RUTHFULLY YOURS

The unfolding collapse of Iraq’s government before the legions of al Qaeda jihadists is the capstone of Barack Obama’s incompetent and politicized foreign policy. The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), armed with plundered American weapons and flush with stolen money, is consolidating a Sunni terrorist state in eastern Syria and northern Iraq, replete with mass executions, sharia law, and the beheading of violators. With revered Shiite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani calling the Shia faithful to arms, a vicious civil war between Shia and Sunnis will likely intensify in the coming days. But whoever wins, the fallout for our security will be disastrous – a Shiite “crescent” from Aleppo to Mosul allied with Iran, which looks ever more likely to be nuclear armed, and a safe haven for terrorist training camps to prepare “martyrs” for attacks against the West. And our allies Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel all will to various degrees find their own security and interests impacted by this administration’s criminal foreign policy negligence.

Obama deserves the lion’s share of the blame for many reasons. Most important is his failure to secure a status of forces agreement that would have left in Iraq sufficient American firepower to deter both Prime Minister Maliki from indulging his autocratic tendencies and abusing his power to subjugate the rival Sunnis, and the ISIS from attempting to expand its territorial reach through sectarian violence and mayhem. This catastrophic error was the result of Obama’s political narrative that he ended George Bush’s “bad” war in Iraq and brought all of our troops home, a potent campaign slogan in the 2012 presidential election. That sacrifice of America’s security and interests, and betrayal of the soldiers killed and maimed during the Iraq war – just to gratify political necessity and an ideological disbelief in the goodness of American power – will join Congress’s abandonment of Vietnam in 1973 on the roll of American foreign policy dishonor and disaster. Yet there are larger lessons from the debacle in Iraq that transcend one administration’s incompetence.

Democracy’s Foreign Policy Weaknesses

Political freedom depends on the accountability of politicians to the voters whose interests they must serve. Yet as democracy’s critics starting in ancient Athens have pointed out, electoral accountability to the conflicting interests of citizens and factions makes foreign policy difficult. “The structures and habits of democratic states,” Churchill wrote after World War II, “lack those elements of persistence and conviction which can alone give security to the humble masses.” Foreign policy often requires long-range planning and steadfastness that are compromised by two-year election cycles and the eagerness of self-interested partisan politicians to respond to the short-term interests, impatience, anger, or indifference of the citizens. The hardships of war – the loss of life, the expense, the inevitable blunders and unforeseen consequences, and the necessary brutality that define armed conflict –especially try the patience of citizens and politicians to whom military professionals are accountable. Yet giving in to such impatience can be dangerous in the long run. As Tocqueville wrote, “The people are more apt to feel than to reason; and if their present sufferings are great, it is to be feared that the still greater sufferings attendant upon defeat will be forgotten.”

It has been persuasively argued that President Obama is impeachable [1] on many grounds. Having joked that he could do anything he wants, Obama is guilty of running roughshod over the Constitution, bypassing Congress and governing by executive decree, stuffing his administration with Muslim Brotherhood operatives, making common cause with America’s enemies and betraying its allies, promoting the global warming scam at enormous cost to the taxpayer, accepting illicit campaign donations, failing to defend U.S. soil against illegal border crossings (in direct contravention of Article IV, Section 4 [2] of the Constitution), being in contempt of federal court for his oil-drilling moratorium in the Gulf, allowing the IRS to target conservative nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status, approving via his attorney general Operation Fast and Furious, concocting the Benghazi cover-up, and constantly and illegally rewriting the rules of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, at least 29 times to date. A more comprehensive record of Obama’s ethical violations and misdemeanors lists [3] 51 reasons for impeachment, some of which may be comparatively borderline, others flagrant.

Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliot’s recent volume Impeachable Offenses [4] provides a case for the judicial indictment of the president that is as harrowing as it is incontestable. Former New Jersey Superior Court judge Andrew Napolitano has added his authority to the movement for presidential censure, claiming [5] that impeachment is the only way to stop Obama’s unprecedented resort to executive action. In his new book, Faithless Execution [6], PJ Media’s Andrew McCarthy makes a sustained argument for impeachment not simply as a legal resort but as a political remedy for the commission of “high crimes and misdemeanors” — a term, as he explains, that the Framers borrowed from English law. Ben Shapiro goes even further. In his just published The People Vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against the Obama Administration [7], Shapiro lays out the case for Obama’s arraignment on charges of treason.

We are confronted with the dispiriting spectacle of an ectopic presidency cobbling together broken promise after broken promise to advance an agenda that grows more suspect with every passing day. If impeachment proceedings could be started against Bill Clinton for a sordid fling with a White House intern, it stands to reason that Obama should be impeached for a much graver offense, a sordid fling with an entire nation. Such political tumescence should not go unpunished. That impeachment proceedings have not been initiated to date has nothing to do with Obama’s culpability; rather it is testament to the lack of integrity, courage and political will within the American political class, in particular the fear among Republicans of jeopardizing the upcoming congressional elections or of being considered “racist.”

The Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham’s lightning campaign to conquer Iraq has renewed a jihadist drama between Ayman al-Zawahiri, the head of al Qaeda’s central leadership, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the secretive leader of ISIS. During the past year, these two arch-terrorists have been at loggerheads over al-Baghdadi’s refusal to limit his operations to Iraq, leading to intense clashes between Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Zawahiri’s sanctioned al Qaeda branch in Syria, and ISIS.

Many observers have read al-Baghdadi’s successes in Iraq and his defiance of al-Zawahiri as reason to herald a coup within the al Qaeda network. That’s still premature. But unless the international community succeeds in pressuring Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to abandon its Iranian-influenced sectarian tactics, al-Baghdadi could very well take the helm of a reinvigorated global jihadist movement.

For the time being, al-Baghdadi’s impressive gains in Iraq have done little to sway the allegiance of al Qaeda’s key regional branches, which remain broadly loyal to al-Zawahiri. Even after ISIS stormed Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, earlier this month—possibly the greatest jihadist achievement since 9/11—statements of support from prominent jihadists in the region have been few and far between.

Abu Ayad al-Tunisi, the leader of Tunisia’s Ansar al-Shariah network, issued a statement blessing the ISIS gains but stressing the importance of reconciliation between al-Baghdadi and al-Zawahiri. Tunisi’s message is particularly notable as he was previously known for his outspoken support of al-Baghdadi. The pan-Persian Gulf Salafist Ummah movement issued a statement hailing the ISIS gains in Iraq but also calling for unity among jihadist groups. Jaish al-Islam, or Army of Islam, another prominent jihadist group fighting the Shiite-led government in Iraq, refused to mention its partner ISIS by name in its blessing of the current campaign.

Other prominent jihadist leaders—including those of al-Shabaab in East Africa, Ansar al-Shariah in Libya, AQIM and AQAP (al Qaeda franchises in North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, respectively), along with the Taliban networks in Central Asia—have all refrained so far from any outburst of support that for al-Baghdadi’s achievements.

Despite his rapid rise, al-Baghdadi has crossed several red lines, and his peers have reproached him. Zawahiri—even amid mounting criticism of his own poor leadership and lack of initiative following the death of Osama bin Laden —remains widely respected across radical networks as the one and only head of al Qaeda, which itself is perceived as the sole umbrella network of global jihad.

URUMQI, China—The video posted online last month looks much like ones from Middle East jihadist groups. It shows what appears to be a man making a suitcase bomb and grainy footage of an explosion at a crowded train station here. The soundtrack plays an Arabic chant inciting holy war.

But the video isn’t meant to rally followers in Iraq or Syria. Its appeal is to China’s 10 million Uighurs, a largely Muslim ethnic group from this northwestern region of Xinjiang, some of whom have resisted Chinese rule for decades.

The Internet has been a key propaganda tool for Mideast militants. Now, it appears to be helping spread the ideology and tactics of violent jihadism to this remote corner of the Muslim world, poorer parts of which came online only recently.

The video was posted after a knife-and-bomb attack at a train station in Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital—one of a series of assaults in Chinese cities since October that have made unrest emanating from the region the biggest domestic-security issue for China’s leadership.

In the video, a speaker of Uighur (pronounced WEE-gur) congratulates the train-station bombers, declaring: “In this blessed jihadist act, many Chinese migrant aggressors were killed and wounded. As for those remaining, it put terror into their hearts.”

Chinese officials are pointing to an upsurge in Uighur language videos like this and other religious-extremist material online as a key factor behind the recent attacks. China’s censors block most such material, but Chinese officials and some Uighurs say some locals find ways to access it.

China’s government launched a crackdown on terrorist material online on Friday and took the unusual step Tuesday of broadcasting a documentary on state television including jihadist video clips it said were from Xinjiang militants.

The film, jointly produced with Chinese police, said such material had inspired and helped to train the alleged perpetrators of several recent attacks, including an apparent suicide bombing—a tactic rarely used by Uighurs in the past—that killed 43 at an Urumqi market last month.

The narrator of the film said most relevant videos were produced outside China, posted online via countries including Turkey, which has strong cultural links to Xinjiang, and then spread within the region via memory cards, social media and other electronic means.

Substituting one wrong for what is perceived to be another wrong, makes little sense. Requiring New York City’s elite public high schools to use demographics as one standard with which to measure a student’s admissibility is wrong, even it furthers the goal of diversity. It has been pointed out by Mayor Bill de Blasio, the NAACP and others that the students who make up New York City’s nine select public schools do not reflect the demographics of the entire school system; thus they discriminate. It is true; the student populations in these special schools do not look like the demographics of the New York City public schools. But they are not discriminatory, at least not in the sense suggested.

The city of New York has nine selective public schools. It is mandated by state law that students at the three oldest schools – Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Tech – be admitted solely on how well they do on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Five of the other schools require the exam, but also look at other criteria, such as grade point average and extra curricular activities. (The one specialized high school that does not require the exam is the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts.) The exam lasts two hours and 20 minutes and is administered to eighth and ninth grade students. From about 150,000 students in those two grades, between 25,000 and 30,000 take the test. In the fall of 2013, 5,096 were admitted to one of the specialized schools. Given that selective schools educate less than 2% of the student population, they do discriminate.

Stuyvesant High School, which is located on Chambers Street in Manhattan, began life in 1904 as a manual training school for boys. Today it is the most coveted of all the specialized high schools. Of the 3,292 students enrolled in 2013-2014, 73% were Asian, 22% Caucasian, 2% Hispanic and 1% African-American. In contrast, the ethnic make-up of the city’s 1.1 million public school students is: 40% Hispanic, 28% African-American, 20% Caucasian and 15% Asian. In all nine select high schools, only 12% of Hispanics and African-Americans were enrolled, despite representing 68% of all public school students. The schools do discriminate, but they do so based on intellectual ability, not on ethnicity or economic background.

Oh dear, she struggled so to make ends meet- let’s hope she now meets the end—-of her political ambitions….rsk

We haven’t learned much new about Hillary Clinton on her book tour except that she mistakes herself for a version of Norma Rae.

First, during an interview in her well-appointed Washington, D.C., home with ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, she said she and Bill left the White House “dead broke,” although they always made better potential subjects for Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous than for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Next, in an interview with the Guardian, she seemed to suggest that she and Bill aren’t among the “truly well off,” and said that no one could possibly resent their wealth since they earned it “through dint of hard work.”

And so they did — the hard work of building political careers for themselves, and then, when the time came, profiting massively off them. As Hillary put it in her walk-back of the “dead broke” remark, she and Bill had different “phases” in their lives. One phase involved climbing into the White House and incurring stupendous legal bills in fending off various scandals. The other has involved getting showered with money.

Most people can’t understand the nature of the hard work with which the Clintons are constantly building their fortune.

They don’t know what it’s like to write a calculatedly tedious book for an almost $14 million advance.

They don’t know what it’s like to get up every morning and take a private jet to an event where adoring fans line up for a book-signing (only one copy per person, and no posed photographs, please).

They don’t know what it’s like to run from speech to speech, collecting as much as $200,000 per gig.

They don’t know what it’s like to be married to a man who earns $700,000 for one speech in Nigeria.

They don’t know what it’s like to have a daughter who gets paid $600,000 by NBC News for a not particularly taxing job.

It’s a fact of human nature that it’s easier to talk about who’s to blame for a problem than it is to figure out what to do about the problem.

Case in point: There’s a near-riot in liberal circles over the very idea that supporters of the Iraq War should even be allowed to criticize the president’s handling of the current Middle East crisis, never mind offer advice on how to proceed.

The Atlantic’s James Fallows says Dick Cheney and company “have earned the right not to be listened to.” Slate magazine’s Jamelle Bouie says that prominent public intellectuals and journalists who supported the Iraq war should “be barred from public comment.” Charles Pierce at Esquire is less subtle: “Shut up, all of you. Go away.”

Some go even further. Katrina vanden Heuvel asks in the Washington Post: “Can someone explain to me why the media still solicit advice about the crisis in Iraq from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)? Or Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)?” (One possible answer: They are newsmakers, holding prominent positions on pertinent Senate committees.)

I’m always curious what agency in a free society is in charge of enforcing prohibitions on such things.

Given the tendency for nearly everyone to get things wrong over time, this is a dangerous game. Vanden Heuvel has been wrong about so many things, it’s difficult to know where to begin. She opposed pretty much the warp and woof of America’s Cold War policies. She opposed Bill Clinton’s war in the Balkans. She opposed the Persian Gulf War.

Fallows made a name for himself in the 1980s and ’90s championing the notion that Japan Inc. would overtake the United States. Shall we stop listening to him on economic issues?

Congress doesn’t have prosecutorial power, but it can act to remove those responsible.

For all my friends who continue to call for a “special counsel” — meaning an independent prosecutor — for the IRS scandal, I have one simple question:

If you believe, as I do, that President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are corruptly covering up the conspiracy by the executive branch and congressional Democrats to violate the constitutional rights of conservative groups, what makes you think they would appoint a scrupulous lawyer to investigate and expose the conspiracy?

The question answers itself, so much so that some members of Congress, in their understandable outrage and frustration, are proposing unconstitutional solutions to the Obama administration’s unconstitutional lawlessness. Exhibit A: Senator Pat Roberts (R., Okla.), a member of the Finance Committee investigating the IRS scandal — a metastasizing exhibition of high crimes and misdemeanors that now piles destruction of evidence, misleading testimony, and obstruction of justice atop abuse of the revenue agency’s awesome powers to intimidate conservative groups.

Senator Roberts says:

At this point, only a Congressionally appointed and separately funded special counsel, with full subpoena power, can get to the bottom of this matter. Congress has longstanding and broad authority to both investigate allegations of wrongdoing within the federal government and to delegate its investigatory powers to other entities. It’s time to put this authority into action.

The italics are mine, in order to highlight the problem. Yes, Congress has investigative authority in connection with its important oversight function — i.e., overseeing the activities of executive-branch agencies such as the IRS that Congress establishes and underwrites with taxpayer funds. What Congress does not have, however, is prosecutorial authority.

Congress can issue subpoenas for information in connection with its oversight function; it lacks any power to issue subpoenas in connection with what Senator Roberts says he is calling for: “the arrest and prosecution of those responsible for suppressing the First Amendment.” Congress is bereft of authority to enforce the penal laws, to conduct grand-jury proceedings, to issue indictments, to make arrests, and to subject offenders to criminal trials.

Fouad Ajami: A courageous scholar who was friendly to Israel
If Fouad Ajami had been brought into U.S. public diplomacy, perhaps the Obama administration wouldn’t now be stumbling in its support for the right of the Arab world for liberty.

The death of Fouad Ajami, a Lebanese-born American scholar of the Middle East, would be for all who knew him a sad day whenever it occurred. But his death — he succumbed Sunday to cancer at the age of 68 — is particularly tragic, because we have lost him just as America is engulfed in the kind of crisis where we are going to be in need of the wisdom he dispensed.

I didn’t know Ajami well, but we both wrote for the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages across the same generation. Like scores of other editors and colleagues, I came to admire him enormously. This was not only for his great scholarship, his friendliness to Israel, and his adherence through all the travail of the Middle East to the ideals of freedom and democracy. I also admired his courage and his preparedness to take an unpopular stand.

In respect of Israel this was remarkable enough, as Ajami made clear when, in 2011, the Palestinian Arabs unilaterally went to the UN General Assembly for a vote on statehood. Ajami was among those who argued that the Palestinian Arabs had, as he put it in the Wall Street Journal, “misread” the vote in 1947. “True, the cause of Jewish statehood had been served by the vote on partition, but the Zionist project had already prevailed on the ground.”

“Jewish statehood was,” Ajami wrote, “a fait accompli perhaps a decade before that vote. All the ingredients had been secured by Labor Zionism.” Here was an Arab American intellectual prepared to acknowledge not only that there was “a military formation powerful enough to defeat the Arab armies,” but that there were “political institutions in place, and there were gifted leaders, David Ben-Gurion pre-eminent among them, who knew what can be had in the world of nations.”

Yet the clearest glimpse I had of Ajami’s preparedness to stand apart was his friendship with Ahmed Chalabi. He is the Iraqi exile, a Shia who, during the Baathist tyranny, played an outsized role in forming the Iraqi National Congress. Chalabi also played an important role in winning passage in the United States Congress of the Iraq Liberation Act. The law, enacted in 1995 on an overwhelming and bipartisan vote, made it national policy to seek regime change in Iraq.

Chalabi, who once sat with First Lady Laura Bush at a State of the Union Address by President Bush, fell out of favor with the administration. He was a casualty of, among other things, the intramural wars in Washington. The State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency didn’t like Chalabi. He was the man the Left, in particular, loved to hate, although he had some distinguished enemies on the right. All the more admirable that Ajami stuck with him.

Incompetence breeds incompetence, and eventually the slowest-witted among us recognizes the man who not only doesn’t know what he’s doing but won’t listen to those who do. His earnest ignorance blights everything he touches. Even yellow-dog Democrats are growling.

By all accounts Barack Obama is a nice man, decent, attractive, a faithful husband, devoted father and highly intelligent. He no doubt means well, by his lights, blinkered by ideology. He’s just not very smart.

Like a lot of liberals, he has learned a lot of things that ain’t so, and is eager to apply them. He learned, as the hyper-educated often do, to mistrust experience and common sense. Only such a sage, armed with prodigious book-learning, will sit down on a red-hot stove twice (if that’s where the textbook tells him to sit).

Mr. Obama doesn’t know much about the 57 states of America (as he once numbered them), or how Americans think, or appreciate the fundamental verities Americans cherish. How could he? His Kenyan father abandoned the family when Barack was a small boy, and when the Kenyan father didn’t work out his mother found another Third World father for him, one with no appreciation of America, either, and took him to Indonesia to spend his formative years far from the influences of America and the West. The poor Jakarta street kid, as he described himself, never knew the down-home delight of a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich. He famously said the evening call to Muslim prayer he heard in Jakarta was the prettiest sound on earth, and in his tender ears it no doubt was. That’s because he never heard America singing.

His later childhood years in Hawaii, with his expensive private-school education, couldn’t teach him much about America. Hawaii is a gorgeous tropical paradise, where life is a day at the beach. No one growing up in Hawaii has ever heard the sighing of an icy wind through the wheat fields, the wail of an outbound freight at 3 o’clock in the morning on its way across the sleeping continent. His lack of intuitive knowledge of his native land is not Barack Obama’s fault, but he never tried to challenge his ignorance. He doesn’t understand why the rest of us think Abraham Lincoln was right that America is, indeed, “the exceptional nation.” We hear a hymn to the land — “… for heroes proved in liberating strife, who more than self their country loved, and mercy more than life …” and think that hymn, not the call to Muslim prayer, is the prettiest sound on earth.