Strategic defense is going to have to, once and for all, become a top national priority

Brian Kennedy, president of the American Strategy Group, says that while it has been entirely appropriate for the US to focus on asymmetrical threats and poisonous jihadist ideology, the country remains a sitting duck with regard to a nuclear danger from nation-state rivals and enemies:

Americans will be shocked to learn that should a madman in Russia, China, Iran or elsewhere seek the nuclear destruction of the United States there is little an American president can do today except launch a retaliatory nuclear strike guaranteeing the Cold War policy of mutually assured destruction. There can be little satisfaction, however, in the mass slaughter of Russian, Chinese or Iranian subjects while American citizens would have suffered their own nuclear attack. The morality of MAD was always questionable. In a world where Iranian mullahs preach hatred of the United States and Israel while they continue their nuclear ambitions, it is absurd.

President Trump has pledged to build a national missile defense. Its strategic necessity is greater, if less well-understood, than the wall he will be building on our southern border. When completed, Trump will have done what no president, including Ronald Reagan, has done: ensure that the American people are not vulnerable to the strategic designs of a foreign power. Our freedom and our constitutional order cannot be guaranteed so long as a single command by a Russian or Chinese president or an Iranian mullah could mean the end of American civilization. It would be fair for President Trump to ask his generals how we have arrived in this position.

We know that the end of the Cold War brought a regrettable lack of seriousness to our strategic thinking. Although advanced forms of missile defense were within our technological ability, the reorganization of the Soviet Union removed all urgency. Successive U.S. administrations starting with George H.W. Bush treated missile defense as desirable but not a priority. After an explicit nuclear threat by the PRC in 1995, billions were spent on a limited, land-based system in Alaska that can stop a handful of North Korean missiles. Its main purpose, it would appear, was to give the illusion that we were defended.

Equally vexing, our paralysis continued despite the fact that U.S. intelligence knew the Russians had developed a primitive but effective missile defense of their own during the Cold War and that the Chinese were developing their own missile defenses to complement their growing nuclear arsenal.

Although one could register this failure to build missile defenses as mere incompetence, September 11 should have sharpened our strategic outlook. The world of Islamic terrorism had put the United States in its cross hairs. The 9/11 hijackers had been aided and abetted by Iranian intelligence, itself an act of war. With certainty, we knew that Iran was also building a nuclear capacity to match their advanced ballistic missiles. In this enterprise, the Iranians had the assistance of Russia, North Korea, and, by extension, Communist China. As we were constructing a homeland security super state, it would not have been crazy to include the building of a national missile defense using land, sea and space-based interceptors on the off chance that a future attack on America would be with nuclear missiles.

Underscoring this is the fact that the Iranians have practiced the launching of ballistic missiles from ships in the Caspian Sea. In such testing the Iranians simulated an Electro Magnetic Pulse attack that could, with the right nuclear warhead, destroy the electric infrastructure of the U.S. and, at its most severe, cause the deaths of hundreds of millions of Americans. The Iranian test on January 29th was of the same kind. The use of an EMP weapon is at the heart of Iranian strategic nuclear doctrine. It does not require thousands of nuclear warheads and missiles. It requires one highly advanced or several less advanced missiles. This latest test was, moreover, a message to President Trump that the Iranians are perfecting the means, and being aided by the world’s superpowers, to kill every last American man, woman and child. Subtle they are not.

Bracing words, but words we cannot fail to heed.

The Detroit debate

I've seen some takes by folks whose views I align with that were barely above "meh." These people say it probably didn't move the needle.

I'm more inclined to see it the way John Podhoretz does:

Well, it was nice being the greatest country in the history of the world.

We pulled it off for 240 years. Then came the Republican debate Thursday night in Michigan, in which the rattled front-runner of the party of Abraham Lincoln defended the size of his male member before 10 to 20 million of his fellow Americans.

By the way, Lincoln was sworn in as president 155 years ago yesterday. And so, on behalf of a horrified people, let me just say: I’m sorry, Abe, for what’s become of the union you sacrificed your life to save.

Since Donald Trump’s reference to the substantiality of his private part came at the beginning of an almost insanely raucous two hours, and cast a shadow over everything that followed, it’s hard to know whether one can properly judge the night’s proceedings as a debate and not a living civic nightmare.

The entire evening was what Trump would call a “disastuh.” Now, I know it makes no sense to bet against him, and that anyone who has written his political obituary thus far (me included, after the “ban all Muslims” moment in November) has had to eat crow. 

But the events in Detroit last night will have long-lasting effects even if they don’t affect his path to the nomination in the short term.

And Matthew Continetti:

The spectacle made me ill. On screen I watched decades of work by conservative institutions, activists, and elected officials being lit aflame not only by the New York demagogue but by his enablers who waited until the last possible moment to criticize and try to stop him. And even then it may be too late.

You may have heard about the open letter signed by 80 national-security experts who, in their opening paragraph, point out that they have by no means always agreed on everything but are now bound by a common alarm about Squirrel-Hair. One of its signatories, Max Boot, elaborates on his own alarm in a piece at Commentary:

Donald Trump woos voters with promises to safeguard and strengthen America. The reality is that he has neither the policies nor the principles nor the knowledge to do that. Far from strengthening America, he is emerging as the number one threat to American security.

Yes, that’s right — a bigger threat than ISIS, North Korea, Russia, China, Iran, or all the rest. That may sound like hyperbole, but I firmly believe it to be the case. The possibility of Trump — a man who knows no more about national security than Kim Kardashian does — taking control of the nuclear codes is simply terrifying.

As I argued in a COMMENTARY cover story in January, Trump appears intent on destroying the very foundations of American foreign policy. Unfortunately he has no better alternative–indeed, he can barely string together a coherent sentence on the subject.

That is why a group of more than eighty conservative national security experts have now issued a letter making clear that they will never support Trump, never work for him, and will do everything possible to defeat him. (The letter was organized by Eliot Cohen and Bryan McGrath; I was one of the signatories.) Even John McCain, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Republican presidential candidate in 2008 — as well as an American hero — has endorsed the statement.

The letter is short and well worth reading. A few of the points it makes regarding Trump: “He swings from isolationism to military adventurism within the space of one sentence. His advocacy for aggressively waging trade wars is a recipe for economic disaster in a globally connected world… His hateful, anti-Muslim rhetoric undercuts the seriousness of combatting Islamic radicalism by alienating partners in the Islamic world… His admiration for foreign dictators such as Vladimir Putin is unacceptable for the leader of the world’s greatest democracy.”

This sets the table for the latest example of what these experts are talking about :

A lot of people will be talking about this exchange, and with good reason:

BAIER: Mr. Trump, just yesterday, almost 100 foreign policy experts signed on to an open letter refusing to support you, saying your embracing expansive use of torture is inexcusable. General Michael Hayden, former CIA director, NSA director, and other experts have said that when you asked the U.S. military to carry out some of your campaign promises, specifically targeting terrorists’ families, and also the use of interrogation methods more extreme than waterboarding, the military will refuse because they’ve been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders. So what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?

TRUMP: They won’t refuse. They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.

BAIER: But they’re illegal.

TRUMP: Let me just tell you, you look at the Middle East. They’re chopping off heads. They’re chopping off the heads of Christians and anybody else that happens to be in the way. They’re drowning people in steel cages. And he — now we’re talking about waterboarding. A few moments later:

BAIER: But targeting terrorists’ families?

(APPLAUSE)

TRUMP: And — and — and — I’m a leader. I’m a leader. I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it. That’s what leadership is all about.

BAIER: Even targeting terrorists’ families? 

And here's a glaring example of the inconsistency of which the experts speak:

He said America had to stay in Afghanistan, which he has opposed, and gave a reason no one else has ever given — we need to because it’s next to Pakistan, and Pakistan has nuclear weapons. So are we there to protect the nuclear weapons, or to steal the nuclear weapons, or what? 

Then there's the issue that the one-note-johnnies yammer about to the exclusion of everything else on Western civilization's plate: immigration. S-H just plain, once again, pretty much acknowledged that he's a chameleon rather than a consistent man of principle (that is to say, he basically said, "I'm a phony, okay?")

. . . people who follow immigration closely were stunned Thursday night when Trump, at the Fox News debate here in Detroit, announced that he has changed his position on one key element of the immigration debate -- the use of H-1B visas to bring skilled foreign workers into the United States.

In the distant past -- say, yesterday -- Trump focused on abuses in the system, in which some big companies have been caught using H-1Bs to bring in foreign workers, force American employees to train their own replacements, and then pay the foreign worker less than the American had made -- all to do mostly routine jobs in the tech industry.

At his recent rally in Alabama -- the one in which Trump received the endorsement of Sen. Jeff Sessions, Congress' strongest voice against expanding the troubled H-1B program -- Trump also won the endorsement of some American workers who were victims of H-1B abuse at Disney.
"The fact is that Americans are losing their jobs to foreigners," one of the laid-off workers told the crowd. "I believe Mr. Trump is for Americans first."
In Detroit, Fox's Megyn Kelly pointed out that Trump's campaign website has a strong statement against increasing the number of H-1Bs, saying it would "decimate American workers," and yet in one debate Trump spoke favorably of the program. "So, which is it?" Kelly asked.
"I'm changing," Trump said. "I'm changing. We need highly skilled people in this country, and if we can't do it, we'll get them in. But, and we do need in Silicon Valley, we absolutely have to have."
"So, we do need highly skilled," Trump continued, "and one of the biggest problems we have is people go to the best colleges. They'll go to Harvard, they'll go to Stanford, they'll go to Wharton, as soon as they're finished they'll get shoved out. They want to stay in this country. They want to stay here desperately, they're not able to stay here. For that purpose, we absolutely have to be able to keep the brain power in this country.
"So you are abandoning the position on your website?" asked Kelly.
"I'm changing it," Trump said, "and I'm softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country."
Trump's turnaround sent a jolt through the group of policy wonks and activists who have opposed Gang of Eight-style comprehensive immigration reform. "I've heard from enough tech workers displaced by H-1Bs that Trump's apparent answer very dispiriting," tweeted the writer Mickey Kaus. "Clarification?"

With regard to the others, we can quickly summarize: Ted Cruz had an excellent night, choosing to aim his fire at S-H rather than Rubio. Rubio did likewise, and had an okay night but looked tired.

Then there's this year's poster boy for Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, John Kasich, who took every available opportunity to position himself as the gosh-darn-it-let's-all-get-along-and-make-everything-wonderful candidate. David French at NRO points out why this stance is not innocuous but in fact rather insidious:

Regarding Kasich, his performance was cheap and cowardly. Anyone can look statesmanlike when they opt out of a necessary fight. By choosing to cast himself as above the fray, he created a false moral equivalence between Trump, Rubio, and Cruz, and he transparently curried favor with viewers weary of conflict. With every passing moment, he is staining his legacy and his reputation. At a crucial moment, Kasich chose to be — first and foremost – for Kasich. Shame on him.

It's becoming obvious that the way LITD sees it is now the only way to save the GOP, the conservative movement, and America: We must tirelessly work to make Ted Cruz the next president of the United States.

The confluence of West-disdain and cluelessness

Ben Rhodes takes lameness to a whole new level:

CNN’s Jake Tapper really grilled White House deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes on State of the Union for President Obama saying just days ago ISIS is “contained.”And given the horror in Paris, not to mention the downed Russian airliner and suicide bombings in Beirut, Tapper said, “If this is what ISIS looks like contained, I shudder to think what ISIS looks like uncontained.”
Rhodes said that the U.S. has been able to stop ISIS advances in specific regions, but when he said “we have to be one step ahead,” Tapper asked incredulously, “One step ahead? We don’t seem to be one step ahead of any terrorist group these days!”
He brought up the continued criticisms that the president and the White House “may continue to underestimate” ISIS and put things into stark perspective when he said, “This is the worst atrocity in France since Hitler!”

Rhodes said the U.S. campaign against ISIS is a long-term one with “tragic setbacks” like Paris. He defended the U.S.’ plan to bring in refugees and said that the U.S. is prepared to ramp up if France invokes Article V of the NATO treaty to get allies on its side to fight back against ISIS.

Ya got yer "tragic setback."

And it's so comforting to know the architects of post-America's eclipse on the world stage are ready to "ramp up."

 

"Led" by an empty suit at a time of war

Did you have much doubt about this?

 

Islamic State claimed responsibility on Saturday for attacks that killed 127 people in Paris, saying it sent fighters strapped with suicide bombing belts and carrying machine guns to various locations in the heart of the capital. The attacks were designed to show France would remain a top target for the jihadist group as long as the country continued its current policies, the group said in a statement. Gunmen and bombers killed at least 127 people in Friday's attacks. Islamic State earlier on Saturday distributed an undated video threatening to attack France if bombings of its fighters continued. The group's foreign media arm, Al-Hayat Media Centre, made threats through several militants who called on French Muslims to carry out attacks. "As long as you keep bombing you will not live in peace. You will even fear traveling to the market," said one of the militants, identified as Abu Maryam the Frenchman.

Juxtapose it with this, from earlier yesterday:

Friday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” President Barack Obama seemingly downplayed the threat of ISIS in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that aired on Friday’s broadcast of “Good Morning America.”

Stephanopoulos asked Obama if ISIS was gaining in strength, to which Obama denied they were.

“I don’t think they’re gaining strength,” Obama responded. “What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them. They have not gained ground in Iraq, and in Syria they’ll come in, they’ll leave, but you don’t see this systemic march by ISIL across the terrain.”

His statement last evening after the attack was pretty lame, too. As usual, the term "radical Islam" was completely missing.

I kind of wondered whether to focus on this angle in my first LITD post about this act of war (no, Most Equal Comrade, it was not a "tragedy" and we are not "heartbroken."), but what it demonstrates is that we now live in post-America. When this was the United States of America, the Western world used to look to the USA's president for leadership and a resolve to defeat threats.

We're on our own now that everything's fundamentally transformed.

It's time to start considering the timeline of the Syria debacle

Michael Goodwin at the New York Post raises a disturbing question: At what point did the Most Equal Comrade know that Russia's aim was to form a regional power axis with Iran, Iraq and what's left of the Assad regime in Syria and thereby elbow the post-America-led West out of the Middle East?

Consider:

For much of September, reports of Russia moving soldiers and military equipment into Syria invariably said the Pentagon was “puzzled” or the White House was “unclear” about Putin’s intent. Obama declared on Sept. 11 that whatever the dictator’s plan, it was “doomed to fail.”

The claims of fuzziness about Syria allowed Obama to keep the focus on his push to sell the Iran pact to Congress. He touted Russia’s support, vowed to impose “snapback” sanctions if Iran cheated and said he would work to stop the mullahs’ ­regional aggressions.

His arguments and arm-twisting kept 42 Senate Democrats in line, enough to save the deal. Yet soon ­after opponents lost their final vote, on Sept. 17, Russia revealed that it would lead a coalition of Iran and Iraq to intervene militarily to save the Assad regime.

The shock-and-awe attacks launched last week are rattling the world as Russian airstrikes pound Syrian rebels, including some we support, with Iraq and Iran providing boots on the ground. But it’s not possible that nobody in Washington saw this coming.

After all, the Russian plan took shape well before late September. The Iran deal was officially finalized on July 14, and Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani met with Putin in Russia on July 24. Fox News, which first reported the meeting, even had the flight numbers of Soleimani’s Iran Air flights between Moscow and Tehran.

Soleimani, banned from international travel because of links to terrorism, earlier had been spotted in Iraq, helping to defend Assad against Islamic State. Yet five days after Soleimani was in Moscow, Secretary of State John Kerry told the Senate the travel restrictions against Soleimani would never be lifted. Apparently, they would never be enforced, either.

Although Russia and Iran had separately supported Assad, Kerry never mentioned that they could be working together militarily. Yet the Institute for the Study of War, a respected think tank, reported that “available satellite imagery and open sources” showed that “the new buildup of Russian military forces in Syria began in July 2015 and accelerated considerably in late August and September.” That means the buildup began near the Soleimani visit to Putin.
The institute offered key details, including that in late August, a Russian ship unloaded armored personnel carriers. It cited another report from Syrian rebels that Russian-speaking soldiers were engaged in combat against Assad’s opponents.
Yet in early September, less than two weeks before the final Iran vote, Kerry still wondered whether the buildup reports were “accurate.” That ridiculous feint would soon morph to an acknowledgment of a buildup, but with convenient claims that nobody understood Putin’s intent.

Now, of course, everybody understands Putin’s intent and is alarmed because the war is widening and Russia has replaced the United States as the region’s top power broker, a blow to our national security and allies. 

Why would someone who was ostensibly the president of the United States of America (how fondly I remember that office and that country) allow things to come to this juncture?

If you're the Most Equal Comrade, it's the international component of the Great Leveling Project. Domestically, reduce a once-robust populace to a shuddering herd of cattle-masses, dazed and desperate and dependent on government "benevolence." On the world stage, reduce post-America to just another country among those that have come and gone in the passing parade that is world history, just a big land mass that has offered nothing particularly special to the human condition.

He is pure poison.

The fog and the flame

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Philippians 4:8



For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people are upon us; so that if we deal falsely with our god in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world . . .

John Winthrop


Instead of covetously consolidating its premises, the United States seems tormented by its tradition of fixed postulates having to do with the meaning of existence, the relationship of the state to the individual, of the individual to his neighbor, so clearly enunciated in the enabling documents of our Republic.

"Our Mission Statement" by William F. Buckley Jr., first issue of National Review, November 19, 1955

A lot of major world-stage figures are visiting post-America these days.

There's Pope Francis, who, on his plane ride from Cuba to post-America strove to convince reporters that he really didn't lean left. And a lot of devout Catholics who decidedly don't lean left are performing all kinds of contortions to see his point.

Sure, they say, he has signed on to the obvious fraud of global warming, he clearly misunderstands the free market, and his views on immigration indicate that he fails to fully understand how critical the sovereignty of nation-states is to an orderly world, but, balanced against his views on homosexuality and abortion, what he presents is a Christ-informed worldview that, if it's a mystery to us, is our responsibility to discern.

But the cat came further out of the bag in his address to Congress when he chose to include this figure in his pantheon of towering champions of justice:

 . . . the pontiff mentioned her in the same breath as Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln, before going on to hail her achievements.

Yes, yes, we know: After her Greenwich Village days, which included flirtations with anarchism and Communism, and affairs with the likes of writers Eugene O'Neill and  Mike Gold, atheist biologist Foster Batterham and others, and a brief marriage to a wealthy businessman, Dorothy Day converted to Catholicism.

It didn't seem to change much about her ideology:

In 1951, she fell foul of Cardinal Francis Spellman, Archbishop of New York, after siding with archdiocesan workers who had gone on strike.

Later, she declared her support for Fidel Castro and his regime in Cuba and, in 1970, when the Vietnam War was at its height, praised Viet Cong leader Ho Chi Minh as a 'man of vision' and a 'patriot'.

Her views hardly mellowed at all in later life, either in religious or political terms, and in 1971, she paid a visit to Leonid Brezhnev's Kremlin in Moscow, Russia.

The following year, she joined Cesar Chavez's campaign for better treatment for Californian farm laborers - and, during the protest, was arrested and spent 10 days in jail.

The Pope's choice of this figure, among all those he could have chosen to cite, is rather telling, no?

Then there is the closed-door meeting Chinese president - actually "paramount leader," in the Chinese lexicon, as he also holds the top posts in the Communist Party and the military - Xi Jinping held with some of the biggest names in corporate post-America, with representatives from a particular sector conspicuously absent:

Chinese President Xi Jinping addressed Silicon Valley’s titans, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos and billionaire investor Warren Buffet, in a closed-door conference in Wednesday.

At the event with America and China’s top business leaders, Xi vowed to work to remove barriers to foreign investment and improve intellectual property protections in a bid to crack down on his country’s rip-offs of US products.

But among those missing from the event was Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

In fact, representatives from the social media giant, Twitter and Google were all notably missing and it is telling that China currently blocks those companies’ websites.

Xi's rise to power involves some noteworthy elements. His father, Xi Zhongxun, was one of the founding revolutionaries of Red China and had in fact been involved in guerrilla activities  and political rabble-rousing since the early 1930s. After the Party came to power in 1949, he alternately landed some prestigious positions and ran afoul of Mao's designs. During the late-1960s Cultural Revolution, he spent some time in prison, which meant that his son had no special status and was sent into the fields as part of the Down to the Countryside movement. He began working his way back into the regime's good graces during that period, becoming the political leader for his production team. His education, while it included degrees in chemical engineering and law, was primarily about ideological indoctrination.

He's clearly a guy who knows how to play chess with regard to a career path as a Communist-dictator aspirant.

Since he's been in the upper echelons of power, he has made a point of stressing Party primacy in the nation's affairs.

As we know, he is also clearly positioning China to be the big regional power in east Asia. That no doubt will be at least the implicit message at this upcoming pow-wow:

China said on Thursday it will host defence ministers from the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) next month, amid tension between some of its members and China over the disputed South China Sea.

The Oct. 15-16 informal summit will take place in Beijing and China has invited the defence ministers of all 10 members, Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman Wu Qian told a regular monthly news briefing.

Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan will have a "deep exchange of views" with participants, he added, without elaborating.

China has overlapping claims with Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei in the South China Sea, through which US$5 trillion in ship-borne trade passes every year.

China's increasingly assertive moves to press its sovereignty claims have rattled its neighbours and aroused concern in the United States, though China says it has no hostile intent.

A U.S. expert said this month, citing satellite photographs, China appeared to be carrying out preparatory work for a third airstrip in contested territory in the South China Sea.

And then Putin intends to meet with the Most Equal Comrade on the sidelines of next week's UN General Assembly. It's a rather sure bet as to what the leverage dynamic of that conversation will be. Russian fighter jets and ground troops are now in Syria. Russia intends to bolster, not topple, the Assad regime. The "moderate" - that is, anti-Assad as well as anti-ISIS / al-Nusra Front - rebels, into whose arming and training post-America poured millions, never numbered more than sixty and now don't exist. Putin is the figure that everyone from the Iranian mullahs to Benjamin Netanyahu wants to talk to.

LITD stands by its assertion that this is all by design. The Most Equal Comrade - indeed, all the policy-shapers of his Freedom-Hater Party - has pursued planned decline over the course of their rule.

That figures who either do not understand, or harbor animosity toward, what has been precious - indeed, indispensable - about America over the course of its existence are now dominant on the world stage is perfectly fine with the Freedom-Haters.

This is why, as the 2016 election cycle unfolds, we must cultivate the art of close listening. Those of us who retain what we were taught about wisdom, clarity, and the defense of the absolutes of this universe must bring that understanding to bear as we decide who, among those aspiring to govern, shares it.

There is no more margin of error. Getting it wrong this time around will be fatal.

No bounce from the speech

Post-Americans think the Most Equal Comrade's resolve is shaky.

Nearly 70 percent of Americans say they lack confidence that the U.S. will achieve its goals in fighting the terrorist group ISIS, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Annenberg poll. The findings come in the wake of President Barack Obama’s national address announcing new measures to combat the Sunni militants.

Pressure is mounting on the U.S. and its allies to cripple the militants, who have waged a brutal campaign across Syria and Iraq. ISIS already has beheaded two American journalists and on Saturday released a video showing the execution of a third Westerner, British aid worker David Haines.

The poll – conducted before the latest execution emerged – showed that a combined 68 percent of Americans say they have “very little” or “just some” confidence that Obama’s goals of degrading and eliminating the threat posed by ISIS will be achieved. Just 28 percent said they had “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence. Still, 62 percent of voters say they support Obama’s decision to take action against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, while 22 percent oppose it.

Post-Americans support victory over jihad. They just realize this guy ain't made of what's necessary to do it.

Does Marie Harf want to question this guy's credibility?

Bergdahl's squad leader, that is:

"He didn't want anything to do with us anymore," says Gerleve.

Many soldiers in Bergdahl's platoon said attacks seemed to increase against the United States in Paktika province in the days and weeks following his disappearance.

"The attacks did get more direct, the IEDs did get more pinpoint to our trucks," said Gerleve. "I can't say for sure the leakage came from Bergdahl, but it's kind of that suspicion that it did happen."

Within days of Bergdahl's disappearance, former Army Sgt. Evan Buetow told CNN, teams monitoring radio chatter and cell phone communications intercepted an alarming message: The American is in Yahya Khel (a village two miles away). He's looking for someone who speaks English so he can talk to the Taliban.

Gerleve also heard the intercept, and says there is no doubt the message referred to Bergdahl.

"There was no other American out there, running around ... except for him on that day," says Gerleve.

This "swift boating" meme is going to be short-lived, I think.

More aspects of the emptiness of the "good news" of Bergdahl's release

His dad is now out there tweeting for the release of yet more Gitmo prisoners.

At the Rose Garden presser with Bergdahl's parents, the Most Equal Comrade said that he's confident that Qatar will "protect [US] national security.

The guy himself was a weirdo without a lot on the ball:

As a teen, the home-schooled son of Calvinists took up ballet — recruited to be a “lifter” by “a beautiful local girl,” Rolling Stone reported, “the guy who holds the girl aloft in a ballet sequence.” The strategy worked: Bergdahl — who also began dabbling in Budd­hism and tarot card reading — soon moved in with the woman.

Even as a teen, he could fire a .22-caliber rifle with precision.

At age 20, he traveled to Paris and started learning French in hopes of joining the French Foreign Legion.

His application was rejected, and he was devastated, the magazine reported.

Bergdahl would drift for years, working mainly at a coffee shop near home. He briefly considered moving to Uganda to help villagers being terrorized by militias before deciding on a different ­adventure.“I’m thinking of joining the Army,” he told his folks after ­already having signed up.

Bergdahl’s dream was to help Afghan villagers rebuild their lives and learn to defend themselves, his dad told the magazine.

“The whole ‘COIN’ thing,” Bob explained, referring to America’s strategy of counter-insurgency. “We were given a fictitious picture, an artificially created picture of what we were doing in ­Afghanistan,” the dad said.

. . . and appears to have devolved into a full-blown anti-American:

“I am sorry for everything here,” he wrote. “These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.”
Bergdahl also complained about fellow soldiers. The battalion commander was a “conceited old fool,” he said, and the only “decent” sergeants, planning to leave the platoon “as soon as they can,” told the privates — Bergdahl then among them — “to do the same.”

“I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools,” he concluded. “I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.” 

And Susan Rice was back on the Sunday shows, once again keeping us guessing as to the ratio of delusion to obfuscation swirling in her post-American skull, saying Bergdahl served with "honor and distinction."

I'd really like to think this all indicates some kind of linear narrative, but post-America is a funny place

S. E. Cupp takes a paragraph of her latest column to sprint us through the scandals that have shaped the Most Equal Comrade's regime's rule through the last week or so:

From Fast and Furious at the ATF to the Pigford fraud at the Department of Agriculture, the IRS’ political targeting to the State Department’s Benghazi mess, the healthcare.gov debacle at HHS to spying at the NSA and the DOJ, President Obama is running out of agencies and departments to defend in his two years left in office.

She then goes on to discuss the VA scandal and accurately identifies its core cause as huge government.

And, as you probably know by now, there's an even fresher mess: the outing of the CIA's chief undercover officer in Afghanistan.

Brit Hume depicts the scope and impact of this one:

This, I think, in political terms is damaging to the administration because it feeds into the question of whether the administration can in fact administer. We had first the fiasco with the rollout of the health care program. Now we've got the troubles at the VA. now this blunder by the White House press office. 

Think about this, this is an administration that is fond of telling us -- that the president is fond of telling us that he finds out about these things in the press. In this case, this was something that his press office put out and the mistake wasn't noted until somebody in the press told him about it. So they found about this from the press all right, after they put it out. That's a high level of bungling, I think it's fair to say. 

It's going to feed into this whole question about whether the administration can run anything.

A protective news media notwithstanding, people are finding out about these developments, and getting a sense of the significance of their sum total.  Other signs that people are on to the failure of MEC-ism abound.  FHer-care remains unpopular.  As noted here yesterday, the nation's public-school students are throwing away the rabbit food Michelle insists that cafeterias serve.  There are signs throughout society of discreet seething over inescapable political correctness.

There are signs abroad, such as the results of EU parliamentary elections in countries as far-flung as Denmark, Greece and the UK, as well as the election of free-market champion Narendra Modi as prime minister in India, as well as his clear understanding of what's necessary - on Pakistan's part - for peaceable relations between the two neighbors.

So there are still some clear heads in this world.

But there's still more nonsense permeating our civilization than there has been in a long time.  Certainly,  evidence of the considerable presence of rabid leftism abounds on social media as well as in the punditry world and the halls of government.  But there's also Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, and the insinuation of grotesque societal transformation into the ethos of the corporate world.

And then there's the way identity politics greases the skids for the H-Word Creature the way it did for the Most Equal Comrade starting in the middle of the last decade.

And then there's the silliness of what's left of our culture.

Human history is a messy story, full of mixed signals and developments suddenly arising.  You're not going to find a 98 percent majority of humanity suddenly signing on to an impeccably sensible and noble worldview for the rest of our species' life span.

Still, I'm cautiously optimistic that post-America may be waking up and wanting actual America back.

Any fresh goof-ups by the MEC regime, and I think freedom has a fighting chance.

Because the threat is real and growing

LITD readers may notice that I have yet to chime in on the debate over the proper extent of our nation's security apparatus's information-gathering prowess.

I'm aware that the NSA has a vast and detailed body of knowledge about who called whom.  I'm aware that the guy who brought this to our attention, Edward Snowden, is nobody's idea of a patriot upholding the principles that the Founders have handed down to us.  He does, however, raise questions worth asking, principally, what is to be done if this kind of reach falls into unsavory hands?  In a day and age when the nation's tax-collection function is thoroughly politicized, when an agency like the EPA can dictate how people enjoy and use their own property, and when the "president" tells law enforcement agencies that it's okay to selectively enforce immigration laws, it's a fair question to ask.

But consider the other side of the debate.  If we're not making every effort to know every last thing we need to know to keep jihadists from inflicting horrifying catastrophes on us, are we not the biggest fools in human history?

It's for this reason that I found this New Yorker interview by Mattathias Schwartz with General Keith B. Alexander, until March the NSA director, most edifying.

Consider what our intelligence-gatherers face when they try to start piecing together clues in a red-flag situation:

I was trying to think of the best way to illustrate what the intelligence people are trying to do. You know “Wheel of Fortune”? Here’s the deal: I’m going to give you a set of big, long words to put on there. Then I’m going to give you some tools to guess the words. You get to pick a vowel or a consonant—one letter. There’s a hundred letters up there. You’ll say, I don’t have a clue. O.K., so you’ve used your first tool in analysis. What the intelligence analysts are doing is using those tools to build the letters, to help understand what the plot is. This is one of those tools. It’s not the only tool. And, at times, it may not be the best tool. It evolved from 9/11, when we didn’t have a tool that helped us connect the dots between foreign and domestic.

Around 9/11, we intercepted some of [the hijackers’] calls, but we couldn’t see where they came from. So guys like [Khalid al-]Mihdhar, [one of the 9/11 hijackers who was living] in California—we knew he was calling people connected to Al Qaeda in Yemen. But we thought he was in the Middle East. We had no way to connect the dots. If you rewound 9/11, what you would have done is tipped the F.B.I. that a guy who is planning a terrorist attack is in San Diego. You may have found the other three groups that were with him.

The C.I.A. could have simply told the F.B.I. that al-Mindhar was in the country. Which they didn’t do, for whatever reason.

But, you see, not everybody is looking at the same picture. So you’re thinking, We’re solving this puzzle. C.I.A. is over here, solving this puzzle. There are a lot of these puzzles that many of us are trying to work. Thousands at any given time. You might ask: What’s the best way for you to figure out who bad guys are? I’m going to tell you there’s a bad guy. What would you start with? You’d say, Well, I need to know who his network for friends are, because chances are many of them are bad, too.

Metadata is the least intrusive, most efficient way to do it. You don’t want to translate millions and millions of calls; you want to get to the most efficient approach. Then, once you know that’s a terrorist, then you can go and get content. 

The General clearly wishes to stress the scope of the challenge:

We know we didn’t stop 9/11. People were trying, but they didn’t have the tools. This tool, we believed, would help them. Let’s look at what’s happening right now. You ought to get this from the START Program at the University of Maryland. They have the statistics on terrorist attacks. 2012 and 2013. The number of terrorist attacks in 2012—do you know how many there were globally?
How many?Six thousand seven hundred and seventy-one. Over ten thousand people killed. In 2013, it would grow to over ten thousand terrorist attacks and over twenty thousand people killed. Now, how did we do in the United States and Europe? How do you feel here? Safe, right? I feel pretty safe.
But the P.C.L.O.B. said that there weren’t any more plots [that were disrupted by the N.S.A. programs]. I don’t know if these are things that couldn’t be shared.They should have had access to those.
I imagined they would have.Sometimes, people don’t ask all the right questions.… Going back to “Wheel of Fortune,” 702 is like getting the free vowels. It helps you get all the key things that you need. It’s the base program. And, then, all the rest of your things are one-offs. Like the [telephone-metadata program]. It’s going to give you a piece, but it’s probably not going to be the key piece. It’s a starting point.

Now, really take in his reasoning for not wanting to give up Section 215 of the Patriot Act.  Be forewarned; it will chill you:

How do you do enough against terrorists without telling them how you’re doing this? This is the issue that I have with leaking classified material, with what Snowden has done. I’ve had forty years of doing this. And some of those were good years.
This must be a very personal thing for you.Yup. So think about how secure our nation has been since 9/11. We take great pride in it. It’s not because of me. It’s because of those people who are working, not just at N.S.A. but in the rest of the intelligence community, the military, and law enforcement, all to keep this country safe. But they have to have tools. With the number of attacks that are coming, the probability, it’s growing—
I’m sorry, could you say that once more?The probability of an attack getting through to the United States, just based on the sheer numbers, from 2012 to 2013, that I gave you—look at the statistics. If you go from just eleven thousand to twenty thousand, what does that tell you? That’s more. That’s fair, right?
I don’t know. I think it depends what the twenty thousand——deaths. People killed. From terrorist attacks. These aren’t my stats. The University of Maryland does it for the State Department.
I’ll look at them. I will. So you’re saying that the probability of an attack is growing.The probability is growing. What I saw at N.S.A. is that there is a lot more coming our way. Just as someone is revealing all the tools and the capabilities we have. What that tells me is we’re at greater risk. I can’t measure it. You can’t say, Well, is that enough to get through? I don’t know. It means that the intel community, the military community, and law enforcement are going to work harder.

So when people ask me that—including the President—would you give this up? 

His level of certainty confirms what anyone begins to conclude when piecing together developments on the world stage today.  Regarding the proper length of time for keeping metadata, he says this:

We sat down with our analysts. We asked, What are you comfortable with? I said, Now, tell me, because, you know, if something bad happens everybody in the world is going to ask: Why didn’t you tell us?

So we have to explain everything that we can, because I believe the terrorist attacks are coming. You’re going to be in an interview with my successor and say, How could you let this happen? And they’re going to say, Well, you eliminated all the tools to catch the terrorists! You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure that out.

Are there are other things that you can point to when you say that you believe more terrorist attacks are coming?

Look at the way Al Qaeda networks. From Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb, and now in Syria, the al-Nusra front. Look at the number of jihadists going into Syria and what they want to do. When put all that together, yeah, you can say those are distant countries, but a lot of these groups are looking to attack the United States. I take that threat very seriously.

His overall point is that, yes, Constitutional safeguards must go hand in hand with advances in our ability to know what our enemies are plotting, but that those advances are essential to maximizing our chances for our civilization's survival.

He has a point, I think.

Secretary Global-Test, isnt it time to give up the patty-cake now?

Surely Global-Test isn't going to continue to delude himself that any kind of real agreement, much less peace is possible with this bunch:

MEMRI. Org: Speaking at a conference held in Tehran, Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Deputy Commander Brigadier-General Hossein Salami said: “We, here, can muster all our energies in order to annihilate the Zionist entity, more than 1,400 kilometers away. We are ready for that moment in the future.” 
Following are excerpts from the speech, which aired on Al-Alam TV on March 11, 2014. 
Brigadier-General Hossein Salami: Despite the geographical distance, we are attached to the hearts of the Palestinians. How is it that our slogans and goals are identical to the slogans and causes of the Palestinians? Why do we strive to become martyrs and risk our lives for the Palestinian cause? 
The answer is that the religion of Islam has designated this for us – this goal, this motivation, this belief, this energy – so that we, here, can muster all our energies in order to annihilate the Zionist entity, more than 1,400 kilometers away. We are ready for that moment in the future. 

And knock it off on this business of treating our best ally in that part of the world with open disdain.

We left it to metastasize

The post immediately below, about Robert Gates's new book, confirms what we've known for a long time:  the MEC is a declinist, but also a lazy narcissist who basically finds foreign policy boring, and the entire Freedom-Hater party is actively orchestrating Western decline, for a mixture of reasons including ideological conviction and cynical political calculation.

So shameful developments will continue to come down the pike.  Of course, there is the ongoing economic collapse of Egypt, the de facto legitimization of the Assad regime's rule in Syria, a new wave of rocket attacks into Israel, Iran's nullification of the Geneva agreement, political chaos in Turkey, and the still-unanswered questions about the September 2012 jihadist attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Add to that list the beginnings of an al-Qaeda state on either side of the Iraq-Syria border, and Karzai's dithering on signing a secutiry agreement that would provide at least a glimmer of hope that Afghanistan will be characterized by order, safety and what passes for freedom in Muslim countries as the US winds down its presence there.

The West has essentially no influence in the most dangerous yet strategically important area of the world.

It's long past time to shed the mindset of our youth, when, even as the cultural, economic chaos and global challenges of the last three decades of the 20th century unfolded, we could be confident that American leadership could be roused on short notice and employed to thwart the unthinkable.  Let's be clear: Even more than the nation's economic prowess or cultural influence, our basis for such an assumption rested on its military might.  We may still outnumber and out-fancy the rest of the world in terms of battleships, fighter jets, and elite teams of highly-trained assassins and rescue personnel, but, as the Gates memoir drives home, that whole apparatus is rife with resentment of, and contempt for, the commander-in-chief of it all.

We're not safe at all.  We need national prayer - and lots of it - for a three-year breather from the kinds of consequences of the FHer worldview that, while unthinkable, are - admit it - likely.

It looks like the mullahs don't consider the six-month period spelled out in the Geneva accord to be underway yet

Iran's nuclear chief announces the development of a new generation of uranium-enrichment centrifuges.

I'm sure Secretary Global Test considers this unhelpful and a hindrance to Iran joining the community of nations.

Because the MEC still insists on chasing a phantom nuke deal with Iran

Jay Carney tells the press corps that the bipartisan sanctions bill Congress has crafted will get a veto from the Most Equal Comrade.  The sanctions wouldn't kick in unless, after a year of negotiations, we still weren't living in a world of unicorns and rainbows, but Jay says it would still send the wrong message to the mullahs.

Never mind that the mullahs don't think there is a binding agreement, and that the six-month period the non-agreement establishes has not yet begun.

Add Syria to the list of the regime's foreign-policy failures

The head of the Supreme Military Council - the only really viable non-Islamist anti-Assad force in Syria -  has fled the country and the Islamists have captured its warehouses. So the MEC regime is suspending non-lethal aid to it.

 Naturally, the Obama administration does not want to supply groups that are too weak to protect their supplies from radical forces. But it was the administration’s unwillingness to arm the non-radical groups early on that ensured their weakness. The American-backed rebels have been on life support since Obama pulled the rug out from under them by negotiating with Assad over his chemical weapons instead of punishing him for using them.

As Max Boot says:

That the non-Islamist opposition is collapsing is utterly predictable given the administration’s hesitancy to provide it with more backing. The Islamic radicals are the obvious winners on the rebel side, while Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Force grow stronger on the other end.

Where do Obama and John Kerry go from here? They would like to go to, you guessed it, Geneva for “peace talks.” But the Islamist rebel forces have no interest in making peace with Assad. And the more moderate forces are now too marginalized to be partners in a meaningful peace agreement.

An agreement between those forces and Assad, in the unlikely event one were reached, would essentially ratify Assad’s triumph over them. It would thus help consolidate the power of the regime and its partners Hezbollah and Iran.

Out of control, on middle-east policy as with everything else.

Ever fewer remaining microseconds

The basic purpose of this blog since its inception has been, per its name, to point out how far Western civilization has strayed from its foundations and how close to a state of irretrievability we have inched.

Because whatever is happening to America and the West generally is happening to all of us, whether we fear it or, in the case of mad minority, embrace it, I've seen little point in taking an alarmist tone except for the most egregious cases.  In fact, I think I have made this site a voice for where we should be going as much as a rail against the damage.

In the last few days, however, the full horror of the western Left's agenda has been bearing down on our civilization, and I'm not sure any depiction of it could be construed as unwarranted hyperbole.

From a roundup of developments, a picture emerges:

 - Everyone is aware that the FHer position is to increase the debt limit.  Harry Reid has put a number on it: $1.1 trillion.  And mind you, America's $17 trillion debt is only a fraction of what we really owe when you consider the unfunded liabilities of our transfer-payment programs.

- Using the excuse of the shutdown, the regime is turning World War II vets away from their open-air memorial, while mere yards away, a rally for illegal aliens hosted by the AFL-CIO and SEIU is allowed to take place without harassment.

- The rollout of the FHer-care exchanges is generally agreed to be a disaster, but the Most Equal Comrade got not one question about it at his presser yesterday.

- Miley Cyrus's exercise in self-embarrassment at the MTV music awards show not only did not harm her career, it emboldened her to keep pushing the envelope, as she did last week when, as host of Saturday Night Live, she played Michelle Bachmann in a soft-porn skit that also involved a John Boehner character.

- The UN has appointed Iran to its disarmament committee.  Israel is protesting strongly.  A US reaction has yet to be reported.

- China warns the US - Japan - Australia alliance to stay out of Pacific territorial disputes.


These are just five very recent developments, mind you.  They follow a steady flow covered by this blog and elsewhere: Putin's NYT column, anti-Christian bias in the US military, the murder of the US coal industry, the bankruptcy of Detroit, the Marxist-supporting past of New York mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio . . .

Scroll though your Facebook news feed.  If there is any diversity at all to your array of "friends," you'll see how dug in the two sides warring for America's soul are.  And you'll see how afraid of basic facts the pro-tyranny side is.

There are just days when how very, very late it is is especially impressed upon one.

Latest developments in the ongoing jihad

Terrorist bus bombing in Tel Aviv.  21 injured.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri says his organization "blesses" the attack.

2 dead, 2 injured in massive blast near US embassy in Kabul.  The perp was armed with a gun, grenade and vest.

It would seem we have conflicting accounts

Libyan president Yousef El-Magariaf says he's certain the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi was planned well in advance.

The MEC regime's ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, says it was spontaneous.

There are so many people currently in the US government who need to be fired immediately and so thoroughly disgraced that their careers are over.

There's never been another quite like the MEC

My master's degree in history has only been tangentially helpful in my making a living in the years since I earned it.  Still, I regard it as a thing of great value.  It provides a perspective sort of like a needle-reading graph printout, with which one can see peaks and valleys over various spans of time.  One is thereby better equipped to determine which periods in the story of our species really constituted "unprecedented times."

Every age - actually every day - has its share of crises and harbingers of crises.  Marvelous creatures that we are, however, we usually find some way to address them that staves off their worst possible outcomes.  Once in a while, we miss.  Witness the two world wars of the last century, or the Great Plague of 1665 in England.

I can truly say that we've never seen a confluence of factors quite like this.  A president who is committed to a mad revolutionary utopianism, but is so riddled with narcissism and laziness that he can't even execute his ideological vision without botching it.  A Congress divided between those who basically share his vision and those who oppose it albeit haltingly due to their incredulity at the sheer toxicity of what they're up against.  A cultural infrastructure that likewise has signed on to that destructive vision.

In June 2012, that president's speeches have become exercises in disconnect, reaffirmations of his obstinate refusal to see the inherent failure of his vision.  The rest of his behavior exudes disconnect as well: the near-constant fundraisers and celebrity parties, the golf outings, even as Fast and Furious threatens to get his Attorney General cited for contempt of Congress, even as the national-security leaks condemn the country to a vulnerability of apocalyptic proportions, even in the wake of multiple bankruptcies of "green" "companies" subsidized by borrowed government money in pursuit of a fantasy posing as science, even as the signature FHer-care monstrosity remains vehemently hated by most Americans and is likely to have its core provision found unconstitutional, even as illegal aliens are given an open invitation to take American jobs at a time when unemployment has been north of 8 percent for 40 months.

What this singularly dangerous figure has done is increase the likelihood on every side that something disastrous will occur.  An increased likelihood in any one arena of our national life would be alarming enough.

  Pondering our odds of squeaking through without one of the myriad manifestations of precariousness with which he has saddled us doing us in is obviously a grim exercise.  Nonetheless, the alternative is to be caught unawares when the moment of reckoning arrives.