RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Most significantly, Gibbon’s core thesis has long been controversial, to wit, that Rome ultimately fell through internal weakness and loss of civic virtue, owing in no small part to Christianity. This failure of the ruling class and its sclerotic governing mechanism allowed barbarian tribes to overrun Rome’s borders. Many authors now consider it definitively disproved, and there are many other more plausible explanations for the empire’s decline: from internal political fighting to the change in the nature of the army. Two and a half centuries after Gibbon, historians are still fighting over the causes, and two of the best recent books on the subject are Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization and Adrian Goldsworthy’s How Rome Fell: Death of a Superpower.”

The greatest historian still has much to teach us about the empire-ending consequences of internal decay.

Rome — I am sitting on the steps of the Capitoline Hill, as close as I can approximate the spot where, exactly 250 years ago today, on October 15, 1764, the 27-year old Edward Gibbon was struck by the muses, leading to perhaps the greatest work of historical scholarship in the English language.

Though the anecdote in his biography recalling the moment has been called into question, it is both sufficiently famous and sufficiently inspiring to anyone with a historical bent to warrant retelling. Gibbon’s recollects the moment:

It was at Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.

That history would consume much of the rest of his life. The first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was published in 1776, became an immediate best seller, and vaulted its author into the most exclusive ranks of British letters. The final volume appeared in 1788, and the sixth edition of the first volume appeared in 1789, just five years before Gibbon’s death. There remains a historical poignancy that Decline and Fall first appeared the same year that the American Declaration of Independence was expressing perhaps the loftiest sentiments of Enlightenment political philosophy, while its last installment came on the heels of the French Revolution, which guillotined the hopes of liberalism.

Much of Gibbon’s work has been superseded by subsequent discoveries, though its sweep and grandeur have never been surpassed. Only half of his work, that dealing with the Western Roman Empire, is any longer read and known, and his dismissal of the Eastern (Byzantine) half of the empire no longer stands up to historical scrutiny.

Anti-American educational elites need a dose of reality.

Goddard College’s recent decision to have its students addressed from prison by a convicted cop killer is just one of many unbelievably irresponsible self-indulgences by “educators” in our schools and colleges.

Such “educators” teach minorities born with an incredibly valuable windfall gain — American citizenship — that they are victims who have a grievance against people today who have done nothing to them, because of what other people did in other times. If those individuals who feel aggrieved could sell their American citizenship to eager buyers from around the world and leave, everybody would probably be better off. Those who leave would get not only a substantial sum of money — probably $100,000 or more — they would also get a valuable dose of reality elsewhere.

Nothing is easier than to prove that America, or any other society of human beings, is far from being the perfect gem that any of us can conjure up in our imagination. But, when you look around the world today or look back through history, you can get a very painfully sobering sense of what a challenge it can be in the real world to maintain even common decency among human beings.

Living just one year in the Middle East would be an education in reality that could obliterate years of indoctrination in grievances that passes for education in too many of our schools, colleges, and universities. You could go on to get a postgraduate education in reality in some place like North Korea.

If you prefer to get your education in the comfort of a library, rather than in person amid the horrors, you might study the history of the sadistic massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire or the heart-wrenching story of Stalin’s man-made 1930s famine in the Soviet Union that killed as many millions of people as Hitler’s Holocaust did in the 1940s.

The Democrats’ “war on women” strategy has always been frivolous and intellectually dishonest, and it is now being revealed as ineffective, too.

Let us call the roll: Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state hoping to oust Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is trailing in the polls in spite of being a cause célèbre for the Hollywood Left — Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Katzenberg have lavished Manhattan and Beverly Hills money upon her race — even after having engaged in such questionable shenanigans as attempting to portray Senator McConnell, an original cosponsor of the Violence Against Women Act, as an opponent of the law. In New Hampshire, where incumbent senator Jeanne Shaheen leads Republican challenger Scott Brown by a hair, Democrats have been reduced to braying that Brown is a sexist because he keeps running against female opponents, as though he had somehow ensured that Elizabeth Warren secured the Democratic nomination in his lost 2012 Massachusetts race. Colorado’s Senator Mark Udall, not content to let the ladies enjoy all the ill-gotten benefits of the so-called war on women, has deployed similar measures against his Republican challenger, Representative Cory Gardner, but is trailing in the polls and just witnessed the Denver Post, no Republican stronghold, endorsing his opponent. In Texas, Wendy Davis’s increasingly distasteful abortion-based hate parade is making the wheelchair from which Republican Greg Abbott performs his public duties the central image of its attack ads, and Davis is at the moment positioned to suffer a resounding rejection.

Including counseling and TV programming “with themes that reject violent extremism”; U.S. ambassador says it’s “hard to believe” terrorists “motivated by religion.”

WASHINGTON — Six months after Boko Haram terrorists seized more than 200 girls from the Chibok Government Secondary School, the Nigerian government is claiming it’s still trying to bring them home and the White House says it’s still helping the effort.

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag campaign saw its 15 minutes of prominence [1] in Washington circles, with a few dedicated lawmakers continuing the effort [2]. The al-Qaeda affiliate briefly became a household term yet has since slinked to the back-burner and continued its rampage [3] across Nigeria outside of the mainstream news cycle. At least seven of the girls’ parents have since been killed [4] in Boko Haram attacks and the terrorists, better equipped than ever, have been on a steady march through Borno state to claim more territory for the caliphate.

They’ve seeped into Cameroon, kidnapping the wife of Vice Prime Minister Amadou Ali. Sahara Reporters revealed [5] this weekend that Boko Haram got four of its commanders released from prison in exchange for her return and the release of other hostages, along with at least $400,000 and a nice cache of arms and ammunition.

Last week, Nigeria’s defense chief criticized [6] the U.S. for not helping the counterterrorism efforts in the region while publicly focusing on ISIS.

“Boko Haram is not different with ISIS in Iraq and Syria, in fact our own people are more vicious, but everybody has gone to Syria, to go and bomb!” Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh said. ”Who has come to your aid? You have just been left alone to do it.”

U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria James Entwistle fired back that the two countries have a “strong military relationship,” adding “the idea that U.S. doesn’t support Nigeria is not true.”

Numerous publications close to the White House have reported that Labor Secretary Tom Perez has emerged as the leading candidate to replace Attorney General Eric Holder. That Perez has a documented and repeating history of dishonesty, racialism, and radicalism shows that this administration feels unrestrained by conventional political wisdom. That the White House is dropping his name before an election should demonstrate to every Republican that Obama is fundamentally transforming politics in corrosive ways that the GOP seems ill-equipped to contain.

So who is Tom Perez?

Perez ran for Maryland attorney general in 2006. But his campaign ended when he was thrown off the ballot for the embarrassing reason that he didn’t practice law.

To Democrats, Perez is the charming, articulate, and politically savvy secretary of Labor. He is the president’s point man on Hispanic and labor issues. But to anyone objective who has paid close attention, Perez is a menace to the rule of law in ways that make Eric Holder seem like a kitty cat.

Much of Holder’s dirty work over the last six years was done by Tom Perez.

Perez has a record of duplicity and dishonesty, sometimes even under oath. As assistant attorney general for civil rights under Holder, Perez famously set up a parallel email system so he could conduct his most controversial business using email accounts unreachable by federal law, or even by a Justice Department inspector general. On these private email accounts, he conducted some of his dirtiest dealings, like shaking down St. Paul, Minnesota, to ensure that the Supreme Court wouldn’t get to hear an appeal that might invalidate some of the prized racial set-asides this administration cherishes.

But his dealings with St. Paul were small potatoes compared to everything else he has done.

Perez testified falsely under oath to the United States Commission on Civil Rights — and it isn’t just me who says so. I am frequently introduced in radio or television interviews as having “resigned over the Department of Justice’s handling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.” That isn’t accurate: I was at the Justice Department for over a full year after that case was dismissed.

I resigned on the day that Tom Perez provided false testimony about the case.

Coming soon after Sweden’s recognition of a non-existent state of Palestine, the British Parliament’s 274-to-12 resolution to recognize “Palestine” flags a sea-change in European sentiment towards Israel. France is thinking of following suit. The European Community bureaucracy, meanwhile, has readied sanctions against Israel. One remonstrates in vain. The Gaza War should have taught the world that Israel cannot cede territory to Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 7th year of a 4-year term. Hamas has the support of 55% of West Bank Palestinians vs. just 38% for Abbas, and Hamas openly brags that it could destroy Israel more easily from firing positions in the West Bank. Only the Israeli military keeps Abbas in power; without the Israelis Hamas would displace Abbas in the West Bank as easily as it did in Gaza; and a Hamas government in the West Bank would make war on Israel, with horrifying consequences.

To propose immediate Palestinian statehood under these circumstances is psychotic, to call the matter by its right name. The Europeans, along with the United Nations and the Obama administration on most working days, refuse to take reality into account. When someone tells you that Martians are transmitting radio waves into his brain, or that Elvis Presley really is the pope rather than an Argentine Jesuit, one doesn’t enquire into the merits of the argument. Rather, one considers the cause of the insanity.

The Europeans hate Israel with the passion of derangement. Why? Well, one might argue that the Europeans always have hated Jews; they were sorry they hated Jews for a while after the Holocaust, but they have gotten over that and hate us again. Some analysts used to cite Arab commercial influence in European capitals, but today Egypt and implicitly Saudi Arabia are closer to Jerusalem’s point of view than Ramallah’s. Large Muslim populations in Europe constitute a pressure group for anti-Israel policies, but that does not explain the utter incapacity of the European elite to absorb the most elementary facts of the situation.

Europe’s derangement has deeper roots. Post-nationalist Europeans, to be sure, distrust and despise all forms of nationalism. But Israeli nationalism does not offend Europe merely because it is one more kind of nationalism. From its founding, Europe has been haunted by the idea of Israel. Its first states emerged as an attempt to appropriate the election of Israel. As I wrote in my 2011 book How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too):

The unquiet urge of each nation to be chosen in its own skin began with the first conversion of Europe’s pagans; it was embedded in European Christendom at its founding. Christian chroniclers cast the newly-baptized European monarchs in the role of biblical kings, and their nations in the role of the biblical Israel. The first claims to national election came at the crest of the early Dark Ages, from the sixth-century chronicler St Gregory of Tours (538-594), and the seventh-century Iberian churchman St Isidore of Seville.

Reports that ISIS has surrounded Baghdad and is quickly closing in on the Baghdad International Airport (armed with MANPADS, no less) are troubling. Baghdad itself has been rocked by a series of VBIED attacks in the past 24 hours by ISIS, indicating that the battle for Baghdad has begun.

The possible fall of Baghdad could be the most significant development in the War on Terror since 9/11. And yet many among the D.C. foreign policy “smart set” were not long ago mocking such a scenario.

So what happens if such a situation comes to pass? Here are five key implications (by no means limited to these) if Baghdad falls to ISIS:

1) ISIS will not be claiming to the be the Islamic State, they will BE the Islamic State

Symbolism doesn’t matter much to your average post-modern Westerner, but it still does in the Islamic world, and the capture of Baghdad will hold enormous value. For 500 years Baghdad was the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, and its fall to ISIS would allow the terrorist group to reclaim that mantle. Such an event will electrify the Middle East and beyond, with many Muslims holding firmly to the belief that the abolition of the Ottoman caliphate in 1924 by Ataturk was one of the key contributing factors in the decline of the Muslim world over the past century. No amount of State Department hashtags or tweets, or pronouncements by Sheikh Barack Obama and Imam John Kerry that there is nothing Islamic about the Islamic State, will be able to negate any claims by ISIS to be the revived caliphate.

2) The Great Reconciliation between jihadist groups will begin

Much of the Obama administration’s anti-ISIS efforts have been trying to leverage other “vetted moderate” groups in Syria against ISIS, with some “smart set” thinkers even advocating engaging “moderate Al-Qaeda” to that end. We are already seeing jihadist groups gravitating towards ISIS, such as the announcement this week by Pakistani Taliban leaders pledging their allegiance to the Islamic State. Other groups of younger jihadis are breaking away from Al-Qaeda franchises in North Africa and defecting to ISIS. Despite bitter rivalries between ISIS and other jihadist groups in Syria, namely Al-Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra, these other groups will be hard-pressed to deny ISIS’ caliphate claims if they do take Baghdad. In that part of the world, nothing succeeds like success. If Baghdad falls, jihadist groups, some of whom have been openly hostile or remained neutral, will quickly align behind ISIS. And the horrid sound coming out of Washington, D.C., will be of foreign policy paradigms imploding.

“We are living in Hamburgistan.” — Daniel Abdin, imam of Hamburg’s Al-Nour Mosque.

One politician has been repeatedly threatened with beheading as the price to pay for leading a fundraising campaign to provide food and water for Kurds in northern Iraq.

“As a society we must ask ourselves: how can it be that people who live in Germany and… born and raised here, are supporters of a brutal, inhuman and fundamentalist group such as the IS and attack peaceful protestors with knives, sticks and machetes. Here in Germany, the IS threatens to become a refuge for frustrated young people….” — Claudia Roth, Vice-President, German Parliament.

“Under no circumstances should [politicians who receive death threats] give in and change their stance, otherwise the extremists will have achieved their objectives.” — Wolfgang Bosbach, CDU official.

Parts of downtown Hamburg, the second-largest city in Germany, resembled a war zone after hundreds of supporters of the jihadist group Islamic State [IS] engaged in bloody street clashes with ethnic Kurds.

The violence—which police say was as ferocious as anything seen in Germany in recent memory—is fuelling a sense of foreboding about the spillover effects of the fighting in Syria and Iraq.

Some analysts believe that rival Muslim groups in Germany are deliberately exploiting the ethnic and religious tensions in the Middle East to stir up trouble on the streets of Europe.

The unrest began on the evening of October 7, when around 400 Kurds gathered outside the Al-Nour mosque near the central train station in Hamburg’s St. George district to protest against IS attacks on the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani.

According to police, the initially peaceful protest turned violent when the Kurds were confronted by a rival group of around 400 Salafists armed with baseball bats, brass knuckles, knives, machetes and metal rods used to hold meat in kebab restaurants.

Senate candidates across the country are now training their fire on President Obama , railing about his failed policies and touting their fierce opposition to his agenda. And those are the Democrats.

The Obama-denial campaign reached new comic heights last week with Kentucky Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes ’s refusal to say if she had voted for Mr. Obama in 2008 or 2012. The Democrat dodged the question again at a Monday debate, insisting she had a “constitutional right” to keep secret whether she voted for the man for whom she served as a delegate at the 2012 Democratic nominating convention. Voters might fairly conclude Ms. Grimes is less worried about the sanctity of the ballot than she is Mr. Obama’s 31% job approval in Kentucky.

Not that this is a new theme for Ms. Grimes, who last month debuted an ad showing her toting a shotgun, declaring she is “no Barack Obama” and explaining she disagrees with the President on “guns, coal and the EPA.” The ad followed one by West Virginia Democratic candidate Natalie Tennant, who in July ran an ad showing her cutting off the electricity to the White House and vowing to “make sure President Obama gets the message” that she supports coal.

More amazing have been Senate Democratic incumbents, who want voters to forget their lock-step support of the President for the last six years. Arkansas Sen. Mark Pryor ’s first ad—which ran last year—highlighted his opposition to Mr. Obama’s gun control agenda. “No one from New York or Washington tells me what to do,” Mr. Pryor declared. He’s voted with Mr. Obama 93% of the time.

Alaska’s Mark Begich is bragging that he “took on Obama” to fight for oil drilling in his state and has mused that he’d love to drag the President to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and “bang him over the head” with the oil subject. He’s gone with the White House 97% of the time.

Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu boasts in an ad that she helped end the Administration’s 2010 moratorium on drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, and in another TV spot claims personal victory in forcing Mr. Obama to let people “keep their health care plans.” People still can’t keep their health plans, and as chair of the energy committee Mrs. Landrieu has passed nothing of note.

The Campaign Against Serbia in 1999 Averaged 138 Strike Sorties Daily. Against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: Seven.

Since U.S. planes first struck targets in Iraq on Aug. 8, a debate has raged over the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s air campaign against Islamic State. The war of words has so far focused on the need to deploy American boots on the ground to provide accurate intelligence and possibly force ISIS fighters to defend key infrastructure they have seized, such as oil facilities. But debate is now beginning to focus on the apparent failure of airstrikes to halt the terror group’s advances in Iraq and Syria—especially Islamic State’s pending seizure of Kobani on the Syrian border with Turkey.

While it is still too early to proclaim the air campaign against Islamic State a failure, it may be instructive to compare it with other campaigns conducted by the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War that were deemed successes. For instance, during the 43-day Desert Storm air campaign against Saddam Hussein’s forces in 1991, coalition fighters and bombers flew 48,224 strike sorties. This translates to roughly 1,100 sorties a day. Twelve years later, the 31-day air campaign that helped free Iraq from Saddam’s government averaged more than 800 offensive sorties a day.

By contrast, over the past two months U.S. aircraft and a small number of partner forces have conducted 412 total strikes in Iraq and Syria—an average of seven strikes a day. With Islamic State in control of an area approaching 50,000 square miles, it is easy to see why this level of effort has not had much impact on its operations.

Of course, air operations during Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom were each supported by a massive coalition force on the ground. Thus it may be more appropriate to compare current operations against Islamic State with the 78-day air campaign against Serbian forces and their proxies in 1999, or the 75-day air campaign in Afghanistan that was instrumental in forcing the Taliban out of power in 2001.