You see, I thought bombing the wogs when “no compelling national interest was at stake” was something done only by Republicans, and was therefore (i) inherently racist (of course, that’s pretty much a 1:1 correlation for anything they do, isn’t it?), (ii) imperialistic, (iii) done solely to further the corporate interests of their donors (most of which donate disproportionately to the other party, but we’ll overlook that), (iv) the result of irredeemable bigotry and cultural myopia, (v) doomed to failure, (vi) unless done during times of continued budget surpluses a “war on the credit card” and therefore incontestably financially irresponsible, and/or (vii) did I mention racist?
And here we’ve got nice, enlightened, socialist France pasting bits and pieces of wogs all over the landscape. In Mali, for example. And now we find that, over three years after he was captured, France goes all general quarters on us and tries to free up some Secret Agent Man who’d been abducted in Somalia. With about the same degree of success that the United States enjoyed at Desert One. And now the French are pretty much admitting that they believe the victim has been slaughtered and his corpse and those of the soldiers killed in and after the rescue attempt are going to be paraded in public, much like happened when Clinton tried the same thing in Somalia.
Once upon a time having two Western powers humiliated in such a fashion, by the same groups of filthy bastards in the same penny-ante place and under similar circumstances, would have resulted in exactly one and only one form of response. The joint would be removed from the list of known inhabited locations on the planet. The Western powers, including but not necessarily limited to those directly concerned, would have reduced the place to a howling desert and left the surviving locals to figure out what hit them.
Our ancestors understood many things we’ve apparently forgot. The fact that all men are created equal does not mean that all societies and all states are created equal. When our co-equals band together and behave poorly, they must be suppressed. Means of suppression that are not violent do not function. Peacefulness, respect for another’s culture, and so forth are post-suppression phases of the relationship. Further, there are cultures and traditions which have no place in a modern world. Gen’l Napier understood as much when his program of suppressing the burning of widows in India was greeted with whines of “but it’s our tradition . . . .” His reply (according to his brother):
“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.”
Somalia has elected to follow the path of piracy, plunder, murder, and rapine. Their people have tolerated and to a great degree welcomed into their midst the actual pirates. Other than occasional bleats of how awfully unfair it all is, the West has done . . . well, not much. Now mind you, in Somalia there actually are important national interests of the West at stake (contrast Mali; what, precisely, is fundamentally at stake for France or anyone else?). These filthy bastards are interdicting one of the most important sea lanes in the world. Countries have gone to war — declared war — for less. Add to that the simple fact that pirates are enemies of the human race, and have been acknowledged to be such for centuries, and there is no longer any reason to permit the continued existence of a place called “Somalia” in any other than a purely geographic sense.
Every one of their harbors should be mined. Every watercraft — down to and including kiddies’ water-wings — must be destroyed. Every building in every corner of the land must be destroyed. Their fields must be rendered infertile for the foreseeable future. Any dams, waterworks, sewage treatment plants, bridges, electrical generation capacity . . . anything capable of encouraging humans to remain in any particular location must be destroyed. Their cattle must be driven off or slaughtered. Every one of the people who offers the least resistance must be treated as being one with the pirates and dealt with as they are. The survivors must be removed to other parts of the world, there to amalgamate themselves and gradually lose their identities as a nation of pirates and plunderers.
Our new Enlightened Leaders seem to have forgot that the world is a violent, vicious place, has always been such a place, and will forever remain such a place unless and until those peoples and societies eschewing that mode of existence decide no longer to tolerate the continued existence of those who embrace it. Period. The novel thing about the UN when Roosevelt and Churchill conceived of it was not the Great Big Council of Nations thing; that crap had already been tried with Wilson’s League, and everyone was cleaning up the wreckage of the peace-keeping job it had done so well against Germany, Japan, and Italy. No, what made the UN’s organization unique was precisely the promise of violence against aggressors. And by the way, the UN was not put in place to go ride herd over two ethnic groups merrily slitting each other’s throats in some godforsaken place around the corner from the back end of nowhere. It was put in place specifically to curb violence between states, and to suppress aggressor states, rogue states, through the threat of collective, overwhelming, physical violence against them. Sanctions had not worked against the Axis powers; what reasons existed then or exist now to suppose that sanctions will work against the Somalians? It wasn’t sanctions that caused Khadaffi to drop his nuclear ambitions. It was witnessing what happened to Saddam in Iraq that wrought his change of heart.
But all this is of a piece with Dear Leader’s (and Hollande’s) fundamental anti-Westernism. Vigorous measures must be taken only when they will have minimal chances of success and only when their success will achieve little but failure will work great harm.
All of which is to say: Expect to see more, rather than less, of this. Also expect to see the NYT and the rest of the off-balance sheet Democrat party operatives play up the fearlessness with which Dear Leader sends up a recon plane for the French to guide themselves to their own destruction. We will hear how intrepid Dear Leader was, how noble his intentions, and how morally refined he is. And no one will publicly ask why it should be done this way, or what of lasting significance was to be accomplished.
[Update: 15 Jan 13: And the dear Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung helps to figure out why France is in Mali. Gold. Copper. Uranium. Petroleum. Natural gas. Diamonds. Other gemstones. In recent years Mali’s been granting concessions to exploit its natural resources. The jihadisti are of course interfering in that profitable little business. When the U.S. went back in 2003 to finish the job it had funked in 1991, and turned out of power a thug who’d used chemical weapons on his own people, who was giving every impression of actively pursuing not just further chemical armament but nuclear weapons as well, and who had welcomed with open arms senior terrorists involved in the planning and execution of the deadliest attack on U.S. territory since 1941 . . . well, we were told that was just some War for Oil. As if we couldn’t have got all the oil we wanted from Iraq simply by lifting all the sanctions and letting Saddam rock and roll. Folks, France in Mali is what a war for pelf looks like. Why is the UN officially blessing France’s war for resources in Mali, when its members roundly condemned the U.S. for getting rid of a viper? Mali’s not in a position to go after Israel. Iraq was, and is.]