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.
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