RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama Middle East foreign policy lens is focused on one issue at the moment: the defeat of ISIS. In pursuing this goal, the Obama team is seeking allies including former enemies such as Iran, notwithstanding claims to the contrary. While the U.S. now sees Iran as a potential stabilizing force in Iraq and Syria, Tehran is chafing at what it considers the tough negotiating stance of the U.S. on its nuclear program.

No one at the moment – on either side of the negotiating table – has specifically referred to linkage, but the firm position of Ayatobllah Ali Khameni is a sign Iran believes it has new found leverage over Washington. A White House spokesman contends, “The United States will not be in a position of trading aspects of Iran’s nuclear program to secure commitments to take on ISIS.”

On the sidelines are allies of the U.S. apprehensive about the American position. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the UAE have vowed to assist the U.S. in the effort to destroy ISIS, but they are reluctant to use Iran as the instrument for doing so. The fear is that a stronger Iran, one with nuclear weapons, becomes an imperial threat to the region. As Secretary of State John Kerry underscores the importance of Iran’s role in the war against the Islamic state, Sunni leaders shudder.

Establishing a balance between a harnessed Iran nuclear program and an Iranian army deployed as a regional balance wheel is a proposition emerging from the evolution of recent events. Already Iranian officials are calling the U.S. negotiating position “unreasonable.” Iran’s foreign minister, Jawad Zarif, said, “what do they, [the U.S.], want?” “Iran has been… the first that came to the aid of the Iraqis in dealing with that problem.”

What the Iranians cleverly avoid is the sectarian divide in the Middle East. With Iraq, Syria and Iran united as a powerful bloc of Shia dominated governments, it poses a threat to their Sunni counterparts. In fact, the Sunni states accuse Bagdad of fueling the rise of ISIS by marginalizing Iraq’s minority Sunni population, a stance adopted by the former Maliki government.

Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu maintained that the nations of the world should not ignore the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons even if some officials “are saying that world powers should go easy on Iran’s nuclear program so it will fight ISIS.” This Netanyahu stance is consistent with the position of most European leaders.

The signs were all there, glaring, waiting to be seen. The predisposition to violence, time spent in prison, emotionally unstable, website postings. Alton Nolen was not an aberration. He was if anything a ticking time bomb with a short fuse. His firing from Vaughn Foods was simply the catalyst that tripped the trigger in his mind to move from jihadi thoughts to violent action.

One small switch, one perceived slight and he was gone. Doing what he had heard and seen of others, specifically ISIS members beheading innocent victims in the Middle East. The call to him was clear, at least in his twisted mind. Several radical Islamist groups had recently urged American “lone wolfs” to act in the name of Allah and attack innocents where ever they could.

Could this action have been stopped before it started? Should authorities have known beforehand what an individual like this could do? Is there a profile or tell-tale signs that authorities should have picked up on? The answer is yes.

Over ten years ago a US Intelligence agency report on the profile of potential terrorist (violent extremists) was issued that stated in part;

“Based on a variety of reporting – including a preliminary analysis of a small sample of US converts to Islam who become associated with extremist violence…we assess… Some individuals, particularly those who convert in prison, may be attracted directly to jihadi violence at the outset of their conversion for opportunistic rather than ideological reasons. For this group, jihad represents a convenient outlet for aggressive behavior.”

The report goes on to say:

“In an apparent play on this psychological vulnerability…extremist groups are actively recruiting prisoners…”

One must really hand it to President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron for their anti-ISIS speeches at the U.N. on Wednesday: They managed to condemn ISIS, or the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq, without much uttering the words “Islam” and “Muslim.”

Not once did Cameron in his UN speech mention “Islam,” but rather “Islamist extremism,” surely a redundancy in terms. He did, however, utter “Muslims” or “Muslim” five times. The rest of his speech stressed that other Muslims were also being killed by the “extremists” and, echoing George W. Bush from nearly a decade and a half ago, indicated that ISIS had “hijacked” Islam, thus exonerating Islam. He mentioned “evil” once, at the end of his speech.

Did Hitler “hijack” Nazism? Did Stalin “hijack” Communism? Did Ruhollah Khomeini “hijack” Islam?

Obama mentioned “evil” once, also, and uttered “Islam” four times. From him we heard the usual puffery about Islam being benign and peaceful and the cornerstone of Western civilization, and repeated his assurances (to Muslims) that we are not at war with Islam. It’s a statement he made in Cairo and in Ankara, Turkey (“In Ankara, I made clear that America is not – and never will be – at war with Islam. “) It’s an “extremist ideology” that has declared war on the West, it’s the “violent extremists” who are responsible for the thousands of deaths and the carnage, not Islam itself, implying that Islam is just a hapless spectator to horrific crimes, and not the perpetrator of them.

Obama will not acknowledge that Islam is nothing if not “extremist” or “radical” or “violent.” However: Islam is as Islam does. That is the immutable fact which Obama and his ilk disguise in their patter of dhimmitude, multiculturalism, and moral relativism.

One can even pronounce a proscribed word and not mean that it has any connection to reality or the word’s actual meaning. Obama has made a rhetorical career of it.

Obama will throw a tantrum and berate his military advisors if they try to “paint all of Islam with the same brush.” That is, as a conquering, murdering, raping, looting ideology, as ISIS is and does. If the future indeed does not belong to those who “slander” the prophet of Islam – that is, identify Mohammad as the conquering, murdering, raping, looter he was, provided he actually existed – then the West is cooked per halal style, with our throats cut with knives or machetes we handed to our executioners , our property looted, our womenfolk sold off as sex slaves and concubines, and our children enrolled in politically correct madrassas.

Denial, willful ignorance, wishful thinking: the hallmarks of our age. If you know the truth about ISIS and Islam, as Obama does, and deny the truth, that is to side with Islam and ISIS. Cameron is merely a knee-knocking fool, whose middle name must be ostrich.

Everyone but a semi-literate dolt reading the British press knows that the term “Asian,” when it occurs in a story about the Pakistani grooming gangs or an attack on white Britons, stands for the prohibited and unmentionable term “Muslim.” But it isn’t only careless usage of the term “Muslim” which could incur judicial disapprobation, jail time, and financial and personal penalties, but the wrath of Muslims over their “outraged religious feelings” or the alleged imputation of their ethnicity, as though mentioning a criminal’s Islamic affiliation was tantamount to expressing one’s “racism.”

Euphemisms, except in certain, defined circumstances (such as in dramatic dialogue, or in lyrics or poetry, or in humor), are corruptors of language and of minds. Euphemisms are not metaphors or similes for anything. Their purpose is to disguise facts, not serve as guides to facts or as a means of clarification. Their primary purpose is to help a mind evade perceiving and dealing with reality. A euphemism used in dramatic dialogue can be justified if it stresses a disguised fact; but there is no justification for employing a euphemism when dealing with reality.

The USSR killed 338,000 whales. Its relentless illegal whaling fleets drove the blue whale into extinction in the North Pacific and caused population crashes in a number of other species.

Some have labeled it the worst environmental crime of the century, but it was really just a slow day for the USSR whose other contributions to the environment included destroying one of the four largest lakes in the world (“One of the worst environmental disasters of the world”: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon) and multiple nuclear disasters culminating in Chernobyl (the world’s worst nuclear disaster).

The USSR was determined to show that communism could defeat capitalism and while it couldn’t beat the United States in industrial production, it took home the gold medal for environmental disasters. By the end, 75 percent of its surface water was polluted and its air was among the dirtiest in the world.

The only ones to give the old USSR a run for its money when it came to environmental disasters were their fellow Communists across the border in the People’s Republic of China.

But the only thing that the left does better than wreck economies and the environment is rewrite history. Its three-legged roaches crawl out from underneath the rubble and pretend that nothing ever happened. The left claims historical inevitability while refusing to learn anything from history.

Like mutated cockroaches in Chernobyl, its red-shirted acolytes converged in the People’s Climate March chanting that the only solution for the environment was to replace capitalism with Socialism.

The Party for Socialism and Liberation carried a banner proclaiming that “Climate Change is the Symptom, Capitalism is the Disease, Socialism is the Cure.” The PSI is a Marxist splinter group from the even more insane Workers World Party. It thinks that the collapse of the USSR was the real disaster.

The Communist Party of the United States, whose logo still includes a sickle and gear, announced that it was now concentrating on nature. But it will take a lot of greenwashing to turn those reds green.

The International Socialist Organization, another Marxist group, came promoting its “Eco-socialism” while bearing posters of a globe dripping with oil. “Capitalism is Killing the Planet; Fight for Socialism.”

The Kurds are fighting bravely, but they need arms, and they need air support.

In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama pledged to the world that the United States would use its might to stop the horrific depredations of the terrorist movement variously known as the Islamic State, ISIS, or, as he calls it, ISIL.

“This group has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria,” the president proclaimed. “Mothers, sisters, daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”

“No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions,” he said. “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death. . . . We will support Iraqis and Syrians fighting to reclaim their communities. We will use our military might in a campaign of air strikes to roll back ISIL. We will train and equip forces fighting against these terrorists on the ground.”

These are brave words that well and truly denounce evil for what it is. Unfortunately, the president’s actions since then have been anything but consistent with his pledge to stop the terrorism.

As these lines are being written, some 400,000 Kurds in and around the town of Kobane in northern Syria, on the Turkish border, are being besieged and assaulted by massed legions of Islamic State killers armed with scores of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery. Against these, the Kurdish defenders have only AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Kurds have called on the U.S. to send in air strikes to take out the jihadist forces. In response, the administration sent in two fighter jets Saturday, which destroyed two Islamic State tanks and then flew away. The Kurds are begging for arms. The administration has not only refused to send arms, but is exerting pressure both on our NATO allies and on Israel not to send any either. Over 150,000 Kurds have fled their homes to try to escape to Turkey, but they are being blocked at the border by Turkish troops. Meanwhile, Turkey is allowing Islamist reinforcements to enter Syria to join the Islamic State, while Islamist elements of the Free Syrian Army, funded and armed by the United States, have joined forces with the group in the genocidal assault on the Kurdish enclave.

The inequality bed-wetters are misleading you.

The inequality police are worried that we are living in a new Gilded Age. We should be so lucky: Between 1880 and 1890, the number of employed Americans increased by more than 13 percent, and wages increased by almost 50 percent. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the Barack Obama years will not match that record; the number of employed Americans is lower today than it was when he took office, and household income is down. Grover Cleveland is looking like a genius in comparison.

The inequality-based critique of the American economy is a fundamentally dishonest one, for a half a dozen or so reasons at least. Claims that the (wicked, wicked) “1 percent” saw their incomes go up by such and such an amount over the past decade or two ignore the fact that different people compose the 1 percent every year, and that 75 percent of the super-rich households in 1995 were in a lower income group by 2005. “The 3 million highest-paying jobs in America paid a lot more in 2005 than did the 3 million highest-paying jobs in 1995” is a very different and considerably less dramatic claim than “The top 1 percent of earners in 1995 saw their household incomes go up radically by 2005.” But the former claim is true and the latter is not.

Paul Krugman, who persists in Dickensian poverty, barely making ends meet between six-figure sinecures, is a particularly energetic scourge of the rich, and he is worried about conspicuous consumption: “For many of the rich, flaunting is what it’s all about. Living in a 30,000 square foot house isn’t much nicer than living in a 5,000 square foot house; there are, I believe, people who can really appreciate a $350 bottle of wine, but most of the people buying such things wouldn’t notice if you substituted a $20 bottle, or maybe even a Trader Joe’s special.” In an earlier piece on the same theme, he urged higher taxes as a way to help the rich toward virtue: “While chiding the rich for their vulgarity may not be as offensive as lecturing the poor on their moral failings, it’s just as futile. Human nature being what it is, it’s silly to expect humility from a highly privileged elite. So if you think our society needs more humility, you should support policies that would reduce the elite’s privileges.” That is, seize their money before they order the 1982 Margaux.

Obama hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, but at least he isn’t George W. Bush.

The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war.

The October 2002 joint congressional authorization to go to war was not just about fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Other worries prompted broad bipartisan support for the resolution. A majority of Democratic senators (as evidenced by their passionate speeches from the Senate floor) cited many of the resolution’s 23 writs. The latter were mostly concerned with things other than WMD: harboring terrorists, offering bounties for suicide bombers, giving refuge to at least one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects, committing genocide, attempting to kill a former U.S. president, and so on. Hillary Clinton should watch her own 2002 speech from the Senate floor.

George W. Bush was the third consecutive U.S. president to have bombed Iraq. By 2001, the first Iraq war was seen as incomplete, in that a genocidal Saddam Hussein was not only still in power, but also had broken most of the accords signed after his 1991 defeat. The no-fly zones were eroding. That is why Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 and supposedly blew up lots of things and killed lots of Iraqis (Operation Desert Fox). Earlier that year he had signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which had passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House. And still earlier he had famously summed up his administration’s fears:

Iraq admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulin, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.

Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq’s remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits. . . .

Diana West, just gave the following address earlier today (~ 2 PM, Monday, 9/29/14) at The National Security II Conference sponsored by The Center For Security Policy.

Direct Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBhG6iy-DF8

For anyone still puzzled as how it could be that our leaders and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” it’s important to know that such widespread brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My recent book “American Betrayal”delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, this double standard not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale up the road at University of Maryland. It’s also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.

There are no such trendy portraits of Hitler, and who would want them? Who would want to swig a bottle of Hitlerpop, decorated with a swastika? So, why Leninade? Not only does the stench of death not follow the Communist murder-cult, the brand lives.

Barring a tsunami of common sense, I predict that Islam, the brand, will remain separate in the public mind from the violence and repression it causes and has caused for more than a millennium. That’s certainly the direction leaders from both political parties have been relentlessly herding us in for over a decade, insisting against all reason — against all sacred Islamic texts — that “Islam is peace.”

What should senior officers do if experience tells them that the president’s plan to defeat ISIS is unworkable without U.S. combat troops?

In President Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, he reiterated his vow not to involve U.S. combat troops in the fight against Islamic State jihadists. He would avoid “the mistake of simply sending U.S. troops back” into Iraq, Mr. Obama said, noting that “there’s a difference between them advising and assisting Iraqis who are fighting versus a situation in which we got our Marines and our soldiers out there taking shots and shooting back.”

Yet many Americans are skeptical, judging by the new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll showing that 72% of registered voters believe that U.S. troops will eventually be deployed. Perhaps Americans have been listening to some of the president’s senior military advisers and several retired senior officers and have decided that their expert opinions sound more realistic.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 16 that if necessary he would recommend that the president order U.S. military advisers to “accompany Iraq troops on attacks” against Islamic State, also known as ISIS. A day later Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said that “you’ve got to have ground forces that are capable of going in and rooting [ISIS] out.” Gen. Odierno did not specify that the ground forces needed to be American, but he said an air campaign alone cannot defeat the jihadists occupying large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Retired senior officers speak with greater candor. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former commander of the U.S. Central Command, told the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 that it would be a mistake to rule out U.S. ground forces against ISIS. A couple of days earlier, retired Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who commanded coalition forces in Afghanistan, said in a TV interview that ground troops will be needed to defeat ISIS. If the jihadists’ threat “is as serious as some people say,” the general asked, “then why aren’t we applying all elements of American power to it?”

President Obama rode to the White House in part by assailing George W. Bush for believing faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. So there is no small irony in his claim now that America’s spooks missed the rise of the Islamic State. The difference is that U.S. intelligence did warn about the threat from ISIS. Mr. Obama chose not to listen.

Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday if ISIS’s march into Iraq was a “complete surprise,” Mr. Obama replied, “Well I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Mr. Clapper is the presidential appointee who coordinates U.S. intelligence messaging. Perhaps he does think his agencies misjudged ISIS. But we doubt he missed the Feb. 11, 2014 Senate testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time:

“Al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (IS1L): AQI/ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

That was five months before the fall of Mosul and a couple of months after Mr. Obama had compared ISIS and various al Qaeda offshoots to the junior varsity.

If Mr. Obama didn’t want to believe DIA, he could always have bought this newspaper. On Jan. 6 this year we wrote that “Syria’s contagion is also spilling into Iraq with the revival of al Qaeda in neighboring Anbar province. . . . Much of eastern Syria is now controlled by the al-Nusrah front or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and they move with ease back and forth into Iraq. Men flying the flag of al Qaeda took over large parts of Ramadi and Fallujah last week, ousting the Iraq army.”

This required no great prescience or deep sourcing. It was apparent to anyone paying attention to Middle Eastern events, or at least to anyone who was open to hearing news that conflicted with Mr. Obama’s mantra that “the tide of war is receding” and that al Qaeda had been defeated.