The Treachery of Ambiguous Political Policy

You’re out to bag a Gunnison sage-grouse, a protected species. You have it within your sights, but wait until a quotidian migratory gallinaceous game bird flies past and pow! You kill the quail, but don’t mention the sage-grouse lying as dead in the bush beyond. On its discovery, you are heartbroken. Who’s to say you aren’t? 

We little guys of democracy, that’s who, the billion wiggling arms and legs, hands and feet, fingers and toes, of today’s behemoth governments. Our weighty responsibility is to penetrate the treacherous double-talk that allows world powers to run riot and to expose their ambiguities as deliberate attempts to deceive us. If we do not, they will exploit our confusion to encroach further on our rights, fracture our societal bonds, and expropriate our collective wealth until the power, discretion, and orientation we once had to stop them has been stripped from us as well.

Russia is the latest example. The tragic attack on the Crocus City Hall on March 22 that left over 140 people dead gave Putin a perfect opportunity to speak with forked tongue to his bruised Russian folk. Ostensibly responding as fierce — if dilatory — defender of Russian welfare, Putin ordered a gruesome display of his security apparatus to demonstrate his outrage at the injury done his people. With obscene disregard for propriety or decency, the protector of all Russia released uncensored coverage of the torture of the four gunmen for those with the stomach to view it. Afterwards, the suspects were dragged into the courtroom to have their mutilated heads put on full display so all might shudder at Putin’s wrath. With no mention that he had disregarded repeated warnings of just such an attack some weeks earlier, with no mention that he had been directing Russia’s self-defense resources to raid LGBTQ+ clubs, Putin took this opportunity to reveal the violence his state terror apparatus would apply to any who dared harm his Russian subjects.

Who’s to prove Putin’s message was forked?

Except resolute commitment to defend his people was not Putin’s message. What every Russian confined within Putin’s territory understood by the exhibition of sadistic abuse was this: Don’t you step out of line. Who’s to prove Putin’s message was forked? The Russian people just know it.

A second example of treacherous ambiguity in diplomacy is as simple as it is sensitive: Israel’s war on Hamas. Attacked on October 7, 2023, when Hamas broke out of Gaza, Israel retaliated in self-defense with fury. Six months on, Israel’s self-defense has become indistinguishable from what the International Court of Justice calls plausible genocide. 

Enjoying its 53rd year, Israel’s prodigious program of self-defense began in 1971. After herding the violent, rebellious elements once strewn throughout Palestine inside, Israel shut up Gaza behind a barricade, sealing the troublesome population off from Israel — and the rest of the world — in self-defense. 

Children know, on capturing a grasshopper, to punch holes in the jar’s lid to let the grasshopper breathe until it dies from other causes, seeing as grasshoppers cannot live in jars. No child, Israel was also aware. Oh, heavy is the head that wears the crown! Having sealed off a population of some 340,000, Israel became responsible for determining how much water, power, and food such a population might require and then deciding how much of that it would supply — a sickening echo of the illusory omniscience communists have been known to presume. What’s more, with its smart fence and state-of-the-art checkpoints, Israel was obliged to decree which crate, catheter, sack of plaster, pair of scissors, uncle, and grandmother would be permitted to move into or out of Gaza. Each item could serve a dual purpose. Israel was well acquainted with dual-purpose artifice.

Desperate people are not to be trusted, just as history proved Nat Turner was not to be trusted.

With the construction of the Gazan barrier came another formidable task. The population teeming inside, Israel knew, was near desperate from its meager allowance of food, water, and medical services; stir-crazy from severely restricted movement; and, in all likelihood, chafing to get out. Desperate people are not to be trusted, just as history proved Nat Turner was not to be trusted. Hence Israel’s additional burden of dedicating military resources to monitor that barrier. But, alas, with inadequate tenacity. Lo and behold, Hamas — defenders of the straitened population trapped for so long inside and committed to destroying their jailers — crashed out. 

And so Israel was done with lids and jars, fences and checkpoints. To be safe forever, it had to go in there and root out Hamas. As Netanyahu stalked that murderous bird, a hapless setback occurred. A rare, protected species wandered into his sights, the population confined there. Taking out the heinous first bird would certainly dispatch the second, the first kill readily exonerated, the second unpardonable. Yet, though lined up perfectly as those prey were, Netanyahu fired away undaunted, forcing one to wonder: Was it perhaps the second bird, the forbidden species, he was after? To skirt all recrimination, Netanyahu simply so regretted its blundering into his line of fire as he pounded away at the first. Even the ICJ has been unable to tell, calling it “plausible” genocide.

Thus we may behold forked diplomacy at its best at the hands of a master, Netanyahu.