Category Archives: Military

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”.”