Mark Steyn: "The Non-War on Non-Terror"

It looks like that mosque at Ground Zero in New York is on again. 

Is the Ground Zero Mosque back? According to Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer (who helped get it nixed almost a decade ago), a Muslim "cultural center" is once again in the works just a few feet from where their coreligionists killed 3,000 people and left a smoking crater. The principal evidence is a sentence at the end of a report on a neighboring property:

Construction has also yet to begin on 51 Park Place, which is slated to become a 71-foot-tall, 16,000-square-foot Islamic cultural center.

On the other hand, the developer - Sharif El-Gamal - is said to be debt-riddled, with $10 million in unpaid bills and crews no longer prepared to swallow the assurance that the check's in the mail.
If that's the only obstacle, then the mosque will be built, albeit after a cash injection from some obliging Saudi or Emirati. The mosque will rise because what started on September 12th 2001 as a politic euphemism - "the war on terror" - has become a form of self-castration: unless you're flying a plane into a skyscraper or riding your rental vehicle up onto the sidewalk, almost any other Islamic provocation is not only unobjectionable but has to be actively encouraged. That, after all, is how it went last time round. Recall that both the President of the United States and the Mayor of New York City were all in favor of the Ground Zero Mosque.

Because we now have Democrat members of Congress who basically agree with the people who made the crater in New York that their co-religionists want to convert to a Moslem shrine.  

And so the Ground Zero Mosque goes quiet, but it never quite goes away. 9/11 was "the day that everything changed" mainly in the sense that the urge to self-prostrate became pathological: precisely because America was attacked in the name of Islamic supremacism, it is no longer acceptable to object to Islamic supremacism.

Read the whole thing.  

Mark Steyn: "Baghdadi Bagged"

This weekend, half a decade after that shameful image, US special forces arrived at the door of the wannabe caliph. After dragging three kids and two missuses down into a dead-end tunnel, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself and his family to Virgin Central. He left his head, more or less intact, which I wouldn't be averse to Trump putting on a spike across the street from The Washington Post. The Post's obituaries department, to general derision from the Internet, marked the Caliph's unexpected self-detonation with the headline "Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48".
[snip]
Four months after Kayla Mueller's execution, Donald Trump came down that escalator. He is not to everyone's taste stylistically but he is a more serious man than his predecessor, and than many of his GOP rivals, who simply assumed that a Republican restoration would mean a return to Bush-style "war on terror". Trump grasped a simple truth but one apparently beyond Bill Kristol & Co - that there are no takers for ineffectual warmongering. If "shock and awe" had actually shocked and awed, things might be different. But it didn't. As I wrote in The Spectator a little over sixteen years ago, or about six months after my mixed grill in post-Saddam Rutba - October 11th 2003:

In a nutshell, Iraq is the last war. That's to say, the last war in which the Bush Administration will spend the months beforehand amassing a quarter of a million troops on an enemy's borders. Doing it that way gives the enemy too long to enlist his own forces — the Western media, the UN and the moth-eaten French pantomime mule of Messrs Chirac and de Villepin. All these parties are dedicated to ensuring that even when the Americans win, they lose. The speed with which they've managed to taint victory in Iraq is impressive, though it bears no relation to anything so tiresome as reality. So from hereon in engagements in the war of terror will be swift, sudden and as low-key as can be managed. The US will depend not on multilateralism but bilateralism — the many agreements the Americans have signed for base rights and training missions and other below-the-radar stuff from the Middle East through old Soviet Central Asia to the Pacific. There will be, faute de mieux, a reliance on light and mobile configurations and special forces.

If you're an old-school imperialist such as myself, one might wish it were different. But America has not an imperialist bone in its body and, without it, long-term occupation, ever more confined to Iraq's "Green Zone" or Afghanistan's "crusader forts" (as an Aussie PM described the allied bases to me), is a fool's errand. So we have to figure out how to win with "light and mobile configurations".

Thus Trump these last two-and-a-half years: When he took the oath of office, the Islamic State was a nascent Saudi Arabia, bloodsoaked and oil-rich and merely awaiting diplomatic recognition. Month by month, he shrunk it, and reduced it from a caliphate back to a terrorist group - but without committing vast numbers of American infantrymen: low-key shock and awe. That culminated this weekend with a brilliantly executed raid on the holed-up Caliph - and with his head as a highly apt trophy of war.

With their usual unerring timing, NBC's "Saturday Night Live", winner of thirty-seven Emmies for Best Toothless Committee-Written Satire, opened this weekend with a sketch in which Trump's Syria pullout, widely derided by all sides in Washington, is credited with "bringing jobs back" ...for Isis. I wonder how many comic geniuses it took to come up with that rib-cracker.

Nevertheless, thanks to Trump (the real one, not Alec Baldwin), the leaden jest came true - at least in the sense that Isis now has an opening for Caliph, no previous experience required. For good measure, even as the President was giving that remarkable and masterful one-hour Sunday press conference, news came that the Islamic State's Number Two guy is unlikely to be promoted:

Likely Successor to Dead ISIS Leader Also Reported Killed

Why the War On Terror Has Taken 15 Years, and Will Take Much Longer

And it is the key reason why this war drags on, fifteen years after 9/11: millions unthinkingly accept the dogma that to speak honestly and accurately about the jihadis’ motives and goals is to descend into “racism” and “bigotry,” and to endanger innocent Muslims.

Fifteen years after jihadis murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, it is still almost unheard-of for there to be an honest discussion of jihadi motives and goals in the mainstream.

The free West is dug in: wholeheartedly committed to denial, willful ignorance, and policies that are self-defeating to the point of suicidal. In light of that, the wonder is not that this war has lasted so long, but that we have held out so long.

Unless the political landscape changes considerably and this denial is decisively rejected and discarded, much darker days are coming.

Obama Era Euphemisms about the Global War On Terror

Of course Obama has no intention of effectively waging a war on terror, unless he can target Bitter Clingers. But from PJ Media here's partial list.

• “Outliers" is their kinder, gentler term for "rogue states”
• “Al-Qaeda core” are the al-Qaeda terrorists who survived the Bush presidency, then regrouped and multiplied under the Obama presidency. They are not in any way, shape or form "decimated."
• “Overseas contingency operations” is the Obama administration's Orwellian term for "the global war on terror."
• “Man-caused disaster” is the Obama-speak for "terrorist attack."
• "Workplace violence" is how the Obama administration describes Islamic terrorist attacks that take place at work.
• "Violent extremism" is how the Obama administration prefers to describe terrorism because it gives them an opportunity to lump Islamists in with the KKK, IRA, and Nazi skinhead groups who all together commit about 1% (or less) of the terrorism we see throughout the world
• “Kinetic military action” is how the Obama administration says "war" without upsetting anti-war groups.
• "Leading from behind" is Obama's euphemism for his "CYA" approach to foreign policy. It translates roughly to, "we'll wait until it's too late to be effective, and when pressured, take some modest steps, but don't blame us when the excrement hits the fan." (Because it will.)
• "Strategic patience" is related to Obama's "leading from behind" philosophy. The administration uses it in place of "dithering," or "kicking the can down the road for the next president to have to deal with."

OBAMA’S CRAZY VISA POLICY MAKES TRUMP LOOK LIKE A PROPHET

Today on Good Morning America, John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and now a national security consultant for ABC News, dropped a bombshell: over the objections of security-minded DHS personnel, the Obama administration secretly barred DHS from looking at postings on social media by visa applicants like Tashfeen Malik.

Choose Your Fascism

If the only explanation for Trump's 'Islamophobia' is bigotry or mental deficiency a better one is needed to account for the data. A much simpler explanation for the fear which drives the Trump crowds is a loss of confidence in government assurances that they will keep the public safe.

As the blogger Ace of Spades put it, "think about this for a moment though. How many people who are deeply, deeply offended about keeping non-citizen Muslims out of the US think it's perfectly fine to force Christian bakers to provide a cake for same sex ceremonies? "

Then there's this.  Referring to Obama's Surveillance Regime ...

It is a false kind of hospitality that rolls out the red carpet to strangers only to direct them straight to the bugged room. It is a strange kind of anti-fascism that uses police state methods to enforce tolerance. We live in a world of "friends and neighbors" only rhetorically. In practice we are well on our way to creating a penitentiary.

Fear is natural in the world of ghosts the Western elites have created through their deceptions. They tell us not to worry but clutch at amulets and nostrums as if they were jumpy themselves. Rukmini Callimachi, writing in the New York Times, seriously argued that president Obama is basing his anti-ISIS strategy on an attempt to avoid fulfilling an Islamic prophecy which holds that "boots on the ground" would signal the last battle in which the infidel will be destroyed.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on. ...

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

That so far has been the approach of the Obama administration, which has armed as well as provided air support to a number of militias in northern Iraq and Syria, hoping to give a local veneer to the tip of the sword. The result has been mixed, with gains only in areas that are outside the main Sunni Arab strongholds that the Islamic State controls.

Obama was brought up in Muslim countries and could very well be aware, and influenced by Muslim prophesy. Ridiculous? How many times have Christians been accused of supporting Israel because they believe in biblical prophesy about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ? The answer is, Lots. So it's an interesting hypothesis.

TRUMP: REVOKE PASSPORTS FOR THOSE WHO GO TO FIGHT FOR ISIS, WOULD ‘LOOK AT’ CLOSING CERTAIN MOSQUES’

Another good Trump idea.

Walter Russell Mead Gets It Wrong

Writing in The American Interest, Mead compares two events:

This weekend saw U.S. Special Forces pull off a stunning raid, flying deep into Syrian territory in an attempt to capture a senior Islamic State leader called Abu Sayyaf. Sayyaf, a Tunisian citizen, was killed in the raid, but his wife was caught and the raid produced “a significant intelligence gain” according to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Around the same time, however, the Islamic State made huge strides in Iraq by taking over the city of Ramadi, the largest city in Sunni al-Anbar province, only 68 miles west of Baghdad. ISIS boasted of seizing tanks and executing dozens of Iraqi soldiers and militants. The United States increased its bombing campaign around Ramadi as Shi’a militia began massing for an assault to retake the city.

He says this was A Tactical Success, A Strategic Failure.  But the Abu Sayyaf raid did not rise to the level of a "tactical success." In this war, the death of one man is strategically meaningless unless the death is that of the person creating the strategic loss.

Comparing the "stunning raid" to capture Abu Sayyaf (who was killed, not captured) to the loss of Ramadi is like comparing jaywalking to murder.  Yes, they are both against the law, but that is where the comparison ends.  

When I read reports of American Special Operations successes in the war on Islamic radicals I am reminded of  Otto Skorzeny.  For those who are not amateur historians, Skorzeny was in the Waffen SS during World War 2.  He participated in a number of high visibility raids.  The most famous was his rescue of Mussolini from his captors at Gran Sasso.  But the important thing to remember is that despite some brilliant raids by men like Skorzeny, Germany lost the war.  They lost because they lost ground and were finally overwhelmed. 

I have no doubt that the German press gave lots of coverage to the isolated successes of people like Skorzeny even as the Allies were over-running the Third Reich.  It may even have fooled some Germans into thinking they could win.  But it was just a sideshow and had no effect on the war.

 

The idea that an ideological/religious movement like ISIS and its offshoots can be defeated by killing the occasional leader here and “important person” there is delusional.  The Islamist movement is not a nation with a capital that can be captured … or a leader that can be killed.  Bin-Laden is dead but the ideology is more alive than ever and its adherents are slaughtering Christians by the seashore for the edification of its followers.  It’s not a movement of poor people that can be bought off with “things.”  It is creating chaos far beyond its immediate area of operations.  See the flight of thousands of refugees arriving not just in the Middle East but in Europe.

So what’s more frightening: That Team Obama believes what they’re doing is effective? Or that he does not?

The solution to ISIS is "jobs."

This is not a joke, it's the Obama administration policy.

Stacey Lennox @ScotsFyre

Follow

This may sound stupid, but it EXACTLY echoes the strategy outlined by Susan Rice. Give radical Islamists jobs & hope http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/02/marie-harf-explains-3.php …

8:50 AM - 17 Feb 2015

And Green energy.

Finding our Churchill

Roger Simon doesn't mince words.  We are at war, whether we want to be or not.  And we're losing.  The leaders we have are ignoring it or desperate to change the subject.  Obama did that yesterday, like a magician creating a distraction.  while people were dying in Paris, his focus was on pandering to people who want free junior college.

Meanwhile, under the watch of the man who masquerades under the moniker of president of the United States, someone who can barely muster a dopey three-minute speech filled with banalities about the killings in France, radical Islam has metastasized across the world in a manner only dreamed of on 9/11. A map on Gretawire shows terror networks cutting a wide swathe across the planet, from South America through North Africa on to the Indian subcontinent and then into South-East Asia. In a sense the map should already include Western Europe, the way things are going.

And most likely things are going to get worse. Al Qaeda (operating with impunity in Syria, Yemen and elsewhere) and ISIS (with a state of its own the size of Indiana) are in a pissing contest for terrorist maniacs of the year while Boko Haram is doing its best to exterminate everyone in Nigeria, andapparently succeeding – all in the name of Allah. And our president never uses the word “Islamic” or acknowledges that we are at war — even though, quite obviously, the Islamists are at war with us and with Western civilization. And they seem just to be getting started. Only the morally narcissistic buffoons at the New York Times would think otherwise.

Which brings us to the 2016 presidential election. I have written before, “We need a wartime consigliere.” (Yes, yes, I know the consigliere isn’t the boss — but you get the reference.) We need a wartime president. Hillary Clinton, obviously, is as far from that as you could get, except for Barack Obama. So we have to look on the Republican side.

I’m not prepared to comment on any of the candidates now. I don’t know enough. But I will say this: In this time of war, I will be looking, far above all things, for the best possible commander-in-chief, man or woman. Put another way, how much does the person resemble Winston Churchill, the ultimate wartime leader, in my view? That’s not an easy thing. Churchill had a great verbal skill and certain unique charm that could inspire people. I can’t immediately think of anyone who has that. But Churchill was a figure of legend, someone even the oldest of us see from afar or on old news clips. In his day, we know he was reviled by many.

So maybe someone will emerge. We are in desperate need of that person after the last six, soon to be eight, years. What has been lost domestically is certainly significant, but pales in comparison to the global situation and the religious war that we are in. If America continues to lead from behind after 2016, it will cease to be America. The world will shortly be in chaos and we will all be back in the Middle Ages. Sound excessive? I wish it did.

So I implore those of you reading to put aside your special interests for the moment, or at least soft-pedal them. Most of them can wait and if we lose the war against Islamic terrorism, which, believe it or not, we are currently losing, they will all be irrelevant, the unread text of Obamacare buried in the sand like Shelley’s statue of Ozymandias. Civilizations have died before. Let’s not let it be ours. Let’s overcome the reactionary leaders in our own country and in Europe, who suffer from such extreme cognitive disorders that even after #CharlieHebdo they insist on delinking Islam from terrorism. Let’s find our Churchill — and now.

DRUDGE In Paris Terror Ending

THREE DAYS OF TERROR COMES TO END IN FRANCE...

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MURDOCH: Muslims Responsible for 'Jihadist Cancer'...



PARIS WARZONE...

LE FIGARO...

L'HUMANITE...

Britain's MI5: Al Qaeda planning mass attacks on West...

Landmark synagogue shut on Shabbat first time since WWII...

FBI, State Dept issue new terror bulletins for Americans...

American troops to fight on in Afghanistan: Obama kicks military under the bus

Leaked to the NY Times by Team Obama:

In an announcement in the White House Rose Garden in May, Mr. Obama said that the American military would have no combat role in Afghanistan next year, and that the missions for the 9,800 troops remaining in the country would be limited to training Afghan forces and to hunting the “remnants of Al Qaeda.

But a secret order by Obama changed that.

Mr. Obama’s order allows American forces to carry out missions against the Taliban and other militant groups threatening American troops or the Afghan government, a broader mission than the president described to the public earlier this year, according to several administration, military and congressional officials with knowledge of the decision. The new authorization also allows American jets, bombers and drones to support Afghan troops on combat missions.

To me that sounds as if Americans will be in combat under any conceivable circumstance. It sounds as if the military and the new Afghan government convinced Obama that if his Afghan strategy was carried out, the war would be lost before he left office.

So, despite prior promises, Obama doesn't want Afghanistan to turn into another Libya on his watch. One Benghazi is enough.  

According to the report in the NY Times, official print house organ of the Obama administration:

“… generals both at the Pentagon and in Afghanistan urged Mr. Obama to define the mission more broadly to allow American troops to attack the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other militants if intelligence revealed that the extremists were threatening American forces in the country.

And if things go wrong, will the Commander in Chief be responsible? You have to be kidding me. It’s going to be the fault of the military. As one administration official put it:

“… the military pretty much got what it wanted.”

[Cue Obama voice] "You can'r blame me, I gave the military what it wanted.  The Commander in Chief?  Not me; it's the military's fault."

The Limbaugh Theorem in action.

I guess that Obama doesn't want al Qaida to take over Afghanistan until he leaves office

In a Shift, Obama Extends U.S. Role in Afghan Combat

Kowtowing to Headchoppers

We are informed by the always delightful Bud Norman that President Obama sent an emissary to a mosque in Oklahoma City.

Has the President of the United States sent an emissary to your house of worship to commend it for its good works? Our humble little low church on the near westside hasn’t yet been so honored, despite its many commendable efforts on behalf on the poor and unfortunate, so we’re feeling a bit slighted. The Islamic Society of Greater Oklahoma City recently got a high-ranking visit and official effusive thanks, after all, and none of our congregation have beheaded anyone.

The mosque wasn’t being thanked for the beheading, we are assured, but rather for its past support of the rescue and recovery efforts in the aftermath of a devastating tornado last year in the nearby town of Moore. We don’t mean to diminish the mosque’s good works, and will freely acknowledge Islam’s longstanding reputation for charity, but there’s no shaking a suspicion that the official effusive thanks from our government has more to do with the more recent beheading committed by one of the mosque’s newest converts against a former co-worker in that very same nearby town. Islam also suffers a longstanding reputation for such brutality, especially lately, and by now it’s an obligatory rite to respond to every Islamist outrage with official pronouncements that Islam is a religion of peace and has contributed greatly to world civilization and most Muslims aren’t going to chop your head off and the rest of the familiar boilerplate.

When I stood with George Bush on the war in Iraq, and even now support it (though not the nation-building that followed), I was always uncomfortable with his decision to absolved Islam of any complicity in 9/11. I realize that we he did not want to start a religious war - and even renamed it after initially referring to it as a 'crusade."

The practice began shortly after Islamist terrorists slammed airliners full of terrified passengers into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, when even good old President George W. Bush felt compelled to immediately rush to the nearest mosque and pose for a religiously tolerant photo-op ...

At what point are we going to stop allowing Islam to war on us without acknowledging the fact that there is a war going on and Islam started it. Invading countries is an act of war. Bombing is an act of war. The problem with the current - unacknowledged - war is that we refuse to name the enemy. It's as if we face Voldemort: "He who must not be named."

There are several reasons. The first is the all-embracing multiculturalism that pervades the Liberal portion of the American population.  The thought police on the Left strictly enforce the belief that other cultures are neither superior or inferior, better or worse, friendly or inimical. We are compelled to celebrate them all. So when the practitioners of Islam force women to wear burkas, forbid women to go out without an escort, forbid them to drive, stone women to death for adultery and subject them to clitorectomies, the women who call themselves feminists, the ones who attend "slut walks" and redefine unwanted touching as rape, are silent.

The second reason for refusing to refer to Islam as an enemy of the West is because "we don't want to declare war on 1.3 billion people."    But what happens when many of those people are part of the war on us?  If we should acknowledge Islam as the enemy of modern civilization, we will gain much-needed moral clarity and may well be surprised by the effect is has in the Muslim community.  It may have escaped the notice of people unfamiliar with war that most people in any country don't do any fighting.  They go to work, raise families and try to live as normal a life as possible.  Most Germans did not fight in World Wars 1 or 2.  From our perspective, we fought the Kaiser; we fought Hitler and the Nazis.  In the Cold War we fought against Communism and its leaders - Stalin and the butchers that followed him - not the Russians, Ukrainians, Latvians, and the of the people that comprised the USSR. 

It is time to take a realistic look at militant Islam, why it's rising, where it's centers are, who funds it and spreads its message, and why it attracts new followers in the West.  Europe has imported the agents of its own impending civil war.  We need moral clarity to make sure it does not happen here.

Obama, Benghazi and the Pleasures of Self-Deception

When theory and reality conflict, the ideologue sides with the theory.  It explains how people who go to a mountaintop to await the predicted end of the world descend unshaken in their faith.

William J. Luti's subhead is:  Since the White House promised that war is winding down, evidence to the contrary is ignored.

It almost cost the British their freedom.

British planners needed a reason to keep their defense budget down. They found one in the "Ten Year Rule," adopted in August 1919. The British assumed, on an annual basis, that no major war would break out in the subsequent 10 years.  They ran that assumption right up to the onset of World War II...

 The Obama administration is committed to fundamentally transforming America and appeasing our enemies because, in the ideology of the people that have shaped Obama, the enemy is the white race like Obama's "typical" aunt and the free market system.  That leaves no room for real, existential enemies external that can cause the country major harm.  It's why any problems can be handled by the occasional drone strike or the police and courts. 

Today, it is the United States that is war weary. A decade of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has taken its toll, and Americans are looking inward. Bin Laden is dead, and President Obama assures us that the core of al Qaeda is on a path to defeat, that it is now a "diffuse" threat, dispersed from Syria to Somalia to Yemen to the Maghreb and wreaking havoc largely in those lands.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the victory party. The enemy fought back. Islamic radicals took quick advantage of a strategic shift in the battle and flooded into the power vacuum created by the Arab Spring. With force and guile, they push toward their objective: Get the U.S. out of the region and take over a state. What better way to further that goal than to attack the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, killing four Americans on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America.

So why, after two years of chaos caused by the Arab Spring, was the Obama administration unable to separate the Benghazi signal from the noise? We now know that there was a flood of advance warning about the danger to U.S. interests across the region before the attack on the U.S. consulate. Those CIA "cable(s) to stations on 9/11 security," referenced obliquely in White House emails, may hold evidence to the severity of the threat.

In times past, military and diplomatic councils would convene. Reasoned threat assessments would be made and forces repositioned accordingly. Perhaps an American aircraft carrier or an amphibious ready group would have been dispatched to patrol the waters of the eastern Mediterranean gathering intelligence, providing situational awareness and, most importantly, better positioned to respond to a potential crisis.

But in these times, taking such action runs counter to the administration's template. After all, we are now in the business of winding down wars.

For those in the Obama administration who want to believe the world is no longer a dangerous place, holding close to "cherished beliefs and comforting assumptions" about the nature of radical Islam can indeed provide respite from the war on terror.

But in the brutal world of the Islamic radical, not everyone can be trusted to act with reason. The scramble to close 19 embassies from West Africa to South Asia and airlift dozens of Americans out of Yemen last week raises the awkward question of who has who on the run? It also exposes the essence of the administration's strategic confusion about the nature of the conflict.

In this case, the proposition "the war is over" is what Roberta called a "self-annihilating prophecy." Such prophecies, she wrote, can be suicidal in two ways: They endanger both the prophecy and the prophet.

The Legion of Doom

Via Belmont Club

The second-ranking CIA official calls now Syria the greatest threat to American national security today. “WASHINGTON—The Central Intelligence Agency’s second-in-command warned that Syria’s volatile mix of al Qaeda extremism and civil war now poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security. Michael Morell says the risk is that the Syrian government, which possesses chemical and other advanced weapons, collapses and the country becomes al Qaeda’s new haven, supplanting Pakistan.”

Shouldn’t he ask, “who armed the Syrian rebels”? And might not he say “in addition to Pakistan”?

Arming the Syrian rebels is the "smartest" political move since we armed the Soviets against the Nazis.

Obama's follies are aided and abetted by a media that tells us to believe stupid things.  Things like this NY Times story that Obama's cancellation of a summit with Putin will hurt Putin.

How could he get it so wrong? The New York Times’s coverage of President Obama’s canceled summit with Putin illustrates one reason why. This time NYT argues that Putin would regret not meeting Obama.

In a statement, the White House said the president had decided to postpone the summit meeting between the two leaders after concluding that there had not been enough progress made on the “bilateral agenda” to make a meeting worthwhile. …

Mr. Obama’s decision to forgo the summit meeting with Mr. Putin, which was first reported by The Associated Press, is a blow to Mr. Putin that will deprive him of a high-profile moment on the worldwide stage. It also threatens to add to the already chilly relationship between the two countries.

Just think of it! Putin is missing out on the honor of meeting Obama. Now Putin won’t be invited to Leno. He’ll miss out on the chance to come out on Oprah. He must be crazy.

This is another case of the “wish being the father of the deed”. It is yet another instance of the Narrative being taken for reality. The NYT thinks Putin reasons like them. In the Narrative universe — the one which the NYT inhabits — Barack Obama is at the center of Washington and Washington is a center of the universe. If President Obama declares al Qaeda to be dead then al Qaeda must in fact be deceased. If President Obama supports the Syrian rebels, the Syrian rebels must be worthy of support. If President Obama decides not to meet the President of Russia then Putin is losing out.

It’s like Versailles in the days of Louis the XIV. The inmates cannot conceive that an external universe exists. One in which another sun shines more brightly than the Sun King.

Yet as as Bret Stephens points out, the Emperor has no clothes. He is manifestly capable of getting things fundamentally, spectacularly and catastrophically wrong. And the media elites are pathologically incapable of acknowledging this.

If I were Putin I would look for further opportunities to tweak President Snark.  It has to be driving him crazy. 

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE PANICKED EMBASSY CLOSINGS

Glenn Reynolds:

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE PANICKED EMBASSY CLOSINGS: White House: ‘Core’ of al Qaeda remains ‘greatly diminished.’

Other headlines from Glenn.

INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES WARNED ABOUT EMBASSY ATTACKS FOR MONTHS: “Why Is This Coming Out Now?”
UPDATE: Note this: “An intelligence official said the controversial NSA programs that gather data on American phone calls or track Internet communications with suspected terrorists played no part in detecting the initial tip.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: How Obama Got The Al Qaeda Threat So Wrong.

So, are we wagging the dog?

From RARE: How Obama got the al Qaeda threat so wrong

In May, Barack Obama told an audience at the National Defense University that the core of al Qaeda was “on the path to defeat.” The “future of terrorism,” Mr. Obama predicted, would involve “more localized threats,” on the order of “the types of attacks we faced before 9/11,” such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing or the 1983 attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut. “Dealt with smartly and proportionately,” he added, “these threats need not rise to the level that we saw on the eve of 9/11.” He ended by calling for repeal of the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force—Congress’s declaration of war on al Qaeda.

On Monday, the front page of The Wall Street Journal ran with this headline: “Regrouped al Qaeda Poses Global Threat.” The second shortest distance in Washington now runs between an Obama speech and its empirical disproof.

Community organize this, Bozo!

U.S. Surveillance Is Not Aimed at Terrorists

Interesting article.

The debate over the U.S. government’s monitoring of digital communications suggests that Americans are willing to allow it as long as it is genuinely targeted at terrorists. What they fail to realize is that the surveillance systems are best suited for gathering information on law-abiding citizens.

People concerned with online privacy tend to calm down when told that the government can record their calls or read their e-mail only under special circumstances and with proper court orders. The assumption is that they have nothing to worry about unless they are terrorists or correspond with the wrong people.

The infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency, however, may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use.

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Public Peace, Secret War: The Snooping Scandals and The President’s War Strategy

 

Via Meadia

President Obama’s core war strategy depends on massive intelligence capabilities that were undreamed of twenty years ago. It depends on the substitution of drones for troops. PRISM and similar programs aren’t a ghastly misstep or an avoidable accident. They are the essence of Obama’s grand strategy: public peace and secret war. To cool down the public face of the war, he must intensify the secret struggle.

Here’s the big problem: to the degree that the strategy works, and the public begins to feel safe and the war atmosphere fades, the intelligence work and the drone strikes that the strategy requires look less and less justifiable. After all, the President’s message is that the threat is under control and the terrorists are on the run. Why then is the NSA tapping every phone and reading every email in the country?

As the gap grows between the public peace and the secret war, leaks about the war become more likely and more damaging. Those who service the secret war begin to wonder if what they are doing is right; they wonder if somebody shouldn’t blow the whistle on what begins to look like a massive deception of the public. And the more the administration has been putting out the ‘peace in our time’ vibe to the media, the more explosive is the news that in secret it is ramping up some of the most controversial aspects of W’s war policy to levels Dick Cheney could only dream about.

Obama’s strategy can only work if the American people are as stupid as he thinks they are. He’s aided in this by the “guilty white Liberal” syndrome that infects and dominates the MSM, academia and the media. These people may not be that stupid but they are incapable of overcoming their prejudice and will either look the other way or seek to cover for him.

Conducting secret wars in faraway places with strange sounding names is hard enough, to do it at home by entering everyone’s home, everyone’s secrets, is impossible. The chickens are coming home to roost.

Obama: “This war, like all wars, must end,”

Richard Fernandez

The problem of declaring victory against an enemy who refuses to concede defeat is not new. The World War 2 generation solved the problem by continuing until the foe threw in the towel. Although President Obama may believe that victory consists in convincing one’s countrymen that “we won”, historically it consisted of convincing the enemy that he lost. In World War II for example, both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were defeated as a military fact by early 1944. But they were not convinced of the fact. The remainder of the war was spent knocking the idea into their consciousness.

But the allies did not declare peace in 1944. They went on and by mid-1945, Curtis LeMay’s bombers were incinerating one Japanese city a night; US battleships were shelling coastal towns, harbors everywhere were being mined and submarines kept ships from leaving or entering ports. Victory as an objective fact was not debatable. But to the Axis accepting defeat subjectively was unthinkable. One of the supreme ironies of World War II was that the Japanese high command needed the A-bomb more than the Americans. They needed it not to change any military fact, they were as defeated before the Bomb as after it, but in order to change a mental perception. The bomb provided the pretext to accept defeat.

But in the bad old, unenlightened days you convinced the enemy they lost. Today we’re smarter. We convince ourselves the whole misunderstanding should never have happened in the first place.

What is the administration’s pretext to accept victory? As near as can be seen, it consists in convincing ourselves that we never had an enemy to begin with. We just misunderstood things. There is no such thing as a Clash of Civilizations, nor rogue states, nor even a militant version of Islam. That’s all a conservative invention. There are just only misunderstood people who, if we got to know better, we would not drive to workplace violence.

Maybe that’s why the White House erroneously refers to its authority to bug domestic communications as deriving from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act. Not the “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act”, which actually exists, but by some slip of the fat finger, the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which are the words which occur in the White House transcript.

Read the whole thing.

If the war is over, why are we bugging everyone in the country and who are we killing with those drones?