So should they be killed? The thought is tempting and rather appealing, the imagination runs pleasingly wild. On reflection it has to be rejected. Provided we accept the morally necessary assumption that for all their sulphurically scented traits, the Bankers are “humans,” we cannot escape the Raskolnikov dilemma.

The Russians are the last civilized nation to take literature as seriously as life, and they will be the last to subject that heritage to the deconstructivist butchery of effeminate idiots with minor-college PhDs. This is to their credit because Raskolnikov should be seen as a living person living a real life in New York, or London, or the Midwest today. This real-life person—a teacher, a corporate bureaucrat, a construction engineer, a retired policeman, or a housewife…—should be forgiven for wishing Bankers dead. But their all too understandable sentiment is essentially the same as that of the Red Commissars of 1917 and their heirs everywhere As Dostoyevsky understood decades before Lenin, it is dangerous; understandable; but not justified.

The Bankers should be discredited, tarred, and feathered, stripped of every last cent of their ill-gotten gains, and put to work on a Californian orange farm—absolutely!—but they should not be killed.

A bit of history. I was 15 when I visited St. Petersburg—then still “Leningrad”—with a Belgrade high school tour. My purpose was to go in quest of Dostoevsky, my favorite writer, whom I had just started discovering at that time. He wrote Crime and Punishment on the banks of the Neva—one of the best structured, intricately multi-layered novels of all time. (I even named my son Theodore in Fyodor Mikhailovich's honor.)

It was early July and the White Nights of the North were at their whitest, and the days were sunny. Yet the essential gloomy essence of the place—thickly felt in the courtyard of the building the author inhabited when writing his masterpiece, and in which his tortured hero Raskolnikov lived—could not be concealed. Behind the layers of Soviet decrepitude, one could sense the splendor of Peter the Great’s design. Such splendor makes up not for joyful livability. The city was essentially unchanged since the 1860s (minus some 1941-44 German-inflicted damage, not too visible) and its misty distances looked flat and indistinct against the pale backdrop of the Northern sky behind and the rising mist of its many waterways and canals in front. St. Petersburg is the most European city in Russia and the most inherently perverted for being so. Dostoevsky's novel embodies the worst aspects of both cultures that offer two poles of one civilization.

That essential gloom of the place (which I have not visited since but I don't believe has changed) provided a perfect setting for the novel which is the essential key to understanding the dilemma of our postmodern times. Raskolnikov rails against the social injustice without being a Marxist (not even knowing that the author of Das Kapital exists), adores Napoleon as the 19th century model of superhuman greatness but does not seek l'Empereur's glory for himself. His obsessive quest for "justice" becomes tangibly personified in the old usurer whom he finally kills—premeditatedly murders her—as an act of ontological retribution.

“I wanted to kill without casuistry, to kill for my own sake," Dostoevsky has him say reflecting obviously his own passions, "it was not money I needed but something else…I wanted to know, and to know quickly, whether I was a worm like everyone else, or a man. Shall I be able to transgress or shall I not? Shall I dare to stoop down and take, or not? Am I a trembling creature, or have I the right?”

But Raskolnikov soon discovers he is not a superman capable of enacting his own moral laws, and the lesson has been re-learnt at a great cost by Dostoyevsky’s heirs in the horrible century that followed his death. On the other hand, Raskolnikov is not satisfied with the lower-category claim that because the victim was a horrible, laecherous hag (the usurer was ugly, unlike many of her well-groomed Wall Street heirs), her death was for the good of all. The key issue is that Raskolnikov is utterly unable to live with what he has done; he is going neurotic verging on insane; and in the fullness of time, he willingly makes a full confession to a police inspector who knows his soul. Porfiry Petrovich is not playing games—but merely leading him along the way to inner release that comes with confession.

This dilemma—can we be Gods?—is at the novel’s heart, and at the heart of the crisis of our civilization. And that is why we should let the bankers live, which is not to say we should try to destroy them and all they stand for.

Unlike the Communist mass murderers of the past century, Raskolnikov sees clearly his tragic predicament through the prism of a distinctly Christian hate of cunning commerce and ruthless profitmaking. Being prepared to use violence against those who destroy the meek and the pure of spirit for Mammon's sake, but NOT being a secular revolutionary—he IS what the Rulers of the World fear the most.

But in the end, with a Russian twist that is essentially pan-Christian, he repents and realizes that "Thou shalt not kill!" takes precedence. And the end of the story is the new beginning, as he serves his sentence in Siberia, accompanied by his long-suffering Sonia: “Here begins a new story, the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his rebirth, of his gradual transition from one world to another, and of the revelation to him of a new, hitherto quite unknown reality.”

This is a blueprint for our own rebirth and renewal in the dark times ahead. And screw the bankers.

While the unemployment rate had fallen from 8.2 percent to 8.1 percent, 342,000 workers had stopped looking for work. They had just dropped out of the labor market.

Only 63.6 percent of the U.S. working age population is now in the labor force, the lowest level since December 1981.

During the Reagan, Bush I and Clinton years, participation in the labor force rose steadily to a record 67 percent. The plunge since has been almost uninterrupted.

Here is a major cause of the economic malaise of the 21st century, a condition over which a president has little control. A shrinking share of our population is carrying an ever-expanding army of dependents.

If this were a result of American women going home to have kids, that would be, as it was after World War II, a manifestation of national vigor and health.

But that is not the case here.

The number of Americans of working age not in the labor force grew in April from 87,897,000 to 88,419,000—by an astonishing 522,000. This is an immense army for the rest of society to carry.

Why are Americans dropping out?

Some have given up looking for jobs in towns they grew up in, because the jobs are gone and not coming back, and they don't want to leave. Some are rejecting the low-wage unskilled work being offered, because the alternative—unemployment checks and federal and state welfare—is not all that torturous.

With some, the work incentive was never implanted. With others, the option of moving back in with the parents is not all that terrible.

America, it seems, is becoming less like the country we grew up in, in its attitudes about work and idleness, and more like Europe.

Whatever its causes, this social and economic torpor that seems beyond the capacity of presidents to correct or cure is a dark cloud over the hopes of Barack Obama for a second term.

And yet another ominous cloud, no longer on the far horizon, is now directly above: the impending departure from the labor force of 70 million baby boomers in the next two decades.

According to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, from Jan. 1, 1930, to Dec. 31, 1935, there were 13 million births in the U.S. From January 1940 through December 1945, there were 16 million.

This was the Silent Generation, born in Depression and war. It never produced a president, and never will, unless Ron Paul catches fire pretty quickly. The Greatest Generation gave us six presidents, starting with JFK and ending with Bush I. Our three most recent presidents—Bill Clinton, Bush II, Barack Obama—are all baby boomers

And here we come to the heart of our next economic crisis.

If one adds up all the children born between Jan. 1, 1946 and Jan. 1, 1965, the era of the great American baby boom, the total comes to 77 million babies born in the United States.

Why is this so significant now?

Because this year, 2012, the first wave of baby boomers, all those born in 1946, like Clinton and George W. Bush, will reach 66, and eligibility for full Social Security and Medicare benefits. The boomers, en masse, will start moving off payrolls onto pension rolls.

Let us assume the 77 million boomers are down to 72 million. This means that over the next 20 years, boomers will be retiring and reaching eligibility for Social Security and Medicare at a rate of 3.6 million a year, or 300,000 a month, or 10,000 every day.

Three hundred thousand a month leaving the labor force may help to explain its shrinkage. And as the boomers are the best-paid, best-educated generation we produced, the loss of their collective skills, abilities and tax contributions will be as heavy a blow to the nation as the funding of their Medicare and Social Security will be a burden to the taxpayers they leave behind in the labor force.

Since Roe v. Wade, abortions have carried off 53 million of the generations that were to replace the boomers. While those 53 million lost have been partially replaced by 40 million immigrants, legal and illegal, our recent immigrants have not exhibited the same income- or tax-producing capacity as boomers.

In 1965, LBJ announced his plan to convert our ordinary society into a Great Society. Since then, trillions have been spent.

The fruits of that immense investment? The illegitimacy rate, dropout rate, crime rate and incarceration rate have set new records, as the test scores of high school students have plummeted to new lows.

Our labor force is shrinking, the number of dependent U.S. adults is growing, our social programs are failing, and our best educated and most productive generation is retiring.

To borrow from Merle Haggard, "Are the good times really over for good?"

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

But after Joe told David Gregory of Meet the Press he was "absolutely comfortable" with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.

Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism's next great moral advance into post-Christian America.

Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on The View, where Whoopi Goldberg would have demanded to know why he lacked the courage of Biden's convictions. He has a $40,000-a-plate fundraiser at George Clooney's, where the Hollywood crowd would want to know why he does not end discrimination against homosexuals.

He has appearances lined up before gay activists raising millions for his campaign. Monday, his press secretary was pilloried for his feeble defense of Obama's now-abandoned position.

His hand was forced. Yet the stand Obama took could cost him his presidency. Same-sex marriage may yet be a bridge too far, even for a dying Christian America.

On the plus side for Obama, his decision is producing hosannas from the elites and an infusion of cash from those who see same-sex marriage as the great moral and civil rights issue of our time.

But Obama may also have just solved Mitt Romney's big problem: How does Mitt get all those evangelical Christians and cultural conservatives not only to vote for him but to work for him?

Obama, by declaring that homosexual marriages should be on the same legal and moral plane as traditional marriage, just took command of the forces of anti-Christian secularism in America's Kulturkampf. And Nov. 6, 2012, is shaping up as the Antietam of the culture war.

Obama's second problem is that he may soon be seen as America's champion of same-sex marriage, but an ineffectual advocate. For Obama can do nothing, as of now, to impose homosexual marriage on the American people.

Thirty-one states have voted to outlaw it. A constitutional amendment supporting same-sex marriage could not win a majority of either house of Congress, let alone the necessary two-thirds of both.

Hence, Obama is going to spend six months winning cheers by calling for same-sex marriage. But the price of those cheers will be the rallying of millions of opponents of homosexual marriage, who will fight this battle where they are winning it, at the state level.

Only six states have approved homosexual marriage, while 30 have imposed a constitutional ban. In North Carolina, a ban not only on same-sex marriage but also civil unions, though opposed by Obama and Bill Clinton, carried on Tuesday with 61 percent of the vote.

Republican turnout in North Carolina's primary was up half a million, the highest in history. And this is a state Obama carried in 2008, a state whose largest city, Charlotte, will host Obama's convention.

Even in liberal California in 2008, while John McCain was getting a smaller share of the vote than Barry Goldwater in 1964, Proposition 8, restricting marriage to men and women, won.

How does Obama propose to win this battle?

He has one path to victory—the Supreme Court.

The New York Times, declaring that homosexuals' right to marry is "too precious and too fragile to be left up to the whim of states and the tearing winds of modern partisan politics," is looking to the court as the last, best hope to impose same-sex marriage on the nation.

Can't trust voters, can't trust elected legislators, can't trust Congress. Homosexual marriage, says the Times, is too important to be left to democratic decision. The republic must be commanded to accept it by unelected judges who serve for life and against whom the people have no political recourse.

That process of judicial tyranny has begun. A California judge has overturned the decision of California's voters to ban gay marriage, and his ruling is headed for the high court.

The Supreme Court thus will tell us whether this issue is to be decided democratically by voters and their elected state and federal legislators, or dictatorially by themselves.

Four liberal activists on the Supreme Court—Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor—are probably ready to declare that homosexual marriage is a constitutional right, as their predecessors declared abortion to be a constitutional right.

But Obama needs one more justice. If elected, he will get it, and same-sex marriage will be forced on all of America. If Romney wins, the Supreme Court will likely leave the issue of same-sex marriage to be decided by the people and their elected representatives.

Thus everything is up for grabs this November: the House, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and whether we still call the United States of America God's country.

Game on!

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Spleen

(For Arthur Symons)

I was not sorrowful, I could not weep,

And all my memories were put to sleep.

All day till evening I watched it change.

Beat wearily upon the window pane.

I was not sorrowful, but only tired

Of everything that ever I desired.

Her lips, her eyes, all day became to me

The shadow of a shadow utterly.

All day mine hunger for her heart became

Oblivion, until the evening came

And left me sorrowful, inclined to weep,

With all my memories that could not sleep.

Here is another, Ad manus puellae

I was always a lover of ladies' hands!
Or ever mine heart came here to tryst,
For the sake of your carved white hands' commands;
The tapering fingers, the dainty wrist;
The hands of a girl were what I kissed.

I remember an hand like a fleur-de-lys
When it slid from its silken sheath, her glove;
With its odours passing ambergris:
And that was the empty husk of a love.
Oh, how shall I kiss your hands enough?

They are pale with the pallor of ivories;
But they blush to the tips like a curled sea-shell:
What treasure, in kingly treasuries,
Of gold, and spice for the thurible,
Is sweet as her hands to hoard and tell?

I know not the way from your finger-tips,
Nor how I shall gain the higher lands,
The citadel of your sacred lips:
I am captive still of my pleasant bands,
The hands of a girl, and most your hands.

Many of the Decadents were drawn, for reasons both sensuous and spiritual (it is not always hard to distinguish) to the Roman Church.  Here is a rare religious poem of Dowson,

                 Benedictio Domini

Friday, May 4, 2012, 16:08 Moscow Time

Wiping out local minorities after an extensive NATO airstrike is the only combat tactic the KLA had mastered and the only thing the Syrian opposition can really learn from them, foreign-affairs editor for the U.S.-based Chronicles magazine, Srdja Trifkovic, told RT.

RT: Just what might the Syrian opposition learn at these camps?

Srdja Trifkovic: Well, first of all I don’t think they can learn much from the KLA veterans in terms of combat efficiency because the KLA was singularly unsuccessful in its rebellion against the Serbian security forces until the NATO bombing. They started their terrorist ambushes in 1997. They intensified their activities in 1998. But all along it was atrocity management that they wanted, for instance, the famous case of Racak where the combat victims were presented as innocent civilian dead slaughtered by the Serbs.

But even during the bombing the Serbian forces maintained full control of all of the key population centers and they even kept the roads open. It’s only that the KLA came in after the Serbs started withdrawing under the terms of the ceasefire with NATO. And even then they were not engaging in combat, they were acting as marauders ethnically cleansing non-Albanians. So the first point is that there is nothing to learn in terms of combat efficiency and in terms of actually organizing a successful guerrilla force.

RT: Words that have been associated with the KLA—assassination, terror, bombings—is that really the kind of thing that the Syrian opposition wants to be associated with?

ST: It seems that they don’t care, because I understand that Ammar Abdulhamid, one of the Syrian opposition leaders who came to Pristina and actually spoke to an AP reporter, said “We are here to learn.”  Now this should be a huge wake-up call for those Syrians who are not supportive of the opposition, especially the minorities: the Alawites, the Christians—either Orthodox or Greek Catholic—the Shiites, the Kurds.  The moderate Sunni Muslims should remember that if the Syrian rebels learn from the KLA, that means there will be a bloodbath after the fall of Assad and there will be no room for anyone but the majority group which subscribes to its extremist credo, whether it is that of greater Albania in Kosovo or the Muslim Brotherhood offshoot in Syria.

“Today, I signed an historic agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that defines a new kind of relationship between our countries—a future in which Afghans are responsible for the security of their nation, and we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states; a future in which the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

Hundreds of agreements signed by U.S. presidents over the decades have been called “historic,” including several high-profile ones from the Cold War era—agreements involving serious partners in charge of serious countries—yet they are mostly long forgotten.

A generation from now the “Strategic Partnership Agreement” (SPA) signed by Presidents Obama and Karzai on May 1, 2012, will be forgotten, too. It may be vaguely remembered by a few historians specializing in the U.S. foreign policy in the early 21st century, and even then only for its sheer frivolity. The sole detail that matters is negative: the SPA does not commit the U.S. to the maintenance of any troop levels or funding after 2014; the pending exit will be conclusive. The rest is wishful thinking bordering on the surreal, including:

• “Protecting and Promoting Shared Democratic Values” (Afghanistan reaffirms its strong commitment to inclusive and pluralistic democratic governance, including free, fair and transparent elections, and to protecting human and political rights.)
• “Advancing Long-Term Security” (The U.S. will designate Afghanistan a “major non-NATO ally,” and after 2014 will support training and equipping the government forces.)
• “Reinforcing Regional Security and Cooperation” (Working with regional countries and organizations in fighting terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, money laundering.)
• “Social and Economic Development” (The U.S. will encourage American private sector investment, with both parties fighting “decisively against all forms of corruption.”)
• “Strengthening Afghan Institutions and Governance” (Afghanistan will promote efficiency and accountability at all levels of the government.)

This is not an agreement. This is a work of romantic fiction hardly worthy of detailed comment (see my Afghan Debacle of February 29). Its cloud-cuckoo quality would be humorous were it not for all the wasted lives and treasure in the decade preceding it.

The rest of President Obama’s TV address had the same absurdist quality as the “historic” agreement itself.

[L]et us remember why we came here. It was here, in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden established a safe-haven for his terrorist organization…  It was here, from within these borders, that al Qaeda launched the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children. And so, ten years ago, the United States and our allies went to war to make sure that al Qaeda could never again use this country to launch attacks against us. Despite initial success, for a number of reasons, this war has taken longer than most anticipated. 

“For a number of reasons” is a curious turn of phrase which glosses over the problem of flawed strategy. It is true that the initial objective of U.S. military operations was to remove the Taliban regime and deny Islamic terrorist networks a key base of operations, but the chosen method was wrong. A surgical operation against al-Qaeda, a brief occupation of Kabul in the aftermath of 9-11, and a vigorous supervision regime based on pilotless aircraft, should have been enough to demonstrate American resolve, to neutralize terrorist threats, and to satisfy the public opinion at home. Making Afghanistan peaceful, democratic and prosperous—reflected in the Agreement wish-list—had never been an attainable goal. No “strategy” based upon it could be successful.

The initial objective—ostensibly limited and attainable—had morphed under George W. Bush’s presidency into an open-ended exercise in nation building underpinned by grossly wasteful development programs. By the end of his second mandate, the situation on the ground had settled into a stalemate. The Taliban were able to reestablish their more or less permanent presence in the majority Pashtun rural areas in the south; the “allies” held the cities and kept the main roads open; Mohammad Karzai and his corrupt cronies pretended to be a real government.

The Obama administration decided to give Afghanistan higher priority, however. Unlike Iraq—which was treated as “Bush’s war” and eventually terminated on terms far from satisfactory—Afghanistan was adopted as Obama’s own project. Starting in early 2009, the U.S. committed significant additional financial and military resources to the country. The new strategy was twofold. One objective was to transfer responsibility for security to the Afghan National Army and police throughout the country and to withdraw U.S. and NATO forces by the end of 2014. The other was to facilitate a power-sharing agreement that would bring the Taliban into political mainstream, thus creating conditions for durable and stable peace in the country after the U.S. withdrawal. Both goals were unrealistic from the outset, as the slow progress on both fronts in 2011 confirmed. Even worse, achieving one without the other was neither useful nor possible: the twin pillars of U.S. strategy were unattainable in isolation from each other. “This war has taken longer than most anticipated” because it was unwinnable on Obama’s own terms—and it remains so, contrary to his claim on Tuesday night that “the tide has turned”:

[O]ver the last three years, the tide has turned. We broke the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan security forces. We devastated al Qaeda's leadership, taking out over 20 of their top 30 leaders. And one year ago, from a base here in Afghanistan, our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The goal that I set—to defeat al Qaeda, and deny it a chance to rebuild—is within reach. Still, there will be difficult days ahead. The enormous sacrifices of our men and women are not over. But tonight, I'd like to tell you how we will complete our mission and end the war in Afghanistan.

Obama’s claim that his goal all along has been “to defeat al Qaeda, and deny it a chance to rebuild” is incorrect: that may have been the original goal, but three years ago Obama broadened it. His current twin goals of making Afghanistan secure by transferring security tasks to the Karzai government and by bringing the Taliban into political mainstream are not “within reach.” His strategy started collapsing last February, when a wave of mass protests—triggered off by the burning of Qurans at an American military base—indicated that the fight for Afghan hearts and minds had failed. The violence resulted in several murders of Americans by their Afghan “allies.” This made mockery of the process of Afghanization of security tasks. The key issue of the lack of “partnership” with the Afghan forces was not new. In May 2011, a U.S. Army study established that murders of Westerners by Afghan forces did not represent “rare and isolated events.” Even before last winter there had been little trust between U.S.-led coalition forces and their Afghan “allies,” contrary to Obama’s assurances:

[W]e have begun a transition to Afghan responsibility for security. Already, nearly half the Afghan people live in places where Afghan security forces are moving into the lead. This month, at a NATO Summit in Chicago, our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year. International troops will continue to train, advise and assist the Afghans and fight alongside them when needed. But we will shift into a support role as Afghans step forward.

This statement overlooks the crisis in relations which started on March 11^th with the killing of 16 unarmed Afghan villagers by a U.S. Army sergeant. The reaction in the country was predictably frenzied. In a symbolic gesture, the Taliban took over the village where the killings took place without a fight. Five days later, Karzai called on U.S. and NATO troops to leave Afghan villages and confine themselves to major bases, and asked for the withdrawal to be accelerated to late 2013. As if anticipating Obama’s TV address, Karzai asserted six weeks ago that the “Afghan security forces have the ability to provide security in the villages of our country.” Both claims were belied by the December 2011 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, which warned that the war was still essentially a stalemate. Moreover, the “State of the Taliban”—a classified NATO report leaked to the media in February — warned that once the coalition withdraws, “the Taliban considers victory inevitable.”

[B]y the end of 2014 the Afghans will be fully responsible for the security of their country.

Second, we are training Afghan security forces to get the job done. Those forces have surged, and will peak at 352,000 this year. The Afghans will sustain that level for three years and then reduce the size of their military. And [at the NATO summit] in Chicago, we will endorse a proposal to support a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.

The notion that U.S. troops will be able to hand over security to Afghan forces able and willing “to get the job done” is unrealistic. Obama is still sticking to the timetable predicated upon successful Afghanization of operational tasks, but the effort has been badly behind schedule for months. Last summer, Army Lt. Gen. William B. Caldwell admitted that the plan to train Afghan soldiers and police to replace the 100,000 American troops remained plagued by high attrition, corruption, attacks on allied troops and assassinations of Afghan officials by “rogue” members of government security forces. Gen.Caldwell admitted that only one of the 84 infantry battalions trained and fielded by the coalition was ready to operate independently. Obama must be aware that, left to their own devices, those units will disintegrate and a significant minority of their rank-and-file will desert to the Taliban. His address therefore makes sense only as a deliberate bid to conceal from the nation, six months before the election, the fact that the “mission” has failed. That is the true meaning of the “agreement” signed with Karzai, and Obama’s rhetoric seemed to confirm the underlying agenda:

The agreement we signed today sends a clear message to the Afghan people: as you stand up, you will not stand alone… It includes Afghan commitments to transparency and accountability, and to protect the human rights of all Afghans—men and women, boys and girls… [W]e will work with the Afghans to determine what support they need to accomplish two narrow security missions beyond 2014: counter-terrorism and continued training. But we will not build permanent bases in this country, nor will we be patrolling its cities and mountains. That will be the job of the Afghan people.

Obama further said that “our goal is not to build a country in America's image, or to eradicate every vestige of the Taliban.” Quite so: the time has come to cut the losses and leave Afghanistan to the devices of its own “men and women, boys and girls.”

A few hours after Obama’s crack-of-dawn departure a suicide car bomber and Taliban militants disguised in burqas attacked a Kabul compound housing hundreds of foreigners, killing seven. This is the shape of things to come. “Tens of thousands of people will be killed here if the Americans pack and get out,” says Afghan independent parliamentarian Mirwais Yasini, who warns that the Taliban would seize power again in just a matter of weeks. He may be right, but that is an Afghan problem. Ensuring lasting peace and stability in the country is theoretically desirable, but neither essential to U.S. security nor likely to be attained.

The final part of Obama’s address promised American assistance in the quest for a lasting political solution, but that is a bad idea. A future intra-Afghan dialogue involving the Taliban and their Pashtun tribal base on the one hand, and Tajiks, Uzbeks and other elements of the Northern Alliance on the other, should be left to the parties concerned. American involvement would be detrimental to success. Confidence-building measures aimed at bringing disparate factions to the table are probably doomed to fail anyway, but they certainly cannot work if one or more of the parties have no confidence in the United States as the facilitator of the process.

After Obama’s television address it is obvious that the Afghan mission is over. From now on the decision-makers’ energies should focus on the technicalities of a swift withdrawal and on the preparation of contingency plans to neutralize any future terrorist threat using drones and missiles. All along, the Taliban had only needed to survive to win, and they have survived. Within weeks or months after the last American soldier leaves Kabul, the Afghan National Army will collapse, Karzai will be killed or exiled, and Afghanistan will be its old unpleasant self. And, more importantly, Barack Obama will likely still occupy the White House.

There was more to it even than that. He knew how to get things done.

The faint breezes from the '50s and '60s rustling the page of Robert Caro's super biography of Johnson—the brand-new volume, titled The Passage of Power, is fourth and penultimate in the series—stirs memories of times when politicians sort of, a lot of the time, understood their job. They were not nearly as busy as their modern heirs. Their role in our affairs was smaller, less intrusive. That could be part of the reason that "legislative success" was not yet an oxymoron. The larger and more complex the thing you're trying to do in government, the fainter the chances of actually getting it done in a way that contributes to the general good and brings credit to the political artisans.

In our era of mega government, hardly anything goes right when lawmakers attack a problem. It was somewhat otherwise when Johnson led the Senate's Democratic majority and later, ran the White House. The new volume, which I haven't yet read, though naturally I will do so (what adventure story fan wouldn't?), is the tale of LBJ's presidential quest, the failure of that quest in 1960, the miserable years spent as vice president, and then his takeover of power upon John Kennedy's assassination. On from there, in volume 5, to the Great Society and the War in Vietnam. And then ... the end, the legacy.

There's the tricky part—the legacy. We all know Johnson's capacity to "do." What we forget, sometimes, is that there are times to do and times not to do. Don't just do something; stand there, is the right witticism for the occasion. Lyndon Johnson never got the drift. He was all about action—about getting things done and assuming that, in the process (because he was smart and had smart people working for him), they were getting done right. A lot of the time, the good of the order—the good of the nation—means doing the least you can get by with.

The comparison of Medicare—a keystone of the Johnson Great Society program—with Obamacare seems irresistible. The former started small—a hardly noticeable $7.7 billion in 1970. It grew and grew as new beneficiaries and programs were added. By the turn of the century, the program cost $224 billion. What a pittance that now seems. A recent report by Medicare's trustees shows the system becoming insolvent in 2024, with long-term debt presently calculated at $26.9 trillion. The Congress through which Lyndon Johnson cajoled and flogged the Medicare bill dwelled only sporadically, it seems, on the principle of "One Thing Leads to Another."

The last thing to which the principle led was, of course, Obamacare, the scripted takeover by government of one-sixth of the American economy. Maybe the U. S. Supreme Court will grasp the constitutional irony of allowing a government of supposedly limited powers to operate with no limits.

Thus with other elements of the Great Society, the federal takeover of public education began with passage, at Johnson's instance, of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. The government's latest education gig is the quest for a set of national standards. Creation of the Job Corps, for training of unemployed workers, created no lasting new jobs but lots of new government dependents, eager for government grants to multiply.

Lyndon Johnson got things done. To a monumental extent, he got the wrong things done while borrowing heavily against the future. That he probably thought he was doing good isn't the main point. The point is an ancient one: Beware power; it corrupts, undermines liberty, and empties treasuries. Save us from dynamic politicians, as well as from egotistical by barely competent ones, is a prayer that makes sense. Maybe the dull, middling kind is the kind that best serves people who love liberty.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Here are a few sonnets: 

To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens: it’s impossible to eat enough in order to vomit enough on reading such material. The Muslim populations of Bosnia and Kosovo bear as much relation to al-Qaeda as the Archbishop of Canterbury does to the snake-handling sects of Appalachia. Milosevic’s victims should be remembered. The truth about their fate should be defended.

“It is not just the equivalent of Holocaust denial,” Kamm goes on, “but the same fraudulent argument. It should be recognised and named for what it is: genocide denial.”

BEFORE WE REVISIT “Srebrenica,” let us deal briefly with Kamm’s interesting contention that the Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo are immune to the well-known pursuits and obsessions of their coreligionists around the world.

“Frankfurt airport gunman jailed for life,” reported the BBC (among many others) on February 10. “A young Kosovan man who admitted shooting dead two US airmen at Frankfurt airport last year has been sentenced to life in prison,” the story went:

Arid Uka, now 22, is a Muslim ethnic Albanian who was born in Kosovo but grew up in Germany. Uka was convicted on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder by the court in Frankfurt. The American servicemen were travelling from the UK to the Ramstein airbase near Frankfurt… Two other airmen were seriously injured in the attack on a bus at the airport. A jammed gun prevented Uka from shooting a fifth airman in the head.

“Sarajevo gunman fires at US embassy in Bosnia capital,” the same source reported on October 28 of last year. After a standoff in the city centre, a police sniper wounded the 23-year-old Mevlid Jasarevic, a member of the Wahhabi sect, and he was arrested. Jasarevic spent an amazing 50 (fifty) minutes emptying frames of ammunition from his Kalashnikov at the embassy before he was wounded and apprehended. Earlier this week, on April 23, he and his two accomplices, Emrah Fojnica and Munib Ahmetspahic, were accused of forming a terrorist group in the Bosnian-Muslim village of Gornja Maoca. Jasarevic talked about his motives in a video taped just before the attack: “I don’t need to explain why I attack Americans,” said the bearded man, sitting with two automatic rifles leaning against the wall behind him. “They have launched a fight against Islam and Muslims across the whole world. They kill Muslims, rape their wives, take away the old and the young, arrest, do whatever they want.”

A former MI6 man who spent considerable time in Bosnia after the war told Balkanalysis.com that the delayed Bosnian police reaction—and the fact that security lapses allowed the attack to happen in the first place—came as further confirmation that “the Bosnians are just not reliable partners. We’ve seen them befriending the Saudis, but also others if it suits [their interests]. Bottom line being, they are never going to be trusted completely.”

Last January 5 a Federal appeals panel upheld the convictions and sentences of five Muslim men—four of them Albanians from the former Yugoslavia – accused of planning to attack Fort Dix and other military bases. The men—Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka—were arrested in May 2007 and convicted by a federal jury in Camden, N.J., 18 months later. The goal of the group was to “kill as many soldiers as possible.”

“Bosnian accused of carrying explosives into U.S. Embassy in Vienna,” The New York Times reported on October 1, 2007. The 42-year-old Bosnian Muslim attacker tried to enter the embassy with a backpack filled with explosives, nails and Islamic literature. He was arrested after the bag set off a metal detector.

On February 12, 2007, a Bosnian Muslim immigrant, Sulejman Talović, opened fire in a shopping mall in Salt Lake City, resulting in the deaths of five bystanders and the shooter himself, as well as the wounding of at least four others. He used a shotgun with a pistol grip and a handgun, and had a backpack full of ammunition. Talovic’s family and a “shocked” Bosnian-Muslim community were unsurprisingly quick to reject any possibility of the jihadist connection. But Talovic’s Bosnian-born girlfriend revealed that his favorite film was Malcolm X—the same movie that triggered off John Walker Lindh’s path to jihad. Talovic also had a contact at the local mosque—the same mosque attended by U.S. Marine Corporal Wassef Ali Hassoun, the deserter now safely back in his native Lebanon.

The list goes on, and it will go on in the years to come. Archbishops of Canterbury, indeed.

To understand the problem we need to revisit The Jewish Chronicle’s archives. On September 30, 1994, it published an article (“Let’s Remove the Blinkers”) by Sir Alfred Sherman, former advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and co-founder of the Centre for Policy Studies. Sherman warned that the Muslims’ objective was “to create a ‘Green Corridor’ from Bosnia through the Sanjak to Kosovo” that would separate Serbia from Montenegro. Western powers are “in effect fostering this Islamistan,” Sherman warned, and developing “close working relations with Iran, whose rulers are keen to establish a European base for their politico-religious activities.” In addition, “Washington is keen on involving its NATO ally Turkey, which has been moving away from Ataturk’s secularist and Western stance back to a more Ottomanist, pan-Muslim orientation, and is actively helping the Muslim forces.”

Sherman’s 1994 diagnosis proved to be prescient. Over a decade later it was echoed by Col. Shaul Shay of BESA Center at Bar-Ilan University, in his book “Islamic Terror and the Balkans” (Transaction Publishers, 2008). Shay noted that “the Balkans serve as a forefront on European soil for Islamic terror organizations, which exploit this area to promote their activities in Western Europe, and other focal points worldwide.” His conclusions were unambiguous: “[T]he establishment of an independent Islamic territory including Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania… is one of the most prominent achievements of Islam since the siege of Vienna in 1683. Islamic penetration into Europe through the Balkans is one of the main achievements of Islam in the twentieth century.” Shay’s account shows how the Bosnian war provided the historical opportunity for radical Islam to penetrate the Balkans at a time when the Muslim world – headed by Iran and the various Islamic terror organizations, including al-Qaeda – came to the aid of the Muslims. The Jihadist operational and organizational infrastructures were thus established in the heart of Europe.

BACK TO “SREBRENICA” – As I wrote in this column a year ago, “Srebrenica” is used by the apologists for the American intervention in Bosnia on the side of the Muslims not as a geographic location that needs to be preceded by a noun (“the massacre in…”) but as a stand-alone term that denotes horror, on par with “Auschwitz” or “Hiroshima.” Oliver Kamm and his late role-model Christopher Hitchens provide a paradigmatic example of the species.

I have said it before, and I repeat now: “Srebrenica” used in this sense is a myth based on a lie. The upholders of the lie deny that there is anything to question: thousands of Muslim prisoners were allegedly executed by the Serbs and a distinguished international judicial forum of unquestioned authority has found it to constitute genocide, so according to Kamm there is nothing to debate because everything is settled and clear.

Reasonable people with no ethno-religious axe to grind in the Balkan quagmire have long fought this black-and-white version, however, including the claim that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed in cold blood and the systematic misuse of the term “genocide.” But let me get back to that article of mine, behind which I stand as firmly today as I did at the time of its writing.

The fact beyond dispute is that during the Bosnian war thousands of Muslim men were killed in the region of Srebrenica. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell almost without a fight to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison—the 28^th division of the Bosnia-Herzegovina Army—attempted a breakthrough. A significant number reached safety at the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 60 km to the north; a few found shelter in Serbia, across the Drina River to the east. An unknown were killed while fighting their way through; and many others—numbers remain disputed—were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.

The numbers remain unknown and misrepresented. With “8,000 executed” and—inevitably—thousands more killed in the fighting or reaching the Muslim lines, the column attempting to break out should have counted 12 to 15,000 men—an impossibly large number. There should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of executions, burials, and body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, still falls far short of the sanctified figure of 8,000. The Islamic shrine at Potocari, where the supposed victims are buried, includes those of many soldiers killed in action, Muslim and Serb, between May 1992 and July 1995, at different locations all over the region.

The Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) never came up with a conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unproven. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes. The number of likely casualties corresponds closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Rooper says.  But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell’:

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed.  This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia.  It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.

The Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.

The last census results, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995—notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald—give 40,000 as the maximum figure. It just does not add up.

Having spent five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “We have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later a Dutch field investigator, Dr. Dick Schoonoord, confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”

A “PROTECTED ZONE”?—It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Muslim Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.

French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.” Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself… he didn’t even look for an excuse… One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”

Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes caused a storm with his book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims.

On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”

POLITICAL BACKGROUND—Two prominent supporters (at the time) of the late Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica SDA party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims.

Testifying at The Hague Tribunal, Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed this theory by describing how 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995.  Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:

Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.

Military analyst Tim Ripley agrees that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”

The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide, instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north—which left open escape routes to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped:

The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.

The fact that The Hague Tribunal called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Srebrenica and other parts of Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.

Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey—a major regional player in today’s Balkans—committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict can be genocide-free.

The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes—which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about—is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake. Oliver Kamm is guilty of both.

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