RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama’s exchange of 5 high-ranking Taliban murderers for a soldier who possibly was a deserter and collaborator encapsulates everything that is wrong with this administration’s foreign policy. The serial failures of the past 5 years reflect a toxic brew of partisan politics and naïve ideology.

The staging of the announcement last Saturday in the Rose Garden obviously was intended to milk every drop of photogenic pathos and political gain from a decision rife with moral hazard and questionable legality. To reap political advantage from this disaster of a deal, lies and half-truths were necessary for creating the narrative behind the picture of Obama flanked by Bergdahl’s joyful, if somewhat bizarre, parents. Contrary to the president and his supporters, Bergdahl was not a “hero” or “prisoner of war.” Nor had he served with “honor and distinction,” or been “captured on the battlefield,” as the terminally mendacious Susan Rice said on a Sunday morning news-show.

In fact, evidence continues to mount that Bergdahl voluntarily left his post to connect with English-speaking Taliban, a move consistent with his renunciation of his citizenship and disgruntled anti-American emails. Whether he is just a flake, as his earlier biography and strange comments suggest, or had more sinister motives will become clearer as more information surfaces. He may even be a traitor. His team leader on the night he disappeared, former Army Sergeant Evan Buetow, has told CNN that radio intercepts revealed that Bergdahl was looking for the Taliban, and that after his capture, the Taliban’s attacks on Americans became “far more directed.”

The serious questions about Bergdahl were known to the administration, if only from a 2012 Rolling Stone article. Yet consistent with Obama’s foreign policy approach, facts are never an impediment to political advantage, as his record shows. The Benghazi disaster was created by politics and covered up for political reasons. Beefing up security for the diplomatic mission was nixed because it contradicted the political narrative that the multilateral “leading from behind” removal of Ghaddafi had started Libya on the road to Jeffersonian democracy and peace, when in reality it had unleashed hundreds of feral jihadists gangs now armed with missiles and other weapons. Likewise blaming the attack on an obscure video rather than an al Qaeda franchise reinforced the “al Qaeda on its heels” and “bin Laden dead” memes peddled during the presidential campaign in order to prove the success of Obama’s anti-Bush foreign policy.

IF IT TURNS OUT THAT BERGDAHL IS REALLY A DESERTER, WHY NOT DEPORT HIM AND HIS MUM AND DAD TO QATAR (PRONOUNCED GUTTER) ? rsk

For Obama, foreign policy is mainly about domestic politics.

President Obama’s decision to swap five Taliban killers for the return of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has morphed from a debatable policy decision into the Administration’s latest political fiasco. There’s a lesson here about the risks of spin and narrow political calculation, especially in foreign policy when American lives are stake.

Start with the fact that little the Administration has said about this swap has turned out to be true. “He served the United States with honor and distinction,” declared National Security Adviser Susan Rice on ABC on Sunday. But as everyone has since learned, the soldiers who served with Sgt. Bergdahl almost to a man believe that he deserted his post in Afghanistan in June 2009 before falling into the hands of the Taliban.

We think Sgt. Bergdahl deserves the benefit of the doubt until the facts are all known, but our guess is that Ms. Rice oversold him as a hero because the White House was hoping to turn the swap into a big foreign-policy victory. Thus Mr. Obama hosted the sergeant’s parents in the Rose Garden on Saturday in front of the TV cameras, while Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel took a victory lap in Afghanistan, and Ms. Rice called it “a great day for America.”

You can argue the prisoner swap was necessary to retrieve our man, or a difficult moral choice, but it is not a reason for back-slapping and high fives.

Then there’s the dubious claim that the Administration had to move fast to negotiate Sgt. Bergdahl’s release because he was dangerously ill. This line was used to explain why the President had ignored a statute demanding that Congress be consulted 30 days in advance of any prisoner release from Guantanamo Bay. But Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was briefed on the swap after the fact, says that she “heard no evidence that Sgt. Bergdahl was in immediate medical danger that made it necessary to act without consulting Congress.”

Barack Obama will be remembered as a president who walked in his own spotlight. Whatever else, he’s been on view all the time. This week it’s the Barack Obama-Bowe Bergdahl deal.

Why did “Obama” do it? Let us count the conjectures overflowing the World Wide Web. Because he felt Bowe was in failing health. No, because he wants to close Guantanamo. No (and sign me onto this one), because he wants to do a peace negotiation with the Taliban. Just as he is doing a peace deal with Iran’s mullahs, just as he is doing a peace deal with the new PLO-Hamas “unity” government.

With the Obama presidency, nothing’s ever close to done. Benghazi sits as one of life’s mysteries. We don’t know what was going on with the IRS audits. ObamaCare may be a real law, but it has more potholes than the streets of New York.

It is too bad Barack Obama can’t meet the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square. He would learn that sometimes in the affairs of the world, there comes a time to say, enough. Stop.

This Thursday is the 25th anniversary of the Tank Man’s solitary protest. On June 5, 1989, the morning after the Chinese army crushed the students’ democracy rebellion in Tiananmen Square, with hundreds dead, a man in a white shirt walked in front of the army’s tanks, driving down a street near the square. For a while, he made the tanks stop.

To this day, no one knows who the brave Tank Man was. But the whole world watched on global television as he stood down the tank commander. When the tanks tried to go around him, he moved in front of them. Eventually, two people came from the crowd and led him away. He was never seen again.

There are two other anniversaries this week, and both evoke the same idea of taking an unmistakable political stand.

NOTHING, REPEAT, NOTHING NIXON EVER DID RIVALS THE MALFEASANCE OF OBAMA….AND THE IRONY IS THAT NIXON DEFEATED LEFTIST GEORGE McGOVERN IN A LANDSLIDE AND OBAMA IS MORE LEFT AND LESS A PATRIOT THAN GEORGE McGOVERN….WHO FOUGHT FOR THE COUNTRY OBAMA IS DESTROYING IN WORLD WAR 11 AS A B24 LIBERATOR PILOT WITH 25 MISSIONS OVER GERMAN OCCUPIED EUROPE AND WON A DISTINGUISHED FLYING CROSS.RSK

‘Barack Obama is really the president Richard Nixon always wanted to be. He’s been allowed to act unilaterally in a way that we fought for so many decades.”

So said George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley on Fox News Channel’s Hannity program Tuesday night. Turley is no Clarence Thomas conservative. He is an avowed liberal, yet one who believes that government should obey the rule of law. That law is, supremely, the United States Constitution — which Turley both studies and teaches.

Turley is disturbed that Obama repeatedly speeds past federal law (narrowly) and the constitutional separation of powers (broadly) as he drives his agenda. This is frightfully clear, yet again, in the rapidly exploding controversy surrounding the Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl/Taliban-high-command swap.

“Even though one could agree with many of the policies — as I do — that this administration holds, the means that it is selecting are very troubling,” Turley lamented. “This president, once again, has said that he simply chose not to comply with federal law.”

Turley referred to Obama’s violation of Section 1035(d) of the 2014 National Defense Authorization Act — a federal statute that Obama signed. This law requires Obama to give Congress 30 days’ notice before releasing anyone from Guantanamo. Obama argues that he emancipated the “Taliban Dream Team” — as Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) calls them — due to Bergdahl’s declining health. The 28-year-old soldier, however, departed Afghanistan in apparently decent shape and arrived at America’s military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, in “stable condition.”

America’s Medieval Universities

Employment rates for college graduates are dismal. Aggregate student debt is staggering. But university administrative salaries are soaring. The campus climate of tolerance has utterly disappeared. Only the hard sciences and graduate schools have salvaged American universities’ international reputations.

For over two centuries, our superb system of American public and private higher education kept pace with radically changing times and so ensured our prosperity and reinforced democratic pluralism.

But a funny thing has happened on the way to the 21st century. Colleges that were once our most enlightened and tolerant institutions became America’s dinosaurs.

Start with ossified institutions. Tenure may have been a good idea in the last century to ensure faculty members free expression. But such a spoils system now encourages the opposite result of protecting monotonies of thought. In a globalized world where jobs disappear in an eye blink and professionals must be attuned to the slightest changes in the global marketplace, academics insist that after six years they still deserve lifetime guarantees of employment.

In the age of the Internet and global readerships, faculty promotion is still based largely on narrow publication in little-read, peer-reviewed journals. Many are often incestuous and have no bearing on enhancing faculty teaching skills.

Post-tenure review and peer evaluations have become pro forma quid pro quos among guild members. The result is a calcified professoriate that demands it alone can still live in the protected world of the 1950s.

Part-time teachers and graduate students are not so lucky. They are often paid less than half for the same work done by full-time faculty, in illiberal fashion that would be unacceptable at Walmart or Target.

Universities are the least transparent of U.S. institutions, defending protocols more secretive than those of the Swiss banking system. Few colleges publish the profile of students who were favored in the admission process through legacies, athletic prowess, or race and gender preferences. The result is that almost no one knows why one student gets into Yale or Stanford and another with a far more impressive academic record does not.

The president is recklessly derelict as commander-in-chief and studiously duplicitous in dealing with Congress.

Pardon me if I couldn’t care less whether Jeffrey Toobinthinks President Obama “clearly broke the law.” It is not at all clear that he did. Yes, it is clear that he ignored a statute that purports to trim his plenary commander-in-chief powers over the disposition of enemy combatants and his Article II supremacy over the conduct of foreign relations. But since a statute cannot amend the Constitution, it is not clear that the statute in question is constitutional.

But this is entirely beside the point.

The president has knowingly provided material support to terrorists. More importantly, he has replenished the enemy in wartime by giving the Taliban and Haqqanis back five senior, capable, rabidly anti-American commanders at a time when, as the president well knows, the Taliban and Haqqanis are still conducting violent jihadist operations to kill our troops. This is a shocking dereliction of duty.

Moreover, as I have been arguing, the Obama administration also flatly lied to Congress in representing last year that it would comply with the statute Obama has now flouted. A president has every right not to enforce a statute he believes in good faith is unconstitutional. He commits a profound breach of faith, however, when he announces he will comply with the statute and consult with Congress and then refuses to do so—precisely to deprive Congress and the public of the ability to mobilize against his objectionable policy of empowering our enemies.

In the IRS scandal, for nearly a year, the Obama administration was able to distract attention from its appalling abuse of power in harassing the president’s political opponents by encouraging an abstruse legal debate over whether Lois Lerner said enough in her opening statement to waive her Fifth Amendment privilege.

We’re now heading into the same feint. The president is recklessly derelict as commander-in-chief and studiously duplicitous in dealing with Congress. And we’re talking about a dubious 30-day notification statute? If you think Jeffrey Toobin has diagnosed to heart of the problem here, good luck.

What is clear is that Austria’s “Law of Islam” of 1812 represents protection for Islamic organizations that no other European country has to offer.

Many Egyptian communities in Austria, however, do not define themselves as Muslim. They are completely opposed to political Islam, and are enormously worried about the presence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The 1912 law might be delivering the most potent weapon of Islamic extremism at the expense of the majority of Austria’s Muslims — most of whom practice their religion as a part of life not as an instrument of power.

One reason for the possible relocation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s European headquarters from London to Graz, Austria, mentioned by The Daily Mail on April 12, might well be the inquiry, started by the British government in March, into the activities of the Brotherhood.

Ibrahim Munir, Secretary General of the Muslim Brotherhood and often referred to as the head of the Brotherhood in Europe, had said to the Anadolu news agency that he could not “imagine or accept leaving Britain for any other country.”

However, the satellite channel Al Arabiya reported, from a source linked to the Brotherhood, that in London a meeting had taken place in the presence of Mahmoud Hussein, the secretary general of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, during which those present had discussed not only the situation in Egypt and the appointment of 17 new leaders, but had also endorsed the decision to move their headquarters from London to Austria and three other European countries.

Even Khalid Sham’a, Egypt’s ambassador to Austria, confirmed to Al Arabiya that many leaders and members of the Brotherhood had moved to Austria, and noted that the main Egyptian community in Austria is located in Graz.

It appears that the European Muslim Brotherhood, in keeping with its pragmatic strategy of adjusting to contingencies, might be thinking of decentralizating.[1]

The enticement, however, that might really make Austria attractive to the Muslim Brotherhood, is its legislation. In 1912, Emperor Franz Joseph, as a result of the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as an attempt to integrate Bosnian soldiers in Imperial army, issued the so-called Islamgesetz [Law of Islam].

Why I am a Zionist
Because I am a Christian, many people assume it is my religious faith that is the primary motivation for my advocacy for Israel. But that is not the case.
Because I am a Christian, many people assume it is my religious faith that is the primary motivation for my advocacy for Israel. But that is not the case. Like all true Zionists, my strongest motives are more visceral, more mysterious than any creed or pledge. I am a Zionist because of my son, Taylor. His spirit and his struggle led me to the only people, the only nation on earth, that share the essence of both.

When Taylor was nine years old, a huge tumor was discovered in his pelvic dish. It was an especially insidious cancer, one in which tumors calcify, turning into bone, stabbing from the inside out. My immediate concern was not only for Taylor’s body but also for his spirit. Witty, curious and charismatic, he loved people and life. What good, I wrote to friends and family, if his body is healed but his spirit is crippled? Please, pray for both.

In the two years that followed, everyone prayed and fought and fixed their hopes on physical recovery. Almost no one did the same things for his spirit. And so Taylor and I became a team, fighting for each other’s inner man. Early on, I shaved my head. When he first saw the new look, Taylor deadpanned and said, “Now both of us are MIB’s. Kinda like the movie, Men In Black. Except we are Men In Baldness. You are Agent B and I am Agent T.”

Three months after diagnosis and initial treatment, his case was transferred to Herbert Schwartz, Vanderbilt’s chief of orthopedic oncology. When Taylor and I went for a consultation, Herb’s kindness was expected. It was, however, a kindness that did not preclude breathtaking clarity. I was warned about this. “It is because he’s Jewish,” several whispered. After months of patronizing prevarication, plain-speaking clarity was sunshine and fresh air. But the news we heard was dark. “The tumor has grown,” he said. “In order to remove it, I probably will have to remove the left of side of your pelvis and so, of course, your leg as well.”

When Schwartz left the room, we cried and prayed, then headed out the door. Passing by the surgeon and his retinue of residents looking up at scans upon a lighted wall, Taylor stopped them all and said, “Dr. Schwartz?” Every head turned. “If you do have to amputate my leg,” he continued, pausing for effect, “do you think you could get it stuffed so that I can hang it over my fireplace at home?” Turning with a grin, Taylor walked away.

Four days later I walked into surgical recovery. Vastly diminished but with the tumor removed, I did not know if Taylor knew the leg was gone. His eyes were shut. An oxygen mask blew on his face. Leaning down, I said, “Honey, I’m here; I love you.” He responded with a halting rasp, “Now… I should… be able… to get… a really… good deal… on shoes. At least 50 percent off.” Just a few days later, he accepted an invitation to speak to first year medical students. That afternoon he hopped up on a treadmill and using armrests, walked. In less than six weeks he was climbing trees. “It’s easier on one leg,” he explained. “I can get places where I could not get with two.”

Taylor’s body was diminished but his spirit was enhanced, radically enhanced. In spite of heartbreaking pain, shocking loss and eventually death itself, Taylor always rejected despair, always chose life. For my part and more often than not, I fought. I challenged our doctors, our culture, our religion and our God.

One Fall day, eighteen months into Taylor’s war with cancer, a war his body was losing, my Christian congregation held a prayer meeting. It began with at least thirty minutes of “praise and worship” music. I did not sing along. When asked to speak, I stood and said, “Right now, God is my Opponent. Like Jacob, He insists I wrestle with Him. And so I do, I do.” Everybody squirmed. Almost everybody; one man smiled. Taylor’s Jewish surgeon, Herb Schwartz, was there. Afterward, he shook my hand, looked me in the eye and with a sympathetic twinkle said, “Nice speech.” He was the only one who understood.

For Israel, nuclear weapons and doctrine are absolutely necessary, but they are not sufficient.

When Pericles delivered his Funeral Oration in 431 BCE, the same year as the start of the Peloponnesian War, his oratorical perspective was plainly strategic. As recorded by Thucydides, an early Greek historian whose dominant focus was on a better understanding of military power, Pericles’ speech acknowledged that Athenian security must forever remain uncertain.

“What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies,” lamented the wise Athenian wartime leader Pericles, “is our own mistakes.”
More precisely, his oft-quoted words expressed a determinedly timeless apprehension: “What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies,” lamented the wise wartime leader, “is our own mistakes.”

Contemporary Jerusalem is not ancient Athens. Nonetheless, history is often kaleidoscopic, and despite unimaginable changes in science and technology, the most primal inclinations toward war and peace continue largely unaltered. On complex matters of military strategy, there is always considerable reshuffling and recombination of doctrine, but still no genuinely basic transformation of constituent “parts.”

To be sure, Pericles didn’t have to concern himself with nuclear weapons and nuclear war. Still, the core principles of offense and defense in warfare have remained pretty much unchanged. Later, Machiavelli said as much, when, in the Discourses, he reminded his early sixteenth-century readers that both strategic dilemmas and strategic solutions are endlessly repeating themselves: “We ought to consider,” commented Machiavelli, that “there is nothing in this world at present, or at any other time, but has and will have its counterpart in antiquity.”

On 6 June 1944 the Western Allies landed in northern France, opening the long-awaited “Second Front” against Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Commanded by U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Normandy assault phase, code-named “Neptune” (the entire operation was “Overlord”), was launched when weather reports predicted satisfactory conditions on 6 June. Hundreds of amphibious ships and craft, supported by combatant warships, crossed the English Channel behind dozens of minesweepers. They arrived off the beaches before dawn. Three divisions of paratroopers (two American, one British) had already been dropped inland. Following a brief bombardment by ships’ guns, Soldiers of six divisions (three American, two British and one Canadian) stormed ashore in five main landing areas, named “Utah”, “Omaha”, “Gold”, “Juno” and “Sword”. After hard fighting, especially on “Omaha” Beach, by day’s end a foothold was well established.

GENERAL DWIGHT “IKE” EISENHOWER’S ADDRESS TO THE TROOPS:

Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.

But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!

Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking.

— Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower