Bag Man In A Karakul Hat

by Thomas A. Droleskey

Bag man in a karakul hat (a hat made out of the fur of aborted lamb fetuses!).

That's all that the thoroughly corrupt President of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, likes the high life. So much that he has spoken publicly now of taking bags and bags and bags filled with cash from almost anyone and everyone, including his American sponsors and from the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, of course, is not especially friendly to the interests of the United States of American and the presence of its combat forces in Mohammedan nations. Ahmadinejad has supported insurgent forces in Iraq and in Pakistan and Afghanistan. What does this mean to Hamid Karzai? Nothing. He is nothing other than an old-fashioned Mohammedan rug merchant who sells the same rug to different people without ever giving them the product. He is nothing other than a big man in a "chic" karakul hat.

The terrorist attacks that took place on the soil of the United States of America on September 11, 2001, provided the neoconservative war hawks in the administration of then President George Walker Bush the excuse that they needed to engage in a massive exercise of Americanist social engineering and Wilsonian nation-building with the blood of American service personnel as they were prepared to--and did in fact--help to mortgage the future fiscal stability of the government of the United States of America (that has been further undermined by the Keynesian, statist policies of the man who is, at the very least, the son of a Kenyan, Barack Hussein Obama). A new breed of Mohammedan thugs and bag men in Iraq and Afghanistan were empowered to bleed the American taxpayers dry as they lived high on the hog and as their countries continued to be awash in fratricidal warfare. Bag men never care about others. They care only about themselves.

Consider this article, written by one who clearly supports the American invasion and occupation of Iraq, that nevertheless just eviscerates the bag man in a karakul hat named Hamid Karzai, who happened to have had the hat, once all the rage in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, designed for him to wear following his ascent to power after the American invasion of the country (see Hamid Karzai's Famous Hat):

'They do give us bags of money—yes, yes, it is done, we are grateful to the Iranians for this." This is the East, and baksheesh is the way of the world, Hamid Karzai brazenly let it be known this week. The big aid that maintains his regime, and keeps his country together, comes from the democracies. It is much cheaper for the Iranians. They are of the neighborhood, they know the ways of the bazaar.

The remarkable thing about Mr. Karzai has been his perverse honesty. This is not a Third World client who has given us sweet talk about democracy coming to the Hindu Kush. He has been brazen to the point of vulgarity. We are there, but on his and his family's terms. Bags of cash, the reports tell us, are hauled out of Kabul to Dubai; there are eight flights a day. We distrust the man. He reciprocates that distrust, and then some. Our deliberations leak, we threaten and bully him, only to give in to him. And this only increases his lack of regard for American tutelage. We are now there to cut a deal—the terms of our own departure from Afghanistan.

The idealism has drained out of this project. Say what you will about the Iraq war—and there was disappointment and heartbreak aplenty—there always ran through that war the promise of a decent outcome: deliverance for the Kurds, an Iraqi democratic example in the heart of a despotic Arab world, the promise of a decent Shiite alternative in the holy city of Najaf that would compete with the influence of Qom. No such nobility, no such illusions now attend our war in Afghanistan. By latest cruel count, more than 1,300 American service members have fallen in Afghanistan. For these sacrifices, Mr. Karzai shows little, if any, regard.

In his latest outburst, Mr. Karzai said the private security companies that guard the embassies and the development and aid organizations are killer squads, on a par with the Taliban. "The money dealing with the private security companies starts in the hallways of the U.S. government. Then they send the money for killing here," Mr Karzai said. It is fully understood that Mr. Karzai and his clan want the business of the contractors for themselves.

The brutal facts about Afghanistan are these: It is a broken country, a land of banditry, of a war of all against all, and of the need to get what can be gotten from the strangers. There is no love for the infidels who have come into the land, and no patience for their sermons.

In its wanderings through the Third World, from Korea and Vietnam to Iran and Egypt, it was America's fate to ride with all sorts of clients. We betrayed some of them, and they betrayed us in return. They passed off their phobias and privileges as lofty causes worthy of our blood and treasure. They snookered us at times, but there was always the pretense of a common purpose. The thing about Mr. Karzai is his sharp break with this history. It is the ways of the Afghan mountaineers that he wishes to teach us.

When they came to power, the Obama people insisted they would teach Mr. Karzai new rules. There was a new man at the helm in Washington, and there would be no favored treatment, no intimacy with the new steward of American power. Governance would have to improve, and skeptical policy makers would now hold him accountable (Vice President Joe Biden, Special Representative Richard Holbrooke, et al.). Mr. Karzai took their measure, and everywhere around him there were signs of American retreat, such as the spectacle of the Pax Americana eager to reach a grand bargain with the Iranian theocrats.

Mr. Karzai didn't need to be a grand strategist. He had, as is necessary in his world of treachery and betrayal, his ear to the ground, his scent for the irresolution of the Obama administration. He saw the scorn of Iran's cruel leaders for America's diplomatic approaches. He could see Iranian power extend all the way to the Mediterranean, right up to Israel's borders with Lebanon and to Gaza. The Iranians were next door and the Americans were giving away their fatigue. Why not accept the entreaties from Tehran?

A year ago, the U.S. ambassador to Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, laid out the truth about Mr. Karzai and his regime in a secret cable that of course made its way into the public domain. "President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner," Mr. Eikenberry wrote. The Karzai regime could not bear the weight of a counterinsurgency doctrine that would win the loyalty of the populace. There were monumental problems of governance but "Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance, or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending war on terror and for military bases to use against surrounding powers." In Mr. Eikenberry's cable, Mr. Karzai is a man beyond redemption, who was unlikely to "change fundamentally this late in his life and in our relationship."

In one of his great tales of the imperial age, "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad depicts the encounter between a criminal and a noble figure. "Gentleman" Brown and a band of robbers had come into Tuan Jim's domain—a small world, Patusan, where Jim's writ ran and the natives honored and deferred to him. Everything was on the side of Jim—possession, security, power. But Brown senses the hidden irresoluteness of Jim, a man who had come to this remote, small world in the Pacific in search of redemption. We are equal, says Brown: "What do you know more of me than I know of you? What did you ask for when you came here?" Jim pays with his life. He had let the ruffian set the terms of the encounter.

A big American project, our longest war, is now waged with doubt and hesitation, and our ally on the scene has gone rogue, taking the coin of our enemies and scoffing at our purposes. Unlike the Third World clients of old, this one does not even bother to pay us the tribute of double-speak and hypocrisy. He is a different kind of client, but then, too, our authority today is but a shadow of what it once was. (Karzai and the Scent of U.S. Retreat.)

 

No foreign invader has succeeded for very long in Afghanistan. Even the full might of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was crushed by the Mujahideen fighters, many of whom have become important elements in the fractured tribes that make up the Taliban. The administration of the former caesar, Caesar Georgii Bushus Ignoramus Bushus, believed that American might would conquer all as the Israeliphiles within its ranks failed to realize that they were serving as recruiting agents for the Taliban just as surely as the Israeli Defense Force was the single largest recruiting agency for the Palestine Liberation Organization of the late Yasser Arafat and is at present serving the same function for the Hamas in Gaza and the Hezbollah in Lebanon. The administration of the current caesar, Caesar Barackus Obamus Ignoramus, has played a cynical game with American lives by promoting a "surge" in Afghanistan that will never conquer the Taliban even as caesar himself tries to placate his leftist base by stating a deadline for the end of the surge.

No one has the courage to say: "This has been a failure. Bring the troops home now. Assign those who are still active duty troops to a really important function that is vital to the national security of the United States of America: protecting our border with Mexico from the wave of illegal immigration and from the murderous activities of Mexican drug lords who are taking American lives (and the lives of a few honest Mexican police officials) with utter impunity at this time."

Sure, of course, there are a lot of no-goodniks in the world. It is not the business of the leaders of any one particular country to assert that they have the right to cleanse another country or countries of no-goodniks who pose no real, substantial, credible and imminent threat to the security of their citizens. Moreover, as has been explained on this site numerous times, including most recently in Five Years Later, no war may be prosecuted if it is not winnable, if there are no clearly defined goals and if, after making prudent calculations that are, most admittedly, subject to human error and debate, there is a determination that the cost in human lives or expenditures or the harm to the international community outweighs its prosecution. War must be undertaken as a regrettable last resort, not as an ordinary means of conducting a nation's geopolitical strategic policy-making.

American policy-makers of the "right" believe in the Americanist myth that people in non-Western nations are just waiting to embrace American "democratic" ways that was described very well by the late Dr. Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn at Harvard University on June 8, 1978:

But the persisting blindness of superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems, the best in theory and the most attractive in practice; that all those other worlds are but temporarily prevented (by wicked leaders or by severe crises or by their own barbarity and incomprehension) from pursuing Western pluralistic democracy and adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in that direction. But in fact such a conception is a fruit of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, a result of mistakenly measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet's development bears little resemblance to all this.  (Solzhenitsyn's Harvard Address.)

 

Most American policy-makers of the "left" believe that the mistaken foreign policy presuppositions of the "right" can be "corrected" by being obsequious to the real-life enemies of the United States of America.

None of those on the false opposites of the naturalist "right" or the naturalist "left" understand that nations can never be made secure when their citizens are at war with the true God of Divine Revelation by means of persisting in their own sins unrepentantly and by promoting one abject evil after another both at home and abroad. Empires have collapsed because of the decadence of the citizens and the overreach of emperors

None of those on the false opposites of the naturalist "right" or the naturalist "left" understand or accept these plain words found in Pope Pius XI's Ubi Arcano Dei Consilio, December 23, 1922, that have been quoted so many times on this site but are worth repeating yet again:

Because the Church is by divine institution the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ, she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state. The Church alone can introduce into society and maintain therein the prestige of a true, sound spiritualism, the spiritualism of Christianity which both from the point of view of truth and of its practical value is quite superior to any exclusively philosophical theory. The Church is the teacher and an example of world good-will, for she is able to inculcate and develop in mankind the "true spirit of brotherly love" (St. Augustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae, i, 30) and by raising the public estimation of the value and dignity of the individual's soul help thereby to lift us even unto God.

Finally, the Church is able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God "Who beholdeth the heart," to His commands, to His laws, to His sanctions. If the teachings of the Church could only penetrate in some such manner as We have described the inner recesses of the consciences of mankind, be they rulers or be they subjects, all eventually would be so apprised of their personal and civic duties and their mutual responsibilities that in a short time "Christ would be all, and in all." (Colossians iii, 11)

Since the Church is the safe and sure guide to conscience, for to her safe-keeping alone there has been confided the doctrines and the promise of the assistance of Christ, she is able not only to bring about at the present hour a peace that is truly the peace of Christ, but can, better than any other agency which We know of, contribute greatly to the securing of the same peace for the future, to the making impossible of war in the future. For the Church teaches (she alone has been given by God the mandate and the right to teach with authority) that not only our acts as individuals but also as groups and as nations must conform to the eternal law of God. In fact, it is much more important that the acts of a nation follow God's law, since on the nation rests a much greater responsibility for the consequences of its acts than on the individual.

When, therefore, governments and nations follow in all their activities, whether they be national or international, the dictates of conscience grounded in the teachings, precepts, and example of Jesus Christ, and which are binding on each and every individual, then only can we have faith in one another's word and trust in the peaceful solution of the difficulties and controversies which may grow out of differences in point of view or from clash of interests. An attempt in this direction has already and is now being made; its results, however, are almost negligible and, especially so, as far as they can be said to affect those major questions which divide seriously and serve to arouse nations one against the other. No merely human institution of today can be as successful in devising a set of international laws which will be in harmony with world conditions as the Middle Ages were in the possession of that true League of Nations, Christianity. It cannot be denied that in the Middle Ages this law was often violated; still it always existed as an ideal, according to which one might judge the acts of nations, and a beacon light calling those who had lost their way back to the safe road.

There exists an institution able to safeguard the sanctity of the law of nations. This institution is a part of every nation; at the same time it is above all nations. She enjoys, too, the highest authority, the fullness of the teaching power of the Apostles. Such an institution is the Church of Christ. She alone is adapted to do this great work, for she is not only divinely commissioned to lead mankind, but moreover, because of her very make-up and the constitution which she possesses, by reason of her age-old traditions and her great prestige, which has not been lessened but has been greatly increased since the close of the War, cannot but succeed in such a venture where others assuredly will fail.

 

How many Catholics understand this today, no less the naturalists of the false opposites of the "left" and the right"?

Then again, of course, the conciliarist in chief, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and his representatives keep insisting that "religions," not only the true religion, Catholicism, play a "vital" role in assuring peace. How can false religions, each of which belongs to the devil, do anything except foment disorder among men and nations?

We must continue to remember that the situation we face in the world and in the Church Militant at this time is a chastisement that has been sent us by God Himself, Who permits men and their nations to suffer the consequences of rejecting and spitting upon the Social Reign of Christ the King as It must be exercised by Holy Mother Church. No electoral victory by any group of naturalists, whether of the naturalist "left" or the naturalist "right," is a victory of Christ the King as there is only one thing that can come from naturalists: naturalism, which convinces men that there is something short of Catholicism that can "save" us from the statists at home and from the no-goodniks in the world. Men and their nations must convert to the true Faith.

There is no shortcut whatsoever to social order within a nation and/or peace among nations. The path to world peace runs through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. She has told us at Fatima that this is so. Why are we so slow to believe her? Why are we so quick to gush enthusiastically about everything except Heaven's Peace Plan: Our Lady's Fatima Message? Why don't we pray to Saint Jude, the Patron of Hopeless Cases, for what appears to be, humanly speaking, "hopeless" to so many, the conversion of the United States of America to the true Faith?

We must pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit, conscious of the fact that must make reparation for our sins, which are so responsible for the worsening of the state of the Church Militant and of the world-at-large, accepting with joy and with gratitude each of the sufferings and calumnies and difficulties that come our way as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Rosary is, after Holy Mass and Eucharistic piety, the best means to plant a few seeds for the fulfillment of Our Lady's Fatima Message and for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and of the Social Reign of Christ the King in the world.

Aren't we willing to suffer some more for the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Immaculate Heart of Mary?

Viva Cristo Rey! Vivat Christus Rex!

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

 

Immaculate Heart of Mary, triumph soon!

 

Our Lady of Fatima, pray for us.

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Saints Simon and Jude, pray for us.

See also: A Litany of Saints

Appendix

Why Do I Refer To The Naturalist "Left" and Naturalist "Right" As "False Opposites"?

(yes, for the third time in recent months: repetition is the mother of learning)

Although I have explained the terms that I use on these site any number of times in various articles, I do know that human beings forget. Some people forget definitions and concepts. I have had the tendency in recent years to forget names of people who have crossed our lives only a time or two in our travels across the nation, something that I used to remember quite well decades ago. It's not decades "ago" any longer, I am afraid, which is how some e-mails fall between the cracks.

Thus it is that I thought it useful to rework an explanation of the "false opposites" of the "left" and "right" that I had included parenthetically in the first posting of this article as a more easily readable appendix.

I refer to the "false opposites" of the "left" and the "right" because, despite their differences over  the powers "government" over that of the "individual," both the "left" and the "right" reject Catholicism as the one and only foundation of personal and social order. The adherents of the "left" and the "right" believe that it is neither prudent or necessary to acknowledge that the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Most Blessed Trinity in the Virginal and Immaculate Womb of His Most Blessed Mother has changed human history. Such adherents also reject any suggestions that both men and their nations must be subordinate to Christ the King and the authority of His true Church on all that pertains to the good of souls and that the civil government has an obligation to pursue the common temporal good in light of man's Last End.

No matter the differences between "conservatives" and "liberals," my friends, they both have one mind and one heart in the belief that man does not need the teaching and sanctifying offices of the Catholic Church to guide them in their private and social lives. This is, of course, the triumph of the Judeo-Masonic spirit of naturalism that was dissected so well by Pope Leo XIII. It matters little as to who is or is not a formally enrolled member of the "lodges" when most Catholics and non-Catholics alike are infected with the ethos of naturalism.

Similarly, any civil leader who believes that can, either by himself or with others, pursue genuine order without the help of Our Lady and the use of her Most Holy Rosary is a fool. We must give public honor to Christ the King and to Mary our Immaculate Queen.

That's the point I try to make repeatedly on this site.

Viva Cristo Rey!