Strategic Vision, or, how to pull our collective heads out of our, you know what

There are too many currents in mind to put into words at the present time distinctly, succinctly, and directly. This will be a wandering topic that has roots in many different avenues of the human enterprise. The very nature of what concerns me is ultimately one thing: the survival of the Western world as the dominant force in the upcoming century and the preservation of our traditions, culture, and of course, the holy trinity of civil society, the rule of law, the market economy, and limited, constitutional, federal, representative government. The changes that are abreast will make this century the critical century for quite possibly the very future of mankind, and or at least allow us to begin colonization before anyone else. Yes, that's correct, space colonization.
So many people scoff at the future that is inevitable--there are simply too many resources, too many places to go and see first hand. If you haven't ever perused the websites of the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter for several years, or the Cassini craft that is currently orbiting Saturn, or the massive amount of imagery that the Mars rovers have returned in their trek across Mars, you really should, because they are spectacular. Who doesn't want to go and see those places, to examine the geology and possible biology of those planets? Or more importantly, who doesn't see dollars to be earned. I pointed out yonks ago that Ceres, an asteroid that orbits just outside of Mars is 80% ice water. That means it contains more freshwater than the entire Earth does!!! And we're worried about depleting resources. But beyond that, the advances that WILL happen in molecular nanotechnolgy, biotechnology, and robotics over the next twenty years will make the future a great deal more dangerous than it is even right now, especially as the forces that are at work in the world right now coalesce. And that's really what this post is about: our leaders, our pundits, our everybody pretty much doesn't seem to be aware of the undercurrents that are happening throughout the world. There are several things that I always take note of when I read the news:
1. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of China, and I am aware of the recent reports of massive pollution and contamination of water supplies there. But that was the first report of any significance that had been pried out of China since a reported for the Voice of America, I believe, managed to get video out of Chinese villagers and police forces engaged in, well, the cops were trying to put down a protest and the protesters didn't like it too much.
2. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news still to this day reported out of Russia. You have to go and look for news about Russia. You just don't find it on any common website that is an American one. Instead there's a hodgepodge. You can go to Pravda via Drudge, but their translators are terrible and the stories read like old Soviet press releases. Yuck.
3. There is rarely, and I mean rarely any news reported out of Iran...

Do you see a trend here? The Western nations on the other hand, all have plenty of information coming out of them, for free. Information that provides all those other nations that don't have information coming out of them with all the knowledge that they need to figure out just how effective their current strategies may or may not be. In other words, we are providing a ready made and free propaganda machine to the enemy, and therein lies the problem. We aren't really sure yet who is the enemy here. Are the Russians with us, or against us? Will they long tolerate the training of Chechen rebels by Islamists? Are the Chinese really in it to join the "international community" (whatever the hell that means) or are they in it just for themselves? Are the Japanese genuinely committed to amending their Constitution and assuming their role as the world's second largest economic and who should be the second largest military power as well? What is going on in Somalia, does anyone know? Can anyone in the intelligence community give a briefing concerning the "take on the ground" from any place in the world, except for Washington D.C., which is apparently the only place that the analysts know what's going on and even then the pundits can't agree on it and we end up with two years of investigations into what is tantamount to a he-said/she-said and that sounds like a split infinitive and we had better boldly stay away from those. We haven't got the slightest idea as to what the take on the ground is in Mexico City or Rio or even Montreal much less Baghdad, Kabul, Tehran, Beijing, or Moscow. If we did, maybe the leadership would display a little more Bismarkian cunning when it comes to foreign relations, instead of the current system whereby every US combat death is broadcast immediately when it happens. Don't you think that maybe that's exactly the signal that the Islamists are looking for? They get free confirmation and effect of their latest action and when we engage them we get nothing. Every victory for us is meaningless and every attack for them is worth a hundred of our actual victories in the number and caliber of the people they are able to recruit. Every word uttered by seditionous and treasonous public officals utterly undoes the efforts of every US serviceperson throughout the entire field of combat, whether it be actually in combat, or engaged in nation-building. That's what really just pisses me off more than anything right now, is the galling ability of the Left to escape clear condemnation of moral hypocrisy concerning nation-building when foreign policy conundrum was essentially always concerned with nation-building, from Haiti to Bosnia to Kosovo, the Left waxed eloquent concerning the need for American power to help people who could not help themselves and now that a Republican President has wholesale adopted their vision (something that usually meant the person being copied had won the argument) freeing more than 50 million people from two of the most oppressive regimes on the planet, they stand their with their hands in the pockets looking at the ground like a twelve year old you caught smoking a cigarette. He made me do it, and they point to Dubya. It's pitiful. A dutiful opposition party would have much traction right now, decrying the wasteful spending of America's dollar during a time war, demanding a declaration of war against ALL state sponsors of terrorism and ALL terrorist organizations worldwide, and recognizing only TOTAL victory on the battefield; they would be up in arms over the nature of the borders, a genuine opposition party would have the GOP on their heels in a second. Which of course leads me to the conclusion that the entire cadre of Democratic leadership are actually Karl Rove's agents, planted by Rove as early as spermhood and possibly before he was even alive, through Divine intervention, Rove was able to plant Dean and Kennedy amongst others to insure that the GOP (Gored On Pork) remains in power indefinitely.
That's the only conclusion that I can reach. There is legitimate criticism to be made of both the administration and Congress. But the Democrats haven't made one legitmate criticism of either since 9/11! The only good proposal that any Democrat has made in the past five years was to increase the size of the military and I can't remember who proposed that, but that's it! Nothing constructive, nothing positive, nothing to indicate that there's one iota of intelligence anywhere on the Left except Mickey Kaus and Christopher Hitchens, and Victor Davis Hanson, who I believe considers himself to be a liberal, but don't quote me on that. Which means that not only does the Right alliance have to be the ones making legitimate criticism, but it means that we can count out a significant plurality of the population when it comes to legitimate decision making capability.
I'm not sure there are any recommenations that I have only that we have to recognize that we are at war. Until that realization comes to everyone, until everyone understands that this conflict will not simply go away by making everyone take conflict resolution classes, we will make no real progress. Every one of accomplishments is immediately overshadowed by any number of what constitutes digital setbacks. The power of the internet has made information available to everyone. A jihadist can look up the names of the soldiers that he and his companions have killed and recite their names aloud and proclaim to Allah that they will only kill more of the infidel. And the leader of the Democratic Party can find himself suddenly the spokesman for al-Qaeda and not be aware at all of the strategic consequences of his actions. There is only one solution to this matter: declare war on all state-sponsors of terror and begin the long hard slog that will become known as World War IV. The longer we wait, the more the shadows of evil come together to form that black boot of authoritarianism that lurks every generation, that must be fought, that must be defeated if we are to live free. Do you think that China does not see the perfect opportunity brewing to allow them to take Taiwan? Israel, threatened by the imminent arrival of Iranian nuclear weapons, attacks Iran, which in turn attacks Israel, which in turn retaliates again, and 160,000 US forces and who knows how many aircraft are already in the region and suddenly, what has up to this point been a relatively quick and efficient modern US war becomes a bloody war of attrition whereby the US essentially is caught in the cross-fire and we find ourselves in the strategically enviable position and knocking out both Syria and Iran, which constitute massive reinforcements being sent and then kaboom! The Chinese begin an all out invasion of Taiwan and we are stuck. What then, if North Korea, acting alongside the Chinese, decides, what the hell, let's go for South Korea? Random Muslim extremists throughout the world, where ever they live in clusters, begin tactics similar to what happened in Paris recently? Without any warning at all, the world has gone from relative peace to relative conflict in a matter of weeks. We are always so tempted to cite history at this point, and say that similar circumstances have happened before, look at how quickly the assasination of Archduke Ferdinand precipitated a war no one thought was possible. Why levels of foreign trade between the Great Powers of Europe were never again reached until the mid 1990's, when everyone was again proclaiming that war between the great powers was all but impossible, just as they had proclaimed in the years, months, and weeks leading up the Great War. And here we are today, descendants of the world that the Great War left us with, a world divided between nation-states that were actually nation-states, and the rest, the Gray Area of the world. The Gray area that is only that much grayer because we have no idea what's really going on there. What the people are saying. A message boards only gives you so much of an idea of a person's heritage, their motivations, their desires. Human intelligence can never replace digital intelligence, and yet here we are, with no human intelligence and a glut of digital intelligence that we can't even begin to sift throuhg. Our tactics are pitiful. Our ability to control information escaping to the enemy, pitiful. The behavior of most of our so-called allies, pitiful. Before we can proceed to the next chapter of human evolution, namely, the integration of technology into our biological make-up, we must defeat this last rag-tag band of savages, and we must defeat them before our Leftist elites give them any more cause to continue fighting. We must develop a strategic vision and then set out to implement it. We cannot rely on the euphemism that is "democracy" which we tout round the world while ignoring the underlying basis for the success of our way of our life. We can no longer hope to get by on blind luck, because sooner or later, we will be attacked on American soil. And we can only hope that the next attack will not be a nuclear, biological, chemical, electromagnetic, or any other. We can only hope that instead we kill the bastards before they kill any more of us. And the only way to do that is head on, with a ferocity and intensity that we have displayed before, in the face of very similar tactics. They were called kamikazes then and they are called suicide bombers today. We defeated them once and by George Washington, we will defeat them again.