The east west dance continues…

The frustration and moral outrage over the Iranian abduction of the 15 Brits touches the most sensitive of western nerves. But the world also has other terrible things going on to include genocide in Dafur, blatant thuggery in Zimbabwe, small wars in the southern Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Horn of Africa, and the narco-state areas in southwest Asia and South America. And this is the short list. How about gang warfare in L.A. and the 20,000 person riots in China to begin to expand the list?

Having been on the pointy end of the spear (though back on the blade) one might consider balancing emotional outrage and frustration with a cold hard look at our National Interests, and deciding what courses of action should be applied. And of course where you are on the spear also depends on where one is during a career. And the period of a career often includes increasing exposures to how others think, to include many in the more eastern third world part of the world. Knowing how others think is important, and some westerners don’t get it. The most classic example of this in the last 50 years is the failed Limited War Doctrine: one premise was that others would think and respond like we would.

Most outraged western people look to a military response for all the right reasons. It might succeed, it certainly sends a political message, and if anybody can do it, the military can. Unfortunately, this is all too often too hopeful since the bad guys don’t cooperate, the locations and distances are extreme, and the supporter suggestions often sound like off or on, with no in-between.

Of course the bad guys are not 10 feet tall, though one might question this if reading all the western media reports. The most obvious example of this in the last 15 years is nuclear weapons. There are more than two open source reports of the Iranians buying 3 or 4 Russian nukes in 1991 from Kazakhstan. I’ll leave the details out because it is worth noting they have not used them since. Why? Perhaps it has to do with shelf-life problems, maintenance skills, PAL (unlocking codes), or Russian political control? Something similar probably applies to the recent North Korean nuclear fizzle. And don’t leave out the Iranian very senior physicist who died mid-January at the Natanz atomic facility due to gas-poisoning (he may have been assassinated). Bottom line, these fellows are not 10 feet tall, and the western press may not report it all. And we Americans or Europeans are not the only ones knocking down these people to less than 10 feet tall. Give the Turks credit last summer during 2006 when they turned back an Iranian flight into Syria. Why the Iranians turned around on this, their third flight over Turkish airspace, nobody knows at the citizen level.

Let’s advance to today’s world, the real world. That which is going on in so many places is just outrageous, morally repugnant, and deserving of a response. The normal hand wringing feel good response is to do something like our former Secretary of State writes about: talking, protesting, and other do-gooder things. She even has included Bishop Desmond Tutu, who I hope lives in the west since the Xhosa are running South Africa into the ground. And, in an opinion, this is the best course of action because it is not in almost all nations’ National Interests to do otherwise. Bitch but let them hang out in the wind.

And so it comes to this … National Interest. What is worth fighting for, and worth sending our children to fight for. The world is both ugly, and not so simple. There are alternatives to on-or-off to our public servants. I hope they choose them. This especially applies to the east west dance.

Do we have political and military leaders who know how to listen and respect those we try to dominate in pursuit of National Interest? I think the militaries have the word, do the politicians? This applies to politicians from America and Europe and Japan. As the environmentalists say: “we have concerns”.