You don’t need a crystal ball to forecast that next year we’ll
see the nastiest, most expensive and exhausting presidential
campaign ever. We can take the low comedy and the irrationality. We
can even understand why the angry liberal narrative labels those
conservatives who are supporting Herman Cain racists.
We should welcome the Occupy Wall Streeters’ invention of
the Teat Party. They want wealth to be redistributed, from each
according to his ability and to each according to his needs. Which
has a familiar ring to it and explains why President Obama and Noo
Yawk Mayor Mikey Bloomberg are siding with them and against
sanitation.
We can handle it all because we love full-contact
politics. But what we can’t handle is the sense of weirdness that
pervades not only our domestic scene, but seemingly grips the whole
world. There’s a lot of really strange SGO out there, stretching
from the inner sanctums of Tehran to Shenzhen, China.
(For those just joining us, “SGO” is the comprehensively
useful acronym for “s*** goin’ on” coined by my pal and former SEAL
Al “The Heckler” Clark.)
According to a
report in the UK Daily Telegraph, workers at the Gucci
outlet in Shenzhen, China — the Worker’s Paradise — are being
oppressed by their managers. The Oxford English Dictionary traces
the word “irony” back to 1388 but until we have an Oxford Mandarin
Dictionary, we can’t describe adequately the facts that Gucci has
an outlet in a communist country, and that some of its workers are
being oppressed on the job. That would require a modern-day
Kipling. Kipling’s talents — and his understanding of Afghanistan
and Islam — could also have done better than any modern writer to
describe the foiled Iranian plot to kill a Saudi ambassador in a
ritzy Washington, D.C. restaurant.
The plot, by the supposedly elite Qods Force of the IRGC,
was interdicted when the Qods goons were detected transferring
money to an Iranian in Texas who plotted with some Mexican drug
cartel guys to mount the assassination. It was a comic book plot,
unworthy of Ian Fleming. Which is both comforting — because it
shows that the Qods Force can be as inept as an underwear bomber —
and troubling because we are doing nothing about Iran’s escalation
of its war against us.
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chair Dianne
Feinstein (D-Cal.) told Fox News Sunday’s Chris Wallace
yesterday that though she first doubted its plausibility, the case
against the Qods Force is “dead bang.” And, she said, we shouldn’t
be going to war over it. The Saudis apparently agree with DiFi.
They plan to take the matter to the UN. And may they have as good
luck there as we have had with Iran’s nuclear program.
What Senator Feinstein — and our political leaders on
both sides of the aisle — won’t admit is that Iran has been at war
with us since 1979. And no one — not us, not the Europeans, nor
anyone else — has ever negotiated a change in the Tehran
kakistocracy’s behavior in the 32 years it has been in power.
(We’ve tried to keep the peace engagement with Iran, and we’ve been
rewarded with a one-sided war. Now it’s time for a grownup — if
such a person there be in American politics — to suggest an
alternative.) The Occupy Wall Streeters will, if a television
camera is offered, chant “give peace a chance.” We’ve tried that
for more than three decades, and now it’s time for something
else.
The Saudis are quite scared of Iran, and they’d like
nothing more than for the gringos — or the Israelis — to destroy
the Iranian regime for them. The Saudi government has launched
warnings against Iranian disruptions to the hajj, the annual Muslim
pilgrimage to Mecca scheduled to reach its peak in the first week
of November.
Their fear is well-founded. Iran, if it can, will launch
everything from protests to suicide bombers in the midst of the
religious rite. And if they succeed, the Saudi regime would be
weakened enormously. They are the “keepers” of Islam’s holiest
sites and if they can’t protect them their standing in the Muslim
world will be threatened.
The Saudis will act ruthlessly to suppress an eruption of
an “Iranian Spring” in Mecca, but their ability to do so is
doubtful. In past hajj’s, they’ve failed to prevent riots by
Iranian pilgrims and stampedes in which pilgrims trampled each
other to death. However inept the IRGC may have been in the planned
Washington attack, there’s no way to guarantee it won’t succeed in
Mecca.
President Obama shouldn’t help the Saudis, and won’t
because he’s too busy with his campaign and random military
adventures. It’s been almost eight months since he committed U.S.
forces to the French-British war in Libya, promising our
involvement would be for “weeks, not months.” Having succeeded in
needlessly tying up U.S. forces in one war in which there is no
American interest whatever, our warrior president has now sent US
forces to Uganda. Uganda?
The last time Uganda deserved our attention to was on July
4, 1976, when the Israelis conducted a textbook antiterrorist raid
at the Entebbe airport that rescued the passengers on a hijacked
airliner that Idi Amin’s Ugandan government had given safe harbor.
Just as in Obama’s Libya adventure, there is no U.S. interest at
stake in Uganda. Nevertheless, Obama has sent about 100 U.S.
“advisors” there — probably a few Army Special Forces A-teams —
to help train Ugandan forces to defeat something called the “Lord’s
Resistance Army.”
The Lord’s Resistance Army, a militia commanded by one
Joseph Kony, is a terrorist force that has taken many lives in
central Africa. Which makes it as unique as a stick of chewing gum.
U.S. forces are engaged in Libya, Somalia and Yemen. And
Afghanistan and — for the moment — Iraq. If we are to take on
every murderous militia in Africa, we’ll need a lot more troops
than we’re going to have after Obama’s cuts to defense spending.
Those cuts are about to be increased massively by the “super
committee” created by the August budget ceiling deal.
The “super committee” will deadlock because the Democrats
are insisting that Republicans agree to massive tax hikes before
they even discuss spending cuts. And when the deadlock happens, it
will be up to some grownups among congressional Republicans to
prevent destruction of our military if they can. They probably
can’t because they agreed to the trigger mechanism already, and
Obama is standing by to veto any restoration of essential military
and intelligence spending.
Our defense cuts haven’t yet reached the stage that
Britain’s have, but they may soon. The British reallocation of
military spending to other priorities — such as control of global
warming — has reached the stage of low comedy.
Britain’s Secretary of State for Defense Liam Fox resigned
last week over allegations that one of his associates was
implicitly acting as if he were a staffer with government status.
Fox, a brilliant Scot, shouldn’t have resigned because of this
micro-scandal. But he should have resigned before his boss — PM
David Cameron — cut the Brit forces to the level they have now
sunk. British airmen, operating over Libya, can’t launch from a
Royal Navy carrier because there isn’t one. While Brit forces, as
skilled and brave as almost any of ours, were fighting in
Afghanistan and Libya on a bare-cupboard budget, Ministry of
Defence funds were spent on buying carbon allowances in the
EUnuchs’ entirely ridiculous “cap and trade” scheme.
According to a UK Daily Mail
report, “In February 2010, Gordon Brown’s
cash-strapped Government spent
£60 million on ‘carbon credits’ for
Whitehall and other Government offices in the UK, as well as
British NATO bases in Europe. Thus while troops were
going short of kit in Afghanistan, the
defense budget was being raided to buy
carbon certificates.” Brit PM David Cameron can blame
that on the Gordon Brown’s Labour Party government, which will
carry as much weight as Obama’s never-ending campaign against the
economic crisis that began under George W. Bush.
There are no grownups in British politics, and if there
are some here they have yet to reveal themselves as people who can
actually stop the devolution of our economy and our military. One
of these people was lost to cancer about a week ago.
Steve Jobs knew how to get things done. He reportedly left
four years’ of planned product innovations as part of his legacy at
Apple. One wag I know said that the newest “app” for the iPhone
would be “iHaunt.” Was it a coincidence that the world of
BlackBerry fell apart for three days shortly after Jobs’s untimely
death? Perhaps.
