Hillary - poor little rich girl! Another narcissist?
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How to help America and get the economy back on track - go to yard sales and buy their stuff so they can sell their homes up north and move down south where we know how to vote!
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Expiration dates apply to food,beverages, license of all kinds and even credit cards - why not laws/ (See 1 below.)
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Israel strikes back at Syrian for sending rockets into the Golan Heights and killing an Israel. (See 2 below.)
Presbyterians also strike at Israel and probably will wind up shooting themselves in their feet. (See 2a below.)
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Hillary giggles ! Last laugh may be on her even if the press and media do their best to protect her and circle the wagons they have used to isolate Obama. (See 3 below.)
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Today I had lunch with a group I have not lunched with for two years because I would go after Monday tennis but hd been going to therapy instead..
We discussed the long term goal of Jihadists. We all believe the rise of the radical Muslim threat will consume the world for many years.
One believes the West will eventually come to their senses , realize the threat and start pushing back in a serious manner.
I believe their burning desire is to restore The Caliphate and they will only be stopped from within by less radical elements of the Muslim Community. Because radical Muslims will stop at nothing and the West is unwilling to wake up, it could be too late because demographics elevates their strength and developing and possessing WMD will give them the ability to carry out their desires and implement their goals.
Time will tell. Your thoughts? (See 4 and 4abelow.)
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Dick
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1) Credit Cards Have Expiration Dates; Laws Should Too
From milk to medical prescriptions, from coupons to credit cards, expiration dates are routine. Yet laws, regulations, and government programs are presumed to last forever.
The great state of Minnesota, you’ll be glad to learn, is no longer interested in the size and color of your bug deflector. The legislature in St. Paul recently scrapped the 1953 law regulating that automotive accessory, one of almost 1,200 antiquated or bizarre laws that Governor Mark Dayton recommended repealing as part of a major legislative “unsession.” Among other changes: Minnesotans have been liberated from the ban on possessing more than two hen pheasants, the penalty for distributing berries in the wrong-sized container is history, and it is now legal to coast with your car’s gears in neutral.
“We got rid of all the silly laws,” one state official told the St. Paul Pioneer-Press. That was probably overstating things, given the more than 46,000 laws that Minnesota lawmakers have enacted over the years. Still, the pruning of 1,200 pieces of deadwood is no small achievement.
It’s also a reminder of why nearly all laws and regulations should come with expiration dates.
Government at all levels is far more inclined to create new rules and programs than to overhaul or undo existing ones. Politicians are always under pressure to respond to the crisis or controversy of the moment – by passing a statute, imposing a mandate, authorizing a subsidy, setting up an agency. When the issue fades, the laws and regulations remain, piling up ceaselessly and expensively long after public attention has moved on to other sources of tumult and debate.
Over time, some laws become harmless curiosities, like the Massachusetts law doubling the penalty for anyone who picks mayflowers “secretly in the nighttime.” But others – such as the Bay State’s Blue Laws, which still make it illegal to conduct “any manner of labor, business, or work” on Sunday, apart from specified exemptions – continue to affect public policy long after the circumstances giving rise to them have changed.In the real world, things don’t last forever. The carton of milk in your refrigerator has an expiration date. So does the credit card in your wallet. Cars need periodic tune-ups, medical prescriptions have to be reauthorized, and financial plans require adjustment.Government should operate on the same assumption. Every law should expire automatically after a fixed period of time – say, 12 or 15 years – unless lawmakers expressly vote to reauthorize it. Likewise every legislatively created agency and program.
Members of Congress and state legislatures should be required to revisit their handiwork on a regular basis, reviewing it for relevance, efficacy, and soundness, and allowing measures that have outlived their usefulness to lapse.
“The presumption should be that laws are experimental solutions to social problems we want to eliminate,” says political scientist Matthew Franck of the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, N.J. If the solutions are working and continue to be needed, a legislature is always free to extend them. But if the experiments fail – the “solutions” didn’t solve – “a sunset provision helps forestall the problem of vested interests, in and out of government, building up to protect them despite their failure or irrelevance.”
Mandatory sunset clauses aren’t a new idea; American reformers going back to the founders have championed the idea. So numerous and ingrained are the impediments to good government, wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1789, that it should be clear “to every practical man that a law of limited duration is much more manageable than one which needs a repeal.” Congress has sometimes included sunset provisions in federal laws. The post-Watergate independent-counsel statute expired in 1999. The federal assault weapons ban, enacted in 1994 with a 10-year lifespan, lapsed on schedule in 2004. Even when expiration dates are just moved back, as with provisions of the Patriot Act or the Bush-era tax cuts, they at least force lawmakers to debate whether an existing law should be continued.But ad hoc sunsetting won’t change the underlying assumption that government enactments are forever. It’s that assumption, and the political culture it drives, that makes it so hard to overhaul regulatory codes or streamline government programs.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------The key to reform is to flip the assumption that a law once passed lives on in perpetuity. Regrettably, “unsessions” like Dayton’s are all too rare; no such thing has occurred in Massachusetts in recent memory. There have been occasional efforts in Congress to tackle the problem: In the late 1970s, for example, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine sponsored a bill that would have sunset most federal programs after 10 years. Though it had bipartisan supporters ranging from Barry Goldwater to Ted Kennedy, the bill never became law.It’s time to try again, and not just in Congress. “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth,” Ronald Reagan once observed. If laws came with expiration dates, that would change. And lawmakers wouldn’t have to go to such lengths to repeal goofily obsolete laws about bug-deflectors and hen pheasants..
2) Israel strikes Syrian military targets.
The Israeli Air Force launched retaliatory air strikes on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights overnight Sunday, confirming direct hits on nine army positions belonging to the Assad regime — including a regional command center – after a 15-year-old boy was killed earlier Sunday in an attack on the Israeli side.
“The Assad regime now sees that it is responsible for the area under its control,” Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said. “We will respond aggressively and harshly against any provocation and violation of our sovereignty.”
A Syrian human rights group has claimed that at least ten Syrian soldiers were killed in the airstrikes.
2a Presbyterians Join the Anti-Israel Choir
2a Presbyterians Join the Anti-Israel Choir
Divesting from companies like Motorola Solutions to show solidarity with the Palestinians.
The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is bleeding members. Between 2000 and 2013, almost 765,000 members left the organization, a loss of nearly 30%. Last week the church's leadership met in Detroit for crisis talks.
No, not about the emptying-pews crisis. The Israel-Palestinian crisis.
On Friday, in a close vote (310-303), the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)—the largest of several Presbyterian denominations in America—resolved to divest the organization's stock in Caterpillar, CAT -0.55% Hewlett-Packard HPQ +0.70%and Motorola Solutions. MSI +0.01% The church's Committee on Mission Responsibility Through Investment said the companies have continued to "profit from their involvement in the occupation and the violation of human rights in the region," and have even "deepened their involvement in roadblocks to a just peace." Israel's counterterrorism and defense measures have included razing Palestinian houses (with Caterpillar equipment), operating Gaza and West Bank checkpoints (with Hewlett-Packard technology), and utilizing military communications and surveillance (with Motorola Solutions technology).
The church signaled its antipathy for Israel earlier this year by hawking a study guide called "Zionism Unsettled" in its online church store. In the 76-page pamphlet, Zionism—the movement to establish a Jewish homeland and nation-state in the historic land of Israel—is characterized as a "a struggle for colonial and racist supremacist privilege."
In a postscript to "Zionism Unsettled," Naim Ateek, a Palestinian priest and member of the Anglican Church, explains the meaning of the charges in the pamphlet. "It is the equivalent of declaring Zionism heretical, a doctrine that fosters both political and theological injustice. This is the strongest condemnation that a Christian confession can make against any doctrine that promotes death rather than life."
Members of the Presbyterian Church of the Big Wood in Ketchum, Idaho on June 1. Reuters
In one response, Katharine Henderson, president of New York's Auburn Theological Seminary, said in February that the "premise of the document appears to be that Zionism is the cause of the entire conflict in the Middle East," in essence "the original sin, from which flows all the suffering of the Palestinian people." And amid intense criticism of the study guide from the Anti-Defamation League and other groups, the church's General Assembly declared on Wednesday that " 'Zionism Unsettled' does not represent the views of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)." But the assembly didn't bar the church from continuing to distribute and sell it.
The divestment resolution that ultimately passed included language affirming Israel's right to exist and denying that divesting from the three companies is tantamount to alignment with the broader Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Still, the vote is a victory for anti-Israel forces within the church. And the divestment vote hardly means that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is ready to shift its focus: The organization's Middle East Issues Committee sees only one Middle East issue. All 14 of the matters before it this year concerned Israel and Palestine. No Syria. No Iraq.
Another vote regarding Palestinian-Israeli matters by the church's General Assembly, seemingly more innocuous, is actually more disturbing. The vote instructed the church's Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy to prepare a report to help the General Assembly reconsider its commitment to a two-state solution and to create a study guide "that will help inform the whole church of the situation on the ground in Palestine."
In its "advice and counsel" on an anti-divestment proposal, the committee voiced its support for the boycott-Israel movement, compared Israel with apartheid-era South Africa and declared Israel responsible for its own "de-legitimation." It complained that the anti-divestment proposal "prioritize[d] Israel's security and underline[d] the flaws of Hamas and other 'hostile' neighbors without noting the constant violence of the occupation." Even with respect to Hamas, whose charter commits it to the destruction of Israel, the committee felt compelled to put "hostile" in scare quotes. The committee has some history on this score: In 2004, it drew widespread condemnation for meeting with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah.
The General Assembly instructed the advisory committee that the new study guide should "honestly point out" that "simple financial investment in a completely occupied land where the occupiers are relentless and unwavering regarding their occupation is not enough to dismantle the matrix of that occupation or dramatically change the vast majority of communities or individual lives that are bowed and broken by systematic and intentional injustice." The vote to commission the guide was 482-88.
With a dwindling membership, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) clearly needs new friends, but the church does itself no favors by courting Israel's enemies.
Mr. Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pa.
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3) The Delicious Irony of Hillary's Potential Political Demise
In what may turn out to be the most delicious irony in the history of politics, an archived tape recently resurfaced featuring Hillary Clinton chuckling about defending a lowlife rapist named Thomas Alfred Taylor. That dusty old tape may be what finally halts Hillary Clinton’s decades-long climb to what she had hoped would be the top of the political power heap.
Back in 1975, Thomas Alfred Taylor lured a 12-year-old girl into his car and raped her. At the time, Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham knew Taylor was guilty, but as a favor to a prosecutor friend she provided the rapist a legal defense, pleaded him down, and years later was taped laughingly recalling her clever courtroom strategy.
On those tapes, the woman in pursuit of the ultimate power can be heard giggling about how she singlehandedly managed to get the rapist of a 12-year-old child a lesser charge of unlawful fondling of a minor under the age of 14. Self-professed women’s advocate Hillary Clinton’s defense effectively lowered a five-year prison sentence to four years of probation with one year in county jail, which was then reduced to 10 months for time already served.
3) The Delicious Irony of Hillary's Potential Political Demise
In what may turn out to be the most delicious irony in the history of politics, an archived tape recently resurfaced featuring Hillary Clinton chuckling about defending a lowlife rapist named Thomas Alfred Taylor. That dusty old tape may be what finally halts Hillary Clinton’s decades-long climb to what she had hoped would be the top of the political power heap.
Back in 1975, Thomas Alfred Taylor lured a 12-year-old girl into his car and raped her. At the time, Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham knew Taylor was guilty, but as a favor to a prosecutor friend she provided the rapist a legal defense, pleaded him down, and years later was taped laughingly recalling her clever courtroom strategy.
In pursuit of her long-term goal to become the first female president of the United States, besides carpet-bagging and pretending to be the better half of a sham marriage, forbearing Hillary Clinton has spent most of her married life regularly defending her cigar-smoking husband’s sexual improprieties.
Mr. Clinton’s extracurricular activities have included groping married women in the Oval Office, introducing Little Willy to frightened registration clerks at governors’ conventions, and messing up blue Gap dresses.
It’s also common knowledge that notorious Lothario Bill Clinton once had an ongoing affair with a cabaret singer, not to mention one-night stands with various actresses, politicians, and ex-beauty pageant winners. Besides Monica there were names like Markie Post, Sally Perdue, Elizabeth Gracen, Dolly Kyle Browning, and last but certainly not the last, Clinton campaign volunteer Juanita Broaddrick.
Sometime in 1978, just three years after Hillary got Thomas off the hook, Ms. Broaddrick alleged that then- Arkansas attorney general Bill Clinton raped her in a Little Rock hotel room. Bloodied, stunned and violated, Broaddrick said, “I tried to get away from him. I told him 'no’… He wouldn't listen to me.”
By the time the Broaddrick accusation surfaced, Hillary had already successfully defended Thomas Alfred Taylor. That’s why Mrs. Clinton certainly wasn’t going to let a lowly nursing home administrator from Arkansas get in the way of her political ambitions.
Two weeks after the alleged crime, during which Broaddrick claimed Bill Clinton assured her that she needn’t worry about pregnancy because he was rendered sterile from the mumps, women’s advocate Hillary thanked her for ‘all she’s done for Bill,’ which Juanita understood to be a veiled threat.
In an accurate assessment of Hillary’s ongoing defense of the indefensible, years later Broaddrick accused the inventor of the “vast right wing conspiracy” of spending her entire life ‘covering up’ Slick Willy’s actions for “power and money.”
Fast-forward to the Washington Free Beacon recently gaining access to a recorded interview that was archived at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, now dubbed the Hillary Tapes.
During the trial,a little girl was put through what she now, at age 52, describes as “hell” by none other than Hillary Clinton, whose defense strategy was to “impugn the credibility of the victim,” a skill Mrs. Clinton has continued to honeover the years. Case in point: Hillary calling Monica Lewinsky “a narcissistic loony toon.”
Hillary had zero compunction about exploiting the tried-and-true “putting the victim on trial” technique on a young girl. After accusing the 12-year-old rape victim of seeking out older men, Hillary, who Bill once called “smartest woman in the world,” deceitfully used that allegation to request that the injured child undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
That despicable strategy leaves rape victims, even as adults, still feeling they need to defend themselves, which is what Taylor’s victim recently did when she said, “I never sought out older men. I was raped.” Having been traumatized by both Taylor and Clinton, after hearing the tape the victim courageously challenged Mrs. Clinton’s feminist credentials, asking, “You call that [being] for women, what you done to me? [sic]”
Hillary, who more recently lied that a judge appointed her to defend the rapist – thus implying that she had no choice but to take the case – is neither for women, children, nor men being sodomized and murdered in Benghazi, for that matter. As Juanita Broaddrick correctly discerned, Hillary Clinton has proven that the only woman she is for is herself.
On the tapes, Hillary can be overheard confessing, “I had [Taylor] take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” That admission, in effect, confirmed that Hillary revictimized the child, knowing full well the attacker was guilty.
Mrs. Clinton was also overheard laughing when discussing the crime lab’s unintentional destruction of DNA evidence tying the rapist to the crime.The ability to discredit the DNA evidence during the rape trial was what, in her 2003 autobiography Living History, Hillary claimed inspired her to set up Arkansas’ first rape hotline, which must have come in handy for at least some of Bill’s alleged victims.
Judging from her track record of defending a sexual predator to benefit personal political aspirations, from what can be overheard on the tape apparently Hillary was rather amused that she managed to elevate her own status by putting a child rapist back on the street.
That’s why, after spending decades protecting her professional aspirations at the expense of women victimized by her philandering husband, it would be deliciously ironic for Hillary to be publicly disgraced for having defended a fiend who had raped a 12-year-old child while knowing full well he was guilty.
Moreover, after subjecting America to the ongoing Clinton charade and now being caught snickering about a child rape case, it’s time Bill’s victims finally get to see Hillary ‘What Difference Does it Make’ Clinton exposed for the deceitful, ruthless opportunist she really is.
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4)The Jihadi Menace Gets Real
ISIS is bigger, badder, richer, and better organized than any jihadi threat the United States has faced thus far. Its rise represents a foreign policy disaster of the first order.
By Walter Russell MeadWALTER RUSSELL MEAD
A group more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East?
Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world. After six years in office pursuing strategies he believed would tame the terror threat and doing his best to reassure the American people that the terror situation was under control, with the “remnants” of al-Qaeda skittering into the shadows like roaches when the exterminator arrives, Obama now confronts the most powerful and hostile jihadi movement of modern times, a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes.
The FT has rounded up some expert commentary that tries to describe exactly what kind of organization we’re up against here:
“They’re probably the richest jihadi organisation ever seen,” says Aaron Zelin, a fellow at the Washington Institute, and an expert on extremism. “They get their money from trafficking weapons, kidnappings for ransom, counterfeit currencies, oil refining, smuggling artefacts that are thousands of years old and from taxes that they have for areas they are in – either on businesses, or at checkpoints or on ordinary people,” he adds. [...]“Most jihadist groups are tightly controlled, secretive and well co-ordinated, but Isis has essentially taken that to another level, with a quite impressive level of bureaucracy, extensive account keeping, and multiple channels of accountability,” says Charles Lister, an analyst at the Brookings Doha Centre.
The state ISIS hopes to construct may not endure; in periods of radical instability like this one in the Middle East, the fortunes of war can change with breathtaking speed. But the capacities it is building, the supplies it is gathering, the networks forming around it, the training it imparts, and the enormous psychological boost its current success, however fleeting, gives to the jihadi cause will remain.
One wishes we had a Republican President right now if only because when a Republican is in the White House, the media and the chattering classes believe they have a solemn moral duty to categorize and analyze the failures of American strategy and policy. Today that is far from the case; few in the mainstream press seem interested in tracing the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure that dog the footsteps of the hapless Obama team in a region the White House claimed to understand. Nothing important has gone right for the small and tightly knit team that runs American Middle East policy. Most administrations have one failure in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking; this administration has two, both distinctly more ignominious and damaging than average. The opening to the Middle East, once heralded by this administration as transformative, has long vanished; no one even talks about the President’s speeches in Cairo and Istanbul anymore, unless regional cynics are looking for punch lines for bitter jokes. The support for the “transition to democracy” in Egypt ended on as humiliating a note as the “red line” kerfuffle in Syria. The spectacular example of advancing human rights by leading from behind in Libya led to an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.
Rarely has an administration so trumpeted its superior wisdom and strategic smarts; rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed. No one, ever, will call this administration’s Middle East policies to date either competent or wise—though the usual press acolytes will continue to do what they can to spread a forgiving haze over the strategic collapse of everything this White House has attempted, as they talk about George W. Bush at every chance they get. (An honorable exception in the NYT today: Peter Baker has a piece examining the Administration’s failure to end American involvement in Iraq, and making the obvious but important point that the Iraq fiasco is a consequence of Administration failures in Syria. There are more dots still to connect. )
Now, from the ruins of the Obama Administration’s Middle East strategy, the most powerful and dangerous group of religious fanatics in modern history has emerged in the heart of the Middle East. The rise of ISIS is a strategic defeat of the first magnitude for the United States and its allies (as well as countries like Russia and even China). It is a perfect storm of bad policy intersecting with troubled times to create the gravest threat to U.S. and world stability since the end of the Cold War.
The mainstream press and the professional chatterboxes of the news shows need to set aside their squeamishness at poring over the details of a major strategic failure by a liberal Democrat. The rise of ISIS/ISIL is a disaster that must be examined and understood. How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?
Meanwhile, as the liberal press does its earnest best to ignore the real-time collapse of a foreign policy it once cheered to the rafters, some GOP voices are doing their best to add to the confusion and further muddy the debate. The architects of the war in Iraq are claiming that this disaster somehow vindicates them, and some hope that, as the nature of the danger and the magnitude of the disaster sink in, the nation will call them back to power.
In fact, the architects of the surge and the policies that stabilized Iraq following the nadir of the war do deserve credit; Generals Petraeus and McCrystal, both driven from public service as a consequence of minor indiscretions, tower like giants over the moralistic timeservers who arrogantly and foolishly cast them aside. But if those who led the nation into Iraq want to play a positive role now, they need to embrace some humility and talk about “lessons learned.” If they want to help the United States of America in an hour of real need, they must not try to use the current situation to win personal vindication—and the more stridently they demand it the more they will place obstacles in the path of the debate that we need, marginalize their own voices and divide a people who need to unite as the dangers grow.
Some members of the Democratic foreign policy establishment are looking for ways to rescue their nation and party from the current mess. Les Gelb at the Daily Beast understands the revolutionary nature of the jihadi blitzkrieg, and argues for a new Grand Alliance of the U.S., Russia, Iran and even Assad against the new power in the Middle East. He tries to head off criticisms:
I’m certainly not saying that Assad is a good guy and that we should abandon pursuing his eventual departure, or that we can now trust Russia and Iran. Washington has and will have serious problems with all these countries. And most certainly, the U.S. will have to stay on its guard. But the fact is that there is common ground with Moscow and Tehran to combat the biggest threat to all of us at this moment. Russia frets all the time about the jihadis in the Mideast making joint cause with Muslim extremists in Russia; it’s Moscow’s number one security issue. Iran worries greatly about the Sunni jihadis torturing and killing Shiites in Syria and Iraq. There’s nothing more frightening in the world today than these religious fanatics.
But ultimately, even with Gelb’s many caveats, his proposal may not be practical; a number of these “allies” would be at least as interested in weakening the U.S. as in striking at ISIS—and placing the U.S. on one side of a sectarian war has big drawbacks. There is also the question of whether the earnest White House types who have piled up such a disastrous record in the Middle East could negotiate their way into a used car lot, much less handle a complex negotiation involving Russia, Iran, Assad, and a bunch of other canny operators. Even so, Gelb is right about this: The rise of ISIS, unless checked, presents a challenge big enough to change the international alignment of more than one state. We could be looking at a major geopolitical upheaval here, an earthquake whose aftershocks will be felt across the world.
From current press reports, it appears that Secretary Kerry is off to the Middle East on a mission of splitting the difference. On the one hand, he is kissing up to the Saudis: telling the Saudi backed Egyptian leader Sisi not to worry, that the aid check is in the mail, and insisting that any solution in Iraq must involve a better deal for the Sunnis. On the other hand, he is urging the Shia to make nice—to throw Maliki out and “be more inclusive” with the Sunnis in Iraq. This is the sort of counsel the .U.S always hands out in these situations; we want both sides to “rise above” their “narrow interests” and accept a compromise solution that, coincidentally, gives us what we want.
The Middle East’s leaders have heard exactly this kind of message from many Presidents and Secretaries of State in the past. They are less inspired by our logic than American policymakers think. As the region’s leaders listen to Kerry, they will be asking whether he brought anything but the usual stale platitudes in his baggage. What, specifically, does the U.S. want people to do? And what good things will happen to those who agree to support the U.S. line in this crisis, and what bad things will happen to those who don’t? One hopes the White House has given Kerry big bags full of extra-tasty carrots and intimidating sticks; otherwise, his mission this week will be no more successful than his most recent bout of Middle East peacemaking with the Israelis and Palestinians. The problem is that what Middle Eastern leaders want most from the United States is exactly what President Obama doesn’t want to give them: firm promises of significant and effective military support. The Iraqis want more than a few drone strikes, the Saudis want Iran’s ambitions blocked and the “moderate” Syrian rebels effectively helped; the Iranians want the U.S. to crush ISIS for them.
Secretary Kerry faces a tough week, especially after the Egyptians celebrated his visit by convicting three Al-Jazeera journalists on terrorism charges and giving them long prison terms. For our part, we wish him all the success in the world, and observe that any tangible successes — like the ouster of Maliki — would help to restore the credibility of an administration that desperately needs a win.
For the immediate future, there are two things to watch. First, does ISIS’s momentum carry it forward when it reaches the Shia districts of Iraq? The militias and parade groups currently marching around Baghdad and thumping their chests may not be very effective in the field, and it is not yet clear whether the Iraqi Army will fight any better on Shia home turf than it did in the north and the west. The Sunni crushed the Shia in Iraq for decades and there is no law of nature that says they can’t do it again—if they are willing to be brutal enough.
They probably are.
In any case, the fall of Baghdad and further disintegration of the fragile Shia Army would create one kind of situation; the stabilization of a military front north and west of the city or even inside it would be something quite different. Until we know how that develops on the ground, it will be difficult to think much about the future.
Second, there’s the question of the political balance within the ISIS-held territories. Tribal leaders, Baathist activists, other religious groups and their allies outnumber the true ISIS cadres by an immense factor. It is far from clear whether the rebel region in Syria and Iraq will be under one increasingly powerful and effective government or whether it falls apart into factionalism and internal power struggles. For ISIS to impose real order and authority on the population under its military control, and to build up its forces from a guerrilla army to a force capable of imposing dictatorial religious rule on a large civilian population, would be a victory as difficult and in some ways more astonishing than the triumph of its forces on the ground. The U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.
So the dust will have to settle before we can tell what exactly we are dealing with. But even as we wait for the new picture to emerge internationally, the American people need to come to grips with a strategic escalation of the terror threat at home. ISIS is much richer, much bigger, much better organized and much better positioned to launch attacks in the U.S. and Europe than any of its predecessors. For now, the organization appears to be focused on its local wars, where it certainly has plenty to do. But we’ve consistently underestimated the group’s capabilities, strategic intelligence, innovative planning methods, and drive to prevail. It would be most unwise to assume that a jihadi terror organization 2.0 like ISIS, richer than Osama bin Laden and better supplied with arms and supporters, is incapable of thinking one or two steps ahead. And there’s the reality that hotheads all over the world will be inspired by its success to try a little murder and mayhem on their own.
So here, alas, is where we now stand six years into the Age of Obama: The President isn’t making America safer at home, he doesn’t have the jihadis on the run, he has no idea how to bring prosperity, democracy, or religious moderation to the Middle East, he can’t pivot away from the region, and he doesn’t know what to do next. He’s the only President this country has got, and one can’t help but wish him well, but if things are going to get any better, he needs to stop digging. He probably needs to bring in some new blood, and he must certainly ask himself some tough questions about why so many of his most cherished ideas keep leading him and his country into such ugly places.
Six years into what the President and his supporters thought would be an era of liberal Democrats seizing the national security high ground from enfeebled, discredited Republicans, the outlook is much grimmer than the President’s team could have dreamed. Perhaps they should take comfort from the example of George W. Bush; at this point in his presidency things looked pretty bleak, too. Between the surge in Iraq and hard work building bridges with allies, Bush had some positive foreign policy momentum going by the time he left office. It’s not a place on Mount Rushmore, but it’s better than the alternative. Mr. Obama must now hope he can accomplish as much.
4a) Iraq likely isn't the last stop for ISIS
By
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continued its consolidation of power on the Iraq-Syria border over the weekend, but U.S. officials and experts warn that the Sunni Islamic militants may not end its quest for power even if it takes over Iraq.
The group's name also translates to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a swath of land across the Middle East that includes Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Israel - and that's exactly where the militants may be headed.
One of the looming concerns was that ISIS may capture the Iraqi capital of Baghdad, although CBS News National Security Analyst and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell said that the "blitzkrieg" toward the capital has all but stopped.
"I think they're now on a different focus than they were when they were heading towards Baghdad," he said on CBS News "Face the Nation" Sunday. That new focus could be Iraq's other neighbors in the region.
Once an offshoot of al Qaeda, ISIS became a separate entity in February 2014 when it stopped following orders from al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri. Now, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., says, the two groups are like "two organized crime families" fighting for turf.
ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi "wants more territory. He wants the Levant. He wants Lebanon. He wants Jordan. They talk about Israel," Rogers said on "Face the Nation" Sunday. "They want to expand their Islamic caliphate. They believed that because they have a piece of Syria and a huge piece of Iraq now that they are well underway to do that."
Morell echoed those concerns about ISIS influence in Jordan and Lebanon, citing the group's activity in Lebanon in recent months that includes a suicide bombing just last week. It wasn't the first attack: back in January, the group claimed responsibility for a car bomb in January aimed at leaders of Hezbollah, a Shiite militia.
Rogers also noted the possibility of al Qaeda sympathizers in Jordan coming into contact with ISIS as it spreads throughout Iraq.
The al-Arabiya news channel has reported that the group hopes to create a state combining territory in Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon and Israel.
"There is no question that ISIS presents a regional threat and is forming the platform for a new global terrorist movement. The antecedents to ISIS envisioned a broader regional and global agenda -- and launched attacks into Jordan and attempted to influence in Lebanon," said former Bush counterterrorism adviser Juan Zarate, now a CBS News national security analyst.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies' (CSIS) Tom Sanderson, who co-directs the organization's Transnational Threats Project, said that ISIS' growth in Syria, where it was able to recruit foreign fighters from 70 to 80 different countries, makes it uniquely capable of reaching beyond its current base of power along the border with Iraq.
"ISIS has networked with people from dozens, scores of countries," Sanderson told CBS News. "It gives them the potential to travel to and operate in these countries where they have people they know, they trust, who have the skills to operate."
Among the countries that might be susceptible to ISIS influence are Indonesia, Germany, Canada, Yemen, Algeria and Morocco, among others.
"As far as North Africa is concerned I think they would find a lot of welcoming and open hearts and hands because they're fielding tons and tons of fighters from Morocco and Tunisia in particular as well as Libya," Sanderson said.
At a CSIS panel last week, former CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes said the group's ability to bring in disenfranchised men from countries like Pakistan and Morocco should not be underestimated. "It's a far more successful thing than people realize here in the United States," he said.
The group has also grown wealthier as they have expanded in Iraq, as wealthy Arabs from the Gulf countries keep the monetary support coming in.
"They give their money to the most successful group. And so the success that we're seeing on the ground today is drawing in more money," Morell said. "The other place they're getting money is from Iraq. When they overrun a city, they gather all the money that happens to be available in that city. They are a very wealthy terrorist organization."
Complex regional politics complicate efforts to slow ISIS' growth. Secretary of State John Kerry is traveling in the Middle East this week to build support among leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help stabilize Iraq.
But many of ISIS' wealthy donors come from within Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and Kerry will have to pressure them to help cut off the group's funding, CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan reports. The leaders of those states are also very skeptical of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the potential influence Iran has over him.
Iran, a predominantly Shiite country, is similarly concerned about a takeover of Iraq by the militants, who are Sunni Muslims. They have been working to ensure the Shiite militias inside Iraq are organized and well-armed to battle ISIS.
In the meantime, experts are warning that if they go unchecked, ISIS could become an even bigger threat to the U.S.
"To allow terrorist movements with global aspirations to fester, regroup, gain resources, and strategize is a prescription for disaster in the 21st century. That's what we've seen in Syria and Iraq for a few years now," Zarate said.
President Obama announced last week that he was sending up to 300 military advisers to assist Iraq security forces. Many Republicans are still urging more aggressive action, though, including airstrikes.
But the president remains firm in his commitment not to put U.S. combat troops on the ground there. He told CBS News' Norah O'Donnell he is not "just going to play whack-a-mole and send U.S. troops occupying various countries wherever these organizations pop up."
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