RUTHFULLY YOURS

After World War II, the U.S. abandoned the concepts of total and hard war and adopted a more politically correct view of war.

Western civilization is immolating itself on the sword of political correctness. Our leaders fail to recognize the existential threat that we now face and are unwilling to take the decisive actions necessary to combat the threat of radical jihadist Islamists.

Leadership on both sides of the political spectrum refuse to identify how we might counter this threat. This is not necessarily a new type of threat that we have not experienced before. However, what is new is our refusal to properly utilize the tools at our disposal to combat this threat.

We often hear our leadership say that it is against our values as Americans to use some of these ruthless but effective tools. Gen. George S. Patton once said, “War is cruel, ruthless and brutal and it takes a cruel, ruthless and brutal man to fight it!” It was the implementation of this approach that ultimately secured victory in 1945.

Unfortunately, our nation does not presently possess Patton’s “cruel, ruthless and brutal man” in any senior leadership position in our government or military. Politicians and generals alike often state that it is against our long-held American values to target civilians or torture prisoners. However, our country’s history is replete with examples of our leadership doing what is necessary to win. We can only logically extrapolate that those who would refuse to fight hard war would be willing to sacrifice our lives and freedom on the altar of the absurd fallacies of American values crowd.

During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington hanged spies and executed deserters. During the Mexican-American War, Gen. Winfield Scott ordered the execution of fifty members of the St. Patrick’s Battalion in 1847. Many members of this unit were determined to be deserters from the U.S. Army who joined forces with the Mexican army under Santa Ana. Both Union and Confederate generals during the Civil War executed prisoners in retaliation for executions by their counterparts. Gen. William Sherman during his famous march from Atlanta to the sea issued General Order V which stated,

Army Corps commanders alone are entrusted with the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton gins, etc., and for them this general principle is laid down: in districts in neighborhoods where the Army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

Asked about the fight against ISIS today, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter stressed “we need to get this over with.”

Carter was taking questions after a talk on preparing the Defense Department for the future today at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

“Beyond terrorism, we also potentially face future nation-state adversaries with widening geographic reach but also widening exposure, something we may want to take into account in order to de-escalate a crisis and to deter aggression. In other cases, we may have to respond to multiple threats across the globe in overlapping time frames,” Carter said during his speech.

“…We’re not postured to be as agile as we could be. Accordingly, we need to clarify the role and authority of the Chairman, and in some cases the Joint Chiefs and the Joint Staff.”

In the Q&A, Carter said of ISIS, “We have got to get these guys beaten as soon as possible, which is basically where I’m coming from.”

“We are looking for every opportunity we can take to do that. Of course, our overall strategic approach is not only to defeat ISIL, but to keep them defeated. That means you also have to look ahead to the next stage and who is going to keep the peace afterwards, which is why we try to work with local forces where they can be made capable and motivated, which is difficult in some places but that is a necessary part of the strategy,” he said.

Last week, a fresh political scandal erupted on Capitol Hill over Iran. At issue was a new plan being considered by the Obama administration to provide Iran’s ayatollahs with limited access to the U.S. financial system as a sweetener for their continued compliance with their government’s 2015 nuclear deal with the nations of the P5+1.

Doing so would have effectively reneged on promises made by the White House last summer in selling the nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA) to a skeptical Congress. Back in July, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew waved away congressional worries over the prospects of Iran’s regime being unjustly enriched as a result of the JCPOA. Lew pledged that — irrespective of the provisions of the new nuclear deal — Iran would “continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

The plan would also have been a potential violation of federal law, since under the provisions of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act the White House is required to “block and prohibit” Iranian assets if those funds “come within the United States, or are or come within the possession or control of a United States person.” (Similarly, the administration’s proposal would have fundamentally undermined one of the central pillars of post-9/11 counterterrorism law, the USA PATRIOT Act, by allowing Iran’s tainted money to permeate U.S. financial institutions.)

News of the new initiative drew outraged responses from key lawmakers, who promised — among other things — to penalize U.S. companies who used the opportunity to expand their business with the Islamic Republic. The pushback worked, and by the weekend the administration had walked back the dog on its proposed idea. “The administration has not been and is not planning to grant Iran access to the U.S. financial system,” a spokesperson deployed by the Treasury Department insisted to reporters on April 1.

That, however, isn’t the end of the story. While the White House may have stopped short of giving Iran direct access to the American financial system, it still appears to be mulling workarounds that would nonetheless allow the Islamic Republic to take advantage of the U.S. dollar.

Deterrence is lost through lax foreign policy, an erosion of military readiness, and failed supreme command — often insidiously, over time, rather than dramatically, at once. The following random events over the seven years that Barack Obama has been in office have led to the idea abroad that the U.S. is no longer the world’s leader and that regional hegemonies have a golden opportunity to redraw regional maps and spheres of influence — to the disadvantage of the West — in the ten months remaining before the next president is inaugurated.

The otherwise disparate Boston Marathon, Fort Hood, and San Bernardino Islamist bombers had three things in common: First, the killers had all communicated on social media with radical jihadists, or had come to the attention of both U.S. and foreign intelligence, or had expressed jihadist beliefs. Second, their attacks were followed by administration warnings about not embracing Islamophobia, as Obama doubled down on his administration’s taboo against the use of terms such as “jihadist,” “radical Islamist,” and “Islamic terrorist.” Third, after each of these incidents, there was no stepped-up administration vigilance; instead, there was a flurry of sermons about not blaming Islam for inciting such killers. The greatest check on ISIS terrorism may lie in the hands of ISIS itself: If its operatives continue to cull the Western herd by a few dozen murders every few months, the U.S. will likely continue to do little. If they get greedy and seek a repeat of something on the scale of 9/11, then the American public will force this administration to act. Unfortunately, ISIS may not be so much energized by anger over supposed Islamophobia as buoyed by the administration’s inability to say “radical Islam.”

The Bowe Bergdahl swap for five Taliban terrorists — and National Security Adviser Susan Rice’s praise of the deserter Bergdahl’s service — reinforced the global message that the Obama administration did not necessarily see Taliban killers as killers or American deserters as deserters, apparently because such definitions are anachronistically absolute concepts. After all, who would willingly swap five killers for one deserter? Apparently everything is negotiable and political, given that the U.S. does not feel deeply about either terrorist killers or those who have renounced their duty to thwart them.

On March 30, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei rejected Western pressure for Iran to stop testing ballistic missiles and a statement by a former Iranian president favoring negotiations instead of the missile program by warning in a speech: “People say that tomorrow’s world is a world of negotiations and not a world of missiles.” Khamenei added, “If they say this thoughtlessly, it shows that they are thoughtless. However, if this is intentional, then this is treachery.”

Khamenei’s defiant comments came in the midst of growing international concerns about Iran’s missile program. Iran tested two ballistic missiles last fall and several over the last month. Written on the sides of two missiles recently tested by Iran reportedly were the words “Israel should be wiped from the pages of history.” Iran is expected to soon launch a space-launch rocket that most experts believe will be a test to develop an ICBM capable of firing nuclear warheads against Europe and the United States.

Iran has the largest ballistic missile arsenal in the Middle East and is the only nation in history to develop missiles with ranges of 2,000 km or more without having a nuclear weapons capability. Although Iran claims its missiles are not intended to carry nuclear warheads, most experts believe they are being developed as a nuclear weapons delivery system. The United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany said in a joint letter sent this week to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that Iran’s recent missile launches were “inherently capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

The White House said today that interdiction of an Iranian vessel shipping arms to Yemen showed that they’re not ignoring Iran aggression after implementation of the P5+1 nuclear deal.

According to the U.S. Navy, the Cyclone-class patrol craft USS Sirocco first spotted a dhow in the Persian Gulf that was packed with weapons. With the help of the guided missile destroyer USS Gravely, American forces seized cargo including 1,500 AK-47s, 200 RPG launchers and 21 .50 caliber machine guns.

The U.S. 5th Fleet said it was the third time since late February that ships originating in Iran were caught smuggling weapons across the water with Houthi rebels being the “likely” recipient.

On Feb. 27, the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Darwin intercepted a dhow with nearly 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 100 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 49 PKM general purpose machine guns, 39 PKM spare barrels and 20 60mm mortar tubes.

On March 20, the French Navy destroyer FS Provence seized nearly 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 64 Dragunov sniper rifles, nine anti-tank missiles and “other associated equipment.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest was asked at the daily briefing if this was “an example of the Iranians following the letter of the agreement, but not necessarily the spirit of it” or “a violation.”

Once upon a time there were people who naively fantasized about how all the incompatible cultures of the world were going to magically blend, weaving a beautiful tapestry of colors and variations. They called this “Multiculturalism”. Increasingly, the tapestry is made up of glass shards and human remains. At what point do we begin to tally the lives ruined or taken by members of all the “guest” cultures from members of all the host cultures? Pretty soon, I hope, since that seems to be a recurring element of multiculturalism. Wherever you see one, you see the other.

Cultures are either consciously abandoned, or consciously enforced. The theory of multiculturalism has always been a tonic for simpletons, since it celebrates the perpetuation and imposition of an incompatible culture, still being practiced by those who carry it, upon a host culture with which it is mutually exclusive. Multiculturalism is entirely subversive. It is intended to force one or more cultures upon the hosts who do not want or need them. Since both cultures cannot successfully coexist within the host, which has its own successful working culture, the purpose of the exercise has always been fraudulent. The “melting pot” concept worked not because of the concept of multiculturalism, but as testament against it. Those who came here in our parents’ and grandparents’ generation consciously chose to abandon the cultures they left in favor of the American culture. They became Americans, embracing one culture.

If one was being less generous than to call multiculturalism a tonic for simpletons, it would be more accurate to say that modern leftist multiculturalism is actually a weapon. Its purpose is not to enhance the host, but to consume it. If the host’s culture is peaceful, it has no use for malcontents who insist upon the dominance of their native culture. Malcontents, in the form of angry and entitled guests, foment chaos and disorder. And yet, the leftists insist that we demonstrate our cultural superiority by abandoning the superiority of our own culture and importing incompatible languages, traditions, practices, and morals.

Iran and North Korea exposed its hollowness weeks before our president convened it.

Hours before President Obama convened a fifty-nation summit on nuclear weapons last Thursday, he celebrated himself in a Washington Post op-ed. He began the article by reminding us that nuclear proliferation and the use of nuclear weapons are the greatest dangers facing the world, saying that was why he committed us, seven years ago, to stopping the spread of such weapons and seeking a world without them.

Obama went on to praise his nuclear weapons deal with Iran, saying that it closed every single one of Iran’s paths to the bomb. (He omitted to mention those that remain open, such as the agreement’s risible inspections regime which guarantees Iranian cheating by allowing it to self-inspect some of its key nuclear sites. And the one that allows it, after fifteen years, to enrich as much uranium to weapons grade as it likes, ensuring it can produce nuclear weapons then whenever it likes.)

Unsurprisingly, neither is there anything to learn from nor anything accomplished at Obama’s summit. There’s much more to learn and dissect in the actions and pronouncements of Iran and North Korea before the summit.

On March 8 and 9, Iran launched ballistic missiles in tests of weapons that have at least the range to hit Israel. According to the Iranian FARS news agency, the missiles were painted with the slogan, “Israel must be wiped off the Earth” in Hebrew. UN Security Council resolutions are supposed to be stopping Iran from testing such missiles, but those resolutions are having the same effect they usually have, which is exactly none.

On March 30, the day before Obama’s summit, Iran’s “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said, “Those who say the future is in negotiations, not in missiles, are either ignorant or traitors.”

By now, last summer’s nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries, including the United States, is widely understood to have been a windfall for the clerical regime in Tehran. The agreement, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), netted the Islamic Republic some $100 billion in previously escrowed oil revenue, a sum roughly equivalent to a quarter of Iran’s annual economy.

That, however, now appears to be just the tip of the iceberg. Recent days have brought new revelations that the Obama administration is planning still more economic concessions to Iran’s ayatollahs. Specifically, the White House appears to be mulling the possibility of allowing Iran limited access to the U.S. financial system, as a sweetener for its continued compliance with the terms of the JCPOA.

That plan effectively reneges on promises made by the White House last summer in selling the nuclear deal to a skeptical Congress. Back in July, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Treasury secretary Jack Lew waved away congressional worries that Iran’s regime might be unjustly enriched as a result of the JCPOA. Lew pledged that, regardless of the provisions of the new nuclear deal, the administration was committed to keeping existing, and extensive, trade restrictions in place.

“Iranian banks will not be able to clear U.S. dollars through New York, hold correspondent account relationships with U.S. financial institutions, or enter into financing arrangements with U.S. banks,” Lew promised. “Iran, in other words, will continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.”

Now, however, the secretary and his colleagues are singing a decidedly different tune. “Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” Lew told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington last week. The message was abundantly clear: For the administration, allowing Iran access to the U.S. market has become an article of good faith.