He Is Sam

In my piece a few weeks back, Joel Gillespie for President - Presenting My Cabinet, I wrote...

"For National Security Adviser I'd go with my good friend Sam. He knows everything about everything. Really, he does. He's amazing."

The other day I did a short little thing on the Kosovo/Serbia tensions entitled WW V.

Billy wrote a worthy and interesting response, to which I wrote a short response back, and then yesterday my friend Sam wrote this:

To offer a little perspective on this ...

The current Serb-Kosovar mess will not lead to another World War. I'd be surprised if it leads to much of anything, other than another enclave/breakaway province in the perpetually troubled Balkans. WWI hinged on the Balkans because of the bellicose alliances European nations got sucked into as they armed themselves to the teeth; it took only a match to set off a powderkeg. If it hadn't been the Balkans, WWI would've started over some other relatively petty assassination, border dispute, international incident, etc. Everyone wanted that war, until everyone saw how horrifying modern war could get -- and by then, it was too late.

Neither the Cold War nor the War on Terror (whatever that means) is WW3. Not even close. Only the Norman Podhoretzes of this world have the fevered lapses of intellect to imagine that a fairly normal state of global affairs is a "world war."

Can't compare U.S. military operations to other invasions because the purposes were different. The Germans invaded other countries for conquest, as did so many empires of the past. We pursued al Qaeda in Afghanistan because the Taliban was providing them safe cover; our purposes were very specific and limited. As a happy side effect of that, the Taliban's government fell. (Then Bush blew it, big time, by shifting all our military resources to an ill-advised invasion of Iraq, but that's way too much to go into here.)

Germany at the dawn of WWII (or at any other point) was nowhere near being "the closest thing to a superpower the world had ever known." How about the Roman Empire, Greek Empire under Alexander, Mongol empire during the Khan line, Carthage at the height of its powers, among many others -- all controlled far greater land, far greater wealth, far more people relative to the standards of their time. Germany was effectively countered by the Soviets in the east, the Allies in the west, and had a mighty short run. In most cases, the aforementioned empires crumbled from within. That is a better analogy to our own "soft" empire.

Also, the majority of grassroots insurgencies have been utterly demolished. Only the rare ones gain any traction whatsoever. Again, read a good history (Gibbon's is a good one) of the Roman empire. Do you know how many pitched rebellions the Romans crushed during their long reign? The Soviets and their various satellites and allies? Heck, Russia was long the land of the failed revolution before 1905 (the first big failed one).

Point being that you can't compare apples and oranges. I'm no warmonger, and I oppose our occupation of Iraq and want ALL of our troops to return home post-haste, including those at the nearly 700 bases we have worldwide. But I also don't compare even our misguided foreign policy with imperial conquest.

A far greater threat to our nation comes from within, and it is composed of economic decline, increasing balkanization via uncontrolled immigration (sans assimilation) and identity-group politics, and declining cultural standards -- which are, after all, what binds us together in the first place, to the extent it does.

Just my .02 "ameros"! (;-}

As I said above...