ParaPundit is Neutralist of the Week

In a post entitled Thucydides And America: Foreign Adventures Gotta Go, Parapundit quotes another blogger quoting the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War on how Athenian hyper democracy led it to ruin and how demo ain't working for us.

As he writes,

With about two thirds of US federal spending going to old folks and poor folks we've already shot our fiscal wad before we get to foreign adventures. We really need to cut out the foreign games so that government can provide basic non-welfare services like prisons, crime investigators, roads, bridges, and scientific research.

I've followed your man for some time and this is his most Neutralist post yet.  It's not perfect, but still a strong position.  Keep up the good work.

Link here.

COIN-Another shiny theory bites the dust

COIN is Counter Insurgency Doctrine and was how we were going to make the 21st Century safe for democracy.  It had a lot of cheerleaders, chief among them David Petraeus.  It has been so successful that the Taliban has long closed shop and started taking sociology courses at Kabul U, not.

We were tipped off that it is not working by an article in Antiwar.com blog by Kelly Vlahos.  Actually, the Neutralist has always thought it snake oil, but too many of our national big shots bought into to it.  Kelly discusses and links to a Fred Kaplan interview at Small Wars Journal.

Just how damaged is the COIN doctrine.  According to Kaplan, it has met its Waterloo in Afghanistan.

Fred says, "The US tends to get into these kinds of wars, deliberately or otherwise, once every generation, but the previous instance had proved so dreadful that, immediately afterward, the generals ignore, or toss away, every lesson learned from it - so we spend the first few years of the next war screwing it up."

The quote goes on, but for the Neutralist, the words "the generals ignore, or toss away, every lesson learned from it - so we spend the first few years of the next war screwing it up" say it all.

We either break the pattern of history, that is the eternal recurrence of "these kinds of wars" or we get into another one that will be no more successful.  Unless, as we get near to the centennary of WWI and the beginning of a century of intervention, we change to a Neutralist Ethos, we shall repeat the stupidity.

Economically, this probably cannot go on anyway, but it would be smarter to recognize the situation and adapt to reality instead of trying to stay the dumb course.

Sequester Egypt

Poor Malcolm Pollack, he will never live this down.  We are awarding him the un-coveted Neutralist of the Week designation.  Twice he has provided us with fodder so that we have nothing to do but steal his well done post.

Pretty Sharp!
MARCH 3, 2013 – 11:43 PMI guess we’re all feeling pretty low, now that the Sequester has gone into effect. I haven’t been paying much attention to the news since Friday (been busy arranging the canned goods down in the shelter), but if the predictions I’d been hearing have turned out to be correct, the entire nation is now unemployed, our daughters are selling their virtue on the street, airliners are falling from the sky, and Twitter posts have been reduced to seventy characters.
Well, let not your hearts be troubled, readers! Things may be really, really bad, but all is not lost. Sure, meat inspections may be a thing of the past, and criminals will now be asked to arrest themselves — but I’ve learned that Mr. John Kerry will manage, nevertheless, to send hundreds of millions of dollars to the Muslim Brotherhood.
What’s that? You say that the Ikhwan is our mortal enemy, committed, in its own words, to destroying Western civilization, sabotaging our “miserable house”, and making “God’s religion” victorious over all others?
Come on. Seriously? What do you think we are, a bunch of chumps? Well, let me clue you in: if you want to know who’s really getting the short end of this deal, it’s Mohammed Morsi and the rest of those jihadist bozos.
That’s right: we’re giving the Brotherhood your money in exchange for future reforms.
Are those guys suckers, or what?

Yes, a tad sarcastic, but still dead on.  Foreign Policy is not the Western Republic's strong point and our good Malcolm has made the point for us.  We have every confidence that in the fullness of time, he will attain his full neutralismo.