Category: Military

Obama Eradicates Islamic Terrorism – From NSA Documents Only

From the Middle East Forum:The Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all words that allude to Islam from important national security documents. Put differently, the Obama administration has just announced its intent to ban all knowledge and context necessary to confront and defeat radical Islam (news much welcomed by Islamist organizations like CAIR). While this move may reflect a naively therapeutic administration — an Obama advisor once suggested that Winnie the Pooh should inform U.S foreign policy — that Obama, the one U.S. president who best knows that politically correct niceties will have no effect on the Muslim world is enforcing this ban, is further troubling.

An Associated Press report has the disturbing details:

President Barack Obama’s advisers plan to remove terms such as “Islamic radicalism” from a document outlining national security strategy and will use the new version to emphasize that the U.S. does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism, counterterrorism officials say.

First off, how, exactly, does the use of terms such as “Islamic radicalism” indicate that the U.S. views “Muslim nations through the lens of terrorism”? It is the height of oversensitivity to think that the so-called “Muslim street” can be antagonized by accurate words in technical U.S. documents — documents they don’t know or care about — especially since the Arabic media itself often employs such terms. Surely we can use “Islamic radicalism” to define, well, Islamic radicals, without simultaneously viewing all Muslims “through the lens of terrorism”? Just as surely as we can use words like “Nazism” to define white supremacists, without viewing all white nations through the lens of racism?

The AP report continues:

Obama’s speechwriters have taken inspiration from an unlikely source: former President Ronald Reagan. Visiting communist China in 1984, Reagan spoke at Fudan University in Shanghai about education, space exploration and scientific research. He discussed freedom and liberty. He never mentioned communism or democracy.

The analogy is flawed. For starters, in Reagan’s era, the Soviet Union, not China, was America’s prime antagonist — just as today, Islamic radicals, not Muslims, are America’s prime enemy. Moreover, unlike Obama, who would have the U.S. bend over backwards to appease Muslim nations— or, in his case, just bend over — Reagan regularly lambasted the Soviet Union, dubbing it the “evil empire.” Finally, the Chinese never attacked America, unlike Islamic radicals, who not only have attacked it, but daily promise it death and destruction — all in the name of Islam.

The ultimate problem in the White House’s new “words-policy,” however, is reflected in this excerpt from the report:

The change [i.e., linguistic obfuscation] would be a significant shift in the National Security Strategy, a document that previously outlined the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. It currently states, “The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century.”

Read the whole article.

I Had a Dream

I Had a Dream

By Jed Gladstein

The following is an essay that appeared in The American Thinker. It is an important piece so I am posting it here in its entirety, with permission of the author.

I awakened the other morning from a dream to a vivid certainty. The certainty is that America is in mortal danger. Our country has reached a pivot point in its national existence, and the American people must now decide whether this country will be victorious or join the long line of historically vanquished nations.

Here is the dream:

A young hawk is let loose in the sky. It is lean and strong and full of life’s surging impulse. And it is hungry. It circles the sky in search of food, and then it dives. In a moment, it fastens upon and tightly clutches a healthy pigeon. It forces the pigeon to the ground. There, it bites open the neck of its prey and sucks the life blood from its heart. In the awful ineluctability of that reality, the pigeon’s submissive protests simply fade into silence.

If my dream is merely the product of “an undigested bit of beef” (hat tip to Charles Dickens), then I beg forgiveness for what will surely be seen as an alarmist article. But if my dream is tinged with prophecy, what then? If America’s light goes out, it will fail in its historic mission to hold up a beacon of freedom in the world, and that will surely be a tragedy for all people of good will. But how many Americans actually understand that it is possible for our nation to fail?

Do we think America cannot die like the hapless pigeon of my dream? If so, we had better think again. Nations have died many times throughout recorded history — big nations, powerful nations. They die from a multitude of causes and in a myriad of circumstances. But when they die, their death is always accompanied by the draining away of the people’s will to survive as a cohesive and powerful nation.

If the American people do not have the will to reclaim their national identity and power from the predators now draining this country into lifelessness, the America we know will surely die. Our country is already gripped tight by foreign and domestic predators, and the sinews of our national power are steadily weakening. If we do not want to be present at America’s funeral, we must summon the will to overcome the mortal dangers that confront us.

For decades, we have allowed one kind of predator to package and sell America piece by piece on the international market for the sake of private profit, [1] while another kind of predator has been busy on the domestic front giving away huge hunks of American prosperity for the sake of political power. [2] In consequence, we have lost energy independence, heavy industries, financial solvency, cultural cohesion, educational excellence, and something we used to call the American middle class. But those are only a few of the more obvious outward signs of the deadly struggle taking place in America.

There is also a battle going on for America’s soul. Intellectual integrity, political principles and moral standards are being deliberately attacked and undermined. The assault on America’s universities and public schools by the forces of cultural Marxism has produced two generations of citizens who possess almost no knowledge of American history and very little understanding of the requirements of a civilized society. [3] Our politicians promote domestic divisiveness while they pursue international policies deliberately designed to weaken our nation. [4] In their arrogance, the cultural elite inculcate irreverence, glorify nihilistic violence, and demean the Judeo-Christian values on which this country was founded. To survive, our nation cannot allow this behavior to continue unchallenged.

In the epic Indian poem known as the Mahabharata, the Lord Krishna observes that “Destruction never approaches weapon in hand. It comes slyly on tip toe, making you see bad in good and good in bad.” In that succinctly stated truth lies the greatest danger that confronts our nation. Krishna did not mean that warriors lack weapons of destruction. He meant that all wars are won in the will, and when a people lose the ability to distinguish between good and evil they will be unable to summon the will to resist when the forces of destruction approach. [5]

So, the question for Americans is this: Do we have the will to oppose the predators trying to choke the life out of America, or have we lost the moral clarity necessary to confront the forces of destruction? The answer to that question will determine whether America joins the list of nations whose historical greatness is now just a distant memory. If the triumphant cry of the American eagle becomes the submissive whimper of a dying pigeon, it won’t just be Americans who suffer. People of good will all over the world will have cause to grieve that loss.

Jed Gladstein is an attorney, author, educator and professional speaker.

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[1] Although they are certainly not alone, the international energy cartels come readily to mind in this context, with their massive assault on American wealth, power and independence.

[2] The “welfare society” in America, for example, is a national disgrace. Predicated on legal compulsion, it impoverishes those who must support it and degrades those it purports to help. Three generations of “Great Society” economic dependency is more than enough to convince any reasonable observer of the truth of the Chinese proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

[3] The demonstrable decline in civic literacy in America is appalling. The decline in historical literacy is just as bad. It is no accident that this decline has been accompanied by the ascendancy of cultural Marxism in American education. Although the evidence of that ascendancy is too voluminous to cite here, I have had occasion to refer to it before in an article entitled The Point of the Dagger. For those who want to study the phenomenon in depth, a good place to begin is the excellent website created by David Horowitz’s Freedom Center.

[4] I have already written, for example, about the extra-constitutional attempt of the current administration to make America subject to “transnational” law. Quite recently, the Obama administration’s policies were implicated in the move to topple the dollar’s preeminence among world currencies. Soon, the administration plans to cede American sovereignty over large sectors of American industry to unelected officials at the United Nations. These are only a few of the many instances where the activities of America’s political elite and the bureaucrats who report to them serve to weaken rather than strengthen America.

[5] Lack of moral clarity abounds in America. A recent example is a statement by Congresswoman Jane Harmon, Democrat from California. Ms. Harmon is considered by the political left to be “a leading Democrat hawk.” But during a recently televised panel discussion about the possibility of American success or failure in Afghanistan, Ms. Harmon quietly confessed, “I don’t like winning or losing.” For someone who is supposed to be a “hawk” on matters of national defense, that statement betrays a remarkable degree of moral ambivalence.

Obama Makes U.S. Vulnerable

Frank Gaffney, Jr., President of the Center for Security Policy, and a columnist for the Washington Times has an article today about how the steps that Obama is taking with respect to our national security will not only diminish our power, but will also encourage our enemies to perceive us as less powerful – a very dangerous and vulnerable position for America.

President Obama’s stewardship of the national security portfolio to date amounts to a wrecking operation, a set of policies he must understand will not only weaken the United States but embolden our foes. After all, the Communist agitator Saul Alinsky, a formative influence in Mr. Obama’s early years as a “community organizer,” made Rule Number One in his 1971 book Rules for Radicals: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.”

According to this logic, the various steps Barack Obama is taking with respect to the armed forces, the foreign battlefields in which they are engaged, our allies as well as our adversaries will not only diminish our power. They will encourage our enemies to perceive us as less powerful – with ominous implications. Consider some illustrative examples:

* The Obama administration is cutting the defense budget by 10%. The result will be to preclude much, if not virtually all, of the modernization that will be required to prepare the U.S. military to contend with tomorrow’s wars. Most of what the Pentagon spends goes to fixed – and growing – personnel-related costs (pay, bonuses, health care, etc.) and operations. As a result, at Obama funding levels, there will not be much available even to “reset” today’s forces by refurbishing the equipment they have been using up in present conflicts.
* The President is on a path to denuclearizing the United States by refusing to modernize the arsenal or even to fund fully the steps necessary to assure the viability of the weapons we have. He hopes to dress up this act of unilateral disarmament by seeking to resume arms control negotiations with Russia, as though such throw-backs to the old Cold War and its bipolar power structure apply today – let alone that there are grounds for believing the Kremlin will adhere to new treaties any better than the previous ones it systematically violated.
* For good measure, Mr. Obama is mounting a frontal assault on the armed forces themselves. The President plans to repeal the law prohibiting homosexuals from serving in the military. It is absolutely predictable that significant numbers of servicemen and women – including many of the most experienced commissioned and non-commissioned officers – will retire rather than serve in conditions of forced intimacy with individuals who may find them sexually attractive. The effect will be to break the all-volunteer force.
* Then there are the Obama initiatives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President’s adoption of a deadline for withdrawing most U.S. forces from the former and his signaling that – despite a near-term 17,000 troop “surge” – he is preparing to turn the latter over to the oxymoronic-dubbed “moderate” Taliban are conveying unmistakable messages to friends and foes alike: Under Barack Obama, it is better to be a foe of America than one of its friends.

This message is, of course, being strongly reinforced by the treatment he is doling out to nations in each category.

* Friends like the Poles and Czechs have been left in the lurch as the Obama administration intimates that the United States now thinks Europe does not need after all to be defended against Iranian nuclear-armed missile threats. Not since Jimmy Carter abandoned the NATO deployment of so-called “neutron bombs” has a President conveyed such a devastating message of weakness and irresolution in the face of hostile threats to our European alliance partners.
* Other allies have not fared much better. Israel is on notice that its security interests are going to be sacrificed to the Obama administration’s pursuit of a Palestinian state – even one ruled by a terrorist organization like Hamas (or, for that matter, Fatah) committed to Israel’s destruction. Britain has been told it neither deserves nor has a “special” relationship with the United States.
* Meanwhile virtually every enemy of the United States is the object of assiduous cultivation and overtures for rapprochement by the Obama administration. It will reward IranSyria can expect the Golan Heights and removal from the terrorism list even as it pursues nuclear arms, renews its overtly colonial hold on Lebanon, supports the terrorists of Hezbollah and helps its abiding master, Iran, destabilize Iraq. for “going nuclear” with normalized relations.
* As mentioned above, Russia gets to be treated like a superpower again while it arms Iran, inserts bombers and naval units into our hemisphere, wields its energy leverage against our friends in Europe, Ukraine and Georgia and squeezes our supply lines into Afghanisan. There are no repercussions for China as it makes a mockery of the administration’s beloved Law of the Sea Treaty by threatening an unarmed U.S. naval vessel in its Exclusive Economic Zone.
* Last but hardly least, a “respectful” Obama administration seems keen to embrace those in the Muslim Brotherhood and like-minded Islamist organizations who seek to impose the toxic theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah on distant populations – and insinuate it into our country.

Can there be any doubt what America’s adversaries make of all this? Great grief will come our way if they conclude, as Alinsky surely would, that our power is waning, and that they can exercise theirs with impunity against our interests – and those of whatever friends we have left.

President Bush, whatever else you can say about him, was very careful to make sure that our enemies never got a perception of the U.S. as being weak or vulnerable. Is that why we were never attacked after 9-11? Will the actions of this President encourage at attack because we will be perceived as weak? Only time will tell.

Victory means winning no matter what it takes

Victory means winning no matter what it takes

COMMENTARY By BRUCE HERSCHENSOHN:

This war will either be won by those who shout “Death to America” or won by those who fight for our survival and the survival of civilization as we know it. Too bad, but there is no room for the politically-correct. To win in Afghanistan, in Iraq, or wherever the jihadists may take us, we must fight a politically incorrect war as we did in World War II in which world opinion and winning hearts and minds were not issues until after victory was achieved. Today, the politically-correct ask, “Ahhh, but what is victory?” Weird question. Victory means winning no matter what it takes. Otherwise, in this case, all is lost. All.