RUTHFULLY YOURS

Had she written a novel about life in Washington, Jane Austen might have begun: it is a truth universally acknowledged, when information requested by Congressional subpoena could cause political damage to the party charged, that that information would disappear. On June 20, 1972, three days after operatives connected to the White House broke into the headquarters of the Democrat National Committee at the Watergate complex, President Nixon held a 79-minute conversation with his chief-of-staff, Bob Haldeman. Eighteen and a half minutes of that taped conversation went missing. In early January 1996, copies of documents that described Hillary Clinton’s work for a failing savings and loan association, and which had been requested two years earlier by a Congressional investigating committee, were discovered on the third floor of the White House. The discovery occurred “a few days after the statute of limitations expired for a variety of civil lawsuits that may be brought against professionals who fraudulently advised corrupt savings associations,” according to Stephen Labaton, writing about the incident for The New York Times.

Now we are being told that Lois Lerner’s computer crashed in the summer of 2011, permanently erasing e-mails to and from people and organizations, including the White House, Treasury, Department of Justice and the Federal Election Committee. Any involvement of the White House targeting conservative organizations, we are told, would now be impossible to prove. Ms. Lerner, we are led to believe, had to have been a lone wolf. But why did it take so long for the IRS to divulge the information that the computer had crashed three years ago? The investigation has been on-going for over a year. Even more egregious, according to David Camp (R-MI) who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, the letter containing news that the e-mails had been lost also had the chutzpah to suggest Congress end its investigation. Why not? If the dog ate my homework, which I intended to hand in, why should I be punished? In fact, why not forget the whole thing? Next subject.

Nothing to see here. Literally. Because the IRS keeps losing stuff.

It’s not just Lois Lerner’s e-mails. The Internal Revenue Service says it can’t produce e-mails from six more employees involved in the targeting of conservative groups, according to two Republicans investigating the scandal.

The IRS told Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp and subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany that computer crashes resulted in additional lost e-mails, including from Nikole Flax, the chief of staff to former IRS commissioner Steven Miller, who was fired in the wake of the targeting scandal.

The revelation about Lerner’s e-mails rekindled the scandal and today’s news has further inflamed Republicans. Camp and Boustany are now demanding a special prosecutor to investigate “every angle” of the targeting. They expressed particular outrage that the agency has known since February that it would not be able to produce the e-mails requested by the committee yet did not apprise the committee of that fact, and they charged in a statement that the IRS is attempting to “cover up the fact that it convenient lost key documents in the investigation.”

The federal government swooped into Gibson Guitar’s Tennessee headquarters in August 2011, with armed agents, and shut the company down temporarily. The suspected crime was using illegally imported wood. Not a particularly important crime, yet the government treated it as if it was a clear and present danger to the republic. No charges have even been filed in that case.

In the case of the IRS, the suspected crime is weaponizing government against citizens who exercised their rights as such. That is a clear and present threat to the republic. There is an active cover-up happening right now in the very heart of the IRS. It’s time for a raid, a round-up, and trials.

WASHINGTON — The arrest of a key suspect in the Sept. 11, 2012, consulate bombing simply opened new controversy in the Benghazi attack, with Republicans questioning how the administration plans to handle the Ansar al-Sharia commander.

Ahmed Abu Khatallah, the subject of criminal charges filed last July, had been essentially living in the open, making himself available for multiple media interviews since the attack that killed four Americans including Ambassador Chris Stevens.

“With this operation, the United States has once again demonstrated that we will do whatever it takes to see that justice is done when people harm Americans,” President Obama said in a statement stressing that he’d green-lighted the Sunday special forces operation. “We will continue our efforts to bring to justice those who were responsible for the Benghazi attacks. We will remain vigilant against all acts of terrorism, and we will continue to prioritize the protection of our service-members and civilians overseas.”

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, said the next step should be sending Khatallah to proper facilities for processing.

“The Obama administration should immediately transfer him to the military detention center at Guantanamo Bay for detention and interrogation. In order to locate all individuals associated with the attacks that led to the deaths of four Americans, we need intelligence. That intelligence is often obtained through an interrogation process,” Rubio said.

“At times, this administration has been more interested in the politics of the war on terrorism than the execution of it, and we have not had an articulable detention policy in six years,” Rubio added. “America remains at war and a return to the failed law enforcement approach of the 1990s is not an adequate response to the very real threats we face.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said he was pleased with the capture, but “I am very disappointed to hear that he will be held on the ship and not sent to Guantanamo Bay.”

So whose fault is the implosion of Iraq? Bush? Obama?

Back in the real world, Republicans don’t lose wars and Democrats don’t lose wars; America loses wars – which is how US allies and enemies alike judge what’s happening in Iraq right now, and how it will be recorded in the history books. Tthere is certainly something to Robert Tracinski’s analysis – that this was a wish-fulfilling prophesy for Obama, and that, in some deep primal sense, for the Democrats it was necessary ultimately for the Iraq war to be lost. Undeniably lost. And to be seen to be undeniably lost – even if it took five-and-a-half years after Bush’s departure from office, or about the length of the entire Second World War.

Let it be said that there is more than enough blame to go round. I see Senator Lindsey Graham has been all over the airwaves saying we need to work with Iran to help save Iraq from ISIS. This is the same Lindsey Graham who’s been calling for the US to assist Syrian rebels in trying to overthrow Assad, Iran’s client. The Syrian resistance is dominated by the same guys currently overrunning Iraq – the Sunni jihadists of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Consider the now largely erased Syrian/Iraqi border: On the eastern side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Baghdad is an enemy of the United States whom we must join with Iran in destroying; but, on the western side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Damascus is a plucky Arab Spring freedom fighter entitled to the full support of the United States. Granted that this isn’t the easiest part of the world in which to distinguish friend from foe, the way around this abiding problem is not to locate both of them within, literally, the same person.

So Senator Graham is making even less sense than usual.

Let it also be said that President Obama’s antipathy to meaningful military action undoubtedly commands the support of the American people, who after 13 years of slow-motion unwon wars have had enough. By the way, even we supporters of the Afghan and Iraqi interventions are not in favor only of war. There’s a whole section of America Alone (personally autographed copies of which are exclusively available, etc, etc), beginning on page 158, on the other elements of national power through which an effective sovereign state prosecutes its interests – diplomatic, economic, legal, informational, cultural… They’re what medium-rank nations call “soft power” and Hillary Clinton calls “smart power”. The problem is simple: As inept as they might think the Republicans’ deployment of hard power is, the Democrats’ use of soft power is even lousier. Effective soft power requires great clarity and cunning, neither of which President Obama, Secretary Kerry or anybody else seems to possess.

Hence the chain of dominoes:

She says she didn’t make security decisions on Benghazi. But that’s the secretary of state’s job.

In her interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer last week, Hillary Clinton said “I was not making security decisions” about Benghazi, claiming “it would be a mistake” for “a secretary of state” to “go through all 270 posts” and “decide what should be done.” And at a January 2013 Senate hearing, Mrs. Clinton said that security requests “did not come to me. I did not approve them. I did not deny them.”

Does the former secretary of state not know the law? By statute, she was required to make specific security decisions for defenseless consulates like Benghazi, and was not permitted to delegate them to anyone else.

The Secure Embassy Construction and Counterterrorism Act of 1999, or Secca, was passed in response to the near-simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. Over 220 people were killed, including 12 Americans. Thousands were injured.

Bill Clinton was president. Patrick Kennedy, now the undersecretary of state for management, was then acting assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security. Susan Rice, now the national security adviser, was then assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

As with the Benghazi terrorist attacks, an Accountability Review Board was convened for each bombing. Their reports, in January 1999, called attention to “two interconnected issues: 1) the inadequacy of resources to provide security against terrorist attacks, and 2) the relative low priority accorded security concerns throughout the U.S. government.”

Just as U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens did in 2012, the U.S. ambassador to Kenya, Prudence Bushnell, had made repeated requests for security upgrades in 1997 and 1998. All were denied.

Such is America’s strategic disarray in Iraq that the Obama Administration has come up with a new version of an old idea—court Iran as an ally. So in order to defeat Sunni extremists who want to form a potentially terrorist state, we are going to get in bed with a terrorist-sponsoring Shiite regime that wants to dominate the Middle East.

“Let’s see what Iran might or might not be willing to do before we start making any pronouncements,” Secretary of State John Kerry told Yahoo News on Monday in discussing a rapprochement with the mullahs. “I think we are open to any constructive process here that could minimize the violence, hold Iraq together—the integrity of the country—and eliminate the presence of outside terrorist forces that are ripping it apart.”

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The mullahs must be astonished at their strategic good fortune. A year ago they were isolated by global sanctions and scrambling to save their endangered client Bashar Assad in Syria. Then President Obama agreed to spare Assad’s airfields from bombing in return for promising to give up his chemical arms. The chemicals aren’t all gone, but Assad has used the reprieve to retake much of the country.

Now the sanctions on Iran have been eased as part of nuclear talks, and the U.S. is negotiating to be the air force for Iran’s Quds Force that is helping to prop up the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. This is the same Quds Force that fashioned the deadly roadside bombs that killed so many Americans after the fall of Saddam Hussein. It is the same Quds Force that arms Hezbollah and Hamas to attack Israel, and the same Quds Force that planned to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. In last year’s report on “state sponsors of terrorism,” Mr. Kerry’s State Department noted that the Quds Force “is the [Iran] regime’s primary mechanism for cultivating and supporting terrorists abroad.”

America does have an interest in defeating the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, that has captured much of Sunni Iraq. But that doesn’t mean the U.S. has shared interests with Iran in the region. The mullahs consider America the “great Satan” for a reason. The U.S. lost 4,489 troops and spent billions of dollars to make Iraq a unitary, Western-leaning and independent state. Iran wants the Shiite portions of Iraq as a satrapy.

The jihadist butchers (see here, here, here) of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)—supported by a much broader Sunni insurgency (see here, here, and here) against the Shiite-dominated, U.S. mid-wived al-Maliki government—continue their Baghdad-bound carnage.

Predictably—confirming obvious trends I documented 8-years ago—Maliki’s longstanding patron (and puppet-master) Iran, has committed (and pledged even more) military assets against the Sunni assault. Eli Lake of the The Daily Beast reported today (6/17/2014):

“The offer to help us with everything we need has been made from the highest levels of the Iranian government,” a senior Iraqi official told The Daily Beast.

Lake added,

This official stressed that Iran’s offer to assist Iraq’s fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham (ISIS) [the Levant/ (ISIL)] was not conditional on Maliki making any immediate reforms or changes to his government.

An indelible, “unconditional” feature of the Iranian, and indeed the entire region’s “religiously” imbued Muslim mindset, which transcends the bitter, violent Shiite-Sunni divide, was simultaneously on display today: conspiratorial Islamic Jew-hatred. General Hassan Firouzabadi, Chief of Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces, insisted Tuesday (6/17/14, in Tehran) Israel—i.e., in regional parlance, Jews/“Zionists”—had created and supported ISIL, while further claiming,

The ISIL is Israel’s cover up for distancing the revolutionary forces from Israeli borders and creating a margin of security for the Zionists, and the Zionist media have also admitted this fact

One year ago, a Sunni cleric also blamed the Jews—from his own Jew-hating Islamic sectarian perspective—for the internecine Sunni-Shiite bloodshed taking place in Syria. The good cleric, preaching at the renowned Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, invoked conspiratorial Jew-hating themes from the Koran and traditions of Muhammad—i.e., Jews as prophet-killers (which includes being murderers of Muhammad himself), who allegedly violated their agreements with Muslims, driving Muslims astray (from Islam), and sowing “corruption” throughout the world—before inculpating them directly for the carnage in Syria.

Barack Obama could use a little relief. The world is crumbling around him, much of it the result of his presidential misfeasance at home and abroad.

The chickens coming to roost on Pennsylvania Avenue are neither ideological nor partisan. Evil men are bold and quick to take advantage of timidity and weakness. There’s a growing consensus, and it includes Democrats — the president is in over his head. He probably scares himself.

Like all second-term presidents, Mr. Obama naturally feels liberated from partisan concerns, free to do what he likes. He can thumb his nose at public opinion because he never again has to face an angry voter. He can follow the Clinton model and get rich making speeches. He’ll be good at it.

But he needs a break today. His approval ratings have sunk into the low 40s. Vladimir Putin laughs at him. When Hillary Clinton accepts an invitation to lunch at the White House she insists on using the back door. The family dog growls at him.

He clearly needs a public-relations triumph. Fortunately for him, there’s a candidate at hand. A 27-year-old woman is languishing in a filthy prison in Sudan, together with her son, aged 20 months, and a daughter, aged 3 weeks. The mother’s only crime is that she is a Christian and won’t convert to Islam, and she is regarded as an adulterer because she married a Christian, and the marriage is not recognized in Sudanese law. Meriam Ibrahim is to be hanged as soon as she weans her newborn, and before the noose is tightened around her pretty neck she must be flogged with 100 lashes. Life in the Islamic world often sounds like something from a blood-and-thunder horror movie, and the abuse of Mrs. Ibrahim is living proof of how horrible a horror movie can be.

Other leaders in the West have given Mr. Obama the cover he needs to stand up like a man eager to defend the innocent and the helpless. The plight of Mrs. Ibrahim has shocked and offended the Europeans. British Prime Minister David Cameron says the treatment of Mrs. Ibrahim “has no place” in the world. “Religious freedom is an absolute, fundamental human right. I urge the government of Sudan to overturn the sentence and immediately provide appropriate support and medical care for her and her children.”

The ICRC has turned the international community against Israel – unfortunately, without a significant response from the prime minister.

According to the International Committee of the Red Cross’s Anton Camen (“Why the law prohibits settlement activities,” May 27) Israeli presence in and control of Judea and Samaria are illegal. But what is “the law” to which he refers? Camen says the law defining and governing occupation is the Hague Regulation (1907). He writes that “the law of occupation… is defined by Article 42 of the Hague Regulations….”

That’s a half-truth. Article 42, Section III, Military Authority Over The Territory Of The Hostile State, states: “Territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army. The occupation extends only to the territory where such authority has been established and can be exercised.”

The title of this section, however, refers to territory belonging legitimately to a sovereign state; that was not the case in 1967.

Moreover, Camen ignores Article 43, which states: “The authority of the legitimate power having in fact passed into the hands of the occupant, the latter shall take all the measures in his power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety, while respecting, unless absolutely prevented, the laws in force in the country.”

This means that “occupation” occurs when the “legitimate power” of one country is usurped by another. Since Jordan’s invasion and occupation was not legitimate, Israel’s acquisition of Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem in 1967 cannot be considered illegal.

The ICRC, however, differs – and here is the problem. The ICRC decided unilaterally and behind closed doors that Israel had violated the Fourth Geneva Convention (FGC). They made that “the law,” as if nothing preceded Jordan’s illegal conquering of the area which was renamed the “West Bank.”

In an essential article published on June 16, one of the key architects of the Iraq war, former ambassador John Bolton, argued that “US focus must be on Iran as Iraq falls apart.” He is unapologetic about the war itself, saying that “inevitably, analysts are rearguing George W. Bush’s decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein, Barack Obama’s complete withdrawal of U.S. forces, and virtually everything else Iraq-related in between.”
To start with, this is a remarkable admission. The war was to remove Saddam, then, and not about Iraq’s WMD’s, or Iraq’s links with the terrorists, as claimed ad nausem at the time. “In-between” is dismissed as some past unpleasantness, unfit to be mentioned in polite company. “None of the parties to Iraq’s current conflict have anything to recommend them,” Bolton says, but excludes himself from the unnamed “parties.” It is not done to claim that what has come to pass in Iraq and its region since March 2003 would not have happened… but for the war.
This reasoning is frankly outrageous, but there’s more surreality to come. According to John Bolton, “This is all beside the point, for today’s decision-makers confronting the question of what, if anything, to do as Iraq nears disintegration. America must instead decide what its national interests are now, not what they were five or ten years ago.” In his scheme of things, we should be looking forward, not back, with the same old crew offering advice that created the disaster in the first place.
For a seasoned foreign policy analyst like myself, the word “incredibly” does not come easy. Incredibly, Bolton suggests the United States to pursue her “national interests” by putting the rampaging ISIS – now in charge of a contiguous swath from north Aleppo to the outskirts of Baghdad – on the back burner, and refocus on Iran, the same country that is helping Nouri Al-Maliki’s Shiite militias beat back the Sunni jihadist onslaught:
[O]ur objective should be to remove the main foe, Tehran’s ayatollahs, by encouraging the opposition, within and outside Iran, to take matters into their own hands. There is no need to deploy U.S. military power to aid the various opposition forces. We should instead provide them intelligence and material assistance, and help them subsume the political differences that separate them. Their differences should be addressed when the ayatollahs’ regime lies in ashes. And as Iran’s regime change proceeds, we can destroy ISIL.