Canadian Cincinnatus

Why has the Real Clear Politics not updated its GOP presidential polling graphics since Nov 19?

Specifically, I am speaking of their “2016 Republican Presidential Nomination” graph, where results of all the national polls concerning the Republican Presidential contest are tabulated and turned into a running average, which is graphed. As I write this, this page has not been updated since Nov 19, almost a week ago. Here is a screencap, I took today (Nov 25):

And yet, polls on the Republican race have emerged since that time. For instance, Reuters runs a 5-day rolling poll on this race. Each day the average of the preceding 5 days are released.

Perhaps there is a reason for the exclusion of the Reuters poll, but the methodology of the RCP poll charts seems to be to take every poll – even if the comparison is no longer strictly apples-to-apples (for example, in the past they have averaged together polls of voters, registered voters, and likely voters) – and average them out. The method is not perfect, but the method is transparently objective. So why exclude the Reuter’s poll?

One possibility is that since the 19^th, the political fortunes of Donald Trump have taken off and those of Ben Carson and Marco Rubio have fallen. For instance, on Nov 24, they have Trump at 38%, Cruz now tied with Carson at 12%, and Rubio at 8%. Could this be the reason?

This worries me because up until now, I have judged the Real Clear Politics to be one of the most transparently objective news aggregators around. Their policy seems to be to link to the conservative articles that conservatives feel best represent their views, and liberal articles that liberals feel best represent their views. Often they put articles that favour opposite conclusions against each other.

If it is true that they are withholding news simply because they don’t like the result then it would be profoundly disappointing. I hope that isn’t the case. We need more aggressive neutrality and less MSM whitewashing.

So how do we defeat ISIS then?

In my last article, I pointed out that committing conventional forces to Syria would be strategically stupid. This naturally begs the question: how do we then defeat ISIS if not with large quantities of infantrymen at the point of the spear? This article is my answer to that question.

In short, I think the proper strategy is to contain them and use attrition to wear them down. President Obama gave a much-derided interview with George Stephanopoulos on Friday morning, seven hours before the Paris Massacre, where he stated that ISIS has been contained. President Obama’s mistake is not that a containment strategy is wrong but that he had failed to contain ISIS. So how do we contain ISIS?

You contain them by stopping all immigration from Syria into your country. And if another country accepts Syrian refugees, you must then take steps to restrict Syrian refugees from coming in via those countries. This is already happening in Europe (though too slowly) but it needs to happen in the US and Canada as well. There are ISIS sleeper cells and sympathizers here already of course, but they can be ground down though patient but relentless police work and counterintelligence operations (including active counterintelligence measures). The key to victory on the domestic front is to cut off their source of reinforcements. I won’t lie to you and tell you that this can be done quickly. It can’t. It is a slow, grinding process but the initial damage has already been done so we might as well just roll up our sleeves and get on with the job.

The natural objection here is that many of the Syrian refugees are probably the most persecuted people on the planet. The Christian and other minorities in Syria are the people who feel the sting of the ISIS lash the most. This is all true. And I think we should help the Syrian refugees as much as humanly possible - as long as we don’t compromise our own security by doing so. The fact is, most Syrian refugees come not directly from Syria but from refugee camps in Turkey and Jordan. If we take in any of these deserving people, it should only be after we have vetted them deliberately and methodically in the camps where they currently reside. If in doubt, we should lean towards national security. The isolation of ISIS must be our priority.

That I am right about the way to isolate ISIS can be seen by the Western country in closest proximity to Syria – Israel. It is relatively unconcerned about them. They realize ISIS is militarily incompetent, but as long as their border to Syria is closed, they have little to worry about from them. (In contrast, Israel worries about Iran and its nuclear weapons program. We should follow their lead too, as that is a much bigger threat to the West than ISIS is.)

OK, say we’ve isolated ISIS, now what? The next step is to slowly grind ISIS down in Syria and Iraq through a war of attrition. In a very perceptive article (read the whole thing, as a great man once said), Walter Russell Mead makes the excellent point that in such a campaign, time is our friend while it is an enemy of theirs. What he means is this:

“The goal of the terrorists has always been to escape the drab realities of ordinary history and events, to create a kind of magical space—a return to the 7th century, the age of the Prophet, of miracles and legends. Joining the group offered a real life version of a video game.

The problem the jihadis are now facing is that while it is easy to create this kind of illusion in the short term, it is very hard to make it work over the long run. History grinds that kind of illusion down and drags those who tried to sustain it back into the world of real forces, real obstacles, real (as Clausewitz would say) friction.”

Holding a piece of territory, as ISIS now does, gives them the disadvantage that they now must govern it. This is not a “magical space” anymore but a real space, with ho-hum logistical problems like sewage and food distribution. A logical, rational mind is best suited for such tasks. An apocalyptic religious fanatic is the worst suited. Give them time and their Islamic paradise will turn into hell on earth. (I know it already is a hell on earth, but this fact is currently obscured by the excitement of their military adventures. Unfortunately, euphoria based on military glory can only be maintained for so long, as Vladimir Putin is about to discover in Russia.) In waging this war of attrition, we need to do everything we can to hasten the process along – disrupting cell-phone communications, bombing the oil fields in order to deny them a source of revenue, launch destabilizing commando raids, etc. In this phase of the war our motto should be, the worse the better.

Our ultimate goal should be not simply to defeat ISIS by making the Caliphate implode from its own contradictions, but to make ISIS look like a bunch of incompetent bumblers. The more examples there are of Islamofascist losers, the fewer new Islamofascist movements will develop in the future.

This is a long war, where patience is as much a virtue as ruthlessness and speed. We cannot let ISIS goad us into their preferred course of action by the emotions of the moment. If we do, we are only allowing ourselves to become a cooperative adversary.

Putting boots on the ground in Syria is nuts

Since World War II, the wars that America remembers with least fondness are its counterinsurgency struggles: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. They were seen as long, drawn out, and unsuccessful. They were considered failures because after the US got tired of the protracted struggle and left, the enemy just moved into the vacuum left behind. The wars the US remembers with fondness (or doesn’t remember at all) are El Salvador, the Invasion of Grenada, the Invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the air campaign over Bosnia, the early stages of Afghanistan, and the Iraq Invasion. This is largely because these wars were successful. With the exception of El Salvador, they were short, sharp conventional wars that resulted in overwhelming victory.

These examples demonstrate that the US fares much better in conventional wars than it does in counterinsurgency operations. The obvious lesson for American strategists in this history is that if US has enemies that it needs to defeat, it should avoid counter-insurgency campaigns (except when they can be done on a sufficiently low level so that they can be maintained comfortably over an extended period of time - like El Salvador), while maneuvering to defeat its enemies conventionally.

The problem with going into Syria to defeat ISIS is not that the US cannot crush the Islamic State militarily. On the contrary, one heavy armoured division, sufficiently supplied, could romp across ISIS-held territory in a matter of weeks. The problem is that ISIS won’t put up a fight because they know they will lose.

There is a story floating around that ISIS actually does what an apocalyptic confrontation, where they can defeat evil finally and for all time. Their ideology is said to favour the village of Dabiq, just north of Aleppo, for this apocalyptic battle. If I though that ISIS were actually serious about this, then I would be the most enthusiastic supporter of a ground invasion around. ISIS is a rag-tag force of incompetents and lunatics. In a pitched battle, they will lose - and fast. Killing them to the last man would be a great way to get rid of them for good. But I doubt they will be that much of a cooperative adversary.

The one type of war the Arabs have shown themselves to be good at is guerilla war. In all likelihood, instead of seeking the apocalypse, they will melt away among the masses, leaving the US Army with a Pyrrhic victory. A few months after that victory, the guerilla war will begin, with a car bombing here, a sniper there, and a suicide bomber yesterday afternoon. This will force the US into a long, grinding counterinsurgency operation that will take a decade to win, and will require over 100,000 men on the ground for that entire time. And in the end, all we will end up controlling is a strategically worthless piece of real estate (while magnanimously allowing the Chinese to buy the mineral rights, as was done in Afghanistan).

We have seen this movie before. Do we really want to see it again?

Our enemy in the Middle East and what to call it

The Paris Massacre and its aftermath got me thinking about our enemy in the Middle East and the inability of our national leaders to name it. President Obama still uses the nebulous phrase, “terrorism”, while Secretary of State John Kerry speaks of a war on “extremism”. I am far from the first to point out the fact that this reluctance smacks of cowardice. Not that this is a problem unique to Obama. His predecessor, George W Bush famously declared a “War on Terror”. At the time, a few pundits said that this was like FDR declaring a War on Aircraft Carriers.

There are many reasons to be more specific, avoiding the appearance of cowardice is but one reason (though it is an important one). Another is to frame the propaganda battle that must accompany the actual fighting. In politics, it is said that he who frames the debate wins the debate. What is true in domestic politics is also true in international struggle – as well as diplomacy.

One key goal in the diplomatic maneuvering surrounding a war is to ensure that your side has as many allies as possible while the other side is as isolated as possible. In the War on Terror, many of our key allies are Muslim. For this reason, a key goal of our diplomatic terminology and propaganda slogans must be to divide the Muslims we are at war with from the Muslims who we wish to have on our side. Unless of course we wish to go to war with 1.2 billion Muslims, which is both unnecessary and strategic folly of the highest order. I believe this consideration is what motivated George Bush to declare a more generic “War on Terror”.

A popular term for our Islamic enemies is ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’. This distinguishes them from the more moderate Muslim friends. The problem I have with it is that it makes it sound like our enemies are like our allies except more so – that they are like our friends, except with their religion cranked up to 11. Rather, what our diplomatic and military needs require is for us to draw a sharp a distinction as possible between our Muslim enemies and our Muslim friends.

A less popular term, but one that does draw a sharper distinction, is ‘Islamist’. It is better because it implies that while regular Muslims believe in Islam, our enemies believe in something else: a mutant, deviant form of Islam. As a point of fact, I think this is correct. What our Muslim enemies believe in is not really Islam, but a dialectic synthesis of 7^th Century Islam and 20^th Century Western Revolutionary terrorism – to understand the latter, think Anarchism, Bolshevism, and National Socialism. While a more accurate term because it draws a necessary distinction, it is still not ideal because its explanatory power depends on distinctions in English word construction that might not translate well into other languages, like say Arabic.

The better term, but one seldom used, is Islamofascism. What I like about it is that it is a portmanteau of two political concepts – one Eastern, one Western. The term fascism is sufficiently loaded politically that it won’t be lost in translation, and because it is freighted with negative connotations, most Muslims will think that it refers to somebody else – not them. Our stated enemies will know whom we are talking about, but that is exactly what we want.

This may seem like semantics, but in any war, the war of ideas is as important as the war on the ground. Our strategic need is to cleave as many Muslims as possible from our sworn enemies, to make them as isolated as possible in the Muslim world.

If any Syrian refugee commits a terrorist act in Canada, Justin Trudeau will own it

Justin Trudeau promised to bring 25,000 Syrian refugees into Canada in the recent Federal Election. Flush with electoral victory, Trudeau seems eager to carry out that promise and to do it before Christmas. There have been stories in the news suggesting that proper vetting will be impossible because of the haste. (How much vetting can be done at all when people are coming from a place of complete anarchy is another question. I doubt anything but the most rudimentary screening is possible.)

One of the Prime Minister’s principal responsibilities is for the safety and security of Canada. While it is nice to help out refugees when we can – and we should do so when it doesn’t imperil us, the Paris Massacre graphically illustrates the dangers involved in bringing in more of this bunch. Even prior to the horrible events of Friday evening, it was already obvious to anybody paying attention that the Syrian mob - called refugees by the press - are surly, criminally violent, ungrateful, and thoroughly hostile to Western values. They have openly mocked those providing them relief, chanting ‘Allah u akbar’, implying – and often directly stating – that Islam will conquer Europe. Somehow, I think these people will not be amenable to assimilation, even if our multicultural elites were even contemplating such a course of action.

There is one reasonable path Trudeau could follow now but won’t. He could bring in 25,000 refugees from ISIS held territory in Syria AND Iraq. If he brings in Yazidis, Assyrian Christians, and even Shia Muslims, who are considered apostates by ISIS, there is far less chance that the radical Sunnis of ISIS will slip through the net. I suspect that fear of being referred to as an Islamaphobe will prevent Trudeau from giving preference to people who are now among the most persecuted in the world. Christian males under ISIS domination are being crucified, beheaded, and burned alive. Christian women are raped, forced to convert to Islam, and are sold into slavery. We don’t need Amnesty International to inform us of these atrocities, because ISIS proudly posts videos of the barbarity. They even posted videos of their slave auctions.

With all of this occurring right before our eyes, importing 25,000 Syrian refugees so quickly into Canada when we have absolutely no reason to do so is what is called an unforced error. If Justin Trudeau intends to keep this promise in spite of the Paris Massacre, he is demonstrating his naiveté and unfitness for higher office. He would be showing everybody that he just isn’t living in the real world. The world is not the make-believe Barney-the-Dinosaur universe that he would like it to be. It just is what it is.

In spite of his good wishes, if just one of these Syrian ‘refugees’ commits a terrorist act in Canada, Trudeau will own it. All of it.

Cincinnatus and Mike Downtown

Any Canadian gun owner who sat out the last election has only himself to blame if his guns are confiscated

I was scheduled to go to a pistol match on the Saturday before the last Federal Election, but I cancelled out. Instead, I cleared my schedule and spent the entire weekend dedicated to my candidate’s GOTV efforts. The recent polls had me worried. When I told the match organizer what I was doing, as well as my friends at the match, they shrugged. Election? I’d rather go out shooting.

It seems that the recent political successes that Canadian gun owners have enjoyed has also lulled us into complacency. The bad old days of Alan Rock and Kim Campbell are gone for good. Or so many think.

I got the same apathetic reaction from a fellow shooter while discussing politics over a beer. He told me that Harper has to go. He’s too annoying. I told him that Stephen Harper has been the best friend Canadian gun owners have ever had. He got rid of the long-gun registry - the lack of which is a significant obstacle to any future gun-grab scheme - and he cut useless red tape meant only to harass shooters. My friend said he will vote Conservative - like he always does - but he thinks the Conservatives need a new leader.

I responded that loyalty is an important virtue in politics – both for politicians and the voters. Nothing can be achieved without it. Whatever Harper’s faults (and I agree they became increasingly manifest in his last few years in office), he has been steadfastly loyal to shooters. In response, we needed to come through for him. Because if we don’t - and by come through, I mean donating and volunteering, as well as just voting – why would anybody else champion our cause in the future?

Well, what I feared might happen is beginning. The Federal Election was held on Oct 19. From a press release from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association (CSSA), dated merely five days later:

“THE RCMP TEST THE WATERS ON THE FIRST NEW ROUND OF FIREARM PROHIBITIONS.  

October 24, 2015 – As reported by CSSA in the last several months, the RCMP has been eager to impose new prohibitions on semi-automatic rifles at the earliest opportunity.

Little known to most firearm owners, an unsuccessful attempt was made by the RCMP’s Canadian Firearms Program to prohibit the common-as-dirt SKS rifle, a non-restricted firearm imported into Canada by the hundreds of thousands over the last 40 years. Its solid reliability, inexpensive ammo and very reasonable price have made it a stalwart in a large portion of Canadian gun safes. Every year, thousands of game animals are humanely harvested and millions of rounds of ammunition are sent downrange by this humble firearm.

Yet, one broken gun sold by a large retail store sparked an all-out pogrom against the ubiquitous rifle by the RCMP. Some adroit stick handling prevented this from achieving fruition and while the tale is not well known by consumers, it is common knowledge in the firearm industry. As is often the case, lobbying is a prophylactic exercise where success is measured by what doesn't happen.

The story below – reported by the CBC – is the opening salvo in an attempt by the RCMP’s Firearms Program to ban the following firearms: the SKS, the Ruger Mini-14/Mini-30, the Tavor TAR 21, the CZ-858 and the Norinco M-305 rifles.

Do not ignore this message and do not be fooled by political rhetoric. THIS IS REAL, and the storm is only beginning.”

That old phrase, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is nowhere more true than in politics.

All I can say is that my conscience is clear, but I wonder how other Canadian gun owners can sleep well at night.