Category Archives: defense policy

Language

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Does Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speak the same language the rest of us Americans do? Does anyone on the Left?

Asked about the terms “radical Islamist” and “radical form of Islam,” she, like her Left constituents and supporters, says you can’t use those terms. On ABC‘s This Week Sunday, she said,

I don’t want to do that [use those terms] because, No. 1, it doesn’t do justice to the vast numbers of Muslims in our own country and around the world who are peaceful people[.]

In what way does it do anything to “vast numbers of Muslims…who are peaceful?” In the American version of English, those modifiers—by definition—limit the ones being discussed in those terms to a carefully restricted subset of Muslims. Those modifiers explicitly exclude “vast numbers of Muslims” from the characterization.

It seems part of the problem with trying to reach agreements with anyone from the Left is that they don’t even speak the same language. They appear to have napped through their grammar school lessons.

“Putin to Keep Up Pressure on Turkey Over Shootdown”

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That’s the headline of a Thursday Wall Street Journal piece about Russian President Vladimir Putin continuing his dudgeon over Turkey’s having shot down one of his fighter-bombers for violating Turkish airspace.

For instance, Putin said this in his State of the Nation speech:

If anyone thinks that—after having committing such a heinous war crime of killing one of our people—[the consequences] will be limited to tomatoes or other restrictions in construction and other sectors, they are deeply mistaken[.]

It’s a pressure game I don’t think Putin can win, unless he’s prepared to go to a shooting war with Turkey. Russia isn’t the one who controls the egress route from the Black Sea, for instance. This is the route a significant amount of Russian trade must take to get into the Mediterranean and points beyond. This is the route significant fractions of reinforcements and resupply for Russian forces in Syria and of aid for Bashar al Assad’s rump Syria must take.

Turkey controls that egress route.

Economic Contest

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It’s not yet an economic war. Russia is beginning the contest with Turkey after that nation was so impertinent as to shoot down a Russian fighter-bomber that was the latest Russian aircraft to violate Turkish airspace, this time refusing to leave despite multiple requests and warnings.

…Moscow took aim at Turkey’s economy, ordering tougher checks on its food imports.

This isn’t a contest that Russia can win, though. The Turkish economy is in sounder shape than Russia’s, and Turkey isn’t particularly dependent on exports to Russia. Russia, though, already has banned food imports from the rest of Europe over the latter’s sanctions that responded to Russia’s invasion and occupation of significant parts of Ukraine. This latest move, delicate though it is, simply makes Russia more dependent on domestic food production.

To be sure, this isn’t all the posturing Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing. He’s also shipped a number of near state-of-the-art S-400s, long-range anti-aircraft missiles, to his base in Syria, and he’s moved his guided missile cruiser, Moskva, which also is equipped with SAMs, closer to Syria. Both deployments put Turkish aircraft operating over a significant portion of Turkey in Putin’s gunsights.

This is a contest that Russia needn’t be allowed to win, either. If Putin continues to violate other nations’ airspace in his efforts to prop up his client Bashar al-Assad, those two isolated deployments can become targets themselves.

EU Border Policy

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Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission President, says the Paris attack won’t cause the EU to change its strategy for handling the flood of refugees from Syria, North Africa, and elsewhere.

Jean-Claude Juncker…urged citizens and politicians not to confuse the Paris perpetrators with those seeking shelter from war and terror.

It’s becoming apparent that one of the Islamic terrorists entered France legally, via Greece, on a Syrian passport. But that’s just one of the seven, or so, terrorists who butchered so many innocents. How, exactly, does Juncker propose that “citizens and politicians” sort out the terrorists from the refugees (and “ordinary” migrants, legal or otherwise) when they’re all so thoroughly mixed in among each other as the flood crosses the EU’s “borders?” The Paris butchery clearly demonstrates that the EU’s existing strategy is worse than unequal to the task, it’s a signal and tragic failure.

Strategy and Foreign Policy

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This is how Frank Bruni ended his Saturday op-ed in The New York Times [emphasis in the original]:

I felt sick. For a few hours, even a few days, I’d like to focus on the pain of Parisians and how that magnificent city reclaims any sense of order, any semblance of safety. I’d like not to wonder if Hillary Clinton’s odds of election just ticked upward or downward or if Donald Trump’s chest-thumping bluster suddenly became more seductive.

I’d like not to be told, fewer than 18 hours after the shots rang out, how they demonstrate that Americans must crack down on illegal immigration to our own country. I read that and was galled, and not because of my feelings about immigration, but because of my feelings about the automatic, indiscriminate politicization of tragedy.

The Paris atrocity inflicted by Islamic terrorists (Daesh is claiming responsibility) is but one battle in the long war against terrorists. Yet, in Bruni’s mind, we’re not supposed to assess the inputs to the battle, its outcome, or corrective actions to be taken from that analysis until enough time has passed to satisfy his safe space requirements. Time, incidentally, in which Daesh and/or other terrorist organizations can complete their own analyses and plan future battles.

This is how the Left understands strategy, this is how the Left understands foreign policy. Which is to say, they understand neither.