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| Antisthenes |
Interviewer: We haven’t talked to you in quite some time.
Cynic: You’ve been denying yourself
a great pleasure.
I: Connecticut U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal questioned
Department of War chief Pete Hegseth recently. Blumenthal’s opening interrogatory gambit
was as follows: “I know you have characterized this war as an astonishing
military success. But the American people aren’t buying it. One point is
irrefutable: which is, Americans never succeed in war unless the American
people are behind it. And if what you are seeing as success now is winning, I
would hate to see what losing looks like, because none of the shifting and
contradictory objectives of the war have been achieved so far…”
Cynic: Yes. Responding in a like manner, Hegseth might have
said, “If, as you suggest, the U.S. military engagement with Iran, a notorious financier
of anti-American terrorism throughout
the Middle East for roughly 40 years, must be called losing, I would hate to
hear what you would call winning.” The U.S has destroyed Iran’s navy and ground
forces. It has closed the Strait of Hormuz to shipping coming and going from
Iran, thereby imposing on Iran a crippling loss of daily revenue. Iran will be
losing an estimated $150 million a day in oil revenue as
long as the U.S. blockage continues. Blumenthal equates “winning” with 40 years
of pointless non-productive “peace negotiations.” Everyone recalls how former
President Barack Obama said pointedly that Iran must never be given the
opportunity to develop nuclear weapons and followed up by sending the
self-declared enemies of the United States and Israel planeloads of cash later
used to finance terrorist groups at the very gates of Israel. Blumenthal, a
Jew, has not rushed to point out the obvious failings of Obama’s Iran policy. The
twitter-like clips Blumenthal cherishes are intended only to be used as a campaign
voting inducement. In almost every such partisan Congressional “discussion”,
the person being interrogated is not permitted to answer in full the points
made by the interrogator. Attempts at debating questionable propositions
usually are cut short by interrogators screaming “I am reclaiming my time…”
which is simply a not so polite way of saying, “Shut up!”
Some students of history at the Pentagon could easily
demonstrate that the most productive peace negotiations between belligerents
occur after one side has defeated the
other on the battlefield. The Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC) between Athens
and Sparta lasted through 27 years of fruitless negotiations. Sparta finally defeated
Athens and imposed peace terms, but in the end Athens won the peace, and a very
productive one it was. Sparta was a magnificent military barracks but far
inferior culturally to Athens, which gave us a Socrates, an Aristotle and ideas
concerning democracy and a republic that lit the imaginations of the founders
of the American Republic.
World War II ended in a military victory against Nazi
Germany and Imperial Japan. The U.S. and its allies, having won the war,
imposed peace terms on Germany. These things are usually mentioned in
historical accounts with which Blumenthal, a student of military affairs,
should be familiar. The notion that wars never blossom into long periods of
peace is an anti-historical fable easily dismissed. Despite the Democrat
Party’s occasional successful attempts at resurrecting old animosities, the
Civil War and later Constitutional amendments dealt a death blow to both
slavery and Jim Crow attempts to reintroduce de facto political slavery through
a back door.
I: Some people regard Blumenthal as a pragmatist rather than
an ideologue.
C: There is no such thing as a partisan pragmatist. That is
what is wrong with most news reports these days. They present themselves as
pragmatic and indifferent to partisan designs, but their product tells against
them. The Democrat Party has for decades been retreating from the foreign and
domestic policy of President John Kennedy, a genuine
liberal, and campaign enthusiasts such as Blumenthal and his fellow
neo-progressive U.S Senator Chris Murphy are leading the retreat. Pragmatism is
an American locution. The philosopher most closely associated with it is
William James, who defined pragmatism as a method of resolving philosophical
disputes by attending to the practical consequences of ideas rather than
abstract or purely logical distinctions. We see before us the practical
consequence of a violent attack by an Islamic regime on Israel. One may always
hope that partisan Democrats who falsely regard Trump as Hitler would
understand and embrace a policy of unremitting distain for true enemies of the
United States – particularly when the Democrats are Jewish.
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