International Affairs

Obama’s plan for an alliance with Iran.

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There has been considerable curiosity about Obama’s foreign policy goals in the middle east. He has picked a major fight with Israel and the PM, Netanyahu. It has been known for years that Obama and Netanyahu loathe each other. Obama withdrew US forces from Iraq while American military leaders kept silent but were disapproving. The CIA Director, General Petraeus, was removed after a scandal that had administration fingerprints all over it. Senior generals who opposed Obama’s plans and let it be known, were relieved like like General McChrystal, who had permitted other officers in his commend to talk disrespectfully about the administration in front of a reporter.

As for McChrystal: In a press conference on June 24 of this year, Adm. Mike Mullen said, succinctly, “It was clear that … in its totality, it challenged civilian control … .”

Mullen’s “it” refers to the disrespect for civilian authority by now-former U.S. Afghanistan commander McChrystal’s staff, as portrayed in an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. President Obama, whose wife until his candidacy was never proud of her country, relieved McChrystal for this disrespect — not so much for what McChrystal had said, but for his staff’s biting criticism of other members of the administration, including Vice President Joe Biden.

Not long after this, General Petraeus resigned from the CIA but is still being harassed by the FBI.

“All of us who know him and are close to him are mystified by the fact there is still this investigation into him,” Jack Keane, a retired four-star U.S. Army General said in an interview. Keane has been both an adviser to and mentor of Petraeus since he saved Petraeus’s life during a live-fire training exercise in 1991.

It may be as simple as an effort, so far successful, to keep Petraeus from talking about the Obama Administration’s most important foreign policy initiative.

How eager is the president to see Iran break through its isolation and become a very successful regional power? Very eager. A year ago, Benjamin Rhodes, deputy national-security adviser for strategic communication and a key member of the president’s inner circle, shared some good news with a friendly group of Democratic-party activists. The November 2013 nuclear agreement between Tehran and the “P5+1”—the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany—represented, he said, not only “the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian [nuclear] issue,” but “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.”

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My Saudi Essay Contest Entry

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(I am informed that the DoD is soliciting memorial essays for the recently-departed monarch of the House of Saud. My entry, somewhat inspired by a Facebook post by Robert Zubrin, is below. Other ChicagoBoyz contributors are encouraged to compose entries as well.)

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A Random Upper-Middle-Class White Guy Writes About MLK

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So, OK, my employer made me burn off some vacation days before the end of the fiscal year, in the form of a cap on the number of PTO hours that can be carried over from FY14 into FY15, which boundary has shifted by 3 months due to our recent change of ownership. Much lower down, my management intimated that due to certain software-release and testing milestone dates, no significant block of time off in February or March would be approved. But thanks to an unrelated M&A a few years back (a spectacularly problematic one, destined to be a business-school case study for decades to come), we now get the MLK holiday off. I decided to take the whole week and head southwest in search of sunlight. After a swing through New Mexico, I am spending a few days at Crow’s Nest, a 10-minute hike from the 6+ acres I own near Bloys Camp. It’s my first visit in four years.

Mitre Peak (1887m/6190') as seen from my lot
Mitre Peak (1887m/6190′) as seen from my lot

This is what I would write if somebody made me enter one of those hoary MLK essay contests that middle- or high-school students get sucked into. The entries that I’ve read over the years have seemed pretty unimaginative, but it’s hardly realistic to expect much historical perspective from a teenager. The tone I’m aiming for here is, of course, originality combined with some mildly discomfiting assertions, while avoiding stereotypical politics. The structure is a simple three-parter: past, present, and (near) future.

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A Few Cautious Predictions About Our “Crisis Era”

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The world weighs on my shoulders, but what am I to do?
You sometimes drive me crazy, but I worry about you
I know it makes no difference to what you’re going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg, and I worry about you …

Neil Peart, Distant Early Warning

 

But wouldn’t it be luxury to fight in a war some time where, when you were surrounded, you could surrender?

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

 

Reading through background material on the UN’s recent request for $16.4 billion in humanitarian aid in 2015, I find that the number of displaced people was already at its highest since World War II at the end of 2013, and has risen by several million since then. Nearly all are somewhere inside or on the perimeter of the Muslim world, with Ukraine the only sizeable exception. My sense, in which I am hardly alone, is that we are reliving the mid-1930s, with aggression unchecked and chaos unmitigated by morally exhausted Western institutions. That “low dishonest decade” ended in global war with a per capita death toll around 1 in 40. A proportional event a few years from now would kill 200 million people.

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Quote of the Day

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Henry Kissinger, World Order (quoted in a review by Niall Ferguson):

…If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed, actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity. Demonstrations of power will be peripheral and largely symbolic; because the configuration of forces will be generally understood, no side will feel the need to call forth its full reserves. When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field is open to the most expansive claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established.