Obama's Weakness

By Alan Caruba

It is one of those coincidences that is, at the same time, so odd and so apt that it requires analysis.

Both Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda and Jed Babbin, editor of Human Events, have come to the same conclusion about President Barack Hussein Obama and virtually on the same day.

When two such disparate individuals, separated by half a globe, conclude that Obama has rendered himself “powerless”—bin Laden’s word and “weakened”—Babbin’s description, you have to take notice.

Commenting two days after the 9/11 anniversary, bin Laden redundantly blamed America’s relationship with Israel for attacks and promised that “all we will do is continue the war of attrition against you on all possible axes,” during an 11-minute video that showed a still photo with a voice-over.

Babbin calls Obama “the incredibly shrinking president”, who has become weakened in his first eight months in office by domestic objectives to the point that he has taken his eye off the ball when it comes to international threats “at least as old as bin Laden’s 1996 fatwa of war against the United States.”

Babbin worries that Obama is clueless regarding the impending Iranian goal of producing enough fissionable material to make its own atomic bombs and nuclear tipped missiles. He reminds readers that, in June, Obama’s Cairo speech “green-lighted Iran’s nuclear program by saying, ‘I understand those who protest that some countries have weapons that others do not. No single nation should pick and choose which nations hold nuclear weapons.'”

Translation: The U.S., under Obama’s administration, will do nothing to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear power. “Weakened by anger and naivete,” says Babbin, “Obama is incapable of dealing with Iran. On Iraq and Afghanistan, the news is no better.”

Bin Laden is of the same opinion! Noting that Obama retained Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense from the Bush administration, bin Laden said, “Reasonable people knew that Obama is a powerless man who will not be able to end the war as he promised.”

It must really suck to be President of the United States and have bin Laden and Jed Babbin, along with two million folks who showed up on September 12, tell you they think you’re an idiot and a weakling to boot.

A third voice requires our attention and it is Dore Gold, Israel’s former ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999. Dr. Gold has a new book, “The Rise of Nuclear Iran: How Tehran Defies the West.”

Dr. Gold takes the U.S. and Western nations to task for their long and tepid response to Tehran’s openly declared intention to become a nuclear power.

Iran’s Mamoud Ahmadinejad has made no secret of the fact that he wants to “wipe Israel from the map” and one of its ayatollahs has mused that Iran could afford to lose a million or more of its people to achieve that goal.

Dr. Dore warns that, “Few understand the significance of the moment the world is facing. A nuclear Iran involves the merger between radical Islam and nuclear weapons technology,” adding that “a nuclear Iran will be able to offer a protective, nuclear umbrella over al Qaeda or any group, allowing it to strike with impunity.”

“In short, says Dr. Dore, “a nuclear Iran will totally alter the international security environmental, setting the stage for a new scale of terrorist threats that the world has not yet witnessed.”

A lot of people find reasons to deplore Israel, but I suspect they will be greatly relieved if that tiny nation does what a great power like the U.S. won’t do.

Unless Iran’s nuclear facilities are destroyed, no American, no European, no Russian, no Chinese, and no one in the Middle East will be safe from the chaos Iran’s leaders want in order to bring about the return of the Twelfth Imam, a mythical Shiite figure.

You cannot talk to or negotiate with people who are crazy.

War! War! War!

By Alan Caruba

“In defense of our nation, a president must be a clear-eyed realist. There are limits to the smiles and scowls of diplomacy. Armies and missiles are not stopped by stiff notes of condemnation. They are held in check by strength and purpose and the promise of swift punishment.” I will tell you who said that at the end of this commentary.

D-Day, 65 years ago, was one of many days throughout history that determined the final outcome of a war. I suspect one can attach a great battle to just about every day in the calendar because the history of humanity is one of constant warfare somewhere, anywhere in the world where two men, two families, two tribes, two empires, or two or more states clashed.

The courage that Americans, joined by Canadians, British, Free French, Polish, and other troops showed on June 6, 1944 preserved freedom for a bit longer among the victors, though all of Eastern Europe had to be written off as the bribe to keep Soviet Russia involved. It would ultimately loose 20 million of its people.

The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed about 199,000. People forget that the Japanese emperor and the military, though clearly defeated, refused to concede.

War is the natural element of mankind. Peace is merely the interlude between wars.

Man is the most dangerous creature on Earth and young men, in particular, are either conscripted into armies or will just as likely form gangs to fulfill the desire “to seek the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth.”

Every time I hear Barack Obama talk of diplomacy, I can hear guns being cocked or missiles being positioned. He is surely the most naïve President since the days of Woodrow Wilson who get elected promising keep the U.S. out of World War I and then, after committing U.S. troops, he went to Europe to participate in the writing of the Versailles Treaty where the British and the French ate his lunch. They divided up the spoils, punished Germany, and set in motion World War II before the ink was dry.

Wilson returned home with his dream of a League of Nations and the U.S. Senate shot it down, preferring to maintain our sovereignty than to get in bed with the knaves that started WWI.

That fool’s dream of an organization to ensure world peace was revived by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and signed into being by his successor, Harry S. Truman, who probably had little choice in the matter. Its first Secretary General was a Soviet spy named Alger Hiss, a communist who had risen high in the FDR government.

The world has always been a dangerous place because it has always been full of egotists and psychopaths who have seized or gained power in one fashion or another. Alexander tried his hand at a Macedonian empire. Rome laid down some fine roads and used them to ensure their hold on a widespread Mediterranean empire. Attila knocked on the doors of Europe. The Visigoths and other barbarian tribes sacked Rome.

The Church sent forth crusades in response to the military aspirations of Muslims to seize and hold Jerusalem, holy to Christian and Jew. The Muslims or Moors had already spread far into India and northern Africa, up into Spain. Their northern drive into Europe was stopped at Poitiers, France in 732 AD and on September 11, 1683 they were decisively defeated at the gates of Vienna.

In the last century, the Empire of Japan murdered thousands, if not millions in China while waging war to control Asia. In Europe the Nazis redefined barbarism and depravity.

War! War! War! Diplomacy is merely the process by which war may be delayed a bit and the terms of surrender are determined by the winner. Diplomacy has never stopped a despot from pursuing war. It has merely rescheduled it.

In 1986, Osama bin Laden formally declared war on the United States. He is still at war with the United States whether anyone is paying attention or not. And we are not. The Iranians, as crazed as bin Laden, have made their intentions clear by declaring “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel” every single day since seizing our diplomats in 1979 and holding them for 444 days.

After 9/11, George W. Bush did not hesitate to pursue war against bin Laden in Afghanistan and against a man, Saddam Hussein, and nation, Iraq, that were the object of dozens of useless United Nations resolutions as an instigator of wars. Obama’s response has been to denigrate our military achievement in Iraq and demand that Guantanamo be closed down.

Barack Obama is going to get a lot of Americans killed with his poetry about diplomacy.

The lessons of history are lost on this fool. Buchenwold concentration camp and the beach at Normandy are just background for “photo ops” to this greatest of narcissists. He is too busy waging his own war on America while seeking yet another stage on which to strut.

To become a nation in its own right America took on the greatest military power of its time, Great Britain, and won. It fought Barbary pirates. It waged a bloody civil war for its soul and won. It fought Mexico and added territory by winning. It fought Spain. It fought insurgents in the Philippines. It fought two world wars. It fought Communists in Korea. It fought them again in Vietnam. It forced the Russians to back off in Cuba. It fought Communists on the island of Granada and it fought a drug lord in Panama. It fought Iraq after it invaded Kuwait. It fought the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan and it again fought a despot in Iraq. We are still in both these places.

On September 10, 2001 Americans thought they were not at war with anyone. They were wrong. The only thing that has kept us from another attack was the policy enunciated in the quote with which I began this contemplation of war and peace. The man who said it is former President George W. Bush. The date was November 19, 1999.

The Death of Orthodox Islam

By Alan Caruba

Wars are won and lost by the calculations made by those that start them. The Japanese Empire destroyed itself when it attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By contrast, the Vietnamese War was lost because President Lyndon B. Johnson never understood that it was, first, a war of liberation from colonial France and, second, a civil war. Within the LBJ White House and over at the CIA, no one had any realistic idea of who they were fighting.

Iraq has been deemed “the wrong war in the wrong place” by people who, decades hence, will be deemed very wrong in their judgment. One of its critics, Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, said not long ago, “The war is lost.” He’s wrong. Other spineless Democrats are wrong.

Other critics pontificate that all we’ve done is allow an Iranian puppet government to take over Iraq, but they underestimate the nationalism that Iraqis feel and the long lingering memories of the losses they had when Saddam Hussein waged war first against Iran, then against Kuwait, and finally produced not one, but two bloodlettings as Americans with allied help, ultimately rid them of their pathological despot.

And, of course, that great military leader, Sen. Barack Obama, who first denied the surge worked and then declared it did, keeps insisting that we should have first taken care of business in Afghanistan. What this ignores is that Iraq became the perfect killing ground, luring in wannabe jihadists from all over and sending their sorry butts to Hell.

The result is that al Qaeda, who started this war by attacking our peacekeepers in Beirut in the 1980s, blowing up our embassies in the 1990s, and finally, attacking our homeland to destroy the Twin Towers and taking lives at the Pentagon as well, is seriously degraded. Angry letters pass between their raggedy leadership complaining of poor results and low morale.

These days U.S. drones, loaded with hellfire missiles, are systematically killing those al Qaeda leaders who thought they had the perfect hiding place along Pakistan’s northern border, only to be disabused of that further miscalculation as they die.

Throughout the Middle East and the rest of the world, al Qaeda and other jihadists are being hunted and killed.

Bin Laden may be alive but it no longer matters. Throughout the Middle East and even in the heart of the most orthodox practice of Islam, in Saudi Arabia, opinions are shifting and the tides of social change are on the move. In a decade or two they will shed their seventh century outlook and wonder that they were ever so backward and barbaric.

For that you can thank President George W. Bush and the Neocons who understood the lessons of history, who understood that 9/11 had to be dealt with by punishing the enemy, Islamofascism, until the price for it was too harsh to pay.

“The Muslims have seen with their own eyes that bloodshed leads to nothing but destruction, devastation, isolation, and persecution.” So said Saudi liberal, Salah Al-Rashid on the website Elaph.

What lessons have Muslims drawn from Bin Laden’s attack on 9/11? Al-Rashid said that Muslims now understand they “must pursue a culture of peace and eschewing bloody wars and conflicts.” If 9/11 was a wakeup call to Americans that we have real enemies in the world, it brought Saudi and other Muslims “to their senses and awoken them from their slumbers…”

In an article in the Saudi daily, Al-Watan, Ali Sa’d Al-Mussa, a journalist and a lecturer at King Khaled University in Abha, wrote that 9/11 was a watershed moment between the era of Islamist-led Saudi public discourse and what he deemed “the modern era” a mere seven years later!

“The 45 minutes between 8:45 AM and 9:30 AM on September 11, 2001 were unlike any other 45 minutes in the modern history of humankind,” wrote Al-Mussa. “These minutes made it impossible for the world to revert to its former state…” He meant, of course, his world, the Saudi world, the world of the Middle East, trapped in the seventh century demand for endless aggression against any part of the world that did not accept Islam.

Osama bin Laden has destroyed the thing he treasured most, orthodox Islam as practiced in his homeland of Saudi Arabia. He destroyed the myth that Muslims could and would come together to fight the infidel and would triumph.

The real triumph has been the rise of Western civilization, free of the restraints of orthodox Islam. The real victory will be the realization that the only future Saudis, Iraqis, Syrians, Palestinians, and all others in the Middle East must embrace is one of toleration and of modernization. The alternative is death and destruction.

It took an American war to make that happen! It took the vision of men in the White House to see it and the courage to pursue the war despite those who declared it wrong or lost.

It wasn’t the first time American warriors went to the Middle East to put an end to piracy, hostage taking, and the violence and death that Islam venerates. It won’t be the last. Keep your eye on Iran, home to Islamists who have not yet learned that lesson.

That’s something that Sen. John McCain understands. That’s something his opponent, with a mere 143 days spent in the Senate chambers, may never understand.

Here's a link to an article by an international business consultant, Bob Kingberry that augments my post on this topic:

http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20011208&slug=satrdr08

Bin Laden Sounds Off Again

By Alan Caruba

On the fifth anniversary of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Osama bin Laden was sounding off again from whatever cave he’s in. More likely he is staying at the Tehran Motel Six, surrounded by family, bodyguards, and Iranian keepers.

He was calling for—what else—a holy war to liberate the Palestinian lands, otherwise known as the nation of Israel. The very notion of a successful democracy in the midst of Middle Eastern dictatorships and monarchies drives him and his followers’ crazy. Turns out, Israel is full of Jews!

So bin Laden, famed founder of al Qaeda, brother to the Taliban, and perpetrator of 9/11, was urging the Palestinians to ignore political parties such as Fatah and Hamas “mired in trickery of the blasphemous democracy” and to rely on armed might. Democracy bad. Theocracy good.

It is probably impolite of me to point out that every time Arab nations attacked Israel, they got their heads handed to them. Egypt sued for peace and is no longer an official enemy, along with Jordan.

Israel has occupied Lebanon on and off thanks to the Palestinians in its midst who kept provoking conflict, thus leading to large parts of Beirut being reduced to rubble, along with sundry other death and destruction. For fifteen years, from 1975 to 1990, Palestinians provided a civil war in Lebanon that rendered the place uninhabitable.

After a brief difference of opinion between Fatah, an arm of the late, unlamented Yassir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization, and Hamas, a wholly owned operation of Iran and Syria, as is Hezbollah, a shootout between the two resulted in Hamas being in charge of Gaza. Yes, Hamas had been democratically elected to power in Gaza on its platform of killing every Jew.

Having sent more over 4,000 rockets into Israel since being granted “land for peace” by the Israelis who voluntarily and unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, the Palestinians are amazed and appalled that the Israelis respond by blowing up those using the rockets, standing near those using the rockets, or distantly related to those using the rockets.

Bin Laden also called on all good Arabs to “help in support of their mujahedeen brothers in Iraq, which is the greatest opportunity and the biggest task.” Considering that Sunni tribes have turned against al Qaeda and that martyrdom is the primary "opportunity" being offered, there’s a strong likelihood that Iraqis have figured out al Qaeda is not their friend.

As the geniuses in the CIA opined, it appears that bin laden was seeking to merge the Palestinian cause into the wider al Qaeda struggle. Or maybe he’s just running out of martyrs? When your life sucks as badly as it does for most Palestinians, it’s an option.

In Israel, the foreign ministry spokesman told the Associated Press that Israel does not comment on bin Laden’s statements. This is very intelligent in lieu of how idiotic the man sounds these days.