Charlie Wilson’s War

Considering what happened to Afghanistan after the Soviet armed forces pulled out and left their collaborationist regime dangling to await overthrow by the Taliban and establishment of the al-Qaida camps that shortly followed, I would say that we ought to have paid the Russians to permanently occupy the fucking place. Chances are that if we had done just that, the World Trade Center in New York would still be standing today.

Some of you folks sound as though you never take into account the unintended consequences of the principles that you regard as holy writ. Which is a really shallow way to think.
 
No, I truly do not give a shit about communism, which, except for the way it set up Stalin’s dictatorship to indusrialize Russia and fight off the Nazis, accomplished little more than to put their whole society into poverty and pain.

But all things considered, I sure as hell would have preferred to see young Russians rather than young Americans facing enemy fire keeping all those tribesmen in line in Afghanistan. I was sorry then the commies lost that way, and I’m even sorrier today, now that I’ve seen what has happened over the past 18-19 years.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Vigilante,

I’m hardly what you could rightfully call a callow youth. I recently passed my 74th birthday, served in the United States Army late in the Korea War (1952-1955), spent almost two years overseas in the early 1970s, and have studied history the way some people study big league ballclub scores. I have degrees in journalism and communications and in urban and regional planning.
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Dean,

The cold war with the Soviet Union ground to a halt even before Breshnev and the politburo gerontocracy croaked.

Moreover, that cold war was relatively easy for the West to handle, because we were dealing with a single identifiable and well-organized leadership, that of the Soviet Union, and all of whose personalities were characterized by a high degree of rationality and an instinct to avoid pushing confrontations with us to the level of an all-out shooting war.

The present cold war of the West, which has been accurately characterized by professor Samuel Huntington as a clash of civilizations, is the one in which we are engaged against Islam. In this cold war, we are not merely confronting the leadership of a hostile political and economic system such as the one that had taken power in Russia in 1917. 

Instead, we face the hostilities of most of the populations of north Africa, the middle east and much of southern Asia, on out eastwards to the southern Phillipine islands and far southeastern Asia. And there we face a system of hatred for the West that is nurtured by their religion and even its local preachers of that religion, almost certainly in scores of thousands of their religious schools, which, in the main, are the only schools the islamic cultures organize, pay for, maintain, and permit their children to culturally indoctrinated.

This particular cold war was organized even before their great prophet died almost 14 centuries ago. And regardless of any supposed truces or accommodations they claim to make with the rest of the world, they still regard themselves as the dar al-islam — the house of submission — and the rest of us as the dar al harb — the house of war.

If so, then irrespective of what you think or wish today, your great-great grandchildren will be facing this particular cold war — this clash of civilizations — and either standing up to it or succumbing to it.

And so too will their great-great grandchildren. Because there never shall be true peace with the dar al-islam. Only minor accommodations that they deem shall neither threaten the death-grip of their culture over their own populations, nor their ability to spread that cultural grip elsewhere in the world, such as the continent that stood up against them for so long but is know becoming known as Eurabia.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
   

Vigilante,

You are corresponding here with a man who thinks in totally ruthless terms and who has no beliefs whatsoever, other than the certain knowledge that life is vicious, cruel and uncertain, and that only the fittest or the temporarily lucky survive.

So I think saving russian ass in Afghanistan in the 1980s would have been an excellent idea. For the same reason that sending 10000 2-1/2 ton army trucks, along with the rest of the 11 billion dollars in military assistance under the US Lend-Lease program that we sent to Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union in World War II, was also a perfect idea that fit the needs of the moment. That moment was the destruction of nazi Germany.

Why them in particular? Because the Germans were threatening the English-speaking world and the Russians were not. And because the Russians had the manpower, the factories to produce their own armaments, and the great lass mass that Hitler’s armies could invade but never conquer. Roosevelt and Churchill indeed made the smart move in their grand alliance with the russian communist leadership. At least for the duration of the war, which is what they limited it to.
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As for the Moslems, I think you have it all wrong about the religious fakirs and nihilists.  It may be true that they make enemies as they kill. But even faster, they make emulators.

But as I see it, there is a bright side to all this. And that is the fact that the islamic populations only began burgeoning after the onset of the age of cheap, ubiquitous and relatively high-grade petroleum, much of which was found in Arabia and the Persian Gulf states. 

But recently, the world’s fossil fuels have begun  running out. Especially petroleum, the peak production of which was in about the third quarter of 2005. In the face of world demand for petroleum that continues to increase 2.7 percent per year, largely driven by the industrialization of China and India and the rapidly growing use by the population of vehicle fuels refined from crude oil, worldwide production of this presently most vital of all non-replenishable energy sources is expected to begin its long-awaited — and long-feared — permanent production decline in about 2-4 years.

In expectation of just that event, farmlands all across this planet are starting to grow crops for fuel and not merely for food. That, plus the greatly increasing expense of petroleum-based fertilizers and the endlessly increasing costs of shipping bulk food products around the planet, has begun causing serious food shortages around most of Africa and south parts of southern Asia.

World population was about 1.5 billion at the beginning of this all-too-temporary age of ubiquitous petroleum about 100 years ago. It had doubled to 3 billion people when I was born in the early 1930s.  But this 21st century will be one marked by a rapidly disappearing supply of fossil fuels that can be easily extracted and converted to vehicle fuels, agricultural fertilizers, the myriad of plastics now derived from hydrocarbons. 

Therefore, the 21st century will be an age marked by massive economic dislocations and hordes of hungry refugees who will be turned away at every border by every organized government. It will also be an age in which people will kill their own fetuses in order not to have to starve themselves to be able to feed the children that would result from such births. This has happened before in human history. It will happen again.

So, the more I think about all this and where it is headed, I think the world population will shrink back to what it was before the petroleum was discovered and made available.

And I also think that when the world settles down again, the descendants of the survivors will not give much thought to the billions who died or were never born.

But what does all that have to do with the islamic countries? They are the among the least productive in terms of feeding themselves from the resources of their own lands. Therefore, in the universal food shortages that I am certain are coming, their populations will stabilize and then shrink, at a rate greater than for the rest of the world as a whole.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI