Wednesday, October 26, 2011
RJC Refuses to be Silenced
Tunisia's New Leader is a Jihadist
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Obama's Arab Winter
Why Gaddafi Was Killed
Monday, October 24, 2011
The New, Nightmarish Contest
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
Diana West: "Horrific as it sounds, Qaddafi was killed
because we and our NATO allies joined the other side--
Related: Video Shows NATO-Backed Savage
Writing in Foreign Affairs in 1967, the preeminent American political scientist Hans J. Moregenthauanalyzed the international political situation as follows:
While contemporary interventions serving national power interests have sometimes been masked by the ideologies of communism and anticommunism, these ideologies have been an independent motivating force. This is the fourth factor which we must consider. The United States and the Soviet Union face each other not only as two great powers which in the traditional ways compete for advantage. They also face each other as the fountainheads of two hostile and incompatible ideologies, systems of government and ways of life, each trying to expand the reach of its respective political values and institutions and to prevent the expansion of the other. Thus the Cold War has not only been a conflict between two world powers but also a contest between two secular religions. And like the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the war between communism and democracy does not respect national boundaries. It finds enemies and allies in all countries, opposing the one and supporting the other regardless of the niceties of international law. Here is the dynamic force which has led the two superpowers to intervene all over the globe, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly, sometimes with the accepted methods of diplomatic pressure and propaganda, sometimes with the frowned-upon instruments of covert subversion and open force....
... We have come to overrate enormously what a nation can do for another nation by intervening in affairs--even with the latter's consent. This overestimation of our power to intervene is a corollary of our ideological commitment, which by its very nature has no limit. Committed to intervening against communist aggression and subversion anywhere, we have come to assume that we have the power to do so successfully. But in truth, both the need for intervention and the chances for successful intervention are much more limited than we have been led to believe. Intervene we must where our national interest requires it and where our power gives us a chance to succeed. The choice of these occasions will be determined not by sweeping ideological commitments nor by blind reliance upon American power but by a careful calculation of the interests involved and the power available. If the United States applies this standard, it will intervene less and succeed more.
Morgenthau was absolutely right. And this reporter (who, as an undergradute, had the privilege of having Morgenthau as a teacher) has no doubt that if the founding proponent of political realism--a truly towering intellectual who early on opposed the Vietnam War on national interest grounds, in sharp contrast with the Useful Idiots of Appeasement who actually praised and rooted for the totalitarian North Vietnamese regime--was alive today, he would raise his voice in opposition to America's irrational interventions in Iraq and Libya, imperialist foreign policy adventures (according to Morgenthau's non-Marxist, political realist definition of the term imperialist) that ironically have only served the interests of rightwing political Islam, a clerical fascist creed, which, like the defeated global Communist menace, "does not respect national boundaries" and "finds allies in all countries."
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