Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant and well informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations, after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

-Will and Ariel Durant

Reading about the collapse of the Middle East is depressing stuff. Of course, the collapse has been going on for some time. The latest phase is just a continuation of a process that started with the end of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the Arabs to define themselves as separate from the West without rejecting the West. Arab nationalism sprung up after WW2 and was a defining characteristic of the Mohammedan lands for close to fifty years.

The Cold War kept the lid on a lot of problems that we’re rediscovering. One is the fact that the national boundaries in the land of the Muslim are meaningless. The other is that the Mohammedan is incapable of living under anything resembling western style liberalism. Authoritarian rule by hereditary clans is the natural order. Saudi Arabia is the model, not the exception. That may take the form of military dictatorship (Egypt), theocratic dictatorship (Iran) or the palace system in the gulf states.

This reality has been impossible for American elites to accept. Egalitarianism, consumerism and materialism are the three legs of their religion. They looked out over the Muslim world and had the same reaction they get when thinking about Appalachia. The two decade war to set things right in the Muslim world have brought us to the point where region-wide war is the most likely outcome. Yemen is looking like the Balkans of the Persian Gulf.

This old article from the American Thinker offers some useful background.

What is happening in Yemen is symptomatic of the whole Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. The population was semi-starved until oil production began in the 1980s, when oil production began and wheat imports rose to feed a population doubling every 25 years. The situation now is that oil exports will cease in the next couple of years, the capital is being besieged by rebel groups and Islamists of various types, and groundwater is close to complete depletion because of kat production.

Saudi Arabia has been ponying up to keep the Yemeni population fed. But a day will arrive when the Saudis will be sick of that, or there will simply be no administration on the Yemeni side to handle the aid. The Saudis are still building a 1,100-mile-long fence to keep the Yemenis out. Completion of the border fence will give the Saudis more options on when to stop feeding the Yemenis. The fate of Yemen is to break up into its constituent tribes and for perhaps 90% of the population to starve. That is more than 20 million people and it is likely to happen in the next few years.

The Dissident Right likes to blame the messianic spasm of the Bush years for what has gone wrong in the MENA and they have some points. Bush blowing up Iraq was a foolish decision. You never replace the known with the unknown. That’s what they did when they broke up Iraq. The unknown was an attempt to impose Western democracy on them. Instead they got a sectarian war that rippled through the Muslim world.

The true cause of that ripple is what American planners can never confront. In order to accept that the Arabs do not want and cannot accept the combination of egalitarianism, consumerism and materialism we call “liberalism” calls into the question the very nature of the western project. If “liberalism” is not universal, it is not perfect. If it is not perfect, it can be debated. If it can be debated, it can be rejected at home, as well as abroad. That’s simply impossible so the West refuses to accept the Arabs as Arabs.

The errors of the Bush years could have been patched over without going down this road. The Obama people could have backed a suitable strong man in Iraq, provided the means, money and weapons and then pretended he was just a proto-democrat. That would have allowed the region to fall back into a familiar pattern. Instead, they set off on a course that is strikingly insane. The results thus far are chaos in the Maghreb, particularly Libya. We have a breach with our only reliable ally in the region. Now, it appears our other allies are about to be swept away by Iranian backed lunatics.

Part of this is due to the people in charge. Anyone who has watched a vibrant American city government do business knows the pattern. Today they have policy X. Tomorrow it is policy Y, which is contradictory to policy X. Every day is a new day with new plans, often in conflict of with previous plans. It’s big man government jammed into an Anglo-Saxon political structure.

Another aspect is the central defect of American Progressives. Their singular focus on reaching the promised land leaves a huge blind spot, which the rest of us call the past. They never ask why things are as they are. They just assume the current arrangements happened randomly and therefore they are free to re-arrange them in pursuit of current fads. It’s why their cult ends up murdering people. They can’t imagine why the people are not going along with the new scheme so they assume it is malice. What else could it be?

In the case of the Middle East, Team Obama started with a policy of reversing the Bush policy, because Bush was Hitler and bad so they had to reverse all that. That meant abandoning Iraq to the Iranians. Then it meant undermining the despots in the Maghreb. Of course, they ramped up our involvement in Afghanistan for no other reason than the Bush people did not want to do it. The result was six years of fighting for no reason.

Once they ran out of Bush polices to reverse, they set out to re-arrange the region as if they were starting with a blank sheet. They looked at the alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the GCC and Jordan and decided this did not make sense to them. if they could start over, they would have an alliance with Iran as the regional hegemonic power, with Iraq as the second. Why this is preferred is unknown to me. Shia are the minority sect in Islam so maybe that’s the connection. It will be an alliance of the oppressed. Who knows?

The result is this all out push to make a deal with Iran, no matter the cost. So far the cost is a breach with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The general destabilization of the region is a direct result of America suddenly changing sides. The fact that the president’s team is acting with the consistency of the Detroit city council only adds confusion to the mix. As a result, we are on the brink of all out war in the region. The price of incompetence in the White House could turn out to be very high if the House of Saud is toppled or Israel strikes Iran.

The other day, John Derbyshire posted a column of questions he would like asked of prospective presidential candidates. One of them was about Iran.

Nuclear proliferation.  Pakistan, a dysfunctional kleptocracy maggoty with Muslim fanatics, has for nigh on 20 years had nuclear weapons, and now has missiles with which to deliver them.

North Korea, under the control of a Mafia-style gangster family utterly ruthless in maintenance of its power, is similarly equipped.

Fifty years ago, communist China, under the autocratic control of a megalomaniac who had just got through watching impassively while his policies caused 30 million of his countrymen to die of starvation, got the bomb, and is now a major nuclear power.

Deterrence has an excellent track record, even with regimes at the furthest extremes of craziness and cruelty. Should Americans be concerned about Iran going nuclear? Why?

I’ve been mulling that one over for a while and I don’t think I agree with what Derb is suggesting. Pakistan is a mess now, for sure, but it was not always this sort of a mess. The secular rulers have, even now, been able to keep the religious crazies from gaining control of the nukes. In other words, so far we have been lucky.

To say deterrence has any impact on Pakistan is simply wrong. The world has been lucky so far. Maybe the almost certain annihilation of the country that would come from India, if the Muslim crazies got hold of the nukes has made the secular elements more determined. That feels like a stretch to me. Dumb luck looks like the right answer here and who knows how long that holds.

North Korea is not run by religious fanatics and the sanity of the ruling class is not in question. We may think it is nuts to operate as a hermit kingdom, but that’s a matter of taste, not fact. Otherwise, we are dealing with rational people who are pretty smart.Given their position in the world, they have managed to survive despite a lot of big enemies.

Has deterrence altered their behavior? We have no way of knowing.  We do know they have sold nuclear technology to Syria and missile technology to Iraq and Iran. If they have not been deterred from that, there no reason to think they will be deterred from selling a nuke. We can’t know these things, which means we can’t say deterrence has worked here.

China and the Soviet Union are the two good examples. Russia and China are old countries run by smart people. These are people with no history of messianic religious impulses. There’s nothing in the history of these people to think they are anxious to usher in the end times. Deterrence works with these countries for the same reason it works for the US. It’s not fear of destruction. It’s fear of blowing up the planet.

Iran is nothing like China or Russia. Persia is an old society, but there’s not a whole lot of Persia left. Genetically, Iranians are just Arabs. I’m sure the average guy walking the streets of Tehran is in no hurry to blow up the world, but we know a lot of them are tossing and turning every night dreaming of it.

Here I’ll share a story from an Iranian I knew in the 80’s. He was a conscript fighting against the Iraqis. His unit was in the Basra area as the Iranians threw everything they had at the city hoping to end the war. They were faced with a minefield and volunteers were called for to clear a path. A bunch of Revolutionary Guards volunteered. They cleared a path through the minefield by running through it, exploding the mines.

The point is Iran is not China or even Pakistan. The people in charge are messianic fanatics. A good portion of the population supports the leaders on religious grounds. Maybe they are not that serious about destroying Israel and ushering in the end times. Maybe it is just what they say to keep up appearances. We can’t know that.

I think if I was asked to pick the worst country on which to test the deterrence theory, I’d pick Iran. Even the Saudis seem to be more constrained in their actions and they may be the most thoroughly Muslim society on earth. Iran defines itself in opposition to the West and therefore seeks out ways to cause mayhem in the West. Deterrence does not seem to have had any effect so far.

There’s a tendency on the Dissident Right to blame American foreign policy for everything wrong in the world. The Paultards do this a lot. I think it is fair to say America has bungled a lot of things in this realm. When it comes to the Arabs, American has been stunningly incompetent. None of which changes the fact Iran is run by messianic fanatics who talk constantly about blowing up the world.

Of course, there’s good old fashioned indifference, which I find appealing, generally speaking. Iran is not going to nuke America. If they did, we could easily wipe them off the map. We would lose a city, but they would not exist. Iran is a problem of Europe, Israel and the Arabs. There’s an argument there, but it is not deterrence. It is indifference.

Regardless, It seems pretty clear that the Obama administration is prepared to let the Iranians go nuclear. Who knows, maybe they will be right this time.

I’m fond of pointing out that the Left has a strange and predictable opposite rule of rhetoric. Whatever they are accusing the bogeyman of doing, you can almost always be sure it is the exact opposite of the truth. In almost all cases, the thing they are accusing the bogeyman of doing is what they are currently doing. It is a wonderful bit of deception and a great group adaptation. While the non-believers are examining the bogeyman’s actions, the Left gets to operate unfettered. Shifting the focus is one of those individual traits that scales up very well.

So it is with the Left and foreign policy. They are always accusing the neo-cons or the plain old regular cons of trading blood for something, like oil. Iraq was allegedly about oil. Afghanistan was about Halliburton and the defense industry. A lot of time was spent examining these claims only to learn that it was ideology and sloppy reasoning, not money, at the root of these adventures. The Bush people really thought they were spreading democracy.

The Cuba deal, on the other hand, was a pure money play. Obama’s money men see opportunity in Cuba. It may be a poor country, but it can be a resort colony, medical colony for health care tourists and a source of cheap labor. To the average America, Cuba is a wart on the face of humanity and should be allowed to sink into the sea. In other words, the Right is motivated by morality, while for the Left, Cuba is just another place to feed.

The pending Iran deal is similarly about money. The usual suspects on the professional Right are trying to make it about Obama the Muslim or Obama the Jew-hater. Obama is most certainly pro-Muslim and he hates Jews, but that’s not what it is about. It is about money. I have a friend in the region who works in the oil and gas sector. He reports that American firms are sending top level delegations to Tehran in anticipation of a deal. The head of Ceva Logistics was just in Iran trying to cut a deal. They are a prime for Halliburton and Schlumberger.

The American Left is not Marxist. That strain died out in the 50’s. As David Horowitz has explained in great detail, the modern Left rejected the old commies early on as has-beens and opportunists. The modern American Left is very comfortable with global capitalism. They made their peace with it in the late 80’s and have since evolved into a movement Mussolini would easily recognize and envy. In some respects, the Clintons get away with their shenanigans because their coevals envy their prowess. Obama and the Wookiee hope to follow their model and become super-rich after his term in office is complete.

This sort of cynical self-dealing has its limits. In the banana republics, it usually ends in a bloodbath. In a nuclear world, a bloodbath is a good result. Sane people who follow Iran think the rulers truly believe their rhetoric. The Iranian mullahs think they are ushering in the end times and they will be triumphant in the final great clash. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just say all that stuff because they think they have to keep up appearances, like American politicians wearing flag lapel pins. No one can know, but it is a big risk for a little cash.

Every president has his issues and by that I mean the things he likes to work on as a matter of policy. Johnson was a natural at domestic policy wrangling. Nixon had a great mind for foreign affairs. Clinton loved interns. Bush the Younger became a war president and surrounded himself with people good at prosecuting wars. The defect in the American system is that we are stuck with our president until he dies, leaves office or is voted out in the next election, which rarely happens. So, if our guy is not very interested in foreign affairs, like is the case with Obama, you have to hope nothing big happens in the world while he is in office. Otherwise, it can get ugly.

The Europeans seem to have figured this out finally. I’m surprised it has taken so long, but old habits die hard. Most of our post-WW2 presidents have had experienced people to rely on for this stuff and all of them have been willing to work with the Europeans. Some of them too much, but that’s hardly a vice. You can disagree with the policy, but even our week presidents have not followed weird policy goals. Obama is the exception. He has a weak team and he seems to hold the Europeans in contempt.

I think Europe has finally thrown in the towel and is ready to walk away from the US, at least when it comes to Ukraine.

MUNICH (Reuters) – The leaders of Russia, Ukraine, Germany and France agreed to meet in Belarus on Wednesday to try to broker a peace deal for Ukraine amid escalating violence there and signs of cracks in the transatlantic consensus on confronting Vladimir Putin.

The four leaders held a call on Sunday, two days after Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande traveled to Moscow for talks with Putin that produced no breakthrough in the nearly year-long conflict that has claimed over 5,000 lives.

After the call, Ukraine President Petro Poroshenko said progress had been made and that he was hopeful the meeting in Minsk would lead to a “swift and unconditional ceasefire” in eastern Ukraine, where pro-Russian separatists have stepped up a military offensive in recent weeks, seizing new territory.

But Putin warned in a newspaper interview that Kiev must stop its military operation in east Ukraine and stop exerting economic pressure on rebel-held regions.

“Kiev’s attempts to exert economic pressure on Donbas (region of east Ukraine) and disrupt its daily life only aggravates the situation. This is a dead-end track, fraught with a big catastrophe,” Putin told Egyptian state newspaper Al-Ahram, according to an English transcript provided by the Kremlin.

A Ukraine military spokesman said on Sunday that intense fighting was continuing around the rail junction town of Debaltseve, with rebel fighters making repeated attempts to storm lines defended by government troops.

At a high-level security conference in Munich over the weekend, Merkel said it was uncertain whether further negotiations would lead to a deal with Putin but argued that all opportunities for a diplomatic solution should be pursued.

She came under sharp criticism from U.S. Senators Lyndsey Graham and John McCain, both Republican hawks, for opposing the sending of defensive weapons to the Ukraine army to help it fight the separatists.

“The Ukrainians are being slaughtered and we’re sending them blankets and meals,” McCain said in Munich. “Blankets don’t do well against Russian tanks.”

If you’re Merkel, Hollande and Putin, you have to be thinking you’re on your own at this point.Obama let the State Department run wild in Ukraine, helping create this mess. Victoria Nuland should have been publicly sacked so as to show the World Obama is not going to tolerate that sort of bungling. Instead this woman stays on, like a big”FU” to the Europeans. Further, Obama keeps sending John Kerry to Europe, despite the fact everyone thinks he is a ridiculous person.

The bellicose ramblings of the warmongers in the GOP must be very concerning. A weak president surrounded by boobs can be bulldozed by a John McCain channeling Cato the Elder. Americans are largely clueless about the politics in the provinces, the rest of the world watches American politics closely. They have to worry that weak, lame duck president could be bullied into doing something stupid. Eliminating that possibility means even a bad deal is a good deal.

The trouble with the Europeans turning their back on Obama is it means turning their back on America, if they can make a deal with Putin. Putin surely knows this so now he has a reason to make a deal over Ukraine. There’s the looming Greek problem that could also complicate things. When Cyprus is talking with Russia about military bases, it’s reasonable to assume the Greeks would jump at such a deal. The rest of Europe has to think they would be better off letting the Russian have Ukraine back so they can focus on their other issues to the south.

I don’t think Putin is the evil genius many on the Right think. It’s just that he is matched against a nitwit. In comparison to Obama, Putin looks like Goldfinger.

I like what Ron Unz is doing to support the Dissident Right. Ron is very rich and very smart. He allegedly has an IQ over 200, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. Still, his business career supports the argument that he is an exceptionally bright man. Having super-smart people in your corner is almost always good. Having smart rich people in your corner is even better. Having smart, rich curious people is ideal.

That’s what strikes me about Unz. He is not doctrinaire, as far as I can tell. His site has all sorts of political and philosophical points of view. Steve Sailer is what we used to call the mainstream Right in the 1980’s. Noam Chomsky is a socialist circa 1968. It takes self-confidence and a high degree of curiosity to open the doors to such a wide range of opinion. It is something I try to cultivate in myself and therefore admire in others.

The thing you have to guard against, however, is falling for crackpot ideas with which you are unfamiliar. I’m a natural skeptic so this is much easier for me than most. My default assumption, when confronted by a new answer, is to assume that it must be wrong. I then set out to disprove it. I’m a natural puzzle solver so reverse engineering an idea or argument to see how it works is second nature. That wins me few friends, but it avoids stumbling into this sort of stuff I see on Ron’s site.

Philip Giraldi had a long career in the intelligence business as a CIA agent and later as a private dick for international clients. Therefore, his words carry an authority that most do not. He’s also a dedicated Israel hater. Here’s a quote from him:

“The Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away. “

Giraldi’s opinion of Israel is popular in Europe and, obviously, dominant in the Middle East. Arabs, fond of conspiracy, have created an elaborate mythology around Israel, international Jewry, the United States and their own plight. Westerners, who spend long periods in Arab lands, tend to pick up this habit of mind, along with a suspicion of Israel. They often return home sounding like retired Nazis to American ears. Giraldi has a bit of that to him and I would assume it comes from many years posted abroad.

Regardless, his obsession with Israel borders on the pathological. To suggest, as he does in that post, that the Israelis were behind the Paris shooting is simply nuts. All of the evidence points to two unstable young men who probably spent too much time on-line fantasizing about being the great Arab warrior. It’s not al-Quaeda or the Mosad. It was two disaffected Muslims. Instead of shooting an aging rock star to win the heart of a woman, they shot up a newspaper to win a place with Allah. But, the conspiratorial mind can never accept such banal explanations.

In his essay In Search of Anti-Semitism Bill Buckley laid out the turf that lies between criticism of Israel and/or commentary about Jews and anti-Semitism. This has remained an unresolved dispute between various factions of the Right since it boiled over in the 1980’s. The result, in my view, is that the folks chased out of the mainstream Right over the issue of Israel have never gotten over it. Their non-personhood haunts them even after all these years. The result is a deep paranoia about Israel and their neo-con supporters on the American Right.

I think Giraldi’s paranoia about Israel is simply weird. Israel is a country that does what it can to advance its interest. If it were located in the heart of Europe, it would be a Hebrew Lichtenstein, a commercial center with a big Temple. Instead it is surrounded by Arabs and it must adjust to deal with them. Americans have a romantic view of Israel so that is reflected in our foreign policy. Israel does not exist to undermine America. It acts in its own interests as it views them.

I’ve never been much of a conspiracy buff. My own experience says people have a tough time keeping a secret. Anglo-sphere countries also suffer from the concreteness of language, which makes it tough to pull off a good conspiracy. For a ruse to work, the mark has to believe things that are not true based on his own mistaken interpretation of what has been said by others. English is not a great language for that.

Arabic is a great language for nuance. Russian is a pretty good language for deception as well. In both there is lots of room for interpretation. Whether culture shaped the language or language shaped the culture is unknown, but a hour working with Arabs or Russians and you figure out that it is nearly impossible to pin them down on anything. It’s why contract law is alien to Arabs.

Anyway, this got my attention today. Since it is probably fire-walled, I’ll past it here.

Barely 24 hours after Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s prime minister, joined millions marching in Paris to pay tribute to the 17 people killed by Islamist extremists, the country’s president struck a much more confrontational tone.

“The duplicity of the west is obvious,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan said at a press conference on Monday evening. “As Muslims we have never sided with terror or massacres: racism, hate speech, Islamophobia are behind these massacres.”

“The culprits are clear: French citizens undertook this massacre and Muslims were blamed for it,” he added.

Although political leaders in Turkey have repeatedly condemned the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo magazine, a Jewish supermarket and a policewoman, a parallel narrative has emerged in the country, with conspiracy theorists blaming the murders on foreign intelligence agencies rather than radical Islamists.

This is so Turkish. I’m by no means an expert on Anatolia, but I have strong interest. It is, in part, due to their love of conspiracy. The other reason is the first “fast woman” I ever had fun with as a young man was Turkish.

A similar phenomenon has occurred in Russia, which sent Sergei Lavrov, foreign minister, to Sunday’s march.

Some such theories have been endorsed by pro-government figures — highlighting the growing resentment and suspicion of the west in two strategically important countries at a time of rising tensions over Ukraine and the Middle East.

Russians are not the same sort of conspiracy mongers as the Turks. Russians seem to like the deeper, more subtle brand of conspiracy and intrigue. There’s an assumption that things are not as they seem, but also an internal logic is at work. Turks seem to like chaotic conspiracies that make no sense to anyone.

“In Turkey, at least, it looks dangerously like people are playing a double game,” said Aaron Stein of the Royal United Services Institute, a UK think-tank. “Issue condemnations that play internationally, even as you tolerate supporters pushing crazy opinions that appeal to your political base.”

Melih Gokcek, mayor of Ankara for the ruling AK party, said on Monday that “Mossad [the Israeli intelligence service] is definitely behind such incidents . . . it is boosting enmity towards Islam.” Mr Gokcek linked the attacks to French moves towards recognising Palestine.

Ali Sahin, a member of Turkey’s parliament and foreign affairs spokesman for the AK party, last week set out eight reasons why he suspected the killings were staged so that “the attack will be blamed on Muslims and Islam”.

Mehmet Gormez, director of the state-run religious affairs directorate, described the attacks as a “perception operation” that cynically used the symbols of Islam, although he later appeared to tone down his comments.

In his own remarks on Monday, Mr Erdogan added: “Games are being played throughout the Islamic world”. He expressed bewilderment that French intelligence services had not followed the culprits more effectively. However, he has mainly appeared to hint at a conspiracy behind the depiction of the killings rather than the murders themselves.

That’s the other difference between Turks and Russians. Turks personalize their conspiracy theories. Whoever is pulling the strings is not as important as who is the target of the subterfuge. In this case, they start with Muslims being blamed and work backwards. Russians don’t have the self-pity for this sort of stuff.

In Russia, some pro-Kremlin commentators sought to link the killings to geopolitical machinations by the US.

Komsomolskaya Pravda, one of Russia’s leading tabloids, ran the headline: “Did the Americans stage the terror attack in Paris?” and posted a series of interviews on its website that presented various reasons why Washington might have organised the attack.

In one interview, Alexander Zhilin, head of the pro-Kremlin Moscow Centre for the Study of Applied Problems, claimed the terror attack was US retribution against President François Hollande for a January 6 radio interview in which Mr Hollande urged the EU to lift sanctions against Russia.

Washington used the attacks as “a quick fix for consolidating” US and EU geopolitical interests in Ukraine, Mr Zhilin claimed.

Others repeated a popular Russian conspiracy theory blaming the US intelligence services for a swath of terrorist assaults, from the 9/11 attacks on the US to last week’s Paris killings.

“For the last 10 years, so-called Islamist terrorism has been under the control of one of the world’s leading intelligence agencies,” Alexei Martynov, director of the International Institute for New States, a think-tank, told pro-Kremlin internet outlet LifeNews. “I am sure that some American supervisors are responsible for the terror attacks in Paris, or in any case the Islamists who carried them out.”

The Russians, I think, just enjoy giving the Americans the business by feeding Muslims these wacko ideas. Given what is happening in Ukraine and Syria, it is in the interests of the Russians to angry up the Muslims. That does no mean the Russians don’t think skulduggery is at foot. It’s just that the assume it is rational. So, they throws some logs on the fire to suit their interests.

In all seriousness, I keep wondering when the West is going to wake up and figure out that Turkey is a lost cause. Turks with anything on the ball are heading to Europe. The remaining Turks are trying to figure out how to keep from being outnumbered by the Kurds. Their answer is to go all in on Islam. Supplying these guys with modern weapons and technology is a terrible idea.