Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Islam, Slavery and Rape pt. 2

FP: What were the ingredients of Mohammed’s own life in terms of slavery?

Warner: Mohammed is the perfect pattern for all humanity and his life was saturated in slavery. When his mother died, it was a freed slave who nursed him. His first wife owned slaves. One of his first converts was a slave. His closest friend, Abu Bakr, traded one of his black kafir slaves for a Muslim who was enslaved by a kafir.

But all of this was small change compared to his involvement with slavery once he turned to jihad. In his first major battle at Badr, he stood by and prayed as his henchmen beat and tortured captured slaves to get information about the enemy kafirs.

Slaves made Mohammed’s pulpit. Slaves mended his cloths, cooked his food, and did everything that a slave does for the master. He gave away slaves as gifts and received them as gifts. He went to war to kill the males so that the remaining people would surrender to be sold as slaves. Mohammed sold slaves on both the retail and wholesale markets.

He offered captured slaves their freedom if they would first agree that he was the prophet of Allah. A kafir slave then became a slave of Allah, because all Muslims are slaves of Allah. For a slave, the religion of Mohammed started and ended with slavery.

FP: Can you talk a bit about Islam and sexual slavery?

Warner: All morality in Islam is patterned after the example of Mohammed. Everything that he did and said defines what is permitted or “good”. Mohammed repeatedly sanctioned forced sex (rape) with kafir females after they were captured. The Hadith clearly reports that he got first choice of the women. In one case, he repeatedly demanded one particular woman for himself and swapped two other kafir slave women for his choice. So if Mohammed was involved in the rape of kafirs, then rape is a virtue, not a sin or error.

When Mohammed destroyed the Banu Qurayza tribe, all of the adult male Jews were beheaded, so that no husbands were left. Mohammed then took the children and gave them to Muslims to raise as Muslims and he sold off the Jewish women as slaves.

We know from another story that the women were divided into sex slaves and domestic slaves. In one scene, a jihadist is trying to obtain a high ransom for a woman and he is told that her breasts are flat and her mouth is cold, so her value was less. In short, she was only good for work around the house, not in the bedroom.

The Hadith tells of another story where the Muslims used coitus interruptus to avoid impregnating the kafir sex slaves. The reason was purely for business. If the kafir sex slave was pregnant, then she was worth less money.

Islamic doctrine says that kafir women should not be used for prostitutes, only for the pleasure of the master.

When Mohammed attacked the Jews at Khaybar [the invoking of this battle is still used as a curse thrown at the Jews, though few Jews know what it means], many moral precedents were set. Sexual slavery received an entire set of rules. Muslims were not to rape pregnant or menstruating women until they had delivered the child or finished their periods. At Khaybar, Mohammed’s god Allah announced that even married women were fair game for rape.

Mohammed only killed some of the Jews at Khaybar. The male and female survivors were needed to work the land as dhimmis. [The land that they had owned] (The original dhimmis were semi-slaves with no civil rights. Today, dhimmis are ignorant kafirs who apologize for Islam.) Since Islam needed the men to work, husbands were left alive. That was the reason that the Koran said that in this case, even with the husbands looking on, it was good to rape the women.

Sexual slavery was not only fun and profitable for the Muslim men, but rape was a powerful tactic of war, then and today. The women are forced into submission to Muslim men and the husbands are humiliated. Humiliated men are weakened men, so more kafirs were less able to resist Islam.

For some time Mohammed’s favorite sex partner was a Christian slave from Egypt named Mary. One of Mohammed’s wives caught him in some state of intimacy with Mary in the wife’s bedroom and raised hell. Mohammed promised to not do it again and moved Mary to her own apartment in Medina.


Mohammed had received Mary and her sister as gifts. He gave her sister away to a Muslim poet. He was used to giving away sex slaves. He gave several of his top lieutenants kafir sex slaves. Umar, who later became caliph, gave his sex slave to his son. [As an aside, when he was caliph, his son got drunk and Umar beat him to death.]
Islam, Slavery and Rape pt. 3

FP: This institution of Islamic sexual slavery isn’t just a reality of the past is it?

Warner: Everything that has been said up to now is not only history; it is Sunna (the example of the perfect pattern of action and morality found in Mohammed). So today we don’t have a beautiful blonde Christian girl on the block in Mecca, but we have continuous and ongoing rapes by Muslims in kafir cities. This goes on everywhere that Islam goes because it is Sunna.

This is a continuous 1400-year history of jihad. In every detailed history that comes from the original documents from history, rape is a constant. You have to look in the original documents, since our historians refuse to report it in so-called history books.

Rape is Sunna. Rape is not a sin. Rape is permitted and encouraged by Mohammed and the Koran. Islam is the only political system in the world that includes rules for rape and war. Rape is jihad. How good can it get? A Muslim gets to rape a kafir girl and get heaven credits. All jihad is a ticket to Paradise.

The most disgusting aspect of the Islamic rape of kafirs is not the rapes, but the kafir response. Kafirs become dhimmis by ignoring the rapes. I challenge you to find one, even one, mention of Islamic rape in the history books.

Islamic rape is more taboo than the N-word in the media. At least the N-word is acknowledged to exist. Even unicorns exist in media fantasy. But Islamic rape is forbidden to even exist as a fantasy.

And to reach a fevered rant: our so-called “feminist” scholars are absolutely intellectually and morally bankrupt hypocrites. They are traitors to our culture and a shame and a disgrace. They remain silent in the face of heinous crimes against women. They are arch-dhimmis when they refuse to speak of the Sunna, history and current rapes of our daughters, mothers, and sisters.

And our tax dollars support their evil in our public universities.

FP: Mohammed was a white man and had black slaves, correct? Isn’t there a racism here? Where is all the leftist indignation against Islam on this issue?

Warner: The relationship between blacks and slavery is ironic. A standard approach of Islam to blacks is that Christianity is the religion of the white man and Islam is the natural religion of the black man. They add that Mohammed’s second convert was a black slave, Bilal, who was Mohammed’s companion and the first muezzin (the man who calls to prayer).

The Hadith, however, goes out of its way, many times, to tell the world that Mohammed was a white man. The Hadith also tells us the race of the kafirs that Mohammed enslaved. And Mohammed had many black slaves in his household. One of his slaves was a black man called, Anjasha.

Mohammed owned black slaves. It is that simple. His favorite wife, the child Aisha, had a black slave. But to be fair to Mohammed, he was not a racist about slavery. He enslaved Arabs, Africans, and Greeks. Islam enslaves all kafirs, independent of race.

Mohammed was politically incorrect about blacks and called them “raisin heads” in the Hadith. Thus it would be a compliment to call a black Muslim a “raisin head.” It would be Sunna and not offensive. Mohammed also said that Muslims are to obey the Islamic leader, “even if they were black.” A left-handed compliment, at best.

Mohammed used his robe to shield Aisha, so she could watch black slaves perform a martial arts routine in the mosque. The Hadith tells of a prophecy about a black man bringing evil to Islam. Black men were prophesized to destroy the Kabah.


But when Muslims preach to blacks they only say that Islam’s first muezzin was a black man. They don’t tell the rest of the story.
Islam, Slavery and Rape pt. 5

FP: The violent capture and enslavement of black Africans by Muslim Arabs continues to this today. The root of this modern-day slavery is, of course, Islamic doctrine.

Warner: The enslavement of Africans is happening today. The only reason that Islam stopped enslaving whites and Hindus is that Islam is too weak to resist the social pressure. The Sunna of slavery has not changed, just the ability to use their law.

In the African countryside Muslims are still using jihad to enrich themselves. I have spoken with a Sudanese slave who escaped. The Muslims killed his parents and took him and his sister. Each night the jihadists gang raped his sister. Remember, rape is Sunna.

When he met his new masters, they put him in the middle of a circle of the family and each beat him with a stick. He was told that his new name was Abd, black slave. He slept in the barn with the animals.

Our media and intellectuals are quick to punish the slightest insult by a white against a black man, but they have not the slightest recognition of murder, rape and enslavement of blacks by Islam. Our media and intellectuals are dhimmis.

FP: Final thoughts and comments?

Warner: Slavery is the fruit of Islamic duality. Mohammed, the master of dualism and submission, used slavery as a tool of jihad because it worked. Mohammed’s life was infused with slavery. Slaves were the lifeblood of Islam. Mohammed, the white man, owned both male and female black slaves. His attitude was pure dualism.

The most disgusting thing about Islamic slavery is not that Muslims enslave others, but that we ignore it. The Muslims have been fed the Koran and the Sunna in their mother’s milk. They are doing what is ethical according to Islam. In a strange way, Muslims are to be pitied. A Muslim is the first victim of Islam.

The criticism of whites because of their being involved in slavery is standard fair in the media and the universities. Try to find a university that even teaches about the killing of 120,000,000 Africans for Muslims to profit from the 24,000,000 slaves.

Blacks define themselves on the basis of slavery. They will not go beyond the white, Christian version of slavery. There is only one theory of history in the black community—the West African Limited Edition version of history. Blacks will not admit the broad scope of slave history. Hindu slavery? It never happened. White and European slavery? It never happened. Slavery on the East coast of Africa? It never happened. A massive slave trade through the Sahara into North Africa? It never happened. Black, eunuchs at the Medina mosque? It never happened. This incomplete history of slavery is what the taxpayers fund in the state universities.

How can black leaders ignore Islam’s sacred violence in Africa? Why aren’t the black columnists, writers, professors, or ministers speaking out? They are ignorant and in total denial. They are the molested children of Islam.

Blacks are dhimmis and serve Islam with their silence. There is a deep fear of Islam that makes them overlook and placate Islam. Arabs are the masters of blacks.

One thing whites and blacks have in common is that their ancestors were enslaved by Islam, and both are too ignorant to know it. Blacks and whites have a secret shame buried under the denial of being slaves inside Islam.

But the rest of the media and intellectuals line up as dhimmis, too. One of the marks of a dhimmi under the fourth caliph, Umar, was that a dhimmi was forbidden to study the Koran. The chief mark of dhimmitude today is ignorance of the Koran, the Sira and the Hadith. The ignorance of kafir intellectuals about Islam is profound.


They don’t know about how jihad killed the 120,000,000 Africans, the 60,000,000 Christians, the 80,000,000 Hindus or the 10,000,000 Buddhists. Our intellectuals do not know about the Tears of Jihad (detailed in all of our books). That is a lot of death and ignorance—270,000,000 dead. Our intellectuals don’t know, don’t care and don’t bother. They deny.

By Jeffrey Lord on 9.3.13 @ 6:09 AM in the American Spectator

What Reagan’s foreign policy experience can teach us about Syria.

They are Reagan’s Rules. 

There are four of them, all concerning the use of American military force.

Ronald Reagan had learned them the hard way, and he wanted to make sure he communicated what he learned to his presidential successors. So he wrote them out one-by-one in his memoir, An American Life.

What prompted them? What are Reagan’s Rules? And how do they apply to the current situation in Syria?

We’ll begin with what happened, move on to the four Reagan Rules and then apply them to Syria.

Reagan’s Disaster in Lebanon

October, 1983.                 

What began a year earlier as just one more chapter in the seemingly eternal turmoil of the Middle East had, predictably, mushroomed. In response to the attempted assassination of Israel’s British Ambassador by the Abu Nidal faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin had had enough. On June 6, 1982 Begin had launched an Israeli invasion of Southern Lebanon. It was an invasion designed to expel the PLO from Lebanon, strip Syria—then run by President Hafez al-Assad (the father of today’s Bashar al-Assad) — of its Russian backed influence in Lebanon. Then, once done, install a pro-Israeli government run by the Christian Bashir Gemayel.

Suffice to say, all hell broke loose. Lebanon quickly became a nest of vipers. There was the PLO, the non-PLO Palestinians, the Right and the Left, the Christians, the Muslims, this and that paramilitary group, the armed forces and the security forces. There were the occupying Israelis and the conniving Syrians, the latter a client state of the Soviet Union in the middle of the Cold War.

The international community, as the media loves to call Everybody Else, was frantic. Lebanon went to the United Nations begging for help — and got it. That help came in the form of what was called the “Multinational Force in Lebanon,” MFN for short. President Reagan had warily agreed to U.S. participation, and by October of 1983 the MFN “peacekeeping” force included Americans (US Marines and Navy Seals), British and Italian soldiers plus French paratroopers.

For a while, it seemed to be working. At least, President Reagan thought so.

On the Friday of October 21, 1983, the Reagans flew to Augusta, Georgia for a weekend of rest — which meant golf for the President. He liked golf but didn’t play regularly and in fact it had been so long since he had played that he expected  his performance to be miserable. As events turned out, his golf game was to be the least of his worries.

At four in the morning, Saturday, Reagan was awakened by his national security adviser, Bud McFarlane. There was a problem — a big one. Slipping on his bathrobe over his pajamas, the President walked into the living room of the Augusta National Golf Club’s “Eisenhower Cottage” — so-named in honor of another president who really was a serious golfer and used the place on his own golfing vacations.

Already there was McFarlane and Secretary of State George Shultz. The problem? The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) was urgently asking for the United States to intervene militarily on the island of Grenada. Grenada had been on the president’s radar for months. In his famous March speech on the Strategic Defense Initiative — “Star Wars” as it was derided by liberals — Reagan had mentioned the growing problem of Grenada then. There had been a Marxist coup in 1979, and along with the Soviet presence in Cuba and Nicaragua, Reagan had spent a considerable amount of time discussing what appeared to be yet another Soviet attempt to establish a military base in the Western Hemisphere, a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. A 10,000 foot runway had been built at the Grenadian airport. Since tiny Grenada didn’t even have an air force, military analysts knew there could only be one purpose: to accommodate Soviet transports bringing in weapons and ammunition. On top of the military buildup, with both Soviet and Cuban aid flowing into the country, there were threats from Grenada’s Communist government to take 800 American medical students studying on the island as hostages. Always believing that predecessor John F. Kennedy’s hesitation at following through in the 1961 Bay of Pigs operation the Eisenhower administration had been organizing against Fidel Castro’s Communist Cuba — a mere 90 miles off of Florida — was a mistake, Reagan was determined that if similarly confronted he would not repeat the same mistake. At Reagan’s directions, the Pentagon had been at work planning a military option if one was needed.


Of a sudden, that October night the situation had come to a head. 

The Communist government of Prime Minister Maurice Bishop was overthrown by an even more radical group of Marxists. Now the new government — having freshly executed Bishop — was refusing a State Department request to send an American diplomat to arrange for the safe departure of 800 American medical students studying on the island. In other words, 800 young Americans were now officially hostages on Grenada.

Reagan was determined. There would be no repeat of the JFK Bay of Pigs disaster, a disaster that launched further crises with the Soviets as it sent a message of weakness. Both the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis had resulted. Reagan would have none of that. He believed the Communist presence on Grenada to be a direct threat to United States national security. He also believed he had the authority as commander-in-chief to protect the lives of those American kids. Now, with the urgent request for help from the OECS, his earlier instruction to have a naval flotilla that had just departed for Lebanon diverted to Grenada just in case had paid off. The Joint Chiefs of Staff said they could be ready to do a rescue mission and take out the Marxist government in 48 hours.

Said the President in two short words: “Do it.”

Under cloak of secrecy — Reagan did not want any leaks—the invasion of Grenada was getting ready to roll. The President went back to bed.

An hour later, he got up to play his scheduled golf game.

Suddenly, on the 16th hole, Secret Service agents abruptly surrounded the President and his golf party, shoving them into White House limousines and raced him back to Eisenhower Cottage.

An armed gunman had smashed his pick-up truck through the entry gate of the golf course and taken control of the pro-shop, where seven White House aides had set up a very different kind of shop. He was threatening to kill them all unless Reagan agreed to meet with him. The Secret Service was apoplectic. They wanted the President out of there on the spot, on Air Force One and back to Washington. Reagan wouldn’t hear of it. Instead he picked up the phone and called the pro-shop. The gunman picked up the phone to hear the familiar voice say: “Hello, this is Ronald Reagan…”

There was silence. Then the gunman hung up and the line went dead. Reagan tried again—four more times. Each time with the same result. The armed man had sent word that he wanted to meet Reagan personally. The Secret Service said absolutely not. They were out searching the golf course and the woods around the golf course to see if there was more than just this one guy. They found no one—but kept after Reagan to go back to Washington, pronto. Knowing that he had only hours ago secretly ordered the invasion of Grenada, not wanting to raise the specter of impending crisis with the media, Reagan refused and stayed put. Eventually the gunman was persuaded to release his hostages unharmed and he was arrested. 

Reagan went on with his schedule, which by now meant dinner with friends. Then, tired from being up half the night, he went to bed.

At 2:30 in the morning, Bud McFarlane was on the phone yet again. This time it wasn’t about Grenada or the gunman.

A suicide bomber had driven into the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and first reports said there were 100 dead Marines. That did it.

After another pajama and robe clad meeting with McFarlane and George Shultz, by 6:30 a.m. the President was on Air Force One headed back to Washington. The hell with the golf.

The attack in Beirut, he was learning, was more horrific than first thought. The final death toll was 241 Marines, all murdered as they slept. In a pattern that would years later become familiar to Americans in events as disparate as 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombing, minutes after the first attack came a second. In the case of Beirut that second attack came two minutes after the first, the second attack at a building housing the MFN peacekeeping force’s French paratroopers. Fifty-eight of the French were killed. 

The Grenada invasion was a success. Launched in secrecy, it rescued the 800 American medical students, overturned the Marxist revolutionaries, discovered thousands of Russian and Cuban-supplied weapons, plus literally a million rounds of ammunition hidden in a false floor in the now-empty Cuban Embassy. There was a treasure trove of documents that tied the Grenadian Marxists to Moscow and Castro [And to Ron Dellums (D. Ca.), the congressman representing Oakland Ca. exposing his relationship to the Grenadian Marxists, both factions.], revealing the suspected objective of making Grenada the third Communist outpost in the Caribbean after Cuba and Nicaragua. Grenada was being designed to make of the Caribbean a Communist lake in America’s back yard.


But if Grenada was a success — it is a peaceful democracy to this day — what was going on in Beirut was an utter failure. Most importantly, Reagan knew it.

The Reagan administration, and the “international community” right along with it, had grossly underestimated the situation in Beirut. Reagan would later write of his mistake a recognition that only really began to sink in with Americans in the aftermath of 9/11:

“…the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics forced us to rethink our policy…How do you deal with a people driven by such a religious zeal that they are willing to sacrifice their lives in order to kill an enemy simply because he doesn’t worship the same God they do? People who believe that if they do that, they’ll go instantly to heaven?”

Some weeks after the bombing of Beirut, Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger gave Reagan a Pentagon report not yet public that placed the blame for the Beirut massacre on “negligence by the marines’ commanding officers in Beirut.” 

Reagan wouldn't hear of it. He told Weinberger that he, the president, would take full responsibility for the disaster. Said he: “I was the one who sent them there.”

If Reagan was the man who sent the Marines to Lebanon, he was also now to be the man who decided he would be the man to remove them. To get out. He knew that this was a bad situation. Doing this would send a signal of weakness to some (and indeed, years later Osama Bin Laden said just that.) But Reagan had no intention of committing Americans to a full-scale war in the Middle East. And the MFN peacekeeping operation with the British, French and Italians had failed abysmally. So….he pulled out the troops. And home they came.

Which prompted Reagan to eventually write out a set of four principles. Four principles, he would write in his memoirs, that were specifically designed “to guide America in the application of military force abroad, and I would recommend it to future presidents.” 

Here they are:

Reagan Rule 1: The United States should not commit its forces to military actions overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest.

Reagan Rule 2: If the decision is made to commit our forces to combat abroad, it must be done with the clear intent and support to win. It should not be a halfway or tentative commitment, and there must be clearly defined and realistic objectives.

Reagan Rule 3: Before we commit our troops to combat, there must be reasonable assurance that the cause we are fighting for and the actions we take will have the support of the American people and Congress. (We felt that the Vietnam War had turned into such a tragedy because military action had been undertaken without sufficient assurances that the American people were behind it.)

Reagan Rule 4: Even after all these other tests are met, our troops should be committed to combat only as a last resort, when no other choice is available.

Now.

As of this moment, President Obama is confronted — in precisely the same area of the world that bedeviled Reagan — with the use of chemical weapons in Syria. He is even dealing with exactly the problem Reagan had — the Syrians now as then are backed by the Russians. 

One can spend much time and space — and undoubtedly that time and space will be spent — discussing how in the world we have gotten to this point. 


Be that as it may: here we are. So as America and the world await the return of Congress on September 9, let’s employ Reagan’s Rules to today’s situation.

Reagan Rule 1: The United States should not commit its forces to military actions overseas unless the cause is vital to our national interest.

Is the use of chemical weapons in Syria “vital to our national interest”? 

The question is not, as Secretary of State Kerry says, whether the use of chemical weapons is “immoral.” It is immoral. So too was blowing up a barracks full of 241 sleeping Marine peacekeepers in Beirut.

The hard fact is that there have been, according to most news reports, some 100,000 people killed in this Syrian civil war. Killed by conventional means — guns and bombs. To be shot dead by a gun, to be killed dead because one is in the way of a bomb makes no one less dead than if killed by a chemical weapon. All are horrible. All leave behind gruesome pictures. (As herewith a victim being carried from the site of a car bombing in Damascus, no chemical weapons involved.)


 It is a very tough question to ask, perhaps to some a callous question. But it is a needed question in any event. Why is death by chemical weapon any more “vital to our national interest” than death by gun or bomb?

Reagan Rule 2: If the decision is made to commit our forces to combat abroad, it must be done with the clear intent and support to win. It should not be a halfway or tentative commitment, and there must be clearly defined and realistic objectives.

Every indication from President Obama and his team indicates they have every intention of violating Reagan Rule 2. What is apparently in store is launching cruise missiles to “degrade” Syria’s military capacity. This precisely meets Reagan’s definition of “a halfway or tentative commitment.” There is quite clearly no “clear intent…to win.” Sending these missiles is the equivalent of sending those Marines to Beirut. Absent an intention to win — which is to say — unhorse Bashar al-Assad as Reagan did with those Grenada Marxists — this is going to be seen by the world, by America’s enemies — as a “halfway or tentative commitment.” Thereby making an already bad situation worse.

Reagan Rule 3: Before we commit our troops to combat, there must be reasonable assurance that the cause we are fighting for and the actions we take will have the support of the American people and Congress. (We felt that the Vietnam War had turned into such a tragedy because military action had been undertaken without sufficient assurances that the American people were behind it.) 

Reagan finally made up his mind about Grenada in the dead of night, although he had in fact discussed the situation in public a number of times. On his return to Washington that October Monday, Reagan made a point of summoning congressional leaders for consultation — yet made it plain that he not only had the authority as commander-in-chief to rescue those 800 American medical students but that the Communist control of a small island was decidedly an American national security interest.

Liberals of the day, beginning with House Speaker Tip O'Neill  were furious. Steven F. Hayward’s The Age of Reagan documents the typical liberal fury beginning with O'Neill and one liberal politician after another and running on through the editorial page of the New York Times. Then, lo and behold, in addition to the findings of the American troops — Hayward documents the presence of 800 Cubans along with contingents of Russians, North Koreans, Bulgarians, East Germans and even Gaddafi’s Libyans plus enough arms for a ten-thousand man military along with a million rounds of ammunition “found in a false floor of the vacated Cuban embassy” — there came an unexpected something else.

The television cameras were on hand to record the return of the 800 rescued American students to the United States. The first student, thrilled to be safely home, bounded down the steps of the plane, stepped onto the tarmac — and knelt and kissed the ground.

By day’s end, liberals were in full retreat, with Speaker O'Neill saying grudgingly that Reagan was “justified” in his actions. The American people, in poll after poll, overwhelmingly agreed.

But importantly, when Reagan made his decision to pull the Marines out of Lebanon — they agreed as well. Reagan couldn’t justify an American war in Lebanon — and, he knew, the American people wouldn't support it either. So….there wasn’t one.

Reagan Rule 4: Even after all these other tests are met, our troops should be committed to combat only as a last resort, when no other choice is available. 


There is no present plan to send American troops to Syria. But what will happen as a result of any American missile attack on Syria? In fact, no one knows. So the question must be — if the Obama Administration generates a situation that does in fact call for committing combat troops as a “last result” — will they be prepared? And will they have the courage to do it if “no other choice is available”? 

It should be pointed out here that in spite of all the criticism from all sides of President George W. Bush, in fact he followed Reagan’s Rules in dealing with both Afghanistan and Iraq. He made the Reagan Rule 1 case that each instance involved the vital “national interest” of the United States. He followed the Reagan Rule 2 and went all-in to win — while it was Obama who eventually got Osama it was the infrastructure set up by Bush that made it possible, and Bush himself was responsible for getting Saddam literally out of his hiding hole.

As recommended by Reagan Rule 3 Bush went out and sold the Congress and the majority of the American people on the need to go into both Afghanistan and Iraq, specifically getting congressional authorization. And after repeatedly working through the UN to get Saddam Hussein to open up and come clean — and failing repeatedly — it’s very safe to say Bush and company saw the invasion of Iraq as Reagan Rule 4’s “last resort.” 

America is now in a very difficult spot — precisely because in the Obama era it has abandoned Reagan’s mantra of Peace through Strength.

What we now have — what liberalism in foreign policy always produces from Vietnam to Syria — is War through Weakness.

The so-called “re-set” of American relations with Russia proclaimed by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has resulted in Vladimir Putin having nothing but disdain for the American president and his country. Whether the issue is the return of Edward Snowden or blocking action on Syria in the United Nations Security Council, bluntly speaking Putin has given a scornful diplomatic obscene gesture to Obama and Clinton and now John Kerry’s foreign policy.

Going to Congress is the exactly right thing to do. It is no small thing. It is the Constitutional thing to do. Ted Cruz sending out a tweet that showed the British Parliament in full session discussing Syria while the floor of the U.S. Senate was empty was exactly right. Cruz, Rand Paul, and others are to be applauded — and yes so too the President.

But unfortunately doing the right thing so late — and worse complicating the issue immeasurably by blurting out off-prompter talk of a “red line” and giving the impression of great urgency—then befuddling the whole issue by holding off until the scheduled return of Congress on September 9 is precisely the wrong image to be sending abroad. 

If Syria is as urgent an issue as Secretary of State Kerry insisted it is, the President should have forthwith stepped in front of the cameras and stated that he was using his authority as provided by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, which reads in part that the president “may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses.”

One of Reagan’s heroes was his old friend Harry Truman, whom the young actor and then-Democrat had supported for re-election to the White House in 1948. It was Truman who recalled Congress in a special session not over an issue of war or peace but for a political confrontation with Republicans over his 1948 election agenda. If Truman can do it to make a mere point in a political campaign, Obama should certainly be doing it in a situation which is infinitely of more moment — an actual question of war or peace.

This is a turning point in modern American history.

It is as much about Iran as it is Syria. It is about the American role in the world. It is about the Constitution of the United States. It is about understanding that peace comes through strength and war comes from the perception of weakness.

Ronald Reagan’s success as president came about not in spite of his failure in Beirut but because he learned from that mistake. He made a point of rebuilding the American military that had been so terribly weakened by his predecessor — but he also learned the hard way that real military strength is not simply about “sending in the Marines.” Real military strength comes rather from first, having the military strength — and then knowing when not to send in the Marines — or for that matter cruise missiles either.

Reagan understood the importance of the Constitution. He well understood his authority as commander-in-chief to protect the vital national security interests of the country. Failing to get those 800 American medical students out of Grenada peacefully, Reagan knew what he had the authority to do. Getting the urgent plea from governments in America’s back yard to stop a Communist revolution bristling with arms, ammunition as well as Cubans, Russians and all manner of Soviet allies dedicating themselves to Communizing said American back yard — Reagan knew he had the constitutional authority to go into Grenada.

He never hesitated. Saying simply: “Do it.”

But after Beirut, Reagan made sure he was not turning the United States into some globe-straddling empire. He concentrated on defeating the premiere American enemy of the day — the “Evil Empire” that was the Communist Soviet Union. His philosophy, as he said at the time, was clear: “We win, they lose.”

What we have today is a president who has, in the style of liberalism everywhere, induced the weakness that invites war. All of five years of repeatedly sending a message of weakness by bowing to this or that foreign potentate, trying to make friends with the likes of the Muslim Brotherhood while happily sending video greetings to the Imams of Iran and more has now resulted in chemical weapons being loosed upon the people of Syria. Not to be forgotten either is the fact that, as Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) has sharply reminded:


Even Gen. [Martin] Dempsey (chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) said we are putting our military on a path where the ‘force is so degraded and so unready’ that it would be ‘immoral to use the force…’

In short?

The Obama foreign policy has served up a mess. A lethal mess.

How to get out of this mess? Where to begin this discussion in the Congress on September 9?


Recalling Reagan’s Rules for Military Action would be a good place to start the debate.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Al-Qaeda Is Back!

Killing Bin Laden was never enough.
  
AUGUST 1, 2013 12:00 AM NRO

By  Clifford D. May





By all accounts, the attack was planned with care and executed with precision. At two notorious Iraqi prisons, Abu Ghraib and Taji, al-Qaeda combatants last week used mortars, small arms, suicide bombers, and assault forces to free 400 prisoners, including several who had been on death row. AQ spokesmen hailed those released as “mujahedeen,” holy warriors, who will rejoin the jihad on battlefields throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Soon after, we were seeing headlines such as this: “Al Qaeda Is Back.” 

Where had al-Qaeda gone? Dig deep in the memory hole — all the way to last summer. At the prestigious Aspen Security Forum, Peter Bergen, CNN’s national-security analyst and a director at the New America Foundation, gave a talk titled, “Time to Declare Victory: Al Qaeda Is Defeated.”  

Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Lynch III (retired), a distinguished research fellow at the National Defense University, was writing and speaking widely on the same theme. And President Obama’s reelection campaign was making similar claims, e.g. “The tide of war is receding,” “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” Mitt Romney hardly attempted to rebut the thesis.

I don’t like to say “I told you so” — oh, who am I kidding? Of course I do. But in this instance there is more than ample justification. Scholars at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, in particular Thomas Joscelyn and Bill Roggio, have argued consistently and forcefully, based on solid evidence, that the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, followed by the elimination of other al-Qaeda leaders, did not, by any stretch of the imagination, mean the demise of al-Qaeda.

Instead, it led AQ to adapt, evolve, and morph. It is essential to study these changes and probe their strategic significance — an assignment unlikely to be seriously undertaken by those convinced al-Qaeda swims with the fishes.

On July 18, Joscelyn testified before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, attempting to make clear to members of Congress that AQ has become “a global international terrorist network . . . that, despite setbacks, contests for territory abroad and still poses a threat to U.S. interests both overseas and at home.”

The nodes of AQ’s network are affiliates that pledge bayat, unswerving allegiance, to “core AQ” while retaining substantial operational autonomy. That makes them harder for intelligence operatives to monitor, penetrate, weaken, or eliminate. Nine years ago, FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer wrote a book called Al-Qaeda’s Armies predicting that such AQ affiliates would increasingly constitute the organization’s “outer perimeter and the pools from which new terrorists can be drawn. Indeed, al-Qaeda affiliates, in the Arab world and beyond, represent the next generation of the global terrorist threat.”

Since the waving of the “mission accomplished” banner last summer, AQ affiliates have killed an American ambassador in Libya, and hoisted their flag above the U.S. embassy in Cairo. They have taken the lead in the rebellion against the Assad dynasty in Syria. They have fought an American-backed government in Yemen, and they conquered much of Mali before French troops drove them back into the desert. They continue to slaughter Christians in Nigeria — more than a thousand last year. They have regenerated in Iraq since the departure of American troops, killing 700 people in July alone. They remain undefeated in Afghanistan and Pakistan, poised for the opportunity further American troop withdrawals will present. Last week, they attacked Turkish diplomats in Somalia. On Monday, AQ’s close ally, the Taliban, attacked a jail in northwest Pakistan, freeing as many as 200 prisoners.

Joscelyn and Roggio have been making another argument that has challenged the conventional wisdom: They maintain that al-Qaeda has long had a working relationship with Iran’s rulers. Two years ago the U.S. government formally confirmed that hypothesis, yet now as then many Iran experts deny the links, arguing that there is no way that Sunni AQ and Shia Iran could collaborate.

What those experts fail to grasp is that Iran’s rulers and al-Qaeda’s commanders, despite very real theological disagreements and differing strategic interests — indeed, they are literally at each other’s throats in Syria — are united in their commitment to what they see as the moral imperative of Islamic supremacy and domination. Their shared goal is a global revolution leading to the defeat or submission, or both, of those they regard not just as inferior, but also as “enemies of God.” America and Israel top both their lists.

This worldview is very difficult for Westerners to take seriously. Surely, there must be a less medieval explanation — perhaps grievances that can be addressed or fears that can be assuaged. But this conflict is deeper and more complex. Until that is understood, the U.S. and its allies cannot possibly devise a coherent strategic response — which is why 34 years after Iran’s revolution and twelve years after 9/11, we still don’t have one. That is another point that Joscelyn and Roggio have long been making, and which too many in the government and the foreign policy community have been either unable or unwilling to grasp. 


— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.
Needed: A Tragic Hero

JULY 30, 2013 4:00 AM

In good times, the larger-than-life figure is an affront; in crisis, he is necessary.

By Victor Davis Hanson

Tragic heroes — from Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone to the Western films’ Shane and Woodrow Call — can be defined in a variety of ways. But the common archetype is a larger-than-life figure. He is endowed with extraordinary gifts and sometimes even more monumental flaws. Fate decrees that even his departure or self-destruction will be memorable.

Sometimes the tragic hero suffers from hubris, like know-it-all Oedipus. The goddess Nemesis waits until just the proper moment to tap his arrogance, blind him to the reality around him, and thereby lead him to his own destruction.

But note: What separates the tragic hero from the arrogant fool who suffers the same fate is the sheer magnitude of his gifts, and thus the depth of the abyss into which he falls, and the spirit with which he accepts larger cosmic forces at work.

At other times, the tragic hero is simultaneously irreplaceable and unfit for the changing world about him. That paradox is a common theme of classic Westerns like High NoonLonesome DoveThe Magnificent SevenThe Man Who Shot Liberty ValanceRide the High CountryThe Searchers, and Shane. Tragic heroes are throwbacks to a prior, perhaps pre-civilized age (hence the Old West is our version of the pre-Athenian city-state, so fertile for the mythological nature of Greek tragedy).

They hold a Manichean notion of good and evil, and in unapologetic fashion. There is little nuance in General Grant’s “lick ’em tomorrow” or “I propose to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.” (Imagine if President Obama said that about his health-care plan’s employer mandate!)

Tragic heroes possess the requisite primeval physical and mental assets to welcome the challenge at hand, and they exude a certain sort of self-destructiveness — or is it self-sacrifice? — that puts the welfare of the people they’re protecting above their own. In Ride the High Country, an aging Steve Judd, with all his talk about “sand,” doesn’t much care whether he lives, but he very much cares that the job is finished.

When there are ruthless outlaws, gangs of thieves, unapologetic gunslingers, renegades, or lawless cattle barons who are not likely to fall in line with the law of the so-called civilized world, then the weird Tom Doniphons step forth from the twilight to deal with the Liberty Valances.

They are out of place as saviors. Yet these defiant ones apparently gain a sense of Schadenfreude at the fact that their benefactors, the civilized Ransom Stoddards, in extremis need the very skills that they profess should be superfluous.

We are a society of lawyers, not cowboys — 99 percent of the time. But it is that 1 percent that can become fatal to a sophisticated society without the cowboys prepared to step out of the shadows. Do we need now and then the half-civilized — a slapping Patton; an Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, who is a temper tantrum away from who knows what?; a Sherman raging about making plantationist Georgia “howl”? If so, tough luck — there are few of these dinosaurs around. The France of May 1940 needed the old cry of the Verdun of 1916 — “Ils ne passeront pas” — but then, Verdun had ensured that there would be no more “Ils ne passeront pas,” and not a Clemenceau (“The Tiger”) to be found.

From Sophocles to John Ford, we are reminded that tragic heroes accept — or is it that they enjoy? — the idea that their own triumph will eliminate the evil of their era and thus the very reasons for them to exist as uncouth warriors against that evil.

Breaker Morant agrees that a middle-aged superb horseman and unapologetic warrior is not exactly what the politically minded British Empire of the early 20th century needs any more — most of the time. Tragic heroes welcome the idea that action is necessary to deal with violence, while conceding that it becomes anachronistic and antithetical to the pretensions of the new society they help to save.

Note that tragic heroes are not anti-heroes, who, of course, share this acceptance that they no longer fit and who would rather die than change. Still, Shane is not the Wild Bunch, who rob banks and kill the innocent in their crossfire. The thieves in Heat have a certain nobility and code of conduct, but ultimately they are cold-blooded killers. Creepy Tony Montana in Scarface has some chivalry in his code, and is unapologetic about being the thug he is — but his talents are solely destructive, and as a psychopath he pollutes all in his sphere.

But the tragic hero?

He somehow marries his rugged savagery with civilization, if only for a moment. True, like Sam Peckinpah’s anti-hero Pike Bishop, he can be a noble sort of relic who fights the uniformity and monotony of the modern world, and would not just rather die than change but welcomes death (“Why not?”) given what the world has become (“I wouldn't have it any other way”).

Indeed, the genius of Peckinpah was that he ended the Wild Bunch in a redemptive moment. His anti-heroes almost became tragic heroes, by whose violent sacrificial deaths the federales were decimated and the revolutionaries, now helped by the reborn Deke Thornton, have a fighting chance.

Perhaps the most moving tragic hero in recent cinema was Denzel Washington’s brilliant portrayal of the bodyguard Creasy in Man on Fire. He alone possessed the skills to save his ward, Pita, but thereby, Shane-like, he acknowledged that his mission would nullify his own brief return to civilization, for which he was utterly unsuited.

Remember the lines of Christopher Walken, speaking of Creasy’s revenge: “A man can be an artist . . . in anything, food, whatever. It depends on how good he is at it. Creasy’s art is death. He’s about to paint his masterpiece.” The tragic hero carries around his own world and its codes wherever he goes. It is irrelevant that Creasy is in Mexico or that Shane ends up in Wyoming; their skills trump landscape and culture and make even the most bizarre new landscape bend to their protocol — sort of like Horace’s wandering man who is integer vitae scelerisque purus, and who is oblivious to his always-changing surroundings.

The greatest generals are tragic heroes. Take again George S. Patton — the man who was needed to instill a 19th-century martial audacity in an untrained army of conscripts reliant on superior logistics and material supply. Yet Patton was singularly inept in adjusting to the necessary politics of an allied effort, and indeed to the cultural parameters of modernism itself — thus his crackpot talk of reincarnation and manly essence.

In contrast, Omar Bradley, reminiscent of the Civil War general Henry Halleck, best typified the sort of sober and judicious bureaucratic figure necessary for a new American military with global responsibilities — but his battlefield aptitude and leadership were mediocre in comparison with Patton’s. Patton may not have consciously sought to destroy his own career, but he almost welcomed the fact that his flamboyance, foul speech, and dash would do just that as the price of convincing the Third Army that they were not just people mechanically obeying orders, but fighters who could go toe to toe with the dreaded Waffen SS.

We wanted the brilliant, unapologetic, and uncouth Curtis LeMay, cigar and all, to come to the fore in the Pacific theater, when the billion-dollar B-29 program was in shambles and a horrendous invasion of Japan loomed on the horizon. But 20 years later, in Vietnam, he was considered not just eccentric but culpable for urging that we really had to napalm the cities of North Vietnam as we had firebombed those of Japan to win the war. Please go away, Mr. LeMay.

When Ethan Edwards walks out the door at the end of The Searchers, we assume not just that there is nothing left for him to do, but that he wants nothing more to do with us. “Live nobly or nobly die,” sighs doomed Ajax, suggesting that most of us live ignobly and so live on.

Can we have tragically heroic leaders? Lincoln excelled as a tragic hero — to the point of his strange premonitions about his early and violent death. He grasped that the Unionist cause, and with it eventual abolition, could be advanced only by a man of the border — in his case a native Kentuckian and a transplanted son of Illinois, who would confuse Southerners, given his affinities with the South, while remaining a pragmatic Midwestern man of the people and yet almost satisfying the New England abolitionists.

Yet he put his majestic prose to the cause of militarily ruining the Confederacy. Without his soaring rhetoric, there would not have been much transcendence to mask the horrors of Little Round Top or the decimation of Grant’s forces at Cold Harbor. It was to be the wage of the great emancipator and peacemaker to preside over the near-destruction of the American people. “Now he belongs to the ages,” Stanton sighs as Lincoln expires, perhaps with the implication that he might not have, had he lived through the mess still looming on the horizon.

Churchill was a tragic hero. I would guess that, without him, there was a 40/60 chance that Britain would have settled for a negotiated peace with Hitler after June 1940. All his supposed flaws — unrepentant imperialist, monarchist, aristocrat, colonialist — were part of the larger menu of polymath, veteran, stylist, orator, and political genius, with an iron will that towered over the wills of his contemporaries.

In Churchill’s case, the public did not even wait until the end of World War II to depose him. After all, the man who rallied the nearly defeated with “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat” was soon, when danger passed, perceived as opposed to the socialization of a new modernist United Kingdom.

We cannot live in a world of tragic heroes, at least too many of them. The Achaeans could handle only one Achilles, but hundreds of Menelauses and Agamemnons. Churchill sucked the oxygen out of every room he entered. Even Lincoln’s friends were bewildered by him. It was easy to mock Patton’s vanity and childishness, impossible not to acknowledge his superior genius.

Yet in those rare times of existential crisis, civil or global, the tragic hero is our only salvation. Take away Shane, and the sodbusters are through; without Yul Brynner the Mexican villagers of The Magnificent Seven remain Caldera’s sheep to be sheared.

Could there be a tragic hero in the 21st century? Might a candidate reform the tax code, balance the budget, recalibrate entitlements, return the U.S. to a meritocratic and self-reliant society, and understand that he had to be hated for doing what might save us? “I shall end agricultural subsidies entirely and cut Food Stamps back to 2009 levels,” a heroic president might thunder as he welcomes a single term as the price for that defiance.

In theory, this tragic hero would require the oratorical gifts of Reagan, the wit and verve of JFK, the political savvy of Clinton, the steadiness of Truman, the decency of the George Bushes — and something far more. There would have to be some acceptance that our president was different from the rest of us, that he did not welcome, but expected nonetheless, disdain from us, the fickle turba.

A tragic president would not be ruined during his presidency, but only after it and by transcending it. He would not cash in like the Clintons but would walk away from it like Truman.

Petulance is not part of the tragic hero: He ignores both insults and praise, and expects to be hated more than loved, as Aristotle so brilliantly describes the megalopsuchos, the magnanimous soul, of the Nicomachean Ethics.

In these times we need a president who will accept, even welcome a single term, who expects to be broke after he leaves office, to be offered $5,000 a lecture at most, who embarrasses us by our own ingratitude.

Again, are there tragic heroes on the horizon?

Few, I fear. Mitch Daniels has the standoffishness, and a sense that what has to be done would be near politically intolerable for the most of the public. But does he have the spirit, over familial objections, to turn the buckboard around back to Hadleyville before High Noon?

Chris Christie is the antithesis of the current metrosexual president, as unconcerned with his appearance as Obama is prissy and compulsive in his manners and grooming. But while Christie’s bluster shows signs of tragic unconcern, is it matched by a spiritual unconcern for what the presidency might do to him if he were to try to save the country?

Perhaps things must become even worse to cause a tragic hero to emerge — for someone to speak the truth, offend the majority, and, when the successful effort is over, to lose.

At the end of The Magnificent Seven, Chris sighs of both his victory and the near-destruction entailed in achieving it, “The Old Man was right. Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose.”


 NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His latest book is The Savior Generals, published this spring by Bloomsbury Books.