RUTHFULLY YOURS

Its bloodthirsty fanatics had a better business model than the other bloodthirsty fanatics.

First, the good news: It turns out that President Obama was right. Al-Qaeda is being destroyed. One could even say he deserves some credit for this happy turn of events.

Which brings us to the bad news: Al-Qaeda is dying out because it’s being replaced by something far worse.

According to a fascinating report in the Guardian, two of al-Qaeda’s leading clerics say that the Islamic State has all but destroyed its parent organization. Basically, people in the market for jihad think the Islamic State offers the best product on the market.

It’s ironic. For a decade, terror analysts marveled about how creative al-Qaeda was. Lawrence Wright, in his gripping account of the rise of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower, writes that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri deliberately set out to bring the best practices of the business world to religiously fueled terror and carnage. Al-Qaeda’s jihadis got paid vacations, round-trip tickets home to visit family, health care, etc. They saved huge money on retirement gifts, since Allah promised to provide 72 virgins at the end of a productive career in lieu of a gold watch.

In the foreword to his classic book Amusing Ourselves to Death, the cultural critic Neil Postman proposed that it was Aldous Huxley, and not George Orwell, who had more accurately foreseen the tribulations of the future. “Orwell,” Postman reflected, “feared those who would deprive us of information.” Huxley, by contrast, “feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.” The likely consequences of these prognostications were, necessarily, divergent. “Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us,” Postman submitted. But “Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” In the early years of the 21st century, it is tough to mount a solid counterargument against Huxley’s supposition. 1984 may be often cited by critics of linguistic corruption and security theater, but it ultimately forecast a landscape that is ascetic and austere and, in truth, wholly unfamiliar to us. In fact, our present arrangement is quite the inverse of that imagined by Orwell. In 2015, stimulation is quotidian and ubiquitous. Information is cheap. Choice is the happy norm. And the truth is a luxury not of the well connected, but of the astute.

As Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker has demonstrated solid leadership qualities.

As Scott Walker appears to be preparing a bid for the 2016 Republican nomination, he has been suggesting that his time spent as governor of Wisconsin demonstrates some leadership qualities that would be useful in a commander-in-chief. Critics reply that Walker’s gubernatorial experience is irrelevant to the presidency. President Obama himself has chimed in, saying that Walker needs to “bone up” on foreign policy.

But Walker has a point. Here’s why.

Obviously, any plausible candidate for president needs to familiarize himself with a broad range of international issues. And that is exactly what Walker has been doing over the past few months. But while issue familiarity is necessary, it is not sufficient. Other indispensable qualities include a right sense of current international challenges and a demonstrated readiness to exercise strong leadership. And here, Obama is in no position to criticize the Republican governor.

President Obama has now spent more than six years retrenching American power overseas, trying to accommodate multiple international adversaries, and focusing above all on the achievement of a sweeping domestic liberal legacy. It hasn’t worked. The main result has been an even more bloated and dysfunctional welfare state, combined with an expansion of international security challenges for the United States. Russia, China, Iran, al-Qaeda affiliates, and the Islamic State have all advanced in dramatic ways against American allies. Far from questioning his own foreign-policy premises, however, Obama seems annoyed by any suggestion that something might be wrong with them.

Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott has warned a regional counter terrorism summit that Islamic State terrorists are coming with a “simple message, submit or die.”

Speaking in the New South Wales state capital Sydney, he said: “Daesh [IS] is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: ‘Submit or die’. You can’t negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it.

“This is not terrorism for a local grievance, this is terrorism with global ambitions.”

Chaplain Wes Modder spends his days basically alone in the base chapel. He is no longer allowed into his office. By order of his commanding officer, he is not allowed even to speak to the sailors in his unit. If anyone from his unit comes into the chapel, he may not speak with them.His commanding officer, Captain Jon Fahs, has taken this unusual step because of complaints lodged against Modder by a handful of sailors who claim he is “unable to function in a pluralistic and diverse Navy.” Modder ran into the buzzsaw of political correctness related to human sexuality.
Fahs requested various actions against Modder, including taking him off the promotions list, separating him for cause, and initiating a board of inquiry. None of that has happened yet and, in the meantime, Modder sits alone unable to help his fellow sailors.
Modder was not even allowed to minister to his unit personnel after a recent suicide in the unit.
Modder and his lawyers at the Liberty Institute have taken the highly unusual step of filing a complaint against his commanding officer. According to Modder’s lawyer Mike Berry, it is almost unprecedented for a subordinate officer to file such a complaint.

TEL AVIV—Last week journalist Ilana Dayan interviewed President Obama on her popular Israeli prime-time investigative television program. This was the latest in the president’s campaign to take his case for a nuclear agreement with Iran — and against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — directly to the people, particularly the Jewish people. The president launched the campaign in late May in an interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, and followed it with a speech a few days later at Congregation Adas Israel in Washington.

Goldberg and Dayan elicited clarifying answers from the president. What was most clarifying, however, was Obama’s questionable judgments and policies.

The industry has been beset by punitive fines, armed raids and threats of jail. Even banjo makers aren’t safe.

For more than a century, the music industry escaped the gaze of government agencies thanks to its small scale—$6.8 billion now in the U.S.—and its wholesome, noncontroversial products. Few things seem less deserving of federal regulation than a 5th grader with an oboe. On the rare occasions in history when prominent officials took notice, the magazine I edit, Music Trades, ran celebratory headlines: “President Taft At Baldwin Piano Plant Opening,” or “Clinton Says Playing Music Made Me President.”

Over the past seven years, however, the tenor of the government’s interest in the music business has changed. Our magazine now regularly carries accounts of punitive fines, armed raids and threats of jail time.

Russia’s military exercises in the region can only be an attempt to provoke.

Group of Seven leaders in Bavaria on Monday vowed to extend sanctions if Russia doesn’t dial back its aggression against Ukraine. Previous sanctions haven’t deterred Kremlin land-grabs, and the question now isn’t if Russian President Vladimir Putin will strike again but whom he’ll target next. Mr. Putin considers Europe’s eastern periphery part of Russia’s imperial inheritance.

Yet in recent years the Russian leader has also turned his attention northward, to the Arctic, militarizing one of the world’s coldest, most remote regions. Here in Finland, one of eight Arctic states, the Russian menace next door looms large.

“That is a tough nut to crack, to know exactly what the Russians want,” newly appointed Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini says. “But I’m sure they know. Because they are masters of chess, and if something is on the loose they will take it”—a variation on the old proverb that “a Cossack will take whatever is not fixed to the ground.”

China’s internal power struggle continues. That’s the meaning of Thursday’s announcement that former Politburo Standing Committee Member Zhou Yongkang was sentenced to life in prison for corruption.

After taking power in 2012, Party General Secretary Xi Jinping had former rival Bo Xilai sentenced to life the following year. Then Mr. Zhou disappeared from public view, and his associates were arrested one by one. He is the highest-ranking Party official to be purged since the days of Mao Zedong.

That is no coincidence. Mr. Xi has championed a return to Maoist rhetoric and political mobilization. His propaganda organs sometimes claim that the “ongoing anticorruption campaign” is a sign of the rule of law. But they give the real game away with attacks on Mr. Xi’s enemies for building factions within the Party.

Automatic registration at 18, letting felons vote—it’s all part of an unconstitutional progressive dream.

Declaring that Republican-controlled states have “systematically and deliberately” tried to “disempower and disenfranchise” voters, Hillary Clinton has called for a sweeping expansion of federal involvement in elections. In a speech last week in Houston, laying out what promises to be a major campaign theme, Mrs. Clinton called for automatic voter registration at age 18, a 20-day early-voting period and a maximum 30-minute wait period to vote.

She has also endorsed the idea of a federal law permitting convicted felons to vote and allowing individuals, such as students, who reside in one state to vote in another. All of these federal mandates would augment and make more onerous an unconstitutional election-regulating federal statute known as the “Motor Voter” law enacted during her husband’s White House tenure.