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I can’t much blame this ex-Marine (if such exists) for throwing in the towel:

When Matthew Hoh joined the Foreign Service early this year, he was exactly the kind of smart civil-military hybrid the administration was looking for to help expand its development efforts in Afghanistan.

A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.

But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department’s head of personnel. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.

Back in 2006 I wrote the following, on the fifth anniversary of 9/11:

As Americans, we live in a country with two distinct ideas on how to deal with problems such as radical Islamicism.

The first is that we must understand our enemy if we are to engage him, and engaging him means that, if we “understand” him, we will be nice to each other and everything will be better. This is the approach of the left. With most enemies, this leads to defeat, because they interpret your actions (rightfully) as a sign of weakness and will move against you accordingly.

The second is that, if we understand our enemy, we will become sympathetic to him and it will weaken us, so we must always do it “our way” and defeat him. This is the approach of the right. This can lead to victory but it will be costly.

In those days, we had the former idea.  Now we have the latter.  It’s hard to implement effective foreign policy when you’re careening from one extreme to the other.

Barack Obama is pretty skilled politically, but he’s painted himself into a corner on this one.  He defined the Afghan war as the “necessary war.”  But now he’s stuck.  He doesn’t want to really ramp up our efforts, and he really can’t bring himself to bail out.  Sooner or later, his dithering and taking his half out of the middle is going to get him (and us) run over.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of motivation.  Americans like to think that, if and when they fight wars, they’re for a moral cause.  But there are two reasons why we’re operating there that belie that idea.

The first is the war on drugs, a point driven home by the death this week of DEA agents.  We’ve made the world miserable by our inability to deal with our insatiable demand for hallucinogenic drugs, an endemic problem since the 1960’s.  Since we can’t (or won’t) come up with a way to deal with the demand, we go around the world and camp out in drug-producing countries (like Colombia) and try to solve the problem by eliminating the supply.  But this is, if we think about it long enough, ridiculous.

The second is our desire to establish a secure foothold in Central Asia so as to insure an oil supply from that part of the world.   This is of a piece with our endless involvement in the Middle East: instead of developing our own resources, we’ve spent the last forty years importing the oil of others, and having to insure those places stay friendly and productive.  But our left reels at the horror of domestic oil development, so we’re stuck there.  Insisting on a strong presence in Central Asia also guarantees conflict with Russia and China.

There’s no good way out of this, and Obama knows it, which is why he’s taking so much time making a “decision.”

But former McCain-Palin staffer Robert Heiler does it just the same:

In many countries – as the history of Latin America alone illustrates – the institutions and the culture offer a weak defense against personality cult movements. In America, the defense is strong, buttressed by the First, Second, Fifth, Eighth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. The “bipartisanship” that Obama envisioned was really “monopartisanship” – a form of one-party rule erected on the foundation of his personal popularity. This vision has been realized periodically throughout history, most recently by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. But achieving it in America is far more difficult, because the Founding Fathers consciously and specifically erected bulwarks against it. Those bulwarks are the source of institutions that resist populist, personality-based, and momentary passions. (The Amendments I named are but a few of the most important ones, but there are others, including the bicameral legislature, and even, originally, the non-direct election of Senators.)

His appeal, like most conservatives, falls back on the Constitution.  But, as Anita Dunn’s hero Chairman Mao used to say, people and people alone are the motive force behind human history.  The basic problem in blindly appealing to our constitution is that the American people are a) on the whole ignorant of the real workings of our system and b) desperate enough to try anything.

To use a Chinese analogy again, Obama’s key problem is that the American left is a mandarinate left rather than a “peasant” one.  The fact that Obama connected with the American people as well as he did is a testament to himself and his campaign staff’s brilliance.  To sustain it in a governing coalition with other elitist snobs is another business altogether.

Barack Obama’s greatest competitor for dominance isn’t either the Republicans or the Constitution but hard economic reality.  It’s been that way from the start.  The more his programme advances the worse that problem will become for him, at which point he’d better watch his backside for either a) foreign domination or b) a “peasant” revolutionary.  Or maybe a little of both.

It’s a new ball game in the U.S., get used to it.

I’ve gotten a couple of “canned” comments (they sure look like they’re canned) about my piece on Rush Limbaugh and the NFL.

I think I’ve found the cannery.

In looking at the IP info, both of them come from the “Palomar Community College District” in California.  Obviously one or more people with connections to this institution of higher learning (?) have nothing else better to do with the state’s computers (this, a state in dire financial straits) than to issue non-responses to blog posts on current events.

The fact that this is coming from California doesn’t surprise me.  The nastiest objections to the content on this site come from that state, and even its educational institutions.  But perhaps someone will have more use for this information than I do.

P.S.  I don’t agree with Rush’s explanation of the difficulties black people in the U.S. face today.  The issue of the government being a surrogate father cuts across racial boundaries.  I discussed this issue a while back here.

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn needs to think twice about quoting Chairman Mao.  Let’s consider these two well-known quotes, from Mao’s 1927 classic “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan:”

For the present upsurge of the peasant movement is a colossal event. In a very short time, in China’s central, southern and northern provinces, several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm, like a hurricane, a force so swift and violent that no power, however great, will be able to hold it back. They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves. Every revolutionary party and every revolutionary comrade will be put to the test, to be accepted or rejected as they decide. There are three alternatives. To march at their head and lead them? To trail behind them, gesticulating and criticizing? Or to stand in their way and oppose them? Every Chinese is free to choose, but events will force you to make the choice quickly…

Secondly, a revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.

Mao was a revolutionary.  Unlike many of his contemporaries, who attempted to build a viable left-wing movement out of intellectuals and workers, his idea was to use the peasants, those widely-despised “ignoramuses” who made up most of China’s population.  And he succeeded, a fact that Dunn isn’t shy about trumpeting.

But Dunn, like her master, is now in power.  There’s no indication, unlike Mao, that a “perpetual revolution” is in the offing.  Au contraire, what we have is an attempt to build a perpetual mandarinate, one that really gives short shrift even to trade unionists who have been an important component of the Democrat Party’s coalition for a long time.

Substitute “tea baggers” for “peasants,” mix in some major desperation, and you have the makings of serious social unrest.  If they find a real Mao Zedong–unlike the “imitation” one (like Lu Xun’s “Imitation Foreign Devil”) that Anita Dunn is–Barack Obama and his underlings are going to have a real mess on their hands.

Not Conservative Margaret Thatcher, nor Socialist Francois Mitterand:

History comes back to haunt us. Just over 20 years ago, the then British prime minister Margaret Thatcher told Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Britain and western Europe are not interested in the unification of Germany. The words written in the Nato communique may sound different, but disregard them. We do not want the unification of Germany.” She went on to say, inaccurately: “I can tell you that this is also the position of the US president.” That’s according to the Russian record made by one of Gorbachev’s closest aides. A British note of the conversation, quoted in a volume of documents just published by Foreign Office historians, adds some fascinating new detail…

Things are made no better by the fact that François Mitterrand and the French were conveying much the same message to Moscow. Gorbachev’s close adviser, Anatoly Chernyaev, who made the record of the Thatcher conversation, notes in his diary on 9 October 1989 that Mitterrand’s aide Jacques Attali “talked with us about a revival of a solid Franco-Soviet alliance, ‘including military integration – camouflaged as the use of armies in the struggle against natural disasters’.” Linking these French whispers to Thatcher’s remarks, Chernyaev reflects: “In brief, they [that is, the French and the British] want to prevent this [German unification] with our hands.”

The French and British were looking backward at two world wars where their entire vision of civilisation–to say nothing of their national sovereignty–were attacked by the Teutonic colossus to their east.  The unification of Germany in 1871 had set the stage for the next seventy five years of German expansion–economic and military–and the cultural changes that went with it:

It was here where “modernity” as we understand it first became the philosophy of an entire society in the years leading up to World War I; indeed, the enthusiasm generated by those heady days fuelled Germany’s aggressive prewar stance and led to the war itself. Its defeat was not educational; Adolf Hitler simply used a more “populist” form of modernity to propel the rise of the National Socialists and the return of Germany as a world power, albeit unwelcome after 1 September 1939.

Germany’s place in modernity was better understood during the 1930’s and earlier than now. For some of those involved in aviation, an obvious centre of modernity, the temptation of admiration for Germany in the 1930’s was too much…the German influence on many during this period is too great to ignore. It is easier to see the horrors of Nazism in hindsight than through the lens of the 1930’s. There is a sober lesson: just because something is popular, successful and outwardly attractive, it doesn’t make it right.

Retro though it was, the French and the British attitude towards German reunification in the 1990’s is understandable.

The Americans, for their part, had more in common with the Germans that either cared to admit.  (German immigration to the U.S. was part of the reason for that.)  And, of course, American victory in the two world wars over Germany–a victory which left the homeland largely intact, unlike Britain, France or many other European countries–made the U.S. a superpower.  The Americans felt they could be more at ease with a reunified Germany.

Europe’s subsequent course hasn’t been written yet, so eurotriumphalism is premature.  Germany is still the economic engine of the EU.  If the need to expand that superiority elsewhere becomes necessary–and I’m thinking about a reawakened Europe militarily in the wake of the general U.S. retreat we’re seeing now–Thatcher and Mitterand’s concerns may come back to haunt us.