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Biden's last despicable chapter in his disastrous foreign policy act will be to give The Taliban what they seek. I am willing to bet he will recognize The Taliban and provide them with the money (aid) they need to govern and establish their legitimacy.
Biden will do anything to make this tragic story disappear and he will depend on the mass media to shift their reporting to the questionable massive "infrastructure" legislation. Op Ed writers, I rely upon, suggest this is why Pelosi rushed the bill through in order to take attention away from his self made disaster.
Will this strategy work? Perhaps if things do not worsen, because American's have short attention spans, and as long as there is no further tragedies it will inure to Biden's benefit.
Far too many Americans do not comprehend the extent to which this episode reaches, wrecks our nation's credibility and puts the entire Western World in the target sight of radical terrorists. Over the ensuing years episodes of terrorism will rise as radical Islamists regain their traction and ability to cause havoc. I further believe we will sustain some tragic domestic damage because I believe our nation has become a refuge of many Islamist terrorists intent on more 9/11 events.
As for The Taliban, for the moment they are accommodating because they are seeking a quid pro quo but they will revert to their normal stance over time. Meanwhile, they are busy laying the groundwork for re-introducing Sharia Law, shutting down the American University of Afghanistan and hunting down those who worked with America.
Soon we will not be able to track their actions because our presence and ability to do so will have been greatly weakened and diminished.
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Will Mexico yield to The SCOTUS's new decision? Why should they?
Mexico Could Ignore Supreme Court Ruling
(RightWing.org) – On Tuesday, the Supreme Court, in an attempt to fix the Biden administration’s immigration mess at our southern border, ordered the federal government to reinstate former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” law. Unfortunately, there’s a problem – Mexico.
One of President Biden’s first acts in office was to scrap most of his predecessor’s immigration laws. That included the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), which kept would-be asylum seekers in Mexico until immigration judges could process their claims; instead, Biden let them into the US, where they could simply disappear.
On August 24, following legal action by Texas and Missouri, the Supreme Court ruled Biden must reinstate the Protocols. The problem is, hundreds of thousands of migrants have already crossed the border, and Mexico isn’t obliged to take back anyone who isn’t a Mexican citizen.
Mexico is already refusing to accept migrant families returned under a different US law, the Title 42 coronavirus regulations. Migration experts think it’s unlikely they’ll be any more cooperative about the MPP, although DHS officials are already negotiating with their Mexican counterparts about reactivating the law.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is doing what it does best – trying to find a new way to scrap MPP and sneak the action past a judge.
Copyright 2021, RightWing.org
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A must repeat for those who still defend Biden, hate Trump, have their heads in the sand and believe what the mass media tells them to accept as factual news..
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Biden Hands China The Keys To America
And:
Papier-Mâché Tiger
Featuring John Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, and H. R. McMaster via GoodFellows
America’s inability to adequately game-plan and execute a clean withdrawal from Afghanistan brings into question the foresight and competency of the nation’s political and foreign policy establishment. Hoover Institution senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane discuss what went wrong in Kabul, the harm done to US prestige, and whether the image of a weakened America at odds with its NATO allies opens the door to Chinese and Russian aggression.
Finally:
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My third editor daughter reviews John Pollocks "Shortcut."How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
By John Pollack
256 pp. Avery. 2014.
In Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas, John Pollack, a communications consultant and former presidential speechwriter for Bill Clinton, shows readers the power and pitfalls of analogies. An analogy compares two disparate things based on what they have in common. For example, Steve Jobs said that Apple was building "a bicycle for the mind, [a tool] to amplify a human ability" (154). But when a comparison oversimplifies, the analogy can anchor on an idea and frame out other possibilities (for example, the three-strikes-you're-out laws). Pollack deconstructs familiar analogies from law, business, politics, and technology along five criteria, by how well they: "1. use the familiar to explain something less familiar, 2. highlight similarities and obscure differences, 3. identify useful abstractions, 4. tell a coherent story, and 5. resonate emotionally" (50). Pollack examines how our legal system reasons by analogy, comparing aspects of a case to a "statute, precedent, rule, or cultural standard" (112). Is a DNA sample the new fingerprint? The author lauds Martin Luther King, Winston Churchill, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt (America, the "great arsenal of democracy") for their effective analogies. Shortcut concludes with tips to step up our analogy game, including to avoid trivializing with hyperbole (no, the vaccine mandate is not like the Holocaust). Overall, strive to balance an analogy's accessibility and clarity with its logic, completeness, and truth. "Only the very best [analogies] approach truth" (182), says Pollack. —Lisa Thaler, 28 August 2021
Lisa Thaler
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Appeasement
By Rabbi Ezra KatzI was brought up to despise the word appeasement. It was the ideology favored by much of the British aristocracy and political leaders before the Second World War. For years Lords and Ladies traipsed across the Channel to marvel at what Hitler had achieved for Germany: “what a very nice chappie he was,” and “someone we can do business with.” Even the king of England was enthralled (thank goodness he abdicated).
The American Ambassador to London, the father of future president John Kennedy, was also an admirer and advised President Roosevelt to make his peace with Hitler. As a result, the British government believed there was no real threat; they averted their eyes from increasing German militancy and re-armament. And as for antisemitism and murdering Jews, well, who really cared? And besides, the Jews probably deserved it.
British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, the man most associated with appeasement but by no means the only one in government, was completely gulled into believing that if you were nice to Herr Hitler, he was a gentleman just like you. He would agree to peace and would honor his word. As for what Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, of course, he thought the fellow was not being serious and only wrote it to get votes and power. Now, of course, we know he meant all of it, broke every treaty he had ever signed, and disregarded every moral standard.
Thanks to the brilliant unpredictability of a hitherto failed and unpopular politician, Winston Churchill, Britain was persuaded to stand up to Hitler. Had he not succeeded, all of Europe would have fallen to the Nazis and I would not be here today to tell the story. Remember that America only entered the war when both Japan and Germany declared war on the United States first, as public opinion had been against going to war to defend anyone.
However, appeasement did not end there. Roosevelt was sick when he met Stalin at Yalta in 1945 when they decided on carving up the stinking Nazi corpse. He, too, thought Stalin was a reasonable man you could deal with. And so did President Truman at Potsdam. They conceded every one of Stalin’s requests. When it came to dividing Berlin between the victors, the Americans caved in on everything, and when Col. Frank Howley, in Berlin, protested that he was told to accept all the Russian conditions. To make matters worse, the State Department was made up almost entirely of appeasers on almost all overseas issues, then as now. Spineless men who pathetically believed that if you are nice to mad dogs, they won’t bite you. (You can read more about the subject in “Checkmate in Berlin,” by Giles Milton.)
It was thanks to a few outliers over the years that other voices were heard. The first was the famous letter from George Kennan, the American chargé d’affaires at the Embassy in Moscow, which began to change Truman’s opinion. Bolstered by Winston Churchill’s famous speech in America about “The Iron Curtain,” it led eventually to the Cold War and standing up to Russia.
But if you have read the history of Berlin after the war, you will know how the Americans were very reluctant to stand up to Russia until the Russians themselves blocked Berlin. And on all other issues, including Israel, the State Department professionals have continued to believe that appeasement works. The Suez campaign in 1956 was another example of the State Department’s failed appeasement.
Now, the failures of Obama’s State Department, the cheerleaders of successive appeasements, are back in charge of the Asylum — bolstered by the woke who refuse to support anyone not aligned with their view of the world (which anyway sees Israel as the enemy). They believe that if you are nice to any of the morally corrupt dictators and terrorists and shower them with money (which will go into the pockets of them and their cronies), you will win friends and get them to change. This explains why they naively believed that appeasing the Iranians, and the Taliban (we can argue about Lebanon and the Palestinians), would bring peace to the Middle East and turn them into amenable, civilized democrats. It is this deluded mentality that has dominated Washington’s thinking.
Extreme, jihadist Islam — emphatically not all of Islam — stands for conquering the world. It justifies killing (even other Muslims) and lying and betraying one’s word if it suits the cause of turning the world into Dar al-Islam, in contrast to everywhere else which is Dar al-Harb, the world of the sword. Jihadism shares with Marxism the belief that the end justifies the means. This also explains why fanatics often defeat moderates in political battles even when they are outnumbered: fanatics are prepared to die for the cause.
The only defense against extremism is to fight from a strong, protected home base and venture beyond it only to destroy threats. But thinking that one can turn failed states into loyal allies or democracies that really work, is a delusion. The rival terror groups are delighted because they will now benefit from Taliban arms and support, and the world knows America is not going to do anything about those of its allies who cannot defend themselves. They can’t even arrange an orderly evacuation which is an important rule of warfare: retreat from strength if you want to survive.
The US has always resorted to the use arms when its own interests were in danger. But there is a difference between going to war and trying to impose your values and policies on others. And whenever they have tried that they have failed — because wars that were waged by the military had a specific identifiable goal. Wars that seek to change a culture are endless, if not pointless. Whereas generals tend to look at targets, politicians look to their own agendas. Intellectuals and professional policy wonks think of ideologies, living in their isolated worlds of theories and dream of re-making the world in their image with little regard to the realities on the ground.
I do not believe the US should have gone into Afghanistan in the first place beyond their specific mission to destroy terrorists and their resources. Did no one know the Afghan army was a paper tiger? Did no one think about an orderly evacuation in stages, given that it has been in the cards for over six months? So far this appears a bigger disaster than Vietnam, and America seems incapable of learning any lessons. Why would any so-called ally trust America again?
And it is not just in the military area. Both Russia and China (to name only the largest adversaries) are committed to supplanting the United States, with the efforts moving on from the military and trade to technology. How has America reacted to the hacking of its major industries and government records? By being nice and saying to China “naughty boy, you really shouldn’t do that.”
In the ancient world, conquest was all that mattered. Religions thrived if they fought. Empires rose and fell. Then the Colonial powers divided their conquests into national units that forced rival tribes and religions to live together, and we have been suffering ever since. The Roman Empire collapsed when it had no coherent agenda, no shared national will.
Without a common ideology on survival, if nothing else, there is no chance of winning. Thank God that Israel has that survival gene. For all its faults and divisions, it has the passion to fight — which I will pray this New Year that it will not have to.
The author is a rabbi and writer currently living in New York.
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