Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

[The original post on a new strategic grasp is here.]

Writing under title The Mystery At Idlib, Richard Fernandez at PJMedia provides important data points for strategic reflection.

Prolific internet commenter Subotai Bahadur commented as follows:

1- There are no “moderate” Islamist groups. They may lie and tell the gullible anal orifi of the State Department that they are. And to them they are not lying because lying to Infidels is mandated by Islam. q.v. Taqqiya. But they all are enemy barbarians by any rational western measure. Note that the State Department is not rational. The only non-barbarian Muslims are those which are secular. However they are still vicious. Just not as vicious, usually, as the religious ones.

2- There are also NO friends of Americans, the West, or Christians in the Mid East except for Israel and the Kurds, in the entire Middle East. Even the Arab Christians are not really our friends, because they share their Muslim cousins’ anti-Semitism. As Senator Ted Cruz (and here) encountered and honorably called them on it. The Turks under Erdogan, who Buraq Hussein is depending on, are Islamists supporting ISIL and dreaming of re-establishing a Caliphate.

3- The “moderates” fighting Assad are allied to or part of ISIL. All the aid and training we have given them has been used to create the Caliphate.

4- ISIL claims to be an Islamic State. And to be honest, they have the attributes of statehood. Fine. They have murdered Americans as a deliberate part of their state policy. We have a Casus Belli. Congress should declare war on them and their territories and subjects. And the full weight of American military might, including nuclear weapons, should be used to shatter their will and end their existence.

It is a truism that Arabs will be either at your throat or at your feet. They need to be forced to have an up close and personal study of American combat boots for a few generations.

It is not as if sucking up to them has worked all that well.

Subotai Bahadur

I commented as follows:

Subotai Bahadur is correct but there are larger yet dimensions to this. For example, mass enemy population movements into Europe and USA and collapse of Catholic and Protestant moral authority because of the Thirty Years War, which has left those churches not just impotent towards but complicit in that enemy population’s mass movement onto Latin Christian center of gravity.

Interestingly, the Russian churches, though their view of authority is Turanian — authority is the state, to which the individual belongs — rather than Latin — authority is the individual, to which the state belongs — yet holds more moral authority, at this moment of history, against the enemy population’s mass movement than do the Latin churches (Protestant, Roman, Anglican). Russia defeated or at least delivered some serious unhappiness to the vanguard of the enemy population moving onto her. (So far, she appears not to be doing that to the mass Chinese movement into Siberia …?)

At this larger/longer scale view of the situation/problem (mass enemy population movement onto one), the looking is for a force of moral authority sufficient to defeat or seriously (permanently) disconsolate that enemy and his mass movement. Socialism/New Age has proven a poor bearer of moral authority. This gang of schizophrenic paranoiacs occupying the White House and so much else is the best they have — their chosen one — and their moral authority is in minus numbers heading down, just as did that of their ancestors in Russia, Germany and so many other lands.

So underneath, this is all really about religion, just as the caliphists say it is. Only a religion can generate moral authority sufficient to defeat evil doers. The religion of Socialism/New Age demonstrably cannot do that. WILL NOT do that. That leaves the Latin churches to regain moral authority or deliver themselves to caliphism and look as cheerful as they can. I think they will regain moral authority and there will be a fight which ends demonstrating that caliphism is not in fact a religion but a disease in promulgation of which Socialists/New Agers fight.

To that comment of mine a commenter going as itellu3times wrote:

drg said: rather than Latin –authority is the individual, to which the state belongs

Well, following Samuel Huntington of the “Clash of Civilizations” the Latin model is also centralized and he makes the more individualistic culture Germanic/tribal. No doubt one can quibble about this at length. However your point remains, an individualistic culture may, in some interpretations, have little resistance against invasion. The US was historically a melting pot and did not NEED resistance, but exactly how *did* that work?

To which I replied:

Good question and point. I think the answer is, it worked because America was a new beginning but with accumulated wisdom of long experience as self-consciously (and multi-form) Christian. So while a fresh start could be made, and was, it was not done by people without viable, proven character and skill. They had deep traditions, several in fact, mostly Latin Christian, to draw on and used them to make both prosperity and devotion in forms of ordinary life not previously seen. Hoped for, surely, and thought about, but not actually made. A New World indeed. Did not have to fight overgrowth or under-crowding to find sun and water.

Our situation is not that. Our world is old. And feeble. The Thirty Years War enfeebled the churches and humanism/secularism paralyzed businesses, guilds, schools and governments. There is not space to plant a new, strong world of freedom. Yet, we have still some memory of the wisdom of Christian experience, so that, for example, beheading one bound and defenseless still appeals to us as barbaric (immoral). To very many, including right in our neighborhoods, it does not … thank you secularists/humanists.

So we are obliged to find our way through what is now pretty dense overgrowth and under-crowding to reach light and water to sustain a new garden, new forms of freedom. The finest forms of freedom man has known have grown from the Vedic/Biblical root. So at heart we are wanting a revival of genuine, i.e., freedom-producing religion. (Freedom is power.) In our area — the nations of the Latin culture — that means Christianity and that means the churches are obliged to regain moral authority. I think they can and even are doing.

That is how I see it. Some thoughts, anyhow, in response to your very appropriate comment and question. Thanks.

Of course, it is unnecessary to nuke most of the Middle East and parts of USA and EU to convince the caliphist horde of the error of their ways.  Just neutralizing their clergy and scholars would do that.  They power and drive the insanity called Islam and Muslim Culture.  Remove that engine and driver and the buggy stops.  The same is true, by the way, for remediating such insanity as powers and drives American and European cultures.

Update 1: An American Renaissance.

Update 2: On 27 January 2015, Marine GEN (Ret.) James N. Mattis addressed the United States Senate Armed Services Committee on the subject A New American Grand Strategy.  At Hoover Institution, who published an adapted version of General Mattis’ address, I commented — with edits here — as follows:

Not that it matters, but, I both appreciate and despond over General Mattis’ address here. Appreciate because (1) as a genuine warrior he says what he sees and eloquently and (2) his heart is unalloyed courage and compassion. Despond because (1) his address reflects lack of situational awareness — half his auditors at least regard the nation state, including USA, as obsolete and perishing — and (2) his address, although latterly specifying or implying serious tactical weaknesses of current operations, transits the periphery of his title: grand national strategy.

It is rare for a military leader to grasp and execute the several strands — principally diplomatic, economic and military, but others as well — of grand national strategy sufficiently to create a rational grand national strategic *objective* that is also inspirational. It is rare for anyone to be able to do that. General David Petraeus has that ability, which is why the Anti-American, Globalist-partisan US Justice [so-called] Department is persecuting/prosecuting him. Asking Congress or a bureaucracy to develop that ability and execute with it compares with asking a herd of cats to organize an expedition to summit Annapurna. Distilling and serving a happy grand national strategic *objective* is a personal, leadership thing few can do, but some definitely can and do accomplish. Their thoughts merit discovery and attendance.

The cynosure of a nation is not her grand national strategy. It is her grand national strategic *objective.* Given what we see now, project and anticipate — always expecting the unexpected, as General Mattis mentions, thankfully, in his address — where and what do we want to be as a nation three, five, ten, etc. years hence? What is our objective? What do we really, truly — as a nation — want for and of ourself to be, to do, to think? What is our inner necessity as a nation? What are we on this earth to accomplish as a national presence? And why do members of Congress not live in the states from which they were selected for office?

Related: On 04 March 2015  Marine GEN (Ret.) James N. Mattis wrote for Hoover Institution under title Using Military Force Against ISIS.  I commented:

I am content that GEN (Ret.) Mattis’ thinking, clear and compelling, be expressed in public.  Thank you, General!  Our countrymen are working their way towards how they will think and what they will do when they are quit of the hag riding their back.  And they will be that.  This exercise in preparation for the restoration of national sovereignty and wealth flowing from national moral and intellectual strength is what should be happening and what is happening.  I am content.

Update 3: Stephen D. Krasner embodies the bathetic stupidity of America’s ruling class.  I commented:

Good enough governance. Sounds micro-managerial, timid, sophistical/Solomonic and Ivory Tower. And a military not tasked with winning a war/conflict? … words fail and casting aspersions is unmanly. I prefer colonization and culture-splicing. Solve the problem, don’t manage it. It is unmanageable. Defeat it or detach from it. Do not manipulate/manage it.

Update 4: Michael J. Totten reviews ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror

Update 5: Scott Johnson at Power Line links two videos of Senator Tom Cotton discussing USA foreign policy.  These are instructive, depressingly so.  I commented as follows:

I have attended, carefully, both videos mentioned here. Senator Cotton is a good man, a fine man. His intellect, heart and bona fides are unimpeachable. He walks point for the best intentions and thinking our nation’s official leader cadre can produce at this moment in time.

His grasp of American strategic objective, strategy and tactics so lags the need as to arouse disconsolation.

This is not a personal failure of Senator Cotton’s. It is a corporate failure of America’s leader cadre. And behind them it is a failure of America’s parents (in particular, mothers, but also fathers), schools, churches and synagogues to foster spiritual, cultural and moral infrastructure that builds and protects our mother country.

Related: PL has two mentions in Tom’s Wikipedia bio.  And he’s a knuckle-dragger.  The Times letter may have caused his move from line to staff and then out.  Something got him out early after a fast rise in the line, consignment to staff and a short time in reserves.  I’d say the Times letter signaled political aspirations and counter-signaled mil career, another reason for an early out for a rising OBC line officer.

PL featured the Times letter, as I recall.  It would be a rare serving officer, especially a junior, who would address the Times without command prior-approval and expect a mil career afterwards.  Maybe the Harvard Man Syndrome punched through to dominance for that incident.  The military is not a democracy.

Update 6: GEN (R) Petraeus: The Islamic State Is Not Our Biggest Problem In Iraq

Update 7: Daniel Greenfield: Dear Corporate America

Update 8: Papa Francis is Exhibit A of someone who has the nub of a good idea and spreads it out into a bad idea.  Out of his depth and, more importantly, his remit, commission.  Pity.

Update 9: John R. Schindler: How To Defeat The Islamic State

Update 10: Franklin C. Spinney: Introduction To The Strategic Theories Of John Boyd

Update 11: Austin Bay: On the Anniversaries of Benghazi and 9/11/2001

Update 12: [The Fraud’s] New Middle East

Update 13: Why It’s Time for the Carrier Battle Group

Update 14: Dubik’s ‘Just War Reconsidered’ and Schadlow’s ‘War and the Art of Governance’: A double review

Update 15: Contemplating Positions On Chinese Flanks

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA