The Razor

One of the charges made against those of us who supported the war in Iraq or war in general is that we must take responsibility for each and every casualty. “Visit the parents of a Marine killed in Iraq and ask them if it was worth it,” was once spat at me. That’s a responsibility that those of us who support such actions have to bear I suppose.

But the other side of that conceit rarely figures in debate. I realized that recently during Nancy Pelosi’s struggle to square the circle of her actions in 2002 versus her beliefs in 2009 regarding waterboarding. One of the few terrorists who was waterboarded gave intel during the procedure that prevented an attack in Los Angeles. That attack could have killed thousands of Americans.

So if I am burdened philosophically with facing the loved ones of each and every dead American soldier killed in a war that I support, shouldn’t Nancy Pelosi and those opposed to waterboarding face those who are alive today and state their regret that our American principles have been compromised and they would rather these Americans be dead? Perhaps they should visit the homes of those who weren’t killed and explain to their loved ones why their beloved should have perished to spare a terrorist some discomfort.

Oh, during last night’s presidential press conference did anyone catch Helen Thomas’s use of the term “supposed terrorists” to describe al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan? I’m not sure what one would have to do to qualify for the label in her book on the very day they release another snuff video.

It has been a long tough slog supporting the Iraq War, although nowhere near as hard and tough as it has been for our forces fighting it and the Iraqi people living through it. Championing an unpopular position – especially one involving warfare and the building of a nation – is never easy. In the case of Iraq it was the choice between a freed people and American determination, or genocide and American weakness that encourages its enemies whether the Japanese view of the US as “paper tiger” or alQaeda’s perception of the US as “the weak horse.”

For the past five years Iraq War supporters have dealt with tactical and strategic errors in Iraq. This should be no surprise given that war tends to shred even the best laid plans, the slow progress three-steps-forward two-steps-back that comes with a counterinsurgency strategy, a political party hell-bent on returning to power on the coffins of dead American soldiers and the blood of Iraqis shed by al-Qaeda and Iranian-backed militias, and an antagonistic mainstream media establishment. Epithets like “Haditha“, “Abu Ghraib“, and “Guantanamo” were hurled along with the standard “quagmire,” ”blood for oil,” and ”Vietnam.” Some of these epithets were deserved; in the end most were not.

Those of us who supported the Surge trusted in General Petraeus at the same time the nation’s most respected newspaper ran an ad calling him “Betray Us” at an embarrassingly discounted rate.

With a mainstream media firmly entrenched in the anti-war camp, war supporters were forced to find alternatives like the views of soldiers returning from the field, or in many cases actually still there, as well as the writings of Bill Roggio, Michael Totten, Michael Yon and others who reported what they witnessed amongst the Iraqi people and embedded with US soldiers. These reports were in stark contrast to the mainstream reports written from the Green Zone using material from pro-insurgent stringers, and early on sowed the seeds of hope for those of us who wanted nothing less than victory by our forces and a free Iraq that would eventually join the ranks of normal democratic nations.

In the end the contrast between the two became laughable – as Dave Price regularly pointed out the MSM’s often breathless reports of Moqtada al-Sadr’s (aka “Mookie”) “victory” over Iraqi forces in Basra and Baghdad this past spring. It was only a matter of time before the mainstream media came gave up and began writing positive stories about Surge’s success in Iraq – although with more caveats than are found in any drug commercial. A few sundays ago the local Delaware newspaper – which is horribly biased against anything that 1)doesn’t support the Democratic Party or 2)questions the banking industry – ran an AP wirestory on its front page, “US Now Winning War That Seemed Lost”. It was the first positive story on the Iraq War I had ever seen on the paper’s frontpage.

I waited five years to see column header, five very long years in which I felt the American press had become the propaganda arm of al-Qaeda in Iraq or Mookie’s Jaish al Mahdi (JAM).

The history of the Iraq Surge makes for interesting reading. I never saw the War as lost, nor did I want to see us and the Iraqis lose – unlike Sen Harry Reid. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama both voted sometimes for – sometimes against funding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq depending which way the wind blew. Iraq War opponent Congressman John Murtha disgraced himself with his slander that his fellow marines slaughtered civilians “in cold blood” in a case that eventually led to a defamation case being filed against him (make that two defamation suits) .

Even the political party I freely chose hasn’t been immune. Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-France) voted against the surge, and now demands that we quit talking about its success or who voted for it. I suppose he would want us to forget considering his consistent anti-military position and his current push for a place in an Obama administration. Even my own Congressman Mike Castle – Delaware’s lone Republican voice in a state dominated by Democrats  - voted against a bill funding the war in early 2007.

One writer – I’m trying to figure out whom – early on in the surge wrote a piece about General Petraeus that has inspired me through the dark days. It described the chaos that was Iraq, and the hope for a better future that seemed more distant day by day as the nation descended into the heart of darkness. It portrayed General Petraeus in almost mythical tones, and promised that though the times were desperate he would lead his forces and the Iraqi people out of the darkness and into the light of victory and peace. The writing conveyed to me, a civilian of untested loyalty, what it must have been like for my father to serve under Gen. MacArthur in 1944-45. General Petraeus was that kind of leader, one whom good men willingly follow to their last breath.

Michael Yon in his four part series, The Ghosts of Anbar (one of the best pieces of wartime writing I’ve read), complemented the General thus:

It took enormous guts to take the job at this stage of the war, when it’s like an airplane with one of the wings blown off, and there is this pilot in the back of the airplane who easily could have parachuted out the back—where some of the others already have gone—but instead he says, “I can still fly this thing!” Had David Petraeus jumped and landed safely, he’d still have been one of the few who could land with a sterling reputation after his previous commands here. If this jet crashes while Petraeus is flying it, we will always know that the best of the best did not jump out the back; he ran to the cockpit.

Now we have finally made it into the light, and Freedom’s enemies now scurry back to their caves in Pakistan or rewrite history like the denizens of the Kremlin of old in order to portray themselves as fathers to success.

But I can’t forget. And I can’t forgive. Too much has been done; too much said to warrant forgiveness or forgetfulness. A rubicon was crossed – I’m not sure exactly when or where, but crossed nevertheless, and we find ourselves in a new land where judgments must be made, debts repaid and accounts settled. While leftists ponder war crimes tribunals held under an Obama administration, it’s only fair for those of us who stayed the course to not forget what has been said and done by those determined to see America humiliated and genocide prevail in Iraq.

We are at long last vindicated, but we must not forget. Forgive? Perhaps. But not forget.

Ralph Peters writing in the NY Post:

What don’t the critics like? Democracy? The defeat of al Qaeda? Muslims turning to the US military for help? Troop cuts? The dramatically improved human-rights situation? What’s the problem here?

The answer’s simple: Admitting that they’ve been mistaken about Iraq guts the left’s argument for political entitlement. If the otherwise deplorable Bush administration somehow got this one right, it means the left got another big one wrong.

So be prepared for frequent time-machine trips until November. The encouraging reality of today’s Iraq will go ignored in favor of an endless mantra of “Al Qaeda wasn’t there in 2003 . . .”

The bottom line? Al Qaeda let the war’s opponents down.

Bias? What media bias? Ralph Peters writes in the New York Post:

Our troops deserve better. The Iraqis deserve better. You deserve better. The forces of freedom are winning.

Here in the Land of the Free, of course, freedom of the press means the freedom to boycott good news from Iraq. But the truth does have a way of coming out.

The surge worked. Incontestably. Iraqis grew disenchanted with extremism. Our military performed magnificently. More and more Iraqis have stepped up to fight for their own country. The Iraqi economy’s taking off. And, for all its faults, the Iraqi legislature has accomplished far more than our own lobbyist-run Congress over the last 18 months.

When Iraq seemed destined to become a huge American embarrassment, our media couldn’t get enough of it. Now that Iraq looks like a success in the making, there’s a virtual news blackout.

Of course, the front pages need copy. So you can read all you want about the heroic efforts of the Chinese People’s Army in the wake of the earthquake.

Tells you all you really need to know about our media: American soldiers bad, Red Chinese troops good.

Is Jane Fonda on her way to the earthquake zone yet?

Mirrored at Dean’s World.

For over the past 25 years former president Jimmy Carter has used the prestige of his office to stay in the news, winning a peace prize in the process. Is Carter truly motivated by the quest for peace, or is there something else making him get involved in nearly every major foreign policy issue of the last 17 years?

Before traveling to Syria this week to meet Hamas Chief Khaled Mashaal, former president Jimmy Carter spoke at American University in Cairo, where he condemned the Israeli blockade of Gaza. “It’s an atrocity what is being perpetrated as punishment on the people in Gaza. It’s a crime… I think it is an abomination that this continues to go on,” Carter said. A few days earlier Carter visited southern Israel where he met with the kin of those killed by rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza. There he referred to the Qassam rocket attacks as criminal acts.

When Israel left Gaza there was no blockade in place. Immediately after assuming control, the Palestinians began firing rockets into southern Israel – just as predicted by the Israeli settlers evicted by force from settlements in Gaza. When Hamas violently overthrew the Palestinian Authority in June 2007, the rockets rained down in earnest and the blockade was put in place. But even today when nearly a dozen rockets landed, fuel supplies are being sent to Gaza from Israel from a depot where 2 civilians were murdered by Palestinians earlier this week.

Carter refuses to accept that Israel cedes land and gets rockets in return from Hamas. It’s not perceived by Hamas as “land for peace”; it’s “land for rocket staging areas.” He sees no difference between a terrorist organization that targets civilians and a military that targets the terrorists. Instead he sees Hamas and the Israeli government as morally equivalent, unelected terrorists who slaughtered their own people in the coup last year and a government freely elected by its people as moral equals. By this logic a cop that shoots a killer to death in the line of duty is just as immoral as the killer himself.

On Friday he met Mashaal. By doing so he has elevated a terrorist organization that is sworn to the destruction of Israel, and one that has the blood of his own countrymen on his hands. Why? Because he accepts the validity of terrorist acts as a means to wage war, according to former adviser to Carter and onetime executive director of the Carter Center Ken Stein. Writing in this piece for the Middle East Quarterly:

(In his book, Peace Not Apartheid, Carter writes) “It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel,”[40] he leaves the impression that it is legitimate to engage in terrorism and suicide bombing against Israelis until Jerusalem accepts his interpretation of international law. In doing so, he ignores the fact that the performance-based formula for advancing Israeli-Palestinian talks, the so-called “Road Map” endorsed by the Quartet in 2003, required immediate cessation of terrorism.

To return to the cop analogy, it’s as if the cops must stop pursuing a murderer before the killer stops killing. It’s a naive morality that wouldn’t survive an hour in a sandbox full of preschoolers, but it’s the one Carter has followed since being thrown out of the Oval Office in 1981. But with Israel in particular, there is more to Carter’s meddling in its affairs. It starts with the fact that Carter has never forgiven American Jews for siding with Ted Kennedy during the 1980 primaries according to Stein. Beyond that,

Carter’s grievance list against Israel is long: He believes the Israeli government’s failure to withdraw fully from the West Bank is illegal and immoral; he condemns settlement construction; and he lambastes its current human rights abuse in the West Bank, which he labels “one of the worst examples of human rights abuse I know.”[5] From the time he was president, he has criticized Israel’s confiscation of Palestinian land, usurpation of water rights, and retaliatory bulldozing of Palestinian houses. Such policies, he has argued, are responsible for the moribund Palestinian economy. Carter holds particular animus toward the security barrier, first proposed by the late prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin,[6] as the latest example of what he believes to be a policy of de facto annexation of the West Bank.

Carter sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the root of both U.S. unpopularity in the region and the wider problem of Middle East instability. Once the historic injustice done to the Palestinians is resolved, he believes, other issues plaguing U.S. foreign policy will dissipate, if not disappear.

Stein writes that Carter believes had he won re-election in 1980, he would have solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Carter possesses missionary zeal. He believes that had he won re-election, he would have succeeded in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Numerous times during the 1980s, Carter quipped after leaving meetings with Middle Eastern or U.S. officials that, if given a chance, he could “make this happen.”

The Carter presidency was an unmitigated disaster economically as well as militarily. The rise of Islamic fascism began on Carter’s watch, and was exacerbated by Carter’s personal ineptitude as well as that of his administration. He encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in 1979. He made Iran the example that anyone with a grudge could do whatever they wanted against the United States without penalty, whether it was holding embassy personnel hostage in total disregard of international law or attacking civilians at home and abroad. The blame for 9-11 lays solely with al-Qaeda, but the Carter Administration mishandling of the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (in which Carter’s bungled handling of the SALT I treaty led the Soviets to believe that they could get away with the invasion, followed by U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s recommending the supporting of the mujahadeen against the Soviets) played a critical role in the internationalization of Islamic terrorism beyond the Middle East.

Since leaving office Carter has striven to rehabilitate his legacy as one of America’s worst presidents (#11 according to this meta-survey). He could have stuck with Habitat for Humanity and lived an honorable and exemplary life proving such polls wrong in the end. But his ego wouldn’t let him. Instead the incompetence that doomed his presidency has stalked his efforts in personal diplomacy. He undercut George Bush’s senior’s efforts to drive Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 by appealing to governments to not join the coalition he was putting together to do so. In 1993 he brokered a “get out jail free” deal with Mohammed Farah Aidid, after the firefight with his militiamen (backed by al-Qaeda we later learned) that left 18 servicemen dead and 77 wounded. The 1994 “agreement” he “brokered” in North Korea to halt its nuclear program was never taken seriously by the North Korean regime, and the regime made a dozen nukes. Given Carter’s willful ignorance to listen to members from his own party over the years as well as these failures, it’s clear that he’s not in it for peace: he’s in it for his own personal glory.

Like the neo-cons from the Ford Administration gravitated around Bush in 2000, Carter officials have glommed onto Barack Obama’s candidacy. For millions of under 35’s who don’t remember gas lines, aren’t familiar with terms like “misery index” and never saw US hostages being paraded before cameras on the nightly news every night, the Carter years are just history pages from a textbook turned very quickly at the end of the school year. For many of us who lived through it, names like Brzezinski coupled with the sight of the ex-president meeting and elevating the status of our enemies are chilling reminders of what the world would have been like had Kennedy beaten Carter in the 1980 Democratic Primaries, or better yet, if Ford hadn’t pardoned Nixon and thereby beaten Carter soundly in 1976 Election – depriving the USA of one of its worst presidents and the enemies of freedom and peace with one of their most determined champions.

I have been  ruminating on the term “Iraq War”, and the more I think about it the more I believe we have a nasty semantics problem on our hands. The issue came to the fore in another thread over at Dean’s World where a poster said that Obama will not withdraw from Iraq. He suggested that Obama would simply declare the “war” over and call the troops stationed there “peacekeepers.” This of course is simply semantics being used to justify the breaking of a campaign promise. No one who supports Obama simply because of his anti-war stance would accept this semantic change, which is why I continue to believe that should Obama win Iraq will lose.

Commenters to the thread made the case that what is happening in Iraq is best described as “war” or an “occupation”, but I have problems with both terms. The former term ignores the reconstruction and reconciliation efforts of our military, while the latter ignores the fight against al-Qaeda and Iran’s Quds force. But the semantics of the issue go much deeper than that when you look at the definitions of the words:

War: 1 a (1): a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations…

In Iraq there is no hostile conflict “between states or nations.” The Iraqi government is our ally, and our opponents are stateless and disorganized (with the exception of Iran, which is using the cover and support of various Shi’a militias to attack the Iraqi government and the United States).

Note the usage of the word “declared” in the definition: wars have a beginning and an end. Consider Vietnam: the war officially began with the Gulf of Tonkin resolution and ended with the official surrender of South Vietnam to NVA forces in April 1975. If the USA left Iraq as Sen. Obama declares he will do once he becomes president, who would the remaining Iraqi forces surrender to? Al-Qaeda? Al-Qaeda is neither a state or nation: it’s at best an ideology. How do you surrender to an ideology? Given the reconstruction efforts and the fact that you need an enemy with a state or a nation to have a war, perhaps occupation would be the better term. Unfortunately the dictionary shows the limits of this term as well:Occupation: 3 a: the act or process of taking possession of a place or area : seizure b: the holding and control of an area by a foreign military force c: the military force occupying a country or the policies carried out by it.

On the face of it this word works better than the term “war” to describe the US military effort in Iraq; the US clearly is setting Iraqi priorities and policies and is doing so using military force. Where the word fails is in the attacks against al-Qaeda as mentioned earlier, but with the failure of the definition to note the effort to build (there’s no ‘re’ – Iraqi infrastructure was a shambles long before the attacked Iraq in 1991) infrastructure, private and government institutions and create a non-sectarian Iraqi military. The term also implies permanence, and the US has made its occupation conditional on the ability of Iraqi government and military to support an independent and peaceful Iraq.

So how about Peacekeeping?

Peacekeeping: the preserving of peace; especially : international enforcement and supervision of a truce between hostile states or communities (emph. add.).

Finally a term that appreciates the divisions within a state. Peacekeeping is necessary particularly in places with mixed ethnic and religious communities, as in Baghdad, and in southern Iraq where the Shi’a and Mookie are harassing the locals.

In short we are actually doing all three: warring, occupying and peacekeeping in Iraq. There isn’t a single term that sums up all our efforts Language fails us, and may fail Iraq if Obama takes power and ends the “Iraq War” as well as the “Iraqi Occupation” and the Iraqi Peacekeeping Mission”. History will ultimately be the judge, but a lot of good that will do the Iraqis who suffer from the catastrophe that follows Obama’s decision.

The following is a brief history of world events as I see them today, March 18, 2013. I will update this as time permits. I apologize in advance for boring those of you to whom this is “yesterday’s news,” but it’s my way of trying to place the last five years in perspective. A lot has changed, but a lot has not. After all, there are still those who believe that those horrible events our nation experienced in 2010 were just “inside jobs” to either force the president’s hand to declare war, or to make him look ineffectual depending on which side of the “Truther Spectrum” you find yourself on. Long-time readers will note my position on those terrifying days hasn’t wavered: the terrorists are ultimately to blame. But I still hold the prior administration and the former Democratic Congress responsible for creating the conditions that allowed the terrorists to strike, so I didn’t shed a tear when President Obama gave his concession speech. (Like all of his speeches, it sounded good when I heard it but as soon as it was over I forgot what he said. Freakin’ typical…)

I also want to remind readers that the way things are today aren’t the way they were in the past. We tend to believe that Change happens slowly, and when it doesn’t, such as in 2010 and before that Sept. 11, 2001, we rationalize it until we can safely ignore it as “freak event.” Instead we should view History the way seismologists view faults. A fault may be quiet for years, but a seismologists knows that unseen forces are stressing the fault line until it eventually snaps. When it does, the earth moves for a few moments and transforms the landscape by destroying buildings, raising mountains or altering the courses of streams. After the stress is released, the fault becomes quiet again. But that doesn’t mean that the stress is gone; almost immediately after a quake the fault begins accumulating stress that it will release during the next quake.

And that’s why I’ve fought the policies that led to 2010. I knew that I wasn’t being paranoid – although I was portrayed as such by the commenters here and elsewhere – because earthquakes don’t happen for no reason: they are the result of stress. 9-11 and 2010 don’t happen spontaneously; they were the result of a series of conscious decisions and mistakes made by our political, military, law enforcement and intelligence officials any of which might have stopped the plots. If Houston Patrolman Rodriguez had detained the “speeder” instead of releasing him on his own recognizance for fear of bucking the “don’t ask – don’t tell” illegal immigrant policy supported by his department under pressure from the ACLU, his “speeder” wouldn’t have made it to Kansas and achieved martyrdom, taking hundreds of thousands with him. If the NSA had been allowed to monitor the satellite phone traffic that passed through microwave towers in Virginia without a warrant from a judge that happened to be hunting in Saskatchewan at the time of the call, we might have been able to arrest the “moneyman” and unraveled the plot before it made the History books as the greatest series of terrorist attacks of all time.

The refusal by politicians of both parties to take illegal immigration seriously that eventually allowed the terrorists to enter our homeland. The Chinese Walls put in place between foreign intelligence services and domestic law enforcement under the Clinton administration that prevented the warning signs of the impending 9-11 Attacks from being acted on. These walls were breached briefly after those first attacks, but then the Democratic-controlled Congress rebuilt them after Obama took office. The politicization of the CIA and NSA that started under Bush II kept bad news from being reported up the chains of command for fear of appearing disloyal. We all know their roles in 2010 even if you didn’t download the PDF version of the McCain-Webb Report and read the 876 pg investigation results word-for-word.

This is a draft: I will amend it as I see fit but the history itself will not change. We can’t bring back the dead of 2010, nor can we cure those who are permanently scarred. But I believe we can honor their memory best by writing the truth to counter the propaganda that clouds those events, dehumanizing those innocents who died those days for what? For simply being who they are, who we are, Americans.

Middle East

Iraq

As promised President Obama ordered an immediate withdrawal of troops from Iraq starting in 2009, leaving a token presence in Baghdad. Iran and Syria accelerated their undermining of the Iraqi regime while the Kurds in northern Iraq continued to react coolly for demands of assistance by the central government. By 2010 the Iraqi government had fallen, and a new regime backed by a coalition of Iranian/Syrian forces demanded a complete withdrawal of US forces from Baghdad. The US complied and by the Summer of 2010 Iraq was in complete chaos with the exception of the Kurdish controlled north, which finally gives up the pretense of being a part of Iraq and refers to itself in all official communiqués as Kurdistan. Turkey reacted to the growing autonomy with threats and several military incursion to chase PKK rebels, but the Kurdish authorities promised to keep the PKK under control and renounced claims to a greater Kurdistan – for now. A steady exodus of Iraqi refugees set up camps in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, demanding visas to the United States due to the threat of persecution for supporting the US occupation.

Afghanistan

Emboldened by their success in Iraq, the anti-war Left in the United States demands a similar US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Taliban, with help from former Iraqi insurgents and Iranian Special Forces, escalate attacks against former-NATO forces and the Afghani populace. This leads to a large increase in casualties among the local populace as well as the remaining contingent of former NATO forces. Weary from the relentless terrorism of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, support evaporates for the regime and by the middle of 2010 the government of Hamed Karzai has fallen. US forces evacuate the remaining former-NATO forces from Baghram air base as Taliban leader Mullah Omar parades triumphantly into Kabul. After reports in the western press that the Taliban are going door-to-door and executing the families of suspected collaborators with former NATO and Karzai’s forces, the Taliban Communication’s chief imposes a news blackout and demands that all reports must receive the approval of Taliban authorities. Cell phones are confiscated, and cellphone towers dynamited. News trickles out from Afghan refugees at camps in Iran and Pakistan of a bloody “cleansing” of the Afghan community by the Taliban, with hundreds of thousands slaughtered.

Saudi Arabia

The abrupt withdrawal of US forces from the region has made traditional Saudi enemy Iran the major player in the region. King Abdullah takes a public stance of solidarity with the Iranian regime, all the while resisting and covertly attacking Iranian interests in Iraq as the kingdom and Iran vie for supremacy over the remnants (the oil fields) of the former state. However Iran soon gains an upper hand in Iraq through its Shi’a allies there, and uses its ties to al-Qaeda developed during the US occupation of Iraq to attack the Saudi kingdom directly. This is made all the more easy when one of the Sudairi Seven, the seven close-knit sons of King Abdul Aziz “ibn Saud” by Hassa bint Ahmad Sudairi, dies under suspicious circumstances. The Arab Street immediately blamed the Jews, but the Saudis knew better.

The collapse of oil prices to below $50 a barrel hasn’t helped Saudi finances much either. With stagflation haunting the USA and international trade under attack in most of the developed world, world demand for oil has slumped significantly since the US economy entered recession in early 2008. Add in several million Iraqi refugees, many of whom are suspected of being al-Qaeda, and the Kingdom find itself in the toughest place it has been in the modern era.

The United States

The first successful terrorist attack on US soil since 2001 occurred in 2010. You would think that the savagery we witnessed in 2001 would have prepared us somewhat for what happened that year, but unfortunately our capacity for horror is unlimited. Like most I was simply speechless for days afterward. The President’s “Solidarity” speech seemed calming, but that was before the second strike. Then came the third, and the fourth and I remember thinking to myself that they would never end. As with the attacks on 9-11, there were no claims of responsibility but al-Qaeda was suspected until a tape was uploaded to Youtube two months later by al-Zawahiri stating that the US was being punished for its “past transgressions against Islam.” It threatened further attacks unless the USA “redeems itself by repudiating it’s Crusader past” and embracing Islam. Unlike the other threats, al-Zawahiri made good on this one and 2010… Well, it sure wasn’t the vision Arthur C. Clarke had when he wrote the novel. The book it most resembled was Dante’s Inferno.

Leftists claimed that America deserved the attack for its past support of Israel, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. After several months of investigation it was determined that the terrorist cell infiltrated the United States through Mexico. Proof of ties between the terrorist and drug gangs operating in northern Mexico were produced by US authorities, but denied by the Mexican government. In an unusual statement, the head of the Mexican drug gang posted a video statement on Youtube where he admits that his gang helped the terrorists infiltrate the United States, but denies knowing anything about their mission.

A small group of influential Leftist scholars called for the indictment of former president George W. Bush, vice president Dick Cheney, and former secretary of state Condoleeza Rice as war criminals. They hoped that a successful prosecution would encourage “peace with our Islamic brothers,” and demanded that a diplomatic delegation be sent to Pakistan to negotiate with al-Qaeda.

The electorate punished President Obama in the 2010 mid-term elections by re-electing a single Democrat to her seat; the Republicans ran the table using the infamous “2010” campaign. Even the Leftist MSM had a hard-time attacking the Republicans due to effectiveness of the campaign message highlighting the government failures that allowed the terrorism to happen.

One of the leading lights of a revitalized Republican party was a governor with strong ties to the religious right but who repudiated the “internationalism that infected our party for the last half a century.” Calling Sen. Ron Paul “an inspiration, and one of the smartest men I’ve ever met,” the Governor demanded that President Obama send the returning armed forces to man the border with Mexico and Canada. “These brave men and women enlist to protect America from its enemies – not the Koreans who stole our jobs, not the Europeans who stole our dignity, and not the Saudis who stole our souls.” On Sunday January 20, 2013, he was elected the 45^th President of the United States.

As anyone who has read this journal before, I am not a big fan of the President. While I have written in the distant past that Isolationism is the default state of America, I cannot help but think how things would have been different had we not elected a closet isolationist president in 2008 at what should have been the end of the recession. It turns out later that the economy wasn’t as bad as Obama and the Democrats made it out to be late in the year, but by that time the recession had bitten deeply into our economy with millions thrown out of work, falling tax revenues and worse, inflation as the Fed printed flooded the markets with cash to try to get the economy moving.

For those of you who weren’t around back then, it was like 1978 all over again. The Democrats reminded us of that over and over, reviving the term “misery index” that had been coined under one of their own presidents. Every potential bright spot of the economy was talked down, while every negative statistic made the headlines. Sure this was a cynical ploy just like the Clinton team had done to the first George Bush’s candidacy in 1992 – but like Clinton it worked – just too well. Perception is reality for Wall Street, and all the trash-talk by Democrats (and those Republicans who thought that McCain’s rhetoric was too polly-annish to dent Obama’s lead) altered its perception. All the negativity about the economy and trading partners was enough to sweep Obama into office but also boxed him into a corner. He had lost the ability to backaway from his more radical policies early in his campaign, but in order to survive he had to repudiate that strategy. When it came time to deliver, he had to come through for his constituents. Taking office just after the economy was starting to dig itself out of negative territory turned out to be a disaster. The markets were tanking. Our trading partners were matching our anti-trade rhetoric tit for tat. We faced the perfect storm: bad monetary situation, low confidence in free markets and trade, and an election without an incumbent. Somehow Obama managed to piss off the Canadians more than Bush ever had. Honestly I didn’t think it was possible given the shared history of our two nations, but the comments he made in 2011 supporting Quebec separatism pretty much killed what little relationship our two nations had after the trade rhetoric cooled.

I was never a fan of Obama. I always thought him to be in the mold of Jimmy Carter. However his term by comparison made Jimmy’s term look like a Golden Age. It’s hard to relate what life was like to those of you who don’t remember living in a country that was open to the rest of the world. The prosperity this openness brought us was always taken for granted so that we only appreciated it when we lost it. I always had my doubts about Free Trade, but I wanted to see it tweaked not discarded completely as it has been by both the Obama and current administrations.

Free Trade never got the credit it deserved in Academia due to the latter being the last bastion of Communism on the planet. Therefore much of the elite that grew up in the 80’s and 90’s never appreciated how trade had lifted more people out of poverty than any single idea or ideology. The only time that this was recognized was by the Malthusians in the Eco-movement who wanted the people in China, India and Africa to return to poverty because it lowered their carbon footprint. When the elites started leading, as Obama’s generation took power in the USA, Europe and elsewhere, they were indifferent to Free Trade or worse, antagonistic to it.

But the bonds of trade are not made of steel; they are based on trust, and when that trust began to be broken by Obama’s attempt to renegotiate NAFTA, the bonds were broken. Then 2010 happened and Isolationism became the new paradigm. I suddenly found myself feeling catapulted backward in time with the constant chatter about “the gold standard” and tariffs – not from a Hearst broadsheet, but the blogosphere and MSM.

Europe:

Forces in Europe have been drawn down starting with deployments in Bosnia and Kosovo, followed by the quick redeployments (home) of forces in Spain, Italy and eventually Germany. Finally, all remaining forces returned home by the end of 2012, only the contingents protecting US embassy personnel remained. Total force drawdown as of Dec 2012: 98,000. Remaining: 250

Impact:

NATO unofficially expired going the way of the Warsaw Pact. European governments have been forced to rebuild their dilapidated armed forces; some opted for an EU force, while others (UK, Italy, France) continued to field their own militaries under their own command. Russia’s interest in Europe revived as it saw an opportunity to extend its influence westward, but all this has apparently done is push Europe to the Americans. Much of the virulent anti-Americanism is gone, although some remains among the “usual suspects” (the universities and trade unions). There are articles in the continental press that put forward the idea that should Europe find itself in trouble with Russia, the US will intervene as it has done for the past century. But the Brits seem to get it, with the Daily Telegraph noting in recent piece the depth of America’s antipathy towards Europe:

This expectation ignores the very fundamental question from the American perspective: Why? Why would the United States return to the past, placing US troops on European soil? What would the US derive from such a bargain? Protesters chaining themselves to the gates of their bases? Governments pursuing their own interests and prospering often at the expense of those of the United States, as France emphatically proved in the 1990’s in the Middle East? The transports planes have long gone and the bases at Aviano and Wiesbaden are already becoming overgrown with weeds. Why would the US reverse this process which it believes to be in its own best interest?

Remaining to do;

Iran

Israel

Asia

China’s blockade of Taiwan.

First Harvard bans men from buildings to comply to Sharia law. Now Berkeley. The university that harasses US military recruiters on campus for their “don’t ask don’t tell policy” towards homosexuals is cutting a deal with a university in Saudi Arabia where the punishment for sodomy is the death penalty.

The University of California at Berkeley is set to receive $28 million and Stanford University $25 million under the five-year agreements with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a graduate research university on the Red Sea expected to open in fall 2009 with a multi-billion dollar endowment.
...
A report from Berkeley’s Academic Senate addresses a number of questions along those lines posed by the Senate Task Force on University-Industry Partnerships. Pisano provided written answers, for instance, to questions on the commitment to coeducation at KAUST and the applicability of Saudi laws restricting sexual orientation. In Saudi Arabia, sodomy is punishable by death. In October, two men convicted of it were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, according to Australia’s Herald Sun. Berkeley’s Academic Senate report, however, states that “Saudi laws related to sexual orientation and practice will not be applied at KAUST.”

Well that’s a relief. At least on campus gays won’t have to worry about being beaten to death by the Saudi religious police, the Mutaween.

Of course, once off campus all bets are off.

While women within the KAUST compound will have the opportunity to work and live their lives as they would in the West, once they leave the KAUST compound and residential area, they will be governed by current Saudi laws, which, for example, prohibit women from driving.

Those behind the deal have engaged in some serious cognitive dissonance to justify the abandonment of their ideals. Jean-Claude Latombe, the Kumagai Professor in the School of Engineering who helped negotiate the agreement stated, “When I was in Saudi Arabia a month ago, I read in a Saudi newspaper in English that it will probably be hard to forbid women to drive for much longer.” No word on when the death penalty for being gay will be overturned though.

It’s nice seeing that even the most devout Lefties are willing to sell out their beliefs for cold hard cash. I’d say that they had sold their souls, but since Lefties don’t believe in religion (at least the non-Islamic variety), they don’t have any.

Maureen Faulkner has written a book about her life after Mumia shot her husband Office William Faulkner to death. It’s excerpted in today’s Philly Inquirer. The following explains why she believes that Mumia deserves death.

I explained that I was wise enough to know that in our legal system, LWOP is not what it seems. I explained to the reporters that unless Jamal is executed, my family and I will have to live every day of the rest of our lives knowing that a future governor could set Abu-Jamal free with the stroke of a pen, and that I had no doubt that Abu-Jamal’s misguided and uninformed supporters and friends would relentlessly lie about the facts to future generations in order to perpetuate the myth that Abu-Jamal is a victim of a racist justice system, then demand his release.

I appreciate irony, that sense of bitterness one gets when a fantasy is shredded by truth.

Caprice Hollins, the Seattle School District’s director of Equity, Race & Learning Support – an Orwellian title if there ever was one – sent out a directive warning district officials that Thanksgiving was a time of mourning for native Americans – without actually consulting native Americans.

Native Americans in the Northwest celebrate the holiday with turkey and salmon, said Daryl Williams of the Tulalip Tribes. Before the period of bitter and violent relationships between natives and their culturally European counterparts, they worked together to survive, he said.

“The spirit of Thanksgiving, of people working together to help each other, is the spirit I think that needs to grow in this country, because this country has gotten very divisive,” he said.

Of course Hollins and those like her know better. After all, they’ve studied dedicated their careers to learning what should minorities should think and be offended by.

One wonders how much time Hollins has spent among the people she wants to protect. At least the British and French lived in the places they ruled during their empires.

One of my posters on my thread about gerbil care pointed this out to me tonight.
Unfortunately I’ve been following the destruction of Zimbabwe for years through the increasingly erratic and kleptocratic rule of Robert Mugabe.

One one of my all-time favorite bloggers is Zach Barbera. Zach blogged frequently about Zimbabwe five years ago. His commentary remains as relevant today as back then, and serves to remind us why Zimbabwe is the way it is – and how the world did nothing.

Dean Esmay lays out current facts about Iraq.

Coalition and Iraqi security force operations against Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) continue. (Rear Adm. Greg Smith, Press Briefing, 11/7/07)

· Over 40 Al Qaeda leaders were killed or captured in October, including:

o Six AQI emirs

o Six cell leaders, including two responsible for the personal security detail for Ayyub al-Masri, the foreign leader of AQI

o 14 foreign terrorist facilitators

o Six logistics and weapons facilitators

o Three truck and car bomb leaders

o Four AQI leaders who worked in the Mosul media or propaganda cell

o Two administrators who worked on false documents and AQI finances

o Two AQI leaders who were involved in senior communications and courier activities

· Recent analysis of documents captured from Abu Muthanna, a foreign terrorist facilitator killed in September, confirms that approximately 90% of the suicide bombers and bombings are perpetuated by foreign terrorists, not by Iraqis.

· View MNF-I Slides

As security improves, the U.S. is working with Iraqis to improve basic services and economic opportunities. (Rear Adm. Greg Smith, Press Briefing, 11/7/07)

· On October 30, coalition forces, working with the Qadr neighborhood advisory council, distributed micro-grants to 29 small business owners in Jamaya, located in western Baghdad.

o The recipients received between $2,000 and $2,500 in grants to help renovate businesses, buy inventory and office supplies, hire workers, and pay for other business-related expenses.

· Coalition forces have invested over $2.6 million in micro-grants to Iraqi businesses so far this year.

Economic progress continues on the ground throughout Iraq. (Information compiled by U.S. Department of the Treasury)

· The number of registered businesses in Iraq has increased 500% post-Saddam, from 8,000 to 40,997.

o In 2007, registered businesses have increased 9.1%.

· Cellular phone subscribers have increased from almost none to 8 million post-Saddam, representing almost one-third of the Iraqi population.

· In August, three mobile telecom licenses were auctioned for $3.75 billion.

· There are now approximately 260,000 internet subscribers in Iraq, compared to an estimated 4,500 pre-war.

· The Iraqi Stock Exchange Index is up 41% year to date, with 94 companies listed and 30 actively traded.

Provincial Reconstruction Team reports on reconciliation. Reconciliation movement evident in northern and western outskirts of Baghdad. (Mr. Thomas Burke and COL Paul Funk, State Dept. Briefing, 11/13/07)

· Over a period of several months, reconciliation has gathered momentum through U.S. military and civilian efforts engaging key sheiks in a dialogue towards establishing a secure future.

· Initial reconciliation meetings in the area consisted of only a dozen sheiks. Subsequent meetings have grown to involve hundreds of tribal elders and village businessmen.

· Because of the dramatic change in the area’s security, the PRT team is able to work with businessmen and community leaders to begin the real work towards reconstruction and development.

It must drive some people nuts. In fact I know it does because I receive all kinds of ramblings and rantings from them everyday… Which I delete without reading. Poor crazy bastards. I suppose it’s tough getting your meds adjusted when you live under socialized medicine and have to wait 6 months just to see your GP.

Looks like the U of D has backed down with their Orwellian experiment in student housing:

Upon the recommendation of Vice President for Student Life Michael Gilbert and Director of Residence Life Kathleen Kerr, I have directed that the program be stopped immediately. No further activities under the current framework will be conducted.

It’s pretty sad when alumni – who often are parents – have to keep an eye on their alma mater to make sure it’s behaving itself.

November 2, 2007 UPDATE:
The local newspaper FINALLY picked the story up today.

University of Delaware President Patrick Harker pulled the plug on the school’s residence life educational program Thursday after the program was blasted publicly by students, parents and a civil liberties group that questioned the purpose of the program and the methods it used.

Nothing like hearing about local issues in the national news first. Nice job, guys.

Natan Sharansky says what I want to say sooo much better.
Source Link to Washington Post editorial.

THE CASE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Leave Iraq and Brace for a Bigger Bloodbath

By Natan Sharansky
Sunday, July 8, 2007; Page B03

Iraqis call Ali Hassan al-Majeed “Chemical Ali,” and few wept when the notorious former general received five death sentences last month for ordering the use of nerve agents against his government’s Kurdish citizens in the late 1980s. His trial came as a reckoning and a reminder—summoning up the horrors of Saddam Hussein’s rule even as it underscored the way today’s heated Iraq debates in Washington have left the key issue of human rights on the sidelines. People of goodwill can certainly disagree over how to handle Iraq, but human rights should be part of any responsible calculus. Unfortunately, some leaders continue to play down the gross violations in Iraq under Hussein’s republic of fear and ignore the potential for a human rights catastrophe should the United States withdraw.

As the hideous violence in Iraq continues, it has become increasingly common to hear people argue that the world was better off with Hussein in power and (even more remarkably) that Iraqis were better off under his fist. In his final interview as U.N. secretary general, Kofi Annan acknowledged that Iraq “had a dictator who was brutal” but said that Iraqis under the Baathist dictatorship “had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school.”

This line of argument began soon after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. By early 2004, some prominent political and intellectual leaders were arguing that women’s rights, gay rights, health care and much else had suffered in post-Hussein Iraq.

Following in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, Walter Duranty and other Western liberals who served as willing dupes for Joseph Stalin, some members of the human rights community are whitewashing totalitarianism. A textbook example came last year from John Pace, who recently left his post as U.N. human rights chief in Iraq. “Under Saddam,” he said, according to the Associated Press, “if you agreed to forgo your basic freedom of expression and thought, you were physically more or less OK.”

The truth is that in totalitarian regimes, there are no human rights. Period. The media do not criticize the government. Parliaments do not check executive power. Courts do not uphold due process. And human rights groups don’t file reports.

For most people, life under totalitarianism is slavery with no possibility of escape. That is why despite the carnage in Iraq, Iraqis are consistently less pessimistic about the present and more optimistic about the future of their country than Americans are. In a face-to-face national poll of 5,019 people conducted this spring by Opinion Research Business, a British market-research firm, only 27 percent of Iraqis said they believed that “that their country is actually in a state of civil war,” and by nearly 2 to 1 (49 percent to 26 percent), the Iraqis surveyed said they preferred life under their new government to life under the old tyranny. That is why, at a time when many Americans are abandoning the vision of a democratic Iraq, most Iraqis still cling to the hope of a better future. They know that under Hussein, there was no hope.

By consistently ignoring the fundamental moral divide that separates societies in which people are slaves from societies in which people are free, some human rights groups undermine the very cause they claim to champion. Consider one 2005 Amnesty International report on Iraq. It notes that in the lawless climate of the first months after Hussein’s overthrow, reports of kidnappings, rapes and killings of women and girls by criminal gangs rose. Iraqi officers at a police station in Baghdad said in June 2003 that the number of reported rapes “was substantially higher than before the war.”

The implication was that human rights may not really be improving in post-Hussein Iraq. But the organization ignored the possibility that reports of rape at police stations may have increased for the simple reason that under Hussein it was the regime—which includes the police—that was doing the raping. When Hussein’s son Uday went on his legendary raping sprees, victims were not about to report the crime.

Of course, Hussein’s removal has created a host of difficult strategic challenges, and numerous human rights atrocities have been committed since his ouster. But let us be under no illusion of what life under Hussein was like. He was a mass murderer who tortured children in front of their parents, gassed Kurds, slaughtered Shiites, started two wars with his neighbors and launched Scud missiles into downtown Riyadh and Tel Aviv. The price for the stability that Hussein supposedly brought to the region was mass graves, hundreds of thousands of dead in Iraq, and terrorism and war outside it. Difficult as the challenges are today—with Iran and Syria trying to stymie democracy in Iraq, with al-Qaeda turning Iraq into the central battleground in its holy war of terrorism against the free world, and with sectarian militias bent on murder and mayhem—there is still hope that tomorrow may be better.

No one can know for sure whether President Bush’s “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq will succeed. But those who believe that human rights should play a central role in international affairs should be doing everything in their power to maximize the chances that it will. For one of the consequences of failure could well be catastrophe.

A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces could lead to a bloodbath that would make the current carnage pale by comparison. Without U.S. troops in place to quell some of the violence, Iranian-backed Shiite militias would dramatically increase their attacks on Sunnis; Sunni militias, backed by the Saudis or others, would retaliate in kind, drawing more and more of Iraq into a vicious cycle of violence. If Iraq descended into full-blown civil war, the chaos could trigger similar clashes throughout the region as Sunni-Shiite tensions spill across Iraq’s borders. The death toll and the displacement of civilians could climb exponentially.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the political debate over Iraq is that many of Bush’s critics, who accused his administration of going blindly to war without considering what would happen once Hussein’s regime was toppled, now blindly support a policy of withdrawing from Iraq without considering what might follow.

In this respect, the debate over Iraq is beginning to look a lot like the debate about the Vietnam War in the 1960s and ‘70s. Then, too, the argument in the United States focused primarily on whether U.S. forces should pull out. But many who supported that withdrawal in the name of human rights did not foresee the calamity that followed, which included genocide in Cambodia, tens of thousands slaughtered in Vietnam by the North Vietnamese and the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of “boat people.”

In the final analysis, U.S. leaders will pursue a course in Iraq that they believe best serves U.S. interests. My hope is that as they do, they will make the human rights dimension a central part of any decision. The consequences of not doing so might prove catastrophic to Iraqis, to regional peace and, ultimately, to U.S. security.

Natan.ISS@shalem.org.il

Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who was imprisoned for nine years in the gulag, is chairman of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies in Jerusalem.