The World's Policeman Goes On Coffee Break

by Peter Huessy
June 24, 2013 at 5:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3781/world-policeman

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For the next seven years after Vietnam -- victory we threw away in 1974 by defunding our Vietnamese allies -- nearly twenty nations either fell into the Communist orbit or to other totalitarian rulers, such as Iran. Sequestration is again creating calls to remove troops from overseas.

Many of America's leaders have decided it is better for their country to retreat from the world, "hope for the best" and let "them over there" decide their own fate – and ours.
America, we are told, wants to build bridges here at home, not in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq.
And, these "experts" say, to the extent we are involved in the world, it should be reluctantly and with a light footprint.
That view appears to be the growing consensus of national security and foreign policy experts, even Republicans, as the United States wrestles with the war in Afghanistan, the civil war in Syria, terrorist attacks seemingly everywhere, a declining defense budget, and a cumulative weariness from being continuously at war since the attacks of 9/11.
Unquestioned appears to be whether a "reluctant" security stance protects American security and keeps us safe; assures our well-being and economic prosperity; and supports our values.
Is it really true that there is little value in U.S engagement in the world and our enforcement of the rule of international law?
Many analysts would be quick to complain that the U.S. liberation of Iraq was against the rule of law, what is often described as a "war of choice" rather than necessity. One former top newscaster complained that Abu Ghraib, the presence of Gitmo and "waterboarding" had so stained America's reputation that we needed, as a kind of "penance," to withdraw from the world.
What does history say?
After World War II we literally disarmed, reducing our military far beyond what was warranted. Most people did not anticipate the advent of the Cold War. So defense was not a priority.
Many Congressional Republicans therefore opposed the 1950 Truman defense budget of $11 billion [compared to $94 billion at the peak of World War II]. They proposed to cut it to $7 billion: a 44% cut. A proposal to send assistance to the Republic of Korea was also turned down by Congress.
The administration also did not help matters. It said that North Korea would not invade the South Korea because it did not have such a capability without massive assistance from Soviet forces. It further cited a 1950 intelligence report that said North Korea could get such a capability but not before 1955.
But on June 25th, 1950, Pyongyang and its Soviet masters ordered the invasion of the South. After three years, millions lay dead, 35,000 American soldiers included, as a totally unprepared United States stepped into the breach and saved what are now 49 million free Koreans in the Republic of that name.
What did the Russians learn from this? Do not mount cross-border invasions, even against a relatively weak ally of the United States. Use guerrilla war and fraudulent "national liberation fronts" to mask your aggression and stealth invasion.
Less than a year after the July 27^th, 1953 armistice ended the war on the Korean peninsula, weapons from the Soviet and Chinese communist coalitions empire next went to Vietnam, where guerrilla tactics were used to defeat the French at Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954.
Also after the Korean war, the United States adopted a policy of massive nuclear retaliation as its prime means of deterrence and defense. Consequently, our military spending fell from $43 billion to $36 billion to reflect the end of the war; then by 1960, it gradually increased to $41 billion: a 10% increase from after the Korean war.
We were again unprepared as an aggressive Soviet Union and China funded guerrilla wars in South Vietnam and in such places as El Salvador, the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere.
For the next seven years after Vietnam -- a victory we threw away in 1974 by defunding our Vietnamese allies -- nearly twenty nations either fell into the Communist orbit or to other totalitarian rulers, such as Iran.
The highest ranking defector from North Korea. Hwang Jang-Yop, told an American general officer in a rare 2001 interview that the objective of Pyongyang was to drive US military forces from the peninsula and then use its nuclear weapons capability to "hold American cities at risk, to prevent the US from returning to aid Seoul".
Sequestration, recognized by many as foolish, is again creating calls on both the left and right to remove U.S. military forces from overseas, including the Republic of Korea. The Chinese recently called for the U.S. to remove some of its troops from the region, to stop provoking Pyongyang. China's Defense Ministry spokesman Yang Yujun on April 16 "slammed " U.S. plans to pivot toward Asia, according to Iran's PressTV.
Actions have consequences; major actions can have major consequences.
As the U.S. contemplates how long a coffee break to take, our fellow police officers around the international neighborhood may take this pause the wrong way: they may accommodate the adversaries of the free world and "hope for the best." This movie, which we have seen before, does not end well.

Related Topics: Peter Huessy

Islamists and Jihadis: A Cancer on the Face of the World

by Kamel Daoud
June 24, 2013 at 3:00 am

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3784/islamists-jihadis

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The salafist man finds it unbelievable that there are people who do not believe the same way he does. He considers this difference as a personal attack. He is astonished that the whole world is not Muslim and he is going to correct [this mistake].

The following op-ed was originally published in French in the Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d'Oran. Translated by Anna Mahjar-Barducci
It is not going to stop, [instead] it keeps on reproducing itself in the cities of the Sahara, it becomes vocal and shouts, then kills, taking you by the throat; it destroys giant Buddhas and [people's] bodies and advances like a desert that dries out even the desert itself: salafism/Islamism/fundamentalism, the cancer on the face of the world and on the will to live.
All this no longer obeys the ancient forms of the threat: it is no longer a brigade, a group or a front, but a sort of tumor: it may swell under your armpit or on the streets of London. It kills; we then arrest the killer, but we do not stop the disease. We kill the hostage taker, but not the malignant cell. And it has a banner, a sort of skein of darkness, that is waved in the dry and dead wind of a theological infinity. It is everywhere and it is like barbed wire running over your bare skin. Everywhere, as the living dead himself explains: "It is Allah who says that Sharia should be implemented." And "in Islam there is no democracy, for that would mean that people have the right to challenge Allah and to decide in His stead. This is inadmissible and one will not allow this heresy, may God protect us."
Who is speaking? A dead cell, convinced that God spoke to it and that it has the right to infect a world that shines and replace it with a world that kills.
Unbelievable: at first, one might think that Islamism is an ideology, a policy or a line of thought. This is a simplistic point of view -- political orthodoxy, conventional wisdom and ideas. No, we must also see through the prism on biology: It is a disease, which intends to devour the world, it is not an issue of faith and belief.
A salafist man is not looking for God, but in the dark, he is after your throat. He believes that the whole world must believe the way he does and, if it does not, it is the whole world that is 'sick' and must be brought back to the right path. By persuasion or by blood.
The salafist man finds it unbelievable that there are people who do not think the same way he does! He considers this difference as a personal attack. He is astonished that the whole world is not Muslim and he is going to correct this.
First of all, we must stop talking about ideas: It is a disease like the Plague in the Middle Ages. It is the disease of the century, but without poetry. It is a pathology against civilization. This disease will stop only when the whole world will be a total tumor. This is what is threatening the future and frightens people down to their bowels. What eventually arrives are wars, massacres and slaughters against our children, who will have to fight a war of survival against the black flag, which is not the symbol of a "nation," but the end of nations and of the earth.
For [the Islamists] all look alike, as, in general, corpses do: from Yemen to Mauritania, from London to Australia. Same hirsute look, same crazed eyes, same surreal sales pitch, same signs and anger and same convulsions of the body inhabited by a demon made of ink and verses. And all this proceeds from south to north, from your neighbors towards you. This accursed Salafi flag everywhere wants men to prostrate themselves, and explains what is right, that God has spoken, that the earth is the booty of heaven. A terrible and murderous world which intends to kill us all: us, our children, light, art, hope, freedom and the dignity of questioning.
This is not a pessimistic view, just a glimpse of what is coming: salafism/Islamism/jihadism is a disease that wants to destroy the world. We must see it and treat it as such. The black flag is the abscess under the armpit of the those who are plague-ridden. A sign of death.
Kamel Daoud is a journalist based in Algeria.

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