The rapid spread of the Ebola virus in West Africa poses as a test for the United States. While Ebola appears to have natural origins, its characteristics are similar to what we should expect from genetically engineered plagues, which are likely to be Fourth Generation war’s preferred weapons of mass destruction. Ebola, especially the current strain, spreads in ways we do not understand. It is highly contagious. Its lethality approaches 90%. These are exactly the characteristics designers of new plagues will want in their weapons.
The test the current Ebola epidemic poses is simple: will we take the measures necessary to protect the American people from it? Those measures are well known to history. At their heart lies quarantine, i.e., keeping infected people away from the rest of the population. When the Black Plague hit Italy in the Middle Ages, some towns protected themselves effectively by a policy of immurement. When plague was detected in a household, the house was bricked up with all its inhabitants inside. How did they survive? They didn’t. But the town did.
Today, quarantine means stopping all travel between infected regions and the United States. No one from here may go there; no one from there may come here. What if they are American citizens? The quarantine still applies. What is at stake is survival. All “rights” come second.
Instead, in an act of mind-boggling stupidity, we have deliberately brought two people known to have Ebola into the United States, with more certain to come. We are assured by the usual authorities that they pose no danger. Since we do not know all the ways in which this strain of Ebola spreads, that is an obvious lie. Should Ebola get started in this country, from these two cases or others that enter because there is no quarantine, millions of Americans could die. In the insane reckoning of the politically correct Establishment, the risk of millions of deaths is less important than the supposed “rights” of two people. In a country whose government was still connected to reality, those who made the decision not to quarantine would be shot.
Nor does the problem end if this time we escape an epidemic. The real test is not Ebola. The real test is the Ebola-like plagues that will arise from the Hellish technology of genetic engineering. It is likely that when one of these plagues begins somewhere in the world, the American Establishment will follow the precedent it has set with Ebola — and millions of Americans will die.
How can it happen that a country’s leaders show such utter disregard for its people’s primary interest, namely survival? The answer is, this is what happens when you feminize — or to use the old word, womanize — a culture. Every question, every issue is personalized. It is all reduced to “Oh, the poor little _______(Child, dog, immigrant, loser, refugee, deer eating our gardens, etc., ad infinitium). If you don’t immediately melt into a puddle of sympathy, you are heartless, Scrooge, a monster. A womanized society cannot survive, because it cannot defend itself. Worshiping weakness, it becomes too weak to live.
The doctor heading the disease centers where the imported Ebola carriers are to be treated was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “These are American citizens, American citizens have a right of return. I certainly hope people’s fear doesn’t trump their compassion.” Those words would make a good epitaph on the tombstone of a country so womanized, so weak, that it could not quarantine a Fourth Generation plague. 
The world is heating up, and I am not referring to the atmosphere. Crises are proliferating and intensifying. Five are now on the front burner: Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza, Ukraine, and Ebola. Three are direct results of past U.S. policy failures. Current American policy is not what the highest conservative political principle, prudence, would recommend in any of them.
Iraq is President George W. Bush’s gift that keeps on giving. We are once again engaged in war in Iraq, this time against ISIS. ISIS exists only because the U.S. invasion destroyed the state of Iraq. If ISIS has not formally thanked the neo-cons for its existence, it should.
The air strikes ordered by President Obama may work tactically. The terrain is open, major weapons systems can be found and identified from the air, and, most important, air power has an effective ground force to support in the Kurdish Pesh Merga. So long as the aim is limited to preventing further advances by ISIS into Kurdistan, we may not get in over our heads.
However, our limited means do not accord with what President Obama has adopted as his strategic objective. In an interview on August 8 with Columnist Thomas L. Friedman, published in the August 9 New York Times, the President said
We do have a strategic interest in pushing back ISIL. We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq, but we can only do that if we know that “we’ve got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void.”
So are we or are we not committed to blocking ISIS from creating a caliphate? Outside Kurdistan, we have no effective partner on the ground in Iraq. The Iraqi armed forces have proven themselves worthless. In Syria we do have a potential partner capable of filling the void on the ground, the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad. But, in yet another policy failure, we have ruled that out. Yet the president’s statement, “we’re not going to let them create some caliphate,” would seem to commit us to defeating ISIS. It all adds up to a strategic muddle, which is where American policy on Iraq has been ever since we decided to overthrow Saddam, peace be upon his beloved memory.
In Afghanistan, the inevitable is happening. As foreign forces withdraw, the Afghans go back to fighting each other. That’s Afghanistan, as it has been, is, and always will be. Every American soldier or Marine killed, every dollar spent on our Afghan War since we failed at Tora Bora has been wasted. In the end, they will have gained us nothing. This was all entirely predictable, because it is what happens to every foreigner who invades Afghanistan. The policy failure is astounding. And we still have to evacuate our remaining forces from Afghanistan safely, which may not prove easy.
As the Afghan folly fades, the West’s new folly, that in Ukraine, grows. Backed by Washington and the E.U., the Kiev government is pursuing maximalist objectives, including complete defeat of the Russian separatists followed by widespread punishment of Russian-background citizens of Ukraine. Little Ukraine is spitting in the bear’s face and daring it to take a swipe back. In the previously cited interview with President Obama, Thomas Friedman wrote,
Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like Syria and Iraq to the extent that the communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished.
Why is Obama not applying the same logic to Ukraine? If Washington told Kiev to accept a cease-fire and negotiations to guarantee the rights of Russian-speaking Ukrainians, that would happen. Instead, we are involving ourselves more deeply, through increased economic sanctions on Russia, while allowing Kiev to do as it likes. Once again, the neon sign that reads “Policy Failure” is flashing.
Gaza and Ebola are not the results of American policy failures, but our current policies are not prudent in either crisis. Ebola demands a rigid and complete quarantine, now. The price of a policy failure could be millions of dead Americans. In Gaza, 1.5 million Gazans cannot be left under permanent siege, with no means to import, export, or travel. It is appropriate to require a takeover in Gaza by the new joint PLO-Hamas government as a price for ending the siege, but Washington must be prepared to do whatever is necessary to bring Israel to terms, including cutting off aid. In the end, Tel Aviv cannot afford to alienate its only remaining ally, especially after its massive bombing of Gaza alienated public opinion everywhere except in America.
Does the fact that all these crises are coming at once tell us something? It does not tell us that the trend will continue. Only two of the five crises, Ukraine and Ebola, could pose any threat to the United States (Russia is still a nuclear power, which those who seek to humiliate her seem to forget). But the pace of crisis development does carry a danger. Policy is, in the end, made by humans. The more messes humans have to deal with simultaneously, the more they feel harried, exhausted, and stressed, the worse the decisions they are likely to make. We are already paying the price for past policy failures. In all five cases, we are seeing yet more failure of policy, more strategic confusion, more folly, more hubris. At some point, one player or another may make one really, really bad decision, like, say, shooting an Austrian archduke (which was not an act of a lone madman but an operation planned and carried out by Serbian military intelligence). As high as the price has been for American policy failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, that price can still go far higher in other places. Saddam, after all, did not have weapons of mass destruction.
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