Category Archives: Culture Wars

In less than 24 hours the “comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” sinks,  torpedoed by the left and right, leaving the clueless nincompoops at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue grasping rhetorical life-vests and petulantly parsing the meaning of “war”.  No need for the Islamic State propagandists to write a script, all they need to do is play Obama administration video clips running away from saying “war” to embolden their tens of thousands of fighters (more than 30,000 if our CIA analysis is in the ballpark).  They’re attracting recruits globally and our leader from behind keeps emphasizing that he isn’t putting any Americans boots on the ground for his comprehensive and sustained fight to destroy them.  This chicken little man continued his political rubber chicken circuit with barbarians, who rely on wringing real necks or chopping them off to emphasize their commitment to their “war”  His entire strategy rests on fighters on the ground who are no match for IS and a whole bunch of fancy political maneuvering within Iraq to unify the fractured country.  His vaunted coalition rests on building trust in American leadership, where diplomatic success relies on deft confidence-building by Mr. “I was for it, before I was against it” Kerry, in a world which has watched Obama’s waffling, changes in direction, obfuscations and disastrous Mid-East foreign policy blunders  since 2009.   Witnessing just this past 24 hour administration semantical tap dance undercut their credibility and commitment to destroying the Islamic State.

To demonstrate the difference between those committed to the battle, let’s just compare the messaging.  The ISIL/ISIS/IS camp openly declared war against America and unbelievers everywhere, while we get President Obama and John Kerry parsing their “counter-terrorism efforts” and going to great pains to downplay the military actions that compose their newly-minted “comprehensive  and sustained counter terrorism strategy”.  The absurdity of the Obama clown mobile drives on, with this shameless mountebank offering up snake oil like this:

“I have made it clear that we will hunt down terrorists who threaten our country, wherever they are,” he said. “This is a core principle of my presidency: If you threaten America, you will find no safe haven.”

The irony of proclaiming no safe havens for ISIL (his preferred designation), when his disastrously short-sighted and misguided policies created the very safe haven ISIL now controls should propel responsible elected representatives in Washington to speak up.  You could not make this stuff up, even in your wildest imagination.  While vast blobs of Americans meander through life, fat, dumb and happy to be part of the low-information voter, 5-second-attention-span group, you can be certain that in Iraq, Syria or the Levant (Obama’s spin to avoid saying Syria) and beyond the people in Iraq are listening to his lies, but worse than that their very lives are at risk, from his failed policies.  They are forced to live out his lies and on the ground that grim truth feeds a rising tide of recruits for ISIL/ISIS/IS.

American influence and global power, which President Obama frittered away, now leaves him truly leading from behind, with John Kerry chasing after potential coalition members, who no longer trust this administration.  The big picture power dynamics in the region elude this administration, with tossing olive branches to Iran, sticks and stones to Arab leaders who did our bidding, like Mubarak and Qadaffi, and a deaf ear to Israel.

The parsing may work for partisan politicos, but to half-hardheartedly commit US Armed Forces to his announced  military action September 10,2014 and then walk back that declaration the following day speaks volumes that the speech to the nation was a disingenuous and opportunistic PR gambit.

On September 10, 2014 he said: “Our objective is clear: We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy.”

On September 11, 2014 CBS reports:  “We’re engaged in a major counterterrorism operation, and it’s going to be a long-term counterterrorism operation. I think war is the wrong terminology and analogy but the fact is that we are engaged in a very significant global effort to curb terrorist activity,” Kerry told CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan in an interview from Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he is traveling as part of American effort to build a global coalition to battle ISIS.

President Obama’s address to the nation serves a mixed-messaging 16-bean soup that’s bound to cause enough flatulence to provide alternative energy to fuel America for the next year.  What a gigantic crock pot with the emphasis on crock.  Keep the Tums handy.

The big picture situation for the entire region shows a culture suffering major hemorrhages and dying .  America alone can’t stop this bleed out.  David Goldman, in his Spengler column, “14 Million Refugees Make The Levant Unmanageable”,  states:

“The Arab states are failed states, except for the few with enough hydrocarbons to subsidize every facet of economic life. Egypt lives on a$15 billion annual subsidy from the Gulf states and, if that persists, will remain stable if not quite prosperous. Syria is a ruin, along with large parts of Iraq. The lives of tens of millions of people were fragile before the fighting broke out (30% of Syrians lived on less than $1.60 a day), and now they are utterly ruined. The hordes of combatants displace more people, and these join the hordes, in a snowball effect.”

He continues:

“When I wrote in 2011 that Islam was dying, this was precisely what I forecast. You can’t unscramble this egg. The international organizations, Bill Clinton, George Soros and other people of that ilk will draw up plans, propose funding, hold conferences and publish studies, to no avail. The raw despair of millions of people ripped out of the cocoon of traditional society, bereft of ties of kinship and custom, will feed the meatgrinder. Terrorist organizations that were hitherto less flamboyant (“moderate” is a misdesignation), e.g. the Muslim Brotherhood (and its Palestine branch Hamas), will compete with the caliphate for the loyalties of enraged young people. The delusion about Muslim democracy that afflicted utopians of both parties is now inoperative. War will end when the pool of prospective fighters has been exhausted.”

For a far better explanation of the situation than I could ever muster, Henry Kissinger lays out the disintegrating geopolitical situation in an August 31, 2014 piece in The Sunday Times, “The world in flames”.  His analysis breaks down to this one ominous line:

“If order cannot be achieved by consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanising cost, from the experience of chaos.”

As Caliphates Compete, Radical Islam Will Eventually Weaken.

Here’s my lesson of the day:  Read opinion pieces and articles written by folks you generally discount!  Being opinionated can serve to blind you to reading views that run counter to yours and isolating yourself to reading the work of writers and websites ideologically aligned to your own views will keep you swimming in endless circles in a goldfish bowl.

I mostly ignore Fareed Zakaria’s reporting and interviews, preferring to relegate him to “Obama-apologist status”, but here’s his very thoughtful opinion piece,“Why they still hate us, 13 years later”,  from the Washington Post (9/4/14). He writes:

“The central point of the essay was that the reason the Arab world produces fanaticism and jihad is political stagnation. By 2001, almost every part of the world had seen significant political progress — Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America, even Africa had held many free and fair elections. But the Arab world remained a desert. In 2001, most Arabs had fewer freedoms than they did in 1951.”

“The one aspect of life that Arab dictators could not ban was religion, so Islam had become the language of political opposition. As the Westernized, secular dictatorships of the Arab world failed — politically, economically and socially — the fundamentalists told the people, “Islam is the solution.””

“The Arab world was left with dictatorships on one hand and deeply illiberal opposition groups on the other — Hosni Mubarak or al-Qaeda. The more extreme the regime, the more violent the opposition. This cancer was deeper and more destructive than I realized. Despite the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq and despite the Arab Spring, this dynamic between dictators and jihadis has not been broken.”

Assessing the nation-building aspect of our effort, Cora Sol Goldstein, in a piece titled, “The Afghan Experience: Democratization By Force” (page 20, published in the Autumn 2012 Parameters), writes:

“The case of Afghanistan exemplifies the challenges associated with attempting to democratize a reluctant population by force. Small wars aimed at regime change do not create the conditions for executing such ambitious agendas as nation building. The decapitation of the regime’s leaders or the transient defeat of a guerrilla movement does not necessarily lead to popular support for a program of radical change inspired by the victors. A military occupation following a war with limited violence will exacerbate nationalism, sectarianism, and militarism, passions that fuel resentment and the violent rejection of a foreign agenda. In Afghanistan, the presence of the Western allies, and their attempt to impose ideas of governance, first generated skepticism, then political resistance, and finally the emergence of a full-fledged insurgency. NATO forces became involved in a counterinsurgency operation that inevitably led to human rights violations and unacceptable excesses. This resulted in the consequent loss of the moral high ground that supposedly inspired the original occupation, and led to the collapse of the transformative agenda.”

In the past 13 years we the people of the United States of America have been trained to rely on “experts” to guide us on the path to defeating Al Qaeda, by eliminating safe havens for them, by costly democratization efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by believing in the universality of our democratic aspirations.  However, since our politically correct policy experts set off formulating policy to fit multiculturalist arbiters rather than reality, we have lost thousands of American lives tilting at windmills and now, faced with the reality that Islam does not mean peace, Al Qaeda is just part of the threat, and “democracy” is not the aspiration for millions of Muslims in the Arab world, our policy experts on both sides of the political aisle keep trying to hide behind mindless slogans and repeating the same old tired rhetoric.  Parsing takes the place of facing up to the failures and wrong-headed analyses and policies.

Being stuck facing gloating Islamist nuts gleefully displaying beheaded Americans, one can almost feel our leaders reacting like George Orwell in his story, “Shooting An Elephant” and let’s hope President Obama, a weak and ineffectual leader, does not follow the same course:

“I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open – I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast Lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock.”

“In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dash and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon.”

“Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.”

Craig Whiteside over at War on the Rocks, laid out the background on the internal dynamics in Iraq, “Obama Shouldn’t Lose His Cool Over The Islamic State”, and he concludes:

“One can look at the chaos in Libya to see that airstrikes cannot be a stand-alone solution, regardless of how much a group “deserves” that kind of attention. If we couple an expanded airstrike campaign with steps aimed at the elimination of militias and reduction in the Iranian presence inside Iraq (including proxies), we can help the Iraqi government convince (once again) the Sunni reconcilables to return. The consequences of failure are ten years of warfare over exactly how Iraq will be “partitioned,” a reduction in oil production and a rise in global energy prices, and a worsening of the sectarian civil war that is threatening the entire region. This is the time to “think slow”and not just react out of anger for the Foley/Sotloff tragedies and other IS atrocities.”

Just last week news reports on another American attack following the same “leadership decapitation strategy”, which John Brennan and President Obama rely on as their silver bullet approach was reported, “Pentagon: Airstrike kills terror leader in Somalia”.   Hooray, we killed another #1 in an Al Qaeda affiliate, but Al Shabaab responded:

“Al-Shabaab’s new leader is Ahmed Omar Abu Ubaidah, spokesman Sheikh Ali Dheere said in an audio message posted online.”

“He is the group’s third leader and was characterized as a low-ranking commander. No other information was available.”

Alas, Nightwatch printed a very insightful comment on this approach 11/7/13.  So in case John Brennan and the CIA didn’t see it, here it is:

 “It also highlights a degenerative leadership pattern resulting from the US program of leadership decapitation. First, there is always someone waiting for the chance to be leader. Second, the new leaders are less experienced and wise than the men they replace. Third, the new generation of leaders is more extreme and theologically rigid than its predecessors. Finally, the new leaders tend to be unknown to intelligence relative to their predecessors. Decapitation is not a permanent solution to an insurgency or an uprising.”

Eureka, JK’s formula, “AQI>ISIL>ISIS>IS”, hummmm “more extreme and theologically rigid than its predecessors”, sound familiar?

Now is the time to start reading our own intelligence reports, study the lessons learned reports, talk to people outside our own comfortable niche of policy “experts” and begin to form a broader, long-term strategic framework.   The voice that has never wavered on the big picture threat we face, Andrew McCarthy, states:

“The same has also always been true of the ideological/doctrinal divide between Sunni and Shiite jihadists. For example, al-Qaeda has had cooperative and operational relations with Iran since the early 1990s. Iran collaborated with al-Qaeda in the 1996 Khobar Towers attack that killed 19 U.S. airmen; probably in the 9/11 attacks; certainly in the aftermath of 9/11; and in the Iraq and Afghan insurgencies. Al-Qaeda would not be what it is today without state sponsorship, particularly from Iran. The Islamic State might not exist at all.”

“The point is that al-Qaeda has never been anything close to the totality of the jihadist threat. Nor, now, is the Islamic State. The challenge has always been Islamic supremacism: the ideology, the jihadists that are the point of the spear, and the state sponsors that enable jihadists to project power. The challenge cannot be met effectively by focusing on one element to the exclusion of others.”  (The Islamic State Is Nothing New, National Review Online 9/3/14)

Let’s not keep shooting elephants to avoid looking a fool.

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The media, the White House and even our Defense Department want to play some silly semantics game about IS, so JK referred me back to the Sinjar Records, captured by American forces in Iraq in 2007 and compiled and analyzed at the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) located  at West Point:

http://tarpley.net/docs/CTCForeignFighter.19.Dec07.pdf

The very first sentence in the introduction states:

“On December 4, 2007 Abu Umar al‐Baghdadi, the reputed Emir of al Qa’ida’s Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), claimed that his organization was almost purely Iraqi, containing only 200 foreign fighters.”  1
(1. Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, For the Scum Disappears Like Froth Cast Out, posted to http://www.muslm.net on December 4, 2007.)

So, al Baghdadi is not some new nemesis to mysteriously come out of nowhere in Iraq and certainly his IS is not some completely new entity – it’s the same al Qaeda terrorists, who are now following through on their stated mission – to create a new Caliphate.  The White House can pretend it’s some new radicalized group, but really it’s still al Qaeda.  Our officials love to regale us with the endless stream of #2s and #3s in the al Qaeda power structure they’ve eliminated with their leadership decapitation strategy, whilst the al Qaeda leadership remaining prefers to follow a straight up literal decapitation strategy.

So, the news and media talking heads can’t stop talking about what IS is. IS is a CALIPHATE emerging, hummm, doesn’t that sound like the oft mocked pipe dream of Osama bin Laden and friends?  Well, here I’ll answer for you – yes it does.  In January our astute President, beneficiary of the world’s most magnificent intelligence apparatus in the world, stated:

“The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” Obama told Remnick. “I think there is a distinction between the capacity and reach of a bin Laden and a network that is actively planning major terrorist plots against the homeland versus jihadists who are engaged in various local power struggles and disputes, often sectarian.” (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/01/20/obama-dismisses-al-qaeda-resurgence-theyre-jv/)

So, juxtapose that brilliant analysis with his current assessment from his August 20th speech on the beheading of American journalist, JimFoley:

“Let’s be clear about ISIL.  They have rampaged across cities and villages — killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence.  They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery.  They have murdered Muslims — both Sunni and Shia — by the thousands.  They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion.  They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people.

So ISIL speaks for no religion.  Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents.  No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day.  ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings.  Their ideology is bankrupt.  They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.

And people like this ultimately fail.  They fail, because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by people like Jim Foley, and the overwhelming majority of humanity who are appalled by those who killed him.” (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/08/20/statement-president)

President Obama chooses to once again ignore the threat posed by this emerging CALIPHATE.  He summarily dismisses their declaration of war on the US and the West, still choosing to view them as a localized menace to their neighbors.  Once they begin to launch terrorist attacks on the US and the West, perhaps he will reluctantly, albeit too late, realize they are the ones capitalizing on America “ending” the war on terror, by waging a full-fledged offensive to defeat us in that selfsame war that he declared ended.  Choosing to underestimate the persistence, dedication and global reach of Islamists (the tentacles of Al Qaeda) by simply rhetorically parsing language, while they are furiously planning/training/expanding their capabilities, demonstrates that this president and his flunkies will never be able to protect America.  They neither see any threats that might interfere with their domestic political agenda, nor have the strategic vision to focus on threats through a big picture prism juxtaposed with  short and mid-range distance assessments.  Planning in reactionary mode fits and starts is the only method they know – so, this one is going to be a mission-creeper of military responses rather than part of a comprehensive offensive plan to defeat the CALIPHATE.

General John R. Allen wrote,  “IS must be destroyed and we must move quickly to pressure its entire “nervous system,” break it up, and destroy its pieces.” (http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/08/gen-allen-destroy-islamic-state-now/92012/)  We can crush IS, but then what?  That is the same dilemma we faced before and I honestly think we should let IS run rampant a little longer, until the actual neighboring state leaders begin to feel really pressured and threatened by them.  Make them choose a side, instead of rushing in to shield them.  It would take seeing  waves of horrific carnage in the media and on their videos, but it might invoke enough fear in neighboring states to really act this time.  They must be forced to choose an Islamist future/potential extermination for being apostates or joining the 21st century modern world.  With large segments of disaffected citizens, particularly young men, these Muslim countries still are sitting on a powder keg and our going to war on IS will fuel the IS mobilization effort, with us not even having considered any strategies to thwart that.

A “war on terror” redux will  NOT solve the long-term strategic issue of global Islamist Ascendancy or even the more localized power vacuum problems.  We need to think more about the end objective, which is the defeat of the global Islamist movement and to do that requires putting and sustaining pressure on the Arab/Muslim facilitators of this virulent Jihad movement.  A few serious imperative objectives  would still be becoming energy independent, securing our borders, setting expectations of “acceptable conduct” and following through on punishing the state players who support/aid/abet the Islamist agenda.  We need to face down the “religion of peace” trope and say, “fine, you practice your “religion” however you like, but the minute one of my citizens is murdered for being an “infidel” and your fingerprints are connected, we will consider you an accomplice!”  And then we start following through on really cutting off military support, financial support, etc. to the abettors.

Only the Muslim world can really defeat this Islamist Ascendency and until some real leaders among them emerge, this scourge will continue.  And sad to say, their religious authorities seem confident their “kill all the infidels” belief is a requirement of their faith.  So, without a religious reformation of Islam itself, in conjunction with strong international pressure to change, we’ll end up with more of the same.

PS:  Here was my assessment from a 2/2012 email to Gladius:

““The whole Mid-East is set to go up in flames with radical Islamists gaining control of actual states and our media and government glides blithely along, still waxing on about the Arab Spring and “democracy,  while the reality is Islamists have made monumental gains in the last year and present a threat that will define the next few decades.  Sure, Al Qaeda may not be the prescient threat at the moment, but these Al Qaeda elements will be absorbed and utilized by these Muslim Brotherhood elements gaining power in various Mid-East governments.   Our government is clueless and totally oblivious to the looming crisis developing.” 

Being right doesn’t give me any comfort though, because we’ve got the same nitwits running our country:-(

This morning I posted a comment using “mhere” on a piece, “Reckless Abandonment”, by Mario Loyola at National Review Online.   The gist of his argument is that Obama’s missteps, like failing to arm the moderate Syrian resistance, led to the formation of IS and he also writes a stinging indictment of the lack of a coherent Obama foreign policy.  I disagreed with  a good bit of his assessment.  Loyola explains the Bush approach:

“The Bush administration recognized the danger of failed and failing states, and put in place a preventive doctrine of “partnership capacity building” to shore up the governance capability of threatened states. The idea was to prevent the sort of lawless safe haven from which al-Qaeda organized the 9/11 attacks on America. The first task was to make sure that sovereign states could control the whole of their territory.”

JK and I jabbered back and forth a bit via email about this situation and he, of course, provided some very good links to expand on this subject of “moderate” Syrian resistance fighters.  Hillary tried latching onto those “moderates” too and insisting she, the queen of soft power and smart diplomacy, would have armed these  “moderates” while Obama waffled. Loyola explains the Obama approach:

“Obama, by contrast, seems utterly unconcerned with failing states and terrorist safe havens. “I’ve been careful to resist calls to turn time and again to our military,” explained Obama, “because America has other tools in our arsenal than our military. We can also lead with the power of our diplomacy, our economy, and our ideals.” How that soft power is supposed to protect us from terror networks operating with impunity in safe havens across the Middle East has yet to be explained.”

My inexpert take in the comment section goes:

“Certainly Obama’s whimsical strategic vacuum provided the conditions for power vacuums across the ME to develop, but the Bush foreign policy had huge gaping flaws that boded poorly for long-term success. So, partisan politics aside, we went from bad foreign policy under Bush to no foreign policy under Obama (or at least no coherent foreign policy).

To say, “if Obama had armed the moderate Syrians things would be different”, might have altered the fate of Assad, but there was no stomach among those calling for throwing more arms into the mix to stay the course and ensure a “better” Syria emerged at the end. The arming the rebels rests as a simplistic tactical move, without a fully thought out long-term strategy. We hadn’t considered all the various scenarios that could ensue from arming “moderate” rebels and how we would respond to various outcomes. We didn’t have any clue as to who possible “moderate” political factions are in Syria, whom we hoped would emerge and build this better-than-Assad-Syria.

We so often throw ourselves into well-meaning foreign policy initiatives that blindly ignore the political/cultural realities of the people we are trying to “help” and as long as we refuse to acknowledge the pall Islam and more ominously Islamism casts over any reforms directed at dragging these cultures into modernity, our efforts will meet with failure and defeat.

In both Iraq and Afghanistan we spent billions of dollars with shaky accountability and little to show for the amount we squandered. Standing up a credible Afghan Army or Iraqi Army proved futile – these people want our money, not our democratic values. Obama’s mercurial foreign policy bodes much worse than Bush’s, but as Americans we should demand and expect a grand strategy that rests on reality, not wishful thinking and delusions, like “Islam means peace”.”