RUTHFULLY YOURS

The fifteen years following September 11, 2001, demonstrate that the free world is still struggling to understand the various jihadist threats that achieved such global notoriety in this day’s mother of all terrorist attacks. Yet slowly but surely citizens are comprehending centuries-old Islamic ideologies that are once again assaulting free societies, a sign of hope after years of policy mistakes and politically correct “Islamophobia” taboos..

Al Qaeda’s hijackings in this black September awoke wrenched America from a halcyon “holiday from history” derided by many like former CIA Director James Woolsey. While many who have come of age since 9/11 condemn an ensuing “endless war,” he complained that his commander-in-chief, President William Clinton, payed little attention to national security. Yet his notorious playboy manners inside and outside of the Oval Office seemed to befit the relative peace and prosperity of the long decade from the Berlin Wall’s fall on 11/9/1989 to 9/11/2001.

Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush, was thankfully made of sterner stuff for what would soon be sterner times, but history would pass critical judgment upon his neo-Wilsonian strategies for dealing with the Islamic world’s various dangers. Perhaps giddy with American “hyperpower” in a historic “unipolor moment,” this evangelical Texan sought to replicate Republican icon Ronald Reagan, whose Cold War defeat of Communism liberated millions. Efforts to extend a Kantian zone of peace would attract supposedly huddling Muslim masses yearning to breathe free away from the poverty and perils of dictatorships and religious fanaticism.

Costly expenditures of blood and treasure in Afghanistan and Iraq with little result dashed any hope of these countries celebrating Francis Fukuyama’s End of History. His often misunderstood and maligned thesis rightfully noted that free societies had proven their superiority in good governance over all ideological competitors like Communism. Yet as his own reservations about the Iraq war indicated, many Muslims presently eschew such empirical evidence in favor of faith-based adherence to various sharia-supremacist illiberal beliefs.

Although Bush’s experience seemed to influence little President Barack Obama’s disastrous Libyan humanitarian intervention that left behind a jihadist-dominated country, his disengagement policies often personified an anti-Bush. Obama’s Vice President Joe Biden incongruously declared Iraq an Obama Administration success before Obama’s troop withdrawal helped unravel a dearly-won tenuous peace there. Meanwhile his lesson from Bush’s Iraq war of “don’t do stupid s-t” hardly produced any discernibly better results as Iraq’s neighbor Syria broke apart in a bloody regional war between Shiites and Sunnis. Most importantly, Obama’s enablement of Iran’s power and nuclear ambitions is only strengthening the Middle East’s most dangerous jihadist state.

Israeli researchers: Notes from USSR archivist who defected indicate PA president was working for Soviets in Damascus in 1980s while Putin’s current Mideast envoy was stationed there

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel’s Channel 1 television reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an archive smuggled out of the USSR.

According to Channel 1’s foreign news editor Oren Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.The documents — obtained by Israeli researchers Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez — purportedly show that Abbas, code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin’s envoy to the Middle East. was stationed in Damascus.

Bogdanov was caught in a diplomatic tussle earlier this week after trying to broker a summit between Abbas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow, who both claimed a willingness to meet while decrying the other for allegedly refusing.

Mitrokhin was a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK in 1992, and his edited notes on various KGB operations were released in 2014. His handwritten notes remain classified by MI5.

The archivist’s notes on the KGB are considered among the most complete information available on Soviet intelligence operations. He claimed that the KGB recruited the then head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Wadi Haddad, as an agent in the 1970s.

His writings also revealed that Haddad, operating under the code name NATSIONALIST, was given Soviet assistance in funding and arming the PFLP.

The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them. In his recent book Mission Failure, Prof. Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright to make war on the Serbs by provoking them into killing a hundred or two civilians.

Most of Clinton’s cabinet didn’t want to support the KLA, which made its money in narcotics and human trafficking, and they didn’t want to divide the sovereign state of Serbia—a precedent that Russia later used to justify its seizure of the Crimea. Nonetheless the moral blackmail succeeded, and Muslim radicals learned how to push the guilt button of the West.

My review-essay on Mandelbaum’s book appears in the Summer 2016 issue of Claremont Review of Books. Although I find much to disagree with, his reading of the salient events is incisive. His argument intersects with my warning just after the 9/11 attacks that radical Islam intended to horrify the West—not only by committing atrocities against Western civilians, but by causing massive civilian casualties among Muslims.

To a great extent they have succeeded. The fragile conscience of the Germans could not bear the suffering of Syrian refugees streamed towards its border with the connivance of Turkey. As Giulio Meotti reported for the Gatestone Institute, the refugee invasion will radically alter Europe’s demographic balance.

Hamas fought the Gaza War in order to maximize civilian casualties among its own population, and thereby entice the West into forcing Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, where short-range rockets could devastate the national airport as well as Tel Aviv. This has not succeeded—yet—because Americans support Israel over the Palestinians by a 4:1 margin. But Palestinian leaders are patient; as the Palestinian journalist Mohammed Daraghmeh wrote (translate by the Times of Israel), the war with Israel “will end only when the world understands it has a duty to intervene and to draw borders and lines, as it did in Bosnia-Herzegovina, in Kosovo.”

This macabre pantomime should be transparent, but such is the squeamishness of the West that enlightened opinion shudders at the prospect of more dead Palestinian civilians. The world forgets that the Allies killed 1 million German civilians and between a quarter and half a million Japanese, mostly through aerial bombardments. This sacrifice was justified by the need to destroy wicked governments that killed tens of millions of civilians in Europe and Asia. States have the right to defend themselves against artillery attacks. Israel’s right of self-defense is generally acknowledged, but with the caveat the self-defense should be “proportionate,” that is, ineffective.

Frequently the “proportionality” canard is linked to a demand for Israeli concessions that have nothing to do with the issue at hand. Oxford University theologian Nigel Biggar for example writes in the Summer 2016 issue of the Christian strategy journal Providence: “It was within Israel’s power to take diplomatic, confidence-building initiatives. Uniterally, she could have stopped and reversed the illegal settlements in the West Bank. Since she didn’t do so, her military assaults on Gaza were inapt and therefore disproportionate.” Prof. Biggar forgets that Israel’s unilateral “confidence-building” withdrawal from Gaza put Hamas rockets on its borders. Logic is beside the point. The West is horrified and wants the horror to stop, and that is just what Hamas counts on.

Worse is yet to come. On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah now has 150,000 rockets, by far the largest such inventory in the world, including many precision-guided missiles which can be programmed for evasive flight paths and are more difficult to shoot down with the Iron Dome air defense system, as I warned two years ago. Many of these are emplaced in civilian homes in the Shi’ite towns of southern Lebanon. To destroy them would entail civilian casualties one or two orders of magnitude greater than the collateral damage in Gaza.