War and Peace

“Iran’s Diplomatic Brilliance”

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Michael Rubin:

Never before has a country repeatedly declared its goal was “death to America,” taken clear actions to achieve that aim, and suffered no serious consequences for its actions. The reason for this is Iran’s diplomatic brilliance. They have conditioned successive administrations as easily as Pavlov: They hint at diplomacy, and get a free pass for abusing and murdering Americans.

Rubin is spot-on, and his critique applies to US administrations of both parties, from Carter’s to Obama’s. The Iranian regime has never paid a significant price for its numerous attacks against Americans and American interests. We may pay a high price for this failure.

V S Naipaul on ISIS as the Fourth Reich

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Read and consider

“The utility of America’s residual power in this situation is almost extinguished.”

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J. E. Dyer: Like it never even happened: Tikrit and the unwriting of modern history

This is an excellent long discussion of the historical background of today’s struggle for Iraq between ISIS and the modern Persian empire:

The eschatology of revolution and Western decline
 
All of this history is recent, in Persian terms. The ancient Persian Empire was old by the time Herodotus the Greek, father of Western history, walked the earth, 2,400 years ago. There are much older ghosts in the plain of Zahab but the Islamic conquest of the 630s is the “break” that counts: the one that set Persia and modern Iran on course for their rendezvous with 2015.
 
Three and a half centuries after the Treaty of Zahab, a revolutionary Iran, sensitized to eschatological signs, found herself facing serious danger from an independent and radical Iraq. The pathway to Baghdad suddenly had geo-military significance again.

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Quote of the Day

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Richard Fernandez:

How they must have laughed as they watched Susan Rice go on all the talk shows blaming it on some Los Angeles film-maker. They were probably in stitches while viewing the paid advertisements shown in Pakistan blaming the whole thing on amateurs posting on YouTube. It must have opened their eyes to see how the Washington press corps swallowed it hook, line and sinker, like hayseeds from the sticks. That forced a re-evaluation of everything.
 
And then they knew: they had his number. They had the administration dialed in. They understood exactly what they were dealing with. The Iranians too must have been watching from the sidelines and concluded what Nemetsov understood. As did Putin. Here was a man with no core; whose only value was to protect the precious image of himself, because image was all there was.
 
And at that moment the wolves, heretofore only circling on the periphery, as if by mutual consent advanced. They understood. They knew. And the man at the center of the closing circle has been busy throwing ever larger pieces of raw meat them to keep them away. But the wolves are no longer to be denied and the circle is tightening.

The End of the World?

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Sarah Hoyt  thinks not.

When I was thirty one, I sat on my back porch on a lovely summer day, reading Reason magazine.   The issue was devoted to debunking global warming.   And suddenly, like a weight lifting, I realized there really wasn’t proof.   That it wasn’t preordained that my generation would be the last to have a decent life on Earth.   That my kids and grandkids (I only had one kid at the time, and he was still nursing) wouldn’t necessarily be doomed.   That the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.

And I realized my entire life I’d lived in the shadow of the fear of decay and death.   First there was the cold war, and sooner or later, the bombs would fly.   We’d die screaming.   Then there was overpopulation.   If we escaped the bomb, we’d all starve to death.   Or thirst to death (thank you, Paul Ehrlich!)   Then there was global cooling.   We were all going to freeze in the ice age.   Then there was global warming.  Amid all these threats, how could we escape.  To watch the thing debunked and to see it pointed out that even the proponents of AGW don’t live like they believe in it lifted a weight from my heart.


Since then I’ve been skeptical of the end of the world prophecies.

RTWT