Soviets Won the Second World War?

Soviets Won the Second World War?

Col Mike Walker, USMC, retired

All,

The “Soviets Won the Second World War” mythology is running around again.

We will put aside the cogent point that there never would have been a Second World War if Stalin had not allied himself with Hitler to invade Poland in September 1939 and move on the argument at hand.

Historian Norman Davies once wrote: 

“The Soviet war effort was so overwhelming that impartial historians of the future are unlikely to rate the British and American contribution to the European theatre as much more than a sound supporting role.”

That is over-the-top silliness. 

Indisputably, the Eastern Front was not just the largest and most dominant land campaign of the Second World War but in recorded history and was essential to the Allied victory.

However, the case is not at all clear that the war can be characterized as a “400 division clash” in the East versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the West as Davies further argued. That claim crumbles before serious and objective analysis.

A. The critic’s numbers do not add up

First, the war was global for the United States (US) and the British Commonwealth (UK) troops who made up of the bulk of the remaining anti-Axis combatants, save China.
  

The Soviets never had to build, equip, man and train the vast naval forces needed to defeat the U-boat threat in the Atlantic, battle the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific and simultaneously deploy and sustain large ground and air forces worldwide.
  

To put this in perspective, the U.S. Army comprised only 8.5 million of the 16 million Americans who served in uniform during the war.

Second, the “400 division clash in the east versus a “15 to 15 division” fight in the west” argument is hard to follow.  The 400 division number is true enough when counting the total forces on the front but when the Nazi armies peaked in the east during the 1942-1943 period, their 200 plus divisions included approximately:

10 Italian divisions

18 Romanian divisions

9 Hungarian, divisions

15 Finnish divisions

Not an insignificant portion of the Nazi order of battle.

The Allied ground campaign in the West was more extensive than the critics are willing to admit.

On the Nazi side, the rough disposition of their forces (to include other Axis armies) in mid-1944 (before D-Day) shows that the Eastern Front was still dominant:

Approximately 200 divisions on the Eastern Front

28 divisions in the Balkans

17 divisions in Italy

8 divisions in Norway

61 divisions in the West

As the war progressed after D-Day, the number of Nazi divisions sent to the West continually increased and the number in the East continually declined.

By January 1945, the numbers were:

Approximately 145 divisions on the Eastern Front

15 divisions in the Balkans

28 divisions in Italy

15 divisions in Norway

79 divisions in the West

There was net decrease in the number of Nazi divisions during this period due to losses suffered on the war fronts. 

It would be wrong to down play the importance of the Western Allied onslaught during this period. Consider this statistic: After D-Day, the US Army alone captured on average the equivalent of one German division per week, every week throughout 1944. As the war on the Eastern front progressed, prisoners were often not taken which attributed to disparity in deaths and POWs taken.

When the Allies began the final 1945 offensive following the Battle of Bulge, Eisenhower had three Army Groups involved:

US 6th Army Group under Devers with 22 divisions

US 12th Army Group (main effort) under Bradley with 48 divisions

British 21st Army Group under Montgomery with 17 divisions

The 1^st Allied Airborne Army with 1 division was in strategic reserve

The US/UK forces also had the British 8th Army and US 5th Army in Italy that together totaled another 16 divisions. 

All in all, Eisenhower had 104 divisions in Europe by late 1944/early 1945. The “15 on 15” statement is nonsensical.

Fighting Japan, the US/UK ground forces had another 38 divisions deployed:

Six divisions with the British 14th Army in Burma plus 21 US Army, 6 US Marine and 5 Australian Divisions in the Pacific

B. Size Matters

Significantly, a US infantry division was manned at 13,700 soldiers compared with 10,400 for the Soviets and similar size difference existed for armored units (which had both more tanks and troops per unit) and Commonwealth units were larger still.

If we adjust for those differences, the Western Allies had the equivalent of 232 “Soviet size” divisions on the front lines by late 1944, extending from the Dutch-Belgian-French front to Italy to Burma and on to the Pacific.

C. Lend-Lease was vital to Red Army Success

Subtract out Lend-Lease and the power of the Red Army was significantly degraded.

The US provided over 7,000 tanks and the British another 5,000 as well as 11,000 US and 9,000 British aircraft. The overall amount of fuel and food supplies shipped to the Red Army was enough to keep 80 Russian divisions in the field.

Not surprisingly, putting in place the global logistics chain represented a major Allied commitment of resources and many Allied sailors lost their lives sailing through enemy laden artic waters to “deliver the goods.” 

D. The role of the USAAF-RAF strategic bombing campaign on the Soviet war effort has been undervalued 

After the failed German 1943 Kursk offensive, the Luftwaffe shifted the overwhelming majority of its fighter squadrons to Germany and other parts of Western Europe to battle RAF Bomber Command the emerging US Eighth Air Force. This eliminated the Luftwaffe as a major threat to the Red Army. 

Between 1939 and 1945, the Luftwaffe added slightly more than 13,000 88-mm flak guns for air defense duty. The army only received 3,500 such guns in the same period, but they were effective anti-tank guns of the war. 

Had those weapons been deployed in numbers to the Eastern Front, they would have turned Wehrmacht anti-tank defenses into vast killing fields for the Red Army’s armored forces. 

Finally, the strategic bombing of German oil production largely grounded the Luftwaffe and went far in making the Soviet 1945 breakout at the Baranov bridgehead on the Vistula River a success when the 1,200 German panzers massed there were rendered useless for lack of fuel.

There was never a case where a Red Army offensive defeated a mobile panzer force of that size while operating on ideal tank terrain. Allied strategic bombers first forced the removal of the Luftwaffe fighters, then removed thousands of deadly tank-killer "88s" from the battlefield and finally turned a huge panzer army into a mass of expensive and largely static pillboxes. Those factors were arguably decisive.

Western air power indirectly played a major role on the Eastern Front in 1944 and 1945.

E. Conclusions

The Eastern Front surely dominated the ground war, but when looking at the combined size and scope of the Western Allies ground, sea, air and material efforts, it could be argued that the West’s aggregate commitment of people, machines and resources was greater. 

Measuring war solely by buckets of blood spilt, however tragic, is a crude and misleading metric. No one played a “supporting role” in gaining the Allied victory. The real truth is that the Allies needed each other. All proved indispensable.

Semper Fi,

Mike

Meet the Snobocrats

Meet the Snobocrats

Victor Davis Hanson, National Review Online

Last week, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jonathan Gruber, one of prominent architects of Obamacare, was exposed as little more than an elitist fraud.

Gruber was caught on videotape expressing the haughty attitude that drove the Affordable Care Act, deriding the “stupidity” of Americans as a way to justify misleading them.

Gruber apparently thinks such deception is okay because yokel voters could not handle the truth about the looming chaos he helped to engineer in their health coverage.

Unfortunately, Gruber’s disdain for the proverbial masses — he was paid nearly $400,000 in consulting fees — is thematic of the last six years.

Another master-of-the-universe drafter of Obamacare was Ezekiel Emanuel. He scoffed on national television that the number of people covered by Obamacare at that point was “irrelevant.”

Emanuel also drew attention for his recent adolescent rant in a men’s magazine about the desirability of everyone dying at 75 to save society the expense of maintaining what he sees as the unproductive elderly.

Former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi lectured of Obamacare that “we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.” The same elitist message reverberates: that government and academic elites are smarter than average Americans, and so need not explain what they are doing.

This is a pattern of Obama administration ruling elites who express disdain or lack of concern about the people they are supposed to serve. Former energy secretary Steven Chu made a series of astounding statements about energy use, the most inane being that America would be better off if gas costs soared to Europe’s sky-high prices.

Susan Rice, the former U.N. ambassador and current national-security adviser, has misled in chronic fashion. She was untruthful about the Benghazi killings on national television, claiming that the attacks on the American consulate were the result of a spontaneous riot over a video. Rice defended the administration’s surreal Sergeant Beau Bergdahl prisoner swap by claiming that the AWOL soldier had served with “honor and distinction.” She again prevaricated on national television when she boasted of a diplomatic breakthrough in getting Turkey to provide U.S. bases and support against the Islamic State.

The list of deceptions and untruths goes on. Remember IRS bureaucrat Lois Lerner’s cute trick of planting a questioner at a conference to leak her own past targeting of conservative groups? The Veterans Administration hierarchy did not just cause the deaths of its own patients, but tried to cover up the scandal.

Do we recall how Attorney General Eric Holder contemptuously called Americans collective “cowards” because they did not necessarily share his identity-politics idea of race relations? Holder was the first attorney general in the nation’s history to be held in contempt of Congress.

President Obama habitually believes that his own superior talents make him immune from accountability.

He has referenced his own talent by bragging, “Just give me the ball,” or, “I’m LeBron, baby.” In 2008, he bragged to an interviewer, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m going to think I’m a better political director than my political director.”

That same sense of superiority explains his campaign boast that, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.”

No wonder Obama believes that he can just give millions of foreign residents amnesty by executive order — against the will of Congress, the American people, the courts, and his own prior warnings that the president has no such power of fiat.

What explains the sense of entitlement of a few self-anointed grandees believing that they are somehow superhuman and not accountable to common notions of truth?

Progressivism has always assumed that the supposed noble ends of fairness and quality justify any means necessary to achieve them.

Influential Americans also have developed a sick idea about higher education, equating wisdom and character with a degree stamped from an Ivy League or exclusive university.

The media has abdicated its watchdog role. Barack Obama, Jonathan Gruber, Eric Holder, Lois Lerner, and Susan Rice are empowered by understandably assuming that they should be exempt from media criticism.

Wealth and status assure elites that their own lives are never affected by the laws they pass or by the concrete ramifications of their own ideology.

In the view of the snobocrats, the harm that follows from Obamacare, blanket amnesty, or out-of-control bureaucracies should always affect someone else — someone thought to be too stupid to figure out what hit them.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals.  © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Good old boys...

The farther we get from this guy the more he is going to stink as his media filter evaporates. The left still believes that he is a natural leader. He has not led anything except fund raising.

The Gruber Confession

The Gruber Confession

By Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post

It’s not exactly the Ems Dispatch (the diplomatic cable Bismarck doctored to provoke the 1870 Franco-Prussian War). But what the just-resurfaced Gruber Confession lacks in world-historical consequence, it makes up for in world-class cynicism. This October 2013 video shows MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, a principal architect of Obamacare, admitting that, in order to get it passed, the law was made deliberately obscure and deceptive. It constitutes the ultimate vindication of the charge that Obamacare was sold on a pack of lies.

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage,” said Gruber. “Basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.” This was no open-mic gaffe. It was a clear, indeed enthusiastic, admission to an academic conference of the mendacity underlying Obamacare.

First, Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate — what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance — was not a tax.

Worse was the pretense that Obamacare wouldn’t cost anyone anything. On the contrary, it’s a win-win, insisted President Obama, promising that the “typical family” would save $2,500 on premiums every year.

Skeptics like me pointed out the obvious: You can’t subsidize 30 million uninsured without someone paying something. Indeed, Gruber admits, Obamacare was a huge transfer of wealth — which had to be hidden from the American people, because “if you had a law which . . . made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money, it would not have passed.”

But of course you couldn’t, as millions discovered when they were kicked off their plans last year. Millions more were further shocked when they discovered major hikes in their premiums and deductibles. It was their wealth that was being redistributed.

As NBC News and others reported last year, the administration knew this all along. But White House political hands overrode those wary about the president’s phony promise. In fact, Obama knew the falsity of his claim as far back as February 2010, when, at a meeting with congressional leaders, he agreed that millions would lose their plans.

Now, it’s not unconstitutional to lie. Nor are laws enacted by means of deliberate deception thereby rendered invalid. But it is helpful for citizens to know the cynicism with which the massive federalization of their health care was crafted.

It gets even worse, thanks again to Gruber. Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case claiming that the administration is violating its own health-care law, which clearly specifies that subsidies can be given only to insurance purchased on “exchanges established by the state.” Just 13 states have set up such exchanges. Yet the administration is giving tax credits to plans bought on the federal exchange — serving 37 states — despite what the law says.

If the plaintiffs prevail, the subsidy system collapses and, with it, Obamacare itself. Which is why the administration is frantically arguing that “exchanges established by the state” is merely sloppy drafting, a kind of legislative typo. And that the intent all along was to subsidize all plans on all exchanges.

Remember: The whole premise of Obamacare was that it would help the needy, but if you were not in need, if you liked what you had, you would be left alone. Which is why Obama kept repeating — PolitiFact counted 31 times — that “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Re-enter Professor Gruber. On a separate video in a different speech, he explains what Obamacare intended: “If you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” The legislative idea was to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by otherwise denying their citizens subsidies.

This may have been a stupid idea, but it was no slip. And it’s the law, as written, as enacted and as intended. It can be changed by Congress only, not by the executive. Which is precisely what the plaintiffs are saying. Q.E.D.

It’s refreshing that “the most transparent administration in history,” as this administration fancies itself, should finally display candor about its signature act of social change. Inadvertently, of course. But now we know what lay behind Obama’s smooth reassurances — the arrogance of an academic liberalism, so perfectly embodied in the Gruber Confession, that rules in the name of a citizenry it mocks, disdains and deliberately, contemptuously deceives.

OBAMA’S “PRAGMATISM”

OBAMA’S “PRAGMATISM”

PAUL MIRENGOFF , Powerline

Peter Berkowitz’s latest column is called “The Poverty of Obama’s Pragmatism.” My first thought was, what pragmatism. 

Obama is, after all, an ideologue. He seeks radically to transform America both at home and in its role abroad. When Obama seeks to redistribute income and to lessen America’s footprint in world affairs, he does so based on a pre-set ideological vision of how things should be, not on an empirical analysis of what course of action will work best in the real world.

But this approach, though not consistent with the common understanding of “pragmatism,” fits comfortably within the tradition of American pragmatist philosophy. As Peter explains:

Rather than dissolving metaphysical questions, [American philosophical] pragmatism encourages the delusion that they have been dissolved. When pressed, philosophical pragmatism becomes a series of rhetorical ruses designed to impel those who wish to explore the deep conflicts between moral, political, and religious views to shut up and go away.
Obama’s political pragmatism operates in similar fashion. It preaches that disputes between left and right that appear unresolvable are illusory, while systematically resolving them in the left’s favor.

Exactly.

Claims that Obama is a pragmatist in the ordinary, non-philosophical sense are based on confusion between substantive pragmatism and political pragmatism. Obama is a politician and thus has often felt compelled to act in politically pragmatic way.

Left to his own devices, Obama would not have increased U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan. Nor is it likely that he would have devoted resources to finding Osama bin Laden. But political considerations forced his hand.

The case of Afghanistan is particularly instructive. Obama tried to split the policy difference by “surging,” but with fewer troops than the military wanted and with a pre-announced withdrawal date.

This move looked politically pragmatic, but certainly was not pragmatic in substance. The true pragmatist always focuses on what is likely to work. Launching a military offensive while telling the enemy how long the campaign will last was inherently unlikely to work.

Obamacare is also instructive. Here too, Obama was politically pragmatic. He relied on congressional Democrats to figure out what would work politically — i.e., what would pass Congress — without worrying about what was in the actual legislation. A genuine pragmatist would never act this way because the legislative details will always have a strong bearing on whether a law will work in practice.

It turns out, however, that even Obama’s political pragmatism is impoverished. Its political consequence is incoherent policies that have undermined both the president and his party.

Going after bin Laden while ignoring the resurgence of al Qaeda throughout the Middle East and North Africa produced disastrous results that are now clear for all to see. Radically reforming the health insurance system without a clear understanding of how the legislation would work, or even what it says, has produced one surprise after another — nearly all of them bad. The Supreme Court may be poised to deliver the final surprise.

Obama is the only president in my lifetime to experience wave-election defeats in two mid-term elections. The first could, perhaps, be explained away as the product of a terrible economy and a highly controversial reform (Obamacare) that had not yet conferred its benefits.

Last week’s wave cannot be so explained. The explanation lies instead in what Peter calls “an inexpedient brew of dogmatic progressivism and disdain for government process.”

Pragmatists in the true sense should be appalled.

Why Many Did Not Vote on Tuesday

Why Many Did Not Vote on Tuesday

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

Here is a corollary to the President’s explanation as to why so many Americans did not vote on Tuesday.

The President focused on Congresses low approval ratings and blamed it on them.

An equally valid point -- based on the President’s own low approval numbers -- is that many stayed home because they believe the President will not listen to them.

They concluded (correctly?) that nothing will make the President change course so voting is a waste of time.

Mike

The CSG Plague, Mike Walker

The CSG Plague

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

We are facing a grave foreign policy and national security policy problem and I would argue, the gravest in my lifetime.

Why?

We have a domestic political agenda masquerading as international policy.

The cause is simple and the recent donnybrook with Israeli Prime Minster Netanyahu captures the problem perfectly.

The foreign policy-national security wonks in the White House are more or less a Chicken S—t Gang (CSG), to use their colorful terminology.

The CSG survives because we all want friendly relations with Russia and Iran, we want a just settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians and we wanted U.S. troops out of Iraq. We all wantworld peace and a strong global economy.

Why is that bad?

The CSG exists to tell us the bad news about bad things abroad. 

The purpose of having a foreign policy-national security group in the White House is not to tell us what we want to hear. Its job is to tell President and us what we do not want to hear.

Simply put, their job is to differentiate what we need from what we want and then ensure that our needs are met.

That requires the CSG to get out of their domestic bubble, something they have proven incapable of doing. That is why we are in the predicament we are in around the world.

Examples of the CSG in Action

The Reset With Russia. This proved a complete fiasco but the CSG wanted to be chums with Putin so the needs of the United States be damned. By the way, the CSG also threw two good allies, Poland and the Czech Republic, under the bus to “please” the Kremlin.

Crushing the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran. This was the first time the CSG gang got caught off balance (shouldn’t we be on the side of peaceful liberal progressives in Iran?) and it defaulted to its wants strategy. The CSG wanted to prove it could be friends with the Islamic Republic and so sad – too bad for the opposition in Iran.

What did the CSG care if the regime beat, tortured, imprisoned and often killed the peaceful agents for change in Iran? In the view from inside the CSG bubble, the American people would soon forget about all that and the CSG still wants to be pals with the Ayatollahs, a hoped-for part of the CSG’s legacy.

Abandoning the liberal progressives in Syria. This was a replay of the stale CSG game plan with Russia and Iran. The CGS wanted to be pals with Assad so Assad adopted Tehran’s policy of brutally suppressing peaceful opposition. Out went the good guys, leaving only the bag guys standing in Syria.

The Total Iraq Pullout. This was another fiasco and it is now becoming clear that the CSG sabotaged the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqis (see Ambassador Jefferies 3Nov2014 WSJ column).

But the CSG had no choice: Life in the bubble is defined by domestic American politics. To meet the CSG’s domestic political wants, doing what was right – what America needed – did not matter. The CSG foolishly walked out and three years later, Iraq walked right back in.

Benghazi. Hey, the election was in two months and POTUS had to be in Las Vegas the next day for a fundraiser. The CSG knew what it wanted so the solution was simple: blame it on the video and be done with it.

The Red Line in Syria. The CSG was sure that if the President spoke, Assad would obey. Once again, life in the bubble prevented the CGS from formulating a realistic policy for the real world. The CSG made the President look feeble and incompetent. Even from inside the bubble, that was a bad call.

The Rise of ISIL/ISIS. This is very much the monster created by Herr Doktor CSG Frankenstein. When the CSG orchestrated the precipitous withdrawal from Iraq, pushed for an incoherent policy in Syria and ignored all the warning signs that ISIS/ISIL was a real danger you get the mess we are faced with today.

No other outcome does a better job of explaining why life in the domestic bubble inevitably leads to international catastrophe. The CSG has failed America.

Why does the CSG get away with it?

First, we like our wants addressed whereas needs can be bitter medicine. We can be part of the problem.

Second, our independent safeguards have done a poor job. Too many in the media have redefined news casting. Hard-nosed objective reporting has been replaced with info-goop, an entertaining editorial sprinkled with cherry-picked facts posing as news. Again, it is a pursuit of wants at the expense of needs.

Third, the CSG has overwhelmed the traditional checks and balances within the Administration. When push comes to shove, the CSG can and has overridden the judgment of State, Defense, CIA, NSA, JCS and any other dissenting voice you care to add. For that failure, the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of President Barak Obama.

Now we face the greatest danger: A Nuclear Iran

The CSG and Iranian Centrifuge Nonsense. The CSG's biggest misperception is that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program is for nuclear medicine and electricity.

If Iran wanted to be the world leader – bar none – in nuclear medicine it would have reached that goal over a decade ago and at a small fraction of cost it has spent on its “peaceful” nuclear program.

Why would anyone invest several hundred billion dollars to obtain nuclear material that could be had for millions? The answer is you would not. The purpose of Iran’s atomic program is notnuclear medicine.

Nor is it electrical power. Iran’s first nuclear plant opened three years ago. It operates entirely off of nuclear fuel bought on the international market – none that was produced in Iran. Iran could open additional reactors without any need for the thousands of refinement centrifuges.

The Islamic Republic of Iran’s nuclear program serves one primary purpose: to allow the production of nuclear weapons for use against its enemies.

Al Qaeda and its various mutations like ISIL are very serious threats but they pale before the threat of a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic.

If you want to raise the cost to the United States in treasure to a new level and that in blood exponentially then “reset” our relationship with Iran along the line followed by the CSG. The result will be catastrophically worse than the Russian failure that ended in invasions of Crimea and Ukraine.

At this point in time, no deal with the Islamic Republic is the only thing America needs. And speaking of needs, the CSG needs to be tossed out of the coop and the sooner the better.

Mike

The Irony of the Obama Economy

The Irony of the Obama Economy

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

While the recovery from the Great Recession brought to fore any number of economic issues, two regarding the Obama economic vision for America are particularly fascinating.

(1) Obama directed Big Government to transform the energy sector away from one dominated by fossil fuels and towards one focused on renewables.

(2) The recovery was to stem from those types of Big Government Washington-centric interventions. 

How did that work out?

First of all, Big Government failed. The Obama foray into renewable energy resulted in business failure after business failure and the loss of hundreds of the millions of taxpayer’s dollars. To date, the economy got no meaningful boost from the “renewable” fiasco.

More amazingly, the recovery, such as it is, is being driven by the biggest boom in fossil fuel exploration, extraction, refinement and marketing since the 1950s.

How frustrating it must be for Obama visionaries to realize that the driving factor in the economic recovery of the United States is being carried out by the Private Sector and IN THE FACE OF Obama’s Big Government economic policies!

That truth can only make one think about how strong the US economy would be today and how many millions of Americans would have middle jobs now if we had a pro-Private Sector President sitting in the White House.

Regards,

Mike

THE KOBANI CONUNDRUM

THE KOBANI CONUNDRUM
Paul Mirengoff, Powerline

Turkey has finally agreed to allow Iraqi Kurdish forces to cross its border with Syria to help fight ISIS and thereby relieve the besieged town of Kobani. For weeks, Turkey had refused to allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters or weapons to cross its border in support of the Kurdish fighters defending Kobani.

Why the change? The New York Times cites “international pressure.” But the pressure has been there all along.

More to the point, it seems to me, is the fact that (in the words of the Times) “as the United States-led coalition has increased its airstrikes as well as its coordination with the Kurdish fighters, who have provided targeting information, the militants have lost momentum after appearing close to overrunning the town.” In other words, the Obama administration is beginning to behave seriously, at least in Kobani, and may actually be winning there. The predictable consequence is that Turkey takes the U.S. more seriously.

Turkey has also come under pressure from its Kurdish population. There have been mass protests against the government’s unwillingness to assist in the relief of Kobani. The Turkish government has resisted the pressure, both international and internal, because it considers the Syrian Kurds who are resisting ISIS as terrorists and its mortal enemies. And, indeed, these forces are associated with the PKK which is the enemy of the Turkish government.

By agreeing to help the Iraqi Kurds, President Erdogen seeks to thread the needle. He can no longer be accused of doing nothing to relieve Kobani, but at the same time he tries to limit his assistance to the Iraqi peshmerga, an ally.

In reality, though, allowing Iraqi Kurds into Syria will almost certainly play into the hands of Erdogen’s Kurdish enemies in Syria. According to Michael Rubin, “as soon as those Kurdish fighters enter Syria, they will subordinate themselves to the YPG [the peshmerga associated with the PKK] which know the ground and are, at this point, better motivated and more skilled.”

Erdogan surely understands this, but now apparently sees value in cooperating President Obama and in relieving some of the domestic pressure that his unwillingness to lift a finger to help Kobani has generated.

It isn’t just Erdogan who faces a Kobani conundrum. The Obama administration is airlifting arms to YPG even though the State Department has designated it (along with its political arm, the PYD, and the PKK) a terrorist organization.

Rubin argues that the designation “is long overdue for a review, if not elimination.” He adds:
The PYD governs Syrian Kurdistan better than any other group which holds territory runs its government. Nowhere else in Syria can girls walk to school without escort (let alone attend school) or is there regularly scheduled municipal trash pick up.
And the YPG, meanwhile, has been the most effective force fighting ISIS and the Nusra Front. Given a choice between ISIS and the PKK, the United States should choose the PKK.

Mugged by reality on the ground in Northern Syria, the Obama administration may be coming around to the same view.

Understanding the Turks

Understanding the Turks

Mike Walker, Col USMC (retired)

All,

There has been another foreign policy brouhaha with Susan Rice again at the center no less. This one deals with the use of Turkish military airfields for US aircraft to attack ISIL in Syria, a part of Operation Quodestnomeneius.

Turkey has balked at this and there are three reasons.

 

One secondary reason is the long-standing reluctance of Turkey to come to the aid of the Kurds.

Over the last two years, Erdogan has invested significant political capital in reaching an understanding with the Kurdish population in Turkey. He does not want to squander that effort by being seen as another Turkish “Kurd-hater.”

Another secondary reason for the "no" is Erdogan’s fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. He is staking out a “rational” policy for modern Islamic state and Turkey’s return as the leading Muslim country in the region. He will not blindly attack ISIL if that alienates the region's fundamentalist Sunnis he is trying to reach out to as a leader.

Both of those factors pale before the overarching problem: The Turks believe that the United States has no coherent Syrian strategy.

Strike one came when Washington declared that the ouster of Assad was the goal and then did nothing concrete to achieve that end.

Strike two was the failure to act when Assad crossed the President’s “red line” and employed chemical weapons.

Strike three is the United State’s mistake of trying to compartmentalize the problems. Washington seems to follow one distinct policy for Iraq, another for ISIL and a third for Assad.

To the Turks (and many other astute observers) that is NO STRATEGY AT ALL.

Turkey will NOT enter a shooting war in Syria unless (1) the United States accepts the removal of Assad as a principal objective of the war and (2) the United States is in it for the duration.

Mike

Making Harding Look Good

Making Harding Look Good 

The Obama administration has tarnished nearly every major federal agency.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Many have described the Obama departure from the 70-year-old bipartisan postwar foreign policy of the United States as reminiscent of Jimmy Carter’s failed 1977–81 tenure. There is certainly the same messianic sense of self, the same naïveté, and the same boasts of changing the nature of America, as each of these presidents was defining himself as against supposedly unpopular predecessors. But the proper Obama comparison is not Carter, but rather Warren G. Harding. By that I mean not that Obama’s scandals have matched Harding’s, but rather that by any fair standard they have now far exceeded them and done far more lasting damage — and without Obama’s offering achievements commensurate with those that occasionally characterized Harding’s brief, failed presidency.

The lasting legacy of Obama will be that he has largely discredited the idea of big government, of which he was so passionate an advocate. Almost every major agency of the federal government, many of them with a hallowed tradition of bipartisan competence, have now been rendered either dysfunctional or politicized — or both — largely because of politically driven appointments of unqualified people, or ideological agendas that were incompatible with the agency’s mission.

The list of scandals is quite staggering. In aggregate, it makes Harding’s Teapot Dome mess seem minor in comparison.

There is now no Border Patrol, at least as Americans have understood the agency whose job was enforcing federal immigration statutes. It died as an enforcement bureau sometime in 2013, not long after the reelection of Barack Obama, in a way that it could not have before the election. Instead, in Orwellian fashion, at a time of plague and terrorism abroad, it is now the Border-Crossing Enabling Service, whose chief task is facilitating the illegal entry of thousands from Latin America and Mexico, largely to further the political agenda of the Obama administration, contrary to the law, the will of Congress, and the wishes of the majority of the American people. Mention the phrase “immigration law” or “Border Patrol,” and Americans sigh that neither any longer exists. Yet such a perversion of the mission of a federal agency for political purposes has become thematic of this administration. Perhaps the end of border enforcement is emblemized best by Obama’s own uncle and late aunt, who in open defiance broke federal immigration law and did so with impunity, resided illegally in the United States, broke various state laws, and ended up either on public assistance or mired in the U.S. judicial system.

No one quite knows how to deal with the deadly threat of the Ebola virus. We can assume, however, that the Obama administration’s policy will be predicated foremost on some sort of predetermined ideological concern. Unlike many European countries, the United States still allows foreign nationals from countries with pandemics of Ebola to enter the country freely. What the administration has so far told us about Ebola — that a case here was unlikely, and then, after it happened, that probably only a handful of people had been exposed — was almost immediately proven false.

If this seems a harsh judgment, consider the policy of restricting flights to and from foreign countries because of national-security concerns. During the controversial Gaza War, the FAA ordered U.S. airlines to suspend flights to Ben Gurion Airport — the best protected airport in the world — supposedly because of a rocket that exploded in the general proximity of the facility. Hamas claimed the step as a psychological victory and proof of the efficacy of its strategy of targeting Israeli civilian centers, and as further evidence of growing U.S. anger at Israeli war conduct. In contrast, the FAA has not shut down flights to and from African countries in which Ebola has reached pandemic status. Which threat — a deadly virus or a stray rocket — posed the greatest danger to the American public? Perhaps if infected Liberian nationals send their child to Sidwell Friends, radical changes in FAA policy will follow; or, in contrast, if Israel had been gripped by an Ebola pandemic, then Americans might have been allowed to fly in and out of Ben Gurion.

The combination of Lois Lerner’s taking the Fifth Amendment and Barack Obama’s characterizing the IRS’s partisan targeting of conservatives as involving not a “smidgen” of corruption sum up the current status of the tax agency. So far no one has been held accountable for the corruption. Most Americans now assume that any high-profile political activity or contribution deemed inimical to the Obama administration will earn an audit or at least additional IRS scrutiny — a Machiavellian gambit that has discouraged contributions to conservative candidates. The agency that relies on voluntary tax compliance now holds taxpayers to standards of transparency, record-keeping, and honesty that it cannot itself meet. That too will be a lasting legacy of the Obama administration.

Eric Holder has politicized the Justice Department in a way not seen since the scandals of Nixon appointee John Mitchell. Holder’s prior ethical lapses – notably, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, the disreputable eleventh-hour pardon for fugitive (and Democratic contributor) Marc Rich — were well known. But in less than six years, he has managed to trump them. Holder was held in contempt by Congress for withholding subpoenaed documents about the Fast and Furious scandal, and he editorialized on pending criminal cases, such as the Trayvon Martin and the Ferguson cases. He arbitrarily chose not to enforce existing laws, whether elements of Obamacare or immigration statutes. He was forced to pay back the government for using a Gulfstream to junket to the Belmont Stakes with family and friends. He sought to try terrorists in civilian courts, and he demonized the idea of Guantanamo, which earlier, when it was politically expedient, he had praised. He caricatured his critics and made race essential rather than incidental to his tenure (e.g., “my people,” “nation of cowards,” and the false charges of racism against critics of the administration) in a way that would have gotten anyone else fired. Had any other attorney general monitored reporters’ communications as Holder did those of AP reporters, and, even more so, James Rosen, he would also have been summarily dismissed. Even the media will not be able to prevent Holder’s legacy from being seen as one of the Justice Department’s no longer enforcing the law without prejudice, but instead choosing haphazard compliance in order to advance partisan ideas of social justice.

The Secret Service used to be unimpeachable. Not now. Agents have been caught patronizing prostitutes while on assignment in Latin America. They have allowed an armed former felon to enter an elevator with the president. They had no clue that gunshots may well have hit the White House. They allowed an unhinged and armed intruder to not just enter the White House grounds, but make his way into the White House itself — and the agency then tried to cover up its laxity. Its reputation is now in shreds. One day a confused White House expresses full confidence in the Secret Service’s incompetent director, and the next gladly accepts her resignation.

Then there is the unfortunate alphabet soup of scandals. The GSA junketeering is now the stuff of caricature, but the sad thing about the agency’s fraud was the utter contempt for the taxpayers shown by its vacationing grandees, who are supposedly watchdogs of the public infrastructure. Former VA director Eric Shinseki, appointed largely for his banner opposition to the Iraq war, proved inept. The VA has shown itself to be not just incompetent but lethally so: It has allowed dozens of veterans to die for lack of adequate treatment. Like other Obama administration agencies such as the IRS and the Secret Service, the VA sought to cover up its near-criminal negligence. No one knows quite what the NSA is doing or should be doing, but most agree that it should not be tapping the private cell phones of allied foreign leaders. Nor should the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lie before Congress that the government does not track the communications of ordinary Americans.

Obama recently scapegoated the intelligence agencies for his own laxity in addressing the Islamic State in its early ascendance. True, his appointees may well be incompetent, but if so, it is in a way that reflects the president’s own politically driven narratives. Thus Clapper assured us that Qaddafi would not fall and that the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular. John Brennan, head of the CIA, once offered a rant about the innocuous nature of jihad that was delusional, as was his characterization of the radical Islamic agenda of forming a worldwide caliphate “absurd.” Would that Brennan had been as up on the circumstances of the arrest of would-be underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab as he is on the nuances of jihad. Do we even remember now how the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, helped usher in the euphemisms that became the stuff of ridicule (from overseas contingency operations and man-caused disasters to workplace violence). Under her directorship, we were told that right-wingers and returning veterans were greater threats to our security than radical Islamists.

The State Department has been even more tarnished. No one was held to account for serial untruths about the Benghazi killings, even though no one now defends the yarn of a video causing spontaneous riots or denies that the consulate was sorely unprotected. U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assiduously peddled demonstrable falsehoods, massaging the truth to fit within reelection parameters. The president bragged about pulling troops out of Iraq when it was convenient for his reelection campaign, and then blamed others when that foolish move proved one of the most disastrous decisions in the last decade. Add in reset with Russia, leading from behind in Libya, constant contextualizing of American sins, and pseudo red lines, step-over lines, and deadlines, and you see that our foreign policy has become a serious embarrassment abroad. Indeed, Obama suffers from the paradox of the Cretan Liar (who assured everyone he spoke with that all Cretans lie): He seeks to bask in adulation abroad as U.S. head of state even as he tells his worshipers that the U.S. is culpable and by implication thus does not deserve such adulation.

Then there are the departed Cabinet secretaries. No one really knew exactly what Labor Secretary Hilda Solis was doing other than that she abruptly departed the administration and was quickly mired in all sorts of post-tenure financial scandals. Ditto EPA Director Lisa Jackson, who mysteriously drifted out of office once it was learned that she had created a false e-mail identity to pound her own drum. No one has ever explained why NASA Administrator Charles Bolden believed that the primary mission of the space agency should be Muslim outreach, and everyone still is puzzled about why the nation that reached the moon first is now dependent on Vladimir Putin for sending its astronauts into space. 

Kathleen Sebelius left the Department of Health and Human Services under a cloud of suspicions, after serially misleading the public about Obamacare. Her chief defense is that she was merely parroting the untruths of the President of the United States (you can keep your health plan and your doctors, and premiums and deductibles will go down, along with the deficit). Does anyone remember Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, now infamous for his quirky ideas about wanting gasoline prices to rise to European levels (e.g., $9 a gallon), and for hoping to shut down coal-fired electricity generation — along with approving crony-capitalist loans to the green lobbyists who gave us a subsidized and bankrupt Solyndra.

Obama has set the standard that the purpose of government is to facilitate his version of social change, regardless of protocols, laws, or traditions. And the result is a scandal-ridden administration that exceeds that of Warren G. Harding — one that has now convinced the public that their government agencies are not lawful, competent, or to be trusted.

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