichs may lead to a world war that destroys what is left of a decaying Western civilization.

The National Intelligence Estimate reported that Iran had stopped its nuclear-weapons development program in 2003. This gives Iran the green light to complete that program. A nuclear-armed Iran will control Saudi Arabia as well as pacifist Europe on which America’s economy and survival depend. Of course, a nuclear-armed Iran dooms Israel.

The Annapolis Conference buys time for the United States, while Israel retreats to its indefensible 1949 borders to accommodate the establishment of Palestinian state which, in a second stage orchestrated by Iran, will cover all of Palestine.

Pundits attribute the first mentioned Munich to a “shadow government” in the American State Department working in conjunction with dovish elements in American intelligence agencies. The same shadow government is committed to Israel extinction.

This marks a stunning victory of the godless Left and satanic Islam—allied in a war against the nation-state and the source of West civilization, the Bible of Israel.

The trans-nationalism that animates the American State Department is more dangerous than the trans-nationalism of Islam! Let us probe this department with the help of John Bolton, whose book, Surrender Is Not an Option, was published only a few months ago. By the way, President Bush’s appointment of Bolton to a full term as U.S ambassador to the UN was blocked by Senate Democrats because of Bolton’s reputation for “muscular diplomacy.”

Returning to America’s “shadow government”: it is simply the State Department’s permanent bureaucracy. It consists of highly educated Machiavellians who know how to manipulate secretaries of state as well as American ambassadors. These secretaries and ambassadors are political appointees. Generally speaking, they have little or no professional experience in foreign affairs. In theory, they are supposed to implement the president’s foreign policy. Yet State and the CIA blocked implementation of the Iraqi Liberation Act, which provided for drawing up a constitution for post-Saddam Iraq; developing an interim legal code; and training thousands of Iraqis for police functions. The president was not on top of events: State and the CIA thwarted his policies.

Condoleezza Rice, like her predecessor, Colin Powell, has been captured by the State Department’s permanent bureaucracy. This bureaucracy is dominated by liberal-leftists. Leftwing ideologues have dominated State for more than seventy years, and it requires a strong-willed and an intellectual fortified president to counter State’s leftist approach to foreign affairs. Such presidents are rare.

One consequence is that American ambassadors often succumb to what Bolton calls “clientitis.” They end up representing not American interests so much as the foreign policies of the countries to which they have been posted—with Israel a notable exception.

Moreover, the very training or experience of the permanent bureaucracy in the domain of diplomacy inclines them to overestimate the efficacy of negotiations when dealing with Arab dictatorships. (I have written extensively on this subject in my book Jewish Statesmanship, where I discuss the inability of democratic diplomacy to compete with martial diplomacy.)

Not only is the State Department dominated by liberal leftists, and not only do they tend to be internationalists or globalists, but they know how to forge links with their ideological counterparts in Congress, especially when Congress and its foreign relations committees are controlled by Democrats. When Congress is controlled by Republicans, or when the president is himself a Republican, State knows how to obstruct conservative or nationalist oriented foreign policies. President Bush simply failed to appoint competent, conservative secretaries of state to implement his foreign policy agenda. Let us probe even deeper.

Few countries are more anti-American than America’s own State Department! State has been anti-American for many decades. In my book Beyond Detente: Toward an American Foreign Policy, published in 1977, I pointed our that the State Department, which consists of the most highly educated civil servants in American government, has long been tainted by the university-bred doctrine of moral or cultural relativism. This doctrine denies the existence of good and evil. It undermines confidence in the justice of a nation’s cause. It erodes Americanism and patriotism. The anti-Americanism rampant among academics has become notorious.

In Surrender Is Not an Option, John Bolton emphasizes that relativism or “moral equivalency” permeates the State Department. The left-wing culture of moral equivalency has very much contributed to America’s fainthearted foreign policy; especially its anything but “even-handed diplomacy” in the Middle East, as witness Annapolis. Secretary Rice’s moral equivalency in dealings with Israel and the Palestinian Authority is nothing less than moral reversal.

Bolton—a man of superior intellectual and moral courage—may have chosen the title of his book, Surrender Is Not An Option, because he feared that America, like England and Europe, is in danger of surrendering its national sovereignty to Islam or to an Islamic-dominated United Nations.

Surrender seems to be the option of Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who confessed, before a New York audience, “We are tired of being courageous.” It seems that President Bush is also tired of being courageous.

The defeat of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the toppling of Saddam Hussein were not enough to sustain his post-9/11 momentum. What stopped him was not simply an underestimation of the military forces required to prevent or overcome the insurgency in Iraq. Such errors are made and overcome in many wars. More significant is Mr. Bush’s inability to define America’s enemy.

The enemy is not “terrorism,” a vacuous concept. The enemy is Islam, more specifically, Islamic imperialism, which dates back to Muhammad. But one cannot say such a thing in a liberal, pluralistic democracy, especially one whose intellectual elites are steeped in moral relativism, or in the multiculturalism that prompted the eminent American political scientist Samuel Huntington to write Who Are We? Mr. Bush can speak of an “Axis of Evil,” but he dares not attribute evil to any religion. That would be unadulterated racism!

And so, the day after 9/11 he called Islam a “religion of peace” and does so even now! Americans are given to believe that Islam was hijacked by “extremists.” Many experts foster intellectual dishonesty by defining the enemy as “Islamism” or “radical” Islam” or “Islamic fundamentalism.” Today, “IslamoFascists”—a more subtle piece of obscurantism”—has become au courant.

We are told of “Muslim moderates,” and we are happy to learn of these exceptional Muslims. But take a random sample of the thousand mosques in the United States to learn about these moderates. See whether these mosques denounce Islamic extremists and preach peace with “infidels” as readily as they preach hatred of America, Jews, and Christians.

How can American politicians criticize Islam without violating the law? How can they expose a religion whose devotees danced in the streets on 9/11 and admire Osama bin Laden? How can America confront a religion whose faithful slaughtered more that 200 million people since the seventh century? But this means that American liberalism has become obsolete vis-à-vis Islamic imperialism. It cannot muster the ruthlessness required to confront an enemy that exults is suicidal murder.

And so America, like Israel, is committing national suicide. National suicide is inevitable given the moral relativism American universities have been propagating for more than sixty years.

These universities provided the people that dominate the “shadow government” entrenched in the American State Department. Therein you will find the doctrine that led to the National Intelligence Estimate of 2007 and Annapolis. Therein you will find that surrender is no longer an option because it has already taken place—first in the minds of men.**

—————————————
*Edited transcript of the Eidelberg Report, Israel National Radio, December 31, 2007.

**For a happier conclusion, read my book A Jewish Philosophy of History. Order it online at Lightcatcherbooks.com. And to hasten that happier conclusion, support the Foundation for Constitutional Democracy—the pace setter on systematic in-depth analysis on Israel.

Here is the link to LISTEN NOW