In authorizing limited strikes on Syria, Congress may inadvertently give its stamp of approval to an ideological revolution in the use of U.S. power. Our military can’t and shouldn’t be a global genocide watchdog.

So an Investor’s Business Daily editorial plausibly warns.  It goes on, in part:

Obama’s pointless intervention in Syria could be a blueprint for a new leftist foreign policy, long championed by his new U.N. ambassador, Samantha Power, in which America intervenes not to defend its strategic interests but to avenge victims of bloodthirsty thugs.

This comic-book internationalism would keep the world’s lone superpower busier than Superman.

Where do America’s armed forces go first to “change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel with their bare hands”? Zimbabwe, where Mugabe has tortured thousands? Nuclear-armed North Korea, the slave state where, under Kim Jong-un, over 40% of young children are seriously malnourished?

Or how about the mass murderers you’ve never heard of? Under Isaias Afewerki, in power for over two decades in Eritrea in northeast coastal Africa, thousands of young refugees have fled slavery-like indefinite national service — enforced by a shoot-to-kill policy — and government-tolerated human trafficking for sex and even organ extraction.

Over his quarter century in power, Sudan’s Omar Bashir has killed hundreds of thousands; thousands are being tortured today in Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan, as tens of millions starve in Thein Sein’s Burma. …

We could add most other countries to the list. Only a minority of the world’s nation states are genuinely free democracies. (According to Freedom House’s 1973 through 2013 reports: Free, 90; Partly Free 58; Not Free 47.)

[Samantha] Power complains of “America’s toleration of unspeakable atrocities, often committed in clear view”, of Hutus slaughtering Tutsis, for instance. But America can no more save each of the world’s billions than it can give each of them green cards.

It is an extraordinarily ill thought-out idea, even for the ignorant and foolish people who now form the executive branch of the US government.

If it becomes policy for America to barge into every country that acts in a way a US administration dislikes, and if such a policy is implemented, it will mean that America will be engaged in perpetual war. Nation states will not allow invasion by self-appointed policemen or nannies in US military uniform to march in and take over. Or to subdue them with drones or missiles and then issue orders in conformity with American notions of human rights. They will defend themselves. There will be blood. There will be “collateral damage”.

It would take a Nobel Peace Prize winner to cause such global chaos.

Our view on the pros and cons of a US military attack on Syria is very close to Douglas Murray’s as he expresses it in The Spectator (UK):

For me the conundrum of Syria now comes down to one particular problem. That is one which the House of Commons stumbled over last week and which the US Congress is likely to stumble over in the week ahead. The West has now given ample warning to President Assad of its intention to strike at some point. President Obama has famously drawn a red-line over the use of chemical weapons.

The problem then is this. If any country carries out punitive strikes against the Assad regime they will undoubtedly and rightly be demonstrating the international community’s revulsion over the use of chemical weapons. But if the targets that are hit in the resulting strike are meaningful (government buildings, installations etc) then there is the risk that such an intervention could tip the balance in the Syrian civil war. If that balance is tipped and Assad is severely weakened or even falls as a result then whoever carried out the strikes will be at least partly responsible for what comes next. That is a responsibility which neither America, Britain, France nor any other Western power can handle and it is one which none of us wants.

So – and here is the imponderable – the only purpose of strikes must be to hit targets which are meaningless. … That means something akin to President Clinton’s futile lobbing of missiles at an aspirin factory in Sudan as a response to the 1998 al-Qaeda embassy bombings in Africa. …

I don’t believe that the military should be used for making gestures, but rather to exert power and punish enemies in as meaningful a way as possible.

And the US should only intervene when its own interests are at stake. We want Iran’s nuclear installations to be attacked – in as effective a way as possible.

With the unlimited technological resources at our disposal, we observed and recorded this interchange:

You just gotta do something, B’rack!

But what, Samantha?

Protect the kids, B’rack.

How, Samantha?

Take action, B’rack.

What action?

I dunno. Hit something with something.

I can’t make war on Iraq. I mean … Libya?

Syria.

I can’t do what Bush did.

Do it different.  

What can I do that would be different?

Don’t go it alone.

Did Bush go it alone?

Not really, but we say he did.

So who should I go with?

The British?

They voted not to.

Well, get NATO to do something.

Then it would be like war.

Well, this is war.

I can’t say that. The base wouldn’t like it.

But you can’t lose face. You said you’d do something if Whosit used gas, so you must do something.

Boots on the ground?

Oh no! The base wouldn’t like that.

Bombing?

Nor that.

Drones?

Maybe. But you mustn’t kill anybody.

What then?

I dunno.  Buildings. 

Buildings? With no people in them? Are there some in … where’s it, Syria?

Someone said something about munition stores.

Hit munition stores? With drones?

Just a few.

In and out. A quick dip. Just to show them.

Yes.

That would be okay with the base?

Sure. If it’s quick. In and out. Two three days. At most.

Nobody killed.

Right.

I can do this, Samantha.

Sure you can.

I’ll ask Rashad to ask the King.

The King? Isn’t he dead? 

The King of Saudi Arabia. There’s always a King of Saudi Arabia. … And I’ll ask Valerie.  

And maybe the Pentagon.  

And the UN?

Leave the UN to me.

Do I have to ask Congress?  I hate asking Congress.

You don’t have to ask Congress.

Okay. I’ll do it. Maybe.

Maybe?

I’ll think about it. I’ll give you my answer when I’ve thought about it.

When will you decide?

In two three days. Or weeks. Maybe. 

 

Afternote: Seems B’rack decided not to decide anything himself after all except to let Congress make the decision – and so take the blame for whatever the US then does or doesn’t do.

We knew it and we said it. When Left fascists in power advocate “free” – ie tax-payer funded – pre-kindergarten education for all toddlers, they are planning early indoctrination.

That is to say, in our vocabulary, they are planning to corrupt them.

At present they can only start at kindergarten level.

This comes from CNS:

The Chicago Public Schools this year are mandating that the district’s kindergarten classes include sex education … 

And it’s okay, you see, because the Left Fascist in Chief has ached for it for a long time …

… fulfilling a proposal President Barack Obama supported in 2003 when he served in the Illinois state senate and later defended when he ran for president in the 2008 election cycle.

At a Planned Parenthood convention at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Washington, D.C., on July 17, 2007, a teenage girl who said she worked as a sex-education “peer educator” in the D.C. public schools asked then-U.S. Sen. Obama what he would do to encourage the teaching of “medically accurate, age-appropriate, and responsible sex education”.

Obama [said] … that he had worked with Planned Parenthood to push a sex education bill when he served in the Illinois state legislature. … [because] it is the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools.”  …

Explanations and “clarifications” follow. Belt out a few of those and no one should have any more questions. Okay, once more. Pay attention.

To further clarify Obama’s position on sex ed for kindergartner’s, Obama’s campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, pointed MSNBC to the “curriculum for those in kindergarten” produced by the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).

Ah, there’s an authority to command respect. And we didn’t even know it existed! (Read about it here.) Obviously, with a name like that, it deserves to have the last word.

This curriculum suggested discussing same-sex relationships — in non-graphic terms – with kindergartners.

Non-graphic terms, you see. So what’s there to worry about? You thought they’d be discussing sex with five-year-olds in graphic terms? What do you think they are? Filthy-minded?

SIECUS explained that the bill Obama supported did indeed extend sex education to kindergartners in Illinois. At that time, Illinois mandated sex education only for children in grades six through 12. SIECUS also said the bill would have removed all mention of “marriage” from sex education in the state’s public schools. …

Marriage was even then becoming a no-no. Except for gays.

“It would also have expanded sexuality education to students in kindergarten through fifth grade and mandated that students be taught the age of consent, positive communication skills, and that they (the pupil) have the power to control behavior,” said SIECUS.

Bureaucratese is always a difficult language to interpret, but you could try.  Remembering that the euphemistic phrases are spoken by sex-maniacs, fill in the blanks:

Teaching five-year-olds “the age of consent” means …

“Positive communication skills” means …

“You, five year old, have the power to control behavior” means …

Well, it seems common sense prevailed that time in Illinois:

Despite Obama’s support for it, the bill did not pass and did not become Illinois law. …

But now the pedophobic pedagogues are having another go. Chiefly because they are determined that homosexuality be accepted as a norm, this time the corruption is “mandated”.

Its the healthy way, you see:  

According to a report published yesterday by the CBS affiliate in Chicago, the new sex education program mandated in Chicago public schools will — like the SIECUS curriculum — instruct kindergartners about same-sex relationships.

“Students [they’re “students” already at five] will also take a look at the different family structures that exist in today’s society,” said the CBS report. The report then quoted Stephanie Whyte, the chief health officer of the Chicago Public Schools: “Whether that means there’s two moms at home, everyone’s home life is different, and we introduce the fact that we all have a diverse background.”

When you’re  five years old, you gotta know that. Get it into your head, baby. Don’t sit there among your toys thinking nasty thoughts about homosexuals. We’re on to you. Listen up …

The Leftist fascists now in charge of America declare individual liberty, the ideal on which and for which the USA was founded, dangerously “extremist”.

Their aim is to make Leftist ideology the norm.

This comes from Investor’s Business Daily:

Once more, military training has become an Orwellian re-education camp where a radical transformation of the truth depicts the Founding Fathers as extremists and conservative groups as “hate groups.”

Saying “Give me liberty or give me death” qualifies Patrick Henry as an extremist, according to the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute training guide … And so were the rest of those who took up arms against the British Crown and pledged their lives, their fortune and their sacred honor for a shot at liberty and democracy.

Under a section titled “Extremist Ideologies,” the document states, “In U.S. history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

We would not lump the two together necessarily, but the Pentagon does. …

“Nowadays, instead of dressing in sheets or publicly espousing hate messages, many extremists will talk of individual liberties, states’ rights, and how to make the world a better place,” the Pentagon guide advises.

Which provides us with an opportunity to recall the fact that those who dressed up in sheets to terrify Blacks, those who lynched and murdered them, which is to say the members of the Ku Klux Klan, were Democrats.

This is from Free Republic, quoting David Bartonand his book Setting the Record Straight: American History in Black & White:

Republicans often led the efforts to pass federal anti-lynching laws and their platforms consistently called for a ban on lynching. Democrats successfully blocked those bills and their platforms never did condemn lynchings. …

Further, the first grand wizard of the KKK was honored at the 1868 Democratic National Convention, no Democrats voted for the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to former slaves and, to this day, the party website ignores those decades of racism …

Although it is relatively unreported today, historical documents are unequivocal that the Klan was established by Democrats and that the Klan played a prominent role in the Democratic Party … A 13-volume set of congressional investigations from 1872 conclusively and irrefutably documents that fact.

The Klan terrorized black Americans through murders and public floggings; relief was granted only if individuals promised not to vote for Republican tickets, and violation of this oath was punishable by death … Since the Klan targeted Republicans in general, it did not limit its violence simply to black Republicans; white Republicans were also included.

The IBD article continues about those designated “extremists” by the Pentagon:

They might even form groups with “tea party,” “patriot” or “9-12” in their name, like the groups targeted for political harassment and intimidation by the IRS.

“The Obama administration has a nasty habit of equating basic conservative values with terrorism,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And now, in a document full of claptrap, its Defense Department suggests that the Founding Fathers, and many conservative Americans, would not be welcome in today’s military.

“And it is striking,” he added, “that some of the language in this new document echoes the IRS targeting language of conservative and tea party investigations.

Indeed, it also echoes the 2009 document issued by Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security, Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment:

Rightwing extremism in the United States can be broadly divided into those groups, movements, and adherents that … are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely. It may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.

The guide makes no mention of Nidal Hasan, the Army major who worked his way up through the ranks amid politically correct indifference to kill 13 people, including a pregnant soldier, and shoot 32 others in a Nov. 5, 2009, rampage at the base in Killeen, Texas, while shouting “Allahu Akhbar!”

But then he was defending the Taliban, not seeking freedom from the British.

Somewhat less distressing – though wrong both factually and morally – is the information that the guide calls Catholics, Evangelicals, [religious] Jews, Mormons “extremists” – just like al-Qaeda.

So it labels al-Qaeda “extremist”, but not Muslims as such? The article doesn’t say, but we very much doubt that the guide has a word to say against Islam.

This is from PowerLine, by Paul Mirengoff:

The Chaplain Alliance has issued a press release alleging, based on a review of documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, that in training materials, the Department of Defense classified Catholics, Evangelicals, Jews, and Mormons as religious “extremists” similar to Al Qaeda. The Chaplain Alliance also claims that the military deemed the [far left] Southern Poverty Law Center’s “hate group” list a “reliable source” for this conclusion. …

There was never any reason to suppose that the left’s long march through our institutions would not encompass the U.S. military. And we’ve seen plenty of evidence of the success of this portion of the long march.

So now the mighty Pentagon is helping the Obama regime turn the USA into the land of the unfree, and the home of the politically correct.

If it is possible for the US to have a worse president than Obama, it would be Hillary Clinton.

The two of them have already embarrassed their country more than enough.

She’s done nothing to boast of in her long career as the wife of a politician, her very short career as a senator, and her disastrous career as Secretary of State. But she’s done much to be ashamed of. The worst thing she did was set up a death trap  – what difference does it make whether she meant to or not? – for a US Ambassador and three other Americans in Benghazi. Then she lied about it. Blamed an obscure amateur video maker. Weird!

Her speeches are flat, dull, unmemorable – inevitably so, because she’s a dull thinker. There have been, and will be, countless speeches by other politicians just as boring and forgettable, but none could ever be more so.

This is from PowerLine, by John Hinderaker:

The aftermath [of the appalling mess in Benghazi] is embarrassing, too. Hillary told the father of one of the murdered SEALs that the administration would stop at nothing to bring that lousy video maker to justice. The man must have thought she was a lunatic. Later, according to an eyewitness, Hillary erupted in rage against a Republican Congressman who suggested that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. Which, of course, she knew it was shortly after it began. Is it bad to be a cowardly liar? Not if you are a Democratic presidential candidate, evidently.

The aftermath didn’t end with the administration’s initial lies, either. It continues to this day. One might think that a Secretary of State who lost an ambassador on her watch would stop at nothing to make sure that the terrorists who carried out the attack were killed or otherwise punished. (Killed, preferably.) If this is a subject in which Hillary has taken interest, she has shown no sign of it.

And this is from Front Page, by Daniel Greenfield:

This week CBS joined NBC and CNN in the Hillary entertainment business. While NBC airs a 4-hour miniseries produced by James D. Stern, the son of a top Bill Clinton donor, whom the New York Times accused of pushing Hillary Clinton’s candidacy eight years ago, CNN will air a documentary about Hillary and CBS is developing Madame Secretary, a television series about a female Secretary of State.

The biggest challenge for all these projects is how small a figure they have to hang so many hours of dead air on.

The NBC series will “recount Clinton’s life as a wife, mother, politician and cabinet member.” Tellingly, the political side of her life comes last. The CBS series will cover “the personal and professional life of a maverick female Secretary of State as she drives international diplomacy, wrangles office politics and balances a complex family life.”

It always comes back to the family life, because what else is there? Turn off the cameras and sitting there is the compulsively dishonest and corrupt wife of a compulsively dishonest and corrupt former president. The wife of a dishonest, but popular, president, running for his old job, may have a slight Latin American or Middle Eastern flavor, but it’s not even Evita; let alone Hillary of Arabia.

Hillary’s closest supporters don’t have much to say about her weak tenure as Secretary of State. Once you get past the usual material about serving as a role model for girls and facing the challenges of being a wife and a mother, there are very few specific mentions of what Hillary actually did while in office.

Hillary took a lot of trips and spent a lot of money on art in embassies and green energy, but you couldn’t find her actual accomplishments with a microscope.

The only two moments of her diplomatic career that anyone remembers is the bungled Russian reset button and her clumsy participation in the Benghazi cover-up. Even the most favorable reading of both events, a misspelled gimmicky button and blaming her subordinates for not providing adequate security funding which helped lead to the murder of four Americans, don’t make for much of a resume.

After Hillary stepped out of the State Department to begin her 2016 campaign, the medals and awards came pouring in almost as fast as the television shows.

The National Constitution Center awarded her a Liberty Medal because she “traveled to more countries than any other Secretary of State” and “used social media to engage citizens”. That’s not the bio of a Secretary of State. It sounds like a celebrity getting some meaningless UN humanitarian award for tweeting about Rwanda.

The National Defense University Foundation will follow that up by giving her the Patriot Award in the Ronald Reagan Building in order to celebrate “the American spirit of patriotism” which she embodies in some unspecified way.

The ridiculous parade of awards and shows is a rerun of how Obama, an uninteresting Illinois politician, was transformed into the most interesting figure in American politics through obsessive attention and hysterical praise. But Hillary Clinton, who will be pushing seventy by the time her big moment in the sun arrives, has fewer excuses for needing to slap this much greasepaint on an undistinguished resume.

The positions that will be used as props in her quest for higher office came to her only by way of being married to the former President of the United States. And it’s impossible to find anything revolutionary that she did with those positions, except use them as launching pads for an office she was even less qualified for. …

There is nothing factual in Hillary’s background to justify her inevitability as a candidate. Her time as Senator and Secretary of State was a shapeless blur of undistinguished mediocrity culminating in one final bloody disaster.

And Dan Calabrese writes about Hillary’s dishonesty:

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her [untrue] story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

He goes on to tell a little known story of what he mildly terms her “unethical behavior”. One to add to a long list. Find it here.

And this is an extract from Discover the Networks’ survey of Hillary’s deplorable career. (The whole survey is a must-read.)

In July 2012, author and former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy noted the following items about the relationship between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Muslim Brotherhood …

• The State Department has an emissary in Egypt who trains operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.

• The State Department announced [in November 2011] that the Obama administration would be ‘satisfied’ with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.

• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.

• The State Department and the administration recently hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gama’at al Islamia), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization.

• On a just-completed trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta currently governing the country, to surrender power to the newly elected parliament, which is dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, who is a top Brotherhood official.

In the summer of 2012,controversy arose over the fact that Secretary Clinton’s closest aide and advisor, Huma Abedin, has longstanding intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

Then came Benghazi …

They holiday alike; they dress alike; they govern alike; talk alike and now they’re “playing” war alike. President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron are the Bobbsey Twins of their Brave New World.

It should come as no surprise that both Obama and Cameron also share the same creepy campaign guru in Jim Messina.

And Cameron, like Obama, is a disciple of Saul Alinsky.

The picture comes from Canada Free Press, as do the comments we quote, which are by Judi McLeod.

The two mealy-mouths were going through a series of vacations when the people of Egypt took to the streets to draw worldwide attention to the evils of the Muslim Brotherhood in the largest grassroots protest in history. …

On Saturday, Obama and his top military and national security advisers hashed out options for responding to the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria amid “increasing signs” that the government used poison gas against civilians. …

With prospects of World War III …

We say World War IV, counting the Cold War as World War III, and we say  it has already started …

… now waiting only for the lighted match, the outcome of geopolitics now counts on a president who relies on a Valerie Jarrett for his marching orders and the prime minister of a country who lives mostly to copycat him.

If Obama had a baby brother, he’d look a lot like Prime Minister Davey Cameron. …

The entire world is a safer place when Barack Obama and David Cameron are on vacation.

Three adolescents set out to kill a man. And they did. The victim – a young Australian student and baseball player named Christopher Lane – was not known to them. One of them, fifteen year old James Edwards, said he did it because he was bored.

Let us now be disputatious, provoking, even – some might think – radical.

We contend that if the bored boy had to work for a living he would not have been bored. If all three boys had to work rather than sit at a school desk and have free “education” poured over them, they would have been too busy to kill.

The struggle to exist is a reason to exist. Socialism, the welfare state, by supplying all the necessities of life, can bring anybody – even the illiterate and non-introspective – to ask “What’s the point of my life?” “What’s it all for?” Or simply, “What can I do to stop being bored?”

Sure, there is a minority who have mental resources enough to keep themselves occupied if all their daily needs are provided. They have interests to pursue. They may be inventive. They set their own purposes and find their personal answers to existential questions.

The rest should invest time and effort in surviving. They’ll know then what their own lives cost, and probably be a lot less likely to hold the lives of others cheap.

*

About the mother of one of the killers, information is provided here by Bryan Preston at PJ Media.

Did “bored” teen James Edwards learn about crime from his mother? Edwards is the 15-year-old …  accused of shooting Australian baseball player Chris Lane in the back last Friday. He appeared in court Tuesday and reportedly made a mockery of the proceedings.

A search on Mugshots.com turns up one Brenda M. Edwards, 50, of Stephens County, Oklahoma. I called the Stephens County district attorney’s office today and confirmed that Brenda M. Edwards is James Edwards’ mother.

Edwards is currently incarcerated in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections. Her extensive rap sheet begins in 1994 with a conviction for larceny, and spans her son’s entire life.

She has three known aliases. As things stand now, her relationship with Oklahoma’s criminal justice system won’t end for several decades. …

If we’re going to blame a “culture” for James Edwards’ alleged part in Chris Lane’s murder, as some want to blame the so-called “gun culture”,* shouldn’t the culture of recidivist criminality come under scrutiny?

And wasn’t Brenda Edwards paid by the state to have a child whom she couldn’t otherwise have afforded?

And hasn’t the welfare state taken on the guardianship of children, providing them with everything from housing and food to schooling and health care?

The Left sometimes characterizes the political philosophy of the Right as “Devil take the hindmost”. Today we feel that, speaking for ourselves, they are not entirely wrong.

 

* A few days later two teenage boys beat to death an old man – Delbert Belton, 88 – in a car park in Spokane, Washington. Belton should have been armed with a gun.

The US is at war. Not with “terror”, which is absurd. Not even with “terrorism”, which is almost as absurd. But with Islam. Which doesn’t mean that we regard every Muslim in the world as an enemy. We are under attack by Muslims who are fighting the jihad, directly or indirectly, as the ideology of Islam requires every Muslim to do.

We need to recognize this, and declare it to be the case. And we need also to recognize our enemy in Islam’s ally – the Left.

We call it World War IV. (World War III was the “Cold War”.)

Michael Ledeen is of much the same opinion. Though he defines the enemy more narrowly as “radical Islamists” and “radical leftists”.

He writes at PJ Media:

It’s hard to get our minds around the dimensions of the slaughter underway in the Middle East and Africa, and harder still to see that the battlefields of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria and Mali are pieces in a global war in which we are targeted. For the most part, the deep thinkers zero in on the single battlefields. What if anything should we do about the big fight in Egypt? Should we assist the Syrian opposition? What to do in Lebanon or Jordan? Should we respond positively to the Iraqi government’s request for security assistance? Is anyone thinking hard about Tunisia, likely to be the scene of the next explosions?

It could not be otherwise, since our government, our universities, our news organizations and our think tanks are all primarily organized to deal with countries, and our analysts, policy makers and military strategists inevitably think inside those boxes.

We don’t have an assistant secretary of defense for global strategy. (Actually we do, his name is Andrew Marshall, he’s a sprightly genius of 92 years, and he runs a largely ignored corner of the Pentagon called “Net Assessment”). But we do have one for the Near East and South Asia. And there’s hardly a professor in America who is talking about the fundamental change in the nature of global affairs in which we are enmeshed, the paradigm shift from the post-World War II world dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, to … we know not what.

So there’s a global war, we’re the main target of the aggressors, and our leaders don’t see it and therefore have no idea how to win it.

Any serious attempt to understand what’s going on has to begin by banning the word “stability”, much beloved of diplomats and self-proclaimed strategists.

Yes. What is the point of wanting stability in or between tyrannies? How long should we want them to last?

If anything is fairly certain about our world, it’s that there is no stability, and there isn’t going to be any. Right now, the driving forces are those aimed at destroying the old order, and their targets (the old regimes, very much including the United States) have until recently showed little taste to engage as if their survival depended on it. But things are changing, as always.

The war is easily described: there is a global alliance of radical leftists and radical Islamists, supported by a group of countries that includes Russia, at least some Chinese leaders, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua. The radicals include the Sunni and Shi’ite terrorist organizations and leftist groups …

Their objective is the destruction of the West, above all, of the United States.

The alliance of Islam and the Left is very strange. The Left champions women, sexual and ethnic minorities, condemned criminals, thin people, the planet, and promiscuous copulation. Islam is an ideology concerned centrally with the subjugation of women. It hangs homosexuals; massacres blacks in Africa even if they’re Muslims; tortures prisoners; and has issued no fatwa against the fat. Its only aim for the planet is to put it under a caliphate. It punishes non-virgin brides and stones adulterers to death.

If the alliance is victorious and overcomes liberty, which of the allies will have its way?

What if they win? Some of them want to create a (Sunni or Shi’ite) caliphate, others want Castro- or Kim-style communist dictatorships. …

For the present, Islam is pre-occupied with internecine wars.

War is foggy, and alliances are often very unstable, especially at moments when the whole world is up for grabs. Look at Egypt, for example. At one level, it’s a sectarian fight: the “secular” military vs. the “Islamist” Muslim Brotherhood. So nobody should be surprised when the Brothers burn churches and murder Christians. But the top military dog, General Sisi, has some pretty impressive Islamist credentials. Indeed, his elevation at the time of the Brothers’ purge of Mubarak’s generals was frequently attributed to his close ties to the Brotherhood.

I don’t think anyone nowadays would call him a friend of the Brothers. So what happened? Did he go secular all of a sudden? Was his “Islamism” a trick from the get-go? Or is “Islamism” less monolithic than some suppose? A Saudi of my acquaintance showed up in Cairo a few days ago with a bunch of checks, some currently cashable, others postdated over the next twelve months, all hand-delivered to Sisi and his guys. Their advice to the Egyptian military is to mercilessly crush the Brothers, and their advice will likely be adopted, both because the junta knows that death awaits them if they lose (2 Egyptian major generals and 2 brigadier generals, along with many colonels, have been assassinated by the Brothers in the current spasm), and because only the Saudis can foot the huge bill facing Egypt just to provide the basics for the people. Most of whom, to the evident surprise of Western leaders and journalists, seem inclined to support the junta. (Neighborhood militias have taken on the Brothers throughout the country, for example).

So we’ve got an indubitably Islamist regime – the Saudi Wahhabis – supporting a military junta whose leader is famously Islamist against the infamously Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Yes, they may well all yearn for the destruction of the infidel West (although the junta impiously pockets our dollars), but for the moment the struggle for power trumps the power of the faith.

In Egypt the internecine war is not even between Sunnis and Shiites, but between Sunnis and Sunnis. (Christian casualties are collateral damage.)

Notice that this bloody confrontation [in Egypt] has nothing to do with the celebrated Sunni-Shi’ite war that is so often invoked to “explain” current events. It’s all happening within Sunni Egypt (although the Shi’ite Iranians are certainly meddling – surprise! – on behalf of the very Sunni Brothers). And there are plenty of “foreign fighters”, just as there were in Iraq, just as there are in Afghanistan: in the last 8 days, according to usually reliable sources in Cairo, 253 Uzbeks, 21 Yemenis, 40 Afghans and 11 Turkmens have been arrested, along with 126 Hamas operatives, who bring weapons and train pro-Brotherhood Egyptians. …

Maybe the Middle East is now the scene of a war between Islamists and ex-Islamists, or between pious Muslims and not-so-pious ones, or even between Muslims and ex-Muslims. In this context, we should ban the use of the word “moderate” along with “stability”…

We’re all for that.

Move on to Syria.

You’ve got Bashar Assad on top in a neighborhood of Damascus, supported by Iran and Russia, fighting against a variety of insurgents including al-Qaeda units, Salafists, former members of Assad’s military, and the usual mob of adventurous souls, including Americans and Europeans, who believe they are waging jihad in the name of Allah.

Assad is actually a figurehead; the real capital of Syria is in an office of the Iranian supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. A leader of the Syrian opposition made this clear, saying that Hezbollah and Iran were the real powers in Syria, and there’s plenty of evidence for his assertion, including dead Hezbollahis and Quds Forcers.

So al-Qaeda’s fighting Iran in Syria, right? That fits nicely into the Sunni vs. Shi’ite meme … But wait: our very own Treasury Department, which is as good as we’ve got when it comes to deciphering the crazy quilt network of global terrorism, told us in no uncertain terms a couple of years ago that there was a secret deal between AQ and the mullahs. Moreover, the tidal wave of terrorism that has crashed on Iraq is universally termed a resurgence of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has been Iranian-sponsored since Day One . … [So there is] an Iranian (Shi’ite)-sponsored (Sunni) al-Qaeda assault against (Shi’ite) Iraq, and right next door an Iranian-assisted (Sunni) al-Qaeda, alongside other (mostly Sunni) foreign and domestic fighters against a (kinda Shi’ite) regime under the control of (totally Shi’ite) Tehran. …

Let’s get outside these little boxes and look at the big board.

There’s an alliance plotting against us, bound together by two radical views of the world that share a profound, fundamental hatred of us. If they win, it’s hell to pay, because then we will be attacked directly and often, and we will be faced with only two options, winning or losing.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that they’re divided, and slaughtering each other. And it’s not always possible for us to sort out what “each other” even means. But one thing is quite clear, and I know it’s an unpopular idea, but it’s a true fact: they’re not an awesome force.

That is true. And because they are not militarily a match for the US, Michael Ledeen thinks they will fail.

The radical left has failed everywhere, and so have the radical Islamists. Both claim to have history (and/or the Almighty) on their side, but they go right on failing. The left is now pretty much in the garbage bin of history (you can hire Gorbachev for your next annual meeting if you can afford his speaking fee), and the “Muslim world” – sorry to be so blunt – is a fossilized remnant of a failed civilization. Look at the shambles in Iran, look at the colossal mess the Brothers unleashed on a once-great nation.

So we’ve got opportunities, lots of them. We’ve already passed up many: failing to support the Iranian people against the evil regime that is the central source of terror against us and our would-be friends, failing to support Mubarak against the Brothers, failing to quickly support the opposition to Assad at the outset, before the enterprise got buried under a heap of jihadi manure, and so forth. OK, we’re human, we’re led, if that’s the right verb, very badly, by ideologues who think we [Americans] are the root cause of most of the world’s problems. Which is the same thing our enemies believe …

Just think of the consequences of a free Iran: the fall of the Syrian regime, a devastating blow to Hezbollah, the Revolutionary Guards, Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Bad news for the Brothers. A kick in the solar plexus of the nasty lefties in South America…

Think globally. Act as if you understood it. On our side, confound it.

Excellent advice. But omitted from the reckoning is the “stealth jihad”. Islam’s advance by immigration, taking over regions within Western countries, imposing sharia wherever they can, infiltrating governments, disseminating their propaganda surreptitiously through the public schools with false accounts of Islam and its history in prescribed books.

And is the left “in the garbage can of history”? Our view is that the USSR was defeated in the Cold War, but Communism was not. It is crowing its triumph in almost every Western university. It’s purring in the public schools. It colors many a ruling from a judge’s bench. It holds the mass media in thrall. It beats its dreary drum and sounds its infuriating trumpet in the United Nations. And it has a protégé of its acolyte Frank Marshall Davis, a member of its New Party, a disciple of its prophet Saul Alinsky presiding over the United States.

Which side, so far, is winning?

A video from the archives of our quaking civilization.

“I am for the separation of State and Economics.”