Confederacy of Dunces?

Confederacy of Dunces? 

From the president on down, they are in resolute denial about radical Islam.

By Victor Davis Hanson

The military effort against the Islamic State hinges on a successful threefold approach involving intelligence, homeland security, and diplomacy. Unfortunately, the Obama administration does not have much past history in these areas to warrant confidence.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper just announced that the U.S. has underestimated the Islamic State. Clapper was probably correct, if unwise in apprising the world of U.S. incompetence. But he left out of his apologia any mention of why the U.S. has continuously downplayed the dangers of radical Islam. The answer is largely found among the Obama team, of which Clapper is a key part, and which has constructed its assessments to fit preconceived political directives.

The overriding belief of the Obama administration is that there is not really a radical Islamic movement that seeks to destroy the present nation-state order in the Middle East, form some sort of caliphate out of the mess, and then marshal the region’s population and resources to attack the West.

Clapper himself usually adheres to that belief. He once described the radical Islamist Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt as largely secular. His veracity and his judgment are equally suspect. Under oath before Congress, he once insisted that the NSA did not gather information on ordinary Americans — a flat-out lie (or, as he put it, the “least untruthful” answer he was in a position to give). He also once assured us that Moammar Qaddafi would survive in Libya.

The present director of the CIA, John Brennan, called the idea of a caliphate absurd. He has given us all sorts of strained, politically correct takes on jihad (“a holy struggle,” “a legitimate tenet of Islam”). He warned us when he took office in 2013 that the new Obama administration would focus on “extremists” rather than radical Islamists. That naïveté might explain why, days after the foiled attempt by the so-called underwear bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Brennan seemed to have almost no detailed knowledge of the plot and suggested that there had been no breakdown in either intelligence or airport security. Then again, Brennan also once assured us that there had not been a single collateral death from drone attacks for an entire year, and insisted to U.S. senators that the CIA had never hacked into their computers.

Our two intelligence czars in their earlier political manifestations were once staunch defenders of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols, when it was helpful career-wise to be so. Then they became public critics when it was more helpful to denounce them and to join the Obama team. Once upon a time, Clapper defended one of the many casus belli for going into Iraq by stating that Iraq had transferred its WMDs to Syria, a believable, if not politically correct, assertion that Clapper has never since repeated. Brennan, in his own earlier Bush incarnation, was a strong advocate of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols — including enhanced interrogations — which he subsequently derided as counterproductive.

If our intelligence grandees have been naïve about the dangers of radical Islam, have we at least enjoyed competent Homeland Security directors? Again, there is reason to worry. Former director Janet Napolitano once urged that we move away from using the word “terrorism” and the supposedly accompanying “politics of fear” to prefer instead “man-caused disasters.” That gullibility reflected an ongoing administration campaign of euphemisms among copycat bureaucrats, from “workplace violence” to “overseas contingency operations.” We see this again in the administration’s fashionable collective denial that the Islamic State has anything to do with Islam — as if foreign tourists visited Mecca as freely as they do the Vatican; as if Muslim apostates picked and chose their new religions as easily and safely as do Protestants; as if beheadings and stonings were as frequent in Paris and Houston as they are in Riyadh and Teheran; as if Bibles were brought into Iran and Saudi Arabia as freely as Korans are into America; as if churches sprouted up in Turkey, Iran, and Gaza as do mosques in Britain and Michigan; and as if women and gays were as equal in the Middle East as they are in the West. Islam is not just different from the West, but different in a manner that means its own extreme versions manifest themselves in predictable ways.

To deflect criticism about an increasingly open southern border, Napolitano suggested falsely that the 9/11 attackers had come through Canada to the United States. She also suggested in an official assessment that the real threat of terrorism in this country came from supposed right-wing groups, among them veterans and critics of Obama, not radical Islamists. Like Brennan, she was unconcerned about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab; she even claimed that “the system worked” when he successfully got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear and tried to blow up 290 people — as if a mechanical failure in the bomb’s triggering device had reflected her department’s vigilance.

Unfortunately, Jeh Johnson, Napolitano’s successor, does not seem eager to adopt new policies. Recently, he seemed equally clueless about the threat of radical Islam. When testifying to Congress, he was asked about reports of Middle Easterners crossing illegally into the U.S. across the southern border. He seemed completely unconcerned about the possibility. (“I’ve heard reports to that effect. I don’t know the accuracy of the reports or how much credence to give them. But I’ve heard reports to that effect.”)

Hillary Clinton is all but running for president, boasting about her reset diplomacy while secretary of state during Obama’s first term. But it is hard to find a single example of inspired diplomacy during her tenure. Canceling missile-defense cooperation with the Czechs and Poles while resetting relations with Vladimir Putin was not wise. Nor was leading from behind in Libya (“We came, we saw, and he died”). Nor was her emphasis on climate change as a global threat or her pressure on Israel to grant concessions supposedly to ensure Middle East peace. Nor was welcoming the election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Nor was ignoring requests for beefed-up security at the consulate in Benghazi. Nor was claiming that the deaths of the four Americans in Benghazi were due to a spontaneous riot over a video (“What difference at this point does it make?”). Nor was pulling all troops out of Iraq. Nor was lifting the embargos and trade sanctions against Iran. Nor was much of anything except an impressive near million miles of traveling while secretary, an astonishing feat for someone in her sixties and often in poor health.

Perhaps John Kerry will eventually be an improvement. But so far, his assessment of the threat of the Islamic State and what to do about it have often been at odds with the characterizations of both the president and the Joint Chiefs. Kerry was once widely quoted as assuring us that Bashar Assad was a “man of his word” and “generous.”  He and Obama were both confused over red lines, and it helped little that Kerry then assured Americans that any strikes would be “unbelievably small.” His offhanded remarks about WMDs gave Vladimir Putin a green light to enter the Syrian fray. The Bowe Bergdahl swap let loose five dangerous terrorists and may have encouraged further hostage taking by radical Islamists.

In the politically correct administration worldview the Islamic State is not Islamic. The Muslim Brotherhood is secular and to be welcomed into office. A caliphate is absurd. Terrorism is really just workplace violence and man-caused disasters, and it can be dealt with by overseas contingency operations. Right-wing videos and ad hoc demonstrations are the real dangers to our consulates. The Canadian border is as dangerously porous as the Mexican border. Right-wing terrorists are more likely than Islamists to commit another 9/11 terrorist attack. In President Obama’s words, the result is that the world has never been calmer, or America safer.

Obama’s confederacy of intelligence, security, and diplomatic minds is aimed at denying that there is something called radical Islamic terrorism, a movement that has enlisted millions in its cause to destroy the West.

The Obama team’s apparent aim is to assure Muslims that the United States does not associate the rise of terrorist killers in their midst with any passive or active support from the wider Muslim community. This way, the Muslim world supposedly will appreciate American friendliness and engage with us in defeating those whose nature and agenda we will out of politeness not mention publicly. Given that commandment, intelligence, security, and diplomacy reflect theory, not reality.

What then keeps us safe? Three considerations alone.

First, for all the convenient trashing of the Bush-Cheney protocols, so far the Obama administration has quietly kept most of them. It tried to square the circle of embracing what it once denounced by creating euphemisms and politically correct banalities while the drones bombed on, the renditions kept occurring, and the NSA stepped up its spying.

Second, the U.S. military, despite massive cuts and efforts to force on it proper politically correct mentalities, is still preeminent. Just as it had broken the back of the insurgencies in Iraq by 2009 and killed thousands of would-be global terrorists who flocked to Anbar Province, so too, if it is unleashed, it can probably destroy the Islamic State.

Third, so far we have been very lucky, and yet we are not out of the woods. The underwear bomber easily could have blown up nearly 300 Americans and paralyzed air travel for months. The Tsarnaev brothers could have dropped off more backpack bombs in Boston and tripled the number of casualties. Iran is probably accelerating its efforts to get a bomb before Obama leaves office. We still have no strategy to stop the onslaught of the Islamic State. Putin may soon invade a NATO-member Baltic State — just to see what the United States is going to do about it.

So real dangers will persist for the rest of Obama’s tenure. Our enemies have been carefully watching the administration’s hedging and self-doubt, and have taken the full measure of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and their diplomatic, intelligence, and security subordinates. They understand all too well how we view red lines, step-over lines, deadlines, and other assorted threats.

What we are doing silently from the past is saving us from what we are saying loudly in the present — at least for a bit longer.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.

The Jihadi Logic

The Jihadi Logic 
Lure the U.S. into the fight that Obama will quit, as in Iraq, Libya, and (soon) Afghanistan. 
By Charles Krauthammer, NRO

What was the Islamic State thinking? We know it is sophisticated in its use of modern media. But what was the logic of propagating to the world videos of its beheadings of two Americans (and subsequently a Briton) — sure to inflame public opinion?

There are two possible explanations. One is that these terrorists are more depraved and less savvy than we think. They so glory in blood that they could not resist making an international spectacle of their savagery and did not quite fathom how such a brazen, contemptuous slaughter of Americans would radically alter public opinion and risk bringing down upon them the furies of the U.S. Air Force.

The second theory is that they were fully aware of the inevitable consequence of their broadcast beheadings — and they intended the outcome. It was an easily sprung trap to provoke America into entering the Mesopotamian war.

Why?
Because they’re sure we will lose. Not immediately and not militarily. They know we always win the battles, but they are convinced that, as war drags on, we lose heart and go home.
They count on Barack Obama’s quitting the Iraq/Syria campaign just as he quit Iraq and Libya in 2011 and is in the process of leaving Afghanistan now. And this goes beyond Obama. They see a post-9/11 pattern: America experiences shock and outrage and demands action. Then, seeing no quick resolution, it tires and seeks out leaders who will order the retreat. In Obama, they found the quintessential such leader.

As for the short run, the Islamic State knows it will be pounded from the air. But it deems that price worth paying, given its gains in propaganda and prestige — translated into renown and recruiting — from these public executions.

Understanding this requires adjusting our thinking. A common mantra is that American cruelty — Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, “torture,” the Iraq War itself — is the great jihadist recruiting tool. But leaving Iraq, closing Abu Ghraib, and prohibiting “enhanced interrogation” has had zero effect on recruiting. In fact, jihadi cadres from Mali to Mosul have only swelled during Obama’s outstretched-hand presidency.

Turns out the Islamic State’s best recruiting tool is indeed savagery — its own. Deliberate, defiant, triumphant. The beheadings are not just a magnet for psychopaths around the world. They are choreographed demonstrations of its own unbounded determination and of American helplessness. In Osama bin Laden’s famous formulation, who is the “strong horse” now?

We tend to forget that at this stage in its career, the Islamic State’s principal fight is intramural. It seeks to supersede and supplant its jihadi rivals — from al-Qaeda in Pakistan to Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria — to emerge as champion of the one true jihad.
The strategy is simple: Draw in the world’s great superpower, create the ultimate foil, and thus instantly achieve supreme stature in radical Islam as America’s nemesis.
It worked. A year ago, the world had never heard of this group, then named ISIS (the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria). Now it is the subject of presidential addresses, parliamentary debates, and international conferences. It is the new al-Qaeda, which itself has been demoted to JV.

Indeed, so eclipsed and upstaged is al-Qaeda that its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, scrambled to reveal the creation of a new India/South Asia branch. It announced itself this month with its first operation — a comically botched attack on a Pakistani frigate that left ten al-Qaeda fighters dead and the ship intact.

While al-Qaeda was being humiliated, a huge Paris conference devoted entirely to the Islamic State was convened by Secretary of State John Kerry. Like his other conferences, it failed. Obama’s “broad coalition” remains a fantasy.

It’s more a coalition of the unwilling. Turkey denied us the use of its air bases. The Sunni Arab states are reluctant to do anything militarily significant. And not a single country has volunteered combat troops. Hardly a surprise, given that Obama has repeatedly ruled that out for the U.S. itself.

Testifying on Wednesday to the Senate, Kerry issued a stern declaration: “ISIL must be defeated. Period. End of story.” Not the most wisely crafted of declarations: The punctuational emphasis carried unfortunate echoes of Obama’s promise about health-care plans, and the word “must” carried similar echoes of Obama’s assertions that Bashar al-Assad had to go.

But Kerry’s statement remains true for strategic and even moral reasons. But especially because when the enemy deliberately brings you into combat, it is all the more imperative to show the world that he made a big mistake.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2014 The Washington Post Writers Group

OBAMA AGAIN COMES UP SHORT

PAUL MIRENGOFF, Powerline

In his mercifully brief address to the nation about ISIS, President Obama assured Americans that the military action he has in mind will differ from the action we took under President Bush in Iraq and Afghanistan. In those campaigns, we used U.S. ground troops. In the upcoming campaign, we will not, relying instead on Iraqi forces and Kurds in Iraq and the Free Syrian Army in Syria.

While some may find Obama’s distinction reassuring, we should not forget that the action President Bush took in Iraq and Afghanistan accomplished its primary mission. Saddam Hussein’s forces were routed and his regime fell. The Taliban was routed and its regime fell.

Obama says his mission against ISIS is intended to achieve a similar goal — the degradation and destruction of that outfit. Will it succeed, absent the commitment of U.S. ground forces? There is plenty of reason to doubt that it will.

Let’s start with Iraq. There, the boots on the ground will be supplied, Obama hopes, by Kurds and the Iraq government. Are these forces, supported by the U.S. from the air, capable of destroying ISIS or, alternatively, driving it out of Iraq?

There is little reason to believe they are. It took a substantial U.S. troop commitment to drive al Qaeda in Iraq, ISIS’s earlier incarnation, out of Anbar province in 2007. And al Qaeda in Iraq was a smaller, less battle hardened, and less well-armed force than ISIS.

Syria seems even more problematic. There, Obama will rely not on a regular army (as in Iraq), but on a group that just last month he ridiculed as a collection of former doctors, farmers, and pharmacists.

Actually, the Free Syrian Army did not deserve that level of ridicule. Its core, as I understand it, consists of former elements of Assad’s army.

Nonetheless, Obama may well have been right when, in the same remarks, he described as “fantasy” the idea that this force, even if armed with sophisticated U.S. weapons, could prevail in the Syrian civil war.

Keep in mind first that the Free Syrian Army exists to fight the Assad regime, not to serve as a U.S. proxy force against ISIS. Second, by all accounts the Free Syrian Army has steadily lost strength and influence thanks in part to Obama’s failure, for years, to support it.

Will the provision of U.S. arms and air support at this late date reverse this trend? Possibly.

But will the reversal be dramatic enough to enable the Free Syrian to fight off Assad forces (backed by Hezbollah and Iran) and degrade and defeat ISIS? Doubtful. I fear that we’ll be lucky if the weapons we supply don’t fall into the hands of ISIS and/or other forces hostile to our interests.

Speaking of Assad, does Obama plan to use air power against his regime if necessary to protect the Free Syrian Army and keep it viable as our proxy in the fight against ISIS? I don’t know. Perhaps Obama hopes to make a side deal with Assad and Iran to protect the Free Syrian Army in exchange for its giving up the fight against Assad.

Or maybe Obama has no strategy to deal with this contingency.

More broadly, we are left to wonder how real Obama’s campaign against ISIS actually will be. Will Obama actively work to keep his proxy forces, such as they are, engaged in the fight against ISIS? Does he have a Plan B? Or was Obama simply checking a few boxes tonight in the hope of stopping the political bleeding his presidency and his Party is experiencing?

I don’t know. I was not reassured, however, when Obama, compared his strategy for dealing with ISIS to the one he has employed in Yemen and Somalia. For one thing, as I argued here, ISIS is not analogous to the terrorists we are dealing with in Yemen and Somalia. Beyond that, the U.S. hasn’t destroyed the terrorists in those two countries. In fact, things seem to be going rather badly in Yemen.

At best, then, we have a president who, though finally taking ISIS seriously, has failed to devise a fully serious strategy. At worst, we have a president who still doesn’t take ISIS very seriously except as a matter of domestic politics.

Only Deterrence Can Prevent War

Only Deterrence Can Prevent War 
Most aggressors take stupid risks only when they feel they won't be stopped. 
By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

The world seems to be falling apart.

Only lunatics from North Korea or Iran once mumbled about using nuclear weapons against their supposed enemies. Now Vladimir Putin, after gobbling up the Crimea, points to his nuclear arsenal and warns the West not to “mess” with Russia.

The Middle East terrorist group the Islamic State keeps beheading its captives and threatening the West. Meanwhile Obama admits to the world that we “don’t have a strategy yet” for dealing with such barbaric terrorists. Not long ago he compared them to “jayvees.”

Egypt is bombing Libya, which America once bombed and then left. Vice President Joe Biden once boasted that a quiet Iraq without U.S. troops could be “one of the great achievements” of the administration. Not now.

China and Japan seem stuck in a 1930s time warp as they once again squabble over disputed territory. Why all the sudden wars?

Conflicts rarely break out over needed scarce land — what Adolf Hitler once called “living space” — or even over natural resources. A vast, naturally rich Russia is under-populated and poorly run. It hardly needs more of the Crimea and Ukraine to screw up. The islands that Japan and China haggle over are mostly worthless real estate. Iran has enough oil and natural gas to meet its domestic and export needs without going to war over building a nuclear bomb.

Often states fight about prestigious symbols that their own fears and sense of honor have inflated into existential issues. Hamas could turn its back on Israel and turn Gaza into Singapore — but not without feeling that it had backed down.

Putin thinks that grabbing more of the old Soviet Republics will bring him the sort of prestige that his hero Stalin once enjoyed. The Islamic State wants to return to 7th-century Islam, when the Muslim world had more power and honor.

The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once summed up the Falklands War between his country and Britain as a fight “between two bald men over a comb.” In fact, Britain went to war over distant windswept rocks to uphold the hallowed tradition of the British Navy and the idea that British subjects everywhere were sacrosanct. The unpopular Argentine junta started a war to take Britain down a notch.

But disputes over honor or from fear do not always lead to war. Something else is needed — an absence of deterrence. Most aggressors take stupid risks in starting wars only when they feel there is little likelihood they will be stopped. Hitler thought no one would care whether he gobbled up Poland, after he easily ingested Czechoslovakia and Austria.

Saddam Hussein went into Kuwait believing the U.S. did not intervene in border disputes among Arab countries. Deterrence, alliances, and balances of power are not archaic concepts that “accidentally” triggered World War I, as we are sometimes told. They are the age-old tools of advising the more bellicose parties to calm down and get a grip.

What ends wars?

Not the League of Nations or the United Nations. Unfortunately, war is a sort of cruel laboratory experiment whose bloodletting determines which party, in fact, was the stronger all along. Once that fact is again recognized, peace usually follows.

It took 50 million deaths to remind the appeased Axis that Germany, Italy, and Japan in 1941 were all along far weaker than the Allies of Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. The Falklands War ended when Argentines recognized that boasting about beating the British was not the same as beating the British.

Each time Hamas builds more tunnels and gets more rockets, it believes this time around it can beat Israel. Its wars end only when Hamas recognizes it can’t.

War as a reminder of who is really strong and who weak is a savage way to run the world. Far better would be for peace-loving constitutional governments to remain strong. They should keep their defenses up, and warn Putin, the Islamic State, Iran, North Korea, and others like them that all a stupid war would accomplish would be to remind such aggressors that they would lose so much for nothing.

Even nuclear powers need conventional deterrence. They or their interests are often attacked — as in the case of Britain by Argentina, the U.S. by al-Qaeda, or Israel by Hamas — by non-nuclear states on the likely assumption that nuclear weapons will not be used, and on the often erroneous assumption that the stronger power may not wish the trouble or have the ability to reply to the weaker.

If deterrence and military readiness seem such a wise investment, why do democracies so often find themselves ill-prepared and bullied by aggressors who then are emboldened to start wars?

It is hard for democratic voters to give up a bit of affluence in peace to ensure that they do not lose it all in war. It is even harder for sophisticated liberal thinkers to admit that after centuries of civilized life, we still have no better way of preventing Neanderthal wars than by reminding Neanderthals that we have the far bigger club — and will use it if provoked.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.