THE CARTER-OBAMA PARALLEL

THE CARTER-OBAMA PARALLEL

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF , Powerline 

James Kirchick compares the foreign policy records of Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter. He finds that President Obama’s is worse.

I agree with Kirchick. As he explains, Carter eventually saw the error of his weak ways and changed course, though it took a series of major setbacks for him to accomplish this.

With Obama we have had the serious setbacks — e.g., the Benghazi attacks, the rise of al Qaeda and al Qaeda-like terrorist legions, and the fall of vast chunks of Iraq — without the realization of error and the course correction.

I disagree with Kirchick on one point, though. He perceives a strong similarity between Obama’s “Cairo speech” and the address in which Carter told America to overcome its “inordinate fear of Communism.”

Re-reading the Cairo speech, I don’t see the parallel. As I read it, Obama never suggests that our fear of Islamism is inordinate. Rather, he states that “we will relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security.” Indeed, he emphasizes that his “first duty as President is to protect the American people” from such threats.

Obama does reject the view that America is, or should be, “at war with Islam.” However, Obama wasn’t breaking new ground here. President Bush often made the same point.

Bush went so far as to appoint one his most trusted advisers, Karen Hughes, as the point person for outreach by the State Department to the Muslim world. And he liked to call Islam “the religion of peace.”

I’m not defending this approach; in fact I didn’t like it when Bush tried it. But Bush’s tendency to praise Islam, almost certainly sincerely, didn’t cause him to be soft when it came to combating Islamic extremists.

Similarly, nothing in Obama’s praise precluded firmer policies. Had Obama surged in Afghanistan without setting a timetable for withdrawal; had he armed the non-jihadist rebels in Syria early on and provided them with air support; had he negotiated a status of forces agreement in Iraq that left behind a substantial force to train government troops; had he either “led from the front” in Libya or stayed out of that dispute altogether — in each instance, he would not have acted inconsistently with the praise of Islam that he spewed in Cairo.

The Cairo speech has flaws, to be sure. But as I reread it five years later, my main reaction is regret that Obama didn’t more closely adhere to what he told his audience that day.

For example, Obama stated, “when innocents in Bosnia and Darfur are slaughtered, that is a stain on our collective conscience.” Yet, Obama has taken no meaningful action to halt the slaughter of innocents in Syria.

With respect to Afghanistan, Obama stated:

We would gladly bring every single one of our troops home if we could be confident that there were not violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can. But that is not the case. And that’s why we’re partnering with a coalition of 46 countries. And despite the costs involved, America’s commitment will not weaken.

Unfortunately, violent extremists in Afghanistan and Pakistan are still determined to kill as many Americans they possibly can. Meanwhile, Obama’s commitment has all but evaporated.

On Iraq, Obama promised to “support a secure and united Iraq as a partner, and never as a patron.” But Obama essentially washed his hands of Iraq, with catastrophic consequences.

On Israel, Obama tried to speak in even-handed terms — too even-handed, as far as I’m concerned, but not all that different from those uttered by various administration officials during Bush’s second term. While pledging to work for a Palestinian state, Obama insisted that “Palestinians must abandon violence;” that “the Palestinian Authority must develop its capacity to govern with institutions that serve the needs of its people;” and that “Hamas must put an end to violence.”

Unfortunately, Obama’s pursuit of a Palestinian state was one-sided. Along with Hillary Clinton, he harangued Israel for its policy on settlements, while refusing to hold Palestinian feet to the fire. In fact, Obama seemed largely to ignore the violence and abuses of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas.

On democracy in the Arab world, Obama was for it, naturally. However, he added an important caveat:

[T]here are some who advocate for democracy only when they’re out of power. Once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others.So no matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who would hold power: You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party. Without these ingredients, elections alone do not make true democracy.

Obama also denounced the “disturbing tendency among some Muslims to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of someone else’s faith.” And he expressed his support for “religious diversity,” including tolerance for “the Copts in Egypt.”

But when the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in Egypt and engaged in just the suppression that Obama had warned against, including the harsh suppression of Copts, Obama’s support for that government did not waver.

In sum, although Obama’s Cairo speech is flawed, I don’t view it as a roadmap to the misguided, and in some instances disastrous, policies that followed. Rather, I think it promised something better, though far from ideal.

Dithertude

Barry doesn't DITHER, he just doesn't do it.

The media is blindly following

The media is blindly following Obama and the Democrats

By Michael Goodwin

After President Obama spoke about Iraq, Politico posted a story last week that said Democrats were “starting to unite” behind his policy. It reported that party members “from a broad ideological spectrum” supported the decision to deploy 300 military advisers as terrorists threatened Baghdad.

Readers who ventured beyond the frothy claim were rewarded with this hidden gem: “Senate Democrats actually did not watch the president’s speech on Thursday, instead talking energy policy over lunch.”

In other words, anything Obama said was good enough for them. Nothing, not even the possible creation of a new jihadist state, can wake Dems from their hypnotic daze. Their master’s voice turns them into iron filings, obedient to his magnet.

Pass the dessert, I vote yes!

What, pray tell, is the Obama “policy” they are uniting behind? Since he didn’t actually articulate one, the only conclusion is that they support him, period.

That the leftist media remain a sucker for story lines about Democratic unity, as opposed to those about a Republican “civil war,” is a disgrace that helps define the age of Obama.

Uncurious and unserious journalists are not journalists. They are stenographers at best, shills at worst.

Their abdication is destructive. The refusal to subject Obama to the same critical standard applied to Republican presidents provides cover for policies that lack public support. And that blackout of skepticism serves to keep potentially wayward Democrats in line. Then and only then is it possible to claim they are “starting to unite” behind a policy that doesn’t exist.

Contrast that fable with the results of a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll: It found Obama’s approval rating falling to 41 percent, with only 37 percent approving of his foreign policy.

A staggering 54 percent say they do not believe the president “is able to lead the country and get the job done,” with just 42 percent saying he can. A Gallup poll finds only 31 percent approve of his handling of immigration.

The dreary view of the president reflects the reality of ordinary Americans who see a weak economy and mounting crises at home and abroad. From the VA and IRS scandals, the ObamaCare mess and the surge of illegal immigrants on the southern border, to slaughters in Syria and Iraq, Russia’s advance on Ukraine and China’s aggression against its neighbors, they see the world turning darker and more chaotic.

They no longer believe their president is capable of rising to the challenges, making this a watershed moment for Obama and the nation.

If we lived in a parliamentary system, that sour mood could trigger a no-confidence vote and a collapse of the government.

Yet the Dems fall in line. They rouse themselves only to denounce Republicans as obstructionists, and occasionally racists, for daring to criticize Obama. With few exceptions, they show no interest in probing the IRS for playing political enforcer because so many Dems demanded the agency do just that.

This is wholesale dereliction by an entire party, yet there is no chance of getting to the truth because Eric Holder’s Justice Department is also corrupted by partisanship.

Most of the Washington media are similarly blinkered, defining all GOP complaints as “political,” as if Dems are doing God’s work.

A popular idea among historians is that cataclysmic events, including World War I, happen because major players “sleepwalk” into tragic mistakes. Complacency, as well as ambition, cowardice and greed, lead to bad decisions and fatal actions.

That pattern suggested itself in a stray comment Obama made Thursday. Aiming to do as little as possible about Iraq, he answered a question about Iran that was consistent with his fetish for the Kumbaya moment.

“Our view,” he said, “is that Iran can play a constructive role if it is helping to send the same message to the Iraqi government that we’re sending, which is that Iraq only holds together if it’s inclusive and that — if the interests of Sunni, Shia and Kurd are all respected.”

Inclusive? Ah, yes, that must be it — a desire for inclusion is why the mad mullahs are sending fighters to Syria and Iraq and financing terror groups Hezbollah and Hamas. Rest assured, once the mullahs get nuclear weapons, we’ll all be included.

Maybe then the president and his party will wake up.

ON THE IRS EMAILS, THE PLOT THICKENS
John Hinderaker, Powerline

It has emerged over the last few days that at the time of Lois Lerner’s hard drive crash, the IRS had a contract with a company called Sonasoft (“Email archiving done right.”) Sonasoft promoted its relationship with the IRS in 2009: “If the IRS uses Sonasoft products to backup their servers why wouldn’t you choose them to protect your servers?”

So why doesn’t that solve the problem of the missing IRS emails? Because the IRS canceled its contract with Sonasoft in September 2011, a couple of months after Lerner’s hard drive crash. Everyone seems to assume that Sonasoft would have deleted whatever information it had gotten from the IRS at that time. That is certainly a logical assumption; in fact, it would make sense to require Sonasoft to get rid of any customer’s data once the business relationship ends. But it wouldn’t hurt for a House committee to lay a subpoena on Sonasoft to learn more about the IRS’s dealings with that company and make certain that it doesn’t still have any IRS records.

Two observations about the Sonasoft story: first, the IRS’s cancellation of the Sonasoft contract occurred in the context of a $1.8 billion annual budget for information services, plus $330 million annually for “business systems modernization.” All of that, and the IRS couldn’t afford an email archiving service? Not only that, it had to recycle its backup tapes to save money? Ridiculous.

Second, I noted here that the IRS gave Senators Hatch and Wyden an email thread in which Lois Lerner talks with IRS technical employees about trying to recover materials from her crashed hard drive. The striking thing about the exchange is that Lerner begins the discussion by writing:
It was nice to meet you this morning–although I would have preferred it was under different circumstances. I’m taking advantage of your offer to try and recapture my lost personal files. My computer skills are pretty basic, so nothing fancy–but there were some documents in the files that were irreplaceable.

Lerner’s concern was about the “personal files” on her computer, nothing about emails. This would make no sense if her computer crash had destroyed the principal record of her work for the IRS over the previous two years, i.e. her email traffic. But it makes perfect sense for Lerner to be unconcerned about emails if she knew the IRS had a contract with Sonasoft and that her emails were safely archived. All she needed to worry about were her own personal files. That unconcern would have been entirely appropriate until two months later, when the IRS canceled the Sonasoft contract. Based on what we now know, that appears to be the moment when the record of Lerner’s dealings with other federal entities (like the White House and DOJ) was lost.

Swiftboat

Lost IRS E-Mails, A Story only an Arse Ole would try to pass as the Truth

Lost IRS E-Mails, A Story only an Arse Ole would try to pass as the Truth
Mike walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

In what century does the IRS thinks we are living?

If we were in the late 20th century, I might -- just might -- believe that the IRS e-mails were only kept on an individual's desk top computer hard drive.

But this is the 21st century.

Is there anyone, anyone, reading this who keeps their e-mails solely on their desk top computer hard drive?

Heck, how many of you even keep e-mails a hard drive as they are already stored elsewhere on servers and back-up servers, etc.?

That is what I thought.

The IRS is full of you know what (and do not step in it!).

This is pure political cover-my-arse dishonesty.

Period. End of story.

Mike

A Contrarian Assessment of Iraq

A Contrarian Assessment of Iraq

With Mike Walker, Col. USMC (retired)

To appreciate this argument, two assumptions need to be laid out.

First, like a growing number of analysts, I am convinced that the Islamic world is being rent apart by the Third Fitnah, or religious civil war.

There are three main factions: progressive Muslims, radical revolutionary Shi’a (Iran, Hezbollah, etc) and radical revolutionary Sunni’s (al Qaeda, the Taliban, Hamas, Boko Haram, ISIS, etc).

 

The fourth, largely inert group, are the masses of Muslims who are sitting on the sidelines embracing the disappearing status quo of the past.

Second, revolutionary Iran has proven to be a far more dangerous threat than al Qaeda over the last decade.

Who has a surrogate state in Lebanon and perhaps very soon in Syria while possessing a huge military on the verge of going nuclear? And who has its leaders in hiding in Pakistan while its organization splits apart into ever-smaller factions?

Iran is clearly the greater threat.

The Assessment: What will the future hold?

Is the fall of Maliki a bad thing?

His anti-Sunni prejudice and ineptness has brought on the current strife in Iraq. No other individual plays a greater role and no other individual should pay a greater price. I say good riddance.

The idea of a militant Sunni Iraq facing down militant Shi’a Iran on its borders is, in a true Machiavellian sense, not necessarily a bad outcome. It offers a great counterweight to the expansion of the Iranian Revolution.

Further, the leaders of the ISIS movement in Iraq may not turn out to be as radical as they are being portrayed. There are a large number of Iraqis who simply hate the repression instituted by Maliki. They are not all radical Islamists.

Maliki repeated the 2003 blunder by Bremer in purging the Sunni officers. We learned from that mistake and that was one reason why the insurgency virtually ended by 2010.

Those officers were once again thrown into poverty and disgrace by Maliki.

That is why the ISIS columns became so effective in such a short period of time: They are led and staffed by hundreds of expert Iraqi military leaders. 

It is not an exaggeration to state that the Iraqi ISIS officers are more capable than their Iraqi Army counterparts.

That is entirely the fault of Maliki.

Had the Sunni officers been allowed to remain in the Iraqi Army and serve honorable then there would be no ISIS offensive in Iraq today.

But, as already noted, the majority of those commanders are not radical Islamists and a radical ISIS state is not a foregone conclusion.

That leads to the next big question: To prevent a Sunni victory, will Iran intervene in force?

This is the absolute worse case scenario, almost literally a possible road to Armageddon.

If Iran invades Iraq, it likely will not stop there. It will most probably go on to Syria (at Assad’s invitation) to crush ISIS there.

That may set a terrible chain of events in motion.

If Iran has its army in Iraq and Syria, then it will create armies there in its own image and likeness.

Lebanon will eventually fall to Hezbollah and become a satellite of Iran.

Iran will eventually get nuclear weapons. The realists saw that the international community did not have the will to stop North Korea from getting nuclear weapons in the 1990s and the international community has less backbone today.

Iran will go nuclear, period, end of story.

That leads to Armageddon.

Revolutionary Iran, with armies on the border of Israel in Lebanon and Syria, will do what it has always said it will do: Go to war to eliminate Israel and purge the region of Jews.

If Iran goes into Iraq in strength, we just might be witnessing the first step towards an eventual regional nuclear war. We will be in it.

Sleep tight, friends.

Crisis in Iraq: Think – Do Not Panic

Crisis in Iraq: Think – Do Not Panic

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, has made significant gains this year and poses a grave threat to Iraq.

That demands a reasoned change in strategy, not mindless panic.

Having served two tours Iraq, to include time in Mosul, Irbil, Baghdad and al Anbar governorate, nothing that is occurring today is shocking, disappointing, yes, but shocking? No.

We quit Iraq too soon.

The official reason was the failure of the Obama Administration to obtain from the Maliki regime an extension of essential legal protections for American troops through a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA). That goal was doomed.

Why?

Politically, our bottom line was to get out. For the U.S., if a good SOFA was in the offing then that was OK, if not then that was OK too. For Maliki, if the US wanted to stay then it was to be on his terms, if not then they could leave. Reaching an obtainable compromise was simply not worth the effort.

Neither party saw the national security ramifications of failure, only the immediate political gain. In that narrow sense, both sides won when the SOFA talks failed.

Many in Baghdad and Washington celebrated and the long-term security consequences be damned.

Timing also hurt the policy makers in Washington and Baghdad.

The Obama Administration threw in the towel in October 2011.

The Syrian Civil War had only begun that March, in July the Syrian Free Army was formed and by October, it looked like they would soon oust Assad. ISIS did not even exist. There was no perceived military threat to Iraq.

Maliki also saw nothing to fear.

Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was on the ropes, a rump group of politically impotent but still-deadly malcontents and violence was down by nearly 90% from the high in late 2006.

 The Iraqi economy was growing by leaps and bounds. In 2011, Iraq was the one the ten fastest growing economies in the world (an amazing 6^th in the world today) and unemployment fell to under 15% in 2011, down from a crippling 45% rate in 2004.

Then things went wrong, very wrong.

Maliki proved to be a vindictive and divisive leader, systematically persecuting the Sunni minority and its political leaders.

The Sunni Awakening (when the insurgency turned on AQI and joined with the Government of Iraq) was based on the reality that AQI had given the Sunnis only violence and repression while the Government of Iraq offered a promising future.

Maliki destroyed that dynamic by punishing and disenfranchising the Sunni. They turned away from Baghdad.

Simultaneously, the Syrian Civil War turned into a disaster. The West refused to militarily support the progressives that had been the initial leaders of the resistance against Assad. Al Qaeda and its adherents filled the vacuum and that led to the rise of ISIS.

That ISIS was able to infiltrate into Iraq was no surprise at all.

In 2004, we fought a losing war to close the border with Syria but the “rat lines” continued to allow several hundred radical Islamic fighters to cross into Iraq each month. Bashar Assad wanted this to happen. Assad played Dr. Frankenstein and that al Qaeda “monster” is now threatening both his and Maliki’s regimes.

So has ISIS won? There is good reason to think that the answer is no.

Why?

All the ISIS victories are in the Sunni areas that were repressed and disenfranchised by Maliki. For the Sunni minority, rule by ISIS seems at the moment a preferable choice to continuing misrule by Maliki.

The Peshmerga in the Kurdish region are very tough and capable (I saw them in action in 2003) and ISIS had steered clear. Can ISIS defeat them on their own ground? I think not.

ISIS has yet to gain a foothold in the predominately Shi’a regions. They failed do so throughout the 2003-2011 War in Iraq and there is nothing to indicate they will succeed now.

Every time ISIS or its predecessor, AQI, attempted to govern the Sunni they failed. Have they improved so much that they will succeed now? Again, I think not. 

Maliki forced the Sunni into a Hobbesian choice. As Kenneth M. Pollack sagely wrote in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Maliki’s failures are not irreversible and it is not too late for the United States to help turn the tide (without ground combat troops).

Only time will tell if Baghdad is willing to re-right the ship of state, but an imminent ISIS victory is not preordained.

Semper Fi,

Mike

The Taliban and Bowe Bergdahl

The Taliban and Bowe Bergdahl

Mike Walker, Col USMC(retired)

The Taliban

The current controversy over the safe return of Bowe Bergdahl has led to a lot of talk about the Taliban. Too much of it is based on a very poor understanding of the relationship between the Taliban and the Afghan people.

Let me try to set the record straight and bluntly so.

People who support the Taliban support a violent and radical hate group. That is the truth, period and end of story.

Background

After the Afghan-Soviet War ended in 1989, the country fell into chaos as the seven key mudjahedin groups that had defeated the Soviets (informally called the “P-7”) split apart and those Afghans who fought with the Soviets somehow held on to power in part of the country. That disunity plunged the nation into civil war.

The Taliban, roughly meaning religious students in Pashtun, came together after the war in 1994 under Mullah Omar and were able to rapidly gain control over most of the country by 1996.

Coalition Forces overthrew the Taliban regime in late 2001 for supporting al Qaeda training and planning for the 9/11 Attacks. If you do not remember, the Taliban invited al Qaeda into Afghanistan in 1996 and al Qaeda’s military arm became 055 (Arab) Brigade of the Taliban army. The Taliban have been al Qaeda’s longest and strongest ally.

The Afghan people oppose al Qaeda by a margin of 81% against versus 6% who support it, according to a 2006 World Public Opinion poll. That disconnect alone shows the vast gap between the beliefs of the Afghan people and the Taliban.

After the Coalition surge into the Taliban heartland began (Kandahar and Helmund), sympathy for the Taliban plummeted rapidly, falling to 29% by 2011, according to Asia Foundation.

At the same time, support for U.S. troops in Afghanistan continued to rise, with 68% of the Afghan people in support according to an 11 January 2010 BBC report.

Ironically, the Afghan people liked having U.S. troop in their country in much higher numbers than the American people wanted our troops in Afghanistan.

The drop in Taliban support also reflected the 2010 change in Taliban tactics of targeting civilians, a move that led the Afghan people to blame the the continued fighting on the Taliban over Coalition Forces by a ratio of 2 to 1 by 2011.

Reuters noted the weakness of the Taliban in having no influence in stopping the recent 2014 elections, an election that Mullah Omar ridiculed and his Taliban boasted they would derail. They failed.

Reuters published this Afghan twitter posting: “This is how people vote to say death to the Taliban.” What the Taliban want is not what the Afghan people want.

Opposition to the Taliban can also be seen in those fighting against them.

Of the aforementioned P-7 who defeated the Soviets, four groups are part of the current Afghan government and fighting WITH USin Afghanistan, the other two, Hezb-e- Islami under Hekmatyar is opposed to our presence in Afghanistan as is Hezb-e-Islami Khails, now referred to a the Haqqani Network.

The last group, Islamic National Revolution Movement, broke apart after the war and that is where Mullah Omar comes from.

Another amazing statistic is the breakdown of the number of combatants. Look at this comparison of the last year that Soviet ground forces fought in Afghanistan compared to our last year:

–      Back then:

Afghans against the Russians:   150,000 to 250,000 Mudjahedin                       

Afghans fighting with the Soviets:              25,000 Afghans

–      Today

Afghans against the Coalition:  30,000 Taliban/Haqqani/Hekmatyar       

Afghans fighting with the Coalition:      200,000 Afghans soldiers

The Soviets suffered ten times the number killed, seven times the number wounded, and fifty times the number fallen due to illness.

Soviets/Afghan allies lost over 600 tanks versus zero for the Coalition, over 1,500 APC’s versus less than 10 for us; lost over 450 aircraft, to include over 300 helicopters shot down, versus less than 15 US helicopters and no fixed wing aircraft shot down.

Why are the Taliban so Hated by the Afghan People?

When the Taliban took power:

a. Women were forbidden from holding jobs outside the house and girls were banned from school. After we tossed them out of power, Sabrina Saqib, a member of the Afghan Parliament, later stated: “Women came back to life after the Taliban.”

In frustration, the Taliban reverted to horrific tactics such as throwing acid in the face of little girls walking to school. The purpose was to intimidate families into keeping the girls both illiterate and at home.

b. Under the Taliban’s dreaded Department of Vice and Virtue, the punishment for most crimes was death, carried out by public beheading or being shot in the back of the head at Kabul’s Ghazi Soccer Stadium. Stoning of women for adultery was also “popular.” The Taliban used to show these barbaric practices on national television.

The Taliban claimed it was religiously “virtuous” for people to attend the slaughter.

The crimes?  Besides murder, "evils" such as prostitution, adultery, homosexuality, and religious offenses such as converting to Christianity all fit the bill. Lessor crimes, like being a moneychanger, bought on the amputation of hands or feet, usually carried out a few feet from in front of the goals. Sickening.

Today, the stadium is a place of peace and once again used for sports.

c. The Taliban proved to be racist butchers and their hatred of anyone who was not Pashtun played out on the battlefield. If a Pashtun village resisted during their march to power in the 1990s, the people were treated humanely by and large.

If the villagers were not Pashtuns, every house was destroyed, the crops razed, and suspected enemy resisters shot out of hand with the corpses scalped and mutilated on many occasions.

When the Taliban took Kabul, all non-Pashtun peoples were fired from government jobs across the country.

Every Tajik, Hazara, Uzbek and members of other ethnic minorities know that a return of the Taliban means a return to a savage apartheid state.

d. In 2001, The Taliban destroyed the sacred Buddhas of Bamiyan statues that had been built in the 6th century, when some Afghans had been Buddhists. For over a thousand years, Islamic Afghan rulers had protected or at least ignored the site but the hate-filled and intolerant Taliban under Mullah Omar blasted them apart with dynamite.

Conclusion

Is it any wonder that another poll found that only a little over 10% of the Afghan people (and just 30% of the Pashtuns) wanted the Taliban to return to power?

Supporting Mullah Omar and the Taliban because they are “good” for the Afghan people is the equivalent of praising Adolf Hitler and the Nationalist Socialists because they were “good” for the German people.

That is morally and ethically unconscionable.

People who support the Taliban support a violent and radical hate group. That is the truth, period and end of story.

Semper Fi,

Mike