Pragmatically Distributed

Assad?

Leave him be we say.

An occasional Raytheon ™ provided slap across the face if he plays too fast and loose with sarin?  Very reasonable, if not without risks.

But to those who want him removed, beware:  The ghost of Moammar Ghadaffi (How the world misses ye! May ye rest in peace!) resplendent in still magnificent African robes casts a long shadow.   For the alternatives to Assad are all worse than Assad many times over.  Remove Assad from power and post-Assad Syria instantly becomes post-Ghadhaffi Libya without precious, soul-nourishing, hydrocarbons, and with still more dubious stakeholders invested in carving up Syria’s geopolitical carcass.

Assad can and most likely will be reined in now that he knows he does not have a blank check from Trump to do whatever he wants.

North Korea is an entirely different matter.

I admire NorkKor’s intelligence service.  Whatever it does (and whatever the hell that is, is quite opaque even to the Chinese) is built around Proletarian Socialism, which means it does not involve pussyhats, global warming, human “rights”, or diversity.

I have recommended the North Korean model of discipline for America’s intelligence agencies.  I will continue to recommend it so long as our intelligence services are more interested in transgender “rights” than espionage.

But this Stalinist throwback, as a whole, may have finally outlived its usefulness, even to this blog which is still very open to having authoritarian regimes make their case without any historical filters.

But a North Korean ICBM program that can eventually produce a nuclear weapon able to reach the Continental United States will have to be destroyed, one way or other.

I admit, as a foreign policy crisis, I admire the threat North Korea poses for its purity, a survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.  Without those minor distractions we have a true strategic threat that will allow America to be even more unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality in annihilating it.

At Pragmatically Distributed we rarely leave a discussion of a particular case study without tying it back to theory.

The greater theoretical lesson to take from the saga of North Korea’s nuclear program is that the objective rogue governments have in acquiring nuclear weapons is not so much to actually use them.  The true advantage to their having them is to grant them leverage to get away with all sorts of extra mischief that they could not get away with if they had only conventional weapons.  With an ICBM, North Korea would be, for example, able to attack First World merchant ships because they would know the cost of retaliating to the United States for North Korea’s non-nuclear aggression could potentially escalate into a nuclear attack against the Continental US.

If an ICBM gives North Korea freedom to do evil, the United States’ objective must be to deny them the freedom an ICBM would give them by any means necessary.

 

As has been made clear numerous times I am entirely opposed to overthrowing Assad’s government.

I will remain opposed until a good argument emerges for why a post-Assad Syria will not disintegrate into Islamic warlordism as Libya did after the fall of Gadhaffi; a fall  brought about by military action also justified on humanitarian grounds.  I have not seen any argument by the most anti-Assad partisans for why his fall would not be similarly disastrous, I myself cannot think of one, and I do not expect one to be made.

But what of limited actions comparable to last week’s missile strike to dissuade him from the liberal use of WMDs?  How justifiable would containment actions such as this be if they are occasional, narrow in scope, and by design fall short of being enough to bring down Assad?

Secretary of State Tillerson made the best defense for America’s attack on grounds of foreign policy realism.

In Tillerson’s view by using nerve gas Assad was creating bad precedents that could well be imitated by other rogue actors.  To get the point across that firing nerve gas cannot become a routine activity in international affairs Tillerson supported the air raid as a warning shot for Assad to break this bad habit of his.  But Tillerson, citing the recent example of Libya, does not see this attack as a prelude to driving Assad from power.  The warning shot was a warning and nothing more ambitious.

This realist argument of Tillerson’s is very strong and in keeping with the tradition of Hamiltonian foreign policy realism that is averse to humanitarian interventions to spread Democracy, and which instead prioritizes military operations that serve America’s strategic interests.

However, if the decision were mine I would not have approved the strike primarily because, as a result of this attack, American operations against ISIS in Syria are now made at least somewhat more complex than before.

The Syrian theater of operations is already dangerously Byzantine enough with forces from Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, Turkey, the official Syrian government, and disparate rebel groups all maneuvering across Syria for power.  The chances Iran, Russia, Assad – or some other undesirable alliance of regional actors – will try to sabotage directly or indirectly our primary mission against ISIS have increased.

If our existing forces in Syria subsequently encounter more obstacles we will have to commit more military resources to get them back on offense.  This could be especially taxing if these problems occur at the same time we are organizing for military action against North Korea.  To minimize the potential for further complications we should accelerate our campaign against ISIS so that we will be out of Syria, or at least winding down our presence, by the time matters come to a head at the Korean Peninsula.

However, I must admit that although I myself would not have approved the attack against Assad for the reasons listed it is for me a very close call between firing a warning to Assad or ignoring him.

The reasons Tillerson made in favor of the attack are sound, logical, and serve the national interest enough for me to almost agree with it, and cannot be dismissed as easily as can proposals to forcibly remove Assad from power.

We hope yesterday’s airstrikes against Syria were only warning shots to the Assad regime and not the opening move of a campaign that will lead to his removal from power because none of the facts that led us to conclude Assad is the least bad option in Syria are changed by Assad’s attacks against his own citizens.

Those facts are simply that there is no possibility whatsoever the government of Assad can be replaced by anything other than Islamic terrorists and warlords orders of magnitude worse than Assad ever was.  The primitive nature of the Islamic religion and savage nature of its adherents inherently prohibit the civilized norms required to sustain prosperous democracies ever taking hold in the Muslim world.

Since the start of the Cold War, and especially since its end, the history of the Middle East has been littered with examples of Muslim strongmen or military juntas that fell out of international favor because they brutalized their own people, but whose “democratic” successors turned out to be worse than their tyrannical, but stabilizing, authoritarian predecessors.

The rule of the Shah was replaced by the worse rule of the Ayatollahs.  The fall of Gadhaffi led to Libya being carved up by Al Qaeda and ISIS warlords.  The weakening of the secular Turkish military freed Erdogan to saber rattle against the West and Turkey’s non-Western enemies.  The arrest of Egypt’s President Mubarak opened a path for Muslim Brotherhood terrorists to temporarily assuming power.

The only examples where a change of regime led to an improvement in the international balance of power were those that led to the rise of a Western backed Islamic dictator in defiance of the democratic preferences of ordinary Muslims:  The Shah’s CIA endorsed overthrow of Mohamed Mossadeq; the Egyptian military’s coup against Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood controlled government, and various Turkish juntas that periodically took power during the Cold War.

By his chemical attack against a town sympathetic to the rebels Assad has erred greatly in testing how far the Trump administration would be willing acquiesce to Assad’s humanitarian abuses because of a lack of any remotely civilized alternative to Assad.

It would be a greater error on the part of the Trump administration to think Assad’s most recent offense means the alternatives to Assad are any better than they were last week when the administration appeared willing to grudgingly live with Assad.

Metternich, Volume V page 418

June 4, 1834. — Prince Esterhazy will doubtless have spoken to you of a most interesting conversation he has had with King Louis Philippe. What I beg you to insist upon is, that I do not dread the Republic more than it is to he dreaded; a fact contradicted by the King, who apparently does not fear it at all. In order to make myself clearly understood, I need only tell you that I mean by anarchy, the Republic. I know very well that the Republic — in other words a Republican Government affording the prospect of stability — is not what is in store for France, but anarchy under the colours of the Republic, for no one will ever proclaim anarchy.

Emmanuel Macron

April, 2017. — “Nationalism is war. I know it. I come from a region that is full of graveyards.”

Macron’s answer to Le Pen’s Nationalism is EU Supranationalism; Supranationalism being the European equivalent of American Progressivism.

Macron’s Muslim appeasing Supranationalism will, far from preventing war, culminate in civil war within five years should he win the French Presidency.  But, paraphrasing Metternich’s point, not even Macron will proclaim civil war.  Instead he proclaims the civil war that will result from his policies Supranationalism; and he promotes this euphemism for civil war as an antidote to the militaristic nationalism of the early 20th century wrongly associated with Le Pen’s Democratic Nationalism.

To the French people the election is a choice between maintaining the false comforts of the EU welfare state and euro currency with the independent Technocrat candidate Macron, or rolling the dice with Le Pen’s nationalism which will very likely lead to the complete disintegration of the EU.

Sadly, Macron is the favorite to win because too many French would rather buy into his status quo illusion that civil war is peace than step into the risky world of independence.

The lesson to take from France’s sorry condition is that the welfare state cannot be reconciled with Conservatism or Nationalism as a number of Nationalists have recently argued.  The welfare state is a comfortable slavery that leaves the citizenry too weak to naturally adopt Nationalism – even when civil war is around the corner as in the case of France – because Nationalism inherently requires self-sufficiency.

The narrative continues to backfire on the Progressives who conjured up out of nothing that chimera.

Just as we predicted:

The flimsy allegations Russia somehow coordinated with the Trump campaign have trapped the accusers in a catch-22 they have no obvious way to escape from:

• If the Obama administration did have the Trump campaign wiretapped, numerous Obama officials are at risk of becoming targets of criminal investigations.
• If the Obama administration did not have the Trump campaign wiretapped, no actual evidence of collusion with Russia was found because if it was it would have surely been leaked during the campaign.

In either case the Progressives can do little more with their allegations. If they insist on their investigation going forward the Left risks Trump retaliating with his own investigation into the legality of the wiretaps. Based on the non-denial denials coming from Obama officials it is doubtful they believe they will come out of an investigation looking better than Trump.

If the Progressives back off their story they are admitting they knew their reported accusations were based on little to no evidence.

…

Judged by the standards intelligence operations the Shallow State has proven a total failure and it leaves the observer with no reason to believe it will be more successful in the future.

One of the first rules of counter-intelligence is to not alert enemies too soon about monitoring efforts. When Germany’s enigma code was cracked by the Allies Churchill did not warn British citizens about the timing of planned German airstrikes he had learned about through deciphered intercepts. Churchill chose not to act on that information early so the Germans would not know to change their encryption codes.

The Shallow State is beginning to pay heavily for ignoring this iron rule.

Instead of telling Obama personnel to lie low for a few years and slowly gather information about the Trump administration, the impatient former administration has stupidly let Trump in on their game before Trump had enough time to get involved in a major Presidential scandal, even if he had planned on getting into one.

The early leaks to the media (and the exceptionally stupid bragging about their incompetent “coup” on Twitter) has given Trump reason to clear out former Obama personnel, tighten internal communications, knock the Russia-Trump hysteria off course with a single tweet, discredit a questionable FBI Director whose days may well be numbered, crackdown on disobedient agencies, and either investigate or threaten to investigate Obama era officials.

In exchange for handing Trump these serious long term advantages the Left can only count as victories the resignation of Mike Flynn (whose resignation will prove advantageous to Trump since it disposed of a problem case before Flynn had time to become entangled in a worse scandal), temporary social media euphoria, and a “Russia stole the election” narrative too weak and broken to hang a pussyhat on.

We have these further thoughts –

It now appears the Progressives wound up with the worst of both worlds – there was legally dubious monitoring of Trump’s circle and that monitoring turned up nothing.

Susan Rice is a standout political hack even by the standards of the Obama White House.  If there had been a true criminal link between the Trump campaign and the government of Russia, Rice would certainly have leaked the information to the press during the election campaign.  The fact she was unable to pinpoint such collusion with the full capacity of the American intelligence community at her disposal and the grand prize of the Presidency hanging in the balance is strong evidence there is no such link.

The Progressives exhausted their best attempt to investigate Trump-Russia during the campaign.  If they found nothing in that time span then the Trump-Russia well is most likely dry.

The Obama-Monitoring well, however, is likely untapped.  We heartily recommend the Trump White House explore it to the full extent possible now that the Progressives have very stupidly invited him to do so.

We are very amused to see Progressives react to yesterday’s reports about Rice’s handling of sensitive information by arguing that, even if true, no crime was committed by her doing so.  They had better not bet money on that theory.  The numerous Federal statutes dealing with classified information are so complex that a plausible indictment against Susan Rice and other senior Obama advisers would not be at all difficult to design.

At a minimum, those laws are complex enough that Rice and other Obama figures would be tied up in legal knots for years in court even if the case is weak and all of the accused are ultimately exonerated on every charge.

If Rice were confident she acted completely within legal boundaries she would not have said she had nothing to do with the alleged unmasking.  We look forward to a robust criminal investigation to see what else she and other Obama era officials may be hiding.

We told Secretary Tillerson to back Assad.  And now he has.

His reasons for endorsing Assad are good because they are Pragmatically Distributed’s reasons:

As #NeverTrump did during the election, their opposition to Assad is justified while either avoiding what the alternative to their #NeverCandidate is guaranteed to be, or deluding themselves in the hope there is a viable third candidate to save everyone from two undesirable options.

Few things in foreign affairs are as certain as the fact there is no Democratic 3rd option in Syria.

The time for #NeverAssad to have their say was in the primaries between Assad, ISIS and other equally loathsome terrorist groups, and those ever elusive Islamic “moderates”.

Primary season is over; the general election is now, and those Westernized moderates – as always happens in Muslim “democracies” – were beheaded on the floor of the party conventions by amphetamine-addled delegates, their wives and children sold into chattel sex slavery, and their Western bank accounts stripped clean of every digital penny.  You can believe us when we say no one throws a nomination convention quite like ISIS!

This obscenely Darwinian process has selected for a simple binary choice between two tyrants –

• Bashar Assad
• The various Islamic terrorist rebels opposed to Assad, the most powerful of which is ISIS

Setting aside any delusions that the world can enjoy #NeverAssad without #AlwaysBaghdadi, and understanding that only one of these two characters can win, Pragmatically Distributed gets to the point and asks what condition will Syria be left in following an Assad or rebel victory:

We applaud Tillerson taking our informed advice that a post-Assad Syria will be no more interested in human rights than post-Gadhaffi Libya now is.

We do question the wisdom of the Russia-Turkey backed peace plan.  Their proposal would have Syria divided into three zones of influence with Assad the titular head of all three but leaving a degree of local autonomy for the various Syrian factions in each zone who are now at each other’s throats.

We would prefer Assad simply lay waste to any remaining zones of resistance – civilian casualties be damned – and rule the entirety of Syria with an iron fist.  Granting regional privileges seems to us just a temporary truce that will be broken by pro-ISIS Syrians once time is used to regroup, rearm, and position themselves for a new civil war.

It is a sad commentary on the state of modern day Absolutism that neither Putin nor Erdogan, both genuine authoritarians, remember how to run a true scorched earth campaign in the examples set by the Romanovs and Ottomans.

But we suppose it will do for now to squash the deadliest threat facing the Syrian people – allowing Syrian Muslims the freedom to choose their own leadership.

Granting that circumstances are always subject to change, it is for the moment true that Marine Le Pen has run into a ceiling of public support encountered by other European Nationalists since Britain voted to exit the European Union.

We at Pragmatically Distributed see the inverse link connecting Britain’s referendum to the plateauing fortunes of anti-EU populists as, simply, the public on the Continent realizing (correctly) that if another large EU member goes over to populism that the complete disintegration of the European Union becomes a strong possibility.

The electorates of Western Europe can, like de Gaulle once did, envision the EU functioning without Britain.  With its individualistic tendencies Britain was always reluctant to embrace “pooled sovereignty”, too wealthy (except for a brief period in the 1970s) to truly be sold on the idea their normally strong economy benefited from the petty Technocrats seated in Brussels, and too close to the United States to support anti-American EU Supranationalists when it counted.  The end of the bad marriage of Britain with Belgium is arguably survivable because it was, to a degree, expected.

France is an entirely different matter.

No one can envision the EU existing with a President Marine Le Pen threatening to withdraw France from European Monetary Union; particularly the French electorate which overwhelmingly opposes leaving the euro.  The post-Britain EU is already in a precarious enough state with Italy threatening to elect an anti-euro Parliament and Greece’s unpopular, radical Left (i.e., Proletarian Socialist) SYRIZA government led by Alexis Tsipras toying with the idea of having its revenge against the Troika by defaulting on its debt; a default that may well spark a new European banking crisis.

Even Eastern Europe, where they have so far gotten away with rejecting EU imposed immigration mandates while still enjoying wealth transfers from Western Europe, finds the prospect of another populist victory worrisome because the end of the EU will be the end of their subsidies.

The French, unfortunately, also realize what a vote for Le Pen entails.  Unless the French warm to the idea of returning to the franc very soon the independent Liberal candidate Macron is set to win the election.

Meanwhile, Britain has invoked Article 50. We applaud the start of their exit from that most thoroughly developed manifestation of Dictatorial Bureaucracy.  We encourage them to drive a hard bargain in the exit negotiations.  If, as expected, an anti-euro government wins elections in Italy this year Brussels will be ought of economic leverage to deny Britain generous trade and financial terms.

This is also an opportunity for England to destroy the loathsome SNP.  The SNP has been agitating for a second Scottish independence referendum.  Their calls must surely be hollow bluffs because Scotland would almost certainly vote against leaving the UK since, if they opted for independence, they would then have to either launch their own currency to replace pound sterling or begin applying to enter the EU.  The currency of an independent Scotland start out as exceptionally weak.  Joining the euro would require Scotland to cripple itself trying meet the entry requirements for a currency that may not exist in the years it would take Scotland to join the EU.

We recommend Britain call the SNP’s bluff and agree to a second independence referendum.  If the vote fails for a second time, the SNP will be politically obsolete when they are robbed of the ability to pretend Scottish nationhood is a possibility as they have been pretending at election time for decades.

We have previously explored the need for legislation to convert all Federal government workers (except for those serving in the military, Federal law enforcement, and the Judiciary) from hard to dismiss unionized employees to at-will employees dismissable at the whim of the President.

Exemptions should be granted to military and law enforcement personnel because they already have adequate, if not perfect, hiring and firing rules; the Judiciary is exempted to maintain its Constitutionally defined status as an independent branch of government.

Aside from these exemptions, the power of the President to remove Civil Servants should be fully restored in order to bring the FedGov bureaucracy under the strict control of the Executive, which is how the founders intended the bureaucracy to fit in the Federal system, and to break the Bureaucratic State’s present freedom to act as a Technocratic Fourth branch of government acting independently of the other three branches and the voters.

Any restoration of the, now completely broken, chain of command between the Executive and the Civil Service brings with it the potential problem of restoring the corruption produced by the Hamiltonian Spoils System of Golden Age America.  This corruption was the result of President’s excessively using Federal government positions to reward political cronies.  Although I would without hesitation prefer the worst political scandals of the Golden Age over the best of today’s politics, it is still preferable to mitigate the potential for excessive Spoils System cronyism if only to prevent unnecessarily handing the Progressives scandals they can hold up to justify making the Civil Service again independent of the Executive.

To head off this problem, our ideal Civil Service legislation would include the following items –

• All new Civil Servant candidates must be approved by the Senate just as Cabinet Secretaries are.
• Because the above would require the Senate vote on potentially thousands of candidates at once, to save time the Senate could, for every vote, vote on slates of multiple candidates on a single list submitted to the Senate by the President.
• A single Senator will have the power to block any nominee they find objectionable from appearing on a candidate list that is to be voted on for Senate approval.
• All candidates must meet certain requirements before they can take their Civil Service job, such as having no criminal background, passing drug tests, etc.
• Forbid the President from nominating bureaucrats who have had personal financial dealings with the President in any capacity over the past 20 years (or some other span of time).
• To avoid running afoul of Supreme Court rulings forbidding the President from making unilateral cuts to the Federal budget, the President will be required to nominate a replacement for every vacancy made by his dismissal of an existing Civil Service bureaucrat instead of just letting the position (and the money budgeted for that position) go unfilled.

The advantage of these policies rests in that they would make it harder for the President to seat very objectionable candidates for government jobs while at the same time giving him great freedom to remove any government bureaucrat from a previous administration.

An easy-to-fire/hard-to-hire Civil Service rearrangement of the Federal workforce is far more advantageous to Conservatives than Progressives because a Conservative President like Trump can easily afford to leave government positions temporarily unfilled if the Senate delays and stalls votes on his  nominees to the bureaucracy.  Trump would be especially happy with any Senate obstruction if, in exchange for this obstruction, he is handed the statutory power to unilaterally remove vast swathes of existing bureaucrats, at any time, without Congressional approval.

Technocratic Progressives, whose reason for existence is to give as much unconstitutional power to tyrannical government bureaucrats as possible, have little to gain from our outline of a restored Spoils System because Republican Senators would be empowered to block the most objectionable nominees of a Democratic President and because the Progressive political system is inherently more dependent on an activist Bureaucracy than any Republican Presidential administration.

Paul Ryan

We predicted Ryan was courting failure of Obamacare repeal by ignoring the concerns Conservative Congressmen held about the bill.

Ryan ignored our advice, continued on his path to try sneak a flimsy repeal bill under the noses of Conservatives, and was finally humiliated because of his disregard for reality.

His Speakership has probably been wounded beyond repair even if he limps on in the position for a time.

Ryan’s position is in jeopardy because his major constituents, the Republican establishment, now know Ryan cannot be trusted to move their preferred legislation through the House, he is not feared after this week’s debacle, and through his failure has proven he is not a shrewd enough legislative tactician to outmaneuver Conservative House members.  And if Ryan is too weak to defeat the Freedom Caucus Ryan is even more unsuitable as an obstacle to Trump’s formidable political capacities.

Trump, of course, has many reasons to see Ryan replaced as Speaker.  Aside from the obvious personal animus that brewed between them during the campaign, Trump cannot have anymore confidence in the ability of Ryan to move legislation than establishment Republicans do.

A crippled Speaker, disloyal to his party’s then-nominee now-President throughout the election, and incompetent at passing laws can be of no utility as a lieutenant to Trump’s agenda when Trump demands his political underlings be formidable operatives.

A number of Trump advisers would also like to see Ryan’s Speakership come to an end as a way of finally dispensing with Ryan-ally Reince Priebus.  Priebus is not only mistrusted by Trump’s most Conservative advisers.  Others such as Secretary Mnuchin are irritated with Priebus’ interference in their roles as well as his, at best, lackluster performance coordinating legislation with Congress.

The sooner Ryan is toppled the better for Trump.

Obamacare – Can it be Repealed?

Many believe repeal will be almost impossible to pull off because Obamacare is an entitlement.  This is incorrect.  Obamacare is not an entitlement because its insurance offerings are expensive for the non-poor.  In reality, Obamacare for everyone modestly above the poverty line is very costly private insurance designed according to poorly thought out, government imposed, specifications.

Because Obamacare is not welfare it remains vulnerable to repeal in the future.

The London Terror Attack

Finally we more attacks such as the one that took place outside Britain’s Parliament because ISIS feels increasingly cornered.  They are losing ground in Syria and Iraq to Assad loyalists and his Russian allies before Trump’s Pentagon begins its own military operations.  Their oil revenues have decreased proportionate to their loss of territory.  As they feel the noose tightening they have every reason to use whatever operatives they have in Europe and the United States and cause as much havoc as possible before they are wiped out in the Levant.

 

Moscow is anxious to begin negotiations with Trump based on the recent statements of Russian officials.  The expressed mood in Russia is one of mild frustration at what they sense is a slow pace to normalizing relations with America.

So that these concerns may be smoothed over before a lack of initiative turns them into more significant obstacles we recommend Putin simply discuss diplomatic relations directly with Trump.

The important thing to keep in mind about Trump is that he often does not know details about and is not firmly wedded to specifics related to his broad policy outlines.

What this means for diplomacy with Russia is that Trump needs to be prompted before he will dive substantively into topics that are priorities to Russia but that are either not high priorities for Trump or that he is not aware of.  In the absence of the nudge a direct discussion with Putin would provide it is possible that Trump will not feel compelled to further focus on Russian-American ties since they have not become worse since he took office and, therefore, from his perspective do not require greater attention.

Continue reading “Reviving American Relations with Russia”