All Mark Steyn‘s columns are so good, so funny however serious and important the point he is making, that it’s hard to say this one or that one is the best or the funniest. But a recent article titled Too Big To Win, on the highly important subject of America’s wars, must surely be among his best and funniest.

We are picking sentences and passages from it to give our readers a taste, but we hope they’ll be enticed to read the whole thing here and enjoy the feast.

Why can’t America win wars? …

Afghanistan? The “good war” is now “America’s longest war.” Our forces have been there longer than the Red Army was. The “hearts and minds” strategy is going so well that American troops are now being killed by the Afghans who know us best. …

Libya? The good news is that we’ve vastly reduced the time it takes us to get quagmired. I believe the Libyan campaign is already in The Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest quagmire on record. In an inspired move, we’ve chosen to back the one Arab liberation movement incapable of knocking off the local strongman even when you lend them every NATO air force. But not to worry: President Obama, cooed an administration official to The New Yorker, is “leading from behind.” Indeed. What could be more impeccably multilateral than a coalition pantomime horse composed entirely of rear ends? Apparently it would be “illegal” to target Colonel Qaddafi, so our strategic objective is to kill him by accident. So far we’ve killed a son and a couple of grandkids. Maybe by the time you read this we’ll have added a maiden aunt or two to the trophy room. It’s not precisely clear why offing the old pock-skinned transvestite should be a priority of the U.S. right now, but let’s hope it happens soon, because otherwise there’ll be no way of telling when this “war” is “ended.”

According to partisan taste, one can blame the trio of current morasses on Bush or Obama, but in the bigger picture they’re part of a pattern of behavior that predates either man, stretching back through non-victories great and small — Somalia, Gulf War One, Vietnam, Korea. On the more conclusive side of the ledger, we have . . . well, lemme see: Grenada, 1983. And, given that that was a bit of post-colonial housekeeping Britain should have taken care of but declined to, one could argue that even that lone bright spot supports a broader narrative of Western enfeeblement. At any rate, America’s only unambiguous military triumph since 1945 is a small Caribbean island with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. For 43 percent of global military expenditure, that’s not much bang for the buck. …

At the dawn of the so-called American era, Washington chose to downplay U.S. hegemony and instead created and funded transnational institutions in which the non-imperial superpower was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s status in a kind of geopolitical affirmative-action program. …   In 1950, America had a unique dominance of the “free world” and it could afford to be generous, so it was: We had more money than we knew what to do with, so we absolved our allies of paying for their own defense. …

By the time the Cold War ended … U.S.–Soviet nuclear standoff of mutual deterrence decayed into a unipolar world of U.S. auto-deterrence. …

At a certain level, credible deterrence depends on a credible enemy. The Soviet Union disintegrated, but the surviving superpower’s instinct to de-escalate intensified: In Kirkuk as in Kandahar, every Lilliputian warlord quickly grasped that you could provoke the infidel Gulliver with relative impunity. Mutually Assured Destruction had curdled into Massively Applied Desultoriness. …

The Pentagon outspends the Chinese, British, French, Russian, Japanese, German, Saudi, Indian, Italian, South Korean, Brazilian, Canadian, Australian, Spanish, Turkish, and Israeli militaries combined. So why doesn’t it feel like that?

Well, for exactly that reason: If you outspend every serious rival combined, you’re obviously something other than the soldiery of a conventional nation state. But what exactly? In the Nineties, the French liked to complain that “globalization” was a euphemism for “Americanization.” But one can just as easily invert the formulation: “Americanization” is a euphemism for “globalization,” in which the geopolitical sugar daddy is so busy picking up the tab for the global order he loses all sense of national interest. … The Pentagon now makes war for the world. …

An army has to wage war on behalf of something real. For better or worse, “king and country” is real, and so, mostly for worse, are the tribal loyalties of Africa’s blood-drenched civil wars. But it’s hardly surprising that it’s difficult to win wars waged on behalf of something so chimerical as “the international community.” If you’re making war on behalf of an illusory concept, is it even possible to have war aims? What’s ours? “[We] are in Afghanistan to help the Afghan people,” General Petraeus said in April. Somewhere generations of old-school imperialists are roaring their heads off, not least at the concept of “the Afghan people.” But when you’re the expeditionary force of the parliament of man, what else is there? …

Nation building in Afghanistan is the ne plus ultra of a fool’s errand. But even if one were so disposed, effective “nation building” is done in the national interest of the builder. The British rebuilt India in their own image, with a Westminster parliament, common law, and an English education system. In whose image are we building Afghanistan? Eight months after Petraeus announced his latest folly, the Afghan Local Police initiative, Oxfam reported that the newly formed ALP was a hotbed of torture and pederasty. Almost every Afghan institution is, of course. But for most of human history they’ve managed to practice both enthusiasms without international subvention. The U.S. taxpayer accepts wearily the burden of subsidy for Nevada’s cowboy poets and San Francisco’s mime companies, but, even by those generous standards of cultural preservation, it’s hard to see why he should be facilitating the traditional predilections of Pashtun men with an eye for the “dancing boys of Kandahar.” …

So the Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity is building schoolhouses in Afghanistan. Big deal. The problem, in Kandahar as in Kansas, is not the buildings but what’s being taught inside them — and we’ve no stomach for getting into that. So what’s the point of building better infrastructure for Afghanistan’s wretched tribal culture? What’s our interest in state-of-the-art backwardness?

Transnational do-gooding is political correctness on tour. It takes the relativist assumptions of the multiculti varsity and applies them geopolitically: The white man’s burden meets liberal guilt. No wealthy developed nation should have a national interest, because a national interest is a selfish interest. Afghanistan started out selfishly — a daringly original military campaign, brilliantly executed, to remove your enemies from power and kill as many of the bad guys as possible. Then America sobered up and gradually brought a freakish exception into compliance with the rule. In Libya as in Kosovo, war is legitimate only if you have no conceivable national interest in whatever conflict you’re fighting. The fact that you have no stake in it justifies your getting into it. The principal rationale is that there’s no rationale, and who could object to that? Applied globally, political correctness obliges us to forswear sovereignty. …

On we stagger, with Cold War institutions, transnational sensibilities, politically correct solicitousness, fraudulent preening pseudo–nation building, expensive gizmos, little will, and no war aims . . . but real American lives. … Sixty-six years after V-J Day, the American way of war needs top-to-toe reinvention.

“We must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed.”

Who said that? Whoever it was should have got a standing ovation.

It was Paul Ryan. We took the quotation from Investors’ Business Daily:

Ryan introduced important elements to the U.S. political debate: about U.S. leadership — and its critical economic, military and moral components.

Power takes resources, Ryan suggested, and if the U.S. means to retain its global leadership, it better get its finances in order.

“If there’s one thing I could say with complete confidence about American foreign policy, it is this: “Our fiscal policy and our foreign policy are on a collision course; and if we fail to put our budget on a sustainable path, then we are choosing decline as a world power.”

Ryan warned that defense spending has shrunk as entitlements — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — swallow 40% of all federal spending. By contrast, defense has shrunk to 16%.

“If we continue on our current path, the rapid rise of health care costs will crowd out all areas of the budget, including defense,” said the one Republican who has a plan to reverse that. …

With the rise of China today, the economic muscle is moving to the enemy’s side … And once economic and military matters decline, America’s moral authority will fade too.

“A world without U.S. leadership will be a more chaotic place, a place where we have less influence and a place where our citizens face more dangers and fewer opportunities. … Take a moment and imagine a world led by China and Russia. …

“An expanding community of nations that shares our economic values as well as our political values would ensure a more prosperous world … a world with more opportunity for mutually beneficial trade … and a world with fewer economic disruptions caused by violent conflict.”

That means more free-trade agreements, including legislative action on three finished free-trade pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea, which are awaiting votes after five years of inaction.

The ultimate purpose, Ryan stressed, is to prevent a retreat of America in the world.

“Instead of heeding these calls to surrender, we must renew our commitment to the idea that America is the greatest force for human freedom the world has ever seen; a country whose devotion to free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any economic system ever designed; and a nation whose best days still lie ahead of us, if we make the necessary choices today.”

We don’t know if he’ll run for president, but the more Ryan speaks, the more presidential he sounds.

If he doesn’t run, whoever does would do well to become as much like him as possible.

Professional skeptics though we are, we think Osama bin Laden really is dead.

The American people, who paid for the raid by the SEALs who carried out the glorious act of revenge for them by killing him, should have been shown the corpse. As it was hastily disposed of (or so we’ve been told), they should be shown the photos of it.

But the president has decided we may not see them.

Does the president really have that power? If so, why?

And why should we not see the pictures of the corpse of the man who plotted 9/11? Is Obama afraid that some might gloat over them? (We would.)

And why have we been told lie after lie about the SEALs’ raid on his compound?

Michelle Malkin, a reliable provider of sound information and intelligent analysis, sets out the lies-thus-far, writing at Townhall:

Take One: Bin Laden died in a bloody firefight. …

Take Two: Bin Laden did not engage in a firefight. …

Take Three: Bin Laden’s wife died after her feckless husband used her as a human shield.

Take Four: Bin Laden’s wife did not die, wasn’t used as a human shield and was only shot in the leg. Someone else’s wife was killed, somewhere else in the house.

Take Five: A transport helicopter experienced “mechanical failure” and was forced to make a hard landing during the mission.

Take Six: A top-secret helicopter clipped the bin Laden compound wall, crashed and was purposely exploded after the mission to prevent our enemies from learning more about it.

Take Seven: The bin Laden photos would be released to the world as proof positive of his death.

Take Eight: The bin Laden photos would not be released to the world because no one needs proof …

Take Nine: Bin Laden’s compound was a lavish mansion.

Take Ten: Bin Laden’s compound was a glorified pigsty.

Take Eleven: Bin Laden’s compound had absolutely no television, phone or computer access.

Take Twelve: Bin Laden’s compound was stocked with hard drives, thumb drives, DVDs and computers galore.

Take Thirteen: Er, remember that statement about bin Laden being armed? And then not armed? Well, the new version is that he had an AK-47 “nearby.”

Take Fourteen: A gung-ho Obama spearheaded the “gutsy” mission.

Take Fifteen: A reluctant Obama dithered for 16 hours before being persuaded by CIA Director Leon Panetta.

Take Sixteen: Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and close advisers watched the raid unfold in real time … and a gripping insider photo was posted immediately by the White House on the Flickr picture-sharing website for all to see.

Take Seventeen: Er, they weren’t really watching real-time video “minute by minute” because there was at least nearly a half-hour that they “didn’t know just exactly what was going on,” Panetta clarified. Or rather, un-clarified.

Take Eighteen: Stalwart Obama’s order was to kill, not capture, bin Laden.

Take Nineteen: Sensitive Obama’s order was to kill or capture — and that’s why the SEAL team gave him a chance to surrender, upon which he resisted with arms, or actually didn’t resist with arms, but sort of resisted without arms, except there was an AK-47 nearby, sort of, or maybe not, thus making it possible to assert that while Decisive Obama did tell the SEALs to kill bin Laden and should claim all credit for doing so, Progressive Obama can also be absolved by bleeding hearts because of the painstakingly concocted post facto possibility that bin Laden somehow threatened our military — telepathically or something — before being taken out.

Take Twenty: “We’ve been as forthcoming with facts as we can be,” said an irritated [Jay] Carney [White House Press Secretary] on Wednesday.

So the SEALs, not Obama, made the decision to kill bin Laden.

Will Eric Holder’s Department of “Justice” now charge them with murder?

We keep reading that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) was an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terror finance trial in 2007 and 2008. And we keep wondering why it remains unindicted.

Now we have the answer, scandalous but not surprising. It has been obvious from the start of Obama’s presidency that the present US administration is strongly pro-Islam, despite the fact that Islam is waging war on the US.*

Patrick Poole breaks the story at PajamasMedia:

A number of leaders of Islamic organizations … were about to be indicted on terror finance support charges by the U.S. attorney’s office in Dallas, which had been investigating the case for most of the past decade. But those indictments were scuttled last year at the direction of top-level political appointees within the Department of Justice (DOJ) — and possibly even the White House.

“This was a political decision from the get-go,” [our DOJ] source said.

“It was always the plan to initially go after the [Holy Land Foundation] leaders first and then go after the rest of the accomplices in a second round of prosecutions. From a purely legal point of view, the case was solid. …

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. … It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts. How would Holder explain that when we’re carting off these prominent Islamic leaders in handcuffs for their role in a terror finance conspiracy we’ve been investigating for years? This is how bad the problem is. Why are we continuing to have anything to do with these groups knowing what we know?

“By closing down these prosecutions … the evidence we’ve collected over the past decade that implicates most of the major Islamic organizations will never see the light of day.”

The FBI still has boxes and boxes of stuff that has never even been translated  … But it’s already been made public that they have copies of money transfers sent by NAIT [the North American Islamic Trust] directly to known Hamas entities and Hamas leaders. …

The actions by the DOJ to crush these prosecutions are just another schizophrenic episode in the U.S. government’s ongoing relationship with Islamic organizations, especially CAIR. After CAIR was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, the FBI was forced to cut ties with the group. … Yet …  CAIR leaders continue to be regularly received by top DOJ and FBI officials despite the official ban …

I asked my DOJ source why they decided to come forward now. The source said:

“This is a national security issue. We know that these Muslim leaders and groups are continuing to raise money for Hamas and other terrorist organizations. Ten years ago we shut down the Holy Land Foundation. It was the right thing to do. Then the money started going to KindHearts. We shut them down too. Now the money is going through groups like Islamic Relief and Viva Palestina. Until we act decisively to cut off the financial pipeline to these terrorist groups by putting more of these people in prison, they are going to continue to raise money that will go into the hands of killers. And until Congress starts grilling the people inside DOJ and the FBI who are giving these groups cover, that is not going to change. … ”

But if the U.S. government publicly acknowledges the terror ties of these groups why do they continue to deal with them?

“We tried to do what we could during the Bush administration. After 9/11, we had to do something and [the Holy Land Foundation] was the biggest target.

To say things are different under Obama and Holder would be an understatement. Many of the people I work with at Justice now see CAIR not just as political allies, but ideological allies. They believe they are fighting the same revolution. It’s scary. And Congress and the American people need to know this is going on.”

The American people need to know that the present leadership of the United States is not just letting Islam wage jihad, not just allowing the funding of Hamas terrorism, but is “fighting the same  revolution”. The Islamic revolution. That is the name of the change Obama and Holder hope for.

But how will they be informed of this when most of the media, being themselves complicit in “the revolution”, are unwilling and unlikely to tell them?

*

*Further to this, from Corruption Chronicles:

In the Obama Administration’s continuing effort to befriend Muslims, the United States will for the first time host an international Islamic forum held annually in the Middle East and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will headline the three-day event. …

Bringing the Islamic forum to the U.S. is simply the latest of many Muslim outreach efforts for the administration. In the last year alone Napolitano discussed national security matters with a group of extremist Muslim organizations, the nation’s space agency (NASA) was ordered to focus on Muslim diplomacy and Clinton signed a special order to allow the reentry of two radical Islamic academics whose terrorist ties long banned them from the U.S. …

The Justice Department also created a special Arab-American and Muslim Engagement Advisory Group to foster greater communication, collaboration and a new level of respect between law enforcement and Muslim and Arab-American communities.

Here’s a scandalous story of the present American government doing such positive harm to American interests that it might surprise even those who believe the worst of President Obama and his clique.

Since the very first days of this president’s administration, the drug-fueled cartel violence in Mexico has provided a stalking horse for the gun control agenda. Early on, both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Attorney General Eric Holder cited Mexican violence as a reason to renew the Bill Clinton gun ban of 1994. After those trial balloons were shot down, the ball was passed to Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who repeatedly has blamed American gun rights for Mexican violence. And more recently, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives [ATF] cited cartel mayhem as justification for an attempt to mandate the reporting of all multiple long gun sales in border states … effectively creating a registry.

But now, shocking revelations that grow bigger every day completely undercut the argument for additional restrictions. In fact, they illuminate bureaucratic arrogance, recklessness and hypocrisy of the highest order in the hallways of the Obama administration — including the spreading stench of a massive cover-up.

As it turns out, the ATF was already aware of efforts by shady characters to undertake mass gun purchases in border states, because law-abiding gun dealers reported the attempted purchases voluntarily. But ATF agents acting on “orders from Washington” encouraged gun dealers to complete these transactions against the dealers’ better judgment. Worse yet, the guns — thousands of them — then were allowed to be smuggled, or “walked,” into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels. And worst of all, these guns now are turning up at crime scenes — including where a U.S. federal agent was murdered.

The operation is called “Fast and Furious,” and it’s absolutely appalling — but it’s all true, and there is still much more to come. Attorney General Holder has attempted to deflect the call for an investigation by asking the inspector general of the Justice Department to look into the matter. …

The ATF has been stonewalling inquiries from Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and now Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., has joined the fray — and he has subpoena power as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. …

To their credit, numerous rank-and-file ATF agents [objected] to the “Fast and Furious” operation from the get-go. Their superiors told them they “have to break some eggs to make an omelet” and then apparently threatened the agents with career discipline if they continued their objections.

The agents also were warned that the operation had been approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department — levels that are populated by presidential appointees, not career law enforcement officials. And now the Mexican government has elevated the scandal into an international incident, launching its own investigation and warning that “sanctions will have to be carried out with the full force of law to (whoever) could have been responsible.”

Barack Obama himself was questioned about the scandal …  He quickly passed the buck, claiming ignorance of the operation and saying, “There may be a situation here (in) which a serious mistake was made, and if that’s the case, then we’ll find out and we’ll hold somebody accountable.” But a presidential effort to pin the tail on the donkey ignores the tremendous scope of “Fast and Furious,” which apparently involved personnel from not only the ATF and Justice but also the Homeland Security and State departments. Any attempt to lay this massive botch at the feet of an individual ignores systemic problems that “Fast and Furious” illustrates in the federal bureaucracy.

Our quotations are from an article by Chuck Norris at Townhall. He concludes by saying:

Proponents of gun control — including the White House — should focus on bringing U.S. government agencies into compliance with our existing laws before pushing new restrictions on the rest of us.

Read it all here.

Obama does not make war. Definitely not. So what’s the US doing firing Tomahawk subsonic cruise missiles at Libyan targets?

According to official spokesmen, it is taking “kinetic military action”. And that only to protect civilians.

Let us, in this stifling atmosphere of pacifism and sentimentality, consider some information (from Wikipedia) that raises questions in an enquiring mind:

The numbers of US military personnel in foreign lands “as of March 31, 2008”, though it must be remembered that  numbers change due to the recall and deployment of units, show that there are more US military personnel in Germany, 52,440, than in Iraq, 50,000.

Why are they in Germany?

9,660 in Italy and 9,015 in Britain.

What for?

28,500 in South Korea (good);  71,000 in Afghanistan (we know what for) and about half as many, 35,688, in Japan.

Why are they in Japan?

Altogether, 77,917 military personnel are located in Europe [more than in Afghanistan], 141 in the former Soviet Union …

What are the 141 doing in “the former Soviet union”?

47,236 in East Asia and the Pacific,  3,362 in North Africa, the Near East, and South Asia, 1,355 are in sub-Saharan Africa with 1,941 in the Western Hemisphere excepting the United States itself …

Within the United States, including U.S. territories and ships afloat within territorial waters –

As of 31 December 2009, a total of 1,137,568 personnel are on active duty within the United States and its territories (including 84,461 afloat). The vast majority, 941,629 of them, were stationed at various bases within the Contiguous United States [the 48 U.S. states on the continent of North America that are south of Canada, plus the District of Columbia, not the states of Alaska and Hawaii, or off-shore U.S. territories and possessions, such as Puerto Rico]. There were an additional 37,245 in Hawaii and 20,450 in Alaska. 84,461 were at sea, 2,972 in Guam, and 179 in Puerto Rico.

What of the US navy?

The United States Navy is the largest in the world; its battle fleet tonnage is greater than that of the next 13 largest navies combined. The U.S. Navy also has the world’s largest carrier fleet, with 11 in service, three under construction, and one in reserve. The service had 328,516 personnel on active duty and 101,689 in the Navy Reserve in January 2011. It operates 286 ships in active service and more than 3,700 aircraft.

The 21st century United States Navy maintains a sizable global presence, deploying in such areas as East Asia, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. It is a blue-water navy with the ability to project force onto the littoral regions of the world, engage in forward areas during peacetime, and rapidly respond to regional crises, making it an active player in U.S. foreign and defense policy.

See a list of US Navy ships here.

The air force?

As of 2009 the USAF operates 5,573 manned aircraft in service (3,990 USAF; 1,213 Air National Guard; and 370 Air Force Reserve); approximately 180 unmanned combat air vehicles, 2,130 air-launched cruise missiles, and 450 intercontinental ballistic missiles. The USAF has 330,159 personnel on active duty, 68,872 in the Selected and Individual Ready Reserves, and 94,753 in the Air National Guard as of September 2008. In addition, the USAF employs 151,360 civilian personnel, and has over 60,000 auxiliary members in the Civil Air Patrol,making it the largest air force in the world.

See the list and the pictures of the military aircraft here.

Weaponry – here. And a quotation:

We have achieved a level of technology in military weapons and equipment that no other nation on earth comes close to.

What of US nuclear armament? The US maintains an arsenal of 5,113 warheads.

Space dominance? The question of weapons in space has been much discussed and is not settled. Not wanted by Obama.

What conclusions can be drawn from these facts and figures?

The Cold War is not over?

China is a menace?

The US is still the Watch of the World? Patrolling, protecting, ready to defend? Defend what, specifically?

One thing is certain. The United States of America is a military colossus.

Its military might is a hard – and surely very comforting – fact.

The fact alone should be enough to deter impudent adventurer states, like Russia and Iran, and make tyrannical chieftains who think of plotting massacre, like Gaddafi, think again – unless a silly leader like Obama announces that America will not go to war.

America must not be humble. Far better that it be feared than loved.

America must remain strong. Its ineluctable duty is to awe the world.

In our post below, An unanswered (and unanswerable?) question, we ask what the Western world can do to win the war Islam is waging against it.

The very tolerance and freedom that characterize the West provide advantage to the enemy, but if the only way to defeat the aggressor is to become intolerant and unfree, there would be nothing worth defending.

We don’t think the question is unanswerable, and we don’t think tolerance and freedom have to be lost. On the contrary, they have to be insisted upon.

If Muslims take advantage, as they do, of our freedom of speech to advocate their system which prohibits it, we must argue them down, loudly, publicly, and persistently.

That is what the West is not doing. European governments are doing the opposite, prosecuting critics of Islam.

In America, government policy since 9/11 has been to appease Muslims rather than hold them to account. Great effort is put into propitiating those who claim to be aggrieved, with the result that the jihadists in our midst have become ever more powerful.

In a PajamasMedia column, N.M. Guariglia discusses the policy and suggests how better to deal with the internal and international threat:

There is one silver lining to the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt: it will eventually force the United States to adopt an international policy on Islam itself. Given his Cairo speech in 2009, littered with historical inaccuracies and undue politically correct praise of Islam, we shouldn’t expect President Obama to take upon himself this task. Perhaps another statesman will. But that it must be done …  is no longer a matter of debate.

The national discourse is petty. Policymakers talk as though the problem were merely 500 terrorists cave-hopping around Waziristan. This is not so. The issue is societal. Europe is on the precipice of cultural implosion. The issue is also imminent. The entire Persian Gulf and Arab Levant is up for grabs. Atomic bombs are in question. Radical Islamists have entrenched themselves in the West’s political mainstream — even into the U.S. government. For decades, the Muslim Brotherhood has had more power within the United States than in Egypt.

Take Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi, a former advisor to President Clinton and the State Department. Amoudi also ingratiated himself to then-Governor George W. Bush. In the months after the 9/11 attacks, Amoudi was one of the Muslim “moderates” championed by the administration. He spoke at the Washington National Cathedral honoring the victims. Three years later, Amoudi was arrested for conspiring to work with al-Qaeda and Moammar Gaddafi of Libya in an assassination attempt on the Saudi king.

There’s Omar Ahmad, founder of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim organization in the United States. CAIR was involved with the Holy Land Foundation, an operation that guised charity funds as subsidies to terrorist groups. And then there’s Nihad Awad, the co-founder of CAIR. Awad is an operative of Hamas and yet served on Vice President Gore’s commission for aviation safety and security — the irony! — and was invited to stand alongside President Bush after 9/11. Ismail Elbarasse worked with Amoudi and was involved with the Holy Land Foundation. He also conspired with Hamas leader Mousa Marzook and the “Virginia Network,” a cell of Pakistani terrorists.

In 2004, Elbarasse was arrested. Documents seized in his basement revealed the Muslim Brotherhood’s archives for the United States. CAIR is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Students Association (MSA) is a front for the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas is the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood spawned Egyptian Islamic Jihad and subsequently al-Qaeda.

These are just a few of the men running the Islamic mosques, schools, campus organizations, and charities in the United States. They are all avowed jihadists and see no distinction between Palestinian “resistance” and al-Qaeda terrorism. The entire apparatus of U.S.-Muslim dialogue is controlled by our enemies. And we have accepted this — so much so that to acknowledge this reality is political suicide.

It’s time to address this. Embassies have been burned, diplomats and newspaper editors have cowered, cartoonists have been hunted down, film directors have been hacked, operas have been canceled, and books have been taken off the shelf. We are losing the Enlightenment out of fear of offending others. …

In the United States, there were terrorist attempts on Penn Station, at a military recruitment center in Arkansas, on a federal building in Illinois, against other landmarks in Manhattan, and on a Dallas skyscraper. Then there was the Christmas Day plot against Northwest Airlines Flight 253, which would have killed more than 300 people had the al-Qaeda operative been more competent; the Times Square plot, which would have been worse than the Oklahoma City bombing had the operative been more competent; and the Fort Hood massacre, which could have been avoided had we been less afraid to appear intolerant of intolerance. And all this happened in just the past year and a half. They’re here.

There is the prevalent argument that this is not representative of real Islam. Fine. Then let’s at least have a discussion as to what “real Islam” actually is. Surely it makes little sense to define all the good things as real Islam and all the bad things as a perversion of real Islam, no? Can we no longer think objectively? Have we become that terrified into silence?

The truth is this: Islam is not merely a religion. Islam is a complete way of life: theological, political, social, and legal. Islamic law is the literal word of the Koran, which is supposed to be the direct word of God. It claims to be unalterable. …

Even amongst the disparate schools of Islam, there are no distinctions of Islamic law. All of these interpretative matters have been addressed long ago. It is what it is and it cannot be anything else. …

“Jihad” is not a yoga-like exercise for internal spiritual discovery. It is the killing of non-Muslims and the enforcement of Islamic rule throughout the world. “Peace” is not coexistence. It is Islamic dominion over the planet. “Freedom” is not individual liberty. It is submission to the supernatural.

Where is the United States to go from here? We ought to shut down the internal jihadist infrastructure controlling the American-Muslim community. We ought to challenge the ten-year plan of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference to stifle freedom of speech, thought, and expression in the West. We ought to more passionately defend the superiority of democratic and liberal values — in ethics, in philosophy, and in practice. We ought to call for explanations on behalf of the Islamic world. What is it they actually believe? What actions are they willing to take on behalf of these beliefs? Rather than tell them what they want to hear, we ought to begin insisting they tell us what we want to hear.

And finally, we ought to devise a foreign policy whereby we officially oppose the inclusion of fascist theocratic movements in new democratic governments — whether Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Taliban in Afghanistan, or the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt [or the elected government in Iraq – JB]— and proclaim our support for true freedom.

There is no power greater than brain power, and Israel has it.

From the Jerusalem Post:

Antitank rockets … had been the bane of the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) Armored Corps. Until now, the answers had been increasingly thick steel protective plates for the tanks to literally dull the blow. But improved rockets proved essentially able to penetrate any shield and there are limits to how much armor can be piled on a tank without impeding its movement.

Realizing how deadly portable hollow-pipe devices can be, both Hamas and Hezbollah stocked up on them, amassing colossal arsenals. In the Second Lebanon War in 2006, dozens of Israeli tanks were struck, 19 crewmen were killed and others wounded.

But while Israel’s enemies were arming themselves to the teeth, Israel’s scientists … were busy re-accentuating the country’s qualitative military edge, which had sometimes appeared to be fading.

They have invented a new missile interceptor called Trophy.

The first time it was used in the field, this is what happened:

It happened so quickly and functioned so flawlessly that the IDF tank crews doing routine duties last Tuesday near the security fence in the southern Gaza Strip frontline didn’t even notice anything unusual.

They didn’t immediately realize that they had just witnessed history in the making and that the lives of a fourman crew had been spared when the miniature Trophy system, fixed onto all tanks in the Gaza sector, recognized that a rocket propelled grenade (RPG) had been launched at one of the tanks.

Trophy intercepted the RPG with a neutralizer and blew up the incoming projectile in mid-air, with no harm wrought to either the tank or to the corpsmen in its belly.

(Pronounced cor-men, President Obama.)

The system quickly reloads in a fully automated process. It’s “smart” enough to hold fire if an RPG is about to miss its target. Moreover, the explosion it sets off is so small that friendly-fire casualties are highly unlikely.

The Trophy is perceived as the harbinger of the future in ground warfare, being the first operational active defense system, and capable of granting Israel a new strategic advantage.

Trophy will be available to Israel’s allies.

The Trophy’s premiere matters not only for Israel but globally. This was the first time that antitank fire had been successfully intercepted under real combat zone conditions, as distinct from controlled trials. The implications both to Israel and its allies cannot be overestimated.

Rocketry that is easy to carry is a favorite weapon for terrorists and a whole host of irregulars [such as] the roadside-ambushers in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Trophy could radically alter the balance of power on both the Lebanese and Gaza fronts and it could become crucial for US and allied forces battling al-Qaida and associated insurgents.

And there’s more to come:

[Trophy] is not alone. In the works is the Iron Fist, an antimissile defense that is being custom-designed for armored personnel carriers. Its jamming capabilities can swerve an oncoming rocket off course, or it can detonate it with shock waves.

Lots more is being concocted in Israeli labs, workshops and testing grounds. Despite our proven penchant for fault-finding and self-deprecation, this is a fitting occasion for unstinting collective pride. Our defenses and those who man them are, mercifully, a little more secure today in the face of our enemies.

It seems likely then that those massive stockpiles of heavy pipes, those colossal arsenals of RPGs, so painfully assembled in Gaza by smuggling pieces through tunnels, will soon have no more value than any old pile of scrap metal. Unless Hamas puts them to use against fellow Arabs, which is more than likely.

The US was right to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and right to invade Afghanistan where the 9/11 attack on America was plotted. In both cases war was the answer.

In both cases it was wrong to stay on to attempt “nation-building”.

But once that sentimental policy was decided on, the essential thing for the US to achieve in each case was a constitution of liberty.

Both Iraq and Afghanistan got new constitutions, but neither enshrines liberty. They enshrine sharia law, and where sharia prevails, liberty is shut out.

Andrew McCarthy writes trenchantly about the tragic failure of America’s vision and the ultimate futility of its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq:

In 2006, a Christian convert named Abdul Rahman was tried for apostasy [in Afghanistan]. The episode prompted a groundswell of international criticism. In the end, Abdul Rahman was whisked out of the country before his execution could be carried out. A fig leaf was placed over the mess: The prospect of execution had been rendered unjust by the (perfectly sane) defendant’s purported mental illness — after all, who in his right mind would convert from Islam? His life was spared, but the Afghans never backed down from their insistence that a Muslim’s renunciation of Islam is a capital offense and that death is the mandated sentence. …

Mainstream Islamic scholarship holds that apostasy, certainly once it is publicly revealed, warrants the death penalty.

Having hailed the Afghan constitution as the start of a democratic tsunami, the startled Bush administration made all the predictable arguments against Abdul Rahman’s apostasy prosecution. Diplomats and nation-building enthusiasts pointed in panic at the vague, lofty language injected into the Afghan constitution to obscure Islamic law’s harsh reality — spoons full of sugar that had helped the sharia go down. The constitution assures religious freedom, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice maintained. …

Read the fine print. It actually qualifies that all purported guarantees of personal and religious liberty are subject to Islamic law and Afghanistan’s commitment to being an Islamic state. We were supposed to celebrate this, just as the State Department did, because Islam is the “religion of peace” whose principles are just like ours — that’s why it was so ready for democracy.

It wasn’t so. Sharia is very different from Western law, and it couldn’t care less what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has to say on the matter of apostasy. …

The constitution that the State Department bragged about helping the new Afghan “democracy” draft established Islam as the state religion and installed sharia as a principal source of law. That constitution therefore fully supports the state killing of apostates. Case closed.

The purpose of real democracy, meaning Western republican democracy, is to promote individual liberty, the engine of human prosperity. No nation that establishes a state religion, installs its totalitarian legal code, and hence denies its citizens freedom of conscience, can ever be a democracy — no matter how many “free” elections it holds. Afghanistan is not a democracy. It is an Islamic sharia state.

To grasp this, one need only read the first three articles of its constitution:

1. Afghanistan is an Islamic Republic, independent, unitary, and indivisible state.

2. The religion of the state of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is the sacred religion of Islam. …

3. In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam. …

Was that what you figured we were doing when you heard we were “promoting democracy”? Is that a mission you would have agreed to commit our armed forces to accomplish? Yet, that’s what we’re fighting for. The War On Terror hasn’t been about 9/11 for a very long time. You may think our troops are in Afghanistan to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban — that’s what you’re told every time somebody has the temerity to suggest that we should leave. Our commanders, however, have acknowledged that destroying the enemy is not our objective. In fact, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top U.S. commander, said what is happening in Afghanistan is not even our war. …

It’s not our war, nor is it something those running it contemplate winning. … Indeed, the administration had concluded … that the war could not be won “militarily.” …

Afghanistan is not an American war anymore. It’s a political experiment: Can we lay the foundation for Islamic social justice, hang a “democracy” label on it, and convince Americans that we’ve won, that all the blood and treasure have been worth it? The same thing, by the way, has been done in Iraq. …

The affront here is our own betrayal of our own principles. The Islamic democracy project is not democratizing the Muslim world. It is degrading individual liberty by masquerading sharia, in its most draconian form, as democracy. The only worthy reason for dispatching our young men and women in uniform to Islamic countries is to destroy America’s enemies. Our armed forces are not agents of Islamic social justice, and stabilizing a sharia state so its children can learn to hate the West as much as their parents do is not a mission the American people would ever have endorsed. It is past time to end this failed experiment.

Yes, it is way past time. Leave them now to do it their way.

And it is past time to dispel the sweet illusion of good-hearted Americans that all Others are the same as Us in their values, wants, and desires. They are not.

Here it comes, looming into sight over the horizon – war.

Tomorrow, Monday February 21, 2011, Iranian warships, at least one of them carrying long-range missiles for Hizbullah, will pass through the Suez Canal and enter the Mediterranean. [Monday update: their passage has been postponed to Tuesday.]

From DebkaFile:

Up until now, Saudi Arabia, in close conjunction with Egypt and its President Hosni Mubarak, led the Sunni Arab thrust to contain Iranian expansion – especially in the Persian Gulf. However, the opening of a Saudi port to war ships of the Islamic Republic of Iran for the first time in the history of their relations points to a fundamental shift in Middle East trends in consequence of the Egyptian uprising. It was also the first time Cairo has permitted Iranian warships to transit Suez from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, although Israeli traffic in the opposite direction had been allowed. …

Iran is rapidly seizing the fall of the Mubarak regime in Cairo and the Saudi King Abdullah’s falling-out with President Barack Obama as an opportunity not to be missed for establishing a foothold along the Suez Canal and access to the Mediterranean …

King Abdullah’s “falling-out” with Obama? The King to whom Obama bowed deeply now furious with him? Not much reported in the US, although it’s a transformative event.

The King (DebkaFile reports here) has changed his policy towards Iran as a result of what he regards as Obama’s betrayal of Mubarak.

The conversation between President Barack Obama and Saudi King Abdullah early Thursday, Feb. 10, was the most acerbic the US president has ever had with an Arab ruler … They had a serious falling-out on the Egyptian crisis which so enraged the king that some US and Middle East sources reported he suffered a sudden heart attack. …

Those sources disclose that the call which Obama put into Abdullah … brought their relations into deep crisis …

The king chastised the president for his treatment of Egypt and its president Hosni Muhbarak calling it a disaster that would generate instability in the region and imperil all the moderate Arab rulers and regimes which had backed the United States until now. Abdullah took Obama to task for ditching America’s most faithful ally in the Arab world and vowed that if the US continues to try and get rid of Mubarak, the Saudi royal family would bend all its resources to undoing Washington’s plans for Egypt and nullifying their consequences.

According to British intelligence sources in London, the Saudi King pledged to make up the losses to Egypt if Washington cuts off military and economic aid to force Mubarak to resign. He would personally instruct the Saudi treasury to transfer to the embattled Egyptian ruler the exact amounts he needs for himself and his army to stand up to American pressure.

It’s too late for King Abdullah to save Mubarak now, but he is carrying out his threat to end his country’s alliance with the United States and turn towards Iran.

Through all the ups and downs of Saudi-US relations since the 1950s no Saudi ruler has ever threatened direct action against American policy. … [But this time] the King informed Obama that without waiting for events in Egypt to play out or America’s response, he had ordered the process set in train for raising the level of Riyadh’s diplomatic and military ties with Tehran. Invitations had gone out from Riyadh for Iranian delegations to visit the main Saudi cities.

Abdullah stressed he had more than one bone to pick with Obama. The king accused the US president of turning his back not only on Mubarak but on another beleaguered American ally, the former Lebanese Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri, when he was toppled by Iran’s surrogate Hizballah.

Our sources in Washington report that all of President Obama’s efforts to pacify the Saudi king and explain his Egyptian policy fell on deaf ears. …

The initiation of dialogue between Riyadh and Tehran is the most dramatic fallout in the region from the crisis in Egypt. It is a boon for the ayatollahs who are treated the sight of pro-Western regimes either fading under the weight of domestic uprisings, or turning away from the US as Saudi Arabia is doing now.

This development is also of pivotal importance for Israel. Saudi Arabia’s close friendship with the Mubarak regime dovetailed neatly with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s alignment with Egypt and provided them with common policy denominators. The opening of the Saudi door to the Iranian push toward the Red Sea and Suez Canal tightens the Iranian siege ring around Israel.

DebkaFile lists six strategic advantages that Iran gains by acquiring an open route through Suez into the Mediterranean:

1. To cut off, even partially, the US military and naval Persian Gulf forces from their main route for supplies and reinforcements

2. To establish an Iranian military-naval grip on the Suez Canal, through which 40 percent of the world’s maritime freights pass every day

3. To bring an Iranian military presence close enough to menace the Egyptian heartland of Cairo and the Nile Delta and squeeze it into joining the radical Iranian-Syrian-Iraqi-Turkish alliance

4. To thread a contiguous Iranian military-naval line from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea through the Suez Canal and the Gaza Strip and up to the ports of Lebanon, where Hizballah has already seized power and toppled the pro-West government

And not improbably –

5. To eventually sever the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, annex it to the Gaza Strip and establish a large Hamas-ruled Palestinian state athwart the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea

And evidently –

6. To tighten the naval and military siege on Israel.

Israel is about to be threatened on three fronts: from Lebanon on its north, from Gaza on its west, and from Sinai on its south.

Obama’s policies have brought about this world-endangering crisis. He has weakened Israel (see here and here); relied on wrong intelligence about Egypt; lost the alliance of hitherto friendly Arab states; and above all allowed Iran to grow steadily stronger despite its president’s repeated announcements that his country intends to make war.