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Propaganda!

October 17, 2015

Propaganda! Gates of Vienna, MC, October 16, 2015

stabbingisrael

So we are told endlessly that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’, and that the flood of Islamic warriors knocking at the gates of Europe consists of ‘refugees’ fleeing war. And you know what? It works. Germans (and Swedes) are already swamped, overwhelmed even, but thanks to effective propaganda they do not see the truth before their eyes. However, the indigenous poor are less distracted. They have to live with the filth and violence, but they have no voice; they are shouted down as ‘racist’ and offered no platform.

It is propaganda at play which keeps the Merkels and Obamas of this world in power. Truth is hidden behind a smokescreen of mendacious words: words such as ‘hope’, ‘change’, ‘progress’, ‘liberal’, ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’. These words have become Orwellian doublespeak, a stinking hole of corruption, a rotten miasma emanating from a mass grave — ours!

*************************************

I get very bored when people tell me (which is often) that “Israel murders Palestinians”. Whilst it is true that Palestinians get murdered in Israel, what this statement fails to comprehend is that Israelis get gaoled for murdering anybody, including Palestinians, as in any civilized Western country, but unlike most Middle Eastern countries including the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The difference here is the relentless propaganda to demonise Israel.

Jews have been demonised down through the centuries; it is a historical fact. Every evil regime persecutes Jews, and in every aspiring evil regime, there is an increase in the persecution of Jews.

That said, most people are not born with Jew-hatred embedded in their psyche. It is placed there by nurture, which is essentially propaganda.

Jews particularly open themselves to negative propaganda. A minority of Jews are arrogant and self-righteous in a singularly narrow and offensive way, as can be seen from recent comments on this website. They, too, are mostly reacting to propaganda. They expect tolerance, but are not prepared to be tolerant in return.

It is this dichotomy which is at the heart of the East-West problem. In the West we are all taught to tolerate other people’s peccadilloes (within reason), but this does not tend to occur elsewhere, and certainly not in the Middle East.

Intolerance is a human emotion based on fear, it is thus a prime target of propaganda. Has a ‘white African” president of the USA increased or decreased racial tensions in the USA?

When a President says one thing (“I am a Christian”) but acts like he is a Muslim, it causes confusion and fear. We then need oceans of propaganda and not a little dissimulation to patch the gaping hole in his credibility. As an outsider, one gets the impression that the real, actual ruler of the USA is the (possibly criminal) Islamic organisation CAIR, and that the citizens of the USA are fed layer upon layer of lies and trickery to ensure the current political status quo. A status quo of a non-violent coup d’état.

Propaganda as such started in the UK. In 1906 the British Government did a secret deal with France calling for the UK to side with France in the case of another war with Germany. It should be remembered that relations between UK and France had been hostile for centuries, and after the Fashoda incident; not particularly warm, so this deal was kept under wraps.

When the time came for fulfilment of this obligation in 1914, the UK government had to ‘cover up’ its motives, so they created the ‘poor little Belgium’ story of rape and pillage by German soldiers.

Thus Britain went to war on the back of lies and deceit, and many young men paid for it with their lives.

In 1919 Edward Bernays basically merged propaganda and commercial advertising, using various manipulative techniques to ‘bend’ public perception on issues such as women smoking in public. The idea was to get you, the victim, to spend your money on something you would not normally spend it on.

With the advent of radio, advertising (and thus propaganda) became big business.

Political propaganda grew alongside of commercial propaganda. The human brain is wired such that we are creatures of habit, and this can be used for propagandistic purposes. If, by constant repetition, a meme, true or false, is embedded in the brain, it becomes a truism. Thus most people can be cynically manipulated, for example, to equate Jews (Israelis) with rats, and subsequently be convinced of the need for pest control. The rest is history.

So we are told endlessly that Islam is a ‘religion of peace’, and that the flood of Islamic warriors knocking at the gates of Europe consists of ‘refugees’ fleeing war. And you know what? It works. Germans (and Swedes) are already swamped, overwhelmed even, but thanks to effective propaganda they do not see the truth before their eyes. However, the indigenous poor are less distracted. They have to live with the filth and violence, but they have no voice; they are shouted down as ‘racist’ and offered no platform.

So how did ‘racism’ become the number one social crime? The answer lies in the spin given to Nazi doctrine in the immediate postwar period. The German people were taught by the Nazi propaganda ministry to ‘blame’ their hardships on Jewish bankers and capitalists, especially the defeat in 1918. Yes, the racism behind this was very old and already embedded in society; all that was needed was for the blame to be projected onto all Jews, not on those who were actually guilty (as, of course, a few were, along with their many non-Jewish colleagues). It was also necessary to demonize Slavs, as it was their lands that were required as lebensraum, the expansion of Aryan Germany into their god-given rightful living space.

At the same time as the Nazis were manipulating Germans, the Russian KGB was penetrating the media and education systems of the free Western world. In the immediate postwar period, the benign racism of the interwar period was amplified, by continuous distortion of the Nazi example, into the number one ‘hate crime’ of postmodernism. Nazi racism was focused on political and social need; modern ‘racism’ is a whites-only crime focused on the political needs of the KGB and its cultural Marxist successors.

The demise of Western cultures is predicated by the fear of the accusation of ‘racism’, with its negative associations with Nazism. This is the overarching victory of modern propaganda. It is this set of distortions that projects guilt onto an otherwise rational target group. I am not guilty of ‘white supremacy’, because the whole premise of the accusation of white supremacy is built upon the idea that we are all born equal, and that all cultures are equal. This concept is unproven, and moreover cannot be proven — except, that is, by propaganda. It is the product of a very clever and cynical set of lies and distortions aimed at bringing down Judeo-Christianity, the very root of Western success.

Part and parcel of modern propaganda technique is the necessity of omission. Whilst facts can be reported as such, the omission of pertinent data can render the report truthful but dishonest. So we see with the reporting in Germany of conditions in areas invaded by the latest wave of migrants. How is the Goebbels-era reporting of Jewish issues any different to the Merkel era reporting of immigration issues? One was negative and invented lies, the other was positive — because it left out anything derogatory — thus creating an untruth. The Goebbels lies preceded a war. What will be the result of the Merkel distortions?

The German people have just been shafted to the tune of hundreds of billions of Euros: the cost of open borders. And over the next ten years Merkel’s migrant lies are going to cost many more trillions of euros. One guess as to who will have to pay.

Hitler’s socialism was very expensive, for which reason he had to acquire the gold reserves of Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland. How will Merkel cope?

It is propaganda at play which keeps the Merkels and Obamas of this world in power. Truth is hidden behind a smokescreen of mendacious words: words such as ‘hope’, ‘change’, ‘progress’, ‘liberal’, ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’. These words have become Orwellian doublespeak, a stinking hole of corruption, a rotten miasma emanating from a mass grave — ours!

Categories: Culture, Foreign policy, Islamic culture, Islamic immigration, Israel, Jews, Obama - rogue president, Obama's legacy, Palestinian heroes, Propaganda
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I got Syria so wrong

October 15, 2015

I got Syria so wrong, Politico, , October 15, 2015

Fully complicit in the Assad regime’s impressive portfolio of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Iran relies on its client to secure its overland reach into Lebanon. And Russia works to sustain Assad as a rebuke to Washington. All the while, the eastern part of Syria is run by the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIL, itself a criminal enterprise. For the most part, the two titans of crime — the Assad regime and the Islamic State — have been able to live and let live, concentrating their hideous repertoires of violence on civilians and on armed rebels offering a nationalistic alternative to both. The result is widespread and profound hopelessness. Many Syrians are giving up on their beloved Syria. They are voting with their feet.

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I spent early 2011 trying to ease tensions between Syria and its neighbors. I never predicted the brutality that would come from inside.

Now and then I am asked if I had predicted, way back in March 2011 when violence in Syria began, that within a few years a quarter-million people would be dead, half the population homeless and hundreds of thousands of defenseless civilians terrorized, traumatized, tortured and starved. The companion question, more often than not, is if I had forecast the failure of the West to offer any protection at all to Syrian civilians subjected to a systematic campaign of mass homicide. Having first been exposed to Syria as a teenage exchange student, I was expected by questioners to know something about the place. And as a State Department officer, I was assumed to know something about my government.

But no. It took me the better part of eighteen months to comprehend fully the scope of an unfolding humanitarian and political catastrophe. By September 2012, when I resigned my State Department post as adviser on Syrian political transition to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, I knew that Syria was plunging into an uncharted abyss — a humanitarian abomination of the first order. And I knew that the White House had little appetite for protecting civilians (beyond writing checks for refugee relief) and little interest in even devising a strategy to implement President Barack Obama’s stated desire that Syrian President Bashar Assad step aside. But at the beginning, nothing drawn from my many years of involvement in Syria inspired accurate prophesy.

That Russia’s recent military intervention in Syria has shocked the Obama administration is itself no surprise. For nearly two years, Washington had chased Moscow diplomatically in the belief that the Kremlin’s soothing words about supporting political transition in Syria were truthful. That which was obvious to many — Russia’s desire to perpetuate Assad in office — is now jarringly clear to the administration. That training and equipping anti-Assad rebels to fight anyone but Assad has been dropped like a bad habit by an administration warned not to proceed along these lines is hardly a bolt from the blue.But the White House is not alone in failing to accurately forecast the severity of the Syrian disaster.

The major reason for my lack of foresight: It didn’t have to turn out this way, and I remain mildly surprised that it did. It is not that Syrians were without grievances concerning the way they were being governed. Widespread unemployment, underemployment and opportunity deficits were already prompting those with means among the best and brightest to leave the country. Although the regime’s corruption, incompetence and brutal intolerance of dissent were hardly state secrets, Assad was not universally associated by Syrians with the system’s worst aspects: “If only the president knew” was a phrase one heard often. Some Syria watchers believed that the Arab Spring would visit the country in the form of political cyclone. I did not. I did not think it inevitable that Assad — a computer-savvy individual who knew mass murder could not remain hidden from view in the 21st century — would react to peaceful protest as violently as he did, with no accompanying political outreach. And as Syria began to descend into the hell to which Assad was leading it, I did not realize that the White House would see the problem as essentially a communications challenge: getting Obama on “the right side of history” in terms of his public pronouncements. What the United States would do to try to influence Syria’s direction never enjoyed the same policy priority as what the United States would say.

Back in early 2011, it seemed possible not only to avoid violent upheaval in Syria but to alter the country’s strategic orientation in a way that would counter Iran’s penetration of the Arab world and erase Tehran’s land link to its murderous Hezbollah militia in Lebanon. Much of my State Department time during the two years preceding Syria’s undoing was thus spent shuttling back and forth between Damascus and Jerusalem, trying to build a foundation for a treaty of peace that would separate Syria from Iran and Hezbollah on the issue of Israel.

There was a degree of idealism in my quest, born in the brain of an American teenager many years before. But there was another personal element as well. Long before Hezbollah murdered Mr. Lebanon — Prime Minister Rafik Hariri — in 2005, it had brutally and pathologically tortured to death a friend of mine serving as an unarmed United Nations observer, Marine Lt. Col. Rich Higgins. Peace between Israel and Syria would require Damascus to cut all military ties to Hezbollah. It would require Syria to stop facilitating Iran’s support to Hezbollah. It would set the stage for a Lebanon-Israel peace that would further marginalize Lebanon’s murder incorporated. Peace for its own sake is good. But the prospect of beating Hezbollah and its Iranian master was inspiring. This prospect, more than anything else, motivated the mediation I undertook as a deputy to Special Envoy George Mitchell in the State Department.

Assad, told me in late February 2011 that he would sever all anti-Israel relationships with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas and abstain from all behavior posing threats to the State of Israel, provided all land lost by Syria to Israel in the 1967 war — all of it — was returned. My conversation with him was detailed in terms of the relationships to be broken and the behavior to be changed. He did not equivocate. He said he had told the Iranians that the recovery of lost territory — the Golan Heights and pieces of the Jordan River Valley — was a matter of paramount Syrian national interest. He knew the price that would have to be paid to retrieve the real estate. He implied that Iran was OK with it. He said very directly he would pay the price in return for a treaty recovering everything.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was interested. He was not at all eager to return real estate to Syria, but he found the idea of prying Syria out of Iran’s grip fascinating. And the negative implications for Hezbollah of Lebanon following Syria’s peace accord with Israel were not lost on him in the least. Although there were still details to define about the meaning of “all” in the context of the real estate to be returned, Netanyahu, too, knew the price that would ultimately have to be paid to achieve what he wanted.

But by mid-April 2011 the emerging deal that had looked promising a month earlier was off the table. By firing on peaceful demonstrators protesting police brutality in the southern Syrian city of Deraa, gunmen of the Syrian security services shredded any claim Assad had to governing legitimately. Indeed, Assad himself — as president of the Syrian Arab Republic and commander in chief of the armed forces — was fully responsible for the shoot-to-kill atrocities. Even so, he told Barbara Walters in a December 2011 ABC TV interview, “They are not my forces, they are military forces belong[ing] to the government . . . I don’t own them, I am the president. I don’t own the country, so they are not my forces.”

Before the shooting began the United States and Israel were willing to assume Assad had sufficient standing within Syria to sign a peace treaty and — with American-Israeli safeguards in place — make good on his security commitments before taking title to demilitarized territories. But when he decided to try to shoot his way out of a challenge that he and his first lady could have resolved personally, peacefully and honorably, it was clear he could no longer speak for Syria on matters of war and peace.

Some of my U.S. government colleagues from bygone days tell me we dodged a bullet: that an uprising against the Assad regime’s arrogance, cluelessness and corruption in the middle of treaty implementation would have caused real trouble. Others believe we were too slow: that a treaty signing in early 2011 could have kept the gale force winds of the Arab Spring from unhinging Syria. I don’t know. I don’t know if Assad or Netanyahu would, in the end, have done a deal. What I do know is that I felt good about where things were in mid-March 2011. What I also know is that by mid-April hope of a treaty was gone, probably never to return in my lifetime.

Assad’s decision to apply lethal violence to something that could have been resolved peacefully was the essence of betrayal. He betrayed his country so thoroughly as to destroy it. Four years on, he reigns in Damascus as a satrap of Iran and a dependent of Moscow. In the end, he solidified Israel’s grip on land lost in 1967 by his defense minister father.

Fully complicit in the Assad regime’s impressive portfolio of war crimes and crimes against humanity, Iran relies on its client to secure its overland reach into Lebanon. And Russia works to sustain Assad as a rebuke to Washington. All the while, the eastern part of Syria is run by the self-styled Islamic State, or ISIL, itself a criminal enterprise. For the most part, the two titans of crime — the Assad regime and the Islamic State — have been able to live and let live, concentrating their hideous repertoires of violence on civilians and on armed rebels offering a nationalistic alternative to both. The result is widespread and profound hopelessness. Many Syrians are giving up on their beloved Syria. They are voting with their feet.

There is no end in sight to this vicious bloodletting. Iran and Russia could stop the gratuitous mass murder but opt not to do so. Moscow now facilitates it with military intervention. The United States could stop it or slow it down significantly without invading and occupying Syria — indeed, without stretching the parameters of military science. But it has adamantly refused to do so. Meanwhile, the minions of the Islamic State loot and destroy the world heritage site of Palmyra while subjecting much of eastern Syria to their own brand of violent rule and internal terror.

Both sides of this debased criminal-terrorist coin need to be addressed urgently. Assad’s barrel bombing of Deraa in the south — where peaceful protests against regime brutality first attracted international notice in March 2011 — along with his bombing of Aleppo and Idlib in the north must be stopped cold. These horrific devices kill the innocent and recruit for the Islamic State: precisely as they are intended to do. Means exist far short of invasion and occupation to make it difficult for Assad regime helicopters to deliver their deadly cargoes. What is required is a clear statement of intent by Obama, one communicated to the Department of Defense, so that options can be produced for presidential decision and execution.

With regard to ISIL, a professional ground combat component provided by regional powers is desperately needed to work with coalition aircraft to sweep this abomination from Syria and permit a governmental alternative to the Assad regime to take root inside Syria. With central and eastern Syria free of both the regime and ISIL, an all-Syrian national stabilization force can be built. Western desires for a negotiated end to the Syrian crisis would be based, under these circumstances, on more than a wish and a hope.

The United States should neither seek nor shy away from confrontation with Russian forces in Syria. Moscow will not like it if its client’s ability to perform mass murder is impeded. Russia will not be pleased if ISIL, its false pretext for military intervention in Syria, is swept from the table. Ideally, Russia will not elect to escort regime aircraft on their mass homicide missions. And it would be difficult for even Russian President Vladimir Putin to articulate outrage if ISIL is crushed militarily. But if Russia seeks out armed confrontation with the United States in Syria, it would be a mistake for Washington to back down. People like Putin will push until they hit steel. And he will not stop in Syria.

Having failed miserably as a prophet in 2011 does not deter me from predicting the following: Obama will bequeath to his successor a problem of gargantuan dimensions if he does not change policy course now. Left to the joint ministrations of Assad and the Islamic State, Syria will continue to hemorrhage terrified, hungry and hurt human beings in all directions while terrorists from around the globe feast on the carcass of an utterly ruined state. Western Europe now reaps a whirlwind of desperate and displaced humanity it thought would be limited to Syria’s immediate neighborhood.

My failure to predict the extent of Syria’s fall was, in large measure, a failure to understand the home team. In August 2011, Barack Obama said Assad should step aside. Believing the president’s words guaranteed decisive follow-up, I told a congressional committee in December 2011 that the regime was a dead man walking. When the president issued his red-line warning, I fearlessly predicted (as a newly private citizen) that crossing the line would bring the Assad regime a debilitating body blow. I still do not understand how such a gap between word and deed could have been permitted. It is an error that transcends Syria.

I want the president to change course, but I fear that Syrians — Syrians who want a civilized republic in which citizenship and consent of the governed dominate — are on their own. I’ve been so wrong so many times. One more time would be great. It would mean saving thousands of innocent lives. It would mean real support for courageous Syrian civil society activists who represent the essence of a revolution against brutality, corruption, sectarianism and unaccountability. It would mean the reclamation of American honor. It would mean preserving my near-perfect record of getting things wrong. It would be a godsend.

Categories: Assad, Foreign policy, Golan, Hezbollah, Iran - Syria war, Israel, Netanyahu, Obama and Syria, Putin, Russia - Syrian war
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Cartoon of the day

October 15, 2015

H/t Power Line

Leading-from-Behind-copy

Categories: Foreign policy, Humor, Obama's weakness
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“Russia” calling “another US’ bad bluff”!

October 15, 2015

“Russia” calling “another US’ bad bluff”! Zero Point via You Tube, October 14, 2015

 

 

According to the blurb below the video,

The US has now thrown in the towel on the ill-fated strategy of training Syrian fighters and sending them into battle only to be captured and killed by other Syrian fighters who the US also trained..

The Pentagon’s effort to recruit 5,400 properly “vetted” anti-ISIS rebels by the end of the year ended in tears when the entire world laughed until it cried after word got out that only “four or five” of these fighters were actually still around. The rest are apparently either captured, killed, lost in the desert, or fighting for someone else..

This has cost the US taxpayer somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million over the last six months..
Because this latest program was such a public embarrassment, the Pentagon had to come up with a new idea to assist Syria’s “freedom fighters” now that they are fleeing under bombardment by the Russian air force only to be cut down by Hezbollah..

The newest plan: helicopter ammo. No, really. The US has now resorted to dropping “tons” of ammo into the middle of nowhere and hoping the “right” people find it..

Here’s CNN:

U.S. military cargo planes “gave” 50 tons of ammunition to rebel groups overnight in northern Syria, using an air drop of 112 pallets as the first step in the Obama Administration’s urgent effort to find new ways to support those groups..

Details of the air mission over Syria were confirmed by a U.S. official not authorized to speak publicly because the details have not yet been formally announced..

C-17s, accompanied by fighter escort aircraft, dropped small arms ammunition and other items like hand grenades in Hasakah province in northern Syria to a coalition of rebels groups vetted by the US, known as the Syrian Arab Coalition..

And here’s a bit more color from GOP mouthpiece Fox News:

The ammunition originally was intended for the U.S. military’s “train and equip” mission, the official said. But that program was canceled last week..

“So now we are more focused on the ‘E’ [equip] part of the T&E [train & equip],” said the official, who described equipping Syrian Arabs as the focus of the new strategy against ISIS..

The Defense Department announced Friday that it was overhauling the mission to aid Syrian rebel fighters. After the program fell far short of its goals for recruiting and training Syrian fighters, the DOD said it would focus instead on providing “equipment packages and weapons to a select group of vetted leaders and their units so that over time they can make a concerted push into territory still controlled by ISIL”..

The shift also comes as Russia continues to launch airstrikes in Syria, causing tension with the U.S. amid suspicions Moscow is only trying to prop up Bashar Assad..

Col. Steve Warren, spokesman for the U.S.-led anti-ISIS coalition, confirmed that coalition forces conducted the airdrop..

“The aircraft delivery includes small arms ammunition to resupply counter-ISIL ground forces so that they can continue operations against ISIL. All aircraft exited the drop area safely,” he said in a statement. All pallets successfully were recovered by friendly forces, a U.S. official said..

The US just paradropped 50 tons of ammo on pallets into the most dangerous place on the face of the planet with no way of ensuring that it falls into the “right” hands (it goes without saying that the term “right” is meaningless there). Meanwhile, the Russians are dropping bombs on the same extremists who are set to receive the guns the US is dropping..

Of course if it does somehow fall into the “wrong” hands, it wouldn’t be the first time (see Mosul and recall the $500 billion worth of weapons Washington “misplaced” in Yemen) and as we said a few days ago, this is at least great news for the military-industrial complex. It means more “terrorist attacks” on U.S. “friends and allies”, and perhaps even on U.S. soil – all courtesy of the US government supplying the weapons – are imminent…

Categories: Foreign policy, Insurgents, Iran - Syria war, Islamic State, Obama and Syria, Obama's weakness, Putin, Russia - Syrian war
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Looking beyond the ‘third intifada’

October 14, 2015

Looking beyond the ‘third intifada’ Jerusalem Post, Louis Rene Beres, October 13, 2015

ShowImage (14)Funeral in the Shuafat refugee camp in east Jerusalem, on October 10, 2015. (photo credit: AHMAD GHARABLI / AFP)

About expected Palestinian state intentions, there is little real mystery to fathom. It should already be widely understood that any new state of Palestine could provide a ready platform for launching endlessly renewable war and terrorism against Israel. Significantly, not a single warring Palestinian faction has ever even bothered to deny such overtly criminal intent. On the contrary, aggressive intent has always been openly embraced, fervently cheered as a distinctly sacred “national” incantation.

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It’s farewell to the drawing-room’s civilized cry, The professor’s sensible where to and why, The frock-coated diplomat’s social aplomb, Now matters are settled with gas and with bomb.”

– W.H. Auden, Danse Macabre

With apparent suddenness, and a very deliberate brutality, Palestinian terrorists are launching a new wave of indiscriminate assaults they proudly hail as a “third intifada.”

But behind the protective veneer of language, where homicide is conveniently transfigured into revolution, these latest Arab attacks remain what they have always been – that is, crudely camouflaged expressions of rampant criminality.

Jurisprudentially, this is all perfectly obvious. Prima facie, under all pertinent international law, calculated assaults on mostly women and children can never be sanitized or justified. Always, rather, they represent codified crimes of war and crimes against humanity.

Always, such crimes are unpardonable.

Oddly enough, even after the painfully long history of egregious Palestinian crimes carried out against noncombatant populations, a sizable portion of the “international community” still seeks to encourage Palestinian statehood. Self-righteously, of course, and with ritualistic indignation directed against Israeli “intransigence,” the “civilized community of nations” remains willing to rip a 23rd Arab state from the still-living body of Israel. Even now, as the Palestinians remain rigorously segmented into barbarously warring factions – into opponents who enthusiastically maim and torture each other, all while cooperating in doing the same to their commonly despised Israeli victims – world public opinion calls naively for Palestinian “self-determination.”

Even now, when any new Palestinian state could quickly come to resemble an already-fractured Syria, the United Nations and its secretary – general seem much more concerned with comforting the markedly unheroic Palestinian criminals than with protecting fully innocent Israeli civilians.

Unapologetically, and whatever their unhindered and ongoing excesses, Fatah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are easily able to incite followers to inflict and then celebrate incessant harms upon Israel.

At some point, it is likely that such harms, joyously imposed with a reassuring impunity, could involve diverse weapons of mega-terrorism, including assorted chemical, biological, or even nuclear agents.

In this last category of insidious choice, Palestine, after formalizing its sought-after condition of statehood or sovereignty, could be placed in an optimal position to assault Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor.

This plainly sensitive facility was previously attacked, in both 1991 and again in 2014. Those earlier missile and rocket barrages, which produced no ascertainably injurious damages to the critical reactor core, had originated with Iraqi and Hamas aggressions, respectively.

About expected Palestinian state intentions, there is little real mystery to fathom. It should already be widely understood that any new state of Palestine could provide a ready platform for launching endlessly renewable war and terrorism against Israel. Significantly, not a single warring Palestinian faction has ever even bothered to deny such overtly criminal intent. On the contrary, aggressive intent has always been openly embraced, fervently cheered as a distinctly sacred “national” incantation.

A September 2015 poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey research – the leading social research organization in the Palestinian territories – found that a majority of Palestinians unhesitatingly reject a two-state solution.

When asked, as a corollary question, about any preferred or alternate ways to establish an independent Palestinian state, 42 percent called for “armed action.”

Only 29% favored “negotiation,” or some sort of peaceful resolution.

Not much mystery here.

On all currently official Hamas and Palestinian Authority (PA ) maps of “Palestine,” Israel has been removed altogether, or identified exclusively as “occupied Palestine.”

By these revealingly forthright and vengeful depictions, Israel has already been forced to suffer a “cartographic genocide.” Unambiguously, from the standpoint of any prospective Palestinian state policies toward Israel, such incendiary maps are portentous, predictive and possibly even prophetic.

What is not generally recognized is that a Palestinian state, any Palestinian state, could play a determinedly serious role in bringing some form of nuclear conflict to the Middle East. Palestine, of course, would itself be non-nuclear; but that’s not the issue. There would remain several other ways in which the new state’s predictable infringements of Israeli security could make the Jewish state more vulnerable to an eventual nuclear attack from Iran, or, in the even more distant future, from a newly-nuclear Arab state.

This second prospect would likely have its core origins in understandable reactions to the plainly impotent Vienna pact with Iran.

Following the July 14, 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA ), several Sunni states in the region, most plausibly Egypt and/ or Saudi Arabia, will likely feel compelled to “go nuclear.”

In essence, any such considered Sunni Arab nuclear proliferation would represent a more-or-less coherent “self-defense” reaction against expectedly escalating perils, once still-avoidable dangers now issuing from the reciprocally fearful Shi’ite world.

There is also more to expect from the Sunni side. Here, in actions that would have no apparent connection to expected Iranian nuclearization, Islamic State (IS) could begin an avowedly destructive march westward, across Jordan, and all the way to the borders of West Bank (Judea/Samaria). There, should a Palestinian state already be established and functional, dedicated Sunni terrorist cadres would likely make quick work of any deployed Palestinian army. In the event that a new Arab state had not yet been suitably declared – that is, in a fashion consistent with codifying Montevideo Convention (1934) expectations – invading IS forces (not Israel) will have become the principal impediment to Palestinian independence.

Credo quia absurdum – “I believe because it is absurd.” In either case, any such IS or IS-related conquest could create another available platform for launching relentless terrorist attacks across the region.

In time, of course, most of these murderous attacks would be aimed precisely at Israel.

IS, as everyone can see, is on the move. It has already expanded well beyond Iraq and Syria, notably into Yemen, Libya, Egypt and Somalia.

Although Hamas leaders generally deny any IS presence in Gaza, that terrorist group’s black flag is now seen more and more regularly in that expressly Palestinian space.

In principle, at least, Israel could sometime find itself forced to cooperate with Hamas against IS, but any reciprocal willingness from the Islamic Resistance Movement, whether glaringly conspicuous or beneath the radar, is implausible.

Additionally, Egypt regards Hamas as part of the much wider Muslim Brotherhood, and prospectively, just as dangerous as IS.

In any event, after Palestine, and even in the absence of any takeover of the new Arab state by IS forces, Israel’s physical survival would require increasing self-reliance in existential military matters.

Such expansions, in turn, would demand: 1) an appropriately revised nuclear strategy, involving deterrence, defense, preemption and warfighting capabilities; and 2) a corollary conventional strategy.

Significantly, however, the birth of Palestine could impact these strategies in several disruptive ways.

Most ominously, a Palestinian state could render most of Israel’s conventional capabilities substantially more problematic. It could thereby heighten certain eventual chances of a regional nuclear war.

Credo quia absurdum. A nuclear war in the Middle East is not out of the question. At some point, such a conflict could arrive in Israel not only as a “bolt-from-the-blue” surprise missile attack, but also as a result, whether intended or inadvertent, of escalation.

If, for example, certain enemy states were to begin “only” with conventional and/or biological attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem might then respond, sooner or later, with nuclear reprisals. Or if these enemy states were to begin hostilities with certain conventional attacks upon Israel, Jerusalem’s own conventional reprisals might then be met, at least in the future, with enemy nuclear counterstrikes.

For now, this second scenario could become possible only if Iran were to continue its evident advance toward an independent nuclear capability. It follows that a persuasive Israeli conventional deterrent, at least to the extent that it could prevent enemy state conventional, and/or biological attacks, would substantially reduce Israel’s risk of any escalatory exposure to a nuclear war. Israel will need to maintain its capacity for “escalation dominance,” but Palestinian statehood, on its face, could still impair this overriding strategic obligation.

A subsidiary question comes to mind. Why should Israel need a conventional deterrent at all? Israel, after all, seemingly maintains a capable nuclear arsenal and corollary doctrine, even though both still remain “deliberately ambiguous.”

And there arises a still further query. Even after “Palestine,” wouldn’t enemy states desist from launching conventional and/or biological attacks upon Israel, here, out of an entirely reasonable and prudent fear of suffering a nuclear retaliation? Not necessarily. Aware that Israel would cross the nuclear threshold only in certain extraordinary circumstances, these enemy states could be convinced – rightly or wrongly – that so long as their attacks were to remain non-nuclear, Israel would respond only in kind. Faced with such probable calculations, Israel’s ordinary security would still need to be sustained by conventional deterrent threats.

A strong conventional capability will still be needed by Israel to deter or to preempt conventional attacks – attacks that could, if undertaken, lead quickly, via escalation, to various conceivable forms of unconventional war.

Credo quia absurdum. It is still not sufficiently understood that Palestine could have serious effects on power and peace in the Middle East. As the creation of yet another enemy Arab state would need to arise from the intentional dismemberment of Israel, the Jewish state’s strategic depth would inevitably be diminished. Over time, therefore, Israel’s conventional capacity to ward off assorted enemy attacks could be correspondingly reduced.

Paradoxically, if enemy states were to perceive Israel’s own sense of expanding weakness and desperation, this could strengthen Israel’s nuclear deterrent. If, however, pertinent enemy states did not perceive such a “sense” among Israel’s decision-makers (a far more likely scenario), these states, now animated by Israel’s conventional force deterioration, could then be encouraged to attack. The cumulative result, spawned by Israel’s post-Palestine incapacity to maintain strong conventional deterrence, could become: 1) defeat of Israel in a conventional war; 2) defeat of Israel in an unconventional chemical/biological/nuclear war; 3) defeat of Israel in a combined conventional/unconventional war; or 4) defeat of Arab/Islamic state enemies by Israel in an unconventional war.

For Israel, a country less than half the size of Lake Michigan, even the “successful” fourth possibility could prove intolerable. The tangible consequences of a nuclear war, or even a “merely” chemical/ biological war, could be calamitous for the victor as well as the vanquished.

Under such exceptional conditions of belligerency, the traditional notions of “victory” and “defeat” would likely lose all serious meaning.

Although a meaningful risk of regional nuclear war in the Middle East must exist independently of any Palestinian state, this uniquely serious threat would be still greater if a new Arab terrorist state were authoritatively declared.

Palestine, it has increasingly been argued, could sometime become vulnerable to overthrow by even more militant jihadist Arab forces, a violent transfer of power that could then confront Israel with an even broader range of regional perils.

In this connection, IS, again, could find itself at the outer gates of “Palestine.” In such a scenario, it is plausible that the IS fighters would make fast work of any residual Palestinian defense force, PA and/ or Hamas, and then absorb Palestine itself into a rapidly expanding Islamic “caliphate.”

Before anything remotely decent could be born from such a determined theocracy, a very capable sort of gravedigger would have to wield the forceps.

The “third intifada” is just another legitimizing term for remorseless Palestinian terrorism. Should it transform the always fratricidal Palestinian territories into another corrupted Arab state, Palestine, either by itself, or as a newly-incorporated part of a still-growing IS “caliphate,” would become another Syria. Even more significantly, Palestine could bring specifically nuclear-based harms to the broader region.

Then, quite predictably, all pertinent “matters” would be settled “with gas and with bomb.”

Categories: Defense of Israel, Fatah, Foreign policy, Hamas, International Community, Iranian nukes, Islamic jihad, Islamic State, Middle East, Muslim Brotherhood, Obama - Middle East, Palestinian heroes, Palestinians, Two state solution
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Never Again’ means standing with Israel

October 14, 2015

Never Again’ means standing with Israel, Jerusalem Post, Dr. Ben Carson, October 14, 2015

ShowImage (13)Ben Carson . (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

While Israel must be able to go it alone, it should never have to stand alone.  In recent years, personalities and politics have been permitted to negatively affect America’s relationship with Israel despite the fact that the bonds between our two nations are so unique and vital.  When the enemies of Israel and the United States sense rifts between us, they are emboldened and grow even more dangerous.

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Sometimes it is hard to find the right words to talk about the kind of evil that defies reason and destroys lives.  We saw that evil on full display during the Holocaust perpetuated by the fanatical and tyrannical Nazi regime under Adolph Hitler.  The lessons to be drawn from those darkest of days in world history are plentiful, and as relevant today as they were nearly 80 years ago.

In recent days I suggested that things might have unfolded in a very different manner in Europe had the Jewish people been armed and better able to defend themselves. What would have been the impact on Hitler’s war machine if his victims had had more access to guns? It is something that we will never know for sure.

What I do know however, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is that I never intended for my words to diminish the enormity of the tragedy or in any way to cause any pain for Holocaust survivors or their families.

Both those who perished and those who survived the Nazi camps deserve our deepest reverence, as do the partisan fighters who rose in armed opposition.

It is truly incomprehensive to imagine what these men, women and children endured, and it is impossible for us to put ourselves in their shoes.  This I know, since I have seen some of those actual shoes first-hand at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and at Yad Vashem in Israel. Those shoes, stripped from just some of the millions of Holocaust victims, are a jarring symbol that humanizes the loss.

They are poignant and painful reminders. I have learned about the Holocaust and studied the history.  So should every American, as well as others all around the world.

When I was in Israel last year, stepping from the dimmed lights of their Holocaust Museum into the bright Jerusalem sunshine underscored for me in a literal and figurative manner that often out of darkness comes light.  And upon reflection, I concluded that there are vital lessons that can be drawn from the Holocaust’s senselessness and savagery.  One is that going back centuries the Jewish people have somehow managed to find a way to overcome every oppressor who sought to destroy them.

Another is that the Jewish people need a state and that they must have the ability to defend themselves in order to ensure that “never again” remains a reality. That state, Israel, has been re-established in their historic homeland.

The founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was an accomplishment that almost never fully came to pass. Just hours after declaring its independence, Arab armies descended on the fledgling state in a war of annihilation only to be overcome by spirited Israeli forces who fought with the conviction and valor of those with nowhere else to go and no other option for survival.

Sadly for Israel, serious threats remain and its people must still live in a perpetual state of readiness to confront those who seek her destruction.  Israel’s armed forces and the country’s qualitative military edge over other nations in the Middle East are essential elements that ensure that the Jewish people continue to have a state of their own and that Israel can thrive.

The Middle East is a region awash with dictatorships, ruthless violence, turmoil and political instability where Israel is the only Western-style democracy.

As Americans we stand with Israel because the Jewish state embodies many of the same aspects that make the United States the greatest nation in the world: commitment to human rights, religious liberty for all citizens, the rule of law, equal rights for women, a free press, a robust judicial system.

America’s relationship with Israel is one with deep benefits for both nations. This proves invaluable every day in term of strategic cooperation and in specific arenas of homeland security and counterterrorism.

In the years to come, America’s ability to defend herself against all enemies, foreign and domestic, will be critical.  Our determination to secure our homeland and to safeguard our citizens against adversaries and radical Islamist terrorist groups must be stronger than ever.

Looking to the future, while remaining mindful of the past, I believe that it is in America’s national security interests to deepen our commitment to Israel.  If elected president in November 2016, I will explore every opportunity to strengthen ties between our two nations and to ensure that Israel always has the tools it needs to protect herself and our shared interests.

While Israel must be able to go it alone, it should never have to stand alone.  In recent years, personalities and politics have been permitted to negatively affect America’s relationship with Israel despite the fact that the bonds between our two nations are so unique and vital.  When the enemies of Israel and the United States sense rifts between us, they are emboldened and grow even more dangerous.

The strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship can and must be strengthened.

That is precisely why I look forward to my first conversation as President of the United States with the Prime Minister of Israel. On that phone call I will utter four important words that reflect the future direction we will take together: “Our relationship is restored.”

Categories: Defense of Israel, Dr. Ben Carson, Foreign policy, Holocaust, Islamic jihad, Obama and Israel
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Czar Putin defends the West

October 14, 2015

Czar Putin defends the West, American Thinker, James Lewis, October 14, 2015

Vladimir Putin isn’t a nice liberal, but he is a realist, which is much more than any Western leader can say today. Without realism it is impossible to act morally. Without realism, everything turns into an Obamaesque kabuki play.

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Well, Obama has systematically undercut our friends in the Middle East, and Vladimir Putin is picking up the pieces. Obama promised big change — only not the ones we see happening. As Obama promised the radical left, America is now drastically weakened; but oddly enough, peace hasn’t busted out all over.

So here comes the Czar of all Russias to rescue Christian civilization from a bloody nightmare in Syria and Iraq. While the United States is supplying major weapons to brutal Sunni gangs who keep committing horrific war crimes, jihadis are taking advantage of the chaos to make genocidal attacks on Arab Christians, Egyptian Copts, Orthodox Armenians, Kurds, Yazidis, and Druze. (And each other — of course.)

Every time another domino falls, this administration looks more shell-shocked. Their comforting delusions are crumbling. Today they’ve stopped even pretending to understand what’s going on.

Even Obama’s surrender to Iran’s nuclear obsessions is now failing. Today, none of the European “partners” in that miserable appeasement are still willing to sign Obama’s Diktat; not even the Iranians, who are getting everything they want without Obama. It’s a total capitulation, with sinister consequences to come soon.

The Germans have doubled their profitable trade with Tehran, while  Russia and China are making huge military and nuclear power plant sales. Seven thousand Iranian Revolutionary Guards are fighting against U.S.-sponsored jihadis in Syria, along with ten times as many Hizb’allah fighters. Iran’s strategic noose around Saudi Arabia is tightening, and the naval chokepoint of Aden is under direct military threat.

The CIA failed to predict Putin’s intervention in Syria, yet for months everybody from Israel to Saudi Arabia has been sending top-level negotiators to Moscow. It’s the only thing they could do, after we threw them to the sharks. For nations in mortal peril, it’s any port in a storm.

And yes, it’s a fair bet that all the players carried gifts for the Tsar, to make sure they would not be victimized by the new hegemon.

The CIA failed to predict the Russian move into Syria. But you don’t need a huge intelligence “community” to see the obvious. This White House isn’t interested in the truth anyway. Obama can’t stand being contradicted, and the CIA is responding by not telling him what he doesn’t want to hear.

Syria’s President Assad is as ruthless as any dictator in the Middle East, but he based his power on protecting minorities, like his own Alawites. Like Muammar Gadaffi in Libya, he kept a precarious peace among hostile factions.

Christian bishops in the Middle East see Putin as their sole protector in the double bind between jihad and a militantly atheist West. To persecuted minorities in the Middle East, Putin has seized the moral high ground.

We have no idea what Putin is going to do next. Russia has the potential of becoming a major stabilizing force in the Middle East. But his convictions are becoming clearer. He understands Syria along the lines of his war with Chechnya: His actions there were ruthless but effective. ISIS has thousands of Chechnyan jihadis, now with combat experience, and ready to assault Russia. Putin will not tolerate that, just as China won’t tolerate its own Muslim rebels in Syria-Iraq returning to attack its vulnerable Uighur flank.

Putin carries street cred in a world of jihadist gangs. In 2002, Chechnyan terrorists murdered school children in Beslan and bombed the Dubrovka Theater. Putin reacted with brutal efficiency. His rise to power since that time is based on knocking down the Chechnyan rebellion, by bombarding entire cities. Much of Putin’s popularity among regular Russians is based on his brutal suppression of violent Islam.  But the Islamists attacks still continue.

Obama has just spent half a billion dollars to arm and train “Syrian moderates,” who took the money and ran, to join the worst terrorist gangs in the neighborhood. This week we heard that 70% of our military equipment sent to “Syrian moderates” ended up in the hands of ISIS.

I know we’re not supposed to say words like “Christian civilization,” but Vladimir Putin believes them. He isn’t wrong. For four centuries, until Lenin murdered the last Romanovs in 1918, the Tsars prided themselves on being the defenders of Christianity. Like the Vatican, the Russian Orthodox Church claims a direct line of apostolic descent from the early Christian churches, by way of the Byzantine Empire. And yes, there were plenty of wars between Polish Catholics and Russian Orthodox.

There was cruel persecution of Jews whenever a scapegoat was wanted. But today the Ottoman Turks are still remembered with a special horror in Eastern and Southern Europe. Sometimes you have to choose between bad and worse.

(Several years ago Pope Benedict quoted the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Paleologus II, condemning the sadistic cruelties of jihadist Islam. Telling the truth horrified liberals around the world, the way it always does. That quote came from a time shortly before the Byzantine Empire was destroyed by jihad, leaving the remaining Orthodox Churches bereft of their original lands.)

Putin has his picture taken regularly with the Patriarch of Moscow, probably for political reasons, but also because he has a deep sense of history. Unlike every cowardly Western liberal politician who can’t say the words “Muslim barbarism,” Putin is very clear about jihad. He understands the history of horrific Muslim assaults on Russia. He knows that jihad war has not changed one little bit in a thousand years. Like Samuel Huntington, the first historian of the jihad war, Putin also understands in a very profound way that this is a war for civilization.

Vladimir Putin isn’t a nice liberal, but he is a realist, which is much more than any Western leader can say today. Without realism it is impossible to act morally. Without realism, everything turns into an Obamaesque kabuki play.

Putin was raised by an Orthodox mother and a Marxist father. He came to power by brutally putting down a Muslim terrorist rebellion in Chechnya, using the standard Russian method of bombarding entire cities until they surrendered.

As a rising KGB colonel, Putin saw his world falling apart under Gorbachev, who tried to liberalize the Soviet Empire, only to see it collapse. In his eyes, democratic liberalism doesn’t work, Soviet Marxism didn’t work, and he certainly doesn’t want nuclear jihad to win.

Americans are used to thinking of Soviet Russia as a militant atheist regime, which tried to destroy religious faith wherever it could, for seven or eight decades. One of the astonishing facts of the 20th century is the survival of traditional religion under decades of Marxist oppression. It sometimes seems as if faith tends crumble in rich consumer societies; but persecution and misery bring it back.

When the Soviet Union was beginning to crumble in the late 1980s, some members of the Central Committee were quoted as exclaiming “Bozhe moye!” — My God!! whenever another piece of bad news came in. Religion had survived, even at the secret heart of the heart of the Communist Party. The same is happening in China today.

So Putin has gone back to the Tsarist practice of using the Orthodox Church to build national unity. He is also religiously tolerant as long as it’s peaceful. As long as they don’t threaten the Tsar, people can practice their faith. (But not when it comes to militant gay movements).

If Putin is smart, he won’t abuse his new credibility and power in the Middle East. Russia stands to gain numerous benefits, as long as it is perceived to be preserving an acceptable balance of power. That also means finding a position between Iran and Saudi Arabia, between Israel and Iran, and between Europe and the oil it depends on. Russia can reap huge benefits just from protecting mutually hostile oil regimes from each other; by saving their cookies, Putin also gets into the oil game.

Putin now runs the biggest military near the world’s oil spigot, even as shale deposits are quickly being exploited all over the world.

This is a time of constant probing to discover the parameters of the new hegemony.

So far, Putin’s intervention has been cheap,  taking advantage of historically stupid moves by the Euro-American Left. Putin can use his new-found influence in the Middle East to rebuild Russia’s economy in a world of fast-falling oil prices.

 

Categories: Assad, Christianity, Foreign policy, Iran scam, Obama - Middle East, Putin, Russia - Middle East, Russia - Syrian war
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The Iranian Majlis Has Not Approved The JCPOA But Iran’s Amended Version Of It

October 13, 2015

The Iranian Majlis Has Not Approved The JCPOA But Iran’s Amended Version Of It, Middle East Media Research Institute, A. Savyon* and Y. Carmon, October 13, 2015

(Even Obama’s foggy notions of “common sense” should include the premise that, if there are multiple parties to an agreement, they should all follow the same agreement. — DM)

[T]he inclusion of these new Iranian demands in a Majlis decision constitutes the first written demand by an Iranian authority to amend the agreement, a demand that was mentioned verbally on September 3, 2015 by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

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On October 13, 2015 the Iranian Majlis approved, by a majority of 161-59 with 13 abstentions, not the JCPOA but rather an Iranian amended version it.

Paragraph 3 of the Majlis decision states that “the government will monitor any non-performance by the other party [to the agreement] in the matter of failing to lift the sanctions, or restoring the canceled sanctions, or imposing sanctions for any another reason, and will take steps to actualize the rights of the Iranian nation and to terminate the voluntary cooperation [this apparently refers to the Additional Protocol, which, according to the JCPOA, Iran will implement voluntarily] and to handle the rapid expansion of the Iranian nuclear program for peaceful purposes, so that within two years the enrichment potential in Iran will reach 190,000 SWU. The Supreme National Security Council will handle this matter, and the government will to submit to the Council a plan in the matter within four months.”[1]

Implications:

Considering that the non-cancellation of the sanctions is part of the JCPOA (according to the JCPOA, U.S. sanctions will be merely “suspended,” rather than canceled, so as to allow their “snapback” in the case of an Iranian violation); and considering that the re-imposition of sanctions, and the imposition of new sanctions, in case of an Iranian violation are likewise part of the JCPOA – the Majlis decision constitutes ratification of a nonexistent document. It was not a ratification of the JCPOA as it stands, but rather of additional demands made by Iran after the JCPOA was agreed upon on July 14, 2015 in Vienna.

Furthermore, the inclusion of these new Iranian demands in a Majlis decision constitutes the first written demand by an Iranian authority to amend the agreement, a demand that was mentioned verbally on September 3, 2015 by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.[2]

The Majlis decision defines clauses in the JCPOA as “non-performance of the agreement by the other party” and therefore the Majlis’ approval is meaningless.

* A. Savyon is director of the MEMRI Iran Media Project; Y. Carmon is President of MEMRI.

Endnotes:

[1] ISNA (Iran), October 13, 2015.

[2] Khamenei announced explicitly on September 3, 2015 that he does not accept the terms of the agreement and demanded that the sanctions should be immediately removed, rather than suspended, as a condition for accepting the agreement. See the following MEMRI reports:

Special Dispatch No. 6151, “Khamenei Declares That He Will Not Honor The Agreement If Sanctions Are Merely Suspended And Not Lifted,” September 4, 2015; Special Dispatch No. 6162, “Expected September 28 NY Meeting Between P5+1 Foreign Ministers And Iran Could Signify Reopening Of Nuclear Negotiations To Address Khamenei’s September 3 Threat That If Sanctions Are Not Lifted, But Merely Suspended, There Will Be No Agreement,” September 21, 2015.

Categories: Foreign policy, Iran - sanctions relief, Iran scam, Iranian nukes, Iranian parliament
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Islamic State grows in Afghanistan, encroaches on Kabul as U.S. remains ‘passive observer’

October 12, 2015

Islamic State grows in Afghanistan, encroaches on Kabul as U.S. remains ‘passive observer’ Washington Times,  Rowan Scarborough, October 11, 2015

10112015_afghan8201_c0-275-5060-3224_s561x327Photo by: Massoud Hossaini  Afghan security forces and British soldiers inspect the site of a suicide attack in the heart of Kabul, Afghanistan. Loyalists of the Islamic State group are making inroads into Afghanistan, with homegrown militants claiming allegiance to the Islamic State as it controls territory in some parts of the country. (Associated Press)

Afghanistan’s 3,000-member ISIL army is about one-tenth the size of the Afghan Taliban’s forces. But NATO says the Islamic State has reached the next stage of being an emerging threat. If its growth in other regions, such as North Africa, is a gauge, its Afghan component will only expand further as young Muslims are drawn by social media to its ultraviolent ways and Sunni orthodoxy.

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The Islamic State is growing at an alarming rate in Afghanistan, within striking distance of the capital, and there does not seem to be a concerted U.S. effort to strike the terrorist army as there is in the Syria-Iraq war theater.

An independent think tank has concluded that the allies are “reacting disjointedly and ineffectively” to the group in Afghanistan and other places outside those two countries.

The Islamic State’s numbers now may reach as high as 3,000 in Afghanistan, mostly in Nangarhar province, less than 50 miles east of Kabul. The emergence presents the NATO-backed elected government there with a fifth deadly enemy in addition to the Taliban, al Qaeda, the Haqqani network and elements of the Pakistani intelligence service.

Globally, the Islamic State, also called ISIL and ISIS, has affiliates in nearly 20 countries.

“It’s like a metastasizing cancer spreading throughout certain parts of the Islamic world,” said James Russell, a former Pentagon official and an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. “We have to hope that the antibodies in these societies can ward off the death, misery and destruction that will come raining down upon them if ISIS takes hold in their communities.”

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Afghanistan’s 3,000-member ISIL army is about one-tenth the size of the Afghan Taliban’s forces. But NATO says the Islamic State has reached the next stage of being an emerging threat. If its growth in other regions, such as North Africa, is a gauge, its Afghan component will only expand further as young Muslims are drawn by social media to its ultraviolent ways and Sunni orthodoxy.

Yet unlike in Syria and Iraq, where a U.S.-led coalition conducts a series of daily airstrikes against the Islamic State, there appears to be no such strategy in Afghanistan, where Afghan government forces now have the lead in all combat operations and request NATO air power on an ad hoc basis.

“What concerns me most is the fact that the United States has become a passive observer rather than the driver of the policy,” said Larry Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the State Department, commenting on the overall U.S. effort against the Islamic State.

U.S. military spokesmen had no immediate comment on the question of American policy toward the Afghan Islamic State. Army Gen. John Campbell, the allied commander in-country, was asked at congressional hearings last week what triggers action against Islamic State. He answered that the criterion is “force protection.”

After the Syria-Iraq war theater, Islamic State’s emergence near Kabul could be the most troublesome for the U.S., whose troop levels have dropped to less than 10,000, and only a small portion of those forces are dedicated to assist in counterterrorism. The Islamic State has shown it can execute brutal attacks and deploy vehicle bombs to take territory and hold it.

Gen. Campbell said Afghanistan’s security forces lack the leadership and troop numbers to respond to every trouble spot.

Meanwhile, the Islamic State is beginning to flex its terrorism muscle in Afghanistan.

Islamic militant competition

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in Washington is tracking the Islamic State’s violent ways in Afghanistan and other countries. It said the Islamic State launched attacks in mid-September against a UNICEF convoy, Afghan government forces, the Afghan Taliban and Shiite civilians. In late September the Islamic State “launched coordinated attacks on multiple Afghan security positions” in Nangarhar, the think tank said.

“The group reportedly also shut down several schools in eastern Afghanistan amid other efforts to assert social control,” the institute said. “ISIS has established robust ground campaigns in Libya, Egypt and Afghanistan.”

The ISW said in the special report “ISIS Global Strategy: A Wargame,” written by counterterrorism analyst Harleen Gambhir, that the Islamic State’s expansion stems from its ability to attract local jihadis.

“The coalition is focused on Iraq and Syria, and it is reacting disjointedly and ineffectively to ISIS’s activities in Libya, Egypt, Afghanistan, and other places,” Ms. Gambhir writes. “ISW’s war game demonstrated how this failure enables ISIS to strategically outpace the U.S. and its allies.”

U.S. intelligence agencies are still trying to digest the meaning of Islamic State setting up shop in South Asia.

Nicholas Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, speaks of an “increasing competition between extremist actors” in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region involving al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Islamic State.

“So that’s an additional factor that we’re still trying to understand,” Mr. Rasmussen told the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point in remarks published last month. He characterized the burgeoning competition as an “interesting feature of the South Asia landscape.”

Gen. Campbell, the U.S. commander closest to Islamic State terrorism in Afghanistan, said foreign fighters are arriving to join the Islamic State as they “try to bring in some sort of funding stream to build a place in Nangarhar.”

He said the emergence of Islamic State “has further complicated the theater landscape and potentially expanded the conflict.”

Mr. Johnson, the former counterterrorism official, said the leaders of Middle East and South Asia countries “concede that the U.S. has no appetite for being engaged, especially militarily in the region.”

The struggle between two radical Sunni groups, the Taliban and the Islamic State, may be sparked in part by the Taliban’s willingness to do business with Iran, a Shiite Islamic country.

“The Taliban have always been far more pragmatic in dealing with Iran, and the religious difference is not a critical factor,” Mr. Johnson said. “Not so with the ISIS crowd. For them, theology takes precedence, and Iran is an apostate state that must be destroyed.”

Categories: Afghanistan, Department of Defense, Foreign policy, Islamic State, Obama - Middle East, Taliban, U.S. Military
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World view: Politics may force Obama to ‘over-react’ militarily in Syria

October 11, 2015

World view: Politics may force Obama to ‘over-react’ militarily in Syria, Breitbart, John J. Xenakis, October 11, 2015

(Fine. But what advice will he take from whom before he does something? Perhaps his favorite military political adviser?

PJ boy and Obama

— DM)

 

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Palestinian-Israeli violence continues in Gaza and West Bank

g151009bPalestinian protesters in Gaza on Friday (AP)

Six Palestinians were killed and hundreds of Palestinians and Israeli were wounded on Friday as several weeks of violence continued. ( “9-Oct-15 World View — Israeli-Palestinian violence spreads across West Bank as anger grows”)

Ismail Haniyeh, the leader of Hamas, which governs Gaza, applauded the recent Palestinian knife attacks on Israelis, and called for a “third intifada.” By contrast, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “strongly condemned the harming of innocent Arabs.” Both Israeli and Palestinian security forces are on high alert, with more violence expected. Fox News/AP

Obama administration announces an abrupt change of policy in Syria

The Obama administration’s widely ridiculed $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels to fight the so-called Islamic State (IS or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh) was “paused” on Friday as a publicly admitted failure. The program was supposed to train thousands of rebels, but the public was shocked several weeks ago when the administration admitted that only “four or five” had been trained, despite the program’s huge price tag.

As Foreign Policy magazine put it: “On Capitol Hill, it’s been called “a joke,” a “total failure,” and “a bigger disaster than I could have ever imagined.” And now we have another name for it: dead.”

A new program has been announced. The new program will provide air support and basic equipment and training to vetted opposition group leaders who are already fighting ISIS and who are committed to fighting ONLY ISIS, and not the regime of Syria’s president Bashar al-Assad.

Brett McGurk, whose title is “White House deputy envoy to the Global Coalition to Counter Islamic State,” described the new program as follows:

“Is it best to take those guys out and put them through training programs for many weeks, or to keep them on the line fighting and to give them additional enablers and support? I think the latter is the right answer, and that’s what we’re going to be doing.”

According to Secretary of Defense Ash Carter: “I remain convinced that a lasting defeat of ISIL in Syria will depend in part on the success of local, motivated and capable ground forces. I believe the changes we are instituting today will, over time, increase the combat power of counter-ISIL forces in Syria and ultimately help our campaign achieve a lasting defeat of ISIL.”

The old policy was criticized and mocked from the day it was announced last year. The new policy is receiving similar treatment. A NY Times editorial titled “An Incoherent Syria War Strategy” points out that the strategy of finding and arming rebel groups that want to fight ISIS but who are going to be forbidden from fighting the al-Assad regime makes no sense:

“The initial plan was dubious. The new one is hallucinatory, and it is being rolled out as the war enters a more perilous phase now that Russia has significantly stepped up its military support of Mr. Assad’s forces.

There is no reason to believe that the United States will suddenly be successful in finding rebel groups that share its narrow goal of weakening the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, but not joining the effort to topple Mr. Assad. Washington’s experience in Syria and other recent wars shows that proxy fighters are usually fickle and that weapons thrust into a war with no real oversight often end up having disastrous effects.”

This harsh criticism from a newspaper that regularly slobbers over President Obama symbolizes how much even the left-wing mainstream media, not to mention foreign media throughout the Mideast, now views the Obama administration as weak and rudderless, lurching from one policy to the next. (As another example, it had been widely expected that Secretary of State John Kerry would win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for the Iran nuclear deal, but even the loony Norwegians have lost faith.) VOA and NY Times

Obama administration may be forced into greater military role

I’ve written many times about the Harry Truman’s Truman Doctrine of 1947, which made America policeman of the world. The justification is that it’s better to have a small military action to stop an ongoing crime than to let it slide and end up having an enormous conflict like World War II. Every president since WW II has followed the Truman Doctrine, up to and including George Bush. Barack Obama is the first president to repudiate the Truman Doctrine, essentially leaving the world without a policeman.

Call it Kismet or Karma or God’s Will (or call it an unstoppable generational trend), but America does have an exceptional role in the world, and repudiating that role does not end it. Obama’s policy of apologizing for America has held sway for over six years, but now powerful political pressures are growing to force a change. Those forces are being driven by massive shifts in public attitudes towards Obama, both in the US and abroad, as reflected in worldwide criticism of him in the media as a weak president.

According to the left-leaning Washington Post:

“Russia’s military moves in Syria are fundamentally changing the face of the country’s civil war, putting President Bashar al-Assad back on his feet, and may complicate the Obama administration’s plans to expand its air operations against the Islamic State. …

But others within the administration, and many outside experts, are increasingly worried that if President Obama does not take decisive action — such as quickly moving to claim the airspace over northwestern Syria and the Turkish border, where Russian jets are already operating — it is the United States that will suffer significant damage to both its reputation and its foreign policy and counterterrorism goals. …

The current internal administration debate is largely the same one that has kept the administration out of significant intervention in Syria’s civil war for the past four years. On one side, Russia’s involvement has strengthened the winning argument that the United States should avoid direct involvement in yet another Middle East conflict and should continue directing its resources toward countering forces such as the Islamic State that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security.

On the other side, the argument is that it makes no strategic sense for the United States to concede Russian dominance of the situation: If Russia succeeds in keeping Assad in power, the problems in the West caused by both the Syrian war and militant expansion will only get worse.”

The article describes two sides of the debate whether to intervene in Syria, but does not draw the obvious conclusion that the weight of political opinion is moving sharply towards the side of some kind of intervention — although those that say that “it makes no strategic sense … to concede Russian dominance” do not agree on what steps should be taken to avoid conceding.

The left-leaning Brookings Institution makes the claim that intervention in Syria is costing Russia enormously, and so “For the United States, avoiding the temptation to over-react is still the key guideline.”

But the article then goes on to describe problems with doing nothing, and even conclude:

“Finally, the United States and its allies could deliver a series of airstrikes on the Hezbollah bands around Damascus. That would be less confrontational vis-à-vis Russia than hitting Assad’s forces. Hezbollah has already suffered losses in the Syrian war and is not particularly motivated to stand with Assad to the bitter end, away from own home-ground in Lebanon. (Israel would appreciate such punishment, too.)”

I almost can’t believe my eyes reading this recommendation. American warplanes around Damascus would almost certainly come into contact with Russian warplanes, and even if they didn’t, bombing al-Assad’s close ally Hezbollah could be the trigger that sets off a wider war in this generational Crisis era.

Policy can sometimes act like a rubber band that be stretched in one direction so far that when it’s released, it snaps back in the other direction violently. After six years of constantly apologizing for America, the pressure is on President Obama to do something different. Brookings advises Obama about “avoiding the temptation to over-react,” but Obama may be politically forced to decide that with his previous policies so widely criticized and mocked, he has to take some step to prove to the world that he’s a tough leader after all, and he may have to over-react, because no half-measure will provide the proof he needs. Washington Post and Brookings Institution.

Categories: Foreign policy, Iranian proxies, Middle East, Obama and US military, Putin, Russia - Syrian war
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