What is going on in the US Defense Department? There are people in it who seem to be positively on the side of the enemy.

From Investor’s Business Daily, by Paul Sperry:

The internal threat from Muslim extremists in the military extends to high-level Defense Department aides who have undermined military policy. In fact, one top Muslim adviser pushed out an intelligence analyst who warned of the sudden jihad syndrome that led to the Fort Hood terrorist attack.

An honored guest of the Ramadan dinner at the Pentagon this September was Hesham Islam, who infiltrated the highest echelons of the Ring despite proven ties to U.S. terror front groups and a shady past in his native Egypt.

As senior adviser for international affairs to former deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, Islam … persuaded brass to sack a Pentagon analyst, Stephen Coughlin, after he advised cutting off outreach to ISNA, which he accurately ID’d as part of a covert terror-support network in the U.S. — something the Justice Department recently confirmed in a major terror finance trial.

Islam invited ISNA [Islamic Society of North America] officials to lunch with the avuncular England, known by insiders as Gullible Gordon, who in turn spoke at ISNA confabs. Islam also helped set up a Pentagon job booth at one recent ISNA convention to recruit Muslim chaplains and linguists.

Most disturbing, Islam met regularly with Saudi and other embassy officials lobbying for the release and repatriation of their citizens held at Gitmo. He in turn advised England, who authorized the release of dozens of Gitmo detainees. Some have resumed terrorist activities.

No one really knew who Islam was when he was promoted — in fact, the Pentagon removed his bio from its Web site after reporters noted major inconsistencies in it — yet he was allowed to get inside the office of the Pentagon’s No. 2 official.

“In effect,” a senior U.S. Army intelligence official told me, “we’ve got terrorist supporters calling the shots on our policies toward Muslims from the highest levels.”

Meanwhile, politically incorrect prophets like Coughlin have been frozen out. …

Coughlin … warned that by using ISNA and other radical [Muslim] Brotherhood fronts to endorse Muslim chaplains and recruit Muslim soldiers, they were courting enemies of the U.S. — and courting disaster. But they were too drunk with political correctness to listen. …

The Fort Dix terrorists …  talked about joining the U.S. Army so they could kill U.S soldiers from the “inside.” …  Some of them [like Nidal Malik Hasan, the Muslim terrorist of Fort Hood -JB] were inspired by al-Qaida preacher Anwar Awlaki, who on his Yemen-based Web site calls for jihad against U.S. military targets inside and outside the U.S.

But so do so-called moderate American clerics like Zaid Shakir. … Frequently booked by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as a guest speaker at its events, Shakir tells his Muslim audience: “Jihad is physically fighting the enemies of Islam to protect and advance the religion of Islam. This is jihad.”

Acceptable targets of jihad, he says, include U.S. military aircraft. “Islam doesn’t permit us to hijack airplanes filled with civilian people,” he said, but “if you hijack an airplane filled with the 82nd Airborne, that’s something else.”

The 82nd Airborne is based out of Fort Bragg, which is part of North Carolina state Sen. Larry Shaw’s home district. Shaw is CAIR’s new chairman. He is also a minority contractor who operates Shaw Food Services Co. near Fort Bragg. According to the legislator’s financial disclosure form, Shaw Food customers include the Defense Department. …

CAIR, like ISNA, is an unindicted terrorist co-conspirator. The FBI says CAIR is a terrorist front group and has cut off formal ties to it. So should the military. …

This enemy is hiding behind a religion, making it easier for them to infiltrate our sensitive security agencies. Communist spooks did not have such an advantage. …

Military command must stop currying favor with suspect Muslim groups and start beefing up counterintelligence activities. It must institute a policy of zero tolerance for Jihad Joes in the ranks.

And while we’re trying to digest that, here’s another piece of information we must swallow to make the heartburn worse – an Obama program making it easy for foreign Muslims to join the US armed forces:

Illegal aliens with “special skills,” such as speaking Arabic, Dari, Pushti and other languages are now allowed to enlist in the U.S military. There is NO requirement that these people be in the United States legally. No background check! A Muslim Pushti speaker could sneak across the Rio Grande today and be getting 3 hots and a cot (meals and a place to sleep) in the U.S. Military tomorrow! Even worse, he would be on a path to get citizenship in less time than any other naturalized citizen in history! Special “citizenship expediters” at military bases across the country rush their citizenship papers through in as little as 10 weeks.

Does Obama mean to pack the army with potential traitors?

Obama has sent a letter to Kim Jong Il, the contents of which are not disclosed to the American people who pay the president to conduct their foreign relations. What on earth has he written? Does he imagine that something he says can suddenly transform the murderous little squirt who tyrannizes over North Korea into a nice reasonable guy who only wants the best for everyone?

Or does the letter ask for advice on how to attain absolute power?

From Investor’s Business Daily:

The fact is, Kim, while cunning in his pursuit of self-preservation, is a sociopath, a mass murderer of his own people, responsible for the death by famine and torture of as many as 3 million North Koreans. The idea that you can make a rational appeal to his moral conscience is, well, beyond silly. …

By some estimates Kim has killed 3.5 million people or more out of a population of 23 million. The murder toll includes children and infants. The deaths have come from starvation, beatings, torture and inhumane incarceration in hellish concentration camps.

It’s bad enough that we tolerate genocide. But someday soon, he — or his ally, Iran — will have the means to attack us. Just last week, a North Korean plane was detained in Bangkok carrying 35 tons of missiles, explosives and other weaponry. Where it was going, no one’s sure. No doubt we’ll send them a stern letter in rebuke.

Apparently the war we are fighting against them is not the same war they are fighting against us.

This story from Investor’s Business Daily may contain a clue to help answer the question we ask in the post immediately below concerning the kid-glove treatment of a Muslim terrorist in Britain:

The Pentagon has launched a 45-day probe into the Fort Hood massacre, promising to find answers to why it happened and how it can be prevented from happening again. But the investigation may prove an exercise in futility, judging from PC remarks by military brass.

“My message to all those in uniform — including Muslims in uniform — is how much we appreciate their service. The diversity of our force is one of its greatest strengths,” said the Joint Chiefs chairman, Adm. Mike Mullen, who appeared alongside the defense secretary to announce the inquiry, which reports say will focus on mental health services for troubled troops. …

Military brass appear to be doubling down on the political correctness that blinded them to warning signs telegraphed by the Quran-waving Muslim officer accused of the worst mass killing on a domestic military base in U.S. history and the bloodiest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

The breakdown in security stems from “fears over offending a member of a religious minority,” finds a report by the Westminster Institute, a security think tank. So worried about conveying any notion that it’s at war with Islam, the Defense Department has deluded itself into believing that the enemy is bereft of religious motivation.

Though the enemy clearly states that it’s waging “jihad,” or holy war, against us, it’s now taboo to use the term because it risks reinforcing the idea that the U.S. is at war with Islam itself. “We are not at war with jihad,” a high-ranking Pentagon official said at a recent conference. “Jihad is a legitimate component of Islam” — no worse than fasting or bowing to Mecca.

Even defining the enemy as “jihadist” is no longer acceptable, leaving GIs to fight an enemy their own commanders refuse to name. The 2009 U.S. National Intelligence Strategy, which takes into account Pentagon priorities, uses the term Islam zero times, Muslim 0, jihad 0 and jihadist 0. In sharp contrast, the 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, used the word Islam 322 times, Muslim 145, jihad 126 and jihadist 32. It took five short years to completely whitewash the Islamist threat. Any wonder [Nidal Malik] Hasan was treated with kid gloves?

Again it is Diana West who says what needs to be said about the war in Afghanistan.

From the Washington Examiner:

Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s long-awaited testimony before Congress on the Afghanistan “surge” was, according to one account, “uneventful.” The general himself, another story noted, was “a study in circumspection.” And questioning from lawmakers was, said a third, “gentle.”

“Ineffectual” is more like it. Throw in “callous,” too, given House members’ obligations to constituents in the war zone, operating under what are surely the most restrictive rules of engagement in U.S. history.

But not a single lawmaker appears to have ventured one question about these dangerously disarming ROEs, which, in McChrystal’s controversial view, are key to the success of his “counterinsurgency” strategy. What kind of a commander puts his forces’ lives at increased risk for a historically unsuccessful theory that depends not on winning battles against enemies, but on winning the “trust,” or, as we used to say (and as Gen. David Petraeus put it in Iraq), the “hearts and minds” of a primitive people immersed in the anti-Western traditions of Islam?

That would have made a nice icebreaker of a question for any lawmaker troubled by the Petraeus-McChrystal policy of elevating Afghan “population protection” over U.S. “force protection” to win “the support” of this 99 percent Islamic country, and the rules that American forces must follow to do so. If, that is, there were any lawmakers so troubled.

Things really tightened up back in July, when McChrystal essentially grounded air support for troops except in dire circumstances. … The McChrystal counterinsurgency rules now include: No night searches. Villagers must be warned before searches. Afghan National Army or Afghan police must accompany U.S. units on searches. Searches must account, according to International Security Assistance Force headquarters, “for the unique cultural sensitivities toward local women.” (“Islamic repressiveness” is more accurate, but that’s another story.) U.S. soldiers may not fire on the enemy unless the enemy is preparing to fire first. U.S. forces may not engage the enemy if civilians are present. U.S. forces may fire at an enemy caught in the act of placing an improvised explosive device, but not walking away from IED area. And on it goes.

Here’s another ROE that McChrystal should have been asked to justify to all Americans who hope to see their loved ones return home in one piece. The London Times recently reported that Marines, about to embark on a dangerous supply mission, were shown a PowerPoint presentation that first illustrated locations of IEDs along the way and then warned the Marines “not to fire indiscriminately even if they were fired on.”

The Times story went on to note: “The briefing ended with a projected screen of McChrystal’s quote: “It’s not how many you kill, it’s how many you convince.”

Another question: How many you convince of what, general? Of the depravity of child marriage? Of the injustice of Shariah laws that subjugate women and non-Muslims? Of the inhumanity of jihad?

Of course not. In an oblique reference that likely took in Islam, McChrystal told Congress: “I think it’s very important that from an overall point of view, we understand how Afghan culture must define itself, and we be limited in our desire to change the fundamentals of it.”

Fine. I don’t want to change Afghan culture, either. But acknowledging its roots in an ideology that is anti-Western is crucial to devising strategy for the region. That’s obvious. But not to any of our leaders.

Final question: Are such leaders, civilian and military, doing their duty when they send the nation to war with a strategy that totally ignores jihad, the war doctrine of the enemy?

Truth is, they don’t know what the hell they’re fighting for.

The following extract is from a Washington Post report on the grinding process by which Obama eventually arrived at a decision on how to proceed in Afghanistan:

In June, McChrystal noted, he had arrived in Afghanistan and set about fulfilling his assignment. … “Defeat the Taliban. Secure the Population.”

“Is that really what you think your mission is?” one of those in the Situation Room asked.

On the face of it, it was impossible — the Taliban were part of the fabric of the Pashtun belt of southern Afghanistan, culturally if not ideologically supported by a significant part of the population. “We don’t need to do that,” Gates said, according to a participant. “That’s an open-ended, forever commitment.”

But that was precisely his mission, McChrystal responded, and it was enshrined in the Strategic Implementation Plan — the execution orders for the March strategy, written by the NSC staff.

“I wouldn’t say there was quite a ‘whoa’ moment,” a senior defense official said of the reaction around the table. “It was just sort of a recognition that, ‘Duh, that’s what, in effect, the commander understands he’s been told to do’.”

Read it all if you have the stamina.

The great British historian Andrew Roberts made an illuminating and accurate speech, a speech so good that it is hard to find a word strong enough to praise it as it deserves, to the Anglo-Israel Association on December 8, 2009, the 60th anniversary of its founding. In it he traced the relationship between Britain and Israel from the time a ‘national home’ for the Jewish people was brought into existence by the Balfour Declaration at the end of the First World War, to the present day when Israel is under threat of annihilation by Iran. He laid stress on the consistently hostile attitude of the British Foreign Office to the Jewish State, and its unremitting [and emotionally-charged] support for the Arabs. You can find the whole speech here.

This is how he concluded it, speaking of the danger posed by Iran to Israel’s very existence, and why Israel would be justified in making a pre-emptive strike against the Islamic republic:

None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides pre-emptively to strike against such a threat – in the same way that Nelson pre-emptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill pre-emptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran – then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism, because for all the fine work done by this Association over the past six decades – work that’s clearly needed as much now as ever before – Britain has only ever really been at best a fairweather friend to Israel.

Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:

That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.

We hope that his words might encourage Israel – if Israel needs encouragement – to make such a strike in the very near future.

We owe the following to NCR, a reader and vet, who emailed it to us. It was written by a French soldier in Afghanistan. The translator is unknown.

We have shared our daily life with two US units for quite a while – they are the first and fourth companies of a prestigious infantry battalion whose name I will withhold for the sake of military secrecy. [It is the 101st Airborne – NCR] We live with them and have got to know them, and we know we have the honor to live with one of the most renowned units of the US Army.

They have terribly strong American accents – to us the language they speak is not even English. How many times did I have to write down what I wanted to say rather than waste precious minutes trying various pronunciations of a seemingly common word?  Whatever state they are from, no two accents are alike and they even admit that in some crisis situations they have difficulties understanding each other.

Heavily built, fed at the earliest age with Gatorade, proteins and creatine [Heh. More like Waffle House and McDonald’s – NCR) – they are all head and shoulders taller than us and their muscles remind us of Rambo. Our frames are amusingly skinny to them – we are wimps, even the strongest of us – and because of this they often mistake us for Afghans.

Honor, motherland – everything here reminds one of that: the American flag flying in the wind above the outpost … Even though recruits may often originate from the heart of American cities and gang territory, they all hold high and proud the star spangled banner.

Each man knows he can count on the support of a whole people who provide them through the mail all that an American could miss in such a remote front-line location: books, chewing gums, razorblades, Gatorade, toothpaste etc. in such way that every man is made aware of how much the American people back him in his difficult mission.

This is a first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team is the focus of all his attention.

And they are impressive warriors!

We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you [that we think this] when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how.

The wearing of combat kit never seems to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.), and the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to trouble them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles, their sight unmoving in the direction of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues night and day. At night, all movements are performed in the dark – only a few subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered – everything happens in pitch dark, even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.

And combat? If you have seen Rambo you have seen it all – always coming to the rescue when one of our teams gets in trouble, and always with the shortest delay.

That is one of their tricks: they switch from T-shirt and sandals to combat-ready in three minutes. Arriving in contact with the enemy, the way they fight is simple and disconcerting: they just charge! They disembark and assault in stride. They bomb first and ask questions later – which cuts any pussyfooting short.

This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies, find repeatedly surprising. No wonder it surprises the hell out of our enemies.

We seldom hear any harsh word from them, and from 5 AM onwards the camp chores are performed in beautiful order and always with excellent spirit.

A passing American helicopter will stop near a stranded vehicle just to check that everything is alright. An American combat team will rush to support ours before even knowing how dangerous the mission is.

From what we have been given to witness, the American soldier is a splendid and worthy heir to those who liberated France and Europe.

To those who bestow upon us the honor of sharing their combat outposts, and who everyday give proof of their military excellence, to America’s army deployed on Afghan soil, we owe this tribute, hoping that we will always remain worthy of them and always continue to hear them say that we are all a band of brothers.

We took this map from Dry Bones, the Israeli cartoonist. The Islamic states colored yellow all passionately desire the elimination of Israel. Turkey is warming its diplomatic relations with Iran. Iran is not only actively building up its own military power, including a nuclear capability, but also arming proxy forces on Israel’s borders in Lebanon and Gaza. Two more neighboring Islamic states, ostensibly less aggressive towards Israel but in fact no less desirous of its destruction, are Jordan and Egypt. Beyond Jordan lies ruthlessly jihadist Saudi Arabia. Now imagine the whole of Europe as equally hostile Muslim territory, as it almost certainly will be in just a few decades from now. Bear in mind that the present decider-in-chief of US foreign policy is the son of a Muslim, emotionally pro-Islam, and reluctant to take any action to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear-armed power. What are the odds that the tiny sliver of a state called Israel will survive to the end of this century, do you think?

It’s hard to see what America has to gain by fighting any kind of war in Afghanistan. But if a war is to be fought at all, it should be done with overwhelming force, sustained until victory is complete. Anything less is an expense of lives and dollars in a waste of shame.

We appreciate this splendid stinging scorn for the fiasco of a war that Obama is waging, from the ever sharp pen of Diana West:

Barack Obama is sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, to come home again starting in 2011.

Madness.

Worse is the conservative reaction. The futility of “nation-building” in the Islamic world lost on the poor infidels, they deem the president’s plan correct even if undermined by the exit date.

This means the leftist White House and the conservative opposition have signed the same suicide pact to sink this country ever deeper into the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

For no achievable thing.

Not that our military, unleashed, couldn’t achieve whatever it wanted. Four years to roll back Nazi-occupied Europe, but eight years and counting to roll back Taliban-occupied bedrock? Today’s military, of course, is and will continue to be tightly leashed, bound by criminally restrictive rules of engagement and strategies to serve an unproven theory of “counterinsurgency,” a demeaning campaign to make 20-plus million Afghans like us more than jihad-happy Taliban drug-thugs, no matter what it takes in terms of billions of dollars and the blood of our bravest.

But this isn’t a conventional war, critics say. There’s no comparison between World War II and today.

You can say that again.

But why isn’t there? Why couldn’t there be? Or, to turn the question around, what if World War II had been fought as a counterinsurgency?

What if, instead of waging total war on the Axis powers — firebombing and nuking German and Japanese cities and, in the process, killing tens of thousands of Germans and Japanese — the Allies had tried something a little more postmodern? What if they had tried instead to win “Kraut” hearts and “Jap” minds?

What if Gen. Eisenhower, like Gen. McChrystal today in Afghanistan, had wandered through German towns, asking das volk, “What do you need?” What if Gen. MacArthur, like Gen. McChrystal today, had emphasized Japanese population protection over U.S. force protection, ordering troops to guard “the people” from everything that could hurt them? What if U.S. forces had bought and paid for a Sunni-style “Nazi awakening”? What if Gens. Patton and MacArthur had rewritten constitutions to enshrine Nazism in Germany and Shintoism in Japan? What if the United States remained to protect the new governments from “extremists” who, as President Obama said this week, “distorted and defiled,” respectively, their ideology and religion?

The East Coast would be speaking German, and the West Coast would be speaking Japanese.

Luckily, we didn’t have proponents of “armed social work” pulling the levers back then, commanders who today see in every Taliban redoubt lollipop-ready customers for micro-loans — if, that is, the troops can only survive the booby-trapped house-to-house searches to complete the necessary paperwork.

Take Marjeh, for instance. An enemy stronghold in Helmand province that doubles as a hub of the opium trade and a manufacturing center for IEDs (which cause more than 80 percent of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan), Marjeh is a much-discussed potential target for incoming reinforcements.

This promises to be a moral if not a strategic blunder. If Marjeh is so vital to the American war effort it should be bombed into surrender or smithereens, whichever comes first — not seized in a casualty-costly ground assault.

And even then, as the Washington Post notes, any Helmand Province “gains will be transitory if U.S. forces do not build effective local police forces and foster a government that is relatively free of corruption and able to provide for the Afghan people, U.S. officials said.”

Is that all? Anything else U.S. forces should do while they’re at it? “Build” Hamid Karzai into Abe Lincoln? “Foster” the Taliban into the Viennese boys choir?

“This will be a credibility test for the (Afghan) government to see if it can deliver,” said a spokesman for McChrystal.

A credibility test. To see if the government can deliver. Using flesh-and-blood Americans as game pieces. This is sickening and sick. …

An editorial in the Wall Street Journal titled The Welfare State and Military Power shows why redistributive domestic policy necessarily leads to the decline of power. In other words, socialism weakens the nation. And that is what Obama and the Democrats want to do.  As we have reiterated (see below, The two-horse rider and Obama’s grandiose equivocation), it is a choice between liberty and power  (and, we should add, prosperity) on the one side, or collectivism and decline (and impoverishment) on the other.

Has the moment of decision come and gone with the election of Obama? Has America already freely chosen to be unfree?

Or is it coming now with the push to nationalize health care, put the economy under government control, and begin the disarmament of America?

If now, which way will  America choose to go?

Here’s an extract from the WSJ article:

Welfare spending [in Europe] has crowded out defense spending. The political imperative of health care and pensions always trumps defense spending, save perhaps in a hot war. Europe may never again be able to muster public support for a defense buildup of the kind the U.S. undertook to end the Cold War in the 1980s, or even the smaller surge after 9/11.

The tragic irony of this year is that Democrats are rushing the U.S. down this same primrose entitlement path. With ObamaCare certain to eat up several more percentage points of GDP as it inevitably expands, we will take a giant step toward European social priorities.

For many Democrats, this is precisely the goal. Many Europeans, such as those at the Financial Times, will also welcome America’s relative decline. But we doubt the American people fully understand what such a gilded entitlement cage means for our national vitality, or for our ability to defend U.S. interests at home and abroad. …

President Obama’s domestic agenda may well mean that his successors lack the option to deploy 100,000 troops to Afghanistan, or to some other future trouble spot. This is the way superpowers lose their superiority.