Canadian Cincinnatus

Henry Kissinger agrees with Canadian Cincinnatus on Afghanistan

I have argued many times on these pages that the key to victory in the Afghan War is the right strategy. Trying to create a modern nation-state out of a hodgepodge collection of tribes inhabiting a buffer zone created by the British and Russians in the 19^th century to separate their empires is a fool’s errand - especially as both empires concluded that this no-man’s land is worthless and ungovernable. However, if the goal of the Afghan War is merely to deny Al Qaeda and the Taliban a safe haven, victory in this war is quite achievable. All you have to do is to employ the existing tribal structure for your purpose: i.e. you tell the tribes that you will leave them alone (and turn a blind eye to their opium trade) if they don’t dabble in international terrorism. But if they do, your fast reaction force in Kandahar will come down on them like a load of bricks. Also, if they play nice, they get some ‘development money’ that nobody will audit. In other words, basically give them thinly disguised bribes. (Psst! Afghan warlords come cheap.)

After observing the Afghanistan war debate steadfastly ignore this option, I read Henry Kissinger’s Washington Post article with great pleasure, as he argues for basically the same thing. Read the whole article, but here are the relevant passages (emphasis added):

“Afghanistan is a nation, not a state in the conventional sense. The writ of the Afghan government is likely to run in Kabul and its environs, not uniformly in the rest of the country. The attainable outcome is likely to be a confederation of semi-autonomous, regions configured largely on the basis of ethnicity, dealing with each other by tacit or explicit understandings. American counterinsurgency strategy -- no matter how creatively applied -- cannot alter this reality.”

“All this leaves only a narrow margin for the American effort. We are needed to bring about the space in which non-jihadist authorities can be established. But if we go beyond this into designing these political authorities, we commit ourselves to a process so prolonged and obtrusive as to risk turning even non-Taliban Afghans against us.”

“We have a basic national interest to prevent jihadist Islam from gaining additional momentum, which it will surely do if it can claim to have defeated the United States and its allies after overcoming the Soviet Union.”

“Afghan strategy needs to be modified in four ways. The military effort should be conducted substantially on a provincial basis rather than in pursuit of a Western-style central government. The time scale for a political effort exceeds by a wide margin that available for military operations. We need a regional diplomatic framework for the next stage of Afghan strategy, whatever the military outcome. Artificial deadlines should be abandoned.” 

Kissinger added the following feature to this strategy that I didn’t think of:

“Afghanistan becomes an international issue whenever an outside power seeks to achieve unilateral dominance. Inevitably, this draws in other parties to establish a countervailing influence, driving events beyond rational calculation. A regional diplomacy should seek to establish a framework to insulate Afghanistan from the storms raging around it rather than allow the country to serve as their epicenter.”

 

How to recoup the security costs of the G20 summit in Toronto

On the surface, suppressing the people who riot at events like the G20 summit is simple. The army or the police can shut these things down in a matter of minutes, but at great cost in blood and by handing the anarchists the moral victory that they crave (and believe me, they want the casualties). Less than 1000 people who were killed by the Cossacks in the Bloody Sunday riot at the Tsar’s Winter Palace in 1905. And yet, this event is remembered almost as much as the millions who were deliberately starved to death or murdered by the Bolsheviks in their misbegotten reign. There are certainly more statues for them in Russia today than for all those who perished in the Gulag. The four people who were shot to death by National Guardsmen at Kent State were eulogized in many songs (songs that all ignored all the inconvenient details surrounding that multi-day riot). How many songs did the rock stars write for the millions of Vietnamese and Cambodians killed by the communists after the US pulled out of Indochina?

To solve the problem of public rioting it is first necessary to understand that riots are first and foremost Kabuki Theater. In order to best the trust-fund anarchists at their game, you must play by the rules of political theater.

Which is why the Huntsville G8 summit was so brilliant. Hold the summit in a place where the logistics are difficult for the rioters, and you win by default when they can’t get there. But what if you want to hold a summit in a major city like Toronto, where the logistics for the rioters are favourable?

My suggestion is that you do what Pierre Elliot Trudeau did with the FLQ. You drain the swamp. Going after the rioters themselves is difficult: they have little money, and their standing among their peers increases the more you prosecute them. These people crave martyrdom. The key to the success of the War Measures Act was that the government went after the sympathizers – people who weren’t in the FLQ itself but who clearly sympathized with it and expressed their sympathy with monetary and logistical aid. These people are the weak link in any terror group because they do have property and status in the community-at-large that they can lose. They ‘play revolution’ by helping the actual terrorists out but they enjoy their creature comforts too much to actually participate directly. These people were scared out of terrorism when it became clear to them that they might be sharing a jail cell with the likes of Apache Trudeau (no relation to the former PM). All of a sudden, all the revolutionary talk at the trendy cocktail parties wasn’t fun anymore. When these people turned their backs, the swamp was drained and the terrorist fish just flopped around on the dried riverbed. Without money, logistical support like safe houses, and a good word in the press, professional terrorists can do little.

Which brings me back to the G20 summit. Why were the left-wing protesters able to gather in such numbers in Toronto when they couldn’t in Huntsville? Because they had logistical support from organizations such as the University of Toronto, Ryerson University and the United Church of Canada. Among other things, these organizations supplied the rioters with a cheap place to stay. As well, left-wing demonstrators are experts at getting money from governments, foundations and the decadent rich. This is the swamp you drain. Go after them. First, make it illegal for governments to give grant money to groups that riot. Second, sue the churches, schools and individuals for the damages caused by the riots that they enabled. Considering how high profile the anarchists and their tactics are, it is very difficult for a university board of trustees to plead ignorance. I think it shouldn’t be hard to convince a judge that being aware of the criminal activities of these people is covered under due diligence if you intend to give them cheap room and board.

When the trustees and the directors of the United Church of Canada are sitting in a court room on the receiving end of a $100 million law suit, they won’t think that aiding and abetting rioters is way cool any more. The best part? Because civil court proceedings are so long, drawn out and boring, the venue lacks all potential for political theater. Therefore, no anarchists will be demonstrating their solidarity outside the courtroom (especially since they hate these symbols of authority already). They will feel alone and hated by all sides.

And if controversy lingers over any of this, it is just icing on the cake for Stephen Harper. The public hates these rioters and will rally behind whoever cracks down on them. On the other hand, such controversy puts the Liberals and especially the NDP on the horns of a dilemma. Support Harper and piss off your left-wing supporters. Side with the anarchists and alienate the average voter. Heads we win, tails they lose.

If Iran gets nukes, who benefits?

After years of effort, Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons should be bearing fruit soon, thanks in part to strong technical assistance from Russia and diplomatic cover provided by both Russia and China. In the meantime, a powerful regional player, Turkey, is slowly drifting towards Islamic fundamentalism and away from the secularism of Kemal Ataturk, thanks to the fact that the Turkish peasants in the Anatolian hinterland are outreproducing their more cosmopolitan countrymen in Constantinople. Iran and its ally Syria are arming and coordinating Hezbollah and Hamas in their belligerency on Israel. The recent attempt by Hamas to run Israel’s blockade - sponsored by Turkey - only highlights the powder-keg that is building in the Middle East. In the past, the US could be counted on to help defuse such a situation. However this time the Obama administration appears either incapable of doing anything constructive or worse, may actually be siding with the most destructive elements. And The One will be in charge for at least another two and a half years.

The worst part is that, unlike previous Middle East powder-kegs, this one could potentially end with a nuclear exchange. Iran has famously said that Israel is a one bomb state, meaning that one atomic bomb can finish it off. Well Iran is a bit bigger; probably a twenty or thirty bomb state, but since Israel has between 100 and 400 bombs, it can be finished off too.

At this point, the anti-Semite asks the pseudo-profound question with the all too predictable answer, who benefits? Well, perhaps this is a good question to ask at this point in time, who does benefit?

The answer: Russia, that’s who.

If Iran managed to detonate a nuke in Tel Aviv, perhaps 50,000 people would be killed. In retaliation, Iran would be wiped off the map, killing tens of millions. Both countries lose, with the side effect that the price of oil would skyrocket as mushroom clouds rise over the Persian Gulf. With one of the largest oil reserves outside of the Persian Gulf, a nuclear war in the Middle East would be a financial windfall for Russia, and Europe would be on its knees before her. This would explain why Russia is so eager to assist a regional and ideological rival in acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran is Russia’s cat’s-paw right now even though it is really Russia’s enemy. But when this enemy is destroyed, it is Israel, not Russia, that does the deed. Icing on the cake for Russia.

But are the leaders of Russia so cruel and callous to think like this? Perhaps Dmitri Medvedev is not, but consider Vladimir Putin, of apartment-house bombing fame. I wouldn’t put it past him.

The Gulf oil spill and Environmentalism

It has been a widespread observation in conservative and alternate media circles that if this crisis had been happening under George W Bush’s watch, then all hell would be breaking loose now in the media and among the tree-hugger crowd. There would be mass demonstrations daily – many violent, ‘die-ins’ and lots and lots of large paper mache puppets of President Bush and Tony Hayward. Indeed it has been a relief that the reaction to this crisis has been so level-headed.

However there is a big danger for the environmentalist movement in this.

Think back to the Bill Clinton scandals and feminism. When President Clinton was hauled up before the courts in what was really just a fairly typical sexual harassment case, the feminists sided with ‘their President’ against ‘their law’. All of a sudden, all of the arguments used previously by conservatives to argue against this onerous, unjust anti-man law were employed by the feminists to provide cover for Clinton.

As a result, Bill Clinton survived comfortably but the feminist movement was left permanently discredited. The spectacle of feminists carrying water for a powerful lothario simply because they agreed with his left-wing politics demonstrated to everybody what conservatives knew all along, that feminism is really only the ladies auxiliary of the left. As a result, regular college-age women stopped identifying with organized Feminism, which has in recent years become the exclusive club of unhinged, man-hating lesbians.

Getting back to the Gulf: by any objective standards, this oil spill is about the worst possible environmental catastrophe short of a nuclear war – an epic underwater gush of oil, already 60 days old, with no end in sight, and with the potential to grievously pollute thousands of miles of American coastlines. I mean, if this isn’t a red light emergency for environmentalism, then what is?

Unless, of course, the environment is really a cover for other, unstated, priorities. If the environmentalists are seen to care more about Obama’s poll numbers than they are about mother nature, then it will be graphic demonstration to all concerned that they are like a fresh tomato, which is green at first, but can be counted on to turn bright red when left in the sunlight.

The G20 fiasco: a Red Tory boondoggle

Red Tories are always lecturing small government conservatives and libertarians about how we are too ‘extremist’ to be electable and that if we want to win elections, we must become more ‘moderate’ and ‘mainstream’.

Well, what does moderating and mainstreaming involve in practice?

One thing it means is big government dog and pony shows designed to convince voters that conservatives are ‘compassionate’ and big government friendly (which are, apparently, the same thing). One example is David Cameron’s efforts to rebrand the British Conservative Party as the real ‘green party’ of Great Britain. Another is the G8 and G20 summits Canada is hosting.

The G20 summit is the kind of thing that small government aficionados are inherently suspicious of - even when they don’t come with billion dollar price tags (which they usually do). While I admit that international conferences can sometimes be useful, this is usually when a major issue needs to be hashed out face-to-face by world leaders, as was the case at Yalta, Bretton Woods and the Congress of Vienna. However, the recent proliferation of non-agenda driven international confabs is an unambiguously negative trend, especially considering the fact that world leaders these days can communicate electronically and much of the detail work is done ahead of time by high-level bureaucrats anyway. As far as I can tell, the principal purpose of these venues is to provide a forum for international leaders to toot their own horn. In my view, the fewer the better. A modest night-watchman state has no use for this kind of thing.

Of course, there is a price to be paid for this fiscal modesty. Because the mainstream centrist voter (the kind of voter, we are told, holds the key to winning elections) eats stuff like this up, our opposition to them is counterproductive. All we do is alienate ourselves from the voters... Wait a minute... the polls say that G20 boondoggle is unpopular with Canadians.

Hmmm... maybe the Red Tories don’t know what they’re talking about.

How President Obama blew the Gulf oil spill response

I have a lot of sympathy for some of the argument used by the President’s defenders. Really I do. For instance, they say that the President is merely the chief executive of the federal government; he is not an omnipotent being. By holding him responsible for everything that goes wrong within the borders of the United States - including those caused by private entities - you are holding him up to impossibly high standards. I fundamentally agree with this argument. 

In fact, I wish it were truer than it actually is. When the US was a modest, commercial republic a hundred years ago, the president was a remote figure, far removed from everyday matters. As a result, when something bad happened, the local citizens came together, rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. This is as it should be. Unfortunately, these days, after the steady rise of the federal colossus for over a century, when a natural disaster happens, local authorities try to get it declared a Federal Emergency. In this way, hurricanes and tornados are converted into federal dollars. This trend is enervating and corrosive on the ethic of self-reliance America used to pride itself on having. The Big Man theory – the idea that all of your needs and desires can be met by the country’s heroic leader – is more fitting for a third world African thugocracy than a free country, and should have no place in the United States.

Having said that, I still say Obama blew it. How?

Well for starters, while it is true that the US government does not have the expertise or the equipment to deal with the oil leak, after 50+ weeks, it has become abundantly clear that neither does BP. And since an environmental disaster in federal waters ultimately falls on shoulders of the federal government, the federal government must get involved, ready or not.

To me, Obama’s main failing is that he has not so far distinguished between problem number 1 and problem number 2. Problem number 1 is stopping the leak. Problem number 2 is assigning criminal blame and determining legal liability. Solving problem number 2 is important but it is not nearly as important as problem number 1 and cannot even begin until problem number 1 has been decisively solved. The Obama approach has been to periodically lash out about problem number 2 – in-between various vacations and me-times.

Given their lack of expertise in this matter, what could the federal government do? As I argued before, something the US government has a great deal of is resources. Why not offer a prize of, say, $25 billion to whoever plugs the leak (taken from the unspent portion of the stimulus fund). Let the resourcefulness and creativity that has always been one of America’s more conspicuous virtues be employed to plug ‘the damn hole’.

Gulf oil spill demonstrates the ineffectiveness of excessive government regulation

ig government cheerleaders wants to portray the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico as a failure of ‘unregulated’ free enterprise – a classic case of what happens of private companies running amok without oversight. While it is almost certainly true that negligence on the part of British Petroleum caused this disaster, it is also true that this disaster is a failure of ‘big regulation’ as well. Let me explain.

For starters, there is a phenomenon that economists call regulatory capture. This is when regulators and legislators get into a cozy and mutually beneficial relationship where regulations are bent in the regulatees favour. All of the presents showered on the Department of Interior officials by BP are evidence of this. When control freaks push for more and more regulation of ever increasing complexity for the public good, the tacit assumption is that the regulators and legislators work selflessly for the public good. But what allows them to assume that? Have we found angels in the form of politicians and bureaucrats? I don’t think so. In the real world, the people burdened with the regulations have the biggest in the regulatory process. The rest of the public lazily assumes that the problem has being taken care of, and indeed it has, just not quite the way they think it has been. The more regulations you have, the worse this problem gets because the legal framework gets more obtuse and complicated. For instance, how many special favours are buried in the 2,700 pages of Obamacare?

As an example, take the remote arctic community of Hall Beach. The town is partially dry in that there is an alcohol committee that decides who gets a license to import booze and who doesn’t. The joke around town was that all the biggest drunks are on that committee. And why wouldn’t they be? They’ve got a big incentive to make sure that they get to keep drinking. If you don’t drink, you don’t really care enough to attend all those boring committee meetings.

A bigger example: Bill Clinton’s legal crusade against big tobacco in the 1990’s. The assumption in the media covering the story was that these lawsuits hurt big tobacco, because they are forced to make restitution for Medicare expenses incurred by aging smokers. Wrong. The tobacco companies benefited handsomely. How? Though they did have to pay hefty penalties to the states, their payoff was that upstart competitors were banned from setting up shop. You see it would be ‘unfair’ because those new companies would not have any restitution to make. Not having sold cigarettes before, they were not yet responsible for any medical bills and therefore weren’t a cash cow for the states yet. Those fines were money well spent as far as big tobacco was concerned because their payoff was a government guaranteed monopoly.

The second problem with excessive regulation is that regulations often have unintended consequences that actually make the problem they are intended to fix even worse. Take oil drilling. Drilling on land in the ANWAR region of Alaska? Banned for environmental reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the west coast? Banned, same reasons. Drilling for oil in the shallow continental shelf of the east coast? Banned. Shale oil production in Wyoming and the Dakotas? Banned. What’s left? Drilling for oil off the continental shelf in extremely deep water, where fixing blowouts is extremely difficult – that’s what’s left. Considering the cost and complexity of drilling there, nobody would be doing it if they had been allowed access to oil in the much less challenging regions that are now off-limits. 

The third problem is the stupidity of the regulations themselves. Quite often regulations concentrate on irrelevant minutiae while leaving critical issues untouched. For instance, does anybody believe that BP drilling operation was completely unregulated before the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up? Of course not. Likely, they were subject to thousands and thousands of pages of regulations covering all kinds of details – most trivial. In all probability that’s why the Department of the Interior gave them a safety award. All those forms and all those requirements were filled out - to a t. The only problem was that those regulations left the elephant in the room – what do you do when the blowout valve fails? – untouched.

 

Michael Barone: Republicans win elections when ideology is a factor, Democrats win when it isn’t

Noted political commentator Michael Barone gets at the political significance of the Gulf oil spill for President Obama. It undercuts Obama’s message of competence, which is a much bigger deal for a Democrat (particularly a left-wing Democrat like Obama) than it is for a Republican. The money quote in Barone’s analysis is the following:

“Looking back on all the presidential contests held since Obama as a Columbia undergraduate was parroting leftist criticisms of Ronald Reagan, it can be argued that Republicans have won the elections that turned on ideology and that Democrats have won the elections that turned on competence.

Republican victories in 1984, 1988, and 2004 were clearly endorsements of Ronald Reagan’s and George W. Bush’s policies. Democratic victories in 1992 and 2008 were indictments of the two George Bushes for incompetence, and the 1996 election was an endorsement of the competence of Bill Clinton.”

This I believe is an important point, one RINO’s (Republicans In Name Only) tend to miss. Republicans don’t win by ‘moving to the center’, they win by championing conservative principles. That is the secret to the success of that most conservative of American Presidents, Ronald Reagan. It is also the reason Chris Christie became governor in the solid Democrat state of New Jersey. Remember that Arnold Schwarzenegger became Governor of California on a program of fiscal responsibility. It was only after he abandoned that when his star began to fall.

This is just as true in Canada. Mike Harris won two back-to-back polarized elections in Ontario. His successors, “slick Ernie” Eves and hapless John Tory ‘moved to the center’ and proceeded to have their lunch handed to them by a man they both derided as a wimp.

Same story in Alberta. Ralph Klein had a reputation for being a true conservative (which was no longer true by the end of his career). As a result, his power was unchallenged. After he left, Ed Stelmach ‘moved to the center’. Now he is floundering in a one-party province.

After 4 years of dithering, Brian Mulroney was cruising to electoral defeat. Then the Liberal dominated Senate handed him a present in disguise. In order to get the Canada –US Free Trade Theory passed, he had to take it to the electorate. That meant an ideological election over a conservative principle. Presto! He won the argument and the election.

Michael Barone’s lesson, and the lesson of history, is that conservatives generally win polarized, ideological elections and generally lose Seinfeld elections based on ‘competence’ and scandal. 

Mark Steyn is too pessimistic about the fate of the West

When Steyn says that no nation has ever pulled itself out of a demographic decline as steep as that faced by Europe and Japan today, he is wrong. Demographic declines of a similar magnitude have occurred throughout history. The Great Plague of 1350 consumed 1/3 of the population of Eurasia - from India to Ireland - in two years. How’s that for a decline! To give another example - one closer to home - take my homeland Estonia. Historically its population has hovered around a million. However in the early 18^th century, the disastrous Northern War between Sweden and Peter the Great’s Russia combined with a plague to reduce Estonia’s population to 100,000. And yet, the country concerned recovered, just as Eurasia recovered after the Great Plague. It could be argued by Steyn that today’s demographic trends are unique because they are caused by a voluntary refusal to breed, which certainly wasn’t the case with in my examples. This is true, but it only highlights the far more desperate straights those people faced. The decision to not have children is voluntary and therefore can be reversed by an act of will. This is a far better situation than the one my ancestors were in, dropping like flies from forces beyond their control.

It has been remarked by demographic pessimists that countries have failed to increase the birthrate of their citizens with government policies like monetary incentives. From this they conclude that demographic trends are insensitive to government programs. Perhaps, but perhaps the reason the government is failing is because the policies tried so far aren’t attacking the root cause of the problem.

Today’s demographic declines are a direct result of government policy – the welfare state. In the past, everybody had an incentive to reproduce. Your kids were your pension. It is still the same way in the third world where childless couples are pitied. Who will look after them when they are old? As a result, fertility rates there remain high (though they are slowly declining as the globalization decried by Naomi Klein spreads prosperity throughout the world). The contrast with the first world couldn’t be greater, where having children is an act of economic madness. It costs an average of $250,000 raise a child, to say nothing of the loss of personal freedom. To see the flaw in our arrangement, one only needs to ask, who is the state? The answer - when you are old - is all the people who are children today. So, from the perspective of society, it does make economic sense to have children. The difference between yesterday and today is that in the past, personal and societal aims were aligned. Today, thanks to the welfare state, they aren’t.

How does the government fix that? By ending social security as we know it. Replace guaranteed pension plans for all with a system that rewards people who have lots of children with pensions and penalizes those who don’t.

Mark Steyn’s pessimism is most appropriate in his take on Western European countries like France, Spain and the Netherlands where the low birth rate of the natives is matched by a high birthrate of the Muslim minority. This is indeed a frightening situation and one that might only be resolvable through civil war – civil wars where the West could permanently lose many fine countries to the barbarians. Fortunately, in Japan, South Korea and Eastern Europe this dangerous dichotomy doesn’t exist, giving those people the luxury of time in solving their demographic problems. Another thing going in their favour is that it is becoming plainly obvious to everybody that mass immigration from Muslim countries is a bad idea.

Nevertheless, it is always a mistake to ignore your enemy’s weaknesses and automatically assume they are united in lock-step unison. I believe Steyn does this and so ignores the strategic opportunities these present. Look at the abortive Green Revolution in Iran. Though Iran is the premier Islamofascist power in the world today, it is also rotten from within, hated by its people who now openly yearn for a return to Westernism. The West must exploit these rifts and it will do so as the crisis gathers steam.

Many Muslims are our natural allies but they must be supported morally, ideologically and with material resources. Of course, when Western leaders like President Obama openly grovel before their oppressors, these people hunker down.

Another factor favouring the West that is ignored by Steyn is that the idea of the West is itself spreading. India, China and South America are slowly becoming first world Western nations. The importance of this factor should not be discounted. There are many examples in history where the center of gravity of a good idea has leaped from one geographic area to another. Take Christianity. It started in the Middle East. Before being crushed there, it spread to Europe, which remained Christianity’s center of gravity for a long time. However, now that Europe has become post-Christian, Christianity’s center has shifted to the Americas as it simultaneously spreads to China and Africa. Perhaps Western Civilization itself is beginning to make this same trek. Maybe two hundred years from now, the leading Western nations will be India, China and Brazil (and perhaps even Iran! – don’t laugh, Eastern Europe is the most anti-communist place in the world today).

No, I am entirely confident the West will meet the challenge if Islamism and triumph in the end. Of course, the West might look a lot different after the struggle is over. One thing for sure is that the decadence and lack of cultural confidence currently infecting Western elites will be entirely purged from the body politic. All will be for God and country! 

To understand the fundamental weakness of Steyn’s thesis, consider something the great economist Thomas Sowell said (I’m paraphrasing here), “any physical trend extrapolated linearly into the future, no matter what it is, will result in the end of all human life” What Sowell meant by that isn’t that we are all going to die but, rather, that reality isn’t linear. When forces and trends happen, they in turn cause reactions that grow with the trend they oppose until they eventually swamp it. Another way of saying this is that if something can’t continue the way it’s going, it won’t. 

The problem with drawing conclusions from extrapolated demographics is that you are not even extrapolating linearly any more, but exponentially. Whatever prediction you come up with will be even more off base because the countervailing forces will be that much more violent and develop that much quicker. 

UPDATE: Thanks for the Steynalanche, Mark!