THE JOURNAL URGES US TO FIGHT ON BOTH SIDES IN SYRIA: BELLUM GRATIA BELLI?

9/17/14

In its lead editorial this (Wednesday, 9/17/14, page A14) morning, the Wall Street Journal urges the Obama Administration to lift the siege on Aleppo by bombing Syrian President Bashar Assad’s airfields.  This would put the United States, explicitly, on both sides of the Syrian conflict and clearly on one side of the larger Sunni/Shiite conflict in the Middle East.  Who but someone who urges us to fight a war for the sake of fighting a war would urge such an insane policy?

Even dedicated non-interventionists like yours truly can see some merit in a bombing campaign against ISIS, ISIL, the Islamic State, or whatever it is being called today, especially after this especially cold-blooded group of terrorists has beheaded two Americans and one Brit.   We don’t like our country putting its considerable proboscis where it doesn’t belong, but we also can’t see our country standing idly by while its citizens are tortured, killed, and otherwise abused.  

But I have also urged caution, reminding members of the War Party, and its most stentorian voice at the Wall Street Journal, that only a few months ago, they were urging the United States to bomb Syria in support of the Syrian rebels, the most salient group of which was, and is, ISIS.  (See, for example, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ON THE ISLAMIC STATE:  “I WAS FOR IT UNTIL I WAS AGAINST IT”?,  8/21/14, MORE ENLIGHTENED THINKING FROM WASHINGTON: LET’S FIGHT IN BOTH IRAQ AND SYRIA!, 6/25/14)  A military campaign against ISIS, however, would put us on the side of Mr. Assad, a guy that the Journal and its fellow neocons were urging us to oppose only a few months ago.   Fighting ISIS thus would have the implicit effect of our fighting on both sides of the Syrian Civil War.  Only the geniuses at the State Department and other bastions of deep thinking foreign policy formulation in Washington would put us on both sides of a war.

Now the Journal, by urging the Obama Administration to bomb Syrian airfields and take other steps to lift the siege of Aleppo, is advocating explicitly placing us on both sides of the Syrian Civil War, fighting both the Assad regime and its most powerful and visible opponent, ISIS.

The rationale the Journal provides for getting us on both sides of the Syrian conflict is that

Sunnis will not support the campaign against Islamic State if they think our air strikes are intended to help the regime in Damascus and its Shiite allies in Beirut and Tehran.

This might indeed be the case, though we could, by the intensity and targeting of our air campaign, show the world that our objective, and only objective, is to rid the world, to the extent we can, of a group of extremists who have committed what ought to be the worst of sins on the international stage, i.e., the cold-blooded killing of American citizens.  But I digress.

More to the point, though, is that while the Sunnis may misinterpret an effort solely directed against ISIS as our taking the sides of the Shiites in Syria and in the larger Middle East, what will be the reaction of the Shiites if they see us fighting explicitly on the side of the Sunnis in Syria?  Perhaps they will take solace in that we are supporting the Shiite dominated government in Iraq, but I wouldn’t bet on it.  

The larger point is that it’s easy to see how byzantine the politics of the Middle East are and the best policy is to stay as far away from such intrigue as we can, limiting our involvement to making it clear that killing and torturing American citizens will not go unanswered.

One suspects, though, that the neocons, their manifesto writers at the Wall Street Journal, and the rest of the War Party in Washington care little for either the complexities of the Middle East or the rationalizations they provide for military action there.  Their sole, or at least their paramount, goal in urging us to bomb both the Assad regime and the Islamic State that opposes it is to get us involved in a war, any war…doing so is good for the “defense” contractors who keep War Party members comfortably ensconced in their Washington, D.C. sinecures.  And what could be more important than that?

IRS SCRUTINY OF 501(C)(4) APPLICANTS: A PLAGUE ON BOTH THEIR HOUSES!

6/25/13

Congressional Democrats yesterday released IRS documents that purportedly show that the special scrutiny the agency gave to applicants for 501(c)(4) status was not limited to conservative groups.  (See my 5/13/13 piece THE IRS, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION, AND THE CONSERVATIVES:  LESSONS FROM WHAT SEEMS LIKE YESTERDAY for background on this issue.) While terms like “patriot” and “tea party” were used to flag applications for closer looks, so was the term “progressive.”  It was also learned that groups pushing for one side or the other (or the other or the other, one supposes, but I digress) in the various Middle Eastern conflicts were flagged along with people arguing on either side of the health insurance debate.    

Perhaps assuming that these documents are correct is an inadvisable leap of faith.   They were released in the heat, or at least the intense afterglow, of a bitter partisan battle by a side desperately trying to extinguish an issue that is potentially very damaging to its leader and leaders.  However, those who, like yours truly, have a healthy disdain for both sides of the political preening and primping that masquerades as governance today are as willing to believe one side in any partisan argument as we are to believe the other...not much at all.   But there is no more reason to believe that the documents showing scrutiny of liberal groups were somehow fabricated than there is to believe that documents showing excessive scrutiny of conservative groups were similarly fabricated.  So let’s assume both the new and the old evidence is correct and that the IRS was “targeting” both liberal and conservative groups and groups involved in Middle Eastern politics.   If this is true, I say “Good.”  If I were given to the bouts of emotion that would lead someone to say something like “Hooray,” I would probably say that as well.

Why am I so happy that the IRS was “targeting” for more intense examination liberal and conservative groups applying for 501(c)(4) status?   Applications for such status were pouring into the IRS like water over Niagara Falls.   When the government decides to dispense tax breaks for anything, even the most anti-government groups get in line and push as closely to the front as possible.   Given the deluge of 501(c)(4) applications, the IRS had to winnow down the workload; it had to act efficiently.  I, for one, applaud the efforts of any agency to act efficiently and save the taxpayers some money.   The IRS was simply trying to cull the phonies, or the leaches or the barnacles, in the most efficient way possible. 

Everyone would like to have the taxpayers (i.e., you and I) finance his or her efforts to advance his or her agenda, especially if he can make advancing his or her agenda and opinions a full-time job.   Fulminating beats working for a living, and if one can have the government finance such a sinecure, one has found the career equivalent of valhalla.

There is, however, a larger point here.  As I said in my aforementioned 5/13/13 post,

The IRS doesn’t make the tax laws; the people we elect make the tax laws.  The IRS simply enforces the tax laws and is usually not as unreasonable and unyielding as some would have you believe, but that is grist for another mill.

The best solution to the problem with 501(c)(4) organizations is not to have an  under-resourced and overworked agency find clever ways to work through the pile of applications more efficiently and to winnow out the frauds who are only looking for a subsidy for doing what concerned citizens in a self-governing republic ought to do as part of their civic duty, i.e., advocate for clauses.  The best solution would be to eliminate the 501(c)(4) designation altogether.  Why in the world should one be entitled to a tax exemption if one is conducting an enterprise that is in the business of pushing political positions?   If I want to make my living advocating for causes, that’s my business.   But I am not entitled to have you as a taxpayer subsidize, though the tax code, the organization I have set up to engage in my advocacy.

Like many of my proposals, the elimination of 501(c)(4)s will probably never be achieved.  Our esteemed public servants in Congress and in the White House derive too much benefit from such organizations that serve an ancillary, or perhaps not so ancillary, purpose of keeping these poltroons in office.  Why would Congress eliminate an indirect subsidy to the lifelong larks they call careers, especially when beating up on those who administer the program can provide further avenues for fun, profit, and posturing for the popinjays in Washington?  

To ask Congress to eliminate 501(c)(4)s is nearly as quixotic as asking it to impose term limits.   But that doesn’t make the elimination of 501(c)(4)s and the imposition of term limits bad ideas.

SYRIA: HOW LONG BEFORE WE’RE CALLING OUR STOOGES “BRUTAL DICTATORS”?

6/15/15

British Prime Minister David Cameron, a normally sensible fellow, in attempting to justify western aid to the group of thugs he favors in Syria in their fight against the group of thugs he doesn’t favor, argued yesterday that Syrian President Bashar Assad is

“…a brutal dictator who is using chemical weapons under our nose.”

Mr. Cameron, his French counterpart, and, presumably, our formerly cautious President Barack Obama prefer General Salim Idris, the latest third world fraud parading around calling himself a “moderate” in order to access western cash and a place to defect to if things don’t go his way.

Let’s assume for a moment that General Idris wins this conflict with generous help, including who knows what at this stage, from the west and becomes the latest western stooge to occupy the seat of power in a Middle Eastern ethnic jigsaw puzzle of a “country.”  Should that be the outcome in Syria, one wonders how long it will take Messrs. Cameron, Obama, Hollande and others who are seemingly so anxious to create another dystopic terrorist breeding ground in Syria to call General Idris

“…a brutal dictator who is using chemical weapons under our nose.”

As I have said on numerous occasions in the past (Only my latest post on Syria is 5/29/13’s RUSSIAN ARMS TO SYRIA:   THANK YOU, COMRADE?; please read it and the posts to which it will direct you.), we have no friends in Syria and there are no moderates, whatever that means, in Syria.   We are left with a choice between the devil we know and the devil we don’t.   We do, however, have a promising course of action, to wit, stay the hell out and tell the winner we are willing to do business with him to the extent it is in our interest to do so.  Mr. Obama, though, has just announced his intention to back, with American arms, trainers, and air cover (but only for a “no fly zone” over the areas in Jordan in which we will “train” the Al Qaeda members and wannabes we will be backing), the devil we don’t.  Despite his rhetoric to the contrary, Mr. Obama apparently shares the George Bush view that we indeed can and should save the world and make it over in our image.  Terrific.

We never do learn anything in this country, do we?

SYRIA: GROUNDHOG DAY FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

4/11/13

The Obama Administration, after doing a passingly decent job of keeping us out of yet another war in which we don’t belong, is succumbing to domestic and international pressure by moving toward authorizing our further involvement in the Syrian civil war by providing body armor and night vision goggles for the rebel groups in that troubled “nation.”

Why in the world should we be doing anything to help the “opposition” in Syria?   We know that the core of the opposition, certainly on the ground, is composed of people who are al-Qaeda affiliates or wannabes.   They wish us no good whatsoever.   Maybe even more importantly, toppling of the Assad dynasty, out of a misplaced, unquestioning enthusiasm for what the knee jerkers call “democracy” (perhaps not realizing that what we have in this country is, thank God, not democracy but representative government in the form of a democratic republic.   There is more than semantics involved here.   And there is also the question, given the American tendency to squander our time, and prominent slots in the news, on celebrity gossip and other such cotton candy for the mind, of whether even we here in America are ready for representative government, but I digress.  At least I do so parenthetically.) will not lead to some Valhalla of self-determination but, rather, to chaos.  

Look at Egypt and Libya, where western do-gooders decided that we no longer wanted those very bad men Mubarak and Qadafi.  Egypt is on the verge of, and Libya is thoroughly immersed in, complete chaos, with Colonel Qadafi’s former caches of arms feeding the growing flames to Libya’s south and roving, free lance gangs of armed men having their way with the populace and with, lest we forget, foreign consulates.   Even Tunisia, where the numb-skulled panters for “democracy” first had their way by cheering, and then engineering, the overthrow of Zine Ben Ali, things are spinning out of control, with assassination replacing the ballot as a means of transferring power.   Perhaps a less obvious example (And you heard it here first, folks.), is Myanmar, where the military regime is loosening things up in response to western pressure for “democracy”…and where, suddenly, after years of admittedly uneasy yet peaceful coexistence, the Muslims and Buddhists are fighting pitched battles in the streets and burning each other’s schools and places of worship.   Progress indeed.

No one is arguing that the Assads, Mubarak, Qadafi, Ben Ali, or the Myanmarese (?) generals are/were nice people.  They are/were brutal and repressive.   But now we are seeing why, to some extent, they have/had to be.   They are/were in charge of countries whose borders were drawn to suit Western imperial designs, not to account for the ethnic and religious divergences among their populations.  These countries were designed to fail, albeit perhaps inadvertently, by placing ethnic and religious groups whose most salient trait was their hatred for their neighbors, in the same country.   One can’t keep order in such a boiling, dyspeptic stew of toxins by being a nice guy who adheres to democratic principles and respects the Jeffersonian rights of everyone regardless of literacy, education, etc.   And so these countries were ruled by authoritarians who exercised their despotism in varying degrees according to their predispositions and the conditions over which they had charge.   Nice people?   No.  Necessary people?   Probably.

When these types of leaders are overthrown, the result is not the kind of democracy exercised in the debate clubs of the Ivy League and the discussion desks at CNN; the result is a dystopic hell.   The consequences are horrific for the region, the world, and especially for our ally Israel, which now finds itself, courtesy of the “democratic” impulses of its western friends, on the border of two failed states in which “democracy” translates into hatred of Israel and its very existence.

Yet the European powers charge ahead, seeking the overthrow of the Assad dynasty and pressuring us to join them in creating the conditions for dystopia.   And Mr. Obama goes along with the Europeans and with the members of the War Party in this country, led by Senator John “I’ve Never Seen a War I Didn’t Want Us (Meaning you) to Participate In” McCain and his mini-me from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, who would have us, at a minimum, bombing Syrian airfield and positioning more Patriot missiles in Turkey’s south to enforce a no-fly zone in northern Syria.

At best this is a case of Americans’ and other Westerners’ never learning from their mistakes and their hubris due to their being overly enamored with a concept, democracy, with which they are at best passingly familiar and which they assume requires no preconditions.

At worst, and I used to think that this was too cynical a view, something more sinister is at work here.   Perhaps the bipartisan War Party’s entire aim is to foment chaos throughout the Middle East and beyond.   This would create more opportunities for deploying U.S. troops in pointless conflicts…and rewarding the arms merchants who finance the endless exercises is self-aggrandizement these patheticos call careers.