Canadian Cincinnatus

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

Terror attack in Paris was not ‘senseless’

On the aftermath of yesterday’s Islamofascist atrocity in Paris, one of the adjectives one hears from the mainstream media to describe the event is that it was ‘senseless’. This is nonsense. It was not senseless in any meaningful way. It was a deliberate, premeditated, well-planned operation designed rationally to achieve specific political goals: to intimidate Western media outlets into refraining from criticizing Islam and its jihadis. Their strategy is to do that by concentrating their fire on one outlet at a time.

(This is why it is important to reprint the Charlie Hebro cartoons that drew their ire, even if they might offend an old, well-established religion. I just did. We need to show our enemy that we stand together, that divide and conquer tactics won’t work on us.)

If you want an example of a senseless slaughter, consider the mass murder in Edmonton nearly two weeks ago when a Vietnamese man shot and killed eight people and then killed himself. That was senseless. It was an emotional outburst by a mentally ill man that was designed to achieve nothing and achieved nothing. The nut had no goals, and none were achieved.

And while I am on the subject, it wasn’t ‘cowardly’ either, as weren’t the attacks on the World Trade Center. These were evil acts designed for the furtherance of barbarism at the expense of civilization, but there is nothing timid or meek about purposefully flying a fully-fueled aircraft into a building at 500 mph to certain death.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are at war. It is high time we start working to win this war. This requires strategic thinking, which demands, above all else, clarity of thought. To triumph, one must be able to coldly examine the facts of the world as they really are, not as we wish them to be. Magical, wishful thinking does us no good, regardless of how emotionally satisfying it may be. 

Je Suis Charlie

Why don't feminists oppose the Moslem tradition of covering their women with burkas and niqabs?

I was wondering about this question for a long time. It seems logical that the same women, who tossed “a collection of symbolic feminine products, pots, false eyelashes, mops, and other items into a trash can” at the 1968 Miss America Pageant, and proclaimed “Women's Liberation”, would support the “liberation” of fully covered Moslem women. So why don't they?

The answer came to me indirectly from Rush Limbaugh, and is a proof of his famous “Undeniable truth of life #24”. 

"Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of American life."

Having all women covered from head to toe might seem like an oppression of women by men, to any logical thinking person, but when you look at it from the point of view of Rush's undeniable truth of life #24, it makes perfect sense for feminists to support it. Having all women fully covered, very effectively makes attractive women indistinguishable from unattractive ones.

WiseGuy

And the winner of the Boston Marathon is… Vladimir Putin

In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, Chechnya declared independence, hoping to enjoy the same new-found freedom that the former Warsaw Pact countries, the Baltic States, the Ukraine and other central Asian republics had won. But unlike those other countries, Moscow responded to Chechnya’s desire for freedom with violence. This resulted in the two Chechen Wars, followed by the brutal occupation of Chechnya in 2000 and the election of Vladimir Putin (thanks to a conveniently timed campaign of apartment house bombings).

It is important to note that Chechnya was not always a hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism. In the early 90’s, this ideological poison was virtually unknown there. For instance, the original leader of the Chechnya independence movement, Dzhokhar Dudayev, was a secular nationalist. He was a Soviet Air Force major general who commanded all their nuclear forces in my homeland of Estonia in the 1980’s. He patterned the Chechnyan independence movement from the Estonian independence movement he witnessed firsthand, and if you know anything about the Baltic States, you know that it is about as far away from Islamic fundamentalism as you can get on this planet. Dudayev greatly sympathised with the Estonian anti-Soviet struggle. He learned to speak Estonian while he was stationed there, and when the order came down from Moscow to crush the Estonian independence movement in 1990, he declined to pass the order along. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Dudayev went back home and led the Chechnyan independence movement all the way through the First Chechen War, when he was killed by an anti-radiation missile that homed in on his satellite phone. It is rumoured that this technology was given to Yeltsin’s Russia by the naive Clinton administration. 

In any event, by the time Putin had won the Second Chechen War in 2000, all reasonable, Western-leaning Chechens like Dudayev had been exterminated. Into this Kremlin-created vacuum stepped vicious Islamic fundamentalists who have committed all manner of atrocities in the name of Chechnya.

This terrible situation was created by the Putin administration. But now, if Putin wants to crush Chechnya some more (the Chechens don’t give up easily) by committing further human rights violations there, all he has to do to get his get-out-of-jail-free card from the US  is to remind Americans of the Boston Marathon bombing.

What If Only Liberals Want to Be Multicultural?

The prefered assumption of liberals and the left is that all new Canadians want to embrace multiculturalism and only aging, racist white men are standing in the way of utopian harmony.  I've always been suspicious of this assumption, mostly because I've met racists all over the world, from Pakistan to Romania, from Japan to St. Petersberg, so I find it hard to believe that everyone who immigrates to Canada is ready to embrace everyone else's culture with tolerance and respect.

But this article in the Toronto Sun about Muslims protesting on Remebrance Day raised even my eyebrows.  I have no argument with them protesting the war in Afghanistan, although I'd like to remind them of who helped them during the decade the Soviets occupied the country, and while burning a poppy is culturally insensitive and shows they have no knowledge of Canadian history or where that symbol came from, that kind of drama is the stock and trade of protests, an art perfected by the left.

What struck me dumb was their chant: "Islam will dominate!" and "Our dead are in paradise.  Your dead are in hell."

Now I traveled briefy with the mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1988, just as the Soviets were getting ready to make their escape from that disasterous war, so it doesn't surprise me that they believe we're going to hell or that Islam (and by extension the protesters) will "dominate" in the end.  What amazed me was that they were utterly shameles and open about it.

White males who chant similar intolerant rubbish publicly usually belong to neo-Nazi skinhead clubs, and the thought-police of human rights tribunals would be all over them in seconds for such an outburst.  Stiffer hate crime legislation would be dusted off and enacted, and existing hate crime laws would be prosecuted with extreme prejudice.

With Muslims, of course, the human rights groups fear to tread.  These Islamists are serious, and if you try and charge one of them with a hate crime then you'd better have the RCMP open your mail with a bomb squad robot, let alone brace yourself for a barrage of bad press from the MSM.

The Irish, the Chinese, the Italians, all the Europeans after WWII, the Vietnamese, the Hindu Indians--all these ethic groups and many others came to Canada and for the most part lived and let lived.  They may have felt superior to established Canadians, and some may have even thought they had superior religions or morals, but they were relatively quiet about it.  In the long run, they became Canadians.

But there is a branch of radical Islam that wants to conquer and convert Canada. They shout "Islam wil dominiate!"  Dominate.  Rule.

Jack Layton thinks he can win these people over to the NDP cause by sending them Ramadan greetings, but he'd better be ready to toss away the NDP stand on equal rights for women, homosexuals and anyone whose religion isn't Islam.  There has already been a rise in anti-semetic attacks on everything from synagoges to grave yards, and no one is pointing the finger at skin heads anymore.  Sadly, no one is brave enough to point a finger at all.

If multiculturalism dies in Canada, it won't be white males who killed it.  Indeed, it was Pierre Trudeau and his cronies who pushed the idea in the first place.  It just didn't occur to them that some people would come here and not agree with them that we should all live shoulder to shoulder and respect one another's culture.

It was a nice idea.  So is banning war.  Try that and see how long you last as a country when things go bad.  These ideas fail because there are always some radical groups out there like fundamentalist Muslims who will see it as weakness and exploit it to the max.

Get ready Canada.  The wolves are in the sheep pen.

Mike Downtown

Mayor Bloomberg’s defence of the Ground Zero mosque illustrates how the liberal version of civil rights is the worst of both worlds for ordinary people.

The Mayor of New York defended the ground zero mosque by appealing to the principles of religious freedom and the right of Americans to do with their private property as they wish – both rights that conservatives hold dear.

Let’s take the property rights argument first. As Charles Krauthammer points out, Disney Corporation was not allowed to build an amusement park near the Manassas Battlefield and a commercial viewing tower was not allowed to be built on private land adjacent to Gettysburg. A broad coalition stopped both projects on the grounds that they would vulgarize the hallowed ground of great Civil War battlefield sites. Why didn’t liberals like Bloomberg defend the property rights of private citizens then? In fact, given the fact that the Ground Zero mosque could have been stopped with garden-variety zoning laws, does Michael Bloomberg’s principled defence of the mosque owner’s property rights mean that the mayor believes that municipal zoning laws are an unconstitutional infringement on property rights? Of course not. Don’t get cute. The only property rights he is interested in defending are those of the radical Imams who want to thumb their nose at America. If you are a patriotic, hard working New Yorker, he couldn’t care less about your property rights. So you’d better toe the lines on those municipal ordnances buddy, or Mayor Bloomberg will come down on you like a ton of bricks. He's a law-and-order guy you know.

Let’s move on to the religious argument. Mayor Bloomberg contends that stopping the ground zero mosque would violate of the freedom of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment. But what about the southern courthouse that has the 10 Commandments inscribed on the wall? Scrub it clean, and fast. Never mind that 95% of the residents of that county are practicing Christians. And the volunteer fire department in Texas that wants to put up a Nativity scene at Christmas? Faggettaboutit. Separation of church and state pal. And don’t even mention state’s rights, that’s raaaacist! It seems that when Christianity is concerned, freedom of religion means freedom from religion. But when Islam is concerned, then freedom of religion is a requirement for the state to go along with it. When President Obama has a Ramadan dinner, no problem. Haven’t you heard? we got separation of Church and State not separation of Mosque and State (to borrow a phrase from Ezra Levant).

It’s the same with the US constitution in general. Any fair reading of Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution limits the power of Congress to write laws on 18 enumerated topics and only those topics, but hey that isn’t a problem because the Supreme Court can distort the Interstate Commerce Clause to the point where it would be virtually unrecognizable by the men who actually wrote it in order to allow Congress to do darn near everything it wants to, 9^th and 10 Amendments be damned. Those amendments aren’t to be mentioned in polite company anyway. The religious rights of detainees in Guantanamo require that they get access to the Koran and be given the opportunity to pray towards Mecca every day, never mind that they are not US citizens, nor residents of the US, not on US soil nor even lawful combatants (as defined by the Geneva Convention). On the other hand, it’s no problem at all to infringe upon an American citizen’s right to freedom of political speech through the yoke of McCain-Feingold, net neutrality or the fairness doctrine. 

The end result of all this is the worst of both worlds for the hard-working American. His rights are trampled and hemmed in at every turn, but when he needs the government to fulfill its basic functions - functions such as, say, border security - the government’s actions are hemmed in by an interpretation of civil rights so expansive that it is checked only when those rights begin to actually benefit him.

Bottom line: the liberal interpretation of civil rights screws patriotic Americans at every turn.