RUTHFULLY YOURS

Forty years ago, Saigon fell to communist North Vietnam. Images of terrified South Vietnamese clambering to the roof of the U.S. embassy, and Vietnamese helicopter pilots ferrying them to ships and then pushing the helicopters overboard to make room for more refugees are still heart-wrenching.

Vietnam represented a change in the American security dynamic for the protection of friends and the defeat of adversaries, but the application of useful policy lessons is hard to find.

WWII and the Korean War had required the United States to leave substantial parts of its military in place either to consolidate victory or prevent the erosion of an armistice. In the case of Vietnam, however, the U.S. armed and trained the South Vietnamese military (ARVN) and then left it to the field. The policy was called “Vietnamization.” The question should have been asked, “What is the staying power of an army when its enemy consists of its brothers and cousins — that is to say, when it is fighting a civil war — in the absence of U.S. support on the ground?” And, the corollary, “Particularly when its brothers and cousins are supported by outside powers?”

‘They came with a battering ram.” Cindy Archer, one of the lead architects of Wisconsin’s Act 10 — also called the “Wisconsin Budget Repair Bill,” it limited public-employee benefits and altered collective-bargaining rules for public-employee unions — was jolted awake by yelling, loud pounding at the door, and her dogs’ frantic barking. The entire house — the windows and walls — was shaking. She looked outside to see up to a dozen police officers, yelling to open the door. They were carrying a battering ram. She wasn’t dressed, but she started to run toward the door, her body in full view of the police. Some yelled at her to grab some clothes, others yelled for her to open the door. “I was so afraid,” she says. “I did not know what to do.” She grabbed some clothes, opened the door, and dressed right in front of the police. The dogs were still frantic.
“I begged and begged, ‘Please don’t shoot my dogs, please don’t shoot my dogs, just don’t shoot my dogs.’ I couldn’t get them to stop barking, and I couldn’t get them outside quick enough. I saw a gun and barking dogs. I was scared and knew this was a bad mix.” She got the dogs safely out of the house, just as multiple armed agents rushed inside. Some even barged into the bathroom, where her partner was in the shower. The officer or agent in charge demanded that Cindy sit on the couch, but she wanted to get up and get a cup of coffee. “I told him this was my house and I could do what I wanted.”

The knock on the door in the dead of night is the stuff of Darkness at Noon, and of the state of Wisconsin. To the question of whether armed police can storm your house and take away your personal effects and tell you to shut up about it, based simply on your political advocacy, Wisconsin answered for years, “Why, yes, they can — now please, shut up about it.”

The so-called John Doe investigations into Governor Scott Walker and conservative groups in Wisconsin have been an ongoing travesty that — now that Walker is entering the presidential stage — should be considered a national disgrace. Walker’s opponents weaponized campaign-finance law, literally. Our own David French has talked to families targeted in the John Doe raids for the first time, and their stories are harrowing. Shouting officers at the front door in pre-dawn raids, at least once with a battering ram. Armed police rifling through and carting off their belongings, down to and including a daughter’s computer. And warnings to stay silent.

The targets were told not to tell their lawyers, or their friends, or their neighbors. When armed cops storm the house next door, people often wonder why, but the targets were forbidden from discussing what happened. As French points out, this wasn’t the right to remain silent and avoid self-incrimination, but an order to remain silent and not to make any professions of innocence. They had a keener sense of due process in Salem, Massachusetts. The investigators were, among other things, fishing for campaign-finance violations, on dubious grounds. So, for exercising their First Amendment rights, some targets were denied their First Amendment rights. This is the Bill of Rights, via Kafka and Inspector Javert.

On campus, on the campaign trail. Hillary Clinton in recent months has done the following: She charged UCLA somewhere around $300,000 for reciting some platitudes. That works out to over $165 a second for her 30 minutes on stage — meaning that she made more in one minute than a student barista does in a year. Ms. Clinton acknowledges that, while secretary of state, she solicited donations from wealthy foreign nationals for her family foundation, whose funds she and her husband have frequently tapped for exclusive travel and other expenses.

Everything Ms. Clinton has said recently seems to be demonstrably untrue: Only one of her grandparents, not all four, was an immigrant. One does not need to have two smartphones to have two e-mail accounts. She did not regularly e-mail her husband. One does not secure a server by having a guard on the premises. A cabinet officer does not communicate exclusively on a private e-mail account via a private unsecured server. High government officials do not themselves adjudicate which e-mails are private and which public — and then wipe clean their accounts to avoid an audit of such decision-making. The multimillionaire Ms. Clinton, fresh from jabs against hedge funds and inordinate CEO pay, also just bought lunch at a fast-food restaurant and left no tip in the jar, before parking her car in a handicapped zone at another stop. How is all this connected?

As Iran’s chief puppet in the Middle East (along with Syria’s Bashar Assad), Nasrallah wants to see Iran take over most of the Arab countries.

“[W]hat is the difference between Iran and Islamic State? The answer is simple; they are all trying to establish a foothold on the border with Saudi Arabia.” — Tariq al-Hamid, prominent Saudi editor and political analyst.

Now, however, many Arabs seem to have woken up to the reality that Nasrallah is nothing but an Iranian puppet whose sole goal is to serve his masters in Tehran. But it remains to be seen whether the U.S. Administration and other Western powers will also wake up and realize that Iran and its proxies pose a real threat not only to Israel, but also to many Arabs and Muslims.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran’s protégé and partner in the Middle East, seems to be leading the Lebanese people into another catastrophe.

In 2006, Nasrallah initiated a war with Israel that wrought havoc on the Lebanese, after an ambush by Hezbollah in Israeli territory that left three Israeli soldiers dead and two abducted.

Now the Lebanese people are about to pay another heavy price – this time because of Nasrallah’s involvement in the Syrian civil war and his strong condemnations of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries over the conflict in Yemen.

Under Prime Minister Modi’s leadership, India has seen a rise in foreign investment; in 2014, the country’s economic growth was 7.5%, higher than that of China.

In Yemen, the U.S. Administration watched as Iranian-backed militias disarmed U.S. Marines and seized embassy vehicles, before the diplomatic staff was let out of the country. However, the Indian government and defense forces deserve due credit for conducting a well-organized rescue operation.

As President Obama refuses lead the Free World, other world leaders are rising up to speak for it — Canada’s Stephen Harper, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and now India’s Narendra Modi.

India is now evacuating U.S. citizens from Yemen. Yes, Yemen, a country overrun by an Iranian-backed militia, or as U.S. President Barack Obama likes to call it, “a counterterrorism success story.”

I cannot recall such an unjust, vicious, unrelenting attack on a serious journalist’s book as that mounted against Diana West and her book “American Betrayal”-This latest attack comes from Ron Capshaw of the National Review, whose first screed- one of several admitted that he was reviewing a book he had not read. Since then he has moved on from ignorance to idiocy and libel. Please read Diana West’s rebuttal….rsk

Believe it or not, another attack on American Betrayal — the fifth such attack on me and my book at National Review Online, which started on the high road back in 2013 by questioning whether I was “house-trained.”

And now?

For new readers, a note of explanation. I am once again compelled to respond to attacks as distinguished from normal, even critical reviews. After, by my count, 21 — twenty-one! — attacks from a tiny band of anti-American Betrayal extremists — the cabal — I will resort to boilerplate for the uninitiated:

Cabal membership, it becomes plain, is limited to writers of multiple entries on my book that, as a condition of membership, must fail to intersect, let along grapple with its actual contents. Fabrications, ad hominem attacks are encouraged. (Some background on the cabal here for new readers.)

For the cognoscenti, seeing is believing; what eyes see must be true. But recent events suggest vision is often flawed. In many cases believing is seeing; the mind casts a vision of what it wants to see. Reality becomes what one’s ideology shapes. Clearly events in Ferguson and the University of Virginia reinforce this assessment.

Yet nowhere is it more in evidence than the Obama White House. The president insists his deal with Iran over nuclear weapons restrains that nation from the pursuit of the nuclear goal. He insists negotiation is working, even though details still have to be ironed out. Moreover, he insists on this position despite evidence to the contrary.

Speaking in the Farsi equivalent of the subjunctive the Supreme Leader of Iran, Khamenei uses the word “might,” while President Obama employs the verb “will.” Khamenei notes as well in his assessment of the preliminary accord or framework, “what has been done so far does not guarantee an agreement, not its contents, not even that the negotiations will continue to the end.” What is there about this declarative sentence that President Obama does not understand?

An Iraqi officer planned Islamic State’s takeover in Syria and SPIEGEL has been given exclusive access to his papers. They portray an organization that, while seemingly driven by religious fanaticism, is actually coldly calculating.

Aloof. Polite. Cajoling. Extremely attentive. Restrained. Dishonest. Inscrutable. Malicious. The rebels from northern Syria, remembering encounters with him months later, recall completely different facets of the man. But they agree on one thing: “We never knew exactly who we were sitting across from.”

In fact, not even those who shot and killed him after a brief firefight in the town of Tal Rifaat on a January morning in 2014 knew the true identity of the tall man in his late fifties. They were unaware that they had killed the strategic head of the group calling itself “Islamic State” (IS). The fact that this could have happened at all was the result of a rare but fatal miscalculation by the brilliant planner. The local rebels placed the body into a refrigerator, in which they intended to bury him. Only later, when they realized how important the man was, did they lift his body out again.

Samir Abd Muhammad al-Khlifawi was the real name of the Iraqi, whose bony features were softened by a white beard. But no one knew him by that name. Even his best-known pseudonym, Haji Bakr, wasn’t widely known. But that was precisely part of the plan. The former colonel in the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein’s air defense force had been secretly pulling the strings at IS for years. Former members of the group had repeatedly mentioned him as one of its leading figures. Still, it was never clear what exactly his role was.

CONTENTS
1. ISIS cartoon shows Obama beheaded by Jihadi John
2. Islamic State beheads and shoots 30 Ethiopian Christians in Libya
3. Iran accuses U.S. of creating Islamic State, Boko Haram and the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra front
4. Iran marks Army Day with cries of “Death to Israel, Death to America”
5. An innocent abroad who pays $100,000 for a $100 carpet
6. Israeli-Arab leader: Holocaust “unparalleled” event in human “evil”
7. Abbas’s Palestinian Authority again denies Holocaust
8. MK Zoabi continues to promote “Israeli Apartheid” slur internationally despite re-election
9. Israeli-Arab writer: My teenage daughter has Holocaust-denying teacher in Chicago high school
10. FBI Director: “Why I require FBI agents to visit the Holocaust Museum”
11. Participants at London conference “sniggered at the mention of ashes rising from the death camp crematoria”
12. UK Green Party Deputy Leader threatens Jews