Pullout From Iraq Poses Daunting Challenges – NYT

In today’s New York Times there are a series of articles that show us just how asleep at the wheel we have been the last eight or nine years relative to our understanding of events in the Middle East.  The first article is about our pending pullout from Iraq.  The article is here.

The expense of this war has been enormous and it has hurt us.  The expense of our getting out of the place is equally enormous.  The story is enlightening.

In another equally compelling detail, the United Nations last night released data that shows that one in four people on this planet are now Muslims. The raw power that this indicates is almost beyond comprehension.  Our view of political realities must now adjust to these demographics and our defense and diplomatic posture must now change.

These people are deeply involved in the Muslim Wars of the Reformation and they see us as a side player at best.  We need to understand that we cannot win anything by interjecting ourselves into these constant wars of religion in the Muslim world. 

It is time that we educate ourselves in every aspect of Islamist political, economic and military theory.  We are going to need that knowledge to protect ourselves from our own arrogance (and from our own super elites) in the future. There will be more Islamic wars in the future, that is unavoidable.

These wars based on Islamic theological infighting with roots in the Middle East are going to wage on and on for hundreds of years more.  They have done this already and there is no end in sight.   We must recognize the raw power of this situation and the predicament that this places the West within relative to foreign policy and national defense. 

These simple numbers alone give the Muslim world enormous power to shape events.  We must bend to that.  A constant war-mongering attitude on our part only exacerbates a situation that many will find threatening based on the numbers alone.  We must learn to live with this new reality.

With this in mind, I share more news of a national defense nature with my fellow veterans. Try and understand and keep this in mind at all times.  These people are reacting to Muslim issues in a Muslim dominated area of the world and they do not even consider us a minor player in this theological blood letting.  In their minds, this has nothing to do with us.  That is important for us to always keep in mind.

In this article we see that Iran is tightening its grip on the communication avenues for its own people.  To the extent that this has national defense implications for us, we should prepare.  To any other extent, unfortunately, we are now in a position where we are going to let this Islamic civil war in the heart of Shia Islam play out.  These religionists have a nuclear weapon now or at least are very close to having one.  They are sitting at the table with the adults now, like it or not, that is the reality of the situation.

In this article, an Iranian protestor in the latest provocation by the Iranian government against its own people in the recent stolen election has been sentenced to death. Keep your eyes on this.  Iranians are perhaps the most educated people in the Muslim world.  They will not allow this arrogance and brutality at the hands of the government to continue forever.  A brutal and vicious civil war is brewing.  And they have nuclear capability.  This is not good.

In this Op-Ed piece from Paul Krugman in the Times we see that we are at the very cusp of education meltdown in this country.  We are notably stupider than were our parents relative to educational achievements and ability for basic reasoning.  Our level of illiteracy in the country, in relative terms to our parents’ times, is much higher now then before. With lousy education and falling literacy levels, our chances to lead the world evaporate.  Our standard of living falls, our grand children futures dissipate in a cloud of ignorance.

Now I am going to drive this point home with a sledge hammer.

When we spend $664 billion dollars annually on defense budgets that are actually Offense Budgets that we can no longer afford then we literally drive the future of our children and grand children right up to the steps of the poor house.  We have "bullet and bombed" our children’s future away.  We have made gigantic expenditures on "defense" needs when we really need it for reading, writing and arithmetic all over the country.  We have literally allowed the greed of the war industries and the energy cartels to rob our children of sharp minds and fine educations.

We did this.  You and me and our neighbors. There is no sense in blaming Boeing or Exxon or Enron or IBM or General Motors or the finance industry on Wall Street.  We did this.  We allowed this blindness to the super elites and our own arrogance in defense matters to make our children and grand children very close to achieving Third World levels of education because we "invested" in the defense industries’ need to be super wealthy….at our own expense.

Let me ask a question.  Are we happy now?  Did we get what we wanted?  Do we understand what we have done to ourselves by this incessant need to act like cowboys on a Saturday night drunk in Tombstone in 1880?  Have we shot up enough of our own town to understand now that we are the enemy to our own future?

Have we?

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)