Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel. Show all posts
Friday, February 13, 2015
The French and Their Guests
The American conservatives are delighted with the French Prime Minister's recent "defiant" and "forceful" speech on defending French Jews and defeating anti-Semitism. But, what's wonderful or forceful about this evasive address? He's using the term "anti-Semitism" as a euphemism for "Muslim." Euphemizing the problem is the opposite of being forceful. This is more politically correct garbage from another garbage dealer, one who refuses to recognize the threats posted by both Muslims and Jews. His claim that without the Jews there is no France is absurd--France built itself into the most powerful and culturally accomplished nation in the world during its Jewless era. England followed an identical course. For realists, the question is whether the talents the Jews afford their hosts compensates for the socio-political debasement they inflict. In Israel, this dilemma magically resolves itself. (Could it be the Tribe instinctively undermines the Other, but not itself?)
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Monday, September 1, 2014
Contra the Israel Lobby
I do not understand the need to idealize Israel: we can favor them over their barbaric enemies without idealizing them. The American-Israeli relationship has benefited the Israelis enormously, Americans not at all. There is no such thing as what this fellow terms an "unconditional ally," and Israel is the last country that would subscribe to such a sentimental notion. They are the most Machiavellian of nations--both in the sense of manifesting a rare capacity for intelligent decision-making and in the sense of being rigorously unsentimental. Consider the catastrophization of most of its neighbors of late. Do you really think the Jews had no hand in this bloody madness? Have you ever heard of the neo-cons? It happens to be a Jew-run movement and (extremely) pro-Israel. Chaos virtually surrounds Israel. This might sound disadvantageous; but, militarily, it's sound strategy. A mob cannot defeat a properly motivated military.
Saturday, July 26, 2014
American Jews and Israel
I've noticed some complaints recently among Zionists that Israel's military actions are held to a much higher standard in the press than are those of its neighbors. But I do not perceive anti-Semitism here, at least in the American media. It is anti-Israel because the all-knowing American Jews who run "our" media consider Israel insufficiently progressive, especially since Israel gave up the dream of Jewish communism 25 years ago. Obviously, American Jews avail themselves of the luxury of neglecting the real issue of whether a highly progressive Israel would end up with any Jews in it. That's beside the point. Also beside the point, as they well know, is their propaganda on this issue: the Israelis ignore it, meaning our Jews can have their cake and eat it--blabbing their usual prog-blab, while Israel goes on being Jewish and sufficiently reactionary to survive.
I am mighty suspicious whenever I see the anti-Semitic claim spouted in the media. It's just one of those words used by the leftist elite to control thought. Outside the Muslim world, its use is generally unjustified. The Jews have worked incessantly for over a century to ensure that they can criticize everyone else, while any criticism of the Jews is defined as anti-Semitism, the unholiest of sins. Yet, there is no special reason to trust them, and when one is shot at, the only sane response is to shoot back. This is an inward-looking, narcissistic tribe hardly free of certain manipulative, malicious tendencies--and, at this advanced stage of history, America is virtually the only country naïve enough to play host to them in effective numbers.
I was just thinking recently whether it's a coincidence only that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution all successively occurred--mainly in Italy, France, England, Holland--with so little apparent Jewish involvement. England had almost no Jews during the crucial years, France very few. In Italy and Holland they had little political power. And, in any event, each of these unique developments in world history were accomplished largely without the assistance of Jewish talent. When the Jews came on the intellectual scene in the nineteenth century they immediately began to politicize every field susceptible to politicization, which is almost all of them. Many intellectual fields were thereby destroyed--anthropology, for example, now a sub-field of Marxist studies. Despite their superior talents in many mental pursuits, there's no evidence that any field of legitimate inquiry would have stagnated without their involvement. Slowed, yes, but not stopped. There is every evidence, however, that many fields which now lie in ruins and remain guarded against any revival to this day by these same ruiners, would be much more functional without Jewish involvement.
Only the Jews in Israel are in process of recovering a healthy human perspective. American Jews, still exiles, remain stubbornly unhealthy by continuing the tradition of exiled Jews: through talent, tribalism, and deception they achieve a position of socio-economic superiority over the native population, then use their position to their own benefit, whilst smothering and discouraging native talent. In Israel, only talent avails. Deception, deemed a necessary evil by exiles, is discarded there, since power and responsibility, never united in exile, finally find each other. The exiles often possess power, but never feel responsibility--it is not their homeland after all--and many forswear any homeland, eternal exiles. It may even be that the American Jews now wield such power and sense so little responsibility, that they are, as an incidental effect, destroying themselves, losing tribal coherence, declining in numbers and quality. All around, it's a bad dynamic, not only in their radiating destructive tendencies, and the misapplication of their talents, but in the prospective loss of Ashkenazi talents through internal collapse.
I am mighty suspicious whenever I see the anti-Semitic claim spouted in the media. It's just one of those words used by the leftist elite to control thought. Outside the Muslim world, its use is generally unjustified. The Jews have worked incessantly for over a century to ensure that they can criticize everyone else, while any criticism of the Jews is defined as anti-Semitism, the unholiest of sins. Yet, there is no special reason to trust them, and when one is shot at, the only sane response is to shoot back. This is an inward-looking, narcissistic tribe hardly free of certain manipulative, malicious tendencies--and, at this advanced stage of history, America is virtually the only country naïve enough to play host to them in effective numbers.
I was just thinking recently whether it's a coincidence only that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution all successively occurred--mainly in Italy, France, England, Holland--with so little apparent Jewish involvement. England had almost no Jews during the crucial years, France very few. In Italy and Holland they had little political power. And, in any event, each of these unique developments in world history were accomplished largely without the assistance of Jewish talent. When the Jews came on the intellectual scene in the nineteenth century they immediately began to politicize every field susceptible to politicization, which is almost all of them. Many intellectual fields were thereby destroyed--anthropology, for example, now a sub-field of Marxist studies. Despite their superior talents in many mental pursuits, there's no evidence that any field of legitimate inquiry would have stagnated without their involvement. Slowed, yes, but not stopped. There is every evidence, however, that many fields which now lie in ruins and remain guarded against any revival to this day by these same ruiners, would be much more functional without Jewish involvement.
Only the Jews in Israel are in process of recovering a healthy human perspective. American Jews, still exiles, remain stubbornly unhealthy by continuing the tradition of exiled Jews: through talent, tribalism, and deception they achieve a position of socio-economic superiority over the native population, then use their position to their own benefit, whilst smothering and discouraging native talent. In Israel, only talent avails. Deception, deemed a necessary evil by exiles, is discarded there, since power and responsibility, never united in exile, finally find each other. The exiles often possess power, but never feel responsibility--it is not their homeland after all--and many forswear any homeland, eternal exiles. It may even be that the American Jews now wield such power and sense so little responsibility, that they are, as an incidental effect, destroying themselves, losing tribal coherence, declining in numbers and quality. All around, it's a bad dynamic, not only in their radiating destructive tendencies, and the misapplication of their talents, but in the prospective loss of Ashkenazi talents through internal collapse.
Tuesday, July 9, 2013
Maverick Wisdom
This is my rather lengthy selection from an interview of Edward Luttwak in Tablet Sept 2011
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak?all=1
I'm especially interested in his interpretation of the trajectory of Iranian society, his compare/contrast of intelligent government with "innocent" leaders against ineffective government with clever leaders, and his insight into the typically third world government of Pakistan, a government with "no institutional integrity":
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
You believe the story about the courier who led us to bin Laden?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/76739/qa-edward-luttwak?all=1
I'm especially interested in his interpretation of the trajectory of Iranian society, his compare/contrast of intelligent government with "innocent" leaders against ineffective government with clever leaders, and his insight into the typically third world government of Pakistan, a government with "no institutional integrity":
Why are so many Jews so stupid about politics?
They have not had a state for 2,000 years, they have had no power or responsibility and it will take centuries before they catch up with the instinctive political understanding that any ordinary Englishman has. They don’t understand politics, and of course they confuse their friends and their enemies, and that is the ultimate political proof of imbecility.
When you look at the current conduct of American policy in the Middle East, do you see any coherent policy or strategy?
Obama is no different than most previous administrations that come into office with ready-made solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Jimmy Carter was the first one, and his plan was redacted by Zbigniew Brzezinski. It led to Sadat’s journey to Jerusalem because his brilliant idea was to subject Egyptians and Israelis to a Soviet-American condominium, which was a terrible idea, and so Sadat created his own reality. It was really one of the funnier moments in history. The national security adviser officials, and I believe Brzezinski himself, came out with a lot of negative statements when Sadat first made his announcement because he was ruining their policy scheme, which was, of course, impossible.
Obama is in that tradition. He came in with an impossible policy scheme, which is first you get Israelis to stop agreeing to settlements, and then you proceed. Of course, that doesn’t make any sense. When you draw a border that is what matters. The Israelis removed all the settlements from Sinai without any American involvement in two minutes after the agreement was made with Egypt.
There’s nobody involved who is anti-Israeli like there were in the past, when there was a strong Arabist position in the State Department. The people in the Obama Administration read the New York Times and they don’t know Arabic, and therefore they are operating systematically with false categories. The fundamental error with regard to settlements is a very simple one: When borders are established, borders are established, and settlements are neither here nor there. This notion that when some faction of Israelis puts a camper on a hilltop that this changes anything is a fantasy.
A fantasy both on the part of the people who put the campers on the ground and also American policymakers.
They’re both equally deluded.
Do you anticipate violence this fall between the Israelis and the Palestinians?
I don’t anticipate violence this fall. War leads to peace. Peace leads to war. So, now logically we should have war. And the Iranians, of course, would love to pay for one. But the moment there is an intifada, the Palestinian regiment collapses and gangsters take over. So, the moment the violence escalates they stop fighting and they start talking peace. The moment the talking appears to be approaching an actual peace, they start an intifada.
Do you think the cost of the violence and other social ills that come out of the stalemate you are describing is something Israeli society can easily afford, or do you think there is any alternative to it?
I’m not sure it’s a cost.
Because the strategic depth that it affords and the control over those borders is more important?
Listen, my wife is a very good cook. And we have a housekeeper, who is an even better cook. It’s a weird situation, but I think my housekeeper is a better cook than any restaurant in Washington. She is a simple woman with no education, from Chile, and she just happens to have a superhuman talent. She being such a good cook, she achieves wonderful effects with very strange ingredients, and strange combinations of ingredients. Israel’s success as a state has been made possible by Arab threats of different kinds. Arab violence or threats of violence are part of the Israeli soup. There are certain levels of violence that are so high that they’re damaging, and there are also levels that are so low they are damaging. There is an optimum level of the Arab threat. I would say for about nine days of the 1973 war, the level of violence was much too high. Even when Israelis were successful, the level of violence was destroying the tissue of the state. Most of the time, the violence is positive.
When you say that the effects of Arab violence are positive, you mean that they generate social cohesion inside Israel?
Lenin taught, “Power is mass multiplied by cohesion.” Arab violence generates Jewish cohesion. Cohesion turns mass into power. Israel has had very small mass, very high cohesion. If only the Palestinians understood that, they would have attacked the Jews with flowers.
Shimon Peres says, “Iran is a decaying corpse of a country and the idea that they are any long-term threat to anybody, based on demographics and based on the rickety state of their economy, is a joke. So yes, it would be terrible if they ended up with an atomic bomb, but otherwise, Iran is not a long-term strategic threat to anybody.”
I think to get a good view on Iran you have to put yourself in the shoes of Hezbollah. Hezbollah is wholly dependent on Iran. Without Iran, Hezbollah is just a band of hotheads with a few thousand highly trained men. So, view Iran from Hezbollah’s point of view. What do you see? It’s a regime that has been around since 1979 in one way or the other. Is it consolidated? Is it functioning better and better and getting more and more support? It’s not. Is it getting more dependent on police repression or less? The answer is more. So, from the Hezbollah point of view, you realize that your days are counted because the regime is in a downward spiral.
There is a good measure of social control in Iran, and that is the price of genuine imported Scotch whiskey in Tehran, because it’s a) forbidden, and b) has to be smuggled in for practical purposes from Dubai, and the only way it can come from Dubai is with the cooperation of the Revolutionary Guard. The price of whiskey has been declining for years, and you go to a party in north Tehran now and you get lots of whiskey. And it’s only slightly more expensive than in Northwest Washington.
But on the other hand, the regime is doing something for which they will have my undying gratitude—that is, they have been manufacturing the one and only post-Islamic society. They created a situation in which Iranians in general, worldwide, not only in Iran, are disaffiliated. They are converting Muslim Iranians into post-Muslim Iranians.
One way to look at the place of Israel in this landscape is “Wow, you have a functioning neo-liberal state with a tech economy second to Silicon Valley amidst the rubble of all these failed Arab states. Imagine the Syrian army trying to attack anybody. Egypt’s army is incapable of doing anything despite $10 billion worth of American weapons, Iran is falling to pieces, Lebanon is still a mess, Jordan is a joke of a country with a Palestinian majority.” On the other hand, you could look at it and say, “Israel is a tiny country in a chaotic neighborhood where it will always get sucked into conflicts with its neighbors and will never have a moment of peace.”
Yes, everything you say is correct, but there is a third element you are omitting. The very innermost circle of Israeli security is actually within the 1967 borders. And there you have almost 1.5 million Arabs, some Christian, some Muslim. The current situation is helping consolidate their loyalty to the Israeli state. If you ask them, “Are you loyal to the Israeli state?” They will say, “Oh no, we hate them all.” Are they involved in terror plots? The answer is that out of the 1.5 million, the ones involved in terror plots or even plain criminality of any sort, they could all sleep in my house. Or if not, they could sleep in a motel.
But there is even a more fundamental issue within Israel, which is the functioning of the Israeli economy and its impact on Israeli society. What’s happened, as you know from these latest demonstrations, is that the Israeli economy has become so successful that it has generated big numbers of millionaires, which means that four-room apartments in Tel Aviv cost as much as they do in New York. Israel is becoming Aspen, Colo., where normal people have to travel 20 miles to go to sleep because they can’t live anywhere within Aspen proper.
Are strategic minds nurtured through upbringing and education, or is the ability to think strategically an inborn gift, like mathematics?
It’s a gift like mathematics. The paradoxical logic of strategy contradicts the logic of everyday life, it goes against all normal definitions of intelligence we have. It only makes sense if you understand the dialectic. If you want peace, prepare for war. If you actively want war, disarm yourself, and then you’ll get war. Virile and martial elites understand that kind of thinking instinctively.
Here’s an easily falsifiable statement, but there’s something in it that interests me and I want you to pick it apart. I would start with the moment when George W. Bush met Vladimir Putin and said, “I looked into his eyes and saw this was a man I could really trust.” So, my thesis is this: If you’re Vladimir Putin, and you rise to the top of this chaotic and brutal society after going through the KGB, you must be some kind of strategic genius with amazing survival skills, because the penalty for failure may be torture or death. This kind of Darwinian set-up exists in many countries around the world. What does it mean to be head of the security services in Egypt? It means that you had to betray your friends but only at the right time, and you had to survive many vicious predators who would have loved to kill you or torture you, or otherwise derail your career. By the time you become Vladimir Putin or Omar Suleiman, your ability to think ahead and analyze threats has been adequately tested.
By contrast, what does it take to become a U.S. Senator? You have to eat rubber chicken dinners, you have to impress some rich people who are generally pretty stupid about politics, and smile in TV commercials. The penalties for failure are hardly so dire. And so, American leadership generally sucks, and America is perennially in the position of being the sucker in the global poker game. That’s the thesis. So, tell me why it’s wrong.
Even if your analysis is totally correct, your conclusion is wrong. Think about what it means to work for a Putin, whose natural approach to any problem is deception. For example, he had an affair with this athlete, a gymnast, and he went through two phases. Phase one: He concealed it from his wife. Phase two: He launched a public campaign showing himself to be a macho man. He had photographs of him shooting a rifle, and as a Judo champion, and therefore had the news leaked that he was having an affair. Not only an affair with a young woman, but a gymnast, an athlete. Obviously such a person is much more wily and cunning and able to handle conflict than his American counterpart. But when such a person is the head of a department, the whole department is actually paralyzed and they are all reduced to serfs and valets. Therefore, what gets applied to a problem is only the wisdom of the aforementioned wily head of the department. All the other talent is wasted, all the other knowledge is wasted.
Now you have a choice: You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and wisdom of the whole department, or else you can have a wily head and zero functioning. And that is how the Russian government is currently working. Putin and Medvedev have very little control of the Russian bureaucracy. When you want to deal with them, and I dealt with them this morning, they act in very uncooperative, cagey, and deceptive ways because they are first of all trying to protect their security and stability and benefits from their boss. They have to deceive you because they are deceiving their boss before he even shows up to work. And they are all running little games. So, that’s the alternative. You can have a wily Putin and a stupid government. Or an intelligent government and an innocent head. There’s always is a trade-off. A Putin cannot be an inspiring leader.
You believe the story about the courier who led us to bin Laden?
I believe it and I believe it categorically. Look, the Pakistanis had been sheltering Bin Laden. But in these matters, the only way to proceed is to develop thoughts that are based only on uncontroversial facts. Any analysis of the Bin Laden story tells you that there was active Pakistani complicity simply because people cannot go to Abbottabad and live in a compound without somebody asking questions. For one thing, Pakistan has this system where foreign citizens have to obtain the residence permits and renew them, and there are foreigners including Arabs living there, and they would be asked to show their papers. Pakistani complicity is certain. That’s point one. Point two: The guy uses couriers. Therefore, if you’re going to find him, you had to find the courier. The courier story is not the cover story.
Why kill him?
They were under orders to kill him.
Wouldn’t Osama Bin Laden be a source of useful intelligence? Alternately, one good reason to kill him is that you have a deal with the Pakistanis—“we’re gonna get rid of this problem”—then you need to kill him, because otherwise he might start talking about who protected him for the past 10 years.
There was no deal with the Pakistanis. There’s no institutional integrity. Therefore you cannot make deals with the Pakistani system. They would betray each other. There was no deal.
They killed Bin Laden simply because of the inconvenience of a trial?
They killed him because of the fact that if we captured Bin Laden, every Jihadist in the world would have been duty-bound to kidnap any American citizen anywhere and exchange him for Bin Laden.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Israel and Iran
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This is the take of a former Israeli
fighter pilot, one who bombed Iraq's nuclear facility in 81'. I agree with
everything he says, except his conclusion. In the end, Israel cannot rely upon the U.S. for protection. A
sovereign nation must assume the necessity of self-reliance. As Machiavelli put
it, with Israel's position corresponding to that of the prince: "since men love
at their convenience and fear at the convenience of the prince, a wise prince
should found himself on what is his, not on what is someone else's." And Israel
has a decidedly (and I would add, necessarily) Machiavellian tradition in
foreign relations.
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Thursday, July 8, 2010
Balkanising the Levant
Israel is less and less sustainable, beset by internal and external enemies. I do not think this proposal will work. If it's lucky, Israel will predictably implode in a few decades. The other option is being overrun. |
Friday, December 4, 2009
A Techno Renaissance
These guys came from no place in the world of commercial technology to this:
"Israel has the highest density of tech start-ups in the world. More importantly, these start-ups attract more venture capital dollars per person than any country — 2.5 times the U.S., 30 times Europe, 80 times India, and 300 times China. Israel has more companies on the tech-oriented NASDAQ than any country outside the U.S., more than all of Europe, Japan, Korea, India, and China combined. But it’s not just about start-ups. Scratch almost any major tech company — Intel, Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Motorola, and so on — and you will find that Israeli talent and technology play a major role in keeping these multinational companies on the cutting edge."
Rest of the interview:
The last bit, where he talks about the spark provided by immigrants, goes a little too far in its recommendations; he fails to differentiate between the cultures of the source countries. European Jews, the Ashkenazi, are a special breed and have repeatedly demonstrated that, given a competitive and properly financed environment (eg, prewar Germany or postwar America), they succeed in a variety of intellectually competitive fields of endeavour at extraordinary levels. Silicon Valley has a heavy immigrant footprint throughout the hierarchy of power, but these immigrants tend to originate in just a few source countries: India, China, Russia, and a few others. What you do not see in Silicon Valley is even a modest number of Latins or blacks--and the former constitute, by far, our largest source of immigrants. In this matter, too, differentiation and discrimination must be understood and employed.
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Saturday, August 29, 2009
Palestine
This Jewish-American "thinker" has a point about the refugee issue, but not an especially strong point. His examples of refugees who did not become problems are examples of refugees who had no religious stake in their homeland, only an economic stake. By contrast, the Palestinians, and all Muslims, deem certain sites in Palestine holy. Forcible removal from habitation in a holy land incites holy war. Times past, the Christian nations also fought for control of Palestine because of its religious significance. Religion is the difference. It is the reason the Jews chose Palestine to establish a new nation and it is the principal reason for continued Palestinian resistance to the state of Israel. And religion is not rational, has only the most tainted relationship to logic and reason. Therefore, this holy war for Palestine persists without benefit to either party as the imaginary tribal deities of these madmen, Yahweh and Allah, smile malignantly from above, and their puppets enact the ancient tribal morality play of "an eye for an eye." To no end and without end.
These are two religions with essentially the same moral code: old Mohammed, the thief, stole this, amongst so much else, from the Torah, stupefied and corrupted it, then jammed it into his "divine dictations", Al Quran. The clear fundamental difference is in the relative advancement of their civilisations, which corresponds with their tolerance for cruelty and brutality--the Muslims have a higher tolerance level mainly because their civilisation is still organized along pre-industrial lines, creating both material and mental poverty. But, Israel is no innocent in this game, merely less brutal than its enemies--it owes its inception to a spasm of war and terror against both the British colonial authorities and the native Palestinians.
For the rest, this article is not visionary but idiotic: typical Jewish self-pity and self-aggrandizement, adorned with lies and deceptions. Apparently, the "chosen people" want to be permitted their own "necessary evils" without reproach from others, while passing contemptuous moral judgment upon these same others: a patent double standard.
I'm inclined to believe that any intelligent Jew would be embarassed by this crude propaganda, possibly the worst I've ever read on the Israel issue.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Obama's Israel Dilemma
This article sets out the settlement issue quite clearly: The price we have paid (and go on paying) for Israel's sins seems sometimes even to exceed the price the Israelis pay. Is it possible for an ally to also be our greatest foreign policy liability? |
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Obama's Foreign Policy
http://www.detnews.com/article/20090616/OPINION01/906160319/1008/opinion01/Earnest-goodwill-doesn-t-substitute-for-foreign-policy
This doesn't seem especially coherent to me. He calls Obama a Wilsonian idealist, but then says that he hasn't changed Bush's foreign policy except at the margins. In other words, he talks like an idealist and acts like a realist? And this means he lacks a foreign policy? Reagan talked of abolishing nukes. Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? Bush II tried to democratize the Middle East (surely an idealistic notion). Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? In the end, most ambitious presidents discover that they have less power to alter the course of world history than they would like to think or boast of.
Israel is not an ally. It is a disease our political system has contracted from the Israel lobby. Unless that nation can demonstrate symbiotic characteristics with respect to our body politic, it ought to be flushed out of our system and left to seek some other host.
This doesn't seem especially coherent to me. He calls Obama a Wilsonian idealist, but then says that he hasn't changed Bush's foreign policy except at the margins. In other words, he talks like an idealist and acts like a realist? And this means he lacks a foreign policy? Reagan talked of abolishing nukes. Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? Bush II tried to democratize the Middle East (surely an idealistic notion). Was he an idealist without a foreign policy? In the end, most ambitious presidents discover that they have less power to alter the course of world history than they would like to think or boast of.
Israel is not an ally. It is a disease our political system has contracted from the Israel lobby. Unless that nation can demonstrate symbiotic characteristics with respect to our body politic, it ought to be flushed out of our system and left to seek some other host.
Neither Clinton nor Bush accomplished anything with N. Korea either--it is a virtual protectorate of China. On Iran a little discretion is advisable since our interference is unlikely to help the opposition at this juncture (as Bush's Iran expert Mr. Burns argued on Charlie Rose recently).
Just because certain ideologues in this country are shrieking that Obama is weak does not make it so--and hopefully their misguided efforts will be properly dismissed by our adversaries as those nations reformulate their strategies in face of the new administration. But, BO really should give up on the "apologize for America" shtick.
Obamite Moderation
Here is what the Left would like to hear from Obama: He has declined to bow to either the left or the right on Israel thus far, but has taken a harder line than Bush in areas (especially the settlements) where the Israelis are clearly lying and cheating. |
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Iran, Israel, America: A Lovers' Quarrel
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/18/opinion/18morris.html
Mossad clearly has the "advantage" of operating under a pressure of necessity that our intelligence services do not experience. They have long known, not just in an abstract sense, but in an absolutely visceral sense with whom they have to deal. I willingly grant that Mossad is more intelligent, superior technologially, more experienced, and, when required, just as ruthless as their foes--hell, they're ruthless enough to spy on us. But, Mossad also played a low-profile, and not particularly commendable, role in the intelligence gathering and analysis that led to the Iraq war. Their intel was wrong: Saddam bluffed the Israelis along with the rest of the world. Yet now they are expected not only to know the status of the Iranian nuclear program, but also to have precise information on its multiple locations, the defensive precautions at each location, the key operatives of the program, etc? This much I do not believe. Nor do I deem it inconceivable that they may find themselves in the position of knowing so little of the program as to render an attack counterproductive. Short of a major nuclear strike, I think the Israelis could delay the program for a few years at best. Given this, perhaps the most probable scenario is an Israeli strike (of limited efficacy) followed by Iranian counterstrikes that would enable the U.S. to sell, for purposes of international PR, its immediate intervention as a defensive measure provoked by Iran. This would give us some diplomatic cover, while ensuring that the Iranian program suffers a more serious setback than the Israelis could inflict themselves. To achieve more than a setback would necessitate regime change at a minimum, possibly a full-blown, old-school occupation (see WWII, multi-year occupations of Germany and Japan).
This is a fairly plausible take on the situation as far as I can tell (lacking all the information on Iranian and Israeli capabilities). The qualification that occurs to me is that even Israeli nuclear strikes might fail to stop the Iranian program, unless the Israelis have adequate intelligence to work with on the key locations of the program. Perhaps the gravest threat posed by Iran’s strategy of nuclear escalation is the first strike incentive each side will perceive once the Iranians go nuclear.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Israel and Problems
In a recent speech to AIPAC, the highly influential Israel lobbying group in America, Obama said, "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided." Shortly thereafter he said to Fareed Zakaria: "I think the Clinton formulation provides a starting point for discussions between the parties." The Clinton plan was for a divided Jerusalem. He said he wasn't sufficiently careful with his syntax on the prior occasion.
Making a divided Jerusalem the starting point of negotiations is clearly disadvantageous to the Israelis, and they are much mispleased with this aboutface. Clinton's starting point was more pro-Israel in 2000. Of course, the Israelis would prefer to propose a solution in which they derive all the benefits--but the Palestinians will never (and should never) concede all points. The outcome of negotiation is failure or compromise--neither side dictates except by imposition of simple force. Obama probably could not do worse than any preceding President; each left office with this issue unresolved.
The Israelis get away with playing an evil game, such as we would be most reluctant to countenance in any other ally, by using the excuse that their adversary is still more brutal.
Making a divided Jerusalem the starting point of negotiations is clearly disadvantageous to the Israelis, and they are much mispleased with this aboutface. Clinton's starting point was more pro-Israel in 2000. Of course, the Israelis would prefer to propose a solution in which they derive all the benefits--but the Palestinians will never (and should never) concede all points. The outcome of negotiation is failure or compromise--neither side dictates except by imposition of simple force. Obama probably could not do worse than any preceding President; each left office with this issue unresolved.
The Israelis get away with playing an evil game, such as we would be most reluctant to countenance in any other ally, by using the excuse that their adversary is still more brutal.
The assumption that Israel is the white knight facing off against the Muslim devils is foolish and grossly oversimplified. Israel established its independence by means of terrorism, butchery, brutality, deviousness, and many other less than lovely qualities. Today the West Bank is pockmarked with innumerable Jewish settlements scattered all over a territory to which they have no legal claim. This is simply an ostentatious and unnecessary provocation of the Palestinians and their supporters. It is the "might makes right" philosophy in action. There is little underlying moral difference between the two religions: both are essentially tribalistic in outlook and espouse "eye for an eye" moral codes. The difference arises instead from cultural history and present circumstances. In particular, the Jews have had benefit of exposure to Western ideas for centuries, have understood and largely absorbed the Western tradition (and were in fact contributors to this intellectual background), whereas the Muslims have only a despotic political tradition and no civil society per se, just the overweening religious structures. Finally, as the weaker party in the power relation, the Muslims have been driven to more desperate measures (overt terrorism) to persuade the Israelis that they still have some power and some basis for leverage at the negotiating table.
The American-Israeli relationship is not a fair deal for the U.S. It never was, nor is it today. Their efforts to make peace with their neighbors have been insufficient--and we have borne a substantial portion of the costs created by their foreign policies. Salting Palestinian wounds by planting settlements all over the West Bank is not excused by the madness of Hamas.
They ought to keep in mind that without us Israel would be a radioactive desert within 20 years.
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