Muslims Who Should Be First In Line For Visas

We owe a lot of Muslims asylum in the US. The translators in Iraq and Afghanistan, who risked not only their own lives, but the lives of their families, to work with us and fight side by side with us, are still waiting for visas to enter the US. Several thousand have completed their paper work, but have no visas. To me this appears to be an intentional policy of neglect by the Obama Administration. Barry the Brilliant wants these people to die for the crime of helping the US.

We recruited these people with very specific promises of asylum. We need to make our word good. It's as simple as that. To do otherwise is fraud in the inducement. Also, if our word isn't good, it's going to be a lot harder to recruit translators the next time somewhere else. It's not like these translators have no record with us. The Americans they served with vouch for them. Translators carried guns, wore American uniforms and fought just like the soldiers they were assigned to help.

I'm a Vietnam Era veteran. We made specific promises to get South Vietnam to sign the Paris Peace Accords in 1973. The South Vietnamese were supposed to get continued military aid and US air support if the North Vietnamese violated the agreement and attacked. Congress cut the aid budget 75% between 1973 and the Fall of Saigon in 1975. They also outlawed US air support. Millions of people died because they trusted us. This should never happen again.

If we are taking any general refugees from the Middle East, let's start with Christians and other religious minorities. These people are killed by Muslims if they go to refugee camps. Democrats say that we can't discriminate based on religion when it comes to refugees.  Thousands of former Soviet Jews now living in the US will be very surprised to hear that.

Link to article on lawsuit:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ir...

Number of visas half of what was requested for 2015
http://www.washingtontimes.com...

Thousands left to die:
http://fee.org/articles/our-im...
http://www.npr.org/2015/09/23/...

Even the Huffington Post has noticed:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

War Actually Does Solve Problems

The slogan, “War never solved anything,” and the hidden agenda behind the slogan, need to be clear to everyone.  Democrats need those big bucks for domestic spending to buy votes.  Military spending is easier to cut if the military looks ineffective.  So Democrats adopt policies that limit air strike targeting, and rules of engagement generally, that render US military force ineffective.  At that point, Democrats argue that "war never solved anything," so we might as well spend the money domestically.

The problem right now is the same problem we had in Vietnam. Since World War II, Democrats seem to intentionally mess up running wars. They try half measures that prolong the conflict until everybody wants to give up and go home. Democrats' motivation is to increase domestic spending over the long term. If military efforts are seen as ineffectual, it's easier to cut military budgets and use the money to buy votes domestically. Lyndon Johnson prolonged the Vietnam War by refusing to use US air power to shut down North Vietnam's seaports. Barack Obama is prolonging the ISIS conflict by also refusing to use US air power effectively. Obama has refused to hit oil production, transportation targets and infrastructure targets that are crucial to ISIS funding and operations. ISIS makes a million dollars a day selling oil. ISIS is moving men and supplies over open desert highways. ISIS has vehicle maintenance and bomb factories in civilian neighborhoods the US refuses to destroy.

War actually does solve problems very well.  War solved the world's Hitler problem.  War solved the Imperial Japan problem.  Through history, war solved the American Colonies' British problem, as well as Rome's Carthage problem.  War is the only solution to the ISIS problem.  

The slogan is absurd.  The only reason for it is to excuse poor military performance followed by budgets which shift spending to domestic investments in crony capitalism and programs encouraging government dependence.  If you're dependent on the government, you have to vote for the Democrats, or the gravy train is over. Quite easily done.

Just Leaving the Middle East Will Just Increase the Killing

A lot of ordinary people think it's time to just leave the Middle East.  I think the way we got to this situation in the first place was to just leave Iraq.  ISIS is Al Qaeda in Iraq with a changed name and slightly different ideology.  ISIS used the Shiite dominance in Iraq as its initial recruiting tool. 

When we finally intervened to stop ISIS, Barry the Brilliant decided not to wipe out Bashar al Assad's air force on the ground.  There are widespread reports in military circles that the strike was planned and called off at the last minute.  The combined effect of just leaving Iraq and leaving Damascus' air force intact resulted in the deaths of literally hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis.  

If we leave now, the killing will only move at a more rapid pace.  If you can live with civilian deaths rising towards one million and the rising risk of general, possibly nuclear, war between Iran and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan and perhaps Israel in the Middle East, then we should leave.  I can't.

Baghdad's Corrupt Army Has Usual Historic Flaws

One original reason for military parades was to make sure there were physical soldiers in numbers to match the payroll. Big multiple unit parades assured soldiers were not being shuffled from unit muster to unit muster in different uniforms.

It would seem the Iraqi Army has the traditional weakness of corrupt armies with quite a few phantom soldiers on the payroll. But even worse, the soldiers who actually do show up go months without pay while their officers put the money in their own pockets. All of the best recruits are funneled into the Shiite militias, not the regular Iraqi Army.

If we weren't able to establish an effective Iraqi Army during our occupation, I don't see any way we will be able to do it under current, less favorable, conditions. We should be backing the folks with the best track record on both military effectiveness and religious and ethnic toleration, the Kurds.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/420008/we-need-new-strategy-iraq-and-syria-charles-krauthammer

Why Air Power Isn't Stopping ISIS

It’s fashionable in the past couple of months to say that air power is ineffective against ISIS.  The effectiveness of air power depends on the rules of engagement, which are set by the White House. The White House has decided that it's more important to avoid civilian casualties than it is to defeat ISIS. There is no way that ISIS should be able to move vehicles with troops and supplies on desert highways in the face of US total air dominance. The fact that ISIS is moving troops and supplies means that the rules of engagement are too restrictive to allow victory.

Given how many civilians ISIS kills when they take over an area, it seems to me that even in humanitarian terms restrictive rules of engagement are self-defeating. Even if attacking ISIS targets means some civilians will die, far more will die if ISIS is allowed to continue its rampage across the Middle East.

I think any vehicle convoy which includes military vehicles should be a free fire zone. Military vehicles should be defined to include armored vehicles, Humvees, pickup trucks with mounted machine guns, or civilian vehicles with a lot of gun barrels pointing out all of the windows. Even if these convoys contain civilian human shields, attacking them will prevent ISIS from killing a lot more people when they overrun the next town.

The same policy should be extended to bomb factories. If we know that ISIS has a lot of explosives in a residential neighborhood, we should still bomb the building. If ISIS uses the explosives to take another town, they will kill hundreds or thousands of civilians themselves. The casualty count will be a lot lower from the secondary explosion of the bomb factory.

In the long run, it's them or us. ISIS has made it clear they plan to attack us and kill us if we don't convert to their brand of Islam. We should take them at their word and stop them now, before they become an existential threat to the US. The leaders who did not believe Hitler meant what he said lived to regret it.

Why Does US Still Favor Baghdad over the Kurds?

The article linked below is an interview with the Kurdistan Regional Government's High Representative to the US. In it she reveals that all military shipments to Iraqi Kurdistan are first landed in Baghdad for inspection and only after inspection are the given to the Kurds. This is ridiculous. The Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq and the Kurdish YPG in Syria have proven their combat effectiveness in every battle they've fought as long as their ammunition held out. Even in retreat, they never abandon any weapons for ISIS to capture.  The Iraqi Army, on the other hand, was one of the main sources of arms for ISIS. They abandoned all of their US supplied equipment and ran away before ISIS could even get to them. Iran is supplying the Shi'ite militias around Baghdad with all of the weapons they need. Why aren't we doing the same for the Kurds? 

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/feb/26/obama-lacks-islamic-state-plan-should-increase-arm/?page=all

Democrats' Problems Dealing With Reality

This article in Politico (see link below) shows how Democrats have a problem seeing and dealing with reality. Their policies are destroying the economy and endangering the country. Oil and gas prices have come down in spite of Democrats' efforts to stop drilling, stop pipelines and limit emissions in the name of saving the planet from global warming. Unfortunately, their climate models don't match their data with any statistical significance, so we get expensive energy and Al Gore makes millions off of his Mean Green agenda. The end results of Liberal policies can be found in Detroit, where their one party rule lead to a spiral of decay and finally bankruptcy. The reason Liberals see a war on women and pervasive racism is that they really have nothing else to offer. As Mark "Uterus" Udall found out in Colorado, the war on women doesn't work anymore. The facts of the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner refused to cooperate with the Liberal narrative. The evidence showed Brown was the aggressor. Brown tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was inside his car and Brown was charging the officer on foot when the fatal shot was fired. The supervising police sergeant at Garner's arrest, a black woman, had to be edited out of the picture. The Garner arrest turned out to be a cigarette tax enforcement action, which got a lot of Conservatives to say that nobody should die for cigarette taxes and that big government requires intrusive tax enforcement. The election of Tim Scott, a Black Tea Party Republican, as Senator in South Carolina was not covered at all. The Liberal narrative says Republicans, the Tea Party and redneck whites in the South are all racist. Tim Scott couldn't possibly exist, so he had to be ignored. The President said Al Qaeda is on the run. So the Benghazi attack was a demonstration that turned into a riot, not an organized terrorist attack by an Al Qaeda affiliate. The Iraq War was over because the President said so. The administration then ignored ISIS until it got so big it overran over half of Iraq. This article reads like a pep talk by the coach of a 20 point underdog team before the big game. It ignores the insults and injuries Democrats have inflicted on angry white rednecks like me. Maybe they don't understand that why we are angry has a lot to do with what Democrats said and did to us.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/01/poll-democrats-2016-blue-collar-unmarried-women-voters-114313.html