The only winner that comes out of this in the short-term is Iran. Shiite factions get defended in Iraq, Iran basically gets a free pass, and we (the west) end up doing the dirty work. How is this beneficial to us?
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I read thru the statement that President Obama made last night regarding his plan to address ISIS (which he kept calling ISIL) and I’d like to address some of the problems we will face with this.
As someone who’s actually developed the plans to address problems in Iraq and Syria, and had to brief them to senior leaders, I have a hard time understanding why it has taken so long for him to address this, and why he’s picking the ‘strategy’ that he has. I have agreed, up to now, with the cautious approach- that ‘picking sides’ in Syria is fraught with huge problems. NONE of the groups fighting in Syria are in any way trustworthy- it would be like trying to pick one Mafia family in NY to help clean up crime problems. No one you work with would benefit you in the end. And ultimately, you may end up with a result you still don’t like.
Syria plans had an especially troubling problem- we had ZERO guidance from above on exactly what the end state was to be- we ended up having to develop multiple plans based on assumptions that no senior leader had given guidance on. No, the CENTCOM commander wasn’t the problem- HE wasn’t getting guidance either. Neither Mattis nor Austin either one knew what we really wanted to end up with. So, we built plans based on minimal intervention all the way thru full-on ops. From humanitarian assistance missions thru ‘BOG’ ops. From containment thru air power only, to SOF-only training assistance. And then we went back and re-did them. Several times. We had no choice- we could only assume, based on our collective experience, on what the end state could be. We used Bosnia, Iraq, AFG, DS-1, and a few others as ‘models’. Plus, we considered different types of UN missions that may be used as approaches, in case we had to support only those.
What we also had to contend with was the fact that, at the time, Iraq was in NO WAY to be a part of the mission set. We had zero troops there; we had no presence, and even tho our own intel told us that the border area of Iraq and Syria was the real ‘hot zone’ developing, we could not address any activity there. All of our effort was to ‘contain’ within the borders of Syria, and try to prevent further refugee problems into Lebannon and Jordan. Especially Jordan. Pay SPECIAL attention to the Jordanian issue should we start hitting Syria hard- there are going to be real problems along that border as people flee areas of Syria and Iraq. AQ and ISIS may use that as a ‘distraction’ to force our hand there, and really end up with problems we haven’t prepared for. Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of refugees along the border, and its a complete powder keg readly to go up in flames at the slightest provocation.
Now that Iraq territory has to be worked into the mix, at least we will have areas of ‘safe zones’ working with the Kurds that allow us some help. Erbil airport is a good backup location, and I’m assuming they will use that as a potential staging area. It’s new, it’s got a HUGE runway, and it’s close-by. Fueling will be the most logical, if we can secure it further.
As someone who worked ops in Yemen and SOM and other areas, using these as ‘models’ for what we intend to do in Iraq is fraught with enormous issues- these are missions that are very very different than what is needed to address ISIS (if you want a very good rundown of this, go to Bill Roggio’s column here.) We have ‘advisors’ deep into these missions, and the end-states are very very different. In fact, end-states in Syria and Iraq are completely different- so addressing ISIS across them is NOT going to be simple. Air power alone isn’t going to do it, and you are not going to get Kurds or Iraqi’s to chase ISIS into Syria to combat them- and that’s exactly what ISIS is going to do.
The one issue that remains to be seen is how ISIS-supporting factions take on Baghdad; this is the nightmare scenario that could very well develop as a counter to US-centered actions. The fact that Baghdad becomes a focus is a very real fear; it would force the Iraqi gov’t and forces to abandon northern Iraq to concentrate on securing that area alone, leaving the Kurds as the only support we’d have up north. And that ain’t enough.
Another problem we could not solve internally was this issue of ‘sharing intel’ with anyone. How the HELL do we share intel with these guys? We can’t even legally brief the mayor of NYC (deBlasio) because he doesn’t have a clearance; there is NO such thing as ‘REL YEMEN’ or ‘REL IRAQ’ or ‘REL SYRIA’ for classified, useful intel info. So we’d be breaking the law to even attempt it. And we’ve been working with the Yems for years.
The only winner that comes out of this in the short-term is Iran. Shiite factions get defended in Iraq, Iran basically gets a free pass, and we (the west) end up doing the dirty work. How is this beneficial to us?
Let me ask all of you this- and leave your estimates in the comments- how big of a force do you think this is going to take to support? PBO said 475 additional will be sent; that’s basically a company, and that ain’t gonna do it. If we use air power alone, how many do you THINK that will take? I’ll look at your estimates and let you know in a few days how close you are.
(They should go to Iraq, Syria and other places infested by the Islamic State, its predecessors, cohorts and progeny to preach the Gospels. Surely, all involved Islamists would then understand that their violent ways are evil misguided because contrary to not only to the Gospels but also to their own religion. What could possibly go wrong? — DM)
Islamic State militants assassinate Iraqis
These Christian activists have adopted the Islamist narrative while ignoring the Islamists’ words about their own intentions. By teaching their supporters that ISIS is the result of American “aggression,” they are promoting inaction that will further the Islamist extremist cause and enable the persecution of fellow Christians.
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A group of 53 Christian leaders and activists are urging the Obama Administration not to militarily strike the ISIS terrorist group in Iraq and Syria in a published letter. Several of the organizations represented have a history of willful blindness to the Islamist ideology and have allied with American Islamists with extremist histories.
The letter was published by the Catholic Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns. One of the group’s stated objectives is:
“Identifying and eliminating the root causes of violence and conflict with a focus on…U.S. aggression and national security policy (e.g. war on terrorism and war in Iraq and Afghanistan). The nexus of violence and poverty is clear.”
The worldview of this Christian group is that Islamic extremism is a response to American imperialism. In other words, its America’s fault and the Islamist terrorists are victims, even if their methods are deplorable.
This perspective is fundamentally in error and naïve. ISIS calls itself the Islamic State because that’s what it is fighting for. According to its own words, it is fighting for a caliphate and sharia governance (i.e, an Islamic State). There is no logical way to connect opposition to American foreign policy with this agenda.
In a blunt interview with NBC News, an American from North Carolina who tried to join ISIS and was arrested said, “My reason for the support of ISIS is because they’ve proven time and time again to put Islamic law as the priority and the establishment of an Islamic state as the goal,” Don Morgan said.
By characterizing American military action as “aggression” and ISIS as victims, the organization is assuming the worst of American intentions and the best of ISIS’, even going so far as to ignore ISIS’ own words and actions.
The Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns views Islamic terrorism as an outburst against inequality and poverty. Studies have repeatedly debunked this. The latest was a Queen Mary University of London study that concluded that there is no connection between Islamic terrorism and poverty, lack of education or unemployment.
This latest letter endorsed by 53 Christian activists claims that, “More bombing will ultimately mean more division, bloodshed, recruitment for extremist organizations, and a continual cycle of violent intervention.” They argue that U.S. military action “will only propitiate more armed intervention in a tit-for-tat escalation without addressing the root causes of the conflict.”
The logic is that military action is always counter-productive. If this logic were followed during World War II, the existence of Nazi Germany would be accepted. The Nazi regime was dismantled because the Allies accurately attributed the conflict to an immoral ideology.
The letter’s policy recommendations have already been mostly tried, yet its authors present it as something new and innovative. This includes humanitarian assistance, engagement of Iraqi leaders, sanctions and replacing U.S. airstrikes with “community-based nonviolent resistance strategies.”
Endorsers of this letter include leaders of the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society, the Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Church of Christ, the American Friends Service Committee, professors from various universities and clergy from around the country.
While activists like these may argue that they don’t necessarily oppose all uses of force, their worldview inevitably leads to appeasement and inaction in the face of major threats and human rights abuses.
Mark Tooley, President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy,writes that proponents of this trend “often demand maximalist, unattainable standards [for military action] that default towards a functional pacifism.”
In the current instance of ISIS, Tooley compares the letter to “telling a woman being chased down the street by a rapist that instead of seeking an armed police officer she should urge her aspiring assailant to get counseling for his anger issues.”
Yet, the protest by some of the letter’s endorsers is unsurprising given their history of partnering with Islamists. The United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society endorsed a2012 letter protesting five members of Congress for requesting investigations into the relations between U.S. governmental agencies and Muslim Brotherhood entities.
The letter defends the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a U.S. Muslim Brotherhood entity and unindicted co-conspirator in a terrorism-financing trial, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a group founded by Muslim Brotherhood ideologues.
The United Methodist Church is listed on ISNA’s website as an interfaith partner. The church also endorsed a letter protesting the New York Police Department for its intelligence-gathering programs and showing of The Third Jihad, a Clarion Project documentary that exposes the U.S. Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist extremists.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) participates in the same actions and more. It works with Islamists in producing reports on Muslim-Christian relations and published a book whitewashing radical clericImam Zaid Shakir and the school he founded, Zaytuna College. In July, the Church divested $21 million from Israel. The Iranian regime and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke celebrate the anti-Israel activism of the Church.
The Presbyterian Church (USA), the United Methodist Kairos Response, United Church of Christ Israel-Palestine Network and others belong to the Interfaith Boycott Coalition, the faith-based wing of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. This bloc isdefending a woman accused of perpetrating a bombing of civilians in Israel.
Overwhelmingly, the American people reject these Christian activists’ arguments. The latest poll shows that 71% of Americans support airstrikes against ISIS in Iraq and 65% support doing the same in Syria. About 58% support arming Kurds fighting ISIS.
Another poll found 76% in favor of airstrikes on ISIS with only 23% opposed. About 62% favor military aid to forces fighting ISIS. These high numbers come before President Obama’s speech making the case for military intervention.
These Christian activists have adopted the Islamist narrative while ignoring the Islamists’ words about their own intentions. By teaching their supporters that ISIS is the result of American “aggression,” they are promoting inaction that will further the Islamist extremist cause and enable the persecution of fellow Christians.
Those who understand such matters know that 9/11 was not about America’s chickens “coming home to roost,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright unforgettably characterized the murder of 3,000 Americans. Nor was it a protest against imperialism, colonialism and occupation — an attempt to address “legitimate grievances.” It was about a vision of the past and the future. It was about power and, uncomfortably, about faith.
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Do not call what happened 13 years ago this week a tragedy. It was a terrorist atrocity, an act of war and a war crime. Very different.
The self-proclaimed jihadis responsible for hijacking commercial jets and using them as missiles targeted the World Trade Center because it was a Western financial capital, a place where men and women of many ethnicities and religions worked in peace to create prosperity. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon, the brain of the greatest liberation army the world has ever known. One more jet was meant to hit the political heart of the Free World — the Capitol or the White House — but Americans on that flight refused to surrender and won a battle.
September 11 was not a date chosen at random. I’m inclined to credit the explanation offered by the late Christopher Hitchens, a man of the Left who dissented from the Left’s tendency to condone savagery directed at Americans. “It was on September 11, 1683, that the conquering armies of Islam were met, held, and thrown back at the gates of Vienna,” he wrote in The Guardian on Oct. 2, 2001.
That defeat of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic caliphate was “a hinge event in human history,” he wrote. From then on, “it was more likely that Christian or Western powers would dominate the Muslim world than the other way around.”
Most Muslims do not seethe over a 17th century war any more than most Americans nurse a grudge against the descendants of King George III. But those whom we have come to call Islamists regard the failure of Muslim forces to conquer Europe as “a humiliation in itself and a prelude to later ones.” Hitchens added one more observation, particularly relevant this summer: “The forces of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza once published a statement saying that they could not be satisfied until all of Spanish Andalusia had been restored to the faithful as well.”
Those who understand such matters know that 9/11 was not about America’s chickens “coming home to roost,” as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright unforgettably characterized the murder of 3,000 Americans. Nor was it a protest against imperialism, colonialism and occupation — an attempt to address “legitimate grievances.” It was about a vision of the past and the future. It was about power and, uncomfortably, about faith.
The actions Western leaders have taken to counter this threat have been insufficient. Al-Qaida and its affiliates now operate in more countries than ever. An al-Qaida splinter, the Islamic State, has seized much of Syria and Iraq, declaring a caliphate, a successor to the one defeated at Vienna.
The Muslim Brotherhood — an organization whose motto includes the phrase “jihad is our way” — is regarded favorably by those who lead Turkey, a NATO ally, and rule Qatar, where the U.S. maintains a military base and American universities and think tankshave established campuses.
The Islamic Republic of Iran is keeping its eye on the ball, that ball being nuclear weapons, the great equalizer, although equality is not at all what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have in mind. They are not cooperating with an International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into “the possible military dimensions” of their nuclear program. If they do obtain nuclear capability, the odds increase that a nuclear exchange will occur, and/or that nuclear weapons will fall into the hands of terrorists. Iran and al-Qaida are rivals but they have cooperated in the past and are likely to do so against common enemies again. By now we get that, right?
In New Hampshire last week, Vice President Joseph Biden called those fighting for the Islamic State “barbarians,” melodramatically adding that the Obama administration will “follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice, because hell is where they will reside.”
But the very same day, Secretary of State John Kerry chose to change the subject, making the bizarre suggestion that it is America’s religious “duty” to confront climate change — which he has previously called “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now — not least because “Muslim-majority countries are among the most vulnerable.”
Coincidently, this also was the week that Matt Ridley, a science journalist and member of the British House of Lords, pointed out that “the climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.”
That does not imply climate change is not a concern; it does imply it is not our “biggest challenge.” How inconvenient for the many politicians who would rather fight carbon emissions than jihadis, who are more concerned about you and me driving SUVs than Iranian mullahs spinning centrifuges.
For such politicians, required reading ought to include Brookings senior fellow Robert Kagan’smost recent essay on the West’s disconcerting return to “the realism of the 1930s.” The fundamental grievance of the illiberal and atavistic forces on the march back then, he observes, was no different from that of illiberal and atavistic forces on the march now: “Being forced to live in a world shaped by others.”
Thirteen years after 9/11, the world shaped by Judeo-Christian values and the Enlightenment is undeniably imperfect. But are we willing to let al-Qaida, the Islamic State, the Islamic Republic and the Muslim Brotherhood restructure it for our children?
The jihadis want the job. And they are more passionate about their beliefs than most of us, more willing — even eager — to kill and be killed to spread them. Thirteen years after 9/11, it’s probably time to decide whether we’re capable of a serious response.
(Obama’s most transparent ever administration, ever.
He will likely be as “transparent” on Wednesday when he tells us about his strategy for dealing with the Islamic State — DM)
We can usefully view the Obama administration’s chronic untruthfulness as a sort of multifaceted corporation of untruth, with all sorts of subsidiaries.
THE BALD LIES OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY
Remember the al-Qaeda-is-on-the-run 2012-election talking point? It was mostly a lie. The administration deliberately released to sympathetic journalists only those documents from the so-called Osama bin Laden trove that revealed worry and dissension among the terrorists. Then it nourished essays by pet journalists trumpeting the decline of al-Qaeda. Disturbing memos that confounded that narrative, as Weekly Standard journalist Steven F. Hayes recently noted, were kept back. “On the run” was dropped after the 2012 election, when events on the ground made such an assertion absurd.
Recent disclosures by some of the combatants about the night of the Benghazi attack remind us that almost everything Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama swore in the aftermath of the debacle was knowingly false. A video did not cause the attack. The rioting was not spontaneous. A video-maker, an American resident, was soon jailed, while one of the suspected killers was giving taped interviews at a coffee house in Benghazi. There were ways of securing the consulate and the annex that were not explored, both before and during the assault. Talking points were altered. Again, the catalyst for untruth was reelection worries by an administration that believes its exalted ends of social justice allow any means necessary for reaching them.
Has anything the administration said about pulling our troops out of Iraq proven true? Was it really the Iraqis’ fault or George Bush’s? Was our leaving proof that Iraq might be one of the administration’s “great achievements”? Was the Iraq that we left without any peacekeepers really “stable”? On more than ten occasions the president bragged on the campaign trail that he alone had ended American involvement in Iraq. When Iraq predictably blew up after our departure, he snarled to reporters that he was angry that anyone would dare accuse him alone of being responsible for our precipitate departure.
Was there any element of “reset” with Russia that was accurate? Obama came into office lambasting the prior administration for alienating Russia — when all it had done was adopt some rather moderate measures to punish Russia for invading Georgia. Reset, in truth, was a remission of punishments — from missile defense with the Czechs and Poles to cut-offs of some high-level negotiations — and thus served as a signal to Putin and his subordinates that Obama believed America had been wrong to react to Georgia. And we know what followed from that.
LIES TO HIDE WHAT WE DON’T LIKE
On issues where the public is at odds with the administration, the Obama team too often makes things up to hide its isolation. Little the administration has stated about the IRS scandal has proven true. It was not a slip-up in one local office; nor were liberal groups equally targeted. There was quite a bit more than a “smidgen” of corruption. The administration’s strategy was to make so many things up that the public got confused and the matter went away. The corruption worked to defang the Tea Party in 2012, and the cover-up — except for fall woman Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth Amendment — worked even better.
Have any of the statements the administration has presented about our southern border proven true? Do we know how many people have recently crossed into the United States illegally, what exactly U.S. immigration policy is, or where exactly foreign nationals are and what are their statuses? The public polls strongly against lax borders and blanket amnesties, so the administration apparently must deceive to permit both — and in a politically disingenuous fashion of postponing the requisite executive orders until after the 2014 midterm elections, while blaming the delay on the crisis on the border that it caused.
Did much of anything prove accurate about the Affordable Care Act? Costs, keeping our doctors and existing plans, the effect on the deficit, the website? Had the president in 2008 outlined honestly the ACA’s provisions, he would never have gotten elected, or had he by 2012 fully implemented them, he would never have gotten reelected. Lying about Obamacare and demonizing any who objected were smart politics, but the president will never regain the trust of those whose premiums spiked, who lost their coverage and their doctors, and who still do not understand what exactly Obamacare is.
MYTHOGRAPHY
Most of the assertions uttered in the 2009 Cairo speech were untrue, from false claims about Islamic achievement to supposed Islamic tolerance during the Inquisition in Córdoba — at a time when there were no Muslims in Córdoba. Emperor Hirohito no more surrendered to General Douglas MacArthur than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and FDR were in office when their respective wars ended and they supposedly agreed to prisoner exchanges — or than Barack Obama’s grandfather helped to free Auschwitz. Obama sees history in the same postmodernist fashion in which he looks upon his own past — details are constructed by everyone, and thus truth is a relative concept that should not be adjudicated by those with privilege against those who are using narratives to advance social justice. The result is that almost any time the president makes reference to the past, ours or his, we can assume two things: His facts are wrong, and they are wrong in a way that is meant to highlight his own godhead.
AMNESIA
There are lots of things that Obama says that he knows will simply fade into oblivion. Did we ever believe that Joe Biden was going to bird-dog abuses in spending for the stimulus to ensure shovel-ready jobs? Did we really believe that Obama would halve the deficit by the end of his first term — or that he would close Guantanamo Bay? Did he really obtain congressional approval for bombing Libya, as he once promised for such operations? Did anyone believe that the Obama administration would not hire former lobbyists or that it would end the revolving door, any more than we believed Obama’s assurances that those who made less than $250,000 would not have any of their taxes go up? What exactly is an Obama step-over line, red line, or deadline? Obama’s serial rhetorical emphatics — Let me be perfectly clear, Make no mistake about it, In point of fact, You can take that to the bank, I’m not kidding, I’m not making this up — are the usual verbal tics that warn the audience that a complete untruth is to follow.
SCAPEGOATING
Then there is another sort of untruth summed up best as blame-gaming — “They did it, not me!” The president confessed to having no strategy to deal with the Islamic State. But that was the fault of the Pentagon for not yet formulating any. The Islamic State had crept up on us — and that was the fault of the intelligence services. The world is in chaos? The new social networking — the much-bragged-about hip keystone of Obama’s two election campaigns — is to blame for making the gullible believe the world is falling apart. The president had to remove every last soldier from Iraq — but he didn’t really do that; it was either Bush or Maliki. The president ignored his own red lines in Syria? But they weren’t his own: The U.N., not he, made them. The president dubbed the Islamic State the jayvees? No, he actually meant an array of groups.
Such blame-gaming is simply the current foreign-policy manifestation of a long-established Obama-administration trait of blaming dismal news on something other than its own policies: ATMs were responsible for high joblessness; the stimulus failed, but House obstructionism was to blame. The Republican House also blocked immigration reform — which Obama easily could have passed when the Democrats controlled the Congress in 2009–10. Tsunamis and earthquakes, including a mild tremor in D.C. itself, rattled the economy and contributed to the discouraging economic statistics. Bad GDP news? The American people had gotten a bit “soft” and lost “their competitive edge.”
REDACTED
Sometimes there are lies by omission. The administration is simply incapable of uttering the phrases “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism,” and that fact requires all sorts of lying by omission about who exactly is killing Americans and why. So we are serially told that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular, that workplace violence caused Fort Hood, that jihad is largely a personal journey, that the idea of terrorists creating a caliphate is absurd, and all the other euphemisms necessary to hide the apparently unpleasant truth of killing by radical Islamists.
As far as the VA, AP, IRS, NSA, and other scandals go, do not count on any confession, investigation, lawsuit, or special prosecutor to reveal the truth in the next two years. The Obama administration will lose documents, redact critical information, find e-mails only years later, and lie about evidence until most of its members are safely out of office and working for Citigroup, one of the major TV networks, or Goldman Sachs.
Obama’s prevaricating has lost him any thought of a legacy, all the more so because for years as a candidate and as president he pontificated about his new transparency and the need for executive candor — itself an untruth at best, and at worst a cynical ploy to provide cover for a deliberate effort to enact policies that could not be honestly presented to the American people.
The two fuels that run Untruth, Inc., are, first, a realization that most of the president’s policies, whether deliberately or as a result of indifference and laziness, run counter to what most Americans support, and, second, a media establishment so invested in his agenda that it will not call the administration to account. So the engine of lying keeps humming. On any given day the president of the United States can step up to the teleprompter amid the latest disaster and swear that he did not do what he just did, or insist that someone else, not he, did the dastardly deed, or simply skip over recent history and make things up. The press at first quibbles, then nods in agreement, and Obama is empowered to do it again and again. We have not seen such a disingenuous president since Richard Nixon — but he, at least, was countered rather than enabled by the media.
(Obama’s words have rarely contained substance, even facially.
Suppose Obama were to surprise the world with words not empty but full of apparent substance. His words, at times, appeared to be substantively meaningful but turned out not to have been. Might it be too late for him to sway the decreasingly free and democratic world now, regardless of what he might say? Perhaps we will find out on Wednesday, when he makes a speech about dealing with the Islamic State. — DM)
To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.
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That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.
Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.
To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.
Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?
Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”
Commensurate with this undercutting of America’s armed forces have been Obama’s empty bluster and careless language, something dangerous coming from the Commander-in-Chief of the greatest military power in history. “Leading from behind” in Libya, the vanishing “red line” in Syria, the juvenile scolding of Putin “that in the 21st century, the borders of Europe cannot be redrawn with force, that international law matters,” the “no strategy” gaffe about the “jayvee” jihadists of the Islamic State–– all were instantly refuted and discredited by facts on the ground created by hard men of brutal action. Libya is not a democracy, but the jihadist version of Road Warrior. Syria’s Bashar al Assad is winning in Syria by slaughtering close to 200,000 men, women, and children. The Islamic State still controls northern Iraq and Syria, and still sits at the gates of Baghdad. And Putin has snatched Crimea and is closing in on eastern Ukraine. Throw in Obama’s penchant for berating allies like Israel, ignoring the interests of others like Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, undercutting vulnerable states like Poland and the Czech Republic, and appeasing genocidal mullahs in Iran, and is it any surprise that his words “inspire greater distrust” in everyone except our enemies?
Of course, Obama’s habit of using words to substitute for politically risky deeds is universal in the West. We just saw a NATO confab in which a lot of big talk for the reporters end up so much smoke when the details are parsed. NATO leaders have agreed “to establish a so-called spearhead force of several thousand troops designed to move into trouble spots at short notice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported. Talk about closing the barn door after the Russian bear has got loose. I’m sure Putin is trembling over the thought of “several thousand” NATO troops that someday might materialize to stop his adventurism. If NATO isn’t acting now, what makes anyone think this special “spearhead force” will act in the future, even if NATO members do create it? As Charles Krauthammer writes, the force “is a feeble half-measure. Not only will troops have to be assembled, dispatched, transported and armed as the fire bell is ringing, but the very sending will require some affirmative and immediate decision by NATO. Try getting that done. The alliance is famous for its reluctant, slow and fractured decision-making.”
And haven’t we heard this sort of braggadocio before from Europe? Remember the 60,000-man “rapid reaction force” the EU was going to create so that they could avoid any further embarrassment of having “cowboy” Americans pull their foreign policy irons out of the fire, as happened in Bosnia and Kosovo? Given that only three European NATO members honor the 2% of GDP minimum for military spending, it’s unlikely that the money for creating this alleged “deterrent” will ever be budgeted, not with EU economies in the doldrums, and widespread grumbling over “austerity” budgets. No wonder that, as the Journal reports, “most details of the force . . . remained to be settled.” But don’t worry, NATO leaders have “committed” to spending the 2% on defense they “committed” to in 2002 and subsequently ignored. Better read the fine print: the commitment is non-binding and will be implemented over a 10-year period. Who knows how much more of the old Soviet Empire Vladimir will have taken back by then.
“Word, words, words,” as Hamlet says. But words useful for politicians who want to avoid the risk and uncertainty of action, and don’t want to face disgruntled voters at the polls. And when this perennial calculus is joined to the progressive belief that an exploitative, racist, neo-imperialist America is disqualified by its sins from being the guarantor of global order and stability, you get the world we are rapidly becoming––a Darwinian jungle of feral violence, illiberal hegemons, thug-nations, and nuclear-armed terrorist states.
Islamic State fighters said to be using US armsInvestigation finds IS wielding American-made weapons originally supplied to Syrian rebels via Saudi Arabia
Illustrative photo of a bullet magazine. (photo credit: Flash90)
LONDON, United Kingdom — Islamic State fighters appear to be using captured US military issue arms and weapons supplied to moderate rebels in Syria by Saudi Arabia, according to a report published on Monday.
The study by the London-based small-arms research organisation Conflict Armament Research documented weapons seized by Kurdish forces from militants in Iraq and Syria over a 10-day period in July.
The report said the jihadists disposed of “significant quantities” of US-made small arms including M16 assault rifles and included photos showing the markings “Property of US Govt.”
It also found that anti-tank rockets used by IS in Syria were “identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the Free Syrian Army umbrella in 2013.”
The rockets were made in the then Yugoslavia in the 1980s.
Islamic State is believed to have seized large quantities of weapons from Syrian military installations it has captured, as well as arms supplied by the United States to the Iraqi army after it swept through northern Iraq in recent weeks.
My must read of the day is “President Barack Obama’s Full Interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd,” in NBC News:
CHUCK TODD:
You’ve ruled out boots on the ground. And I’m curious, have you only ruled them out simply for domestic political reasons? Or is there another reason you’ve ruled out American boots on the ground? Because your own—your own guys have said, “You can’t defeat ISIS with air strikes alone.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA:
Well, they’re absolutely right about that. But you also cannot, over the long term or even the medium term, deal with this problem by having the United States serially occupy various countries all around the Middle East. We don’t have the resources. It puts enormous strains on our military. And at some point, we leave. And then things blow up again. So we— […]
—so—so we’ve got to have a more sustainable strategy, which means the boots on the ground have to be Iraqi … and in Syria, the boots on the ground have to be Syrian. […]
And so the— the strategy both for Iraq and for Syria is that we will hunt down ISIL members and assets wherever they are. I will reserve the right to always protect the American people and go after folks who are trying to hurt us wherever they are.
But in terms of controlling territory, we’re going to have to develop a moderate Sunni opposition that can control territory and that we can work with. The notion that the United States should be putting boots on the ground, I think would be a profound mistake. And I want to be very clear and very explicit about that.
It is undoubtedly important to work with troops in both Iraq and Syria. The people who advocated going into Syria three years ago argued a similar thing: arm and work with the moderates so we have a proxy and don’t have to send all of our guys in down the road, if (and now clearly when) the problem metastasizes. But now we’re going to solve the ISIL problem and there will be no U.S. ground troops? There’s just no way.
That’s not to pass judgment on whether it’s a good idea to send them in, but it’s disingenuous to continuously peddle this notion that there will be no combat troops.
If the goal is to destroy ISIL and the task will, by the administration’s account, take years—it only takes a little common sense to realize something like that will require some forces on the ground.
When the president first started to step into Iraq he unequivocally promised there would be no boots on the ground. Then it switched to, “well, we meant no combat troops and these are humanitarian troops; they’re only carrying out the humanitarian mission.”
Currently there are at least 1,100 troops in Iraq, but the administration maintains that they’re not engaging in combat.
Obama is so determined to avoid being the fourth consecutive president in Iraq, and not revisit “Bush’s War” that he refuses to accept reality. We will not be “putting boots on the ground” is a political statement that may make the administration feel better about what they’re doing, but it is not rooted in reality.
In this same interview, Obama said when he addresses the nation on Wednesday it will be in an effort to level with the American people.
“More than anything,” he said, “I just want the American people to understand the nature of the threat and how we’re going to deal with it and to have confidence we’ll be able to deal with it.”
That’s a noble aim, but it is immediately undermined by futile promises and absolutes like “no ground troops.” The American people deserve to hear a general plan, and they deserve to hear one that’s honest. There are boots on the ground, there will be boots on the ground, and it’s unlikely ISIL can be destroyed without them.
Islamic State fighters in Syria’s northern Raqqa province. (Stringer/Reuters/Landov)
Monday, 08 Sep 2014 08:02 AM
By Melanie Batley
This can not be just plain stupidity
The Obama administration is gearing up for a campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS) that is expected to take up to three years to complete, The New York Times reported.
According to senior officials, the operation will be conducted in three phases, continuing past the end of President Barack Obama’s term in office, but as the president has previously stressed, there are no plans to use ground troops.
“What I want people to understand is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum” of ISIS. “We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities; we’re going to shrink the territory that they control; and, ultimately, we’re going to defeat them,” Obama said in an interview aired Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
The first phase of the mission, currently underway, has consisted of air strikes to halt the advance of the extremist group and protect religious minorities as well as American diplomatic, intelligence, and military personnel.
Phase two will be intended to train, advise, and equip the Iraqi military, Kurdish fighters, and possibly members of Sunni tribes, and is expected to begin after Iraq forms a more inclusive government which is scheduled for this week.
The last part of the offensive would destroy the group’s military capabilities inside Syria, with a campaign lasting at least 36 months. This part of the operation is expected to be the most politically controversial, according to the Times.
Meanwhile, the administration is working to solidify an international coalition to join the effort. Officials say that the countries committed to varying levels of help include Britain, Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is also working to secure the support of Turkey, whose location is seen as strategically crucial to stopping foreign fighters from joining ISIS and allowing the American military to launch operations from bases in the country.
Differences, however, are expected to emerge on the issue of airstrikes in Syria.
“Everybody is on board Iraq,” one administration official told the Times. “But when it comes to Syria, there’s more concern” about where airstrikes could lead.
At the same time, the official said that the administration expects countries to ultimately agree to the plan because “there’s really no other alternative.”
“America’s faith communities, including American Muslims, are sources of strength for all of us. They’re an essential part of our national fabric, and we are committed to deepening our partnerships with them. We’re making these efforts to unite religious communities a core mission here at the State Department.” [Emphasis added.]
Neither Kerry nor Obama understands “the real face of Islam,” only their fantasies concerning it. What could go wrong? Might a Cabinet level Department of Religious Truth and Enlightenment someday be established to further what has become “a core mission of the State Department?” Odd things sometimes happen.
Islam, as a political force and as areligion, seeks world domination through Koranic interpretations which, its proponents hope, potential converts will find appealing. Many do. If that is inadequate, the next steps include threats and violence. The Islamic State (IS) and its cohorts seek world domination to spread their religion worldwide. Of course they want power, to use for that purpose.
They also want it, perhaps at least incidentally, to garner increasing numbers of “infidel” sex slaves for their own enjoyment as encouraged by Islam as well as to motivate others to join their groups. Perhaps this is a variant on sexual jihad, which encourages women and girls to become sex companions for jihadists. Sex might seem an insignificant motivation, but consider for a moment the power of sex as a motivational tool in another context: in the West automobiles, appliances and other goods one would not rationally associate with sexual conquest are advertised by attractive models. It has apparently worked rather well, otherwise substantial advertising funds would not have been devoted to it.
Sex slavery is Islamic
Western civilization has often abetted Islamists in acquiring and keeping sex slaves.
As shocking as the Muslim-run sex ring in Rotherham, England may seem to some—1,400 British children as young as 11 plied with drugs before being passed around and sexually abused in cabs and kabob shops—the fact is that this phenomenon is immensely widespread. In the United Kingdom alone, it’s the fifth sex abuse ring led by Muslims to be uncovered.
The question begs itself: If Muslim minorities have no fear of exploiting “infidel” women and children in non-Muslim countries—that is, where Muslims themselves are potentially vulnerable minorities—how are Muslims throughout the Islamic world, where they are dominant, treating their vulnerable, non-Muslim minorities? [Emphasis added.]
The answer is a centuries-long, continents-wide account of nonstop sexual predation. Boko Haram’s abduction and enslavement of nearly 300, mostly Christian, schoolgirls last April in Nigeria is but the tip of the iceberg. [Emphasis added.]
The difference between what happens in Nigeria and what happens in Western nations is based on what I call “Islam’s Rule of Numbers.” Wherever Muslims grow in numbers, Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, the sexual abuse of “infidel” children and teenagers—comes along with them. [Emphasis added.]
Thus in the United Kingdom, where Muslims make for a sizeable—and notable—minority, the systematic rape of “subhuman infidels” naturally takes place. But when caught, Muslim minorities, being under “infidel” authority, cry “Islamophobia” and feign innocence.
In Nigeria, however, which is roughly 50 percent Islamic, such “apologetics” are unnecessary. After seizing the nearly 300 schoolgirls, the leader of Boko Haram appeared on videotape boasting that “I abducted your girls. I will sell them on the market, by Allah…. There is a market for selling humans. Allah says I should sell.” [Emphasis added.]
Islam is not “peaceful”
Many apologists for Islam try to portray the IS and other terror groups as something other than Islamic. According to Andrew McCarthy in an article titled The Islamic State is Nothing New, they are wrong. Islamists who favor the IS, as well as those which claim to oppose it,
regard the West as the enemy to be conquered. Their differences are germane only to the extent that sharia fidelity, in addition to sheer brute force, will determine who comes out on top in their intramural warfare. As we have been observing here for years with respect to al-Qaeda and the Brotherhood, their disputes are mostly tactical; their splits on the finer points of Islamic-supremacist ideology bear only on how they regard each other. When it comes to the West, both see us as the enemy — and they put aside their differences to attack us. [Emphasis added.]
The same has also always been true of the ideological/doctrinal divide between Sunni and Shiite jihadists. For example, al-Qaeda has had cooperative and operational relations with Iran since the early 1990s. Iran collaborated with al-Qaeda in the 1996 Khobar Towers attack that killed 19 U.S. airmen; probably in the 9/11 attacks; certainly in the aftermath of 9/11; and in the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies. Al-Qaeda would not be what it is today without state sponsorship, particularly from Iran. The Islamic State might not exist at all. [Emphasis added.]
The point is that al-Qaeda has never been anything close to the totality of the jihadist threat. Nor, now, is the Islamic State. The challenge has always been Islamic supremacism: the ideology, the jihadists that are the point of the spear, and the state sponsors that enable jihadists to project power. The challenge cannot be met effectively by focusing on one element to the exclusion of others. [Emphasis added.]
. . . .
I opined at the start of this piece that the threat to the United States is more dire now than it was before 9/11. How could it be otherwise? What jihadists need to attack the United States is safe haven and state sponsorship, which enable them to plan and train; financial and weapons resources; and lax immigration enforcement. On every one of those scores, the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, and other violent Islamic supremacists are in a better position than they were circa 1998–2001. The Islamic State, to take the most prominent example, controls a country-size swath of territory; has seized riches and advanced weaponry during its rampage; has enjoyed support from several countries; and targets an America in which border security is a joke, no effort is made to police visa overstays, and the federal government has actually discouraged and prevented state and federal agents from enforcing immigration laws. [Emphasis added.]
The threat is worse, and worsening. But it is not confined to the Islamic State, and we cannot protect ourselves from it — cannot even grasp that it is a threat to us rather than simply to a faraway region — unless we understand the totality of it. [Emphasis added.]
Here is a one lour and six minute video of a recent Oxford University debate on whether Islam is peaceful. The keynote speaker supporting the proposition that Islam is peaceful appears to emulate Obama, although presenting his arguments more cogently. It is useful to watch the entire debate, because the “Islam is Peaceful” proponents use the types of arguments with which “Islamophobes” need to deal. One is that Islam is peaceful because it seeks peace through “justice.” In Islam, “justice” is to be achieved through Sharia law, brutally antithetical to Western concepts of justice. Judaism and Christianity have evolved over the centuries. Islam has not. Islam is as Islam does.
Based on which side made the most effective debating points, the “Islam is Peaceful” side won by subtle and not-so-subtle distortions.
An interesting point — that Islamists are superior to Non-Islamists — was not made during the debate by debater Mehdi Hasan, who argued in favor of the proposition that Islam is peaceful. He presumably omitted it because it would have lent force to the arguments of the opposing side. He articulates it in this short video.
Arabic media reports indicate that Saudi authorities raided a house church in Khafji province, arresting 27 men, women and children. The raid was conducted by the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, according to reports.
. . . .
The raid is another part of an ongoing harassment campaign directed at Christians at the exact same time that the Saudi Kingdom is making a major “interfaith outreach” push internationally. [Emphasis added.]
Sources of Islamist terror funding and other support
GENEVA — The State Department reiterated Iran’s status as a state sponsor of terrorism and as a destabilizing force in the region and also stood by a May report stating that Iran had increased its terrorist activity in a list of responses sent to Capitol Hill last month after the first round of Iran nuclear negotiations.
Turkey has become a principal financial hub for terrorists under the leadership of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government has helped Iran skirt sanctions, supported jihadi groups in Syria, and provided financial backing to Hamas, according to a new report by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD).
Turkey, a key U.S. ally, “has turned a blind eye” to terror financing and is potentially on the verge of crossing the line to becoming an official state sponsor of terrorism, according to the Friday report, which cites the Erdogan government’s close ties to some of the world’s top terror organizations and operatives.
The report comes just a day after 84 U.S. lawmakers and former government officials urged President Barack Obama to confront Erdogan over his harsh repression of political opponents.
As Turkey’s support for terrorism expands, the Obama administration has remained silent out of fear of offending Erdogan, whom the White House considers a strategic asset, according to the report authored by FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department. [Emphasis added.]
Some international leaders have implicated Qatari officials—accusing them of financing the Islamic State (IS) terror group that is rampaging through Syria and Iraq and continuing to expand its self-proclaimed Sunni caliphate.
In late August, German aid development minister Gerd Mueller openly commented on IS’s funding: “Who is financing these troops? Hint: Qatar,” he said, after being forced to walk back the comments due to their lack of political correctness.
Even former Israeli President Shimon Peres—a 91-year-old left-wing dove—took notice of the Qataris, recently warning that they were becoming “the world’s largest funder of terror.”
In June, The Long War Journal’s Thomas Joscelyn said in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News:
Look no further than a series of official documents from the Obama administration about Qatar, and you will see that it is a major financial hub, fundraising for jihadist groups including the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and others. In April, in the State Department’s country reports on terrorism, they specifically worried about Qatar’s relationship with Islamist groups. They worried Qatar had enabled a very permissive environment for fundraising for jihadist groups. It’s obvious why the Taliban set up its political office in Doha and why the Taliban wanted these five to send off to Qatar. They know it’s a very permissive environment with Islamist sympathies. [Emphasis added.]
Qatar is also unapologetically supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood, a global organization founded by a stout Hitler admirer that seeks the same endgame as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State: a worldwide Sunni caliphate. [Emphasis added.]
Last week, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said that Qatar has been unloading millions to create chaos in the Middle East. Sisi said: “Qatar, Turkey and the international organization of the Brotherhood are currently establishing many companies, newspapers, and websites. They allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to spread chaos among the Arab nation, destabilizing Egypt and destroying the Egyptians.”
. . . .
Meanwhile, the United States continues its confusingly close relationship with the ruthless Emirs. [Emphasis added.]
The United States signed in July a massive $11 billion dollar arms deal with Qatar that included Apache Helicopters, Patriot missile defense systems, and Javelin MANPADS (Man-portable air-defense systems), capable of bringing down a commercial airliner.
In June, the United States negotiated an agreement with Qatar as an intermediary that freed five top Taliban commanders in exchange for Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl. When the Taliban officials touched down in Qatar, they were met with open arms and given heroes’ welcomes.
The Islamic State and it cohorts have a broad global reach.
a partial list of reported or suspected ISIS/Islamic State activity outside Iraq and Syria since Jan. 1, 2013. It does not include many reports that referred only to “an Islamist group”; authorities in a number of countries have been reluctant to specify the nature and extent of extremist activity within their borders. The list below, organized by continent and then alphabetically by country, is not exhaustive. Nonetheless, its extensiveness indicates the global reach of the IS, even if the reported activity does not consist of spectacular attacks.
The list is voluminous, but here’s one directly pertinent to the United States:
On Sept. 3, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel said that over 100 US citizens are fighting in the ranks of the Islamic State; intelligence officials have estimated that the number is as high as 300. Hagel warned that the IS controls half of Iraq and half of Syria, and that “we better take them seriously.”
Survivors are likely to return to the United States to pursue their interests there.
Islamists have a strategy, and it appears to have been successful thus far. What is Obama’s strategy? As to the IS and similar Islamic jihadists, Obama has not yet told the Congress what His plans (if any) are so that congressional approval can be given or withheld.
There’s widespread frustration in both chambers and both parties about President Obama’s admission that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with ISIS in Iraq and Syria. But now the lack of strategy is actually protecting Obama from oversight because Congress can’t authorize or reject what it can’t understand.
In fact, the White House has been totally mum on how it plans to legally justify the air war in Iraq after the temporary authority granted to it in the War Powers Resolution expires. According to the 1973 law, the president must report to Congress when he uses U.S. military force in a hostile environment; Congress must then specifically authorize such action within 60 days or the president has to stop. The president can invoke a one-time, 30-day extension.
But, so far, there have been no substantial consultations with Congress about such an authorization. The White House declined to say whether it even cared if Congress acts or not.
When Obama meets with members of Congress on September 9th and makes a speech on September 10th — the eve of the 2001 and 2012 terrorist attacks — will He provide substantive information as to what He wants and intends? Or will He simply continue to utter His customary platitudes? What He says He intends to do, and what He claims to want, are unlikely to coincide.
President Coward:
Is Obama merely cowardly, or is He also charmingly devious?
Even absent attacks inside the United States, the jihadists threaten us significantly. The attacks on the U.S. Mission and Annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, killed the ambassador and three other Americans. This was the first murder of an American ambassador in decades. Nearly one year later, in August 2013, the Obama administration was forced to shutter more than 20 diplomatic facilities after learning that al Qaeda was planning to attack one or more of them.
In the end, President Obama thinks that these types of attacks on American interests abroad are a fact of life. During a speech at National Defense University on May 23, 2013, Obama outlined his vision of the fight ahead. The president described “the current threat” as coming from “lethal yet less capable al Qaeda affiliates; threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad; homegrown extremists.” Obama added, “This is the future of terrorism. We have to take these threats seriously, and do all that we can to confront them. But as we shape our response, we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.”
Notably absent from Obama’s threat matrix was a jihadist group capturing a significant amount of territory in the heart of the Middle East. In fact, the president downplayed the threat posed by groups he described as “simply collections of local militias or extremists interested in seizing territory.” [Emphasis added.]
His own officials are now telling a different story. In a speech on September 3, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center explained that “the terrorist threat emanates from a broad geographic area, spanning South Asia across the Middle East, and much of North Africa.” Matthew Olsen warned that the terrorists “are now active in at least 11 insurgencies in the Islamic world.” He added that the threat from the Islamic State “extends beyond the region to the West,” and the group “has the potential to use its safe haven to plan and coordinate attacks in Europe and the U.S.” The Islamic State’s rivals in al Qaeda’s Jabhat al Nusrah have the same deadly potential: “In Syria, veteran al Qaeda fighters have traveled from Pakistan to take advantage of the permissive operating environment and access to foreign fighters. They are focused on plotting against the West.” [Emphasis added.]
The president hasn’t been thinking strategically about the jihadists’ territorial ambitions. Unfortunately, our enemies have been. The threat they pose to the United States has only grown. [Emphasis added.]
On August 28th, Obama apparently decided that it “is impossible to be the leader of the world’s top superpower and always just hope for the best.” Now, He wants a coalition including Arab and Muslim states to deal with the Islamic State, et al, by putting boots on the ground.
Obama is right in seeking to include Arab and Muslim states in his coalition. ISIS is undoubtedly a cancerous tumor, which threatens, first and foremost, the Arab world from which it grew. Arab states, however, are so factious, so suspicious, so afraid of the reaction in the streets — but primarily so untrusting of Obama (the Gulf States, namely Saudi Arabia) — that they will not rush to join his campaign. [Emphasis added.]
The president believes in the “strong forces” of the states in the region to do the job in the field: The Iraqi army is supposed to cooperate with the Iranian army and the Kurdish Peshmerga forces. Syrian President Bashar Assad quickly realized the opportunity and jumped all over it, offering his assistance, which Washington and Paris promptly rejected. In actuality though, the regimes in Syria and Iran are the first in line to feel the Sunni threat posed by ISIS. The Islamic State is providing the Shiites with a certificate of integrity. [Emphasis added.]
Is the president just talking, and will the Islamic State be permitted to continue in existence, at least west of the Syria-Iraq border? Or is it possible that when the president refers to creating the right “regional” situation to allow for the defeat of “ISIL” he is referring to the one power that potentially could organize a ground attack on the Islamic State? That country is the sponsor and ally of the two governments that exist to the west and to the east of the boundaries of the Islamic State — that is, the Assad regime to its west and the Baghdad government to its east. [Emphasis added.]
The country in question is Iran, which has a clear interest in the destruction of the Islamic State. The IS domain, if it continues to exist, stands between Iran and its desire for a contiguous line of pro-Iranian entities between the Iraq-Iran border and the Mediterranean Sea. The problem is that an Iranian victory over IS would mean a general Iranian triumph in the Levant. That’s a bad outcome too. [Emphasis added.]
Iran has her own reasons for opposing the IS, and they do not coincide with those of Western civilization. Is Obama prepared let Iran get (or keep) “the bomb” in return for its “help” with the IS? His efforts during the P5 +1 Iran Scam suggest that as a real possibility. Please see also, Iran has not abandoned nuclear weapons ambitions.
Conclusions
Obama’s “strategy” appears to be that only in conjunction with the “international community,” particularly Islamic nations, can the IS and its cohorts be defeated or even contained. Apparently, the conclusion He asks us to draw is that He intends in that fashion to deal with the IS, et al. However, the “international community” has in its ranks few friends of Western freedom and many enemies, some of which actively support Islamic terror.
The “international community” is, at best, similar to a homeowners’ association, the members of which love to debate trivial matters while doing little or nothing of substance to advance the interests of the homeowners as a whole. In their defense, some of them do support pleasant golf courses.
The “international community” is larger and in most respects far worse than homeowners’ associations. It has powerful anti-freedom, anti-democracy and anti-civilization members demanding (and not infrequently forcing) others to acquiesce in their demands. As a group, they are by no means suitable partners for peace other than in the Islamist sense.
The lesson here is not that diplomacy is always meaningless. It is rather that we need to be clear-eyed about whom we are dealing with and understand that with determined foes it is military action or the threat of military action (or economic penalties) that can usually move the needle in our direction.
From the get-go, this president seemed to believe that he could shame our adversaries into good behavior or ingratiate himself with those who don’t care how we behave, only that we are nonbelievers.
The Israeli writer Ruthie Blum insightfully summed up Obama’s moral confusion: “What Obama has never been able to get through his community-organizer brain is that it is not enough for him to empathize with the grievances of his enemies, particularly not the genocidal maniacs in question. Without actually swearing allegiance to the interpretation of Islam whose objective it is to catapult the modern world into the Dark Ages, there is no way to avoid beheading. And given the nature of internecine Islamist strife, even doing so does not guarantee immunity from bloodletting.”
***********
If the current cease-fire holds in Ukraine, we will be one step closer to the dismemberment of Ukraine and a humiliation for the West. The Post reports: “The measures appeared, at least initially, to be a first step toward a peace plan envisioned by Russian President Vladimir Putin that would effectively freeze the conflict in a manner similar to other long-running territorial disputes in former Soviet republics. The Kremlin has used those other conflicts, in Moldova and Georgia, to exert pressure on their governments and to complicate their chances of joining the NATO defense alliance.”
Meanwhile, in a pale imitation of the Iraq war coalition that President George W. Bush assembled of some 49 countries, the Obama administration managed to wrangle nine countries into joining with us against the Islamic State. But to do what?
If you listen to the president, it is to make the terrorist state “manageable.” If you listen to Secretary of State John Kerry, he says, “Contrary to what you sort of heard in the politics of our country”– from the president (!) — “the President is totally committed; there is a strategy that is clear, becoming more clear by the day. And it really relies on a holistic approach to ISIL. That is to say that we need to do kinetic, we need to attack them in ways that prevent them from taking over territory, that bolster the Iraqi security forces, others in the region who are prepared to take them on, without committing troops of our own, obviously.” Obviously not, because we’re totally committed up to the point where we are not. After all, Kerry says, “that’s a redline for everybody here, no boots on the ground.” Not the Islamic State’s beheading of American journalists or slaughtering of Christians or terrorizing of the population, but U.S. ground troops are the red line. Is there any wonder aggressors around the world have pounced?
Kerry assures us: “There is no containment policy for ISIL. They’re an ambitious, avowed genocidal, territorial-grabbing, Caliphate-desiring, quasi state within a regular army. And leaving them in some capacity intact anywhere would leave a cancer in place that will ultimately come back to haunt us. So there is no issue in our minds about our determination to build this coalition, go after this.” Unless, of course, this means boots on the ground.
Now contrast the diplomatic minuets and double talk with the only good news internationally today, as The Post reports: “Ahmed Abdi Godane, a co-founder of a network blamed for its brutal tactics in Somalia and for the attack on an upscale Kenyan shopping mall last year, was killed Monday in an attack carried out by U.S. drones and other aircraft, the Pentagon said.” Now, there is some atrocity prevention.
The lesson here is not that diplomacy is always meaningless. It is rather that we need to be clear-eyed about whom we are dealing with and understand that with determined foes it is military action or the threat of military action (or economic penalties) that can usually move the needle in our direction.
From the get-go, this president seemed to believe that he could shame our adversaries into good behavior or ingratiate himself with those who don’t care how we behave, only that we are nonbelievers.
The Israeli writer Ruthie Blum insightfully summed up Obama’s moral confusion: “What Obama has never been able to get through his community-organizer brain is that it is not enough for him to empathize with the grievances of his enemies, particularly not the genocidal maniacs in question. Without actually swearing allegiance to the interpretation of Islam whose objective it is to catapult the modern world into the Dark Ages, there is no way to avoid beheading. And given the nature of internecine Islamist strife, even doing so does not guarantee immunity from bloodletting.”
This is why his “outreach” to Iran, repudiation of enhanced interrogation techniques, the Cairo speech, condemnation of an anti-Islamic video (that had nothing to do with the Libya attack), excoriating our ally Israel for failing to make peace with Palestinians (who never take “yes” for an answer), commitment to a Palestinian state and finger-wagging at Israel when it takes on terrorists militarily (which inevitably causes civilian casualties) have earned us nothing — zero, zilch good will — either from Iran and its allies or from the Islamic State. What works is showing resolve to destroy jihadists. What doesn’t work is bailing out of Iraq, leaving no troops in Afghanistan, flip-flopping on the red line in Syria and letting a genocidal war drag on for three years. What doesn’t work is slashing our military while threats increase.
Obama and Hillary Clinton likewise tried to stay in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s good graces. They began reset, let Russia into the World Trade Organization and tried to slow down human rights sanctions. When that didn’t stop Putin from pursuing his ambitions to re-create the Russian empire, the administration was taken aback. The nice words and political appeasement were worthless (!?!) as were the half-hearted sanctions which we now decide to increase after a cease-fire has cemented Russia’s victory. Declaring that he is so 19th-century and offering “off ramps” were meaningless. Not even telling Putin he was really losing made a difference.
In the end, totalitarians and terrorists want what they want. The way to stop terrorists is to destroy them, preferably early on before they experience victory, kill hundreds of thousands and plant themselves in nation states. In dealing with rational foes who calculate the costs and benefits of actions, convincing them that they will pay a penalty far greater than what they can hope to obtain through aggression is essential. If you are not ready to do either, you have the Obama foreign policy — chaos, bloodshed, instability and diminished fear of and respect for the United States. In short, we either choose to confront our foes or we choose decline. Maybe the next president will choose the former.
anneinpt
artaxes
danmillerinpanama
davidking1530
Peter Hofman
Joseph Wouk
Peter
Louisiana Steve
WarSclerotic 
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