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Posts Tagged ‘International Affairs’
July 26th, 2013 at 1:49 pm
Killing … with Kindness
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We’ve all had the experience. You’re at a social gathering or a meeting with someone you don’t particularly care for and you offer up a totally insincere nicety just because it seems like the civil thing to do. But while that may be an isolated, awkward moment for you, what I’ve just described represents the lion’s share of the practice of diplomacy.

There’s blowing smoke, however, and then there’s actively distorting the truth. That latter category is where President Obama’s remarks while hosting Vietnamese President Truong Tan Sang yesterday fall. In his brief comments to the press following the meeting, Obama felt the need to note that Ho Chi Minh, the country’s former communist dictator, “was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

Now, Ho did indeed invoke Jefferson and the rhetoric of the founding, but it shouldn’t exactly come as news to anybody that communist tyrants’ actions didn’t always match up with their rhetoric. How many “people’s republics,” after all, spent most of their time slaughtering the very ‘people’ they were supposedly organized to empower? As Chris Stirewalt notes for Fox News:

While Jefferson did get pretty fired up about “the blood of tyrants,” it’s hard to see how the Sage of Monticello inspired the murderous career of the Vietnamese dictator. Ho famously slaughtered his opponents, including the infamous butchery of peasant farmers who resisted his brutal taxation in the early days of Ho’s regime. Not particularly Jeffersonian.

Estimates run as high as half-a-million killed in Ho’s effort to consolidate power after his communist forces drove the French out of Indochina. The killing of landlords and bourgeois-class merchants was famous even in its day and since then has been documented in even more horrifying detail.

And those who carried his banner forward following his death in 1969 – he remains “Uncle Ho” even to this day – built upon his brutal regime. Following the final U.S. retreat from Vietnam untold thousands of Vietnamese, deemed collaborators by the regime, were put to death. He and his Leninist regime used V.I. Lenin’s tactics: murder, terror and “reeducation” to obtain, maintain and expand power.
OK, I get it. Sometimes being president requires you to find something nice to say in situations where there’s no real justification for it. But surely we can draw the line at anything that puts an even slightly positive gloss on a murderous regime that sent so many innocents to an early grave.
April 11th, 2012 at 12:50 pm
UN Human Rights Chief Inserts Herself into Trayvon Martin Case
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Last month, I posted here on the blog about the U.N. Human Rights Commission’s risible-if-it-wasn’t-so-deplorable failure to deal with the enormous human rights violations occurring in Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. But be not worried — if those fearless defenders of human rights can’t bring justice to Damascus, they’ll be happy to settle for the Orlando suburbs. From Breitbart:

UN Human Rights chief Navi Pillay has called for an “immediate investigation” into the death of Trayvon Martin.

Leaving aside the matter of the despicable record of the UN on human rights, what kind of record does Pillay herself have on human rights, and does she have any moral leg to stand on when interfering in the domestic affaris of the United States?  According to Freedom House, between September 2008, when she became the Human Rights Chief, and June 2010, Pillay made no comment whatsoever on the victims in 34 countries rated “Not Free.”  Some of the countries not criticized were: Algeria, Angola, Bahrain, Belarus, Cuba, North Korea, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria and Vietnam.

Your United Nations, ladies and gentleman. Cost to American taxpayers: approximately $3 billion a year.

The Trayvon Martin case remains an ambiguous tragedy. Certainly someone was in the wrong, but the available facts give us no clarity as to who. At the moment, only one thing is certain: justice will be less likely with the UN involved.

August 16th, 2010 at 1:59 pm
The Unstoppable Bomb
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I’ve been writing in this space for months now that Western policymakers who believe Iran can be contained or deterred by conventional methods once it goes nuclear are deluding themselves. As I wrote in a commentary nearly a year ago:

In the 1930s, Winston Churchill – virtually alone – called for swift action to remove Hitler before he could wreak havoc.  What was the source of his clarity? Churchill simply understood that Hitler meant what he said in “Mein Kampf” and was developing the capacity to act on it. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe’s political sophisticates believed that Hitler’s rhetoric was purely for domestic consumption – a tool used to exploit the grievances of the demoralized Weimar Republic.
 
Today, a similar debate rages over Ahmadinejad and the mullahs whose regime he leads.  But the sincerity of their beliefs should be in doubt to no one.  The Iranian President is a man who, during his tenure as the mayor of Tehran, ordered the city’s streets widened in anticipation of the return of the Twelfth Imam, a figure who accompanies the apocalypse in Shiite Islamic theology. The American left would call for the head of any mayor in the United States who wanted to widen Main Street to prepare for the return of the Christ. Yet they apparently think a similar figure in the world’s biggest hotbed of religious fundamentalism can be expected to be a benign wielder of nuclear launch codes.

In the new issue of Commentary, the Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens, in a piece entitled “Iran Cannot be Contained”, comes to the same conclusion from a different angle, rebutting those who think that because containment worked on the Soviet Union it can work on the Iranian regime:

… The most important difference between the Soviet Union and Iran may be ideological. A credible case can be made that Communism is no less a faith than Islam and that Iran’s current leadership, like Soviet leaders of yore, knows how to temper true belief with pragmatic considerations. But Communism was also a materialist and (by its own lights) rationalist creed, with a belief in the inevitability of history but not in the afterlife. Marxist-Leninist regimes may be unmatched in their record of murderousness, but they were never great believers in the virtues of martyrdom.

That is not the case with Shiism, which has been decisively shaped by a cult of suffering and martyrdom dating to the murder of Imam Husayn—the Sayyed al-Shuhada, or Prince of Martyrs—in Karbala in the seventh century. The emphasis on martyrdom became all the more pronounced in Iran during its war with Iraq, when Tehran sent waves of child soldiers, some as young as 10, to clear out Iraqi minefields. As Hooman Majd writes in his book The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, the boys were often led by a soldier mounted on a white horse in imitation of Husayn: “the hero who would lead them into their fateful battle before they met their God.” Tens of thousands of children died this way.

The martyrdom mentality factors into Iran’s nuclear calculus as well. In December 2001, former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—a man often described as a moderate and a pragmatist in the Western press—noted in his Qods (Jerusalem) Day speech that “if one day, the Islamic world is also equipped with weapons like those that Israel possesses now, then the imperialists’ strategy will reach a standstill because the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything. However, it will only harm the Islamic world. It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.”

We are, quite simply, running out of time.  We can try to ignore reality, but reality won’t return the favor.