In real time these lines are being written in early September. My spirits are usually high this time of year. I suppose my usual feeling is in part an emotional residue left over from school days long ago. September was when one went back to learning after the summer hiatus, and learning is always exciting, or should be. Anyway, September usually feels like a new beginning, a time of new possibilities.
Of course September 8 is the birthday of Our Lady, the Second Eve. Talk about a new beginning!
But perhaps readers have noticed my saying “usually”. This September my feeling is not as usual. It is colored by foreboding, the sense that once again men of little knowledge and even less wisdom, the kind modernity makes national leaders, are leading those who elected them and everybody else in dangerous directions.
I don’t think I’m alone. I noticed Pope Francis expressing the fear last week that we may be seeing these days the beginning of World War III “piecemeal” (his word). He spoke in general terms, as popes customarily do. I’ll be specific about two situations that might stir unease in anyone who managed to look up from his iPhone long enough to pay them the attention they merit. That so few would seem capable of doing such a thing deepens my foreboding. Pope Francis, I suspect, had these two situations in mind when he spoke as he did.
One is the sudden rise of the entity that calls itself the Islamic State, against which President Obama has declared war, vowing it will be “destroyed” (his word).
IS is headed by a man named Abu Bakr al-Baghadi whose followers have proclaimed him Caliph. I am far from being a historian of Islam but gather that to the majority of the world’s Muslims this is roughly comparable, in Christian terms, to some unknown German appearing out of nowhere and proclaiming himself Holy Roman Emperor. It would look mad, which is why no Muslim has claimed the title in recent time. Fellow Muslims would have stared at him in disbelief, or laughed.
Nobody is laughing at IS and the new Caliph. Their atrocities put a stop to that before it started.
I’m not going to explore the question raised by some other commentators, worthy of exploration though it be, as to whether the war declared by President Obama is a back door to the bombing of Syria that our neocons wanted and didn’t get last year. The real question is whether IS can be destroyed by U.S. air strikes and the “boots on the ground” of a coalition none of whose members have been identified at the time of this writing. After all, smart bombs and our own troops didn’t achieve their promised results either in Vietnam forty years ago or Operation Iraqi freedom begun in 2003.
You’d think that by virtue of IS calling itself a state, moreover one that really does control territory, has declared Raqqa its capital, is collecting taxes, has armed itself (in large measure with weapons stamped Made in U.S.A. since many of its fighters used to be with the “moderate” anti-Assad forces we’ve been equipping in Syria) and obviously has a first-rate propaganda department, it would be easier to destroy than an amorphous operation like Al-Queda. The trouble is: Even if air strikes and the vaunted coalition succeed in destroying IS, a big “if” in light of recent history, how do you destroy an idea?
At the least, you need one of your own to counter it. In his speech to the nation, President Obama said we have the “values” (again his word) of freedom and democracy. Well, they were invoked by Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon in Vietnam and George W. Bush in 2003. They weren’t sufficient then. Why should they prevail now, especially since the very notion of them is abhorrent to jihadists whether they call themselves Al-Queda, Islamic State or something else tomorrow. They want an end to what they see as “Crusader” imperialism and, at least some of them, to finish what was halted at the gates of Vienna in 1683: the subjugation of ex-Christendom with the Muslim crescent atop Notre Dame in Paris, St. Paul’s in London and St. Patrick’s in New York, not to speak of St. Peter’s in Rome.
The situation makes me think back to the seventies when the mullahs took over in Iran. Americans at that time couldn’t understand why the Iranians would reject the Shah’s vision of turning their country into another California in favor of Ayatollah Khomeini’s idea of it as a base for the Shiite conquest of the Islamic world. We still don’t understand why any people would prefer anything to having an election every four years, the freedom to watch internet porn, and the equality of two women “married” to each other with a man and woman who truly are married.
I don’t think that when Vladimir Putin first took over in Russia he had any idea beyond the necessity, if what was left of his country was to survive, of bringing order to a society that the drunkard Boris Yeltsin had let fall into chaos. He succeeded, and now gives evidence to having not so much an idea as a vision of Russia standing as a bastion against the further spread of the “values” of secular liberalism. In doing so, he has made Russia the only major country in the world where Christianity has a visible day-to-day public role in the life of society and with national policies that reflect it.
Whether or not he has done it in order to buttress his rule is immaterial. It is the reason, when all is said and done, why the governments of all the countries of the formerly Christian and now secular-liberal West are against him, and they see Ukraine as a possible means of getting him off the world stage — i.e., of “regime change” in Moscow.
At the moment of this writing, and ignored by most Americans, there are U.S. troops in western Ukraine preparing to engage in “military exercises” with the Ukrainian army. It is easy to predict that some number of these troops will remain after the exercises. They will be called “advisers” and “trainers”. They always are.
Made nervous by all the heavily-armed neo-Nazi thugs with swastika tattoos running around these days in Ukraine, the Russians have beefed up their forces on the Ukrainian border. Consider what could happen in the foreseeable future if American troops, told they are training Ukrainians to resist a possible Russian “invasion,” think they see one coming and somebody opens fire across the border at a Russian patrol.
Supposing nothing like that happens in the near future, relations with Russia still will not improve if African-Americans, Hispanics and suburban women elect Hillary Clinton in 2016. Putin has shown he can keep a cool head but is not likely to forget that Clinton publicly and stupidly compared him to Hitler earlier this year. He’ll also remember her exulting over the pictures of Muammar Gaddafi’s grisly end (“We came, we saw, we killed!”). Men who know him have reported he was horrified by the same pictures, as would be a Christian, or anyone mindful of what mob rule can do.
A poll has just come out showing 71 percent of Americans supporting President Obama’s new war. The percentage may not be enough to make a mob, but it’s enough for the President to assert, as he has, that he doesn’t need Congressional approval to act as he wants in the Middle East and for nobody who matters in Congress to challenge the assertion. Of course the public can turn, as they eventually did with Vietnam and when death and destruction in Iraq finally made everybody forget the euphoria of “Mission Accomplished”.
That’s the trouble with these adventures. There is always too much death and too much destruction before the turning.
As for Ukraine, with Russia controlling much of the natural gas that heats Central and Eastern Europe, even the belligerent Poles may have to retreat before the annual advance of the famous and historically unvanquished General Winter, and the Barack Obamas, David Camerons and Francois Hollandes who want someone like themselves in power in Moscow will be disappointed once again.
But only think of how the face of the world could be transformed if a Christian West were joined to a Christian Russia for the undertaking. Of course this would require the conversion of the West as well as Russia. A Catholic may suppose that she whose birthday was marked on September 8, or more exactly her Son, had something like it in mind at Fatima. Under prevailing circumstances, time is needed before prayers for it can be realized and the Pope is right to fear what can happen between now and then.
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