Monday, August 3, 2020

Beware the high Cost of Hawkishness

Jed Babbin wrote an article to say he is not happy about the party platform of the Democrats because it reverses the military posture of the Trump administration, and by extension its foreign policy as well.

Babbin criticized the Democrats for wishing to put in place a policy of good relations with friends and allies while avoiding the policies that would exacerbate bad relations America may have with foes and rivals.

But even though Babbin keeps referring to the “defense” policy of America, he does not show where the country's defenses are lacking. And so, you realize that when he says defense, he means the offense capabilities of America. This ranges from the projection of power overseas to the ability of defeating one or a combination of enemies on their turf.

Babbin's article came under the title: “Democrats' 2020 platform reverses every aspect of Trump's foreign and defense policies,” published on July 31, 2020 in The Washington Times. The following is how he closes his arguments:

“The most risible of the platform's claims is that the Democrats will ensure our military has no peer. Biden made no objection to the $600 billion in defense cuts Obama imposed in disregard of the threats we face and our military's ability to defeat those threats. Biden can be counted on to do the same. He is a disciple of Obama. If Biden is elected, he will multiply the mistakes his mentor made, and America will be in greater danger than it is now”.

But what is it that endangers America so much, it is imperative in the eyes of Jed Babbin, to restore those $600 billion to the military budget? Well, Babbin says there are two good reasons for that. They can be explained by looking at the difference in mentality between America's foes and America's would-be defenders. Here is the latter's mentality as described by Jed Babbin:

“Platforms are prepared to advertise a candidate's views. Biden's is a much different platform than former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran on four years ago. In 2016, Mrs. Clinton's platform pretended to be serious about national defense. It advocated continuation of a predictable defense budget that meets the challenges we face. It argued for ensuring our military is the best equipped in the world, which implied a huge increase in defense spending. Biden's draft platform states a far more passive view of America's role in the world”.

As to the mentality of America's foes, here is what Babbin had to say about it:

“The 2020 Democrats say they will end the war in Afghanistan by leading with diplomacy, protecting us from terrorist threats, enabling the Kabul government and bringing our troops home. But unless the enemy is defeated, it gets an equal vote on how peace can be made. And the Taliban is anything but defeated. Not only does the draft platform fail to recognize that the Taliban's ideological will to fight is undiminished, it also ignores the Russian, Chinese and Pakistani support for the Taliban in opposition to peace on our terms”.

What Jed Babbin wants now is “peace on our terms.” It is no longer: “Fighting them over there so as not to fight them over here.” It is no longer the liberation of Afghanistan's adult women, and the schooling of the country's girls. It is no longer the elimination of the narcotics trade, and no longer the imposition of a Jeffersonian democracy on a primitive culture at the heart of East Asia. No. It is none of that.

After nearly 20 years of failures, thousands of dead American soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of dead local civilians, Jed Babbin wants to spend trillions more of borrowed money, and kill millions of additional soldiers and civilians to do what? To chase after the elusive peace on “our” terms, says Jed Babbin.

The history thus described began on 9/11 of the year 2001 when 2,977 people were killed by a terrorist attack that was designed in Afghanistan and controlled from there. Well, there are 52 weeks in a year. If you can imagine a 9/11 being repeated once a week for a whole year, the number of dead Americans will amount to 154,804. Guess what, my friend. This is how many COVID-19 has killed in America so far ... and counting.

As of now, people are blaming the Corona virus for that calamity. But in the same way that people eventually came to blame Assad for the death of the Syrians killed by foreign terrorists, there will come a day when people will call the pandemic, “Trump's pandemic,” and call the dead, “Trump's victims”.

And of course, they will attach a nefarious motivation to Donald Trump for causing the horror. They will say he got involved in an egotistical wrangle with the doctors and scientists who were doing their job.

The people will further say that Donald Trump wanted to con his base of religious prostitutes into believing that he learned more about science and medicine than the experts by grabbing the pussies of women in Hollywood and elsewhere.

They will attribute to him saying that he learned more by that method than the doctors and scientists learned during all the years they spent learning about and practicing their professions.

But the “good” news, if you can believe it, is that from among those who will not blame Donald Trump for the calamity, will be Jed Babbin who will blame Joe Biden instead.