Diana West

Lakin Court Martial Judge: Evidence Might Be an "Embarrassment" to Obama

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 14:20:00 GMT

Photo: 1930s Moscow show trial prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky reading an "indictment"

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If evidence in the court martial trial of Lieut. Col. Terry Lakin -- the Bronze-Star-decorated lead flight surgeon who has knowingly triggered his own court martial in his efforts to verify the Constitutional eligibility of President Obama -- might be an "embarrassment" to President Obama, the presiding judge Army Col. Denise R. Lind has in effect ruled, then there just won't be any evidence in the court martial trial of LTC Terry Lakin.

Is this really America 2010, or have we taken a time-warped detour to 1930s Soviet Union?

From WND.com:

Army Col. Denise R. Lind today [September 2] ruled in a hearing regarding the evidence to be allowed in the scheduled October court-martial of Lakin that he will be denied access to any of Obama's records as well as any testimony from those who may have access to the records.

With her decision, Lind mirrored a number of federal judges who have ruled on civil lawsuits over Obama's eligibility. They have without exception denied the plaintiffs' access to any requested documentation regarding the president's eligibility.

Lind ruled that it was "not relevant" for the military to be considering such claims, that the laws allegedly violated by Lakin were legitimate on their face and that the chain of command led up to the Pentagon, and that should have been sufficient for Lakin.

Paul Rolf Jensen, Lakin's civilian attorney, said the case would continue. But he said the courts now have denied his client the opportunity to present his defense.

Jensen had argued that under U.S.C. Rule 46, a defendant put on court martial has the right to call any and all witnesses and obtain any evidence in his or her defense.

Lind, who took 40 minutes to read her decision to the court, disagreed.

She said opening up such evidence could be an "embarrassment" to the president, and it's up to Congress to call for impeachment of a sitting president.

So, presumably, just taser the canary-colonel and throw him in the back of a paddy wagon, right?

This, incredibly, is treatment literally recommended by one of the Army prosecutors in the Lakin case, LTC Steven Brodsky. As related on the website of the American Patriot Foundation, a foundation dedicated to the support of LTC Lakin, the following exchange occurred after LTC Lakin's August 2 hearing.

While Lakin was waiting near the courtroom, Brodsky and COL Melanie Craig (Lakin's "escort") stood around the corner in the main hallway and in voices easily audible to LTC Lakin, spoke about the need to prevent Lakin after the hearing from speaking to the media, "signing autographs or kissing babies". Brodsky then said to Craig "just taser him and throw him in the van."

Lakin says of the incident: "LTC Brodsky meant for me to hear those words, no question. When COL Craig returned to where I was, she said to me 'you probably heard all that, didn't you?' I replied it would have been hard not to. After the hearing, my lawyers asked COL Craig for permission for me to speak to the press, since both CNN and NBC had sent camera crews, but she rudely refused, and she ordered me back into her vehicle to be transported back to Walter Reed."

I caught up on this in an article at WND.com, which last month also reported that a former Navy Captain in the JAG Corps has conveyed his extreme concern over the incident to Lakin's commander, Maj. General Carla Hawley-Bowland. As first reported in the Greeley (CO) Gazette, Lakin's hometown paper:

Vincent Averna, a former Navy Captain in the JAG Corps, sent a letter to Major General Carla Hawley-Bowland, who has authority over Lakin’s superiors. In the letter regarding Brodsky he stated:

“His threat to have LTC Lakin tasered to insure his silence is also a blatant violation of the American principle of innocent until proven guilty. This prosecutor is not following normal procedures in LTC Lakin's court martial. He is violating LTC's Constitutional Rights by prohibiting his freedom of speech, equal protection under the law and Constitutional Procedural Due Process by failure to follow the UCMJ procedures.” He warned that a failure to investigate the veracity of the claims would be “tantamount to Command Influence, since it can legitimately be said your inaction gives consent to this prosecutor's misconduct.”

Following up, WND.com later reported:

A public affairs officer, Chuck Dasey, later commented to WND via e-mail on the alleged threat by denying that there was any intent to "use violence" against Lakin.

"LTC Terry Lakin is receiving fair treatment and due process under the law," Dasey wrote. "He is accused of failing to obey a lawful order to report for military duty, and will be tried in a court martial in October. A statement has been reported as a threat by the military prosecutor to use a taser on LTC Lakin. There was never an intention to use violence against LTC Lakin, and none of his escorts were carrying tasers or weapons of any kind. The Command regrets any misinterpretation of comments that were made and will continue to ensure LTC Lakin's rights are protected."

Lakin, who has almost 18 years of unblemished service to the Army, including six tours of Bosnia, Afghanistan and other overseas locations, has earned the Bronze Star.

This is precisely the kind of "inaction" Averna, the former JAG captain, is concerned about, fearing that it gives "consent to this prosecutor's misconduct."

Prosecutorial misconduct, no evidence for the defense -- what next for LTC Lakin?

Nothing good if the public, mostly cowed into acquiesence by a babyish fear of being mocked as a bad name ("birther") remains silent. Fortunately, senior military men such as retired three-star General Tom McInerney are starting to speak out on Lakin's behalf.

After all, all we're talking about here is just asking the president to show a little i.d.

Allen West & the Leavenworth Ten Freedom Ride

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:58:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

When President Obama said it was time to turn the page on Iraq, he should have also declared his intention to close the book on the lingering, festering injustices the U.S. government has perpetrated on 10 American veterans of the Iraq war still incarcerated in the military prison at Fort Leavenworth.

As noted in this column, these Americans are the war's forgotten men, soldiers trapped by restrictive, legalistic rules of engagement on an ultra-fluid battlefield where the enemy knew no rules. For killing this enemy and, it must also be admitted, surviving to live another day, these soldiers were sentenced to terms ranging from 10 to 40 years. In other words, for the rest of their young lives.

Allen West, himself a retired Army lieutenant colonel and veteran of both Desert Storm and the war in Iraq, has not forgotten these men. West, the Republican candidate for Congress in Florida's 22nd District, is speaking this Labor Day Weekend at the first, and, it is hoped, last Leavenworth Ten Freedom Ride, a parade past the Leavenworth military prison to draw attention to the plight of the Ten, resulting in their freedom.

West could almost have been among them. Back in 2003 as a battalion commander north of Baghdad, West fired his pistol near the head of a uncooperative Iraqi under interrogation who was believed to be withholding information about an assassination plot and ambush of West and his troops. The man talked. West and his men encountered no more ambushes for the next two months until West was relieved of his command and charged with improper interrogation methods, charges that could have drawn a prison sentence.

"I know the method I used was not right, but I wanted to take care of my soldiers," West testified at his 2003 Article 32 hearing (similar to a preliminary grand jury hearing). When asked if he would alter his behavior under similar circumstances in the future, West replied: "If it's about the lives of my soldiers at stake, I'd go through hell with a gasoline can."

I believe he would. It's a great line, something to jump-start the heart of any war movie, but coming from Allen West, whom I have had the honor of knowing since 2007, first as a pen pal, when he was in Afghanistan training Afghan forces, it is also genuine. Little wonder Gen. Raymond Odierno, then commanding general of the 4th Infantry Division, declined to call for a court martial. West paid a fine and subsequently retired from the Army -- our loss. After resettling his family in Florida where he taught high school for a year, West embarked on that training hitch in Afghanistan mentioned above. He returned to Florida late in 2007 to make his first (competitive but unsuccessful) run for Congress in 2008. This election year, his prospects of unseating incumbent Rep. Ron Klein (Florida Democrat) are excellent, and Florida has the great opportunity of returning to national service a man America can be proud of. At this point, West is virtually unique among his military peers in his public commitment to seeing justice done -- in this case, clemency -- for the Leavenworth Ten soldiers and their families. When I spoke to him recently, West made that case quite dramatically, comparing the hundreds of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, known killers of American troops among them, on whom America has bestowed both clemency and freedom, with the implacable refusal of the U.S. government to treat the Leavenworth Ten even half as mercifully. Having forgiven our enemies, the United States has no such forgiveness for the men who served to fight them.

"Something is upside-down about this military legal system," says West, who believes this and other systemic military problems, from "the convoluted rules of engagement" to "Ivy League, think-tank" strategies, will be corrected if Americans send more representatives with battlefield experience to Washington. Of course, West is spending the first day of Labor Day weekend, the kick-off to the traditional sprint to Election Day, in Kansas, far from his southern Florida district, to speak at the Leavenworth rally. Why?

"It's important," he replied. "Going to Congress doesn't mean so much to me as doing something to help these young men."

Fortunately, Allen West can do both.

Jihad at the Cordoba Cathedral: Halfway to a Whole Mosque?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:40:00 GMT

Photo: Inside the Cordoba Cathedral, the architectural legacy of its pre-13th century existence as Cordoba's Great Mosque, which was built from Cordoba's pre-8th century cathedral dedicated to Saint Vincent.

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As noted in Andrew Bostom's essay debunking the just-can't-shake-it myth of Islamic "tolerance" in Muslim Spain, by the middle of the 8th century, the cathedral in Cordoba dedicated to Saint Vincent had been "converted" to a Muslim mosque. However, as 19th-century scholar of Muslim Spain (and Islamophile) Reinhart Dozy writes, this was "clearly an act of spoliation as well as an infraction of the treaty" between Cordoba Christians and the invading Arab Muslims.

All the churches in that city [Cordoba] had been destroyed except the cathedral, dedicated to Saint Vincent, but the possession of this fane [church or temple] had been guaranteed by treaty. For several years the treaty was observed; but when the population of Cordova was increased by the arrival of Syrian Arabs [i.e., Muslims], the mosques did not provide sufficient accommodation for the newcomers, and the Syrians considered it would be well for them to adopt the plan which had been carried out at Damascus, Emesa [Homs], and other towns in their own country, of appropriating half of the cathedral and using it as a mosque. The [Muslim] Government having approved of the scheme, the Christians were compelled to hand over half of the edifice. This was clearly an act of spoliation, as well as an infraction of the treaty. Some years later, Abd-er Rahman I requested the Christians to sell him the other half. This they firmly refused to do, pointing out that if they did so they would not possess a single place of worship. Abd-er Rahman, however, insisted, and a bargain was struck by which the Christians ceded their cathedral.

And so the single remaining church in the city became the Great Mosque of Cordoba. This mosque became a cathedral again in 1236 when King Ferdinand III of Castile recaptured the city from Muslim Moors.

Note, however, in these following thumbnails from recent news accounts of Muslim attempts to take the cathedral back for Islam (I'm not kidding), the fudging or complete omission of the cathedral's Christian origins preceding the establishment of the Great Mosque.

From the Times of London, April 3, 2010, "Muslims arrested for trying to pray in Cordoba's former Great Mosque":

The Great Mosque of Córdoba was converted into a Christian church in 1236 after King Ferdinand III of Castile recaptured the city from the Moors. The building later became the modern-day Cathedral of Our Lady of the Assumption.

Muslim organisations have long campaigned for the right to pray inside the building, which was once one of the biggest mosques in the world.

However, Demetrio Fernández González, the recently appointed Bishop of Córdoba, reinforced a ban on Muslims praying in any part of the 24,000sq m (260,000sq ft) building, saying that canon law did not permit it.

A statement from the bishop’s office said: “The shared use of the cathedral by Catholics and Muslims would not contribute to the peaceful coexistence of the two beliefs.”

The Roman Catholic Church cited archaeological reports that said before the Mosque was built in the 8th century remains of an earlier Christian temple had stood on the same spot.

The not-so-faint implication is that the source of these "archaeological reports" is somehow sectarianly non-objective, while the reports themselves don't merit mention in the recitation of the cathedral's history. And since when are "archaeological reports" dismissed so lightly? When they fail to match the PC narrative.

Oh, and by the way, the Times also reports (paragraph 9):

After being asked to stop praying, [Catholic authorities] added, “they [two of the praying Muslims] replied by attacking security guards, two of whom suffered serious injuries.”

From CNN, August 17, 2010, "Muslims in Spain campaign to worship alongside Christians":

Muslims in Spain are campaigning to be allowed to worship alongside Christians in Cordoba Cathedral -- formerly the Great Mosque of Cordoba.

And what else? Nothing, according to CNN.

Today, at the original Cordoba mosque in Spain, there is no call to prayer, only the ringing of church bells. That's because the former mosque is now a working Catholic cathedral, performing a daily mass.

It's been a Cathedral since Spain's Christian monarchy conquered Cordoba in the 13th century and more than a million visitors walk through its doors every year.

Look, Ma -- no pre-Islamic history! This obliteration of the past is a traditional hallmark of Islamic conquest.

Meanwhile, note the Islamic good-cop, bad-cop routine, something I've been tracking at least since the foiled British Airplane Plot of 2006 when it struck me that in the wake the jihadists' attempt to bring down passenger airliners (bad cop), British Muslim leaders followed up by lobbying the government to sanction more sharia in Britain to avoid future outbreaks of such "extremism" (good cop). Notice both sets of actors, the violent jihadists (bad cop) and the peaceful lobbyists (good cop), are after the same goal: extending sharia.

Anyway, to recap the situation in Cordoba: In April, violent "worshippers" (bad cop) seriously injured (knifed) security guards. In August the "peaceful" lobbying effort (good cop) to convert the Catholic cathedral into a half a mosque continues apace. They're both trying to achieve the same goal

And with CNN's implicit favor:

Depictions of Jesus' crucifixion hang underneath the distinctive red-and-white arches of what was once the Muslim prayer hall. Cordoba's dazzling "mihrab" -- the sacred alcove from where Muslim prayer is lead -- still stands as a separate part of the site and is one of the main attractions for tourists.

In fact, the site remains significant for Muslims as a symbol of Islam's golden age of learning and religious tolerance.

Ah, back to that fraud.

The Mosque of Cordoba was once famed for allowing both Christians and Muslims to pray together under the same roof.

Yes, as, Dozy tells us, as an act of "spoliation" and a broken treaty.

Now, some Muslims are trying to repeat that history. Mansur Escudero, a Spanish convert to Islam, is leading the movement that is pushing for the right of Muslims to pray at the Cordoba Cathedral.

"I don't think it's important for Muslims. I think it's important for humankind," Escudero says. "We think this is a beautiful paradigm of tolerance, knowledge, culture. People of different religions living together."

Uh-huh. Sounds beautiful so long as you block out the clanging echoes from the middle of the 8th century when, as Dozy tells us, Muslims broke their treaty with the Christians, "appropriating half of the cathedral and using it as a mosque."

The Next Time Someone Mentions the Golden Age of "Tolerance" in Muslim Spain, Andalusia or Cordoba ...

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 13:38:00 GMT

... pull out a copy of this slam-debunking by Andrew Bostom (via Pajamas Media). The fate of -- in fact, the ongoing struggle over -- Cordoba Cathedral (photo above, story below) is particularly illustrative.

Andrew Bostom's "The Cordoba House and the Myth of Cordoba `Ecumenism'":

Imam Feisal Rauf, “founder and visionary” of the Cordoba Initiative, apparently sees the construction of a triumphal mosque within the 9/11 World Trade Center attack’s zone of destruction as a fulfillment of his vision for Islam in America. As Rauf stated in his 2004 What’s Right with Islam, a work limited to treacly Islamic propaganda:

For many centuries, Islam inspired a civilization that was particularly tolerant and pluralistic. … Great philosophers such as Maimonides were free to create their historic works within the pluralistic culture of Islam.

Rauf envisions this invented past as a model for the future “Sharia-compliant” America he desires.

Self-proclaimed “contrarian” Christopher Hitchens asserted his distaste for those in charge of the Cordoba Initiative, especially Rauf, characterizing the imam’s utterances about the 9/11 atrocities as “shady and creepy.” Yet even Hitchens upheld the Andalusian myth of Cordoba, calling it:

The site of an astonishing cultural synthesis, best associated with the names of Averroes ibn-Rushd and Moses Maimonides …

Hitchens gleaned this, apparently, from his reading of the pseudo-academic apologetics of María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World, which he insisted was “the finest recent book on the subject.”

Pace Hitchens’ uninformed praise, Menocal’s superficial hagiography ignores the mid-20th century studies of Evariste Levi-Provencal and Charles Emmanuel Dufourcq, and more recently Jane Gerber’s focused 1994 analysis debunking the “Golden Age” myth in Muslim Spain as:

[The] aristocratic bearing of a select class of courtiers and poets, [which consisted only of] garishly packaged … gilded moments.

Whitney Bodman, associate professor of comparative religion at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, has provided the most egregious misrepresentation of “Cordoban ecumenism.” He invoked it specifically to defend Imam Rauf’s GZM project and to condemn its opponents –who now represent 70% of both the U.S. and New York populations — for failing to understand “ … the difference between the Muslims of al-Qaeda and the Muslims of Cordoba.” Professor Bodman’s warped narrative was punctuated by the utterly ahistorical claim that the purported idyllic interfaith relations and glorious cultural symbiosis of Cordoba were abruptly terminated by the Spanish Catholic Inquisition:

The name “Cordoba House” is significant. It is named after the famed medieval Spanish city of Cordoba where philosophers, mystics, artisans and poets — Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — lived and shared together. … Its libraries were vast, and the translations of Arabic works into Latin changed Europe and Christianity forever. Among the resident luminaries were Maimonides, a noted Jewish intellectual, the poet Ibn Hazm, and Averroes, the Muslim philosopher and mystic. … With the coming of the Inquisition and Christian exclusivism, the brilliance of Cordoba faded, but its significance endures as a vibrant, inter-religious community.

Reinhart Dozy (1820-1883), the great Orientalist scholar and Islamophile, wrote a four volume magnum opus (published in 1861 and translated into English by Francis Griffin Stokes in 1913) titled Histoire des Musselmans d’Espagne (A History of the Muslims in Spain). Here is Dozy’s historical account of the mid-8th century “conversion” of a Cordoban cathedral to a mosque:

All the churches in that city [Cordoba] had been destroyed except the cathedral, dedicated to Saint Vincent, but the possession of this fane [church or temple] had been guaranteed by treaty. For several years the treaty was observed; but when the population of Cordova was increased by the arrival of Syrian Arabs [i.e., Muslims], the mosques did not provide sufficient accommodation for the newcomers, and the Syrians considered it would be well for them to adopt the plan which had been carried out at Damascus, Emesa [Homs], and other towns in their own country, of appropriating half of the cathedral and using it as a mosque. The [Muslim] Government having approved of the scheme, the Christians were compelled to hand over half of the edifice. This was clearly an act of spoliation, as well as an infraction of the treaty. Some years later, Abd-er Rahman I requested the Christians to sell him the other half. This they firmly refused to do, pointing out that if they did so they would not possess a single place of worship. Abd-er Rahman, however, insisted, and a bargain was struck by which the Christians ceded their cathedral.

Indeed by the end of the eighth century, the brutal Muslim jihad conquest of North Africa and of Andalusia had imposed rigorous Maliki jurisprudence (one of the four main Sunni schools of Islamic law) as the predominant school of Muslim law. Thus, as Evariste Lévi-Provençal (1894-1956) — the greatest modern scholar of Muslim Spain, whose Histoire de l’Espagne Musulmane remains a defining work — observed 75 years ago:

The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation.

For example, the contemporary scholar J.M. Safran discusses an early codification of the rules of the marketplace (where Muslims and non-Muslims would be most likely to interact) written by al-Kinani (d. 901), a student of the Cordovan jurist Ibn Habib (d. 853) — “known as the scholar of Spain par excellence,” who was also one of the most ardent proponents of Maliki doctrine in Muslim Spain:

[The] problem arises of “the Jew or Christian who is discovered trying to blend with the Muslims by not wearing the riqā [cloth patch, which might be required to have an emblem of an ape for a Jew, or a pig for a Christian] or zunnār [belt].” Kinani’s insistence that Jews and Christians wear the distinguishing piece of cloth or belt required of them is an instance of a legally defined sartorial differentiation being reconfirmed. … His insistence may have had as much to do with concerns for ritual purity and food prohibitions as for the visible representation of social and political hierarchy, and it reinforced limits of intercommunal relations.

Notwithstanding Professor Bodman’s allusion, Ibn Hazm (d. 1064) was hardly just a Muslim “poet,” nor was he a paragon of ecumenism.

He was a viciously anti-Semitic Muslim theologian whose inflammatory writings helped incite the massive pogrom against the Jews of Granada which killed 4000, destroying the entire community in 1066. And Averroes — despite his “philosophical studies” — was also a traditionally bigoted Maliki jurist who rendered strong anti-infidel Sharia rulings and endorsed classical jihadism for the very same Almohads who eventually turned upon him.

Moreover, what Maimonides escaped in the 12th century — disguised as a Muslim — was nothing less than a full-blown Muslim Inquisition under the Muslim Almohads.

The jihad depredations of the Almohads (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations in Spain and North Africa. This devastation — massacre, captivity, and forced conversion — was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators.

Ibn Aqnin (1150-1220), a renowned philosopher and commentator born in Barcelona, also fled the Almohad persecutions with his family. He escaped, like Maimonides, to Fez. Living there as a crypto-Jew, he met Maimonides, and recorded his own poignant writings about the sufferings of the Jews under Almohad rule.

Ibn Aqnin wrote during the reign of Abu Yusuf al-Mansur (r. 1184-1199), four decades after the onset of the Almohad persecutions in 1140. Thus the Jews forcibly converted to Islam were already third-generation Muslims. Despite this, al-Mansur continued to impose restrictions upon them, which Ibn Aqnin chronicles.

Expanding upon Jane Gerber’s thesis about the “garish” myth of a “Golden Age,” the late Richard Fletcher (in his Moorish Spain) offered a fair assessment of interfaith relationships in Muslim Spain and his view of additional contemporary currents responsible for obfuscating that history:

The witness of those who lived through the horrors of the Berber conquest, of the Andalusian fitnah in the early eleventh century, of the Almoravid invasion — to mention only a few disruptive episodes — must give it [i.e., the roseate view of Muslim Spain] the lie.

The simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was of tranquility. … Tolerance? Ask the Jews of Granada who were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126 (like the Moriscos five centuries later). … In the second half of the twentieth century a new agent of obfuscation makes its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience, which sees the evils of colonialism — assumed rather than demonstrated — foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and the persecution of the Moriscos (but not, oddly, in the Moorish conquest and colonization). Stir the mix well together and issue it free to credulous academics and media persons throughout the western world. Then pour it generously over the truth … in the cultural conditions that prevail in the west today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour … do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.

But far more alarming than the corrosive apologetics about medieval Muslim Spain are the expressed ideas and tangible behaviors of “moderate” Muslims actively promoting modern Spain’s re-Islamization.

For example, events surrounding the completion of the new Granada mosque were marked by celebratory announcements on July 10, 2003, of a “return of Islam to Spain.” At a conference entitled “Islam in Europe” that accompanied the opening of the mosque, disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies and switching to gold dinars). The German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment?) values.

Writing in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid 2004 train bombings, Islamic scholar Mordechai Nisan discussed the contention by the “moderate” founder of the Institute of Islamic Education, M. Amir Ali, that medieval Spain had actually been “liberated” by Muslim forces, who “deposed its tyrants.” Nisan extrapolated this ahistorical narrative line, and pondered:

Reflecting on March 11 [2004] as Muslim terrorism killed 200 and wounded 1,400 in Madrid, one wonders whether one day this event will also not be commemorated as a liberating moment.

We must also ponder whether Imam Feisal Rauf, whose 2004 What’s Right with Islam was published and marketed in Muslim Malaysia as A Call to Prayer from the World Trade Center Rubble: Islamic Da’wah [Proselytization] From the Heart of America Post-9/11, considers the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism on 9/11 a similarly “liberating” occasion.

Andrew Bostom (http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/) is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005/2008) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History (2008).

Flash: 3-Star General (USAF Ret.) McInerney Files Affadavit at Court-Martial in Support of LTC Lakin

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:19:00 GMT

From Stand-Up America, the blog of Gen. Paul Vallely (US Army ret.):

Washington, D.C., August 31, 2010.

Retired Air Force Lieutenant General Thomas McInerney has supplied an affidavit in support of Army Lieutenant Colonel Terrence Lakin, who faces trial on October 13-15. The retired Air Force three-star is the highest ranking officer yet to lend public support to LTC Lakin. His affidavit acknowledges widespread concerns over the President’s Constitutional eligibility and demands the President release his birth records or the court authorize discovery.

McInerney’s sworn affidavit was filed in Court-Martial in support of Lakin’s motions for subpoenas for all of the president’s school records, and for a deposition of the custodian of Obama’s birth records in the possession of the State of Hawaii.

The Judge has set a hearing in the Court Martial on these motions for this coming Thursday, September 2nd at 11:00 at Ft. Meade, Maryland. All court proceedings are open to the public. The courthouse is located within Ft. Meade at 4432 Llewellyn Avenue, which is on the corner of Llewellyn and Ernie Pyle Road. At the first intersection after the Reece Road gate, you should turn left on to Ernie Pyle Road. The courthouse is approximately 1 mile south of the intersection of Reece Road and Ernie Pyle Road.

LTC Lakin is a physician, and is in his 18th year of service in the Army. He is Board Certified in Family Medicine and Occupational and Environmental Medicine. He has been recognized for his outstanding service as a flight surgeon for year-long tours in Honduras, Bosnia and Afghanistan. He was also awarded the Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan and recognized in 2005 as one of the Army Medical Department’s outstanding flight surgeons.

In March of this year, he announced in a video posted on YouTube that he would refuse to obey orders until receiving proof of the President’s eligibility. So far, more than 225,000 people have viewed that video.

Affidavit

McInerney’s affidavit can be viewed at www.safeguardourconstitution.com. The following are extracts:

The President of the United States, as the Commander in Chief, is the source of all military authority. The Constitution requires the President to be a natural born citizen in order to be eligible to hold office. If he is ineligible under the Constitution to serve in that office that creates a break in the chain of command of such magnitude that its significance can scarcely be imagined.

As a practical example from my background I recall commanding forces that were equipped with nuclear weapons. In my command capacity I was responsible that personnel with access to these weapons had an unwavering and absolute confidence in the unified chain of command, because such confidence was absolutely essential – vital – in the event the use of those weapons was authorized. I cannot overstate how imperative it is to train such personnel to have confidence in the unified chain of command. Today, because of the widespread and legitimate concerns that the President is constitutionally ineligible to hold office, I fear what would happen should such a crisis occur today.

In refusing to obey orders because of his doubts as to their legality, LTC Lakin has acted exactly as proper training dictates. That training mandates that he determine in his own conscience that an order is legal before obeying it…Indeed, he has publicly stated that he “invites” his own court martial, and were I the Convening Authority, I would have acceded to his wishes in that regard. But thus stepping up the bar, LTC Lakin is demonstrating the courage of his convictions and his bravery. That said, it is equally essential that he be allowed access to the evidence that will prove whether he made the correct decision.

For the foregoing reasons, it is my opinion that LTC Lakin’s request for discovery relating to the President’s birth records in Hawaii is absolutely essential to determining not merely his guilt or innocence but to reassuring all military personnel once and for all for this President whether his service as Commander in Chief is Constitutionally proper. He is the one single person in the Chain of Command that the Constitution demands proof of natural born citizenship.

This determination is fundamental to our Republic, where civilian control over the military is the rule. According to our Constitution, the Commander in Chief must now, in the face of serious – and widely held- concerns that he is ineligible, either voluntarily establish his eligibility by authorizing release of his birth records or this court must authorize their discovery. The invasion of his privacy in these records is utterly trivial compared to the issues at stake here. Our military MUST have confidence their Commander in Chief lawfully holds this office and absent which confidence grievous consequences may ensue.

Lakin is represented by military counsel, and by Paul Rolf Jensen, a civilian attorney from California who has been provided to him by the American Patriot Foundation, a non-profit group incorporated in 2003 to foster appreciation and respect for the U.S. Constitution, which has established a fund for Lakin’s legal defense. Further details are available on the Foundation’s website, www.safeguardourconstitution.com

For further information,

Contact: Margaret Hemenway (202) 725-7659

American Patriot Foundation, Inc.

1101 Thirtieth Street, N.W., Suite 500

Washington, D.C. 20007

www.safeguardourconstitution.com

"Thank You" for What? Updated

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:31:00 GMT

I ask the question without tricks up my sleeve or gimicks of any sort. Conservatives are urging Obama to thank George W. Bush for his Iraq disaster -- sorry, policy -- in O's upcoming speech on the "end" of the war. Or combat. Or something. But why? What have we gotten out of Iraq?

"Nothing yet, but just you wait" is the latest pathetic mantra of Iraq war enthusiasts.

9.1.10: Here is the UPDATE, but it's really just an interjection, and an old one at that, one of the many entries I have written to dispute the assumption that the surge as a strategy was a successful one, an assumption that remains the lodestar of conservative thinking on American foreign policy, as seen in spades in conservative commentary on last night's presidential "turn the page" on Iraq speech.

From October 2009:

There is a point in passing that requires comment because, while made in passing -- while always made in passing, tossed off as a given, an objective fact -- it is the faulty fulcrum of the entire nation-building argument. The point in question is that "surge" strategy in Iraq was a success, and that Iraq was a success.

I don't agree. As I've noted in "All Those Boots on the Ground But No Imprint" and elsewhere, the surge in Iraq left little more impression on the sands of Mesopotamia than the receding tide:

This, to clarify, is not the antiwar Left writing. I am writing from a pro-military, anti-jihad point of view that has long seen futility in the U.S. nation-building strategy in Iraq, and now sees futility in the rerun in Afghanistan. Problem is, the same blind spot afflicts both strategies: the failure to understand that an infidel nation cannot fight for the soul of an Islamic nation. This, in essence, is what President Bush and now President Obama have ordered our troops to do.

I don't suggest these missions are ever considered in such terms, which implicitly acknowledge intractable differences between Judeo-Christian-based Western cultures and Islamic cultures. Doing so, of course, is a taboo thing -- a grievous violation in the PC realm where decisions are made. But the omission helps answer my opening question. I seriously doubt Americans would approve of re-running the surge in Afghanistan if there were an honest reckoning of the religious, cultural and historical reasons why the surge failed to achieve its promised results in Iraq.

This is not to say the U.S. military failed. On the contrary, the U.S. military succeeded, as ordered, to bring a measure of security and aid to a carnage-maddened Islamic society. Given U.S.-won security, surge architects promised us, this same Islamic society was supposed to then respond by coming together in "national reconciliation." They were wrong. Not only did Iraqis fail to coalesce as a pro-American, anti-jihad bulwark in the Islamic world (the thoroughly delusional original objective), they have also failed to form a minimally functional nation-state. And the United States is now poised to do the same thing all over again in Afghanistan.

In other words, the surge strategy was a two-part deal. indeed, Part One was supposed to serve as the catalyst for Part Two. Part One, the part entrusted to the US military, was a success. But Part Two, the part entrusted to Iraqis -- indeed, the endgoal of the strategy -- was a flop.

As a result, six years, untold billions, and immeasurable effort in Iraq did not "get" the US anything -- unless, that is, just another lousy Arab state (OPEC-participating, Israel-boycotting, Hezbollah-sympathetic, Iranian-riddled state we can't even launch anti-jihad attacks from) counts as a prize package. And that description doesn't even consider what is worst about the US effort in Iraq: It was all, in effect, to stand up a sharia state marked to this day by extreme religious persecution, as perusing the 2009 report on Iraq by the US Commission of International Religious Freedom confirms.

I did just that this morning, having missed the release of the report when it came out in May of this year. Murder, forced conversion, assassination, destruction of churches, violence against religious minorities, homosexuals, women, professors ... lovely US-sponsored "ally" we have there.

Among the commission's recommendations to remedy the situation are several suggested amendments to the Iraqi constitution, including:

deleting sub-clause (A) in Article 2 that no law may contradict "the established provisions of Islam" because it heightens sectarian tensions over which interpretation of Islam prevails and improperly turns theological interpretations into constitutional questions;

revising Article 2's guarantee of "the Islamic identity of the majority" to make certain that this identity is not used to justify violations of the individual right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief under international law;

making clear that the default system for personal status cases in Iraq is civil law, that the free and informed consent of both parties is required to move a personal status case to the religious law system [sharia], that religious court rulings are subject to final review under Iraq's civil law, and that the appointment of judges to courts adjudicating personal status matters, including any religious courts, should meet international standards with respect to judicial training; and

removing the ability of making appointments to the Federal Supreme Court based on training in Islamic jurisprudence alone, and requiring that, at a minimum, all judges have training in civil law, including a law degree.

In other words, for religious freedom to become possible in Iraq, it is necessary to remove the sharia from the Iraqi sharia state.

Lots of luck with that. But the point here is how does fighting for, dying for, supporting, enriching, encouraging, enabling such a state help the United States of America? And how does doing all of those things constitute a US win? And not just a win, but a successful strategy to be replicated elsewhere?

I don't entertain the fantasy that the Obama administration will retool foreign or war policy to achieve what could be understood as traditionally pro-American goals. These are questions for conservatives to consider, and with an eye toward the next power cycle.

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Back to 9.1.10 UPDATE: The same still goes for the Obama administration. But conservatives are failing to consider any questions about Iraq -- about the wisdom and effectiveness of the surge as a long-term strategy. Here's the rest of yesterday's original post:

The Wall Street Journal editorial page offers [Obama] some speech tips:

The first is to give his predecessor credit for deciding on and sticking with the 2007 troop surge that turned the tide against the insurgency.

And then what happened? The surge, Part 1 of a two-part strategy, was designed to create the security conditions by which Iraq would become not just governable, but also an ally in the old war on terror (Part 2): in other words, we surge, Iraqis merge, all sing Kumbaya. This just didn't happen. (More here and here.) Why do we regard this colossal policy flopola predicated on a grotesque misunderstanding of Islamic culture as a historic American success story?

George W. Bush made that decision in the face of ferocious bipartisan opposition, not least from a certain Illinois Senator. If Mr. Obama wants to win some bipartisan goodwill, he'll admit he was wrong at the time and say he has learned from the surge's success in Iraq as he has planned his own surge in Afghanistan.

Learned what from the surge's success? His own surge in Afghanistan -- uh-oh.

We also hope Mr. Obama is candid in admitting to the American public that a substantial number of U.S. troops will need to remain in Iraq for many years.

Why? To guard the schoolchildren on their way to school to learn jihad and Islamic supremacism?

Many Democrats want to pack up every last armored Humvee today --

Ditto conservative me.

-- but Americans need to understand that our troops are needed to assist the Iraqis on security matters and to consolidate the strategic benefits of having a democratic ally in the volatile region.

"Strategic benefits of Iraq as a democratic ally" is a punchline right?

Meanwhile, we have such a strategic ally in the region; its name is Israel, and we don't need to station thousands of troops there to prop it up.

The U.S. kept hundreds of thousands of troops in Germany for decades after World War II, and it still has tens of thousands in South Korea and Japan.

This was a terrible idea, born of enormous and enormously costly miscalculations, that is nothing to emulate.

It would be a tragedy if after seven years of sacrifice, the U.S. now failed to assist Iraqis as they try to build a federal, democratic state in an often hostile neighborhood.

Seven years of sacrifice is ENOUGH.

Back to School Jihad in Iraq

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:06:00 GMT

Abeer Mohammed is a senior local editor based in Baghdad for Institute of War and Peace Reporting. Here's an excerpt from a post at the IWPR site about the story behind his sensational report (posted below) on how teachers in Iraq are schooling their students in jihad and Islamic supremacism:

For this story, I tried to interview sources in schools in several Baghdad neighbourhoods but the headmasters refused. So I waited for teachers, parents and students outside of schools in Sunni, Shia and mixed neighbourhoods. One day, I spent six hours in front of a school in a poor Shia-majority area of Baghdad.

I faced the most resistance from officials who gave me veiled warnings to not report on such a hot topic. One official told me I was pushing too hard on this issue, and another accused me of defaming Islam.

When I asked one official why there was no curriculum on Christianity, he became nervous and angry and told me I should not focus on the curricula.

A female Muslim legislator defended the textbooks and asked me, "What is your name again? And where do you work?" Because I always identify myself in any case, these were not questions I was comfortable hearing.

His report is also one that people, whether in Iraq or particularly in the US, are not comfortable hearing. Who in the US, now that the war in Iraq has "ended," wants to hear that in American-liberated Iraq, Islamic education class is Iraqi schools, many of which were rebuilt or built by US soldiers, is teaching jihad and Islamic supremacism? Certainly not Americans fond of claiming victory.

Mohammed Abeer's report from the Kansas City Star (via Islamization Watch):

Zuhair Jerjis and Ahmed Mohammed are both 10. They attend the same Baghdad school and often ride home together. After school, the two get together and play video games.

But Ahmed is worried. He wonders if some day he will have to murder his best friend.

The boys go to the same school and share a ride home to the same district of Baghdad, but their parents do not share the same faith.

Zuhair's family is Christian and Ahmed's is Muslim. Recent religious lessons at school have left Ahmed questioning what end awaits his friendship.

"Our teacher tells us it is forbidden in Islam to make friends with unbelievers," he said. "When I study that we have to fight the unbelievers in the name of jihad, I think, 'Will I kill Zuhair one day?'"

Ahmed's family in Muslim; Zuhair's is Christian. And it turns out that in Iraq's schools today, religious tolerance is not part of the curriculum.

Religious education is a regular feature of public schools in Iraq. Because Zuhair is a Christian, he is not required to attend religious classes. But because the vast majority of his classmates are Muslims, Zuhair said he often feels alone and isolated.

"When all of my friends are in the class, I have to stand outside," he said.

As students prepare to return to classes this fall, there is growing criticism of the recently introduced curriculum, which critics say fails to tackle the causes of religious and sectarian hatred that have fueled the violence of the last six years. Worse still, they accuse it of laying the foundations for future strife.

The main concerns about the school program are that it favors the Shia interpretation of Islam.

In addition, many are concerned that some teachers focus on subjects not directly addressed in the curriculum, such as the treatment of non-Muslims and jihad, or holy war.

From an internal Iraqi standpoint, teaching sectarian lessons to the young promises continued division and worse. From a non-Muslim standpoint, given that Sunni and Shia Islam agree on jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims, the main problem isn't sectarian. The main problem is jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims -- if, that is, religious tolerance is the point of the lesson. But in Iraq, as an Islamic culture, religious tolerance as Westerners conceive of it, is just not a core subject.

The reporter elaborates on the Sunni-Shia disagreement a while longer:

Before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003, religious education reflected the beliefs of the minority Sunni population, which makes up roughly one-quarter of the current population.

The current curriculum places more emphasis on Shia Islam, a sect followed by the majority of Iraq's Arabs and by its most powerful politicians, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ...

Alaa Makki, a Sunni member of parliament and head of a parliamentary committee on education, said the new curriculum was unbalanced.

"The current changes have a huge sectarian impact," he said. "The updating process should focus on the shared aspects (of Islam), not on a specific sect." Some of the areas of dispute are subtle and reflect the centuries-old schism within Islam.

For example, Iraq's former Sunni-accented textbooks followed all mentions of the Prophet with a traditional Sunni blessing, "Peace be upon him." In the new textbooks, the blessing is a typical Shia one, "Peace be upon him and his family."

Somehow, doesn't quite convey the impact of the two little boys at the top of the story, one wondering if Islamic teachings will compel him to murder his Christian friend. But here's more:

In addition, anecdotal evidence from schools suggests many teachers offer their own views on such topics as the treatment of non-Muslims or the obligation to wage jihad.

Sanaa Muhsin, an Islamic studies teacher in Baghdad's Shaab district, said she regularly instructs her students that "each Muslim had a duty to carry out jihad - namely to fight unbelievers." She identified unbelievers as those who did not follow Allah or the Prophet Mohammed.

Some students appear to be learning the lessons well.

Sajjad Kiayyad, 7, of Baghdad, said he plans to become a holy warrior when he grows up. "I will fight the Americans because they are Jewish and unbelievers," he said. "I will be victorious, or I will be a martyr in heaven."

Maryam Ali, 9, also of Baghdad, said she is carrying out her own jihad by calling on "unveiled female friends to cover their heads."

Freji, the education ministry adviser, insisted that teachers had been instructed to steer clear of issues that aroused conflict. The new curriculum, he said, focused on the fraternal aspects of Islam. "The Islamic religion, and therefore the Islamic curriculum, emphasizes forgiveness and mercy."

Must have gotten lost in translation.

Quotables

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:58:00 GMT

"If Iraq is to teach us anything, it must be that a new idea cannot be beat into a society."

Maj. Walt Cooper, Baghdad, 2006 via today's Washington Post.

"General Petraeus, winning the hearts and minds of the Afghans is not the job of a soldier. That's the job of an Afghan."

Mohammad Umer Daudzai, chief of staff to Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, recounting a meeting last week with Gen. Petraeus in Sunday's Washington Post.

Afghan Pride, Updated

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 12:19:00 GMT

Photo by Paul Avallone

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As readers of this site may recall, Paul Avallone served in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003 on a special forces team -- "the lone US military presence in the entire eastern province of Nangarhar" -- and returned to Afghanistan as a journalist in 2006 and 2008. Paul drew my attention to yesterday's posted story on pederasty in Afghanistan by Joel Brinkley and kindly supplied the all too relevant photograph (see post). He also sent in the above photo, which he took of an Afghanistan National Army sergeant, noting:

The ANA sergeant did not know the boy, nor was related to him, but notice the affection of his body language -- and pride in having his photo taken. In fact, he requested it.

I can just hear grammar school teachers of America inculcating moral relativism into our children (something I wrote about in The Death of the Grown-Up, Chapter 7, "Identity"):"That's not gross; that's their culture."

OK. But does that mean that Americans should fight and die to do to protect it?

This sordid underside of the "good war" in Afghanistan has always been with us, but mostly under most radar. More, for example, from Gates of Vienna in 2008 in: Making the World Safe for Pederasty.

Little girls don't fare well in Afghanistan, either

And this ain't so hot, either:

Photo: "Afghan women line up to register as voters for parliamentary elections at a registration centre in Herat, Afgahnistan."

These are "women"? These are "voters"? Is someone kidding us? Uttlerly dehumanized according to Western lights, these pitiable creatures are not recognizable as either.

Joel Brinkley: Why Is America Fighting and Dying for Proud Pedophiles?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:52:00 GMT

Photo by Paul Avallone

Joel Brinkley, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, lifts a rock and finds Afghan culture -- predatory and abusive, twisted out of human shape by a fusion of Pashtun and Koranic influences.

Western forces fighting in southern Afghanistan had a problem. Too often, soldiers on patrol passed an older man walking hand-in-hand with a pretty young boy. Their behavior suggested he was not the boy's father. Then, British soldiers found that young Afghan men were actually trying to "touch and fondle them," military investigator AnnaMaria Cardinalli told me. "The soldiers didn't understand."

All of this was so disconcerting that the Defense Department hired Cardinalli, a social scientist, to examine this mystery. Her report, "Pashtun Sexuality," startled not even one Afghan. But Western forces were shocked - and repulsed.

This would appear to be the same report that Fox News obtained in January of this year, and wrote up here. It didn't go anywhere then -- mainstream-speaking. Will it get the urgent discussion it requires now (as in, what are we doing there, propping up a pederast culture)? Back to Brinkley:

For centuries, Afghan men have taken boys, roughly 9 to 15 years old, as lovers. Some research suggests that half the Pashtun tribal members in Kandahar and other southern towns are bacha baz, the term for an older man with a boy lover. Literally it means "boy player." The men like to boast about it.

"Having a boy has become a custom for us," Enayatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. "Whoever wants to show off should have a boy."

Baghlan province is in the northeast, but Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south. The Pashtun are Afghanistan's most important tribe. For centuries, the nation's leaders have been Pashtun.

President Hamid Karzai is Pashtun, from a village near Kandahar, and he has six brothers. So the natural question arises: Has anyone in the Karzai family been bacha baz? Two Afghans with close connections to the Karzai family told me they know that at least one family member and perhaps two were bacha baz. Afraid of retribution, both declined to be identified and would not be more specific for publication.

As for Karzai, an American who worked in and around his palace in an official capacity for many months told me that homosexual behavior "was rampant" among "soldiers and guys on the security detail. They talked about boys all the time."

He added, "I didn't see Karzai with anyone. He was in his palace most of the time." He, too, declined to be identified.

In Kandahar, population about 500,000, and other towns, dance parties are a popular, often weekly, pastime. Young boys dress up as girls, wearing makeup and bells on their feet, and dance for a dozen or more leering middle-aged men who throw money at them and then take them home. A recent State Department report called "dancing boys" a "widespread, culturally sanctioned form of male rape."

So, why are American and NATO forces fighting and dying to defend tens of thousands of proud pedophiles, certainly more per capita than any other place on Earth? And how did Afghanistan become the pedophilia capital of Asia?

Sociologists and anthropologists say the problem results from perverse interpretation of Islamic law. Women are simply unapproachable. Afghan men cannot talk to an unrelated woman until after proposing marriage. Before then, they can't even look at a woman, except perhaps her feet. Otherwise she is covered, head to ankle.

"How can you fall in love if you can't see her face," 29-year-old Mohammed Daud told reporters. "We can see the boys, so we can tell which are beautiful."

Even after marriage, many men keep their boys, suggesting a loveless life at home. A favored Afghan expression goes: "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." Fundamentalist imams, exaggerating a biblical passage on menstruation, teach that women are "unclean" and therefore distasteful. One married man even asked Cardinalli's team "how his wife could become pregnant," her report said. When that was explained, he "reacted with disgust" and asked, "How could one feel desire to be with a woman, who God has made unclean?"

That helps explain why women are hidden away - and stoned to death if they are perceived to have misbehaved. Islamic law also forbids homosexuality. But the pedophiles explain that away. It's not homosexuality, they aver, because they aren't in love with their boys.

Addressing the loathsome mistreatment of Afghan women remains a primary goal for coalition governments, as it should be.

But what about the boys, thousands upon thousands of little boys who are victims of serial rape over many years, destroying their lives - and Afghan society.

"There's no issue more horrifying and more deserving of our attention than this," Cardinalli said. "I'm continually haunted by what I saw."

As one boy, in tow of a man he called "my lord," told the Reuters reporter: "Once I grow up, I will be an owner, and I will have my own boys."

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Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times.

Permission to Stop the Call to Jihad? Denied in Denial

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:14:00 GMT

Roy, a teenaged, Iraqi interpreter, in 2007

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A platoon leader named Blake Hall has written a moving tribute in the Washington Post to a young Iraqi interpreter named Roy killed in a 2008 blast. The story includes the following anecdote, emblematic of the stunted mindset responsible for what should be recognized someday as America's wars of terrible waste in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hall, recalling events of the "surge" year of 2007, writes:

My platoon was patrolling Dora 12 hours a day, taking turns with another, and we were always tired. I had lost 20 pounds in two months because I usually chose sleeping over eating when we returned to the base. On the roof, the scouts and I were looking at one another with half-closed, bloodshot eyes when the muezzin in the mosque began chanting in Arabic. His voice streamed from the speakers strapped to the top of the minaret and reverberated off the concrete buildings.

Unlike the call to prayer, there was no "Allahu akbar," no pause after each recital, just a stream of words that sounded angry but were otherwise unintelligible to me. I checked my watch. It was too early for the second prayer of the day.

Sgt. Lesner, a scout who carried a grenade launcher beneath his carbine, asked, "What's up with the guy in the mosque freestyling, sir?"

"I don't know." I clicked my radio and asked the team downstairs to send Roy to a window so he could hear.

His voice crackled over my handset: "This is not good, sir. The imam is telling the neighborhood to rise up against the Americans. He is calling the men to jihad."

What did Hall do?

I ordered the platoon to full security, sent scouts running to grab rockets and extra ammunition from the trucks, and told the scout team leader to get two marksmen ready to fire on the mosque's speakers. I then radioed headquarters and requested permission to fire. But shooting at a mosque, even one inciting the neighborhood to attack us, would be a public relations nightmare for the Army.

Permission was denied, so my men and I sat and listened to the enemy organize an attack.

Ultimately, the men repulsed the ensuing attack without US casualties.

But let's mull this "public relations nightmare for the Army" that trumped the platoon leader's plan to stop the call to jihad. Incredibly, to the US Army brass, it was better for the platoon to just sit there and allow the call to jihad against the platoon (being the nearest infidel target) raise and psych up the maximum number of enemy forces than permit the platoon to stop the call to jihad by disabling the loudspeakers. Better to let the platoon take its chances, the Army believed, than risk a "public relations nightmare" by firing on mosque speakers broadcasting messages inciting local Iraqis to kill Americans.

Why? One obvious answer is the probable Al Jazeera response -- "Americans fire on mosque for no reason." But what else is new? And who fights a war paralyzed by the prospect enemy propaganda? (Don't answer that.) Why not have mounted our own pr campaign? Why not have started one against mosques inciting jihad to kill Americans?

Of course, a pr campiagn to stop the call to jihad would involve acknowleging the call to jihad -- not to mention acknowleging jihad, Islamic law and culture, dhimmitude, and a host of complicating factors the US has spent the past nine years avoiding in an array of see-no-Islam policy- and war-making. There's the Army's pr nightmare. But this chronic failure of nerve has resulted not only in fatally flawed strategic planning. It has showed our enemies that we are more afraid of the facts about the Islamic world than losing our own people, our materiel, our money, our prestige and power -- everything. No wonder any political talk of victory or success (or just plain silence about what it's all about) leaves nothing but hollow vibrations.

Of course, Hall and his men were lucky. They were only denied permission to disable a set of loud-speakers at a local mosque. I heard a report out of Afghanistan from a field grade officer about a US position, circa Bush administration, that was shelled 79 out of 100 days from an enemy position at a nearby mosque. Permission to call in an airstrike on the enemy position at the mosque was denied by Washington every time it was requested because the mosque was deemed a "cultural center."

Just sit there, boys, and respect Islam.

Sounds like Mayor Bloomberg's show-and-tell war on terror and tyranny in action.

Tolerance for the Intolerant Dooms Tolerance

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 16:34:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

"We are Americans, each with an equal right to worship and pray where we choose," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said this week. "There is nowhere in the five boroughs of New York City that is off limits to any religion."

Our founding documents guarantee that -- and not just in the five boroughs.

But the unprecedented furor over plans for a mosque complex at Ground Zero tells us there is a coalescing sense that Islam is more than a "mere" religion as non-Muslims conceive of "religion." It is becoming clear to people, despite the gag of political correctness, that there's a reason "Islam" means "submission." Islam not only seeks to order the spiritual realm inhabited by a Muslim and Allah, it lays out a doctrine to control every believer's behavior (down to the most intimate bodily functions) as well as the public life of the collective. Doctrinally, Islam is thus "doubly totalitarian" in the words of G.H. Bousquet, a leading scholar of Islamic law, in accordance with the body of law known as Shariah. Under Shariah, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech are outlawed with extreme sanction (those who leave Islam fear death to this day), while non-Muslims and women exist as legal inferiors to the Muslim man. Meanwhile, jihad -- holy war to extend Islamic rule -- is a sacred command. And I have the books that prove it.

In other words, this isn't Islam because I say so, but because its sacred, authoritative, mainstream, non-hijacked, untwisted texts say so. It is the religious and political and legal ideology that inspired the al-Qaida killers on 9/11, and it is the religious and political and legal ideology that inspires the mosque complex at Ground Zero. And I didn't come up with that, folks; I just happened to notice, and thought you should know.

The crucial fact is, whether we are brutalized by acts of jihad or confused by acts of dawa (proselytizing), their goal is identical: more Islamic law. And this end will always justify the means as seen, for example, back in 2005 when hundreds of acclaimed Islamic clerics and heads of state gathered in Amman, Jordan. There, quite anti-climactically, they issued the "Amman Message" that declares that no Muslim who adheres to a recognized school of Islam may be labeled an apostate. Subtext: Not even Osama bin Laden could be, in effect, ex-communicated or otherwise blackballed or removed from good standing by these Islamic authorities. One of the 552 signatories was Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

Bloomberg types are blind to these things, from the Shariah-spreading efforts of Rauf (noted here last week), to dictates of Shariah that subvert constitutional liberties. So, blindly, they sound platitudes in Islam's defense, plucking emotional chords that resonate with Americans about "liberty," "tolerance" and "religious freedom" on behalf of a belief system that, ultra-ironically, outlaws them all.

Bloomberg actually suggested that a failure to erect the mosque complex would "undermine our soldiers," "our foreign policy objectives" -- even "our national security."

"Just as we fought communism by showing the world the power of free markets and free elections," said Bloomberg, "so must we fight terrorism by showing the world the power of religious freedom and cultural tolerance. Freedom and tolerance will always defeat tyranny and terrorism -- that is the great lesson of the 20th century, and we must not abandon it here in the 21st."

It almost sounds wonderful -- until the froth dries and you remember that fighting tyranny is never as easy as show-and-tell. This is something that victims of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, for example, could explain to the mayor. Freedom and tolerance, regardless of how well they are exemplified, don't have a chance against tyranny and terrorism if they aren't vigilantly protected.

Indeed, tolerance is doomed if it is extended to the intolerant, something philosopher Karl Popper worked out in the last century. "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them. ... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."

For the sake of the Twin Towers that's a duty.

West Wins Florida GOP Primary

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Florida's District 22 -- Broward and Howard Counties -- is where it's at this election season with the splendid Col. Allen West (USA ret.) handily winning his GOP primary.

Said West:

"This evening, after nearly 2 years of hard work, our campaign to restore honor, integrity and character to Washington reached an important milestone. With a vast majority of the precincts having reported their results, we will have defeated David Brady by a margin of nearly 4 to 1. With GOP turnout significantly higher than democratic turnout throughout District 22, our victory tonight is proof that South Floridians are sick and tired of the status-quo in Washington, and are looking for leaders instead of politicians."

More here about the race for the House seat currently -- and temporarily! -- held by Democrat Rep. Ron Klein.

And more about Allen West in next week's column.

What Price "Leadership"?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:13:00 GMT

Brand new Yale teacher Stanley McChrystal will be hitting the lecture circuit and bringing in between $30,000 and $60,000 a pop, says CNN, when he isn't lecturing not exactly for free in a seminar called "Leadership," says the YDN blog Cross Campus. The course for 20 mainly grad students "will examine the way modern technologies and media and global politics present new challenges for leaders, with a focus on military leadership from 9/11 to the present day."

Does that mean like what happens when a commander talks trash in front of a reporter on one continent and it gets published on another?

Islamic Networking, Updated

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:24:00 GMT

From left to right: Kingdom Foundation director Muna Abu Sulayman, a happy Harvard official, Talal and wife Ameerah celebrating in 2008 Talal's $20 million purchase of -- I mean, donation to build -- an Islamic studies program at Harvard.

From a report by Paul Sperry at Worldnetdaily.com:

The Saudi prince whose post-9/11 relief check was rejected by former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani has found a more willing recipient in the city for his millions: the head of the Ground Zero mosque project.

The same Saudi potentate, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, owns the biggest chunk of the parent company of the Fox News Channel outside of the Murdoch family.

Dear Talal.

Former Bush advisers have similar ties to the prince and the proposed mega-mosque in Manhattan, which may explain why they've asked Republicans to soften their opposition to it.

WND has learned that one of the original board members of the nonprofit group promoting the 13-story mosque and "cultural center" took the job as a favor to James A. Baker III, the former President George H.W. Bush official and lawyer who defended Saudi government officials against a lawsuit filed by families of 9/11 victims. Baker has counted bin Talal as a client.

Bin Talal has pumped more than $300,000 into the project headed by New York imam Feisal Abdul Rauf as part of the prince's campaign to "improve the image of Islam in the American public." The prince's charitable foundation in 2008 gave $125,000 to Rauf, which came on the heels of an earlier $180,000 gift, according to the Arab press.

The foundation is run by Muna Abu Sulayman, a Saudi woman who appears on Rauf's website as one of its "Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow."

But not just any Saudi woman. Last summer, while trying to keep up withon Yale's tin-cup submission to Islamic prohibitions against depicting Mohammed in a Yale Press treatise about the Danish Mohammed cartoons, I ran across Muna Abu Sulayman, who was described as a Saudi Arabian "media personality," a newly minted Yale World Fellow, oh, and director of Talal's charitable foundation, which just oozes petrodollars. (I can just see Yale Prez Levin saying to Abu Sulayman over welcome-reception ~~gin and~~ tonics: Do you happen to have any with you?) Abusulayman, as reported by the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report (via Family Security Matters) also has a pedigree worth noting, particularly as we now she learn that, as a Rauf-sponsored (Cordoba Initiative-sponsored) "Muslim Leader of Tomorrow," she also administers the flow of Talal bucks into Rauf's project:

Ms. Muna Abu Sulayman is the daughter of Dr. AbdulHamid Abu Sulayman, one of the most important figures in the history of the global Muslim Brotherhood. According to various biographies, Dr. Abu Sulayman was born in Mecca, Saudi Arabia and received his BA and MA at the University of Cairo and a PhD in International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania in 1973. His global Muslim Brotherhood affiliations include:

Secretary General of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) (1973-79)
Chairman, Department of Political Science at King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, (1982-84)
Initial Board of Directors SAAR Foundation (1983)
Founding member of The Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS) (1972) and its former President, (1985-87)
Rector, International Islamic University Malaysia (1989-1999)

Dr. Abu Sulayman is currently Chairman of the Board and trustee of International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and its former president and founding member. IIIT was founded in the U.S. in 1980 by important members of the Global Muslim Brotherhood who wished to promote the “Islamization of Knowledge.” IIIT was associated with the now defunct SAAR Foundation, a network of Islamic organizations located in Northern Virginia that was raided by the Federal government in 2003 in connection with the financing of terrorism.

Updated:

Sperry's WND piece goes on to report:

After 9/11, Rauf co-founded the Cordoba Initiative with former Aspen, Colo., Mayor John S. Bennett, which explains why Cordoba's tax filings list an Aspen address.

During his four terms as mayor, Bennett was introduced to bin Talal and other Saudi royals, who own chalets and other properties in Aspen (Bennett's own home is valued at more than $2 million). Bin Talal met his second wife in Aspen.

Is that consecutive wife or concurrent?

Before taking over Cordoba as executive director, Bennett headed the Aspen Institute, which included among its board members former Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, as well as former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice has appeared with Rauf at events in Washington and overseas.

Aspen Institute recently launched the Middle East Leadership Initiative with "generous support" from Saudi Arabia. AbuSulayman, bin Talal's aide, is an Aspen Institute Middle East fellow.

Cordoba's tax filings show that Julia A. Jitkoff of Kingsville, Texas, was a director before resigning in 2007. Sources say the Texas socialite was sponsored by "longtime friend" Jim Baker, who sits on the board of her family's King Ranch holding company.

FEC records show Jitkoff and her family gave over $30,000 to the Bush-Cheney campaigns. Cordoba's 2008 IRS statement shows its books are kept by Kay Zimm of Kingsville.

According to bin Talal's biography, he and Baker met regularly in Houston to discuss business in the 1990s, when bin Talal was a Carlyle Group client of Baker. Joining them for business lunches at the Bayou Club was former President George H.W. Bush, a senior Carlyle adviser at the time.

Baker's Houston law firm, Baker & Botts, which defended Saudi officials against the 9/11 lawsuit, is one of the top international firms specializing in Shariah-compliant finance – another hobbyhorse of bin Talal.

Bin Talal in 2007 donated $250,000 to the James Baker III Institute at Rice University.

Bennett is also close to the Bush family. He graduated from both Yale University and Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass. In 2002, bin Talal donated $500,000 to help fund the George Herbert Walker Bush Scholarship at Phillips Academy.

The Cordoba documentary

The Cordoba Initiative is promoting the Ground Zero mosque. According to its tax filing, its mission statement, among other things, is to "address the root causes of international terrorism."

Cordoba was the center of the Islamic caliphate in Spain, and the Cordoba mosque was built over the cathedral there.

Rauf has also worked on a documentary film – "Out of Cordoba" – by New York director Jacob Bender, a peace activist and Islamic apologist. The 2008 film, for which Rauf is listed as an adviser, purports to document how Islam led Europe out of the Dark Ages.

"Cordoba was the most advanced city on the European continent," Bender says.

He also claims it was the most tolerant, allowing Christianity and Judaism to "coexist" with Islam....

He may claim it, but Andrew Bostom debunks it -- here.

Listed first among "major funders" backing the film: Alwaleed bin Talal Foundation.

Another backer is the Islamic Society of North America, which bin Talal also finances. The uncle of Rauf's wife, Daisy Khan, serves on ISNA's board. The U.S. government recently named ISNA an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest terror-finance case in U.S. history.

An ISNA affiliate – the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences – changed its name after federal agents raided its offices after 9/11 on suspicion of supporting terrorism. Northern Virginia-based GSISS is now known as Cordoba University.

It's a small umma.

Basic Training as Basic Submission

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 14:50:00 GMT

Winning hearts and minds means losing your own. It involves teaching defenders of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to "respect" an Islamic tribal culture (as advocated by Admiral Mullen and other leaders) that subjugates women, girls, boys and non-Muslims (assuming there are any of the last left in the country ), while increasingly assuming its customs -- from troops adopting native dress to a US admiral involving himself in the ritual slaughter of sheep, to redefining our very perceptions of reality.

Now, it's part of basic training.

From the Des Moines Register staff blogs (thanks to a vigilant Marine mom):

Camp Shelby, Miss. – Sgt. Eric Campbell did almost everything right in his first try at greeting an Afghan community leader, but he forgot about the gloves.

The Iowa National Guard cavalry sergeant walked confidently into a mock-up of an Afghan police office, where he warmly greeted a commander in a blue uniform shirt and red head scarf. He asked permission to take off his body armor and helmet, and he politely set down his rifle. Then he sat cross-legged on the carpet with his counterpart and an interpreter.

May he be permitted to take off his body armor and helmet?

During a 15-minute conversation, he maintained proper eye contact with the commander, and he used an interpreter to ask appropriate questions about the man’s family and his police force’s needs.

Needs. The continuing theme. Strike that -- the eternal theme -- of the Great Society in A-Stan.

“We need a lot of training for these people,” the commander replied in Dari, one of Afghanistan’s main languages. “We want lots of soldiers, too.” The previous American unit in town sent over a junior officer who never could deliver on his promises, the commander complained.

At what point -- who knows? -- does the role-playing commander start to believe this?

Campbell listened patiently and promised to do all he could to help the local police. Then he added, “God willing.”

That would be, "Inshallah." Allah willing. Redolent of Islamic concepts of pre-destination and all that. Why is an American non-Muslim being steeped in Islamic conventions even as he's giving away the US store?

In the end, the commander seemed satisfied. “You need to come here often, often,” he said.

"And bring more stuff," he should have added.

Campbell, 29, of Sioux City, had never done this sort of thing before. He was going through his first exercise in “key leader engagement” during a training session at Camp Shelby.

Engagement? The term implies a measure of equality that is absent in this demeaning training exercise.

Think of it: The young guardsman is trained to enter the Afghan police station, beg permission to doff his armor, ask all the right (read: obsequious) questions of the Afghan police officer, allow the Afghan police officer to run down the guardsman's American predecessor as a liar, and then offer unconditional aide -- that is, utterly fail to extract concessions of any kind, or make aid contingent on anything whatsoever. Who's the supplicant here -- the American benefactor and protector, or the Afghan drag and recipient?

And the critique is (below) that the he didn't show more ritualistic deference.

One of his soldiers, Spec. Broderick Miller of Sioux City, took notes. Seven other squad members watched, then critiqued the session.

One of the soldiers pointed out that Campbell forgot to take off his gloves before shaking the Afghan commander’s hand, which could be seen as disrespectful. Campbell made a little grimace as he recalled the incident.

A camp instructor, Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Payne, agreed Campbell should have taken his gloves off. But he said overall, the session went well.

“It may not always be that easy,” he warned. “There may be some tension. Sometimes, there may be a lot of tension.” It could take months to build rapport with a community leader, he said. Sometimes, it could prove impossible. ...

Sometimes.

Dawa, Uncle Sam-Style?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:12:00 GMT

The title of the excerped AP report below is "War doesn't rest for Islam holy month." But maybe the title should have been "Islam doesn't rest for war" -- as in doesn't let the war stop its dawa (proselytizing), only now that proselytizing is starting to a bit like Dawa, Uncle Sam-Style.

FORWARD OPERATING BASE WILSON, Afghanistan — “May you have a blessed Ramadan,” reads a poster greeting U.S. troops outside a base mess tent. It refers to Islam’s holiest month, a time of good deeds, prayer and purification of the spirit through sunrise-to-sunset fasting. ...

That would be a Happy Ramadan poster on a US base mess hall tent. Just curious: Does the military post Happy Hannukah, Merry X-mas and Yay Diwali (Hindu holiday) posters on mess hall tents as well?

The story goes on to note that jihad-joyous violence by-now traditionally spikes for US troops fighting wars during Ramadan in Dar al-Islam, although so far this season that has not been the case. But there are other Ramadan issues:

...Ramadan does create problems as U.S. forces pursue one of their most urgent priorities — training the Afghan National Army to a level where it could cope with the insurgency when the Americans begin withdrawing next summer. The Afghan soldiers can’t eat or drink during daylight hours, when U.S. soldiers must down bottle after bottle of water to counter the withering heat. As a result, the Americans must scale down the previously intense pace of training and reduce joint patrols.

“The Ramadan schedule is kicking us in the butt, but it’s also significant for the motivation and morale of the Afghan soldiers,” says Benchoff, who nightly joins his Afghan counterpart as he breaks fast with a meal of goat and rice. U.S. troops are told to minimize eating and drinking in front of the Afghans, who in turn have offered them instructions on Ramadan’s meaning and practices.

You could almost ask who's training whom.

Stoning: A Nightmare

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:07:00 GMT

Tariq Ramadan holds an MA in Philosophy and French literature and PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Geneva. In Cairo, Egypt he received one-on-one intensive training in classic Islamic scholarship from Al-Azhar University scholars. He is currently Professor of Islamic Studies at Oxford University while also teaching at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford. He is at the same time Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha Universoty in Japan and president of the European think tank European Muslim Network. He has called for a moratorium on the shariah-sanctioned practice of stoning.

---

This week's column:

Stonings at Ground Zero -- that'll be the day, right? The concept has no manifestation beyond the cold sweat of a dark-hours nightmare. Still, there's something worth gleaning from the not-so-free association process that inspired it.

It clicked when I read a riveting investigation by Christine Brim at BigPeace.com into scrubbed website material of the Cordoba Initiative, the Internet home of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, he of the Ground Zero Mosque. In this trove of information, curiously deleted from the current Cordoba Initiative website, lie key clues to Rauf's long-term program, the Shariah Index Project, whose "goal," as stated in the "hidden" material, is to "define, interpret and implement the concept of the Islamic state in modern times."

What is Shariah? It is the body of sacred laws that regulates public and private life in Islam. How does the Shariah Index Project fit into the planned mosque complex? Very easily, argues Brim. After accounting for the 13-story building's stated uses, from its mosque to its athletic and other facilities, Brim identified six undesignated stories. That's a lot of empty office space. But with its global spread, the Shariah Index Project just might be the perfect tenant.

Since 2006, Rauf has coordinated a series of international meetings with Shariah experts ranging from Muslim Brotherhood associates to Iran's Mohammad Javad Larijani, "who," as Brim reports, "has justified torture of Iranian dissidents as legal punishments under Shariah law."

That's not all Larijani, who heads Iran's Human Rights Council (for real), has justified. He has also justified Shariah-sanctioned stoning. As Anne Bayefsky recently reported, Rauf's picture with Larijani (and former U.S. ambassador to the Organization of the Islamic Conference Sada Cumber) disappeared from the Cordoba Initiative website, too.

So much to hide -- but the Shariah is out of the bag.

What would expanding Shariah mean here? More halal-butchered livestock leading, as in Europe, to halal-only menus? More midnight football practice during Ramadan? More sex-segregated swimming pools? More incitement to jihad in "radical" mosques? More "apostates" living in fear? More self-censorship, I mean "respect," when it comes to discussing Islam?

An excellent benchmark of Shariah's remarkable and, think of it, post-9/11 progress is that none of the above manifestations of Islamic law -- all designed to sync society with Islamic practice -- are shocking to us. Indeed, marital rape, permissible in Shariah culture wherever it spreads, got a "religious" pass from a New Jersey judge last month (overturned by an appellate court). Death by stoning, however, still seems to take everybody's breath away as those who read about last weekend's Taliban stoning in Afghanistan, I hope, would agree.

In brief, a couple -- he, 25, married and with 2 kids; she, 19 -- eloped before being lured to return to their town. They were then seized by the Taliban, who, as the New York Times reported, convened a Shariah court of mullahs from surrounding villages.

Verdict? Guilty. More than 200 local villagers, including family members, proceeded to stone the couple to death. "People were very happy seeing this," a local told the paper, who described a "festive" atmosphere.

"Let me tell you that according to Shariah law, if someone commits a crime like that, we have our courts and we deal with such crimes based on Islamic law," said a Taliban spokesman. The paper noted: "Perhaps most worrisome were signs of support for the action from mainstream religious authorities in Afghanistan."

"Worrisome," indeed -- particularly to American soldiers advised to remove their protective ballistic glasses and get to know these people. (Repeat after me, as Gen. Petraeus says: "The human terrain is the decisive terrain.") Still, Kunduz Province is not Lower Manhattan. Why the bad dreams about stoning?

I promised a study in free association. Imam Rauf's efforts to advance Shariah law, which sanctions stoning, have involved Iran's "human rights" chief, a public advocate of stoning. What next sprang to mind was the polished and educated form of Tariq Ramadan, the celebrated European Muslim "moderate" and grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna. Why? Infamously, Ramadan has refused to condemn stoning, calling merely for a "moratorium." Once, Ramadan's "moderate" stoning position stood out; now it fits into the nightmare -- only not for Ramadan, or Rauf or Larijami.

For them, at Ground Zero and elsewhere, the Shariah dream continues.

The Problem with COIN (I Think) or: 沃勒斯坦：在世界萧条中无可选择

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:48:00 GMT

Word about COIN seems to be getting around:

某些行动确实采取了。拉姆斯菲尔德让布什总统解除了职务。拉姆斯菲尔德最强大的辩护人副总统切尼，其影响力输给了国务卿康多莉扎·赖斯和拉姆斯菲尔德的继任罗伯特·盖茨，后者倡导更“温和”的观点，强调运用外交手段。新军事战略突然之间获得了支持，即反叛乱[counter- insurgency]（用缩 COIN表示）。它是由先前不知名的军官戴维·彼得雷乌斯[David Petraeus]提出来的。

...

奥巴马能做什么？他不得不解除麦克里斯特尔的职务。随后，他把这个热土豆扔给了无法拒绝的彼得雷乌斯。今后一两年将是一个快速运动的游戏，奥巴马和彼得雷乌斯将努力把公众对失败的抱怨转移到对方身上。

极右派，切尼和拉姆斯菲尔德的朋友们，没有上当。他们的一个所谓权威人士戴安娜·韦斯 Diana West说：“COIN噩梦仍在继续。”对她而言，COIN意味着命令军队“操练文化相对主义的幻想，这在一个讲究政治正确的教室里有左倾的意味，但在前线却是极端愚蠢的。”一个多少不那么刻薄的观点是退休上校道格拉斯·麦格雷戈[Col. Douglas Macgregor]提出的：“以为我们会花费上千亿美元重新塑造伊斯兰世界的文化，这种看法完全是胡扯。”

....

Morocco's Hassan II: "Shariah Is Written in Our Hearts Whether One Wants It or Not"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:22:00 GMT

From the late king's mouth via Gates of Vienna (subtitles by Vlad Tepes).

Terminal Tolerance

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:59:00 GMT

We've been hearing more talk, buzz and chatter about Shariah lately than I imagined was possible. Unfortunately, much of it is still uninformed and reliant only on the emotional bouyance of 9/11, as though the battleground of Lower Manhattan is the only place a Shariah-advancing imam should be barred from building an anti-Constitutional outpost of Islam. Defenders of the mosque project, meanwhile, exhale testaments to religious freedom and tolerance that crest and crash over the apparently unimagined, unknown, ungrasped perils to liberty, equality and freedom of conscience that are actually advertised in Islam's mainstream tenets. We must support this mosque, we are told, lest we become, as MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell actually said on the air (without blushing, fainting or otherwise convulsing), like the 9/11 jihadists. But this is a kind of tolerance without limits.

And how virtuous is that? The British philosopher Karl Popper formulated his answer more than a half century ago.

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them.... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade (Italics added.)

As the situation vis a vis the Shariah-spreading, Wahhabi-supporting, Qaradawi-admiring, taqiyya** (deception) - mongering, open-to-jihad-funding Imam Fesial Rauf tells us, the West is now at the point where enforcing “openness” trumps preserving “tolerance.” In other words, better to be “open” to intolerance (read: Islamic doctrine as codified in the Shariah on women, non-Muslims, freedom of conscience) than “closed” to anything -- including intolerance. There is some ripe irony in the fact, according to this mindset, that tolerating the intolerant becomes the ultimate act of openness -- literally “ultimate,” as Popper tells us, since tolerance of the intolerant leads to the destruction of the tolerant.

Call it terminal tolerance.

With several changes, from The Death of the Grown-Up, pp. 161-162

----

** Taqiyya is Islamically sanctioned deception. When I first ventured onto Imam Rauf's Cordoba Initiative website earlier this year, I found this classic example, now scrubbed from the site, along with other extremely interesting information, as Christine Brim startlingly reports at Big Peace.com (more on that in this week's column):

Here's what I saved from the Cordoba Initiative website, circa May 2010:

The Qur’an makes it clear that Mohammed did not establish his new faith in a vacuum; he simply reinstated a primordial religion originally founded by Abraham, making it accessible to all of humanity.

Catch the blenderizing of Judaism and Christianity into Islam.

Because of this, Jews and Christians (known in Islam as “People of the Book”) are seen as brothers and sisters of Muslims and common followers of scripture. Forced conversion, as a result, was never a policy of Muslim conquerors during the period of Islam’s spread.

Never (no, not much)!

Instead, Jews and Christians living under Muslim rule simply had to pay a tax to finance their protection by their Muslim overlords.

"Simply had to pay a tax" ... Sounds greatl Gee, where do we sign up? The Ground Zero Mosque?

In the post-9/11 environment, some Americans tend to think of Islam as a violent creed and of those who practice jihad as terrorists by definition. Jihad, however, is a large and complicated concept, whose meaning actually boils down to the need for peaceful struggle for self-betterment—the war that we wage against the vices within ourselves—

like Weight Watchers.

-- a central injunction to all Muslims. That Americans associate Islam with violence is, of course, entirely the fault of the extremists who perpetrate crimes under a false Islamic guise.

Lies. But not because I say so. Because Islam says so. From Reliance of the Traveller, the multi-mufti and Al Azhar approved guide to Shariah (that every American should study to learn about Shariah):

o9.0

(O: Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is a spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet ... said as he was returning from from jihad,

"We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad."

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus (def. b7) is such Koranic verses as:

(1) "Fighting is prescribed for you" (Koran 2:216)

(2) "Slay them wherever you find them" (Koran 4:89) ...

It goes on from there, moving from the Koran to the Hadiths (lore of Mohammed) but the gist is clear.

The Rauf site failed to come clean about a crucial, authoritative definition of jihad; in fact, the only definition of jihad that actually matters to -- and endangers -- non-Muslims. That is, it's all very nice if Muslims successfully take up their greater jihads on a personal level, but it's the so-called lesser jihad (holy war) to Islam (submission) that counts for everyone else.

Flimflamming jihad -- how "moderate" is that?

Dubai Mike?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:20:00 GMT

Here's something bouncing around the Internet that just might explain that special gleam in Mayor Bloomberg's eye when he $aid, in the name of tolerance (sniff), that the Ground Zero Mosque was welcome in NYC.

Khaleej Times headline from October 2009:

"Bloomberg Set for Dubai Hub Expansion in Bid to Double Revenues by 2014"

Sigh. A beautiful thought.

(Better be careful though.)

Looks Like the Fix Is In: Russia's Polish Crash Investigation

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 16:13:00 GMT

My most recent column:

It's never been clear what really happened on that foggy morning of April 10 when a Polish airplane crashed on a Russian runway, killing all 96 people aboard including Polish President Lech Kaczynski, cabinet ministers, military service chiefs, intelligence officials, the central bank president, parliamentarians, historians, decapitating the conservative government and gutting the country's elite.

Given the occasion -- the 70th anniversary of the Soviet Union's long-denied massacre of 22,000 Poles at Katyn Forest -- and given many of the crash victims' dedication to exposing Soviet-era treachery and opposing Putin-era Russian expansionism, was the crash, as reported, an epically tragic accident? Even as the Russians immediately cited "pilot error" (they did wait, as former CIA officer Eugene Poteat has noted, until after the plane had gone down), they also pledged to Poland a joint, transparent investigation. But four months later, Russian obfuscation casts doubt on both notions: pilot error and Russian cooperation. Little wonder that Polish parliamentarian Antoni Marcierewicz, a member of the late president's conservative Law and Justice Party, has recently announced a parliamentary probe into the crash, which he calls a "crime."

What sort of crime? I caught up with the story's latest twists at BigPeace.com (where I am a contributor) in a post called "Polish Airplane Crash Cover-Up?" After seeking attribution for the post's more sensational clues from a Polish journalist, I believe that "cover-up" might turn out to be the least of the problem.

Point one. Russia hasn't turned over the plane's black boxes to Polish investigators. This may well follow an odd, post-crash agreement between the two countries, whereby Russia provides Poland with recordings of the black boxes and Poland controls the recordings' release (typical Russian-Polish agreement). But it also hoists a red flag over the entire investigative process. After all, "who" might have done "what" to a black box in a Russian recording studio?

Meanwhile, writing in the Polish newspaper Nasz Dziennik, some Polish pilots have challenged the authenticity of the recordings. Among other aeronautical reasons, they cited the length of the transcript, which appears to exceed the 30-minute capacity of a black box tape. The pilots also noted the transcript is missing the signature of the sole Polish expert involved. Further, Polish Radio RMF has reported that one of the Russian-made black-box recordings contains a 16-second gap.

Good thing no non-partisan, international team of investigators is examining this international mystery, right? Much better that the United Nations, for example, is currently squeezing Israel for defending its lawful naval blockade on Gaza (and concurrent offers to shuttle seaborne humanitarian aid to Gaza via land). With former KGB officer Vladimir Putin having personally taken charge of the crash investigation, why worry?

Point two. The Polish newspaper Fakt reported that three days after the crash, the air traffic controller on duty during the fatal crash disappeared. The Russians say he retired -- and no, they don't know where he is. Uh-huh.

At the website of the Institute of World Politics where he teaches, ex-CIA officer Eugene Poteat writes that Russians "stripped the 97 dead passengers of personal effects, luggage, laptop computers, flash drives, cell phones, sensitive papers, names, telephone numbers, correspondence, documents, and top secret military and diplomatic codes -- a coup for Russia's intelligence service. ... The Russians delayed for weeks before returning the less sensitive items, but kept items of intelligence value. The bodies were shipped to Moscow for `autopsies.' No Polish medical people were permitted as witnesses. ... The bodies were returned to Poland in sealed coffins for burial and families of the victims were not permitted to open the coffins."

And why was that? Some survivors are exploring the autopsy process to find out, with one parliamentarian's widow planning to exhume her late husband's corpse to learn more about the crash circumstances.

"Poland has no doubts about Russia's good will in investigating crash," read a headline from the Russian wire service Itar-Tass on Aug. 7. The story quoted a Polish minister complaining about gaps in Russia's evidence -- not that this minister for a moment doubted Russia's investigatory good will. For its part, Russia maintains it has already handed over everything to Poland. "There is nothing more to transfer," said Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov.

At least nothing more that wouldn't lift the fog on this mystery.

Wackier and Wackier: State Dept. Requests Own Army to Secure Its Mission to Train Police

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:58:00 GMT

US Navy Photo: Iraqi police recruits at Karbala Police Academy, March 2009

----

From the Washington Post:

As the last U.S. combat troops prepare to leave Iraq this month, the State Department is struggling to implement an expanded mission that it has belatedly realized it might not be able to afford.

Money isn't the only problem. The "expanded mission" comes down to the surreal exercise of (still) training (demonstrably untrainable) Iraqi police.

Beginning in September, the State Department will take over all police training in Iraq from coalition military forces, and it has proposed replacing its current 16 provincial reconstruction teams spread across the country with five consular offices outside Baghdad.

But since planning for the transition began more than two years ago, costs have skyrocketed and the money to pay for them has become increasingly tight. Congress cut the State Department's Iraq request in the 2010 supplemental appropriation that President Obama signed late last month; the Senate Appropriations Committee and a House subcommittee have already slashed the administration's $1.8 billion request for fiscal 2011 operations in Iraq.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the outgoing commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and other U.S. officials are urging lawmakers to reconsider their plans, citing concerns that waning resources could jeopardize tenuous security gains.

"We can't spread ourselves so thin that we don't have the capacity to do the job in the places where we put people," said Deputy Secretary of State Jacob Lew, who has told Congress that State will not deploy civilians where it cannot protect them. "If we don't put people in a place where they have mobility, where they can go out and meet with the people and implement their programs," he said, "there's very little argument for being in the place we send them."

Get it? First, the military phase: Go out and meet with the people; oh, and and restore security (all hail "the surge"). Then, the civilian phase: go out and meet with the people some more and implement programs -- for instance, police training.

The State Department has signaled in recent weeks that it will need up to $400 million more than initially requested to cover mushrooming security costs, but lawmakers seem in no mood to acquiesce.

"They need a dose of fiscal reality," a senior Senate aide said, speaking on the condition of anonymity amid ongoing negotiations over the State Department funding....

And a chaser of plain-vanilla reality.

Lew, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies last week, indicated that State might be forced to revise its plans, including limiting the number of police-training facilities to fortified, central locations in major population areas. "That means there will be other places that we don't have a police-training capacity," he said, although "anyone who has done police training in difficult environments knows that it's much better to be out in the field, working one-on-one, than to do classroom training." ...

What to do?

To undertake unprecedented tasks in what is still a highly dangerous environment, the State Department plan calls for replacing protection for civilians that the U.S. military now provides with what amounts to its own armed force. It proposes to triple the current 2,700 security contractors and reinforce facilities where diplomats and police trainers will work to specifications beyond what the military considers safe for its own personnel.

To transport civilians around Iraq, including medical evacuation if necessary, State has asked the Pentagon to leave behind two dozen UH-60 helicopters and 50 bomb-resistant vehicles, heavy cargo trucks, fuel trailers and high-tech surveillance systems -- all of which are to be maintained and operated by contractors yet to be funded. Pending since April, the requests were still under military consideration as of this week. ...

Congress hasn't bought the argument, first articulated by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton when she introduced the budget in February, that State's Iraq proposal is a bargain compared with the $16 billion overall the U.S. government will save in reduced military costs after a reduction to 50,000 U.S. troops at the end of this month.

While defense appropriators are used to such funding levels, they are astronomical to lawmakers overseeing the State Department, whose global operations budget request totals about $16 billion for 2011. An additional $36 billion has been requested for worldwide foreign assistance programs.

Call it the Stimulus Department.

But even the defense committees are balking at what Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has called an unsustainably bloated Pentagon budget and continued expenditures for Iraq. The military's request for $2 billion to equip and bolster the Iraqi armed forces next year -- on top of $18 billion spent since 2003 -- was cut in half by the Senate Armed Services Committee this summer. Defense officials have asked for the decision to be reconsidered.

"They've got a surplus of oil revenue," Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), whose Armed Services Committee halved to $1 billion the Iraq military equipment request, said in an interview last week. "And we've got a tight budget here. Connect that with the fact that we've got a damned big budget deficit of our own. A billion dollars seems to me to be a very generous contribution."

Very pointless, too.

In an interview, Odierno said there was a "misinterpretation that Iraq has this huge amount of wealth now," adding that it is unlikely the country will substantially boost its output of crude oil before 2013.

Money for the Iraqi military is important, he said, to help "mitigate the risks associated with U.S. forces leaving." The 50,000 U.S. troops who will remain in Iraq after Sept. 1 are due to leave by the end of next year.

And we get so much for our money...

Officials in Washington said that the Defense and State cuts were interconnected in several ways, including the expectation that the Iraqi military could assist in providing security for an increased American civilian presence as the U.S. military relinquishes that task.

But while Iraqis are providing some help, officials said they were not yet comfortable depending on them. "We want to work with both the Iraqi army and the Iraqi police in bolstering our security," a senior administration official said. "That has to be worked out in terms of the availability of trained personnel, and it will take time to achieve it.

"I'm not saying it's never going to happen. I'm just saying it's not going to happen tomorrow."

How about in a one hundred years?

Eyeless in A-Stan

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 11:18:00 GMT

This week's column:

"Live our values," Gen. David Petraeus wrote recently to troops in Afghanistan. "This is what distinguishes us from our enemies."

Unfortunately, this is also what distinguishes us from many of our "friends." This culture-chasm is what makes the infidel struggle for hearts and minds across Islamic lands so recklessly, wastefully futile, something I was once again reminded of on reading Time magazine's cover story featuring 18-year-old Aisha. Aisha is a lovely Afghan girl whose husband and brother-in-law, on instructions from a local judge and Taliban commander, sliced off her ears and nose and left her dying to set an example for other wives thinking of running away from abusive in-laws. Only her discovery by U.S. troops saved Aisha's life.

But where was Aisha's father? Where was her family? Where were her town's elders? Where was Hamid Karzai? Turns out her family did nothing to protect her from the Taliban, Time writes. Why? The magazine describes a mixture of fear and shame that I hope still strikes the average American family as so foreign as extra-terrestrials. Time further explains: "A girl who runs away is automatically considered a prostitute ... and families that allow them back home would be subject to widespread ridicule." When Aisha's father enticed her home with promises of a new husband, the girl refused because she was fearful that her family would sell her into slavery, or murder her.

Similar scenarios play out beyond the wilds of the Taliban zone wherever Sharia culture flowers, an expanding zone that now includes urban centers of the Western world -- from Berlin to London to Atlanta to Calgary -- where previously unimagined assaults on women and girls are taking place almost exclusively from within Islamic communities. This gruesome fact renders Time's cover line -- "What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan" -- absurdly provincial in scope. That is, it's not only in Afghanistan where Islamic men have dominion over Islamic women. It is wherever Islamic law, de facto or de jure, empowers them.

It is into this brutish society that American and NATO troops have again been ordered to mix, this time by Gen. Petraeus who believes, as a Pentagon release put it, "meeting and understanding the people is the main mission for military forces." Calling for more interaction with "the people," Petraeus told his forces: "Take off your sunglasses. Situational awareness can only be gained by interacting face to face, not separated by ballistic glass or Oakleys." This last bit inspired a note from a Marine mom who reminded me that eye protection is what defends our soldiers from blast-borne fragments that cause blindness or brain injuries.

Petraeus seems bent on stripping our men bare, almost literally, to make them symbols of a non-threatening openness that he and other counterinsurgency (COIN) zealots insist will win what he calls "the decisive terrain" -- aka, the Afghan people. Of course, that same "terrain" includes not only poor Aisha, but also her cowardly, complicit father, her murderous in-laws, her acquiescent town elders, and corrupto-crat Karzai, whose silence on the plight of women worries observers already concerned about Kabul's and Washington's overtures to the Taliban. Meanwhile, as one female Afghan parliamentarian estimated to Time, fewer than a dozen of the 68 female parliamentarians in Afghanistan support women's rights. Time writes: "The rest -- proxies for conservative men who boosted them into power -- aren't interested."

Aren't interested? Incredible -- at least to people who believe that for a battered bride, no-fault divorce beats slavery and murder. To Sharia-culturalists, however, such "women's rights" violate their code. This is something that Westerners, convinced they are born to be loved and envied, can't grasp. "Is America going to abandon the women of Afghanistan?" an overwrought Christiane Amanpour demanded of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on ABC, brandishing Time's Aisha edition.

It is Islam that abandoned these women, Christiane, not America, and not just in Afghanistan. Whether prisoners of Islamic law or promoters or Islamic law, such women are beyond the reach of America's ineffectual attempts at "nation-building" -- unless, of course, the nation being built is also wholly de-Sharified. Short of a intergalactic missionary movement enforced by robo-conquistadors, that ain't going to happen.

"Live your values," says Gen. Petraeus. "This is what distinguishes us from our enemies." Amen, general. But how about living them -- and guarding them against Sharia -- at home?

On Vaca

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:33:00 GMT

Michelle Obama and I are both on vacation this week -- just not together. She, along with 40 of her "closest friends" (and 70 Secret Service agents), is celebrifying it up on Spain's Costa del Sol; I'm freeloading at my mom's in New England (with the family dogs).

Of course, what American could afford more after paying for Michelle's $2,500 a night hotel room -- or at least whatever the 70 Secret Service agents' room-and-board cost?

The New Daily News' Andrea Tantaros gets it right in her report:

Material girl Michelle Obama is a modern-day Marie Antoinette on a glitzy Spanish vacation

Tantaros asks:

...why not select a more appropriate destination like the California coast? The scenery is just as gorgeous as that of Spain, and instead of patronizing a foreign country they would be pumping money into an American economy that desperately needs it. Camp David wouldn't exactly be slumming it, either. A long weekend there would really send a message of responsibility, leadership and compassion. For a couple that has sharply criticized former President George W. Bush so widely, they could stand to follow his example for once and select a more low-key locale, as Bush regularly did in his Texas vacations.

Instead, Michelle Obama seems more like a modern-day Marie Antoinnette - the French queen who spent extravagantly on clothes and jewels without a thought for her subjects' plight - than an average mother of two. ...

I don't begrudge anyone rest and relaxation when they work hard. We all need downtime - the First Family included. It's the extravagance of Michelle Obama's trip and glitzy destination contrasted with President Obama's demonization of the rich that smacks of hypocrisy and perpetuates a disconnect between the country and its leaders. Toning down the flash would humanize the Obamas and signify that they sympathize with the setbacks of the people they were elected to serve.

Let them eat tapas?

Cameron's Shortcut through Turkey to "Eurabia"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:56:00 GMT

This week's column:

The battle over whether to admit Turkey into the European Union seems eternal, at least among the EU's rulers. Among the peoples of Europe, when granted the rare chance to go to the ballot box -- increasingly window-dressing as far as the EU's soft totalitarians are concerned -- there is little argument. In fact, there is bona fide consensus: NO to Turkey becoming a part of Europe. Why? Because, culturally and historically, it is not.

Tell that to British Prime Minister David Cameron, who just visited Ankara to present himself as Europe's leading booster for Turkish EU membership (a move the United States has meddlesomely supported), pandering so low a prayer rug could give him cover.

Dubbing himself Turkey's "strongest possible advocate for EU membership and for greater influence at the top table of European diplomacy," Cameron gave a speech that also attacked "those who willfully misunderstand Islam" and who "see no difference between real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists."

Of course, such a description likely irked Cameron's host, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan has repeatedly criticized those who make the distinction between "moderate" and "extremist" Islam. "These descriptions are very ugly," Erdogan said in 2007. "It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that's it." Further, Erdogan in 2009 specifically rejected descriptions of Turkey as being an example of "moderate Islam." Enlarging on a theme, Erdogan in 2008 told Turks living in Europe that assimilation is "a crime against humanity."

But Cameron aimed to please. And no doubt he did, especially with his stunning denunciation of Israel for its blockade of Gaza, a defensive measure that Israel devised after Hamas terrorists were elected to govern Israel-ceded Gaza in 2005 and -- no surprise to any student of jihad -- decided to continue their charter-commanded war on Israel, raining down nearly 10,000 rockets onto Israeli civilians. Dubbing Gaza a "prison camp," Cameron also attacked Israel for the May shipboard battle to defend its blockage that pitted Israeli commandos, lightly armed with paintball guns and emergency sidearms, against trained fighters with ties to the Turkish government, specifically to Erdogan's ruling AKP party.

Little wonder that before the day was over -- at some point after Britain hired itself out, as Cameron put it, for the job of "paving the road from Ankara to Brussels" -- Erdogan had hailed a "golden age" of Turkish-British relations.

Of course, giving EU membership to Turkey would be a political move with more than political consequences. Demographically alone, it would accelerate those finishing touches on the Islamization of Europe as Turkey's tens of millions of Muslims entered a largely post-Christian, secular European society, bringing a weighty Islamic influence on European law. Could the total transformation to "Eurabia" be far behind?

This is the salient question that is never asked. Instead, the debate is deceptively framed as a civil rights issue, as though the EU were a pointlessly exclusive Neanderthal society, or supposedly obsolete men's club.

"We know what it's like to be shut out of a club," Cameron said, referring to Charles de Gaulle's efforts to block British entry into the European organization. "Europe can either decide to become a global actor or it can fence itself off as a Christian club," Erdogan has said.

Never mind the EU's deliberate omission of "God" or "Christianity" in its 439-page constitution. And never mind Turkey's having "fenced itself off" into the most exclusive "club" of all: the supremacist Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). Turkey is also a signatory to the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, a distinctly Islamic version of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights that is informed by Sharia (Islamic law) rather than what the West recognizes as universal human rights. The Cairo Declaration declares that the Muslim community's role is to "guide" humanity, a point that isn't "clubby" but is downright imperialist.

But there is another implication to the debate: that Western identity is merely an atavistic expression of petty insularity. Free will, free conscience -- the evolution of individual liberty -- is the fruit of Judeo-Christian civilization, one that Islamic doctrine is unable to produce.

Tragically, it is also one that Westerners are throwing away.

"I've Taken Full Responsibility. Jeez"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:11:00 GMT

The Colorado GOP's Scott McInnis: Giving new meaning to responsibility

---

I don't pretend to have mastered the ins and outs of a hot and hotly contested race for the governor's mansion in Colorado where US borders angel, former presidential candidate and former GOP Rep. Tom Tancredo is now making good on his threat to enter the primary race as a third-party candidate if lame-o GOP candidates didn't drop out and the state party didn't put up credible candidates.

One of the non-credibles staying in the race is the ethically challenged Republican Scott McInnis, who, as Coloradoan.com puts it, is plagued by "the controversy surrounding the plagiarized water writings he produced as part of a two-year, $300,000 agreement with the Hasan Family Foundation after he left Congress in 2005."

What's up with that? McInnis seems to bristle at the question. At a recent appearance, the Coloradoan reports:

McInnis did not discuss the controversy surrounding the plagiarized water writings he produced as part of a two-year, $300,000 agreement with the Hasan Family Foundation after he left Congress in 2005, even though at least one member of the audience asked him before his speech to better explain what he had done.

"I said, this $300,000, what was it for, I mean, what was it really for?" said Kareen Davison, who describes herself as an active Republican.

"He said it was for a number of things that I did over several years. And I said OK, then why don't you e-mail me that information? I'll be glad to try to help you get it out," she said in an interview.

McInnis grew visibly annoyed when reporters for the Denver Post and Coloradoan asked him about Davison's concerns after his speech.

He repeated several times that he had taken full responsibility for the plagiarism revealed by the Denver Post and KMGH TV.

But when asked about Davison's broader question of what he did for the $300,000 over two years from the Hasan Family Foundation, McInnis snapped: "I'm not getting into it. We're done. I've taken full responsibility. Jeez."

He briefly walked away from reporters, then stopped and said he would answer questions on other issues.

Unless "I've Taken Full Responsibility. Jeez" replaces The Buck Stops Here in the annals of leadership, I don't think McInnis will be Colorado's next governor.

Go Tancredo.

Yale on The Vineyard

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 20:24:00 GMT

Some people just know how to live. Take those Yalies lucky enough to summer on "the Vineyard" -- Martha's natch. They all look forward to:

Yale Day in the Sun!

From Yale Vineyard Alumni:

Please join the Yale family for our “Yale Day in the Sun on Martha’s Vineyard.”

GnT's? Boating? Croquet maybe? Not exactly.

Enjoy an afternoon of intellectual stimulation, reconnecting with old friends and meeting new ones.

Yeah?

The afternoon begins with lectures from two of our esteemed Yale colleagues, Master Jonathan Holloway, Professor of History, African American Studies and American Studies presenting, “The Right Kind of People: The Silences in a Civil Rights Narrative.” And Omer Bajwa, Coordinator of Muslim Life at Yale presenting, “Muslim Life at Yale and Beyond: Engaging the Sacred & the Secular.”

Then have fun in the sun with a cocktail reception.

I don't know Master Holloway, but what could be more fun -- in or out of the sun -- than a lecture on "silences in a civil rights narrative"? As for Omer Bajwa, Yale's "Muslim victory" chaplain? A regular laugh riot as regular readers of this blog already know. Bajwa reportedly told an Islamabad audience "Muslims will win the final victory in the West if they conform to their beliefs and disseminate the message of Islam with wisdom and politeness"

Whatever will he say next?

Cheers.

German "Conservative" Ultimatum: Disinvite Geert Wilders or Be Expelled from Post

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:03:00 GMT

Photo: German CDU politician Rene Stadtkewitz faces a political purge for inviting Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders to Berlin

From Spiegel Online:

A local Berlin politician ... is under fire for inviting Dutch populist Geert Wilders to a meeting on Islam on October 2. Rene Stadtkewitz, who is known for his anti-Islamic views, has refused to cancel the invitation, and now faces eviction from his party's parliamentary group in the city assembly ....

Rene Stadtkewitz, 45, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), looks set to be excluded from the CDU's parliamentary group in the Berlin city assembly after inviting Wilders to Berlin on October 2 to discuss integration and Islam. He had also discussed founding a branch of Wilders' Freedom Party in Germany.

Frank Henkel, the CDU's regional parliamentary group leader, gave Stadtkewitz an ultimatum: Withdraw the invitation by July 26 or face the consequences.

Stadtkewitz refused in an open letter in which he also suggested that the CDU should be doing more to combat Islam politically. Up until now, public debate about the Islamic faith had been "too timid" in Germany, Stadtkewitz wrote. He added that the debate should focus on the defense of freedom and of Christian values, including concerns about "countless young women, who are forced into arranged marriages, enslaved and who sometimes become victims of so-called honor killings."

'No Place in Our Party'

Henkel responded Monday by saying that he would propose a motion to exclude Stadtkewitz from the parliamentary group because he had distanced himself from "the goals of the conservatives."

Heil, the Great German Caliphate!

Henkel said Berlin set a positive example of integration and immigration for the whole of Germany. "There is no place in our party for people who demonize Islam and pass judgment on believers in other religions," Henkel explained.

For more on the glories of intergration and immigration, particularly in Berlin, read Bundesbank director Thilo Sarrazin's views here. Sarrazin's blunt take on Germany's Islamic immigration woes includes the proposition that Berlin never recovered intellectually or artistically from having murdered its Jewish population during the Nazi regime, with the resulting vaccuum having been filled by left-wing activists, drop-outs and a Turkish-Arab underclass.

Back to the Spiegel story on the Stadtkewitz Purge:

The party looks likely to back the motion to exclude Stadtkewitz from the parliamentary group in a vote on September 7. This is not the first time Stadtkewitz has been in trouble for his anti-Islamic views. In 2006, he organized an unsuccessful protest against the building of a mosque in Berlin's Pankow district.

"In trouble" for his "views": Spiegel doesn't elaborate more than to note merely that " Germany's far-right National Democratic Party was also involved in the protest" against the mosque, which was the first to be built in East Berlin. It is on the site of a former sauerkraut factory (no kidding), and if that's not cultural conquest, I don't know what is. One notable complaint against the mosque was the fact that it was not going up in response to local need; there were no members in the neighborhood, so the 500 worshippers would be coming in from somewhere else. Failing to go numb and silent in the face of such glaring culture clash, however, lands you "in trouble" for your "views."

If the October 2 meeting in Berlin goes ahead, it would be Wilders' first official appointment in Germany....

And, given the rate of the German Islamization, maybe the last.

PM Cameron: Paving the Road from Ankara to London

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:21:00 GMT

Cameron-Erdogan: The start of a beautiful friendship

Things are moving faster than it appeared, the rails greased by the unctuous British PM Cameron. Indeed, Turkish PM Erdogan is already declaring a "golden age" of Turkey-UK relations.

You've heard of the Full Monty? Behold the Full Dhimmi.

From the BBC:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron has condemned the blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing the territory as a "prison camp."

He also criticised Israel for launching an attack on a convoy transporting Turkish activists and aid to Gaza. Nine Turkish citizens died in the raid.

He was speaking to an audience of businessmen during a visit to Ankara.

The Israeli embassy in London said Gazans were prisoners of Palestinian militant Islamist group Hamas.

Prisoners? They're voters!

Israel and Egypt enforce a blockade on Gaza which restricts goods and people from coming in or out freely.

"Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp," Mr Cameron said.

"People in Gaza are living under constant attacks and pressure in an open-air prison," he said.

'Piracy'

In May, Israeli commandoes stormed the Mavi Marmara and in fighting that followed, nine Turkish activists were killed and four soldiers wounded.

Mr Cameron called the Israeli raid an act of "piracy".

"Israel must apologise as soon as possible, pay compensation and lift the blockade," he said.

Translation: Israel must submit to islam ASAP, pay the jizya, and accept Islamic domination. Why not? The British PM has done it.

The British government's policy has been to call for an end to the blockade, but never before has a British prime minister been so blunt, says the BBC's Jonny Dymond in Ankara.

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy in London said Hamas, which won elections in Gaza in 2006, was responsible for the situation in Gaza.

"The people of Gaza are the prisoners of the terrorist organisation Hamas. The situation in Gaza is the direct result of Hamas' rule and priorities," the spokesman said.

Hopeless infidel.

PM Cameron: Paving the Road from Ankara to Brussels (Updated)

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:17:00 GMT

Reuters photo: Recep Tayyip "Islam is Islam and that's it" Erdogan and David "There is `real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists' " Cameron, together, in Ankara

----

The argument over whether to admit Turkey to the European Union seems eternal, at least among EU elites. Among the peoples of of Europe, when give the rare chance to make their will known at the ballot box -- increasingly window-dressing as far as the soft totalitarians of the EU are concerned -- there is little argument. There is bona fide consensus: NO to Turkey becoming a part of Europe. Why? For one thing, because it is not.

Tell that to British Prime Minister David Cameron, currently in Ankara selling the inclusiveness-for-Turkey-line (something the US has quite meddlesomely clamored for), pushing Tukish membership in the EU as an antidote to -- updated -- as the Telegraph put it, "anti-Muslim prejudice." Such prejudice is typically portrayed as being based in a senseless bias rather than in a historically grounded, contemporarily confirmed fear for the obliteration of bedrock Western values and principles.

As I noted back in 2005, the inclusion of Turkey is a political move with more than political consequences: Demographically alone, it promises to apply, or, rather, accelerate the finishing touches on the Islamization of Europe:

If approved, Turkey, second in EU population only to Germany, would bring its tens of millions of Muslims into largely post-Christian, secular European society; with them comes a weighty Islamic influence on European affairs that would boost the transition, as [then London mayor Ken] Livingstone might say, of Europe to a multicultural, multiracial and — more pertinent — Islamized continent of Eurabia.

Not that this salient point is ever raised. "Europe can either decide to become a global actor or it can fence itself off as a Christian club," Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said, flipping the issue on its head before the EU voted to open membership talks with Turkey. In light of the EU's deliberate omission of "God" or "Christianity" in its 439-page constitution, this was a fairly obnoxious comment. Besides, Turkey has long "fenced itself off" into such Islamic "clubs" as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam. The latter is an Islamic version of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights; it elevates sharia (Islamic law) over universal human rights, and declares the Muslim community's role is to "guide" humanity. Which is more than just clubby.

But there was another implication to the Turkish leader's words: that Western identity is merely a tribal expression of petty insularity. Free will, free conscience — the evolution of individual liberty — is the gift of Judeo-Christian civilization, and it is one that Islam has never accepted. Tragically, it is one that Westerners may be throwing away. Britain's [then-]foreign minister, Jack Straw, was equally dismissive of Europe's "so-called Christian heritage," while Britain's Lord Patten, a former EU official, pegged opposition to Turkish membership to "relics of Christianity,"a rather nasty way to belittle natural concern over a proposed event one European minister has compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. "To define Europe today as though it were an introverted, cohesive, medieval Christian community is, I think, terrible," said Lord Patten. Maybe he means that to define Europe as European is terrible.

The trend continues.

From a report on Cameron's speech in today's Telegraph:

Addressing the EU membership which Britain has supported for years along with nations including Italy and Spain, but which has stalled amid opposition from Nicolas Sarkozy, the French President, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, he [Cameron] will tell the Turks: "I will remain your strongest possible advocate for EU membership and for greater influence at the top table of European diplomacy.

"Together, I want us to pave the road from Ankara to Brussels."

Mr Cameron will attack: "those who wilfully misunderstand Islam" and who "see no difference between real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists."

How impolitic if not downright rude of British PM Cameron! Doesn't he realize that his host Turkish PM Erdogan has specifically and repeatedly expressed his furor over those who would dare make distinctions between "moderate" and "extremist" Islam? To wit: "These descriptions are very ugly," Erdogan said in 2007. "It is offensive and an insult to our religion. There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam, and that's it." Erdogan has also bluntly rejected descriptions of Turkey itself as an example of "moderate Islam," saying in April 2009: "It is unacceptable for us to agree with such a definition. Turkey has never been a country to represent such a concept. Moreover, Islam cannot be classified as moderate or not."

Blunder on. Back to today's Telegraph:

[Cameron] will also criticise those who view international relations as "polarised" or a clash between eastern and western civilisations. Nations who want to keep Turkey out of the EU for protectionist reasons will also come under attack.

Mr Cameron will say it makes him "angry that your progress towards EU membership can be frustrated in the way it has been."

"I believe it's just wrong to say Turkey can guard the camp but not be allowed to sit inside the tent," he will add, criticising those who suggest that the country should pick between the east and the west, saying Turkey was stronger because it had chosen both.

Anyone who thinks Turkey has chosen "both" is closing his eyes. Anyone who believes a country can choose "both" is blind.

State Dept: We Will Be in Afghanistan for "Many, Many Years"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 16:31:00 GMT

That July 2011 "exit date" from Afghanistan has always had the phony feel of window-dressing, as confirmed here, which has failed to cloak the massive American build-up of infrastructure in the area that seems less short-term and makeshift than reorienting and permanent.

More proof of the exit fantasy was confirmed yesterday at the State Department. It subsequently showed up in the Indian press but, as far as I can tell, clear missed the US media.

From the Hindustan Times:

The US has reiterated its long term commitment to the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, allaying India's concerns over America's stated policy to start withdrawing its troops from the war-torn country beginning July 2011.

"We're not leaving Afghanistan or the region at the end of next year," State Department spokesman P J Crowley told reporters at his daily news briefing.

Crowley was responding to questions about India's apprehensions on withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.

New Delhi fears that after America withdraws troops from Afghanistan, the war-torn country will again slip back into the hands of Pakistan and anti-India elements.

"Our commitment to regional security is a significant one. We are going to be engaged with countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, India for a long time, because it is in our interest to do so," Crowley said.

What "interest" is that? And is it the same "interest" in all three of those countries?

The "interest" that brought the US to Afghanistan was the Taliban government of Afghanistan that harbored al Qaeda in the run-up to 9/11. The toppling of the Taliban and rout of al Qaeda was in our interest. Nearly a decade later, is it still in our interest to remain? I say no, advocating a repositioning of our forces to execute what Gen. Paul Vallely describes as the "lily pad" strategy.

But won't al Qaeda return to Taliban safe havens if we depart? This question is the by-now old chestnut that tells us we must remain in Afghanistan to deny al Qaeda Taliban safe havens as though the Taliban offered the only potential safe havens to al Qaeda in the world. Sorry, gang. What we persist in blindly branding as "al Qaeda" is absolutely everywhere -- from Gaza to Thailand to Mumbai to London to Madrid to Yourtown, USA. These facts on the ground, however, are disconnected to the national security debate.

Yes, we have an "interest" in Pakistan: their neutralization-needy nukes. But that's not at all the same thing as common cause with Pakistan, no matter how much summiteering Richard Holbrooke does. As Moorthy Muthuswamy writes in his book Defeating Political Islam, Pakistan, along with Saudi Arabia and Iran, forms "the axis of jihad," and as such is one of the most aggressive purveyors of "political Islam." The sooner we recognize this and accordingly reconstitute our international alliances to include the natural foes of jihad, the greater our likelihood of survival becomes.

Which brings me to India, a natural foe of jihad. But even this shared anti-jihad interest doesn't require the presence of US troops as a means of "engagement."

Back to PJ Crowley and the Hindustan Times story:

"We have, per the President's decision, increased our military capabilities and force levels in Afghanistan. The timeline that the President outlined back in December is well known," he said, adding various reviews including those by NATO and Washington would come up at the end of this year.

"As the President said, we see July 2011 as an important transition point, but remember that we have both a military and a civilian component to our strategy. You know, the military element is not open-ended," he said.

The spokesman said American and international forces would gradually withdraw as Afghan forces build up its capabilities.

Clearly, $25 billion to build up those capabilities just wasn't enough.

As per the Kabul Conference, the Afghan plan is to provide security responsibility to the home forces throughout the country by 2014, he said.

Fantasists.

"So we are there to help stabilise the security situation in Afghanistan. We are there to begin to grow legal economy in Afghanistan, increase the capacity of the Afghan government at all levels -- national, regional, local.

None of which is in the American interest.

But our commitment to Afghanistan -- we will be there for many, many years," Crowley said.

"Over time, obviously the military element of the strategy will be reduced, and the civilian element of the strategy will, you know, continue apace.

It's exactly what's happening in Iraq, for example," he added.

Monster Intell Complex Won't Save Us From Unnamed Threat

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 15:36:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

A clarifying bomblet drops in the final paragraph of the opening installment of the big Washington Post series on what is best described as National Intelligence Sprawl:

"Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon ..."

National security meets mental hospital: How tragically appropriate. And yes, these inmates will definitely be running the asylum -- some of the Post-estimated 854,000 Americans with top secret clearance now filling massive new government complexes all over the country -- another unwanted legacy of 9/11. Some of my conservative brethren worry that the Post series reveals national security secrets. The question is, with nearly a million people possessing top secret clearance, how many secrets are left to reveal? Is it possible that our national security apparatus has gotten too big not to fail?

The Post series focuses on the gargantuan-ness that, more than ever, bloats the intelligence realm. Last year's budget was $75 billion, 2-1/2 times larger than the budget was on 9/11. At least 20 percent of the government organizations pitted against terrorism, the Post reports, have been "created or refashioned" since 9/11, while many that previously existed have ballooned to historic size. For example, the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency went from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. Since the 2001 attacks, 17 million square feet of new office space has been built or is now under construction in the Washington area alone.

I feel safer?

As the intelligence budget increased by tens of billions, the Post reports, "military and intelligence agencies multiplied. ... In all, at least 263 (government) organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11." In round numbers, U.S. intelligence activity is now spread among 1,200 government organizations supported by 2,000 private corporations at 10,000 locations across the country.

But still we must endure the indignities of shuffling shoeless through full-body scanners at our airports just to have a nice flight, maybe. Our great halls and institutions remain defended by state-of-siege-like installations. And we continue to adapt, accommodate and accept the "post-9/11 world," and seemingly forever now that these massive new government bureaucracies and new industries will attempt to retain indefinite support. Why?

The reason is this: In all of these scores and hundreds and thousands of organizations created and boosted and buffed up since 9/11 there is one thing they all forgot.

Islam.

I will bet my bottom dollar that in all of the hyper-burgeoning bureaucracies there is no single office organized to study, in Pentagon parlance, the "enemy threat doctrine" of jihad, which has, whether it is admitted or not, driven this intelligence boom in the first place. Similarly, I will bet there is no program designed to investigate the historical, canonical goals of jihad movements: namely, the spread of Islamic law (Sharia), and the attendant condition of dhimmitude that Sharia imposes on Islamized and Islam-dominated populations, even as such dhimmitude is an enabler of jihad. Instead, what we see in this frantic, government-led explosion is an Orwellian study in mass denial, a hamster-in-a-cage approach to what was first masked as "terror" and is now disguised as "transnational violent extremists" despite the fact that the threat is precisely and guilelessly presented by perps the world over as Islamic jihad.

Such is life in the politically correct, multiculturally dictated (read: dishonest) world.

Here's my idea for a brand new approach.

First, hire a crack team of true experts to catch military and security officials up on the fundamental doctrinal issues by which all of our strategy -- military, immigration, education and intelligence -- should be informed. For example, on jihad as enemy threat doctrine, Maj. Stephen Coughlin; on jihad history and Islamic anti-Semitism, Andrew Bostom; on dhimmitude through the ages, Bat Ye'or; on revaluing the West, Ibn Warraq.; on repositioning our military forces, Gen. Paul Vallely (USA ret.).

That should get us going all right and save the taxpayer trillions. Heck, we could run the whole thing out of my house. Oh, and one more thing: Turn St. Elizabeth's into a top secret rest home for several hundred thousand indefinitely furloughed intelligence analysts.

On Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:52:00 GMT

No Mosque at Ground Zero

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 14:45:00 GMT

I just taped a segment with Frank Gaffney for Secure Freedom Radio and he alerted me to this rousing ad against the mosque at Ground Zero.

Desperately Seeking a Wedge in A-Stan

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 10:58:00 GMT

AFP photo: Gen. Petraeus at a police training center in Kandahar.

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Petraeus Sharpens Afghan Strategy"

WASHINGTON—Gen. David Petraeus plans to ramp up the U.S. military's troop-intensive strategy in Afghanistan, according to some senior military officials, who have concluded that setbacks in the war effort this year weren't the result of the strategy, but of flaws in how it has been implemented.

So predictable. Of course, the lead author of counterinsurgency strategy (COIN) is going to see flaws in its implementation, not the strategy itself.

The officials said Gen. Petraeus, who took over as allied commander in Afghanistan this month and is conducting a review of the war, intends to draw on many of the same tactics he implemented to turn around the war in Iraq—and which his predecessor, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, introduced in Afghanistan.

But the officials said Gen. McChrystal put too much attention on hunting down Taliban leaders, at the expense of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy which focuses on protecting civilians and blostering popular support for the government.

In other words, McChrystal wasn't COIN enough. Cue primal scream.

Such an assessment differs from what Gen. Petraeus led us to believe at his Senate rubber stamp, I mean, confirmation, hearing. There, Petraeus vowed to continue the "great work" of McChrystal. Now it seems Petraeus believes McChrystal's problem was he was too soft ... on hearts and minds.

Supporters of Gen. McChrystal dispute that assessment, dismissing any notion there were flaws in how he fought the war.

Read: I'm just as population-centric as you are! The decisive terrain is the human terrain! XOXOX!

Gen. Petraeus's determination to intensify a strategy focused on driving a wedge between the Taliban and the Afghan people could be tricky to pull off, given --

Let's play a game: could be tricky to pull off, given 1) the affinity between the Taliban and the Afghan people? 2) the common chasm between the Taliban/Afghan people and infidel-outsiders?

Neither. The strategy could be tricky to pull off given:

the mounting political pressure in the U.S. to show results in the nearly nine-year war, and to begin drawing down troops next year.

A non-sequitor, no? It will be "tricky," to say the least, because where there's a will, there's not always a wedge.

Afghanistan "Buts"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 14:27:00 GMT

This is a picture of Northern Ireland Lieutenant Neal Turkington, 26, who was one of three British soldiers killed by a "renegade" Afghan Army soldier at a British base last week. Afghan authorities say the attacker, who remains at large, "was Sergeant Talib Hussein, who was sent to the unit, part of 215 Maiwand Corps, eight months ago. They say he was probably already involved with the Taliban."

Fast thinking, Poindexter.

But guess what? Questions remain. The LA Times reports "the motive for Tuesday's attack in the Nahr-e-Sarraj district remained unclear."

Maybe the Times should consult with Afghan authorities and see what they can come up with.

The BBC calls this the third such murder of British soldiers by our Afghan allies. I well remember the bloodletting last November when an Afghan policeman killed five British soldiers who had just come into their base from patrol. Who could forget that? Or is that who couldn't forget that? I get them confused. Point is, today's stiff upper lip is all about standing firm against this enemy within.

Prime Minister David Cameron condemned the [most recent] killings as "appalling" but insisted that the attack should not change the strategy of working alongside the Afghan army.

British Defense Minister Liam Fox called the attack "a despicable and cowardly act." But he said the training of Afghan security forces would continue because it is "vital to the international security mission in Afghanistan, and today's events will not undermine the real progress we continue to make."

But the British and American forces have to build up trust with the new army. Colonel Richard Kemp, one of the first British commanders in Afghanistan, told the BBC: “It will be very difficult if you now have to say the Afghan soldiers you are trying to train shouldn't have weapons on the base.”

Words well worth pondering. In fact, the more we ponder the implications -- namely, that a war/exit "strategy" which depends on training a native force whom we can't trust to carry weapons on a base -- the more evidence we have that the entire command, from top to bottom, from civilian to military, has lost its grip on logic, reality and, not least, morality.

This week, a similar incident befell the Americans when an Afghan soldier the AP described as a "group leader — an Afghan soldier selected to train other soldiers on the base" opened fire on a firing range amid an argument with American instructors, killing two Americans and one Afghan.

"It's a great tragedy," said British Col. Stuart Cowen, a spokesman for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan, the command responsible for building up the Afghan security forces.

I think the "but" is implied here. That is, the use of the word "tragedy" conjures a fateful inevitablity that somehow relieves command of responsibility, as though these men were lost to sunstroke, and not gunned down by an ever-suspect "ally."

Meanwhile, back in Oz, foreign ministers from around the world gathered for a photo op around the Tin Woodman ....

A Match Made ... in Damascus?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 15:04:00 GMT

Together for the first time (maybe): Allawi and al Sadr. Frame-ready photo by AP

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From the AP (via Andrew Bostom):

BAGHDAD – Anti-American Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr took a rare, public step into the political arena Monday, meeting in neighboring Syria with the man directly challenging Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for his office.

That man would be Our Guy Allawi.

The talks between al-Sadr, who is nominally allied with al-Maliki, and former premier Iyad Allawi, who heads the heavily Sunni-backed Iraqiya coalition, appeared to be as much about showing al-Maliki that al-Sadr is keeping his options open as it was about any firm political agreement between the two men in the offing.

Al-Sadr rarely travels outside of his home base in Iran where he lives in self-imposed exile. His followers won 39 seats in the 325-seat parliament in Iraq's national election in March, giving him considerable sway over who becomes the next prime minister.

Iran, Iran: Does Iran have anything to do with any of this?

Following the ballot, al-Sadr joined a coalition with al-Maliki's list, but the deep-rooted hatred many in the Sadrist camp feel toward the prime minister — who's jailed thousands of their supporters — has stalled any further development of their alliance.

In Damascus, al-Sadr and Allawi appeared complimentary of each other following their meeting — a shocking development considering the past animosity between the two and a clear signal in Iraq's rough-and-tumble political scene that all options are on the table when it comes to forming a new government. ...

But the two leaders' appeared to put aside their differences in the meeting that was arranged by the Syrian president. In pictures, the pair sat side by side, with Allawi in his business suit and al-Sadr in his flowing robes and black turban.

"The meeting was positive and fruitful," al-Sadr said. "The nicest thing I've found in the hearts of the Iraqiya block was their love for the Iraqi people."

Xoxoxo.

Speaking at a separate press conference, Allawi said the two sides agreed on the need to "speed up forming the Iraqi government."

Whether or not the meeting will result in any solid political alliance between the former adversaries is unclear. But for al-Sadr, the meeting sends a clear signal to al-Maliki that their union is on shaky ground. Allawi, meanwhile, scored significant political points in making inroads with Shiite political parties.

Iraq is now in its fifth month without a government since the inconclusive March 7 elections. Allawai's Iraqiya bloc won 91 seats compared to 89 for al-Maliki's coalition, but neither won the 163-seat majority necessary to govern.

As the political wrangling for allies draws out, insurgents have continued their deadly attacks in what appears to be an attempt to take advantage of the political vacuum to re-ignite sectarian tensions.

Insurgent attacks killed nine people across Iraq Monday.

In the day's worst violence, a car bomb exploded near a restaurant and coffee shop in Baqouba, a one-time insurgent stronghold about 35 miles (60 kilometers) northeast of Baghdad. Six people were killed and another 26 wounded, police and hospital officials said.

Hours earlier, in the northern city of Mosul, a car bomb killed a British security contractor, the British Embassy said. The contractor's identity was not released, pending notification of his next of kin.

In Baghdad gunmen on a motorcycle killed Ali Mohammed Fakhir, a national judo champion, while in Fallujah, a member of a government-backed, anti-al-Qaida militia was killed after a bomb attached to his car exploded, police officials said.

What was it we won again in Iraq? Cuz the boosters keep saying we're supposed to win it again in Afghanistan ...

Overdue GOP Reckoning

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 10:17:00 GMT

Photo: Hillary and Hamid today in Kabul. Clinton says we are "encouraged by much of what we see." Well, the flowers look nice.

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Ann Marlowe of the Hudson Institute considers "the war over the war" among Republicans sparked by Michael Steele, arguing we're due for a belated "reckoning" on controversial if prevailing counterinsurgency policy. She also cites recent comments by Newt Gingrich on the cultural disjunction between us and Afghans that is at the flawed heart of the matter.

Writing at the Daily Beast, Marlowe, who recently completed her sixth "embed" with American troops in Afghanistan, writes:

The former House Speaker cautioned that it wasn't quite so simple, saying that "counterinsurgency doctrine doesn't go deep enough for some place like Afghanistan. You're dealing with Afghan culture that is fundamentally different than us, in ways we don't understand."

Or won't understand beause it contradicts multicultural dogma on universalism.

I wish more Republicans would follow suit, neither claiming support for the war as a litmus test for Republican loyalty nor, like Steele, disowning the war as the Democrats' problem.

Amen, sister.

Patriotism means that we must support our troops while they're in Afghanistan—but not that we must agree that they should be there, or that they're doing the right things. There's nothing wrong with being a Republican and being deeply skeptical about our war strategy.

Many of the American soldiers I know in Afghanistan are themselves deeply skeptical of the American non-strategy. And many of these soldiers are Republicans. They often find themselves "enacting governance on the local level," in the words of Captain Mike Tumlin of the 82nd Airborne, trying to sideline or remove Afghan officials who steal from, or murder and rape the very people they're supposed to serve, only to see their hard and sometimes bloody work brought to naught by corrupt higher-ups in Kabul. They're not fighting for a good government against the evil Taliban, but for one evil against another.

Michael Steele was foolish to try to position Afghanistan as a Democratic mistake. But he is also wrong to believe Afghanistan was unwinnable from the start.

In his speech this week, Gingrich got to the heart of the problem. We've been applying counterinsurgency doctrine (and that haphazardly), assuming that the people are the center of gravity.

Or, as Gen. Petraeus put it in his Fourth of July message to military forces in Afghanistan, "the decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain."

Win the people over to support their government and you win the war. But if counterinsurgency is "a war of perceptions," to use a phrase favored by ousted General Stanley McChrystal, it behooves us to understand how Afghans perceive things.

As Newt says, we don't.

Or, again, we won't, fearing the PC consequences. Marlowe continues:

Many American observers were shocked when Dr. Abdullah Abdullah dropped out of the runoff election with President Hamid Karzai this November. It seemed irresponsible and wrong. But Afghan supporters of the opposition candidate—whom I admire—explained to me that in Afghan terms, a candidate who couldn't "protect" his supporters' votes was likely to lose their support. Even if Abdullah lost the second round because Karzai repeated his massive fraud, his supporters would blame him, just as an Afghan father might kill his daughter if she is raped, because that fact alone brings dishonor on the family.

Honor Losers?

We don't understand, and we may not be so good at predicting how the Afghans will respond to our actions.

Bingo. "Predicting how the Afghans will respond to our actions" -- just as predicting how the Iraqis will respond to our actions -- is the cracked keystone of COIN, the "prediction" our government has been staking the lives of our troops on, the gold of our treasury on and the well-being of our nation on for many years now. "Irresponsible" isn't the word for this see-no-Islam PC policy. In a better world, a Congressional investigation into who could have possibly signed off on the sheer lunacy of it all would be long overdue, as would be pink slips to Pentagon brass, and retirement to pliant yes-men civilian leaders.

Marlowe continues:

We've spent $51.5 billion to date on the Afghan war, about four years' worth of that country's GDP—enough to give every Afghan $2,000 to $2,500. About half of our expenditure has gone to standing up the Afghan National Security Forces. That $25 billion also equals the entire Israeli defense budget for two years.

For what we've spent, we could have re-created the Israeli Army, Air Force and Navy in Afghanistan. Only we didn't. Instead, at enormous cost, we have fielded a marginally competent army and a barely capable police force, both of which lose between 25 percent and 70 percent of their men annually.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than $3 billion has been openly flown out of Kabul Airport since 2007.

What we have in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency strategy of tactics. COIN is a set of tactics: station your troops among the people, conduct a lot of meetings with tribal elders to find out what bribes they want, protect them from the insurgents, connect them with their officials—every private knows the mantra. But COIN is not a strategy.

Or, COIN is a bad strategy.

Strategy requires a political vision. Throughout history, counterinsurgency has barely worked when conducted by a government with substantial popular support.

Where is the historic model? I asked this question of COIN strategist Frederick Kagan back in March 2009 at a Washington conference that in many ways previewed the Obama administration war policy. At the time I wrote (in a column):

Onto Afghanistan, where we are told U.S. national security depends on denying sanctuary to Al Qaeda and related jihadists. Meanwhile, the world is riddled with jihadism in the form of active agents, sleeper cells, propagandists and sympathizers from the Bekaa Valley to Belgium, from Iran to London, from Saudi Arabia to South Florida. Nearly eight years after 9/11, the United States still has unsecured borders, but it is Afghanistan where we must establish security and clean government -- for our own good.

Why? Frederick Kagan said "we have to establish the legitimacy of the Afghan government (because) that's how you end an insurgency." John Nagl was more emphatic still, stating, "If we ever want to leave, we have to build an Afghan government that can accomplish those goals (of good government) on its own."

If we ever want to leave?

During a coffee break, I asked military historian Frederick Kagan whether there was any successful historical model for this strategy. Ticking off a few non-matches including the Boer War in South Africa, Malaya, and civil war in El Salvador, he, a little sheepishly, offered Iraq.

Iraq? Heaven help the United States.

Back to Marlowe, who writes:

It is much more of a challenge, when the government, like Karzai's, lacks almost all support.

Why should Republicans tolerate waste of our tax money, merely because it happens in Afghanistan? Exactly which Republican values do the Karzai brothers—merchants in drugs and explosives, skimmers of contracts and runners of protection rackets—exemplify? Why is it honorable for Republicans to sacrifice the best of our young people for a miserable kleptocracy?

Good questions. How about some answers?

Perry Mason Goes to Afghanistan

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 19:04:00 GMT

Washington Post photo: Army Captain Nick Stout presenting his "case" to Afghan "jury."

For actual years now, I've been writing that the foundational fallacy of COIN, whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, is that success depends not on what American forces do, but on how alien peoples react to what American forces have done.

In Iraq, that translated into "surge till they merge," a two-step process in which US forces would amass to provide security, and Iraqis would then, the theory went, automatically react to that American-produced security by forming a more perfect union or something. We're still waiting.

In Afghanistan, American forces are supposed "to secure and serve" the Afghan population, as Gen. Petraeus put it recently. The secured and served Afghan population is then supposed to react by supporting the US-propped Karzai government. We're still waiting for that, too, in the process, ordering our troops, as noted many times here, to participate in a dangerous and degrading popularity contest with the ... Taliban.

Or is it a trial?

The Washington Post recently reported on a typical COIN offensive -- read: lots of tea-drinking with tribal elders-- in a Taliban stronghold in which an American officer offered a new analogy.

"It's a trial, and the people are the jury," said Army Capt. Nick Stout, 27, a commander of the 101st Airborne company that has patrolled Senjaray out of a sun-scorched hilltop outpost for two months. "Whoever presents the best case . . . they're going to side with."

Once again, the COIN recipe for success is out of our hands. And, once again, this jury is rigged.

Seventy-Five Billion Dollars a Year and What Did They Forget?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:07:00 GMT

Talk about burying the lede. The last 'graph of the widely anticipated Wash Post takeout on National Intelligence Sprawl says it all, or at least quite a lot:

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Elizabeths mental hospital in Anacostia, a $3.4 billion showcase of security will rise from the crumbling brick wards. The new headquarters will be the largest government complex built since the Pentagon ....

National security meets St. E's: How tragically appropriate. And yes, the inmates will definitely be running this asylum -- some of the estimated 854,000 Americans with top secret clearance currently and clandestinely spilling out of massive new government complexes all over the country. My conservative brethren seem concerned that the Post report reveals a slew of largely post-9/11 national security secrets. The question is, with nearly a million people possessing Top Secret clearance, how many secrets are there left to reveal? Has our national security apparatus gotten too big not to fail?

The story conveys the sense of intel sprawl with an array of giant figures, beginning with last year's $75 billion budget, two-and-a-half times larger than the budget was on 9/11.The story continues:

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of 9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from 7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today.

The budget of the National Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled.

Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40 billion beyond what was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a global offensive against al-Qaeda. It followed that up with an additional $36.5 billion in 2002 and $44 billion in 2003. That was only a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001, including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36 new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20 or more each in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

But with all of that -- and I haven't even mentioned the hundreds of thousands of square feet of new security-related office space to house it all -- why must we endure the continued indiginity of full-body scanners etc. at our airports just to have a nice flight ... maybe? Why are our great institutions still ringed in mazes of siege-like security? Why must we forever live in a "post-9/11" world? The answer is because in all of these 263 organizations created or reorganized since 9/11 at a cost of untold billions of dollars there is one thing they all forgot.

Islam.

I will bet my bottom dollar that there is in all of this burgeoning bureacracy no single office organized to comprehend, apply or even be curious about, in Pentagon parlance, the enemy threat doctrine, which in this particular case is jihad. Similarly, I will bet there is no program designed to investigate the historical, canonical fruits of victorious jihad: namely, Islamic law (sharia), and the attendant condition of dhimmitude that sharia imposes upon Islamized populations -- which is both an objective and also an enabler of jihad. Instead, what we see in this fractic explosion of bunker-style infrastructure-cum-high-tech extravagance is an Orwellian study in mass denial, a hamster-in-a-cage approach to what is purposefully obscured as "transnational violent extremists" when the actual threat is in fact guilelessly and precisely presented by all perps as Islamic jihad.

Such is life in the politically correct, multiculturally dictated (read: dishonest) world.

Here's my idea for reassessing the national security problem and saving the taxpayers trillions in the process.

First, hire a crack team of true experts to catch security officials up on the fundamental doctrinal issues: On jihad as enemy threat doctrine, Maj. Stephen Coughlin; on jihad history and Islamic antisemitism, Andrew Bostom; on dhimmitude across the ages, Bat Ye'or; on revaluing the West, Ibn Warraq. There are many more experts I would tap -- and, whaddya know, they're not on Uncle Sam's payroll now (among those 854,000 Top Secret personnel). We can start off small, maybe run the thing out of my house. For the time being, Gen. Paul Vallely (USA ret.), our military "lily pad" expert, can even telecommute. (Following the disastrous Russian spy swap, I think we need to overhaul our Russian intel team, but that's another story.)

Next, stop Islamic immigration to minimize the growth of the pro-sharia demographic in this country. At least for the duration, stop and/or restrict travel to and from Islamic countries because we can't always count on airline passengers who don't have Top Secret clearance (or even the 854,000 bureacrats who do) to incapacitate bombers in flight. That won't stop jihadists boarding in London or Paris necessarily (unless there's transiting through from Pakistan, for example) but it would surely help prevent our airports from being the defensive line of battle that they now incredibly are.

Also, withdraw our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq and redeploy forces to the border with Mexico.

That should at least get us going. Oh, and one more thing: Turn St E's into a Top Secret rest home for several hundred thousand indefinitely furloughed intelligence analysts.

Why Do We See Real Spies as Hollywood Fiction?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:33:00 GMT

This week's syndicated column:

Just how entertaining was that Russian spy ring story that came in with a flurry of late-June arrests and went out with a Russo-American agent swap last weekend?

Two thumbs up, judging by the reviews, or was that news coverage? Sometimes it was hard to tell. In fact, something about the way the startling fact that allegedly post-Cold War Russia was running a ring of deep-cover agents in this "reset" era was put over made it seem as though there was little distinction between spy fact and spy fiction. Or, rather, that the main significance to spy fact was its place in our pop-culture attic of spy fiction.

"Details of the Russian spy network, outlined in two FBI complaints and a government press release, tell a spy story that is part John le Carre and part Austin Powers," reported Newsweek. "Russian spy case 'right out of a John le Carre novel'" headlined the Christian Science Monitor. "A sensational summer spy tale that already seemed ripped from the pages of Le Carre or Ludlum," explained the New York Daily News. The real-life events had their reference points not in historical experience but in genre fiction.

Little wonder that the news story found its own storybook femme fatale in Anna Chapman (nee Kushchenko), the comely "flame-haired" agent whose intercepted distress call to ex-KGB papa triggered the string of FBI arrests. Chapman's web-handy glamour portraits only enhanced a story already seen as more celluloid than microfilm, more Hollywood script than criminal complaint. "Do we have any spies that hot?" Jay Leno, 60, asked the vice president, holding up a sultry Chapman pic. "Let me be clear," replied 68-year-old Joe Biden. "It was not my idea to send her back. I thought they'd take Rush Limbaugh."

It was all one big laugh riot. Or maybe it was all one big Hollywood publicity stunt given the spate of spy-related Hollywood products now flooding the market. Indeed, New York Times' television critic Alessandra Stanley decided, in a spy show round-up, that the country is now in a "giddy Spy vs. Spy mood." Giddy? "They may live among us, posing as lawn-mowing, hydrangea-growing suburbanites," Stanley wrote. "They may be reporting intimate secrets back to Moscow, although it's hard to know what those 11 would-be spies infiltrated besides Facebook. Ex-K.G.B. agents do die mysteriously of polonium poisoning from time to time, but Kremlin-sent assassins are not likely to blow up New York office towers or unleash chemical weapons in our subways."

Don't be so sure. That is, the not-so-mysteriously poisoned Russian ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko, whose slow, excruciating 2006 death by polonium poisoning is attributed to orders from Russia's Vladimir Putin, made numerous claims that terrorism attributed to al Qaida and other jihadist groups is, in fact, backed by Russian security services, the original hell-font of global terrorism. In 2005, for example, Litvinenko told a Polish newspaper that top al Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB (successor to the KGB) for six months in 1997, after which he was sent to Afghanistan where he penetrated the top ranks around Osama bin Laden.

Some plot. Almost as perfectly thrilling as the Times-noted upcoming AMC series "Rubicon" about "an intelligence analyst who stumbles on a high-level government conspiracy" (snore), or the upcoming NBC series "Undercovers," which, according to the same Times review that dismisses the occasional polonium poisoning, focuses on "a pair of caterers, a husband and a wife, who are retired agents coaxed into coming in from the cold and using their chef toques as covers." Get it?

Well, we didn't either. That is, as Bill Gertz, noted national security correspondent for the Washington Times, reported this week, a number of current and former national security officials are "critical of the speedy exchange with Moscow" less than two weeks after the Russian spies' arrests because it effectively blocked U.S. intelligence from learning key facts about "Russian espionage and influence operations."

"We gave up the opportunity," said Rep. Pete Hoekstra, Michigan Republican. "Now that these people are out of the country, it's game off, not game on. We will get no additional insights or information from them."

And that means this is one story without an ending.

The Fox & Camel

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 12:07:00 GMT

Photo: Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal and Jamal Khashoggi in Alwaleed's Riyadh office.

No, it's not a new pub serving non-alchololic beer, it's a new media venture between Rupert Murchoch and Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, whose business relationship grows ever cosier (see here and here, for example, to catch up on the whole affair).

From Canada's CBC News, with thanks to Fjordman:

Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal has announced plans to launch a 24-hour Arabic-language news channel in partnership with Rupert Murdoch's Fox network.

Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, former editor in chief of Alwatan newspaper and a media adviser to Prince Turki Al-Faisal at Saudi embassies in London and Washington D.C., will head the station.

Khashoggi is a controversial choice because he has clashed with Saudi authorities over religious police and women's rights and resigned from his newspaper position earlier this year over an editorial questioning Salafism, a form of Islam at the heart of the conservative state.

This (above) is true as far as it goes but the implication that Khashoggi is a proto-classical liberal in manjammies is false. That is, Khashoggi's initial "clash" with "Saudi authorities" in 2003 as editor of al-Watan seems to have resolved itself nicely in a choice appointment as media advisor to Saudi Prince Turki -- one of the more authoritative Saudi authorities -- when Turki was ambassador to the UK. When in 2005 Turki became Saudi ambassador to the US, media advisor Khashoggi accompanied him to DC. In 2007 Khashoggi returned to his newspaper job at al Watan until his resignation as editor in May (he remains on the editorial board) over an editorial "questioning Salafism" -- because he thought it shouldn't have appeared in the paper in the first place.

From the BBC:

The opinion piece by Saudi poet Ibrahim al-Almaee criticised Salafism, a conservative school of Sunni Islam that draws inspiration from the practices of the earliest Muslims.

Saudi Arabia is governed under an austere form of Salafi Islam, Wahabbism.

...

"We believe in al-Watan newspaper, and we believe in reform," Mr Khashoggi said after resigning. "The newspaper is more important than I am, and I hope it will continue. We may question social issues like women's rights, but we should not have allowed an article to question the essence of faith."

He said he was abroad when the decision was made to publish the article, and he did not agree with the points made by Mr Almaee.

...

Mr Khashoggi will keep his position on the editorial board of the paper, and said he would continue to write in support of reform.

Only not "reform," if you catch my drift.

Funny enough, the Saudi online news site Arab News announced the new venture -- without mentioning Old Man Murdoch.

Steele's Trap and Petraeus' "Human Terrain"

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:30:00 GMT

Photo by David Gilkey/NPR

This week's syndicated column:

I've sworn off predictions, having guessed wrong that a deeply apologetic Gen. Stanley McChrystal would keep his Afghanistan command. But what about GOP chairman Michael Steele? So far, at least as I write, he is weathering his own Afghan storm after dubbing the protracted counterinsurgency, President Obama's war -- as though the Obama policy were not in fact an extension and intensification of the Bush administration plan -- and then noting that history tells us war in Afghanistan is unwinnable.

But not always, as I learned after consulting Andrew Bostom's invaluable compendium, "The Legacy of Jihad." Turns out Islamized Turkic nomads came out on top, conquering the Hindu Kingdom of Kabul in the late 9th century, ending Hindu rule in Afghanistan with a victory that was, as a 13th-century-Indian-chronicler put it, "the result of treachery and deception, such as no one had ever committed."

That's one way to win. I have long argued that counterinsurgency's PC battle for hearts and minds (which Steele appears to be rejecting without articulating why) is, alas, not another. And what could we possibly get from a hearts-and- minds victory in Afghanistan -- another Iraq?

I'm afraid the answer is "bingo." Judging by the 99-0 Senate vote that confirmed Petraeus as Afghanistan commander last week, another Iraq is precisely what America wants, as though Iraq were an American "victory" worth the cost, human and monetary, of repeating.

It all depends on what the meaning of "win" is, a definition that includes pretty much anything in Iraq, even the shocking possibility, as noted by Iraq commander Gen. Ray Odierno, that United Nations forces might be needed to secure Iraq's oil-rich northern provinces after U.S. forces depart in 2011. Funny, I thought the United States fought a war about securing Iraq, or something. And funny, northern Iraq happens to be the neighborhood in which Petraeus, as commander of the 101st Airborne, first made his personal counterinsurgency mark back in 2003, 2004. A revealing Senate question for Petraeus last week might have been to ask him to assess how his policy of winning Iraqi hearts and minds (as exemplified by the posters he ordered up in 2003 in barracks asking "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WIN IRAQI HEARTS AND MINDS TODAY?") has fared after all these years. Further, could there be anything about Islamic culture -- the institution of jihad, the animus toward infidels -- that is derailing his best-laid counterinsurgency plans in Iraq and Afghanistan?

But there was only silence on the part of lawmakers, the kind of lazy deference to military brass that inspired the British weekly New Statesman to publish an eye-catching cover story this week called "The Cult of the Generals." The piece argues that U.S. civilian leadership has abdicated its policy-making responsibilities to weirdly deified four-star generals (read: Petraeus). In a sense, Steele tripped this peculiar power circuit in his own bumbling way. There's an argument to be made that as chairman of the apparently pro-COIN GOP, that's not his job. But that doesn't absolve the rest of us, and particularly not our elected leaders, from joining the debate over COIN strategy, with its grossly unrealistic goals and unconscionable methods, and its failure to enhance American national security. After all, even an "Iraq" in Afghanistan would do nothing to neutralize Iranian and Pakistani nukes, the signal threat to U.S. interests in the region (so long as we control our points of entry against immigration and travel from the region, at least for the duration). The war doesn't make sense.

Maybe that's the case because we are so vague about what constitutes American interests -- even threats thereto. In his Fourth of July letter to forces in Afghanistan, Petraeus described the enemy as being "those who embrace indiscriminate violence and transnational extremists." Sorry, but that's loosey-goosey enough to include certain pit-bull owners and Greenpeace activists. "Together with our Afghan partners, we must secure and serve the people of Afghanistan," Petraeus continued, sounding that disconcerting (especially on Independence Day) non-American refrain of what you might call the "transnational extremists" of the COIN world. "We must never forget that decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain."

Haven't we been down this road before?

The Military-Journalistic Complex

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:24:00 GMT

The Politico headline on this story -- "Petraeus' emails on Israel leaked" -- is misleading. The story here is "Leaked E-mails Show CENTCOM General and Journalist (Max Boot) Work Damage Control on Petraeus' Israel Problem."

Background -- lots -- here and here.

Secondary highlights: 1) Petraeus is a butterfingers (he inadvertently sent out the Boot emails, which were leaked to The Nation's Philip Weiss; and 2) he uses an emoticon to sign off. (-:

Petraeus Flashback: Shying Away from Hearts and Minds

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:19:00 GMT

Ruth King of Ruthfully Yours sent around this Washington Times piece by Rowan Scarborough that notes the apparent irony that "in less than three years, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus has risen from the brunt of ridicule by Democrats to President Obama's most valuable field general."

Rather than indicating heightened powers of perception on the part of Democrats, I would argue that the hosannas Gen. Petraeus is greeted with everywhere now are inspired by an overall numbness to what his "victory" in Iraq actually means, which is not a lot, at least not for the US.

The piece goes on to document this sea change in attitudes and quotes Petraeus' ex-public affairs officer:

Col. Steven Boylan, who was Gen. Petraeus' spokesman in Iraq and now teaches at Fort Leavenworth's Command and General Staff College in Kansas, recalls a tense, politically charged Washington.

"I don't think it would be unfair to say the issues of '07 were very divisive, and there was a lot of controversy and a lot of doubt with the strategy, and that doubt came through as we saw in the September '07 testimony," he said.

I remember Col. Boylan from 2007. Shortly after this column appeared, Boylan contacted me through my syndicate editor, and we ended up talking for about thirty minutes, him in Baghdad at around midnight as I recall, and me in Washington in the afternoon. The main beef at Petraeus HQ was my use of the phrase "hearts and minds" to describe the Petreaus strategy. This complaint was and is quite absurd given the phrase's accuracy in summing up the COIN quest for support of "the people," whether in Iraq or Afghanistan. Indeed, Boylan's suggested substitute was "winning support for the new Iraq." Petraeus' most recent letter to forces in Afghanistan urges them never to forget "that the decisive terrain in Afghanistan is the human terrain."

Boylan also maintained that Petraeus had never used the phrase himself, which I later discovered wasn't exactly true given that Petraeus, as commander of the 101st Airborne (2003), had ordered posters for all of the barracks emblazoned with the question: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO WIN IRAQI HEARTS AND MINDS TODAY?

Funny they were so sensitive about h & m.

I managed to get in a few questions of my own and discovered not too much comprehension on the old Islam front, so I followed up with an email containing links to five brief articles I thought might bring the brass a little closer to snuff.

No reply.

Whatever. All hail Petraeus.

Four-Star Heaven

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 11:58:00 GMT

Catchy cover story by Mehdi Hasan in the British weekly the New Statesman.

Opening question:

David Petraeus, George Bush’s “main man” in Iraq and an American military icon, is now expected to win what many consider to be the unwinnable Afghan war. Is the US once again succumbing to the cult of the generals?

Excerpts:

On 23 June, the president of the United States, Barack Obama, sacked his top commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal. The general and his aides were quoted making disparaging remarks about their commander-in-chief, and other senior colleagues, in a now famous article in Rolling Stone magazine.

In announcing the dismissal of McChrystal, the president said he had made his decision not on the basis of "any difference in policy" nor out of "any sense of personal insult", but because the article had eroded trust and undermined "the civilian control of the military that's at the core of our democratic system".

Could this be the end of the love affair between the US political and military classes? In an age in which the citizenry is disillusioned with politicians and repulsed by the bankers, America's top generals, notably McChrystal and his celebrated mentor David Petraeus, have become the subjects of awe and reverence, not to mention the repositories of wide-ranging policymaking powers.

Douglas Macgregor, a retired colonel, decorated Gulf war veteran and adviser to the Pentagon until 2004, says he is disturbed by the "modern deification" of generals. "Most Americans have no military experience," he tells me. "They tend to impute to anyone wearing stars a degree of competence and courage associated with battle-hardened leaders of the Second World War or the Korean conflict. Nothing could be further from the truth."

...

During his eight years in office, Bush relied on different generals to prop up his administration's foreign and defence policies, in particular on Iraq: from the plain-speaking Tommy Franks and the Arabic-speaking John Abizaid, who oversaw the lead-up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq between 2002 and 2003, to the soldier-scholar Petraeus and the shaven-headed Ray Odierno, who executed the so-called surge in US military forces which, its supporters claim, helped reduce the violence in that country between 2007 and 2008.

Petraeus stands out above the rest. A West Point graduate with a PhD in international relations from Princeton, he co-authored the US army's much-lauded manual on counter-insurgency, or "Coin", in 2006. Coin theory disinters the Vietnam-era language of "clear, hold and build", and describes soldiers and marines as "nation-builders as well as warriors". It emphasises a "population-centric" over an enemy-centred approach, and demands large numbers of troops. The Iraq surge was built on the ideas contained in Petraeus's Coin manual and the general himself implemented these ideas as Bush's commander on the ground.

The then president constantly invoked Petraeus's name as he defended his new strategy in Iraq. Bush, noted the Washington Post in July 2007, called Petraeus his "main man" and managed to stave off a revolt over Iraq by Congressional Republicans by telling them "to wait to see what David has to say. I trust David Petraeus, his judgement."

What presidential leadership.

Bush's main man is now also Obama's main man. The current president pre-empted Republican criticisms of his decision to fire McChrystal by instantly appointing Petraeus in his place as the new US commander in Afghanistan. Given the success in Iraq that he and his surge have been credited with [italics added], Petraeus is the particular favourite of pro-war pundits at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News and at the right-wing Weekly Standard magazine. He is equally popular with hawkish neoconservatives such as the former vice-president Dick Cheney and the independent senator Joe Lieberman. Other generals are also popular in these quarters, such as Odierno, the current commander in Iraq, seen to have been successful in fighting terrorists, insurgents and dictators in America's so-called war on terror.

NB: By definition, Dick Cheney is no neocon.

“The senior ranks are politicised in ways never seen in the history of the United States," says Colonel Macgregor. "The top bureaucrats in uniform - that is, the top generals and admirals - are tied to neoconservative political circles in Washington, DC in ways that did not exist before 2001."

But is it too easy to blame it all on Bush and his neocon allies? "American grand strategy has been a shambles for a long time - arguably from the end of the cold war," says the former Pentagon official. "The vacuum of strategic thinking gets filled by operational thinking, which only the military is providing. If we had real strategic thinking and real strategic action, then civilian leaders could more credibly direct the military to do its bidding. But without an overall sense of what the US priorities and objectives are, we are collectively reduced to chasing tactical issues, and the military has the loudest voice in that domain."

...

Powell was the archetypal soldier-politician. Such was his national popularity as a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff in the mid-1990s that most observers believe he could have defeated Bill Clinton for the presidency in 1996 had he stood as the Republican candidate. In the end, he didn't take the plunge - but Petraeus might. A registered Republican, he is thought to be considering a run for the White House in 2012. If so, Obama's decision to send him to Afghanistan could be a tactical move to remove him from the political equation, as the general's tour will last at least a year or longer.

Hmm.

But 2016 could be an even more attractive proposition for Petraeus, who is 57, and his Republican backers - assuming he has "won" the war in Afghanistan by then.

...

Journalists have often attributed super powers to the US military leadership, despite its failure to question the legitimacy and rationale of the 2003 Iraq invasion, and its inability to contain the rise of first the Iraqi and now the Afghan insurgencies. While the top brass are deified and deferred to at home, the military they command is humiliated abroad.

Rather harsh, I'd say, but the notion of bifurcation seems valid. That is, the top brass -- Petraeus, not really anyone else -- is deferred to and certainly practically deified in some circles at home (Senate voted 99-0 to confirm). And the military is at least thwarted and no doubt laughed at by jihadis abroad, forcibly rendered impotent by COIN's impossible mission to win Islamic hearts and minds, all of which leads to war unending.

Macgregor says two types of journalists are complicit in sustaining the cult of the generals - first, those who support the war on terror, and backed the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. This group has used the popularity and seemingly apolitical status of modern generals to "cultivate support inside the American electorate for policies Americans would not normally support". Add to these, he says, "still more journalists who are anxious to enrich themselves by writing ridiculous puff pieces and books about the four stars - men who, for the most part, have no personal experience of direct-fire combat and whose decisions are limited to when and where to approve air strikes against people with no armies, no air defences and no air forces".

The largely uncritical reporting of senior military figures, acknowledges a former adviser to US military commanders in Iraq, is also a "cynical move to ensure continued access to war zones that are ultimately controlled by generals. It generally pays enormous dividends for reporters to have good access to senior officers and, thus, good relations are critical."

These "good relations" produce positive coverage. McChrystal, for example, has been described as a "Jedi" commander (in the words of Newsweek) and an "intellectual and athletic bad-ass" (Vanity Fair). Reporters tended to avoid focusing on his role in the cover-up of the death from "friendly fire" of the army Ranger and former football star Pat Tillman in Afghanistan in 2004, or his links to the abuse and torture of detainees at Camp Nama in Iraq in 2006.

As the former adviser to US military commanders in Iraq points out: "Prior to the Rolling Stone article, profiles of McChrystal tended towards the hagiographic, portraying him as 'brilliant' and virtually superhuman in his personal qualities. But profiles of Karl Eikenberry [the US ambassador in Afghanistan] paled by comparison. Yet Eikenberry has a PhD from Stanford and is a fluent speaker of Mandarin Chinese. If anyone in Afghanistan is brilliant, it's him. But since he was not the military commander, he was not as interesting, and he's not as good a story." (It is worth noting, incidentally, that even the Rolling Stone profile which cost him his job described McChrystal as "brilliant" and referred breathlessly to his "custom-made set of nunchucks".)

The Congressional and media hawks in the United States have acquiesced in the rise and political empowerment of a new cadre of generals and commanders committed to pushing policies - such as so-called small wars, based on counter-insurgency principles - that the US public has usually been sceptical of. It is worth reflecting on a 2006 conversation, revealed by the journalist Bob Woodward in his book The War Within, between the retired general Jack Keane, a former army vice-chief of staff and one of the architects of Petraeus's surge in Iraq, and Robert Gates, then defence secretary to President Bush (and who is now serving in the same post under President Obama):

"Let's be frank about what's happening here," Keane told Gates. "We are going to have a new administration. Do we want these policies continued or not? Do we want the best guys in there who were involved in these policies, who were advocates for them? Let's assume we have a Democratic administration and they want to pull this thing out quickly, and now they have to deal with General Petraeus and General Odierno. There will be a price to be paid to override them."

...

Terrible price? There is a terrible price being paid every day by acquiescing to them. At the same time, it is not the generals who are at fault. It is the Congress who has abdicated in every way its responsibility to examine why it is that America remains at war, endlessly prosecuting strategies that have nothing to do with common sense, let alone American national security requirements.

Updated: GOP Cracking?

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 19:50:00 GMT

RNC Chairman Michael Steele's comments on Afghanistan -- Afghanistan is a war of Obama's choosing, and if Obama is a student of histroy (who said?), he should know that you don't engage in a land war in Afghanistan -- have triggered calls for his resignation from Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney, Charles Krauthammer and no doubt others by now. Aside from the fact that Afghanistan is not a war of Obama's choosing -- he has merely chosen to intensify and prolong the nation-building policy (agony) begun by George W. Bush -- the main point of neocon/con concern here is Steele's disavowal of the war effort. Kristol writes:

It’s an affront, both to the honor of the Republican party and to the commitment of the soldiers fighting to accomplish the mission they’ve been asked to take on by our elected leaders.

There are, of course, those who think we should pull out of Afghanistan, and they’re certainly entitled to make their case. [Thanks, Bill.] But one of them shouldn't be the chairman of the Republican party.

It's regrettable that Steele made such a clumsy and ill-informed showing, although his record as chairman has not been what you might call deft. Still, if it's the "honor" of the Republican party that's at stake, as well as "committment of the soldiers fighting," both that honor and that commitment are ill-served by a truncated debate over the mission -- the fundamentally flawed, counterinsurgency (COIN) mission, a mission now directly commanded by COIN guru Gen. Petraeus, whose confirmation hearing, not incidentally, went by without any such COIN debate, or even discussion.

Liz Cheney writes:

The chairman of the Republican party must be unwavering in his support for American victory in the war on terror — a victory that cannot be accomplished if we do not prevail in Afghanistan.

War on terror. Amazing to hear that hoary, politically correct phrase that never made sense, not even in the beginning, trotted out as insta-justification for the impossible infidel dream of nation-building in the umma. I would agree that the chairman of the Republican party must be unwavering in his support for American victory but I would prefer, for starters, to see that unwavering support at our own borders to prevent the illegal masses from crossing; and at other points of entry to halt immigration and travel from jihad-source nations, at least for the duration of "war on terror" hostilities.

Not another cent, not another man, for Islamic nation-building madness, and all the support necessary to ensure the military is capable of neutralizing threats against NY, NY, not Marja, Afghanistan. Would that the RNC chairman had said so.

July 4 update: Conservative standard-bearer (not) John McCain has weighed in to express displeasure over Michael Steele's comments, calling them "wildly inaccurate" and saying "there is no excuse for them," although he stopped short of calling for Steele's resignation.

McCain, not incidentally, was commenting from Baghdad, scene of another fabulous American intervention that has immeasurably enhanced and advanced American strategic interests and security....Now, that (the latter) is what I call wildly inaccurate but that's just me (almost literally, at least among conservatives).

Joining the Resign Now campaign are GOP Reps. Tom Cole and Duncan Hunter. Steele, meanwhile, has clamped a lid on his comments, having issued the following statement on Friday:

“As we enter the Fourth of July weekend, I proudly remember standing with Maryland National Guardsmen on their way to the Middle East and later stood with the mothers of soldiers lost at war. There is no question that America must win the war on terror.

“During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Barack Obama made clear his belief that we should not fight in Iraq, but instead concentrate on Afghanistan. Now, as President, he has indeed shifted his focus to this region. That means this is his strategy. And, for the sake of the security of the free world, our country must give our troops the support necessary to win this war.

“As we have learned throughout history, winning a war in Afghanistan is a difficult task. We must also remember that after the tragedy of September 11, 2001, it is also a necessary one. That is why I supported the decision to increase our troop force and, like the entire United States Senate, I support General Petraeus’ confirmation. The stakes are too high for us to accept anything but success in Afghanistan.”

Ain't orthodoxy grand?

Founding Fathers' Descendants

rbuscher@haleymiranda.com — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 11:35:00 GMT

The Fourth of July celebrates not just Independence Day but the enduring genius and wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Fathers -- as in men.

Two hundred and thirty four years later, what best exemplifies the American man?

A) A billion-dollar basketball player?

B) The fans who get a little carried away?

C) The policeman who has to control them?

B) A fashion plate of frou-frou?

C) A Marine who loved "the Lord, his family and his country"?

D) A president who is driving the country over a cliff?