Cyreenik Says
"The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."
-- Omar Bradley testifying to Congress in May 1951
This quote can be said about a lot of wars. One of them is the US getting any more involved in fighting ISIS in Iraq and Syria. (in this quote Bradley was talking about the Korean War nine months after it had started)
Why stay away from ISIS?
The biggest reason is: There is no reason to be there. There are nearly identical conflicts going on in Somalia, Yemen and Libya, and the US is not involved in these. Why single out ISIS in Iraq/Syria for special treatment? In all of the above we have a lot of feuding warlords in a failed nation region. ISIS is nothing special.
Right now, none of these regions has a social structure that can support a national infrastructure. Specifically:
o They don't have an economy that needs a nation.
o They are deeply tribal oriented in their social thinking -- they don't have most of the people ready to not betray people outside of their regional/ethnic groups.
o The ISIS government is premised on End of the World thinking -- when it finishes making the caliphate the End of Times will come. This isn't going to happen, which means ISIS is going to transform dramatically before an enduring form emerges. The current form is not going to last, so why fight with this form?
All-in-all, this is not a situation that the US needs to spend time, money or attention on. Let this work out between locals. If Iran wants to mess with it... good luck to them! It is going to be as expensive for them as it was for the US in the Bush Years. And they will have the same kind of success.
As we are doing in Somalia, Yemen and Libya, our best strategy in dealing with ISIS is to simply walk away and watch for a couple years... or maybe a couple decades. There is no advantage in messing in this region until the various ethnic groups are ready to move beyond the local warlord/imperialist overlord choice. When they are ready to move on, then they can become a nation or nations that will survive and thrive.
In the meantime, let someone else besides the US be the blood-letter for this blood-letting war.
This thought is inspired by this 11 May 15 WSJ article, Washington’s Hidden Tax: $1.9 Trillion The cost of U.S. rules is comparable to the GDP of Canada., which talks about the huge cost of regulations.
From the article, "Americans send $1.4 trillion to Washington each year in individual income taxes. But they are forced to spend even more to pay for another Beltway obligation that never shows up on tax forms. The annual cost imposed by federal rules and regulations now stands at nearly $1.9 trillion. That’s according to the latest “Ten Thousand Commandments” report to be released Tuesday by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. "
This is both a huge expense and a huge deterrent to both business growth and increasing the material prosperity for everyone. We want the rising tide. We want all the boats lifted. That happens the most when business people and workers can concentrate on making their products and services faster, better and cheaper. It happens less and less the more these people are distracted from this main goal by thinking about the uncertainties and threats that capricious regulations and regulators bring to their business arena.
This is a cost we should be working diligently to reduce. If we don't, The Midwest Disease (as I call it) will continue to spread and continue to blight progress all through America's communities.
Closely related is this 14 May 15 WSJ article, The Mystery of Declining Productivity Growth The healthy 2.6% a year from 1995-2010 has since been an anemic 0.4%. What’s scary is that we don’t know why. by Alan S. Blinder, about the mystery of why productivity is growing so slowly.
From the article, "How dry and how lately? I prefer to date the slowdown in productivity growth from the end of 2010 because productivity growth (in the nonfarm business sector) averaged a bountiful 2.6% per annum from mid-1995 through the end of 2010, but only a paltry 0.4% since. Other scholars prefer earlier break points. For example, productivity growth averaged 2.9% from mid-1995 through the end of 2005, but only 1.3% since.
Either way, the drop is large, and the scary thing is that we don’t understand why."
Without steady and large productivity growth the Midwest Disease cannot be cured. We need to figure out why our economy is not growing, and if over-regulating is part of the problem work hard at fixing that.
This 8 May 15 WSJ article, Illinois Pension Blowup State judges tell taxpayers to pay for political-union failure., talks about how the Illinois Supreme Court is blocking pension reform, and in so doing is discouraging business growth in the state. This is Midwest Disease still being experienced, and a fine example of "Blame Them" thinking in action.
From the article, "The Constitution is not a suicide pact—except maybe in Illinois. On Friday the Illinois Supreme Court struck down modest pension reforms as a violation of the state constitution in a decision that tees up state taxpayers for years of tax increases.
The court ruled unanimously that pensions are inviolable under the plain text of the state constitution, which holds that “Membership in any pension or retirement system of the State, any unit of local government or school district, or any agency or instrumentality thereof, shall be an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.” "
When Illinois fails to grow like other regions that pension reform, those that support this status quo will find lots of other reasons for the failure, not their choices and actions on this matter. This is "Blame Them" in action.
Africa is on the move, and that moving seems to be worrying a lot of people.
The migrants crossing the Med are making big news and nativist-based attacks in South Africa are making medium news. Both of these are signs of unrest being caused by economic changing and hard times, and both are yellow flags that things can get worse over the next year or two.
Cyreenik says, "Watch out for even bigger, Arab Spring style, unrest to sweep parts of Africa over the next couple years."
These 25 Apr 15 Economist articles talk about the violence accompanying both these issues. First, Xenophobia in South Africa Blood at the end of the rainbow South Africa’s poor are turning on those even more downtrodden, talks about the rising nativist-based violence happening there.
From the article, "South Africa has experienced such horrors before. During widespread anti-foreign violence in 2008, 62 people were killed and some 100,000 displaced. Photographs of the murder of another Mozambican man, Ernesto Nhamuave, whom a jeering mob burned alive in a squatter camp, led to declarations that such atrocities would never happen again. Yet no one was charged in Mr Nhamuave’s death: the case was closed after a cursory police investigation apparently turned up no witnesses (who were easily found by journalists earlier this year). The latest violence flared up in the Durban area earlier this month after King Goodwill Zwelithini, the traditional leader of the Zulus, reportedly compared foreigners to lice and said that they should pack up and leave."
And second, Europe’s boat people The EU’s policy on maritime refugees has gone disastrously wrong, talks about the tragedies accompanying moving people in boats across the Mediterranean.
From the article, "THE European Union likes to boast that it is a force for good. But in the past ten days as many as 1,200 boat people have drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean. An unknown number were refugees from Syria, Eritrea and Somalia fleeing war or persecution. They perished in part because the EU’s policy on asylum is a moral and political failure."
-- The End --