RUTHFULLY YOURS

Fifteen years after the carnage of 9/11, American foreign policy is still mired in its fossilized dogmas and dangerous delusions. The consequences are obvious. Iran, the world’s foremost state sponsor of terrorism and long an avowed enemy of the United States, has filled the vacuum of our ignominious retreat from the Middle East, even as the mullahs move ever closer to possessing nuclear weapons. Russia, Iran’s improbable ally, bombs civilians in Syria, kills the Syrian fighters we have trained, bullies its neighbor Ukraine, consolidates its take-over of the Crimea, and relentlessly pursues its interests with disregard for international law and contempt for our feeble protests. Iraq, for which thousands of Americans bled and died, is now a puppet state of Iran. Afghanistan is poised to be overrun by the Taliban in a few years, and ISIS, al Qaeda 2.0, continues to inspire franchises throughout the world and to murder European and American citizens.

So much for the belief, frequently heard in the months after the attacks of 9/11, that “this changes everything.” The smoking ruins and 3000 dead surely had awoken us from our delusions that the “end of history” and a “new world order” had followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, “a world in which nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice. A world where the strong respect the rights of the weak,” as George H.W. Bush said in 1990. The following decade seemed to confirm this optimism. Didn’t we quickly slap down the brutal Saddam Hussein and stop his aggression against his neighbors? Didn’t we punish the Serbs for their revanchist depredations in the Balkans? With American military power providing the muscle, the institutions of international cooperation like NATO, the International Court of Justice, and the U.N. Security Council would patrol and protect the network of new democracies that were set to evolve into versions of Western nations and enjoy such boons as individual rights, political freedom, leisure and prosperity, tolerance for minorities, equality for women, and a benign secularism.

The gruesome mayhem of 9/11 should have alerted us to the fact many Muslims didn’t get the memo about history’s demise. Indeed, long before that tragic day in September, we had been serially warned that history still had some unpleasant surprises. Theorists of neo-jihadism like Hassan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb for decades had laid out the case for war against the infidel West and its aggression against Islam. “It is the nature of Islam,” al-Banna wrote, “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations and extend its power to the entire planet.” So too the leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world,” which is why “Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers.” The kidnapping of U.S. diplomatic personnel in Tehran by a group called “Muslim Students Following the Line of the Imam [Khomeini]” sent us a message that we were engaged in the religious war the jihadists warned would come. But few of those responsible for our security and interests had ears to hear or eyes to see.

Not even when the words became bloody deeds did we listen. The bombing of the Beirut Marine barracks in 1983, which killed 241 servicemen, was supported by Iran and executed by its proxy terrorist group Hezbollah. Our refusal to respond reflected our failure to take seriously Khomeini’s vow to spread his revolution to the whole world. The humiliating televised abuse of our dead soldiers in Mogadishu in 1993, followed by our withdrawal, was exploited by Osama bin Laden in his sermons as signs that America had “foundations of straw.” That same year came the first World Trade Center attack, which killed six and wounded 1,042, an operation inspired by al Qaeda and traditional jihadist doctrine. In 1995 five Americans were killed by al Qaeda operatives at a training facility in Riyadh. In 1996 a truck bomb exploded in front of a residential complex housing Air Force personnel near Dhahran, killing 19 Americans. In 1998 al Qaeda bombed our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. Twelve Americans died in Nairobi. And the last warning came in October of 2000, when the destroyer Cole was attacked by a fishing boat loaded with explosive. Seventeen sailors died and 39 were wounded.

Two almost simultaneous events in recent days have shed even more light on the Obama administration’s treatment of America’s enemies.

In Cuba, a Marxist, pro-Russian, anti-American tyranny, the administration pressed hard to abandon decades of policy in exchange for nothing. Human rights conditions there are awful, but the United States did not bargain to end the embargo in exchange for improvements. And since Obama’s announcement of a new policy, which was a simple free gift to the Castros, human rights conditions have deteriorated further.

The most recent event was the first commercial flight to Cuba in decades, from Fort Lauderdale to Santa Clara. Santa Clara is the residence of Guillermo Farinas.

Who is he, and why does he matter? He is one of Cuba’s bravest human rights advocates, a recipient of the Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament in 2010.

The citation says among other things this:

A Cuban doctor of psychology, independent journalist and political dissident, Guillermo Fariñas has over the years conducted 23 hunger strikes with the aim of achieving peaceful political change and freedom of expression in Cuba….For his activism, Fariñas has in recent years been threatened with death and confinement in a psychiatric hospital, beaten and hospitalised, and repeatedly arrested and detained, including at the funeral of Oswaldo Payá, another Sakharov Prize laureate and Cuban dissident.

Farinas is in the 48th day of hunger strike right now and was hospitalized on September 5. I write of all this because last week when that Jet Blue flight landed, the Obama administration celebrated it– but has not said one word about Farinas nor has any American diplomat sought to visit him. (And by the way, that flight was chock full of journalists, as the web siteCapitol Hill Cubans points out, and not a single one of them or of the foreign correspondents from Havana who went to Santa Clara sought to visit and speak with him. They were too busy celebrating, it seems. Capitol Hill Cubans quotes Martin Luther King: “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”)

Meanwhile, half a world away the Iranian Navy is making a laughingstock of the U.S. Navy, taunting it with small boat actions that endanger our ships, get within about 100 yards of them, and have forced them to take evasive action to avoid collisions. Reuters reported that

A U.S. Navy coastal patrol ship changed course after a fast-attack craft from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps came within 100 yards (91 meters) of it in the central Gulf on Sunday, U.S. Defense Department officials said on Tuesday. It was at least the fourth such incident in less than a month. U.S. officials are concerned that these actions by Iran could lead to mistakes.

Last year, John McCain told National Review that “the most disturbing briefing that I have ever received” had to do with cyberwar, adding: “We better start doing a helluva lot better job” addressing cybersecurity threats.

Given the current presidential prospects, the chances of that are slim. Donald Trump has made noises about “cyber” (it’s “becoming so big”), but has not outlined any plan. Meanwhile, it’s become undeniably clear that Hillary Clinton’s effort to avoid transparency requirements as secretary of state by setting up a private e-mail server endangered national security, including human-intelligence assets abroad, and that, unable to find more-plausible-sounding excuses, Clinton has opted to plead incompetence: She recently explained that she never realized the “(C)” in certain e-mails she forwarded indicated classified material.

This situation is particularly alarming in the wake of a new report. On Wednesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released the results of its year-long investigation into the unprecedented hack of the Office of Personnel Management. The 241-page document is unsubtly titled “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation.”

In March 2014, the Department of Homeland Security alerted OPM that its security had been breached and data stolen. Over the next two months, OPM monitored the hacker’s activity inside its system, developing with DHS a plan to expel him. So narrowly focused was OPM on its target that it did not notice that a separate hacker had gained access to the system in early May, posing as an employee of an OPM contractor. For almost a year, this second hacker operated at leisure in OPM’s system, stealing security-clearance background-investigation files, personnel records, and fingerprint data.

The two attacks, which the Oversight committee says were almost certainly coordinated, constitute the worst cybersecurity breach in American history: “Attackers exfiltrated personnel files of 4.2 million former and current government employees and security-clearance background-investigation information on 21.5 million individuals,” dating back to the Reagan administration. That background-investigation information, the Standard Form 86 or SF-86, which is required of anyone applying for a security clearance, demands an extraordinary range of personal information, as James Comey explained to the Washington Times last year: “My SF-86 lists every place I’ve ever lived since I was 18, every foreign travel I’ve ever taken, all of my family, their addresses. So it’s not just my identity that’s affected. I’ve got siblings. I’ve got five kids. All of that is in there.” (Comey’s was among the data taken.) The hack has been described as “Cyber Pearl Harbor.” Joel Brenner, senior counsel at the National Security Agency, called the stolen information “crown jewels material . . . a gold mine for a foreign intelligence service.” John Schindler, a former analyst at the National Security Agency, has written: “Whoever now holds OPM’s records possesses something like the Holy Grail from a [counterintelligence] perspective.”