War Was Interested in Obama

Pajamas Media ^ | 06/15/2014 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Billthedrill]

Something like that quotation was reportedly said by Pericles: "You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you." That may, however, also be apocryphal...

Trotsky was a very unlikely fellow to rebuild the Red Army but he did a creditable job, which Stalin promptly undid through purge, but that is a separate issue. Fascinating fellow. His own life was an exemplar of the futility of communism and he never even saw it.

This business of the world being more peaceful - it is the peace of the grave, or as Marx defined it, "the absence of opposition to socialism". In this case, militant Islam. What I find baffling is the persistent illusion among the America haters that if only we'd cease military activity the world would settle into some sort of peace stasis, which is, after all, contrary to the most superficial reading of every history book on the shelf (except perhaps for Howard Zinn's, which is a disaster all unto itself). Less involvement? Fine, how's that working out for you?

Ah, if only it were only that. Because what we actually have is not lack of engagement, but engagement on the covert, deniable level that is more the activity of giggling children in a secret club than a serious attempt at policy. And the weapons, and the blood, are real. And so the policy's principal aim is good for the country only insofar as it supports the aims of a political party, and its principal metric of success is not the attainment of any foreign policy goal, but the ability to blame someone else when the thing falls apart. This is the work of amateurs, dilettantes, personified by the two most ridiculously unqualified Secretaries of State in the country's history in Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and headed up by a chief executive with no foreign policy experience whatever, either when he took office or now, nearly six unendurable years later. There is no quick fix for this short of a wave of change in Congress that results in serious cutting of funding that will be redirected precisely as foreign policy has been: to the advantage of the Democrat party and the ability to blame someone else. And frankly I don't see enough courage in Congress even to begin contemplating it.