Monthly Archives: August 2014

A Gun Control Loss

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The gun rights sheriff incumbent, David Clarke Jr, defeated his Democratic primary challenger for the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) County job (and he’s in because there’s no Republican challenger for the fall general election). This also had been, among other things, a referendum on ex-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control philosophy, as that one had thrown down $150,000 on TV ads in his own attempt to influence the election.

However, primary challenger Milwaukee Police Lt Chris Moews‘ own justification for gun controls demonstrates the fallacy of the gun control position:

If I have the opportunity to defend myself and my family I will do so to the best of my abilities but I’m certainly also going to call 911 if I have the ability because I need the cavalry to come and help me.

Indeed. Because the cavalry—those police on the other end of that 911 call—are minutes away, plus the time to make the call, the man on the scene is the one who must deal first with the situation.

Moreover, as Moews intimated, it might not be possible for the man on the scene to make the call, leaving him without aid in facing the threat.

And there’s Moews’ implied strawman that an armed man wouldn’t call 911 at all.

Forcing that man to remain unarmed maximizes the danger to him.

It’s Only 5%

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As President Barack Obama said regarding his Obamacare, only 5% of Americans actually are affected by his dissembling about their ability to keep their doctor, their health plan, their medical facility of choice, and these 5% are only a tiny, insignificant minority in the greater scheme of things.

And so it is with the victims of genocide. Obama’s self-described standard for intervention requires a sufficiently large number of humans before they can be a enough of a humanitarian crisis to warrant his attention. In his formula, V(olume) + E(fficacy) + A(uthority) = I(ntervention),  the numbers of Yezidis on the mountaintop no longer meet his standards for a balanced equation; they’re not a Voluminous enough number of victims.

Human beings just don’t matter as individuals; there has to be a minimum aggregation into a suitably sized group. His decision not to help the remaining (potential) genocidal victims because there doesn’t seem to be enough of them left is an illustration of a logical outcome of the Progressive view that individuals matter less than the group.

An Inaccurate Description

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As Nour Malas and Joe Parkinson, writing for The Wall Street Journal, put it in a larger piece,

They [Western officials, including especially US officials] now face the choice of launching a major armament program to Kurdish forces, and risk accelerating Iraq’s dismemberment, or offering smaller supplies but failing to turn the Peshmerga into the definitive proxy force against the Islamic State.

Of course, the choice is not limited to these options, nor are these options accurate reflections of reality. An obvious third choice is arming, and supporting with other means, the Peshmerga so that they can do far more than just be someone else’s proxy, but instead guarantee the Kurds’ survival as a society and a polity against ISIS’ attempts to crush, if not exterminate, them—even to crush ISIS instead.

Nor is “launching a major armament program” a serious risk to Iraqi political unity. That threat comes from an Iraqi government that has no respect—no use for—either of the other two major groupings in Iraq: the Kurds, surely, and the Sunnis as well. Arming the Kurds, far from threatening the Iraqi polity, would facilitate the survival and the effectivity of the Kurds, and give them the wherewithal to force the Iraqi government to take them seriously.

On the other hand, not supporting the Kurds adequately, including arming them with serious weaponry and giving them serious air support, guarantees their fall, which in turn guarantees Iraq’s fall to the terrorists.

Which renders irrelevant any discussion of an alleged threat from the Kurds to Iraqi unity.

e pluribus unum

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This post is adapted from a passage in Chapter 4 of my book A Conservative’s Manifesto.

What is the “many” in the title, the pluribus? When the phrase was first proposed for the Seal of the United States in 1776, it referred to the 13 States being joined into one nation. It has come to mean, in addition, the several peoples, religions, languages, heritages, and so on who come to the United States to join our great experiment in individual freedom and individual responsibility.

What is the one, the unum? That’s the point of this post.

We Americans take in and incorporate (note that verb) immigrants, and gladly so, for they bring fresh ideas as well as fresh approaches to old problems and a renewal of dedication to nation. However, we should not become our immigrants—they need to become Americans, or alternatively to recognize their resident alien status. Those who come to the United States do so for the opportunities here, and they’re welcome to share in these opportunities—immigrant and legal alien alike.   Immigrants come to America specifically for the economic opportunities, the political freedoms and opportunities, the sociological opportunities—in a word, for the American culture, which they know a priori to be different from their own—and which they understand to be the foundation of our American exceptionalism.

Immigrants need to adapt to, and assimilate into, our culture. Some will argue that this implies an imposition of a particular majority culture on minorities, but it is not an imposition. It is a recognition and an acceptance that to benefit from what America has to offer, to benefit from American opportunities, and to preserve these for Americans already present and for future Americans, native born and immigrant, it is necessary to preserve and to adapt to that which is America. Immigrants holding themselves apart denies to them the very reason they came—our opportunities and escape from the restraints of their old countries.

What immigrants must do is accept the current political structures, which they knew from the start, and take part in their new community. These new citizens, like the “original” citizens, must speak a common national language and share the commitment to maintaining and defending the nation. And so, having committed to the nation—to America—they will have their impact by engaging as citizens in our common discourse. However, this is not a demand for sublimation. On the contrary, once immigrants have become citizens, rather than having chosen to remain resident aliens, they can, they should, actively participate in that common discourse and make their influence concerning the nation’s goals and future through free discussion.

Parenthetically, the need to preserve these American attributes, these fundaments of American exceptionalism, emphasizes, also, the importance of providing civics courses that teach the American social contract and American citizenship in our schools, so as to reach all American citizens.

Gradual Escalation

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We’ve been taking potshots at ISIS targets, ostensibly to bring relief materials to the Yezidis trapped on mountaintop in northern Iraq. The potshots, though, are having a different effect.

Islamic militant forces in northern Iraq appear to be shifting tactics….

[U]ntil now [ISIS] was behaving like a well-organized army, moving with strategic intent and pursuing military objectives. Now, officials are seeing at least a partial shift to classic insurgency tactics, as militants begin to blend in among the population, making targeting more difficult.

“One of the things that we have seen…is that where [ISIS] have been in the open, they are now starting to dissipate and to hide amongst the people,” LtGen William Mayville Jr, Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said. “The targeting in this is going to become more difficult.”

This, of course, is the result of having ignored the lessons of Viet Nam, specifically the failure of gradual escalation, which leaves the enemy room and time in which to adapt and respond. It also continues to underestimate ISIS: they’re maintaining their strategic intent and military objectives they’ve always had; they’re only changing tactics—just like in Vietnam.

These initial air “attacks” should have been massive and sustained, destroying the terrorists’ formations over a broad swath and while they were still in the open, still concentrated, and still easy targets. Moreover, such a heavy, sustained campaign would have made the Kurds’ Peshmerga’s task easier.

“[M]ilitants can be hard to discern from civilians,” said Michael Rubin, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

“Are you going to risk having someone come on to a helicopter or into a crowd that’s actually a suicide bomber?”

This is the situation into which Obama’s…tactic…has placed the Peshmerga—and us.

[I]n order for the airstrikes to be effective at this stage, US ground forces would be needed to permanently push the group formerly known as ISIS back—something that has been ruled out by Obama administration officials.

This is not the case, and it’s a surprising misunderstanding by Jennifer Griffin, the author of the above linked article. Ground forces—the Peshmerga—already are in place; US ground forces aren’t needed, and the Kurds aren’t asking for them. All the Peshmerga need are those weapons and ammunition that have been “promised”—an Obama-style commitment—and that still are being withheld.

This business of gradual escalation—or of a too light response—is a lesson writ large from our gradual escalation failure in Vietnam. This is a lesson of which the present administration is fully aware and is studiously is ignoring, since to acknowledge the prior failure would be to acknowledge the failure of the present administration’s disdain for US military power in any place in the world.

There is no military solution? Tell that to tomorrow’s historians studying how the extermination of the Yezidis came about. Tell that to the daughters of the surviving Kurds, living—sort of—as ISIS sex slaves. That will be, after all, the outcome of the current decision to ignore that lesson and to allow, thereby, ISIS to continue its…advance.

Or we don’t escalate at all, we stay with the pin pricks, we don’t try to get ahead of the terrorists’ evolving tactics, and we meekly accept defeat.