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Goose-Stepping Iranians An ignorance of history can leave an entire generation vulnerable to threats they may otherwise dismiss as bombast.
In an even more bizarre reflection of the German regime that emerged in the 1930s is the obsessive rhetoric blaming the Jews for the troubles of the Middle East and the threats to wipe Israel off the map. In the midst of WWII, the Nazis diverted important resources to round up and kill six million European Jews, along with five million Christians, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others they deemed "sub-human" or political enemies. We know that in America, Spain and England, being an "infidel" is sufficient to get you killed as you commute to work or prepare for another day in the office. We know that Europe hesitated to confront Adolf Hitler and paid a terrible price for it. We know, too, that those Jews who fled Europe were the fortunate few survivors and those who immigrated to Israel after the war had no place else to go. Would you want to go "home" to live next door to a neighbor who betrayed you to the death camps? Barely one percent of the entire landmass of the Middle East and surrounded by twenty-two nations that still daily deplore its existence, Israel remains the victim of terrorist bombings of its civilian population, along with the rockets and mortars of the Palestinians to the north and south of its borders. Rather than invading Gaza, Israel has withdrawn from it. Rather than remaining in southern Lebanon, it has withdrawn from it. Rather than retain sections of the West Bank, it plans to withdraw from parts of it. This is not the picture of a militant, occupying force intent on retaining its gains in the 1967 war waged against it. This is a people who have opted to build a long, high wall to fence itself off from a totally toxic population on the other side of it. The Palestinians are people who use boys to penetrate the wall in order to murder Israelis with an act of suicide. At some point, the Israelis are going to want their leaders to do unto the Iranians that which the Iranians are threatening to do to them, only first. Unless, of course, the United States decides that diplomacy is inadequate to the job of dealing with homicidal ayatollahs and their henchmen. History reveals that the desperate diplomacy of the 1930s was merely a prelude to World War II. It is likely to be the same for WW III if everyone waits around for the new Iranian Hitler’s to fulfill their threats. Few paid attention to Winston Churchill, out of power in England, when he raised warnings about the intentions of the Nazi government. Comparable warnings being raised today regarding the Iranians are also being ignored. Worse, Americans who have grown weary of the struggle in Iraq are in no mood to consider an extended field of battle that would include Iran. There are, however, some stubborn facts that cannot be ignored. The Iranian leadership has spent twenty years and billions of dollars to achieve nuclear parity with the world. While President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was celebrating the enriching of uranium at Nathanz, the real threat was at Neyshabour in Khorassan, a place guarded day and night by the Revolutionary Guard Corps, the elite Ansar al-Mahdi unit. This site will have three times the capacity of Nathanz to enrich the material the Iranians need to build nuclear bombs. You can thank the Russians for making that happen. Little wonder the Pentagon has pulled the maps of Iran off the shelf and begun to upgrade plans for invasion or, more likely, a deterrent bombing of nuclear facilities. You may think the year is 2006 and it is, but the year is also any one of those leading up to 1939 when the Nazis invaded Poland. They felt safe in doing so. After all, they had signed a secret non-aggression pact with the Russians. And the Russians believed them. Right up to the day and hour when the Germans invaded Russia. Then, for the duration of WW II, the Russians became our allies. When WW II ended, they went right back to their own mad dreams of imposing communism on the world. Iran is hardly isolated. There are the Russians and Chinese who are reluctant to permit the United Nations to impose any sanctions. It has friends in Turkey, a formerly secular nation that is embracing its own Islamic revolution, reversing decades of democracy. It has friends in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. Goose-stepping Iranians are on the march. Ignoring them will not change their minds. Threatening them will not change their minds. History has a nasty way of repeating itself and it is doing so now in the Middle East. Would you like to see excerpts of "Warning Signs" on other favorite news or opinion websites? If you are the editor of a website and would like to receive our weekly excerpts, please email me. If there is a website you think would enjoy sharing "Warning Signs", let me know about it. Recently, having joined my nephew and his wife for a Sunday lunch, the conversation turned to little Jessica, about two and a half years old, and the various preschool programs in which she will be entered. What second language should she taught, asked her mother. My answer was swift. "Chinese."
In some ways Americans would feel at home if they moved to China. They will find hundreds of McDonald’s restaurants, Kenny Rogers Roasters, and be able to sip a café latte in a Starbucks. They will be able to watch National Basketball Association games on Chinese TV, a tremendously popular game there. More significant, however, are the growing number of U.S. companies that have set up shop in China. Its membership in the World Trade Organization has put China on the fast track to economic growth, but the WTO will not prove to be an effective vehicle by which the U.S. can resolve its trade problems with China. There is a subtle but important gap between the leadership of America and that of China. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a China expert, notes that China’s leaders are men with engineering backgrounds. Most of America’s are men trained as lawyers. These two professions see the world in diametrically different ways. The former looks for solutions to problems. The latter looks to avoid liability. China’s greatest resource remains an incredibly industrious population, a people who are fully capable of matching those of us in the West, if unleashed to apply their intellect and energy. It is also a source of many internal problems for China’s leaders today. Thousands of protests continue to break out all over China, suggesting the top-down repressive nature of government there will have to yield to change. We’re going to see a steady increase in national debate and news coverage as China succeeds or fails to respond to its internal problems as its economic power increases. Indeed, trade will have been high on the list of things discussed when the president of China visited the U.S. As Peter Brooks of the Heritage Foundation recently noted, "U.S. grievances range from a huge trade deficit to massive copyright violations to blatant currency manipulation." For decades since the end of WW II, military prognosticators have told us that China is the next big threat. China’s military budget is the world’s third largest, just behind the U.S. and Russia. When you have 1.3 billion people and a vast homeland to defend, this is not surprising. What is troubling is the failure of China to get its satellite, North Korea, to reduce its nuclear arms trafficking. If you looked at a map of the world today and were asked to draw circles around those places that pose a problem regarding America’s need for oil, you would first draw a circle around the Middle East and then draw circles around China and India. The latter are modernizing at an extraordinary pace and that requires energy. In 2005 China and India, long wary of one another, signed an agreement in New Delhi that pledged them to cooperation on trade, economic policy, civil aviation, and the sharing of technology. Together, these two nations have a combined population of about 2.2 billion people. More significantly, they are demonstrating that anything the highly advanced nations the West can do, they can as well. Americans have tended not to pay much attention to China. They are beginning to do so because China represents the largest U.S. trade deficit ever seen between two nations; the $202 billion more we spent last year for imported Chinese-made goods than they bought from us. China is rolling in U.S. dollars from its export sales and it has been reinvesting many of those dollars in U.S. treasuries and corporate bonds. It holds approximately $833 billion in U.S. dollar reserves. If China, Japan, and the other Asian nations that own two-thirds of our dollar reserves stop buying U.S. currency, the impact on America would be devastating, but these nations do not want to encounter an Asian financial collapse such as happened in the 1990s and, much to the annoyance of U.S. officials, they will keep the value of their currencies cheap compared to the dollar.
In February of this year, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, told a Senate committee, "I don’t think that the Chinese ownership of U.S. assets is so large as to put our country at risk economically." Is it any comfort that he told a House committee that China holds only a small percentage of the overall U.S. debt? Bernanke did, however, caution that foreign investors might at some point stop increasing their U.S. holdings, describing that scenario as an "uncomfortable adjustment." Meanwhile the U.S. total trade deficit--$726 billion in 2005—is being financed by foreign investors. America remains a superpower, but a look at the statistics coming out of China suggests a rosy future for that nation. Gross domestic product (GDP) in China has risen from $200 billion in 1978 to $2.7 trillion in 2005. GDP growth in 2005 was pegged at 9.9%. Foreign trade in 2005 reached $1.4 trillion, with a trade surplus of nearly $102 billion. A major indicator in the success of a nation is foreign direct investment. In 2005, other nations, including our own, pumped $60.3 billion into China. This is not to say that China doesn’t have lots of problems to solve, not the least of which is the migration of its poor rural population from farms to the wealthy coastal cities in search of better standards of living. They represent half of the nation’s population and greatly outnumber the 300 million emerging middle-and-upper class Chinese living in Beijing and other major cities. As China has shifted its emphasis from agriculture to industrialization and manufacturing, it still has to do a lot better by those who till the soil. It is a great irony that the children and grandchildren of Mao’s great army of peasants that imposed communism on China after WWII are demanding the benefits of its capitalist success. China’s long-standing problem of endemic corruption at the local and provincial levels of government is yet another major problem with which its central government has wrestled. Don’t even bother discussing human rights. I would have loved to be the proverbial fly on the wall when China’s President Hu Jintao sat down with President Bush to discuss the future. As Business Week noted in late April, China is less vulnerable to American pressure on key issues. It is becoming what they called "a runaway trade giant." I am going to continue to recommend that little Jessica learn Chinese as a second language. To help get our message out, the Center needs your support in the form of a donation via this website or, if you prefer, a check payable to The Caruba Organization, 28 West Third St., Suite 1321, South Orange, NJ 07079. Thanks!
©
2006 Alan Caruba. |
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Most who lived during the 1930s rise of the Nazi’s Third Reich are dead and all that’s left are the images on the History Channel. That’s why the sight of goose-stepping Iranian soldiers is eerily redolent of goose-stepping German storm troopers. 
Why? Because there were 61,000 Chinese studying at American colleges and universities and, just as the Chinese understand that English is the lingua franca of world trade, they also know that China is emerging as the next world superpower. So, perhaps, it is not that crazy to think that American youth who want to make their mark in the world of the future would benefit from a comparable fluency in Chinese.