Skip to main content

Inside Murphy’s Bubble

Only a few years ago a politician might have been laughed out of Congress for postulating that the troubles in the Middle East – Islamic irredentism; the emergence of Iran, still considered a terrorist state, as a regional Middle East power; the attempt by Shiites, rebuffed during the Iraq war, to establish a caliphate in northern Iraq and Syria; the threats against the United States and other western nations that pour like a flood of mighty waters from the throats of its former enemies; the scurrying of foreign states once friendly to the United States from a U.S to a Russian protectorate; the sea of women, children and young men murdered, homeless and enslaved Christians, immigrant hordes persecuted by Islamic terrorists now flooding Europe’s shores, largely owing to the recession of U.S. power and influence in the Middle East; all this and more --  were traceable to global warming, the tocsin of a boisterous environmental movement.


The civil wars in Syria and Mali, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, noted in an editorial board interview, “… were preceded by a ‘massive multi-year drought,’ which were consequences of global warming. ‘The instability that we are seeing in the Middle East and in Africa is today the result of climate change,’ with more challenges coming, Murphy said.”

The connection between global warming and world-altering disturbances in the Middle East, remote at best, is one of the CliffsNotes taken from the current Democratic Party campaign playbook. The global warming bell will be sounded ad nauseam during the coming political campaigns. Socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has already warmly embraced the queer notion. Surprisingly, Mr. Murphy has thrown his support to Hillary Clinton, not Sanders.

Mr. Murphy’s current term in office ends January 2019, and so he can well afford to flourish ideological banners on behalf of movement progressives, which includes the environmental lobby. Nothing Mr. Murphy says, however absurd, will cost him a vote in the near future. Mr. Murphy’s present assertion entails no immediate political cost to him; it is a form of cheap grace. Mr. Murphy’s comrade in the Senate, Dick Blumenthal, is up for re-election in the current cycle, and the remote prospect of losing an election has made the always cautious Mr. Blumenthal wary. Off-election year Senators are usually able to find their spines. 


Mr. Murphy’s assertion – Middle East instability is caused by climate change -- is a near-perfect example of the post hoc fallacy, which may be stated as follows: A occurred, then B occurred; therefore, A caused B. The rooster Chanticleer crowed, then the sun rose; therefore, the crowing caused the sun to rise.

Messy thinking is the principal cause of a messy foreign policy, and the Obama administration is full of threadbare thoughts. Dangerous errors in foreign policy are the product of political procrusteanism, which occurs when politicians seek to fit the wide and various world into their narrow ideological beds: Feet are lopped off, fingers are sheered away, and one ends up with a dead and useless mutilated corpse, an apt description of U.S. foreign policy in the Age of Obama. Far-fetched claims such as those made by Mr. Sanders and seconded by Mr. Murphy obscure the wreckage. But these bizarre notions can be exploded by an application of “Occam’s Razor,” which holds that the most economical explanation of a phenomenon that accounts for all the important facts is usually the right one.

Here is an economical explanation that embraces real-world data in the Middle East:

Syria is ruled by Bashir Assad whose father, Hafez al-Assad, was only slightly more bloodthirsty than his son. In 2012, President Barack Obama drew his famous “red line in the sand” in Syria. He said that the use of chemical weapons by Assad would cross “a red line” that would entail “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war. A year later, In August of 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas, and Mr. Obama’s red line inauspiciously disappeared.

Concurrent with Mr. Obama’s red line doctrine, American troops that had ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq were withdrawn from that country, fulfilling an Obama campaign pledge. The improvident withdrawal of troops created a vacuum in northern Iraq and Syria that soon was filled with the soldiers of Allah, peace be upon him, whose ambition it was to recreate a caliphate. They expressed their fidelity to the Koran by capturing territory from the infidel, killing men who might oppose them, enslaving their children and making concubines of their wives. They also drew the sword of Allah, peace be upon him, across the throats of infidel Christians, which caused Mr. Obama to claim that the ruffians were not behaving in a manner that was faithful to Islam, the Koran or the prescriptions of Mohammed, peace be upon him. Islamic scholars who are more faithful interpreters of the Koran would heartily disagree.

With the supposed failure of President George Bush’s policy towards Iraq before her and the imprecations of Democratic politicians ringing in her ears, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, now the leading Democratic candidate for President, simply repeated the so-called “policy errors” of Mr. Bush and convinced Mr. Obama to oust Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi from power. The ouster was a success: “We came, we saw, he died,” boasted Mrs. Clinton. Libya descended into chaos, and the Obama administration – refusing steadfastly to let a crisis go to waste – began shipping war material from a Libyan compound to American supported, anti-Assad forces in northern Syria. The American compound in Benghazi, Libya soon was destroyed by Islamic terrorists. It is no exaggeration to say that the terrorists who murdered Christians, among others, in the newly established caliphate and in Paris and Brussels and the United States and Canada and London and the Netherlands were, all of them, faithful followers of Mohammed, peace be upon him.


This is only a thimble full of real-world data that should be included in any assessment of the origin and causes of the bloody mess in the Middle East, a good part of it attributable to Mr. Obama’s failed foreign policy. Mr. Murphy’s fanciful theory that Middle East instability is the result of climate change is little more than a head-fake designed in an election year to draw public attention from inconvenient truths. Mr. Murphy, who certainly is no Joe Lieberman, has until 2019 to get it straight before he comes up for re-election, plenty of time for “visions and revisions that time will soon erase,” in the prophetic words of T.S. Elliot.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Blumenthal Burisma Connection

Steve Hilton , a Fox News commentator who over the weekend had connected some Burisma corruption dots, had this to say about Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal’s association with the tangled knot of corruption in Ukraine: “We cross-referenced the Senate co-sponsors of Ed Markey's Ukraine gas bill with the list of Democrats whom Burisma lobbyist, David Leiter, routinely gave money to and found another one -- one of the most sanctimonious of them all, actually -- Sen. Richard Blumenthal."

Powell, the JI, And Economic literacy

Powell, Pesci Substack The Journal Inquirer (JI), one of the last independent newspapers in Connecticut, is now a part of the Hearst Media chain. Hearst has been growing by leaps and bounds in the state during the last decade. At the same time, many newspapers in Connecticut have shrunk in size, the result, some people seem to think, of ad revenue smaller newspapers have lost to internet sites and a declining newspaper reading public. Surviving papers are now seeking to recover the lost revenue by erecting “pay walls.” Like most besieged businesses, newspapers also are attempting to recoup lost revenue through staff reductions, reductions in the size of the product – both candy bars and newspapers are much smaller than they had been in the past – and sell-offs to larger chains that operate according to the social Darwinian principles of monopolistic “red in tooth and claw” giant corporations. The first principle of the successful mega-firm is: Buy out your predator before he swallows

Down The Rabbit Hole, A Book Review

Down the Rabbit Hole How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime by Brent McCall & Michael Liebowitz Available at Amazon Price: $12.95/softcover, 337 pages   “ Down the Rabbit Hole: How the Culture of Corrections Encourages Crime ,” a penological eye-opener, is written by two Connecticut prisoners, Brent McCall and Michael Liebowitz. Their book is an analytical work, not merely a page-turner prison drama, and it provides serious answers to the question: Why is reoffending a more likely outcome than rehabilitation in the wake of a prison sentence? The multiple answers to this central question are not at all obvious. Before picking up the book, the reader would be well advised to shed his preconceptions and also slough off the highly misleading claims of prison officials concerning the efficacy of programs developed by dusty old experts who have never had an honest discussion with a real convict. Some of the experts are more convincing cons than the cons, p