RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The hysterical focus on Israel has blinded both Obama and Kerry on what really troubles the Middle East: Arab against Arab.”

http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/novelists-view-world/2013/sep/3/syria-allahs-war-mr-obama/

— So are we going to war or not? Yes, no, maybe seems to be the answer of the day and it is only Tuesday.

Unsteady is the hand that rocks this cradle, the United States.

President Obama has decided to let Congress do the talking on whether to go after Syria’s President Assad. But here too Obama is hedging his bets. He seeks congressional approval. If he gets a yes vote, so we hear, he will take action… or maybe not. So, as Hillary might say, “What difference does it make?”

Meanwhile, as Obama resolutely dithers, the entire world is on edge. Friends and foes, among them England, China and Russia, are on standby for late word from our Obama/Kerry leadership.

And Kerry does seem to be especially gung-ho for this. Kerry, the 1960s peacenik, suddenly wants blood. London has already spoken, and the answer is “hell no, we won’t go.”

Israel, always sitting on a ticking time bomb, is simply waiting to get hit. Assad has generously provided a blueprint for where the bombs will fall.

President Obama is now hiding behind a reluctant Congress to take action in Syria. I’m not convinced that action is called for, but I long for a leader that at least makes the case instead of issuing a forceful wag of the finger and hollow rhetoric.

Here is an example of a President making the case for war: FDR on May 27, 1941:

“Some people seem to think that we are not attacked until bombs actually drop in the streets of New York or San Francisco or New Orleans or Chicago. But they are simply shutting their eyes to the lesson that we must learn from the fate of every Nation that the Nazis have conquered. The attack on Czechoslovakia began with the conquest of Austria. The attack on Norway began with the occupation of Denmark. The attack on Greece began with occupation of Albania and Bulgaria. The attack on the Suez Canal began with the invasion of the Balkans and North Africa, and the attack on the United States can begin with the domination of any base which menaces our security – north or south….We cannot bring about the downfall of Nazism by the use of long-range invective. But when you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck before you crush him.”

FDR again on the eve of D-Day in 1944:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith. They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest–until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war. For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.”

Today, the mere mention of the Almighty would offend the coercive atheists who legislate today and the notion of fighting to preserve our “Republic, our religion, and our civilization” would be derided in a “multicultural” and apologist society. Our president simply brandishes a limp carrot….inspiring absolutely nothing but the contempt of our enemies and allies…. rsk

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=11791

Would a U.S. military response to the use of chemical weapons against Syrian civilians be justified? Ruthie Blum and Steve Ganot discuss.

An estimated 1,400 civilians were killed using chemical weapons in an Aug. 21 attack on the Ghouta region in Syria. Government officials from the U.S., Israel, Canada, France, the U.K., Germany, Turkey, and the Arab League hold the Syrian government responsible, and U.S. President Barack Obama is laying the ground for a military response against the Assad regime, while Iran and Russia blame Syrian rebels for the attack.

Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have announced that U.S. military strikes on Syria would be met with retaliation against Israel. Meanwhile, a British Parliament resolution in support of military strikes was voted down, and a number of other key U.S. allies appear to be backing away from supporting an American-led intervention. On Aug. 31, Obama announced that he would first seek congressional approval before ordering military strikes on Syrian targets.

Columnist Ruthie Blum and Israel Hayom editor Steve Ganot discuss the Obama administration’s attempts to deal with the Syrian crisis, and preparations in Israel for the possibility of retaliatory strikes.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/marc-thiessen-say-no-to-a-feckless-syria-strike/2013/09/02/f217f36c-13de-11e3-880b-7503237cc69d_story.html

The Libyan war gave us the doctrine of “leading from behind.” Now, in Syria, we are about to see the birth of a new Obama Doctrine: military action “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”

That’s how one U.S. official described President Obama’s plans for a strike against the Assad regime. This is far worse than leading from behind. At least in Libya, Obama’s reluctant intervention led to the toppling of the dictator. In Syria, administration officials say their goal is to strike the regime without dramatically altering the country’s balance of power. This is nonsensical. The very purpose of military action is to “alter the balance of power” in a conflict. If that is not your objective, you should not use military power.
So what is Obama’s objective in Syria? In an interview with PBS, Obama said it would be to fire a “shot across the bow” of the Syrian regime. Huh? A “shot across the bow” is a warning shot. It is designed to send a message that a far more devastating response will follow if the target does not alter its behavior. But Obama has already ruled out broader military action. “I have no interest in any kind of open-ended conflict in Syria,” he said last week. “I assure you nobody ends up being more war-weary than me.”

In other words, he’s just planning to blow some stuff up.

Maybe that’s why Obama has not been able to build a coalition to join him in Syria. It seems no one (save the French) wants to participate in an attack “just muscular enough not to get mocked.” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said he sees “no NATO role in an international reaction to the [Syrian] regime.” The British Parliament has rejected the use of force in Syria. None of the Middle Eastern nations seeking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad are backing Obama either, because, as The Post reported this weekend, they are concerned that “limited strikes could actually work in Assad’s favor.”

They are right. When you say that your objective is to do just enough “not to get mocked,” you are projecting weakness — and weakness is provocative.

It’s not just the Assad regime that is watching our response. Al-Qaeda is watching. Hamas is watching. Hezbollah is watching. North Korea is watching. China is watching. So is Iran. Let’s not forget that Syria is not the only place where Obama has drawn a “red line” on weapons of mass destruction. In Jerusalem this year, the president declared that America would “do what we must to prevent a nuclear Iran.” Why should the mullahs in Tehran worry about crossing Obama’s red line on WMDs when they see the Syrians cross Obama’s red line on WMDs — and the president’s reaction is to do as little as he can without getting mocked?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357412/president-present-john-fund Obama’s pattern of indecisiveness continues — and it has Democrats worried. Washington is abuzz with talk about how much President Obama has damaged America’s credibility with his indecisiveness on Syria. It’s become accepted fact that Obama’s decision-making style resembles that of an academic convening an unruly seminar whose participants he largely disdains. What he […]

http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/09/02/gulliver-tied-down-by-lilliputians/

One in five applicants for jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency have ties to Muslim terrorist organizations, according to the latest round of Snowden leaks. And Israel is a major target of American counterintelligence. Washington is insane.

Three years ago, the Washington Post sketched the elephantiasis in the U.S. intelligence establishment without, of course, access to the detailed numbers leaked by Edward Snowden last week. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can’t hire people you can trust. If you spend $52 billion in the “black budget,” you create so many conflicting bureaucratic interest groups as to cancel out any possible signal with a wave of noise.

As I pointed out in a 2010 post at First Things, reproduced after the page break, at last count there were fewer than 2,500 Americans studying Arabic at advanced university courses (not counting, of course, the internal training of the U.S. military). Fewer than 250 were studying Farsi. The total pool of truly competent Arab speakers coming out of American universities per year probably is in the low hundreds. How many of these can U.S. intelligence agencies recruit? If we can’t recruit translators among Americans whose background is verifiable, we rely on first- and second-generation immigrants from Arab countries whose background is not verifiable. We should assume that our intelligence services are riddled with hostiles. We are Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians.

Israel, by contrast, has a surfeit of Arabic translators — the language is taught in every Israeli high school, and is easy for Hebrew-speakers to master. Israeli friends of mine who were trained as Arabic translators for intelligence work were sent to guard duty in the Negev because the military had too many skilled linguists.

The U.S. has relied extensively on friendly Arab intelligence services, above all the Egyptians, to fill the gap — except that the Obama administration did its best to bring down the Egyptian military in 2011 and install the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis have plenty to tell, but little that Washington wants to hear: Israel never fell victim to the mass delusion about the so-called Arab Spring, and has warned throughout (along with Saudi Arabia) that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be crushed. Israel therefore is treated as an intelligence target rather than as a collaborator, while the Arab intelligence services who most might help us — Egyptian and Saudi — must regard us with skepticism in the best of cases and hostility in the worst.

America is flying blind into a hurricane. Americans who write about the Middle East now depend on what other countries choose to leak to us. Washington isn’t in the loop any longer.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/an-unconstitutional-military-strike?f=puball

I don’t know why the White House doesn’t just send Syria’s Bashar al-Assad a map of where it intends to attack with Tomahawk and other missiles. The bottom line, however, is that this much heralded military adventure is unconstitutional. The President has no authority to initiate the use of the military against Syria.

This has not stopped presidents from engaging the nation in wars, but the last declaration of war, as specified in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, occurred on December 11, 1941 against Germany as a response to its formal declaration of war against the United States. Three days earlier Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor initiating a state of war.

As the Tenth Amendment Center points out, “Unless fending off a physical invasion or attack, the president is required to get a Congressional declaration of war before engaging in military hostilities in another country.”

Let us be clear about this. Syria has not declared war on the United States and, while the use of gas goes against an international convention against it, the Assad regime has already killed 100,000 Syrians in a civil war. Nor is Syria the only nation in the Middle East known to have used gas. Saddam Hussein gassed several thousand Kurds in Halabja, Iraq in 1988 and used it in his eight-year war against Iran. The West’s response was to do nothing except to condemn it.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/obama-gets-syrias-on-syria

You really wish you had the credentials and clearance to attend a White House press conference, indoors or in the Rose Garden, and have the chance to pose this question to President Barack Obama: “Sir: Why don’t you just go on an extended golfing tour for the rest of your term, and leave the country alone? And, the world, too. You might be able to improve your par.”

Barring that, one could just toss a rotten egg at him. Or an over-ripe tomato. If you couldn’t get the egg or the tomato passed security, you could sacrifice one of your shoes. I don’t think the White House Press Corps shows up barefooted, leaving their footwear in a TSA-style Secret Service bin. You would look silly hobbling out of the press conference in handcuffs, but you will have asked your question, or made your point one way or another.

Whatever you threw at him – the question, the egg, the tomato, or the shoe – Obama just might get the point. Or he may not. Chances are that he wouldn’t get it, because he is truth-proof. Reality is optional for him. It is whatever he wishes it to be, and we mustn’t corner him with inconvenient questions, or shower him with expiration-dated foodstuffs.

Let’s take Syria, and President Bashar Assad’s alleged use of chemical weapons. Obama has a “high confidence” that Assad used them. Translated, “high confidence” means a percentile of certainty, and not absolute certainty, based on circumstantial evidence that someone used chemical weapons, because there are bodies to prove it. However, a “high confidence,” in colloquial terms, simply means a “hunch” that Assad used them and not Syrian “rebels” using captured chemical weapons from Iraq. Or from Benghazi. Or from a Mexican drug cartel. Not evidence.

It would be easy to claim that Obama errs. Obama does not “err.” He is not handicapped by an epistemological cataract that prevents him from seeing the truth or that blurs it in a murky mist. The truth is irrelevant to him when it contradicts his wishes. He wishes it to be true that Assad used chemical weapons on Syrians. This will justify his ordering military action against Assad.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/video-jamie-glazov-on-jihad-denial-2/

To order High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, click here.

In the two-part video interview below, Josh Brewster talks to Frontpage’s editor about his critically-acclaimed United in Hate, his latest book High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, his family’s struggle for freedom, David Horowitz’s work and influence, and much more.

In Part I, the discussion focuses on Jamie Glazov’s parents’ dissident activity in the former Soviet Union and how it molded his battle against the Left.

Part II deals with Jamie’s United in Hate, his new book, High Noon For America: The Coming Showdown, the legacy of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and David Horowitz’s priceless contribution to fighting the Left.

Both parts of the two part series are below:

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/mass-attack-thwarted-in-jerusalem/ As Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year) approaches on Thursday this week, the mood here in Israel has been oddly “schizoid.” On one hand, the usual rush on apples, honey, pomegranates and the like for the holiday; on the other, a rush on gas masks as Syria and Iran threaten “retaliation” against Israel for […]