RUTHFULLY YOURS

Our enemies have a strategic vision for a global conflict, but we don’t

We don’t have a leadership vacuum in the Middle East. What we have is a reality vacuum.

The vacuous “vacuum” chatter is back, reappearing in the Iraq debate after its long run as the all-purpose explanation for internecine Islamic bloodletting in Syria. That should make perfect sense since Iraq is Syria: same players, same bloodletting. Yet, the “vacuum” is wildly different from place to place, which also makes perfect sense . . . but only because the idea of a “vacuum” is nonsense on stilts.

Syria, we are told, disintegrated because President Obama’s abdication created a leadership void — “the vacuum” — that al-Qaeda rushed in to fill. The “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” the story goes, were poised to fulfill America’s top priority, undermining Iran, by overthrowing the Shiite regime the mullahs control in Damascus. But the president failed to back “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” who threw in their lot with al-Qaeda — strictly, we are to believe, owing to Obama’s default, not to the ideological harmony of the “rebels” with the jihadists.

Cross Syria’s eastern border, though, and the vacuum abruptly warps. Now, far from undermining Iran, America’s top priority somehow becomes propping up an Iran-backed Shiite state. Obama’s abdication is thus said to be the failure to “consolidate the gains of the Iraq War” by keeping about 20,000 U.S. troops in place to fend off Sunni “rebels,” who — I know you’ll find this hard to believe — have yet again thrown in their lot with al-Qaeda.

In fact, it turns out that if the same “rebel” gravitates from Syria to Iraq, he’s no longer even a “rebel” anymore; he’s a “terrorist.”

It ought to tell us something that al-Qaeda’s latest incarnation is known as “ISIS.” No, not because it takes an Egyptian goddess of magic to make sense of American policy these days. The acronym is derived from the jihadists’ self-proclaimed name: the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham. Al-Sham refers to “greater Syria” or the Levant, encompassing the neighboring territories of Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, Cyprus, and Southern Turkey.

Jihadists, you see, do not recognize or much care about national boundaries drawn by Western powers. In the world, as they see it, they are pitted against everyone else — Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: All must choose the realm of Islam or the realm of war. Significantly, al-Qaeda was not the first to revive this ancient Islamic-supremacist perspective. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the creator of Iran’s revolutionary sharia state, famously proclaimed:

Contempt for the proletariat is nothing new among imperious politicians. But President Obama must think we are dumber than all get-out, when he haughtily proclaimed, as he did Tuesday: “It’s important for us to send a message to the world that when Americans are attacked, no matter how long it takes, we will find those responsible, and we will bring them to justice.” While it was good to see Ahmed Abu Khattala taken into custody, the timing of the arrest was politically auspicious.

Mr. Abu Khattala had given interviews to the New York Times, CNN, Fox News, CBS, Reuters and the Times of London. His first interviews were conducted within days of the attack – the first apparently with Elizabeth Palmer of CBS. All of these interviews were conducted in public places, with the exception of the one with Anthony Lloyd of the Times of London. That interview took place in his home over “tea and biscuits.” This is a man who, if he had been hiding, was doing so in plain sight. Despite his known leadership of the Benghazi branch of the terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia, the United States only charged Mr. Abu Khattala with having played a “significant” role in the attack on the Consulate last August 6th.

In response to a question as to why it took the military so long to get a man that the media had found quite easily, Pentagon spokesman John Kirby responded: “Terrorists go to great lengths to evade capture. It can be a complicated process trying to get at them.” Really? More complicated than the job the media had of setting up cameras (even if they were not used) and microphones? To claim that Mr. Abu Khattala could not have been taken at almost any time assumes one has the naïveté of a buyer of the Brooklyn Bridge. Mr. Lloyd’s interview, keep in mind, took place last October – two months after the man had been publically charged.

Playing the poodle to President Obama, the sycophantic New York Times, in a front page article on Wednesday explained that the announcement on Tuesday ended “…a manhunt that had dragged on for nearly two years.” They went on to add that the “capture was a breakthrough.” It was only on page 11 that they reminded readers that Ahmed Abu Khattala had given an interview to Times reporter, David Kirkpatrick, a report that was in the October 18, 2012 issue of the New York Times. That interview, like many of the others, was conducted over two hours on a Thursday evening “at a crowded luxury hotel, sipping a strawberry frappe on a patio and scoffing at the threats coming from the American and Libyan governments,” is the way Mr. Kirkpatrick put it.

Somali-Americans leave homes, friends in Minnesota to fight alongside ISIS jihadis

Abdirahmaan Muhumed is one of as many as 15 Minnesota Somali-Americans who left their homes to join ISIS, according to Minnesota Public Radio. (Screengrab from public Facebook page).

As many as 15 Somali-American men have left their homes in Minnesota in recent months to travel to the Middle East and join up with ISIS, the jihadist army at war with Syria and Iraq, according to Minnesota Public Radio.

The fighters appear to have made the decision to go fight with Islamic State of Iraq and Syria/Levant while the terror group was fighting to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, but some may now be in Iraq, where the marauding group is seeking to topple Baghdad.

“A Muslim has to stand up for [what’s] right,” Abdirahmaan Muhumed told MPR News through a series of Facebook messages dating back to the beginning of the year. “I give up this worldly life for Allah.”

ISIS, an Iraq-based, Al Qaeda-linked terror group, poured into Syria as rebels known as the Free Syrian Army fought to overthrow Assad. But ISIS’s ferocious brutality, especially toward Christians, quickly caused a rift with the Syrian rebels. Now, the group appears bent on establishing an Islalamic caliphate, or nation under strict Islamic law, spanning the two nations.

Among Minnesota’s thriving Somali community, Muhumed’s transformation from ordinary life in Minneapolis to Middle East jihadist is evidence of a strong recruitment and radicalization effort.

“Most of [those who left] don’t have the resources to even buy a ticket to go to Chicago. So that means there is some influential individuals who are taking advantage of our youth,” Mohamud Noor, executive director of the Confederation of Somali Community in Minnesota, told MPR. “So it’s up to us to defend ourselves. This is not only a fight for our youth. It is a fight for our future.”

It is against the law for Americans to independently travel overseas to fight in civil wars or armed conflicts against foreign governments. FoxNews.com has written about Americans who went to join the war in Syria in the past, including Eric Harroun, a onetime U.S. Army soldier from Arizona.

THIS IS A COLUMN FROM 2009 AND AS PITHY AND RELEVANT TODAY AS IT WAS PRESCIENT THEN….RSK
America was very proud of itself in November of 2008 when it elected its first black (or at least half-black) president, Barack Obama. Liberal media outlets (excuse the redundancy) framed this event as one of our greatest national cathartic exercises of democracy. They worked directly with Obama and his media manipulators to elevate his presidency to Messianic proportions while they displayed an endless parade of people entranced in ecstasy over this supposedly magnanimous accomplishment.

Magnanimous it was. Here was a man who, with virtually no experience relevant to the world’s most important job, walked right in with global support. Here was a man with an endless sequence of non-specific promises read from a teleprompter able to sell himself to a public interested primarily in getting rid of what it had been led to believe was evil and responsible for all the ills of life: President Bush. Here was a man whose background (at least as much as he would permit to be disclosed, discovered, or discussed) gave every indication that he would deeply uproot much of what most Americans hold dear – freedom, responsibility, capitalism, accountability, transparency, limited control over individual lives, and so forth.

And here is a man who, as President, is being considered by rapidly growing numbers of Americans to be a dangerous disaster. And his failures present a troubling dilemma for much of the public: We worked so hard to get on this train and congratulated ourselves so profusely for climbing aboard. How do we get off?

The reasons people voted for Obama are as varied as the ways he is now failing. Nonetheless, for many whites, the relief of “white guilt” was a significant contributing factor. As former black militant Shelby Steele has brilliantly articulated in various books and articles, white guilt is the behavior of whites that attempts to regain a sense of moral authority presumed forfeited in an age of “white supremacy.” It is the behavior (not the emotion) whites utilize to attempt to relieve themselves of the stigma of racism.

In the superb, Tony-winning Best Play All the Way — now at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theater — Tony-winning Best Actor Bryan Cranston brilliantly portrays President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In this comedy-drama tour de force, LBJ works furiously to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and, later, launches the War on Poverty.

While a nearly three-hour play necessarily misses a few things, All the Way seems to epitomize Great Society liberalism: Fight discrimination, fund social programs, shower, repeat. As for the general public, if you want to eat lunch, heat your home, or watch baseball, knock yourself out; Washington has fatter fish to fry.

LBJ likely would be appalled, however, with the scope of modern liberalism. Far beyond even his expansive definition of Big Government, Obama and his ilk try to choreograph every step of American life. There seems to be no detail too minute nor any activity too obscure to avoid what today’s liberals crave more than anything else: control.

“Control over the economy. Control over our health care. Control over the government. Control over our lives,” Terrence Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., recently wrote. “That’s what drives their every move in politics and in public policy. They’ll settle for nothing less than total control over virtually everything in this country.”

Modern liberalism has little to do with sticking up for the little guy or comforting the poor. It’s all about telling people what to do — around the clock. Amplifying the efforts of the often busybody Bush administration, Obama has replaced Uncle Sam with a giant millipede whose spindly limbs reach everywhere. Each aspect of American life, regardless of size, and each spot on the map, regardless of distance, has become fair game for Washington’s intrusion — usually in the most costly and high-handed fashion possible.

The recently released Unified Agenda of Regulatory and Deregulatory Actions is to red tape what trailers are to motion pictures. Every six months, via this document, 55 different federal departments, agencies, and boards preview their coming attractions. The Energy Department, for instance, is producing 80 new rules, such as: “Energy Conservation Standards for Wine Chillers,” “Energy Efficiency Standards for Automatic Commercial Ice Makers,” and “Test Procedures for Ceiling Fans.”

Well as articulate and glib as Mr. Krauthammer can be…he’s been dead wrong before. Remember when he cheered the “Arab Spring” as if another Moses had emerged from the weeds in Egypt? And his view of the Bergdahl swap- Krauthammer said, “The one area where the president holds the upper hand in those disputes is in matters of war and peace, he’s commander in chief. And I think a prisoner exchange is in the province of the presidency.”There is no question that Obama’s obeisance to the Arab/Moslem world has incited and encouraged radical Islam. But it was Bush who refused to use the words Jihad and Islam; it was Bush who referred to the bombers of 9/11 as “enemies of freedom who had “hijacked” the religion of peace: it was Bush who declared “mission accomplished” while jihadists were simply regrouping poised to strike again. And, to claim that Petraeus won the war is simply risible. It was the Petraeus COIN doctrine- rules of engagement that endangered our soldiers by showing such exquisite sensibility to the mores of savages. Al Qaeda has never, not for one minute, been gone from Iraq…it is present everywhere in Moslem countries in its various incarnations- Taliban, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Shabaab- different names same goals….rsk
Yes, it is true that there was no al-Qaeda in Iraq when George W. Bush took office. But it is equally true that there was essentially no al-Qaeda in Iraq remaining when Barack Obama took office.

Which makes Bush responsible for the terrible costs incurred to defeat the 2003–09 jihadist war engendered by his invasion. We can debate forever whether those costs were worth it, but what is not debatable is Obama’s responsibility for the return of the Islamist insurgency that had been routed by the time he became president.

By 2009, al-Qaeda in Iraq had been not just decimated but humiliated by the American surge and the Anbar Awakening. Here were aggrieved Sunnis, having ferociously fought the Americans who had overthrown 80 years of Sunni hegemony, now reversing allegiance and joining the infidel invader in crushing, indeed extirpating from Iraq, their fellow Sunnis of al-Qaeda.

At the same time, Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki turned the Iraqi army against radical Shiite militias from Basra all the way north to Baghdad.

The result? “A sovereign, stable, and self-reliant Iraq.” That’s not Bush congratulating himself. That’s Obama in December 2011 describing the Iraq we were leaving behind. He called it “an extraordinary achievement.”

Which Obama proceeded to throw away. David Petraeus had won the war. Obama’s one task was to conclude a status-of-forces agreement (SOFA) to solidify the gains. By Obama’s own admission — in the case he’s now making for a status-of-forces agreement with Afghanistan — such agreements are necessary “because after all the sacrifices we’ve made, we want to preserve the gains” achieved by war.

Which is what made his failure to do so in Iraq so disastrous. His excuse was his inability to get immunity for U.S. soldiers. Nonsense. Bush had worked out a compromise in his 2008 SOFA, as we have done with allies everywhere. The real problem was Obama’s reluctance to maintain any significant presence in Iraq.

He offered to leave about 3,000 to 5,000 troops, a ridiculous number. U.S. commanders said they needed nearly 20,000. (We have 28,500 in South Korea and 38,000 in Japan to this day.) Such a minuscule contingent would spend all its time just protecting itself. Iraqis know a nonserious offer when they see one. Why bear the domestic political liability of a continued U.S. presence for a mere token?

The naked self-interest of the government-worker class

For understandable reasons, the IRS scandal has largely focused on the political question of whether the White House deliberately targeted its opponents. To date there’s no evidence that it did. That’s good for the president, but it may not be good for the country, because if the administration didn’t target opponents, that would mean the IRS has become corrupt all on its own.

In 1939, Bruno Rizzi, a largely forgotten Communist intellectual, wrote a hugely controversial book, The Bureaucratization of the World. Rizzi argued that the Soviet Union wasn’t Communist. Rather, it represented a new kind of system, what Rizzi called “bureaucratic collectivism.” What the Soviets had done was get rid of the capitalist and aristocratic ruling classes and replace them with a new, equally self-interested ruling class: bureaucrats.

The book wasn’t widely read, but it did reach Bolshevik theoretician Leon Trotsky, who attacked it passionately. Trotsky’s response, in turn, inspired James Burnham, who used many of Rizzi’s ideas in his own 1941 book The Managerial Revolution, in which Burnham argued that something similar was happening in the West. A new class of bureaucrats, educators, technicians, regulators, social workers, and corporate directors who worked in tandem with government were reengineering society for their own benefit. The Managerial Revolution was a major influence on George Orwell’s 1984.

Now, I don’t believe we are becoming anything like 1930s Russia, never mind a real-life 1984. But this idea that bureaucrats — very broadly defined — can become their own class bent on protecting their interests at the expense of the public seems not only plausible but obviously true.

The evidence is everywhere. Every day it seems there’s another story about teachers’ unions using their stranglehold on public schools to reward themselves at the expense of children. School-choice programs and even public charter schools are under vicious attack, not because they are bad at educating children but because they’re good at it. Specifically, they are good at it because they don’t have to abide by rules aimed at protecting government workers at the expense of students.

The Veterans Affairs scandal can be boiled down to the fact that VA employees are the agency’s most important constituency. The Phoenix VA health-care system created secret waiting lists where patients languished and even died, while the administrator paid out almost $10 million in bonuses to VA employees over the last three years.

The New York Times has distinguished itself as one of the most anti-Israel papers of today. Its writers habitually skew events to fit a particular narrative, one that is misleading and often, devoid of any truth. But among its cadre of writers, there stands one who is without a doubt heads and shoulders above the rest in terms of both his anti-Israel invective and propensity to engage in outright mendacity and that dubious distinction goes to Robert Mackey.

To say that Mackey’s coverage of Israel is reprehensible simply doesn’t do justice to the word. Consider his latest article, Israelis Start #BringBackOurBoys Campaign. An outpouring of sympathy for three Israeli youths kidnapped by Arab terrorists while hitchhiking prompted those supportive of Israel to take to social media in an effort to bring attention to their dire plight.

Here’s Mackey’s spin; “A group of Israelis trained to promote their country online started a #BringBackOurBoys campaign last week after three teenagers disappeared on their way home from religious schools in the occupied West Bank.” First, how does Mackey know for certain that Israelis created the site? The kidnapping produced a wave of both outrage and support throughout the international community, from Brazil to the United States. The Facebook page that Mackey refers to could have therefore been created in any number of countries and by any number of people of varied nationalities.

Second, assuming that the page was created by Israelis, how does Mackey know that those who created the page were “trained to promote their country online”? Mackey embeds that part of the sentence with a link to an article that talks about Haifa University offering an elective to students on ways to combat international deligitimization efforts by anti-Israel activists. But Mackey has no way of knowing that the creators of the page took such a course or even attended Haifa University for that matter and the leap is therefore beyond irrational. Indeed, Israelis are among the most prolific users of social media and are also among the most tech savvy so it’s not a stretch to imagine that some kid or a group of kids, devoid of any formal “training” commenced the campaign.

Here Mackey’s malevolence truly comes to the fore. He creates a moral inversion of sorts by linking grassroots Israeli efforts to free the kidnapped youths to automaton-like agents of government propaganda. This certainly is not the first time that Mackey has engaged in this sort of insidious yellow journalism.

My new book Insecurity is a comedy about political correctness run amok in the government and the military. But, as recent events show, there is a decidedly unfunny side to the world that political correctness is helping to create.

Up until recently, the colloquialism “heads will roll” referred to a threat to fire employees. Nowadays, however, that phrase is more likely to evoke its original literal meaning—as in the beheadings that have become a common feature of the daily news cycle. The streets of Mosul in Iraq are reportedly lined with the severed heads of police and soldiers—victims of the ISIS jihadists. A photo circulating on the web shows one of the recently released Taliban leaders in the days before his capture posing with his trophy collection of five lopped-off heads. Those who thought that decapitation went out with the French Revolution have come in for a rude awakening.

It’s disturbing to realize that such things can happen in this day and age, but we in America tend to console ourselves with the reassuring thought that, thank God, it can’t happen here. Or can it? Why shouldn’t it happen here? Or, to put it another way, “Who’s going to stop ‘em?”

The most obvious answer to that question—the one that will jump most readily to mind—is the Army. And certainly, the U.S. Army is more than a match for any invading force of Middle Eastern jihadists. But, although our army can repel armed jihad, it’s not very well-equipped to resist the other kind—namely, stealth jihad. And if the conquest of America ever comes—as Islamists say it will—it will come about through stealth jihad.

What is stealth jihad? It’s the incremental spread of Islamic law in a society by means of activism, propaganda and lawfare, and by the gradual co-option of schools, courts, and media. It’s the long march through the institutions that the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci recommended to European communists. Leftists have already co-opted many of society’s institutions. What’s to prevent jihadists from doing the same?

Stealth jihad is much more difficult to detect and resist than the armed variety. It’s not the type of aggression the Army is trained to deal with. And, in fact, the Army has proven itself on several occasions to be an enabler of stealth jihad. Take the case of Major Stephen Coughlin. He was the Army’s top expert on Islamic law until he made the mistake of pointing out that Islamic law obliges Muslims to wage jihad. The Army didn’t cotton on to that idea and Coughlin was dismissed from his Pentagon job as an intelligence contractor. The official attitude was nicely captured by an admiral who, upon hearing Coughlin’s assessment, replied that he would first “have to check with my imam on that.”

How can a false cult fool so many people all of the time? They would scoff at a Senate hearing on creationism but go along with this claptrap….rsk
WASHINGTON – Four former Environmental Protection Agency administrators – all veterans of Republican administrations – are urging lawmakers to take action on global climate change, which one warned carries an “enormous consequence for our future.”

“We all know, after all, that the earth’s climate is changing,” former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who headed the EPA under President George W. Bush, told the Senate Subcommittee on Clean Air and Nuclear Safety. “We also know that human activity, although not solely responsible, as we should freely acknowledge, is both contributing to that change and increasing the risk that we will push the environment beyond the point upon which we can repair it.”

Those contributing to the problem, Whitman said, have “an obligation to contribute to its solution.”

Whitman was joined by William Ruckelshaus, the agency’s first administrator during the administration of President Richard Nixon; William K. Reilly, who served under President George H.W. Bush; and Lee Thomas, who held the post under President Ronald Reagan. All agreed that while a legitimate scientific debate exists over the pace and effects of climate change, there is no question that the earth is warming and that the human race is contributing to the change.

“The models of the world’s leading scientists predict rising seas, drought, floods, wildfires and more severe and frequent storms,” Rckelshaus said. “We are seeing impacts already.”

Ruckelshaus told the panel that the world’s oceans absorb 25 to 30 percent of produced carbon – an element thought to contribute to global climate change.

“The culprit is the same carbon that originated from fossil fuels that is contributing to planetary warming,” Ruckelshaus said.

If the U.S. fails to take action, Ruckelshaus noted, “nothing much will happen in the rest of the world.”