Failed State Colonization - The Greatest Threat of Our Time

Let's compare two countries side by side. Country A has a sizable middle class and economy, social welfare benefits and a low birth rate. Country B is a failed state where thugs run amok in the street, a few families control the economy and the birth rate is off the charts. Country A's citizens are taught that nationalism is evil and that everyone should get along. Country B's citizens are taught that they are the greatest people that ever lived and would be running the world if not for Country A. But despite all this, Country B's citizens all want to move to Country A. And Country A wants to let them. Because Country A needs new workers to subsidize its welfare state and voters who will vote for pro-social welfare parties. Since Country B's workers want the social welfare benefits, they move to Country A. Country A ends up with a huge failed state population and dramatically increases its social welfare spending for them. Bankruptcy threatens, but change is almost impossible because the pro-social welfare benefits party has become very hard to beat. The pro-reform parties no longer tackle immigration, but try to get the immigrant vote. Their reforms turn into band aids. Country A slides toward the abyss. Country B continues shipping more immigrants every year who remain loyal to its culture and religion. Country B is a failed state. But Country A is also turning into a failed state as it imports Country B's surplus population, along with its criminality, its political culture and its ignorance across the border. Look at a map of the world, and what you see are successful states and failed states. This is a map that transcends ethnicity and race. It is not dependent on resources or the starting level of technology. It's not even dependent on wealth, or its level of distribution, Gulf petro-states with small populations can have rich subsidized per capita incomes, but they are still failed states dependent on a single resource and a vast army of foreign workers. It was thought once that success would spread from the successful states to the failed states. That it was only a matter of passing along certain techniques, educating their leaders in modern universities and starting them off with some World Bank loans. But instead the reverse has happened. Rather than failed states becoming successful under the influence of successful states, successful states are failing under the influence of failed states. Migration from failed states to successful states is leading the way to utter ruin. The Pakistanization of Europe and the Mexicanization of America are two examples of the phenomenon. But there are others. Cote d'Ivorie, one of the more prosperous African countries, has been taken over by Muslim migrant workers, with the armed backing of the UN. What happened resembled events in South Africa, but this time both sides were black. The difference was not racial, but religious. It is another example of an ongoing phenomenon. Failed State Colonization. Failed State Colonization is the greatest threat of our time. It marks a major shift from the old era of colonization where successful states colonized unsuccessful ones. Now failed states are colonizing successful ones. Failed states have become a global plague through their population migrations, which spread terrorism, crime and bankrupt the social systems of successful states. And as the migration wave continues FSC is turning formerly successful states into failed states. Failed states have higher birth rates and stronger group loyalties. That combination weaponizes their migrations into successful states with lower birth rates and weak group loyalties into a takeover. Failed State Colonization uses the disunity, tolerance and democracy of successful states to destroy them from the inside. It's not always a conscious act, but that doesn't make it any less destructive. The grey squirrels didn't intend to wipe out the red squirrels in the forests of England. But the populations are incompatible and though the red squirrels may be a nobler breed, those very qualities that make them admirable, also make them less able to resist an incursion by a rougher breed. The high ground moralizing of successful states may also be admirable, but it is equally doomed in the face of an incursion by cultures whose only morality is the success of their own group. Liberal immigration advocates cheer the destruction of our worthless culture as they look forward to a world state without borders. But there will be no world state without borders because the only people who believe in such a thing are wiping themselves out by importing migratory populations that don't think nationalism and patriotism are evils. Muslim and Mexican immigrants are not ashamed of their history. They don't think borders are a bad idea, so long as they're the ones who control where those borders are set. The left is destroying the West, but it is only the West that ever believed in a world without borders. Conservative immigration advocates insist on a cultural exceptionalism that will absorb immigrants because of our innate superiority. And that can work in the proper ratios. Done correctly the host society ends up with some new ethnic foods, a few immigrant communities and some more loanwords. Done incorrectly, entire cities become no go zones and go bankrupt providing social welfare for all. The difference isn't just in the numbers, though those are important, but selectivity. Immigration will almost always spike crime rates, but those go down as absorption takes hold. (So long as productive absorption is possible.) What you never do is import mass populations who think of your country as their own and want to take it over. In such a scenario the absorption will go the other way and then you end up with the likes of Taliban Terry, a former altar boy who goes around Dublin, with son Osama in tow. The Western left has committed itself to multiculturalism, the Western right has committed itself to free enterprise-- and both positions make it hard to choke off the flow of migrants. The social welfare left and the anything for a buck right need more immigrants because there are jobs that the natives just won't do, like work without under the table without benefits while putting eight kids and two wives on the welfare rolls. The irresponsibility of corporations and social welfare lobbies inflates budgets and increases crime, while the blame gets passed around. And then you end up with cities that are No Go Zones, Imams preaching Jihad and Mexican flags waving at protests-- all because companies wanted cheap labor and left wing politicians wanted to build a constituency. Failed State Colonization isn't an invasion by armed force. But then colonization by successful states often wasn't either. The natives lacked the will and unity to mount an active resistance, they didn't see the scale of what was happening until it was too late, the invaders took advantage of native hospitality and many of the natives collaborated with the colonists to gain some personal advantage. All three of these factors exist in Failed State Colonization. The West has failed to learn the lessons of its own conquests. And now it is falling victim to many of those same tactics. The West is divided, the migrants are united. The scale of what is happening can only be seen on the ground or in a few mostly hidden statistics, but neither show the full scope of the phenomenon, and even if they did, most natives are conditioned to think of their countries as nearly invulnerable. When they learn otherwise, the shock is too much and they default to appeasement and collaboration. That's something the Incas could tell you about. Hospitality is lavishly extended to the migrants, but it's repaid with treachery and violence. Again something the Incas could tell us about. If their civilization was still around. The difference between the successful state and the failed state is cultural. Successful states are successful to to the extent that they are democratic in that the agenda of the government mirrors that of the people. Failed states are successful only to the extent that their tyrants are competent, and even such competence has to be filtered through the culture of a failed state. The successful state is dynamic, the failed state is static. The successful state is always getting things done, the failed state is just struggling not to fall apart. Where the successful state uses its resources and wealth to advance, the failed state locks them up or uses them to bribe its people. And when that fails it guns them down in the street. The successful state believes that hard work will give it a better future. The failed state believes that a turn of the wheel will put it on top of the world. The successful state blames itself for its failures. The failed state blames wicked conspirators who undermine it at every turn. The greatest error of immigration advocates is the failure to understand that immigration does not just import a population raw for the mixing, but entire cultures with their own political culture. The migrating population of a dominant state imports its culture. The very element that made it into a failed state.  The people of a failed state may work hard, but they don't believe that hard work will move them forward because the system is corrupt and rigged against them. Instead they either work mechanically or look for ways to beat the system. The black market is ubiquitous. Everyone cheats everyone else. Political leaders are not representatives, but patrons, linking the people at the bottom to the top, who can provide favors and make things happen. You don't vote for a political to reform a system, but to get in on the good side of his party and his family, who may then help out when you have to deal with the tangle of bureaucracy. Nothing works without a bribe. Not even the simplest things. The people love and hate their country at the same time. They go from wanting to tear their leaders to pieces with their bare hands, to proclaiming them as gods in the space of a day. They distrust all leaders and yet they worship them. They fear the secret police and are its eagerest informants. The only injustice they protest against is personal injustice. They don't mind when the regime puts a thousand people to the wall, so long as one of them isn't their relative. They talk amongst themselves of whom the regime should really be shooting instead. "Ah, if only I were in charge. I would line them all up against the wall." That is the flavor of their democracy. As successful states take on the political culture of failed states, their ability to reform their way out of the situation declines. Their welfare states might function if they could hold a steady native birth rate in a population that was steadily employed. But the companies of a post-modern country in a global economy feel no loyalty to remain and give up the profits they could make by outsourcing production. And a population for whom life begins after getting their second degree and where two family incomes are the norm is not going to have the birth rate necessary to sustain the next generation of the whole setup. Pouring a migrant population into the mix is like trying to fix a structural defect by setting the building on fire. The more the ruling party responsible for the mess alienates the working class population it depended on, the more it needs immigrants to replace them as a voting base. The liberal parties become foreign parties. The conservative parties abandon their constituencies and chase after the immigrant vote. After all who are the natives going to vote for, the feckless leftist atheists or the good traditional conservatives who are busy observing Ramadan and learning to deliver speeches in Spanish. As the system breaks down, the leftist parties pretend that nothing is wrong and the rightist parties go for slash and burn reforms that ignore the root of the problem. Scrap the military, nuke Medicare, cut funding to this office and that office. As if the root of the problem is the amount of money being spent, rather than the way it's being spent. Failing companies often try to cut expenses, but ignore that the underlying problem is not in the budget, but in its culture. The company isn't going under because it's spending too much money, that is a symptom of its fecklessness. It's going under because it has lost all sense of mission, it has lost touch with its old program and its new program is a dead end, and no one at the top can think of a reason for it to exist, except to keep them employed. Take an honest look at Western governments and that's what you come away with. Massive bureaucracies that exist to provide compulsory services run by people who can't honestly provide a reason for the continuing existence of these countries except as an interim phase until the EU or the UN comes to take over for them. They mouth the rhetoric of exceptionalism, but they don't really believe it. They have more in common with their counterparts in other countries, than they do with the people whose lives they mismanage. Like most collapsing companies, the executives are obsessed with the minutiae of bureaucracy, enforcing rigid control in between attending lavish cocktail parties. They fiddle, Rome burns. Failed State Colonization would not be a threat, if the successful states had not locked themselves into this mess. As the successful states fail, they lack the two elements that would repel the invaders. A high birth rate and a nationalist leadership. Those are elements the failed states do have. And so the showdown is an uneven one. The disparity is not of force, but of a willingness to use it. Successful states attempt to avert the catastrophe by trying to police failed states, sending planes to bomb Libya to keep the migrants out, trying to shore up the Mexican government with aid and advisers. But those are all dead ends that lead to further entanglement and migration. American efforts in Somalia, Iraq and Yugoslavia have accomplished one indisputable thing. They have increased the numbers of Muslim immigrants coming from those countries. Practicing Nation Building on failed states won't stop them from colonizing us. It only accelerates the process. Failed State Colonization is the greatest threat of our time, but it too is a symptom of the intellectual failures of the successful states. As failed states continue their prolonged collapse, they send out migrant populations which accelerate the collapse of the formerly successful states. This colonization means there will be no gradual decline. That we will not sink into the sunset like Japan, instead we will be brutally overrun. There will be no decline, but a fall.

Obama, Let My People Go

3,000 years after the Jewish people left Egyptian slavery bound for the land of Israel, their freedom remains as elusive as ever. A new Pharaoh adjacent not to the Nile, but the Potomac, looks out from the White House and issues his decrees regarding the Jews.

No sooner does a Jew build a house in Jerusalem, than one of the Pharaoh's flunkies rushes to condemn him for it. A week before Passover, one of those flunkies announced that the administration was both "deeply concerned" and "very worried" about new Jewish homes in Jerusalem. A day later Jewish families hoping to be able to live in their own holy city were greeted with the announcement that approval for more housing had been suspended to avoid offending the little man with the big ears in the White House.

The Obama Administration has spent more time condemning housing in Jerusalem, than genocide in the Sudan. If some parts of Israel are constantly being shelled by terrorists, the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem is constantly being shelled by administration spokesmen. Year after year, the people of an overcrowded city are frustrated in their efforts to find a place to live, when some White House or State Department flunky finishes sipping his coffee, gets up in front of a microphone and expresses the grave concern of his master that a new condominium might go up in a place where Jews had been living long before the religion of Obama's grandmother was even a twinkle in her mad prophet's eye.

Full story: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-let-my-people-go.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews+%28from+NY+to+Israel+Sultan+Reveals+The+Stories+Behind+the+News%29&utm_content=Yahoo%21+Mail

The Afghan War to Nowhere

In the first years of Operation Enduring Freedom, the United States managed to oversee a campaign that broke the Taliban, drove them out of major cities and regions, including Kabul, and left them dispirited and broken. And did it while taking under 50 casualties a year. But in 2010, the United States suffered almost ten times as many casualties as it did in the toughest battles of the early days of the war.

The differences between the US involvement in Afghanistan in 2001-2003 and 2005-2011 are tremendous and profound. And they explain the ugly death toll and the nature of the unwinnable war as it's being fought today.

In 2001-2002, we barreled into Afghanistan on a mission to break the Taliban and kill or capture as many Al Qaeda as possible. We employed maximum firepower so casually that the fleeing Taliban fighters were thoroughly demoralized. So much so that it took them years to even seriously think about confronting us again.

 

 

Full story: http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2011/04/afghan-war-to-nowhere.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+FromNyToIsraelSultanRevealsTheStoriesBehindTheNews+%28from+NY+to+Israel+Sultan+Reveals+The+Stories+Behind+the+News%29&utm_content=Yahoo%21+Mail

Muslims and Moral Handicaps [from sultan knish]

Posted: 03 Apr 2011 11:03 PM PDT Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid wants an investigation into Koran burning. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer suggested that this form of free speech could be banned. Senator Lindsey Graham is also looking for ways to limit free speech, saying, "Free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war". Free speech is more than a great idea, it's a fundamental freedom untouchable by legislators. But all it takes is a few Muslim murders-- and Reid, Breyer and Graham eagerly hold up their lighters to the Constitution. Free speech has been curtailed before in the United States during a time of war-- but only free speech sympathetic to the enemy. During WW1 a suspected German propagandist filmmaker was jailed. But could anyone have imagined anti-German propagandists being jailed? The Wilson administration was behaving unconstitutionally, but not insanely. Today we aren't jailing filmmakers who traffic in anti-American propaganda in wartime. If we did that half of Hollywood would be  behind bars. Instead Democratic and Republican Senators are discussing banning speech offensive to the enemy. Because even though they're killing us already-- we had better not provoke them or who knows how much worse it will become. Traditionally it's the victors who give their laws to the defeated. But massive immigration at home and nation building occupations abroad mean that the defeated of failed states are imposing their Sharia law on us. We're asked to trade in our Constitutional freedoms out of fear of Muslim violence. And so the murderers impose the terms of peace on us. And then don't abide by them. Violence in the Muslim world is a constant. We have been fighting Muslim violence since George Washington's time. And we have been subject to it even longer. Whether it's Muslims killing Hindus, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians or any and every religion under the sun-- there is a pattern here. It's a story as old as time. And it's not one that we can stop by ladling out honeyed words of appeasement. Senator Graham warns us to shut up in a time of war-- but is there any foreseeable future in which we won't be fighting in a Muslim country? Democrats elected the most anti-war candidate of the bunch only to see him begin his 2012 reelection campaign by bombing another Muslim country. And what's surprising about that. Most of the trouble spots in the world that directly or indirectly affect us are located in Muslim countries. The major threat to the United States comes from the Muslim world. And that means we're going to be tied up dealing with the Muslim world in one way or another, whether as soldiers, diplomats or aid workers. And even if we weren't-- there are hundreds of thousands of Americans still living and working in Muslim countries. Hostages to the latest Muslim temper tantrum. As Muslim terror has gotten worse, we have started treating the Muslim world like a ticking bomb-- tiptoeing around them to avoid setting them off. Whatever they don't like about us, we're willing to change. The paradigm of the angry dog or the ticking bomb means that we're damned if we do and damned if we don't. Whatever you do, the dog mauls you and the bomb blows up. But by pretending that you control the situation, you can feel better about your role in the outcome. When a man teases a dog on the other side of a chain link fence-- we blame the man for provoking the dog, not the dog for being provoked. Animals have less of everything that makes for accountability. And so don't hold them accountable. Instead we divide them into categories of dangerous and harmless, and treat them accordingly. Our response to Muslim violence in Afghanistan, supposedly touched off by a Koran burning in Florida, uses that same canine logic. The Muslims are dangerous and violent, so whoever provokes them is held accountable for what they do. Don't tease a doberman on the other side of a chain link fence and don't tease Muslims on the other side of the border or the world. That's the takeaway from our elected and unelected officials. But the Muslim rioters are not dogs, they are human beings whose moral responsibility is being denied by treating their violence as a reflexive act. Their violence is not unconscious or instinctual-- it emerges out of a decision making process. There is nothing inevitable about what happened in Afghanistan. If Muslims had some sort of hair trigger, then why was the violent rioting confined to a very specific part of the world. For the same reason that the reaction to the cartoons took so long. And why was it directed at the UN and not the US. The Koran burning was not the cause of Muslim violence-- but a rationalization for existing violence that would have occurred anyway for reasons having nothing to do with Terry Jones. And by treating Muslims like the 'Morally Handicapped' who have no choice but to kill when something offends them, we are not doing any favors for them or us. It is far more insulting to treat Muslims as if they have no ability to control themselves and have no responsibility for their actions-- than it is to burn their Koran. That is an assessment that even many Muslims would agree with. To blame Jones for their actions, we must either treat murder as a reasonable response to the burning of a book, or grant that Jones has a higher level of moral responsibility than the rioters do. There are few non-Muslims who could defend the notion that burning the Koran is a provocation that justifies bloodshed. And virtually no liberal would openly concede that he believes Muslims are morally handicapped-- but then why does he treat them that way? If a Christian had torched a mosque in response to the Muslim arson of churches in Africa-- is there any liberal columnist or pundit who would have directed the lion's share of the blame at the original Muslim arsonists? No. The mosque burning would be treated as an independent act with no linkage to the church arsons. That is the attitude of Western jurisprudence which does not allow one crime to justify another, let alone one provocation to justify a crime. Individuals are treated as responsible moral actors-- not shooting balls in a pinball machine. Why then does this standard fly out the window when it comes to Muslims? Why does the press so easily sink into the rhetoric of 'retaliation and 'provocation', treating Muslim terrorism as a reflex, rather than a chosen act. Is it not because for all their fanciful prose about the Religion of Peace, they do indeed see Muslims as dogs on the other side of a chain link fence. "Don't tease the dog, son, and it won't hurt you." Liberalism begins as condescension toward lower class violence and culminates in complicity with it. Class warfare treated the poor as less morally responsible than the rich because of their deprivation and persecution. By treating physical deprivation as equivalent to moral deprivation, they became guilty of a far worse prejudice than those they were combating. They had declared that the poor were subhuman. When class warfare gave way to race warfare, they repeated the same ugly trick, romanticizing the Black Panthers and empowering thugs and rioters who destroyed black and white communities. The discriminated against were not bound by the same moral code as the discriminators. Their violence was 'purer' because it was a reflex against their conditions that they could not control. And so liberals who lectured ceaselessly about racism, were treating minorities as less than human. Now in the age of Globalism-- Muslims are the new oppressed, exempted from the norms of civilized society. The morally handicapped who cannot be expected to turn the other cheek, the way we're supposed to. But Muslims are not morally disabled-- they are immorally enabled. Muslim violence is a choice. Their choice. It is not a reflex or a reaction or a pinball bouncing off the cycle of violence. It is not something that we are responsible for. It is something that they and only they are responsible for. By pretending otherwise, we are immorally enabling them. Treating them like mad dogs or ticking time bombs just guarantees that they will play their part and fulfill our expectations by mauling or exploding. We have never held Muslims morally accountable for anything they do. Not as a religion or as countries or individuals. Instead we pretend that Osama bin Laden or Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi are the problem. A handful of extremists and a few bad leaders somewhere. Not the people themselves. Never them. Instead we have treated Muslims as the morally handicapped, too morally feeble to understand that violence is not the answer to everything from your daughter sneaking out with a boy to a pastor torching the Koran for a BBQ. And they have reacted exactly as people do when they know they will not be held accountable for their actions. Treating someone as dangerous gives them power over you. They will test that power and then use it. Allowing yourself to be intimidated is the first step to being defeated. For many it is also the last step. We treated Muslims as dangerous and then we insist loudly that we love them very much and aren't afraid of them at all. Guess who we're fooling? Only ourselves. Every time there's a terror alert or American politicians talk about the wonders of the Koran-- the Muslim world sees it as evidence of their power over us. And when a Koran is burned, that just means we need further intimidating. It's a cycle of violence, but we're not the ones driving it except through our appeasement. Muslims have stifled their own moral development-- but we haven't helped either. And the only way we can do that is to push them toward a moral reckoning. Instead we have bought into their genocidal narrative, enabled their violence and empowered the murderous aspects of their ideology. It's time that stopped. Lies and flattery will not prevent the violence. Only the confrontation of truth can force a moral reckoning. Senator Graham wishes there was a way to hold Koran burners accountable for violence carried out by Koran readers, but what we really need is a way to hold Koran believers accountable for their own violence.

"Mr. Obama's Libyan Adventure" from Sultan Knish

Posted: 02 Apr 2011 06:34 PM PDT It's a lot easier to start a war than it is to finish it, as Mr. Obama is learning on his Libyan adventure. That is why wars are generally entered into after some consideration of the situation on the ground. There is only one excuse for a rush to war-- and that is either an imminent threat or in response to an act of war. Such was the case after September 11, and yet even then the United States waited longer to begin bombing the Taliban-- than we did before bombing Gaddafi. Obama rushed in when bombing Libya was popular, and now when it hasn't he's rushing out again. The US is ending combat operations almost as soon as it began them to avoid being associated with the failure of the Libyan intervention. Or rather to avoid associating Obama with its failure. Obama was happy to take credit for the fall of Mubarak until the Muslim Brotherhood stepped up to succeed him. He was happy to take credit for toppling Gaddafi until he realized that it wasn't going to happen without a full bore invasion. The Arab Revolt was cool, but now it isn't anymore. And Obama doesn't want to be associated with it anymore. Suddenly it's last year's Keffiyah lying in the trash. Waiting is not a virtue in and of itself-- but planning is. That allows you to determine if the rebellion you are intervening to support only consists of a few hundred fighters-- some of whom are Al Qaeda. No general would have called for an assault before learning such simple facts and clarifying what the mission was to be. But the Summa Cum Anti-War grad of 2008, who has doubtless read Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky, and built a grass roots network based entirely on his opposition to the war, had spent too much time studying why war is wrong and not nearly enough time studying how wars are won. A month ago the Arab League and European leaders were rushing to get on the right side of history. When the Libyan army, which had lost every war it ever fought, was pushed back by a few rebel attacks, the consensus was that Gaddafi was finished. Leading members of his own regime rushed to join the opposition. And the media triumphantly reported an inevitable rebel victory. There was just one problem. This time we were the ones getting our news about the war from 'Baghdad Bob'. The Libyan army is probably the worst army in the Middle East. It may be the worst army in the world. The last time it fought a war was 1987 and it lost badly, even though it had tanks, jet planes and the African warlords it was fighting had Toyota pickup trucks. Despite 3 to 1 numerical superiority, Gaddafi's forces somehow managed to lose 7 men for every 1 they killed. And also lost nearly a 1,000 tanks, armored vehicles and aircraft to enemies who were driving Toyota pickup trucks. When you come equipped with top of the line Soviet equipment and lose it all in something called The Toyota War, your enemies have good reason not take you seriously. With this in mind, it wasn't unreasonable to assume that the rebels could defeat Gaddafi. It was just unreasonable to assume that without knowing anything about the rebels. On the last day of the Six Day War, Soviet citizens woke baffled to the news that the Israelis who had been on the edge of defeat for five days straight were suddenly threatening Cairo and storming through Jerusalem. It was inexplicable. But there was a simple explanation. They had been getting fed false information by the losing side in a war. And then reality caught up with them. Similarly, King Hussein jumped into the war because he believed reports that Egypt and Syria were on the verge of victory. Actually they were on the verge of defeat. For weeks the media treated every Libyan rebel report as fact-based and every Gaddafi report as fiction. When the Libyan rebels began to lose, it was inexplicable. Our elites gaped like Baghdad Bob confronted with American troops. It wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. So the elites convinced themselves that it was just air power making the difference. If we could shut down Gaddafi's air force, then the rebels would win. And so we did that. The No Fly Zone is here. The Libyan air force is toast. So why are the rebels still losing? They're losing because the No Fly Zone was built on an illusion. The Libyan air force was never a major factor in anything. In the 1980's, it lost to African fighters in Toyotas brandishing Stinger missiles. And the entire Libyan army is mostly useless too. Arabs make terrible soldiers, but good skirmishers. The entire history of the Arab-Israeli wars should amply testify to that. An Arab country with a thousand tanks and jets is no threat to anyone. But a thousand fighters can cause serious havoc. Even win a war. This makes no sense to First Worlders who have grown on images of massive armies clashing on the battlefield. But this is not the modern world. The Libyan civil war is primitive even by Arab standards. It's a typical African civil war, complete with pickup trucks and swords. A battle is won when a dozen men die and the other side runs away. Once the Libyan army stopped pretending it was a modern military force, and whoever is in the field began ignoring whatever crazy orders were being issued by Gaddafi and his loyalists, and just started fighting this the old fashioned way-- the tide began to turn. A modern army is a complex instrument. If you don't use it properly, then it's worse than useless. But turn a couple of thousand fighters loose with machine guns and some artillery, and manpower becomes the crucial factor. And this time the African fighters are on Gaddafi's side, while the rebels are Arabs from different factions who don't trust each other. This is no longer a war between an army and guerrillas, but between militias, some of whom wear uniforms, most of whom don't. Gaddafi's men are handing out AK-47's to anyone willing to fight the rebels. We went in to protect civilians, but how do we do that when the civilians are massacring other civilians. Gaddafi is a butcher, the Arab rebels are violent racists. This is not a conflict between democracy and tyranny, but between tribes, clans and ethnicities. It is exactly the type of war we should have avoided like the plague because there is no up side to it. There is no right and wrong, just an explosion of tensions reined in by a tyrant, as every faction scrambles for power. This is the dumb war we stumbled into with our new administration's smart power. We're tossing cruise missiles into a war being fought with pickup trucks. And we don't even quite know why we're here. Our intervention will drag out the conflict, perhaps indefinitely if we choose it. NATO forces may be enlisted to guard a few rebel strongholds, dividing Libya between the rebels and Gaddafi. And with Al Qaeda fighters pouring in to take advantage of our air strikes, that will make for a pretty picture. Our unclear mission objectives mean that we've become a peacekeeping force with no goal or exit strategy. The Obama Administration is now warning Libyan rebels that if they kill civilians we will bomb them too. So not only are we at war with Gaddafi, we may now also be obligated to fight the rebels too. And how do we tell civilians from soldiers anyway. Once a weapon is picked up as loot, one body looks the same as any other. We could assume that all men are fighting men, but we went into Kosovo, because we treated Serbian executions of Muslim fighters as atrocities. Even though they were all men. If we apply the same rules to Libya, we'll have to start bombing everyone. Including ourselves. This is what happens when you start a war without thinking it through. Liberals have an ideological approach to war, as to all things. They are not concerned with whether a war can be won-- only whether it should be won. Either a war is right or it's not. If the war is not right, then it's also unwinnable. And if a war is right, then it is also winnable. Reality must comply with their ideology. That's how we came to have a 15 trillion dollar deficit to aid a 'recovery' in which families are struggling to put food on the table. And a democratic revolution in which the Islamists are set to take over. Reality meets ideology-- and their ideology crumbles every time. From the 1860's, Democrats have been a party ideologically averse to war, and yet the party most likely to get into a war without really knowing what they're doing. JFK and LBJ got into Vietnam with tens of thousands of advisers and before they knew it there was a war on. The enthusiastic college students who came out for JFK, did their best to denounce Nixon for the war, but it was their man who had done it. The Vietnam War was a disaster for the simple reason that we lacked clear goals and tactics from the start. It was not a war we chose, but a war we stumbled into. After World War II, liberal intellectuals fancied a new order in which military force would be used to enforce international law. Instead of wars, there would be police actions. And police actions are vague things. Euphemisms for war without its clarity. We know how to fight and win wars by applying force to achieve the destruction of enemy forces. But what is a police action. What are its goals? Implicitly it is to keep the peace. Not to win, but to stand as the Union Nation's towering beat cop on the block, waving our armed forces around like a billy club.  This is why we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, because we defined the objective not as the defeat of the Axis of Evil, but as rebuilding the target countries into havens of peace and democracy. The vaguer the objectives, the harder it is to accomplish them. Obama treated Libya like an adventure, announcing a war from sunny Brazil, and ignoring congress and the public, until they forcefully made their objections clear. The war turned goalless, confused and contradictory-- with military leaders saying one thing and political leaders saying another. The coalition is confused and at odds with each other, packed full of frightened European and Arab leaders who are afraid that the world is changing, but have no idea what to do about it. Now Obama is running away from the war that he started. And Mr. Obama's Libyan Adventure is what happens when liberal leaders start wars with no idea how to see them through.