ISIS Trembles As Climate Hawks Meet In Paris! Obama All Talk, Putin All Action! Stay In Your House!

Obama wants to sugar coat his way out of a legitimate concern related to any president's first obligation - protect the nation.  Whether America's vetting process is equal to the challenge is also a legitimate issue.

But then Obama tells us 'climate change' is far more a threat and the meeting next week in Paris  is a powerful rebuke to ISIS!

Meanwhile, Putin is expanding his political and military footprint in Syria and intends to use protecting Syria's leader as cover, Obama displays his weakness for all to see and  Hillarious's reset button policy has boomeranged!

One thing we can be thankful of - Obama will be out of office in another year but then, another turkey could replace him by a crook in a pant suit or a loud mouth with crazy hair.

You could not come up with a movie script as bizarre as what we are experiencing if you tried.
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Lamentably, stability does not have as much appeal as chaos.  The press and media are not likely to report on and/or show calm but they will break their necks to show and report on malcontents  and terrorists parading and engaged in acts of violence etc.

This is the appeal of ISIS.  This is why the world's  malcontents and misguided youth are attracted to ISIS etc.and this is why rioters take to the streets and this is why fighting these type of animals and occurrences is so difficult.

The best we can hope for is to discredit the likes of ISIS, fight them with all we have because we are at war.  This is something we seem unprepared to do because we have an impotent leader who has been more engaged in dividing our nation and frankly seems to sympathize with the  Muslim world than the Christian World and believes America is responsible for much of the world's discord.

Obama claims he has stitched together a coalition of 65 nations but, in reality, this coalition is toothless and doing nothing for lack of American leadership.  Obama is all talk and BS.  Putin acts!

In the near term I am betting on Putin.

You decide! (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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Obama came out today and told us there is not credible threat that he and our various agencies are aware of , so we can go about our Holiday Shopping as long as you are not in Chicago, Minneapolis, St Louis and other cities and college campuses where a lot of Americans are not happy for a variety of reasons.

The State Department told us we should not travel overseas because terrorists are busy trying to blow up buildings and kill innocent people seeking to enjoy life.

The president of France came to America hoping he could convince Obama he should come out of hiding and lead. However, after Obama made a long speech thanking the French president for visiting before he meets with Putin, he went back into his shell, like he ground hog,

Obama did say he was looking forward to coming to Paris next week for the Climate Change meeting and was sure this would convince ISIS they are on the wrong side and should quit being incorrigible.

Obviously the biggest threat we face is global warming because Obama said so. Therefore, please stay in your house and don't breathe.
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Dick
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1)

We face a three-headed monster

By Niall Ferguson 

It is usual for horror to be followed by hysteria. The unusual thing about the Paris massacre on Nov. 13 is that the most hysterical reactions have been thousands of miles from the scene of carnage.

American politicians appear to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson compared refugees to dogs. Rival Donald Trump vaguely threatened to do “things . . . that we never thought would happen in this country.”

Yet mental disturbance is sometimes more dangerous when it is repressed. “The terrible events in Paris” were a “setback,” declared a haggard and at times wild-eyed President Obama in a press conference that was painful to watch. Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that January’s mass murder of staff at the magazine Charlie Hebdo had, if not “legitimacy,” then at least a “rationale” because the magazine had made people “really angry.”

Let’s come off the prescription meds. The world faces three distinct threats: an epidemic of jihadist violence, most of it in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia; uncontrolled mass migration from these places to Europe; and the emergence of a “fifth column” of Islamic extremists within nearly all Western societies, including the United States. We must take care to distinguish each component of this terrifying trifecta.

The jihadist epidemic is by no means confined to Syria. Last year alone, according to the Institute for Economics and Peace, 32,658 people were killed by terrorism, compared to 18,111 in 2013. The two most deadly terrorist groups were Boko Haram and the Islamic State, which together were responsible for half of the fatalities. Nearly four in five attacks occurred in just five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Syria. But the plague of jihad extends as far as the Malian capital Bamako, where Islamist gunmen slaughtered hotel guests on Friday.

There is clearly an urgent need to end the civil war in Syria. But let’s not kid ourselves. Even if President Obama recalled David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal to run a counterinsurgency campaign against the Islamic State similar to the one they ran against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the jihadist epidemic would still infect a dozen other countries.

Threat number two is a wave of mass migration to Europe that has been triggered by the Syrian crisis, but is by no means exclusively Syrian or even Middle Eastern. Statistics on the “country of origin” of asylum seekers in Germany show that they come not only from Syria but also from Albania, Afghanistan, Iraq, Serbia, and Eritrea.

At present, continental Europe has almost no way of controlling this influx, which grows larger with every passing month. Although the German government has now restored the Dublin regulation — which stipulates that asylum seekers can claim asylum only in the member state in which they entered the EU — in practice the entire apparatus for assessing applications has collapsed, as has the hotly contested scheme to redistribute asylum seekers between countries.

Even if every single one of the newcomers was an angel in human form, this would be a disastrous state of affairs, not least because continental labor markets are notoriously bad at integrating foreign-born workers. And no one should underestimate the domestic political backlash that is going to result.

The third threat is posed by a fifth column within Western societies of young Muslims or converts to Islam who join or at least sympathize with groups like the Islamic State. The overwhelming majority of these people are not refugees from Syria or anywhere else. Many are the children or grandchildren of an earlier wave of economic immigrants from former colonies. The biographies of the Paris terrorists tell the story.

What links the three threats together is the fact that at least six of the Paris terrorists spent time in Syria; and at least two of them were able to use the refugee route through Greece to return to France undetected. But that does not mean that the Syrian war or the immigration crisis were necessary for the Paris attacks to happen. Young Muslims are getting radicalized all over the Western world without going anywhere near Syria. Americans who think they can make themselves safer by excluding refugees are missing the point. The Tsarnaev brothers, who were responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings, were little different from the Abdeslam brothers, who helped carry out the Paris attacks.

The ancient Greeks believed that the gates of Hades were guarded by a monstrous three-headed dog. Like Cerberus, the monster we confront today has three heads: rampant jihadism, uncontrolled mass migration, and homegrown extremists. To defeat it, we shall need to keep our own heads very clear indeed.

Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard University, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, and the author of “Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist.’’


1a) Dick I know John and he is a very solid clear thinking soldier. Top quality person in every respect.     J---

Subject: General Abizaid's Talk at Jax World Affairs Council

Classmates

General (Ret.) John Abizaid was here this past Tuesday to discuss the Middle East with our Jacksonville World Affairs Council. He was invited by the former Supe who lives here (General “Buster”Hagenback who led the Mountain Division into the Hindu Kush area of Afghanistan immediately after 9-11). Most of you know of John Abizaid and you will recall that he is an Arabic speaking West Point grad who studied in Amman Jordan and who spent much of his career involved with the fighting in the Middle East.  He finished as the CentCom Commander commanding our forces in Afghanistan

and Iraq in the critical 2005-2007 time frame. In the wake of Paris a number of his comments were quite enlightening and prescient, so I thought I would pass them along.

In John’s view the recent initiatives of ISIS is a game changer.  The killings in Beirut, downing of the Russian Airliner and Paris all show a paradigm shift in their strategy. They are moving outside their territories and going on the offensive. Their goal of a worldwide Caliphate based on their ideology draws a parallel with Hitler in the 30’s. He stated what his intention in Mein Kampf. The threat was visible for years before it tore the world apart. 

The old Middle East doesn’t exist anymore.  The boundaries were drawn by the post WW I victors based on their own “imperialistic ambitions” and without any thought of religious and ethnic consequences. 

Iraq is the perfect example.  Our strategy has for years been to put the “Humpty Dumpty” Middle East  back together again which is a mistake.  John Commanded in Bosnia and stated that Yugoslavia had to be partitioned to bring it into stability in the 90’s. Yet the entire West and the U.N. still persists in not even considering any initiative to do the same in the disaster that is the Middle East.

ISIS views their struggle strategically in terms of centuries; the West views it in tactical terms trying to gain stability in the short term. The Air War was cited by him as totally sub optimal.  The flying missions

are not synchronized and the Intelligence Communities are not working together in any reasonable and effective manner. (My son Colonel Scott Arbogast is an F-16 pilot  in the Strategy Directorate of the Air Staff in the Pentagon and is in the middle of this; he mentions the same issues on the flying side). Thus, we are not “mining the gaps”, nor are we “following the money” (foreign donors in many of our supposed allies are supporting ISIS and need to be tracked down and eliminated). The Internet needs to be contested as it is being used by ISIS as a major recruiting and otherwise empowering  tool in their strategy.  Privacy concerns are limiting proper government oversight.  Combined with new, powerful encryption technology that is now  privately available, ISIS is able to coordinate and mask strikes such as in Paris.

John did not recommend massive “boots on the ground”. What is needed is an American led world-wide coalition that will confront the threat. Military forces, including well equipped and led ground forces, are needed to hit ISIS hard in the territories that they have taken. The ISIS timetable needs to be seriously disrupted and the world needs to see that they are clearly losing the struggle.  Military action must then be followed up by a world-wide strategy that includes education, economic, social and political initiatives. The US must lead all of this, but what is new.  American leadership has been at the heart of keeping the world safe for the past hundred years.  The biggest challenge will be to organize a functioning and effective Muslim coalition in the Middle East that will be able to implement a follow-up set of policies that will bring stability to the region.

Failure to do this will lead to a 21^st century world that will be a nightmare for our children and grandchildren to live in.  ISIS will continue to metastasize and spread their sick  ideology all over the world. The Free world as we know it will be living daily with terrorism in a major way (kidnappings, suicide bombings, horrific destruction of all that we hold dear etc.).  ISIS has stated that if they get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, they will not hesitate to use them in the pursuit of their goal. With the spread of nuclear weapons (see Pakistan), this should provide sufficient enough motivation for us to act.

John’s concluded that the US has  no other choice than to take on this challenge. Winning heart and minds with ISIS is futile (Vietnam thinking). We must set our priorities and win this war.  We need to recognize that the world of political correctness that has evolved in the West is an absolute distraction in summing up our resolve to persevere.  We are in an existential battle of civilizations and must arm ourselves for the struggle that looms ahead.

Footnote from me: Although not stated directly by John, his talk has caused be to start to reflect on a number of related issues, one of which is the refugee crisis.  If huge Islamic populations are settled in Europe, the US etc., in the short term we may consider that we are being good humanitarians.  Granted, the large percentage of these people are fleeing the hell of the Middle East and need a hand up.  However, looking at it long-range, what about the next several generations of Muslims that would be embedded into the fabric of the West.  If only a small percentage of them become radicalized in the ISIS mode, the seeds will be there for a Paris exponentially raised to some n power in 2050? 2060? Case in point: it only took 8 Jihadists to cause the bedlam in Paris.

In the recent Democratic debate Bernie Sanders said the main threat in our time is Global Warming. Before we get anywhere close to this, ISIS will have warmed up the planet if we do not bring them to heel.  Thanks for reading this.

Gordon

Gordon W. Arbogast,  Ph.D., P.E.

Management, Decision Sciences & Info Mgnt Dept.

Professor  

Jacksonville University

Ph: (904) 256-7466

1b)

Turkey Shoots Down a Paper Tiger

His neighbors don’t find Mr. Putin quite as impressive as some Americans do.

ENLARGE

Russian President Vladimir Putin. PHOTO: MAXIM SHIPENKOV/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

By

HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

Vladimir Putin is not the master strategist some make him out to be. He’s a gambler and maneuverer whose bold moves are not testaments to vision or cojones but to the unhealthiness of his domestic political situation.

His choice of words in reaction to Turkey’s downing over Syria of a Russian jet—he called it “a stab in the back”—was redolent of another leader who spoke of stabs in the back, and not one whose regime broke any records for longevity.

Mr. Putin presumably has two immediate goals: Remove sanctions so Russian companies can start rolling over their debts again, without which many may collapse. He also needs higher oil prices to stave off the eventual insolvency of his state.

Opinion Journal Video

Hoover Institution Research Fellow Kori Schake on the downing of a Russian jet over Turkish airspace. Photo credit: Getty Images.

The Putin regime, let’s recall, arose to loot the benefits of Russian integration in the world economy, not as a reaction against it, despite claims by some today that Russia is motivated by eternal geopolitical insecurities prompted by (largely mythical) Western expansionism.

He needs conflict with the West to justify his people’s privation and his failure to allow the diversification and modernization of the Russian economy under a rule of law. He also needs the West’s complicity, which he has mostly gotten. It’s hard to fathom, for instance, why his cheating athletes were allowed at the London Olympics, much less why he was allowed to host the Sochi Olympics. Both would have been unthinkable if the West had publicly recognized his regime’s likely complicity in nuclear terrorism on British soil in the polonium murder of Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko.

His salvation, though he would not phrase it this way, is to become the West’s client regime, while masquerading as a superpower-equal.

Truth be told, there are Westerners who would like to accommodate him, but Western politics is not likely to allow it, especially the politics of a post-Obama America.

A related problem likely guarantees failure in any case: There is quite probably nothing that U.S. or Western appeasement can do to save the Putin regime from itself in the long run.

Which brings us to the shootdown. Whatever he woke up thinking on Tuesday morning, Mr. Putin now appears to be contemplating playing the victim of NATO aggression (Turkey is a NATO member). Where he goes from here is hard to forecast. Pathological gamblers who get themselves in holes tend to double down. KGB colleagues recall that as a youthful agent Mr. Putin was sidelined to an East German backwater because his recklessness and propensity for miscalculation were unwelcome at a time when the Soviet Union was weak and the KGB had become risk averse.

Otto Dietrich, Hitler’s press aide, noted the Fuhrer’s own devolution from “domestic reformer” into a “foreign-policy desperado and gambler in international politics,” who “began to hate objections to his views and doubts on their infallibility. . . . He wanted to speak, but not to listen.”

It’s not exactly reassuring that Mr. Putin’s reaction to Turkey’s defense of its airspace seems to have emerged almost instantly, unlike the shilly-shallying that proceeded his reaction to the blowup of a Russian airliner over Sinai (perhaps partly because Mr. Putin was trying to figure out if his own security apparatus was involved).

If he’s paying attention, Mr. Putin should by now have learned his leverage is much less than he imagines. At least while Angela Merkel is around, he has only managed to turn his important German friend into a quasi-enemy. He has turned a formidable Turkish friend into an actual enemy.

On Friday the Turkish government called in the Russian ambassador for a tongue lashing over Russia’s bombing of ethnic Turks in northern Syria. Tuesday’s downing was clearly not an accident. The Turkish government doesn’t seem to find Mr. Putin quite as impressive as some of his American admirers do.

Then again, only the misguided ever did. By March of this year, Russian economist Sergei Guriev estimated that Russia had already spent half its 2015 military budget. Russia’s spending plan was premised on $100 oil. This year’s budget hopes for $50 oil. Meanwhile, capital flight is running at perhaps $100 billion a year. Meanwhile, some of Russia’s biggest companies are verging on default. The Russian army has had to cease recruiting in the fertile Caucasus region due to a worrisome overreliance on Muslim troops. Moscow also faces a growing liability in economically failing Crimea and eastern Ukraine, complicated this week by partisan sabotage of Crimea’s electricity supply.

Global stock markets dipped only modestly on the Turkish shoot down. Oil jumped a buck. This muted reaction should not be seen as a testament that Mr. Putin or his regime have much of a future.

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