US Strategy So Complex, It's Incoherent

The US Middle East strategy is so complex, it's incoherent. Our Dear Leader is making it up as he goes along. Barry the Brilliant's tilt towards Iran was meant to win us an arms control treaty. Nothing else mattered. And we are so close! Just a few more days and we can wrap it all up! Sure. In the meantime we have a mess where the US provided close air support for the Iranian Quds Force militias in Iraq, while we provide intelligence to the Saudis so they can attack an Iranian Quds Force militia in Yemen.

For those of you not familiar with the Quds Force, it's the part of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard responsible for sponsoring terrorism and paramilitary organizations in foreign countries. The Quds Force has managed to combine the less attractive aspects of the German SS and the Russian KGB with numerous terrorist bombings. The Shi'ite militias that just took Tikrit, Iraq, after helpful US air strikes are run by Iranian Major General Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force. He had his picture taken in several places all over Iraq, including near Tikrit. He was touring Iraq like he owned the place, because he does. The Quds Force militias are the friendly folks who planted the deadliest roadside bombs that killed and maimed hundreds of Americans during the Iraq War. If you think supporting Quds Force militias is a popular thing to do in US military circles then you will believe almost anything the Smartest President Ever says.

In the meantime, we are helping our friends the Saudis and the Egyptians with their Yemen problems. The Yemen problems are from Houthi militia trained and supplied by the Quds Force. In military terms, sanitized for a family publication, this is a cluster foul up. To believe the Middle East situation was the result of some grand master plan, a military analyst would need a ton of Maui Wowie consumed in the company of your buddy Jose Cuervo.

The only good thing to come out of it is that the Saudis and Israelis are so scared of the Iranians that they are negotiating quietly on military cooperation with each other. That fact alone says a lot about how bad things are.

Jews: The Canaries in the Coal Mine

There are a lot of idiots who think everything that's wrong in the Middle East would be fixed if only Israel was removed. Many believe we don't need to continue to support Israel because they have enough weapons to make it on their own. Both ideas are totally manure.

The terrorist tactics that ISIS and Al Qaeda use today were tested on Israelis by Palestinian terrorists starting in the 1970's. Then, lots of people said the Jews brought it on themselves and it was nobody else's problem. Now, the terrorism has expanded to include everybody else who doesn't practice Islam exactly according to whichever Jihadist nut is holding a gun to their head. As Jews were in the run up to World War II, Jews are today the canary in the coal mine. It may start with them, but it never ends with them.

By now, everyone should realize we have big problems with Islamofacism, whether it's Sunni ISIS or Shi'ite Iran. Of the two, Iran is the more dangerous. Iran is working on a nuclear bomb. Iranian leaders organize frequent government sponsored street demonstrations around two slogans, "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." Iranian leaders have called Israel a one bomb country. They also have said that even if Israel retaliates with nuclear weapons, Muslims will win because there will still be over a billion Muslims and no Jews. Further, they are also working on an ICBM that can reach the US. The best we can hope for there is that they want to discourage us from protecting Israel. The worst case is that they are crazy enough to attack us. Everyone thought Hitler was a joke. It would be a big mistake to believe Iran is a joke.

If we leave Israel to fend for itself, we are risking a general war in the Middle East. The Saudi's and the Gulf States are so scared of a nuclear Iran that they will make a deal with the Israelis for a coordinated attack on Iran. The attack might include nuclear weapons, because against the Iranian air defense systems the Israeli Air Force can't deliver a conventional weapon big enough to destroy the Iranian centrifuges in their deep underground bunkers. They would have to use nukes.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/414643/standing-our-friends-standing-our-enemies-scott-walker

Recriminations Are Required on Vietnam War

I really can't stand the casual assumption that we were the bad guys in Vietnam. We left all of Indochina to its fate in 1975. The victorious Communists killed about 2 million Cambodians, and hundreds of thousands of other ethnic groups. Two million Vietnamese fled in leaky boats. There had never been any such mass exodus from Vietnam before. Ten to a hundred times more people died after we left than died during the war. I was in Air Force ROTC from 1968-1972 and on active duty from 1972-1976. In college arguments, I always said that if we lost there would be a bloodbath. It was obvious after the Tet Offensive. The Viet Cong left several mass graves of thousands of men, women and children that they executed. The Vietnamese knew about it, but it was not widely reported in the US. Anybody who took the time to look into it could have easily predicted the subsequent mayhem. Here it is 40 years later and the anti-war left has yet to even notice the havoc they unleashed, let alone apologize for it. The willful ignorance is so bad that our Secretary of State, who testified under oath to Congress that Americans commonly committed war crimes in Vietnam, gets a pass for his obvious perjury and is appointed to the highest level cabinet level post in the federal government.

What about war crimes in Vietnam?  The Vietnam War Crimes Working Group was a Pentagon task force set up to investigate.  They found 320 substantiated cases. At the height of the war, there were over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam. This number of war crimes were a low productivity hour or two for Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.  American war crimes were hardly as common as John Kerry testified they were.  He lied.

I think that the post WWII policy of trying to contain communism made the Vietnam War almost unavoidable. I agree that the stated objectives of Kennedy and Johnson did not include stopping the killing that accompanied any communist takeover of any country. However, the anti-war protesters loudly proclaimed that they wanted to stop the killing as one of their major slogans. I heard them loud and clear, up close and personal. They claimed that the killing would stop if the US withdrew from Southeast Asia. The actual outcome did not match their stated goals at all. Worse, the "Peace Movement" didn't even bother to look to see the damage the withdrawal actually did. They patted themselves on the back for making "peace" and went on to their next causes with enthusiasm. They took no notice of the fact that they facilitated massive slaughter. When peacenicks look back, it's with nostalgia for the righteousness of their cause.  They are oblivious to their actual results.  And they are running US foreign policy today with the same disastrous results in Syria, Iraq and Nigeria.

Vietnam War Crimes Working Group link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_Crimes_Working_Group

Terrorists are NOT Covered by the Geneva Conventions

Captured terrorists are not covered by the Geneva Conventions. They are war criminals. They attack innocent civilians instead of military targets and intentionally kill them. They do not wear uniforms to distinguish themselves from innocent civilians. In fact, they hold civilians near their military activity as shields. They torture and even behead prisoners. They commit ethnic cleansing and genocide. The enslave women. All of these actions are war crimes.  Terrorists are outlaws in the Medieval sense of the word, which means they get no protection from the law and can be shot (or attacked by drones) on sight. The laws of war do not apply to them. They are not in the same class as soldiers captured in uniform on a battlefield and do not have the same rights to fair treatment. The closest comparable status would be spies. Anybody who says we never used enhanced interrogation techniques on spies during WWII or the Cold War is either exceedingly naive or willfully ignorant. 

This report is an attempt to rewrite history. At the time, Democrats were informed of the interrogation techniques but the fear of Al Qaeda was paramount then. Now, Democrats desperately need issues that work against Republicans, so they want to erase their past consent to enhanced interrogation techniques. If their past consent goes down the memory hole, then they can be "shocked, shocked" that "torture" was going on. Feinstein is so corrupt, she does not care that pursuing this strategy means no foreign intelligence service will ever cooperate with us again. The needs of the Democratic Party and the cause of Liberalism come first.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2014/12/11/democrats-cia-gambit-backfires/

The 100% Reliable Syrian Rebels

There is one rebel group in Syria that is 100% reliable, the Kurds! They are fighting ISIS to a standstill with nothing but small arms and guts. With a little help they could really regain some ground. However, right now they are on a US State Department list of terrorist organizations because of their guerrilla war of independence against Turkey. At a minimum we should take all the Kurdish groups off the terrorist lists. While the Turks would be very unhappy with the US if we armed the Syrian Kurds, I don't think we have any reason to care about hurting their feelings. They won't let us use our own airbase at Incerlik to fight ISIS. If we promise the Kurds they can keep what they take, they might be willing to fight further away from their traditional turf. Longer term, I think a lot of people in the ethnic stew of the Middle East might actually like to be under Kurdish administration. They certainly do a better job in their provinces in Iraq than most of the other countries in the area. By Middle Eastern standards, they are religiously tolerant, democratic, pro-American and even pro-Israeli. The only drawback is that arming the Kurds could lead to an independent Kurdistan. The Kurds got screwed when the post World War I borders were drawn. There are 40 million Kurds, but no Kurdistan. Kurdish independence would require redrawing the sacred boundaries. Since we obviously don't care about the territorial integrity of the Ukraine, why should we care about the territorial integrity of Syria and Iraq?

Can We Win Against ISIS Without Boots on the Ground?

If we were willing to inflict massive collateral damage, we could discourage ISIS and its imitators for a long time simply by bombing. This is the lesson of Hama, Syria. In 1982, Hafez al Assad put down a Sunni Muslim insurgency centered in the town by surrounding it and then shelling it for 3 weeks. The place was leveled. Between 10,000 and 25,000 people were killed in the fighting. Things got quiet for almost thirty years. The US Air Force has the physical power to do that kind of damage to ISIS' capital in a week. We don't have the capability to do it morally. That's why we need boots on the ground to completely defeat ISIS.

Without boots on the ground, we can "win" only in the way the Israelis win. They call their periodic wars against Hamas and Hezbollah "mowing the lawn." The weakness of Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS is all the same. Once you claim and hold real estate, you become responsible for what happens to it. In Lebanon in 2006 and in Gaza this year, the Israeli Air Force was very, very destructive. The damage estimate for Gaza is $6 billion. The damage to Hezbollah assets, along with Lebanese infrastructure and Shiite owned or occupied buildings, was similarly massive. Hezbollah has not really attacked Israel since. I think it's because even though the Iranians paid for a lot of rebuilding, they can't afford to do it again. Hamas is finding that Gaza residents are equally unhappy with the massive damage that may take a decade or two to repair. ISIS is similarly vulnerable. They own territory with assets they value. If those assets vanish in a series of targeted explosions, leaving worthless rubble, they will lose the ability to buy support.

Our first strikes against ISIS in Syria were disappointing. It’s an indication of how much we want to avoid collateral damage that we blew the antenna array off of an ISIS building without blowing the building up. We only destroyed the antennas on the ISIS financial control center, leaving the building intact with all the computers and equipment used to manage ISIS' money. We should have destroyed everything to make it harder for ISIS to manage its funding. A 2,000 lbs. guided bomb would have taken the whole thing down. This smells like a civilian designed targeting order. It really seems like the White House is drawing up what the targets are and how hard we are going to hit them.  Do we want to "send a message" or do we want to destroy or at least degrade ISIS?
 

Middle East Mess Caused by Global Warming and George W. Bush

On further review, I find that the mess in the Middle East was caused by a combination of global warming and George W. Bush. Our Dear Leader was at a fund raiser and playing golf when the mess happened, so he had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact, the first he heard of it was when he read about it in the newspapers. The White House TV system had crashed at the time and email wasn't working either, so the Smartest President Ever had Valerie Jarrett read the story to him from hard copy. The Chicago Machine Prodigy said he was outraged and that the situation was unacceptable. No one could have predicted the ISIS attacks in Iraq because they started as a small demonstration in reaction to an internet video, according to Susan Rice. The President said that if Iraqis liked their country, they could keep their country, period. 

66 Years of Inheriting Refugee Status

Palestinians have been "refugees" from generation to generation since 1948. Israel has managed to resettle up to 800,000 Jews expelled from Muslim countries since 1948.  At the same time, Muslim countries with a lot more land than Israel have failed to resettle 710,000 Palestinian refugees. Instead, Muslim countries have kept Palestinian refugees in camps and made it illegal for them to work. Palestinians have been held hostage by their own Muslim brothers to force a perpetual war with Israel. Working through the UN, Muslim countries have made status as a Palestinian refugee hereditary. There are now about 4,950,000 Palestinian refugees, subsidized through the UN. Most of them are descendants of the original refugees. Isn't it time to end subsidies to Palestinian refugees? .Isn't it time for the world to encourage Muslim countries to admit Palestinians as immigrants allowed to work? Isn't it time for 66 years of refugee status to end?

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/381726/tragedy-israel-rand-paul

Treat Iranians Like Republicans

I would feel more confident about the Smartest President Ever if he treated the Russians, Syrians and Iranians as if they were Tea Party Republicans. Unfortunately, The One seems to believe that John Boehner is a bigger threat to our Republic than the Iranian Ayatollahs. 

Liberals ask, "What's our interest in supporting a dictator that oppresses women and religious minorities?" They ask a very good question. I have no idea why the One supported Morsi in Egypt on his quest to become a dictator, with Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood buddies burning down a number of Christian churches in the process. I also don't understand why our Maximum Leader did not do anything to encourage the 2009 Iranian protest against their theocratic and dictatorial government, whose slogan is, "Death to America." Perhaps The One We Were Waiting For, having been groomed by the Chicago Machine, believes that fixed elections are nothing to get upset about?  Clearly our Dear Leader favors the Iranians and the Muslim Brotherhood because their policies towards women and gays are so enlightened, in contrast to Congressional Republicans.