International Affairs

The Turks Just Gassed the Kurds?!?

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The world just changed.

Der Spiegel just reported the following:

German experts have confirmed the authenticity of photographs that purport to show PKK fighters killed by chemical weapons. The evidence puts increasing pressure on the Turkish government, which has long been suspected of using such weapons against Kurdish rebels. German politicians are demanding an investigation.

American built M-60A3 Tanks in Turkish Service

American built M60A3 Tanks in Turkish Army Service

If this pans out as true, and not a Leftist German-PKK disinformation exercise, expect two things —

1) The NATO Alliance as we know it to dissolve.
2) Turkey will go nuclear within a couple of years.

The age of Catalytic Nuclear Proliferation will be upon us, with lethal gas as an accompaniment.

Update: Gatewaypundit is on the case

Afghanistan 2050 — Two Successful Campaigns in a Wider War

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What was determinative in America’s victorious 2001 and 2008 – 2013 Afghanistan military campaigns was the will of the American people to keep the Afghanistan from becoming a terrorist base again. Unlike Vietnam, but like the Second World War, this war was started by a surprise attack on the American people at home. Thus the America people’s definition of “victory” was security at home, whatever games America’s ruling elite of the time were doing to either make the goal more or less than that definition.

This American determination was aided by two things. The will of the Afghans not to be ruled by foreign Islamist backed drug warlords and the terrain of Southern Afghanistan.

The much missed at the time fact was that America’s military was not “colonizing” Afghanistan for the West. It was _re-establishing_ the old cultural order of Afghan tribal elders against the drug trade and the students of the foreign Saudi-Wahabi Islamist schools in Pakistan and the wider Muslim world.

American Special Forces Soldier on Horseback

American Special Forces Hunting Taliban on Horseback

The Pashtun Drug Warlords, the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were the “power challengers” with guns and cash who were atomizing local Afghan tribal culture and cutting that culture off from both welcome modern medicine and wireless telecommunications, not the Americans.

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The EU vs. Israel

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From Israel Through European Eyes by Yoram Hazony:

In these words, the tie between the Holocaust and what Ben-Gurion calls the “sin” of Jewish powerlessness is powerfully in evidence. The meaning of Auschwitz is that the Jews failed in their efforts find a way to defend their children. They depended on others, decent men in power in America or Britain, who, when the time came, did virtually nothing to save European Jewry. Today, most Jews continue to believe that the only thing that has really changed since those millions of our people perished—the only thing that stands as a bulwark against the repetition of this chapter in the world’s history—is Israel.[11]
 
It is a little-discussed fact that the Jews are not the only ones for whom Auschwitz has become an important political symbol. Many Europeans, too, see Auschwitz as being at the heart of the lesson of World War II. But the conclusions they draw are precisely the opposite of those drawn by Jews. Following Kant, they see Auschwitz as the ultimate expression of that barbarism, that brutal debasement of humanity, which is national particularism. On this view, the death camps provide the ultimate proof of the evil that results from permitting nations to decide for themselves how to dispose of the military power in their possession. The obvious conclusion is that it was wrong to give the German nation this power of life and death. If such evil is to be prevented from happening again and again, the answer must be in the dismantling of Germany and the other national states of Europe, and the yoking together of all the European peoples under a single international government. Eliminate the national state once and for all—Ecrasez l’infame!—and you have sealed off that dark road to Auschwitz.
 
Notice that according to this view, it is not Israel that is the answer to Auschwitz, but the European Union: A united Europe will make it impossible for Germany, or any other European nation, to rise up and persecute others once again. In this sense, it is European Union that stands as the guarantor of the future peace of the Jews, and indeed, of all humanity.
 

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Not a Joke

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You may remember that back in April, the United Nations elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women. No, this was not an April Fool joke, not an article in the Onion, not a blog post from Iowahawk, but real news in the real world.

PowerLine was reminded of this story by today’s headline: Iran human rights chief defends stoning sentence.

In other U.N. related news, the Security Council on Friday denounced the sinking of a South Korean ship–but managed to do this without denouncing anyone in particular for having sunk it.

Why do “progressives,” and even many old-line liberals, continue to have such a worshipful attitude toward the U.N.? If you corner one of the latter and press him on this point, he will probably say something along the lines of, “It would be so wonderful if it worked, and people could just talk their problems out instead of fighting.”

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Pundita on Pakistan

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Miss P. bangs pots and pans, shoots off fireworks, uses her knee to pound a bass drum while blowing a vuvuzela in an effort to draw attention to the Elephant in the policy room no one wishes to address.

It won’t work until a Pakistani-sponsored terrorist pulls off an act of catastrophic terrorism inside the United States and kills a large number of elite Americans in Manhattan or the Beltway. After that point, we’ll get serious and these views will become conventional wisdom.

I just hope the terrorists don’t succeed in Arizona or Kansas – the story will only make page 2, then and policy will stay the course:

Why General Stanley McChrystal is going straight to hell

On or about August 30, 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates received a detailed assessment of the military situation in Afghanistan that included a request for additional U.S. troops. The report was from General Stanley A. McChrystal, Commander, Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Commander, U.S. Forces Afghanistan. But as noted on the first page the assessment was a joint effort representing input from ISAF staff and the component commands.On the matter of Pakistan the report noted:

Afghanistan’s insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan’s lSI.

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