Bully, Heel, Hypocrite and Thug! Drones and Rot Within!

Poking Fun:

1) A 'fatwa' can be issued by a thin Muslim.
2) Making a Muslim woman wear a Bukhara outside is an insult.
3) When Obama wants to be loquacious he drones on and on.
4) It is not a blast when Muslims strap bomb belts to their children.
5) Radical Muslim women are veiled threats
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What Brigette Gabriel warned about is accelerating.  Hagel should be thrilled.(See 1 below.)
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Justice Thomas interview.  I consider him to be a far better Jurist than his detractors. Attacks on Thomas are liberal's weapons of choice.

The video starts with him speaking at around the 6:00 mark..  It's long but you will see that the Supreme Court judge, constantly chided for never opening his mouth in the courtroom, actually has a lot of very interesting things to say.

"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=heQjKdHu1P4&feature=player_embedded "
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Hanson on Obama's 'hypocritic' oath. (See 2 below.)
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Rotting from within continued.  (See 3 below.)
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It would behoove Obama and Kerry to read Elliot Abram's book but it is doubtful they will.  They seem to believe history offers no meaningful messages nor provides  insights.  (See 4 below.)
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Stratfor's Friedman weighs in on drone airstrikes. (See 5 below.)
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For shame you obstinate Republicans!  

The consummate bully uses the bully pulpit not to enhance our nation's economic picture nor our fiscal debacle but simply to isolate Republicans. 

As a leader Obama is not only a heel but also a thug!(See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)Middle East Broadcaster Al Jazeera Launches Major US Expansion

By Lisa Barron

Al Jazeera, the cable news network owned by the government of Qatar, has big plans for its American operation despite being criticized by the U.S. government for airing videos from Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. cable news channel, Al Jazeera America, will be editorially separate from the Doha-based broadcast center that is also home to Al Jazeera English. 

Bob Wheelock, the former ABC executive in charge of setting it up, believes times have changed and so has Al Jazeera’s image.

“Imagine six or seven years ago, trying to find real estate for Al Jazeera in Washington. I’m sure it wasn’t easy,” he told USA Today. Now, he said, “We’re going to have signage, you know, just like CBS, ABC, CNN, NBC, just like everybody else. We’re psyched.”

Al Jazeera spent $500 million last year to buy Current TV — which can be seen on cable channels in 41 million homes — from former Vice President Al Gore and other investors. Cable operators have the option of dropping Al Jazeera, which Time Warner has suggested it might do.

Al Jazeera English, which launched in 2006, has until now been available on just a few cable systems or online. It has won numerous awards, however, for its international news — especially its coverage of the Arab Spring — and received praise from some in Washington, including former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

“We hope to bring international news and more in-depth storytelling for the viewers,” said Wheelock. “There’s an appetite for news from elsewhere and for the documentaries we do and the type of coverage we do.” 

Al Jazeera America plans to increase its staff of 13 to some 200 people across the country. It is building a new broadcast center in Washington, expanding its space at the UN in New York, and setting up bureaus in Detroit, New Orleans, San Francisco and five other cities.

The network recently posted job listings for more than 100 reporters, producers, videographers, and online writers and received thousands of applications. 

Al Jazeera will face an already crowded field of cable news providers, competing with American channels, including CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC, and global networks such as BBC World News, Russia Today, France 24 and CCTV.
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2)Obama’s Hypocritic Oath

The startling disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality

 By Victor Davis Hanson

Barack Obama has a habit of identifying a supposed crisis in collective morality, damning the straw men “them” who engage in such ethical lapses, soaring with rhetorical bromides — and then, to national quiet, doing more or less the exact things he once swore were ruining the country. 

Washington will always be a city of hypocrisies, as one would expect when astronomical amounts of money and political power collide. What is striking about the recent disclosures about Obama’s tenure is not that his embarrassments are all that different from embarrassments of other administrations, but that they are at odds entirely with almost everything Obama has professed. And that realization is starting to damage his presidency as much as its actual shortcomings.

Take the recent drone memo and the context in which it was leaked. When Harold Koh was dean of the Yale Law School, he used to berate the Bush administration for its supposedly criminal anti-terrorism policy. He went so far as to call President Bush “torturer in chief.” But as State Department legal counsel in the Obama administration, a metamorphosed Koh and others gave President Obama the go-ahead to up the Predator-drone kill tally tenfold over the Bush administration’s, and insisted that it was legal to kill American citizens suspected of al-Qaeda affiliations.

The centerpiece of Obama’s 2008 campaign was the simultaneous unlawfulness and superfluity of the Bush anti-terrorism protocols. But Obama embraced most of them while failing to implement any of his supposed correctives — such as trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in a New York City courtroom, transferring Guantanamo inmates to prisons within the United States, and subjecting CIA agents to scrutiny for their enhanced interrogations. So what are we now left with? Historians will see American anti-terrorism policy post 9/11 as a Bush-Obama continuum — albeit with a vast expansion of targeted assassinations by the civil libertarian and Nobel laureate Obama. Oddly, there has never been any acknowledgment by the administration that Obama adopted the policies of his predecessor that he had once damned, much less that in the case of drone assassinations he far exceeded them, while most of his own innovations were quietly dropped.

Obama also promised a radical reform, both legal and spiritual, of the big-money nexus between Wall Street and the federal government. He especially jawboned firms that had taken federal bailout money and then given big bonuses to executives who had overseen losses — while he made frequent promises of implementing fair-share taxation and ending offshore tax avoidance, lobbyists in government, and the revolving door. Obama’s two appointments to the position of secretary of the Treasury scarcely meet his rhetorical flourishes. Timothy Geithner was a confessed tax dodger in a fashion that was both trivial and selfish. Treasury designate Jack Lew took a million-dollar bonus while a grandee at Citigroup, an ailing company that was a recipient of massive infusions of federal cash. Recent disclosures suggest that Lew had Caribbean offshore investments in the very Potemkin building in the Caymans that Obama so dramatically derided as symptomatic of 1-percenter pathology. Former budget director Peter Orszag went from the administration into a six-figure job at Citigroup. By Washington standards, none of this is unusual; but by the standard of Obama’s own sanctimonious rhetoric it is shocking.

Until the advent of the Obama administration, Bush was sharply criticized for adding $4 trillion to the national debt over eight years. His defense that he inherited a recession, that 9/11 sent the economy into a tailspin, and that he was funding two wars fell on deaf ears. Likewise, Bush’s explanation that, as a percentage of GDP, his deficits (on average 3.4 percent of GDP) over eight years were smaller than either Reagan’s (4.2 percent) or his father’s (4.3 percent) likewise was ignored. Yet Obama in just four years borrowed a trillion dollars more than Bush had in eight, and set a peacetime record of serial deficits averaging 8.7 percent of GDP. The problem is not just that Obama took a model of reckless spending and doubled it in half the time — Washington is full of wild spenders, both Democratic and Republican — but that Obama was zealous in his castigation of Bush’s much lower spending (“unpatriotic”) and strident in his vows to stop the borrowing, going so far as to vote against the debt ceiling while in the Senate and to promise as president to halve the deficit by the end of his first term.
It is hard to blame the president when the huge U.S. economy is showing a weak pulse. But Barack Obama did just that in repeatedly damning Bush for the 2007–09 recession. He is now in his fifth year of governance, and the economy has not seen a single month with the unemployment rate below 7.8 percent, when in the prior eight years there was not one month of unemployment above 7.8 percent. After over $5 trillion borrowed, by the end of Obama’s first term, the economy was contracting and unemployment was higher than when he began his presidency.

One of the keystones of Obama’s promised reset foreign policy was the premise that George Bush’s obstinacy had needlessly antagonized our enemies like Iran, North Korea, Syria, and Venezuela — and, in fact, most of the Arab world. But at the beginning of his second term, Iran refuses even to talk with his administration as it presses ahead with its nuclear program. North Korea just issued a video of an envisioned nuclear strike on New York City. And Syria has suffered 60,000 killed in a cruel civil war. Obama campaigned on the bad war in Iraq and the good war in Afghanistan, but when he entered office the war in Iraq was over, in terms of American losses, while the Afghan war was about to explode, costing more American lives since the end of 2008 than it had in the prior seven years since 2001. Add in the Benghazi disaster and the spread of Islamic extremism across North Africa from Egypt to Mali, and one could argue that the world is a more dangerous place than it was when George Bush left office. Presidents cannot be blamed for such events, but they can be called out for their hypocrisy when they have made the case that prior presidents were in fact culpable for chaos abroad.

There is a pattern here, and the list could be expanded: the Affordable Care Act, which will send health-insurance premiums skyrocketing; the bragging about new oil and gas development that came despite, not because of, administration action; the moralizing about the selfish and high-living 1 percent amid the president’s vacationing at Martha’s Vineyard, lavish entertaining, and golfing at tony links; and the platitudes about a new civility and a new politics while raising record amounts of money in order to blacken Mitt Romney as a sexist, racist, veritable crook, and near killer.

In 2008 Obama was not just a fierce critic but a sanctimonious critic of just the sorts of practices and protocols that he has later embraced. Why? Partly, Senator Obama was inexperienced and really believed that the presidency would be as easy a task as had been his opportunistic brief tenure as a senator. Partly, because during the 2007–08 campaign the media never asked questions of Obama in the manner that they did other candidates, he naturally assumed, quite correctly, that they were so invested in his symbolism that they would never critique him when he was president. And partly, as a man of the Left Obama believed that the means really are justified by the ends — and so the reactionary Bush should be judged by standards that can hardly apply to the egalitarian progressive Obama.
Will the abject hypocrisy continue for another four years? There is no reason to believe that Obama has become more circumspect and now understands that he cannot meet the very expectations he demanded of others, or that the media will try to salvage their tattered reputation by applying the same scrutiny to Obama that they did to others. 

But who knows — in 2016 we may see a young charismatic senator like the Barack Obama of 2007 who creates a messianic persona through hypnotizing the media, insisting that the incumbent is an utter failure, and promising “hope and change.”

Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. 

His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books.

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3)American Education: Rotting the Country from the Inside

By Daren Jonescu

The day after Barack Obama's re-election, unrepentant terrorist-turned-"education reformer" Bill Ayers posted an open letter to the president on his blog, focused on educational matters.  Specifically, it was a straw man-filled plea to resist private influences in public education, in the names (naturally) of "freedom" and "democracy." 

Perfectly echoing his intellectual forbear, John Dewey, Ayers tells Obama that "[w]hen the aim of education and the sole measure of success is competitive, learning becomes exclusively selfish, and there is no obvious social motive to pursue it."  (See my discussion of Dewey's near-identical remarks, and their meaning, here.)

Ayers even concludes his post by citing his hero by name.  Reminding Obama of the progressive University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where Ayers, Obama, and "your friend Rahm Emanuel" all sent their own children, he urges Obama to universalize this schooling through the public system, and concludes:

Good enough for you, good enough for the privileged, then it must be good enough for the kids in public schools everywhere -- a standard to be aspired to and worked toward.  Any other ideal for our schools, in the words of John Dewey who founded the school you chose for your daughters, "is narrow and unlovely; acted upon it destroys our democracy."

In a typical leftist projection, Ayers, one of America's foremost living experts on the methods of destroying a democracy, argues that only by following his prescription may democracy be saved.  And, in a perfect parallel of the modern progressive ratchet, in which government causes a problem through regulation and then advocates more regulation as the solution to the problem, Ayers responds to the death of education under the hundred-year influence of Dewey ("the father of modern education") by proposing to salvage the public schools by infesting them with even more Deweyism. 

And make no mistake about one point: Ayers is invoking Dewey not merely as a respectable cover for his subversive agenda.  Deweyism is his subversive agenda.  Ayers and his fellow "reformers" are to Dewey what Lenin was to Marx.  Marx was an intellectual who wished to undermine Western civilization.  Lenin was a thug who sought to bring Marxist principles into full practice through propaganda, armed revolution, and sophisticated lies.  Likewise, Dewey hated American liberty and individualism and wished to undermine them through socialist education.  Ayers is Dewey's less civilized, more "practically minded" disciple.

Having laid the groundwork regarding the methods and goals of Ayers and the Weather Underground (WU) in Part 1 of this interview with Larry Grathwohl, we turn now to the significance of this radicalism in today's terms, particularly with regard to modern education.

DJ: Several members of WU and SDS, most famously Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, but also Howard Machtinger and others, have become prominent childhood education and "children's rights" activists and theorists.  What do you make of this?

LG: Having failed to accomplish their goal of destroying capitalism and U.S. imperialism when they went underground and began their strategic sabotage, it is my belief that they decided to accomplish this goal by infiltrating the educational system and using it to their own [ends].  Reflecting on this, it is obvious that Bill Ayers, as an example, has been a professor of education and thus has been teaching our teachers for at least three or four generations.  As you pointed out in your article, "Good News: You May Be Spared Execution," the result of this has been that many students and individuals have been educated to believe that the United States is an evil empire and should be punished if not eliminated.  This means that many will simply give up and comply with whatever the future may hold or impose upon them when people like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn are able to succeed in their ultimate goal of the destruction of the U.S. 

So it is my conclusion that what the WU failed to accomplish when they went underground and began their strategic sabotage is now being accomplished through the educational system and the political means that they have gained by supporting such people as Barack Obama and his Chicago supporters.  I tell people today that we are losing our freedoms because of the attacks that emerge from the left and are targeted on all of our basic societal organizations.  God is eliminated from the classroom; the history of our country is no longer being taught, but rather a revised edition which depicts our people and our nation as enemies of the world and of all that is good and right.  This includes church, religion, veterans, educational institutions, and any organization that supports the greatness of our country and the strength of its institutions. 

Presently, our president tells us that there is no economic problem, that the national debt is not something to be concerned about, and that the Constitution is outdated and needs to be replaced or at least revised.  And because of this educational problem, there are people who no longer know what the Constitution is or the reasons for its existence, so how can these people be expected to defend it?  This has been accomplished through control of the classrooms and through the constant political babble that the left puts out and that people are simply unprepared to defend [against].

DJ: What would you say to Democrats, Republicans, and academics who point to Ayers's years of "academic respectability" as an argument against identifying him with the statements or actions of his radical days?

LG: Bill Ayers has never apologized for or recanted on the goals of the WU from the 1970s and '80s.  Furthermore, he has stated that his only regret was that the WU didn't do enough.  There are pictures of him leaving the courthouse when he was exonerated for his crimes while part of the WU and he states, "[G]uilty as hell, free as a bird, isn't America wonderful?"  Bill and Bernardine have continued their political activities in regards to their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, in which Bill has led classes on how to disrupt and defy authority.  Bill and Bernardine have participated in the activities of Code Pink, which has been involved in the Middle East and in creating the turmoil in that part of the world. ...

Bill Ayers has not changed his ways, has not changed his goals or his objectives.  He is now traveling around the country, giving talks to people, telling them that they are very close to changing this country and making it into what he wants it to be and that they should not give up at this point.  He also tells them that they cannot completely depend upon Barack Obama to create this new order and that they must not fail because they are so very close to accomplishing their mission of changing America forever.

DJ: Would you willingly allow your own child to attend a school or school board in which the teachers were trained, and the educational goals set, by Ayers, Machtinger, or likeminded others?  If not, why not?

LG: My answer to this question is no.  Absolutely not.  I want my children and grandchildren to be educated in a way that they have the ability to make up their own minds about issues without having been indoctrinated into the Bill Ayers way of thinking.  It is my belief that teachers today are more interested in teaching social resistance rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic.  The result is that we have a tremendous number of young people who are unable to read or write, or add and subtract.  They are, however, very capable of protesting when they think that their individual rights have been imposed upon [and] feel that they are being punished if they have to do homework and learn the basic precepts of our country and our government.  In many cases they don't even know that the Constitution exists, and if they do, they are taught that this is a document written by old white men 200 years ago and that it is meaningless in today's world. 

I encourage people to send their children to private or parochial schools, and if this is not possible, they should home-educate their children in order to assure that they learn the true history of America and the necessary tools to be a good citizen and be able to contribute and to succeed in our society.

Author's note: There are a hundred compelling reasons for removing your children and grandchildren from the public schools, regardless of any practical or financial inconveniences this may cause you.  If the one you have just heard from Larry Grathwohl -- that the progressive revolutionary intentions and methods of Bill Ayers are being woven into the mainstream of modern education, in effect establishing the re-education camps of the WU's hopes -- is not forceful enough to move you, then I give up.

(To be continued)

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4)The Peace Process Obsession

By Richard Baehr

A Review of Tested by Zion, by Elliot Abrams, Cambridge Press

It is 20 years since the start of the Oslo Peace Process, and this is where things stand:

• 1. Hamas, a terrorist group committed to the elimination of the state of Israel through violent resistance and the murder of Jews, is in control of Gaza, which it seized from Fatah, Yassar Arafat's Party, in a short war in 2007. Israel has twice (in 2008 and 2012) been forced to launch major operations to stop increasingly sophisticated and frequent rocket fire from Gaza aimed at its towns and cities.
• 2. In the North, Iran has rearmed Hezb'allah, a Shiite terror group, through deliveries of weapons to Syria, then carried across the border into Lebanon. Despite a UN resolution that accompanied the end of the Israeli operation against Hezb'allah in 2006, which called for an international force and the Lebanese army taking up positions to prevent Hezb'allah from reoccupying the south of Lebanon , the group is now better equipped and more of a threat to Israel than before the 2006 war. The Lebanese government is effectively controlled by Hezb'allah.
• 3. The Palestinian Authority has a President who is now serving the 8^th year of a 4 year term, and its legislative body has not been in session for years since Hamas won an easy victory in the last elections. The Palestinian Authority is broke, relying almost totally on foreign money, mainly from the United States and the Europeans, to pay an enormous public work force. Corruption still abounds, including the lining of the pockets of the PA President's family.
• 4. We have had the Oslo Accord, the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Hebron accord, the Wye River agreement, the Roadmap, and the Annapolis conference. Three times, in 2000 at Camp David, in 2001 at Taba, and in 2008 in direct talks between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas, the Israelis have made far reaching offers to the Palestinian authority for an end of conflict deal. Every such offer was rejected or ignored. After Camp David, Yassar Arafat launched a vicious second intifada that resulted in over a thousand deaths on each side, in Israel mainly from suicide bombers blowing themselves up in buses and schools and restaurants. Neither Arafat nor Abbas was willing to sign off on a deal that would end the Palestinian struggle against Israel, a long war that has always been defined by what it is against (Israel) , rather than what it is for (presumably a Palestinian state next to Israel) .
• 5. Israel disengaged from Gaza and a few West Bank towns, pulling out all Israeli residents and soldiers. Israel constructed a security fence to prevent terrorists from slipping into Israel from the territories. After a string of high casualty terror attacks in the spring of 2002, Israel took back control of several cities in the territories. Over time, it pulled back from them.
• 6. The government of Egypt has fallen, and the Muslim Brotherhood has taken power. The MB has always been closely aligned with Hamas. Syria is in the midst of a bloody civil war, with nearly 70,000 now killed. Barack Obama chose not to get the U.S involved when we might have had some influence with the groups challenging Bashar Assad. Now the resistance is led by Sunni terrorists, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda. Oh, and Iran has continued on its merry path to obtaining nuclear weapons.
• 7. Through it all, the peace processors working for Bill Clinton, George Bush, and Barack Obama have soldiered on, certain that they knew what the final deal between the Israelis and Palestinians must look like, and in the end counting on rational people on both sides agreeing to it. They have proclaimed that resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict is the key to resolving most of what ails the region, and to improving U.S. relations with the Arab and Muslim world. Above all, the peace processors were and are convinced that the major obstacle preventing a deal between the parties, or even the start of serious talks, were "Israeli settlement activities in the West Bank". This canard has been repeated despite the fact that Israel has created no new settlements, nor expanded the land area of existing settlements for a number of years. There has been construction activity within settlements (more accurately described as towns and cities), but after all, couples have children, they grow up and want their own homes, more people have moved to these communities, and so on. Israel has offered various "settlement freezes at times, none of which have been enough for the Palestinian Authority, and in some cases, the American President or his negotiator.

Elliot Abrams, who worked in the office of the National Security Council in the White House in the Bush years, has provided  a valuable history of the 8 years of peace processing by the Bush administration.  Abrams' history reveals that contrary to the established wisdom, the Bush administration was heavily engaged in the Israeli Palestinian conflict for its entire 8 years in office.  Abrams' tale is far more thoughtful, serious and readable,  than the multi pound tome written by Dennis Ross to describe the peace processing in the Clinton years, a tale in which Ross describes pretty much every move to and from the dining halls, restrooms, and clothing closets by the key participants, but seems to have learned almost nothing from the failure of the Oslo process. That failure was capped by the walkout by Yassar Arafat from Camp David,  and led to his creating the second intifada to change the subject from his rejectionism to the always preferred Palestinian narrative of resistance and  suffering. 

Abrams makes clear that he thinks the Bush administration got some things right, but also made some errors, in particular mistakes in judgment, policy, and communication by Condoleeza Rice after she moved over from the NSC to run the State Department in Bush's second term.  Abrams says President Bush got it right when he broke off U.S relations with Yassar Arafat, the multi decade terror master who never really changed his ways after Israel allowed  him and his Fatah allies to return to the West Bank from Tunisia after the signing of the Oslo accord.  Bill Clinton hosted Arafat 13 times at the White House, but by the end of his term in office, Clinton was bitter at Arafat, knowing he had individually sabotaged Clinton's best efforts at peacemaking and gone back to what he knew best: terror attacks designed to kill Jews.

Bush tried to prop up Abbas as an alternative, and after Arafat's death, Abbas took control of the Palestinian Authority. But Abbas changed only a few things. Corruption continued, there was no real effort to disarm terror groups, and the incendiary treatment of Israel and Jews in Palestinian media and schools continued.   When Secretary of State Rice became obsessed about getting a final deal done before Bush's second term ended, Abbas rejected (or did not respond) to the final offer from lame duck Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.  Rice, who had very good relations with Ariel Sharon, was often sharply hostile to Olmert and his aides, beginning with the war with Hezb'allah in the summer of 2006.  Rice seemed to get State Department-ized after she made the move from the NSC, an affliction that has hit others with the move into Foggy Bottom, with its cobwebs of  long time Israel haters and Arab sympathizers filling the ranks.

Abrams also argues that Bush understood that Israel's flexibility in negotiations was directly linked to its sense of the strength and warmth of its relations with the United States. Sharon agreed to disengage from Gaza, but only after Bush released his 2004 letter that tacitly agreed to Israel retaining major settlement blocks in any final agreement  and that the U.S supported Israel in its position that there would be no right of return of Palestinian refugees to Israel.  Barack Obama got it completely wrong, when he argued that the failure to get a deal done during the Bush years (when Bush was friendly to and supportive of Israel) proved that you needed distance and separation between Israel and the U.S. and American pressure on Israel in order to make progress. Obama's miscalculation has ignored the Palestinian unwillingness for most of the past 20 years  to  negotiate, and when they have come to the table,  to book what Israel offers, and move on to new demands of Israel, never offering any compromises in its position.  To those who argue that "the negotiation window is closing" or the "time for achieving a two state solution is disappearing," the history of the last 20 years suggests the Palestinian have never been enamored enough by a two state solution to really try to achieve it.

Abrams suggests that there is no deal on the horizon, and the PA is not nearly ready to run its own state.  Rather, he suggests working on the ground -- to improve mobility within the territories, to improving the economy, to strengthening the PA's security forces. These were also the recommendations of Salam Fayyad, the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority and its finance minister, who believed that the desperate attempt to reach final status deals, often in the closing days of U.S Presidential administrations, was a misguided long shot, when the real effort needed to be made in smaller steps that improved the lives of ordinary Palestinians.

I hope that the President, and John Kerry will take a look at Abrams' book before they begin to repeat the mistakes of the past and resume the effort at "peace processing." 

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5)Hellfire, Morality and Strategy

By George Friedman of Stratfor 

Airstrikes by unmanned aerial vehicles have become a matter of serious dispute lately. The controversy focuses on the United States, which has the biggest fleet of these weapons and which employs them more frequently than any other country. On one side of this dispute are those who regard them simply as another weapon of war whose virtue is the precision with which they strike targets. On the other side are those who argue that in general, unmanned aerial vehicles are used to kill specific individuals, frequently civilians, thus denying the targeted individuals their basic right to some form of legal due process.

Let's begin with the weapons systems, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper. The media call them drones, but they are actually remotely piloted aircraft. Rather than being in the cockpit, the pilot is at a ground station, receiving flight data and visual images from the aircraft and sending command signals back to it via a satellite data link. Numerous advanced systems and technologies work together to make this possible, but it is important to remember that most of these technologies have been around in some form for decades, and the U.S. government first integrated them in the 1990s. The Predator carries two Hellfire missiles -- precision-guided munitions that, once locked onto the target by the pilot, guide themselves to the target with a high likelihood of striking it. The larger Reaper carries an even larger payload of ordnance -- up to 14 Hellfire missiles or four Hellfire missiles and two 500-pound bombs. Most airstrikes from these aircraft use Hellfire missiles, which cause less collateral damage.

Unlike a manned aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles can remain in the air for an extended period of time -- an important capability for engaging targets that may only present a very narrow target window. This ability to loiter, and then strike quickly when a target presents itself, is what has made these weapons systems preferable to fixed wing aircraft and cruise missiles.

THE ARGUMENT AGAINST AIRSTRIKES
What makes unmanned aerial vehicle strikes controversial is that they are used to deliberately target specific individuals -- in other words, people who are known or suspected, frequently by name, of being actively hostile to the United States or allied governments. This distinguishes unmanned aerial vehicles from most weapons that have been used since the age of explosives began. The modern battlefield -- and the ancient as well -- has been marked by anonymity. The enemy was not a distinct individual but an army, and the killing of soldiers in an enemy army did not carry with it any sense of personal culpability. In general, no individual soldier was selected for special attention, and his death was not an act of punishment. He was killed because of his membership in an army and not because of any specific action he might have carried out.

Another facet of the controversy is that it is often not clear whether the individuals targeted by these weapons are members of an enemy force. U.S. military or intelligence services reach that conclusion about a target based on intelligence that convinces them of the individual's membership in a hostile group.

There are those who object to all war and all killing; we are not addressing those issues here. We are addressing the arguments of those who object to this particular sort of killing. The reasoning is that when you are targeting a particular individual based on his relationships, you are introducing the idea of culpability, and that that culpability makes the decision-maker -- whoever he is -- both judge and executioner, without due process. Those who argue this line also believe that the use of these weapons is a process that is not only given to error but also fundamentally violates principles of human rights and gives the state the power of life and death without oversight. Again excluding absolute pacifists from this discussion, the objection is that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is not so much an act of war as an act of judgment and, as such, violates international law that requires due process for a soldier being judged and executed. To put it simply, the critics regard what they call drone strikes as summary executions, not acts of war.

THE ARGUMENT FOR AIRSTRIKES
The counterargument is that the United States is engaged in a unique sort of war. Al Qaeda and the allied groups and sympathetic individuals that comprise the international jihadist movement are global, dispersed and sparse. They are not a hierarchical military organization. Where conventional forces have divisions and battalions, the global jihadist movement consists primarily of individuals who at times group together into distinct regional franchises, small groups and cells, and frequently even these groups are scattered. Their mission is to survive and to carry out acts of violence designed to demoralize the enemy and increase their political influence among the populations they wish to control.

The primary unit is the individual, and the individuals -- particularly the commanders -- isolate themselves and make themselves as difficult to find as possible. Given their political intentions and resources, sparse forces dispersed without regard to national boundaries use their isolation as the equivalent of technological stealth to make them survivable and able to carefully mount military operations against the enemy at unpredictable times and in unpredictable ways.

The argument for using strikes from unmanned aerial vehicles is that it is not an attack on an individual any more than an artillery barrage that kills a hundred is an attack on each individual. Rather, the jihadist movement presents a unique case in which the individual jihadist is the military unit.

In war, the goal is to render the enemy incapable of resisting through the use of force. In all wars and all militaries, imperfect intelligence, carelessness and sometimes malice have caused military action to strike at innocent people. In World War II, not only did bombing raids designed to attack legitimate military targets kill civilians not engaged in activities supporting the military, mission planners knew that in some cases innocents would be killed. This is true in every military conflict and is accepted as one of the consequences of war.

The argument in favor of using unmanned aerial vehicle strikes is, therefore, that the act of killing the individual is a military necessity dictated by the enemy's strategy and that it is carried out with the understanding that both intelligence and precision might fail, no matter how much care is taken. This means not only that civilians might be killed in a particular strike but also that the strike might hit the wrong target. The fact that a specific known individual is being targeted does not change the issue from a military matter to a judicial one.

It would seem to me that these strikes do not violate the rules of war and that they require no more legal overview than was given in thousands of bomber raids in World War II. And we should be cautious in invoking international law. The Hague Convention of 1907 states that:

The laws, rights, and duties of war apply not only to armies, but also to militia and volunteer corps fulfilling the following conditions:

To be commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

To have a fixed distinctive emblem recognizable at a distance;

To carry arms openly; and

To conduct their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

The 1949 Geneva Convention states that:

Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:

(a) that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;

(b) that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;

(c) that of carrying arms openly;

(d) that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.

Ignoring the question of whether jihadist operations are in accordance with the rules and customs of war, their failure to carry a "fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance" is a violation of both the Hague and Geneva conventions. This means that considerations given to soldiers under the rules of war do not apply to those waging war without insignia.

Open insignia is fundamental to the rules of war. It was instituted after the Franco-Prussian war, when French snipers dressed as civilians fired on Germans. It was viewed that the snipers had endangered civilians because it was a soldier's right to defend himself and that since they were dressed as civilians, the French snipers -- not the Germans -- were responsible for the civilian deaths. It follows from this that, to the extent that jihadist militants provide no sign of who they are, they are responsible under international law when civilians are killed because of uncertainty as to who is a soldier and who is not. Thus the onus on ascertaining the nature of the target rests with the United States, but if there is error, the responsibility for that error rests with jihadists for not distinguishing themselves from civilians.

There is of course a greater complexity to this: attacking targets in countries that are not in a state of war with the United States and that have not consented to these attacks. For better or worse, the declaration of war has not been in fashion since World War II. But the jihadist movement has complicated this problem substantially. The jihadists' strategy is to be dispersed. Part of its strategy is to move from areas where it is under military pressure to places that are more secure. Thus the al Qaeda core group moved its headquarters from Afghanistan to Pakistan. But in truth, jihadists operate wherever military and political advantages take them, from the Maghreb to Mumbai and beyond.

In a method of war where the individual is the prime unit and where lack of identification is a primary defensive method, the conduct of intelligence operations wherever the enemy might be, regardless of borders, follows. So do operations to destroy enemy units -- individuals. If a country harbors such individuals knowingly, it is an enemy. If it is incapable of destroying the enemy units, it forfeits its right to claim sovereignty since part of sovereignty is a responsibility to prevent attacks on other countries.

If we simply follow the logic we laid out here, then the critics of unmanned aerial vehicle strikes have a weak case. It is not illegitimate to target individuals in a military force like the jihadist movement, and international law holds them responsible for collateral damage, not the United States. Moreover, respecting national sovereignty requires that a country's sovereignty be used to halt attacks against countries with which they are not at war. When a country cannot or will not take those steps, and people within their border pose a threat to the United States, the country has no basis for objecting to intelligence operations and airstrikes. The question, of course, is where this ends. Yemen or Mali might be one case, but the logic here does not preclude any country. Indeed, since al Qaeda tried in the past to operate in the United States itself, and its operatives might be in the United States, it logically follows that the United States could use unmanned aerial vehicles domestically as well. Citizenship is likewise no protection from attacks against a force hostile to the United States.

But within the United States, or countries like the United Kingdom, there are many other preferable means to neutralize jihadist threats. When the police or internal security forces can arrest jihadists plotting attacks, there quite simply is no need for airstrikes from unmanned aerial vehicles. They are tools to be used when a government cannot or will not take action to mitigate the threat.

THE STRATEGIC DRAWBACK
There are two points I have been driving toward. The first is that the outrage at targeted killing is not, in my view, justified on moral or legal grounds. The second is that in using these techniques, the United States is on a slippery slope because of the basis on which it has chosen to wage war.

The United States has engaged an enemy that is dispersed across the globe. If the strategy is to go wherever the enemy is, then the war is limitless. It is also endless. The power of the jihadist movement is that it is diffuse. It does not need vast armies to be successful. Therefore, the destruction of some of its units will always result in their replacement. Quality might decline for a while but eventually will recover.

The enemy strategy is to draw the United States into an extended conflict that validates its narrative that the United States is permanently at war with Islam. It wants to force the United States to engage in as many countries as possible. From the U.S. point of view, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because they can attack the jihadist command structure without risk to ground forces. From the jihadist point of view as well, unmanned aerial vehicles are the perfect weapon because their efficiency allows the jihadists to lure the United States into other countries and, with sufficient manipulation, can increase the number of innocents who are killed.

In this sort of war, the problem of killing innocents is practical. It undermines the strategic effort. The argument that it is illegal is dubious, and to my mind, so is the argument that it is immoral. The argument that it is ineffective in achieving U.S. strategic goals of eliminating the threat of terrorist actions by jihadists is my point.

Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a highly efficient way to destroy key enemy targets with very little risk to personnel. But they also allow the enemy to draw the United States into additional theaters of operation because the means is so efficient and low cost. However, in the jihadists' estimate, the political cost to the United States is substantial. The broader the engagement, the greater the perception of U.S. hostility to Islam, the easier the recruitment until the jihadist forces reach a size that can't be dealt with by isolated airstrikes.

In warfare, enemies will try to get you to strike at what they least mind losing. The case against strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles is not that they are ineffective against specific targets but that the targets are not as vital as the United States thinks. The United States believes that the destruction of the leadership is the most efficient way to destroy the threat of the jihadist movement. In fact it only mitigates the threat while new leadership emerges. The strength of the jihadist movement is that it is global, sparse and dispersed. It does not provide a target whose destruction weakens the movement. However, the jihadist movement's weakness derives from its strength: It is limited in what it can do and where.

The problem of unmanned aerial vehicles is that they are so effective from the U.S. point of view that they have become the weapon of first resort. Thus, the United States is being drawn into operations in new areas with what appears to be little cost. In the long run, it is not clear that the cost is so little. A military strategy to defeat the jihadists is impossible. At its root, the real struggle against the jihadists is ideological, and that struggle simply cannot be won with Hellfire missiles. A strategy of mitigation using airstrikes is possible, but such a campaign must not become geographically limitless. Unmanned aerial vehicles lead to geographical limitlessness. That is their charm; that is their danger.

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6)Obama's sequestration strategy: Shame

By CARRIE BUDOFF BROWN and JAKE SHERMAN

President Barack Obama’s sequester strategy is all about one word: shame.

With the parties at an impasse on stopping across-the-board budget cuts set to hit March 1, the White House is prepping another multimedia, cross-country drive to stoke public outrage against congressional Republicans.

Certain that the political winds are in their favor, they’re forgoing serious negotiations for a high-risk public offensive, banking almost entirely on the president’s ability to persuade. They believe that the GOP will be scared of taking the blame from an angry public — and the White House says this is just the kind of thing that gave them the victory they claimed in the fiscal cliff fight and the most recent standoff over the debt limit.

(Also on POLITICO: Lawmakers go NIMBY on sequester)

The aim is to force Republicans to submit to new revenue as part of a deal to avert the $1.2 trillion in potential cuts — and the only way to get there, senior administration officials said, is by making the GOP position indefensible.

Obama will hold events at the White House with constituencies facing the brunt of the cuts, and travel to places where the deepest cuts loom. His aides hinted Tuesday at releasing data in the next few days that break down the damage state by state.

“That’s the choice,” Obama said Tuesday while surrounded by first responders, a constituency that neither party wants to be seen as hurting. “Are you willing to see a bunch of first responders lose their job because you want to protect some special interest tax loophole? Are you willing to have teachers laid off, or kids not have access to Head Start, or deeper cuts in student loan programs just because you want to protect a special tax interest loophole that the vast majority of Americans don’t benefit from? That’s the choice. That’s the question.”

(Also on POLITICO: Obama decries sequester)

Senior administration officials projected confidence Tuesday during a background briefing with reporters. One official said Republicans are in a worse position than during the fiscal cliff fight, arguing that the only thing more popular than raising tax rates on the wealthy is closing loopholes that benefit them.

But if Republicans hold to their cuts-only approach — as they insist they will — and the sequester kicks in, Obama could face a fiscal crisis that threatens to tank the economy and sideline his top legislative priorities such as immigration reform and gun control.

The early signs aren’t encouraging for the president.

In the face of the planned escalation in pressure from the White House, House Republicans feel no compulsion to do anything — at all.

(Also on POLITICO: OP slams Obama sequester speech)

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) think they’ve done their job by passing a bill last Congress to replace the sequester cuts, and they’re content with blaming the president, since Bob Woodward reported that the White House staff devised the idea of sequester before House and Senate leadership pushed it through the Capitol.

“The president is going to try and pretend that his enemy on this is us,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. “His enemy is reality. The president created the sequester and insisted on it, House Republicans have acted twice to replace it. If there’s going to be a solution here, he’s going to have to work with his own political party in the Senate.”

House Republicans face an incredibly complicated political and legislative situation.

Boehner, Cantor and McCarthy constantly tell reporters that this is “Obama’s sequester” and that House Republicans have passed a bill to replace the cuts. They often fail to acknowledge that the bill has expired because it passed last Congress. There is some concern in leadership about making moderate Republicans vote for the cut-heavy plan again.

Members of the House Armed Services Committee and other defense-friendly Republicans privately griped to POLITICO that they are insulted by that message, since Boehner privately assured them in 2011 that they should accept the sequester because it would never go into effect. Boehner, Republican lawmakers told POLITICO, shouldn’t try to lay the blame of the cuts at the president’s feet.

How those lawmakers react in the next few weeks will dictate how the House fixes the sequester — and Obama plans to nudge them along with a relentless campaign.

“That’s his card,” said Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic strategist who ran a pro-Obama super PAC in the 2012 election. “He wasn’t known as a legislative craftsman on the Hill. He is wise to play to his strengths.”

Obama wants Republicans to agree to replace the indiscriminate cuts of the sequester with better-targeted spending reductions and new revenues from closing loopholes, such as tax breaks for corporate jet owners, oil and gas companies, hedge fund managers and prescription drug companies.

There is no shortage of reasons why House Republicans are opposed to new tax revenue. They say they gave Obama more revenue during the fiscal cliff debate. Republicans — chiefly Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp of Michigan — hold out hope for tax reform. Closing loopholes before tax reform makes a comprehensive overhaul more difficult.

House Republicans privately say they don’t view March 1 as a deadline to replace the sequester cuts, but instead the end of March — closely tied to the expiration of the continuing resolution that currently funds the government.

Republicans say they may put another bill on the floor to replace the cuts after the sequester hits, but there are no plans to put a new legislative fix before the cuts take hold.

In part, the GOP is concerned about another vote to cut deep into social programs — especially in advance of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s next budget, which will attempt to bring the nation’s books into balance in the next decade.

Short of replacing the cuts, the House majority is trying to take preventive measures to make the sequester less drastic.

Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) is looking to craft a government funding bill that would give the Defense Department more flexibility when the sequester hits. But Boehner hasn’t decided whether he should endorse that approach, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) would most likely amend that bill and send it back to the House, threatening a messy government shutdown fight that the Ohio Republican is seeking to avoid.

But for now, a Senate Democratic leadership aide said that even Senate Democrats are waiting on the president to change the political dynamics.

“There is a resignation setting in that it looks less and less likely that we can get Republicans to seriously negotiate on this to turn it off,” the aide said. “He needs to make them feel the heat so they feel the need to return to the negotiating table.”

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