The NY Times is reporting on an intelligence-sharing accord pertaining to the Islamic State between Russia, Syria, Iraq and Iran. The Russians did not consult with the United States before initiating this accord, so once again Putin has done an end run around the Obama administration, highlighting the stark contrast between “leading” and “leading from behind”.
I sized up the characters and personalities of both men along ago and it felt odd for me, being a Cold War warrior about the evils of the Soviet Union, to find myself choosing Putin as a far better geopolitical strategist than President Obama and his lame narrative-writers. Sure, lots of western analysts cast Putin as just an opportunist, but I think they’re underestimating him. Back in January 2013 I wrote “Putin By A Mile”, about who would you choose in a geopolitical match-up between Putin and Obama. I think my call was right:
Taking “a walk a mile in their shoes approach” puts us on firmer strategic ground than all this suspect psychobabble our assessments often contain. To understand Putin all it takes is to view Russia from where he stands. George Friedman does this best (here). While Putin’s actions do remain diametrically opposed to ours and most assuredly will produce future friction points, his actions make perfect strategic sense from the Russian viewpoint. He aggressively has secured energy resources and engaged the US in nuclear arms wrangling where he certainly pushed and received the things that are advantageous to Russia.
Then we have Barack Obama where he refused to sign the Keystone Pipeline deal, he gave away too much in the nuclear arms dealing and he and Madame Secretary have made one after another terrible missteps, stabbing our allies in the back, while bowing and scraping to our adversaries. He’s put us on the path to not only universal healthcare, but to being a universal third-rate bit player on the world stage. If I were assessing how the strategic plane looks from others’ vantage points, I would wonder, “those stupid Americans, they don’t even have the national will to promote their own interests”. And truly, any administration that utters a phrase like,”leading from behind” is worthy of only supreme contempt, in my opinion.
The ill-mannered TV reality urchin, Honey boo boo can keep Barack Obama, but as for me I’d pick Putin by a mile.
Leadership is about character and sadly for us we have the Captain of the JV team in this match-up….
Last week after reports emerged of more embarrassing details of US trained “Syrian moderates” either defecting or giving their weapons to ISIS in exchange for safe passage, the Pentagon had come out and denied this story. On Friday McClatchyDC ran this story:
In about-face, Pentagon says U.S.-trained Syrians gave trucks, weapons to al Qaida
The video of the interview is very interesting, but I’ll warn you that the viagra ads every few minutes got old fast. There were some very interesting exchanges and Rose certainly asked some very probing questions. Had a busy day cooking and spending time with my granddaughters, so I’ll save further comments for later.
“National Security Administration director Mike Rogers confirmed Thursday that Hillary Clinton’s email correspondence would have been a top priority for foreign spies and hackers, the Associated Press reported.
“Are the communications of the senior-most advisors to the president of the United States—even those that may be unclassified—a top priority for foreign intelligence services, in your opinion?” Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) asked in a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee.
“Yes,” Rogers said.”
The video above is also from the Washington Free Beacon story.
Back in 2006 my husband and I took a cross-country trip to New Mexico. We were going to visit our son at an Air Force base there, where he was assigned, before he deployed to Iraq. As evening approached we entered the state of Arkansas and decided to stop at a motel for the night. We ended up at an exit, where the tourist gimmick appeared to be a bird, which was believed to have been extinct for 60 years, but allegedly was sighted on February 27, 2004.
I always like to ask the locals where the best places to eat are, rather than trust online searches or road signs. So, after we got settled in our room, I went and chatted up the receptionist at the front desk and off we went in search of a local BBQ joint. As we ate, I kept looking at the pictures of the ivory-billed woodpecker on the walls and I asked my husband if he knew what the big deal was about this woodpecker, which I had never heard of. He didn’t know either. Near the cash register were shelves filled with the usual tourist junk, much of it plastered with images of the “ivory-billed woodpecker”.
Yesterday, I commented several times on Senator Marco Rubio’s foreign policy piece, “Obama’s Pathetic Cave-in to Putin’s Power Play in Syria”. Rubio offers a lot of Cold War sounding rhetoric and insists he will arm the Syrian moderate rebels. I believe this “Syrian moderate” strategy was foolish from the very beginning and a recipe to inadvertently place heavy weapons into the hands of ISIS, jihadists or Assad’s forces, because really do “moderates” win wars against committed, hardened fighters? I doubt it and much to our embarrassment, we have armed “moderates” numerous times in Syria, only to have them walk away with our training and weapons and join ISIS. Here’s part of one of the exchanges with an ardent supporter of arming “Syrian moderates”:
There were jihadi elements based primarily in eastern Syria in 2012, yes. But if you look at a map of Syria, most of the population centers run along the western edge well away from those early staging areas. That’s where the important action was happening. The infiltration of the jihadi elements into the mainstream opposition came about because western policy toward Syria left the outgunned opposition to Assad nowhere else to turn for support and no incentive not to work with whoever would back them. If you offer nothing, you get nothing. As to ISIS specifically, their strategy from the beginning was to snatch territory from whoever was the winner in local fights between the regime and the opposition. They were spoilers from their inception interested in controlling territory of their own, not cooperating with others against the regime. Conflating them with other actors in the conflict was and is a fallacy.
I read the article you link to. The reference to the fight against Assad becoming “jihadized” is a consequence of the early failure to support the original opponents of Assad enough to be effective on the ground, not a justification for the refusal to do so. That’s rich. We had a window of opportunity, and we let it close. It wasn’t al-Qaeda or al-Nusra that took to the streets by the thousands to protest Assad’s dictatorship. It was ordinary people. Ideally, we should have destroyed both Assad’s air force on the ground and the Al Qaeda training camps out in the eastern desert and mountains that became the source of the jihadi infiltration. Dithering has costs.
As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbed by Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII. The half-hearted effort in Jordan has been a farce. Backing Assad as the “lesser of two evils,” however, only guarantees more war and more jihadism.
We had no vital US national interest in Syria – NONE. This misguided post 9/11 policy where we were going to remove safe havens for terrorists who attacked us, by regime change, if necessary, morphed into regime change to democratize the Arab world post Arab Spring. None of it has worked – NONE. Libya’s a gigantic safe haven for terrorists, Iraq too, Afghanistan will be back in Taliban hands, in Egypt we backed the Muslim Brotherhood, the granddaddy umbrella organization for Salafist radicals. You say “Dithering has costs.” Arming rebels in that neck of the woods has costs too. And there’s always unintended consequences when you throw more arms into the mix. We were gunrunning from Libya to Syria from the beginning. Of the rebels we armed I am not sure who is is “moderate” and who is “jihadist”, because the groups change sides and alliances frequently. Benghazi sound familiar – that’s what blowback looks like. Or how about the Seal Team 6 helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2011.
“Moderates” will not win against hardened, Islamist fighters.
I have noticed that the most ardent “arm them” crowd seem to be academics in think tanks with no military experience, while military strategists will raise concerns and discuss possible blowback and unintended consequences from arming foreign fighters. Frantic hunts for manpads ring any bells? How about the “Syrian moderate” last year, Jamal Maarouf, whom Foreign Policy wrote about as our last best hope? We trained and armed him and his band with TOW missiles – he immediately declared a truce with ISIS.
So your best hope is:
“As things stand now, most of the original rebels are dead, were absorbedby Nusra and its affiliates, or fled the country. The best thing we can do now is to raise a new force from among these new refugees similar to what was done with Polish refugees in WWII.”
Yes, the fake Syrian passport business is booming, the Islamists are determined to dupe us any way they can and one wonders who is going to vet these “Syrian moderate” refugees to train into a force capable of defeating hardened Islamist fighters or Assad’s forces. This should go as well as training Afghan security forces – where they sell their US-issued gear at the bazaar, then come back and want more, then there was the endless drug-addiction problem among Afghan recruits. Training Iraqi security forces has worked great too. In Libya we sent in some General Hifter, because we left a gigantic safe haven for terrorists there, in addition to fueling a refugee crisis. It’s not like moving inanimate pieces on a chess board – there are many more than two sides in these fights, alliances and allegiance between factions are fluid, and all these sides get to think and make moves that run counter to your plan. So, now we’re being offered the Polish plan – I will not laugh.
The image above is from a post card I bought at that BBQ joint in 2006. Our waitress, a very young woman, who looked to be still in her teens, cautiously answered my questions about this elusive “ivory-billed woodpecker”. I asked her if she thinks the sightings of this woodpecker, long believed to be extinct, are true or a hoax. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled. She said she didn’t know for sure, but a lot of “experts” from back East believe it and came to search for that bird.
As I read Patrick Poole’s report at PJ Media today of another Syrian moderate we trained who took our weapons and joined ISIS, I thought our search for “Syrian moderates”, which began based largely on neoconservative think-tank “experts and a young Syria “expert” at the Institute for the Study of War/political director for the Syrian Emergency Task Force, Elizabeth O’Bagy seems much like the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker.
Today, GEN Petraeus testified before Congress, I am presuming at the request of the likes of Senator John McCain, the neoconservative “Arm Syrian Moderates”, and to offer his insights into the fight against ISIS. He thinks the US should establish safe zones in Syria, that will ostensibly encourage moderate Sunnis to fight against ISIS. He stated:
“The central problem in Syria is that Sunni Arabs will not be willing partners against the Islamic State unless we commit to protect them and the broader Syrian population against all enemies, not just ISIS,” Petraeus said using an acronym for the militant group. “That means protecting them from the unrestricted warfare being waged against them by Bashar Assad, especially by his air force and its use of barrel bombs.”
He suggested that the U.S. tell Assad that if he continues to use barrel bombs, the U.S. will stop the Syrian air force from flying.
“We have that capability,” he said. “It would demonstrate that the United States is willing to stand against Assad and it would show the Syrian people that we can do what the Islamic State cannot — provide them with a measure of protection.”
At the same time, Petraeus warned against rushing to oust Assad without knowing who would fill the resulting political vacuum in the country.
Putin has moved Russian military personnel, equipment and fighters into Syria to bolster Assad. Putin has had meetings with the regional leaders and even with Israel and ironed out an understanding about Russia’s aims to help the Syrian state, to avoid any misunderstanding about how the IDF forces will respond to Assad transferring arms to Hezbollah. Yet. GEN Petraeus talks about creating some safe zone for imaginary Sunni moderates and he believes they will want to fight ISIS for us, when in truth, those Sunnis’ mortal enemy is really Assad, not ISIS (radical Salafists, who are Sunnis). Nowhere in Petraeus’ statement is a recognition of Russia’s diplomatic effort and coordination with regional leaders and even Israel or an insistence that we must talk to Putin to avoid escalating this into a US vs. Russian conflict very quickly, if US and Russian planes are operating in tight air space over Syria. Nope, it’s more magical-thinking that we’re going to create some viable proxy forces to fight ISIS for us. He argued that the US should not allow Putin to push us into an alliance with Assad. Instead he’s fine with the US supporting the Baghdad government, which relies heavily on Iranian backed militias to fight the Islamic State. And we’re going to chug along rebuilding the Iraqi Army – again. He did deliver the requisite catchphrase to be thrown around – this time, the clever, Russian-themed one for the pundits to saber-rattle and fear-monger to sway public opinion for another regime change in the Mid-East. He said:
“He called Syria a “geopolitical Chernobyl — spewing instability and extremism over the region and the rest of the world.””
The experts in search of the ivory-billed woodpecker began their search for the elusive bird in the eastern woods of Arkansas, then spread out to search in 8 different states. They did not find any. Last night I believed that poster’s plan, which I facetiously referred to as “The Polish Plan”, was laughable, but today with the “geopolitical Chernobyl” hyperbole, it sounds like it just might be an expansion of the neoconservative experts’ new “Syrian moderate” plan – the search for “Syrian refugee moderates”. One place they likely won’t find any is Poland, because the Poles were smart enough to say they are not Western Europe and they don’t want any terrorists….
The media has tried to throw Ben Carson under the very same “Islam” bus that rolled over Donald Trump, leaving Trump (and his hair) not quite flattened, but a little unsteady on his political feet, after his strange hit and run encounter (with what sure smelled like a plant in the audience). With Carson that bus spent the weekend backing up and running over him a few more times. CAIR went on the Islamophobia warpath, demanding Carson drop out of the race, but what Carson said isn’t hate speech or religious bigotry – he’s speaking the truth. Carson, in his quiet, thoughtful manner offers his reasoning, that tenets of Islam are not consistent with the US Constitution, which is irrefutable – Sharia law, with its totalitarian tenets is incompatible with our principles in the Declaration of Independence and with the US Constitution. Andrew McCarthy at National Review lays out the case, in his usual brilliant style:
“These assertions would not be nearly as hotly debated if the political class and the media had not sought for decades to suppress all discussion of Islam – other than mindless blather about its being a “religion of peace.” If we had been having the adult discussion we should have been having, it would be well understood by now that Islam is not merely a religion but a comprehensive societal framework with its own legal system.
Why is that important to grasp? Because in the West, we recognize a division between the spiritual realm and political life – a division reflected in our Constitution. Mainstream Islam recognizes no such separation. While Islam unquestionably has tenets that we would recognize as religious in nature (e.g., the oneness of Allah), it is also teeming with rules that control law, governance, the economy, military affairs, social life, hygiene – virtually everything we see as the realm of politics and self-determination.”
Since I haven’t weighed in on the Donald Trump flap last week over the question from the man in the audience asking Trump a question about Muslim training camps in America, which the man prefaced with the assertion that President Obama is a Muslim and not even an American, here it goes with my thoughts.
I like to break statements into parts, because that man’s question had 5 parts, so let’s look at the parts.
The man states we have a problem in American and that problem is Muslims.
President Obama is a Muslim.
President Obama isn’t an American
There are Muslim training camps in America
What will Donald Trump do about the problem (which broadly the man might mean Muslims in America in general or he might have meant the Muslim training camps. I doubt he was asking about a specific course of action on his assertions that President Obama is a Muslim and not an American).
Let me deal with parts 2 and 3 first, President Obama attended the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for almost 20 years, where the controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright served as the pastor. Wright, as we all know, became a lightning rod when his anti-American diatribes became political fodder, because President Obama made statements that Rev. Wright had been his close friend and spiritual mentor for those long years. This begs the question, what are President Obama’s views, since Wright preaches black liberation theology, antisemitism, anti-Americanism and he blamed 9/11 on America, not on the Islamic nuts who attacked us.
I will take the President’s birth certificate, that was reluctantly produced, as legit,which makes him an American, but on the larger issue of his spirit, he has acted in ways that undermine America on the international stage and has consistently used the Presidential bully pulpit to inflame racial hostility and jumped into racial issues in the news, before the facts were even known. From the “Cambridge police acted stupidly” to his Trayvon Martin comments, on to Ferguson, NY, Baltimore, his track record on fomenting racial tensions and prematurely passing judgment speaks for itself. He does race-baiting and makes grand pronouncements on these issues, which when the dust settles are proven to be lies. He consults with Al Sharpton, a virulent anti-Semite, a purveyor of hate, a tax cheat, and a proven liar.
In 2009, President Obama appointed Van Jones to be his Special Advisor for Green Jobs. Jones is an avowed communist and radical, who belonged to a group called STORM, which advocated an actual armed revolution in America, not to mention Jones aligned himself with 9/11 truthers, who believe that attack was an inside job, not the work of Islamic terrorists.
So, while I can’t read another person’s heart, President Obama is an American, but I certainly question his American spirit, even though I never believed he was born outside the United States or that he’s a secretly practicing Muslim. Religion may play a role in how he leads his daily private life, but in his public life and political decisions, his belief system appears to be far-left, college campus radicalism. And yes, I consider that “un-American” rather than not being an American citizen and in my book being “un-American” is a greater “sin”. As President, he has weakened America’s military, undercut America’s credibility around the globe, created and fueled racial animosity and even undercut civilian law enforcement. He has elevated black thugs as heroes, while casting police officers as the enemy of the people.
On the broad issue of Muslims in America, yes, we have a problem. The punditry class, both left and right, marches in PC lockstep and bends over backwards to assure us that most Muslims in America are law-abiding, loyal Americans, which is true. This White House uses the “lone wolf’ to describe attacks inside the US perpetrated by radicalized Muslims – they are never connected to radical mosques or radical imams, nope, they just get on the internet and read up at radical Islamist websites, then attack. It’s a lie and our media repeats the “lone wolf” explanation from this administration, brushes each case off into the old news repository, out of sight and mind, then off they go ready to nod and repeat the next shallow left-wing spin and repeat administration narratives or jump on the 24/7 cable news punditry soapbox to do an Oprahesque hand-wringing about the anger and hate in America, which always means someone from the political right is the hater, never the young black thug who robbed a convenience store or the double-whammy left-wing special interest poster boy, a black Muslim young man who drove hundreds of miles to wage jihad in America.
What both Muslims and blacks in America have is a “lone voice” problem. Peer pressure and group identity politics keeps the vast majority of both groups silent or nodding agreement with the rabid, dominant political leftists who castigate and stigmatize blacks and Muslims who veer away and become “lone voices” in the far, left political wilderness. Blacks who become vocal opponents of leftist policies, get marginalized and taunted as “Uncle Toms” or “plantation Negroes”. Muslims who stray from the radical fringe, which plays both advocators of violent Jihadists and the chorus of Muslim victimization, with the refrain of endless Islamophobia, get shunned and face death threats from fatwas.
Even in cases where the connection to a particular mosque with radical Islamist ties emerges, the press doesn’t even ask the questions, but will charge full steam ahead attacking straw men or in the case of the Garland, TX case, they attacked Pamela Geller. Those two jihadists were connected to the Phoenix mosque. That imam played the Islamophobia card and pretended he didn’t know anything about one of the suspects being a radical. Here’s a quote from a CNN report:
“Members of a mosque the suspects attended, the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, are in shock about what happened, said its president, Usama Shami.
Simpson was a regular worshiper at the mosque until around 2010 or 2011, about the time the FBI arrested him on the false statement charges.
During that time, he offered no signal that he held radical views, Shami said.
“He was a gentle person,” Shami said of Simpson. “He always had a good attitude, a good demeanor.””
Pamela Geller’s actions and motives received endless dissection and castigation by the media, but CNN didn’t dig into investigating that Phoenix mosque or the radical jihadists connections within many mosques in America. You can google Geller yourself and find her criticized and reviled by the punditry class on both left and right. But the imam, playing dumb about a radical jihadist within his own mosque, despite knowing full well the FBI has been investigating the radicals within his mosque, got a free pass.
With the Muslim exodus from the Mid-East and beyond into Europe, it’s not unreasonable to be concerned about “Muslim training camps in America”. Carol Brown wrote a piece on that at the “American Thinker” just today: “Muslims of America terrorist training compounds”. I certainly would like to know for sure, when terrorist leaders keep ranting for their followers to attack America.
On September 10, 2015, the White House announced that the US will accept at least 10,000 more Syrian refugees (catch that wording at least, which means that’s a low-ball number). Secretary of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson insists the administration will do a thorough vetting and background checks of refugees to weed out extremists, but how they will do that remains a mystery. Reports of the huge fake Syrian passport black market recently and since our government does not deal with President Assad’s government in Syria led me to wonder who are they going to consult to “verify” the identities and backgrounds of these refugees. And since 9/11, we, meaning ordinary Americans, have heard many times from the media and “experts” about the many aliases of Islamist terrorists, so Secretary Johnson, just how are you going to do these background checks??? It’s a huge smokescreen with plumes of hot air and lies!
That man in the Trump audience, might be an out and out racist, xenophobe, or he might be just an average American concerned about alarming trends he’s seen with this President. Of course, the thought occurred to me, immediately that he might be a domestic political plant, a provocateur sent in to create a problem for Trump and create a media storm, in which case it worked. Both the Democrats and the Republican establishment want Donald Trump eliminated from the race, so this idea is not totally crazy. The man certainly seemed to recite his question carefully to hit all the “right-wing nut” themes – broad, vague Muslim charge, birther-ism, Obama’s a closet Muslim, then the training camps with echoes of UN black helicopters thrown in. Has the press bothered to check into who that man is? It wouldn’t be the first time competing politicians tried to sabotage one another.
As to how Donald Trump handled it, well, even though I can state that under no circumstances will I ever vote for Donald Trump, in this situation I believe he did the best he could and when put on the spot like that, actually his response was the TRUTH – there are a lot of problems to look at; with radical Muslims and Muslims in general, the first group speaks, “death to America” loud and clear, the later group’s silence is deafening and alarming.
Sitting here eating breakfast a few minutes ago, I thumbed through my latest Southern Living magazine, in my usual method, which for some reason irritates my husband a great deal. I browse women’s magazines starting from the back and working my way towards the front of the magazine. Why? Well, because the recipes are in the back and I like to peruse those first. Thanks to Pinterest and the internet, there’s no need to save all these magazine recipes in paper form anymore and due to some neat subscription service called “Next Issue”, I’m whittling down and receive just a few magazines in paper form. Once these subscriptions expire, perhaps I may go paperless completely.
Back to the recipes, we’re approaching Fall in a few days, so naturally Southern Living ran Fall themed recipes, which brings me to this trend in American food – making dishes or food items taste like something other than what they normally do. The section titled the “Great Pumpkin Cookbook” contains pumpkin-and-turnip green lasagna, beer-battered pumpkin (strips of pumpkin dipped in batter, then deep-fried) with a dipping sauce, and pumpkin-chocolate brownies. Of course, there was the standard “our easiest pumpkin pie ever” too, but truly pumpkin pie already is one of the easiest pies to make, so that title seemed hyperbolic.
In recent years, the potato chip industry joined this freak food contest game too, with bizarre flavors. Lay’s brand chips went so far as to do a contest, with the 4 finalists announced in July of this year: Wavy West truffle fries flavored chips, New York reuben flavored chips, Southern biscuits and gravy flavored chips, and kettle cooked Greektown gyros flavored chips.
Of course, the fad flavor gimmick creates fortunes for the intrepid mad food scientists in the ice cream industry, from Baskin-Robbins with their fun fact that the company began their sales gimmick of 31 flavors for each day of the month back in 1953. Ben and Jerry’s, which began as a small start-up ice cream business in Vermont, melts catchy named unique ice cream flavors with political activism for a new- age blend of socially conscious consumerism, where you can sample flavors from their “euphoric batches”, all while knowing they are working to “make the best ice cream in the most sustainable way”
Nothing says “America” like pizza, so surprise, surprise, Coolhaus, a Los Angeles creamery, not to be outdone, adds some West Coast artisanal trendiness with, yes, pizza-flavored ice cream…
Well, as for me, I like my pumpkin in pie, my lasagna with meat and tomato sauce, and when it comes to ice cream, as my kids say, “Mom, you’re so old and boring!” Yes, I prefer plain, old-fashioned vanilla, of course,
libertybelle diaries 