Ode to the Strongman

The touch of international politics and diplomacy affects lives. It builds Ebola clinics, dispatches food convoys, sets armies in motion, turns landscapes into cultivated fields or cratered desolations. It impacts this physical world from atmosphere to crust.

With so much at stake then, it is a surprise—a pity, really—when a searching look at the first causes and animating forces behind tectonic political and diplomatic decisions finds them anchored not in hard facts, visited objectively and analyzed rationally, but in illusion.

One such illusion is the perception that an authoritarian leader—any authoritarian leader, any dictator—is a greater evil than anything chosen by force of arms or by elections to replace him. Let’s see if the lessons of recent history shed light any on the subject.

Saddam Hussein: In response to a 2001 terrorist attack against New York City, organized by a Saudi billionaire who holed up in Afghanistan, the United States attacked Iraq. Though Hussein played no part in that attack, many of us bought the faulty intelligence suggesting otherwise and supported the invasion. Besides, Hussein was not a nice man. Opposing him could get you a sip of a sarin/mustard gas cocktail—ask the Kurds in Halabja—or land you in one of his rape rooms. Certainly not my nominee for Man of the Year. The long and short of it is simply this: We didn’t like him, we took him out. Did we have a security imperative or constitutional authority to invade? Irrelevant. The country, furious and still grieving over our 9/11 dead, demanded more than a pounding of the Taliban.

When the invasion-insurgency-civil war was over, we delivered to the world the hanged corpse of the dictator and a country with a government as viciously sectarian as the one that preceded it: only the Shiite shoe was now on the Sunni foot. The results are: near-daily bombings, a stalled government, and a country with an oppressed Sunni minority—rancorous and as stable as your great-grandfather’s cache of nitro glycerin—existing in a political vacuum, while one of the most notorious and ruthless terror organizations in the world rushes toward Baghdad to fill it. 

If we measure the effect of the take-down of Hussein only in terms of lives lost before versus after his ouster, the math may not vindicate us. Add to that the destabilizing affects of the ISIL terrorist group we unwittingly helped spawn and subsequently armed with left-behind weapons of war and we lose the debate.

Muammar Gaddafi: Let’s take a look at another dictator, and one named by one of my heroes—Ronald Reagan—as the leader of Libya’s troop of misfits, looney tunes, and squalid criminals. Well said, Gipper!

In 2011, in the context of the wider Arab Spring, civil war broke out in Libya. In response to atrocities committed by Muammar Gaddafi against his own people the international community came to the rescue. The dictator’s forty-two year regime ended amid a hail of celebratory automatic weapons fire and the parading of Gaddafi's bloody body in the streets.

Where is Libya today? It has melted down into a fractured land roved and run by warring militias and terrorist groups. How many, in addition to U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, have been killed since, compared to those killed in ‘atrocities’ meted out by Gaddafi? No one knows. Statistics are not kept. We do know that 300,000 have been displaced. And though we don’t know how many futures have been injured by job loss, we do know the economic slide has seen what was the highest African GDP take a tumble, and oil production fall by a million barrels a day. Alongside the economic damage, a free health care system has nearly collapsed and higher education is practically shut down. Let’s not discuss the sky-high crime rate. Is Libya better off?

Hosni Mubarak: For years Mubarak worked with us to help maintain the peace treaty with Israel by maintaining the security of the Sinai. We supplied military foreign aid to Egypt to facilitate this and got head-of-the-line privileges for our warships transiting the Suez Canal. We quickly abandoned him during the Arab Spring for elections and democracy. Elections brought us the Muslim Brotherhood, followed by unrest, followed by a military coup. And though Egypt's new leader, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is taking action to put his economic house in order and to keep down the Muslim Brotherhood, there has been a cooling of U.S.-Egypt relations under his watch. Should this surprise us?

The speed with which the U.S. abandoned Mubarak, and the frequency of calls by the U.S. Congress to cut off our substantial foreign aid to Egypt have driven al-Sisi toward Russia, with whom he is negotiating a major arms deal. In the meantime, jihadist activity in the Sinai is on the increase and there are more calls than ever for al-Sisi to ignore the treaty with Israel.

If Egypt, the largest Arab state, cannot reverse the economic malaise that threatens her with failed-state status; turns the Sinai over to the jihadists; or is driven further into the orbit of Russia, history will be hard-pressed to see any advantages for the United States in its blithe abandonment of Mubarak.

Syria’s Assad? Now we come to a pertinent question. Do we send Bashir Al-Assad packing? Can you say, “Significant deployment of U.S. air and ground forces?” Let’s be honest, sending the man on his way is synonymous with "major U.S. led invasion." By now you’ve figured out that we must first ask, “What will the new Syria look like without him? Like Iraq? Libya? Egypt?” (Actually, the first question is whether the turmoil in Syria represents an identifiable security risk to the United States. Ah, but let’s not delve into arcane questions about the constitutional authority of presidents and congressmen).

And, when we depart, who will we leave in place to govern?

Of the many opposition forces, whom do we lift into governance? The Syrian moderates? Name one. And let’s not play with definitions. You may view anyone short of a cannibal as a moderate in today’s Syria. I don’t. There are no Syrian moderates. The only effective fighting forces in Syria are the Al Qaeda affiliates. And if we do decide there are moderates, and arm them, how can we realistically assure ourselves those weapons will not be taken by defecting ‘moderates’ right straight to their Sunni brothers in ISIL?

Given the list of options it is fairly easy to predict what Syria will look like if we intervene and then leave four or five years down the road. After we secure victory against government forces on the battlefield, put down the subsequent insurgency, organize a constitutional convention, pass a constitution, hold elections, reel back in shock when a terrorist organization wins the vote, Syria will look like…a humanitarian catastrophe.

It will be a land where women are given head scarves and have their drivers licenses removed; where petty shoplifters have their arms removed; where dissenting Christians and Alowites have their heads removed. In short, Syria will be another example of U.S. led regime change gone bad. Another humanitarian intervention undertaken without a cool calculation of humanitarian costs. We will look across the landscape of one of the oldest cities—Damascus—and civilizations on earth, and see a long shadow. All else we might say we have achieved by the removal of the strongman—improvement in the lives of Syrians, freedom, an inclusive democratic process—will be illusion.

A World Without the United States

What would the world look like without the United States?

I thought of this when I heard of our latest humanitarian aid payment—this one $51 million—to the Central African Republic. Half the population is in need of assistance. The fighting began as a civil war and has melted into a jumble of sectarian cruelties. Children are finding themselves fatherless, women are finding themselves raped, masses are without food, water, or medical supplies. And though our donation will not go far, it has meaning and will help some.

My thoughts then expanded to take in the full panorama of U.S. aid and influence. When refugees flood a country, we are there. When disease ravages, our doctors ignore borders and move in. Our carrier battle groups patrol the seas, our squadrons and divisions stand in readiness to protect our shores and our allies—a fact not lost on the close neighbors of Ukraine.

Bestriding the conflicts and tragedies of this world, generous to a fault with its borrowed trillions, is the United States of America. True, we patronize. Press releases from our Department of State, its finger raised in admonition, rebuke other nations when they can’t get along and ‘applaud’ them when they may benefit from parental encouragement. But there is another side, another metaphor. We are a lighthouse of kindness in today’s falling darkness of violence and want. Our hearts pound with outrage at injustice, our eyes tear up when a disaster starves a child or levels a city, and, always, we are among the first to step in as a shield, or reach down to console, heal, or bind up.

The history of the United States is a case study in brotherly love. In World War II we came in late, were part of the reason Europe survived, the only reason she recovered. In Korea our blood helped paint a line beyond which naked aggression would not pass. We flopped in Vietnam, spent more than anyone to give Kuwait its country back, and paid terror a house call in Pakistan. We are not perfect. In 2008 our bankers shot the global economy in the foot, but our tax payers handed it a golden crutch, and kept us driving Chevies.

The world has bestowed on us the loving curse of World Leader; criticizes us when we meddle beyond the seas; fumes when we do not right every wrong from Kiribati to Katmandu. We stumble and shine. We are human. But we are a light and a force for good. Where would the world be without us? Let’s hope it never finds out.

The Transgender Frontier

     Two campus or near-campus shootings occurred this week, and a frontal assault on a courthouse. We won’t count the three Canadian Mounties killed and two wounded. Meanwhile, on the cover of Time magazine appears the image of a beautiful black woman, and a caption inspiring us to meet the challenge of the newest civil rights frontier. The woman is a medically altered man: the frontier, transgender rights.

     There is a Bible prophecy that attaches here. Since the pioneers of the new frontier would deem its warning irrelevant, its fulfillment (this past week) necessarily goes unnoticed.

The wicked will be turned into Hell

And all nations that forget God.

     Nations that forget God 'will be turned into Hell.' The phrase is a figure, referring in a picturesque way to the falling of calamitous events upon an offending nation. This week's shootings in Seattle, Washington; Santa Barbara, California; and Cumming, Georgia, are both fulfillment and portent. It is but the beginning.

     How do we spot a nation that has forgotten God? It is simple, really.

     Nations that forget God are morally confused. It is an axiom as certain as the conviction with which some males today assert they are lesbians trapped in a man’s body--speaking of moral confusion. In a morally confused people, the wicked do not see themselves as wicked, therefore any who might read the prophecy would not see themselves as its subject. In fact, there is difficulty among a morally confused people in recognizing anyone as wicked at all. There is no accepted standard for adjudicating right and wrong. To the wicked, the Bible is nothing more than another religious writing, as meaningless as any other. 

     The only standard anyone dares adopt—and it can be turned against the user—is unlimited freedom. Freedom is right. Any restriction on it, is wrong. A person should be free to choose what he goes to bed as, as well as whom he goes to bed with. We should be free--by suction, scalding saline, or dismembering forceps--to eliminate the inconvenience of unborn life. The lords of Wall Street should be free to tank the American (almost the global) economy and not suffer criminal penalties. The vexing problem, of course, is what to do when we become the victim of someone else’s freedom. Hmmm. A morally confused people do not know how to answer that one.

     The frontier today is not a civil rights frontier, but a spiritual one. The question is whether we will remember God, and His words to Hosea the prophet (14:9), or not: 

The ways of the Lord are right.

Herein is the hope for the United States. This, I believe, and as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

The Bible is True: A Two-minute Proof

A battered woman slowly turns pages in a worn Bible, in a one-room violence shelter. She sees the spectacle of a battered man expiring on a rough-hewn cross and understands his pain. ‘For God so loved . . . ,’ it says. Can it be true? She longs to believe she has the divinely attributed worth implied by that sacrificial death. But does God truly exist? Is the writing between these marred leather covers His supernatural communication and, if so, how can one know?

A teenager props his rifle against a tree at a brief rest stop in a steaming, Central African Republic jungle. Head down, he sits and remembers life before he was abducted into Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. He had lived in Uganda near a missionary compound in the year before he was taken at age 13. The missionary once quoted, ‘If the Son shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.’ He knew the missionary spoke of a spiritual freedom—a freedom from sin. But could he appeal to the divine Christ for physical freedom as well, some way of escaping the cycle of village plundering and violence Kony has forced him to be an unwilling accomplice in?  The small new testament he has secreted in a cargo pocket describes Christ as possessing ‘all power in heaven and earth.’ But can the description be trusted?

Let me shine some light on the subject.

The question, whether asked in a violence shelter, an African jungle, or there, right there . . . in your chair, is a valid one.

Revelation 11 lets us move aside the curtain of years and gaze into the future to a time just before the Lord Jesus is to return to establish unending life, righteousness and safety. Two witnesses will arise who will prophesy to the hostile masses. If you don’t like them, be careful how you express your dislike—they have the power to destroy their enemies with fire proceeding from their mouths. Additionally, they have the power, which they will use, to afflict the earth with drought and all manner of plagues during the course of their preaching. When they die, their bodies are not permitted to be buried but are made to lie where they drop for three and a half days while the world looks on and rejoices. Party soon ends, however, as the breath of life returns and they stand, and then rise to heaven while their dismayed enemies look on.

Did you see it there, easily missed between plague and resurrection? The entire world—‘peoples and tribes and tongues and nations,’ as the Bible puts it—will be able to view this spectacle!

It was as recently as the 19^th century, eighteen hundred years after this prophecy was written, that the only pictures viewable by groups of people at long distances were word pictures painted by the clicking keys of the telegraph. And even these could not reach people groups on a grand scale. Yet this prophecy predicts the discovery of some video mass communication marvel. Long ago it foresaw the digital technology device hidden in your purse or clipped to your belt, the one which provided you images of armored vehicles rolling into Ukraine, debris fields in the southern Indian Ocean, and mud slides in Washington state, and all in the last few days, and all in real time.

I recall the powerful words of God spoken through Isaiah the Prophet in chapter 46 of his prophecy:

I am God, and there is no other;

I am God, and no one is like me.

I declare the end from the beginning,

And from long ago what is not yet done,

Saying: My plan will take place,

And I will do all my will.

God knows we are intelligent beings. After all, He made us in His image. The faith the Bible requires of us is not a blind faith. It is a faith that believes God will do what He says he will do. But before we believe, our minds require proof that God is, and that the Bible is His word. One of the ways God proves these things to minds rightfully challenging the world’s competing truth claims is by the instrument of fulfilled prophecy. While Revelation 11 is not intended to be fulfilled just yet, its predicted technology has arrived. What’s exciting is, to see it spreading to every corner of the world-every tribe, tongue, and nation-during our day, in our lifetimes.

Revelation 11 affords us one proof, one among the hundreds already fulfilled by Christ’s birth and life, of the supernatural character of the Bible. Yet that one proof alone is enough to kindle hope in hearts all across this planet: in shelters and jungles and right there, in your chair!

There's a Storm Coming: Vladimir

Russia is in trouble. Perhaps few took note of the announcement this morning by Andrei Klepach, Russia's deputy economy minister, but what he said should raise the eyebrows of those foreign policy analysts whose jobs require them to predict coming convulsions among nations. Billions of dollars in assets, he warned, are being yanked from the already stagnant Russian economy by fleeing foreign investors worried over rising tensions with neighboring Ukraine, the prospect of further military action by President Putin, and retaliatory sanctions by western leaders. The tally is expected to reach $70 billion by the end of the first quarter. The upshot according to Klepach will be further stagnation and inflation—not welcome news for an economy showing a tepid 1.3% growth last year. 

For now, Putin may enjoy the heady days of territorial expansion, high approval numbers and a fully compliant parliament. But how will he react as his economy sickens and the government deficit dances to the tune of falling revenues and increased spending in the form of the Crimean subsidies needed to convince a skeptical world that life as a newly adopted planet in Russia’s gravitational field is a good thing? Well, how have other autocrats-under-fire reacted over history to deflect criticism and calls for regime change during periods of economic chaos? Often by diverting attention—and blame—to real or imagined cross-border crises. 

In Putin's case, one wonders what new groups of oppressed Russians—whom he calls the world’s most divided ethnic group—might he need to ‘rescue’ in his latest territorial grab? Or, what if Putin’s desire to create a new Eurasion Union should excite an appetite to reclaim Russia’s former sphere of influence in, say, Georgia? An appealing proposition if, in the process, Russia should acquire greater control of the profits of Caspian hydrocarbon riches or export pipelines. Would not jeers turn to cheers when economy-enhancing revenues started rolling in? 

Today’s investor flight may be only a first step in a chain of worsening conditions driving Putin to entertain desperate options. For foreign policy wonks, tasked by their masters to analyze growing security threats, it may be a reason to arrive early and stay late.