In an essential article published on June 16, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, former ambassador John Bolton, argued that “US focus must be on Iran as Iraq falls apart.” He is unapologetic about the war itself, saying that “inevitably, analysts are rearguing George W. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Barack Obama’s complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, and virtually everything else Iraq-related in between.”
To start with, this is a remarkable admission. The war was to remove Saddam, then, and not about Iraq’s WMD’s, or Iraq’s links with the terrorists, as claimed ad nausem at the time. “In-between” is dismissed as some past unpleasantness, unfit to be mentioned in polite company. “None of the parties to Iraq’s current conflict have anything to recommend them,” Bolton says, but excludes himself from the unnamed “parties.” It is not done to claim that what has come to pass in Iraq and its region since March 2003 would not have happened… but for the war.
This reasoning is frankly outrageous, but there’s more surreality to come. According to John Bolton, “This is all beside the point, for today’s decision-makers confronting the question of what, if anything, to do as Iraq nears disintegration. America must instead decide what its national interests are now, not what they were five or ten years ago.” In his scheme of things, we should be looking forward, not back, with the same old crew offering advice that created the disaster in the first place.
For a seasoned foreign policy analyst like myself, the word “incredibly” does not come easy. Incredibly, Bolton suggests the United States to pursue her “national interests” by putting the rampaging ISIS – now in charge of a contiguous swath from north Aleppo to the outskirts of Baghdad – on the back burner, and refocus on Iran, the same country that is helping Nouri Al-Maliki’s Shiite militias beat back the Sunni jihadist onslaught:
[O]ur objective should be to remove the main foe, Tehran’s ayatollahs, by encouraging the opposition, within and outside Iran, to take matters into their own hands. There is no need to deploy U.S. military power to aid the various opposition forces. We should instead provide them intelligence and material assistance, and help them subsume the political differences that separate them. Their differences should be addressed when the ayatollahs’ regime lies in ashes. And as Iran’s regime change proceeds, we can destroy ISIL.
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=8755
On Monday morning, I met with the editor of a New York newspaper.
”Isn’t it hard being away from Israel right now, with all that’s going on?” he asked, referring to Thursday night’s abduction of three teenagers — Naftali Frenkel, 16, Gil-ad Shaer, 16, and Eyal Yifrach, 19 — who were on their way home for the weekend from yeshivas they attend in Gush Etzion and Hebron.
“Yes,” I said. “But there is always something critical happening there.”
Indeed, I have yet to visit my family in the United States without either leaving behind, or greeting upon my arrival, a worrisome event that is dominating the news in Israel. And my first response, like that of all Israeli parents, is to locate each of my children to make sure they are safe, or to find out whether they have been called up for reserve duty.
This is not simply a function of Jewish motherhood, however. It is not due to hysteria over the ills that might befall our offspring. No, this is not how we Israelis live at all. If anything, we are experts at compartmentalizing danger, clucking our tongues at existential crises, while fretting over grocery shopping and bad-hair days.
Until something horrific happens to snap us out of our stupor, that is. Like the kidnapping of “our” boys at the hands of bloodthirsty terrorists. It is then that we turn off the soccer matches on TV and gather together to cry with and pray for the victimized families, fully aware that they could be us, that the only thing differentiating them from us is an accident of fate.
It is during such moments that reality hits home, yet again: Israel is under enemy attack, as it has been since its inception.
This fact is continually obfuscated, however, both unwittingly and on purpose. The former is understandable. Israeli democracy is among the most vibrant and successful in the world. In spite of glitches that would be called “growing pains” in any other fledgling state established a mere 66 years ago, it has a viable economy, a passable education system, reasonable health care, a vigilant legal system, a free press, and attention to social justice. It absorbs massive amounts of legal immigrants, and contends, as humanely as possible, with the illegal ones.
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/north-dakota-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand
Whatever you do please don’t say “What difference does it make?” because only one candidate is running- incumbent Republican Kevin Cramer will vote on critical issues affecting all of us not just his state. Every district counts. rsk
North Dakota: 2014 Candidates for Congress – Where They Stand
To see the actual voting records of all incumbents on other issues such as Foreign Policy, Second Amendment Issues, Homeland Security, and other issues as well as their rankings by special interest groups please use the links followed by two stars (**).
U.S. Senate
John Hoeven (R) Next Election in 2016.
Heidi Heitkamp (D) Next Election in 2018.
At Large
Kevin Cramer (R) Incumbent
http://www.kevincramer.org/view/ http://cramer.house.gov/
http://www.ontheissues.org/house/Kevin_Cramer.htm**
HOT BUTTON ISSUES
HEALTHCARE I believe the individual health insurance mandate contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act represents a significant overreach by the federal government. It is also fiscally irresponsible. The new taxes and burdensome regulations in this law are driving the cost of healthcare even higher for working families, and straining our healthcare providers and small businesses.
I support reforming healthcare with market-based solutions to empower patients and doctors, and malpractice reforms to protect consumers and provide incentives for best medical practices.
ENERGY Supports construction of the Keystone Pipeline without limiting amendments. Reducing our Middle East energy dependence is a major step toward increasing our national security. With this in mind, making the United States energy secure from other nations is one of my highest priorities as your Congressman. North Dakota is blessed with the resources to lead the charge toward energy security, and I am proud of the hard work done by our oil producers in North Dakota each day to make this goal possible. I remain firmly committed to advancing this goal on a national level as a member of two important energy subcommittees, and the Subcommittee on Public Lands and Environmental Regulations. I am also pleased to be chosen by the House Majority Leader to serve on the newly formed House Energy Action Team (HEAT).
DEFENSE AND NATIONAL SECURITY House Legislation Ends Mass Collection of Americans’ Phone Records May 22, 2014 – Press Release – Washington, D.C. – The House of Representatives today passed legislation to end the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records and impose other limitations on government intelligence gathering. The USA FREEDOM Act received bipartisan support in the House, and a statement yesterday from the White House indicated President Obama intends to sign the legislation after it is passed by both chambers of Congress.
Defense Authorization Bill Passes House, Includes Missile Protections – May 22, 2014 – Press Release Washington, D.C. – The House of Representatives today passed the annual authorization bill for U.S. military activities. Congressman Kevin Cramer said the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) spends $30 billion less than the 2014 enacted NDAA while rejecting reduced military pay increase, TRICARE cuts, housing allowance cuts, and commissary cuts proposed by the President.
George Sinner (D) Challenger
http://sinnerforcongress.com/
Read more: Family Security Matters http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/north-dakota-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand#ixzz34tYYSG4u
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
I APPRECIATE THE WORK OF PROFESSOR JACOBSON…AND TO BUTTRESS HIS CASE PLEASE READ :Product Details
The BDS War Against Israel: The Orwellian Campaign to Destroy Israel Through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions… by Jed Babbin and Herbert I London (May 28, 2014)
This Tuesday evening in Los Angeles, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors is hosting Cornell law professor William A. Jacobson as he presents “The Case for Israel and Academic Freedom.” At the forefront of the fight against the American Studies Association (ASA) academic boycott of Israel, Jacobson will argue that the boycott is anti-educational, anti-peace, and based on misconceptions and omissions about the history and legality of the conflict.
Prof. Jacobson is the founder and publisher of two popular websites, Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection, which have covered the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement for years. He has been cited in major publications such as The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel, Forbes, National Review, Commentary, and elsewhere. Through Legal Insurrection, Jacobson was instrumental in obtaining rejections of the academic boycott by over 250 University Presidents, and has filed a challenge to the ASA’s tax exempt status.
I asked him a few questions in advance of Tuesday’s event.
Mark Tapson: First, tell us briefly about Legal Insurrection and College Insurrection, and their purpose.
William Jacobson: Legal Insurrection went live on October 12, 2008, less than a month before the presidential election. There was no long-term plan to start it. Rather, it reflected my growing frustration with what I saw as blatant media bias in favor of Obama, and a general mania surrounding the Obama campaign. Since then, we have covered a wide range of political and legal issues, concentrating on those areas in which the two overlap. We have earned a name for ourselves by grabbing onto issues and candidates and doing the type of in-depth research and exhaustive follow-up that are hard to find these days.
As an example, our coverage of Elizabeth Warren drove many of the issues with which she struggled in her 2012 Senate campaign and was so extensive that we preserved the research in a separate website, ElizabethWarrenWiki.org.
College Insurrection was started in August 2012, as we found ourselves focusing more and more on the problems non-liberal students faced on campuses. Unlike Legal Insurrection, which focuses on creating original content, College Insurrection is more of an aggregator, pulling stories from college newspapers and other media.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang/
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, The Point, at Frontpagemag.com.
Daniel discussed “Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died,” outlining the president’s disastrous Afghanistan give-away.
The dialogue also involved an analysis of Obama’s surrender of Iraq, more revelations on the Benghazi betrayal, the scandalous Taliban-Bergdahl swap, and much, much more:
A project is underway to rehabilitate the self-exiled Sixties radical, anti-Semite and “black power” advocate Stokely Carmichael.
The opening salvo in this revisionist project of the Afro-centrist Marxist Left in academia is Stokely: A Life, by Peniel E. Joseph, which was recently published by BasicCivitas Books.
It is more infomercial than biography, calculated to transform its negligible subject into a towering figure of historic importance, and to whitewash the damage he did. Joseph’s central argument is that Carmichael was a “rock star” activist who inspired generations and who singlehandedly changed the course of American history.
Perversely, Joseph calls Carmichael a civil rights leader. If that fairly summarizes Carmichael’s work, he was a civil rights leader only in the bizarre modern sense that racial arsonist like Al Sharpton is a civil rights leader.
It is difficult to imagine an American civil rights leader making common cause with ruthless African dictators but that is what Carmichael did. He changed his name to Kwame Toure to honor two of them. In his self-imposed exile he was a courtier to brutal racist tyrants. He was a friend of Ugandan butcher Idi Amin, and rationalized away the relationship by reminding himself that Amin was anti-American and anti-Zionist. Carmichael even accepted Ugandan citizenship.
He was also a friend of Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. Libya came closest to accomplishing Carmichael’s vision of a socialist state, according to Joseph.
It is difficult to image an American civil rights leaders going abroad to help hostile powers, but this is what Carmichael did.
Carmichael visited Communist Cuba, giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies abroad. While there he called Abraham Lincoln a racist and helped Cuba’s propaganda effort against the United States. After spending three days with Fidel Castro he told reporters that the conversations he had with him were the “most educational, most interesting, and most enlightening of my public life.”
Carmichael praised the world’s most prolific mass murderer, Mao Zedong, as “a great Chinese leader, the greatest Chinese leader there is.” He palled around with Communist Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and called for the U.S. to be defeated in Vietnam.
When the father of Tyrone Woods finally got a moment with the Secretary of State of the United States, she assured him that justice would be done for his murdered son.
“We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” Hillary Clinton told Charles Woods.
The video that the Secretary of State and past and future presidential candidate was referring to was a YouTube trailer for “The Innocence of Muslims.” The killers of Woods, Stevens, Smith and Doherty could rest easy. No drone ever came for them. The cops instead came for a man who uploaded a YouTube video.
At Andrews Air Force Base, Hillary told the families, “We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful internet video that we had nothing to do with.”
Even in the presence of the families of the murdered Americans who died because of her, Hillary Clinton was still making lying about Islamic terrorism and apologizing to Muslims into her two major priorities.
Two days earlier, Hillary Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State had told the Libyan ambassador that Ansar Al-Sharia, a group linked to Al Qaeda, was responsible. The morning of the receiving ceremony AFRICOM had sent the State Department a list of suspects, including Al Qaeda members, responsible for the Benghazi attack.
In January, Hillary had blamed “imperfect information.” As she makes her rounds promoting her book, she’s fighting to keep the video lie alive.
In “Hard Choices,” Hillary claims that there were “scores of attackers that night, almost certainly with differing motives. It is inaccurate to state that every single one of them was influenced by this hateful video. It is equally inaccurate to state that none of them were.”
Since it’s impossible to disprove a negative, it would be equally inaccurate to state that none of the attackers were influenced by a frustrated passion for Hillary Clinton. Since there’s no way to disprove the possibility that at least one of the attackers was motivated by the video, by love for Hillary or by hallucinations induced by bath salts, it’s inaccurate to state that none of the attackers carried a torch for Hillary, were angry at a YouTube video or were tripping on bath salts.
In the late 1980s the Democratic Party decided that appealing to its donor base required strict adherence to the notion of abortion on demand. Anyone who was pro-life (like Al Gore [1], Jesse Jackson [2], and Harry Reid [3]) either switched sides or was chased out of the party.
Today, there are virtually no pro-life Democrats. And soon, thanks to a major push from Barack Obama to please his Sierra Club and Hollywood donors by saddling the coal industry with strict new regulations, there may be no pro-carbon energy Democrats. In turn, this may create a long-term advantage for Republicans in the Senate similar to their strength in the House of Representatives, which the GOP has held for all but four of the last 20 years.
In the holy Democratic Church of Enlightened Environmentalism, red-state Senate Democrats are becoming Carbon Heretics. They risk excommunication — from a steadily shrinking church. Even if the Democrats are correct in believing that demographics give them a long-term advantage in the presidential sweepstakes, they may find their progressive agenda permanently bottled up in Capitol Hill.
Obama’s proposed new anti-coal EPA regulations [4] and continued dithering on the Keystone Pipeline are costing him support in a large number of states you might call the Energy Belt. Thanks to fracking, traditional fossil fuel-producing states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Louisiana have been joined by North Dakota, Colorado and Pennsylvania as major energy producers. “Battle Over Fracking Poses Threat to Colorado Democrats,” [5] read a recent New York Times headline.
Meanwhile, intense support for the Keystone Pipeline and the jobs it would create in Nebraska are making Democratic Senate candidacies there nearly as unlikely as they currently are in Oklahoma and Texas (both of which sent Democrats to the Senate as recently as the 1990s but are now essentially written off by the party).
The potential exists for Democratic Senate candidacies to become increasingly farfetched in ten or more Energy Belt states. Even the most liberal presidents in the future will have difficulty getting anything through Capitol Hill when Democratic energy policy looks increasingly like a writeoff of 20 Senate seats.
On June 7, Marine Le Pen criticized her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen — who founded France’s National Front party [1] in 1972 and headed it until 2011 — for his remarks in a videotaped interview posted on the party’s website about the Tunisian born Jewish singer Patrick Bruel, a vocal opponent of what is often described in France as “the far Right.” Le Pen furiously exclaimed that Bruel would be dealt with “à la prochaine fournée,” [2] or as Canada’s National Post [3] translated Le Pen, “We’ll include him in the next batch.” This is a baker’s expression that usually means momentarily, but can be ominously associated in French with the Nazi crematoriums.
Marine Le Pen asserted that her father’s vile joke was a political mistake, which he should have averted in view of his very lengthy experience. Indeed, Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly indulged in similar puns in the past, and been found guilty in court of racist and anti-Semitic vitriol. He was even suspended twice as a member of parliament for such offenses. The younger Le Pen has been eager to distance herself from such attitudes since she took over the party leadership three years ago. However, this is the first time she did so in an explicit way.
Marine Le Pen may feel emboldened by her victory in the Euro-Parliament election last month: the National Front carried 24 out of the 74 seats allotted to France, almost one out of three (albeit only 44% of the registered French voters took part in the election). She is convinced that she has successfully recast FN as a democratic national-populist party, one more in the manner of Charles de Gaulle than of Philippe Pétain. De Gaulle was the head of the French anti-Nazi Resistance and the founder of the Fifth Republic; Petain was the head of the collaborationist Vichy state.
Many observers contend that her criticism was still comparatively mild. A more relevant charge is that she might not be above double entendres with racist and anti-Semitic overtones herself, although in a much more sophisticated way. On March 31, during an interview [4] with anchorman Guillaume Durand at Public Sénat TV, she contended that she was hated by another journalist, Anne-Sophie Lapix, the wife of Publicis chairman Arthur Sadoun. She claimed that the entire Publicis management belonged to an exclusive caste estranged from most French, while her own political mission was to return power to the people. True enough, Marine Le Pen did not actually say that Sadoun and most of Publicis’ managers were Jewish, and her words could be construed to apply to any restricted upper-class group rather than just to a Jewish elite. On the other hand, the Jewish heritage of Publicis, from its founder the late Maurice Bleustein-Blanchet to Maurice Levy, its current CEO, to Sadoun, is an open secret.
The Pace of Obama’s Disasters
Bergdahl one week. Then Ukraine. Now Iraq. What could be next?
Was it only 10 months ago that President Obama capitulated on Syria? And eight months ago that we learned he had no idea the U.S. eavesdropped on Angela Merkel ? And seven months ago that his administration struck its disastrous interim nuclear deal with Tehran? And four months ago that Chuck Hagel announced that the United States Army would be cut to numbers not seen since the 1930s? And three months ago that Russia seized Crimea? And two months ago that John Kerry’s Israeli-Palestinian peace effort sputtered into the void? And last month that Mr. Obama announced a timetable for total withdrawal from Afghanistan—a strategy whose predictable effects can now be seen in Iraq?
Even the Bergdahl deal of yesterweek is starting to feel like ancient history. Like geese, Americans are being forced to swallow foreign-policy fiascoes at a rate faster than we can possibly chew, much less digest.
Consider the liver.
On Thursday, Russian tanks rolled across the border into eastern Ukraine. On Saturday, Russian separatists downed a Ukrainian transport jet, murdering 49 people. On Monday, Moscow stopped delivering gas to Kiev. All this is part of the Kremlin’s ongoing stealth invasion and subjugation of its neighbor. And all of this barely made the news. John Kerry phoned Moscow to express his “strong concern.” Concern, mind you, not condemnation.
If the president of the United States had any thoughts on the subject, he kept them to himself. His weekly radio address was devoted to wishing America’s dads a happy Father’s Day.
Also last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria seized Mosul. Then ISIS took Tikrit. Then it was Tal Afar. Mass executions of Shiites in each place. The administration is taking its time deciding what, if any, aid it will provide the government in Baghdad. But it is exploring the possibility of using Iraq’s distress as an opportunity to open avenues of cooperation with Tehran.
So because the administration has a theological objection to using military force in Iraq to prevent it from being overrun by al Qaeda or dissolving into potentially genocidal civil war, it will now work with Tehran, a designated state sponsor of terrorism for 30 years and a regime that continues to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Bashar Assad in Syria, to help “stabilize” Iraq. At least the White House has ruled out military cooperation with Iran. But give it time.
Here, then, is the cravenness that now passes for cleverness in this administration: Make friends with a terrorist regime to deal with a terrorist organization. Deliver Iraq’s Arab Shiites into the hands of their Persian coreligionists, who will waste no time turning southern Iraq into a satrapy modeled on present-day Lebanon.
Deal brusquely with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki —who, for all his manifest shortcomings as a leader nonetheless wishes to be our ally—and obsequiously with an Iranian regime that spent the better part of the last decade killing American soldiers. Further alienate panicky allies in Riyadh and Jerusalem for the sake of ingratiating ourselves with the mullahs.
