Realpolitik

In 1953, the Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammed Mossadeh, was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup and

replaced by Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Mossadeh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company the previous year, had balked at compensating the British for their losses and then cut off diplomatic relations with the UK while facing a mounting threat from the Tudeh, Iran's Communist party. President Eisenhower understood that if Mossadeh were overthrown by the Communists, the Soviet Union would control Iran's huge oil reserves, threaten commerce through the Persian Gulf, destabilize the Middle East and gain a major strategic advantage, so he authorized an operation that resulted in Mossadeh's ouster and the elevation of the Shah. Dirty and distasteful, yes, but given the circumstances, Ike had little choice: Stand on idealistic principles and suffer a strategic defeat or get his hands dirty and throw a roadblock in front of the Soviets.

Guatemala in 1954 was led by Jacobo Arbenz, a democratically-elected Leftist who had nationalized United Fruit, a US company, the previous year and who had refused to compensate the owners for their losses, and whose political base included a vocal and growing Communist Party. After Arbenz appointed several Communists to positions within his government, President Eisenhower decided that he wouldn't wait for Guatemala to become a Soviet satellite and he authorized a CIA operation to topple Arbenz, Operation PBSUCCESS. With clandestine radio broadcasts and by co-opting an existing anti-Communist guerrilla force, CIA convinced the Guatemalan Army that they faced overwhelming numbers and that the US was about to intervene. The army refused to support Arbenz, the President fled the country and Operation PBSUCCESS was a success, forestalling a Soviet beachhead in Central America.

In 1963, the United States sanctioned a military coup in South Vietnam in which a group of Army and Air Force officers overthrew and executed President Ngo Dinh Diem over his corrupt and autocratic rule, which had included rigging elections and arresting and executing political opponents. Occurring as it did only three weeks before President John F. Kennedy was himself assassinated, this event is tinged with more than a hint of irony given Kennedy's themes of hope and self-determination for post-colonial countries (he did found the Peace Corps, after all), but the United States was locked in a life-or-death struggle in the early 1960's with the international Communist movement. President Eisenhower had involved the United States in Vietnam to prevent a Communist takeover of Indochina based on the "domino theory" - if Vietnam collapsed, then Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma and Indonesia would soon follow - and Kennedy had adopted Eisenhower's policy and the underlying rationale. He held his nose at Diem's corruption but when the opportunity arose to get rid of him and replace him with someone who would hold free elections, respect free speech and the press, release political prisoners and take aggressive action against the Viet Cong, Kennedy didn't hesitate: Diem was killed and US interests were advanced.

The latest crisis in Egypt illustrates once again the Priest-King administration's painful ineptitude in foreign policy. From the 2008 campaign onward, Priest-King has trumpeted a Leftist approach to foreign affairs that included pandering to the Islamic world, the Russians, the Chinese, the Palestinians and the UN, cutting American military power, vacillating during the Arab Spring, retreating from Iraq and Afghanistan, alienating Great Britain and Israel and generally acting as a bystander in global affairs rather than as the world's only true superpower. Leftist dogma holds that an aggressive American foreign policy that gives top priority to American strategic interests is selfish, arrogant, anachronistic and crude, therefore, American interests should be ignored to mollify the bruised egos of other countries, even countries hostile to us. We are the world's oldest and greatest democracy so we must respect the results of democratic elections wherever they are held, even if the results run counter to our long-term interests; to do otherwise is hypocrisy, goes the Leftist fellow-traveler mindset. This approach, as you may have noticed, is characteristic of liberal philosophy on at least three points, namely:

1. America is always to blame
2. A preoccupation with the opinions of other countries
3. Ideology trumps reality

...and has proven wholly inadequate. In January 2006, HAMAS won a majority of seats in the Palestinian parliament in a democratic election. Nouri al-Maliki is the democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iraq. However, HAMAS is dedicated to the destruction of Israel and al-Maliki is an Iranian puppet, so the fact they both won free elections is not enough: We want democracies that also support our strategic interests.

Mohamed Morsi was elected President of Egypt in that country's first free election ever last year but is also a hardcore member of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest and most extreme terrorist groups in the Middle East. (Ayman al-Zawahiri is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, you will recall.) Since his election in June 2012, the Egyptian economy has tanked while Morsi sacked the most senior members of Egypt's military and intelligence structure, seized all executive and legislative power for himself, declared a state of emergency during which he could take any action he deemed necessary to "protect the revolution," cracked down on free speech and free exercise of religion (Christian churches have been attacked and Christians have persecuted to the point of crucifixion), promoted sharia law and pursued an extreme Islamic agenda. He was able, in only one year, to antagonize every segment of Egyptian society except the Muslim fanatics of his base and - notably - the Priest-King administration, who threw their full support behind him. The $1.5 billion in military aid that we give Egypt every year was confirmed and Hillary Clinton and Priest-King himself both publicly declared their support for Morsi's regime, again solely because he was democratically elected. And now he has been ousted by popular demand and Priest-King is flummoxed, unable or unwilling to grasp that he has bet on the wrong horse ..again.

Foreign policy is not for ideologues or the faint of heart. In Egypt's case, Hosni Mubarak was a dictator but a dictator that we could work with: He fought on our side in Desert Storm, he honored his treaties with us and with Israel, he kept a lid on Islamic extremists and he was a solid ally for thirty years. Throwing him under the bus in favor of Mohamed Morsi was a strategic mistake and we will pay for it. The Egyptians who protested and risked their lives to oppose Morsi are angry that we supported him and ignored their grievances, they will remember that we did nothing to help them in their hour of need, that the world's champion of freedom sat on its hands in their crisis, and they will never trust us again. The world is the way the world is, Mr. President, not the way you want it to be.

A Rising Tide?

Well, we're there. On 26 June, the Supreme Court overturned the Defense of Marriage Act so homosexuals

can receive Federal benefits and upheld the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision to overturn Proposition 8 in California, clearing the way for statewide recognition of homosexual marriages and setting the conditions for nationally-recognized homosexual marriage throughout the United States. Every warning that conservatives have issued on this subject has come true and every last warning has been ignored. God help our country.

Anthony Kennedy, Ronald Reagan's third choice to replace Lewis Powell in 1987, cast the deciding vote and wrote the majority opinion in the DOMA case, twisting logic to fit the outcome he wanted. He asserted that the definition of marriage had always been left to the States and the Federal government had no right to interfere, and I quote: "The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity." So, as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, DOMA had "no legitimate purpose"? Protecting traditional marriage from being mocked and degraded is "no legitimate purpose"? We're in a new country, my friends, a country in which a law passed by 342 Congressmen and 85 Senators and signed by the President of the United States with strong popular support, with the intent of defining marriage for the Federal government and not the States, may be voided by one man for his purpose, that is, advancing homosexuality in our society. Justice Kennedy arrogantly dismisses the idea that the Federal government might have an interest in the institution of marriage, but the whole point of DOMA was to prevent the very trend that is happening now: Pro-gay marriage States attempting to force conservative States to recognize the unions they have sanctioned, using the provisions in Article IV of the Constitution as their basis (that States must respect each others' laws). In short, DOMA was a constitutional device used to prevent an unconstitutional encroachment, and now has been voided as being unconstitutional itself, all so homosexual marriage may proceed.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the coup de grace to the Proposition 8 case on a technical point, specifically, that the people of California who drafted and helped pass the proposition had no standing in Federal court, given that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Prop 8 and the California state government refused to defend it. Although not a direct nullification of Prop 8 on its merits, this decision guts the proposition in effect and the Court covered itself in shame nonetheless. Here we had a lawfully crafted amendment to the California state constitution, approved by a strong majority of the voters, overturned by a notoriously liberal appeals court and a state government, elected to represent the people and enforce the laws faithfully, refusing to do its duty on purely ideological grounds. Given the state's abdication of their duty, what were the people to do but to present their case themselves? If the people's elected officials refuse to enforce the laws impartially, if they refuse to defend the laws and the courts refuse to uphold the laws, then the people are literally at the mercy of their government and that is not democracy but tyranny.

Both cases are defeats for traditional marriage by themselves but together, they signal a sea change for our country. The Supreme Court has decided to reshape American society according to their liberal views much as they did with Roe v. Wade in 1973, steering our country in a dangerous new direction in the face of strong opposition: If most of the people don't want homosexual marriage, then by thunder, we'll just force them to accept it! Or so goes the argument. On the one hand, they insisted that only the States have the right to define marriage and on the other hand, they rejected a State's lawful attempt to do just that. The only thing that mattered was sweeping away all opposition to homosexual marriage by plain judicial fiat and my question is: Then what? Having redefined marriage to suit themselves, how will the homosexual lobby and their liberal friends in the courts respond when polygamists demand equal treatment, or when pedophiles want to marry their victims, or when groups of people want to marry other groups of people? When the supply of desirable children available for adoption is exhausted (so the homosexuals may ape the family), will heterosexual couples be forced to surrender every other child, or every child, to the State for "redistribution"? The institution loses its meaning, becomes irrelevant and fades away, and our society devolves into a confused mass of self-centered dilettantes demanding recognition for their sexuality, however they choose to define it. Marriage, which used to mean only one thing, is then redefined to mean anything, or more correctly, nothing .

...which is what the homosexual lobby wants. Traditional marriage involves a moral judgment wherein one heterosexual man commits himself to one heterosexual woman for life, providing the perfect environment for the birth, growth and education of children and the prosperity of the family, and where there is moral judgment, there is God. Homosexuals cannot possibly match this arrangement, they are excluded - or rather they exclude themselves - by the lifestyle they choose, they bristle at the notion that what they are doing is immoral - how dare God judge them? -  they envy traditional marriage and want very much to mimic it, to share in its social and legal benefits, to be validated. The only way to have what they want, then, is to dispense with the moral dimension altogether, to affirm that sexuality is irrelevant, and to claim that by reserving marriage only for heterosexual couples, society demeans them. This claiming of victimhood goes a long way among the Left, it grants a measure of legitimacy for homosexuals that has obviously resulted in dramatic change in their favor, but what do these decisions mean for our democracy?

• Judicial diktat trumps the democratic process. Both DOMA and Prop 8 enjoyed very strong popular support and were passed by overwhelming majorities in the respective legislatures and they were both overturned. The ability of the people to govern themselves, therefore, through their elected representatives and through ballot initiatives, is seriously undermined, and the people's confidence in their government evaporates since the government may choose which laws they will honor and which they won't, at the same time insisting that the people strictly obey every law without exception.  The courts now have power not accorded them under our Constitution and be assured: They will use it as they see fit, and they will use it to gain even more power.

• Federalism will suffer since neither the Federal government nor the States will understand exactly what they may do.  The Defense of Marriage Act was voided in deference to the States and Prop 8 was voided in deference to a Leftist agenda, so where's the line, really?

• Religious freedom, especially for Christians, is diminished and will continue to suffer. What if a Christian wedding planner refuses to serve a homosexual couple? What if a Christian minister refuses to perform a homosexual wedding? Would a Christian church have its property seized for the same reason, would its members be liable for criminal prosecution?

The Left interprets these decisions as great victories for civil rights and they dismiss conservatives' concerns as the usual handwringing when society changes faster than they'd like, but be wary: If they believe they are riding a rising tide, a rising tide can indeed lift all boats but it can also drown everyone.