A Vacuum is not a Void

Charles Krauthammer is one smart Jew who gets confused once in a while, so you have to straighten him out when he strays too far. And the lesson he needs to learn today is that “a vacuum is not a void, and a wannabe filler is almost always toxic.” Krauthammer is showing a gap in his knowledge with the article he wrote under the title: “A Disaster of His Own Making” and the subtitle: “Obama, not Bush, is responsible for the return of the Islamist insurgency in Iraq.” It was published on June 19, 2014 in national Review Online.

One of the many things that fascinates me about the mental development of children is that they reach a certain age – different for every child – at which point they find it difficult to believe something existed before they came to be. They feel comfortable thinking, even if they know they are wrong, that everything they see around them happened the day they were born or after that. You see an analogue of this among the cultures that believe they are so advanced, they fill a vacuum everywhere they go. This is why the Europeans feel they “discovered” the Americas and Australia. It is also why the Americans feel that a void exists where they have not been.

It is that mentality which tells Charles Krauthammer there is a vacuum in Iraq that America should fill. Starting with this premise, he jumps into the ongoing debate concerning the point: Who is more at fault – Bush or Obama – when it comes to the current situation in Iraq? It is that the Jihadist offshoot of al-Qaeda has scored big filling what must look like a vacuum to those debaters.

The reality, however, is that whichever way they define vacuum, it does not mean there is a void somewhere; it only means there is not the sort of thing they believe is necessary to have in there. Whereas the people who live in Iraq want to see peace and quiet more than anything else, Krauthammer and those like him want to see military power above everything else.

To make this point clear, the author of the article must show that Obama made a mistake when he failed to “conclude a status-of-forces agreement” with Iraq. Regardless as to why this agreement was not concluded or who was at fault for the fact that it was not, what Krauthammer says after that is what demonstrates that a gap exists between the reality of this situation and all such situations, and between what people fantasize when they believe there is a void where they see a vacuum they think was created by their absence.

And what he says as do all those who argue like him is that America should have insisted on leaving at least 20,000 troops in Iraq because it is the strategy that worked in South Korea where 28,500 American troops were left at the end of the Korean war, and worked in Japan where 38,000 troops were left at the end of WW II.

What these people fail to grasp is that troops left in South Korea and Japan to act as a tripwire that would serve to mobilize the entire American military and prepare it to fight a conventional war, played the role of deterrent effectively. This is because if worse came to worse, they would have been pitted against a conventional army, be it a reconstituted Japanese military, a Chinese army that had returned to North Korea or the (old) Soviet army that had decided to take on the American Pacific force. Also, if the tripwire was tripped, bombs of all sorts would have been sent to demolish high value targets that the governments of North Korea, China, Japan and the Soviet Union were not prepared to sacrifice for whatever reason.

In contrast, the Jihadists and those they call terrorists see no high value targets they worry about. In fact, if anything, they want the Americans to destroy what is there because it is a surefire way for them to get the masses of the people in the bombed out countries to come to their side. Thus, the problem in Iraq was not that Obama failed to negotiate leaving behind a residual force; the problem was that the charade they call democracy is what allowed Maliki to alienate the Sunnis who then voided the deal they had worked out with General David Petraeus to keep the terrorists out.

The conclusion we must draw is that the fault was not Obama's failure to scare those who commit suicide defending their cause; the fault was the faulty democracy that Bush tried to shove down the throat of people who developed an allergy to it, having tried it and discovered that it was a form of Jewish domination in disguise; one that was toxic to their system.