Afghanistan, the Definition of Madness

By Alan Caruba

Why did George W. Bush invade Afghanistan? Answer: Occurring just after September 11, 2001 in which 2,977 Americans lost their lives, a CIA team was inserted into Afghanistan fifteen days later to begin a campaign against the Taliban who had allied with Al Qaeda and provided sanctuary for Osama bin Laden while the attack was planned. A U.S. bombing campaign in Tora Bora followed but bin Laden escaped into Pakistan.

When bin Laden was killed in 2011 by a U.S. Navy SEAL team, he was living in Abbotabad, Pakistan, a mile away from its equivalent of West Point.

The initial reason for the military action ceased to be of any critical importance and the Bush administration pivoted to concentrate on removing Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from power. Afghanistan became a backwater concern, but in 2002 Bush announced “a Marshall Plan” for Afghanistan, intended to be a development plan with security goals. In 2003, the U.S. invaded Iraq.

Insurgent activity in Afghanistan never ceased and military authority there switched to NATO, essentially to protect Kabul. It would be the organization’s first operational commitment outside of Europe. Hamid Karzai became the hand-picked leader of a nation that Transparency International deemed the second most corrupt in the world.

Afghanistan was and is a narco-economy. A result of U.S. involvement and due to a level of incompetance that defies comprehension, billions have been expended on the military and development efforts that found their way into the hands of the Taliban and the corrupt Karzai government.

The previous effort by the then-Soviet Union to exercise influence began in the 1960s. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to support its puppet government from an orthodox Muslim insurgent group known as the Taliban. The insurgency drew support from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the U.S. Osama bin Laden would create al Qaeda as part of the effort to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.

From 1979 to 1989, the war proved so costly to the Soviet Union that it finally withdrew its troops. The war would contribute to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Having learned nothing from history, ancient and recent, the U.S. has just initiated an agreement with Afghanistan to provide support for the next decade. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

According to an April 23 news report, “The partnership agreement ensures that the U.S. will continue to support Afghanistan even after the U.S. ends major combat operations and scales back its development projects over the next two years” and “The strategic-partnership will commit the U.S. to more than a decade of economic and financial support for the Afghan state, which is still battling a resilient Taliban-led insurgency.”

No external entity, from Alexander the Great in 329 BC, to Genghis Khan’s Mongol army in 1221 BC, to the British Empire in 1839-1842, has ever encountered anything but defeat in Afghanistan. Add the U.S. and NATO to the list.

There is, one assumes, some military strategic value to trying to control events in Afghanistan in some fashion. Pakistan, since its founding in 1947, and India have engaged in efforts to exercise influence there with varying degrees of success. The deal that the U.S. has signed with Afghanistan is no more likely to ensure any influence than all previous efforts since 2001. At times, Pakistan has even denied U.S. military transports to provision our troops there.

For those who want to learn the truth of the failure of U.S. efforts, I recommend reading Douglas A. Wissing’s new book, “Funding the Enemy: How U.S. Taxpayers Bankroll the Taliban”, just published by Prometheus Books.

Wissing writes, “Within scant months of Tora Bora, the seeds of American failure in Afghanistan were sown: the U.S. consort with deceitful Afghan warlords and leaders; the American complicity in the revived Afghan opium trade; and the flawed U.S. logistics-and-development schemes that fueled corruption and helped finance the Taliban.”

Wissing concludes his intensively documented book saying, “Decades of American arrogance and cupidity have brought us to this point…but doing more isn’t going to change things. The hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars and millions of ruined lives haven’t made Afghanistan safer or less desperate. As America has upped its bets in Afghanistan, the insurgency has continued to grow in power and in influence.”

When he campaigned for the presidency, Barack Obama characterized the conflict in Afghanistan as a just war in contrast to American efforts in Iraq. By the time he took office, the Bush administration had already negotiated a withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government.

The latest deal to continue American investment in Afghanistan defies any common sense, any justification. It comes at a time when America is deeply in debt. It reflects the Obama administration’s penchant for spending money it does not have without continued borrowing.

The next administration, assuming Obama’s defeat, must abandon the deal and abandon Afghanistan. Alexander the Great did. Genghis Khan did. The British Empire did. And the Soviet Union collapsed shortly after it did.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

The Pakistan Conundrum

By Alan Caruba

The answer to whether Pakistan is our friend is “It depends.”

That’s an apt description of U.S.-Pakistani relations over the years, but one thing is sure, Pakistan believes it is surrounded by enemies in general and fears India in particular. With a mindset like that, friendship is not a priority, but survival—even if it just means muddling through another day—most surely is.

I have read several books about Pakistan in order to understand this odd nation that was peeled off from India in 1947 when the British left. Divided between eastern and western sections, even Bangladesh, formerly East Bengal, separated from its western cousin, declaring its independence in 1971. In the ensuing civil war, a million died and ten million fled to India.

In “The Unraveling: Pakistan in the Age of Jihad” by John R. Schmidt, a former State Department diplomat for three decades, reflects on his years in Islamabad in the years leading up to 9/11. He is a sharp observer of Pakistan and provides a lively history while unraveling the complexities of its various tribal groups, who the Taliban were and are, and how Al Qaeda established itself there.

To understand Pakistan is to understand how very different it is from America. It is a feudal society from top to bottom and it came about because its founding father, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, a Bombay lawyer, envisioned a nation separate from India because he feared that Muslims would become a political underclass in a unified India dominated by Hindus.

Fully one-third of India’s Muslim population numbering 35 million people remained behind in India. In Pakistan, it took until 1956 to come up with a constitution, a decade after independence.

A feudal society relies on patronage to function. Thus, whoever holds power at any level in Pakistan is focused on looking out for his own patronage network and not for the general welfare of the nation.

As Schmidt explains, “It requires little imagination to see where such policies lead. They lead to the poorhouse. Nations whose economics are uncompetitive in the global marketplace yet dependent on imported fuel and other vital commodities, and whose governments pay out more than they take in, are bound to be chronically broke.” As a result, a third of the Pakistani federal budget is consumed by servicing its international debt.

Typical of the Muslim outlook, if you are not a Muslim you are simply the enemy. It doesn’t matter if you are Hindu, Christian, Jewish, or any other faith. The problem is exacerbated because of the divisions within Islam, primarily Sunni and Shiite, have little love for one another.

Based on its fear and loathing for India, Pakistan’s various leaders concluded they needed to be a nuclear power as a deterrent. That makes Pakistan a major concern for everyone around them, the world in general, and the U.S. in particular. “If jihadists succeed in seizing power in Islamabad,” notes Schmidt, “they will inherit an arsenal that today numbers approximately one hundred nuclear warheads.”

Pinioned between India on the south and Afghanistan to the north, Pakistan’s leaders, as often as not its army generals who seized control, have only their grievances and themselves to blame for troubles with India and the rise of the Taliban who threaten the government. This explains in part why its military has always been the most stable factor throughout its relatively brief history. Based on merit, it is also represents the best leaders the nation can produce.

Even so, the decision to use proxy jihadist fighters to influence who controlled Afghanistan turned out to be a very bad one. Schmidt believes that “Pakistan seems ill-equipped to deal with this rapidly metastasizing radical Islamic threat.” Can there be a more ironic fate for a nation founded to provide a home to Muslims? The threat the Islamic radicals represent is particularly painful in a nation, the majority of whose population, are more tolerant and moderate followers of Sufi Islam.

The U.S. was none too happy to discover that Pakistan had become a nuclear power. When 9/11 occurred, its leaders were told that their cooperation was required to facilitate the attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan. It was told to break off relations with the Taliban and close its borders to Al Qaeda.

This explains why Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in the capture of top Al Qaeda leaders such Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but professed to be ignorant of the fact that Osama bin Laden was living in Abbotabad, a short drive from Islamabad. Indeed, for the Pakistanis, the news came as a shock and his assassination a cause for much chagrin.

In a similar fashion, the attack on Mumbai, India, by a radical Islamic group ended promising peace talks with India over Kashmir and left Pakistan’s international reputation in tatters.

As is the case in one Muslim nation after another, the central problem to their governance and international relations is radical Islam. Some nations like Indonesia have cracked down on it. Others like Yemen have been over-run by it.

Radical Islam, unless addressed by Muslims will remain a threat. It explains why U.S. troops will likely migrate in and out of Middle Eastern nations for years to come, shooting as many jihadists as possible, taking casualties, angering the local population, and confounding the public at home trying to understand why we’re there.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Terrorist Next Door

By Alan Caruba

The June 16 news from NBC was headlined “Possible Al-Qaeda Hit List Targets Specific Americans.”

The list included the names and photos of “U.S. officials and business leaders” and the call was to kill them in their homes, all the better to spread their stock-in-trade, terror. The individuals have been notified by the FBI. The list includes Wall Street firms, political leaders, think tank influentials, and contractors who do business with the military.

While the U.S. government is now using its drone fleet to whack al-Qaeda folk in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen these days, according to Catherine Herridge, a Fox News correspondent, al-Qaeda has morphed from being a top-down organization to a more generalized movement and these days it is busy recruiting American-born Muslims to continue the jihad.

In her new book, “The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits”, Herridge spells out a chilling scenario. To understand the next phase of terror, it should be the next book on your summer reading list.

Herridge knows the terrorism scene courtesy of reporting on it for years and having an extraordinary number of contacts within the U.S. counterterrorism network that was put together after al Qaeda’s wake-up call on 9/11. The flaws in the system that existed before then were exposed and steps were taken to get better coordination among the FBI, CIA, NSA, and its other elements.

These days the National Counterterrorism Center must process a daily volume of information “between eight thousand and ten thousand reports.” The threat made “sharing data a matter of survival,” says Herridge. They include “at least forty threats and distinct plots.”

Perhaps the worst part of what an army of intelligence analysts determined was that the jihad and the terrorist’s mind set was that “it’s not a generational issue, it’s a forever issue.”

What too many Americans have yet to come to grips with is that the inherent message and duty of Islam is a never-ending war on “infidels”—and in particular the West—is jihad. While Christianity seeks to convert by the power of its message, Islam seeks to convert by virtue of its ability to apply terror to populations that resist it. It seeks out those who feel alienated from American and Western values, recruiting them in the greater jihad—war—to dominate whole nations and peoples.

It is the antithesis of its claim that it is “a religion of peace.”

As one old CIA hand put it, jihad is “not a personal struggle for someone’s soul, but (is) a global movement.” Its primary target these days is America and its success is increasingly the use of the Internet to spread its message.

Constantly learning from its mistakes and constantly evolving, it should come as no surprise that one of its leading figures these days is Anwar al-Awlaki, American born and bred, and currently said to be hiding out in Yemen. With the elimination of Osama bin Laden his mastery of the Internet and his insider’s knowledge of American culture has elevated him.

He has been a major recruiter and one of his most famous was Major Nidal Halik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. If there is one thing that will get Americans killed it is the political correctness that permitted Major Hasan to remain in the Army despite clear, obvious indications that he was drifting into the jihadist’s orbit. His exchange of emails with al-Awlaki should have put him on a short list for interrogation and further action to sever him from military service.

Herridge rarely strays from straight reporting in her book, but it is also clear that she regards the Obama administration as a virtual facilitator of homeland terrorism, noting at one point that “It took the Obama administration nine weeks to publicly acknowledge the Fort Hood massacre as an act of terrorism.”

Her warning is clear. “In a growing number of cases, al Qaeda’s followers are just like us. They are educated here, sometimes born here. The radicalization process is compressed, An offbeat loner can reach out and become a dedicated killer in a matter of months.”

As one former weapons inspector put it, “Terrorism is like water. It takes the path of least resistance. You move one way and it moves another. It is a thinking enemy.”

It is inherent on everyone to be especially watchful and, sadly, to be less attached to traditional legal protections that prohibit law enforcement and counterterrorism personnel from infiltrating the many mosques throughout the nation until this cancer can be isolated and eradicated.

Americans have got to come to a fundamental conclusion and understanding that Islam is a religion of people who want to kill as many Americans as possible by way of destroying the nation and spreading this murderous cult worldwide.

One need only look at the way Muslim nations today are engaged in insurrections and conflicts that, as often as not, kill other Muslims. It is a very different “religion” than Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism.

And now it has a list of American leaders it specifically wants to kill before it gets to you.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Time to Leave Afghanistan

By Alan Caruba

The Greek philosopher Plato said, “Only the dead know the end of war.” I doubt that in the five thousand years of what we call civilization there has ever been a day when war has not been taking place somewhere on the planet. All wars, in one fashion or another, however, have to come to an end.

The war in Afghanistan has degraded into a distraction from the nation’s desperately deteriorating financial situation. Even worse, it is part of that problem. On January 30, 2009, Bill Bonnor, best known for his newsletter, Dead Reckoning, wrote the following:

“’Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy’, was what he (Osama bin laden) was up to, he said in a videotape. He even did the math. ‘Every dollar spent by al-Qaeda in attacking the United States has cost Washington $1 million in economic fallout and military spending’, said the report.

“’We, alongside the mujahideen, bled Russian for ten years, [in Afghanistan] until it went bankrupt…So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.’”

Can anyone deny that bin Laden was right? Can anyone deny that the U.S. under Presidents Bush and Obama has now expended billions in the name of bringing democracy to people who should be responsible for overthrowing their own despots? There was, after all, a time when the U.S. was an ally of bin Laden and even of Saddam Hussein!

On May 9, Rasmussen Reports noted that 56% of those surveyed favored bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan within a year. What do the people know that all the genius strategists in the State Department and Pentagon do not? They know these wars, Iraq included, are a distraction from our real problems.

I do not know how many times over the years since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq I have written that we should withdraw our troops. I have noted how extended military occupations and expeditions have historically always drained and destroyed empires from the Roman to the British and now the present day Pax Americana.

America is now over $14 trillion in debt and yet we keep sending billions to nations like Pakistan and to the United Nations, most of whom must think us stupid beyond belief.

The exception to this was the long Cold War that America fought against the former Soviet Union from the end of World War Two until the collapse of the Berlin Wall and eventual collapse of that Communist nation in 1991. That collapse, however, was facilitated by the decision of the former Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan!

Over the course of the forty-six years the Cold War ground on, the U.S. fought hot wars in Korea and Vietnam. We spent what we had to for a powerful military deterrent. From Truman to Bush41 Presidents remained firm in their determination to resist the Soviet Union.

The war with Islam is different. The asymmetrical war waged against America, Israel, and the West began in earnest after Iran’s Islamic revolution in 1979 and continued through a succession of al Qaeda attacks on U.S. Marines in Beirut, U.S. embassies, the USS Cole, and ultimately 9/11. Israel has had to wage a war of self defense since its first day 63 years ago. Most recently, it resisted Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

Islam has been around since the seventh century A.D. Its initial success saw it sweep across vast regions of the Middle East, Africa, India, up into Spain and to the gates of Europe. The inherent failure of Islam has been its resistance to all Western values that confirm the dignity of the individual, representative government, and the advances of science, literature, and the arts.

Our global opponents, Russia and China among others, are pleased that America must drain its treasury and expend the blood of its children to hold the line against Islam, but it is a short-sighted strategic error because they will find themselves on the frontlines of the war that we have been waging with massive troop deployments. Consider how much more effective drones and special operations have been.

Europe has reluctantly discovered the enemy in their midst. The flood of Muslims it invited as workers because of its failure to ensure a sufficient native population is causing Europeans to grasp at measures to either placate the Muslim population or outlaw some of its practices. The fear is palpable and is why some now refer to it as Eurabia.

NATO nations, rarely credited, have been by our side throughout the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq. They are now charged with determining the outcome of the insurgency in Libya, but Britain is making plans for an early withdrawal from Afghanistan for the same reasons outlined above.

It is a very old war. In 732 A.D., Muslims were defeated at Poitiers, France, halting their expansion. In 1492, Christians recaptured Grenada, the last Muslim stronghold in Europe. In 1683 A.D. Muslims were defeated near Vienna. Europe was safe, but that was then and this is now.

It is reason enough for America and European nations to put their financial houses to avoid a collapse that will leave us vulnerable to the most terrible scourge of mankind.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

The Pakistani Pit of Deception

By Alan Caruba

Even Pakistanis do not believe that their political and military leaders did not know bin Laden was living, as one columnist put it, “wrapped in the bosom of the Pakistani security establishment.”

Cyril Almeida, writing in the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, a few days after the killing of bin Laden noted that, when the question is asked privately, “No one will say anything but, yes, they knew he was there.”

For 34 of its 64 years, Pakistan has been run by generals whose military intelligence presumably works in league with its Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), though both have their own agendas. It is unlikely that much civilian control over either exists.

Almeida wrote, “If we didn’t know, we are a failed state; if we did know, we are a rogue state. But does anyone believe they didn’t know?”

If it were an individual, Pakistan would be diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, subject to raging fears that India intends to invade on a moment’s notice and antagonistic to Afghanistan as it harbors those who attack it.

In his recently published book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country”, Anatol Lieven provides insight to a nation that, until lately, was home to the most wanted man on the face of the Earth, Osama bin Laden. He was dispatched in a compound that was within a short distance of Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point or England’s Sandhurst. If we are to believe Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership, neither had any idea he was there.

“Trying to understand Pakistan’s internal structures and dynamics is complicated,” writes Lieven. “If there is one phrase which defines many aspects of Pakistan…it is ‘Janus-faced’: in other words, many of the same features of Pakistan’s state and government which are responsible for holding Islamist extremism in check are at one and the same time responsible for holding back Pakistan’s social, economic, and political development.”

“Pakistan,” writes Lieven, “is divided, disorganized, economically backward, corrupt, violent, unjust, often savagely oppressive towards the poor and women, and home to extremely dangerous forms of extremism and terrorism.”

Pakistan came into being in 1947 when leaders of India’s Muslim population like Mohammed Ali Jinnah, its founder, made it clear they did not want to be part of the newly independent India after Great Britain relinquished its colonial rule. Later, when East Pakistan broke loose to establish its independence in 1971, it became Bangladesh.

The thing Westerners find difficult to understand is the tribal nature of nations like Pakistan and Afghanistan, but it is not difficult to understand “Muslim nationalism and the bitter hostility to the U.S. role in the Muslim world in general and Pakistan’s region in particular.” However, in order to pursue the present combat role against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the U.S. and its European allies rely on neighboring Pakistan in order to provision supplies to their troops.

Since the Taliban are a creation of Pakistan’s ISI and because Pakistan has long been where al Qaeda has found refuge, those in charge have played a Janus or two-faced role for a very long time; at times providing intelligence of great value and at others aiding or at the very least, protecting the terrorist organizations. In return, the Taliban have proven an internal problem for the military and the government, occasionally requiring that they be driven out of areas they have seized.

In many ways, Pakistan is barely a nation. In its tribal northwest regions, such as the now fabled Waziristan, the state has little influence or control. As to its tribes, the two dominant ones are Punjab and Pathan. Both pursue their own interests.

As Lieven describes it, “A fundamental political fact about Pakistan is that the state, whoever claims to lead it, is weak, and (the) society in its various forms is immensely strong.” It is a nation of many separate fiefdoms who “plunder the state for patronage and favors” and this is graphically demonstrated by the fact that “barely one percent of the population pays income tax, and the wealthiest landowners in the country pay no direct taxes at all.”

Thus, the billions that the U.S. has pumped into its economy take on a very critical role, particularly for the military. This is a very different world from that of the West. The majority of Pakistan’s political parties are dynastic, led by a few powerful families. The entire society operates on kinship loyalty.

Pakistan is a perfect example of why the U.S. and the West are stymied by the illogic, the irrationality, and the duplicity of nations in which Islam is the predominant factor in their politics and society.

When you add in the geography of Pakistan, lodged between India and Afghanistan, bordered by China and Iran, you have a nation that can neither be ignored nor abandoned because of its strategic location.

Finally, there is the fact that Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal that must never be allowed to fall into the hands of the Taliban, al Qaeda, or anyone else crazed enough to use it for the greater glory of Allah.

Pakistan is a pit of deception and it is notable that our current relations with it consist of the special operations raid that killed bin Laden and the drones that continue to kill al Qaeda and Taliban who make themselves available targets.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Jihad is Forever

By Alan Caruba

Americans greeted news of Osama bin Laden's death with a celebration of the payback it represents for the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001.

As former Vice President Dick Cheney said on hearing the news, “Today, the message our forces have sent is clear—if you attack the United States, we will find you and bring you to justice.”

This is part of the American psyche. A great power cannot allow itself to be attacked and harmed without rendering retribution. Every day bin Laden drew breath after 9/11 was a rebuke to America.

The 9/11 attack, however, grew out of a larger context, the Islamic central concept of jihad. Far from being “a religion of peace”, the Koran is a battle plan for the conquest of the world by Islam and jihad is regarded as a sacred duty for all Muslims.

This is why political correctness regarding how we deal with Muslim demands in the United States is a danger to the nation. Islam is one big hate crime directed at all other religious faiths. Failure to understand that is to sign the nation’s and the world’s death warrant.

The irony of al Qaeda’s legacy has been the vast numbers of Muslims that have died as a result of its efforts to overthrow the governments of nations whose wrath it invoked. In the bizarre illogic of the Arab world, even as many Saudis allegedly contributed to al Qaeda, one of its aims was to overthrow the Saudi royal family who bin Laden had condemned for allowing American troops to encamp on its “sacred sands” in the first war against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Al Qaeda was and remains a threat to the existing governments throughout the Middle East and, of course, anywhere in the world it wants to target. The U.S. has cut off the snake’s head, but must now remain even more vigilant against retaliation. That said, there is no doubt the organization has been significantly weakened with the loss of its symbolic leader.

Osama bin Laden has become to many Arabs what the Cuban butcher, Che Guevera, became to Communists and their dupes.

My suspicion is that al Qaeda will break into more isolated, individual units in nations throughout the Middle East and become even more vulnerable to being dismembered and destroyed. It is, however, northern African and Middle Eastern nations that are being restructured from within by millions of Muslims who have grown tired of the century’s old oppression that has been Islam’s hallmark.

Americans should not expect democracy to break out in the Maghreb or the Middle East, but it can expect governments there to become more responsive to the expectations and demands of their people. Even those in the Middle East know they are far behind those in the West in terms of any true freedom and justice. They have seen it and they want it.

We are told bin Laden’s body is in American hands. My suggestion—a fanciful one—is that it be embalmed and put on display in the Smithsonian as a reminder of the threat the nation will continue to face for decades to come.

Lastly, at a time when there are discussions of cutting the defense budget, we need to take heed of the courage and skill of those military who attacked the bin Laden compound in Pakistan and rendered the ultimate justice.

“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf” is a quote attributed to George Orwell, the author of “1984”, a novel warning against all forms of totalitarian government.

Americans, despite our present economic distress, have to keep in mind that our nation has real enemies in the world and they aren’t exclusively Muslim. They are the reincarnated version of the former Soviet Union, Chinese Communists, North Korea, and others that wish us ill.

Their greatest allies will be those who preach isolationism and passivity.

Thus, the role of our military, the wars we choose to fight and where we choose to fight them has never been more critical. Jihad is forever.

For that, we must put our financial house in order and soon---or we shall witness our enemies celebrating, just as we celebrate today.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

U.S. Finds and Kills Osama bin Laden

What next?

War for No Particular Reason

By Alan Caruba

Thanks to the Obama administration, we have now entered upon a new phase of foreign policy. It is war for no particular reason.

Why are we doing anything in Libya? We’re not messing around in any of those other places that involve governments shooting at their own people. Obama famously did not want to “meddle” when the Iranians filled the streets of Tehran in 2009, protesting a stolen election by Mamoud Imanutjob and Ayatollah Comeandgetme.

Americans are connoisseurs of invasions. We know a good one when we see it and are not easily fooled by those who say, “We’re dropping thousands of pounds of ordnance and launching numerous missiles, but we are not in a war. It’s a kinetic military action.” Yeah, right.

Telling Americans that their nation—without so much as a phone call to Congress—has launched a military action over (but not IN) Libya and that NATO is really running the operation, (with a Canadian general taking orders from two American generals) suggests that the White House thinks we are really STUPID.

We know what an invasion looks like. Bush41 had a great one in Kuwait and Bush43 had an even better one in Iraq. It may not have been D-Day, but it was good enough for a generation born too late to remember Normandy Beach. When it comes to invading countries, we are the gold standard.

Conservatives wonder why the liberals screamed bloody murder when Bush43 invaded Iraq after getting all kinds of UN resolutions and authorization from Congress, but are curiously silent when Obama begins bombing the hell out of Tripoli “for humanitarian reasons.” Of course, in fairness, liberals never want to invade any place. That’s why you don’t find many liberals in the Marines and other branches of service.

How do you tell a good despot from a bad one? Let me explain. There are the pro-U.S. ones who cooperate with us and there are all the others. As some statesman once said, nations have interests, not friends.

It is necessary to understand that those generating an Islamic revolution have no love for the monarchs and the former colonels and generals who run Muslim nations. Their ideal is something like Iran. The initial goal of al Qaeda, for example, was (and is) to overthrow the ruling family of Saudi Arabia. They, in turn, told bin Laden to get out and stay out.

The present unrest in Muslim nations is the result of the convergance of al Qaeda and Iranian agendas to exercise control over those nations. But first, they intend to destroy everyone, Jew, gentile, and Arab alike, in Israel. According to Islamic lore, they can’t really take over the world until this is accomplished.

Americans have been slow to grasp that the Iranians have been preparing since 1979 to sweep across the region and the world to ensure that Islam (Shiite version only) is the only religion with the power to dictate to all others. There is zero room for tolerance in Islam, a “religion” that separates the world into dar al Islam and dar al Harb (the world of war!)

As a non-war the Libyan operation is especially disappointing since the so-called rebels at this early point have less cohesion than a Hell’s Angels chapter. This has not deterred talk of “arming” them. However, the latest word out of Libya is that the “rebels” made a couple of million by selling thousands of mustard and nerve gas shells they found in military facilities around Benghazi to the Palestinian terrorist organizations, Hamas and Hezbollah. Let those creeps arm themselves.

How was it that a President who spent weeks agonizing over what to do in Afghanistan took only a few days to decide that the U.S. should start lobbing missiles into Gadhafi’s Libyan compound?

One obvious answer is that the man is just a moron. The other is that he lacks any serious opposition from Republicans and Democrats alike, and for now is being allowed to get away with it.

The U.S. Navy and Marines showed up in Tripoli in 1801 to deal out some hurt and a message to the Barbary pirates harassing our merchant ships. President Thomas Jefferson concluded that killing the pirates was cheaper than paying them the bribes they demanded. He was right.

The rebellion against Gadhafi appears to have a contingent of jihadists that include al Qaeda’s professional mujahideen that migrate from war zone to war zone, but the bottom line appears to be that folks throughout the Middle East are just fed up with the current crop of despots. Forty years in control seems to be the cut-off point whether it was Egypt’s Mubarack, Libya’s Gadhafi, or the former Tunisian tough guy, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

This Libyan non-war reeks of having been a political decision. It is surely not a military one. Odds are that Obama is not paying attention to what his generals are telling him and it’s for damn sure he doesn’t care what the U.S. Constitution has to say on the subject.

No one knows how this kinetic farce will play out, but since Obama is channeling Jimmy Carter, there is a strong likelihood the U.S. is going to end up looking bad and events in the Middle East will just get worse.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Short Attention Spans

By Alan Caruba

The American Revolution, from the day in 1773 when tea got dumped in Boston Bay to the day in 1781 when the British were defeated at Yorktown took eight years. If it had been on television, the ratings would have fallen off in about two weeks.

My point is that, by the end of the second week of the turmoil in Egypt, it mattered less and less to those in the West that a million Egyptians were showing up in Cairo and Alexandria to demand Mubarak’s resignation or that demands for real freedom, real liberty in the Middle East are a very big deal!

Mubarak says he intends to stay in office until the election in September. He appointed a vice president, gave a pay raise to government workers, and has patiently waited for the crowds to grow tired of singing, chanting, listening to speeches, and to get on with their lives.

These events are cultural in nature.

Despite common ties with England, the colonists had been quite distinctly “American” for a very long time and didn’t like being treated poorly by the British crown and parliament. “No taxation without representation” became their rallying call.

Egyptians have been around a lot longer than Americans; several millennia in fact.

They have been Muslims since the religion was “introduced” by its early zealots in the seventh century A.D. Designed to appeal to Arabs in particular, but proclaimed as a universal faith to which everyone would have to submit, Islam put its stamp on Egyptians, just as it would on Persians and others throughout the Middle East, northern Africa, and into India..

It wasn’t that long ago that Egyptians were ruled by a monarch, King Farouk, crowned at age 16 and ruling until 1952 when a coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser forced him into exile in Monaco. The defeat Egypt had suffered in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war would lead to the end of the king’s reign. Until then, from around the 1800s, the British had been deeply involved in Egypt, eventually wresting control of the Suez Canal from the French while the monarchy increasingly became a figurehead.

The British literally modernized Egypt, but by the end of World War Two, depleted in wealth to maintain their empire, they watched it drift away into new, independent nations. Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and continued to engage in wars with Israel. When Nasser died his successor, Anwar Sadat, made a cold peace with Israel and, shortly after, was assassinated by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seated beside him that day was Hosni Mubarak, an air force general and, when he came to power shortly thereafter, he clamped down on the Muslim Brotherhood who wanted to turn Egypt into the same kind of hellish regime that was later imposed on Iran in 1979. As in Turkey earlier, Egypt installed a secular government whose military ensured that it stayed that way.

Most of this is unknown history to Americans who have already tired of seeing Egyptians in Cairo’s main square and, if they have paid any attention to the White House, know that President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Secretary of State Clinton have managed to say conflicting things about the uprising, looking and sounding clueless and foolish in the process.

Freedom, however, is not a joke and, thanks to the Internet, a lot of Egyptians, a lot of Iranians, a lot of Tunisians, a lot of Yemenis, and, in general, people through northern Africa, the Maghreb, and elsewhere in the Middle East would like to vote in legitimate elections where there are real choices among candidates and parties. They would like to live without secret police and other forms of oppression.

We tend to forget that George W. Bush’s aim when invading Iraq was to depose a dictator, to bring about democracy there, and to spread the message throughout the Middle East.

Mostly, the Egyptians would like to be rid of the endemic corruption that authoritarian regimes establish among a small, ruling elite that, in turn, discourages everything from owning a deed to one’s own home to being able to start a business without paying off several levels of bureaucracy and waiting a very long time.

The Egyptians want real opportunity, an energetic economy, and some form of actual democracy. Concessions are being made, but progress is likely to take a while.

The Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and all the other Islamists are in a race to gain control over the nations of the Middle East before freedom breaks out everywhere.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

Al Qaeda Sends a Message Again

By Alan Caruba

On March 11, 2004, just days before general elections in Spain, bombs went off on trains in a series of coordinated attacks that killed 191 people and wounded 1,800. An investigation determined that they were the work of an al Qaeda “inspired” terrorist cell, though it was said at the time there was no direct connection.

The ruling party, Partido Popular, had supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a policy that was generally unpopular with Spaniards. The result was that its opposition won the elections.

I do not believe in coincidences and news that two explosive devices were found on cargo planes headed for America just days before our general elections suggests a pattern.

The larger pattern, of course, has been a number of recent terrorist attacks from the Christmas Eve “underwear bomber” to the more recent Times Square bomber. The only thing that seems to have protected Americans from being murdered as infidels is the sheer incompetence of those involved.

That kind of luck does not last forever.

Ironically, on October 27th I posted a commentary that was intended to be a reminder that, as we got ready to go to polling places on November 2nd, we have been too distracted from the fact that outside of America there is still a dangerous world.

Al Qaeda has sent us a message. The first part of the message was that they are still around and still at war with the Great Satan, America. The second was that they believe they can influence the outcome of our midterm elections. Though unintentional, the third part of the message is that they are a bunch of incompetents who, unlike Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City infamy, cannot put together a decent bomb.

That, of course, is an overstatement because Arabs, whether al Qaeda or not, have been blowing up each other’s mosques with regularity throughout the Middle East. There’s an Arab saying that goes something like “I against my brother. My brother and I against our cousins. My brother, my cousins, and I against the world.”

Even the Mafia had more internal cohesiveness than these sons of Allah whose biggest problem in life is who to kill next.

Unlike the Spaniards who voted to run away from the Iraq conflict, these would-be bombers have seriously misunderstood how Americans think. You attack us, we send in the Marines—and the Army—and the Air Force—and we park a couple of Navy carrier groups off the coast..

If the Yemenese do not get serious about their jihadists, finding and killing them, they will eventually get a visit from Uncle Sam. They don’t have that many friends in the world and that includes their neighbors in Saudi Arabia, so it’s likely to get very nasty for them.

The American military will be exiting Afghanistan in 2011 because President Obama never wanted to be there in the first place. I hate to agree with anything the man says or does, but in this he is correct. The Afghanis are tribal. When not finding a reason to fight one another, they will join together to fight anyone from outside. And that is likely to include the Taliban at some point.

The troops we are leaving in Iraq will be there when our grandchildren have grandchildren. The U.S. has a long history of never leaving a nation once we have invaded. Just ask the Germans, the Japanese, or the South Koreans, all of whom appear to have found that arrangement to their advantage.

Aside from the operational failure of this latest terror attack, what stands out is the lack of terror among Americans. Even the stock market took it in stride on Friday.

On Tuesday Americans are going to clean house in a Congress whose members are so unpopular that the survivors and the new winners will have gotten the message voters will have sent.

That’s not just a problem for Democrats. It’s a problem for al Qaeda, too.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

The Muddle East

By Alan Caruba

For a long time the world’s attention to an increasing degree was on Vietnam. A war was fought there from 1954 until 1975, but the U.S. didn’t get seriously involved until August 7, 1964 with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the arrival of the first combat troops in March 1965. It would take ten years to extricate ourselves from that mess.

The U.S. would remain shy of such conflicts until the 1990s.

In the August 23 Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens provided a short history of the U.S. involvement in Iraq in an article titled “The Twenty Year’s War.” He traced Saddam Hussein’s malevolent trail of death inflicted on Iraqis, Kurds, and, in 1990, the Kuwaitis when he invaded.

Stephens believes Bush41 could have avoided the necessity of Bush43 having to invade a second time to find Saddam and let his people hang him.

I agree with Stephens’ view and recall how appalled Bush41 and Colin Powell were at the efficient and brutal destruction of the Iraqi army in 1990. At the time Powell was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The result was a hasty Iraqi surrender agreement that nullified what had been a victory for U.S. forces.

Later, as Secretary of State to Bush43, Powell tried to talk him out of the second invasion. War is hell, but history teaches that it is frequently necessary. Powell was a very reluctant warrior. The result, said Stephens, was a war that lasted nineteen years longer than it should have.

That got me thinking about the way Israel, from the day it was founded in May 1948 to the present, has never ceased to be in a state of war with its “neighbors” although both Jordan and Egypt concluded peace, the absence of active war, was a good idea. Both got severely mauled in earlier attempts to destroy Israel and peace had included the return of the Sinai to Egypt.

So, here we are, over sixty years later, still concerned for Israel’s fate and especially so now that Iran will have the nuclear plant to which the U.S. and Europe objected and Russia built. At a billion bucks each, Russia understandably thinks this is a good idea.

Back in the 1930s when it was the Soviet Union, Stalin thought it was a good idea to sign a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany in order to divide Poland between them. Twenty million dead Russians later, Stalin no doubt regretted dealing with Hitler. I’m guessing that Putin will have cause to regret the deal with Iran.

Iran’s Brushehr nuclear plant is built on a fault line, one of several that cover some ninety percent of the nation’s land mass. Moreover, it has a long history of earthquakes that since 1900 have killed an estimated 126,000 Iranians. The most recent was on September 10, 2008 and prior to that there were earthquakes every year from 2003 to 2006.

There’s another kind of earthquake that is also developing in Iran and it is a human one because the vast bulk of the population, born since the 1979 revolution, really hates the Supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. They shout “Death to the dictator” at public gatherings. Mamoud Ahmadinejad is just as unpopular. Events, both natural and social, are likely to overtake the current regime.

The Iranians are Persians. They have funded Hezbollah and Hamas, two Arab groups bent on Israel’s annihilation. The threat to Israel is very real, but it is a diversion, a way to keep Iranian and Arab masses focused on that little nation instead of their own oppressive regimes.

The nations and groups currently trying to spread terror worldwide are Arab. Nobody likes or trusts the Arabs and that includes the Arabs. Thanks to its nuclear capabilities, the Arabs distrust Iran’s Persians, too.

The seemingly endless suicide bombings, usually of mosques, are beginning to make Arab Muslims as well as Muslims in non-Arab nations regard this expression of fanaticism as counter-productive.

In Europe where large Arab Muslim populations exist, there are signs that the Europeans have grown tired of their demands and wary of their ghettos, tiny nations within nations, where they live and threaten the social fabric of France, Germany, the Netherlands, and elsewhere on the continent.

It’s not that the Middle East won’t remain a tinderbox of conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. It will, but even in Muslim nations there are forces at work to strike back against al Qaeda and the Taliban as was the case when Pakistan sent troops to the Swat Valley before the recent floods inflicted an even greater threat to its population.

Decades of Islamic oppression within Arab nations is slowly creating a blowback.

If Allah is so great, the world is demonstrating time and again that jihad usually means getting attacked at great cost whether it is Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, or Somalia. Even Turkey, the one nation that had thrived by imposing a secular government after World War One, is feeling the heat for having drifted into the Arab orbit.

In America, where freedom of religion is part of our DNA, the threat of an Arab-inspired Islamic jihad has worn thin our traditional tolerance. The current debate over the audacity of building a mosque within sight of Ground Zero is evidence that enough is enough.

Al Qaeda will worsen life for American Muslims as it continues to recruit them. As reported in Israpundit.com, “It’s under new American management. No fewer than four U.S. citizens and a permanent U.S. resident have risen to senior leadership posts”, warning that “By remaking itself into an American enterprise, al Qaeda is now more lethal than ever.”

How ironic is it that Americans, in a burst of enthusiasm for “cultural diversity”, elected a president who was raised in a Muslim nation, Indonesia, and returned to the U.S. to be raised by grandparents enthralled with communism.

The conflict that some in the Middle East want to export will take its toll on that region of the world until it is exorcised and it will threaten Americans until they root it out from within their society. Being politically correct only gets people killed.

A twenty year’s war? No, much longer than that.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Killing Missionaries, Fellow Muslims, and Civilization

By Alan Caruba

The latest news out of Afghanistan is the brutal murder of missionaries who were part of a Christian medical team. Among the many excuses for Islamic barbarism is that the West is at war with Islam. No, Islam is at war with civilization.

In early August, after having hiked for more than ten hours to bring medical aid to isolated Afghan villagers, a team composed of six Americans, two Afghans, one German and a Briton, doctors, nurses, and logistical personnel, were gunned down by Taliban in the remote Parun valley of Nuristan province about 160 miles north of Kabul.

Their crime, according to Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, was that they were “spying for the Americans” and “preaching Christianity.” They were members of International Assistance Mission (IAM), one of the longest serving non-governmental organizations operating in Afghanistan.

The team leader was Tom Little, an optometrist from Delmar, New York. He and his family had been in Afghanistan for thirty years with a break during the Afghan-Soviet conflict. He and his wife had raised their three daughters there. AIM receives private donations.

None of this made any difference to the Taliban that killed him and the others. Elsewhere in Afghanistan that day, a child was murdered by Sunni bombers and a bomb hidden in a wheelbarrow left five others dead. In Pattani, Thailand, a Buddhist husband and wife were murdered by Muslim gunmen in their bicycle shop and their 4-year-old nephew was wounded. In Kirkuk, Iraq Muslims shot a woman to death and in Baghdad two civilians were blown to bits by bombers.

Islam is an equal opportunity “religion of peace.” It kills Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and anyone else in the name of Allah. All this killing is rooted in the Koran, justified by the view that unbelievers have no right to life unless they convert. Even then, the schism between Sunni and Shiite Muslims is sufficient reason to kill each other.

There are well over a billion Muslims in a world of some six billion people and, while most undoubtedly want peace, their religion requires that the world be divided between Dar al Islam and Dar al Harb, the world of Islam and the world of war.

It can be argued that Christianity has blood on its hands and, historically, that is true, but what is most true about Islam in the last century and this one is that it represents a war on civilization itself.

In a Europe that has seen an influx of Muslims, nations there are struggling with them wherever they have gained large enough numbers to demand submission to Sharia law and other imported customs inconsistent with modernity.

Americans paid little attention to Islam until 9/11 destroyed the Twin Towers and a portion of the Pentagon. Up to then, Islam seemed far away despite a series of embassy bombings and other events.

Now Americans struggle with an Islam that wants to build a mosque within steps of Ground Zero in New York City. This has come as a shock to many, but Islam has a long tradition of building mosques over the sacred ground of others.

The Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem was built over the site of the Jewish Temple on the Temple Mount, sacred to Jews. In Constantinople, now Istanbul, the Hagia Sophia Cathedral was converted to a mosque. Throughout India, an estimated 2,000 mosques were built on the sites of Hindu temples.

Wherever Islam gained a foothold and became the state religion—in Islam there is no separation between church and state—the backwardness, the oppression of women, the refusal to accept another religion unless its practitioners accept a second-class position in society, are all endemic to Islam.

Islam is mired in the seventh century mentality of its founder and charged with a hostility, not just to other faiths, but to modernity itself, to the advances of civilization that seeks to reduce tensions between nations and peoples.

We are not dealing with people devoid of contact with modern civilization. Al Qaeda recruits via the Internet. They show how they behead “infidels” and urge more attacks everywhere against them.

For those who leave Islam, the punishment prescribed in the Koran is death. For those who “insult” Islam, the punishment prescribed is death. And for those who bring free medical care to villagers is death.

The proposed New York mosque should be built only when a synagogue or church can be built anywhere in Saudi Arabia where Islam began and where the harshest form of Islam, Wahhabi, is practiced.

If Islam calls the world of unbelievers Dar al Harb, the world of war, why can’t the world understand that Islam is at war with it?

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Hamas' Definition of "Peace"

Taking Terrorism Seriously

By Alan Caruba

I keep wondering when the world is going to begin to take Islamic terrorism seriously.

The world’s leaders and, in particular, the media could begin by calling it “Islamic” or “Muslim” terrorism. The media were, of course, thrilled to discover that America had a small band of homegrown nut cases, a Christian militia arrested before they did some serious harm. That’s the kind of thing that happens when the president and the government begins to be regarded as the anti-Christ.

I liked Vladimir Putin’s response to the Moscow bombings. He said of those responsible, “We will destroy them.”

The suicide bombers in Moscow will no doubt be identified—there was video of their entering the station—and an efficient national security apparatus will find out who they are, who their family is, who their friends are, and invite them in for some interrogation. They are not likely to be read Miranda rights, nor will their lawyers be present.

The reason for this is that they are potentially all terrorists.

America has been devoted to treating the terrorists we captured on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq as humanely as possible. Those incarcerated at Guantanamo were given copies of the Koran, their dietary laws were observed, ACLU and other lawyers were permitted access to advise them of their “rights.” Under the Geneva Convention, however, they are exempt from the rules of war and have no rights as combatants.

The Attorney General of the United States of America, a former resident of La-La Land, didn’t think it was the least bit odd to suggest trying Khalid Sheik Muhammad, the 9/11 mastermind, in a civil court in the heart of New York City.

Any number of the Gitmo detainees have been returned to their homelands and have since turned up on the battlefield again. This suggests we do not take terrorists seriously. These are, after all, people who cut the heads off of other people.

Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security has an odd notion of who poses a threat to the nation. They identified “right-wing extremists” as their primary concern, particularly those who express concern about the central government’s expansion, opponents of abortion, opponents of illegal immigration, and “disgruntled” veterans returning from the battlefront. No mention of left-wing extremists.

The first rule of war is “know your enemy.” In the space of a decade, they have shown up in New York, London, Madrid, Bali, Mumbai, and in Moscow; all killing civilians indiscriminately on buses, on trains, in subways, in skyscrapers, and at resorts. Before that, they devoted themselves to kidnapping Americans in Lebanon and blowing up two of our embassies in Africa.

From the streets of Paris where Muslims rioted at will to Malmo, Sweden where attacks on local Jews are driving them to leave the country, the story is always the same. Wherever Muslims become a sufficient number of the population, they begin to make demands, harass the locals, and in the Netherlands to murder an outspoken opponent of Islam in broad daylight. The Dutch response has been to put on trial a man who is warning of these dangers.

The British cannot accommodate them enough, while the French have decided it is far better to be French than Muslim, passing several laws to protect their cultural traditions and society.

The impact on Americans has mostly been to turn a trip to the airport into a complete nightmare, but few other restrictions have interfered with their normal activities. Despite valiant efforts by our border patrol, our southern border goes largely unprotected. The insane murder rate from the drug wars in Mexico will arrive any day now in the U.S.A.

The small U.S. Muslim population has been free of harassment, but the organizations claiming to speak for them have all been identified as having links to the Muslim Brotherhood and related jihadist organizations.

Who takes the jihadists, the terrorists seriously? Saudi Arabia where they just rounded up a large ring of al Qaeda conspirators, Pakistan where they have finally begun to hammer the jihadis in Waziristan and other frontier provinces, and just about every nation with a Muslim majority.

The official and rather perfunctory response to the Fort Hood shootings and the “underwear bomber” on Christmas suggests that our government has forgotten the message that arrived on September 11, 2001 or has decided that “right-wing extremists” are the real problem.

That’s unfortunate because the terrorists have an agenda of their own and, unless the global effort is made to find them and kill them, the attacks will be as common as movie listings in the daily newspaper. Or should I say obituaries?

In Cairo, in 2009, President Obama said, “You might say the United States is a Muslim nation.” Some might call this seriously mistaken and some might say it is wishful thinking.

Islamic terrorism remains the great concern of most Americans who probably need to be more watchful of their Muslim neighbors and co-workers. That would have gone a long way toward saving the lives of the Fort Hood victims.

© Alan Caruba

American Al Qaeda is Captured

By Alan Caruba

The news on Sunday, March 7th, is that Adam Gadahn, an American who became a Muslim and then joined al Qaeda, was arrested in Pakistan by intelligence officers and the only question I have is how long will it take to ship his sorry ass back to the land of the free and the home of the brave?

This poor excuse for a human being grew up on a goat farm in Riverside County, California, converted to Islam at a nearby mosque, and found his purpose in life with the enemies of his country and, for that matter, every country. Even the Pakistanis are not keen on al Qaeda and the Taliban.

If he stays in the Middle East, the chances of his being rescued by his al Qaeda buddies or that a sizeable enough bribe will leave his cell door unlocked escalate with each day. A bunch of these jihadists were broken loose from a prison in Yemen. It apparently was constructed from sponge cake and marshmallows.

If returned to the U.S., Gadahn, age 31, should be put before a military tribunal as an enemy combatant, tried, and then taken out to face a firing squad. This is the way the U.S. used to deal with traitors, but we have become so feminized that some will surely cry out that it is cruel and unusual punishment. There is, however, nothing unusual about it.

Briefly, Gadahn starred in several al Qaeda videos urging his fellow American Muslims to join the jihad against the Great Satan. After conversion, he moved to Pakistan in 1998 and went looking for an al Qaeda training camp. I’ve never been there, but you get the feeling that they have highway signs that say turn left for Rawalpindi and right for the Osama bin Laden Terrorist Camp.

By 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation put his face on a wanted poster and offered a $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest or conviction. In 2006, a U.S. court charged him with treason, making him the first American to face that charge in more than 50 years.

In his last video, he praised Major Hassan for having killed thirteen fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, calling him a role model for Muslims. To say the least, he is just one more twisted sister who has found the ultimate justification to kill civilians and military alike because Mohammed said it's okay.

What Americans need to draw from this is the reminder that mosques throughout our great, benevolent and tolerant nation are hothouses for jihadist recruitment and plots. Other favorite recruiting locations are prisons.

It doesn’t matter what the official spokesmen of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has to say. They are part of the “problem.”

To whom do all Muslims owe their loyalty? First, last, and always, it is to Islam.

Are there Muslim Americans who love America? Yes. Do some serve honorably in our military? Yes. Sorting them out from those who have bad intentions is the job of the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and CIA. It would probably help if their next-door neighbors kept an eye on them as well.

The good news is that the U.S. and its Pakistani ally are beginning to make real progress in degrading al Qaeda through the capture of its various serial killers. The bad news is that these people and wannabe groups are not going to go away for a very long time to come.

Gadahn, the show-off, got most of the attention, but any number of Americans, mostly young men, either converts or born into Islam, have demonstrated that killing their countrymen was perfectly fine with them. They are not “crazy”, they are Muslims.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

All Obama, All the Time

By Alan Caruba

We are back to the Obama administration’s original theory of governance, “All Obama, all the time.” Having basked on the spotlight during his rather long State of the Union Speech, Obama addressed the Baltimore conference of Republican members of Congress with yet another familiar excuse, it’s all George W. Bush’s fault.

In one year in office he has learned nothing or, if he has, the lessons have been dismissed as irrelevant to his mission of “transforming” a nation that is far more focused on just surviving the worst Recession/Depression since the 1930s.

Obama seems mystified that, with the greatest majority in Congress in decades, he is unable to get Democrats to coalesce behind his major initiatives such as healthcare “reform.” Republicans wisely decided to avoid being a part of this debacle and have since been labeled “the Party of no.” Sometimes, the right answer is no.

In other parts of the world, our system of government is baffling, particularly for the way it deliberately slows the passage of various legislative proposals. Writing recently in El Mundo, a leading newspaper in Spain, Prof. Rafael Navarro-Valls, said, “The problem, it seems to me, is that we should first consider the very system of power in America. When speaking of the U.S. President as the most powerful man in the world, one forgets the rules of the political circus in which he functions.”

“America produced a political system that is burdened and slowed down by a game of opposing powers,” said Navorro-Valls, who noted that this was intentional on the part of the Founding Fathers who had “fears of kings and tyrants.”

If Obama is unable to lead his own party when it had a lock on political power in Congress, his ability to do so for the rest of the nation is indeed in question and Navorro-Valls noted that “reality is relentless when we come down from the blue sky of promises to the vulgar world of facts, so the gap between what was offered and the reality concerns the electorate.”

The power of the American electorate was seen most recently in Massachusetts, in Virginia, and in New Jersey. It will be seen again in November.

Around the world, America is watched closely and what happens here is news everywhere else. This is particularly true in the Middle East when America, following 9/11, invaded Afghanistan to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda, and then invaded Iraq to remove a regional destabilizing figure, Saddam Hussein. And, of course, America has long been an ally of Israel through several wars perpetrated against it by Arab nations and, lately, the Iranian proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Writing in The Jordan Times, Hasan Abu Nimah took a look at “The Arabs and Obama after a year.” The Arab fixation on the “Arab-Israeli conflict” remains the obstacle to any rational resolution; it is now past sixty years since Israel became a reconstituted sovereign nation and, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, none of the 22 Arab states with their 360 million people, have been willing to accept that fact.

Nimah bluntly said that “Until the Arabs take control of their own destiny, they will continue to wait and hope in vain that rescue will come, if not from Obama’s promises, then from someone else’s.” None of them want that someone else to be Osama bin Ladin.

The answer, of course, is to recognize Israel’s right to exist and to seek peace with it. That is not likely to happen. Nimah wrote, “The Arabs expected that with Obama in office they would see the beginning of the end of the occupation of their land.” Israel is not an occupier. Its claim to the Holy Land predates both Christianity and Islam by thousands of years.

Georgiy Bovt, writing in Izvestia, the Russian newspaper, also took a look at Obama’s first year. Suffice it to say he tore into the young President, along with the “reset” message he tried to send Russia and the rest of the world. Bovt said, “While Obama practiced conciliatory gestures, the camps of al Qaeda prepared and continues to prepare for future attacks.” He ripped the political correctness that leaves America vulnerable.

“How many more of these ‘resets' will this pillar of modern political correctness be able to withstand, with the assertion that terrorism has no nationality, nor religious affiliation?” asked Bovt. Good question!

The Russian analyst concluded saying, “We hope that he doesn’t fall quickly and disgracefully.”

Reading from the newspapers around the world, the message is the same, a distinct sense of disappointment and apprehension regarding Obama’s first year. They are not alone. If the polls are any indication—and they are—approval of Obama’s performance in office is dropping rapidly.

All Obama, all the time is not the answer. It is the problem.

War & Peace at the Car Wash

By Alan Caruba

I was waiting for the crew at my local car wash to finish drying my car when a young man approached and asked where he could get the US Army decal that I display on the rear window. “The Army gives them to people who have served, veterans, and I assume to active duty members as well,” I told him.

“You were in the Army?” he asked. Oh yes, a very long time ago before you were born, I replied, noticing a distinct accent. He was joined by another young man. “Did you fight in the Middle East?” No, I said, but there has never been an absence of wars for America. We have never been free to ignore the rest of the world even if we wanted to.

In a similar fashion, as much as Israel may yearn for peace, they have never been permitted to function as a normal nation. From the hour that Israeli sovereignty was proclaimed, the nation was attacked by its “neighbors” and has, for all intents and purposes, been on a war footing ever since.

The two young men talking with me said they were Palestinians. Both came to America to find peace.

I think that tells you everything you need to know about the reality of Israeli-Palestinian relations—--if one can call the one-sided determination of the Palestinian leadership to “drive the Israelis into the sea.” Or the Iranian pledge to “wipe Israel off the map.” Or the Hezbollah forces in Lebanon being re-armed by the Iranians for whom they are a proxy army against Israel.

In the course of our chat, they said they were both from Gaza and I was reminded that the Israelis, in their futile quest for peace, had forced out their own people from the Gaza strip and turned the area over to Fatah, also known as the Palestinian Liberation Authority.

What they got in return was an endless cascade of rockets from Gaza, not just for a few weeks, but for months and years. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Hamas forced Fatah to retreat to the West Bank where they could have the protection of the Israelis who continue to desperately look for anyone with whom to negotiate a real peace.

In January of last year, the Israelis initiated Operation Cast lead in which their military targeted the sources of the Gaza rockets and looked for Hamas leaders who cravenly hid in the midst the population. The rocketing has largely stopped since then, though ugly individual attacks on Israelis have continued.

The Israeli solution has been to build a very high wall between them and the Palestinians and to maintain tight control over who passes through it. To do otherwise would be to subject their people to suicide bombers and other killers.

“Would you accept peace with Israel?” I asked. I was greeted with broad smiles. Yes, Palestinians want peace I was told, but “Hamas will not permit it.”

So, there you are. It has nothing to do with Washington’s foreign policy with regard to Israel and it has everything to do with the bad intentions of those who continue to use the Palestinian people as pawns of resistance to any Western presence in what they regard as their sacred lands.

The Islamic jihad knows no boundaries, killing Jews, Christians, Hindus and even Muslims with abandon. It took President Obama a year to say out loud that the U.S. is at war with al Qaeda. It took three days to say anything about the Christmas bomber.

Israel was sacred to the Jews for two thousand years before there ever was an Islamic religion. It was sacred to Christians for a thousand years before Islam existed. Jerusalem is never mentioned even once in the Koran, but, for reasons known only to Israel’s “neighbors”, they cannot find any reason to make peace with them.

The two young Palestinians were very happy to be living and working in America. They treated me with the greatest of respect and with good will. That’s the way it should be.

Editor’s note: The photo that accompanies this post is of a young Israeli girl attending the wedding of a friend. Note the automatic rifle slung over her shoulder. Israelis, particularly members of their defense force, never go anywhere without them. Too bad that wasn't the case at Fort Hood.

The Terror Attack and Clueless White House

Al Qaeda Sends a Christmas Message

By Alan Caruba

If there is an American remaining who does not understand that the Islamic revolution is at war with our nation and the West, then they are in serious denial.

For general purposes, it began with the Iranian revolution that overthrew a U.S. ally, the Shah of Iran, in 1979 and then took our diplomats hostage, holding them for 444 days. Only recently have we learned that Iran has been providing sanctuary to the family of Osama bin Laden, the founder of al Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11 and an earlier attempt to destroy the Twin Towers.

This raises serious questions about the Obama administration’s first year in which considerable effort was made to open diplomatic communications with Iran, the primary source of all the conflicts in the Middle East as the guide and funding source for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, and the provider of weapons against our troops in Iraq.

No Middle Eastern nation is safe from Iran, least of all its obsession, Israel. Its quest for nuclear weapons is not merely just another nation seeking to join the Nuclear Club.

On Christmas day, Abdul Farouk Abdul-Mutallab, aka Umar Farouk Abdul Madallad, a 23-year-old Nigerian and former engineering student at University College in London, attempted to set off an explosive device over the U.S. as Delta-Northwest Flight 253 was soon to land in Detroit.

Eight years ago this past week, Richard Reed, aka Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, tried to blow up a flight from Paris to Miami. There is an important message to be understood from these two incidents and it is the contempt for both Christianity and Judaism that Islam has always displayed. It’s worth remembering that Israel was attacked in 1973 on Yom Kippur, one of its holiest days.

The other message is that al Qaeda’s war on the West and its quest for the establishment of a new caliphate to rule the world is far from over.

The fact that the vast intelligence gathering machinery of the United States, in cooperation with that of many other nations, have not been able to find and kill Osama bin Laden and his colleagues has been a major failure.

In 2007, Strategic Forecasting released a report saying, “All signs indicate this group is no longer functional and cannot be replicated. Whether or not Osama bin Laden is still alive, al Qaeda as it once was is dead.”

There are ample signs of life from al Qaeda and events in Somalia and Yemen suggest that some elements of it are still very much alive. One of Osama bin Laden’s earliest goals was to replace the Saudi Arabian monarchy.

It does not help that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has, during the first year of the Obama administration and its Secretary, Janet Napolitano, refused to even use the word “terrorism” throughout 2009. It does not help that President Obama has gone out of his way to display his sympathies for Islam.

What I have found interesting is the way the perpetrators of acts of terrorism against the West frequently involve well educated Muslims willing to die for Islam, but not before killing large numbers of innocent infidels, “unbelievers”, in places like U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, against the citizens of Madrid, London, and, of course, New York.

After attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan following 9/11 and then ridding Iraq of its dictator, Saddam Hussein, I am beginning to believe that former President Bush had a better understanding of the threat of militant Islam than anyone has ever given him credit for. As war-weary as Americans may be at this point, the fact is we have a fairly substantial military engagement precisely where it needs to be in the heart of the Middle East.

Reducing our troop levels now or even in the near future is very likely a very bad idea.

Something is very wrong in the Obama administration’s decision to give Khalid Sheikh Muhammad a civil trial in New York. It defies the obvious fact that he is an enemy combatant who should be subject to a military tribunal, not the full rights of an American citizen. The decision goes beyond just being stupid. It makes New York City “ground zero” for another spectacular attack in 2010.

In large and small ways, the Obama administration betrays sympathies for al Qaeda’s larger mission and the election of a President who spent several years of his youth in a Muslim nation as the step-son of a Muslim father, and whose very first message as President was an interview with Al Jezeera, the popular television channel that serves the Middle East, does not bode well for our national security.

Al Qaeda has sent America a Christmas message. Are we paying sufficient attention to the one the White House is sending?

The Open-Ended War

By Alan Caruba

As I listened to the President address the nation from West Point, I was reminded of how well he can deliver a speech. It’s like watching a slight-of-hand magician. You marvel at his dexterity, but you know he’s still skillfully fooling you.

The speech, given in the Eisenhower auditorium at West Point, reminded me of President Eisenhower, the former general who led allied forces to victory in Europe in World War Two, the man called back to serve his nation, and a man who was hard on the ears when it came to delivering a speech. It made him more human. We forgave him his blunt manner. After all, he had spent his whole adult life in the U.S. Army, taking and giving orders.

Similarly President Bush never seemed all that comfortable giving a set speech, but you knew he meant what he said. You knew he hated the evil of al Qaeda and the Taliban. You knew he despised Saddam Hussein and other enemies of America, of freedom, and human dignity. He was not smooth, not articulate, but he was genuine.

Barack Hussein Obama never spent a day in uniform and something in the area of two years out of six of his first term in the Senate before being launched on the nation as its savior, its messiah. I always found the references to spiritual powers jarring though, like most, amusing in their over-reach. Obama did nothing to discourage the image.

His West Point speech was primarily political. The military elements revealed a get-in and get-out strategy in what has already been a long engagement of the U.S. military in the Middle East. It was filled with talk of NATO partners, Afghani partners, and Pakistani partners, but it also told the enemy that, if they were just patient enough, the U.S. would leave.

Wars, the generals tell us, have to be fought in terms of what the enemy does, not by any timetable we devise. Obama handed us, al Qaeda, and the Taliban a timetable.

When we leave, the Afghan government will still be as corrupt as ever. When we leave the Pakistan government will be as shaky as ever, though perhaps a bit bolder in its desire to resist the Taliban.

Obama made a powerful argument for the need to stamp out the Taliban and kill al Qaeda. He also said that both had “defiled” Islam “one of the world’s great religions.”

Islam is also the world’s single most violent and destabilizing ideology, causing death and spreading terror recently in the Philippines, destroying Somalia, and with a list of atrocities from Mumbai, India, to Madrid, Spain, to London, England. And, of course, on 9/11.

Islam struck again at Fort Hood, Texas.

The one undeniable fact of our times is that the U.S. and the civilized world are in an open-ended war with Islam.

Ironically, one of the expressed aims of al Qaeda is the overthrow of the monarchs, despots or elected leaders of Middle Eastern Islamic nations.

Neither al Qaeda’s soldiers, nor the Taliban, wear uniforms. They are classic guerrilla fighters, fading away like fog into the indigenous population. Not since the day of the Kamikaze, has the world witnessed suicide as an act of war.

While listening to our young President, I was reminded, too, of John F. Kennedy’s inaugural speech, possibly one of the greatest ever delivered in America since Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.

On that cold January day in1961, Kennedy said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

While Obama’s speech was delivered well and met with polite applause from the cadets and others at West Point, its real message was that America will not shoulder the burdens of an open-ended war by itself or with the desultory support of NATO allies.

I thought, too, of the long Cold War America fought with the former Soviet Union.

For a little while, Afghanistan will be Obama’s war. And then we will leave.

We have some big problems here at home, a recession and joblessness, but we have always been able to work our way out of these cyclical financial difficulties.

This time it’s different. We have a White House and Congress hell-bent on initiatives such as Obamacare and Cap-and-Trade that will utterly destroy the economy and the nation. And they know it. And they don’t care.

One wonders, at this time and place, which is the worse enemy?