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.

The Madness of 2008

The Madness of 2008 

A nation became unhinged by trivialities like “hope and change.” It has now awakened.

By Victor Davis Hanson, National Review

America is suddenly angry at the laxity, incompetence, and polarizing politics of the Obama administration, the bad optics of the president putting about in his bright golf clothes while the world burns. Certainly, no recent president has failed on so many fronts — honesty, transparency, truthfulness, the economy, foreign policy, the duties of the commander-in-chief, executive responsibilities, and spiritual leadership.

For those who are “shocked” at the present meltdown, of a magnitude not seen since the annus horribilis of 1979, in their defense: Obama certainly did not campaign on a new health-care plan that would force Americans to give up the doctors they liked and their existing coverage, while raising premiums and deductibles, while giving exemptions for insiders and cronies, and while raising the deficit.

Nor did we hear on the campaign trail that Obama would push gay marriage, open borders, near-permanent zero interest rates, six consecutive $1 trillion deficits, and record food-stamp and Social Security disability payouts. He criticized Bush for relatively minor executive orders, suggesting that he would never rule by fiat — as he since has done in matters of Obamacare, immigration law, and environmental regulations. Remember the promise of ending the revolving door and stopping aides from cashing in — and then follow the post-administration careers of Obama’s closest advisers.

Obama promised to halve the deficit — not run up more red ink than almost all prior presidents combined. Indeed, he once as a senator voted against raising the debt limit and blasted Bush for borrowing from China. He once sermonized to us that the presidency is serious stuff, that it entails inordinate personal sacrifice and even a virtual absence of downtime and vacation — and then he became just the sort of president he was critiquing. But those deceptions were simply politics as usual, and it was logical for the hard leftist Barack Obama to try to appear to be a moderate, given that no Northern liberal had won the presidency in the half-century since John F. Kennedy.

The antidote to the great madness of 2008 would have been, instead of focusing on what Obama claimed or hedged, simply to recall what he had done before he ran for president and to notice what he did during the campaign. Had America done that, there would never have been a President Obama to surprise us now.

The racial animosity characterized by Obama’s editorializing about Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, and, now, the Ferguson, Mo., hysteria, or his call to Latinos to “punish our enemies,” or the tenure of Eric Holder is simply a continuation of 2008’s “typical white person,” the clingers speech, Michelle Obama’s America as “just downright mean,” “They raise the bar,” and “For the first time . . . I’m really proud of my country” commentaries, and of Obama’s earlier boast that he never missed services at the Trinity Church of the hate-mongering and anti-Semitic Reverend Jeremiah Wright. If Obama had not proved to be a racial divider, we should have been surprised — given what we learned of his past in 2008. After all, it’s from Jeremiah Wright that Barack Obama got the title for his campaign brief, “The Audacity of Hope.”

We are now shocked at the current spate of alphabetic scandals — IRS, AP, NSA, VA. But why are we surprised, given that Obama never told the truth about his relationships with the old terrorist Bill Ayers and former PLO ad hoc spokesman Rashid Khalidi, or about the creepy land deal with the crook Tony Rezko? If the Obama White House demonized the Tea Party as tea-baggers, or compared the Republican House opposition to terrorists and arsonists, why should we be astonished, given how he was elected to the U.S. Senate? Quite mysteriously, his primary opponent, Blair Hull, and his general-election opponent, Jack Ryan, both of whom were favored to win, had their confidential divorce records leaked. Their campaigns subsequently imploded.
   
Obama has played fast and loose with ethical rules, from promoting crony capitalists to attending near-constant fundraisers among the pay-to-play 0.0001 percent. Again, why should we be surprised, given that he was the first presidential candidate who refused in a general election to accept federal campaign financing, with its accompanying rules curbing mega-fundraising? Obama was the largest recipient of Goldman Sachs donations in the company’s history, and raised more cash in 2008 and 2012 than any other presidential candidate in history.

We are terrified of the chaos that is spreading across the world: Egypt, Gaza, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Putin’s Russia, and the Chinese–Japanese tensions. But was there any evidence in 2008 that rookie senator Obama had any foreign-policy experience or even knowledge of the world beyond Chicago, other than as a boy in Indonesia or a teen on a jaunt with buddies to Pakistan? We knew in 2008 that his opportunistic trashing of Guantánamo, renditions, tribunals, drones, and preventive detention was permitted only by the fact that the Bush–Cheney protocols he was criticizing had prevented another 9/11-like attack — and thus gave him the leeway of easy second-guessing. If we are now worried about Obama’s equivocation, there was plenty of evidence, as Hillary Clinton pointed out in 2008, that Obama as a state legislator had voted “Present” as a matter of habit.

Polarization? Partisanship? The National Journal warned us in 2008 that Obama was the most partisan of the 100 U.S. senators. Did we assume that he would revert to something that he never had been?

Critics are angry that Obama seems disengaged, or that as a man of the people he is inordinately obsessed with golf, a sport that the Left used to despise as a fixation of the rich in their lime-green pants and bright pink polo shirts. But again, can we point to any landmark legislation that Obama accomplished as a state legislator or U.S. senator? Was not Obama golfing during the 2008  campaign?

Then there is the matter of the presidential untruths. The problem is not just that Barack Obama says things that are untrue but that he lies about what Barack Obama has said. He brags that he set red lines, but then he says it was the U.N. had set red lines. He boasts of pulling out every U.S. soldier from Iraq but then alleges that President Bush, the Iraqis, or Maliki did that. He claims that ISIS are Jayvees but then claims they are serious. But his prevarication too is habitual and was known in 2008 when it was discovered that he had simply misled the nation about his relationships with Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. He had no desire, in the transparent manner of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain, or George W. Bush, to release his medical records or college transcripts. If Americans find their president ill-informed, there was no record that he was informed in 2008. His gaffes were far more frequent than those of Sarah Palin, who knew there were 50 states.

Historians will look back at 2008 as a time when the country became more or less collectively unhinged. There was an accompanying perfect storm of sorts: He was the first serious African-American candidate, whom condescending liberals like Harry Reid and Joe Biden heralded for being clean, light-skinned, and without a black patois; he was running in an orphaned election without an incumbent vice president or president on the other side’s ticket, a situation not seen since 1952; we had an unpopular lame-duck president and the Iraq war; the sudden financial meltdown in September 2008 caused a then-behind Obama to immediately surge ahead; the McCain campaign was lackluster; and the media became an advocate of the Obama effort.

Pundits vied for superlatives. On little evidence, Christopher Buckley assured us that Obama possessed “a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect.” For some, proof of Obama’s godhead became almost physical — a “perfectly creased pant” for David Brooks, a tingling leg for Chris Matthews. For Evan Thomas he was a “sort of God”; for one blue-chip historian he was the smartest man with the highest IQ ever running for the presidency. And on and on, as huge crowds acted as if they were watching Paul McCartney on tour in 1966. After the election, there was real apprehension that the country might not make it for the two and a half months until an elected Obama could take power.

Given that there was no evidence from Obama’s legislative career to justify such superlatives, we can only assume that our intellectual elites got caught up in the faux Greek columns, the Obama tutorials for fainting crowds about proper first aid, the teleprompted emphatics of “Let me be perfectly clear” and “Make no mistake about it,” the Latinate motto “Vero possumus” on the faux presidential seal on his campaign podiums, the boast that Obama & Co. were “the ones we’ve been waiting for,” the messianic promise to cool the planet and lower the seas, the Lincoln self-comparisons, and the other embarrassing childish banalities.

Obama, it is true, ran a brilliant campaign in 2008, hinting to the Other that as a non-white he shared both their racial bona fides and their frustrations, hinting to white elites that his own unique heritage would end racial hostilities and thus allow them to square the circle of living largely separate elite lives and not having to feel guilty about it. He dropped his g’s and went into Southern cadences among African Americans, and then back again into wonkish academese to mainstream whites. It was well known that in impromptu talks he stuttered and stumbled with uh’s in deer-in-the-headlights fashion, and used the pronouns I, me, my, and mine ad nauseam, but such unease was ignored given his teleprompted eloquence and the considerable elite investment in his symbolism.

In sum, in 2008 Obama gave America more than enough evidence to doubt that he was ready for the presidency, but when a nation becomes unhinged by trivialities like “hope and change,” there is not much one can do — until the patient wakes up from his trance and in embarrassment asks, “What exactly was all that nuttiness in 2008 about?”
We will be fathoming that strange madness of 2008 for decades to come.

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

White House Foley Leak Endangers Future Operations

Pentagon Official: White House Foley Leak Endangers Future Operations, American Hostages Joseph Miller, Daily Caller

Joseph Miller is the pen name for a ranking Department of Defense official with a background in U.S. special operations and combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has worked in strategic planning.

On Wednesday, the White House leaked a classified special forces operation to rescue American hostages in Syria. The reason: political cover. The cost: so far, unknown.

But this much, we know: The politicized leak of this operation cut through the fog of war to let our enemies know exactly what happened that day in the desert, and because of that, future attempts to free American hostages will be more difficult to plan, farther between, and more dangerous to carry out.

On Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Rear Admiral John Kirby confirmed reports of the U.S. military’s failed clandestine hostage rescue operation in Syria. The operation was designed to rescue a number of Western hostages, including American journalist James Foley, that were being held by Islamic State terrorists in Syria. Details of the failed raid were leaked by senior White House officials earlier that day after the Obama administration came under intense scrutiny about what actions it had taken to free Foley following, who was beheaded . The leak was designed to provide political cover for President Barack Obama, who has been taking fire from the press for failing to take more decisive action against the Islamic State in either Iraq or Syria.

The operation involved an extremely large number of U.S. special operations forces moving over long distances. It has been described as the largest U.S. hostage rescue operation undertaken since the famed raid on the Son Tay prison camp in Vietnam – meaning it was larger in scope than the mission to free the U.S. hostages being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1980.

Unfortunately, the parallels between this operation and the Son Tay raid did not stop at the size and scope of the mission: Just as in Son Tay, the hostage rescue force arrived only to find that the hostages were not there.

When the hostage rescue force arrived at the target location in Syria, they encountered a handful of fighters on the ground, which they quickly neutralized. As has been previously reported, one U.S. helicopter pilot transporting the rescue force suffered a gunshot wound during the operation. He completed the entire mission before informing anyone that he had been shot. It was an act of heroism that would have gone unknown before yesterday’s leak.

Following the mission, it was determined that the Islamic State did not know that it was the United States that had conducted the raid. This was confirmed Wednesday by media outlets, who quoted the leaker saying the “[Islamic State] did not know who they were fighting that night, and we assess Syria did not know.”

As such, the decision was made to maintain absolute secrecy in the event that hostages could be located again, and another rescue operation could be undertaken. After Wednesday’s leak by the White House, this seems highly unlikely. The Islamic State is now aware that the United States is tracking the whereabouts of the Western hostages, and that the U.S. has shown a willingness to take military action to free them. They will likely increase their operational and communication security postures in order to prevent a repeat operation. (MILLER: The Facts Are In, And Obama’s Policy Is A Direct Danger To The United States)

Wednesday’s selfish, politically motivated leak has reduced the chances for a successful second rescue attempt, and has likely increased the risk to the lives of the hostages still in the Islamic State’s possession. For that, someone should be fired.

Annihilate ISIS

William kristol, The Weekly Standard

Here are the two best responses I've seen so far to the latest barbarism from ISIS.

My friend Seth Leibsohn, now a talk radio host in Phoenix, emails with a short-term suggestion:

The brazen and videoed decapitation of an American by ISIS terrorists should trigger immediate holy hell from the President of the United States. He should open up America's military cupboard to bomb every known ISIS outpost and center in Iraq and Syria today. There are fewer things I can think of that require--yes, require--the fateful lightning of America's terrible swift sword.

Max Boot, writing on Commentary's website, has a somewhat longer-term recommendation under the headline, "Time to Annihilate ISIS; Here’s How."

The videotaped beheading of American journalist James Foley reveals both the barbarism and the weakness of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). 

The barbarism is obvious: how else would one describe the carefully choreographed and televised murder of this innocent reporter who had been kidnapped in Syria? This merely confirms what Army Colonel Joel Rayburn, one of the most astute observers of Iraq around, has previously said: that ISIS is a Middle East version of the Khmer Rouge. It is, in short, a death cult that will commit unimaginable crimes against humanity unless it is stopped. 

What of ISIS’s weakness? That too was revealed by the video, which was a poor response to the military setbacks ISIS has suffered in the past week as Kurdish peshmerga militia have managed to retake Mosul Dam with the assistance of American firepower (and most likely U.S. Special Operations Forces, although their involvement has not been publicized). Recall the last time that al-Qaeda publicly murdered an American journalist. That would have been my former Wall Street Journal colleague Daniel Pearl, who was killed in early 2002 at a time when, thanks to the U.S. offensive in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was on the run. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed killed Pearl for the same reason some ISIS fanatic killed Foley: to convey an impression of strength. But such desperate measures instead telegraph, well, desperation–and far from cowing anyone they are only likely to redouble the resolve of the civilized world to smash this group of genocidal jihadists. 

What is needed now is not strongly worded condemnation of Foley’s murder, much less a hashtag campaign. What is needed is a politico-military strategy to annihilate ISIS rather than simply chip around the edges of its burgeoning empire. In the Spectator of London I recently outlined what such a strategy should look like. In brief, it will require a commitment of some 10,000 U.S. advisors and Special Operators, along with enhanced air power, to work with moderate elements in both Iraq and Syria–meaning not only the peshmerga but also the Sunni tribes, elements of the Iraqi Security Forces, and the Free Syrian Army–to stage a major offensive to rout ISIS out of its newly conquered strongholds. The fact that Nouri al-Maliki is leaving power in Baghdad clears away a major obstacle to such a campaign. 

Now it is simply a matter of resources and resolve on the part of the U.S. and its allies. That, of course, remains the big unknown–how far will President Obama go? He has been willing in the last few weeks to apply a liberal interpretation of his original mandate for U.S. forces in Iraq, which was to protect Americans in Erbil and Baghdad. But beyond protecting the Yazidis and retaking Mosul Dam we still need a strategy to annihilate ISIS. It can be done–and if done right it will be the best, indeed the only worthy, response to James Foley’s barbaric demise.

Mr. President: Listen to Leibsohn. Hearken to Boot. Annihilate ISIS.

The Presidency is Breaking Obama Even As Obama Has Broken the Nation

Peter Wehner, Commentary

One of the nation’s best radio talk show hosts, Hugh Hewitt,interviewed Joe Scarborough, the host of one of the best political shows on television. According to Mr. Scarborough

This is a president that does go out of his way to show that he’s not paying attention to what anybody says. He’s going to do exactly what he wants to do, and he’s going to be stubborn about it. He is politically, he is either politically tone deaf or he just doesn’t give a damn. And I tend to believe based on everything I’ve heard from people who work inside the White House, and we’ve got a lot of friends there, and based on my friends who are senior Democratic senators, this president has checked out… He wants to be the next, I hear it time and time again from his close political allies. This man wants to be an ex-president.

So the president — with crises breaking out across the globe, the economy still staggering, and unrest and despair in America rising — seems to have grown bored with the job. This is on one level an astonishing thing; on the other, it has the ring of truth. I say that in part because Mr. Scarborough is speaking to Democrats, not simply Republicans, on this matter. His sources are excellent. Yet one also sees Obama’s indifference in how he conducts himself, as well as stories leaked by the White House about his “restlessness.”

What could possibility explain this attitude? It may be that Mr. Obama was drawn to the job not for the right reasons but because he viewed the presidency as a new mountain to climb, a prize to win, as a way to feed his unusually large ego (even for a politician). It may also be that Mr. Obama, with his presidency crumbling, is like a petulant child who wants to pick up his marbles and leave. He was fine serving as president when he was adored and well liked; now that things are going south he appears to have emotionally “checked out,” to use Scarborough’s phrase.

The problem with this is that Mr. Obama is disengaging (a) after having done extraordinary damage to America and (b) at a moment when the world is convulsing because of the void left by Obama’s (and therefore America’s) diffidence and passivity. An increasingly insouciant commander-in-chief is not what’s needed at this particular time, given the multiplying threats and increasing disorder in the world.

It’s very much beginning to look at if Barack Obama saw the presidency as primarily a way to satisfy his narcissism. What’s happened instead is the presidency is breaking him, even as he is breaking the nation.

Inversion Perversion

Inversion Perversion

Mike Walker, col USMC (retired)

All,

A lot of political silliness has arisen lately about American companies who seek to avoid paying the highest corporate tax rate in the developed world through the so-called “inversion” tax loophole.

Somehow, this is being portrayed as unpatriotic or un-American.

Really?

I utterly refuse to equate patriotism to sending ever more hard earned dollars to fat-cat elected officials living in Washington DC.

We have the greatest and most successful free market private economy in history. Our laws should embrace and encourage private businesses -- not demonize them.

They create the jobs. They strengthen our communities. They make America great.

That is real patriotism.

If they want to avoid sending money to the federal sinkhole on the Potomac, I say:

GOOD ON YOU!

Mike

Why it's good to be anti-islam...

Thanks Mark… something to think about. He is right, they demand tolerance here but are totally intolerant of anything but islam. If you speak out against some islamic issue they all scream, "Bigotry!"…. that is supposed to end the argument. In the west, in many cases it does. In the islamic world that would be followed by you losing your head or your family slaughtered.

The President Makes the Right Call in Iraq

The President Makes the Right Call in Iraq

Michael Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

As a veteran of two tours in Iraq, let me make two points:

First, the Islamic extremists leading ISIS are conducting a genocide based on religious prejudice and hate-filled intolerance of “others.” That is the heart of the matter.

No moral society could embrace such a dismal and violent world vision.

That the President of the United States acted is all to his credit and a credit to the people of the United States of America.

Second, this is not a replay of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The international scope of operation pales in comparison.

In the spring of 2003, the United States sent some 148,00 troops into combat. The United Kingdom committed 46,000 to battle. They were joined by 3,600 soldiers from the Republic of Korea, 2,400 from Poland, 1,630 from the Ukraine (something to think about!), 1,300 Spaniards and a combined total of just over 2,700 from Albania, Australia, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Denmark, the Dominican Republic, and Japan.

Today, we only have several hundred US special operators in country (less than what Japan ponied up in 2003) and the British have sent in small but elite SAS detachments as well. 

The scope of military operations pales in comparison.

In 2003, there were thousands of the armored vehicles and hundred and hundreds of aircraft that carried out tens of thousands of strike sorties in Iraq.

Today, there are no US armored units in Iraq.  We have conducted dozens of combat sorties but the multi-day total is far less than what was done during the first hour of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

This is not a replay of 2003. We are not going back to a major ground war in Iraq. 

What we are doing is the right thing.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Clueless in Gaza…. John Kerry

Clueless in Gaza
Charles Krauthammer

John Kerry is upset by heavy criticism from Israelis — left, right and center — of his recent cease-fire diplomacy. But that’s only half the story. More significant is the consternation of America’s Arab partners, starting with the president of the Palestinian Authority. Mahmoud Abbas was stunned that Kerry would fly off to Paris to negotiate with Hamas allies Qatar and Turkey in talks that excluded the PA and Egypt.

The talks also undermined Egypt’s cease-fire proposal, which Israel had accepted and Hamas rejected (and would have prevented the vast majority of the casualties on both sides). “Kerry tried through his latest plan to destroy the Egyptian bid,” charged a senior Palestinian official quoted in the Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat — a peace plan that the PA itself had supported.

It gets worse. Kerry did not just trample an Egyptian initiative. It was backed by the entire Arab League and specifically praised by Saudi Arabia. With the exception of Qatar — more a bank than a country — the Arabs are unanimous in wanting to see Hamas weakened, if not overthrown. The cease-fire-in-place they backed would have denied Hamas any reward for starting this war, while what Kerry brought back from Paris granted practically all of its demands.

Which is what provoked the severe criticism Kerry received at home. When as respected and scrupulously independent a national security expert as David Ignatius calls Kerry’s intervention a blunder, you know this is not partisan carping from the usual suspects. This is general amazement at Kerry’s cluelessness.

Kerry seems oblivious to the strategic reality that Hamas launched its rockets in the hope not of defeating Israel but of ending its intra-Arab isolation (which it brilliantly achieves in the Qatar-Turkey peace proposal). Hamas’s radicalism has alienated nearly all of its Arab neighbors.

●Egypt cut it off — indeed blockaded Gaza — because of Hamas’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist attacks on Egyptian soldiers in Sinai.
●Fatah, the main element of the Palestinian Authority, is a bitter enemy, particularly since its Gaza members were terrorized, kneecapped, expelled and/or killed when Hamas seized Gaza in a 2007 coup.

●Hamas is non grata in Syria, where it had been previously headquartered, for supporting the anti-government rebels.

●Hamas is deeply opposed by Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, which see it, correctly, as yet another branch of the Islamist movement that threatens relatively moderate pro-Western Arab states.

Kerry seems not to understand that the Arab League backed the Egyptian cease-fire-in-place, which would have left Hamas weak and isolated, to ensure that Hamas didn’t emerge from this war strengthened and enhanced.

Why didn’t Kerry just stay home and declare unequivocal U.S. support for the Egyptian/Arab League plan? Instead, he flew off to Paris and sent Jerusalem a package of victories for Hamas: lifting the blockade from Egypt, opening the border with Israel, showering millions of foreign cash to pay the salaries of the 43,000 (!) government workers that the near-insolvent Hamas cannot.

Forget about Israeli interests. Forget about Arab interests. The American interest is to endorse and solidify this emerging axis of moderate pro-American partners (Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, and the Palestinian Authority) intent on seeing Islamist radicalism blunted and ultimately defanged.

Yet America’s secretary of state doesn’t see it. Speaking of Hamas-run Gaza, Kerry actually said in Paris: “The Palestinians can’t have a cease-fire in which they think the status quo is going to stay.” What must change? Gazans need “goods that can come in and out . . . a life that is free from the current restraints.”

But the only reason for those “restraints,” why goods are unable to go in and out, is that for a decade Hamas has used this commerce to import and develop weapons for making war on Israel.

Remember the complaints that the heartless Israelis were not allowing enough imports of concrete for schools and hospitals? Well, now we know where the concrete went — into an astonishingly vast array of tunnels for infiltrating neighboring Israeli villages and killing civilians. (More than half a million tons, estimates the Israeli military.)
Lifting the blockade would mean a flood of arms, rockets, missile parts and other implements of terror for Hamas. What is an American secretary of state doing asserting that Hamas cannot cease fire unless it gets that?

Moreover, the fire from which Hamas will not cease consists of deliberate rocket attacks on Israeli cities — by definition, a war crime.

Whatever his intent, Kerry legitimized Hamas’s war criminality. Which makes his advocacy of Hamas’s terms not just a strategic blunder — enhancing a U.S.-designated terrorist group just when a wall-to-wall Arab front wants to see it gone — but a moral disgrace.

Is Ted Cruz the Leader he is cracked up to be?

Is Ted Cruz the Leader he is cracked up to be?

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

OK, Ted Cruz demonstrated once again his negative ability to throw wrenches into the works of government.

But does he have the right stuff to take on the Big Boys in DC?

The House passed an Emergency Bill to address the border crisis, due in no small measure to his ability to influence a select audience of Republican representatives. We should should recognize his leadership on that point.

But does Ted have what it takes to lead a wider audience on the national stage? 

His Senate went home on vacation, a very unimpressive outcome. Throwing bricks through the window of the Republican House is one thing, but does Ted have the HUEVOS to take on Harry Reid?

How about Ted forcing the Senate (of which he is a member) to come back to work and act on the House Emergency Bill?

It is time to put up or shut up, Ted. Or as we said in the Marine Corps, "Lead. follow, or get the Hell out of the way!"

Semper Fi,

Mike