Recently I read something about the “Burning Man” festival and movement, about which I knew very little. So I did a search and read up on Burning Man, interested in seeing what the hub-bub is all about. To be honest, Burning Man is not my cup of tea – you’d need a bit more testosterone in your blood than I have to spend two weeks in the Nevada desert asserting your masculinity with survival exercises, construction projects, mystical chanting, mega-artwork, nude body painting, and games and competitions. E.g., one exercise involves man-to-man combat within a “thunderdome”. I don’t think I’d do too well with that.

In one of the articles that I came across, I saw photo of a typical Burning Man exercise – it involved a whole bunch of guys pulling on long thick ropes, moving a huge wooden replica of a Trojan Horse across the desert floor.  (Of course, once night comes, they burn the thing in front of everyone – what else would you do with a Trojan Horse at a “Burning Man” convocation?) That photo got me thinking about the original “Trojan Horse” concept – i.e., a gift that seems totally legit up front, but turns out to be a subterfuge, a disguise for a secret invasion by a destructive force. 
 
The whole Trojan Horse concept then made me think of modern international politics, i.e. what has been going on between the US and China over the past half century (see Council on Foreign Relations timeline). I.e., we were once sworn enemies, but in 1970, Nixon and Kissinger arranged for some ping-pong team games, Nixon went to China, and over the next few decades, we started trading with and investing in each other, more and more as time passed. By 2000, Congress and President Bill Clinton granted permanent trade relations with China, and thus in 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. Between 1980 and 2004, U.S.-China trade rose from $5 billion to $231 billion; by 2006, China surpassed Mexico as the United States’ second-biggest trade partner; in 2015, China edged out Canada to become the largest partner. The average American consumer today is quite aware  »  continue reading …

There was some public debate recently as to whether America could continue its military presence in Afghanistan. President Trump decided to consult with his generals and then decided to keep us there and even add a few thousand troops. The idea is to shift away towards nation-building and re-focus on defeating terrorist threats to the West.

Various people are rather unhappy about US troops still being there after first being sent in late 2001 (following the Sept. 11 terrorist attack); they call it the “never ending war“. It made a fair amount of sense for US forces to root Al Qaeda out of its secure hiding spots in the Afghan mountains, right after we lost almost 3,000 lives from an Al Qaeda plot. However, a second phase of the Afghanistan mission eventually developed, focusing upon the pro-radical Islamic Taliban political / military movement in Afghanistan. This second phase focused both on degrading the Taliban’s military strength, and in denying its political strength by building an alternative nation-state more in keeping with western democratic traditions.

Unlike Al Qaeda, the Taliban, which had gained control of the Afghan national government, was and remains a home-grown movement focusing mostly on Afghanistan, versus international Islamic conquest as with radical group like Al Qaeda. The US under President Bush (the second) and then President Obama tried with some success to keep the Taliban from ruling Afghanistan. Doing so would help keep Al Qaeda or a similar radical Islamist movement (such as ISIS)  »  continue reading …

I’m not feeling entirely optimistic about the Iran nuclear deal. Sure, there are a lot of good things to be said about it; avoiding a nuclear holocaust in the Middle East would be quite an accomplishment for civilization (the word “holocaust” itself has its ultimate origins in the ancient Middle-Eastern Hebrew language, i.e. “olah” meaning burnt offering). Still, I wish that Obama, Kerry and the Dems were totally honest about what the JCPOA agreement with Iran ultimately is: i.e., a huge bet that politics in Iran are going to fundamentally change over the next decade, such that the pro-western urban secularists will take charge as the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard fade into a genteel irrelevance, sort of like the British monarchy. Unfortunately, we’ve been waiting for an Iranian regime change to happen since the last days of Jimmy Carter.

My heart really hopes that Obama is right and that an opening to the urban secularists by the USA will finally put them over the top in Tehran. But my head and my knowledge of history, however limited, is a bit more cynical — it’s a big crap shoot, a real “Hail Mary” pass. I guess that we shall find out how it goes.

The JCPOA has a lot of very optimistic supporters in the liberal big media, not surprisingly. A typical supporter is Tom Friedman of the NY Times, who focuses on the Middle East. I must give Friedman credit for hinting in one of his recent articles that he too realizes that Iranian regime change is a necessary condition for the agreement to really work as the Obama Administration hopes. Friedman was in a bit of a whimsical mood  »  continue reading …

The cover story in the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic is entitled “What Does ISIS Really Want”. I have the issue on my kitchen table (yes, a old-school paper magazine), but haven’t read the article yet. However, I did come across a good summary today on the Atlantic web site by none other than the article author himself, Graeme Wood.

If I’m reading him right, Mr. Wood is trying to drill down past the “western enlightenment” analysis regarding the social and economic conditions that arguably lead to political extremism and violence, and see just how serious ISIS is about its religious ideology. He seems to be saying that we do in fact need to take seriously the notion that ISIS finds its inspirations in existing (if not entirely mainstream) strains of the Islamic tradition. Although the Islamic mainstream is peaceful and tolerant, the ISIS viewpoint was not made up on the fly for entirely political and sociological reasons; Mr. Brown says that it is not a laughable misrepresentation of historical Islam. And that fact makes it all the more dangerous and powerful.

Of course, many intelligent people here in the US want to think that this really isn’t about religiously-inspired belief. We just can’t believe that anyone in the modern world would accept the notion that God demands an extraordinary level of purity, one that requires violence and death to achieve. In order for the many to be saved, some (“the wicked”) need to die. No, it just can’t be that anyone living today would think that . . . it has to be poverty, historical exploitation by the west (motivated by oil), brutal dictators who were supported by the US and its European allies . . . Recall the recent TV interview statement by State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf, who asserted that a primary motivation for people to join ISIS is the lack of job opportunities in Middle Eastern countries.

Good old Tom Friedman, the self-appointed Middle East guru of the NY Times, today weighed in on what ISIS is, and what problems need to be solved in order to stop it. In a column entitled “ISIS Heads to Rome“, Friedman takes an “all of the above” approach. He asserts that ISIS is led  »  continue reading …