Sunday May 18, the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL) seized Ramadi, capital of Anwar province in Iraq. The Iraqi forces that had been weakly defending the city, fled along with many civilians – some 8,000 in all. About 500 people, many of them civilians, were killed immediately by the invaders. Newsmax reports: “Bodies, some burned, littered the city’s streets … Online video showed Humvees, trucks and other equipment speeding out of Ramadi, with soldiers desperate to reach safety gripping onto their sides.”

In 2008, Anbar Province – of which Ramadi is the capital – was taken from Saddam Hussein’s forces during Operation Iraqi Freedom. But victory came at a high price: 1,335 U.S. soldiers were killed, and another 8,205 soldiers were wounded and maimed.

All for nothing.

Obama pulled all US troops out of Iraq in 2011. And the Islamic State has come in.

But Obama’s press secretary says the policy towards the Islamic State and Iraq is a success.

From RedState:

This exchange is between ABC’s Jon Karl and a thoroughly dishonest Josh Earnest.

Q    Now, on the overall track record of military operations of the President’s strategy on this, you said we’ve seen periods of progress and success.  Would you say that overall, this strategy has been a success?

EARNEST:  Well, Jon, yes.  Overall, yes. It doesn’t mean that there haven’t been areas of setback, as we saw in Ramadi.

Q    I mean, is exporting terror to Libya, taking over the capital of Iraq’s largest province — this is overall success?

EARNEST:  What we’ve also seen is we’ve also seen a coalition of 60 nations both in the region and around the world join the United States in this fight.  We’ve seen a new Prime Minister take office in Iraq and unite that country and deploy a multi-sectarian security force against ISIL that has succeeded in liberating important areas of Diyala and Babil and Nineveh and the Kirkuk Provinces.  We’ve seen important Iraqi security force gains in Tikrit and Ramadi. [!] We’ve also seen strategic areas like Sinjar Mountain and Mosul Dam where Iraqi security forces have emerged victorious. So we have seen a lot of success.  But we’ve also seen significant periods of setback.  And that’s part of what a military conflict is going to be, particularly when it’s going to be a long-term proposition like this one.

For the US, the fall of Ramadi is a failure and a loss, and Josh Ernest is lying about it. The new Prime Minister of Iraq has not united the country. The pathetic charade of “democracy” in that benighted land deceives no one.

But for Obama himself, the loss, the chaos, the slaughter, the destruction is a success. 

His foreign policy – the advancement of Islam – is succeeding, perhaps even beyond his own wildest dreams, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and above all in Iran.

Good news.

The Obama-Jarrett gang in the White House have not been able to stop the US Army from charging Bowe Bergdahl with desertion and misbehaving before the enemy.

Bergdahl could be sentenced to life in prison.

Mark Steyn writes:

Bowe Bergdahl is to be charged with desertion. This is not exactly a surprising development. As I said when he was released, Bergdahl is “a deserter at best and at worst enemy collaborator”. I incline to the latter view myself, but, be that as it may, there are innumerable instances throughout human history of soldiers who abandon their comrades and attempt to aid the enemy.

What makes this case unique is the behavior of Bergdahl’s commander-in-chief. …

Barack Obama decided to honor this man in the Rose Garden, and to embrace his parents. In front of the President and the world, Bergdahl’s father sent greetings to his son in Arabic and Pashto, and began with the words, “In the name of Allah the most gracious and most merciful …” …

When others objected, the White House dispatched the National Security Advisor, Susan Rice, to tell the American people that Bergdahl “served the United States with honor and distinction”. She surely knew, as did the President, that that was a lie.

Given the background checks an ordinary law-abiding citizen requires these days merely to be permitted to be in the presence of the President, the White House must also have known that the man Obama embraced in the Rose Garden that day – Bergdahl’s father – was a Taliban sympathizer. …

The fact is Bowe Bergdahl walked out and he left America behind … and he did it, by the way, on the advice of his father. He wrote to his father saying, ‘I hate America, it’s a horror, I want to renounce my citizenship.’ And his father emails back, ‘Follow your conscience …’

I don’t think this point has been emphasized enough. … What’s the father’s excuse? He gets communications from his son indicating he’s about to crack. He knows that out there, beyond their vulnerable encampment, is a primitive tribal society where pretty much everyone would either ransom his boy or cut to the chase and saw his head off to make a blockbuster jihadist snuff video for the bazaars of Jalalabad. Surely any responsible parent would say, “Look, I know it can’t be easy for you out there. But there are people who wish to do you harm beyond the fence. Stick with it, talk to your platoon leader … You’re serving honorably in a worthy cause …” You don’t encourage him to take a one-way ticket into the badlands of Afghanistan.

And just to underline that: the justification for Bergdahl Snr’s wacky behavior – the Taliban beard, the invocations of Allah, the Arabic and Pushtu, the pledge that the death of every Afghan child will be avenged – the justification for all this is that, well, he’s also been under a lot of strain. He hasn’t seen his kid for half-a-decade. That could unhinge anyone. Give the guy a break …

But the point is he was pulling this strange stuff before his son was kidnapped.

Which makes that Rose Garden ceremony even more bizarre in its weird optics – the President of the United States embracing a Taliban sympathizer at the White House. There was no need to hold such an intimate photo-op. Yet Obama chose to do it. Why?

That’s still the most important question of l’affaire Bergdahl. Obama didn’t just trade five high-value Taliban leaders-cum-war criminals for one American deserter, but he chose to honor that deserter as an American hero. And, in so honoring him, dishonored all the comrades he deserted.

As for those five Taliban A-listers, as of June 1st they’ll be out of their nominal emirate-probation in Qatar and free to roam the world killing infidels once more. …

That’s the point to remember about this debacle: There is no deal. None. Washington gave away five war criminals who are already pledging to get back to killing – and the superpower got nothing in return. The deserter and his kooky dad are merely the cover for the fact that the United States entered into an end-of-war prisoner exchange without ending the war. …

Here’s the history of America’s longest war in two anti-American losers, John Walker Lindh and Bowe Bergdahl, confused young men with a gaping hole at the heart of where their sense of identity should be, stumbling through the Hindu Kush trying to “find themselves”.

In the fall of 2001, the first confused anti-American loser trying to find himself, John Walker Lindh was on the enemy’s side – and was tried, convicted and jailed for 20 years.

By the spring of 2014, the last confused anti-American loser of the Afghan war, Bowe Bergdahl, was on our side – and was honored by the President with a family photo-op in the Rose Garden and declared by the laughably misnamed “National Security Advisor” to have “served the United States with honor and distinction”.

To reprise my current line on “the leader of the free world”:

If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

We cannot find any precedent in history for the leader of a nation betraying his country to its enemy.

Is it America’s moral duty to rescue victims of religious, ideological, racial, national, or tribal oppression, persecution, or genocide?

James Lewis writes at American Thinker:

Genocides happen when the civilized world shuts its eyes and does nothing while some gang of barbarians slaughters human beings by the thousands.  Civilized silence promises safety to the killers and demoralizes their victims.

Samantha Power, Obama’s U.N. ambassador, has made a career criticizing U.S. government passivity in the face of genocide.  She has written Pulitzer Prize-winning books like A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.

Now [she is] U.N. ambassador – a major power position in the Obama administration, the most powerful political job she is ever likely to have to do what she wants.

What has Dr. Power done about genocide? What has she actually done to stop, or even to complain in public about, groups and regimes that thirst after genocide, like Iran, ISIS, the Taliban, the Wahhabi priesthood of Saudi Arabia, the mass killing rulers of the Sudan? What about Boko Haram killing, enslaving, and selling children in Nigeria? What about the Kenya massacres? What has she done?

Samuel Totten studies genocide as a disease of dysfunctional politics and has now written a report on Samantha Power’s actions against genocide.

They are zero, just like her boss’s achievements.

But let’s be more modest. It may be hard to get things done in the real world. So let’s just ask: what has Samantha Power even said in her highly public position as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations?

Has Power even spoken out, in private or public, against the horrors we can all see today?

Like Obama himself, Dr. Power refuses even to call the real thing by its proper name. Somehow, after a career of assaulting previous administrations for their moral failures to even name genocide, she is now struck deaf and dumb.

Samantha Power is symbolic of all the simple moral failures of the Obama years. She has sold her soul for a mess of pottage.  Like her boss, Dr. Power talks a good game.

The Rwanda genocide happened because Kofi Annan, who was a U.N. “observer”, knew all about it but never made a public fuss.

Well, that’s not why it happened. It may have been why it wasn’t stopped, or prevented from happening.

The Armenian genocide of 1.5 million Christians happened because ethnic and religious genocide is what the Turks did during the four centuries of the Ottoman Caliphate, and nobody in the more civilized world wanted to even publicize it.  The same is true of the Holocaust and Stalin’s Ukrainian starvation campaign. …

Again, the disregard of powerful nations by their governments and/or their newspapers was not a cause of those atrocities but – at most – a license to let them proceed.

But perhaps James Lewis means that if the civilized powers made it constantly known, by interfering even in small incidents of persecution when they occurred anywhere in the world – and so demonstrating that they would not allow such things ever to happen – the big events, the starving of millions, the attempts at genocide would not happen because interference would be expected and feared.

He argues that the “civilized world” should at least speak up against the evil that states and rebel armies do.

The civilized world is not obligated to sacrifice precious lives, even for a profoundly moral cause.  We are not infinitely powerful.  But we have an elementary right and duty to tell the truth, and to act on it when we can.  Obama’s abandonment of millions and millions of people is a cruel defeat for elementary morality. Those who don’t get that are sociopaths, and those who twist it are liars.  Abandoning Afghanistan is not, as the delusional left will say, some sort of victory. The rise of barbarian sadistic regimes, those who routinely oppress all women and girls because they can, is not – repeat: not – a wonderful moral victory.

But Obama and his media lackeys will try to paint it that way.

Today we don’t even allow ourselves to think that the Cold War was a noble and civilizing effort by the United States and its allies against the kind of barbarism that we see today being practiced by ISIS – and we know about ISIS only because social media make it impossible for the left to censor it.  The left cares only about power, and the resulting millions of dead and wounded are simply the price to pay for Progress. …

Now Obama is willingly – maybe joyously – retreating from lands where we made a difference. We gave and sacrificed precious lives and treasure in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and elsewhere. It was the right thing to do after 9/11/01 for our national security, and it was the moral thing to do. Today Obama is  turning Afghanistan over to the barbaric Taliban, just as we seem to be turning Iraq over to ISIS and an Iranian proxy regime in Baghdad.

Obama is knowingly running away from the worst war ideology in the world: war-making Islam.

But why? Could it be because he thinks it is the best ideology in the world? There have been many signs that he loves Islam. And not, we suspect, because he is deluded into thinking it other than it is, but because it is as it is.

 Since he is constitutionally unable to tell the truth, he has to lie about it. Suddenly the Wahhabi torture theology of ISIS – identical to that of the Taliban – no longer makes for a “terrorist” gang. No, they are an “indigenous insurgency,” following the most shameful lie of the left today, the corrupt idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom-fighter. We should have realized that when Obama allowed the young people’s Green Revolution in Tehran to be killed and tortured into silence at the very beginning of this administration.

We have lost our moral bearings, and the left likes it that way.

Obama is a typical leftist horror story, just as merciless as Lenin, Chávez, and Pol Pot.  Since we’ve exhausted the English vocabulary for describing him and his gang, I suggest we borrow his own lies to describe him.

He is Obama the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Servant of the most ruthless war theology in history.

He is not my president, and in a moral sense, he is not an American president at all.

But say we did have a president who would tell the truth and speak out against Islam, its ruthlessly destructive ideology, its unjust law, its cruelty to women, its extreme bigotry in allowing no apostasy – would the Taliban or ISIS be deterred?

And if not, would most Americans say they must be stopped by force – American military force?

Samantha Power has a highly selective bleeding heart. She and Hillary Clinton worked passionately to get American bombs falling on Libya; ostensibly to protect the people from massacre by the tyrant Qaddafi when they knew he was not actually threatening them – only to stand back when he was killed as a result of their interference, and let real massacres rip; including the one at Benghazi of the US ambassador and three other Americans.

Perhaps Dr. Power’s silence since then could be read as a sign that she learnt a lesson about “the responsibility to protect” which she had invoked in the case of Libya. That would give her the benefit of any doubt about her character and intelligence. But whether her silence on the daily atrocities being carried out, in the name of Allah, in Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, the Congo, and now the Cameroons – is the result of painfully acquired wisdom or merely conformity to Obama’s “policy” of complaisance, we cannot know.

Today the number of lethal terrorist attacks by Muslims since 9/11, as tallied by (deliberately ironically named) “The Religion of Peace”, reached 24,700.

The daily number is reflected in our margin. And from time to time we reproduce the 6 latest attacks recorded by the same website.

Here is today’s snapshot of Islamic atrocities:

Islam’s Latest Contributions to Peace

“Mohammed is God’s apostle.  Those who follow him are harsh
to the unbelievers but merciful to one another”  Quran 48:29

2014.12.29 (Taji, Iraq) – A Shahid suicide bomber dismantles eleven Shiite mourners at a funeral tent.

2014.12.28 (Aleppo, Syria) – Two children are among six souls sent to Allah by a caliphate car bomb.

2014.12.27 (Mozogo, Cameroon) – Boko Haram burn down a village and slaughter at least thirty residents.

2014.12.27 (Bhiri Sha Rehman, Pakistan) – An Ahmadi is shot in the head shortly after a TV preacher rails against the religious minority.

2014.12.26 (Nad-e-Ali, Afghanistan) – A woman and child are among three killed by a Religion of Peace IED.

2014.12.25 (Ndalya, DRC) – ADF terrorists hack ten villagers to death in the middle of the night.

IED = improvised explosive device.

ADF stands for the laughably named Allied Democratic Forces, a coalition of Islamic terrorist groups in the also laughably named Democratic Republic of the Congo.

President Obama believes that America is arrogant.* If his foreign policy can be explained by anything, it would be his intention to bring America down a peg or ten. Looked at like that, the disasters we see happening in many parts of the world are testimony not to  Obama’s failure, but to his success.

Not that President Obama can have any objection to arrogance as such. He is an arrogant man. He just doesn’t want America to be proud of its superiority. He hates the very idea that it is superior. But while he would not even acknowledge its political-moral superiority as a republic constituted for liberty, he cannot deny that it is economically and militarily stronger than any other country. So he’s been working to change that for the last six years.

The whole world is the worse for his efforts.

This is from Front Page, by Bruce Thornton:

The 6 years of Barack Obama’s foreign policy have seen American influence and power decline across the globe. Traditional rivals like China and Russia are emboldened and on the march in the South China Sea and Ukraine. Iran, branded as the world’s deadliest state sponsor of terrorism, is arrogantly negotiating its way to a nuclear bomb. Bloody autocrats and jihadist gangs in the Middle East scorn our president’s threats and behead our citizens. Countries in which Americans have shed their blood in service to our interests and ideals are in the process of being abandoned to our enemies. And allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia are bullied or ignored. All over the world, a vacuum of power has been created by a foreign policy sacrificed to domestic partisan advantage, and characterized by criminal incompetence.

Incompetence is what it looks like. But if failure is the aim, then either the incompetence is only an appearance, or it is a means to the end.

How we have arrived at this point, the dangers to our security and interests if we don’t change course, and what must be done to recover our international prestige and effectiveness are the themes of Bret Stephens’ America in Retreat. The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. …

A clear sign of American retreat is the precipitous decline in military spending. “In the name of budgetary savings,” Stephens writes, “the Army is returning to its June 1940 size,” and “the Navy put fewer ships at sea at any time since 1916.” The Air Force is scheduled to retire 25,000 airmen and mothball 550 planes. Our nuclear forces are being cut to meet the terms of the 2010 New Start Treaty with Russia, even as its nuclear arsenal has been increasing. Meanwhile Obama … issues empty threats, blustering diktats, and sheer lies that convince world leaders he is a “self-infatuated weakling”.

Unfortunately, 52% of the American people agree that the U.S. “should mind its own business internationally”,  and 65% want to “reduce overseas military commitments”, including a majority of Republicans. This broad consensus that America should retreat from global affairs reflects our age’s bipartisan isolationism, the centerpiece of Stephens’ analysis. This national mood is not a sign of decline, according to Stephens, who documents the enormous advantages America still enjoys globally, from its superiority in research and entrepreneurial vigor, to its healthy demographics and spirit of innovation. But it does bespeak a dangerous withdrawal from the policies that created the postwar Pax Americana – even though this global order policed by the U.S. defeated the murderous, nuclear-armed ideology of Soviet communism, and made possible the astonishing economic expansion that has lifted millions from poverty all over the world. …

For Stephens, isolationism has not been the only danger to American foreign policy success. What he calls “the overdose of ideals”, specifically the “freedom agenda” of the sort George W. Bush tried in Iraq and Afghanistan, has misdirected our efforts and squandered our resources in the pursuit of impossible goals. The success of the Cold War and the subsequent spread of democracy and free-market economies suggested that the world could be not just protected from an evil ideology, but “redeemed” by actively fostering liberal democracy even in countries and regions lacking the necessary network of social mores and political virtues upon which genuine liberal democracy rests. But in attempting to redeem the world, Stephens notes, policy makers “neglected a more prosaic responsibility: to police it”.

The failures to create stability, let alone true democracy, in Iraq and Afghanistan have enabled what Stephens calls the “retreat doctrine”, one to be found in both political parties. Barack Obama is the master of this species of foreign policy, incoherently combining idealistic democracy-promoting rhetoric with actions that further withdraw the U.S. from its responsibility to ensure global order. Under the guise of “nation-building at home,” and in service to traditional leftist doubt about America’s goodness, Obama has retreated in the face of aggression, and encouraged cuts in military spending in order to fund an ever-expanding entitlement state.

But also, equally, in order to make America weaker.

Meanwhile, “Republicans are busy writing their own retreat doctrine in the name of small government, civil liberties, fiscal restraint, ‘realism’,  a creeping sense of Obama-induced national decline, and a deep pessimism about America’s ability to make itself, much less the rest of the world, better.”

The “retreat doctrine” is dangerous because global disorder is a constant contingency. The remainder of Stephens’ book approaches this topic first from the perspective of theory and history, and then from today’s practice. History teaches us that all the substitutes for a liberal dominant global power have failed to prevent the descent into conflict and mass violence. The ideas of a balance of power, collective security, or the presumed peaceful dividend and “harmony of interests” created by global trade did not prevent World War I or its even more devastating sequel. Nor are they any more useful in our own times.

As for today, Stephens identifies several challenges to a global order fragilely held together by the commitment to liberal democracy, open economies, and the free circulation of ideas and trade. The “revisionists” attack this model from various perspectives. Iran sees it as a fomenter of godlessness and hedonism, Russia is moved to oppose it by “revanchism and resentment”,  and China believes that it “is a recipe for bankruptcy and laziness”,  lacking a “sense of purpose, organization, and direction”.  All three see evidence for their various critiques in the failure of the U.S. to exercise its massive power in the face of challenges, and in the willingness of American elites to revel in guilt and self-doubt. These perceptions of national decline invite rivals and enemies to behave as if the U.S. is in fact declining.

The other international players that could worsen disorder are “freelancers” and “free radicals”.  The former include those countries like Israel or Japan who, convinced that America will not act in its own or its allies’ interests, will understandably take action that necessarily entails unforeseen disastrous consequences. Much more dangerous are the “free radicals”, the jihadist gangs rampaging across 3 continents, and the nuclear proliferators like Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan’s A.Q. Khan, whose collaboration with each other and rogue regimes like Venezuela endangers the world through provoking even further proliferation on the part of rivals, or by handing off nuclear weapons to terrorist organizations. And then there are “free radicals” like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who have undermined global order by publicizing the necessarily covert tools, practices, and institutions that undergird and protect it.

Finally, there are the structural weaknesses of the globalized economy and its continuing decline in growth, which may create “breaks” in national economic systems that “will be profoundly disruptive, potentially violent, and inherently unpredictable”. Add America’s retreat from world affairs and reductions in military spending, and in the “nearer term”, Stephens warns, “terrorists, insurgents, pirates, hackers, ‘whistleblowers’,  arms smugglers, and second-rate powers armed with weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles will be able to hold the United States inexpensively at risk”,  provoking further American retreat from world affairs and the inevitable increased aggression by our enemies and rivals. …

 So what can be done? In his conclusion Stephens applies to foreign affairs the “broken windows” tactics of urban policing that caused rates of violent crimes to plummet over the last few decades. Thus “the immediate goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to arrest the continued slide into a broken-windows world of international disorder”.

This foreign policy would require increasing U.S. military spending to 5% of GDP, with a focus on increasing numbers of troops, planes, and ships rather than on overly sophisticated and expensive new weapons. It would mean stationing U.S. forces near global hotspots to serve as a deterrent and rapid-reaction force to snuff out incipient crises. It would require reciprocity from allies in military spending, who for too long have taken for granted the American defense umbrella. It would focus attention on regions and threats that really matter, particularly the borderlands of free states, in order to protect global good citizens from predators. It means acting quickly and decisively when conflict does arise, rather than wasting time in useless debates and diplomatic gabfests. Finally, it would require that Americans accept that their unprecedented global economic, cultural, and military power confers on us both vulnerability to those who envy and hate us, and responsibility for the global order on which our own security and interests depend. …

No matter how understandable our traditional aversion to military and political entanglements abroad, history has made us the global policeman, one committed to human rights, accountability, and political freedom. If we abdicate that position, there is no country powerful, or worthy enough, to take our place.

We agree with that.

And Thornton tantalizes us with this:

Stephens ends with an imagined “scenario” of how a serious global disruption could occur, one grounded in current trends and thus frighteningly believable.

When we’ve found out what that scenario is, which is to say when we’ve read the book, we’ll return to this important subject.

*  “In his first nine months in office, President Obama has issued apologies and criticisms of America in speeches in France, England, Turkey, and Cairo; at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York City. He has apologized for what he deems to be American arrogance, dismissiveness, and derision; for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others; for treating other countries as mere proxies, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations, and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments; for committing torture, for dragging our feet on global warming and for selectively promoting democracy.” – Mitt Romney, quoted by PolitiFact.com

But what better could be expected from Barry (“Chickenshit”) Obama?*

 “Chickenshit” is on the right. The man on the left was a soldier who became the leader of his country.

This is from an article by Diana West at Townhall:

In the summer of 2009, U.S. Marines pushed into Afghanistan’s Helmand province to begin the new offensive that President Obama had ordered based on the model of President Bush’s Iraq strategy of nation-building and counter-insurgency (COIN). This fall, a little over five years later, U.S. Marines turned over their last base in Helmand to Afghan forces and, except for a residual force, left the country.

And?

Maybe a crescendo in background noise, but not much else. Surely, after 13 years of war, it’s not too soon for a public reckoning. Then again, maybe it’s too late. Maybe Americans have forgotten the fiasco of vision, strategy and tactics that civilian and military leaders forced onto the backs of U.S. service members. If so, it’s worth returning to those early days of this war’s final phase.

It started with that childish, lethal idea – COIN. The US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) would fight to make the Islamic tribespeople of Afghanistan like us more than they liked the Islamic tribespeople of the Taliban. Then, according to COIN-plan, Western forces would transfer this fought-over affection of the Afghan people to the Kabul government that the West was simultaneously building and propping up. Presto – COIN victory.

Grown men gushed at the prospect. “Victory in this conflict is about winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people and engendering their trust,” Air Force Brig. Gen. Steven L. Kwast said in 2009. “When the Afghan people trust us and believe us when we tell them what we’re going to do, we will win this overnight.”

COIN’s fight for Afghan “hearts and minds” meant pandering was the order of the day. “I’m reading a very good book now about this part of the world. It’s written in English, but it’s all about you – it’s the Quran,” the top commander in Afghanistan at the time, Gen. David D. McKiernan, told Afghan tribal leaders in April 2009.

Did he really read it? Surely not – or how could he call that manual for massacre “a very good book”?

COIN also meant commanders ordered their troops into proximity and even intimacy with the local population – the menfolk, anyway, pederasts, polygamists and misogynists by culture and religion, and, all too often, jihadists.

“You’re going to drink lots of tea. You’re going to eat lots of goat. Get to know the people,” Marine Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson said, explaining this COIN order of battle to officers in July 2009. “That’s the reason why we’re here.”

This was “population-centric COIN,” as executed by President Obama’s new ISAF commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal. It is a doctrine that values (Afghan) population protection over (U.S.) force protection — but don’t worry, it’s all for the good of the “long-term” cause. In the “short term,” COIN commanders set highly restrictive “rules of engagement” to enforce the doctrine, undoubtedly leading to innumerable U.S. casualties.

And how’s that long-term cause doing?

On “60 Minutes” in October 2009, Marine Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss explained how he got COIN concepts across to the fighting man.

“As I told the Marines before we deployed, it’s about a three-second decision, especially with his personal weapon. The first second is ‘Can I?’ The next two are ‘Should I?’ ‘What is going to be the effect of my action? Is it going to move the Afghan closer to the government or further away?'”

By which time the US soldier has been shot.

As even McChrystal would say about COIN in 2010, as reported in Rolling Stone: “This is the philosophical part that works with think tanks. But it doesn’t get the same reception from infantry companies.”

That’s because infantry companies deal with bullets, not PowerPoint. “I understand the reason behind it, but it’s so hard to fight a war like this,” Lance Corporal Travis Anderson told The Associated Press in 2010. “They’re using our rules of engagement against us,” he said, adding that his platoon had repeatedly seen men dropping their guns into ditches before disappearing among civilians.

COIN was also very much about stuff – “baksheesh,” or bribes – on a massive scale.

“What do you need here?” … McChrystal asked locals … on a walk-through in a Helmand town in 2010.

Schools. Security. Hospitals. Roads.

“Inshallah, we will provide the services as soon as possible.”  …

But Afghans still didn’t like us or trust us. Cultural chasm between Islam and the West, anyone? Nope, not enough COIN, U.S. commanders concluded.

When Gen. David Petraeus became ISAF commander in 2010, he issued a fresh, new COIN guidance that included: “Walk. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population.”

Foot patrols on IED-laced roads made COIN horrifically costly. In June 2011, the U.S. Army reported on a new pattern of injury — “dismounted complex blast injury” — and defined it thus: “An injury caused by an explosion occurring to a service member while dismounted in a combat theater that results in amputation of at least one lower extremity at the knee or above, with either amputation or severe injury to the opposite lower limb, combined with pelvic, abdominal or urogenital injury.”

The final line may be most chilling of all: “This definition is not meant to define a subset of injuries for policy-making decisions.” Heavens, no. Keep walking those IED-laced roads, for the love of not Mike, but Ahmed. Keep reality from all policy-making decisions, or COIN will self-destruct, along with the reputations of its enforcers.

Exactly why a public reckoning is essential.

* An Obama administration official said recently that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is “chickenshit”, according to Jeffrey Goldberg writing in The Atlantic. The official was undoubtedly relaying the opinion of President Obama, who must have wanted it to be made public. If it wasn’t Obama himself saying it directly to the journalist. The implication was that Netanyahu was a coward. Why? For not bombing Iranian nuclear facilities  – an action he would probably have taken had not the Obama gang done everything they could to prevent him from doing it.

We would vote Obama the worst president ever. Even worse than Jimmy Carter.

Bill Whittle makes a case that must annoy Democrats – that Obama is “Bush Lite”.

Call it Islam, call it Hamas, call it ISIS, call it the Muslim Brotherhood, call it BokoHaram; call it the Palestinians; call it the United Nations; call it by the name of any Islamic state; call it the interfaith movement, call it the Left, call it the religion of peace; demonstrate for it in the streets of the capitals of Europe; parade for it in New York and Chicago and Los Angeles; this is the thing itself:

We found the video at christianpost.com. We quote part of the text:

A Christian man in Syria recently had his head brutally hacked off by Islamic militants after being forced to deny his faith and salute Mohammed as “the messenger of God”.

So by Muslim rules he became a Muslim. Islam forbids Muslims to kill Muslims.

The perpetrators themselves filmed the atrocity “for the world to see and broadcast as a warning to ‘everyone like him’.”

In the video that was posted to YouTube with translated captions, the helpless Christian man is surrounded by armed militants wearing masks and he is heard reciting as instructed: “There is no God but God and I testify that Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

The victim did not say “God” but “Allah”. The Christian reporter chooses, like many Christians, to claim that the god of Islam and the god of Christianity are one and the same.

An apparent leader in the group of militants is then heard instructing the group: “No one will shoot him now, do you understand? He will not be killed by shooting because it is merciful for him.”

By which the savage seems to mean that death by shooting would be too merciful for him. He goes on:

“He will be beheaded because he is Kaffir, non-Muslim, sided [with] the government and was not praying at all. Everyone like him will have the same end, beheading,” said the militant.

Then they cut his head off as the Muslim murderers cry ‘Allahu Akbar’.

Islam punishes the crime of being raped with death.

This picture and the text are from the Clarion Project.

A 10-year girl in Afghanistan is in danger of being honor-killed by her family after being violently raped by a mullah in a local mosque after her Quran class. After the family openly talked about killing the girl, the mullah offered to marry her, claiming to the authorities that he thought the girl was 17 and that the sex was consensual.

After nearly dying from her injuries sustained during the rape due to a delay in medical care, “Women for Afghan Women”,  a shelter for battered women and children, arranged for the girl to be taken to a hospital. Her injuries included a severing of the wall between her vagina and rectum that caused hemorrhaging.

After her recovery, she was taken to a women’s shelter to protect her from her family.

Pictures taken of the girl to document the case show a small, pre-pubescent child whose weight at the time was about 40 pounds (about 18 kilos), according to the doctor.

Last week, the police were given orders to return the girl to her family, despite the fact that she will most likely be killed. Tuesday, the police entered the shelter and took the girl.

“I went to the hospital when they brought her there. I was sitting next to her bed when I overheard her mother and aunt saying that her father was under tremendous pressure by the villagers to kill the girl because she had brought shame to them,” said Nederah Geyah, who is the head of the women’s affairs office in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

Yes, there is, or has been, a “women’s affairs office” in Kunduz.

Honor killings of girls who have been raped are common in Afghanistan, as family members believe that the raped girl brings shame to the family. Moreover, a girl who has been raped is considered not fit to be married and therefore must be supported by her family.

Dr. Hassina Sarwari, who is head of the shelter and a pediatrician, said when she arrived at the hospital to take the girl to the shelter, she encounter a large group of elders from the girl’s village. The group included male members of the girl’s family – her father, her brothers and an uncle.

Once inside, she met the girl’s aunt, who told the doctor she had been told by her husband to smuggle the girl out of the hospital and deposit her into the hands of the family outside.

“She said they wanted to take her and kill her, and dump her in the river,” Dr. Sarwari said.

The doctor made her way to the girl’s room, where she found the girl and her mother holding hands and crying.

Did the mother wish to save her daughter?  Not at all.

Dr. Sarwari remembers the mother’s words: “My daughter, may dust and soil protect you now,” she said. “We will make you a bed of dust and soil. We will send you to the cemetery where you will be safe.”

With the help of Geyah, the girl was rescued from her family and placed in the shelter. Geyah also helped initiate legal proceedings against the mullah.

But that “women’s affairs office” is not very powerful or even effective.

After publicizing the case, both women[ Sarwari and Geyah] were threatened with death by the mullahs as well as the girl’s family.

A militia commander demanded that the doctor return the girl to her family or face the consequences.

At one point, Dr. Sarwari was forced to go into hiding. Geyah has since resigned her job and moved to a different part of the country. Dr. Sarwari has said she wants to leave the country altogether. …

Locals …  are angry at the shelter – not at the mullahs or the family. The shelter, which is one of seven in Afghanistan, is perceived as a tool of the Americans to destroy traditional Afghani culture.

The traditional culture, which Afghan men want at all costs to preserve, includes the brutal raping and consequent killing of ten-year-old girls.

The shelter  has been receiving American aid, but the funding will stop when the last of the Americans leave. The seven shelters for women and girls in Afghanistan will have to close. Then there will be nothing to impede traditional Islamic Afghan culture from doing its worst.

As quite often happens, Daniel Greenfield expresses an informed opinion on a headline event so well that we cannot resist letting him speak for us:

The bodies of three murdered Israeli teenagers, 16-year-old Naftali who liked to play basketball, 16-year-old Gilad who had just finished a scuba diving course and 19-year-old Eyal with his guitar, will be met by the same ghastly parade of pallbearers who accompany every victim of terrorism.

The reporters will scribble down something about “settlements” and the “Cycle of Violence.” The diplomats will urge restraint and remind everyone that the only solution can be found through negotiations with the terrorists. And the pundits will put it all into perspective burying them under layers of words and weighting their coffins down with stones of forgetfulness.

But all the empty words about the “Occupation” and the “Cycle of Violence,” the invocation of a peaceful solution that is always about to arrive, but never does, and the maps that cede more territory to terrorists are addressing a problem that doesn’t exist.

It’s not about physical territory. It’s about spiritual territory. It’s not about nationalism. It’s about Islamism.

It’s not about the “Occupation.” It’s about Islam.

“I raised my children on the knees of the [Islamic] religion, they are religious guys, honest and clean-handed, and their goal is to bring the victory of Islam,” the mother of one of the Hamas killers said.

Not a Palestinian nation. Not a Two State Solution. Not forty percent of this and sixty percent of that.

The victory of Islam.

Naftali, Gilad and Eyal were murdered for the same reason that countless people have been killed in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Not to mention the United Kingdom and the United States.

They were murdered in the name of a religious war that has been going on for over a thousand years. Muslims did not suddenly begin killing Jews in 1948 or 1929. They did not begin killing Christians over American foreign policy or the oil business.

Muslims did not begin killing Jews and Christians over foreign policy. They began persecuting and killing their Christian and Jewish neighbors because their religion told them to.

Hamas, the terror group that murdered the three teens, is not a Palestinian nationalist organization, though it occasionally plays the part. Its charter begins with Allah and ends with Allah. Article Five of its charter states that the group extends to “wherever on earth there are Muslims, who adopt Islam as their way of life.”

Its goal is to create an Islamic state. Everything else is secondary.

The Hamas charter describes it as part of the worldwide “Muslim Brotherhood Movement”. Brotherhood terrorists kill Jews in Israel for the same reason that they kill Shiites in Syria or Christian Copts in Egypt.

Article Seven of the Hamas charter concludes with the infamous Islamic Hadith which proclaims that the Muslim end times will come only when “Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”

Aside from the obvious genocidal bigotry, this is a quote from a text that is over a thousand years old. Its author was not preaching the mass murder of Jews because of settlements in the West Bank. At the time Muslims had subjugated and ruled over the Jewish population of the Middle East. The Jews were no threat to them. The idea of a Jewish army was as ridiculous as traveling to the moon.

The hatred that leaks out of that text has nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with Islam.

The insistence on a foreign policy explanation for Muslim anti-Semitism is as ahistorical as claiming that Hitler only hated Jews because of the Yom Kippur War. Except that at least both of these events took place in the twentieth century. Islam has been hating and persecuting Jews for over 1300 years before the rebirth of the modern State of Israel.

There are two ways of looking at the worldwide plague of Muslim terrorism. One is to treat every Islamic conflict with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and a dozen other religions as being due to some local political grievance of recent vintage. The other is to understand them as local expressions of a historical religious war and the continuation of the wave of conquests that made Islam into a worldwide religion.

We can be like the six blind men feeling around the Islamic elephant and assuming that its trunk and tusks are entirely separate phenomena. Or we can open our eyes and see the elephant in the room.

Hamas’ charter begins with the Koran’s praise for Muslims “as the best people” and damns Christians and Jews to be “smitten with abasement” for having “incurred the wrath of Allah.”

This is not a statement of Palestinian nationalism. It’s Islamic supremacism.

There is nothing negotiable about supremacism. Supremacism cannot be appeased. Supremacism does not want a piece of the pie. It wants the whole pie. The allies learned that the hard way with Hitler. So did the countless kingdoms that attempted to live in peace with the armies of the Mohammedan conquerors.

If Israel had never existed, Hamas would still exist, just as the other branches of the Muslim Brotherhood exist elsewhere throughout the Middle East. Even if Zionism did not exist, the Muslim Brotherhood would persecute the Jews under its control, just like the Christians in Egypt and Syria.

If Netanyahu, Sharon, Begin and a thousand other Israeli villains of the apologists of Islam had never been born, the followers of Mohammed would have gone on killing Jews just as they had for over a thousand years.

If the blue and white had never waved over Jerusalem, if Jews had remained as downtrodden and persecuted in the lands of Islam as the Copts and the Zoroastrians, Naftali, Gilad and Eyal would still have been murdered by two killers who were raised by their mothers to usher in “the victory of Islam.”

There is no political solution to a supremacist conflict.

If a thousand years of Jewish humiliation and persecution did not satisfy the ancestors of the murderers of those three teenagers, how will handing over part of Jerusalem do the job?

Solutions begin with truth. The truth is that Islamic violence against Jews is not recent or exceptional. The murder of Jews by Muslims, whether in Israel or Belgium, is not any different than the Muslim butchery of Christians, Hindus, Buddhists and even minority Muslim splinter faiths. These conflicts cannot be resolved through appeasement. They can only be addressed through resistance.

Yes. Once that truth is fully accepted, the only remaining question is, what form should the resistance take?

Our answer is: military force wherever it can be effective; and everywhere, at all times, a de-Islamization campaign along the lines of the de-Nazification campaign pursued intensely in Germany after the military defeat of the Third Reich.

Islam needs urgently to be criticized; constantly, relentlessly, daily; in schools and academies; by the mass media, on all the social media. It should be so denounced and reviled that if anyone chooses to adhere to it he would feel it necessary to do so in secret, furtively, surreptitiously, in shame and fear of being found out.

Islam is an ideology as evil and destructive as Nazism.

All religion is a drag on enlightened civilization. Islam is the only religion now that is actively destroying it. Islam itself must be defeated – not only on battlefields, but with argument.

It is the ideology, not the people (except those actively engaged in jihad), who must be boldly attacked.

The ideology called Islam is a lethal disease. The human race must be cured of it. 

In plain reason –

Those who say they believe in freedom of speech cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in freedom cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in equality of the sexes cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in “the golden rule” cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in “diversity” cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who hate cruelty cannot tolerate Islam.

Those who believe in tolerance itself cannot tolerate intolerant Islam.

Know it, understand it, loathe it, despise it, talk about it incessantly, forbid it, exclude it, abolish it.

Is there any other way?