RUTHFULLY YOURS

Not long after the end of World War II, William J. Perry, age 18 and already on his second enlistment, was shipped off to Japan as part of America’s occupation army. Arriving in Tokyo, he saw that the “once great city was decimated—virtually every building made of wood was destroyed by firebomb attacks. Survivors were living in vast wastes of fused rubble, existing on meager rations.” For the young Mr. Perry, witnessing such horror was a “transformational experience”; and he understood that the destruction wreaked by dropping thousands of conventional bombs on Tokyo, as awful as it was, had been exceeded at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His encounter with the effects of modern war was to lead to a lifetime devoted to protecting America from the fearsome weapons of the nuclear age, recounted now in “My Journey at the Nuclear Brink,” an engrossing memoir and, along the way, a concise guide to some of the most intractable national-security perils confronting our country.

In 1954, while finishing a Ph.D. in mathematics at Penn State, Mr. Perry assumed the title of senior scientist at Sylvania’s Electronic Defense Laboratories in California, a firm established by the Army to devise defenses against Soviet nuclear-armed missiles. The expertise he acquired there was to make him a participant in some of the Cold War’s most terrifying moments. Thus when Nikita Khrushchev installed nuclear weapons in Cuba in October 1962, Mr. Perry was summoned to Washington, where for eight harrowing days he prepared reports for the president on the technical aspects of the weapons themselves.

Marco Rubio
“I do not believe that we have to destroy our economy in order to protect our environment. And especially what these programs are asking us to pass that will do nothing to help the environment, but will be devastating for our economy.”
Will he go as far as Rick Perry did and suggest we shut down the job killing, data falsifying, purveyor of junk science EPA?

The U.S. Has No Global Strategy…The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.

Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.

The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”

Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.

Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”

But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”

13 Hours is a riveting movie and book. What makes it special is the discussion by the six American heroes about the attack on September 11th, 2012. As with most incidents the names are forgotten, but with these accounts people are able to put a human touch on the terrorist assault against Americans. American Thinker had the honor of interviewing the author of the book, Mitchell Zuckoff, a direct spokesman for the four, as well as two of the heroes from that night, Mark “Oz” Geist, John “Tig” Tiegen. AT also spoke to Jose Rodriguez Jr., former Director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service.

This is the story of an Islamic terrorist attack on the U.S. State Department Special Mission Compound and a nearby CIA station called the Annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11th, 2012. Four Americans were killed: U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen “Bub” Doherty, and Tyrone “Rone” Woods. The five operators who provided the account are Tiegen, Geist, Kris “Tanto” Paronto, and two others who are known by the pseudonyms Dave “D.B” Benton and Jack Silva. Both the book and the movie tell the story of true heroism in the face of unbeatable odds.

Questions were answered regarding the attacks being premeditated vs. spontaneous, if those in charge were unprepared, was a “stand-down order” given, and what happened with reinforcements. Scene after scene, chapter after chapter the movie and book are an exhausting, pulverizing experience.

I am a Marco Rubio fan and my opinion was buttressed by his excellent performance last night. But it was not a debate.

Debate is defined as a formal discussion on a particular topic in a public meeting or legislative assembly, in which opposing arguments are put forward. What I saw and heard last night was a bunch of “gotcha” questions with accompanying videos hurled at the candidates by the Fox trio. In a real debate the moderators could have asked simple and straightforward questions on immigration, homeland security, Obamacare and foreign policy and asked each candidate to respond. Two rounds for each candidate.

P.S. Marco Rubio should say “If I am elected” rather the “When I am President” …sounds less presumptuous, and, the beautiful and smart Ms Kelly should ditch those false eyelashes. rsk

In a step towards joining an Israel boycott, the U.S. is now requiring goods originating from the West Bank (also known as Judea and Samaria) to be labeled separately from products from the rest of Israel, following the European Union’s crackdown on products from the disputed territories.
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection service, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), has issued new mandates requiring that West Bank products not be marked “Israel,” citing a notice from the year 1997 that offers such instructions.

The memo from DHS, titled, “West Bank Country of Origin Marking Requirements,” reads:

“The purpose of this message is to provide guidance to the trade community regarding the country of origin marking requirements for goods that are manufactured in the West Bank.”

According to the instructions, “It is not acceptable to mark” goods from the West Bank as having been from “Israel,” “Made in Israel,” or from “Occupied Territories-Israel.”

In its statement, U.S. Customs threatens, “goods that are erroneously marked as products of Israel will be subject to an enforcement action carried out by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

Arthur H. Vandenberg (1884-1951) was a respected Republican Senator from Michigan from 1928 to 1951. In 1945 he was the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Harry Truman, formerly a Democratic Senator from Missouri, became Vice President of the United States when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944.

In the Prologue to his original and meticulously researched book, “Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg and the Partnership That Created the Free World,” author Lawrence J. Haas describes the world to which they awoke on April 12, 1945 – the day that FDR died.

World War 11 was approaching its end in Europe as U.S. and Soviet armies swept towards victory. The Nazi regime was collapsing, and in its wake were 40 million dead; millions of displaced survivors; and devastation, starvation, disease, homelessness, and dislocation for those who survived.

Furthermore, the Soviets and their puppet Communist allies throughout Eastern Europe were exploiting the chaos in the hopes of expanding the Soviet empire across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East.

The accidental President, who was never Roosevelt’s top choice for Vice President to begin with, and Arthur Vandenberg, who had been an isolationist and harsh critic of Roosevelt, his New Deal, and his tilt toward Great Britain before the war, formed an unlikely partnership to forge a revolutionary new American foreign policy in response to the new challenges.

As Lawrence Haas writes:

“Under their leadership from the spring of 1945 to the summer of 1949, the United States would spearhead the birth of a United Nations…; pledge through the Truman Doctrine to defend freedom from Communist threat virtually anywhere in the world; rescue Western Europe’s economy from the devastation of war through the Marshall Plan, and commit itself through the North Atlantic Treaty (which established NATO) to defend Western Europe if the Soviets attacked.”

Their collaboration started with a simple message to a beleaguered Harry Truman in his earliest days on the job. Despite his misgivings, Vandenberg, a prominent and forceful Senator, wrote to the new President: “Good luck and God bless you. Let me help you whenever I can. America marches on.”

On January 27, 2016, the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, downplayed the unique genocidal targeting of Jews in the Holocaust by equating all of the victims of the Nazis. In the words of the statement, which only mentions Jews once: “Groups of women, men and children – Jews, Roma, Slavs, disabled people, political dissidents and others – were singled out as enemies, and deemed somehow less than human.”

The statement claims that the lesson of the Holocaust is “the need to continue to combat racism and religious or ethnic intolerance in every form,” but the High Commissioner had nothing to say about the specific religious intolerance which caused the death of 6 million Jews – antisemitism.

It’s almost two weeks since the release of “13 Hours,” the movie about the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans. In the modern news cycle, that’s time enough for the importance of this movie to be buried by news of the blizzard from which the East Coast is now digging out. But I found this movie so good that I went to see it twice.

Both times, I came away wondering the same thing. What, precisely, was President Obama doing during the hours — all those many hours — in which the Americans in Benghazi, abandoned by their leaders in Washington, fought for their lives?

What was Obama doing, amid the comforts and command centers of the White House, while State Department officer Sean Smith and Ambassador Chris Stevens were choking on the smoke of a diesel-fueled inferno at the poorly secured U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi? What was Obama doing during the hours in which the assault targeted the CIA annex near the compound? What was he doing when al Qaeda-linked terrorists fired mortars at the Americans defending the annex, killing former SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods?

Benghazi in that season was six hours ahead of Washington. The attacks began about 9:45 P.M. in Benghazi, and went on intermittently all night, with the deadly mortar assault coming at about 5:15 A.M. It took another five hours, and then some, before the last of the survivors, assembled at the airport, along with the bodies of the four dead Americans, were flown out of Benghazi — not by American forces, but aboard a Libyan C-130 military cargo plane. Thus the roughly 13 hours referred to in the title of the movie, from approximately 9:45 PM on the evening of Sept. 11, until about 10:30 A.M on the morning of Sept. 12.

One of the most interesting recent articles in the New York Times is a report by Mark Mazetti and Matt Apuzzo describing how a large part of the administration’s Middle Eastern foreign policy is paid for by the Saudis.

When President Obama secretly authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to begin arming Syria’s embattled rebels in 2013, the spy agency knew it would have a willing partner to help pay for the covert operation. It was the same partner the C.I.A. has relied on for decades for money and discretion in far-off conflicts: the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Since then, the C.I.A. and its Saudi counterpart have maintained an unusual arrangement for the rebel-training mission, which the Americans have code-named Timber Sycamore. Under the deal, current and former administration officials said, the Saudis contribute both weapons and large sums of money, and the C.I.A takes the lead in training the rebels on AK-47 assault rifles and tank-destroying missiles.

“From the moment the C.I.A. operation was started, Saudi money supported it,” the article continues. Not surprisingly the Saudis are calling a lot of the shots. “The long intelligence relationship helps explain why the United States has been reluctant to openly criticize Saudi Arabia for its human rights abuses, its treatment of women and its support for the extreme strain of Islam, Wahhabism, that has inspired many of the very terrorist groups the United States is fighting.”

The payment arrangements may also explain why the best of the West’s Syrian rebels are affiliated with al-Qaeda. “Anonymous U.S. officials now tell the media that CIA-backed rebels have begun to experience unprecedented successes … Yet these gains reveal a darker side to the CIA-backed groups’ victories … reports from the battlefield demonstrate that CIA-backed groups collaborated with Jaysh al-Fateh, an Islamist coalition in which Jabhat al-Nusra—al Qaeda’s official Syrian affiliate—is a leading player.”