The New World Disorder
The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled.
The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.” Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism.
Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism, and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.
Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines — Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia, and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path.
A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran’s northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran’s Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan’s largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.
The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years’ War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by 19th- and 20th-century European cartographers, but in blood.
India, too, is feeling the tremors. Ethnic violence in the Assam region has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing in panic.
In East Asia, ethnonationalism, fed by memories from the 20th century, is igniting clashes among former Cold War allies.
China’s claim to the Spratly, Paracel, and other islands in the South China Sea puts Beijing in conflict with Hanoi, which welcomes U.S. warships back to Cam Ranh Bay. Were not these the same people we bombed and blasted not so long ago?
Twenty years ago, Manila ordered the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay, which had been home to the U.S. Pacific Fleet almost since the Spanish-American War. Now Manila is inviting America back.
Why? China is claiming islets, atolls, and reefs 1,000 miles from the Chinese mainland, but only 100 miles from the Philippine coast.
To annex what could be a mother lode of oil, gas, and minerals in the South China Sea, China is stoking the ethnonationalism of its own people.
Yet, a fear of ethnonationalism is behind Beijing’s repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, whose regions are being inundated with Han Chinese, just as Josef Stalin flooded Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia with Russians after annexing them in 1940.
“All is race; there is no other truth,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Tancred. Beijing behaves as if it believes Disraeli was right.
China now claims Japan’s Senkaku islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyu. South Korea claims Japan’s Takeshima in the East China Sea, which Seoul calls Dokdo. Here history enters the quarrel.
In 1908, in the Root-Takahira Agreement, Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Tokyo’s annexation of Korea in return for recognition of U.S. annexation of the Philippines.
Root-Takahira is a black page in Korean history. For Japan’s occupation ran through World War II, when Korean girls were forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for Japanese troops. Tokyo and Seoul were Cold War allies, but these old wounds never healed.
The visit to Dokdo last week by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, cheered by his countrymen, represented a rejection of Japan’s claim and an assertion that the islets belong to Korea.
Russia, too, has now gotten into the islands game.
Two days after the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the day before Nagasaki, Stalin declared war and sent Russian troops to seize the Kuril islands north of Japan and expel the population. Japan still claims the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev just stoked the flames of tribalism in both nations by visiting the Kuril island that is closest to Japan.
With China, South Korea, and Russia asserting claims and making intrusions on islands Japan regards as sacred territory, Tokyo is taking a new look at rebuilding her armed forces.
On Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, two cabinet ministers visited the Yasukuni Shrine to the World War II dead. A new nationalism is rising in the Land of the Rising Sun. China and Russia may be nuclear powers, but Japan could join that club swiftly should she choose to do so.
The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture, and creed matter most and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end — the accretion of power by one’s own kind to achieve one’s own dreams.
As Abraham Lincoln said in another time, when an old world was dying and a new world was being born, “As our situation is new, let us think and act anew.”
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
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The Most Dangerous Man in the World’?
Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to secretly install nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba began to form in his mind sometime earlier, perhaps in April of 1961.
Then it was that the new young U.S. President John F. Kennedy put a brigade of Cubans ashore to become the vanguard of a guerrilla army to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime.
The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.
Khrushchev had ordered an army of tanks into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and watched, astonished, as a U.S. president recoiled at using his power to expunge a Soviet base camp 90 miles from America’s shores.
In June, Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna and was orally mauled. In August, Khrushchev tested Kennedy again, building a wall to sever East Berlin and seal off the Soviet sector. Berliners seeking to escape were shot.
Kennedy ordered a one-year call-up of the reserves.
Moscow then broke a moratorium on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, exploding a 57-megaton monster bomb in the Arctic.
By mid-October 1962, Soviet missiles were in Cuba. Their 1,500-mile target radius put Washington, D.C., in range.
The Air Force chief of staff was Gen. Curtis LeMay, former head of Strategic Air Command, who boasted of his B-29 fleet in the Pacific war, "We torched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
LeMay wanted to bomb and invade Cuba, even after Khrushchev pulled his rockets out. When Mao Zedong denounced Khrushchev’s climb-down, calling America "a paper tiger," Khrushchev is said to have reminded Mao, "This paper tiger has nuclear teeth."
Mao reportedly indicated a willingness to lose 300 million Chinese in a nuclear war if that war would finish off the United States.
These were grave times and dangerous men. What prompts this recitation of what our world was like 50 years ago is the latest cover story in The Weekly Standard, "The Most Dangerous Man in the World."
The cover photo is of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s "man with a mission," who is said to be seeking an atom bomb and who "loathes the United States more than Stalin, Mao, Tojo and Hitler combined." If this "supreme leader gets nuclear weapons, it will be a miracle if he does not stupidly lead his country into war."
Thrust of the 5,000-word article: Be afraid. Be very afraid of this man.
But what exactly are we to fear? And what is the imperative for war now on Iran, for which this piece beats the drum?
Khamenei has declared that nuclear weapons are immoral and Iran will never acquire them. Is Islamic Iran’s supreme religious leader lying through his teeth? Where is the proof? Where is the hard evidence?
Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies stated unanimously in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2011 their conviction that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. In the Standard piece, John Sawyer, head of the British Intelligence Service MI-6, "flatly stated in July that we have two years left before the Iranians can build a weapon."
And if we should fear this most dangerous man in the world, why do not the Iraqis, Turks, Azerbaijanis and Pakistanis, his neighbors, seem to fear him? The Pakistanis, with scores of nukes, seem less nervous about Iran than democratic India, with whom they have fought several wars.
Before now it has been Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was the incarnation of Hitler. But Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office are up next summer, and he is reportedly going back to teaching.
For all his bellicosity, how many wars did Ahmadinejad fight?
When was the last time Iran started any war?
On Al-Quds Day, Wednesday, an annual event since the 1979 revolution, Khamenei reportedly said he was confidant "the fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography." Yes, and Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you," and, "Your grandchildren will live under communism." And we buried him, and his grandchildren saw the end to communism.
The author of the "Most Dangerous Man," Reuel Marc Gerecht, says that should Israel attack Iran, Iranians "will probably take their revenge through terrorism" or opt for "playing dead and railing against Israel in the court of world opinion."
Would Adolf Hitler or Hideki Tojo, pre-emptively attacked, respond with acts of reprisal untraceable to them, or denunciations of their attacker in the "court of world opinion," or by playing possum?
Our fathers crushed fascism in four years and outlasted for half a century the evil empires of Stalin and Mao that had murdered millions. And we should be fearful of an ayatollah?
What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
Posted By Patrick J. Buchanan On August 20, 2012 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 9 Comments
After his great victory in Desert Storm, George H.W. Bush went before the United Nations to declare the coming of a New World Order. The Cold War was yesterday. Communism was in its death throes. The Soviet Empire had crumbled.
The Soviet Union was disintegrating. Francis Fukuyama was writing of “The End of History.” Savants trilled about the inevitable triumph of democratic capitalism.
Yet, in 2012, sectarianism, tribalism, and nationalism are all resurgent, reshaping a world where U.S. power and influence are visibly receding.
Syria is sinking into a war of all against all that may end with a breakup of the nation along ethno-sectarian lines — Arab, Druze, Kurd, Sunni, Shia, and Christian. Iraq descends along the same path.
A U.S. war with Iran could end with a Kurdish enclave in Iran’s northwest tied to Iraqi Kurdistan, Iran’s Azeri north drifting toward Azerbaijan, and a Balochi enclave in the south linked to Pakistan’s largest province, Balochistan, leaving Iran only Persia.
The Middle and Near East seem to be descending into a Muslim Thirty Years’ War of Sunni vs. Shia. Out of it may come new nations whose names and borders were not written in drawing rooms by 19th- and 20th-century European cartographers, but in blood.
India, too, is feeling the tremors. Ethnic violence in the Assam region has sent hundreds of thousands fleeing in panic.
In East Asia, ethnonationalism, fed by memories from the 20th century, is igniting clashes among former Cold War allies.
China’s claim to the Spratly, Paracel, and other islands in the South China Sea puts Beijing in conflict with Hanoi, which welcomes U.S. warships back to Cam Ranh Bay. Were not these the same people we bombed and blasted not so long ago?
Twenty years ago, Manila ordered the U.S. Navy out of Subic Bay, which had been home to the U.S. Pacific Fleet almost since the Spanish-American War. Now Manila is inviting America back.
Why? China is claiming islets, atolls, and reefs 1,000 miles from the Chinese mainland, but only 100 miles from the Philippine coast.
To annex what could be a mother lode of oil, gas, and minerals in the South China Sea, China is stoking the ethnonationalism of its own people.
Yet, a fear of ethnonationalism is behind Beijing’s repression of Tibetans and Uighurs, whose regions are being inundated with Han Chinese, just as Josef Stalin flooded Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia with Russians after annexing them in 1940.
“All is race; there is no other truth,” wrote Benjamin Disraeli in his novel Tancred. Beijing behaves as if it believes Disraeli was right.
China now claims Japan’s Senkaku islands, which Beijing calls the Diaoyu. South Korea claims Japan’s Takeshima in the East China Sea, which Seoul calls Dokdo. Here history enters the quarrel.
In 1908, in the Root-Takahira Agreement, Theodore Roosevelt agreed to Tokyo’s annexation of Korea in return for recognition of U.S. annexation of the Philippines.
Root-Takahira is a black page in Korean history. For Japan’s occupation ran through World War II, when Korean girls were forced into prostitution as “comfort women” for Japanese troops. Tokyo and Seoul were Cold War allies, but these old wounds never healed.
The visit to Dokdo last week by South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, cheered by his countrymen, represented a rejection of Japan’s claim and an assertion that the islets belong to Korea.
Russia, too, has now gotten into the islands game.
Two days after the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, the day before Nagasaki, Stalin declared war and sent Russian troops to seize the Kuril islands north of Japan and expel the population. Japan still claims the four southernmost islands of the Kuril chain.
Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev just stoked the flames of tribalism in both nations by visiting the Kuril island that is closest to Japan.
With China, South Korea, and Russia asserting claims and making intrusions on islands Japan regards as sacred territory, Tokyo is taking a new look at rebuilding her armed forces.
On Aug. 15, the anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, two cabinet ministers visited the Yasukuni Shrine to the World War II dead. A new nationalism is rising in the Land of the Rising Sun. China and Russia may be nuclear powers, but Japan could join that club swiftly should she choose to do so.
The bipolar world of the Cold War is history. The new world order, however, is not the One World dreamed of by Wilsonian idealists. It is a Balkanizing world where race, tribe, culture, and creed matter most and democracy is seen not as an end in itself but as a means to an end — the accretion of power by one’s own kind to achieve one’s own dreams.
As Abraham Lincoln said in another time, when an old world was dying and a new world was being born, “As our situation is new, let us think and act anew.”
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
---
The Most Dangerous Man in the World’?
Posted By Patrick J. Buchanan On August 16, 2012 @ 11:00 pm In Uncategorized | 23 Comments
U.S. newspapers this fall will devote countless column inches and network TV will set aside endless hours to revisiting the most perilous month in the history of the republic, if not of the world.Nikita Khrushchev’s decision to secretly install nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles in Cuba began to form in his mind sometime earlier, perhaps in April of 1961.
Then it was that the new young U.S. President John F. Kennedy put a brigade of Cubans ashore to become the vanguard of a guerrilla army to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime.
The Bay of Pigs became a metaphor for feckless folly and failure.
Khrushchev had ordered an army of tanks into Budapest to crush the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and watched, astonished, as a U.S. president recoiled at using his power to expunge a Soviet base camp 90 miles from America’s shores.
In June, Kennedy met Khrushchev in Vienna and was orally mauled. In August, Khrushchev tested Kennedy again, building a wall to sever East Berlin and seal off the Soviet sector. Berliners seeking to escape were shot.
Kennedy ordered a one-year call-up of the reserves.
Moscow then broke a moratorium on atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, exploding a 57-megaton monster bomb in the Arctic.
By mid-October 1962, Soviet missiles were in Cuba. Their 1,500-mile target radius put Washington, D.C., in range.
The Air Force chief of staff was Gen. Curtis LeMay, former head of Strategic Air Command, who boasted of his B-29 fleet in the Pacific war, "We torched and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
LeMay wanted to bomb and invade Cuba, even after Khrushchev pulled his rockets out. When Mao Zedong denounced Khrushchev’s climb-down, calling America "a paper tiger," Khrushchev is said to have reminded Mao, "This paper tiger has nuclear teeth."
Mao reportedly indicated a willingness to lose 300 million Chinese in a nuclear war if that war would finish off the United States.
These were grave times and dangerous men. What prompts this recitation of what our world was like 50 years ago is the latest cover story in The Weekly Standard, "The Most Dangerous Man in the World."
The cover photo is of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s "man with a mission," who is said to be seeking an atom bomb and who "loathes the United States more than Stalin, Mao, Tojo and Hitler combined." If this "supreme leader gets nuclear weapons, it will be a miracle if he does not stupidly lead his country into war."
Thrust of the 5,000-word article: Be afraid. Be very afraid of this man.
But what exactly are we to fear? And what is the imperative for war now on Iran, for which this piece beats the drum?
Khamenei has declared that nuclear weapons are immoral and Iran will never acquire them. Is Islamic Iran’s supreme religious leader lying through his teeth? Where is the proof? Where is the hard evidence?
Sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies stated unanimously in 2007 and reaffirmed in 2011 their conviction that Iran does not have an active nuclear weapons program. In the Standard piece, John Sawyer, head of the British Intelligence Service MI-6, "flatly stated in July that we have two years left before the Iranians can build a weapon."
And if we should fear this most dangerous man in the world, why do not the Iraqis, Turks, Azerbaijanis and Pakistanis, his neighbors, seem to fear him? The Pakistanis, with scores of nukes, seem less nervous about Iran than democratic India, with whom they have fought several wars.
Before now it has been Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who was the incarnation of Hitler. But Ahmadinejad’s eight years in office are up next summer, and he is reportedly going back to teaching.
For all his bellicosity, how many wars did Ahmadinejad fight?
When was the last time Iran started any war?
On Al-Quds Day, Wednesday, an annual event since the 1979 revolution, Khamenei reportedly said he was confidant "the fake Zionist (regime) will disappear from the landscape of geography." Yes, and Nikita Khrushchev said, "We will bury you," and, "Your grandchildren will live under communism." And we buried him, and his grandchildren saw the end to communism.
The author of the "Most Dangerous Man," Reuel Marc Gerecht, says that should Israel attack Iran, Iranians "will probably take their revenge through terrorism" or opt for "playing dead and railing against Israel in the court of world opinion."
Would Adolf Hitler or Hideki Tojo, pre-emptively attacked, respond with acts of reprisal untraceable to them, or denunciations of their attacker in the "court of world opinion," or by playing possum?
Our fathers crushed fascism in four years and outlasted for half a century the evil empires of Stalin and Mao that had murdered millions. And we should be fearful of an ayatollah?
What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?
COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM
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