Posted tagged ‘Foreign Policy’

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious

May 30, 2016

Kristol’s Betrayal gets Serious, Front Page MagazineDavid Horowitz, May 30, 2016

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Reprinted from Breitbart.

Over the Memorial Day Weekend, Bill Kristol doubled down on his betrayal of this country with a pair of tweets:

“Just a heads up over this holiday weekend: There will be an independent candidate–an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.”

“Those accused of betraying GOP by opposing Trump can take heart from P. Henry 251 years ago today: ‘If this be treason, make the most of it!’”

This fatuous invocation of an American patriot to justify the betrayal typifies the arrogant disregard for political realities shared by all those involved in a defection that could produce even greater disasters than the Obama era’s 400,000 deaths by jihad and 20 million refugees across the Middle East.

A week earlier a Never Trump diatribe appeared in National Review, written by Charles Murray. To summarize why “Trump is unfit outside the normal parameters” to be president, Murray cited these words by NY Times columnist David Brooks:

Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa. . . . He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12.

This is a perfect instance of “Trump derangement syndrome,” the underlying animus that motivates Kristol and his destructive cohorts. Dismissing Trump as an ignoramus and a stunted twelve-year old is the stuff of schoolyard put-downs, not a serious critique of someone with Trump’s considerable achievements. Yet this is typical of Trump’s diehard opponents on the right.Is Trump more unprepared than Barack Obama whose qualification for the presidency was a lifetime career as a leftwing agitator? And how did that work out? Despite the lacunae in his executive resume, Obama is now regarded as “one of the most consequential presidents in American history” by reasonably qualified experts.

Can Trump be reasonably criticized, and is he something of a loose cannon? Of course he can, and yes he is. But criticisms that focus exclusively on the candidate miss the larger reality of this election, which is not merely a contest between two candidates but a clash between two parties and constituencies with radically differing views of what this country is and should be about, and even more importantly about the threats we face and how to deal with them.

Obama’s most consequential domestic legislation is the Affordable Care Act, which he had no part in writing. It was the work of leftwing think tanks and the congressional Democrats. So it will be with Trump, which is why all the blather about his vagueness or impracticality on policy issues is beside the point. Will he build a wall the length of the Mexican border? Probably not. But will he secure the border? Probably so.  Will a Democrat – whether Hillary, Bernie or Joe Biden, secure our borders and stop the flow of illegals, criminals and terrorists? Certainly not. In addition to their decades long war for amnesties and open boarders, Democrats are responsible for the more than 350 “Sanctuary Cities” that openly defy federal law and provide safe havens for those same illegals, criminals and terrorists.

Open borders, Sanctuary Cities, importing unvetted Muslim refugees from the Middle East are but the tip of the iceberg in assessing the threat that the Democratic Party and its candidate (whoever it is) pose to America’s national security. For twenty-three years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the Democratic Party has been the party of appeasement and retreat in the holy war that fanatical Muslims have declared on us. The first bombing of the World Trade Center misfired but still killed 6 people and wounded 1,000 others. Clinton never visited the site while his administration insisted on treating it as a criminal act by individuals who needed to be tried in criminal courts, an attitude that would culminate in Barack Obama’s refusal to recognize that we were in a war at all, and certainly not one with fanatical Muslims. To a man and woman the Democratic Party’s elected officials continue to participate in and support this denial.

Following the first World Trade Center bombing, there were three more devastating attacks on American assets by al-Qaeda’s barbarians during the Clinton administration, with no response and no change of mind towards the nature of the threat. There were also massive security breaches, including the theft by Communist China of America’s nuclear arsenal and the publishing of all our hitherto classified data from America’s nuclear weapons tests. Clinton’s leftist Secretary of Energy published the reports for the world to see, as she put it, “to end the bomb-building culture.

Following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration focused on Afghanistan, which had provided al-Qaeda with a base to attack us, and Iraq, which had violated 16 Security Council resolutions designed to enforce the Gulf War truce, which Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had repeatedly violated and prevent him from reviving the massive chemical and nuclear weapons programs we had destroyed. In 1998 Saddam threw the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq, a further violation of the Gulf War truce and a clear sign of his determination to revive his weapons programs. Embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton fired 451 cruise missiles into Iraq, a pointless response that was correctly seen by critics at the time as an attempt to deflect attention from his appearance before the grand jury looking into his personal disorders.

The Bush administration put 200,000 troops on Iraq’s borders, which prompted Saddam Hussein to re-admit the inspectors, but then to throw obstacles in their path. Bush went before the UN and secured a 17th Security Council resolution, unanimously passed, in the form of an ultimatum to Saddam to destroy any weapons of mass destruction he possessed and provide proof that he had done so. Bush also went to Congress and got an authorization for the use of force from Senate but not House Democrats. The ultimatum date came and went, and to prevent the word of the United States and the commitment of 200,000 troops from meaning nothing, Bush proceeded to invade Iraq. But before he did so he gave Saddam the option to quit the country in which case the invasion would be called off. A simpler measure would have been to assassinate Saddam, since he was the Iraq problem. But thanks to a law passed by the post-Watergate Democrats the CIA is prevented from assassinating foreign leaders, which made the invasion necessary.

Within three months of the invasion, with American troops still in harms’ way. The Democrats who had authorized the use of force and spoken in favor of the removal of Saddam turned against the war and began a five-year campaign to sabotage it. The Democrats reversal – and betrayal of our men and women in arms – was triggered by a presidential primary in which a leftwing candidate, Howard Dean, was running away with the Democratic nomination. This betrayal prevented us from pursuing Saddam’s generals and chemical weapons into Syria, and bringing Assad to heel. Bush managed to rescue the war effort and defeat al-Qaeda on the battlefield through the “surge” that Democrats opposed. But then Obama took charge and implemented, the Democrats’ America-is- guilty platform of appeasement and retreat, creating a power vacuum in Iraq and Syria that ISIS quickly filled. At the same time, the Democrats have systematically taken down our military which is now at its lowest levels since World War II.

This is the issue that defines the coming election. A party in denial about the Muslim holy war against America and its allies, whose basic instinct is to weaken America’s defenses and enable her enemies, is opposed by a party that wants to rebuild America’s strength, secure our borders and put the safety of our people first.

The Kristol attack on the Republican Party and its candidate Donald Trump, is an attack on all Americans, and needs to be seen in that light.

Can US, Turkey keep up appearances in Syria?

May 30, 2016

Can US, Turkey keep up appearances in Syria? Al-Monitor, May 29, 2016

A terrorist group linked to the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for suicide bombings in Tartus and Jableh in Syria on May 23 that killed more than 150 civilians and wounded more than 200 others. Maxim Suchkov points out that the attack in Tartus occurred deep inside government-controlled territory. Russia maintains a naval base in Tartus and an air base and reconnaissance center in Khmeimim in the Latakia region. The suicide attacks, Suchkov suggests, could be a catalyst for a Russian “first strike” strategy against terrorist and aligned Salafi groups.

Moscow had already signaled the prospect of escalation against Jabhat al-Nusra and allied groups prior to the May 23 attacks. The Russian Ministry of Defense has announced a pause in its air campaign to allow armed groups allied with Jabhat-al Nusra to distance themselves from the al-Qaeda affiliate. On May 26, Jabhat al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and allied groups seized the town of Dirkhabiyah near Damascus. Ahrar al-Sham has coordinated more closely with Jabhat al-Nusra in response to increased US and Russian targeting of the al-Qaeda affiliate over the past few months.

This column last week suggested that the United States take up a Russian offer to coordinate attacks on Jabhat al-Nusra, which is not a party to the cessation of hostilities. For the record, we have no tolerance or empathy for groups or individuals who stand with al-Qaeda. We hope that this is at least part of the message the United States is conveying to its regional partners who have backed these groups.

With the Geneva talks suspended for several weeks, the prospect of a Russian campaign to deliver heavy and potentially fatal blows to Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies, especially in and around Aleppo and Idlib, could signal yet another turning point in the Syria conflict.

Turkey’s failed proxy war

The United States and Turkey are struggling to keep up appearances in Syria, despite even further signs of division and discord.

Gen. Joseph Votel, US CENTCOM commander, met last week with Syrian Kurdish forces during a “secret” visit to northern Syria as part of a regional diplomatic tour that also included a stop in Ankara. Votel told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that he is seeking to “balance” Turkey’s role as a “fabulous” partner in the battle against IS with that of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the backbone of the Syrian Defense Forces (SDF), which is a “very good partner on the ground.”

In contrast to the YPG, Turkey’s proxy forces, including a worrying mix of Salafists who are willing to run operations with Jabhat al-Nusra, have been a flop. Last week, IS seized at least seven villages in the northern Aleppo region.

Fehim Tastekin reports that SDF-led military operations to liberate Jarablus, which is an essential gateway along with al-Rai to the outside world via Turkey, were postponed “because of Turkey’s red line against the Kurds.” The offensive against Raqqa has also been slowed, writes Tastekin, because “the SDF’s operational capacity still leaves much to be desired. It is not an option for the Kurdish YPG-YPJ to control Raqqa, because they will encounter local resistance. They also worry that scattering their forces in Arab regions could weaken the defensive lines of Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan). Therefore, Arab forces would have to get in shape to control the situation in the post-IS period.” Laura Rozen reports from Washington that the United States is seeking to boost the numbers of Arab Sunni forces among the SDF in anticipation of an advance on Raqqa.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon found itself in a public relations fiasco after Turkey complained that US special forces in Syria were wearing badges with the logo of the YPG, which Turkey considers the Syrian partner of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and therefore also a terrorist organization. This might be compared with what in the sports world is known as an unforced error, and made Votel’s already daunting diplomacy that much more complicated.

Air Force Col. Sean McCarthy also told Ignatius that US air operations against IS out of Incirlik Air Base were mostly “autonomous” of Turkish missions, saying that “we don’t discuss with them where we’re going.”

Adding it all up, the US-Turkish “partnership” against IS may be more fable than fabulous. The open secret is that Turkey is preoccupied first with thwarting advances by Syria’s Kurds, and second with shutting down the remaining lifelines for IS in northern Syria. These priorities are of a piece. No doubt Turkey is taking up the fight against IS, but first things first. Tastekin, who previously broke the back story on Turkey’s disastrous proxy efforts to retake al-Rai from IS in April, now concludes that “there is no room for optimism that Ankara will erase its red lines vis-a-vis the Kurds. Instead, Turkey is now trying to put together an even more formidable force with Jabhat al-Nusra, which it is trying to steer away from al-Qaeda.”

The catch might just be that many of the Syrian armed groups backed by Washington’s regional partners are proxies for a sectarian agenda that is mostly about toppling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, however unlikely that now appears, and, by extension, keeping the heat on Iran. The when and where of taking the fight to IS or Jabhat al-Nusra is more or less negotiable, depending on trade-offs and pressure. We do not feel we are out on a limb in suggesting that efforts by Ankara or others to wean Jabhat al-Nusra from al-Qaeda will come to no good. This column has repeatedly documented the fluidity of foreign-backed Salafi groups such as Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam shifting in and out of tactical alliances with Jabhat al-Nusra, all the while preaching an ideology almost indistinguishable from al-Qaeda and IS.

The losers, of course, are the people of Syria, including those who suffer under IS’ tyranny that much longer because of Turkey’s concerns about the Kurds, and as Washington’s policymakers and pundits begin another maddening deep dive into how to rejigger ethnic and sectarian fault lines. Syrians fleeing IS terror in Aleppo, meanwhile, told Mohammed al-Khatieb that living under IS is “like hell … unbearable.” While we acknowledge the complexities and challenges of the raw ethnic and sectarian politics of Syria, as well as the potential for vendettas and mass killings, there is, in our score, an urgency and priority to focus on the destruction of IS and al-Qaeda above all else.

Sur’s aftermath

Diyarbakir’s historic district of Sur has witnessed some of the most brutal fighting between Turkish military and PKK forces over the past year. Mahmut Bozarslan reports from Diyarbakir that “historical landmarks in Sur, which was last year added to UNESCO’s World Heritage List, also suffered their share of destruction. The walls of the Armenian Catholic church are partially destroyed, while the nearby Haci Hamit Mosque is missing its minaret, with a dome riddled with bullets. Another Armenian church, Surp Giragos, had its windows shattered and interior damaged.”

“Still, those ancient monuments were lucky compared with more ordinary structures in the area,” writes Bozarslan. “A building with an intact door was almost impossible to find. The warring parties had used some buildings as fighting bases, others as places to rest. Stairways were littered with empty tins; one was also stained with blood. At the bloodied spot, a piece of paper reading “body #1” was left behind, suggesting that the security forces had been there for a crime scene report. A couple seemed relieved that they had escaped with relatively little damage, but grumbled that their apartment had been broken into, with the bedroom and closets rummaged. They claimed it was the security forces who had entered, while their neighbor showed Al-Monitor binoculars that had been left behind.”

US military chiefs overrate damage to ISIS

May 28, 2016

US military chiefs overrate damage to ISIS, DEBKAfile, May 28, 2016

The US military chiefs fighting ISIS, have recently claiming that the US has re-organized its military resources and is determined to cut down the Islamic state after its lame efforts in the last two years.

These words of encouragement have come from genral Votel commander of US Middle East forces and the first US General to be assigned to Syria in its nearly six years of war, and Lt. Gen Charles Brown commanding the US Al Udied Air Base in Qatar where 750 aircraft operating in the Gulf and Middle East are based.

When US airstrikes against the Jihadist organization began the offensive in late 2014 was marred by inadequate intelligence and (specifically that of intelligence analysis), and sporadic aerial action.

DEBKAfiles repeatedly reported that American and coalition air strikes  against the Jihadists were too few, misfired and many of the bombers returned to base with much of their ordinance unused.

It appears that the Obama administration has finally decided to tackle ISIS in earnest.

Our military and anti-terror experts claim it is too soon to determine whether the US commitment is real.

It is true that there are signs of limited US military movement in Syria, Libya and Iraq indicating a possible change.

For example: Increasing the number of US special forces in these three countries, far beyond the framework that President Obama is talking about publicly, when he says ‘small forces’.

There are about 7,500 US soldiers deployed in Iraq and Syria, with an additional  2,000-3,000 fighters working for private security contractors. In Libya there are an additional 1,000 to 1,250  soldiers. American planes take off from Incirlilk base in South Turkey 350km by air from Raqqa, ISIS Syrian capital, and 700km from Mosul, ISIS Iraqi capital, and do not need to fly more than 1,450km (about 770 miles) when they approach from the Persian Gulf.

ISIS still shows no sign of cracking or dismantling its Islamic Caliphate, and its military and terrorist capabilities.

ISIS_State_of_war_25.5.16

There are several reasons for this:

ISIS is expanding fast. While the Obama administration treats Iraq and Syria as the main fronts against the jihadi organization, ISIS has opened three more fronts: in Egypt, Sinai Peninsula, and Libya. While the US had quietly added 4 to 5 detachments of US special forces, these forces are too small to be a military challenge to the terror organization, and all they can do is fight ISIS with the help of local forces, as the US are doing in Iraq and Syria.

In addition to Mosul and Raqqa, the ISIS has established capitals at the Lybian port of Sirte on the Mediterranean Sea and in Jabal Halal mountain range in central Sinai with a cluster of ISIS bases. They provide a fallback option for the terrorist organization in the still distant prospect of Raqqa and Mosul falling to US and local forces.

When General Brown reported that the US Air Force is now hitting ISIS held oil fields, funds and headquarters, and that its revenue has fallen “only” to $56 million per day, he omitted to mention the ISIS Lybian oil fields and their revenue. In fact, DEBKAfile’s military sources note that ISIS is making up for revenue shortfalls in Syria and Iraq by pumping oil in Libya and the surrounding desert.

While US military sources claim that 45 percent of the territory the Islamic State seized in Iraq in 2014, and 20 percent in Syria, has been reclaimed, ISIS still hangs on to its key strategic assets.

Furthermore ISIS this week launched an offensive in the northern and eastern Syrian regions of Aleppo, Azaz, and Deir-a-Zor`; and inflicted damaging assaults on May 14 and May 23 on Russian bases and Syrian Syrian government centers near Jableh and Tartous in Western Syria. It is obvious its external terrorist capacity has not been cut down as was expected.

US and Middle East intelligence agencies hold information showing that ISIS is going to expand its bomb attacks in major cities in Europe and the Middle East, in the coming weeks. This follows an estimate of the organization’s leaders that the attacks on the Russian and Egyptian passenger aircrafts, and the terror attacks in Paris, Brussels and Tunisia, to be very successful.

Obama and Ho Chi Minh: Embracing Evil

May 27, 2016

Obama and Ho Chi Minh: Embracing Evil, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, May 27, 2016

Obama Ho

On his visit to meet with Communist leaders in Vietnam, Obama criticized the United States for having, “too much money in our politics, and rising economic inequality, racial bias in our criminal justice system.” He praised Ho Chi Minh’s evocation of the “American Declaration of Independence” and claimed that we had “shared ideals” with the murderous Communist dictator.

Shortly after the “evocation” that Obama praised, his beloved Ho was hard at work purging the opposition, political and religious. When Obama references these “shared ideals”, does he perhaps mean Ho’s declaration, “All who do not follow the line laid down by me will be broken.”

Perhaps he means the euphemistically named “land reform” which may have killed up to a million people. Like Stalin and Mao, Ho Chi Minh seized land and executed property owners as “enemies of the state”. The original plan had been to murder one in a thousand. But the relatively modest plan for mass murder was swiftly exceeded by the enthusiastic Communist death squads.

Obama has consistently called for wealth redistribution. This is what it really looks like. It’s men being hung from trees or lying in dirt dying of malaria. It’s death squads coming in the night. It’s a declaration that you are to be executed because you are the wrong class in a class war. It’s a man condemned to hard labor in a New Economic Zone and a family starving to death because the regime has commanded that they must be made an example of to other peasants.

What’s wrong with a little wealth redistribution anyway?

As Obama said, on his visit to the brutal Communist dictatorship in Cuba, “So often in the past there’s been a sharp division between left and right, between capitalist and communist or socialist… And especially in the Americas, that’s been a big debate, right? Oh, you know, you’re a capitalist Yankee dog, and oh, you know, you’re some crazy communist that’s going to take away everybody’s property… you should be practical and just choose from what works. You don’t have to worry about whether it neatly fits into socialist theory or capitalist theory — you should just decide what works.”

Does Vietnam’s Communist dictatorship work? Obama seems to think that it does, talking up the, “skyscrapers and high-rises of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and new shopping malls and urban centers.  We see it in the satellites Vietnam puts into space”. What’s a million dead when you’ve got satellites in space? What does it matter if you don’t have freedom of speech when there are skyscrapers in Ho Chi Minh City?

Unlike Pol Pot, whose genocidal crimes leftist activists like Noam Chomsky tried and failed to cover up, the Communist butchery in Vietnam that took place even long before the Vietnam War has largely been erased from common history. The victims of Ho Chi Minh and his successors have become non-persons not just in Vietnam, but in Washington D.C. Instead Obama associates one of history’s bloodiest Communist butchers with Thomas Jefferson.

What of the Declaration of Independence was there in Ho’s concentration camps? The brutal Communist regime whose ideals Obama praises, sent political dissidents to camps. Are those the ideals he shares with Uncle Ho?

Obama praises the “Vietnamese constitution, which states that ‘citizens have the right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and have the right of access to information, the right to assembly, the right to association, and the right to demonstrate.’  That’s in the Vietnamese constitution.”

The Soviet constitution had the same empty guarantees. The Nhan Van-Giai Pham intellectuals who were purged can testify that these words were as meaningless as those of the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence which Obama had quoted earlier. More relevantly the fourth article of the Vietnamese Constitution states that the “The Communist Party of Vietnam… the faithful representative of the interests of the working class, laborers and the whole nation, acting upon the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Ho Chi Minh’s thought, is the leading force of the State and society.”

That means there’s no freedom of speech, press, assembly or anything else except within the confines of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and Uncle Ho’s cunning distortions that fooled almost as many American leftists as Uncle Joe’s plans for Eastern Europe fooled Western European leftists.

Obama equates a Communist dictatorship to America in an ugly display of moral equivalence. “This is an issue about all of us, each country, trying to consistently apply these principles.” Vietnam locked up political bloggers for “abusing their freedom” just this March. According to Obama, America has “too much money in politics”. Vietnam doesn’t have that problem. It only has one party.

The Communist Party.

Vietnam only has one party because its Communist leaders banned, purged and criminalized the opposition. But Obama doesn’t think that Communism is a particularly bad thing.

In his speech, he dismissed the Vietnam War as being caused by “fears of Communism” that overcame our “shared ideals”. Why were we afraid of Communism? It might have had to do something with the mass murder of 94 million people by Communist regimes. It might have a few things to do with concentration camps, bans of political parties and the imprisonment and execution of those practicing freedom of speech, assembly and the press.

Our “fears of Communism” were as real and valid as our “fears of Nazism”. It is only the fellow travelers of the left who deny this undeniable fact.

After one bout of mass murder, Ho Chi Minh dismissed his crimes with the words, “One cannot waken the dead.” Obama clearly agrees. The dead, American and Vietnamese, must be written off as part of an unfortunate conflict. We must forget why they died and embrace their killers.

Obama marked the lives lost on “both sides” as if the Communist terror squads butchering Vietnamese farmers or massacring Catholics were somehow morally the equal of American soldiers dying to stop them. Lives were also lost on both sides when America fought the Nazis. Reagan was rightly criticized for that sort of moral equivalence when he equated Nazi soldiers at Bitburg and concentration camp victims. And yet the liberals who protested that equivalence have nothing but applause when Obama equates murdered American soldiers and butchered Vietnamese families with their Communist killers.

When Viet Cong terrorists threw grenades into markets, are we supposed to mourn the children who were torn apart by shrapnel and the grenade throwers as morally equivalent? If we equate “the names of 58,315 Americans who gave their lives in the conflict” with the evil they were fighting, then we render their sacrifice worthless.

Their deaths become a meaningless mistake in an unnecessary war caused by our failure to understand our “shared ideals” with Ho Chi Minh and our irrational fear of Communist concentration camps.

That is Obama’s real message. We should have adapted some aspects of Communism and learned from our shared values. We should have closed our eyes to Ho Chi Minh’s atrocities as a matter of having to break human eggs to make Socialist omelets while celebrating him as another Thomas Jefferson.

That is the way the left saw it. That is still the way it sees it.

Obama’s trip to Vietnam is not a mere strategic journey, but yet another opportunity for him to remind us that the left has not repented or recanted of its solidarity and support for Communist terror whether in Cuba, in Vietnam or anywhere else. It still sees every Communist dictator as a role model worth emulating and every Communist mass grave as the price that must be paid for a better world.

Iran’s Soleimani leads US-backed attack on Fallujah

May 24, 2016

Iran’s Soleimani leads US-backed attack on Fallujah, DEBKAfile, May 24, 2016

Qassem_Soleimani_overseeing_Fallujah_ops_1Exclusive photo of war conference.

For months, US President Barack Obama and the Pentagon opposed the participation by pro-Iranian militias in the war against ISIS in Iraq.

The main objection were to the Popular Mobilization Army commanded by Iranian Gen. Abu Mahdi al Muhandis who has been named as a “specially designated global terrorist” by Washington.

The US was also against the Badr Organization (formerly the Badr Brigade) commanded by Hadi Al-Amiri from Iran’s Al Qods Brigades. These militias slaughtered the Sunni residents of cities that they recaptured from ISIS during the last year. As a result, many Sunni Iraqis preferred to be ruled by ISIS, and did not trust the coalition of US, Baghdad and Tehran.

But on May 22, with the start of the Iraqi attack on Fallujah, the capital of Anbar province in western Iraq, it became clear that the participation of pro-Iranian forces is no longer taboo for the US.

Even though Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced that 35,000 Iraqi troops launched an attack to liberate Fallujah from ISIS, DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report that most of these forces are not participating in the assault.

It is spearheaded by the Popular Mobilization Army and the Badr Organization, and they are under the direct command of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of Iranian forces in Iraq and Syria, who is operating from a field command center.

The US air force is helping Soleimani’s attempt to capture Fallujah.

In a new exclusive photo showing the Iranian war room on the front, Soleimani is seen smoking a thick cigar with al-Muhandis on his left, leaning on a US map of the area of the battle.

Our military sources report that by assisting the offensive, which the Obama administration opposed for a long time, the Americans have actually given up on attacking Mosul, the ISIS capital in Iraq, any time soon.
Instead of liberating Mosul, Washington now prefers to place it under siege and gradually cause the collapse of ISIS rule.

The American decision to support Soleimani’s operation shows the central role played by Iran for the past few weeks in the wars carried out by the US and Russia in the Middle East.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that the Iranian general came to Fallujah from northern Syria, near the city of Aleppo, where he commanded the Iranian, Syrian and Hizballah armies. At this stage, it can be concluded that he has failed against the Syrian rebels on the Aleppo front.

Following that failure of that campaign, which was backed by Russian air power, Soleimani has relocated to the Fallujah front where his troops are operating under the protective umbrella of the US air force.

Iranian Ayatollah Shirazi: America Is No Longer What It Used to Be; Iran Has Global Final Say

May 23, 2016

Iranian Ayatollah Shirazi: America Is No Longer What It Used to Be; Iran Has Global Final Say, MEMRI-TV via YouTube, May 23, 2016

(You should probably turn the audio off; someone in the background is attempting, poorly, a simultaneous translation. — DM)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BdlosMQoF8

The blurb beneath the video states,

Qom-Based Iranian Ayatollah Naser Makarem Shirazi said in an interview with Lebanese channel Mayadeen TV that the U.S. and Britain are no longer what they used to be and that “Iran now has the final say in the progress of events in the world.” In light of the progress of Iranian ideology, Ayatollah Shirazi said, it is “somewhat realistic” to say that “one of these days we shall hear the azan call to prayer in America.” Ayatollah Shirazi accused the U.S. of trying to ignite a sectarian war in the region as an alternative to the lifted sanctions. The interview aired on May 19.

Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Maria Bartiromo Fox Business (5/22/2016)

May 23, 2016

Newt Gingrich Full Interview with Maria Bartiromo Fox Business (5/22/2016) via YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWHPZ8SwxGw

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals

May 20, 2016

Ten Arabic Words: Bracken’s Challenge to National Security Professionals, Gates of Vienna, May 20, 2016

(A good, strong and highly relevant analysis of our “Global War on Terrorism.” — DM)

constitutionshahada

Ten Arabic Words: A challenge to national security professionals engaged in the Global War On Terror

by Matthew Bracken

If you are a politically-correct bliss-ninny with a coexist bumper sticker slapped on the back of your Subaru, and you don’t have the slightest clue what the following ten words mean, then this essay is not meant for you. You are excused.

dawah, dhimmi, hijra, jizya, kafir, shaheed, shariah, takfir, taqiyya, ummah

But if you are a national security professional, senior military officer or political leader involved in any aspect of the “Global War On Terror,” AKA “Countering Violent Extremism,” these are ten words that should already be a part of your working vocabulary. If you can’t readily discuss their meaning, significance, and relationships, then you are worse than a fool, you are disgrace to your office and a danger to your country.

ummahdc

If you don’t already have a firm grasp of the meaning of these words, then you are as prepared to conduct the GWOT as President Obama’s “Pajama Boy” is prepared to fight a heavyweight MMA champion in a no-quarter steel-cage death match.

If you couldn’t accurately define at least eight out of the ten directly from your personal knowledge base, then as a national security professional, you are an abject failure. You are as dangerously ignorant as a parent who would send his ten-year-old son to a NAMBLA summer camp, because a friendly self-identified “Namblan” neighbor said it was like Boy Scout Camp, but even more fun, and completely free of charge.

In effect, you sent your innocent and vulnerable young son to a summer camp run by perverts, pedophiles and predators, and you didn’t even know it, because you couldn’t be bothered to learn the actual meaning of NAMBLA independently from your helpful Namblan neighbor. Sounds insane, doesn’t it? Nobody could be that stupid, right? Wrong. That level of stupidity is official Obama administration policy when it comes to fighting the GWOT.

So, if you are an Army general or Navy admiral who, right here and now, without looking at your smart phone, cannot discuss how a kafir becomes a dhimmi, and what a dhimmi’s rights and options (if any) are under shariah, then you are as ignorant of your job as an European-theater Army general circa 1942 who did not know a panzer from a pancake, or a schutzstaffel from a schnitzel. A person as ignorant as you should be kept away from any responsibility for protecting our nation. You are incompetent, and you are a fool.

If you don’t know how to determine when a Muslim suicide bomber is ashaheed and when he is a terrorist according to the shariah, then you are as dangerous to our national safety as a North Atlantic ship captain who believes that icebergs are a fairy tale concocted by conspiracy theorists. Full speed ahead, Captain Smith!

If you don’t know takfir from taqiyya, and can’t discuss the meaning and importance of both, you are as useless as a WW2 intelligence officer who didn’t know the Kriegsmarine from the Luftwaffe, (but who thought that one of them was a private flying club, based on conversations that he overheard among his ever-helpful German cleaning staff).

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If you cannot, right now, intelligently discuss the global ummah and its relationship to the OIC in the context of the GWOT, then you should be working for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and not the Department of Homeland Security. If you don’t know what the OIC refers to in this context, put on a dunce cap, and go stand in the corner. And if you don’t know whether your office is in the Dar al Islam or the Dar al Harb, please jump out of an upper-story window, and when you hit the sidewalk, ask any immigrant who is engaged in hijra. He’ll know the answer, even if you do not.

If you don’t know how dawah relates to jihad when faithful Muslims are engaged in long-term hijra, you should turn in your official credentials and take early retirement. You are as oblivious as a WW2 U.S. Army general who thought that the Geheime Staatspolizei were German motorcycle policemen much like our American state troopers, because a helpful German passer-by told him so.

If you don’t know what the three options are for a kafir who violates the shariah when living in the dar al Islam, then please get out of the national security business. If you don’t know why a dhimmi would care about jizya, please retire, and hand your duties over to someone who has the natural curiosity and personal integrity to conduct his own study of our actual enemies and their actual strategies. But in the meantime, you must immediately stop lapping up the false narrative being spoon-fed to you by hostile foreign agents, domestic traitors, useful idiots, and cowards who know better—but who won’t make waves while their pensions are beckoning.

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If your job is national security, and you didn’t score at least an eighty on the ten-word quiz, then you have obviously swallowed the big lie that we can safely delegate the understanding of our Islamist enemies to the WW2 equivalent of “moderate Nazis.” Sounds insane, doesn’t it? But under President Obama, this is indeed our national policy for fighting the GWOT: allow a range of Muslim Brotherhood front groups to conduct America’s narrowly limited analysis of so-called “radicalized Islam,” and thereafter guide our policies toward Islam and Muslims in general.

Here is an important example straight from current events. Please tell us, oh national security professional, whom has the United Nations delegated the critical task of selecting and “screening” the Muslim “refugees” who are currently arriving in the USA at the rate of thousands per month? Any guesses? It is the same organization that the Obama administration has also optimistically granted the authority to choose our new Muslim “refugee” immigrants. If you don’t know the answer, please get out of the national security business.

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So who is it? It’s the fifty-seven-nation Organization of Islamic Cooperation, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, which I referenced above. The mission of the OIC is to promote the spread of Islam across the globe until there is no moredar al harb, and all of the kafirs have either been converted to Islam, killed, or forced into submission as dhimmis. If you didn’t know, dhimmis are formally and legally subjugated second-class citizens who must pay the specialjizya tax as the price of their being allowed to live under shariah in theummah.

But this special offer is only extended to Christians and Jews: all others must choose between conversion to Islam, and the sword. That is, if their Muslim conquerors grant them the option of conversion. According to the Shariah, the defeated kafirs may also be killed or enslaved, if either of these two outcomes would be considered more beneficial to the ummah, based on local conditions and needs. (Of course, the captured women and girls may be taken as sex-slaves.) Mohammed did all of the above, and he commanded that these practices be continued in perpetuity, and they are.

The charter of the OIC puts Islamic shariah law ahead of secular law. This means, for example, that the official position of the OIC is that Muslims who leave the faith should be killed, and that any faithful Muslim who kills an apostate ex-Muslim has done no sin, but instead should be thanked and congratulated for the deed. It’s the same with adulterers: they should die, and killing an adulterer is no crime.

Yes, that really is their position, and they really do believe it, and much more than that. The OIC is made up of fifty-seven Muslim nations, united by a common belief in the supremacy of Islam, and their mutual obligation to conduct both dawah and jihad until the Dar al Islam covers the globe, and Allah’s eternal and immutable shariah has supplanted godless democracy and all manmade laws. This dawah includes the practice of using taqiyya when making arrangements or having negotiations with as-yet unsubmitted kafirs in the dar al harb.

So it’s no wonder that ninety-nine percent of the “refugees” being “screened” by the OIC and transported into the USA are Muslim, even though the Christians and other non-Muslims (who until recently made up over ten percent of the populations of Syria and Iraq) are suffering a brutal genocide and holocaust at the hands of Islamic State kidnappers, mass-rapists and mass-executioners.

The same OIC which is choosing our Muslim “refugees” is also strong-arming the European Union, the United States and the United Nations into acceptingshariah-compliant religious blasphemy laws, which will turn criticism of Islam into illegal “hate speech.” It’s worth noting that Bill and Hillary Clinton have collected millions of dollars in “speaking fees” and “donations” from OIC members, and perhaps unremarkably, Hillary Clinton also supports outlawing criticism of Islam, if the criticism leads to violence by Muslims.

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In light of this, it’s particularly sad to see disgraced former General David Petraeus heap even more shame upon himself, with his recent call for a mindless capitulation to Islamic extortion threats, extortion threats which have been ongoing against kafirs for 1,400 years. With fourteen centuries of history to examine, “Don’t make the Muslims angry, or they’ll run amok like uncontrollable sub-human savages, and kill lots of innocent people” is a wretched strategy for a former American general and intelligence agency director to espouse.

His call for the end of free speech rights anywhere and anytime that they “offend” Muslims is no different than warning a beaten wife not to anger her chronically abusive husband again, lest he give her yet another violent thrashing—which would then be entirely her fault. In fact, she should be punished again, just for provoking him after being warned not to!

This is not merely the heckler’s veto, which we are, sadly, familiar with today on the American college campus. This is the Muslim terrorist’s veto, and it means forced submission to Islam’s shariah law as the price of temporarily forestalling Muslim violence. Shame on David Petraeus for siding with the perpetrators of Islamic terrorism, and not the victims. But at least his motives are transparent: pure greed. Petraeus, who has no background in finance or economics, is making millions of dollars by hustling in Muslim nations for the multi-billion-dollar global hedge fund KKR. They want something for their money, and he gave it to them in his recent Washington Post column. (Read “Why David Petraeus really wants you to shut up about Islamism,” TheFederalist.com, May 18, 2016.)

Let me offer you another simple test that you may apply to your own national security work space and mission. If you have been ordered to purge the ten listed Arabic words (and others) from your official GWOT lexicon, and instead to hand over the task of analyzing “Islamic radicalism” to alleged “moderate Muslims,” then you are being played for a fool by our nation’s most implacable and devious enemies, both foreign and domestic.

Fifteen years after the twin towers came down, you have no excuse for such obliviousness. After the next 9-11, you will not be able to plead ignorance yet again. As a national security official, you have a duty to perform your own due diligence. You must educate yourself, and reject the politically-correct blindfold that you have been ordered to wrap around your own mind.

Sun Tzu wrote: “if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.”

Today, we are literally outsourcing our intelligence analysis in the GWOT to the OIC and various Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Simply do a search for “Holy Land Foundation, Hamas, CAIR, and FBI” to begin your overdue education. Is it any wonder that the official “Countering Violent Extremism” narrative holds that there is utterly no connection between Islamic terrorism and Islam? That the Islamic State, which quotes chapter and verse of the Koran as justification for its every decision, is not Islamic? That Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Caliph of ISIS, who holds a PhD in Islamic Studies from the Islamic University of Baghdad, knows less about Islam than President Obama and his American-trained national security staff?

In 2016, ignorance of the reality of the Islamist threat is no longer an excuse. Many resources are readily available if you are willing to look unblinkingly at the light of truth. I would suggest the online video lectures given by Stephen Coughlin and Dr. Bill Warner as starting points. Those who need or desire to read an exhaustively researched (over a thousand footnotes) academic treatise on the present Islamist threat should carefully study Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad.”

After 9-11, Mr. Coughlin was an acclaimed subject matter expert and frequent high-level lecturer at the CIA, the FBI, and the Pentagon, until 2008 when he was made persona-non-grata on federal property as an unwelcome “Islamophobe.” And who made the determination of Mr. Coughlin’s “Islamophobia?” The same Muslim Brotherhood front groups that our intelligence agencies now rely upon for their understanding of “violent extremism,” which, of course, we are assured has absolutely nothing to do with Islam.

We know this must be true, because President Obama has told us so. Unless, of course, he is practicing taqiyya on behalf of the ummah. Taqiyya is a bedrock principle of Islamic shariah, a ready tool for Muslims to use when they are dealing with kafirs. And not only radical Muslims, but ordinary, everyday, “moderate” Muslims. According to the shariah, it’s not a sin when a Muslim lies to a kafir in order to promote Islam. In that case, taqiyya is just a very clever form of dawah, helping to prepare the kafirs for the final Islamic jihad victory.

Now, go look up the Arabic words that you didn’t know, and read the article again, with fuller understanding. Then, go ask your colleagues how they did on the quiz. In the current threat environment, when mistakes are punished with passenger jets falling out of the sky, seventy is a failing grade for a trained and educated national security professional.

Please strive to do better. Your country is depending on you. Don’t let us down again. Educate yourself, and then prepare to stand firm against the prevailing winds of political correctness. Orwell said, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Remember your core values, and stand tall against America’s enemies, both foreign and domestic.

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Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com. For his previous essays, see the Matthew Bracken Archives.

FULL: Donald Trump at Morning Joe, May 20, 2016- ‘Would you consider Sanders as your running mate?’

May 20, 2016

FULL: Donald Trump at Morning Joe, May 20, 2016- ‘Would you consider Sanders as your running mate?’ May 20, 2016

(Spoiler alert: The question about Sanders as Trump’s VP choice comes at the tail end of the interview, and Trump’s answer was that Sanders should run as an independent. The interview is wide-ranging and deals with foreign policy, China, Mexico, the Islamist threat, the terrorist attack on EgyptAir and a bunch of other stuff. — DM)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B36FldQmVq4

Israel, Gaza and “Proportionality”

May 19, 2016

Israel, Gaza and “Proportionality,” Gatestone InstituteLouis René Beres, May 19, 2016

♦ It appears that several major Palestinian terror groups have begun to prepare for mega-terror attacks on Israel.

♦ The authoritative rules of war do not equate “proportionality” with how many people die in each side of a conflict. In war, no side is ever required to respond to aggression with only the equivalent measure of force. Rather, the obligations of proportionality require that no side employ any level of force that is greater than what is needed to achieve a legitimate political and operational objective.

♦ Under pertinent international law, the use of one’s own people as “human shields” — because such firing from populated areas is intended to deter Israeli reprisals, or to elicit injuries to Palestinian civilians — represents a codified war crime. More specifically, this crime is known as “perfidy.” This is plainly an attempt to make the IDF appear murderous when it is compelled to retaliate, but it is simply a Palestinian manipulation of legal responsibility. Under law, those Arab residents who suffer from Israeli retaliations are incurring the consequences of their own government’s war crimes.

♦ International law is not a suicide pact. Instead, it offers a universally binding body of rules and procedures that allows all states to act on behalf of their “inherent right of self-defense.”

Already, calls from various directions have begun to condemn Israel for its recent retaliatory strikes in self-defense at Gaza.[1] The carefully-rehearsed refrain is all-too familiar. Gazan terrorists fire rockets and mortars at Israel; then, the world calls upon the Israel Air Force (IAF) not to respond.

Although Israel is plainly the victim in these ritualistic cycles of Arab terror and required Israeli retaliations, the “civilized world” usually comes to the defense of the victimizers. Inexplicably, in the European Union, and even sometimes with the current U.S. president, the Israeli response is reflexively, without thought, described as “excessive” or “disproportionate.”

Leaving aside the irony of President Obama’s evident sympathies here — nothing that Israel has done in its own defense even comes close to the indiscriminacy of recent U.S. operations in Afghanistan[2] — the condemnations are always unfounded. Plainly, Hamas and allied Arab terror groups deliberately fire their rockets from populated areas in Gaza at Israeli civilians. Under pertinent international law, this use of one’s own people as “human shields” — because such firing from populated areas is intended to deter Israeli reprisals, or to elicit injuries to Palestinian civilians — represents a codified war crime. More specifically, this crime is known as “perfidy.”

“Perfidy” is plainly an attempt to make the IDF appear murderous when it is compelled to retaliate, but it is always simply a Palestinian manipulation of true legal responsibility. Hamas’s intent might be to incriminate the Israelis as murderers of Gaza’s civilians. Legally, however, the net effect of Arab perfidy in Gaza is to free Israel of all responsibility for Arab harm, even if it is Israeli retaliatory fire that actually injures or kills the Gazan victims. Under law, those Arab residents who suffer from Israeli retaliations are incurring the consequences of their own government’s war crimes. Palestinian suffering, which we are surely about to see again in stepped-up, choreographed Arab propaganda videos, remains the direct result of a relentlessly cruel, insensitive, and criminal Hamas leadership.

Significant, too, although never really mentioned, is that this Hamas leadership, similar to the PA and Fatah leadership, often sits safely away from Gaza, tucked away inconspicuously in Qatar. For these markedly unheroic figures, “martyrdom” is allegedly always welcomed and revered, but only as long as this singular honor is actually conferred upon someone else.

Moreover, the authoritative rules of war do not equate “proportionality” with how many people die in each side of a conflict. In war, no side is ever required to respond to aggression with only the equivalent measure of force. Rather, the obligations of proportionality require that no side employ any level of force that is greater than what is needed to achieve a legitimate political and operational objective.

If the rule of proportionality were genuinely about an equivalent number of dead, America’s use of atomic weapons against Japanese civilians in August 1945 would represent the greatest single expression of “disproportionality” in human history.

It appears that several major Palestinian terror groups have begun to prepare for mega-terror attacks on Israel. Such attacks, possibly in cooperation with certain allied jihadist factions, could include chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. Over time, especially if Iran, undeterred by the July 2015 Vienna Pact, should agree to transfer portions of its residual nuclear materials to terror groups, Israel could then have to face Palestinian-directed nuclear terrorism.

One message is clear. If Israel, pressured by outside forces, allows Palestinian terror from Gaza to continue unopposed, the state could become increasingly vulnerable to even greater forms of Arab aggression.

Also important to keep in mind is that nuclear terror assaults against Israel could be launched from trucks or ships, not only from rockets and missiles.

What about Israel’s active defenses? In its most recent defensive operations, Protective Edge and Pillar of Defense, Israel accomplished an impressively high rate of “Iron Dome” interceptions against incoming rockets from Gaza. Still, it would be a mistake to extrapolate from any such relatively limited successes to the vastly more complex hazards of strategic danger from Iran. Should Iran “go nuclear” in ten years or sooner, that still recalcitrant Islamic regime could launch at Israel missiles armed with nuclear warheads.

746In its most recent defensive operations, Israel accomplished an impressively high rate of “Iron Dome” interceptions against incoming rockets from Gaza. Still, it would be a mistake to extrapolate from any such relatively limited successes to the vastly more complex hazards of strategic danger from Iran. (Image source: IDF)

Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military thinker, already understood — long before the nuclear age — that too great a reliance on defense is always misconceived. Today, Arrow, Israel’s core ballistic missile defense (BMD) interception system, would require a 100% rate success against offensive nuclear missiles. At the same time, such a rate is impossible to achieve, even if enhanced by Rafael’s new laser-based defenses. Israel must therefore continue to rely primarily on deterrence for existential nuclear threats.

Although unacknowledged, Israel has always been willing to keep its essential counterterrorism operations in Gaza consistent with the established rules of humanitarian international law. Palestinian violence, however, has remained in persistent violation of all accepted rules of engagement — even after Israel painfully “disengaged” from Gaza in 2005.

Both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority still speak indignantly of “the Occupation?” But where, precisely, is this “occupation?” After all their agitated umbrage about Israeli “disproportionality,” shouldn’t the Palestinians and their allies finally be able to answer that core question? There are no Israelis in Gaza.

International law is not a suicide pact. Instead, it offers a universally binding body of rules and procedures that allows all states to act on behalf of their “inherent right of self-defense.”[3] When terrorists groups such as Hamas openly celebrate the “martyrdom” of Palestinian children, and when Hamas leaders unhesitatingly seek their own religious redemption through the mass-murder of Jewish children, unfortunately these terrorists retain no legal right to demand sanctuary.

In response to endless terror attacks from Gaza, Israel, with countless leaflets, phone calls, “knocks on the roof,” and other warnings to its attackers, has been acting with an operational restraint unequaled by any other nation and according to binding rules of war. In these obligatory acts of self-defense there has not yet been the slightest evidence of disproportionality.

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[1] Speaking in Beirut on Channel 10 News, on May 7, 2016, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of “attacking Gaza,” continuing: “Unfortunately, the Arab world is silent about the situation in Gaza. … these actions must be condemned.” Cited in Israel National News, “Nasrallah calls for condemnation of Israeli ‘Attacks’ on Gaza,” May 7, 2016. Interesting, too, is that Nasrallah, a Shiite leader, is speaking here in strong support of Sunni Hamas.

[2] See Alissa J. Rubin, “Airstrike Hits Doctors Without Borders Hospital in Afghanistan,” The New York Times, October 3, 2015. This is an account of the October 2015, U.S. destruction of a crowded hospital in the embattled city of Kunduz. The Pentagon confirmed the strike, which it called “collateral damage,” and President Obama offered condolences to the victims in what he termed a “tragic incident.” Doctors Without Borders was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

[3] See, especially, Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.