RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Kurds are fighting bravely, but they need arms, and they need air support.

In his speech to the United Nations last week, President Obama pledged to the world that the United States would use its might to stop the horrific depredations of the terrorist movement variously known as the Islamic State, ISIS, or, as he calls it, ISIL.

“This group has terrorized all who they come across in Iraq and Syria,” the president proclaimed. “Mothers, sisters, daughters have been subjected to rape as a weapon of war. Innocent children have been gunned down. Bodies have been dumped in mass graves. Religious minorities have been starved to death. In the most horrific crimes imaginable, innocent human beings have been beheaded, with videos of the atrocity distributed to shock the conscience of the world.”

“No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions,” he said. “There can be no reasoning — no negotiation — with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force. So the United States of America will work with a broad coalition to dismantle this network of death. . . . We will support Iraqis and Syrians fighting to reclaim their communities. We will use our military might in a campaign of air strikes to roll back ISIL. We will train and equip forces fighting against these terrorists on the ground.”

These are brave words that well and truly denounce evil for what it is. Unfortunately, the president’s actions since then have been anything but consistent with his pledge to stop the terrorism.

As these lines are being written, some 400,000 Kurds in and around the town of Kobane in northern Syria, on the Turkish border, are being besieged and assaulted by massed legions of Islamic State killers armed with scores of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and heavy artillery. Against these, the Kurdish defenders have only AK-47s and rocket-propelled grenades. The Kurds have called on the U.S. to send in air strikes to take out the jihadist forces. In response, the administration sent in two fighter jets Saturday, which destroyed two Islamic State tanks and then flew away. The Kurds are begging for arms. The administration has not only refused to send arms, but is exerting pressure both on our NATO allies and on Israel not to send any either. Over 150,000 Kurds have fled their homes to try to escape to Turkey, but they are being blocked at the border by Turkish troops. Meanwhile, Turkey is allowing Islamist reinforcements to enter Syria to join the Islamic State, while Islamist elements of the Free Syrian Army, funded and armed by the United States, have joined forces with the group in the genocidal assault on the Kurdish enclave.

The inequality bed-wetters are misleading you.

The inequality police are worried that we are living in a new Gilded Age. We should be so lucky: Between 1880 and 1890, the number of employed Americans increased by more than 13 percent, and wages increased by almost 50 percent. I am going to go out on a limb and predict that the Barack Obama years will not match that record; the number of employed Americans is lower today than it was when he took office, and household income is down. Grover Cleveland is looking like a genius in comparison.

The inequality-based critique of the American economy is a fundamentally dishonest one, for a half a dozen or so reasons at least. Claims that the (wicked, wicked) “1 percent” saw their incomes go up by such and such an amount over the past decade or two ignore the fact that different people compose the 1 percent every year, and that 75 percent of the super-rich households in 1995 were in a lower income group by 2005. “The 3 million highest-paying jobs in America paid a lot more in 2005 than did the 3 million highest-paying jobs in 1995” is a very different and considerably less dramatic claim than “The top 1 percent of earners in 1995 saw their household incomes go up radically by 2005.” But the former claim is true and the latter is not.

Paul Krugman, who persists in Dickensian poverty, barely making ends meet between six-figure sinecures, is a particularly energetic scourge of the rich, and he is worried about conspicuous consumption: “For many of the rich, flaunting is what it’s all about. Living in a 30,000 square foot house isn’t much nicer than living in a 5,000 square foot house; there are, I believe, people who can really appreciate a $350 bottle of wine, but most of the people buying such things wouldn’t notice if you substituted a $20 bottle, or maybe even a Trader Joe’s special.” In an earlier piece on the same theme, he urged higher taxes as a way to help the rich toward virtue: “While chiding the rich for their vulgarity may not be as offensive as lecturing the poor on their moral failings, it’s just as futile. Human nature being what it is, it’s silly to expect humility from a highly privileged elite. So if you think our society needs more humility, you should support policies that would reduce the elite’s privileges.” That is, seize their money before they order the 1982 Margaux.

Obama hasn’t a clue what he’s doing, but at least he isn’t George W. Bush.

The Iraq War lies now mostly in the realm of myth. We have forgotten exactly how we got both into and out of the war.

The October 2002 joint congressional authorization to go to war was not just about fears of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Other worries prompted broad bipartisan support for the resolution. A majority of Democratic senators (as evidenced by their passionate speeches from the Senate floor) cited many of the resolution’s 23 writs. The latter were mostly concerned with things other than WMD: harboring terrorists, offering bounties for suicide bombers, giving refuge to at least one of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing suspects, committing genocide, attempting to kill a former U.S. president, and so on. Hillary Clinton should watch her own 2002 speech from the Senate floor.

George W. Bush was the third consecutive U.S. president to have bombed Iraq. By 2001, the first Iraq war was seen as incomplete, in that a genocidal Saddam Hussein was not only still in power, but also had broken most of the accords signed after his 1991 defeat. The no-fly zones were eroding. That is why Bill Clinton bombed Iraq in 1998 and supposedly blew up lots of things and killed lots of Iraqis (Operation Desert Fox). Earlier that year he had signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which had passed unanimously in the Senate and overwhelmingly in the House. And still earlier he had famously summed up his administration’s fears:

Iraq admitted, among other things, an offensive biological warfare capability, notably, 5,000 gallons of botulin, which causes botulism; 2,000 gallons of anthrax; 25 biological-filled Scud warheads; and 157 aerial bombs. And I might say UNSCOM inspectors believe that Iraq has actually greatly understated its production.

Over the past few months, as [the weapons inspectors] have come closer and closer to rooting out Iraq’s remaining nuclear capacity, Saddam has undertaken yet another gambit to thwart their ambitions by imposing debilitating conditions on the inspectors and declaring key sites which have still not been inspected off limits. . . .

Diana West, just gave the following address earlier today (~ 2 PM, Monday, 9/29/14) at The National Security II Conference sponsored by The Center For Security Policy.

Direct Video Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBhG6iy-DF8

For anyone still puzzled as how it could be that our leaders and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” it’s important to know that such widespread brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My recent book “American Betrayal”delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, this double standard not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale up the road at University of Maryland. It’s also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.

There are no such trendy portraits of Hitler, and who would want them? Who would want to swig a bottle of Hitlerpop, decorated with a swastika? So, why Leninade? Not only does the stench of death not follow the Communist murder-cult, the brand lives.

Barring a tsunami of common sense, I predict that Islam, the brand, will remain separate in the public mind from the violence and repression it causes and has caused for more than a millennium. That’s certainly the direction leaders from both political parties have been relentlessly herding us in for over a decade, insisting against all reason — against all sacred Islamic texts — that “Islam is peace.”

What should senior officers do if experience tells them that the president’s plan to defeat ISIS is unworkable without U.S. combat troops?

In President Obama’s “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, he reiterated his vow not to involve U.S. combat troops in the fight against Islamic State jihadists. He would avoid “the mistake of simply sending U.S. troops back” into Iraq, Mr. Obama said, noting that “there’s a difference between them advising and assisting Iraqis who are fighting versus a situation in which we got our Marines and our soldiers out there taking shots and shooting back.”

Yet many Americans are skeptical, judging by the new NBC/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll showing that 72% of registered voters believe that U.S. troops will eventually be deployed. Perhaps Americans have been listening to some of the president’s senior military advisers and several retired senior officers and have decided that their expert opinions sound more realistic.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Sept. 16 that if necessary he would recommend that the president order U.S. military advisers to “accompany Iraq troops on attacks” against Islamic State, also known as ISIS. A day later Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said that “you’ve got to have ground forces that are capable of going in and rooting [ISIS] out.” Gen. Odierno did not specify that the ground forces needed to be American, but he said an air campaign alone cannot defeat the jihadists occupying large parts of Iraq and Syria.

Retired senior officers speak with greater candor. James Mattis, the retired Marine general and former commander of the U.S. Central Command, told the House Intelligence Committee on Sept. 18 that it would be a mistake to rule out U.S. ground forces against ISIS. A couple of days earlier, retired Army Gen. Dan McNeill, who commanded coalition forces in Afghanistan, said in a TV interview that ground troops will be needed to defeat ISIS. If the jihadists’ threat “is as serious as some people say,” the general asked, “then why aren’t we applying all elements of American power to it?”

President Obama rode to the White House in part by assailing George W. Bush for believing faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. So there is no small irony in his claim now that America’s spooks missed the rise of the Islamic State. The difference is that U.S. intelligence did warn about the threat from ISIS. Mr. Obama chose not to listen.

Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” Sunday if ISIS’s march into Iraq was a “complete surprise,” Mr. Obama replied, “Well I think our head of the intelligence community, Jim Clapper, has acknowledged that I think they underestimated what had been taking place in Syria.”

Mr. Clapper is the presidential appointee who coordinates U.S. intelligence messaging. Perhaps he does think his agencies misjudged ISIS. But we doubt he missed the Feb. 11, 2014 Senate testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time:

“Al-Qa`ida in Iraq (AQI), also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (IS1L): AQI/ISIL probably will attempt to take territory in Iraq and Syria to exhibit its strength in 2014, as demonstrated recently in Ramadi and Fallujah, and the group’s ability to concurrently maintain multiple safe havens in Syria.”

That was five months before the fall of Mosul and a couple of months after Mr. Obama had compared ISIS and various al Qaeda offshoots to the junior varsity.

If Mr. Obama didn’t want to believe DIA, he could always have bought this newspaper. On Jan. 6 this year we wrote that “Syria’s contagion is also spilling into Iraq with the revival of al Qaeda in neighboring Anbar province. . . . Much of eastern Syria is now controlled by the al-Nusrah front or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and they move with ease back and forth into Iraq. Men flying the flag of al Qaeda took over large parts of Ramadi and Fallujah last week, ousting the Iraq army.”

This required no great prescience or deep sourcing. It was apparent to anyone paying attention to Middle Eastern events, or at least to anyone who was open to hearing news that conflicted with Mr. Obama’s mantra that “the tide of war is receding” and that al Qaeda had been defeated.

HONG KONG—The mood at pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong shifted Tuesday as a festival-like atmosphere overnight gave way to one of apprehension ahead of a Wednesday holiday that celebrates the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Despite a light police presence at the protest sites that have sprung up around the city since Friday, some protesters braced themselves Tuesday for the prospect of attempts to break up the crowds.

“Tonight will be critical,” said Joanne Chung, a 24-year-old management trainee at a bank who joined the protests. “Everybody should be alert.”

York Lei, a 21-year-old university student, said he expected the police to attempt to clear the sites Tuesday night. “Many mainlanders will be here,” he said, referring to the many tourists from China who visit Hong Kong to sightsee and shop during the weeklong National Day holiday.

Tam Kam Yuk, a 67-year-old grandmother, said she came out to the protests Tuesday specifically to support the students ahead of the holiday. “This is my first time out,” she said.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying’s remarks Tuesday morning did little to narrow the gulf between the government and the protesters. He reiterated that the protests were illegal and said they wouldn’t change Beijing’s decision, made Aug. 31, to effectively prescreen candidates for the election of Hong Kong’s top leader—the issue at the root of the protests.

Beijing’s ruling demonstrated that “the Chinese government won’t give in to threats asserted through illegal activity,” Mr. Leung said, in his first media briefing since Sunday’s police crackdown.

Protest organizers have called for Mr. Leung to step down, holding him responsible for failing to take residents’ wishes for free elections into account and for authorizing the use of tear gas against protesters Sunday night.

Every ideology needs to believe in its inevitability. Religions get their inevitability from prophecies; secular ideologies get theirs from the modernist fallacy.

The modernist fallacy says that history is moving on an inevitable track toward their ideology. Resistance is futile, you will be liberalized. Marxism predicted the inevitable breakdown of capitalism. Obama keeps talking about being “on the right side of history” as if history, like a university history curriculum, has a right side and a wrong side. All everyone has to do is grab a sign and march “Forward!” to the future.

The bad economics and sociology around which the left builds its Socialist sand castles assume that technological progress will mean improved control. Capitalism with its mass production convinced budding Socialists that the entire world could be run like a giant factory under technocrats who would use industrial techniques to control the economic production of mankind in line with their ideals.

The USSR and moribund European economies broke that theory into a million little pieces.

The dot com revolution with its databases and subtle tools for manipulating individuals on a collective basis led to a Facebook Socialism that crowdsources its culture wars and “nudges” everyone into better habits, lower body masses and conveniently available death panels.

The iSocialist, like his industrial predecessor, assumes that technology gives superintelligent leftists better tools for controlling everything. The planned economy failed in the twentieth because the tools of propaganda posters, quotas and gulags were too crude. This time he is certain that it will work.

Intelligence is to leftists what divine right was to the crowned kings of Europe. They frantically brand themselves as smart because in a technocracy, superiority comes from intelligence. Their vision is the right one because they are the smart ones. Their shiny future is backed by what they call “science”.

Science, the magic of the secular age, is their church. But science isn’t anyone’s church. Science is much better at disproving things than at proving them. It’s a useful tool for skeptics, but a dangerous tool for rulers. Like art, science is inherently subversive and like art, when it’s restricted and controlled, it stops being interesting.

It’s a fortunate thing that Bill O’Reilly’s latest book, “Killing Patton,” was written by him and not someone else. If not, O’Reilly would have taken the poor person apart, criticizing the book for its chaotic structure, its considerable padding and its repellent admiration of a war-loving martinet who fought the Nazis and really never understood why. George S. Patton stood almost shoulder to shoulder with them in his anti-Semitism — not that O’Reilly seems to have noticed or, for that matter, mentioned it in his book.

It is, of course, permissible to admire Patton for his generalship and astonishing bravery. It is even possible to give him a pass for some of the foolish things he said that were repeatedly getting him into trouble and finally caused Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to effectively sack him. Even Patton’s likening some Nazis to Republican or Democratic apparatchiks, while tasteless and heroically impolitic, had an explicable context: Plenty of people became Nazis for career, rather than ideological, reasons.
Patton’s anti-Semitism is a different matter. As far as I know, he never made his views public, but he was repulsively candid in letters home to his wife, Beatrice, and in diary entries. What’s more, he acted on those views. It was Patton’s job after the defeat of Germany to run the displaced-persons (DP) camps in southern Germany, where he was commanding officer. In the view of some, including an outraged President Harry S. Truman, he treated these Holocaust survivors little better than the Nazis did.

In a letter to Eisenhower, Truman quoted from a report on conditions in the DP camps. “As matters now stand, we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of SS troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.”

The “military guard” that Truman mentioned was Patton’s idea. He had his reasons, Patton wrote in his diary: “If they [the Jewish DPs] were not kept under guard they would not stay in the camps, would spread over the country like locusts, and would eventually have to be rounded up after quite a few of them had been shot and quite a few Germans murdered and pillaged.” At least twice in his diary, Patton referred to the Jewish DPs as “animals.”

Remember the “Mission Accomplished” speech?

You know, the one where the president declared the war in Iraq over, only to have to eat his words as he sent the U.S. military to fight terrorists in Iraq who were taking over vast swaths of the country?

No, I’m not talking about President George W. Bush’s May 1, 2003, speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. I’m talking about President Obama’s speech at the White House on Oct. 21, 2011, in which he boasted about his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops and bring “the long war in Iraq” to an end. It’s still on the White House Web site under the (now ironic) headline “Remarks by the President on Ending the War in Iraq.”

“As a candidate for President, I pledged to bring the war in Iraq to a responsible end,” Obama solemnly declared, “[And] today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.”

“The last American soldier[s] will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops,” the president continued, adding “That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”