The Twilight Struggle...

Twilight Water by Charles Kolnik





Today, Wretchard over at The Belmont Club offers up this post entitled, The Dark Frontier. It refers to the Muslim Triangle in South America and highlights remarks from a presser held by Donald Rumsfeld during his recent sortie to South America.

It's interesting, provocative and hits the mark with a red-hot bullet.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's press conference enroute to Paraguay is interesting for a number of reasons -- the first being Paraguay itself. The Power and Interest News summarizes the region's strategic importance to the US. South America is wracked by a confluence of resurgent Marxism, fueled by Venezuela and Cuba; failing states and coca. Of particular interest is the Tri-Border area, centered on the town of Ciudad del Este in Paraguay on the border of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. The Associated Press described it as "a key South American point for Islamic terrorist fund raising to the tune of $100 million a year." The Tri-border area is sometimes described as the Muslim Triangle and is alleged to be one end of a conveyor belt leading to the US southern border.

He goes on to point out:

Rumsfeld's press conference produced another gem on the arming of the Iraqi insurgency by Iran. After the media asked precisely one question about the Tri-Border area ("Q: Will you be talking about the tri-border issue in Paraguay? A: I think the cooperation that the countries in the tri-border area have demonstrated has been a useful and constructive thing. It's been good. ...") they skipped straight to the subject of the Middle East.

Media: There have been reports about Iran specifically facilitating -- I mean you've addressed them a little bit. But over the weekend there was an even more detailed report in Time Magazine about Iran’s Revolutionary Guards setting up a specific unit in Iraq to carry out car bombings against Coalition forces. Are you aware of those kinds of reports? Do you think Iran's involvement is getting more intensive as the process of writing the constitution goes along?

You should read the full text of the article for the flavor of his response, but basically, Rummy punted with a non-answer.

Don't get me wrong, one of the reasons I dig the Rum-meister is his ability to tie the press in knots, but in this instance it just serves to reinforce this bad feeling I've been getting lately.

The feeling that we aren't really that serious about this War on Terror maybe.

Read on:

Some Belmont Club readers have repeatedly written to ask why Secretary Rumsfeld would be at pains to downplay Iranian intervention in Iraq -- both before and after Operation Iraqi Freedom -- when these revelations would serve to strengthen the linkage between terrorism and it's state sponsors, a connection whose existence has been repeatedly denied. (Speculation alert) One possible reason for turning a public blind eye to Iranian belligerence is that any administration which very strongly emphasized it would logically be compelled to do something about it, a step which the Bush administration may be unprepared to take or believes cannot be sustained by domestic political consensus.

Wretchard goes on to provide a historical parallel for us to chew on by looking at the Spanish Civil War and the non-response of Great Britain, France and Russia to the torpedoing of merchant ships by Germany and Italy.

"Despite the fact that no major power would acknowledge belligerent acts by Italy and Germany against neutral shipping, the "international community" of the 1930s went on to negotiate the Treaty of Nyon proscribing acts of "piracy" without naming the pirates.

In order to prevent matters from being brought a to a head, Britain and France simply pretended they didn't know who was sinking neutral shipping and instructed their naval forces to conduct a secret war at sea against an enemy they would not acknowledge until two years later. Nor were they alone in this charade. The US Naval Institute has an interesting article describing FDR's undeclared naval war on Germany in 1940, not knowing that the hunt for German and Italian warships in the northern Atlantic."

Then like now, wishy-washy world wide public opinion has prevented politicians from showing the will to take on:
-the Iranian and Syrian interference in Iraq.
-the unending stream of Saudi suicide bombers.
-the burgeoning Muslim Triangle of South America.

Nobody says this better than our man, Wretchard.

Policy is consequently being made in fits and starts in the tug-o'-war between the sides, essentially awaiting events before taking a categorical direction. Whether that direction will be a genuine "peace for our time" or a new Pearl Harbor is unknown. Until history resolves the dilemma the twilight struggle will continue all over the world, from the Tri-Border area to the Iranian frontier.

In this political climate, what will it finally take to send us in a categorical direction, you wonder.

9/11 evidently wasn't enough.

Will it be a nuclear event?

How long are we going to struggle in the twilight?

Leave it to Wretchard to pull it all back into perspective and in the comments section, no less.

The failure by the democracies in the 1930s to act decisively cost millions of lives in the 1940s. Historians have argued that neither FDR nor Chamberlain could have done much more, given the pacifist tide of the time. Even after Munich, Chamberlain continued to try to buy off Hitler with loans and disposable countries, the so-called "silver bullets". One wag retrospectively called the policy suicide committed out of the fear of death.

In the end it was not the Western politicians, not even FDR with his great skills that convinced the public to take up arms but the Fascists themselves. The democracies had to endure near-mortal hurt before awakening to the danger. Then, as now, it was largely the Left that plied the soporific, assisted ironically enough, by the extreme Right who peddled the 'Fortress America' line.

It's dangerous to draw too many parallels with the past, but perhaps it is even more dangerous to draw none at all.