Harrolds.Blogspot.com
Antarctica sets new record for sea ice extent... - wattsupwiththat.com
http://tinyurl.com/kptvavx
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Sunday, June 29, 2014
TARGET: Irael - ISIS declares Islamic 'Caliphate'... - www.reuters.com
ISIS declares Islamic 'Caliphate'... - www.reuters.com
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Election Fear Grips Senate Democrats
| Election Year a Drag on Productivity in Senate |  |
| By ANDREW TAYLOR Associated Press | Jun 27, 2014, 2:19 PM |
WASHINGTON — A fear of voting has gripped Democratic leaders in the Senate, slowing the chamber's modest productivity this election season to a near halt.
With control of the Senate at risk in November, leaders are going to remarkable lengths to protect endangered Democrats from casting tough votes and to deny Republicans legislative victories in the midst of the campaign. The phobia means even bipartisan legislation to boost energy efficiency, manufacturing, sportsmen's rights and more could be scuttled.
The Senate's masters of process are finding a variety of ways to shut down debate.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., now is requiring an elusive 60-vote supermajority to deal with amendments to spending bills, instead of the usual simple majority, a step that makes it much more difficult to put politically sensitive matters into contention. This was a flip from his approach to Obama administration nominees, when he decided most could be moved ahead with a straight majority instead of the 60 votes needed before.
Reid's principal aim in setting the supermajority rule for spending amendments was to deny archrival Sen. Mitch McConnell a win on protecting his home state coal industry from new regulations limiting carbon emissions from existing power plants. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, faces a tough re-election in Kentucky.
This hunkering down by Democrats is at odds with the once-vibrant tradition of advancing the 12 annual agency budget bills through open debate. In the Appropriations Committee, long accustomed to a freewheeling process, chairwoman Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., has held up action on three spending bills, apparently to head off politically difficult votes on changes to the divisive health care law as well as potential losses to Republicans on amendments such as McConnell's on the coal industry.
"I just don't think they want their members to have to take any hard votes between now and November," said Sen. Mike Johanns, R-Neb. And there's "just no question that they're worried we're going to win some votes so they just shut us down."
Vote-a-phobia worsens in election years, especially when the majority party is in jeopardy. Republicans need to gain six seats to win control and Democrats must defend 21 seats to the Republicans' 15.
So Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, probably shouldn't have been surprised when his cherished bill to fund the Labor, Education and Health and Human Services departments got yanked from the Appropriations Committee's agenda this month. Word quickly spread that committee Democrats in Republican-leaning states feared a flurry of votes related to "Obamacare."
"It's not as if they haven't voted on them before," Harkin griped. "My way of thinking is, 'Hell, you've already voted on it. Your record's there.'" Harkin blamed Senate Democratic leaders.
Two other appropriations bills have run aground after preliminary votes. The normally non-controversial energy and water bill was pulled from the committee agenda after it became known that McConnell would have an amendment to defend his state's coal mining industry. McConnell is making that defense a centerpiece of his re-election campaign and his amendment appeared on track to prevail with the help of pro-energy Democrats on the committee.
Again, after consulting with Reid, Mikulski struck the bill from the agenda.
McConnell pressed the matter the next day, this time aiming to amend a spending bill paying for five Cabinet departments. Democrats again headed him off.
Democrats privately acknowledge that they're protecting vulnerable senators and don't want McConnell to win on the carbon emissions issue. They also see hypocrisy in McConnell's insistence on a simple majority vote for his top — and controversial — priority while he wants Democrats to produce 60 votes to advance almost everything else.
Another measure, financing the Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service, failed to get a committee vote last week after speeding through a subcommittee hearing. Mikulski blamed problems with timing. But it was known that Republicans had amendments on hot-button issues coming.
Fear of voting is hardly new. In the last two years of the Clinton administration, Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., blocked Democrats from offering a popular Patients' Bill of Rights, and more. At the time, Charles Schumer of New York and Dick Durbin of Illinois were among the Democrats who cried foul.
These days, Durbin and Schumer hold the No. 2 and No. 3 Democratic Senate leadership posts and now that their party is running the place, they're backing Reid's moves to clamp down on GOP amendments.
"You've always got senators on both sides of the aisle of all political persuasions and all regions whining and complaining how they don't want to vote on this amendment or that amendment," Lott says now. "It always frankly agitated me because I felt like these are big boys and girls." He said "it has gotten worse and worse and worse."
Republicans say Democratic leaders are trying especially to protect Mark Begich of Alaska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. Landrieu says she hasn't asked for such help.
"I've taken so many hard votes up here," Landrieu said. "I could take more."
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Border Resident: Nancy Pelosi Should Visit My Ranch | American Renaissance
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to travel to South Texas on Saturday to meet with immigrant children at a detention facility and be briefed about the ongoing humanitarian crisis along the Texas-Mexico border.
Vickers wishes Pelosi or a member of her staff would come to her ranch to see first hand what everyday Texans are going through.
http://www.amren.com/news/2014/06/border-resident-nancy-pelosi-should-visit-my-ranch/
Vickers wishes Pelosi or a member of her staff would come to her ranch to see first hand what everyday Texans are going through.
http://www.amren.com/news/2014/06/border-resident-nancy-pelosi-should-visit-my-ranch/
Assassination Started WW I, like 'Game of Thrones' Script - ABC News
Assassination That Started World War I like 'Game of Thrones' Script - ABC News
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History - World War I Matters to Today's Economy
History Lessons: Why World War I Matters to Today's Economy
http://news360.com/article/245768315
http://news360.com/article/245768315
Chasing drug-laden 'bogeys' across the skies
Been there, Done that. -- rfh
Chasing drug-laden 'bogeys' across the skies
http://news360.com/article/245747916
Chasing drug-laden 'bogeys' across the skies
http://news360.com/article/245747916
Russia will not sit idly by as jihadists press Iraq assault
Russia will not sit idly by as jihadists press Iraq assault http://news360.com/article/245762922
o'enabling acts - ignores lawsuit threat: 'I'll keep taking actions on my own'... - www.washingtontimes.com
Obama ignores Boehner lawsuit threat: 'I'll keep taking actions on my own'... - www.washingtontimes.com
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Rise of the Machines - GOOGLEbots: Search giant to begin selling humanoids... - www.dailymail.co.uk
GOOGLEbots: Search giant to begin selling humanoids... - www.dailymail.co.uk
http://tinyurl.com/m27jsfl
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New Judge May Seek Special Prosecutor in IRS Scandal... - observer.com
New Judge May Seek Special Prosecutor in IRS Scandal... - observer.com
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'First thing that hits you is smell'... - cnsnews.com
'First thing that hits you is smell'... - cnsnews.com
http://tinyurl.com/o3nz89t
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Saturday, June 21, 2014
o'transparency - Sealed Records (image: o'Endorsed by the Communist Party '04, '08, '12)
https://www.facebook.com/rfharrold/posts/664349293644915
| Forgotten Past+Founding Documents | eBooks+Federalist Papers+American Minute | History+Essential: B.C. to Now | Quotes+American Values |
| Magna Carta:TimeLine | Arbroath Declaration
 Scots Wha
Hae | History of: The US Bill of Rights | Founders'+Constitution+Amendments |
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
The Ring
There's be many theories brought forth about this ....but there's no getting around his relationship with the moustached guy. -- rfh
From: BHAM Sent: Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:14 PM Subject: Ring
Barack Obama has been wearing the same ring for over 30 years. When he and Michelle were married in October 1992, Barack used the ring as his wedding ring.
So, what is so important about this ring that Obama will never take it off? The answer is shocking; well, maybe not to most of you. Below -- Barack Obama and his roommate Hasan Chandoo at Occidental College in 1981:
 
Obama wearing the ring as president:
 
Obama signing legislation while wearing the ring:
Obama in Cairo, Egypt, smiling and waving during his speech:
 
And what does the inscription on the ring Obama will never take off mean?
lâ ilâha illâ allâh: There is no God except Allah
The most transparent president in history? Who is this person that occupies the oval office? Does anyone really know? Clint Eastwood's September 7, 2012 interview with his home town newspaper, The Carmel Pine Cone, is dead on: "President Obama is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
Are you surprised by anything above? I didn't think so.
|
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
o'welcome to o'bamanation: W.H. Opens Doors to Illegals, no arrests expected (President Jarrett?)
-
- Daily Caller - 19 hours ago.... established by Obama to provide living and working status for undocumented young immigrants. ... While the White House is teaming with law enforcement officers, no arrests are expected ... The Daily Caller previously reported that Valerie Jarrett held a handful of secret meetings with illegal immigrant activists.
-
- dailycaller.com/.../valerie-jarretts-secret-meetings-with-il...
Jun 10, 2014 - President Obama's senior White House adviser Valerie Jarrett held a series of meetings with illegal immigrant activists during Obama's first ..
Valerie Jarrett met with illegal immigrant activists | The Daily ...
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/January-2014/The-Mysteries-and-Realities-of-Valerie-Jarrett-Mystery-Woman-of-the-White-House/
Obama's Strange Dependence on Valerie Jarrett
Obama's Strange Dependence on Valerie Jarrett
o'mam - German view on Islam: Something to ponder
From: ren Sent: Sunday, June 15, 2014 Subject: German view on Islam - SOMETHING TO PONDER.
This read not too long.. I did read this and found it to be very interesting.
We cannot be forever be silent. Political Correctness IS also our enemy.
Here is a sample...a few paragraphs from below:
Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on..
________________________________________________German view on Islam - SOMETHING TO PONDERA German's View on Islam - worth reading. This is by far the best explanation of the Muslim terrorist situation I have ever read.
His references to past history are accurate and clear. Not long, easy to understand, and well worth the read. The author of this email is Dr. Emanuel Tanya, a well-known and well-respected psychiatrist.
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism.
'Very few people were true Nazis,' he said, 'but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.'
We are told again and again by 'experts' and 'talking heads' that Islam is the religion of peace and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the spectre of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of 50 shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honour-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard, quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the 'silent majority,' is cowed and extraneous. Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about 20 million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
China's huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering 70 million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet, Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across South East Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of 12 million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet. And who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were 'peace loving'?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason, we often miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don't speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
Now Islamic prayers have been introduced into Toronto and other public schools in Ontario, and, yes, in Ottawa too while the Lord's Prayer was removed (due to being so offensive?) The Islamic way may be peaceful for the time being in our country until the fanatics move in.
In Australia, and indeed in many countries around the world, many of the most commonly consumed food items have the halal emblem on them. Just look at the back of some of the most popular chocolate bars, and at other food items in your local supermarket. Food on aircraft have the halal emblem, just to appease the privileged minority who are now rapidly expanding within the nation's shores.
In the U.K, the Muslim communities refuse to integrate and there are now dozens of "no-go" zones within major cities across the country that the police force dare not intrude upon. Sharia law prevails there, because the Muslim community in those areas refuse to acknowledge British law.
As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts -- the fanatics who threaten our way of life.Lastly, anyone who doubts that the issue is serious and just deletes this email without sending it on, is contributing to the passiveness that allows the problems to expand. So, extend yourself a bit and send this on and on and on! Let us hope that thousands, world-wide, read this and think about it, and send it on.
Saturday, June 14, 2014
The Unmaking of the American World :: SteynOnline
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The Unmaking of the American World
by Mark Steyn
National Review
June 13, 2014
While we're waiting for Baghdad to fall and now that President Obama, fresh from his Saigon-evoking photo-op in front of a helicopter, has departed to play golf in Palm Springs for the weekend, I thought I'd dust off a few pieces not irrelevant to the present situation. This first is from a review of Robert Kagan's book The World America Made that I wrote for National Review two years ago. Certain points are worth re-considering in the light of Iraq's implosion, shortly to be followed by Afghanistan's. "The world America made" is like that US Embassy in Baghdad - lavish, money-no-object, but about to be abandoned and left to others:
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and even more of it in the nation's publishing catalogue. Robert Kagan has noticed the resurgence of declinism; he doesn't care for it; and The World America Made is his response to it. He is an eminent thinker, consulted by Romney, quoted favorably by Obama, but don't hold either against him. I have a high regard for him, too. In the early years of the century, he came up with a line that, as geopolitical paradigmatic drollery goes, is better than Jon Stewart's writing staff could muster: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus." Granted, even at the time, one was aware that many Americans were trending very Venusian, but the gag was worth it just for the way it infuriated all the right Continentals.
Nothing so deftly distilled emerges fromThe World America Made, an extended essay that paints with a very broad brush. What few specifics there are raise far more questions than Kagan assumes they answer. For example, on the very first page:
Put aside those small European nations that, post–Third Reich, recovered their liberty: Norway, Belgium. In 1941, half the democracies were His Britannic Majesty's Dominions — Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. After the war, they were joined by what remains the world's largest democracy, India, and then Jamaica, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea, Belize, etc. Democracies all, and all operating with a local variant of the throne speech, speaker, mace, Hansard, and all the other features of "the Westminster system." During the deliberations on the post-Saddam Iraqi constitution, I received from a retired colonial civil servant in Wales an e-mail with the enviable opening line, "Having helped write seven constitutions . . ." Perhaps he was moved to do so "because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy," or perhaps he was just continuing an imperial evolutionary process begun in January 1848 in Nova Scotia. Likewise, the French decolonized (or attempted to) in their own image.
Which raises a more interesting question:Why hasn't America tried to export its own distinctive constitutional ideas? If England is the mother of parliaments, America's a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating.
In all those new nations supposedly inspired by American democracy, you'll search in vain for, say, a First Amendment, or a Second. Even when the U.S. has expended a decade's worth of blood and treasure in "nation-building," the nation it's built is not in its own image but a sharia state complete with child marriage, legalized rape, and death for apostasy.
Which raises another question: What does Kagan mean by "democracy"? An election twice a decade good enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the U.N. observers? Or genuine liberty? Kagan never defines terms, which is perhaps just as well. The Arab Spring may be the bleak dawn of the post-Western Middle East, and the Coptic Christians are fleeing in terror, and the al-Qaeda flag's flying in Benghazi, and half the new guys all seem to have Iran on speed dial, and the only viable alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood is the Even More Muslim Brotherhood, and they're tossing the offspring of U.S. cabinet secretaries into holding cells, but for Kagan it's all nevertheless "an essential attribute of the American world order," and therefore even the booming burqa sales and state-of-the-art clitoridectomy clinic are in their fashion a tribute to American influence. If some mad scientist crossed Dr. Pangloss with George M. Cohan, he'd sound a lot like Robert Kagan: Once one accepts this is the most American of all possible American worlds, all is as American as it can possibly be.
At such moments, the author, the consummate American interventionist, sounds in need of an intervention himself. He is confident his compatriots retain "a degree of satisfaction in their special role" as global-order maker. Where's the evidence? Well, "during the seventh-inning stretch in every game at Yankee Stadium, the fans rise and offer 'a moment of silent prayer for the men and women who are stationed around the globe' defending freedom and 'our way of life.' A tribute to those serving, yes, but with an unmistakable glint of pride in the nation's role 'around the globe.'"
Really? I'd say he's mistaking that glint pretty comprehensively. Those moments of prayer, and the "We support our troops" yellow-ribbon stickers, and the priority boarding for military personnel on U.S. airlines, and the other genuflections are there to help a disillusioned citizenry distinguish between the valor of the soldiery and the thanklessness of their mission; it's a way of salvaging something decent and honorable from the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America's unwon wars.
Why can't the United States win? The question never seems to occur to Kagan — to the point where, toward the end, he argues that, if America is set for British-style imperial sunset, it is today nevertheless "not remotely like" the old lion at the dawn of the 20th century but "more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power." I had a strong urge at this point to toss the book out of the window and back my truck over it. In 1870, Britain's military victories were honored in the imperial metropolis by Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station; there's a suburb of Melbourne where everything's named after Crimea — Crimea Street, Balaclava Road, Inkerman Road, Sebastopol Street — and you can even find a Kandahar, Saskatchewan, memorializing a long-forgotten Victorian victory on that thankless sod. Today, in an America "at the height of its power," there is no Korea Square, Saigon Station, Jalalabad Road, or Fallujah, Idaho. Yankee fans "support our troops" because they no longer know what the mission is, or ever was.
Kagan would counter that America won what he calls "the war that never happened," the one with the Soviet Union, but, given the way the others turned out, it is perhaps just as well it never happened. A great scholar of the American way of war, he's fascinated with every aspect except victory. "The United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known. . . . The superior expenditures underestimate America's actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat, and would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle."
But put 'em up against illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer, and you'll be tied down for a decade.
What's wrong with this picture? And what's wrong with this analyst that he can't see anything wrong with it? Kagan is a serious historian, but, aside from pondering Europe's revolutions of 1848 vis-a-vis the era of American democratization, a consideration of American versus British dominance is the only serious attempt at historical perspective. Yet, if you step back and take the long view, you wouldn't bother weighing those differences at all. In the sweep of history, scholars will see (as the Chinese and French already do) the last two centuries as a period of continuous Anglophone military-economic-cultural dominance, first by the original English world power, and then by its greatest if prodigal son. The transition from the Royal Navy's Pax Britannica to today's Pax Americana was accomplished so smoothly it was barely noticed. The United States inherited the global networks of its predecessor: American sailors were stationed in Bermuda, and RCAF officers at NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain; Washington joined Australia and New Zealand in the ANZUS alliance, and built a new base on the British island of Diego Garcia. For Britannia's lion cubs, from Ottawa to Canberra, getting a hearing in Washington became more important than getting one in London.
As for the mother country, Britain accepted its diminished status with as much grace as it could muster. As with an old, failing firm, its directors had identified the friendliest bidder and arranged, as best they could, for a succession in global leadership that was least disruptive to their interests and would ensure the continuity of their brand: the English language, English law, English trade, English liberties. It was such an artful transfer it's barely noticed and little discussed. Indeed, even Kagan mentions it only en passant:"Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States," he writes, "so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China." I marvel that anyone could type that sentence without realizing the absurdity of the comparison.
And, that aside, it's not in the offing, is it? For 30 years, the foreign-policy "realists" have assured us that economic liberalization would force political liberalization. Instead, we've helped China come up with the only economically viable form of Communism. So, sometime this decade or next, the dominant economic power will be a totalitarian state with no genuine market, no property rights, no free speech, an abortion policy that's left it with the most male-heavy population cohort in history, and, a little ways inland from the glittering coastal megalopolises, 40 million people who live in caves. This is not your father's transfer of global dominance.
"Great powers rarely decline suddenly," says Kagan. Well, it depends how you define "suddenly." By the time Odoacer took Rome in 476, the city's population had fallen by 75 percent in barely half a century — or the equivalent of the Beatles to now. As Paul McCartney might put it, yesterday came suddenly: Within a few years, a prototype "globalization" of European commerce had reverted to a subsistence economy of local agriculture.
This is where Kagan's complacency serves him ill. America currently spends around $600 billion a year on its military, more than every other major and medium power put together. Nevertheless, says Kagan, "the cost of remaining the world's predominant power is not prohibitive." He's right in the narrow sense that it's small potatoes next to Medicare. But he's wrong in his understanding of the underlying political realities.
Kagan is a geopolitical guy. Economics seems to bore him: The T-word — "trillion" — makes just one perfunctory appearance before the end, although it's profoundly relevant to America's fate. As Paul Ryan put it at the House Budget Committee recently, the entire U.S. economy "shuts down" in 2027 on this path.
Might that not have some impact on our "superior expenditures" on "advanced weaponry"? What about human capital? For Kagan, "America" and "Europe" are entities that seem to exist independent of any actual Americans and Europeans and their respective dispositions. Much of "the world America made" is in steep demographic decline — or transformation. For three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, an accommodation with Islam will be not just a prudent foreign policy but necessary for domestic tranquility, too; the fourth member — China — already has a very friendly working partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. and elsewhere.
What of Americans? Any post-war British general can tell you that, when it comes to a choice between the nanny state and the military, it's the latter that takes the hit, no matter how footling the savings. In an ever broker America, it will always be easier to cut defense — for the Left, as a matter of principle; and, for ever larger numbers of the Right, because, for whatever reason, a lavishly funded military's "unmatched capability" seems utterly incapable up against those it actually gets matched with. Indeed, for Ron Paul Republicans, the more relevant thesis would be "The America the World Made": A prosperous Europe (subsequently joined by China, Singapore, Korea, India, Brazil, you name it) suckered U.S. taxpayers into picking up the tab for global security and signing on to an economic order that turned America into a cheap service economy. I'm no Ronulan, but nor am I deluded enough to sit in the Yankees stands and think "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack / I don't care if I never get back" embodies the locals' quiet "satisfaction" in an open-ended Afghan deployment.
America is an anomaly: the non-colonial superpower. So, having inherited Britain's imperial networks, it had no interest in getting into the business of imperial administration. No American lawyer or police commissioner wants to be chief justice in Kabul or police chief in Tikrit. Instead, Washington opted for the role of global-order maker, setting up international institutions that downplayed its own status and artificially inflated everybody else's. If you encourage the pretense that the Sudanese and Swiss ambassadors are no different, don't be surprised if the former takes it to heart. Today, many of the U.S.-created global luncheon clubs are ever more institutionally at odds with American interests. This too is "the world America made," a world where the wealthiest nations in history are defense-welfare queens, and many of the rest are affirmative-action grievance-mongers with nuclear ambitions.
We speak of "credit bubbles" and "housing bubbles," but the real bubble is America's 1950 moment: a very precise set of post-war conditions that put the U.S. in a different league from other nation-states. Europe rebuilt, Asia got the hang of capitalism, and still America thought 1950 was forever. It's not. It's already fading. The nearest thing to an insight in Kagan's book comes toward the end when he states what ought to be obvious — that "a liberal world order will only be supported by liberal nations."
America is ceding economic dominance to China; the transnational talking shops are hollowed out by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; in Central and Eastern Europe, a resurgent Russia is selling itself as an effective bad cop to Washington's ineffectual good cop. All these forces are highly illiberal — which suggests that Kagan knows the answer to how things are going to go for the "liberal world order."
The Left doesn't believe in American exceptionalism, but assumes that the highly exceptional prosperity of "the world America made" is as permanent a feature as the earth and sky. The Right certainly does believe in American exceptionalism, to the point that its own myth-making blinds it to the lessons of history. The cause of those of us who value American order in the world is done no favors by a book as complacent as this.
Yes, it was a wonderful life.
But what's next?
~from National Review, May 14th 2012
National Review
June 13, 2014
While we're waiting for Baghdad to fall and now that President Obama, fresh from his Saigon-evoking photo-op in front of a helicopter, has departed to play golf in Palm Springs for the weekend, I thought I'd dust off a few pieces not irrelevant to the present situation. This first is from a review of Robert Kagan's book The World America Made that I wrote for National Review two years ago. Certain points are worth re-considering in the light of Iraq's implosion, shortly to be followed by Afghanistan's. "The world America made" is like that US Embassy in Baghdad - lavish, money-no-object, but about to be abandoned and left to others:
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and even more of it in the nation's publishing catalogue. Robert Kagan has noticed the resurgence of declinism; he doesn't care for it; and The World America Made is his response to it. He is an eminent thinker, consulted by Romney, quoted favorably by Obama, but don't hold either against him. I have a high regard for him, too. In the early years of the century, he came up with a line that, as geopolitical paradigmatic drollery goes, is better than Jon Stewart's writing staff could muster: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus." Granted, even at the time, one was aware that many Americans were trending very Venusian, but the gag was worth it just for the way it infuriated all the right Continentals.
Nothing so deftly distilled emerges fromThe World America Made, an extended essay that paints with a very broad brush. What few specifics there are raise far more questions than Kagan assumes they answer. For example, on the very first page:
In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies in the world. Today there are over a hundred.Back in 1941, you couldn't have had a hundred democratic nations, because there weren't a hundred nations. The European empires were still intact. One continent, from Marrakesh to Mbabane, was (excepting a pocket or two) entirely the sovereign property of another. And that latter continent, in 1941, was itself colonized, the German army's sweep west having temporarily extinguished some of the smallest but oldest democracies, from Denmark to the Netherlands. All in all, it's an odd starting date for the point Kagan is making — that the spread of democracy around the planet is "not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy."
Put aside those small European nations that, post–Third Reich, recovered their liberty: Norway, Belgium. In 1941, half the democracies were His Britannic Majesty's Dominions — Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. After the war, they were joined by what remains the world's largest democracy, India, and then Jamaica, Mauritius, Papua New Guinea, Belize, etc. Democracies all, and all operating with a local variant of the throne speech, speaker, mace, Hansard, and all the other features of "the Westminster system." During the deliberations on the post-Saddam Iraqi constitution, I received from a retired colonial civil servant in Wales an e-mail with the enviable opening line, "Having helped write seven constitutions . . ." Perhaps he was moved to do so "because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy," or perhaps he was just continuing an imperial evolutionary process begun in January 1848 in Nova Scotia. Likewise, the French decolonized (or attempted to) in their own image.
Which raises a more interesting question:Why hasn't America tried to export its own distinctive constitutional ideas? If England is the mother of parliaments, America's a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating.
In all those new nations supposedly inspired by American democracy, you'll search in vain for, say, a First Amendment, or a Second. Even when the U.S. has expended a decade's worth of blood and treasure in "nation-building," the nation it's built is not in its own image but a sharia state complete with child marriage, legalized rape, and death for apostasy.
Which raises another question: What does Kagan mean by "democracy"? An election twice a decade good enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the U.N. observers? Or genuine liberty? Kagan never defines terms, which is perhaps just as well. The Arab Spring may be the bleak dawn of the post-Western Middle East, and the Coptic Christians are fleeing in terror, and the al-Qaeda flag's flying in Benghazi, and half the new guys all seem to have Iran on speed dial, and the only viable alternative to the Muslim Brotherhood is the Even More Muslim Brotherhood, and they're tossing the offspring of U.S. cabinet secretaries into holding cells, but for Kagan it's all nevertheless "an essential attribute of the American world order," and therefore even the booming burqa sales and state-of-the-art clitoridectomy clinic are in their fashion a tribute to American influence. If some mad scientist crossed Dr. Pangloss with George M. Cohan, he'd sound a lot like Robert Kagan: Once one accepts this is the most American of all possible American worlds, all is as American as it can possibly be.
At such moments, the author, the consummate American interventionist, sounds in need of an intervention himself. He is confident his compatriots retain "a degree of satisfaction in their special role" as global-order maker. Where's the evidence? Well, "during the seventh-inning stretch in every game at Yankee Stadium, the fans rise and offer 'a moment of silent prayer for the men and women who are stationed around the globe' defending freedom and 'our way of life.' A tribute to those serving, yes, but with an unmistakable glint of pride in the nation's role 'around the globe.'"
Really? I'd say he's mistaking that glint pretty comprehensively. Those moments of prayer, and the "We support our troops" yellow-ribbon stickers, and the priority boarding for military personnel on U.S. airlines, and the other genuflections are there to help a disillusioned citizenry distinguish between the valor of the soldiery and the thanklessness of their mission; it's a way of salvaging something decent and honorable from the grim two-thirds-of-a-century roll call of America's unwon wars.
Why can't the United States win? The question never seems to occur to Kagan — to the point where, toward the end, he argues that, if America is set for British-style imperial sunset, it is today nevertheless "not remotely like" the old lion at the dawn of the 20th century but "more like Britain circa 1870, when the empire was at the height of its power." I had a strong urge at this point to toss the book out of the window and back my truck over it. In 1870, Britain's military victories were honored in the imperial metropolis by Trafalgar Square and Waterloo Station; there's a suburb of Melbourne where everything's named after Crimea — Crimea Street, Balaclava Road, Inkerman Road, Sebastopol Street — and you can even find a Kandahar, Saskatchewan, memorializing a long-forgotten Victorian victory on that thankless sod. Today, in an America "at the height of its power," there is no Korea Square, Saigon Station, Jalalabad Road, or Fallujah, Idaho. Yankee fans "support our troops" because they no longer know what the mission is, or ever was.
Kagan would counter that America won what he calls "the war that never happened," the one with the Soviet Union, but, given the way the others turned out, it is perhaps just as well it never happened. A great scholar of the American way of war, he's fascinated with every aspect except victory. "The United States remains unmatched. It is far and away the most powerful nation the world has ever known. . . . The superior expenditures underestimate America's actual superiority in military capability. American land and air forces are equipped with the most advanced weaponry, are the most experienced in actual combat, and would defeat any competitor in a head-to-head battle."
But put 'em up against illiterate goatherds with string and fertilizer, and you'll be tied down for a decade.
What's wrong with this picture? And what's wrong with this analyst that he can't see anything wrong with it? Kagan is a serious historian, but, aside from pondering Europe's revolutions of 1848 vis-a-vis the era of American democratization, a consideration of American versus British dominance is the only serious attempt at historical perspective. Yet, if you step back and take the long view, you wouldn't bother weighing those differences at all. In the sweep of history, scholars will see (as the Chinese and French already do) the last two centuries as a period of continuous Anglophone military-economic-cultural dominance, first by the original English world power, and then by its greatest if prodigal son. The transition from the Royal Navy's Pax Britannica to today's Pax Americana was accomplished so smoothly it was barely noticed. The United States inherited the global networks of its predecessor: American sailors were stationed in Bermuda, and RCAF officers at NORAD in Cheyenne Mountain; Washington joined Australia and New Zealand in the ANZUS alliance, and built a new base on the British island of Diego Garcia. For Britannia's lion cubs, from Ottawa to Canberra, getting a hearing in Washington became more important than getting one in London.
As for the mother country, Britain accepted its diminished status with as much grace as it could muster. As with an old, failing firm, its directors had identified the friendliest bidder and arranged, as best they could, for a succession in global leadership that was least disruptive to their interests and would ensure the continuity of their brand: the English language, English law, English trade, English liberties. It was such an artful transfer it's barely noticed and little discussed. Indeed, even Kagan mentions it only en passant:"Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States," he writes, "so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China." I marvel that anyone could type that sentence without realizing the absurdity of the comparison.
And, that aside, it's not in the offing, is it? For 30 years, the foreign-policy "realists" have assured us that economic liberalization would force political liberalization. Instead, we've helped China come up with the only economically viable form of Communism. So, sometime this decade or next, the dominant economic power will be a totalitarian state with no genuine market, no property rights, no free speech, an abortion policy that's left it with the most male-heavy population cohort in history, and, a little ways inland from the glittering coastal megalopolises, 40 million people who live in caves. This is not your father's transfer of global dominance.
"Great powers rarely decline suddenly," says Kagan. Well, it depends how you define "suddenly." By the time Odoacer took Rome in 476, the city's population had fallen by 75 percent in barely half a century — or the equivalent of the Beatles to now. As Paul McCartney might put it, yesterday came suddenly: Within a few years, a prototype "globalization" of European commerce had reverted to a subsistence economy of local agriculture.
This is where Kagan's complacency serves him ill. America currently spends around $600 billion a year on its military, more than every other major and medium power put together. Nevertheless, says Kagan, "the cost of remaining the world's predominant power is not prohibitive." He's right in the narrow sense that it's small potatoes next to Medicare. But he's wrong in his understanding of the underlying political realities.
Kagan is a geopolitical guy. Economics seems to bore him: The T-word — "trillion" — makes just one perfunctory appearance before the end, although it's profoundly relevant to America's fate. As Paul Ryan put it at the House Budget Committee recently, the entire U.S. economy "shuts down" in 2027 on this path.
Might that not have some impact on our "superior expenditures" on "advanced weaponry"? What about human capital? For Kagan, "America" and "Europe" are entities that seem to exist independent of any actual Americans and Europeans and their respective dispositions. Much of "the world America made" is in steep demographic decline — or transformation. For three of the five permanent members of the Security Council, an accommodation with Islam will be not just a prudent foreign policy but necessary for domestic tranquility, too; the fourth member — China — already has a very friendly working partnership with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. and elsewhere.
What of Americans? Any post-war British general can tell you that, when it comes to a choice between the nanny state and the military, it's the latter that takes the hit, no matter how footling the savings. In an ever broker America, it will always be easier to cut defense — for the Left, as a matter of principle; and, for ever larger numbers of the Right, because, for whatever reason, a lavishly funded military's "unmatched capability" seems utterly incapable up against those it actually gets matched with. Indeed, for Ron Paul Republicans, the more relevant thesis would be "The America the World Made": A prosperous Europe (subsequently joined by China, Singapore, Korea, India, Brazil, you name it) suckered U.S. taxpayers into picking up the tab for global security and signing on to an economic order that turned America into a cheap service economy. I'm no Ronulan, but nor am I deluded enough to sit in the Yankees stands and think "Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack / I don't care if I never get back" embodies the locals' quiet "satisfaction" in an open-ended Afghan deployment.
America is an anomaly: the non-colonial superpower. So, having inherited Britain's imperial networks, it had no interest in getting into the business of imperial administration. No American lawyer or police commissioner wants to be chief justice in Kabul or police chief in Tikrit. Instead, Washington opted for the role of global-order maker, setting up international institutions that downplayed its own status and artificially inflated everybody else's. If you encourage the pretense that the Sudanese and Swiss ambassadors are no different, don't be surprised if the former takes it to heart. Today, many of the U.S.-created global luncheon clubs are ever more institutionally at odds with American interests. This too is "the world America made," a world where the wealthiest nations in history are defense-welfare queens, and many of the rest are affirmative-action grievance-mongers with nuclear ambitions.
We speak of "credit bubbles" and "housing bubbles," but the real bubble is America's 1950 moment: a very precise set of post-war conditions that put the U.S. in a different league from other nation-states. Europe rebuilt, Asia got the hang of capitalism, and still America thought 1950 was forever. It's not. It's already fading. The nearest thing to an insight in Kagan's book comes toward the end when he states what ought to be obvious — that "a liberal world order will only be supported by liberal nations."
America is ceding economic dominance to China; the transnational talking shops are hollowed out by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation; in Central and Eastern Europe, a resurgent Russia is selling itself as an effective bad cop to Washington's ineffectual good cop. All these forces are highly illiberal — which suggests that Kagan knows the answer to how things are going to go for the "liberal world order."
The Left doesn't believe in American exceptionalism, but assumes that the highly exceptional prosperity of "the world America made" is as permanent a feature as the earth and sky. The Right certainly does believe in American exceptionalism, to the point that its own myth-making blinds it to the lessons of history. The cause of those of us who value American order in the world is done no favors by a book as complacent as this.
Yes, it was a wonderful life.
But what's next?
~from National Review, May 14th 2012
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