With great satisfaction we inform you that the first volume of
"Basic Introductory Manual to Understanding Obamacare" is now available.
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The picture below was sent to me by one of my closest friends, severest critics and a faithful memo reader. I e mailed him that: "The 'crotch' salute is reserved for putzes!"
I am sorry folks, but is this the person that was elected President of our country? You know, the United States of America .
I do believe that saluting the flag goes with that, as does respecting and honoring the service members who have died.
Does this "President" believe he is above that gesture? If not a salute, how about a hand over the heart like the other guy?
He can shower us all with flowery words (via teleprompter) and dazzle us with his B.S., but actions speak louder. He has no idea about patriotism or respect.
Nor did Obama attend Gen. Petraeus retirement ceremony. (See 1 below.)
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This from a dear friend, neighbor and fellow memo reader. Would not ordinarily post but the message is clear and worth revealing. (See 2 below.)
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This from a very dear Liberal friend who asked to be taken off my memo list but who, from time to time asks me to read what he sends. I told him I would both read and post. (See 3 below.)
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Who won the post 9/11 war - George Friedman gives his view.
Personally I prefer Friedman's analysis (see 4) rather Hirsch's accusative tripe (see 3 below) You decide. (See 4 below.)
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Dennis Prager asks a pertinent question of the Black Caucus and points how why it is racist and must continue to be because once black voters realize they have been used and abused by the Democrat Party the party will fold.. (See 5 below.)
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Dick
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1)An old soldier who won’t fade away
Obama is outclassed and outsmarted by retiring Gen. Petraeus
Gen. David H. Petraeus closed his phenomenal 37-year Army career this week with a joint review at Fort Myer in Arlington. Service members from every branch were present, and flags of all 50 states fluttered in the breeze. A substantial crowd had come to hear the general's farewell address. Many were classmates from the West Point Class of 1974, smartly attired but enthusiastic and occasionally whooping like they were cadets. Others were people with whom he had served over his storied career, whom he recognized from the dais during his speech. The morning was sunny and clear, and the general was his usual affable, ebullient self.
In his remarks, Gen. Petraeus recalled the days when he entered the military, when the Vietnam War was winding down and the armed services were being pared down to the "hollow forces" of the 1970s. "The Army I joined as a second lieutenant had suffered enormously," he said. "In the wake of our involvement in Vietnam, our Army and much of our military were grappling with a host of very serious challenges." The senior leaders who first wore the uniform in those dark days were not discouraged. They began their careers with a sense of mission. "I know I speak for many when I say that we came away from that period vowing to never let our forces get to such a point ever again." Through his efforts, and those of countless other visionaries in and out of uniform, the hollow forces were transformed once again into the finest fighting force in the world.
Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, presided over the ceremony with William J. Lynn, deputy secretary of defense. Notably absent were Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta, whose former position as CIA director is Gen. Petraeus' next assignment, and President Obama. Their non-appearance did not sit well with some. "Obama should have been here," a warrior who served under Gen. Petraeus told The Washington Times. "And he should have invited [former President George W.] Bush. The general saved their bacon. Twice.
"Everyone has forgotten that in 2007 we as a nation had said, 'OK, we are going to lose Iraq.' And President Bush said, 'Well what if we win?' Petraeus rode into town and assembled an extraordinary team. His personal drive, his charisma, his optimism, his can-do spirit, all of that is what gave us hope that we could in fact turn Iraq around," our source explained. "And by September of '07, the progress had been dramatic enough that it became common knowledge to the American people that things were turning around in Iraq. Eight months earlier, a lot of people, including Obama, wanted to tuck tail and have another Vietnam."
That's not all. "Here is the guy who saved our reputation as a nation. Seriously, who's missing this? And then he went to [Central Command] and was doing great things. And Obama asked him to take a functional demotion and go back to Afghanistan and save our bacon again," we were told. "To leave his family, to step down from a regional command, to take on that burden. And he said yes, and he did it. Petraeus was the right guy at the right time, he answered the call, and now he's being yanked out before we're ready, just like the troops are being yanked out before Afghanistan is ready."
So what's the reason for the White House about-face? "They are sending him to the CIA to keep him quiet during the 2012 election. It shows how small and scared they are. He is an honorable man, he has never expressed political ambition. But they saw him as a threat. He is an independent thinker, the finest military mind of his generation," our source posits. "What he suffers from is that he is more excellent than almost anyone he meets, to include the president. The troops love him. Strong people surround themselves with the most excellent people they can find, even those brighter and more capable than themselves. Weak people don't."
There is a shameful indignity in how this hero was treated. "The president couldn't find the time in his schedule, nor could the [defense secretary] find the time to look him in the eye and say thank you in person," this warrior told The Washington Times. "It's one thing to say 'we support the troops' and trot out your first lady to do that, but this is where it counts. It would have been an appropriate gesture to come here to recognize the professional and personal sacrifice of this extraordinary man. It would have been the dignified thing to do."
The hero remained above it all. The cannons boomed and the crowd cheered and Gen. Petraeus stood smiling in the sun.
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2)As you open your pockets for the next natural disaster, please keep these facts in mind:
The American Red Cross President and CEO Marsha J. Evans salary for the year was $651,957 plus expenses
The United Way President Brian Gallagher receives a $375,000 base salary along with numerous expense benefits.
UNICEF CEO Caryl M. Stern receives $1,200,000 per year (100k per month) plus all expenses.............................including a ROLLSROYCE ..
Less than 5 cents of your donated dollar goes to the cause
The Salvation Army's Commissioner Todd Bassett receives a salary of only $13,000 per year (plus housing) for managing this $2 billion dollar organization. 96 percent of donated dollars go to the cause. (ALL OF MY CONTRIBUTIONS GO TO THE SALVATION ARMY. IN WW II THE SALV. ARMY GAVE MY DAD AND THE GUYS FOOD, CIGS, ETC--FREE THE RED CROSS CHARGED THEM AND THEY CHARGE EVERYONE THEY CAN FOR ANY FUNDS OR HELP THEY PROVIDE!--BOB M.)
The American Legion National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their familiesand youth!
The Veterans of Foreign Wars National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!
The Disabled American Veterans National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!
The Military Order of Purple Hearts National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!
The Vietnam Veterans Association National Commander receives a $0.00 zero salary. Your donations go to help Veterans and their families and youth!
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3) America’s Decade of Disaster
Ten years later, we are a nation downgraded by Wall Street, disrespected abroad, and defied even now by al-Qaida. How did this happen?
By Michael Hirsh
On Sept. 10, 2001, the United States of America stood at the pinnacle of its power and prestige. Even Rome, in its heyday, did not have the economic and military dominance over rival nations that America possessed. “Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power,” Paul Kennedy, the historian from Yale (who a decade before had predicted a declining United States) wrote around that time. “The Pax Britannica was run on the cheap. Britain’s army was much smaller than European armies, and even the Royal Navy was equal only to the next two navies—right now all the other navies in the world combined could not dent American maritime supremacy. Charlemagne’s empire was merely western European in its reach. The Roman Empire stretched farther afield, but there was another great empire in Persia, and a larger one in China. There is, therefore, no comparison.”
The United States had a booming economy worth $10 trillion, a budget surplus, some of the strongest capital spending in decades, low unemployment, and little inflation. Its military machine could rain death on anyone from unreachable heights. B-2 pilots could take off from Missouri, bomb Belgrade, and be home for dinner.
If anything, America had grown only more dominant since the end of the Cold War, and perhaps for the first time in its history the nation faced no existential threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in late December 1991 introduced a promising era of “unipolarity,” and it was soon clear that U.S. power had no rival—even on the horizon. Japan, which only a few years before had been seen as the up-and-coming superpower, fell into deep recession as its “bubble economy” collapsed. Post-Soviet Russia imploded into an economy smaller than Portugal’s. China lumbered forward, a nation in transition, but it remained a developing country with its future as a putative superpower still far off.
Today, things feel almost inverted. The events of Sept. 11 have ultimately left us, 10 years later, with an economy and a strategic stature that no longer seem terribly awesome. America is still the sole superpower, but our invincible military is bogged down in two wasting wars, and poorly armed insurgents seem not to fear us. The rest of the world, beginning with China and Japan, now underwrites our vast indebtedness with barely concealed impatience. We are a nation downgraded by Wall Street, disrespected abroad, and defied even now by al-Qaida, whose leader was killed only recently after spending most of the decade taunting Washington. How did this happen?
Scholars and pundits have offered up a number of explanations in recent years for what they like to call “American decline”: historical inevitability; the rise of the rest. But the most persuasive answer is, in a word, incompetence. The failure of leadership in Washington is so profound that it must rank not only with the worst failures of American presidents, but also with the worst failures of great-power leaders at any time in history—the kind that can turn great powers into lesser ones. “A phenomenon noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests,” historian Barbara Tuchman wrote in her 1984 book, The March of Folly, which presented case studies of some of these episodes: Montezuma’s unilateral surrender of his Aztec empire to the Spanish; George III’s bungled handling of the American colonies; the foolish overreaching of America in Vietnam. “We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton’s dictum, that power corrupts,” Tuchman continued. “We are less aware that it breeds folly; that the power to command frequently causes failure to think.”
It is hard to escape the conclusion that al-Qaida outthought America—at least in provoking Washington to make the wrong strategic choices at the outset of the decade. That meant, in particular, all but abandoning the narrower fight in Afghanistan, al-Qaida’s true home, for an unrelated and much larger war in Iraq that we started under false pretenses—which is probably the only way a small, fractious group could elude a superpower for so long. If al-Qaida’s rhetoric is to be believed, one of its main goals was to “bleed” and “bankrupt” America—Osama bin Laden’s own words—through a long and draining conflict, as the fighters did to the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. “The jihadis expected the United States, like the Soviet Union, to be a clumsy opponent,” Wall Street Journal reporter Alan Cullison wrote in The Atlantic in September 2004, quoting a remarkable series of letters he found by accident on an old computer left behind by al-Qaida’s then-second-in-command, Ayman Zawahiri, in Afghanistan.
The jihadis were right. America failed, strategically and economically. It failed to anticipate the enormous cost of going into Iraq and of losing focus in Afghanistan. It failed to find a way to pay for the wars that it launched. It failed with its feckless disregard for how all that debt was being amassed in the financial system to pay for war and other expensive government programs, such as the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit. And finally, after all the other reasons for going to war in Iraq had fallen apart—weapons of mass destruction, links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida—the final rationale, establishing democracy in Iraq as a model for the Arab world, has proved largely irrelevant as well: The Arab Spring occurred spontaneously, with no known link to events in Iraq.
It has been, in sum, a decade of disaster. The only remaining question now is: How much permanent damage has it done to the United States and its standing in the world?
FIRST BLOOD
There is plenty of blame to go around. Whatever mistakes Barack Obama has made in the last two and a half years, most of the responsibility rests with the chief steward of the post-9/11 decade, George W. Bush. It is no surprise that a survey of more than 230 U.S. historians and political scientists by Siena Research Institute in New York, conducted toward the beginning of every presidency since 1982, now rates the younger Bush in 2010 as close to the worst president in American history on both foreign policy and the economy. Bush came in at 42nd out of 43 presidents for his handling of foreign policy, just ahead of the dead-last Lyndon Johnson, the main culprit in the Vietnam debacle. He ranked 42nd on the economy, just ahead of Herbert Hoover, who is often blamed for the Great Depression. Since his presidency ended, Bush has also plummeted on other indicators, says Donald Levy, director of the Siena Research Institute: “On imagination, he ranked 40th. On overall ability, he also ranked 40th.”
Levy admits that the scholars who take part in the survey “are somewhat more Democratic than the general population” (and that Bush’s standing may improve over time, perhaps helped by a slew of best-selling, unapologetic memoirs, most recently Dick Cheney’s). But this argument can’t be easily dismissed as partisan. Responsibility for the decade of disaster lies also with the many leading Democrats, including Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Kerry, who supported Bush on Iraq out of a mangled sense of patriotism and apparently because they had few strategic ideas of their own. (“All the intellectual horsepower has been on the Right for the last 15 years,” then-Sen. Joe Biden, who also voted for the Iraq war resolution, lamented to me in 2003, referring to the neoconservatives.) Responsibility lies also with pundits—many of them liberal members of what New York Times Editor Bill Keller once called the “I-can’t-believe-I’m-a-hawk-club”—who became what Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, later described as “complicit enablers” absorbed in “covering the march to war instead of the necessity of war.” Many in the media have to this day failed to acknowledge their error in public, which has muted any real debate over the choices made during the decade.
Indeed, the bravest and most prescient voices of dissent before the invasion—those who clearly saw the strategic mistake as it was happening—were often Republicans. They were realist hawks anguished by the potential costs in blood and treasure and by the failure to focus on al-Qaida. They were justifiably skeptical of the flimsy evidence that Saddam had WMD or ties to bin Laden’s network. Among them were former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, then-Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., and retired Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni, who in early 2002, while serving as a Bush envoy to the Middle East, spoke against the Iraq war. The Democrats were not without their gutsy dissenters, among them then-Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who as head of the Intelligence Committee opposed the war as a major distraction from the real fight. Graham told me in 2003, “We’ve essentially declared war on Mussolini and allowed Hitler to run free.”
Zinni, a wounded Vietnam veteran denounced as a “traitor” by Pentagon neocon William Luti for his publicly voiced doubts about the Iraq war, now says he feels vindicated. “I still believe it was huge strategic error,” Zinni told National Journal in late August, adding that he would rank the misdirection in the war against al-Qaida among the most catastrophic mistakes ever made by an American president, including those by some of the lowest-rated presidents in history, such as James Buchanan, whose laissez-faire approach to slavery and secession is said to have helped precipitate the Civil War.
The errors against al-Qaida may have been even worse, on balance, according to Zinni. The mistakes made by Buchanan during a national debate over slavery, or by LBJ over Vietnam during the Cold War, came under the pressure of truly existential threats to the union. “This was not an existential threat,” Zinni says. “It was a band of maybe a thousand radicals. Yet we created an investment in this that was on a level of what we do for existential threats. Obviously, we were traumatized by 9/11. I don’t mean to play that down. But this was not communism or fascism.”
This was the first error. The Bush administration convinced itself that terrorism-supporting states were the biggest problem—and that virtually all Islamist terrorist groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah, were equally the enemy. But the problem was al-Qaida, a small, transnational group that had been hounded out of the Arab world into the hands of a lunatic regime in Afghanistan. It had no known ties to any other government, and it could not even agree internally about its goals on the eve of 9/11. “Perhaps one of the most important insights to emerge from [Zawahiri’s] computer is that 9/11 sprang not so much from al-Qaida’s strengths as from its weaknesses. The computer did not reveal any links to Iraq or any other deep-pocketed government,” Cullison wrote. “Amid the group’s penury the members fell to bitter infighting. The blow against the United States was meant to put an end to the internal rivalries, which are manifest in vitriolic memos between Kabul and cells abroad.” Al-Qaida was not a deep organization; it had one A-team and resources enough for one big roll of the dice: 9/11.
For Americans, the attacks of that day were a terrible bolt from the blue, but the initial response—the most natural and obvious of which was to attack al-Qaida’s stubborn host in Afghanistan, the Taliban—only sharpened the sense of American dominance and al-Qaida’s weakness. A devastating air campaign sent the Taliban scurrying from the cities. Afghanistan fell to the Americans and their small proxy force, the Northern Alliance, in just eight weeks.
And bin Laden was all but stopped, right at the outset, when he found himself cornered in his Tora Bora fortress. As Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the operation, told me—and repeated in his 2005 book, Jawbreaker—bin Laden said to his followers, “Forgive me,” and he apologized for getting them pinned down by the Americans. (Berntsen’s men were listening on radio.) The al-Qaida leader then asked them to pray. And, lo, a miracle occurred. As Berntsen stewed over the Pentagon’s refusal to rush in more troops to encircle the trapped fighters, bin Laden was allowed to flee. And not only did Bush stop talking about the man he wanted “dead or alive,” the president also began to shift U.S. Special Forces (in particular, the 5th Group, which had built close relations with its Afghan allies) and Predator drones to the Iraq theater.
FALLOUT
That was another strategic misstep. Al-Qaida may have been composed mainly of angry young Arabs, but the group was an organic outgrowth of the anti-Soviet jihad in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. That region was its home, a giant hideout that required an all-out effort by the international community to pacify. In the months after the Taliban defeat, this was still possible, according to many experts, including key Bush administration officials like Jim Dobbins, the former special envoy to Kabul. The Afghans themselves, in stark contrast to the pent-up Iraqis, were so desperately tired of 23 years of civil war that most welcomed the Western presence with open arms. Virtually every warlord was on sale at knockdown prices. As Ismail Qasimyar, head of the loya jirga, told me when I was there in 2002, war-weary Afghans saw that “a window of opportunity had been opened for them.”
Instead of pacifying the region, the Bush administration, led by former Cold Warriors whose views were shaped by an era of state-on-state conflict, began diverting money and attention to Iraq within weeks of the fall of the Taliban. Only a handful of U.S. troops remained, confined to Kabul. By 2004, Afghanistan had become what Dobbins later described to me as “the most under-resourced nation-building effort in history.” Graham, now retired, agrees. “In February of 2002, I had a briefing at Central Command in Tampa,” the former senator says. “After the briefing, the commander, Tommy Franks, took me aside and said he wanted to talk to me personally. He said in his opinion we had stopped fighting the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban and were getting ready to fight a yet-undeclared war in Iraq. He talked about things like the transfer of military personnel and equipment into Iraq.”
The abrupt shift also disillusioned the neighboring Pakistanis, who had been cooperating; they helped, for instance, to capture 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Rawalpindi in March 2003. In an interview in 2004, Mahmud Ali Durrani, then Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States, said that just as Bush was about to invade Iraq, “al-Qaida was almost destroyed in an operational sense. But then al-Qaida got a vacuum in Afghanistan [as U.S. focus wandered]. And they got a motivational area in Iraq. Al-Qaida rejuvenated.”
Chuck Hagel blames the “mad, wild dash into Iraq” on “the lack of any clear strategic critical thinking” about the causes of 9/11. “I think when history is written of this 10-year period, it will record the folly of great-power overreach,” says Hagel, who explains his early stand against the Iraq war as the result of a vow he made to himself as an Army private while fighting the Tet offensive in 1968. “We sent home almost 16,000 body bags that year, and I always thought to myself, ‘If I get through this, if I have the opportunity to influence anyone, I owe it to those guys to never let this happen again to the country,” he says. Not only was there little evidence of WMD (even some Arab leaders like then-Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri of Lebanon thought Saddam was bluffing), but the Iraqi leader was in fact “withering on the vine”; he would likely have been toppled without U.S. intervention, especially by the time the Arab Spring unfolded, Hagel says. “We already had overflights over Iraq and Saudi Arabia. He couldn’t control any of his oil. He had no control of his south. He had no control of his north. He was in trouble. I came to that conclusion in 2002.”
Bush effectively set aside the war of necessity for a war of choice, making precisely the kind of mistake that President Roosevelt avoided in World War II: “In World War II, we didn’t get trapped into side theaters,” says Zinni. Even if it was a legitimate exercise of U.S. power to force the defiant Saddam to surrender his weapons programs—on the chance that he could provide WMD to terrorists—it was a historically reckless act to invade when he had opened up his country to unfettered U.N. inspections after a 15-0 Security Council vote.
Bush invented an entirely new war that both defied world opinion and—in another enormous strategic misconception—gave bin Laden new life by vindicating his often-unheeded warnings to Islamists about the peril of the “far enemy,” the United States. By invading Iraq, Bush displaced Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other “near” regimes as the bogeyman in the jihadi imagination. “I remember a conversation with [former Egyptian leader] Hosni Mubarak, who said whatever face we wanted to paint on this invasion, the Arab people would see it as an attack on Islam,” Graham says. “By launching this war, we erected enormous billboards of recruitment across the Arab world. People who were essentially moderate became extremists because of what the war in Iraq represented.”
Bush also lost the foreign-policy support of nearly every nation friendly to America, with the possible exception of the United Kingdom. The silver lining of 9/11had been a wave of international sympathy for the lone superpower. (“We are all Americans,” as Le Monde famously topped its front page after the attacks.) It was a chance to reaffirm the legitimacy of America’s role as trusted overseer of the international system and to unite nations against a transnational threat. It was an opportunity for alliance- and institution-building. Bush squandered it. “The most serious strategic mistake we made is that we turned this into America’s war,” Zinni says. “It was also Berlin, London, Madrid, and Rome that were attacked.”
A LOST DECADE
Meanwhile, a series of misguided bipartisan policies began to undermine American economic power. The Bush administration wanted to be the first in U.S. history to pay for wars with tax cuts, not tax increases. Moreover, its commitment to a deregulatory philosophy meant lax oversight of the financial markets. Decisions made in Washington enabled Wall Street to keep inventing new ways to package debt, underwriting Bush’s combination of Bigger Government and Smaller Tax Revenues. But they also helped lead to the credit crisis and the Great Recession. According to Seth Egan of Egan-Jones Ratings, of the $14 trillion or so in U.S. debt, $3 trillion was the result of Bush’s two wars, and $2 trillion came from the credit crisis.
Beyond that, the 2000s became a lost decade. Net job growth was zero, which was unprecedented, especially during wartime. Economic output rose at the slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s. Bottom line: By failing to understand the 9/11 threat, Washington created an expensive, decadelong series of wars that sapped our military, our credibility, our economy, our morale, and our moral standing. It unnecessarily cost tens of thousands of men and women their lives and limbs, alienated much of the world, and distracted Washington from destroying the chief culprit of 9/11.
Furthermore, there is no longer any question that the diversion of U.S. troops—especially intelligence assets and Special Forces—to Iraq produced a resurgence of the Taliban and Qaida movements. Worse, the enemy learned tactics from the insurgents in Iraq. According to Defense Department figures, the number of U.S. service members killed by IEDs in Afghanistan has more than quadrupled in the last few years, rising from 68 in 2008 to 268 last year, while the number of wounded has soared from 270 in 2008 to 3,371 last year. The evidence is now incontrovertible that the failure to complete the job in Afghanistan left us with a quagmire there, while the horrifically expensive Iraq war did not need to be fought.
Bush’s all-embracing solution to terrorism—spreading democracy—was always based on an article of faith, not on a thorough look at the sources of terrorism. Remarkably, the administration never cited a single academic or internal intelligence study linking al-Qaida to a dearth of democracy in the Arab world. True, the Arab Spring this year may be tied to waning support for al-Qaida. (Many young Arabs seem to regard it as yesterday’s movement, and bin Laden’s death appears to have had little resonance.) But considering that the democratic uprisings in countries from Egypt to Syria are occurring independent of our wars, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that the same result could have been achieved with more speed and less sacrifice had the United States adopted a better strategy immediately after Sept. 11. Beyond the damage to the economy and America’s reputation, says Hagel, “look at what we’ve done to our force structure. There are a record number of suicides, record divorces. It’s devastating what we’ve done to our poor [military] people.”
A lost decade does not necessarily mean lost hopes. Graham, one of the few presidential candidates from those years to vote no on the Iraq war resolution of 2002, compares America’s strategic errors with those made during the Peloponnesian war 2,500 years ago, when Athens overestimated its strength and squandered its position in a fruitless fight with Sparta. Afterward, the Spartans dismantled the Athenian empire. Today, America’s rivals—say, the Chinese—aren’t close to doing to Washington what Sparta did to Athens. The United States has an unmatched military and a powerful economy despite dropping back on some fundamentals, such as industrial production and R&D, over the last 10 years, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
Even disastrous decisions can be undone if the nation honestly assesses its mistakes, Graham says. “I think the lesson to be learned is that it’s the responsibility of American leaders to tell the American people the truth.” That’s not happening yet. “I voted against both Bush tax cuts, against the Iraq war in 2002, and against expansion of Medicare without paying for it in 2004,” he says. “Those decisions most contributed to the debt problem. Yet the people who largely voted for and cheerleaded for those four actions are now saying that the most important thing America faces is its debt problem.”
Despite his low job-approval rating in the polls at home, Obama has already won back some U.S. prestige and allies abroad by taking out bin Laden in early May and his lieutenant Atiyah Abd al-Rahman in late August, and by directing that the U.S. military play a subordinate role to NATO in ousting Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, this time at the behest of the Arab League. “It’s an obvious contrast with the previous administration,” says James Steinberg, Obama’s recently departed deputy secretary of State, who is now dean of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. But it’s not quite obvious enough. “It’s been a devastating first decade of the 21st century for America,” Hagel says. “We’ll be living with the consequences for a long time.” Perhaps, but the first step toward fixing our mistakes is to acknowledge them. As a nation, we haven’t really done that yet.
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4)Who won the post 9/11 war?
By George Friedman of Stratfor
It has been 10 years since 9/11, and all of us who write about such things for a living are writing about it. That causes me to be wary. I prefer being the lonely voice, but the fact is that 9/11 was a defining moment in American history. On Sept. 12, 2001, few would have anticipated the course the resulting war would take — but then, few knew what to think. The nation was in shock. In retrospect, many speak with great wisdom about what should have been thought about 9/11 at the time and what should have been done in its aftermath. I am always interested in looking at what people actually said and did at the time.
The country was in shock, and shock was a reasonable response. The country was afraid, and fear was a reasonable response. Ten years later, we are all much wiser and sure that our wisdom was there from the beginning. But the truth is that, in retrospect, we know we would have done things superbly had we the authority. Few of us are being honest with ourselves. We were all shocked and frightened. Our wisdom came much later, when it had little impact. Yes, if we knew then what we know now we would have all bought Google stock. But we didn’t know things then that we know now, so it is all rather pointless to lecture those who had decisions to make in the midst of chaos.
Some wars are carefully planned, but even those wars rarely take place as expected. Think of the Germans in World War I, having planned the invasion of France for decades and with meticulous care. Nothing went as planned for either side, and the war did not take a course that was anticipated by anyone. Wars occur at unpredictable times, take unpredictable courses and have unexpected consequences. Who expected the American Civil War to take the course it did? We have been second-guessing Lincoln and Davis, Grant and Lee and all the rest for more than a century.
This particular war — the one that began on 9/11 and swept into Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries — is hard to second-guess because there are those who do not think it is a war. Some people, including President George W. Bush, seem to regard it as a criminal conspiracy. When Bush started talking about bringing al Qaeda to justice, he was talking about bringing them before the bar of justice. Imagine trying to arrest British sailors for burning Washington. War is not about bringing people to justice. It is about destroying their ability to wage war. The contemporary confusion between warfare and criminality creates profound confusion about the rules under which you operate. There are the rules of war as set forth in the Geneva Conventions, and there are criminal actions. The former are designed to facilitate the defense of national interests and involve killing people because of the uniform they wear. The latter is about punishing people for prior action. I have never sorted through what it was that the Bush administration thought it was doing.
This entire matter is made more complex by the fact that al Qaeda doesn’t wear a uniform. Under the Geneva Conventions, there is no protection for those who do not openly carry weapons or wear uniforms or at least armbands. They are regarded as violating the rules of war. If they are not protected by the rules of war then they must fall under criminal law by default. But criminal law is not really focused on preventing acts so much as it is on punishing them. And as satisfying as it is to capture someone who did something, the real point of the U.S. response to 9/11 was to prevent anyone else from doing something — killing and capturing people who have not done anything yet but who might.
Coming to Grips
The problem is that international law has simply failed to address the question of how a nation-state deals with forces that wage war through terrorism but are not part of any nation-state. Neither criminal law nor the laws of war apply. One of the real travesties of 9/11 was the manner in which the international legal community — the United Nations and its legal structures, the professors of international law who discuss such matters and the American legal community — could not come to grips with the tensions underlying the resulting war. There was an unpleasant and fairly smug view that the United States had violated both the rules of war and domestic legal processes, but very little attempt was made to craft a rule of warfare designed to cope with a group like al Qaeda — organized, covert, effective — that attacked a nation-state.
As U.S. President Barack Obama has discovered, the failure of the international legal community to rapidly evolve new rules of war placed him at odds with his erstwhile supporters. The ease with which the international legal community found U.S. decision makers’ attempts to craft a lawful and effective path “illegal and immoral” (an oft-repeated cliche of critics of post-9/11 policy) created an insoluble dilemma for the United States. The mission of the U.S. government was to prevent further attacks on the homeland. The Geneva Conventions, for the most part, didn’t apply. Criminal law is not about prevention. The inability of the law to deal with reality generated an image of American lawlessness.
Of course, one of the most extraordinary facts of the war that begin on 9/11 was that there have been no more successful major attacks on the United States. Had I been asked on Sept. 11, 2001, about the likelihood of that (in fact, I was asked), my answer would have been that it was part of a series of attacks, and not just the first. This assumption came from a knowledge of al Qaeda’s stated strategic intent, the fact that the 9/11 team had operated with highly effective covert techniques based on technical simplicity and organizational effectiveness, and that its command structure seemed to operate with effective command and control. Put simply, the 9/11 team was good and was prepared to go to its certain death to complete the mission. Anyone not frightened by this was out of touch with reality.
Yet there have been no further attacks. This is not, I think, because they did not intend to carry out such attacks. It is because the United States forced the al Qaeda leadership to flee Afghanistan during the early days of the U.S. war, disrupting command and control. It is also because U.S. covert operations on a global scale attacked and disrupted al Qaeda’s strength on the ground and penetrated its communications. A significant number of attacks on the United States were planned and prosecuted. They were all disrupted before they could be launched, save for the attempted and failed bombing in Times Square, the famed shoe bomber and, my favorite, the crotch bomber. Al Qaeda has not been capable of mounting effective attacks against the United States (though it has conducted successful attacks in Spain and Britain) because the United States surged its substantial covert capabilities against it.
Obviously, as in all wars, what is now called “collateral damage” occurred (in a more civilized time it would have been called “innocent civilians killed, wounded and detained”). How could it have been otherwise? Just as aircraft dropping bombs don’t easily discriminate against targets and artillery sometimes kills innocent people, covert operations can harm the unintended. That is the nature and horror of war. The choice for the United States was to accept the danger of another al Qaeda attack — an event that I am certain was intended and would have happened without a forceful U.S. response — or accept innocent casualties elsewhere. The foundation of a polity is that it protects its own at the cost of others. This doctrine might be troubling, but few of us in World War II felt that protecting Americans by bombing German and Japanese cities was a bad idea. If this troubles us, the history of warfare should trouble us. And if the history of warfare troubles us, we should bear in mind that we are all its heirs and beneficiaries, particularly in the United States.
The first mission of the war that followed 9/11 was to prevent any further attacks. That mission was accomplished. That is a fact often forgotten.
Of course, there are those who believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy carried out by the CIA in order to justify interference in our liberty. But an organization as capable as they believe the CIA is would not need a justification to abridge liberty. That was a lot of work to justify something, and the truly powerful don’t need to justify anything. Nor do they need to leave people who are revealing the truth alive. It is striking that the “doubters” believe 9/11 was created in order to crush American freedoms but that the conspirators are so incompetent they cannot shut down those who have discovered the conspiracy and are telling the world about it. Personally, if I were interested in global domination triggered by a covert act like 9/11, I would silence those revealing my secret. But then I’m not that good at it, and the doubters all have reasons why they are blogging the truth and are not dead or languishing in a concentration camp.
I take this detour for four reasons. First, doubters should not be ignored but answered. Second, unless they are answered, they will be able to say the CIA (or whoever they think did it) needed one attack to achieve its goals. Third, the issue the doubters raise is not the structural integrity of a building but the underlying intent of the CIA in carrying out the attack. The why is everything to them, and it is important to point out that it is their explanation of motive that makes no sense. Finally, I am engaging the doubters here because I enjoy receiving an abundance of emails containing fascinating accusations and the occasional threat.
Considering the Failures
But to return to the main theme, it is important here to consider not only the successes but also the failures of the war, and here Iraq comes to mind. There is a case to be made that the Iraq campaign was not irrational, but even more interesting, I think, is the fact that no war is without its disastrous misjudgments, even successful wars. In my mind, the U.S. invasion of the Philippines in 1944 was a major mistake. It did little to contribute to the fall of Japan, cost far more than the 4,000 American lives lost in Iraq, and it could have actually delayed the end of the war. It was opposed by senior commanders and was essentially something Gen. Douglas MacArthur insisted on for political reasons. The Battle of the Somme in World War I cost 600,000 British and French casualties, with 60,000 in one day. Their total gain during the battle was perhaps six miles. And in the American Civil War, the federal drive into Virginia turned into a disaster.
Every successful war is built around a series of defeats and miscalculations. The perfect war is built around deeply flawed and unnecessary campaigns. My own personal selections are not as important as the principle that all successful wars contain massive mistakes. If we simply write off Iraq as one of these, that in itself does not change the fact that the American homeland was not attacked again. Did Iraq contribute to that? This is a question that warrants a long discussion. But conceding that it had no effect simply makes the post-9/11 war normal and, in that normality, tragic.
What has not been normal has been the length of the war. Heavy fighting continues in Afghanistan, Iraq is not quite done and new theaters for covert operations are constantly opening and closing. It is the first U.S. campaign — Afghanistan — that actually poses the most vexing problem, one that is simple to express: When is the war over? That, of course, depends on the goal. What is the United States trying to achieve there?
The initial goal of the invasion was to dislodge al Qaeda, overthrow the government that had supported it and defeat the Taliban. The first two goals were accomplished quickly. The third goal has not been accomplished to this day, nor is it likely that the United States will ever accomplish it. Other powers have tried to subdue Afghanistan, but few have succeeded. The Taliban are optimized for the battlefield they fight on, have superior intelligence and have penetrated and are able to subvert government institutions, including the Afghan military. They have the implicit support of elements in a neighboring major nation — Pakistan — that are well beyond American means to intimidate. The United States has no port from which to supply its forces except the one controlled by Pakistan and only complex and difficult supply routes through other countries.
On the other hand, the Taliban cannot defeat the United States, which can stay in Afghanistan indefinitely. But the major U.S. mission in Afghanistan is concluded. Al Qaeda has not used Afghanistan as a primary base since 2002. Al Qaeda in Pakistan, according to the United States, has been crippled. The Taliban, products of Afghanistan for the most part, have no international ambitions. Al Qaeda has relocated to other countries like Yemen and Somalia.
Given this, continued combat in Afghanistan cannot be linked to al Qaeda. It could be said that the reason to go to war in Afghanistan was to prevent al Qaeda’s return. But the fact is that it doesn’t need Afghanistan, and if it did return to Afghanistan, it would be no more dangerous to the United States than it currently is with its bases elsewhere.
In wars, and especially in counterinsurgencies, the mission tends to creep upward. In Afghanistan, the goal is now the transformation of Afghan society into one that is democratic, no longer corrupt by American standards and able to defend itself against the Taliban. This goal does not seem attainable given the relative forces and interests in the country.
Therefore, this war will go on until the United States decides to end it or there is a political evolution in Kabul in which the government orders us out. The point is that the goal has become disengaged from the original intent and is unattainable. Unlike other wars, counterinsurgencies rarely end in victory. They usually end when the foreign forces decide to leave.
There is talk of a long war against radical Islam. It had better not be. The Islamic world is more than a billion people and radical Islam is embedded in many places. The idea that the United States has the power to wage an interminable war in the Islamic world is fantasy. This is not a matter of ideology or willpower or any other measures. It is a matter of available forces, competing international interests and American interests.
Ultimately, there are three lessons of the last decade that I think are important. The first is the tremendous success the United States has had in achieving its primary goal — blocking attacks on the homeland. The second is that campaigns of dubious worth are inevitable in war, and particularly in one as ambiguous as this war has been. Finally, all wars end, and the idea of an interminable war dominating American foreign policy and pushing all other considerations to the side is not what is going to happen. The United States must have a sense of proportion, of what can be done, what is worth doing and what is too dangerous to do. An unlimited strategic commitment is the definitive opposite of strategy.
The United States has done as well as can be expected. Over the coming years there will be other terrorist attacks. As it wages war in response, the United States will be condemned for violating international laws that are insensate to reality. At this point, for all its mistakes and errors — common to all wars — the United States has achieved its primary mission. There have been no more concerted terrorist attacks against the United States. Now it is time to resume history.
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5)What if Congressional Black Caucus Were Accused of Wanting Jews Gassed?
By Dennis Prager
Imagine a Jewish Congress member accusing the members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) of wanting to see Jews gassed. How would any decent American — on the right or left — describe such a statement? Loathsome? Morally reprehensible? An obvious lie?
All three descriptions would be entirely accurate.
Next question: How much media exposure would that slander be given?
Would it make the front page of The New York Times and The Washington Post? Would we read ferocious editorials from coast to coast? Would the story lead on TV newscasts?
Correct on all three, again.
Final question: Would said congressman be allowed to stay in office?
We all know the answer to that one, too.
So here's a real question: If a black congressman charged that members of Congress who support the tea party "would love to see you and me (blacks) hanging from a tree," what's the difference between that libel and the made-up libel about the CBC wanting to see Jews gassed?
The answer, of course, is that there is no difference.
But because the left thinks in terms of race, gender and class rather than in traditional moral terms of right and wrong, and because the left dominates the media, only one of these two libels would be given the national attention and opprobrium they would both deserve.
Last week, Indiana Congressman Andre Carson told a CBC gathering in Florida that members of Congress who are members of the tea party want to see blacks "hanging from trees." Because he is both a Democrat and a black congressman, the liberal news media, which means essentially all of our news media, has barely reported what is an almost uniquely vicious libel in American political history.
Given this uniqueness, it demands an explanation.
First, it is meant to create racial tension. Without racial tension — specifically, black Americans resenting white Americans, especially conservatives — the Democratic Party fears that it cannot survive as a national force. And it is right.
The day the majority of black Americans adopt the attitude that Washington Post correspondent Keith Richburg has written of in "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa," the Democratic Party will be rendered irrelevant. As a black American, Richberg considers himself a member of the most fortunate group of blacks living anywhere in the world. No Democrat can win a presidential election without more than 90 percent of the black vote. And the only way to ensure that vote is to label whites in general and conservatives in particular as racists.
Second, the CBC is happy to race-bait for the Democrats. The CBC's power emanates from its party's power, so its leaders need to tell fellow blacks regularly how despicable the American majority is — and therefore how only Democrats and the left can save them from everything ... even lynching.
Third, it is the CBC — not the tea party — that should be described as racist. While race plays no role in tea party membership, race is the only criterion for membership in the CBC. One must be black. Nothing else matters.
A black member of Congress whose district is largely non-black can be a member of the CBC, but a non-black Congressman whose district is largely black cannot be a member. Democratic Congressman Steven Cohen, whose Tennessee district is largely black, applied for membership in the CBC and was turned down for one reason: He is white.
What we have here is a racist group hurling false accusations of racism at a group that is on no way racist. But since it is an axiom of the left that blacks cannot be racist — because whites are the authors of racism and because racism is only possible when practiced by the racial group in power — few call the CBC what it is.
Fourth, when you are used to getting away with taking immoral positions, you feel free to continue doing so.
In 2009, seven members of the CBC visited Fidel Castro. Not only were they full of praise for the tyrant — in that regard, they were hardly alone on the left — but they also refused to meet with any democratic dissidents, including Cuba's leading black dissenter.
As a Washington Post editorial noted at the time, "In five days on the island, the (CBC) Congress members found no time for dialogue with Afro-Cuban dissident Jorge Luis Garcia Perez ... Mr. Garcia, better known as 'Antunez,' is a renowned advocate of human rights who has often been singled out for harsh treatment because of his color. "'The authorities in my country,' he has said, 'have never tolerated that a black person (could dare to) oppose the regime.'
"His wife, Iris, is a founder of the Rosa Parks Women's Civil Rights Movement, named after an American hero whom Afro-Cubans try to emulate."
As the snub of Cuba's leading black freedom fighters demonstrated, in a conflict between helping the left and helping blacks, the CBC chooses the left.
On its website, the CBC calls itself "the conscience of the Congress since 1971." Its members probably believe it. But it has about as much truth as Congressman's Carson's accusation.
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