http://thefederalist.com/2017/08/25/breaking-sebastian-gorka-resigns-from-trump-administration/
(Though the White House is hinting that he was fired; clearly, the bottom line is: the Kelly-McMasters faction has won. That means more Afghan war.)
More Afghanistan War
Things have indeed taken a "turn for the worst" at the Trump Administration if this is true; i.e., "once again into the Afghan breach, dear friends, and wall it up with our American dead!" has been going on for 16 years. Surely that's enough?Not apparently.
The Kelly-McMasters faction has won another round, as I noted above. But to what end?
✔What what DO they expect to win, in the end? What's the goal?
- Sure, most Muslims around the world are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere they think theirs is the best of the lot; however...
- What distinguishes Islam from all the others, however, is pretty big; indeed, essential: it's the only religion founded by a pirate (a land-pirate, of course); indeed, it was founded by a guy who made Blackbeard look bookish.
- That brutal thug might not actually have existed, or if he did, he could have been quite different than his traditional portrayal. But that is irrelevant because his traditional portrayal is "gospel" to Muslims, and Muhammad (the name "Muhammad" is a title, "the Praised One", and had been applied to Christ for centuries) is considered the paragon of all men and someone who is to be emulated in the extreme.)
- The way their religion works, then, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely), in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.
- The way their religion works is that Allah is capricious. He can change basic physics at any time, cause the sun to rise in the West, whatever, and he can change morality too. You don't know what he wants you to do but if you feel the urge to emulate Muhammad, the only way you'll know if you should is to go try it. Allah will either favor you or you'll be dead.
- Because of that essential Muslim world-view, and because of the 1400-year-old example of their founder, Muhammad, a ruthless warrior, "ethnic cleanser (remorseless murderer of Jews), treaty-breaker, and "womanizer" (to put that last very politely in an understatement of a millennium), so in the overall scheme of things, the more violent fire-breathing fanatics in that culture come out on top and the more peaceable types learn to keep their mouths shut to keep their heads on.
- (He didn't have any male children, even though Allah gave him an unequaled libido and a host of women of all sorts, sizes, shapes and ages, because of the basic Muslim idea: that all the prophets were related; so since M didn't have any males heirs, there can be no more prophets. Shia Islam has a story of its own here, but that would be a long essay in itself.)
Trump's election: We Were Supposed to Get Realistic About All of the Above
Turns out: NOT!I came across a great word in the Comments section of AKA Catholic (a Trad blog on my blog list): "ethnomasochist". We've been governed (more in Europe than the U.S., at least until Obama was elected) by ethnomasochist types, folks who seem to hate their own culture and who seem to want to promote something completely alien. How else would one explain Angela Merkel, for example? Or Pope Francis? (The Italian public is fed up with him and his endless rants for no-holds-bard immigration.) The general "PC" culture refuses to accept that Islam is different, implacable, unstoppable, even if the vast majority are not terrorist themselves, the free-wheeling, free-booting Prophet-Founder left a free-wheeling, free-booting religion.
- So one major reason Trump was elected was he "called it like it was" about Islam and the endless wars we've been involved in.
- The second was he seemed to be suggesting getting out of those wars and stop trying to be Islam's enabler.
- For that's what the U.S. is in a sense (and it's true about the West in general); we've been "enabling" Islam since before Franklin Roosevelt (ugh, what a disaster he was and historians treat him as greater than Lincoln and Washington combined) met with old ibn Saud (Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman, etc., etc., al Saud) in February 1945.
- If I remember it correctly, it was the British who created the Gulf Emirates back in WWI days – the idea being to keep coastal oil supplies available for the Royal Navy (the Brits kept tight control of Iraq and Iran's oil resources between the World Wars, too; Britain had been a staunch ally of the Turks, and the Disraeli government fell in part because of an Irish-American's reporting on the Turkish atrocities in the Balkans: see Januarius MacGahan, the "Liberator of Bulgaria").
- And really, the West helping the Ottoman forces "modernize" in the late 19th/early 20th century all helped to bring Islam out of the unremitting Dark Ages it had fallen into since the 17th century.
- The Brits and the French divided up the spoils of the Ottoman Turks during World War I (see Sykes-Picot).
- The U.S. stayed out of that then, immediately post-WWI, but by the end of WWII, the U.S. helped the Brits overthrow Iran's PM in 1953, Mosaddeq, yet by 1956, the U.S. wouldn't support the Brits and French as they tried to re-seize the Suez canal. (And that fiasco meant there weren't enough forces to do anything about Hungary's1956 Revolution.)
- Turkey was supposed to be the one, only, single successful "secular" Muslim country...
- But even when Ataturk was alive, he slaughtered non-Turks (see: Slaughter at Smyrna 1922) and the continued deportation of all non-Turks from Turkish controlled territory throughout the Republic of Turkey's history, and how that "secular" government has treated Christianity.
- Today, they've gone whole-hog Islamist (if I may so put it).
- (For the truth of the assertion about Islam being – as the young Churchill called it in the 1890s – the strongest retrograde force on Earth, see my reference to Robert Reilly's "Closing of the Muslim Mind" below for a book that details Islam's intellectual fall, and the reason for it.
- Gorka is out, and Gen. Michael Flynn is out too.
- General Flynn was the first take down the Neo-Conservatives and Deep State crowd made in Trump's Admin.
- Flynn pulled no punches about Islam.
- Since then they've been working assiduously to turn the Trump Administration into another George W. Bush-type Admin on foreign/military affairs.
- Looks like they're succeeding. As I say, the Kelly-McMasters faction is winning.
Dangerous
This is quite troubling. Gorka didn't hesitate to speak plainly about Islam and Jihad, and thus he made many, many enemies in the ethnomasochist PC "Deep State" that runs the U.S. and the Western World.- Not surprisingly; the Left is celebrating, because they WANT yet ANOTHER "Neo-Conservative" Republican lost-in-the-swamp-of-an-unwinnable-war Admin to beat up over its "foreign wars".
- (The American Left keeps thinking in terms of short-term political gains: they're like people in Noah's day, going about their petty affairs as the clouds gathered darker and darker.)
- Example: Keith Olbermann tweets that "Gorka resigns. So the Day isn't a total loss. Now leave the country, @SebGorka, you Nazi f_ _k." https://pjmedia.com/blog/liveblogevent/fridays-hot-mic-21/ (Stay classy, Olbermann; actually, I hope such a person lives long enough to know what it is to be enslaved by a conquering amir, though in truth, it is such types as that who are the first to convert and make sex slaves of the daughters – and the sons – of their enemies.)
Culture War
Are we engaged in a cultural war with Islam?- How you answer that depends on how you see the modern world,
- The massive Islamic immigration into the West,
- The West's fulfillment of Stalin's quip that we'd sell to the Communists the ropes they would later hang us with – though it isn't the Communists who are buying the rope, it's the Muslims.
- In other words, are you an "ethnomasochist"?
As Anthony Esolen wrote here:
When people praise me for perspicacity, I shake
my head and reply that almost all of what I do is to notice what is in front of
my nose, and write about it. Almost all of what I do is to refrain from shutting my eyes toward what is
right there, plain as day. It’s not that I notice it and others don’t. It’s
that I won’t un-notice it. I won’t pretend not to see what I do see, and what
everybody else sees too.
I don't want to "un-notice" anything either.
- One other thing I'm certain of is that the Russians and Chinese – the other bearers of our complicated, soulless techno-international finance world,, would not hesitate, if the U.S. or Europe collapse and Islam tries to take advantage of that and seize control (see below about the war between the Byzantines and the Persians) – I honestly believe the world's remaining nuclear powers would try to use nukes to solve the Islam-on-the-cusp-of–final victory problem.
- They probably hope it doesn't come to that, obviously, but unlike the West, they'd pull that trigger.
The Afghan War
It is nuts to continue the endless war in the planet's most difficult fighting terrain (difficult because of ground itself, the vicious, brutal tribes who inhabit it – among the most ruthless fighters on Earth – and the difficultly of actually reaching it and resupplying your forces). George W. Bush was nuts to "nation build" there, and Obama played a disingenuous game for 8 years about it. But Honestly, it's crazy. It makes Vietnam look like "a walk in the park". About Vietnam, too, remember:- They Johnson Administration didn't talk much about "victory" either, something Trump didn't mention in his speech. LBJ kept thinking he'd make some sort of deal with "Uncle Ho". Didn't happen, did it?
- Lyndon Johnson and his military leaders seemed to be oblivious of what an endless war would do to the country.
- One can make the argument that because of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Thailand never fell to the Communists (the old "domino theory") but whatever the value of that argument, NO ONE can make such a claim about Afghanistan, whose main neighbors are none other than Iran and Pakistan.
Sun Tzu wrote that a long war serves no one and no purpose, except to bring down a state.
Chapter 2 Waging War
2
When you engage in actual fighting, if victory is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town, you will exhaust your strength. #
3
Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain. #
...
19
In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. # https://suntzusaid.com/book/2
The Reality
About the endless, 1400-year long war between Islam and the rest of the planet, we can say:- The West has unmatched force (though the Chinese are trying to catch up, and may have done so) but not the will to engage in an endless war...
- Whereas Islam hasn't (yet) unbridled force (they'd need nukes) but its violent advocates have the will to kill millions for centuries to force the world to submit to Sharia.
- That's just the lesson of history (a lesson so many on both Western Left and Right don't seem to want to learn, or even want to hear about, because, as Anthony Esolen says. everyone sees it but many pretend not to).
- You can fight against such crazies; it's been done: the Romans fought the "Q-speaking" Celts in Northwestern Spain back before Christ, but you need a couple of hundred years of war (as they had then) and you'd have to use your absolute force. The slaughter was horrific.
- Thus, the West hasn't the will for a true Total War against Islam.
- We've had a few lucky battles: Charles Martel at Tours, the Battle of Lepanto, a long series of hair-breath victories by the Byzantines that no one remembers after the Battle of Manzikert (which, curiously, took place in August, August 21, 1071), and the Battle of Vienna, etc.
- But as the Battle of Manzikert suggests, all those successes come to naught when the other side wins a "final" victory.
Again: Most Muslims are average, everyday Abduls and Alis, and like people of other religions everywhere think theirs is the best of the lot. But the way their religion works, in the overall scheme of things, the more radical guys come out on top and the more peaceable types keep their mouths closed to keep their heads on.
Afghanistan again
Afghanistan is not the center of Islam. It's not even backstage. It's not even in the theater's store room or even the toilet. It's the sewer behind the theater in an alley full of mutant crocodiles (as it were).- The Pakistanis created the Taliban, but the brutal tribesmen who are among the most effective fighters in all Islam just happen to live in this remote place.
- If you wanted to "win" Afghanistan, you'd have to either nuke it, or conquer both Iran and Pakistan, and then occupy Afghanistan.
- You'd definitely have to remove Islam itself and replace it with, what? Buddhism? Quakers or the Amish version of Christianity?
- Since those are not options any Western political leader would contemplate, then what?
- Our "leaders" clearly don't know, so why are we tolerating this endless war?
- N.B. Arabs can't fight, Oh, on a certain level, sure. I mean historically they've not been known as good soldiers. Raiders, tribal warriors, sure; they have a "warrior" culture and a "warrior religion" with a resilient (although too often depraved) tribal culture, but otherwise, consider:
- They're good as kamikazes, of course; the Iranians never tire of using them as suicide bombers (ever notice you never hear of an Iranian suicide bomber? Of course not.)
- The Great Islamic Conquests Never Happened; i.e., the Arabs never had a horde of unstoppable Mujahedin Jihadi Bedouin storming out of Arabia, either out of the Hijaz or the larger peninsula; that's a fiction. They simply never had the population to do anything remotely like that, A, and B, the "Arab" conquerors of the Persian Empire and most of Byzantium were ethnic Arab-speaking peoples already in place in what's now Iraq and Syria; they began migrating to those regions in the 100 years or so after Christ. (Many came from the far south of Arabia, always the most culturally advanced peoples on the peninsula.) By the 500s, they were quite populous and financially successful. But they weren't Hijaz or Bedouin Peninsula Arabs.
- It was these "Arabs" who staged a coup d'état at the end of another long, never-ending disastrous war, the "Great War" between the Persians and the Byzantines of the very early 600s. (It's a scenario that could easily be played out today: suppose the Russians and the US/Euros fought it out to exhaustion; and the many Muslims who have been immigrating into the West would simply seize control of the lot – something that could actually happen, given the right circumstances – you know, like exhausting ourselves in war.)
- The Arabs never had unconquerable generals: Khalid ibn al-Walid probably is totally legendary (he was supposed to have fought 100 – or 1000, whatever – battles and won them all), or at least has been quite distorted historically.
- The various tribes of successive waves of Turks eventually took over the "Arab" Empire and (with through their various tribes and dynasties, and with various exceptions, like the Fatimids in Egypt or the Mongols) ruled it until 1918.
- The point above about the Umayyads is fascinating, because the Abbasids always, always, always claimed the Umayyads were heretics and not true Muslims. The words "Islam" and "Muslim" had begun to appear before the Umayyads fell, but the Abbasids did everything they could to murder every single Umayyad they could. Eventually, they did.
- The mostly Persian Abbasids ran the empire till the Turks began to replace them, and (as noted above) despite various ins and outs, the Turks ran the place until 1918, everything except Iran, which has been a mortal enemy of the Turks for a millennia now.
So it is that in Afghanistan we have yet another example of a non-Arab people who have been transformed by their Muslim religion into "a force to be reckoned with".
Summation
We've been in Afghanistan for 16 years and are simply no closer to victory than we've ever been.- And unlike Vietnam, which had a long coast line and with which we could use to advantage (we could have re-commissioned our old battleships – well, we unwisely got rid of the South Dakota class just before that war got out of control in the Lyndon Johnson Admin, and the one New Jersey BB they tried to use, they said it was too expensive; yeah, right – to just sit off-shore and bombard the daylights out of them at little cost to ourselves. (Riiight. It was FAR cheaper to lose hundreds of aircraft and their crews instead of reviving the BBs, whose best work was bombardment.)
- But Afghanistan is a mountainous, nearly inaccessible hell-hole populated by some of the most violent and least "civilized" people on Earth.
- It's insane to keep up such a war.
Meanwhile, the real, never-ending trouble is Islam itself. And no, I'm won't debate that with anyone who hasn't read Robert Reilly's The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist by Robert R. Reilly (2010).
So, Gorka was quite correct to resign. Napoleon said, "If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna." Why would you invade Kathmandu?
Final note: Sorry for being so long-winded, but it is unbelievably frustrating. I would say if you're going to fight "radical" Islam, you need to take on the culture that creates it, and not invade Afghanistan. If some very nasty terrorists use part of it as a hideout, we have weapons that can deal with that. If you don't have the courage to do that, hire Klingons. But honestly, if a Byzantine emperor or a "prudent and sagacious" Tisroc of Tashban was going to do it, he'd just pay one or two of the endlessly warring factions to fight the others to exhaustion. Something like what the infamous Cardinal Richelieu did to the Germans in the Thirty Years War. Otherwise, it's just pointless.
No wonder Gorka resigned. What we're doing there now is nuts.
An Préachán
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