How Did This Mess Get Started

 

Looking at the world around us one has to wonder how it all got into the horrible state of affairs. There had to be a lynchpin which started the unraveling, an actual starting point which we can trace everything back to and find the culprit who made that initial error, mistake in judgement. But in order to do that one has to decide which of the unravellings we should start with as there are so many to choose from. There is Putin, or as we like to call him, Vlad the Invader (our original reference recently stolen by a Fox News commentator the erudite pontificator), who has shaken up parts of Central Asia and Eurasia and is threatening Eastern Europe, or at least there are some former nations swallowed by the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union; there is China who apart from building a blue water navy with which not only to challenge the United States Naval hegemony of the seas, a privilege formerly owned by the British, but are also building Islands in order to cement her claims to the vast South China Sea and thus control or divert much of the sea lane traffic from the Indian Ocean in and out of the Pacific Ocean; there is the financial problems in Europe threatening the stability of the European Union and the adoption of one currency with the Euro; and the final and greatest roiling and boiling cauldron, the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA). There may be other problems out there but these are the most prevalent and easily identifiable.

 

Let us start with the easiest of these, the financial meltdown in Europe. This problem was a situation just waiting to happen as soon as the most disparate economic nations decided to adopt the same currency unit without permitting a central planning committee to set their financial and economic planning and other such decisions in-line with each other. There was absolutely no way the less productive economies of such nations as Spain, Greece and Portugal had any hope of paralleling the productivity, GDP and economic output of a France, Britain or Germany. Additionally, adding the former Warsaw Pact nations probably sparked an even more divergent economic growth rate as nations such as Poland, the Czech Republic, and others plus the reuniting of Germany allowing the already dominant economy to also feast on the same rebuilding and economic recovery from the less efficient economic model of central planning to a market driven economy which granted these nations a greatly exaggerated GDP during their basically playing catch-up with the rest of Europe and becoming modernized economies. Thus the Euro was a pipe dream which probably had hoped that through the singular monetary unit, the Euro, would lead to a centralizing of economic planning being turned over to the European Union to plan these different economies as if they were a single unit. That was highly unlikely as that would have spelled the demise of the nation states and rendered them merely states in the continental nation of the European Union. What the European Union bureaucrats were seeking was a situation very similar to a former economic model using the Union name, the Soviet Union, replacing Moscow with Brussels and otherwise retaining that centralized, top down dictatorial form of economic planning. The hope of having all the European nations of the European Union surrender that much power to centralized governance was an impossible and thankfully unthinkable centralization of power. This became first indicated when Great Britain took a vote of the people on whether or not to adopt the Euro and the people were clearly heard to say not without losing to an invading army first, otherwise reported as a resounding no and Great Britain retained the Pound but with time would accept the Euro but it would change in buying power as it performed against the Pound. The British model of accepting the Euro while retaining their own currency would very likely have been a far better solution considering what we know now. By allowing each nation their own currency while having them also accept the Euro as legal tender the individual national economic planning would have reflected in their national currency which could slide against the Euro while still having an exchange rate at which the Euro would have an established buying power. This way Greece could remain Greece and Germany could march to their own economic tune and both nations would accept the Euro but their economy would be reflected in the exchange rate which would be set in Brussels. That would provide each nation with its economic freedoms while granting the central control freaks in Brussels their power in determining the value of the Euro to the individual currencies.

 

Next, let us take Vlad the Invader and resurgent Russia. Here the answer is simple; things are as they were inevitably meant to be. Russia has always had that appetite to chew on and swallow the smaller nations around her and some more so than others. Georgia and the Ukraine both fall into the more so than others category. Eventually there would have come along a strong and imperialist charismatic leader, instead we got a shirtless man experiencing a middle age crisis and owning a Napoléon complex likely due to the shared attribute of being of diminutive size also known as vertically challenged. Thus we have Vlad the Invader slowly but inexorably making advances which could have been potentially limited in the Ukraine to the Crimea but there would have been no stopping Putin’s appetite for conquest short of tempting his readiness for war by admitting the Ukraine and any other Warsaw Pact nation into NATO as well as the European Union. Of course this would have had the effect of making any of these moves by Russia on its neighboring countries, or as Vlad sees these nations being simply escaped provinces to be reclaimed, and thus pushing NATO or the weaker European Union into backing their mutual self-defense claims of, to quote an oldie but still a goodie, their all for one and one for all defensive agreements contained in both the European Union and especially NATO. So this can be traced back to Putin’s training as a KGB agent merging with his Napoléon complex plus his nationalistic and simplistic view that Russia was dealt a cruel and unfair blow with the, as he sees it, calamitous and most disastrous and lamentable event of the twentieth century and that he was the individual given the extraordinary and heaven ordained duty to rebuild Russia to her full and former glory. As far as others fearing Russia, especially in that neighborhood, Vlad the Invader has succeeded in spades.

 

China is another historical hegemonic power in the Pacific Ocean or at least the western shores of the Pacific Ocean and at times the Indian Ocean as well. One has to remember that China used to have regular wars with the other great power of Asia, India, back when simple people power was a determining factor and has only in recent history run astride of hard times. Historically China has either been the regional power controlling all she could survey or China was broken into separate mini-states which often warred with each other thus diminishing their powers. The only other situation was when China was overrun or controlled by outside influences and she was in a slow but constant state of regaining her independence and eventually sovereignty over her invaders. China has been and remains the slow and patient survivor and eventual victor which one need but wait to see her resurgence. China has a long history of simply refusing to be cowed or defeated, merely witnessing a temporary inconvenience. China has relied on the winds of change always knowing that no matter what the calamity, be it outside invaders or internal misrule, everything changes and change is the one criteria which can be relied upon to render all things dust. China realizes that there are time when you are riding the crest of the wave and time when the wave has crashed down upon you and whichever end of that wave you find yourself, you will eventually find yourself at the other extreme so enjoy the best of times and remember them as a goal in the worst of times. For China time has been her greatest ally and greatest enemy but she also knows that time is her greatest weapon. China will rise and fall just as the ocean tides, just on a much longer cycle.

 

Then there is the Extended Middle East which incorporates the traditional Middle East and North Africa and often called MENA. We like Extended Middle East better. This area has always been a cauldron of swirling fates. One need do no more than read the Bible, the Old Testament, to realize the great swings of fate for all who resided in this area. There have been great empires which rose from next to nothing to greatness only to be blown away like the desert sands. Some of these empires blew away so completely that one is unable to find their descendants as it is as if they were snatched from the Earth itself. Probably the strangest of stories is the people of the Bible who only recently returned to their historic, ancient lands, Israel. However, this return has become the central story and burdened with the weight of responsibility for all the unrest anywhere on the globe and particularly throughout the Extended Middle East. Despite there being no actual or traceable root to the great turmoil destroying and potentially redrawing the map of the Extended Middle East to Israel, that has not prevented many from historians to political pundits to media reporters and even to governments and their agencies such as the United States Department of State from laying all of the blame at Israel’s doorstep.

 

The turmoil in the central Middle East is nothing new as it is the control point for all trade historically between three massive and divergent continents; Africa, Europe and Asia. This was the locations of a city-state which had no viable crop or natural resource and was hidden away behind a narrow splitting in a rock face and the city was entirely built into another rock face which had an outer clearing protected by tall rock walls and survived purely on trade and taking a percentage of all transactions. The city was Petra which finally and literally fell out of use after an earthquake made its further use untenable. But Petra was an indication on exactly how important the areas of the Middle East were for trade between the three continents. Tracing history in this area you find such names as Egypt, Hittite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Philistines, Minoans, Canaanites who worshipped such gods as Moloch and Baal, Persians and entering the more modern age, the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Ottomans and finally the French and British. Where to trace back the turmoil and near constant warfare of the Middle East, perhaps to Cain and Abel and the earliest recorded use of a rock as a tool of war. That might be a stretch but the earliest conflict likely predates writing by a sufficient amount of time that it also ceased being a part of the oral history and never got recorded just as the actual traceable location of Atlantis was never given (Pillars of Hercules and out in the great waters, like that helps).

 

But the recent difficulties and intermitted warfare both between nations and internal to nations is traceable to a particular intentional act meant to create just such internal strife and potentially these external wars in order to prevent the area from ever again uniting into the one promise the French and British had given to particular Arab tribal, nations and even clan leaders to persuade them into assisting them in their efforts against the Ottoman Empire during World War I, the reestablishment of the Caliphate, meaning the areas of the Ottoman Empire intact as a singular entity, and leaving these leaders as the ruling council and the ones who would choose the new Caliph. Instead, this promise was not only shattered but the lines drawn after World War I in both the Middle East and rest of the Ottoman Empire as well as the Austria Hungarian Empire in order to prevent there ever being a reunification thus preventing these powers from becoming preeminent and capable of starting the next conflagration. The division of the Austro-Hungarian Empire mostly achieved its purpose and the next war where it did arise out of Germany which was generally a previous part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had only in the late 1800s gained its unified formation independent of outside control but not necessarily free of their influences thus leading to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi efforts and Word War II. But in the Middle East we had the Sykes–Picot Agreement which made completely arbitrary borders without, or possibly intentionally ignoring, tribal lines and clans or any of the natural political alignments often splitting lands as in the case of the Kurds; who also were promised their own nation as were the Jews in separate agreements but instead the Kurdish lands were divided and became parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran; making each nation internally unstable. Iraq is probably the most well-known of these divisions which in the case of Iraq divided the lands such that the Shiites were predominant in the south, the Sunni predominant in the center and the Kurds predominant in the north. This forced each of these imaginary nations to eventually find that the only way to restore and keep the peace was the rise of a militant strongman willing to impose peace by force of arms such as was the case under Saddam Hussein. Say whatever you like about Saddam Hussein such as he was a butcher, a murderer and a hard tyrant with an iron fist, he kept Iraq from devolving into internecine warfare such as we are witnessing today.

 

The rest of the turmoil which we are suffering through today may have had a recent triggering event, namely the Cairo speech by United States President Barack Obama and his foreign policy which was centered around his campaign promise to end the wars and bring the troops home. Unfortunately for the majority of the people turned victims in the Extended Middle East, President Obama pulled all of the United States military personnel from both Afghanistan and Iraq prematurely as neither nation had developed the experience of the new governance nor the military ability to resist disorder while, especially in Iraq, the suppressed majority had some real and serious issues and grudges to settle with the minority who had ruled the nation through oppressions and they were out to get that revenge which tore the nation apart making it ripe for a force such as ISIS to tear into its midsection and even gain some support from the people there. The Sykes–Picot Agreement was designed to make the Middle East in particular and the Extender Middle East by division of who controlled what area which became independent nations with the arbitrary borders established by their respective colonizers, left the entirety of these areas as a tinder box simply waiting for that spark and it was likely the Cairo Speech and the enthusiastic attempt after the Tunisian vegetable cart vendor’s self-immolation and subsequent uprising in Tunisia being used as the trigger for President Obama’s attempt to redraw the Middle East around granting the Muslim Brotherhood preeminence over the region sharing control with Iran as the hegemon in the east and the Muslim Brotherhood in the west. Even had this plan succeeded it would have only set up a different state of conflict but this time with two very strong entities making for an even potentially greater struggle. The war right now is contained for the most part to the Greater Syrian conflict which includes ISIS and Iraq and the Iranian intervention, and the Egyptian struggle internally for the most part with the Egyptian military wresting control from the Muslim Brotherhood. The trouble in Libya is tribal and most likely to remain in Libya unless ISIS gets a firm and significant foothold and then there will be trouble as ISIS then moves to take all of Libya and begins their spread into Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria, but especially Egypt. History will likely eventually lay the blame for the current explosion of unrest and open warfare in the Extended Middle East to the United States meddling and doing so by proxy removing their personnel, especially military, from the Extended Middle East and stirring the pot so to speak and hoping for the best. They failed, or should we simply say the truth, President Obama really had no idea what he was attempting and misunderstood the players and nearly everything in the Middle East and almost every other foreign affairs which he has chosen action or inaction. Incompetence beyond measure being wielded by a self-indulgent, uninformed, narcissist with delusions of competence and wisdom that produces a boondoggle that only complete ineptitude, ignorance and delusions of grandeur could produce. I am sure there are other adjectives which would apply but for the sake of brevity shall we coin a new phrase and call such complete ineffectiveness which produces great conflagrations as doing an Obamy.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Will it be a Good Year Too?

 

Yesterday we took a somewhat longer view of our universe which can be read here, but now let’s take a look at items a little closer to this year alone and things we can examine closer to the here and now. The first news read on page one or heard on news broadcasts might have been about the petition filed by Jordan before the Security Council as the agents for the Palestinian Authority demanding the Security Council act to basically force Israel to surrender to the territorial demands without any demand for the Palestinians to make peace was not passed missing by a single vote. There will be many editorials examining why the petition failed and in many instances there will be questions as to what actions were taken by Israel to possibly affect Rwanda, Nigeria and Britain that they abstained when predictions from different news organizations had listed combinations of these as the last votes which were thought to be in the Palestinian support column. Reacting immediately to their defeat, the Palestinian Authority in its numerous manifestations acted to join various conventions including and starting with the Rome Convention in order to attempt to call Israel onto the carpet before the International Criminal Court (ICC) on various charges of crimes against humanity and various war crime charges. If Israel were a normal nation these charges would be thrown out without any consideration, but Israel has the advantage, as does the United States and other nations, fearful of being subjected to specious accusations forcing them to be spending an inordinate amounts of time and treasure fighting one charge after the other, of placing themselves outside of the full jurisdiction by retracting themselves or having never joined the ICC, thus leaving them subjected to only a very limited number of acts or accusations emanating from the ICC. The nations who have placed themselves under such a state of exclusion from the complete power to be adjudicated before the ICC have not had efforts made to force them to stand before the court in contradiction to their electing to decide not to be within the full jurisdiction of the court, but we may soon see if Israel will be the first to be demanded to stand before the ICC despite their not being a member after the Palestinian Authority or one of its numerous manifestations bring charges against Israel at the ICC. Where the filing of charges by Mahmoud Abbas and the Authority is not a guaranteed certainty, yet the decision will not be decided or even the slightest bit influenced by the actual fact of whether Israel can legally be brought before the ICC on the more than likely specious charges. But there is always the one unknown, whenever something includes Israel in the equation, evidence soon proves that Israel is not treated the same as other nations and things for which no other nation would be excoriated and forced to be subjugated to adjudication despite presumably being beyond the jurisdiction under the ICC authority. So, it might not prove to be all that surprising, though there will be those newscasters breathlessly commenting as to the potential priority setting situation should Israel actually be brought to answer against the charges filed with the ICC by Saab Erekat and Mahmoud Abbas. These reports will logically be followed by breathless interviews with numerous spokespersons including our culprits, Saab Erekat and Mahmoud Abbas, with easy softball questions and supportive commentary expressing sympathy for and verification of their cause and agreement that the seriousness of their charges demands an exception as there must be resolution for these accusations, the rules be damned. There will also be interviews of Israelis, especially such as Prime Minister Netanyahu and any others who are named in the accusations, where the attitude will be even more accusatory than a television dramatic prosecutor, as that is the part they are actually assuming, with demands that guilt for the charges be admitted berating the interviewee severely as if that would be sufficient to presage the newscaster’s hunger for an admission of guilt from any of the Israelis subjected to this trial by media. This little scenario may even play out throughout the year as new charges are filed and other agencies are sought in further attempts to vilify Israel and bring her down by a continuous barrage of accusations as the latest manner of assault. The Geneva Convention in numerous different areas and treaties were also signed by Mahmoud Abbas granting yet another friendly venue for more charges and then there will be the attempt by Abbas and Iran, Turkey, Qatar, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan and who knows what other Arab or Muslim nations will join demanding that Israeli be forced to sign onto the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) thus also demanding that Israel destroy any nuclear weapons they possess as well as decommissioning their research reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert. The reactions from the community of nations will tell more about the nations of the world than it will about Israel.

 

Russia will continue to be an extension of President Vladimir Putin’s desires to return Russia, and through Russia also aggrandizing himself, to its former glories as the Soviet Union by slowly ratcheting up pressures on the closest former Warsaw Pact nations. He may renew pressuring Georgia, providing arms and potentially providing fighters in the eastern provinces of the Ukraine in efforts to break them away and place a puppet government over the territories. Then there is what appears to be the next target predicted for Russian interest, Moldova. Where it is true that Moldova is a small nation, it also is located centrally between Romania and the Ukraine which means that should Putin gain leverage over Moldova, he will then have a base with which to threaten the western border of the Ukraine making the situation in the Ukraine even more volatile than it currently appears to be. What makes such a move even more dangerous is the fact that in 1992 Moldova was accepted into NATO and has remained a NATO member nation ever since. Any Russian moves on Moldova would have consequences far beyond the Ukraine or Romania, which are the two nations surrounding the small nation, but would also be a direct challenge to the NATO treaty for mutual defense by all nations should any nation under the NATO umbrella be attacked. Should United States President Obama refuse to act or only act by ‘leading from behind’, as he has shown a preference for doing, then Putin might decide that NATO is a paper tiger making her member nations susceptible to attack without any risk of further escalation. Such an indication might trigger Putin making good on his off-the-cuff remark made a few months back in a moment of bravado claiming that he could take any and all NATO countries without suffering any repercussions from the remaining NATO nations. Making a move to take Poland as well as all the smaller nations right on the Russian border might even appear to be something which would carry little downside.

 

There are those who have predicted that President Vladimir Putin would be driven from office in a response to the crash of the Russian nation’s currency taking it from Ruble to Rubble. Recent polling shows Putin still well regarded by the Russian public carrying near eighty-five percent approval, certainly not the sign of a leader in trouble at home. Putin will continue to present a threat to the nations nearest Russia as increasing Russian territory is nearly guaranteed to spur economic growth to aid the Russian economy out of its current difficulties. There is one silver lining in this dark cloud which is the Russian economy, with the decreased worth of the Ruble, this priced the Russian oil and natural gas at a far lower than before the downward spiral thus protecting Russia from the petroleum warfare being waged against Iran by Saudi Arabia. We can expect Russia to also make the news with Iran in their mutual support for Syrian President for Life Bashir al-Assad against the rebel forces largely consisting of forces allied in an al-Qaeda with the majority of the rest belonging to ISIS. We should not expect for Bashir al-Assad to fall from power or stop the extreme methods he has employed against the rebel forces, ISIS and his own people. No matter who prevails in Syria, the victory will be a Pyrrhic victory, as the entire nation has been devastated with the majority of the infrastructure being completely destroyed. The most important yet devastating development to come as a result of the Syrian Civil War has been the rise of ISIS and their control of much of central Iraq and a swath of land across Syria reaching almost to the Turkish border where they were stopped dead at the northern city of Kobane where Kurdish Peshmerga Militias are making a desperate and unbelievable stand.

 

Speaking of Kobane brings us to one of the more desperately unfortunate events which have been unfolding as if in slow motion, the Islamification of Turkey slowly turning back almost one-hundred years of progress by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. President Erdogan has singlehandedly undone the carefully crafted safeguards by which Turkey had been secularized in the aftermath of World War I and the defeat of the Ottoman Empire by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Turkey was included in NATO during the Cold War in order to seize control of the Bosphorus Straights which gave NATO the ability to stop all shipping traffic from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean Sea and from there to the Atlantic Ocean. This gave the NATO allies a way of monitoring and potentially trapping the Soviet Union’s access to the Atlantic as their sole warm water port was in the Crimean, the same port that Russia has grabbed by their assuming control over the Crimea from the Ukraine. President Erdogan has been serving the interests of the Muslim Brotherhood openly with the silent consent of United States President Obama. Erdogan found his best ally in transforming Turkey back into an Islamist state in the European Union where the nations of the European Union with the assistance of the United States then President George W. Bush when they prevented the ranking generals of the military from performing a coup as their reaction as tasked by the Turkish Constitution where it stated that should the Turkish government be detected moving the nation back into the arms of Islamic Sharia that the military must step in and end such governance. Then the Turkish military was tasked with overseeing elections permitting only a secular government to form before returning civilian control. This method had been utilized in 1960 and again in 1980 and was almost going to occur once again around 2004-5 but the European Union warned the Turkish military that the nations within the European Union, which Turkey is trying desperately to join, do not allow for the military to rise up against the civilian government for any reason even if such power is vested in the military to preserve the secular nature of the nation. This basically froze the military’s power and Erdogan slowly but inexorably replaced those generals who were opposed to the direction he was steering the nation. President Erdogan is still moving Turkey away from Europe and NATO and towards the Muslim Brotherhood and seemingly illuminating the imposition of Sharia on all of Turkey. President Erdogan has also waged a low-level war of attrition against the Kurds which has been expanded since to include arming, training and financing the Sunni rebels fighting against Syrian President al-Assad. With the Kurdish also fighting against al-Assad, Erdogan had to decide whether he would aid the Kurds in Syria, and especially in Kobane where the Kurds were getting desperate. This led to allowing the Kurdish Peshmerga Militias from Iraq to enter Syria from Turkey and aid the Kurdish fighters. The Islamization of Turkey is likely to continue unabated and Turkey will probably continue to aid ISIS as best as they are able mostly by reselling the oil from Iraq using that marketing as the easiest way to both provide Turkey with revenue while also funding ISIS.

 

Turkey is not the only nation being inexorably moved into compliance with the Sharia as many of the European nations have minority neighborhoods which are imposing Sharia as the laws within their controlled neighborhoods. These enclaves are almost exclusively inhabited by Muslims with only a small numbers of the original Europeans still reside in these enclaves and they too would have moved given the opportunity. There are those who claim that it is these new immigrants which spend their time protesting against Israel and are also responsible for the increased anti-Semitism. Unfortunately it is not exclusively the immigrant population who are responsible for the recent escalating numbers of anti-Israel, anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic crimes which have increased so significantly that the increases are not measurable as easily as a percentage but rather as a multiplier. Had the increases been merely a percentage such as an increase of fifteen percent, twenty percent numbers like that might have been the new immigrant populations and as such acceptable as an explanation. Perhaps even fifty percent or even anything less than ninety percent but when countries are measuring increases of incidents of violent anti-Semitic acts increasing by four times, five times and in some cities even worse numbers, we are talking increases above, if measured by percentages, numbers of more than seven-hundred percent and those numbers require more than just the new immigrants. Do these immigrants count for a large number? Yes, but not the entirety. One need only look at the evening news to see that at some rallies the participants are not immigrants. When the banners carry the Golden Dawn logo we are not looking at immigrants. The same goes for the Jobbik Party demonstrations. When a Mayor of a major city, one of the five largest in that nation, and the mayor tells the Rabbi of a community which has resided in that city for centuries that the Jews will no longer be safe and there is nothing that can be done to protect them, that is more than the new immigrants. The Jews have seen this before when in the first decade and a half after the founding of the state of Israel we saw this in one Arab country after the other where the Jews were told by a friend that it would be better if they left, if they left and moved to that country of theirs. First it was in individual small towns and villages and eventually became the entire nation regurgitating their Jews. We saw it in Russia in the seventies and eighties. We saw it here in Europe right after World War II when many returned to their homes from before the horrors they had already suffered and when returning to their town only to be met with some family living in their home as the bombs destroyed half of the town and they had to live somewhere and we were not there, so, you do what you have to do. Not everywhere was like this, but still, anyone receiving such a greeting returning from the camps was a bit much. What was the answer every time? We heard you would not be returning, half the homes were hit by bombs, artillery, whatever. What were we told? Go to that country you are founding. Where will the Jews of today go; America? Canada? Israel? We may as well realize that eventually we will all end up together again in Israel as even Canada and the United States are seeing the beginnings of what has metastasized in Europe. The entirety of the world is going to be spitting out their Jews and yet when we find ourselves in Israel, the place everybody tells us is our nation and where we belong, then we get there and are told that is not ours either. If not Israel, where else is there? We asked this question once before in “If Not Israel Where do the Jews Belong? and nobody had an answer then. My bet is nobody has an answer now either. Maybe if every nations sent us here then can we please have all of the lands you once promised we could use for our little corner in the world, our really little corner in the world? Just allow us sovereignty over the lands west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea and allow us to live in peace and in return we will make advances in whatever fields we touch and we will share them with the world just as we have always done. We are a sharing people which we have always been ever since we shared what we received on two stone tablets. Perhaps you remember those ten rules we shared with all the societies on earth; we shared the one enduring set of laws that really were written in stone, twice. We merely asked that others observe seven that Noah recounted after the flood as what his family could base a just and civil society, just Seven Noahic Codes; that’s all.

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Easters Ukraine Simply the Battleground Against Russian Imperialism

Many, initially including myself, thought that Putin was attempting to reestablish Russian influence over the former nations within the Soviet Iron Curtain. I have come to adjust this assessment to believing he is simply attempting to restore the Russian influence and extend its borders to include the areas which came under Czarist control at the peak of the Russian Empire. This is supported by the limited attempts to expand the Russian grab to the northernmost regions of Georgia and now eastern Ukraine as well as Crimean Peninsula. Should this prove to be real then most of the nations of Eastern Europe and Central Asia can feel less threatened as Putin may have a more limited scope than many initially feared. Either scenario places Eastern Ukraine as on the immediate short list for Russian adventurism and the rest of the Ukraine for eventual consumption should Putin’s aims be for the furthest extremes of Czarist expansionism. There is the possibility that the Russian appetite will be satiated by taking the Eastern Ukrainian provinces as those would also give Russia the necessary land access to the Crimean Peninsula. The other interest in the Eastern Ukraine is the factories which includes a number of arms factories as well as other industries vital for the Ukrainian economic wealth. Could the Ukraine remain as a viable nation if they were forced to cede the eastern provinces to the Russians? That is something which has been debated with inconclusive results but the majority view is in favor of survival though lacking much of their arms trade, currently one of the Ukrainian’s most profitable industries.

 

The claims that there are no Russian troops taking part in the fighting in the Ukraine are no longer debatable, let alone believable. There are the Russian troops which the Ukrainian paratrooper forces captured last week, forces that Russian spokespeople claimed had simply become disorientated and had inadvertently crossed over the border and were not taking any part in the ongoing fighting. The doubts about Russian intervention and joining the separatists have completely evaporated with the presence of Russian main battle tanks joining the insurrection. This is no longer a civil war but an invasion of an independent nation by Russia. This invasion by Russia of another independent member nation of the United Nations places Putin’s Russia in contravention of numerous United Nation rules and declarations which protect the individual member states from aggressions by other member states. The United Nations presumably offers methods for mediating any differences between member nations thereby providing peaceable means for resolving differences. Somehow, knowing some of the history of what duties and responsibilities Putin was required to perform, and which he appeared to relish, for the KGB; it is not surprising that he would play fast and loose with any rules and ignore any restriction supposedly enforced by the United Nations and simply rely on brute force of arms to accomplish his goals concerning Russian absorption of Ukrainian lands. The announced annexation which was the initial move against Ukrainian national lands was an early indicator of the extent to which Putin was prepared to go to realize his goals. The only problem has been the undetermined extent to which Putin aims to carry the Russian expansion over Ukrainian sovereign lands. Many have initially hoped that Russian appetite would be satiated with the Crimean Peninsula which included the main Ukrainian naval base and port, facilities which were shared by the Ukrainians with the Russians by treaty, the same treaty which also required that Ukrainian sovereignty to be defended from any and all incursions by foreign powers in exchange for the Ukraine releasing the entirety of their nuclear arsenal, a significant number of soviet ICBMs which had been placed within the Ukrainian borders by the Soviet Union while they occupied all of the Ukraine as a Soviet province. These ICBMs and their nuclear warheads at that time had made the Ukraine the nation with the third largest nuclear weaponry even ahead of Mainland China. Presumably, in exchange for surrendering these nuclear weapons systems the Ukrainians received assurances against any incursions on their borders which the United States, United Kingdom and Russia who were obligated to aid the Ukraine in such circumstance. The treaty made the obligation to be less binding than requiring an actual defense or intervention by the guaranteeing nations and apparently this opt out option appears to have become the selection most favored. At least Putin has not elected to try and excuse his troops intervening in the violence ongoing over the past several months as their intervention under the nuclear treaty with the Ukraine.

 

One might then ask what about the United States and United Kingdom and their treaty obligations to assist the Ukraine. Well, we are talking about an incursion by Russia which, even if it has a declining economic picture, a negative population growth and a slowly but inexorably crumbling infrastructure, it is still the nation with one of the largest nuclear weapons inventories in the world and a formidable military force available with a KGB trained officer at its head. Unfortunately for the Ukraine, the world has reached the twenty-first century where bad actors, even Russian leaders, are threatened with being on the wrong side of history which presumably guarantees that their unsocial behaviors will fail, eventually, as history will right all wrongs. This similar to the threat from ISIS being determined to be an irresponsible set of actors who are guaranteed to also fail as the twenty-first century will belong to the builders and not those who are the purveyors of destruction. These have been the forces which apparently the forces of western principles and virtues which will reign in the twenty-first century and there will no longer be any need for such primitive reliance on violence and the clash of arms deciding the outcomes of good versus evil, the twenty-first century itself will defeat those evil forces which are reliant on destruction and thus fall on the wrong side of history. What a relief, I thought for a moment that there might be a problem with Russian expansionism threatening the independence and sovereignty of the Ukraine but apparently this is simply the machinations of an evil leader who once he realizes that history will place him on its wrong side will repent and immediately cease from his errant ways. What a relief knowing that the twenty-first century is out there guarding the world from the depravations of those who practice destructive influences or other evil inclinations which land them on the wrong side of history. Hopefully I can now sleep assured that the twenty-first century is out there guarding the world from any violence or other malicious and malevolent forces which might have designs of crossing history and pulling it to the wrong side, that dark side which resides on the wrong side of history with the destroyers and against those who promise to build despite any destructive entities.

 

Beyond the Cusp