RUTHFULLY YOURS

WASHINGTON — The White House confirmed today that North Korea conducted more “provocative actions” in “a flagrant violation of their international obligations.”

“U.S. Strategic Command did, in fact, detect and track what we assessed were two North Korean missile launches yesterday. The missiles were tracked over the Sea of Japan, where initial indications are that they fell,” press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at the daily briefing. “NORAD was also monitoring the launches and determined that they did not pose a threat to North America.”

“But I do think that the impact of these provocations will be to only strengthen the resolve of the international community that has such serious concerns with North Korea’s behavior,” he added.

South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported that, of the test launches of the two Musudan intermediate-range ballistic missiles, at least one appeared to have been unsuccessful.

Seoul’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said the first missile was launched at 5:58 a.m. and was unsuccessful, followed by a second launch at 8:05 a.m. “The second Musudan-like missile flew about 400 km,” the JCS said without elaborating. “South Korea and the United States are carrying out an in-depth analysis on it.”

Yonhap cited military sources saying that the first missile “burst into pieces in the air after flying some 150 km.”

“The South Korean military reportedly concluded that the second missile soared to an altitude of some 1,000 kilometers, which could indicate the country has improved the performance of the Musudan missile’s engine,” the news agency added.

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is believed to have watched the launches.

Pyongyang began testing the Musudan this April.

Washington’s response?”The United States will do what we have done in the past, which is work with the international community, particularly our allies in South Korea and Japan,” Earnest said. “We’ll also continue our ongoing dialogue with the Chinese and the Russians about what additional pressure can be applied to the North Koreans. And the key here will be to continue to work with our allies and partners to address this destabilizing threat in Northeast Asia.” CONTINUE AT SITE

“You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” Ayatollah Khomeini said, and promised to President Jimmy Carter that Iran would be a “tolerant democracy.”

Although the State Department has in its just released annual report on world-wide terror designated Iran as the world’s premier state sponsor of terrorism, the Obama administration has assisted Iranian militias in Iraq with air support, provided intelligence to Hezbollah’s allies on Israeli air strikes, and has steadfastly refused to use any military force against any elements of the Assad regime.

America is apparently bent on repeating — yet again — the historic wrong turn it took in 1979 by once again embracing the radical Islamic regime in Iran. Why would the U.S. administration think doing the same thing again will have a different outcome?

Senior leaders from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia are in Washington, meeting with top U.S. diplomatic and defense officials, and are deeply concerned America has significantly worsened the situation in the Middle East by creating a “strategic partnership” with Iran.

Thirty-seven years ago, former American President Carter paved the way for Iran’s Islamic theocratic dictatorship to come to power according to newly declassified secret documents, reports the BBC Persian News Service. The documents show that former President Carter pledged to “hold back” the Iranian military from attempting a coup, which would have prevented the return of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini from France.

The documents also reveal that the Carter administration believed –erroneously– that bringing the Ayatollah Khomeini into power in Iran, and in the process abandoning the Shah, would preserve American interests, keep the Soviets out of the region, protect U.S. allies, and ensure the flow of oil to the world’s industrial nations.

In one of his many messages to President Jimmy Carter, Khomeini played into that belief. “You will see we are not in any particular animosity with the Americans,” Khomeini said and promised that Iran would be a “tolerant democracy.”

Unfortunately, the mullahs did not stop their terrorist ways; and the U.S. government, through successive administrations, did not stopped them, either.

The Reagan administration, for example, deployed “peacekeepers” to Lebanon under Congressionally mandated rules of engagement that, tragically, only facilitated the Iranian- and Syrian-directed bombings of the U.S. Beirut Marine barracks and embassy.

Then, the Clinton administration refused to lift an arms embargo and provide weapons to Muslims in the former Yugoslavia, ensuring that Iranian weapons and influence would fill the void.

The result of decades of the U.S. policy in Iran is that since Islamic terrorists took power in Tehran in 1979, Iran has murdered thousands of Americans[1] in addition to those killed in the bombings in Lebanon, the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the African embassies, and the World Trade Towers in New York.

U.S. court decisions have so far held Iran responsible for more than $50 billion in damages owed to American citizens for these terror attacks directed by the mullahs and their terrorist proxies.

America’s military has also suffered. Thousands of American and allied soldiers have been killed and maimed by Iranian Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan.[2]

It could be argued that the United States has at times had to make deals with unsavory countries. It was allied with the Soviet Union, for instance, in the fight to destroy Nazism in World War II. So, the thinking might go, a genuine agreement to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons program might require some compromise and thus a type of “partnership”.

The Obama administration has, in fact, sought to justify its embrace of Iran by citing the assumed benefits from a nuclear agreement with Iran.[3] But the current “nuclear deal” with Iran is not a real agreement. The Iranians never signed it.

Obama’s “strategy” against ISIS and the rest of the terrorist world has disintegrated. You can’t fight Islamic terrorists with political correctness tying your hands.

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has maintained his willful ignorance of the fact that weakness against terrorists abroad, coupled with weakness against them at home, add up to more than the sum of their parts. To defeat terrorists, we need to have policies at home and strategies abroad that are integrated and support each other.

From the State Department came a petition of dissent, signed by dozens of employees, asking for military action against Syria’s Bashar Assad. If many in the State Department — the last bastion of diplomatic wimpery — are calling for military action, the president’s policies must have disintegrated.

And they have, as CIA Director John Brennan said last week. Mr. Brennan said that two years of President Obama’s war against the Islamic State, or ISIS, haven’t even disrupted its ability to conduct terrorist attacks globally. This despite the president’s insistence that ISIS is suffering low morale and loss of territory.

The Orlando nightclub massacre, committed by a man claiming allegiance to ISIS, leaves Mr. Obama’s shattered policies in stark relief.

The media has desperately tried to blame anything and everything for the Orlando Muslim massacre. The bloodshed by a Muslim terrorist has been attributed to guns, homophobia, family problems and mental illness. By next week, the media may be blaming global warming and UFOs.

But Omar Mateen told his Facebook friends and a 911 operator exactly why he was doing it. Omar killed 49 people as part of the Islamic State’s war against America.

The motive is there in black and white. This was one of a number of ISIS attacks. The roots of the Orlando attack lie in Iraq forcing us to dig down into Obama’s disastrous mishandling of ISIS. Without understanding what went wrong in Iraq, we cannot understand what happened in Orlando.

Under Bush, Al Qaeda in Iraq had been on the run. Under Obama, it began overrunning the region.

In 2009, Obama vowed a “responsible” end to the Iraq War. He claimed that the “starting point for our policies must always be the safety of the American people”. But the safety of the American people was the first casualty of his foreign policy. In 2011, he hung up his own “Mission Accomplished” sign and boasted that “The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year.” It did not and would not.

Obama claimed that his withdrawal from Iraq and his invasion of Libya were both examples of successful policies. Both countries are now ISIS playgrounds. The “sovereign, stable and self-reliant” Iraq he told the country we were leaving behind was a myth. The new Libya was an equally imaginary and unreal place. ISIS gained power and influence as a result of that chaos. And it used that influence to kill Americans.

Today the battle for Fallujah is raging. When ISIS first took the city, Obama breezily dismissed them as a JayVee team. He specifically insisted that ISIS posed no serious threat to America. “There is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.”

Ever since Richard Nixon opened relations with Communist China in 1972, Chinese intentions have been a matter of incessant and often fevered speculation in this country.

In particular, national security and regional experts, non-governmental organizations and office-holders alike, have endlessly debated whether the People’s Republic of China could be brought into a U.S.-dominated international order and world economy in a manner consistent with American interests and, better yet, as a partner in opposition to mutual adversaries (e.g., the Soviet Union, North Korea, and the global jihad movement).

Regrettably, this controversy over China’s intentions has now been largely settled by actions of the Chinese government – and a rapid militarization. Under successive regimes – and most especially that of the incumbent Chinese ruler, Xi Jinping – the Chinese have relentlessly and unmistakably striven to put themselves in a position to challenge, and ultimately to displace, the post-World War II Pax Americana with a new order. This position would return China to what its leaders consider to be China’s rightful place as the Middle Kingdom, the preeminent global power strategically and economically.

At this critical juncture, it is both foolhardy and irresponsible for America and its allies to continue to construe China’s conduct as non-threatening. That conclusion is powerfully articulated by eight essays featured in a book just released by the Center for Security Policy, entitled Warning Order: China Prepares for Conflict and Why We Must Do the Same. (A video introduction is here.)

A Warning Order is a technique long used by the U.S. military to put its units on notice of an impending danger that requires countervailing action. The draft Secretary of Defense directive that briefly summarizes and suggests how to operationalize the findings of the contributors to this new volume – former U.S. Senator Jim Talent, former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet Admiral James “Ace” Lyons, China and national security experts Dr. Peter Navarro, Gordon Chang, Dean Cheng, Kevin Freeman and Lindsey Neas and journalist Bill Gertz – reads as follows:

WARNING ORDER: Required Preparations for Conflict with China

The unfolding misrepresentations of the Obama Administration’s “deal” with Iran, suggest that either the President or the Iranians or both, have been avid readers of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

As in Andersen’s tale, the vain American president, Obama (the Emperor,) cares about nothing except for living up to his preordained legacy as Nobel Peace Laureate, wrapping himself in yarns of deceptions as accomplishments.

Although the American public and the world is led to believe that Emperor Obama initiated the rapprochement with Iran, it seems more likely, just as in Andersen story that idea came from the scheming weavers.

The crafty, terrorism trend-setting, Ayatollah Khamenei and his artful team of disinformation weavers, eagerly sought the opportunity to become the regional power and develop their in-house nuclear arsenal, recognized as early as 2007, the unique opportunity offered to them by then Democratic presidential candidate Obama, who declared he wanted “to talk to Iran.”

After decades of terrorist designations and sanctions, the election of Emperor Obama who strived to justify his unwarranted Nobel Peace Prize, and who did not hide his naked ambition to wear his power as no other American leader has done before him, offered the Iranian the perfect punter to their knotty scheme.

In 1988, Bradford Muslims didn’t apparently manage to incinerate Rushdie’s book — symbolic, says Kenneth Baker, of the endurance of the written word.

This is a book which, as one eyes its lavish illustrations and dips into its elegant prose, looks as if it ought to come with an option to buy a cut-price John Lewis coffee table.

On the Burning of Books is, in fact, much more than that. It wears its scholarship lightly. A weightier treatment of the topic for those interested can be found in Matthew Fishburn’s Burning Books (2008).

Kenneth Baker? A name that rings bells. But what did he do? He enjoyed high office in the Thatcher years. At one point he was touted as a contender for Downing Street. His legacy is the National Curriculum. Best forgotten is the Dangerous Dogs Act. Spitting Image caricatured him, spitefully, as a beslimed slug. He was probably the last politician in England seriously to use Brylcreem.

He has been out of the political game for decades now and, as Baron Baker of Dorking, has enjoyed his later years as a connoisseurial man of letters. Over the years (he is now 81) he has compiled notes on flagrant examples of book-burning. It’s something that gets his goat.

Fishburn devoted thoughtful chapters to what he called humanity’s ‘fear of books’. ‘I’ll burn my books,’ screams a desperate Faustus in Marlowe’s play, thinking thereby to escape the flames of Hell. He doesn’t: he can’t obliterate the books in his brain. He is what he’s read and must burn for it.

Monotonously cited, in various forms, is the Miltonic epigram, ‘Where men are burned, books are burned.’ (Baker recalls being setAreopagitica as an A-level text in 1952: things were different then.) There’s a sacred aura in printed books, even in the lowliest pulp paperback. My Waitrose has a rack or two. But whoever said ‘Where baked beans are burned, men are burned’?

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article is adapted from Heather Mac Donald’s new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe.

Often accompanying the spurious claim that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because of the war on drugs. An even more audacious argument is that incarceration itself causes crime in black neighborhoods, and therefore constitutes an unjust and disproportionate burden on them because blacks have the highest prison rate. This idea has gained wide currency in the academic world and in anti-incarceration think tanks. Professor Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School (whom we met as in “expert witness” in earlier chapters) offered a representative version of the theory in a 2003 law review article coauthored with two public-health researchers. Sending black males to prison “weakens the general social control of children and especially adolescents,” Fagan writes. Incarceration increases the number of single-parent households. With adult males missing from their neighborhoods, boys will be more likely to get involved in crime, since they lack proper supervision. The net result: “Incarceration begets more incarceration [in] a vicious cycle.”

A few questions present themselves. How many convicts were living in a stable relationship with the mother (or one of the mothers) of their children before being sent upstate? (Forget even asking about their marriage rate.) What kind of positive guidance for young people comes from men who are committing enough crimes to end up in prison, rather than on probation (an exceedingly high threshold)? Further, if Fagan is right that keeping criminals out of prison and on the streets preserves a community’s social capital, inner cities should have thrived during the 1960s and early 1970s, when prison resources contracted sharply. In fact, New York’s poorest neighborhoods — the subject of Fagan’s analysis — turned around only in the 1990s, when the prison population reached its zenith.

Fagan, like many other criminologists, conflates the effects of prison and crime. Neighborhoods with high incarceration rates suffer disproportionate burdens, he claims. Firms are reluctant to locate in areas where many ex-convicts live, so there are fewer job opportunities. Police pay closer attention to high-incarceration zones, increasing the chance that any given criminal within them will wind up arrested. Thus, incarceration “provides a steady supply of offenders for more incarceration.”

But if business owners think twice about setting up shop in those communities, it’s because they fear crime, not a high concentration of ex-convicts. It’s unlikely that prospective employers even know the population of ex-cons in a neighborhood; what they are aware of is its crime rates. And an employer who hesitates to hire an ex-con is almost certainly reacting to his criminal record even if he has been given community probation instead of prison. Likewise, if the police give extra scrutiny to neighborhoods with many ex-convicts, it’s because ex-cons commit a lot of crime. Finally, putting more criminals on probation rather than sending them to prison — as Fagan and others advocate — would only increase law-enforcement surveillance of high-crime neighborhoods.

Orlando’s Pulse nightclub terror attack will go down in U.S. history as the single largest case of mass slaughter ever conducted by a lone gunman in the nation’s 240-year history. Barack Obama’s shameful but predictable response to the carnage can best be characterized as deceitful spin involving a two-part strategy of obfuscation.

The first part involves deflection. Divert America’s attention from the main culprit – Islamic terrorism – to forwarding dual strawman/red herring arguments designed to confuse and mislead. By doing so, he hoped to draw America’s attention away from his own flawed foreign and domestic policies which enabled the ISIS-inspired Muslim terrorist to commit mass slaughter.

Obama cleverly but disingenuously framed the issue as a gun control matter, cynically exploiting the tragedy to advance his agenda for further eroding Second Amendment rights. In his eyes, it was the AR-15 sporting rifle (which turned out not to be the gun that was actually employed) and the National Rifle Association that bore direct responsibility for the killings. He then referred to the carnage as a “hate crime” directed against the gay community, completely glossing over the central role played by a malevolent political ideology that seeks to dominate and impose Sharia law on the West.

In fact, Omar Mateen never expressed anti-gay animus during his 911 rants to police though he did express disdain for U.S. foreign policies and unambiguously professed his Islamic leanings and allegiance to the Islamic State. Moreover, he scouted other locations, having no nexus with the LGBT community, before finally settling on the Pulse nightclub to execute his diabolical plans. Perhaps he did so because he was familiar with the club’s layout, having been there on multiple prior occasions as a patron. Or perhaps he viewed it a soft target in which he could easily inflict mass carnage. No one will know for certain why he chose Pulse but Obama has already set the agenda and charted a course for its trajectory. That trajectory places Americans on a thought process that deliberately diverts attention away from the main causes and culprits.