A shooter shoots at cars and drivers randomly in the streets of Hollywood, shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

God responded to the call. He “looked down” on one man and let only his car window suffer.

Atlas Shrugs reports:

Police have so far found no motive in the shooting.

Try as they might, they cannot think what it could be. A real head-scratcher!

P.S. December 12, 2001: This report ascribes a personal motive to the shooter. The witness in the video who heard him shout “Allahu akbar!” may have misheard. But our point that the shouting of “Allahu akbar!’ is officially disregarded these days as evidence of Islamic affiliation and participation in the on-going jihad remains valid.

President Obama is allowing the heroic US military – and, therefore, the American people – to be humiliated in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is withdrawing US soldiers from Iraq and leaving some in Afghanistan under demeaning conditions imposed by vengeful, spiteful, corrupt enemy leaders.

Diana West writes at Townhall:

This withdrawal [from Iraq] will mark the end of a misguided misadventure to convert, in a zealously secular and even philo-Islamic way, a member of the Islamic world to the ways of the West. Despite the courage, dedication and sacrifice of American and allied troops, despite the so-called surge, despite the endless (and endlessly expensive) attempts to win Iraqi “hearts and minds,” it was a flop.

The top American spokesman in Iraq, Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, can spin all he wants – “It’s not about winning or losing but making significant progress” – but this eight-year “counterinsurgency” didn’t work. It was a failure – unless, of course, you’re Iran. To borrow from the great Winston Churchill, also unenthralled with the British misadventure in Iraq in the year 1922, we have been paying billions of dollars “for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having.”

In Afghanistan … President Hamid Karzai has just presided over a gathering of the clans, a “loya jirga” assembly of some 2,000 Afghans, who have produced a list of conditions for a continuing American presence. 

Here, culled from different news sources, is a list of the loya jirga’s conditions:

1) no more immunity from Afghan law for U.S. forces;

2) no more night raids by U.S. forces;

3) no more “arbitrary” detention of Afghan suspects;

4) no more U.S. detention centers;

5) transfer Afghan detainees to Afghan detention centers;

6) a capped 10- year limit to any pact with the United States;

7) Afghans must lead all security missions after 2014;

8) the United States should commit to training role and “support”;

9) no more U.S.-run “parallel” structures to handle contracting and other matters; rather, America should support Afghan institutions; and

10) no U.S. attacks on neighbors [ie Pakistan, Iran] from Afghan soil.

What they’re saying, these vicious, uncivilized, dark-minded men, is “continue to give us what we want from you, but don’t interfere with anything we choose to do”.

But still Karzai wants more. “The U.S. wants military installations from us. We will give those to them. But we have conditions for this. We will benefit from this. Our soldiers will be trained. Our police will be trained. We will benefit from their money.”

The Iraqis and Afghans are, she says, “cold and numb to the blood and sacrifice of tens of thousands of Americans.”

So too, it is plain to see, is President Obama.

Earlier today there was another explosion in Iran, this one in Isfahan, “said to be the primary location of the Iranian nuclear weapons program” and “the site of Iran’s largest missile assembly and production plant … built with North Korean assistance … Involved in the production of Scud-B and Scud-C surface-to-surface missiles by assembling components bought in North Korea and China …  Development and production … was said to include the Shehab 1 and Nazeat missiles …,  the Chinese M-11 …, HY-2 anti-ship and Chinese M-type missiles …, Nodong/Sahab-3 missiles … ”

According to this report, the Iranians are claiming both that it was an accident and that there was no explosion at all.

The Revolutionary Guard said the accidental explosion occurred while military personnel were transporting munitions.

The deputy governor of Iran’s Isfahan province on Monday said however he had no reports of an explosion in his region. “So far no report of a major explosion has been heard from any government body in Isfahan,” he was quoted as saying by the semi-official Mehr news agency. …

A top Israeli security official said that the recent explosion that rocked an Iranian missile base near Tehran [see our post Ah, mighty Worm, all praise to thee!, November 18, 2011] could delay or stop further Iranian surface-to-surface missile development.

This one should make delaying or stopping it even more likely.

Was it the work of the mighty Stuxnet computer worm again? Or of Duqu, son of Stuxnet?

We may never know. But don’t let not knowing delay or stop the celebrations.

Hah! A setback to Obama’s drive to facilitate Islamization.

Patrick Poole writes at PJ Media:

When Barack Obama signed the continuing resolution this past weekend averting another potential government shutdown, it’s doubtful that he was aware that tucked into the bill, which funds several federal agencies through the fiscal year and extends the continuing resolution for the rest of the government until December 16, is a provision that may dramatically impact what Islamic groups and leaders the FBI and other law enforcement agencies can continue to work with.

Under Division B, Title II of the bill, under the Federal Bureau of Investigation-Salaries and Expenses section, is the following provision:

“Liaison partnerships – The conferees support the FBI’s policy prohibiting any formal non-investigative cooperation with unindicted co-conspirators in terrorism cases. The conferees expect the FBI to insist on full compliance with this policy by FBI field offices and to report to the Committees on Appropriations regarding any violation of the policy.”

The most obvious group that this will impact is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which was named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case — the largest terrorism-finance trial in American history. During the trial, FBI Dallas Agent Lara Burns testified that CAIR was a front for the terrorist group Hamas. …

Stung by their loss of access to federal law enforcement agencies, some of the Islamic organizations named as unindicted co-conspirators in the case unsuccessfully sued to have their names removed from the list. In a 2009 unsealed decision by federal Judge Jorge Solis, the court found that the government should have submitted the unindicted co-conspirators list under seal, and ordered the list resealed (a hollow victory since the list is readily available), but declined to remove the groups and individuals named.

In fact, in his decision Judge Solis recounted the evidence submitted by the government that justified CAIR’s being named unindicted co-conspirator in the case …

But it wasn’t just CAIR among the unindicted co-conspirators that Solis focused on, but also the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), which bills itself as the largest Muslim umbrella group in the country, and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), which owns the property to more than one-quarter of all mosques in North America. Solis wrote that the government had “produced ample evidence to establish the associations of CAIR, ISNA and NAIT with HLF, the Islamic Association for Palestine (‘IAP’), and with Hamas.” He also wrote: “The Muslim Brotherhood supervised the creation of the ‘Palestine Committee,’ which was put in charge of other organizations, such as HLF, IAP, UASR [the Muslim Brotherhood associated United Association for Studies and Research], and ISNA.” …

What impact this new legislation will have remains to be seen, but it is clearly intended to roll back the Obama administration’s penchant for relying on groups identified by government prosecutors as fronts for designated terrorist organizations as partners for “outreach.” 

This new law will also curtail relations with the administration’s favorite “outreach” partner, ISNA, which, despite being named unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land trial, was last month included in a top-level meeting with the Department of Justice where Muslim groups demanded a formal declaration by the DOJ that any criticism of Islam constituted religious and racial discrimination. ISNA’s president, Mohamed Magid, is also a regular at White House functions and has been appointed to several government positions, including advising the Department of Homeland Security.

Congressional sources I spoke with on Monday said that this common-sense legislation was necessitated by the continued practice — in open defiance of the stated FBI policy — of dealing with and legitimizing individuals and groups that federal prosecutors had gone into federal court and identified as assisting terrorist groups.

Perhaps the most notorious case was an instance I reported on last year: Kifah Mustapha, who was personally named in the Holy Land case and who prosecutors had on court evidence videotape singing “I am a member of Hamas,” was included last year in the FBI-Chicago Field Office’s six-week Citizens’ Academy training program and given an escorted tour through the FBI Academy at Quantico and the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center. …

Congressional officials expressed skepticism that the new legislation would permanently stop the schizophrenic government policy of engaging groups and individuals that the government itself has said are tied to terrorist groups, but it puts the Obama administration on notice that the days of the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” outreach policies are drawing to a close.

But “let Islam do evil” will go on as long as Obama is in office.

Still, this is one victory, cunningly won, for the freedom side of the war.

But then again, consider how far Islam has advanced in America that we have to count the stopping of law enforcement agencies continuing to co-operate with terrorist-linked criminals as a battle won.

He’s a Lone Wolf. Get that? A LONE WOLF.

Who is?

A man who’s been arrested.

For what? Where?

In New York. On  terrorism charges.

Terrorism charges? In New York? What’s he done?

Nothing. He’s done nothing.

Then why – ?

He’s just a loner who lives with his mother in the Bronx.

What’s his name? Muhammad Something?

Don’t be racist! In fact, his name is Jose Pimentel. Okay, he also calls himself Muhammad Yusuf. But he’s totally a LONE WOLF.

He must have done something to be arrested and charged.

He’s been watched for more than a year by the authorities. The authorities are doing a great job protecting this country, we want you to know.  

Why were they watching him?

He spent a lot of time on the internet.

Any sites in particular?

And lately he’s been buying materials that could be used for making a bomb. They caught him drilling into a pipe. First step in making a bomb. In his mother’s kitchen. In the Bronx. He lived alone with her. A total LONE WOLF.

Do they know what he was planning to bomb?

Returning soldiers. 

Returning from – ?

Iraq and Afghanistan.

Iraq and Afghanistan? What’s his religion?

That has nothing to do with it. But okay, he’s a Muslim. Totally a LONE WOLF who lives with his mother.

I see. You didn’t say what sites he visited on the Internet.

TrueIslam1.

Is that where he learnt how to make a bomb?

No. He learnt that from a magazine called Inspire.

Inspire? Isn’t that the magazine put out by al-Qaeda?

What do you have to bring al-Qaeda into this for? I keep telling you, he’s a …

Lone Wolf.

Right. 

What was his motive in planning to bomb soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan?

Now you’re asking a question we can’t answer. We have no idea. It’s a complete puzzle. We’re stumped. We’re hoping he’ll say what his motive was.  

He hasn’t said anything that gives you a clue?

Nothing. Just a lot of  confused nonsense about America being a legitimate target in time of war. War? What war? And America a target?  None of it makes any sense at all. He’s some kind of nut. And totally a  …

Lone Wolf?

You got it.

Barack Obama is intensely, emotionally, fervently pro-Islam. Under his leadership, the whole executive branch of the government works to advance and empower Islam in North Africa and the Middle East, and/or in the US.

In North Africa and the Middle East:

William Taylor, the State Department’s Special Coordinator for  Middle East Transitions, is overseeing US aid to Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, and advising political parties on how to prepare for elections.

According to a report  by Ryan Mauro –

When asked how the U.S. would feel if the Muslim Brotherhood won Egypt’s elections, [Taylor] said, “I think we will be satisfied, if it is a free and fair election. What we need to do is judge people and parties and movements on what they do, not what they’re called.” The answer seemed to infer that critics of the Brotherhood are needlessly alarmed by the name of the group.

It gets worse. Taylor compared the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Tunisia’s Ennahda Party, as if that is a positive example to follow. “As long as parties, entities do not espouse or conduct violence, we’ll work with them.” He said there is undue fear of the Islamists. “This is something that we are used to, and should not be afraid of. We should deal with them.”

It is hard to imagine a statement more frightening and naïve coming from a senior official.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian affiliate is Hamas, which the Brotherhood still stands by and has never condemned. … The leader of the Ennahda Party, Rachid Ghannouchi, likewise supports Hamas, terrorism and the killing of Israeli children. This certainly qualifies as espousing violence, to use the words of Taylor.

A look at Taylor’s background shows he is a long associate of individuals tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and apologists of the Islamist group. Before taking his State Department post, he was the vice president of the U.S. Institute for Peace (UIP). It has a close working relationship with John Esposito, arguably the most prominent non-Muslim apologist for the Muslim Brotherhood, foreign and domestic.

Esposito defends the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and Sami al-Arian. He served as an expert witness for the defense in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, which was found guilty of being a front for Hamas set up by the Brotherhood.

A trial in which Cair and ISNA were found to be “unindicted co-conspirators” with the Holy Land Foundation. Why, we wonder, do they remained forever “unindicted”?

[Esposito is also] the vice chair of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), the board of which has strong associations with the International Institute for Islamic Thought, another Brotherhood front. On April 28, 2010, Taylor’s UIP sponsored a CSID conference that the Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report calls “perhaps the largest public gathering of global Muslim Brotherhood leaders and U.S. government officials to date.” Tariq Ramadan, the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the original founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, was there, as was Brotherhood members from Bahrain and Jordan. In May 2011, CSID held an event with a senior leader of Ennahda.

Taylor joins several other Obama administration officials who take a benign view of the Muslim Brotherhood or are linked to its American fronts.

The best example is the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, who … during testimony to Congress in February, [said] that the “term ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has described Al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”

There’s Rashad Hussain, the [US] envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference,  who attended the aforementioned CSID event featuring Brotherhood leaders.

For the low-down on Rashad Hussain, see our post The trusted envoy, February 20, 2010. The Organization of the Islamic Conference, recently renamed the Organization of Islamic Co-operation is the body chiefly responsible for launching the “soft jihad” invasion of Western Europe. For more about it see our post Europe betrayed, February 11, 2010.  

Then there’s Dalia Mogahed, one of the members of President Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnership. She is a close associate of John Esposito and is said to have been the “most influential person” advising President Obama on his speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. …

The State Department has teamed up with CAIR to host an event with the Syrian opposition. In January 2010, members of ISNA, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and Muslim American Society, all tied to the Muslim Brotherhood, were given briefings by the Department of Homeland Security including Secretary Janet Napolitano. A member of the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory Council, Mohamed Elibiary, has Brotherhood associations and is a defender of the Holy Land Foundation. …

For more on Mohamed Elibiary, who leaked secret intelligence to which the DHS had given him privileged access [!], see our post National Insecurity, November 16, 2011.

Obama’s chief terrorism advisor, John Brennan, speaks alongside the president of ISNA. Another senior advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, was the keynote speaker at ISNA’s 2009 convention. It has been reported that the Justice Department even blocked the prosecutions of at least two Brotherhood figures tied to Hamas. …

In the US:

This report comes from Creeping Sharia:

If you are a student of Islam, then you might have gathered that Islam has a doctrine of eternal hatred of Kafirs and their civilization. A student of Islam might also gather that after a 1400 year history of hostilities, murder, rape and enslavement that Islam was at war with us. But the White House, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, FBI and CIA have informed us that this is not the case.

It started when Steve Emerson [expert on terrorism] and Steve Coughlin [expert on Islamic law] were going to give talks about political Islam to the FBI and Homeland Security . Then the White House informed them that not only were they not going to talk about the Islamic doctrine and history of jihad, but that henceforth, no Kafir could talk to any Federal agencies, unless they were vetted by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Now, Eric Holder, the Attorney General, has ordered a purge of all Department of Justice manuals and training of all material that will “offend” Muslims. …

U.S. Attorney Dwight Holton explained that FBI training materials that even remotely link Islam to violence will be banned.

“I want to be perfectly clear about this: Training materials that portray Islam as a religion of violence or with a tendency towards violence are wrong, they are offensive and they are contrary to everything this president, this attorney general and Department of Justice stands for,” he told Muslim activists gathered at the George Washington University law school. “They will not be tolerated.”

The president and the Department of Justice do not stand for critical thought, an examination of all sides of a problem. The White House wants to see that Muslims are never offended. Notice that the White House does not say that the Kafir analysts are wrong in their facts and data. Instead, they say that facts have no place at the table. Our government no longer stands for logical thought, but only wants to insure that Muslims are not offended by Kafirs. The way for Muslims to not be offended is for the Kafirs to keep silent. This is pure Islamic doctrine, Sharia law. …

Kafirs must not have knowledge of Islamic doctrine. Kafirs must not make their civilization attractive to Muslims. Kafirs must submit to Islam … This is why we are changing how our textbooks explain America because Muslims will read them. Islam must be praised and the West denigrated. 

You might wonder why they would not want Kafirs to read the Koran. After all wouldn’t they want the Kafir to read the wonderful Koran and become a Muslim? No, Islam wants for you to listen to a Muslim explain the Koran. A Koran reading Kafir might apply critical thought to the text and that would be a disaster. Only Muslims are allowed to know Mohammed and Allah under Sharia law. …

Now they deny truth. Next they will criminalize truth that offends Islam.

*

The mass media are helping the administration to lie about the nature of Islam.

How pro-Islam for instance, is ABC?

Here’s David Wood to tell us:

According to this report, the Stuxnet worm was the cause of a recent explosion that killed a bunch of nuclear experts and again postpones the nuclear war capability of Iran:

Exhaustive investigations into the deadly explosion last Saturday, Nov. 12 of the Sejil-2 ballistic missile at the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) Alghadir base point increasingly to a technical fault originating in the computer system controlling the missile and not the missile itself. The head of Iran’s ballistic missile program Maj. Gen. Hassan Moghaddam was among the 36 officers killed in the blast which rocked Tehran 46 kilometers away.

(Tehran reported 17 deaths although 36 funerals took place.)

Since the disaster, experts have run tests on missiles of the same type as Sejil 2 and on their launching mechanisms. …

Maj. Gen. Moghaddam had gathered Iran’s top missile experts around the Sejil 2 to show them a new type of warhead which could also carry a nuclear payload. No experiment was planned. The experts were shown the new device and asked for their comments.

Moghaddam presented the new warhead through a computer simulation attached to the missile. His presentation was watched on a big screen.

So proud of it. And his pride came before his fall.

The missile exploded upon an order from the computer.

The warhead blew first; the solid fuel in its engines next, so explaining the two consecutive bangs across Tehran and the early impression of two explosions, the first more powerful than the second, occurring at the huge 52 sq. kilometer complex of Alghadir.

Because none of the missile experts survived and all the equipment and structures pulverized within a half-kilometer radius of the explosion, the investigators had no witnesses and hardly any physical evidence to work from.

Iranian intelligence heads entertain two initial theories to account for the sudden calamity: a) that Western intelligence service or the Israeli Mossad managed to plant a technician among the missile program’s personnel and he signaled the computer to order the missile to explode; or b), a theory which they find more plausible, that the computer controlling the missile was infected with the Stuxnet virus which misdirected the missile into blowing without anyone present noticing anything amiss until it was too late.

It is the second theory which has got Iran’s leaders really worried because it means that, in the middle of spiraling tension with the United States and Israel or their nuclear weapons program, their entire Shahab 3 and Sejil 2 ballistic missile arsenal is infected and out of commission …

Good, good, excellently good.

Iran’s supreme armed forces chief Gen. Hassan Firouz-Abadi was playing for time when he announced this week that the explosion had “only delayed by two weeks the manufacturing of an experimental product by the Revolutionary Guards which could be a strong fist in the face of arrogance (the United States) and the occupying regime (Israel).” …

If indeed Stuxnet is back, the cleanup this time would take several months, according to Western experts – certainly longer than the two weeks estimated by Gen. Firouz-Abadi.

And now Son of Worm has been born. Hallelujah!

Those experts also rebut the contention of certain Western and Russian computer pros that Stuxnet and another virus called Duqu are linked.

The head of Iran’s civil defense program Gholamreza Jalali said this week that the fight against Duqu is “in its initial phase” and the final report “which says which organizations the virus has spread to and what its impacts are has not been complete yet. All the organizations and centers that could be susceptible to being contaminated are under control.”

Sure they are. But by whom?

Apparently by Arrogance and the Occupying Regime.

The following is a slightly revised version of a reply Jillian Becker made to a British (and fatuously anti-American) commenter on the post Islam and “Islamism”, November 14, 2011.

*

From time to time it’s necessary for us to state what we’re all about.

We are atheists. That is self-explanatory. We are conservatives in that our principles are those at the core of American conservatism: limited government, low taxes, strong defense, a free market economy, individual liberty.

Liberty is our highest value. We oppose collectivism, which is serfdom.

Collectivist ideologies are  of two kinds: egalitarian and inegalitarian. Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism are examples of the egalitarian. Nazism, Islam, the Catholicism of the Middle Ages are examples of the inegalitarian.

Our chosen task is the critical examination of ideas, mainly political and religious. Our pages are are full of criticism of Catholicism, Calvinism, Judaism, Islam, and many more such systems of belief. They are sets of ideas, and as such need to be examined and criticized. Their histories and the crimes committed in their name need to be repeatedly exposed.

We fix our assessing eye on Islam more than on any other religion because it is waging war on the West. Our view of Islam is not prejudice, it is judgment. We have taken the trouble to inform ourselves. To be against subjugators, oppressors and mass murderers is not “bigotry”.  We quote Muslims who are regarded as authorities, sometimes showing them in videos expressing themselves directly. Islam’s defenders have the hospitality of our comment pages to explain why they like it.

We have never advocated, and never would, the harming of any person except criminals or those who declare an intention to commit a crime. In such cases we expect the law – not a mob – to deal with them. Or if they are terrorists held, say, at Guantanamo Bay, we want them to be brought before a military tribunal and if found guilty, executed.

Islam should become as abominated as Nazism and Maoism generally are at least in the West. It deserves nothing better. That it calls itself a religion in no way exonerates or excuses it. In any case, we respect no religion, no belief in the supernatural, no orthodoxy, no dogma.

To discredit Islam, constant public criticism of it is absolutely necessary. That is why no laws or resolutions protecting it from criticism must be passed by nation states or by the UN, which is currently trying to do just that (with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help).

Islam declared war on the non-Muslim world 1400 years ago. That war has become very hot of late. Since 9/11 there have been some 18,000 deadly terror attacks  carried out in the name of Islam (see our margin). Most of us can only fight the battle with words. Let’s not spare them.

On October 14, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that 100 U.S. troops, acting as advisors to the Uganda military, will help in military action against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) — a rebel force roaming northwest Uganda, recruiting child soldiers, committing atrocities, and taking hostages (including slave “wives”) for more than fifteen years.

Information on the origin and nature of the appalling Lord’s Resistance Army is provided here at PJ Media by Harvey Glickman, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Haverford College, who also speculates on the reasons for the recent stepped-up US involvement against it in Uganda. (For more on the LRA see our post The Lord’s army of child slave cannibals, June 14, 2011.)

The LRA’s main goal is to live off the terror it creates. Northwest Uganda, northeast Congo, and southeast Sudan (now divided by the new border with South Sudan) have all seen decades of bloody disorder as the LRA traversed international borders to elude Ugandan troops. At times, the LRA has also attacked in Rwanda, Republic of Congo, Republic of Sudan, and Uganda, committing atrocities in those countries.

The LRA emerged as an atrocity-anarchy mechanism in the mid-1980s. It arose among the long-neglected Acholi people in northern Uganda, whose brief period of ascendancy during the brutal Idi Amin regime was overthrown by the National Resistance Army, led by Yoweri Museveni, in 1986. Museveni parlayed his military success into the presidency and remains there today.

Joseph Kony, a member of the Acholi people originally from Gulu in northern Uganda, founded the LRA, and instigated a rebellion against the Ugandan government in 1986. His ostensible purpose was to establish a theocracy based on orders from God communicated to him via spirits. His method to spread the “Word” encompassed unspeakable atrocities and child abduction, eventually displacing two million people in his rampages through northern Uganda, Congo, and Sudan.

After the September 11 attacks on the United States, the Ugandan military reinterpreted its own measures against the LRA rebellion as part of the global war against terrorism. In 2002 the Uganda parliament passed a Suppression of Terrorism Act. The United States rewarded Uganda’s support for the war in Iraq by restarting a military training and assistance program in 2003. The agreement provided for electronic technology and some direct military assistance, but not weapons. Part of the program was to “win the hearts and minds” of the Acholi people, whose territory within Uganda has been most ravaged by LRA depredations.

By 2003 it was estimated the LRA had 3,000 fighters under arms and 2,000 camp followers, many involuntary. In October 2005, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for five leaders of the LRA, including Kony.

Early in 2010, however, the Ugandan military stated that the LRA was at its weakest point in the past fifteen years. More recently, it claims there are only 200 to 400 soldiers still in the field for the LRA.

So why does the U.S. government pick this moment to get involved?

It turns out that the United States has been involved with this issue for some time. As early as 2003, the United States contributed aid to the Uganda defense budget as part of the expanded struggle against global terrorism. And President Obama has disclosed that since 2008 the United States has helped efforts in the region to protect local people by pursuing the LRA.

U.S. Public Law 111-172 — the “Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009” — was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 24, 2010. The bill, combining national security and humanitarian goals, was sponsored by Senators McCain and Feingold to provide financial and material assistance to Uganda’s counterinsurgency efforts.

But U.S. support for the anti-LRA war has not been an unmitigated success. The National Security Council authorized training and financial support for the December 2008 Operation Lightning Thunder, a joint Uganda-Congolese-South Sudan campaign. This resulted, however, in major casualties among Congolese civilians, with 200,000 people displaced and the LRA escaping to fight another day.

Again the US is invoking R2P – the Responsibility to Protect – as its reason for intervention in a foreign war. It was the reason given for US military intervention in Libya. But if the intention really was to protect civilians, that intervention must be counted as a failure. (See our posts The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011; A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011; NATO bombards civilians in Libya, October 5, 2011.)

There were other reasons for the US and NATO to go to war in Libya, among them the need for European NATO member-states to ensure their access to that country’s oil. And there are surely other reasons for the US to go to war in Uganda.

Somewhat puzzling about the new U.S. deployment “to protect civilians” — as stated by the U.S. Embassy in Kampala on October 17, 2011 — is the fact that the Ugandan army announced that the Kony/LRA problem is no longer a threat in Uganda, but a regional problem. So, apparently the UPDF is joining the U.S. in an African regional conflict. Uganda has been a leader in the African Union’s battle against the al-Shabaab terrorists in Somalia, and suffered a retaliatory bombing in Kampala by them in July 2010.

So does this new operation mean a wider U.S. regional military action in East Africa in support, however reluctant, of Kenya’s incursion into Somalia against al-Shabaab? Is this part of an expanded role for AFRICOM, the U.S. military command in Africa? …

Among the possible motives that Glickman considers for more military action by the US in the region, one makes more sense than most:

There is one other possible factor inspiring this new U.S. effort. The geographic areas in which the LRA operates are in the middle of recent discoveries of oilfields. The finds are substantial. Three companies have bought the drilling rights. Heritage sold its interests to Tullow, Tullow sold 30% of its interests to Total and CNOOC (China National Offshore Oil Corporation, which is state-run). …

The Obama administration’s motives are still not clear. Given this list of possibilities, the way the campaign develops should provide some answers.

We think oil is a very good reason to go to war. It would be an added benefit, greatly to be welcomed, if in the course of such a war the Lord’s Resistance Army were to be destroyed.

Two videos from Creeping Sharia to remind the West that Islam is waging war against us.