RUTHFULLY YOURS

That line from John Ford’s classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance contains wisdom everyone from peasant to king knew before our modern age and its smug illusions. Go back 2,400 years, and you can hear it from the Athenian orator Demosthenes as he chastises his fellow citizens for responding to Macedonian aggression by “forever debating the question and never making any progress” and issuing “empty decrees.” “All words, apart from action,” Demosthenes warned, “seem vain and idle, especially from Athenian lips: for the greater our reputation for a ready tongue, the greater the distrust it inspires in all men.” We’ve had several years now of watching Obama and his foreign policy team prove this eternal truth as they have feebly and fecklessly responded to crisis after crisis in Ukraine, Syria, and a dozen other venues.

Just in the last few weeks we have heard a lot of bluster about Islamic State, the rampaging jihadists in northern Iraq who have left in their wake a trail of traditional Muslim mayhem–- sectarian cleansing, forced conversion, slaving, rape, torture, slaughter, and Koran-inspired beheadings, including two American journalists. In response to these decisive deeds, Obama has thundered that he will “degrade and destroy” the “cancer.” In an op-ed co-written with British Prime Minister David Cameron, he has vowed that the allies “will not be cowed by barbaric killers.” His vice president Joe Biden, with his usual trite hyperbole, has threatened, “We will follow them to the gate of hell until they are brought to justice.” And Secretary of State John Kerry, after the beheading of journalist James Foley, has warned, “The world must know that the United States of America will never back down in the face of such evil. ISIL and the wickedness it represents must be destroyed, and those responsible for this heinous, vicious atrocity will be held accountable.” “By whom” is the question the passive voice artfully leaves unanswered.

To paraphrase Demosthenes, the greater this administration’s ready tongue, the greater distrust it inspires in our allies, and the greater boldness it creates in our enemies. Or to put it in my old man’s more earthy terms when I smarted off, “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash.” Obama has been bouncing foreign policy checks from Ukraine to the South China Sea, and most points in between.

Indeed, the deeds necessary to back these loud boasts have been few. That should not surprise us, since Obama has said and done much to tell the world that we will not act decisively, relying instead on verbal processes and gestures of force like bombing some trucks to create a telegenic illusion of action. He started his presidency with the “apology tour,” on which he called the U.S. “arrogant, dismissive, derisive,” confessed that we are “still working through some of our own darker periods in our history,” proclaimed that we “will be willing to acknowledge past errors where those errors have been made,” confessed that “too often we set [our] principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford” and so “we went off course,” and promised that we “are working to improve our democracy.” How could such a tainted and flawed state have the moral authority to act with the confidence and decisiveness that his recent rhetoric implies?

Likewise his domestic deeds have undercut the capacity to enforce his tough foreign policy words. Because of cuts to the military budget––inspired in part by his desire to reduce the U.S. to merely one unexceptional member of an international coalition that supposedly can maintain global order and create collective security––our military capacity is destined “to be an increasingly hollow force,” as Bret Stephens writes, “with the Army as small as it was in 1940, before conscription; a Navy the size it was in 1917, before our entry into World War I; an Air Force flying the oldest—and smallest—fleet of planes in its history; and a nuclear arsenal no larger than it was during the Truman administration.”

It’s not enough that the Justice Department is investigating the shooting of Michael Brown by a Ferguson, MO police officer. Now it’s opening up [1] a “pattern and practice” investigation of the entire Ferguson police force. The big question: Is this Justice Department capable of conducting a fair and impartial investigation?

The applicable federal law (42 U.S.C. §14141) makes it unlawful for any governmental authority “to engage in a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers … that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States.” This is not a criminal statute; it gives DOJ authority to file a civil action to “obtain appropriate equitable and declaratory relief to eliminate the pattern or practice.”

The question about the Department’s ability to conduct a fair “pattern and practice” inquiry arises because the shop responsible for conducting the investigation is the Special Litigation Section of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. Sections attorneys enjoy incredibly broad discretion in deciding what investigations and cases to pursue and have a disturbing track record of abusing that power.

As I explained in one [2] of a series of articles called “Every Single One” that J. Christian Adams and I wrote for PJ Media on hiring in the Civil Rights Division:

Anyone who doubts the havoc that renegade attorneys from the Special Litigation Section can inflict on municipal institutions needs only read Heather MacDonald’s extraordinary piece – “Targeting the Police: The Holder Justice Department Declares Open Season on Big City Police Departments” [3] – detailing the $100 million that the Los Angeles Police Department has been forced to incur as part of a draconian federal consent decree demanded by the Section’s legal staff. Or one can examine the (fortunately failed) efforts by Section attorneys during the Clinton administration to intimidate the state of New Jersey into radically modifying its law enforcement practices based on bogus allegations of racial profiling by state troopers.

Incredibly, the Section’s staff even tried to suppress [4] the report that completely debunked the allegations. It was a sad state of affairs that eventually caused the Bush administration to have to remove the then-chief of the Section and force the line attorney involved to find alternative employment.

Political correctness kept authorities silent and whistleblowers ignored for a decade.

It was revealed last week that between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 girls, as young as eleven years old, in just one relatively small English city (Rotherham, population 275,000), had been repeatedly and systematically raped by gangs of men over the past decade.

As summarized in a British government inquiry:

It is hard to describe the appalling nature of the abuse that child victims suffered. They were raped by multiple perpetrators, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten, and intimidated. There were examples of children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone. Girls as young as 11 were raped by large numbers of male perpetrators.

Why was nothing done for 16 years?

Police incompetence was a factor, but not the primary reason.

The primary reason was political correctness. It turns out that the perpetrators were all, or nearly all, of “Pakistani heritage” and the girls were all, or nearly all, white.

This explanation is not that of conservatives alone. Virtually everyone, including media and politicians on the British left, acknowledge that this is the reason. What neither they nor the American Left have acknowledged is that political correctness was created and is sustained by the Left.

It is a testament to the lack of self-awareness on the left that it experiences no cognitive dissonance. The New York Times and other left-wing media have thoroughly reported this story and the fact that political correctness is to blame for what was done to these girls. Yet they are oblivious to the fact that they are the very ones who created the moral monsters known as political correctness, multiculturalism, and “diversity” — the doctrines that forbid judging non-whites, Muslims, and others by the same moral standards by which whites and Christians are judged.

Let us count the ways: bald lies, lies of omission, mythography, amnesia, redaction . . .

We can usefully view the Obama administration’s chronic untruthfulness as a sort of multifaceted corporation of untruth, with all sorts of subsidiaries.

THE BALD LIES OF POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY
Remember the al-Qaeda-is-on-the-run 2012-election talking point? It was mostly a lie. The administration deliberately released to sympathetic journalists only those documents from the so-called Osama bin Laden trove that revealed worry and dissension among the terrorists. Then it nourished essays by pet journalists trumpeting the decline of al-Qaeda. Disturbing memos that confounded that narrative, as Weekly Standard journalist Steven F. Hayes recently noted, were kept back. “On the run” was dropped after the 2012 election, when events on the ground made such an assertion absurd.

Recent disclosures by some of the combatants about the night of the Benghazi attack remind us that almost everything Jay Carney, Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama swore in the aftermath of the debacle was knowingly false. A video did not cause the attack. The rioting was not spontaneous. A video-maker, an American resident, was soon jailed, while one of the suspected killers was giving taped interviews at a coffee house in Benghazi. There were ways of securing the consulate and the annex that were not explored, both before and during the assault. Talking points were altered. Again, the catalyst for untruth was reelection worries by an administration that believes its exalted ends of social justice allow any means necessary for reaching them.

Has anything the administration said about pulling our troops out of Iraq proven true? Was it really the Iraqis’ fault or George Bush’s? Was our leaving proof that Iraq might be one of the administration’s “great achievements”? Was the Iraq that we left without any peacekeepers really “stable”? On more than ten occasions the president bragged on the campaign trail that he alone had ended American involvement in Iraq. When Iraq predictably blew up after our departure, he snarled to reporters that he was angry that anyone would dare accuse him alone of being responsible for our precipitate departure.

Was there any element of “reset” with Russia that was accurate? Obama came into office lambasting the prior administration for alienating Russia — when all it had done was adopt some rather moderate measures to punish Russia for invading Georgia. Reset, in truth, was a remission of punishments — from missile defense with the Czechs and Poles to cut-offs of some high-level negotiations — and thus served as a signal to Putin and his subordinates that Obama believed America had been wrong to react to Georgia. And we know what followed from that.

LIES TO HIDE WHAT WE DON’T LIKE
On issues where the public is at odds with the administration, the Obama team too often makes things up to hide its isolation. Little the administration has stated about the IRS scandal has proven true. It was not a slip-up in one local office; nor were liberal groups equally targeted. There was quite a bit more than a “smidgen” of corruption. The administration’s strategy was to make so many things up that the public got confused and the matter went away. The corruption worked to defang the Tea Party in 2012, and the cover-up — except for fall woman Lois Lerner, who took the Fifth Amendment — worked even better.

Have any of the statements the administration has presented about our southern border proven true? Do we know how many people have recently crossed into the United States illegally, what exactly U.S. immigration policy is, or where exactly foreign nationals are and what are their statuses? The public polls strongly against lax borders and blanket amnesties, so the administration apparently must deceive to permit both — and in a politically disingenuous fashion of postponing the requisite executive orders until after the 2014 midterm elections, while blaming the delay on the crisis on the border that it caused.

Did much of anything prove accurate about the Affordable Care Act? Costs, keeping our doctors and existing plans, the effect on the deficit, the website? Had the president in 2008 outlined honestly the ACA’s provisions, he would never have gotten elected, or had he by 2012 fully implemented them, he would never have gotten reelected. Lying about Obamacare and demonizing any who objected were smart politics, but the president will never regain the trust of those whose premiums spiked, who lost their coverage and their doctors, and who still do not understand what exactly Obamacare is.

According to Roy Gutman, in an article published recently by the McClatchy Newspapers, the Kurds have delayed plans for a referendum on independence. The reasoning seems to be that it is better for the Kurds to first concentrate on defeating the existential threat to the Kurdish region from the brutish ravages of Islamic State (IS).

Massoud Barzani is the Kurdish leader of the largely autonomous Kurdish region but his chief of staff, Fuad Hussein, has said: “We now have a priority to clean the area of IS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). IS must not remain our neighbor. When you have this priority, some other priorities will be delayed.”

Once the Islamic State savages are finally defeated and Barack Obama no longer suspiciously delays and obstructs what any normal U.S. president would have undertaken long ago – namely the total eradication of the barbaric Muslim Islamic State thugs who have been allowed to befoul the world – it is hoped that at long last an independent, sovereign Kurdistan will arrive on the world stage.

The Kurds, like the Jews, unreservedly deserve their existing homelands, for both trace their ancestry in them back thousands of years. It is highly instructive to review the Kurds remarkable history in conjunction with that of the Jews. It is also necessary to review the historical injustice imposed upon both indigenous peoples over the centuries by hostile neighbors and empires.

Let us go back to the captivity of the Ten Tribes of Israel, who were taken from their land by the Assyrians in 721-715 BC. Biblical Israel was depopulated, its Jewish inhabitants deported to an area in the region of ancient Media and Assyria – a territory roughly corresponding to or near that of modern-day Kurdistan.

Assyria was, in turn, conquered by Babylonia, which led to the eventual destruction of the southern biblical Jewish kingdom of Judah in 586 BC. The remaining two Jewish tribes were sent to the same areas as their brethren from the northern kingdom.

When the Persian conqueror of Babylonia, Cyrus the Great, allowed the Jews to return to their ancestral lands, some Jews remained (and continued to live) with their neighbors in Babylon – an area which, again, included modern-day Kurdistan.

It was only in 1948, upon the birth of the reconstituted Jewish State of Israel, that the 2,500 year old Jewish life in the region ended when the Arab regimes drove the Jews out of their ancient homes; most fleeing to safety in Israel.

Not money, power, territory or revenge. The Russian strongman is after bigger game.

Vladimir Putin aims to reconstitute the Russia of the czars. He wants to avenge the historic humiliation, as he sees it, that was the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s got to do what he’s got to do to stay in power, probably for life, if necessary by whipping Russians into nationalist frenzy. And he wants to have a lot of fun while doing all of it.

To adapt Mel Brooks : It should be good to be king.

All true. But maybe Mr. Putin is after bigger game. And maybe our failure to think about how Mr. Putin thinks about himself explains our consistent failure to anticipate his moves and check his ambitions. “What a novel my life has been!” said Napoleon on St. Helena. It wasn’t an idle remark: Napoleon had been an aspiring writer as a young man. Suppose Mr. Putin is also living his life as a novel. How would he write the next chapter?

Here’s a guess: Not by quivering in fear that a fresh round of sanctions is going to spark the third Russian Revolution, or that NATO is going to stop him from another advance into Ukraine or some other tempting neighbor. There’s a reason men who are on a roll never take a break: a udentes fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the daring.

Right now, fortune for Mr. Putin comes, first, in the shape of Barack Obama. The Russian was bound to see the American president as the classic self-infatuated liberal, half as clever and twice as weak as he imagines himself to be. As a former KGB agent working in East Germany, Mr. Putin would have had training, and perhaps experience, in reducing these types to human rubble.

U.S. air strikes in Syria are essential to defeating IS, but we should not cooperate with Iran or its militias.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Friday that an international coalition is forming to confront the terrorists of the Islamic State. President Obama plans to address the nation Wednesday night, as he said over the weekend, to get “the American people to understand the nature of the threat and how we’re going to deal with it.” His strategy is expected to involve an emphasis on a U.S.-led coalition and a reliance on airstrikes in a campaign that could take years, not months. Less clear is whether the president will commit to strikes inside Syria and substantially expanded special-forces deployments to Iraq and as soon as possible to Syria. We will not win unless he does.

There is no time left to argue, dither and wonder what should be done about those who are butchering Americans— and anyone else they care to—across a growing portion of the Middle East.

The enemy has no such doubts. They are not going away. They are getting stronger. The war, ladies and gentlemen, is truly on. We’re just not a meaningful part of it yet.

A name can say a great deal about the intentions of our enemy today. The group on the march in the Middle East began calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Then it chose the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, the latter term including Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories as well as Syria. Now it’s simply the Islamic State, geography unspecified. They already are a state, in that they carry out government functions in occupied territory. You can bet that their aspirations include Saudi Arabia and its holy cities of Mecca and Medina. With their gains in Iraq, nothing but sand separates them from the Saudi border.

It is hard to overstate the threat that this organization poses. I call it al Qaeda Version 6.0. The Islamic State is far better organized, equipped and funded than the original. They are more experienced and more numerous. Several thousand carry Western passports, including American ones. All the terrorists have to do is get on a plane and head west. But perhaps the most important asset they possess is territory. For the first time since 9/11, a determined and capable enemy has the space and security to plan complex, longer-range operations. If we don’t think we are on that list, we are deluding ourselves.

Jerusalem doubts Indyk’s institute after Qatar funding reports

Brookings think tank is home to former Middle East envoy; Arab state’s four-year donation totals $14.8m.

Israeli government officials on Sunday questioned the impartiality of the prestigious Brookings Institution, the past and present employer of former US Middle East envoy Martin Indyk, following a New York Times report Sunday revealing that Qatar is a major contributor to that think tank.

“Qatar has been a major bankroller for Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” one government official said. “The fact that the same Qatari government is also a major provider of funds for a respectable Washington think tank raises a whole series of questions about that think tank’s relationships and impartiality.”

According to the Times report, Qatar – the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings, which gets 12 percent of its funds from foreign sources – agreed in 2013 to make a $14.8 million, four-year donation to the institution.

Among the questions this has raised in Jerusalem is the degree to which the institute can impartially draw up papers relating to Qatar, such as its role in the Middle East and the financing of terror organizations.

Qatar is Hamas’s main financial backer.

According to the report, “more than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donors’ priorities.”

Despite constant media chatter about how the “Israel Lobby” dominates Washington, Israel was not among the 56 countries listed in a graphic as contributing funds to nine major think tanks, such as Brookings, the Atlantic Council, the Center for Global Development, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Middle East Institute and the German Marshall Fund of the US.

There were, however, nine other Middle East countries on that list of givers.

House Republicans should act, as Rep. Frank Wolf has begun to.
When President Obama sits down with congressional leaders this week to talk about fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria — “ISIS” — they’ll probably not agree on anything, not even the proper name of the terrorist organization that now controls about one-third of Iraq and a larger part of Syria.

The president insists on calling it “ISIL”, for “Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.” The “Levant” — an archaic term — refers to the area off the Eastern Mediterranean Sea stretching from what is now Anatolia in Turkey, through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Egypt. By insisting on calling the terrorist micro-caliphate “ISIL,” the president is giving them credit for being a lot bigger than they really are.

One thing that they certainly won’t discuss is the best idea to come out of the House of Representatives in quite a while. Actually, it hasn’t come out yet and it’s a good idea with one major defect.

The idea is a bill to be introduced this week by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) that would revise the Authorizations for Use of Military Force passed by Congress to authorize the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of those measures — passed in 2001 and 2002 — do not give congressional consent to what we face now. The original AUMF authorized war against those people and networks that were behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, and the 2002 version authorized war in Iraq.

Wolf’s bill would authorize the president to use military force:

… in close consultation, coordination and cooperation with NATO and regional allies, to use all necessary and appropriate force against those countries, organizations and persons associated with or supporting terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and its regional affiliates, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, and any other emerging regional terrorist groups that share a common violent extremist ideology… in order to eliminate all such terrorist groups and prevent future acts of international terrorism against the United States or its allies by such terrorist groups, countries, organizations or persons.

The merits of Wolf’s bill are several. It would, in effect, declare war on the broader terrorist networks and the nations that support them. Going back to the original 9/11 attacks, at least some of us have understood that terrorist groups cannot be a significant threat to us without the support of nations. Saudi Arabia is still a major funding source for al-Qaeda and, thus, not an ally but an adversary. Qatar’s funding and providing sanctuary for the Muslim Brotherhood and its appendages, such as Hamas, make it our enemy, as does its covert support of ISIS. Iran is the principal terrorist-sponsoring nation in the world. Other nations that help fund ISIS are equally the enemy. Pseudo-allies, such as France, which help fund it by paying ransom for kidnapped citizens, have to be compelled to stop.

It has always been the moral case that when a civilized country determines that for the sake of self-protection and survival it must retaliate against aggression or embark on war, the primary goal of its military should be the destruction of that which targets and threatens the country, be it weapons or commandos. The foremost duty of that nation’s leader is to prioritize the lives and safety of those he has sent into combat.
This often forces an uncomfortable but necessary choice: minimizing the risk to one’s troops at the expense of the fighters and population of the enemy. This is not only a civic and military responsibility, but the moral one as well, for the first principle of morality is fulfilling a commitment to those for whom one has freely chosen to be responsible. A leader has a special obligation to the people who chose and trusted him, an obligation that must surpass his feelings for general mankind.

The same still holds true in today’s self-defense against Islamic terrorism, where terrorists purposely fight not in remote battlefields, but specifically in cities among civilian populations diabolically used as shields. In all circumstances, the war of self-defense and survival is a Just war.

The maxim of self-defense is not an abstract platitude, but a raw, real-life imperative. Self-defense means the right to kill a soldier or civilian coming at you before they kill you.
A self-defense that is conditioned on excessive caution not to harm those pursuing you is a rejection of the whole notion of self-defense. Is it possible that the rules of engagement for Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan and for Israelis in Jenin and now Gaza – designed to spare harm to civilians – have led to greater death and injury among their warriors, resulting in a lapse in our obligation to those troops?

Once engaged in a just war, combat should fall within the parameters of moral combat. The primary moral combat standard is to not specifically target truly innocent civilians, to refrain from using civilians as shields, and to forswear torturing the enemy for the sake of cruel pleasure or revenge.

Guaranteeing that civilians not be killed in collateral damage has never been a requisite for moral combat. If such was the case regarding conventional warfare, then it is certainly so when confronted by Islamic terrorism that uses civilian human shields as a strategy to freeze its Western opponents. All agree that rape, looting and blood lust are anathema to moral standards, activities too often relished by jihadists. Proportionality in war is thoroughly doing that which needs to be done to permanently remove the source and scourge of aggression.