Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
This is my fourth take on fixing Syria. The previous three are Fixing Syria — Take One (06 April 2017), Fixing Syria — Take Two (22 October 2017), and Fixing Syria — Take Three (15 February 2018).
This time I want to start with a question and answer regarding grand national strategic objective, top-tier:
Who do we want the world to believe we are?
The answer is: We are a sovereign nation intent on remaining as such.
The long version of the answer is: We are a sovereign nation in possession of freedom, will, and means to create, maintain, and consummate our sovereignty.
Removed — and, with luck, cast into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth — are these answers to the question:
We are the protector of the free world.
We protect the free flow of ideas, goods, and services around the world.
Why are these never-true but hoary assertions removed?
First, there is no free world to protect. There are nation states with intentions which belong to them and obligations to maintain their sovereignty. We are not responsible for other nations’ sovereignty, much less their course in history. Those matters are their business.
Second, we protect global communications where/when ours are obstructed, i.e., where our sovereignty is thwarted. We do this with allies if they wish to join us. Persistence of our sovereignty is our sole motivation for making/breaking alliances. We should expect other nations — as well as tribes — to act from the same motivation. This is the nature of nations, and well it should be. It is their Dharma … and their Karma.
What nations do specifically to protect their sovereignty may be rational or irrational. That factors later, however. At the start, nations’ motivation to protect their sovereignty is entirely rational.
Top-tier grand national strategic objective therefore is to remain a sovereign nation and to execute rationally — national deeds aligning with national needs — to make that happen, however that needs doing. As we have noted before, good and bad are not factors in creating, maintaining or consummating national sovereignty.
That is moral in which the thought, the word and the deed align. If the thoughts, words, and deeds of an otherwise odious personality or nation align, that personality or nation is moral. Fact is, the thoughts, words, and deeds of an odious person or nation never align, but that is another subject altogether.
Between nations, the question is only, who is right and who is wrong? The answer is: who sustains their sovereignty is right and who does not is wrong. An important sub-point of that fact is that a usurper of national authority cannot be right because they never had responsibility for the nation’s sovereignty.
The recent multi-nation, multi-missile attack on some of Bashar Assad’s weapons assets was a stupid and costly punch in the air. The costs to its perpetrators included money, prestige, capability revelation, and opportunities. It had no strategic value and was irrational with respect to executing for USA national sovereignty in Famiglia Assad, The Levant and MENA generally.
Three observers recount particulars: Christopher Roach, Angelo Codevilla, and David P. Goldman (Spengler). Spengler believes POTUS Trump will realize he was duped by the foreign policy establishment. I would have used the word misled, but there it is. From other directions, also, I hear fingered wise guys at think tanks. John Bolton, definitely a wise guy, was invited to the White House just before the ill-advised attack.
US Defense Department has become very efficient at executing raids and very inattentive to providing POTUS with strategic justification for the abundance of raids and training missions they execute around the globe. That is because there is no strategic justification for most of those operations and also because as officers, military and civilian, rise in rank they gain experience but lose expertise.
Wise Generals and Admirals, ones who truly execute their responsibilities, block 1-2 hours a day — during daylight or just before it — alone — for observation and rumination upon big pictures they face. Also expertise and decision-making authority should be forced upon and decentralized among officers below and even well-below the starred ranks. This concept informed the development of Brigade Combat Teams. It should inform staff formations at all levels as well.
US State Department has been funding so many Communists and Jihadis at home and abroad for so long, while disparaging and subverting US national sovereignty, that no one even bothers asking them for guidance on USA grand national strategic objective and execution. Their foreign nation sovereignty-building budget reflects that disinterest of theirs. Marie all the terrorists need is jobs Harf was an intellectual giant at Foggy Bottom and before that, unsurprisingly, at CIA. She led State’s communications strategy for the so-called JCPOA with Iran, selling garbage as cordon bleu.
This state of affairs removes one of three assets of statecraft — diplomacy, finance, war-fighting — from the Constitutional responsibility of the USG to protect USA national sovereignty.
Until recently, US Treasury Department has been shoving US wealth into sacks owned by domestic and foreign opponents of USA national sovereignty. POTUS Trump and Secretary Mnuchin appear to be redirecting at least some of Treasury’s attention to gutting mullahs’ finances.
So what about Syria, which is not a nation now?
It ain’t our fight, although the Kurds are. Russia and USA together should decide what happens to former Syria. Shiite Mullahs should be swept and kept off the Mediterranean, an objective that does not require US ground combat forces. Turkey should be punched back into her pre-2001 borders, an objective that may be accomplished by diplomacy and finance but may require US and also Russian and Kurdish ground combat forces. Yemen’s communications with Iran should be severed without using US ground combat forces. The Horn of Africa is a question inside larger USA strategic considerations and meanwhile not an SOF show absent resolving those considerations.
Way, way too much US Armed Forces commitment in Africa, despite China’s willingness to purchase the place. What China gets out of Africa helps her only if it reaches her homeland. Deeds of title are meaningless at the end of lines of communication 10K miles long.
POTUS Trump’s instincts are accurate: get out of MENA, meaning out militarily. The exception is the Kurds. They have been friends. They have over-reached some — i.e., for Syrian oil — but since there is no Syria, spoils of war doctrine applies in that matter. One does not desert one’s friends. The word once given cannot be taken back, and if it is tried, everyone considers you, rightly, a target of opportunity.
USA policy towards Kurds should be this: be their perimeter defense, assure them space and time to evolve their identity as a nation or as sub-units of nations, or some of both. They are both new and old at it. Old on regional scale, new on multi-regional scale. Currently, they are in four parts. See what they produce. Do not force them this way or that. Just guard their perimeter, their geographic perimeter. Russia would be more than happy to assist in that mission and is capable of doing so.
And the Salafi/Shiite Jihad should be addressed using classical doctrine contra geo-political imperialism, such as Salafi/Shiite Jihad is:
Announce, Prenounce, Prevision — take your pick, but the sense is in Latin adnuntiare, regarding which see Appendix I in this — strategic war to annihilate the Salafi/Shiite Jihad.
That is a Warning Order regarding a reality (strategic war to annihilate) that the statement itself puts in train, in motion. It is not a threat. It says, Here is what is coming, you get to deal with it, but at the end of the day, you are dead, so make your choices. Think St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians.
To date, the wise guys — foreign and domestic policy experts — fail to grasp Jihad’s geography. This failure is a howler because Jihad has been everywhere all at once for decades. And the wise guys did not grasp that fact. Even after Jihad’s extra-high-profile attacks against the USA in 1979, 1983, 1993, and 2001 wise guys kept USG focused on their preferred enemy — Russia, who was collapsing and would have loved a helping hand — rather than the biting enemy — Salafi/Shiite Jihad — who was rampant.
In consequence — and/or from an abundance of cowardice, stupidity, malice, treason or combinations of all of the above — the wise guys failed to point USA lines of attack (LOAs) at the relevant target: Jihad’s lines of communication (LOCs).
Lesson of Inchon: your target is the choke point of the enemy’s LOC, and your LOA is the shortest feasible distance between you and that choke point.
The qualifier feasible is used in the spirit of the aphorism L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.
Since Jihad is now virtually everywhere, the classical question, “Where is the enemy?” is answered. The relevant questions for decades and still are:
1- What are Jihad’s lines of communication?
2- What are the choke points on those lines?
3- What is the shortest distance between the USA and those choke points … or between any other potentially sane country and those choke points?
Jihad’s lines of communication are its ideologies, Salafi or Shiite, which are hegemonic legalism joined at the mouth and penis.
The choke points on Jihad’s lines of communication are its mullahs, imams, and Koranic scholars, That lot.
The shortest distance from the USA to those choke points are their bankers and banks.
The major share of the war to annihilate the Salafi/Shiite Jihad belongs to the US Department of the Treasury and the US Department of Homeland Security.
Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
