The consequences of the Obama administration’s frivolous malevolence over foreign policy are now starting to become clear. The inevitable result of Obama’s decision to pull all troops out of Iraq has been to create a power vacuum – into which has stepped al Qaeda. Its operatives have surged into Anbar province, where so many American and Coalition soldiers gave their lives in an attempt to secure the peace.
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth and panicky promises by the US to send ‘support’ – whatever that might be in the absence of troops. The cause of the panic? That all those American and other coalition soldiers who died in Iraq will be soon seen to have died in vain, as America’s scuttling away from the battlefield turns fragile victory into baleful defeat and Iraq stares into the abyss of civil war.
A horribly similar débâcle is about to take place in Afghanistan, where the precipitate decision to withdraw Coalition troops, on top of a series of serious strategic errors in fighting the war there, will soon be seen to have delivered Afghanistan straight back to the Taleban. The outcome will be that these two regions, over which the west rightly went to war because they were viewed as a threat to be neutralised, will return once more to being a threat, if not an even more dangerous one than before.
Blame for this lethal shambles cannot altogether be laid at Obama’s door. He merely delivered the coup de grâce. The deeper reason is the current confusion and moral spinelessness of the west, both in failing to acknowledge the nature and extent of the threat to the free world and in failing also to have the bottle to see its defence through to the bitter end.
Both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were dogged throughout by poisonous western cultural self-loathing and defeatism – which turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy as the public refused to countenance the measures needed to win in either theatre of war, especially the commitment to stay engaged for as long as it took until victory was achieved.
On top of all that should be factored in the arrogance, hubris and rank incompetence of political leaders in the US and Britain in particular, from Bush and Blair to Obama and Cameron. They refused to acknowledge that what the west was facing was not a couple of isolated, terror-promoting regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan but the complex, many-headed hydra of Islamic religious war against the west. Utterly failing to understand the region and what they were dealing with, they came up with one cock-eyed idea and strategy after another.
The third element in this unholy trinity of foreign policy catastrophes in the Muslim world was the capitulation to Iran at Geneva, where the US, UK and EU agreed implicitly to allow Iran to continue to enrich uranium, as a result of which – even absent a final deal – the prospect of sanctions relief has caused Iran’s economy to boom. So relaxed has Iran now become, indeed, that a senior Iranian lawmaker has bragged that the country’s uranium enrichment programme could allow it to build a nuclear weapon ‘in two weeks’ in order to ‘put down Israel’.
Even the eye-popping fact that the terrorist and genocidal Iranian regime has now become America’s new best friend still didn’t lessen the astonishment at US Secretary of State John Kerry’s bizarre suggestion that Iran might play a role in the Syrian peace talks – which, since Iran is Assad’s patron and has fomented chaos and violence not just in Syria but in the region is, as has been said, tantamount to calling on an arsonist to put out a fire.
The other side of all this has been the Obama administration’s obsession with Israel, and its truly fatuous belief that a Palestine state is the key to defusing Muslim rage. Here on display is the same combination of hubris and abject ignorance in assuming that the US can broker a peace deal, when it refuses to acknowledge the true nature of the conflict and stupidly and arrogantly refracts the way the Palestinian Arabs think through the wholly inappropriate prism of western cultural assumptions.
Kerry says he is frustrated by the PLO’s refusal to accept Israel as a Jewish state. But to anyone who looks at the Palestinian Arabs or Middle East history without rose-tinted or hate-infused blinkers, this is hardly a surprise. The Palestinian Arabs brainwash their children into hating and murdering Jews and Israelis.
They glorify terrorists as heroes and martyrs – not least because, according to Mahmoud Abbas back in 2005, their atrocities were perpetrated on the orders of his Palestinian Authority.
They openly preside over terrorist atrocities themselves: one of Abbas’s policemen was amongst those arrested for the recent attempted bomb attack against an Israeli bus in Bat Yam.
And let’s not forget the ‘Palestine ambassador’ who blew himself up by accident in Prague a few days ago when he reportedly ‘opened a safe’ in his ‘embassy’ – following which the Czech police were even more astonished to discover there a store of enough weapons to arm ten people. Former Czech Chief of Staff Jiri Sedivy said he was afraid that
‘…apart from Prague, similar arms arsenals may also be secretly kept at other Palestinian embassies in Europe and overseas.’
Ya think?
Yet these are the people with whom Kerry is bullying Israel to negotiate away its existential safety and the security of its civilians. These are the people with whom Kerry is negotiating their reward for such unending bigotry and aggression in the offer of a state of their own.
Now the PLO has made clear yet again that this whole ‘peace process’ is a sick farce, since a state of Palestine would serve merely as a stage towards its goal of destroying Israel altogether.
‘In an interview on Syrian TV, senior Palestinian official Abbas Zaki said the PA will only agree to a treaty with Israel if the Palestinian state is established on the 1967 lines. However, he stressed that ’67 lines would only be the beginning. After that, the Palestinians will continue with the stages plan:
“Even the most extreme among us, Hamas, or the fighting forces, want a state within the ’67 borders. Afterward, we [will] have something to say, because the inspiring idea cannot be achieved all at once. [Rather] in stages.”
‘In an interview on Al-Jazeera TV in 2011, Zaki also mentioned this PA stages plan and referred to “the inspiring idea,” explaining that it means the end of Israel. He said that Mahmoud Abbas shares the goal of eliminating Israel in stages, but that the PA says it only wants a state along the 1967 borders because it is unacceptable politically to say you want to destroy Israel: “You can’t say it to the world. You can say it to yourself.”’
‘Zaki stressed that the goal is clear-cut because if Israel were to return to the 1967 lines, it certainly could not survive: “Israel will come to an end.”
Yet it is precisely these 1967 lines – known in Israel as the ‘Auschwitz borders’ – that Obama and Kerry are applying the thumbscrews upon Israel to accept.
Of course, all those who have bayed for years that the US was displaying its inherent colonialism and racism by intervening in Iraq and Afghanistan strangely raise no such objection to its grotesque interference with Israel’s defence against extermination.
But then, those people would also like nothing better, or at the very least would not be the slightest bit disturbed, if Israel were to disappear altogether. In this, there is no real moral difference between them and the fanatical jihadis of the Muslim and Arab world – to which the Obama administration appears intent on delivering the west on a platter.
Islam will either lose — their societies devolving into anarchy – by virtue of their inability to innovate or even to feed themselves (for example Egypt, which has no money even for wheat), or they will win by virtue of the fervor of their young men compared to ours. They are willing to die for the cause. Ours want to get stoned and laid. They are angrier, but less adept. In the end, it may well take a nuclear exchange…and it might not be so far into the future. We are watching the death throes of Islamic society — not the establishment of the glorious caliphate. The question is how do we not allow them to take us down with them. How do we not let the mask of our own virtue not defeat the need to become adequately ruthless?
@ CuriousAmerican:
Your comments are stark but true. For Israel and the west the choice is to fight brutally or eventually lose and die. So far the west and Israel are not yet prepared to fight properly and time is running out.
I think you are exaggerating the power of the Islamic countries? This is 2014 not the year 1000. All are dependent upon America to stay in power and who would willingly sell out their people to do so.
And why focus on Obama and Kerry? It was George Bush who started this. Isael did not ‘fled South Lebanon’. Israel excercised restraint. I think you need reminding Israel is the worlds fourth largest military. No country in the Middle East (mainly failed states) even if they combined their efforts could harm Israel.
Further thoughts.
Esau would be a wild man. Untameable.
Boy is that true!
Esau cannot be tamed.
Israel is – sadly to say – in a never ending war.
The West wants NO part of it.
Israel fled South Lebanon. Do not condemn us.
A lot of this is NOT malice but exhaustion.
It is not merely spinelessness in the West.
The West won the war in Afghanistan and Iraq in a few weeks, and then lost it.
The West is NOT prepared to wage a 100 year war in a part of the world where the enemy fight like suicide lunatics. Islam is a peculiar enemy. Nothing short of elimination by either genocide or total ethnic cleansing will stop it.
The British walked into Kabul in 1842 and thought they won. Then sniping started. On their retreat out, all but one man was skilled. 16,000 walked in. One walked out.
Russia retreated.
Unless you take every single Afghan male and kill them, they will kill you in time.
What was the West to do. Fight a hundred year war.
Do you think the 19th century British were undetermined?
Do you think the 20th century Russians were undetermined?
What was the West to do. Remain there forever?
I know this hurts Israel. And I am sorry about that.
But it is a hard sell to the West that the West must continue to remain in Afghanistan.
If you want to beat Islam … IT WILL REQUIRE A WORLD WAR.
A world are on classic lines.
Mobilization! Invasion. House to house fighting. Millions of dead. Land in Morocoo, march to Egypt.
Tens of thousands of dead – at least on the Western side.
Possible use of Nukes.
Suicide attacks in revenge all over the West.
Disruption of oil supplies.
Collapse of Western Economies.
Fighting in the streets of ethnic neighborhoods Paris, London, Berlin.
A possible – POSSIBLE?! – terror attack on a Western city. A million dead.
A world war on the order of the Second World War is required. This won’t go away. Has Israel’s victories ended the conflict?
The West is tired of fighting.
They just want it to end.
They want to leave.
Like the British quite Afghanistan eventually
Like the Russians did.
Lemme tell you a story. When I was a kid, I knew this man. An immigrant to the USA. He had served in the British Army in India in 1947 before England quit.
He said they were running supply trucks near the Hindu Kush, the Mountain Pass which separates India from the Muslim areas.
He said at one point the convoy stopped their trucks.
They opened their canvas tops and then left about one tenth of their good on the side of the road.
He asked what was going on.
One of the veterans told him to look up at the mountain tops. There were Afghan tribesmen everywhere.
He was told, they removed the canvas tops to show the Afghans what they had in their trucks. Then they left one tenth as tribute.
If they did not do this … they would not get through the Mountain pass alive.
The mountains of Afghanistan are so high that Soviet helicopters could not climb to the top where the air was thin. The Afghans would walk to the top of the mountains and shot down on the helicopters with impunity.
They stopped armored tank columns with landslides of rocks.
What is the West to do. Wage a World War?!
You may say we are already in it.
Maybe so!
But the West could retreat to a fortress Europe and America if they cut off immigration which they should do.
The West just wants it to end.