RUTHFULLY YOURS

What should senior officers do if experience tells them that the president’s plan to defeat ISIS is unworkable without U.S. combat troops?

In President Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, he reiterated his vow not to involve U.S. combat troops in the fight against Islamic State jihadists. He would avoid “the mistake of simply sending U.S. troops back” into Iraq, Mr. Obama said, noting that “there’s a difference between them advising and assisting Iraqis who are fighting versus a situation in which we got our Marines and our soldiers out there taking shots and shooting back.”

Yet many Americans are skeptical, judging by the new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll showing that 72% of registered voters believe that U.S. troops will eventually be deployed. Perhaps Americans have been listening to some of the president’s senior military advisers and several retired senior officers and have decided that their expert opinions sound more realistic.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 16 that if necessary he would recommend that the president order U.S. military advisers to “accompany Iraq troops on attacks” against Islamic State, also known as ISIS. A day later Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said that “you’ve got to have ground forces that are capable of going in and rooting [ISIS] out.” Gen. Odierno did not specify that the ground forces needed to be American, but he said an air campaign alone cannot defeat the jihadists occupying large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Retired senior officers speak with greater candor. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former commander of the U.S. Central Command, told the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 that it would be a mistake to rule out U.S. ground forces against ISIS. A couple of days earlier, retired Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who commanded coalition forces in Afghanistan, said in a TV interview that ground troops will be needed to defeat ISIS. If the jihadists’ threat “is as serious as some people say,” the general asked, “then why aren’t we applying all elements of American power to it?”

President Obama rode to the White House in part by assailing George W. Bush for believing faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. So there is no small irony in his claim now that America’s spooks missed the rise of the Islamic State. The difference is that U.S. intelligence did warn about the threat from ISIS. Mr. Obama chose not to listen.

Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday if ISIS’s march into Iraq was a “complete surprise,” Mr. Obama replied, “Well I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Mr. Clapper is the presidential appointee who coordinates U.S. intelligence messaging. Perhaps he does think his agencies misjudged ISIS. But we doubt he missed the Feb. 11, 2014 Senate testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time:

“Al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (IS1L): AQI/ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

That was five months before the fall of Mosul and a couple of months after Mr. Obama had compared ISIS and various al Qaeda offshoots to the junior varsity.

If Mr. Obama didn’t want to believe DIA, he could always have bought this newspaper. On Jan. 6 this year we wrote that “Syria’s contagion is also spilling into Iraq with the revival of al Qaeda in neighboring Anbar province. . . . Much of eastern Syria is now controlled by the al-Nusrah front or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and they move with ease back and forth into Iraq. Men flying the flag of al Qaeda took over large parts of Ramadi and Fallujah last week, ousting the Iraq army.”

This required no great prescience or deep sourcing. It was apparent to anyone paying attention to Middle Eastern events, or at least to anyone who was open to hearing news that conflicted with Mr. Obama’s mantra that “the tide of war is receding” and that al Qaeda had been defeated.

HONG KONG—The mood at pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong shifted Tuesday as a festival-like atmosphere overnight gave way to one of apprehension ahead of a Wednesday holiday that celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Despite a light police presence at the protest sites that have sprung up around the city since Friday, some protesters braced themselves Tuesday for the prospect of attempts to break up the crowds.

“Tonight will be critical,” said Joanne Chung, a 24-year-old management trainee at a bank who joined the protests. “Everybody should be alert.”

York Lei, a 21-year-old university student, said he expected the police to attempt to clear the sites Tuesday night. “Many mainlanders will be here,” he said, referring to the many tourists from China who visit Hong Kong to sightsee and shop during the weeklong National Day holiday.

Tam Kam Yuk, a 67-year-old grandmother, said she came out to the protests Tuesday specifically to support the students ahead of the holiday. “This is my first time out,” she said.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s remarks Tuesday morning did little to narrow the gulf between the government and the protesters. He reiterated that the protests were illegal and said they wouldn’t change Beijing’s decision, made Aug. 31, to effectively prescreen candidates for the election of Hong Kong’s top leader—the issue at the root of the protests.

Beijing’s ruling demonstrated that “the Chinese government won’t give in to threats asserted through illegal activity,” Mr. Leung said, in his first media briefing since Sunday’s police crackdown.

Protest organizers have called for Mr. Leung to step down, holding him responsible for failing to take residents’ wishes for free elections into account and for authorizing the use of tear gas against protesters Sunday night.

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science”.

Science, the magic of the secular age, is their church. But science isn’t anyone’s church. Science is much better at disproving things than at proving them. It’s a useful tool for skeptics, but a dangerous tool for rulers. Like art, science is inherently subversive and like art, when it’s restricted and controlled, it stops being interesting.

It’s a fortunate thing that Bill O’Reilly’s latest book, “Killing Patton,” was written by him and not someone else. If not, O’Reilly would have taken the poor person apart, criticizing the book for its chaotic structure, its considerable padding and its repellent admiration of a war-loving martinet who fought the Nazis and really never understood why. George S. Patton stood almost shoulder to shoulder with them in his anti-Semitism — not that O’Reilly seems to have noticed or, for that matter, mentioned it in his book.

It is, of course, permissible to admire Patton for his generalship and astonishing bravery. It is even possible to give him a pass for some of the foolish things he said that were repeatedly getting him into trouble and finally caused Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to effectively sack him. Even Patton’s likening some Nazis to Republican or Democratic apparatchiks, while tasteless and heroically impolitic, had an explicable context: Plenty of people became Nazis for career, rather than ideological, reasons.
Patton’s anti-Semitism is a different matter. As far as I know, he never made his views public, but he was repulsively candid in letters home to his wife, Beatrice, and in diary entries. What’s more, he acted on those views. It was Patton’s job after the defeat of Germany to run the displaced-persons (DP) camps in southern Germany, where he was commanding officer. In the view of some, including an outraged President Harry S. Truman, he treated these Holocaust survivors little better than the Nazis did.

In a letter to Eisenhower, Truman quoted from a report on conditions in the DP camps. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”

The “military guard” that Truman mentioned was Patton’s idea. He had his reasons, Patton wrote in his diary: “If they [the Jewish DPs] were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camps, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged.” At least twice in his diary, Patton referred to the Jewish DPs as “animals.”

Remember the “Mission Accomplished” speech?

You know, the one where the president declared the war in Iraq over, only to have to eat his words as he sent the U.S. military to fight terrorists in Iraq who were taking over vast swaths of the country?

No, I’m not talking about President George W. Bush’s May 1, 2003, speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. I’m talking about President Obama’s speech at the White House on Oct. 21, 2011, in which he boasted about his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and bring “the long war in Iraq” to an end. It’s still on the White House Web site under the (now ironic) headline “Remarks by the President on Ending the War in Iraq.”

“As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama solemnly declared, “[And] today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.”

“The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops,” the president continued, adding “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

“I, however, beg to differ.Words are extremely important. And Netanyahu’s reiteration of certain truths that are under global assault is more crucial than ever, especially with a hostile administration in the White House and difficult opposition at home.But it is because words matter that I have to take issue with the last part of his tour de force on Monday. Concluding that the only way to achieve peace with the Palestinians is to create regional cooperation with the Arab world and international community, Netanyahu asserted that he is “ready to make a historic compromise” in the form of territorial withdrawals.Though he said that this is not because Israel is an occupier in its own land, and added that any peace deal would have to be “anchored in mutual recognition and enduring security arrangements,” he actually repeated that any peace agreement “will obviously necessitate a territorial compromise.”

Announcements like that, particularly in the context of an increasingly radicalizing Middle East and Europe, only serve to embolden the worst elements of Palestinian society. Offering “land for peace” is the best way to convey to Israel’s enemies that they should continue clinging to what Netanyahu himself called the “branches of the same poisonous tree” from which Hamas and ISIS cultivate their “fanatical creed.”He, like all Israelis, ought to know this by now.”

…….As he set off for New York to address the 69th U.N. General Assembly on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he would be delivering a “razor-sharp” speech. Given his oratorical track record, there was little doubt that he would make good on his promise.

He did not disappoint.

Indeed, the Israeli leader’s 35-minute monologue from the podium of the hornet’s nest in midtown Manhattan was a masterpiece. And it took a great performer to be able to pull it off, particularly since the plenum was nearly empty, and the only people present cheering him on were members of his entourage and some of his Jewish-American supporters in the balcony.

But Netanyahu is a pro, and he knows how to talk into a camera, with his sights on a far wider audience.

What he did on Monday, with a mixture of resolve and elegance, was to use the consensus about combating the Islamic State terrorists to warn against militant Islam in all its permutations, emphasizing the danger of a nuclear Iran — the original and ultimate “Islamic State.”

He began by likening militant Islam to a cancer that “starts out small … but left unchecked … grows, metastasizing over wider and wider areas.”

When they’re taken as the literal and eternal truth, words can lead to beheadings.

Hindsight is, as they say, 20/20, but even before he beheaded one co-worker at a food-distribution center in central Oklahoma last week, then began stabbing another, presumably someone had considered that Alton Nolen was . . . off.

Nolen — whose attack last Thursday at the workplace of his ex-employer, Vaughan Foods, seemed more suited to Mosul, Iraq, than Moore, Okla. — was not your garden-variety felon recently out of prison. Following his conversion to Islam while in prison, he was a fiery Facebook presence, writing under his Muslim name, Jah’Keem Yisrael. Sample prose:

SHALOM ALHAKEIUM (O YE MUSLIMS) ALLAH (sWT) SAYS IN THE LAST DAYS “PEOPLE WILL BE LOVERS OF THEMSELVES, PROUD AND UNHOLY”. SO TO ALL OF U THAT’S MASTURBATING WHICH I THINK IS 80% OF THE WORLD AND FOR WHATEVER THE DESIRE IT IS IN YOUR HEART THAT U DOING IT FOR-U CAN GET! (WARNING) THIS IS THE LAST DAYS . . . 2ND TIMOTHY 3:2 ****InfoFromAMuslim****

There’s much more of that, supplemented by arguments about the finer points of Muslim doctrine in the comments. For Islamic Facebook evangelism, Nolen is, in part, what one might expect: He prophesies coming judgment; he declares that Sharia will sweep over the world; he castigates women of loose morals. But Nolen also takes the opportunity to declare that hunting and paying taxes are sinful, to rail against paper money, and to warn about the Illuminati. His posts are regularly accompanied by cartoon graphics — clipart, screenshots from Aladdin, the Star of David outlined against the all-seeing eye. He also posts photographs — of the Twin Towers burning and Islamic militants holding grenade launchers, but also of Katie Holmes (in garb that is decidedly haraam).

Better advice would be to channel Ronald Reagan…George Bush was a decent, likeable, patriotic President…but like Obama he babbled about “the religion of peace” hijacked by a few meanies and failed to understand the existential threat of Islam, the evil ambitions of Putin, the dangers of a nuclear Iran ruled by a mad man, and a nuclear North Korea also run by a mad man…..the calamity resulting from the Gaza
withdrawal, and the duplicity of the Saudis whose robed thug he invited to “broker” an Israeli/Arab “peace process” only three months after 9/11….rsk
Talk to your predecessor. It will show contrition, humility and real bipartisanship—things you could use to salvage your presidency.

Bill Clinton made news earlier this month when he revealed, at a joint appearance with George W. Bush, that the 43rd president used to call him twice a year during his troubled second term “just to talk.”

“We talked about everything in the right world,” Mr. Clinton said of the conversations, which lasted anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes. “He asked my opinion, half the time he disagreed with it. But I felt good about that, I thought that was a really healthy thing.”

Maybe President Obama also calls Mr. Bush every now and then, just to talk, and one day we’ll find out about it. But I suspect not. No president has so completely built his administration with a view toward doing—and being—the opposite of his predecessor. Long private talks wouldn’t just be out of character for this president. They’d be awkward.

But having a long conversation with Mr. Bush is what Mr. Obama needs to do if he means to start salvaging his failing presidency. It would be an act of contrition: for six years of vulgar ridicule and sophomoric condescension. Also, humility: for finally understanding that the intel is often wrong (and that doesn’t make you a “liar”), that the choices in war are never clear or simple, that the allies aren’t always with you, and that evil succumbs only to force.

And it would be an act of bipartisanship: not the fake kind to which the president pays occasional lip service, but the kind that knows there is no party monopoly on wisdom, and that there is no democracy without compromise, and that there can be no compromise when your opponents sense you hold them in contempt.

“Mr. President,” Mr. Obama could begin, with an emphasis on formality, “I’d like to borrow that portrait you did of Vladimir Putin so I can hang it in my private study. I need to be able to stare my enemy in the face every day.”

That should break the ice.

So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.

The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.

So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.

PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.

Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.

As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”

As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.

For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.

Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.