Barry and the Tarbaby
by Thomas Fleming
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The Obama administration’s decision to pull the plug on the missile defense plan for Eastern Europe and the Republican response should provide hours of fun for political satirists. Both sides have agreed that the real issue is Iran. Can Iran rain nuclear death on the Poles and Czechs? Perhaps a better question is why Iran would choose the Poles. Perhaps as the newest incarnation of the Third Reich they just have to invade Poland and set up concentration camps.
This morning Don and Roma (on WLS radio Chicago) got the “real story” from John Bolton. You see, the Bush administration did not actually think that Iran currently has ICBMs, but they were anticipating the future. Boy, will we all be sorry when they do attack Warsaw, because it will be too late. Missile defense, he opined sagely in the precise tones and convoluted sentences of the megalomaniac impersonating an intellectual, is not a light switch that can be turned on and off.
Even John Bolton, I suppose, must know that this is a lie. Iran had nothing whatsoever to do with this program. The object—and it is more an object of aggression than defense—was always Russia. The US has been steadily expanding its sphere of influence at the expense of the former Soviet Empire, and under Bush II we were muscling into the Ukraine, Belorus, and Georgia. The Poles, God bless them, always knew, which is why they are so alarmed. As the AP reports this morning, the Polish newspaper Fakt ran a headline on the front page: “Betrayal! The U.S. sold us to Russia and stabbed us in the back.”
As Chronicles readers know, we never supported Bush’s imperial thrust into Eastern Europe, but once President Obama decided to back out, there were, certainly, a more graceful and less risky approach to selling out our naive and trusting allies. Allies, one might add, who out of gratitude joined the Coalition of the stupid and bought US, not European military hardware. We might have run into technical complications, aggravated by the current economic crisis, while protesting loudly our determination to put the system in place in a timely fashion. Why Obama did not stall he—or rather the advisors telling him what to do—alone knows. One guess is that the Russians have allowed us to transport materiel to Afghanistan, and this is part of the payback. Or—and this is never safe to rule out—they simply do not know what they are doing. This seems to me incredible, since the Bush policy was a multi-faceted attempt to cut off Eastern Europe from Russian influence and incorporate the former satellites, captive nations, and break-away regions into a US-NATO economic and military sphere.
It was an evil policy, in my view, but at least it was a policy. Like so many bad plans—colonizing Africa, invading Iraq, importing slaves—it is simply not possible to reverse course in mid-stream without grave consequences. Back in the 90’s I tried to explain to Poles and Czechs why it was not safe to rely on the US, because while one administration might have a plan that includes defense of Poland—or support for Marcos, the Somozas, or the Shah of Iran—some future leader with the inevitable mandate will feel no compunction about selling them out.
So-called democracies are incapable of coherent policies, because they are always at the whim of fleeting majorities or of whatever set of knaves lie, cheat, steal, and kill their way to power. America is not a real democracy or even a republic, but it is a a country run by demagogues who lack both comprehensive vision and the willpower to carry through, albeit with gritted teeth, a strategic plan that has been shaped by earlier demagogues. National security? National interest? Good faith? Forget about it, this is America we’re talking about.
Empires are tarbabies. The only way to get loose is to cut off your arms and legs.
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1 Comment by harry colin on 18 September 2009:
Dr. Fleming has accurately portrayed the mess we’ve made of our relationship with the Czechs and the Poles in Eastern Europe. Pulling the plug on these allies on the 70th anniversary of the Red Army’s invasion of Poland was certainly a nice touch! No doubt, this move was made in hopes of a trade-off for easier access to Afghanistan, so that we can even more deeply immerse the US in an unwinnable mess certain only to bleed our treasury and what’s left of our armed forces.
I can’t help but feel it is also a move to ultimately seek Russian support, tacit of course, for sanctions against Iran as a prelude to an attack on the Iranian “weapons of mass destruction.” This seems to be priority one among our foreign policy braintrust (and the people who’ve purchased them). Then we can postpone until later more foolishness like dragging Georgia and Ukraine into NATO so that they too can feel the false sense of security of an American alliance.
Wasn’t it LaRochfoucauld who said “hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue”?
2 Comment by Eagle on 18 September 2009:
It is not entirely clear how much the larger continental European states had to do with all this. This point is highlighted by the NATO head making a public suggestion just today that a joint system be developed with Russia. The European western powers have tired of conflict with the Russians and hope for commercial (and eventual military) integration with Europe’s eastern power. I agree that the US needs to formulate a coherent and complete long-term policy, but on the whole this particular move to scrap the missile defense system, hasty or otherwise, was positive. Why? Diplomatically and geopolitically speaking do we care more about what Germany and Russia want or what the increasingly quarrelsome eastern European mini-states want? Poles may be fuming, but I believe Berlin, Paris, and Moscow are pleased. If the Poles didn’t learn from the Anglosphere’s war gurantees 70 year’s ago, that is a pity.
3 Comment by Allen Wilson on 18 September 2009:
We’re par for the course once again: sucker in a naive ally and then sell them out for some stupid short term gain that will only blow up in our face. The Poles should have learnt their lesson at the end of the second world suicide pact. Perhaps there were one or two of those Polish fighter pilots or Normandy vets still alive to mutter something about Yalta and not be heard. I fear the Poles and Czechs will not forget this.
I thought about drawing up a list of countries we’ve betrayed, but it would just be long and monotonous.
4 Comment by John Seiler on 18 September 2009:
It’s worth remembering that Reagan and Bush Uno solemnly promised Gorbachav and Yeltsin that, if the Red Army peacefully were pulled out of Eastern Europe, NATO would not be expanded up to the borders of Russia. Clinton, to cadge votes from Poles and other Eastern European ethnic groups in America for his 1996 re-election, reneged on that pledge.
Of course, with Moscow-style communism dead for 20 years, there’s no reason at all for America even to be in Europe. And Europe’s main problems have nothing to do with a potential invasion by Tsarist hordes, but instead suffer from rancid ruling elites, extinction-level birth rates, and Ayatollahization.
As Dr. Fleming writes, “National security? National interest? Good faith? Forget about it, this is America we’re talking about.”
5 Comment by jack bailey on 18 September 2009:
Amazingly Obama finally managed to do something good, even if it is for the wrong reasons. Russia does not want to be our adversary and we should not want to be theirs. This move will have positive consequences for US foreign policy worldwide, whether it is Venezuela or the Middle East.
6 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 18 September 2009:
“Do something good” is a bit of a stretch. At this point no one knows Obama’s short-term motives, much less his long-term strategy. It is completely foolish to predict the consequences and probably idle even to speculate. Eagle, on the other hand, may well be right in his assessment of US interests, but the handling of this has been as clownish as the diplomatic moves of Condi Rice and John Bolton. One does not have to see the world as divided into friends (or rather dependents) and enemies to understand that the US faces powerful competitors. We have done everything we could for 20 years to humiliate Russia. This has been a very foolish policy, against which Chronicles editors, Trifkovic and I in particular, have warned. Anyone who thinks that Putin will not seek to take full advantage of any weakness is very naive, and any American who exults in our humiliation might think about emigrating.
I regret that I live in a nation of fools governed by knaves who are only slightly less foolish than the fools, but I experience no joy in the prospect of our decline. Another people might gain spiritual strength from misfortune, but we are too weak. We are like those Christians described by Gregory the Great. While success makes us arrogant, misfortune demoralizes us.
7 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 18 September 2009:
Right decision from a rudderless Administration.
If it were part of an orderly retreat from military involvement in the Old World, I’d be applauding. But it’s not that. More a payoff for the Russians letting us supply our troops in Afghanistan through her territory, which amunts to holding up the IV-tube for our national suicide, even as we spend our children’s resources to divert the takfiris who would otherwise be tormenting Russia and the FSU states of Central Asia.
Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” What is a foolish inconsistency?
8 Comment by Sullivan on 18 September 2009:
That John Bolton shared his “expertise” on the Don and Roma show is not surprising. The pair is as incoherent as most other American conservatives. In one episode, they railed against a pending curfew ordinance in some obscure East coast city. They (and their listeners) were indignant, you see, because the government was “out of control”. Simultaneously, they celebrated the nationalization of education that took place under George W. Bush with the help of Ted Kennedy. The inability to distinguish between the roles and duties of the federal government and those of local governments is one obstacle that “conservative” Republicans will probably never overcome.
9 Comment by Eagle on 18 September 2009:
The whole notion of “allies” has become twisted. An ally is supposed to be not only a signatory to an agreement but one who supposedly has interests common to our’s. What is an ally these days from our government’s point of view? Let’s consider what types of relationships we have today and consider whether we hold common interests in those relations. Further, one should consider new allies “on paper” as versus those who have demonstrably proven their allegiances and consider how our government’s behavior has potentially stained our nation’s honor and future ability to build real, meaningful beyond the paper they are written on, alliances. As a case in point consider a real ally and its sacrifices for America that is well documented in a recently published book called “The Forgotten 500″. Where does that ally stand today? Where does that ally’s neighbor stand? A Muslim state with no demonstrably common interests to our own other than the dismembering of a state at one time demonstrably allied with us. Sick, twisted, idiotic, and not serving our own inetersts does not begin to describe the US government.
10 Comment by voice from Poland on 18 September 2009:
On September 17 1939 Poland, already in war with Germany, was invaded by Soviet Army. During next year and a half more that 300 000 persons
were arrested and deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, many of them never came back. More than 20000 polish officers (prisoners of war) were killed and buried in massive graves. And this is the date chosen by your president. You have elected nice guy!!
11 Comment by voice from Polamd on 18 September 2009:
One more comment. Even powerfull states need friends and America hasn’t many of them in Europe these days, I think she might have lost some of them yesterday.
12 Comment by John Seiler on 18 September 2009:
I just checked the Neocons over at National Socialist Review and The Weekly Reader, and they’re 100% against Obama’s decision on the missile shield. So it had to be right.
The terminally dull Rich Lowry writes: “Obama’s decision to abandon our current missile-defense deserves a Neville for Appeasement in a Perpetually Threatened Region.”
Not that Lowry himself actually would risk his neck, and take a 95% cut in pay, to join the military, which he’s still young enough to do, and man the missile defenses personally.
Given that he’s not Neville, he must be Winston. Hence Lowry’s motto: “We shall fight on the blogs and the Webs. We shall fight with growing paychecks and growing strength in the foundations. We shall defend our perks, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beach resorts. We shall fight on the BMW sales lots. We shall fight in Marshall Field’s and on Wall Street. We shall fight on the Hill. We shall never surrender our dinner reservations.”
13 Comment by Gilbert Jacobi on 18 September 2009:
@10 John Seiler
John,
As I came to the end of your defenestration of Lowry, I suddenly thought of the refrain from the old Cannonball Adderly song, …”mercy, mercy, mercy…” That’s to say, I needed a merciful break from the laughter! Lowry, of course, deserves none.
14 Comment by Etienne Gervaise on 19 September 2009:
Forget about it, this is America we’re talking about.
Or worse, “American interests.” Let’s say the commercial real estate market collapses 3 months from now, all those moneychangers who shifted their capital into Afghan heroin will be very pleased with their return on investment. Only the truly dense would think Wall Street is not involved in the dope business.
And to increase my suspicions of media complicity, the gutter media have referred to Russia as the Soviet Union on more than one occasion in the past few days. And then snidely report that Putin is a tyrant.
I don’t suppose it’s occurred to our Zio-elite rulers that encirling the peaceful Islamic world by teaming up with Russia and China is also a policy,
15 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 19 September 2009:
TJF: “So-called democracies are incapable of coherent policies, because they are always at the whim of fleeting majorities or of whatever set of knaves lie, cheat, steal, and kill their way to power.”
Bush and Obama would make even Alcibiades appear wise.
Having recently reread Thucydides, I’m reminded of some of my favorite passages in all of Western literature, the speeches of Nicias and Alcibiades debating whether to go to war in Sicily. Nicias rightly sees the enterprise as foolish, asking whey they should believe or help “non-Greeks” when they have war in their backyard. Alcibiades, however, wins the day with his feel-good rhetoric about how he’s a “winner” (and so will be the Athenians if they listen to him) and that they should help all people (even non-Greeks) to to add to the glory of their empire.
Some things never change.
America is in precipitous decline, and I imagine our policies will become even more erratic, dishonest, and contradictory.
16 Comment by M.A. Roberts on 19 September 2009:
I’m not saying we should provoke Russia, which is utter foolishness. But just as foolish are the Europeans who think Obama is their friend. Never in American history has their been a president as “anti-European” (in its more profound meanings) as Obama. Some “moderate” Germans I know saw the writing on the wall when Obama was in Berlin essentially telling them they need to let even more of the Third World into their country.
17 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 19 September 2009:
It is a wonderful story, even more wonderful if you have been to Sicily. The people of Segesta are proverbial, literally, for being trouble-makers. They were a native people, Elymian, who had Hellenized to the point of being able to make some sort of exchange-relationship (commerce, intermarriage) with Selinunte, a Greek city on the Southern coast of the island. When the marriage went sour, they appealed to Athens with no better argument than that they were rich enough to pay for the expedition. Since Syracuse was an ally of Selinunte, this made that city–one of the richest and most populous in the Greek world–a target of Athenian aggression. The one difficulty was that Segesta was not as rich as her representatives said, and when they learned Athenians were coming to check them out, they hastily threw up a magnificent Greek temple. We do not know to which god or even if they had a god in mind. It is some temple, one of the prettiest surviving ancient temples, located in a beautiful stretch of countryside west of Palermo. If you look closely at the columns, though, you will see that unlike other Greek columns they are not fluted. Segesta was in too big a hurry. There are numerous other signs that once this Potemkin temple had served its purpose, they simply abandoned work on it.
But, one may ask, who was kidding whom? Even if Alcibiades was not taken in, he would probably still have persisted in a grandiose expedition certain to bring him glory and the dictatorial power that had been enjoyed by his kinsman Pericles. Alcibiades being Alcibiades, he and his buddies got drunk and put on a blasphemous mockery of the Mysteries, which led to a prosecution and Alcibiades’ quick departure from the expedition. Nicias, who had argued strenuously against it, was now one of the generals in charge. He did his duty and was executed by the vindictive Syracusans against the advice of the Spartan officer who had been sent–on the exiled Alcibiades’ advice– to help them. Most historians believe that Thucydides despised Nicias for his superstitious piety and his fear of the mob. But he had every reason to fear the mob, and Thucydides beautiful epitaph, that he died in such as way as he of all men least deserved, gives the lie to this interpretation. Nicias lived in a degenerate time. He had done his best in war and peace to serve his country. He had fought successfully against Sparta but not only had no rancour against the Spartans, he even arranged a peace treaty which, if Athens had observed, would have spared them the horrors of more war, defeat, and subjugation. But when put in charge of an expedition he disapproved of, he nonetheless did his best. We have no such men in our entire leadership class. I thank M.A.R. for introducing this parallel.
18 Comment by Theodore M. Van Oosbree on 19 September 2009:
It is never too late to stop doing the wrong thing and start doing the right thing (according to James Burnham’s Suicide of the West).
19 Comment by jack bailey on 19 September 2009:
“At this point no one knows Obama’s short-term motives, much less his long-term strategy. It is completely foolish to predict the consequences and probably idle even to speculate”.
I concur, it may be just a temporary reprieve but onw can hope. The truth is that the Russians in many ways wanna be just like us. While this is ultimately impossible and also not advisable, this trend will continue. Having a friendly Russia will mean more for the cause of freedom than any number of weapons systems.
20 Comment by Michael Kenny on 19 September 2009:
What always amuses me is the way Americans “de-humanise humanity”, so to speak! Everyone talks about “Poles”, “Czechs” etc. as if they was no spread of public opinion outside the US. Think of how odd it sounds to say “Americans believe in creationism”. True, in the sense that some do, but even more don’t. Some Poles and Czechs undoubtedly wanted the missiles, but, according to opinion poles (sic!), the vast majority in both countries didn’t. Both countries kicked out their governments over this issue and the Czech parliament refused to ratify the treaty. There were calls for referenda in both countries, which would almost certainly have gone against the missiles. In addition, I suspect that both governments were letting the US go ahead with building all the expensive infrastructure but had no intention of ever letting the US put any missiles in. It seems that Obama is now going to sell mobile Patriot missiles to Turkey (a much more likely target for the Iranians!). Let’s see if he gets any thanksgiving from Turkey!
21 Comment by Nicholas MOSES on 19 September 2009:
@18: Think of how odd, then, it sounds to say “Americans de-humanize humanity.” That is such an abstract concept it is possible nor desirable to argue, but I suspect that is the point. On the other hand, I could say that “Irish people value their drink,” and while not all of them do, I think there is far more concrete evidence for this latter proposition than for the former.
Still, Michael Kenny has a point: even nations unified by blood and language are extremely fractious in their outlooks for their countries. He completely misidentifies the culprits, however. It is the deranged modernists and their deformed spawns the post-modernists who have dehumanized us and who have made left and right divisions, shattering the precious unity of our kingdoms.
22 Comment by Nicholas MOSES on 19 September 2009:
it is possible nor desirable to argue
Make that: “it is neither possible nor desirable to argue.”
23 Comment by Allen Wilson on 20 September 2009:
The whole idea for the missile shield, along with the expansion of NATO, was to antagonise Russia, a very stupid thing to do to a potential ally of such great value, who wanted friendship. They thought they could do this and go after Iran, too. They found out that they cant, and that must be because America is not the power it once was. In the 60’s, we had that kind of power, but no more. Therefore, they had to come to some kind of terms with Russia.
Whether we like it or not, we are seeing the shrinking of American power, similar to the shrinking of Soviet power in the 80’s. Thus or need for Russian support in the graveyard of the Soviet empire, soon to be the graveyard of yet another empire. Is it not nice how the Russians are helping us stay mired in their former bog? How rich this must be for them. There is no help for fools.
It appears that the powers that be in Foggy Bottom gave up their dream of a new cold war in order to go after Iran, which is actually Israel’s ambition. That shows which tail wags the dog.
24 Comment by John Seiler on 21 September 2009:
Jeff Huber, a retired Naval officer and one of our best military strategists, writes about this controversy at at Antiwar.com in “Polish Missile Joke Revisited”:
“The scheme Bush promised to Poland and Czechoslovakia was the mid-course interceptor system, one that genuine experts (as opposed to Franks and McCain and Lieberman and so on) say will never work….
“U.S. intelligence has recently reconfirmed that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, and it doesn’t have an intercontinental ballistic missile program either. But if Iran did have nuclear-tipped ICBMs, the mid-course interceptor system wouldn’t have protected anybody from them, so why should Poland and Czechoslovakia want us to dump our junk in their backyards?.
“The Obama administration has instead offered Poland and Czechoslovakia the SM-3 missile system, which is designed to kill a ballistic missile in its terminal flight phase. This is the missile system that defense contractor Raytheon is developing for sale to Israel. The SM-3 could reasonably be expected to protect much of Europe from missiles launched by Iran. The SM-3 substitute is the smartest move the Obama administration could possibly have made….
“Russia has harshly criticized Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denial and announced that it will scrap plans to deploy Iskander missiles near the Polish border. Since the Iskander is only a short- to medium-range missile that would only have been a threat to Poland, Obama’s decision to reverse Bush’s misguided commitment actually makes Poland safer.”
Iskander is, of course, Alexander the Great. It would be appropriate to name the mid-course U.S. interceptor system that doesn’t work the Bush the Less system.
25 Comment by Andrea Nyx Hemera on 21 September 2009:
Why was the American policy of trying to bring Eastern Europe into the NATO-American sphere ‘evil’? Stupid and unrealistic maybe, but evil? Eastern Europeans horribly suffered 50 yrs of communism during the Cold War. Russian imperialism has always been a nasty reality and/or reality to many of those people, especially those of the Baltics and Ukraine.
I would say Bush’s policy wasn’t pragmatic because Eastern Europe is too far away, and there’s simply no way we can safeguard all those little and not-so-little countries. Furthermore, US policy was arrogant and unnecessarily alienated Moscow just when Putin was showing a willingness to work with the US against terrorism. Also, I’m not sure Western European nations would have come onboard with Bush’s New World Order policy. Still, I can understand Eastern European nations wanting to be protected from possible Russian imperialism in the future and the American attempt to capitalize on this fear. It certainly wasn’t ‘evil’. Evil is when a dictator kills 6 million Jews or starves 5 million Ukrainians. Besides, Bush was too stupid to be evil.
26 Comment by janoko on 23 September 2009:
Mr. Sailer,
your intelligent comments are devalued by your reference to Czechoslovakia that no longer exists. Slovakia (a part of the former Czechoslovakia) was not a party to the now abrogated treaty, I believe. As a smart person said, “it is minute details that comprise perfection, but perfections is not a minute detail.”
This, of course, is in no way an attempt to denigrate you comment, just a clarification that may be useful.
J.
27 Comment by Thomas Fleming on 26 September 2009:
The policy I described as “Evil” was the plan to subvert Russia and force the republics into an American Empire that would not be willing or able to protect them from the consequences. I have nothing but admiration for the peoples of central and EAstern Europe who were caught between the two juggernauts of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and I entirely sympathize with their desire for help. The problem is that the USA almost never actually supports its allies. Greeks should know.