RUTHFULLY YOURS

As some congressional Democrats fume over the Obama administration’s reticence to confront Iran about its ballistic missile tests — nevermind introduce any real consequences — the Islamic Republic is defiantly expanding its missile programs.

Iranian Defense Minister Brigadier General Hossein Dehqan said at a ceremony in northern Iran on Monday that Tehran is not scaling back its program or even keeping production at pre-deal levels.

“We have not halted designing, producing and testing our missiles, (on the contrary) we have even increased our production,” Dehqan said, according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

The news agency said the defense minister ranked missile production and military upgrades at the top of the country’s agenda “to ensure protection against enemies.”

On Tuesday, the second-highest-ranking commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said that “anti-Iran resolutions” would have no bearing on the IRGC’s determination to increase its “defense and deterrent power.”

President Obama’s foreign policy failures—Iran, Syria, Russia—aren’t accidents. They’re rooted in flawed theories and misguided judgments.

Many thanks to Dennis Ross and Leon Aron for their comments on “Our Man in Moscow.” They’re greatly appreciated.

Dennis Ross is not only an insightful analyst of American foreign policy but a man of affairs with a depth of experience that few can match. In a career that has lasted some four decades, he has advised presidents of both parties, including President Obama. I’m therefore grateful to him for taking the time to respond to my essay, and delighted that he supports my conclusion: namely, that Obama’s approach to the Syrian civil war amounts to a major strategic blunder.

Ross, however, misleads in suggesting that I “should know better” than to explain that strategic blunder as the result of a “conspiracy.” Just to clear the air: I do know better, and I didn’t so explain it. Merriam-Webster defines “conspiracy” as “a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal.” Conspiracies, that is to say, involve both secrecy and collusion. Neither element is critically present in my argument.

President Obama’s final stretch in office — filled, as he promised, with “interesting stuff” — has become an extravaganza of “historic” foreign-policy deals, most of them distinguished for making common cause with despotic regimes that are less than friendly toward the United States:

— The embrace of Cuba.

— The Iran nuclear deal.

— The Paris climate agreement.

— And, enshrined just this past Friday as United Nations Security Council Resolution 2254, a grand plan in which, under the United Nations umbrella, the U.S., Russia, Iran and sundry others will all come together to produce peace and democracy by June, 2017, in Syria.

On Friday. Obama congratulated himself for such feats, telling reporters at his end-of-year press conference: “we have shown what is possible when America leads.”

OK, but where is this going? What, precisely, does this brand of leadership make possible?

If we measure success by such UN standards as how many nations have agreed to these deals, Obama can congratulate himself (as he has been doing) on capping his tenure with a bonanza of foreign-policy achievements. Last December, scrapping decades of U.S. policy, he buddied up with Cuban dictator Raul Castro, which got him a historic handshake. This summer, via the long palaver of the P5+1 nuclear talks, he clinched the nuclear deal he had fervently sought with Iran; at U.S. behest this deal was adopted pronto — and unanimously — by the 15-member UN Security Council. On December 12, he got his long-pursued climate deal, the Paris Agreement passed unanimously by more than 190 states. And in the name of ending the havoc in Syria, last Friday he got a UN Security Council resolution which passed — you guessed it — unanimously, decreeing “free and fair elections” in Syria within the next 18 months.

The Obama administration has emphasized that the nuclear deal with Iran was narrowly focused and was not intended to address concerns such as Iran’s support for terrorism or its regional activities. Yet while the U.S. and its allies got a narrow deal, Iran effectively received a far more comprehensive one.

Iran’s actions have made clear that it can be expected, at most, to abide by the letter of the text. As Sen. Bob Corker has noted, since the agreement was signed in July, Iran has sentenced Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian–who has been in jail for more than a year–and imprisoned another Iranian-American. It has defied United Nations sanctions by exporting arms to Yemen and Syria; by dispatching Gen. Qasem Soleimani, chief of Iran’s elite military Qods Force, and other sanctioned officials to Russia, Iraq, and elsewhere; and by conducting two ballistic missile launches. Iranian hackers have reportedly engaged in cyber attacks on the State Department. Tehran also refused to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into its nuclear weapons research.

How have the U.S. and its negotiating partners responded to Iran’s actions? Rote condemnation.

Rather than prosecute a genuine War on Terror, our leadership would rather wear a blindfold and play “Pin the tail on the donkey,” the donkey being anything but Islam.

“The process of settlement is a ‘Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the word means. The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”
Page 7, Explanatory Memorandum, 1991, Muslim Brotherhood

I noted in Part I of this review that the “Islamophobia” of Americans is more the enemy recognized by our “defenders” than is the actual enemy, Islam, the enemy that cannot be named. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech, while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines” and the language employed in the War on Terror.

In his magnificent book, The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk cites five cities which have given us our rich heritage and from which we have created an exceptional civilization: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, London and Philadelphia. Kirk offers a philosophically panoramic view. From Jerusalem came the order of the soul and leading a purposeful life. From Athens emerged the order of mind and how one ought to live. From Rome came an understanding of personal virtue. From London, our concepts of common law, private property and constitutional order were formulated. And from Philadelphia emerged the protection of individual rights and the understanding of liberty within a framework of law.

Each of these spheres of understanding built on the previous era culminating in a culture called the West. Truths were not invented but discovered over the course of time. And if we are to flourish, we must tend to the roots of these powerful ideas and replenish them.

The Democrats have a plan to crush ISIS. All you have to do is tweet #CrushISIS, make it a trending topic and then ISIS will be crushed. If not, we can always bring back #BringBackOurGirls.

A party that is hesitant to fight ISIS in real life has become a movement of keyboard warriors convinced that the key to defeating the Jihadists lies somewhere in cyberspace.

It doesn’t. The internet is a medium. Dead men can’t tweet. Corpses can’t create hashtags.

But the Democrats are convinced that they can’t defeat ISIS in real life, only on the internet. And they’re probably half-right. They can’t defeat ISIS in real life or on the internet.

Obama told the Pentagon, “In order for us to defeat terrorist groups like ISIL and al-Qaeda, we must discredit their ideology. This broader challenge of countering violent extremism. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas. We will never be at war with Islam.”

When the USSR wanted excuses for allying with the Nazis, it claimed that an ideology couldn’t be defeated militarily, even though its entire existence was proof otherwise.

As Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov put it, “One may accept or reject the ideology of Hitlerism as well as any other ideological system; that is a matter of political views. But everybody should understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force, that it cannot be eliminated by war.”

The point — one of them — that Niall Ferguson raises in the first volume of his biography of Henry Kissinger is that any coherent arrangement for world order must give more freedom of action to the major powers which created that order in the first place
Kissinger: Volume One: 1923–1968: The Idealist

by Niall Ferguson
Penguin Press, 2015, 1008 pages, $79.99

Henry Kissinger’s career has unquestionably made him one of the leading statesmen not only of the United States but also of the Western world for much of the last third of the twentieth century. That fact alone ensures that he has been, and will continue to be, the subject of unstinted admiration as well as virulent hatred. Both kinds of comments have centered on the two decades from 1960 to around 1980, when Kissinger was effectively in charge of the foreign policy of the world’s greatest power.

To write his life story, he has commissioned Niall Ferguson, previously known for his major books—such as Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire and The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World—and for his lectures and television appearances. But this time he has written, with meticulous care, the first half of what may yet turn out to be his masterpiece. In writing it, he has been able to make full use of the huge Kissinger archive—it weighs several tons—at the Library of Congress.

The story begins with the experience of the Kissinger family in Fuerth, northern Bavaria, and in what became the Third Reich before they managed to emigrate. Ferguson has identified at least twenty-three close family members who perished in the Holocaust arranged by Adolf Hitler, who believed, quite literally, that Jews were sub-human. The Kissingers were lucky. They had a relative in the United States who could help with money, visas and passports, so they were able to leave in 1938 and settle in the Washington Heights section of New York.

At school young Henry was notably studious. After the Second World War began, he joined the army, which in turn slowly recognised him as uncommonly able. He served in the 84th Infantry Division and went through the 1944-45 Battle of the Bulge, where he escaped injury. He then joined the Counter-Intelligence Corps, where he became a most effective hunter of Nazis. He even came across a Nazi death camp, an experience he never forgot, and managed to find, and “take care of”, a group of ex-Gestapo officials trying to form a resistance group in post-war West Germany.

Our leaders refuse to name the enemy, much less fight the war. Our southern border is not protected and secured. Our military has been diminished and undercut. We’re admitting tens of thousands (soon to be hundreds of thousands) of people who embrace an ideology that is at direct odds with our Constitution and our very lives. Our presence on the world stage has receded to a dangerous level where we abandon our allies, align with the enemy, and let evil flourish.

And that’s the short list.

So what is our national security policy at this point, particularly with respect to the Islamic advance?

As far as I can tell, it’s comprised of luck. And water.

Luck

We’ve all been lucky. Our lives have not been snuffed out by Islamic blades, bullets, or bombs.

We weren’t at the World Trade Center in 1993. Nor were we there in 2001 or on any of the planes jihadists crashed

We weren’t at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. We weren’t at Ford Hood or at either of the military installations in Tennessee or at a recruiting center in Arkansas when Islamic terror struck.

We weren’t at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino, California. We weren’t an employee at a food distribution center in Moore, Oklahoma or a student in West Orange, New Jersey. Nor were we Coptic Christians in the same state.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.”

Captain, Cool Hand Luke, 1967

In terms of understanding Islam, that would include a failure, or an outright refusal, to grasp and integrate the truth about Islam and its movers and shakers by especially those charged with the responsibility of fighting the “War on Terror” and securing the safety of this country. Given such a “war,” it is incumbent upon the government, the military, and intelligence assessment agencies to “know the enemy.” As things stand now, in their eyes Islam is not an enemy, but an “innocent” bystander upon which is heaped the “calumny” of associating it with terrorism.

“Islamophobia” in Americans is more the enemy than is the fearful enemy. Within that purgatory of purposeless analytical bean-counting and sand-sifting is a startling and craven ignorance of the actual enemy, enforced by post-modern, left-wing politically correct thought and speech while the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation stymie any meaningful investigation and intelligence analysis by determining definitions and “red lines.”

And to paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke – the Captain, while a villain, is certainly a quotable character – “Some men you just can’t reach.” The men who can’t be reached have already submitted to Islam, and accepted the “war” on Islam’s terms, and they are in our government. And they are not only losing the war, but aiding in the enemy’s advance.

A single column review of Stephen Coughlin’s vitally important Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad, would not do justice to the book. I can only highlight some of the important, interlinked and salient information presented by Coughlin. Therefore this review will run to two or more columns. Coughlin’s book is literally vital, as vital as the blood that courses through our veins. Catastrophic Failure brings to light everything we should know about Islam and its advocates’ determined campaign to conquer the West, and especially America, and impose Sharia law on the world – and everything our government has consistently refused to know or evaded to a degree that amounts to criminal negligence.