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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Afghanistan</title>
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		<title>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: &#8216;Weakness Is Provocative&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rep-jim-bridenstine-weakness-is-provocative</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:51:02 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[GOP congressman unveils the chaos unleashed by America's retreat abroad at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Congressman Jim Bridenstine&#8217;s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114410255" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Rep. Jim Bridenstine: </strong>A lot of people might remember, it wasn&#8217;t too long ago, I went down to a military base in my state called Fort Sill.  I went down there to visit with the commanding general, and the reason I went is because the Department of Defense is being gutted right now.  The fires brigades and the air defense artillery folks that work down there, they&#8217;re getting cut drastically, and so I went down there and I wanted to meet with the commanding general, and when I was down there I said, hey, I&#8217;d like to take a visit of the UAC facility that&#8217;s here at Fort Sill, and the commanding general said you can go, but I&#8217;m not going to go with you.  If you would, by show of hands, do you remember this incident by chance, if you&#8217;d raise your hand if you&#8217;re remember.  I went down to Fort Sill to visit the UAC facility and I got rejected.  I got rejected.  Here I am a member of Congress, a representative of the people, a federal representative of the people going to a federal facility and seeing a federal mission, and they told me I couldn&#8217;t come in. They said you could come back in three weeks.  In three weeks you can come back and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, and I said I&#8217;ve got to talk to somebody in your chain of command because this is not right, and you know what they said, they said, sorry, here&#8217;s the number for the guy in my chain of command and it was the Deputy Director of Communications, who also told me you&#8217;ve got to wait three weeks and we&#8217;ll take you on a tour, to which we immediately said, I told my staff I&#8217;m not one of these guys that runs to the media for every opportunity.  I don&#8217;t do that, but in this particular case, the First Amendment was given to us for a purpose, and it&#8217;s to petition the federal government, and I never realized that as a member of Congress I would be one of the people having to petition the federal government using the First Amendment.</p>
<p>In the next week and a half, we did 72 interviews on television. Seventy-two.  We were tired, but I can tell you this, after a week and a half we get an email from Health and Human Services and they said we&#8217;d like to take you on a tour of the HHS facility at Fort Sill housing the unaccompanied alien children.  It only took 72 interviews and a week and a half, and then they sent another email, and I&#8217;d ask everybody to get quiet because what this next email said is critically important.  I want you to listen to this.</p>
<p>The next email we got from HHS said we&#8217;re going to take you on a tour, but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, you can&#8217;t talk to the personnel that work there, you can&#8217;t talk to the staff, you can&#8217;t talk to the children, you can&#8217;t talk to the medical personnel.  We&#8217;re going to show it to you but you can&#8217;t ask any questions, to which we responded with an email of our own that we&#8217;re going to treat your restrictions the way the president is treating the law of the United States as a suggestion, and we gave them a list of everybody we expected to talk to once we got inside of this facility, and we got in and we started asking questions.  The No. 1 question I asked was how many children here have been abused.  We had a great panel with Dr. Fleming and Louie Gohmert and Jeff Sessions regarding the crisis on the southern border and immigration.  We had this great conversation.  Loved every minute of listening to these great folks talk about this issue, but here is why I have such a big concern.  The reports coming out of Lackland Air Force Base is as many as a third of the young girls had been abused, and when I talk about abuse I&#8217;m talking about sexual, I&#8217;m talking about horrible things that have happened to these young girls, and by the way they&#8217;re 12 years old.</p>
<p>So I wanted to find out in my state at Fort Sill the HHS facility how many of the children there had been abused, and I asked them, how many have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  So I asked somebody else, how many children here have been abused?  Well, we don&#8217;t have those numbers.  I couldn&#8217;t get an answer.  Finally I asked a contractor and the contractor said it&#8217;s well over 25 percent, and then another contractor said, sir, it is well over 25 percent, and friends, here&#8217;s what everybody in this room needs to understand, the question is where is this abuse occurring?  It&#8217;s not happening in these facilities.  The abuse is occurring on the way to the United States, and the reason it&#8217;s occurring is because the children that were coming across our southern border, they already have parents that have been smuggled into the United States illegally, hundreds of thousands of them in 2014, and they made a decision that they want their family to come, including their children, and so they hire a coyote down in Mexico, and the coyote goes down to Central America to bring the children up to the northern border, and here&#8217;s what happens, and people in this room understand this.  The GAO has indicated, has said that we have operational control of over 44 percent of our southern border.  That means 56 percent of our southern border is not under operational control, and if we don&#8217;t control it, friends, somebody else does.  In this particular case, it&#8217;s controlled by drug cartels, transnational criminal organizations and when those children get to the northern border of Mexico, the southern border of the United States, then those transnational criminal organizations say we need more money.  If you&#8217;re going to come into the United States &#8212; and by the way, if you control the southern border of the United States you can make a ton of money, and they are doing it.</p>
<p>And so the children get up there, and the organized crime says they need $10,000.00 and we&#8217;ll let you across the border.  How many of these children do you think have $10,000.00 on them?  They call their parents, their parents don&#8217;t have $10,000.00.  They barely had enough money to pay the coyote, and ultimately the children have to come up with $10,000.00 and the drug cartels will get their money.  So they force the children into slave labor.  The force the children into prostitution.  Some of the children disappear altogether and it goes from smuggling into human trafficking, and some of the children just get killed.</p>
<p>People don&#8217;t realize it, friends, but there are, estimates are 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies in Northern Mexico as a direct result of our open southern border.  We talk about all the crisis in the Middle East, Syria and Iraq.  Horrible stuff happening there, but on our southern border we&#8217;ve got 100,000 dead bodies just south of our border, and friends, here&#8217;s the deal.  When the organized crime starts making all of this money, which they are making a ton of money right now, they destroy civil society in northern Mexico.  Friends, if you&#8217;re a judge, and I know Louie Gohmert is a judge, you understand this as well as anybody.  If you&#8217;re a judge, a police officer, a politician, a mayor in northern Mexico, in many cases you are either on the payroll of the organized crime or you are dead, which is why there&#8217;s this 70,000 to 100,000 dead bodies, many in mass graves in northern Mexico right now.  The southern border is a national security issue as much as it is anything, and I&#8217;m going to talk for a second about civilized society and how it&#8217;s being lost because we&#8217;re unwilling to actually enforce the law.  The Secure Fence Act, which was passed before I got there, requires 100 percent operational control of the southern border, and yet the president doesn&#8217;t enforce that law.</p>
<p>But here&#8217;s the situation, I used to mention in the bio, I&#8217;m a Navy pilot.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003. In 2010, I joined a reserve squadron and I started flying counter-narcotics missions in Central and South America.  My squadron alone, VAW77, the world famous Night Wolves, we used to bust $2 billion worth of cocaine every year on the high seas, $2 billion.  My squadron was one of many units in the military that did this kind of operation.  My squadron got eliminated.  That means $2 billion worth of cocaine is coming into our country that didn&#8217;t use to come into our country and $2 billion worth of cash is going to organized crime in northern Mexico and Central America.  What do you think that does to those countries?  And by the way, my squadron was one of many military units that have been cut under the sequester, and it is decimating the Department of Defense, in ways right now that the American public doesn&#8217;t realize, but I&#8217;ll give you an example.</p>
<p>Nicaragua calls the United States and they say we&#8217;re losing our civil society here in Nicaragua, our judges, our politicians, our police officers.  We&#8217;ve got high crime rates.  The organized crime is controlling our country.  We need your help with some counter drug operations, to which the United States says, sorry, can&#8217;t help you.  Who does Nicaragua call next?  The Russians.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the intelligence surveillance reconnaissance assets.  The Russians are more than happy to provide the ships on the ocean, to do the counter-narcotics operations.  The only thing the Russians are asking in return is military basing.  Do they want military basing for those assets to encounter drug operations?  No.  They want military basing for long-range strategic bombers in our hemisphere, and by the way, Nicaragua is not the only country in our hemisphere under negotiations for long-range strategic bombing for Russian bombers right now.  You&#8217;ve got Cuba and Venezuela.  Friends, all of this is a national security issue.</p>
<p>The other day, I looked up Homeland Security.  There&#8217;s leaked information from Homeland Security of how many folks have come across the southern border from Guinea and Sierra Leone and Liberia.  Friends, it&#8217;s almost 500 people that have been caught coming across the southern border in 2014 from those three countries which have the greatest outbreak of Ebola.  Almost 500 people caught.  The GAO says that one out of every five gets caught, which means there&#8217;s thousands in this country from those countries that are just unaccounted for completely.  Friends, the southern border of the United States is a national security issue.  It&#8217;s a national health security issue, and here&#8217;s the important thing I want everybody in this room to take away: The children are victims.  It is not their fault, and we don&#8217;t not like them.  The humanitarian thing to do, the right thing to do, the thing that will save lives and protect them is to enforce the law.</p>
<p>So when you think about foreign policy and national security, friends, it starts right here at home and I just talked about Nicaragua and the Russian military basing that is potentially going to occur there because of our absence, and I want to be really clear about what Russian is up to.  They&#8217;ve invaded Georgia.  They’re occupying South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia.  They&#8217;re moving the borders towards Tbilisi.  They&#8217;ve got 80,000 troops in Armenia.  They&#8217;ve cancelled energy contracts with Azerbaijan.  That&#8217;s all in the south caucuses.  You go over to Eastern Europe, the Baltic States.  Remember the Baltic States enthusiastically joined the European Union and NATO at the collapse of the Soviet Union.  Well, because of that Russia had to cut off their energy in the dead of winter.  People had to suffer.  People had to die.  In Poland in the Czech Republic they were building a missile defense shield.  Why were they building a missile defense shield in Poland?  It had nothing to do with the Russians.  It’s because Iran is building longer range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and the Europeans said, we’ve got to have a missile defense shield to which Vladimir Putin said, if you keep building that missile defense shield, he said this through his generals, he said, we&#8217;re going to have nuclear war in Poland and the Czech Republic, and I&#8217;m sure everybody in this room remembers when the President of the United States met with Medvedev after that incident. He said wait until after my next election.  I&#8217;ll have the flexibility to bring down that missile defense shield and guess what happened.  He got elected.  The missile defense shield came down and then the Russians moved very quickly to give Edward Snowden asylum.  Friends, here is the lesson, and every lesson of history teaches this: Weakness is provocative and the more we demonstrate weakness the more we will be taken advantage of and the more provocative the enemies of the United States will be.</p>
<p>Then we get to Ukraine, Yanukovych.  This was Thanksgiving.  It was a year ago.  Yanukovych was trying to enter into an agreement with the European Union.  It was social reform, political reform, economic reform.  He wasn&#8217;t joining the European Union, but it included trade, and if you remember Vladimir Putin himself flew to Kiev on our Thanksgiving Day and he said if you sign that agreement we&#8217;re going to cut your energy off, and remember it was going into winter.  It was Thanksgiving Day and they did this before December 31, 2005.  In Ukraine people suffered, people died, they did it in 2009 as well.  So now Yanukovych makes the decision okay I&#8217;m going to align with Moscow temporarily.  Why?  Because he wants to keep energy for his people through the winter.  His people revolt.  Why?  They want freedom.  They want independence.  As people revolt Kiev gets set on fire and then Russia uses that as an excuse to invade and occupy Crimea and make no mistake, regardless of what the State Department says, Russia is now occupying broader eastern Ukraine.  That is happening right now and let&#8217;s talk about where else Russia is active. They&#8217;re helping the Assad regime in Syria, propping them up.  The Mullahs in Iran.  They&#8217;re going around the sanctions because Russia is enabling it.  19,000 nuclear centrifuges in Iran.  I&#8217;m sorry, there is no peaceful nuclear program that needs 19,000 nuclear centrifuges, and under the President&#8217;s P5+1 Joint Plan of Action they&#8217;re going to continue to allow Iran to enrich uranium with 9,000 plus nuclear centrifuges. They&#8217;re not even mentioning the heavy water reactor for plutonium in Iraq. The facility in Parchin which is responsible for creating the devices that can fly on long-range missiles, and I&#8217;m talking about of course nuclear capabilities. None of these are being talked about in the P5+1 Joint Plan of Action on Iran and I&#8217;m going to anchor here for one second.</p>
<p>There is a reason what the President is doing right now to accommodate Iran is wrong and it is because it is extremely dangerous and destabilizing for the best ally the United States has in the Middle East, Israel.  And I will say this on Israel, the Land of Judea and Samaria is not occupied territory.  It belongs to the Jewish people who have had a relationship with that land for over 4,000 years.  And neither the President of the United States or the United Nations has any authority to give that land away.  Only Israel has the authority to negotiate over the land that belongs to Israel, period, end of story.  So you think about what&#8217;s happening in the world and you see that weakness is indeed provocative.  When you think about what Russia is doing, and by the way here&#8217;s an easy answer on the Russian issue.  People don&#8217;t realize this.  Russia relies on energy for 53 percent of its revenue to the Kremlin.  Fifty-three percent of the revenue to the Kremlin is from the export of energy and 84 percent of that energy is going to Eastern Europe, who by the way send ambassadors to my office in Washington, D.C. asking us to send our energy because they no longer want to be dependent on Moscow.  There is an easy way to solve this crisis.  We could dry up 53 percent of Russia&#8217;s revenue simply by exporting American energy.  And interestingly, it&#8217;s not Moscow that&#8217;s preventing us from exporting American energy.  It&#8217;s Washington, D.C.  Friends there are solutions here and, by the way, here&#8217;s the thing: That&#8217;s not a sanction, that&#8217;s allowing the free market to be free, and I know people in this room believe in free markets.  It doesn&#8217;t require firing a shot. It doesn&#8217;t require a sanction, and, oh, by the way, Russia has recently seen fit to send long-range bombers to the Gulf of Mexico.  I don&#8217;t know if you guys have read these reports, and interestingly they&#8217;re defense minister came back and said, well, that&#8217;s not going to work as long as energy prices are about $80.00 a barrel.  We can&#8217;t afford to do this.  Friends energy prices are going to come back and it&#8217;s up to the United States to actually fill the void that everybody understands is happening in Eastern Europe as it relates to energy.</p>
<p>I want to, I&#8217;m going to close here.  I know Ann told me not to take a long time so I&#8217;m not going to take a long time.  I want to close here. Actually, I&#8217;m going to say one thing.  I have to talk about ISIS.  I have to talk about the Middle East and then I&#8217;m going to close.  I flew combat in Afghanistan in 2002.  I flew combat in Iraq in 2003.  Our Americans, in 2002, or, actually, I don&#8217;t &#8212; it was early in the war &#8212; we damaged a guy named al-Zarqawi.  He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden.  You guys probably remember al-Zarqawi.  It was compliments of a 500-pound bomb, compliments of the United States Air Force, that damaged al-Zarqawi, and as a Navy pilot that pains me to say that the Air Force dropped that weapon, and I say that with all due respect to Governor Rick Perry who&#8217;s in the front row here who&#8217;s an Air Force pilot himself.  We&#8217;re good, he says we&#8217;re good.  Thank you. sir.  But here&#8217;s the important thing: al-Zarqawi was in Afghanistan, he was part of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. He was a Lieutenant to Osama Bin Laden, and when we damaged him, his ribs, his leg &#8212; he went to Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital in Iraq.  That&#8217;s where he went to get his care, and at Uday Hussein&#8217;s hospital he got cured and then he became the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ultimately he was killed compliments of two 500-pound bombs of the United States Air Force, but not before he trained his own lieutenant, al-Baghdadi, who now is the leader of ISIS.  Friends, this is an al-Qaeda affiliated force.  All of the authorities necessary to destroy it currently exist, and the President shouldn&#8217;t go on TV and give us a laundry list of everything he won&#8217;t do and, oh, by the way, when he gives us that laundry list he&#8217;s giving it to the enemies of the United States.  What he should do is he should go on TV and tell us what he&#8217;s already done to eliminate this threat, and it could have been eliminated, and if you go back to 2006 when Obama was a senator, he said these words.  He said a precipitous withdraw from Iraq would lead to &#8220;chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.&#8221;  He said it would engulf broad swaths of the Middle East and endanger the United States of America.  Senator Obama in 2006.  Then he ran for President.</p>
<p>Well that message wasn&#8217;t going to work when you&#8217;re running for President, so then he said it was an unjust war.  That we took our eye off the ball, which was Afghanistan, and he&#8217;s going to be the President that would end this war.  Then he became President, and if you look at what happened next, he had his own Iraq team.  Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus.  They said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops in Iraq.  Keep them because we&#8217;ve had all these gains from the surge.  If you remember the Iraqi economy was growing. Things were at peace.  You had an inclusive government, stability and his team said keep 20,000 to 24,000 troops.  You have to have that or else we&#8217;re going to lose the gains of the surge, and the President said, no, I promised something else, give me a different plan, and they come back with a different plan, and they said keep 10,000 troops.  It&#8217;s going to require more risk.  By the way, when they say more risk, for those of us in the military that means more of us are going to suffer.  It will require more risk, but we can sustain the gains of the surge with 10,000 troops.  The President said, no, I promised something else.  Then it was the President himself in a phone call with Malaki who said that any status of forces agreement we come to has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, and, friends, for those of us in the military the status of forces agreement is how we have diplomatic immunity.  It is how when we fight in a foreign country we fall under American law not under foreign law, and that&#8217;s critically important if you want to have a foreign fighter.  And the President, in a phone call with Malaki &#8212; historically all the status of forces agreement is, is an exchange of diplomatic letters.  It&#8217;s our State Department and their diplomats saying we&#8217;re going to exchange diplomatic letters, Americans have diplomatic immunity.  That&#8217;s all it had ever been, but because the President wanted a zero-two presence in Iraq, ultimately he said it has to be ratified by the Iraqi Parliament, knowing full well that the Iraqi Parliament can&#8217;t agree on what day of the week it is, let alone how many American troops need to be in Iraq.  The agreement was scuttled.  Every last troop came home.  And just as Senator Obama predicted in 2006, chaos, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, genocide.  It engulfs broad swaths of the Middle East and it&#8217;s a danger to the United States of America.</p>
<p>Al-Baghdadi has said himself that the next confrontation will be directly against the United States of America.  Friends, al-Qaeda was a terrorist organization.  ISIS is a caliphate.  It has an army.  It is well trained.  It is well financed.  It is well equipped.  They&#8217;re recruiting from throughout the world and they are looking for people that have American passports, and indeed they have recruited hundreds of Americans to join their ranks, many of which the administration has already admitted have come back to the United States.  Friends, this is a very real threat.  It has to be taken seriously, and what I will tell you is this: This idea that we are going to train and equip so-called &#8220;moderate Syrians&#8221; is not gonna work.  Here&#8217;s what they said, we&#8217;re gonna have 5,000 troops in a year; 5,000 moderate Syrian rebels in a year.  By the way, a lot of them have already fled and turned over weapons to ISIS and 5,000 &#8212; I gave a speech, in fact, I talked to Mike at the Red State Convention down in Fort Worth, Texas.  I hear a clap for Fort Worth. And at the time in that speech I was talking about how dangerous ISIS was because they&#8217;ve got 15,000 troops in their army.  Well now the CIA unclassified is saying that it&#8217;s 30,000 troops in a matter of just a couple of months, and again now they&#8217;ve got heavy armor, American tanks, Abrams Tanks, with ISIS flags flying on the top.  This idea that we&#8217;re gonna train and equip so-called moderates, it hasn&#8217;t worked.  If you look at what weapons they have right now, it&#8217;s because we train and equip the Iraqi Army, which fled at the first conflict.  Friends, this is going to require American leadership, and this is a critically important thing that America has to understand.  Without us, it&#8217;s only going to grow, and the longer we wait the worse it gets, and I want to be clear again why this is so dangerous not only to us, but ISIS has its sights set on Israel.  This is a threat to Israel, our greatest ally in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Now, sure.  I would like to, I&#8217;m gonna close now.  At this time I really am.  I see Mike standing over here.  I might take a few more minutes just to upset Ann Coulter.  Okay here&#8217;s a &#8212; I&#8217;m in such trouble.  When I first got elected a friend of mine came to me and he said, he worked really hard, he delivered all kinds of signs throughout the neighborhood.  I challenged an incumbent Republican in a Republican primary which is very difficult and it&#8217;s very hard to find friends when you&#8217;re doing that, but this guy was loyal to me from day one, he worked really hard and we overcame millions of dollars and 11 years of incumbency, and he said I will never ask from you for anything, but I just want one thing I said, and he said, it&#8217;s the only thing that I will ever ask for, he said I want you to get a group, a bipartisan group, Republicans and Democrats alike, and I want you to go down to Arlington National Cemetery and sit there for an hour together and reflect on all the sacrifice that has been given for this nation, and a couple of months ago we made that happen.  Four hundred thousand markers.  Hill after hill, row after row, mile after mile.  Freshman class Republicans and Democrats alike reflecting on the sacrifice and, friends, that is a very small portion of all the sacrifice that has been given for this great country.  One of the markers, there is a gentleman named Martin Treptow who fought in World War I.  Ronald Reagan talked about him in his first inaugural address, and he died on the Western Front delivering messages back and forth between battalions, and when they recovered his body they found on him a journal and in that journal they found these words.  It said &#8212; and he was a barber from Illinois who got drafted.  His words said:  &#8220;America must win this war.  Therefore I will work, I will save, I will sacrifice, I will endure.  I will fight cheerfully and do my utmost as if the issue of the whole struggle depended on me alone.&#8221;</p>
<p>It wasn&#8217;t just a few weeks ago now I went down to a funeral for a friend of mine who died in the Middle East, and this was in Georgia, and my whole squadron &#8212; he got, he was sent, what we call individual augmentation.  He&#8217;s a Navy pilot, but he got sent on the ground to the Middle East, and there he died.  So we were at his funeral.  My whole squadron, VAW77, the Night Wolves, my squadron, which no longer exists to do the counter-drug operations that I&#8217;ve already talked about, but all the Night Wolves gathered and we spent time talking about our friend.  The last time I saw these guys I was just a pilot in the squadron and here I am with my buddies and now I&#8217;m a member of Congress.  Thanks.  And they looked at me and they said, &#8220;Jim, our country is in peril.  We have threats all over the world that will change the landscape for the next generation,&#8221; and it&#8217;s not just foreign, it&#8217;s also domestic.  They said, &#8220;We are willing&#8221; &#8212; they&#8217;re not with 77 anymore, but they&#8217;re all still serving in the reserves somewhere &#8212; &#8220;we are willing, but we&#8217;ve got to have leadership.  We need somebody that will stand up and tell us what needs to be done, &#8217;cause right now we are not feeling it.&#8221;  Friends there is an entire country of people who served this nation in uniform and every single one of them feels the way Martin Treptow felt when he wrote that in his journal and I got to tell you as a member of Congress who&#8217;s serving his first term, I got to tell ya, that is the one thing more than anything else that gives me hope and I really do have a lot of hope.  What is right about America, and I know this has been said before, can fix what is wrong about America and there&#8217;s an entire nation of people that are willing to do the right thing knowing that we need to handoff to the next generation what we ourselves inherited.  Thank you so much for having me.  It&#8217;s an honor to be here.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Trapped in Afghanistan Between Obama and the Taliban</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban-2/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[U.S. soldiers]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246029</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama plays a cynical game with the lives of American soldiers.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/us-soliders.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246083" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/us-soliders-450x271.jpg" alt="us-soliders" width="289" height="174" /></a>Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.</p>
<p>American forces were supposed to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but in a covert acknowledgement that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was a disaster, that isn’t happening.</p>
<p>Afghanistan has been Obama’s bloodiest war and his most neglected war. It’s a war that hardly appears in major papers anymore, but while in terms of damage done Iraq and Libya may be Obama’s biggest disasters, in terms of American lives lost there’s no question that Afghanistan was his worst war.</p>
<p>Obama never had a strategy for Afghanistan. As best as anyone could determine he made a major commitment to it to provide political cover for his Iraq withdrawal. Once he committed to Afghanistan, he had no idea what to actually do there except get a lot of Americans killed while trying to appease the “moderate” Taliban who turned out not to exist despite Qatar’s best efforts to manufacture them.</p>
<p>Since Al Qaeda was a major threat in Iraq (a threat that eventually became ISIS) and Obama needed to disguise his withdrawal from Iraq by blaming Bush for being too weak on national security (a difficult trick for an anti-war lefty), he falsely claimed that Bush had neglected fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>There was just one problem, Al Qaeda had largely been broken in Afghanistan and had scattered to other conflicts. There were a handful of Al Qaeda fighters left. There was certainly nothing that required a major troop surge to handle. There was nothing for American soldiers to do there except die.</p>
<p>Bush had gone into Afghanistan with a plan to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. Obama dusted off that same plan without caring as to whether or not there were even any Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while mixing it together with Bush’s troop surge in Iraq. If nothing else the end result was bound to be Bush’s fault.</p>
<p>Obama went into Afghanistan as a distraction. Unable to make decisions about the war, he forced the commanders to embarrass him by shaking him down for troops. Obama responded by lashing out and replacing commanders the way that losing teams replace coaches. It was an ugly spectacle that wrecked morale and set the tone for a destructive and contentious relationship with the military.</p>
<p>American soldiers were thrown into battle without being allowed to win. They weren’t fighting a war for territory, but for hearts and minds. It was a senseless strategy that threw away the lives of American soldiers in the hopes of winning a local popularity contest against the Taliban.</p>
<p>The rules of engagement focused on preventing Afghan civilian casualties in a war where the other side wore no uniforms. Air support was denied. The odds between ISAF and the Taliban were evened out. And a lot of lives were lost. More American soldiers died in Afghanistan during one term of Obama than had been killed during the entire Bush presidency.</p>
<p>The plan to split the Taliban into moderate and extreme wings by making them unpopular failed miserably. Everything since then has been a holding pattern. The number of casualties has dropped with the actual fighting. American soldiers are still there not to win or even to fight, but to keep Obama from looking bad in case anything goes wrong.</p>
<p>Obama signed on to a troop surge in Afghanistan to cover for his disastrous move in Iraq. Now the troops are staying on to avoid the spectacle of the Taliban overrunning the country ISIS style. Afghanistan has never been an actual priority for Obama. It has always been a way for him to deal with the political consequences of his decisions in Iraq.</p>
<p>Now the war has ground down to its predictable final stage in which the American presence is renamed as advisory even while combat operations continue.</p>
<p>Obama can’t leave Afghanistan because of the political consequences. But he still has no plan for Afghanistan and it’s the generals who are once again pushing him to have a strategic plan that protects American lives and accomplishes something useful instead of a political agenda that protects his own approval rating.</p>
<p><a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/11/23/nyt-blindly-reports-obamas-reluctance-let-troops-defend-afghanistan/">As J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer</a>, pointed out, “The generals… want to be proactive in defending their troops against terrorist threats. They don’t want to just wait – hunkered down on bases, or exposed and vulnerable while they’re out supporting the Afghan national forces – for terrorists to find American troops and attack them.”</p>
<p>But Obama has achieved what he sees as the best of both worlds, a troop presence with low casualty levels that provides him with all the political cover he needs, but with none of the negatives of flag-draped caskets. The official word is that the United States is assisting and advising, it’s helping stabilize the government of Afghanistan and those are safe buzzwords that few can possibly object to.</p>
<p>When it came to Afghanistan, Obama always wanted to be seen doing something. His motives were political. His objectives in Afghanistan were not those of national security, but domestic politics.</p>
<p>Obama had an actual objective, regime change, in Libya, but he didn’t even have that much in Afghanistan. Instead he constantly framed the war in terms of fighting a phantom Al Qaeda enemy. And since the enemy didn’t exist he could easily claim to have beaten it while ignoring the rise of ISIS in Iraq that so many Americans had died trying to prevent.</p>
<p>Now Obama is stuck in Afghanistan because he’s too afraid of the political fallout of leaving.</p>
<p>The only lesson that Obama learned from his disastrous withdrawal from Iraq was that it was safer not to withdraw. Instead American soldiers are trapped between Obama’s approval ratings and the Taliban with no mission left to accomplish except to avoid attracting attention to themselves by dying or killing.</p>
<p>There is no longer a plan to deal with the Taliban. The idea that Afghanistan will retain a stable government is implausible. Even the idea that its military can take the weight of a serious assault is also unlikely. But Obama wants all of that to be someone else’s problem. He is passing on Afghanistan as a hot potato to his successor so that someone else will have to take the blame for Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama’s actions in Afghanistan tell the story of his ugly disregard for national security and the lives of our soldiers. The surge was sold using a lie about an Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan that no longer existed. Now the presence of American forces is being passed off as advisory when what that really means is that Americans will be under fire, but unstable to set the terms on which they meet the enemy.</p>
<p>After all this time Americans deserve the truth. If American soldiers are going to be in harm’s way, they should have a mission and the ability to accomplish it.</p>
<p>Those are two things that they never had under Obama.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong> discussing <span id="fbPhotoSnowliftCaption" class="fbPhotosPhotoCaption" tabindex="0" data-ft="{&quot;tn&quot;:&quot;K&quot;}"><span class="hasCaption"><strong>Obama&#8217;s Fantasies about Un-Islamic Jihad:</strong></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/28J1kYbaqbc" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Trapped in Afghanistan Between Obama and the Taliban</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/trapped-in-afghanistan-between-obama-and-the-taliban/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:05:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[troops]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245954</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-veterans-affairs-carejpeg-01d5e.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245955" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-veterans-affairs-carejpeg-01d5e-391x350.jpg" alt="Eric Shinseki" width="303" height="271" /></a>Never before has an administration been so casual about putting American troops in harm’s way to protect a politician’s approval ratings.</p>
<p>American forces were supposed to be out of Afghanistan by the end of 2014, but in a covert acknowledgement that Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq was a disaster, that isn’t happening.</p>
<p>Afghanistan has been Obama’s bloodiest war and his most neglected war. It’s a war that hardly appears in major papers anymore, but while in terms of damage done Iraq and Libya may be Obama’s biggest disasters, in terms of American lives lost there’s no question that Afghanistan was his worst war.</p>
<p>Obama never had a strategy for Afghanistan. As best as anyone could determine he made a major commitment to it to provide political cover for his Iraq withdrawal. Once he committed to Afghanistan, he had no idea what to actually do there except get a lot of Americans killed while trying to appease the “moderate” Taliban who turned out not to exist despite Qatar’s best efforts to manufacture them.</p>
<p>Since Al Qaeda was a major threat in Iraq (a threat that eventually became ISIS) and Obama needed to disguise his withdrawal from Iraq by blaming Bush for being too weak on national security (a difficult trick for an anti-war lefty), he falsely claimed that Bush had neglected fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>There was just one problem, Al Qaeda had largely been broken in Afghanistan and had scattered to other conflicts. There were a handful of Al Qaeda fighters left. There was certainly nothing that required a major troop surge to handle. There was nothing for American soldiers to do there except die.</p>
<p>Bush had gone into Afghanistan with a plan to deny Al Qaeda a safe haven. Obama dusted off that same plan without caring as to whether or not there were even any Al Qaeda in Afghanistan while mixing it together with Bush’s troop surge in Iraq. If nothing else the end result was bound to be Bush’s fault.</p>
<p>Obama went into Afghanistan as a distraction. Unable to make decisions about the war, he forced the commanders to embarrass him by shaking him down for troops. Obama responded by lashing out and replacing commanders the way that losing teams replace coaches. It was an ugly spectacle that wrecked morale and set the tone for a destructive and contentious relationship with the military.</p>
<p>American soldiers were thrown into battle without being allowed to win. They weren’t fighting a war for territory, but for hearts and minds. It was a senseless strategy that threw away the lives of American soldiers in the hopes of winning a local popularity contest against the Taliban.</p>
<p>The rules of engagement focused on preventing Afghan civilian casualties in a war where the other side wore no uniforms. Air support was denied. The odds between ISAF and the Taliban were evened out. And a lot of lives were lost. More American soldiers died in Afghanistan during one term of Obama than had been killed during the entire Bush presidency.</p>
<p>The plan to split the Taliban into moderate and extreme wings by making them unpopular failed miserably. Everything since then has been a holding pattern. The number of casualties has dropped with the actual fighting. American soldiers are still there not to win or even to fight, but to keep Obama from looking bad in case anything goes wrong.</p>
<p>Obama signed on to a troop surge in Afghanistan to cover for his disastrous move in Iraq. Now the troops are staying on to avoid the spectacle of the Taliban overrunning the country ISIS style. Afghanistan has never been an actual priority for Obama. It has always been a way for him to deal with the political consequences of his decisions in Iraq.</p>
<p>Now the war has ground down to its predictable final stage in which the American presence is renamed as advisory even while combat operations continue.</p>
<p>Obama can’t leave Afghanistan because of the political consequences. But he still has no plan for Afghanistan and it’s the generals who are once again pushing him to have a strategic plan that protects American lives and accomplishes something useful instead of a political agenda that protects his own approval rating.</p>
<p><span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://libertyunyielding.com/2014/11/23/nyt-blindly-reports-obamas-reluctance-let-troops-defend-afghanistan/">As J.E. Dyer, a retired Naval Intelligence officer</a></span>, pointed out, “The generals… want to be proactive in defending their troops against terrorist threats.  They don’t want to just wait – hunkered down on bases, or exposed and vulnerable while they’re out supporting the Afghan national forces – for terrorists to find American troops and attack them.”</p>
<p>But Obama has achieved what he sees as the best of both worlds, a troop presence with low casualty levels that provides him with all the political cover he needs, but with none of the negatives of flag-draped caskets. The official word is that the United States is assisting and advising, it’s helping stabilize the government of Afghanistan and those are safe buzzwords that few can possibly object to.</p>
<p>When it came to Afghanistan, Obama always wanted to be seen doing something. His motives were political. His objectives in Afghanistan were not those of national security, but domestic politics.</p>
<p>Obama had an actual objective, regime change, in Libya, but he didn’t even have that much in Afghanistan. Instead he constantly framed the war in terms of fighting a phantom Al Qaeda enemy. And since the enemy didn’t exist he could easily claim to have beaten it while ignoring the rise of ISIS in Iraq that so many Americans had died trying to prevent.</p>
<p>Now Obama is stuck in Afghanistan because he’s too afraid of the political fallout of leaving.</p>
<p>The only lesson that Obama learned from his disastrous withdrawal from Iraq was that it was safer not to withdraw. Instead American soldiers are trapped between Obama’s approval ratings and the Taliban with no mission left to accomplish except to avoid attracting attention to themselves by dying or killing.</p>
<p>There is no longer a plan to deal with the Taliban. The idea that Afghanistan will retain a stable government is implausible. Even the idea that its military can take the weight of a serious assault is also unlikely. But Obama wants all of that to be someone else’s problem. He is passing on Afghanistan as a hot potato to his successor so that someone else will have to take the blame for Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama’s actions in Afghanistan tell the story of his ugly disregard for national security and the lives of our soldiers. The surge was sold using a lie about an Al Qaeda threat in Afghanistan that no longer existed. Now the presence of American forces is being passed off as advisory when what that really means is that Americans will be under fire, but unstable to set the terms on which they meet the enemy.</p>
<p>After all this time Americans deserve the truth. If American soldiers are going to be in harm’s way, they should have a mission and the ability to accomplish it.</p>
<p>Those are two things that they never had under Obama.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>You Can’t Stop Genocide Without Killing Civilians</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/you-cant-stop-genocide-without-killing-civilians/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=you-cant-stop-genocide-without-killing-civilians</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/you-cant-stop-genocide-without-killing-civilians/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2014 04:58:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[genocide]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[WWII]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242898</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Learning the lesson of Afghanistan.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ISIS-Mass-Killing.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242900" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/ISIS-Mass-Killing-450x286.jpg" alt="ISIS-Mass-Killing" width="321" height="204" /></a>By the time World War II was over entire cities had been devastated and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Allies in one of the last wars whose virtue we were all able to agree on. The civilians were not limited to enemy German and Japanese civilians, but included French civilians in occupied territory, Jewish prisoners and numerous others who were caught in the war zone.</p>
<p>To the professional pacifist these numbers appear to disprove the morality of war, any war, but they were the blood price that had to be paid to stop two war machines once they had been allowed to seize the strategic high ground. There was no other way to stop the genocide that Germany and Japan had been inflicting on Europe and Asia except through a way of war that would kill countless civilians.</p>
<p>A refusal to fight that war would not have been the moral course. It would have meant that the Allies would have continued to serve as the silent partners in genocide. The same thing is true today.</p>
<p>War is ugly. It is made moral by why it is fought, not by how it is fought.  If we are fighting a war to prevent mass murder, our moral obligation is to win it as quickly as possible. Not as cleanly.</p>
<p>Our attempt to streamline the ugly parts into a drone taking out a terrorist target with no collateral damage is a moral fiction. Civilians die in drone strikes as in any other form of attack and believing that we can have our moral cake and eat it too has convinced some that any other kind of war is immoral.</p>
<p>If we had set out to win World War II as cleanly as possible the price for our morality would have been paid by our own soldiers as well as by the countless victims of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.</p>
<p>As we can see the way that American soldiers and Afghan civilians paid the price for Obama’s morality.</p>
<p>As I <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/frontpagemag-com/the-great-betrayal/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">wrote in The Great Betrayal</span></a>, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased&#8230; 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint.  This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”</p>
<p>“By 2011, the ISAF forces were responsible for only 14.2 percent of Afghan civilian deaths, while the Taliban were responsible for 79.8 percent of them.”</p>
<p>American soldiers were killing fewer Afghan civilians, but more Afghan civilians were dying. The rules of engagement allowed the Taliban to win which meant that they would be able to kill more civilians. Instead of helping Afghan civilians, we were causing more of them and more of us to be killed.</p>
<p>Obama’s moral approach to war was what the Jewish sages had called the “righteousness of fools.”</p>
<p>This issue takes on a renewed urgency as the United States confronts ISIS genocide in Iraq and Syria. To stop ISIS, we will have to do what we were unwilling to do when it came to fighting the Taliban. We will have to hit them and hit them hard.</p>
<p>There was a time when we could have dealt a setback to ISIS with drone strikes. Obama golfed that golden time away. Pinpoint strikes will no longer stop the Islamic State. Only decisive force will.</p>
<p>The White House was panicked enough to relax the rules on “near certainty” allowing more freedom of action against ISIS, but it’s also not nearly enough. ISIS is not a group of terrorists hiding in caves. It operates like an army. It sustains its forces by maintaining a constant forward momentum. This is something that it has in common with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, both of whom were running fragile military and economic enterprises that depended on a steady stream of new conquests.</p>
<p>Stopping ISIS will require a willingness to either put boots on the ground or accept heavy civilian casualties. We once again have a choice between “Shock and Awe” or years of occupation.</p>
<p>We made the wrong choice in the past. We have to be willing to make the right one now.</p>
<p>We can break ISIS if we are willing to clear away the obstacles in the kill-chain by moving as quickly as the enemy does. Instead what we have is the worst of both worlds, a process of approving strikes that treats ISIS as if it were a ponderous conventional foe combined with minimal strikes better suited to the kinds of terrorist enemies we were fighting a decade ago.</p>
<p>Our enemy is mobile and resourceful. It knows our tactics and our limitations. Our people need to be free to take immediate and responsive action on the spot instead of relying on a process that has become too slow and inflexible under the bureaucratic pace of drone warfare.</p>
<p>Obama’s delays closed the door on our opportunity to rescue American hostages being held by ISIS. The dithering which has accompanied all of his military decisions is completely unworkable when confronting groups that have learned to quickly adapt and respond. If the war against ISIS continues to be run through the White House, filtered through its advisers and polls, then the war will be lost.</p>
<p>On the battlefield we have to be willing to accept that if we use large scale bombing to go after a military group that uses civilians as human shields, there will be large numbers of civilian casualties. But that number will be far less than what it would be if ISIS gets to carry out its genocides and continues to drag out the war across the region.</p>
<p>The lesson that we should take away from Afghanistan is that finicky attitudes about civilian casualties only end up costing more civilian lives.</p>
<p>Ending a war requires the use of decisive force. The alternative is the miserable situation in Israel in which it hurts Hamas enough to buy some time, but not enough to stop another war two years later.</p>
<p>Sparing terrorists to save civilians is morally and practically backward. Terrorists kill civilians. Sparing terrorists means that more civilians will die.</p>
<p>On September 10, 2001, <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/07/31/clinton-on-sept-10-2001-could-have-killed-bin-laden-but-didnt/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Bill Clinton said that</span></a> he could have had Bin Laden taken out if not for the collateral damage in Kandahar. As a result of his inaction, 3,000 people in the United States and countless civilians in Afghanistan died. By trying to prevent 300 civilian casualties, he actually caused ten times and then a hundred times that many civilian casualties.</p>
<p>We can’t afford any more Clinton moralizing that sacrifices the World Trade Center to spare Kandahar and then has to bomb Kandahar anyway. We can either learn the lessons of Afghanistan or continue losing thousands of Americans to wars that never end.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><em>Don&#8217;t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on The Glazov Gang discussing <strong>&#8220;ISIS Rising&#8221;</strong>:</em></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/9E8gGysQZzU" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> it on </strong><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang" target="_blank"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>Pesky Questions About Those AWOL Afghans</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/michellemalkin/pesky-questions-about-those-awol-afghans/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pesky-questions-about-those-awol-afghans</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:10:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cape Cod]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Missing]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soldiers]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[training]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242168</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the silence from authorities? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/img-Missing-Afghan-soldiers-found-at-Canadian-border.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242169" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/img-Missing-Afghan-soldiers-found-at-Canadian-border-450x313.jpg" alt="img-Missing-Afghan-soldiers-found-at-Canadian-border" width="346" height="241" /></a>So the five Afghan soldiers who went missing from two separate U.S. military bases are now all accounted for and apparently headed back to their home country. Feel safer now? Don&#8217;t.</p>
<p>The Pentagon, State Department and Department of Homeland Security would like this story to be over and done. (Just like they wanted the White House &#8220;fence-jumper&#8221; story to be buried. But then we found out he didn&#8217;t just jump the fence; he also overpowered a Secret Service agent, burst through the halls and invaded the East Room wielding a knife.)</p>
<p>Here are my nagging questions about another hushed-up national security incident the White House would prefer to whitewash:</p>
<p>—Why were officials so quick to tell the public that these men were not a threat to the public?</p>
<p>The two Afghan men who disappeared on Sept. 13 from a training program with the Drug Enforcement Administration in Quantico, Va., were Mohd Naweed Samimi, 24, and Mohammad Yasin Ataye, 22. The three men who ditched Cape Cod&#8217;s Camp Edwards on Sept. 22 were Major Jan Mohammad Arash, Captain Mohammad Nasir Askarzada and Captain Noorullah Aminyar.</p>
<p>Both Afghan and U.S. officials rushed to assure the public that none of these men posed a security threat. The Pentagon said &#8220;they were vetted&#8221; by the State Department through its so-called &#8220;Leahy vetting process.&#8221; Big deal. This so-called process has been under fire for years because of shoddy or unavailable records, as well as inconsistency across programs and agencies.</p>
<p>&#8220;We generally don&#8217;t know who we are training. We have little reliable information,&#8221; one U.S. official told RAND Corp. researchers. Their study &#8220;found significant problems with current U.S. vetting practices in relation to security assistance.&#8221; That was six years ago.</p>
<p>In 2008, similar problems were exposed by the State Department inspector general in visa programs for thousands of Afghan and Iraqi translators and interpreters who worked for U.S. government agencies. The programs were deemed at &#8220;high risk for fraud and abuse,&#8221; with almost 25 percent of those approved failing to meet the eligibility criteria.</p>
<p>In 2012, after Afghan trainees murdered 45 NATO troops, U.S. Special Operations forces suspended Afghan police and special forces training. Lax screening and security measures led to widespread abuse and corruption within Afghan law enforcement units, not to mention endangerment of our troops. In addition to a massive rescreening effort of 350,000 Afghan security forces, U.S. military leaders directed coalition force units to &#8220;create safe zones inside (Afghan National Security Forces) compounds where they can defend themselves if necessary.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the &#8220;safe zone&#8221; initiative didn&#8217;t work at Camp Bastion in September 2012, when an unprecedented attack by Taliban infiltrators left two Marines dead, 17 troops wounded and eight Harrier jets destroyed or damaged. Neither did &#8220;safe zones&#8221; stop the August 2014 slaying of U.S. Maj. Gen. Harold Greene at the hands of a Taliban infiltrator wearing an Afghan army uniform.</p>
<p>And no such &#8220;safe zones&#8221; have been created here at home for when Afghan trainees come to our shores and suddenly wander off.</p>
<p>—Where exactly were the Afghan soldiers who ditched Quantico found and with whom?</p>
<p>According to press reports citing unnamed federal law enforcement officials, Samimi and Ataye were &#8220;picked up in Buffalo, N.Y., without incident.&#8221; Some speculated they wanted to reunite with a &#8220;relative.&#8221; I&#8217;m sure the residents of Buffalo would appreciate more details.</p>
<p>Alarmingly, when I asked DHS/ICE public affairs officer Khaalid Walls on Tuesday what the status of the Quantico Afghan soldiers was, he told me: &#8220;I haven&#8217;t heard of that.&#8221;</p>
<p>—What steps are being taken to ensure that the Cape Cod Afghans aren&#8217;t catch-and-release beneficiaries?</p>
<p>According to Walls, the men will be in immigration court in Batavia, N.Y., on Thursday for a hearing. When I asked whether the feds would intervene if the judge orders them released pending further removal proceedings (which can drag on for years), Walls told me he didn&#8217;t know.</p>
<p>—Isn&#8217;t it uncanny that both sets of AWOL Afghan soldiers were headed up north near the U.S.-Canada border? The Afghan trio who abandoned Camp Edwards turned up on Rainbow Bridge as they attempted to enter Canada. That&#8217;s just a half-hour away from Buffalo, where the Quantico Afghans were apprehended.</p>
<p>Side notes: The FBI is still searching for Canadian al-Qaida terror plotter Amer el-Maati, who trained in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and fellow Canadian fugitive jihadist Faker Ben Abdelaziz Boussora, another al-Qaida terror suspect trained in Afghanistan. And just last week, a Taliban-trained jihadist living in Ottawa pleaded guilty to a terror plot involving 56 cellphone-triggered explosive devices smuggled into Canada from Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Hiva Alizadeh was arrested with beheading videos and &#8220;How To Kidnap an American&#8221; pamphlets. Past Canadian jihad plots have targeted financial districts, tourist landmarks, government buildings and power grids on both sides of the border.</p>
<p>Last questions: Did the Quantico and Cape Cod soldiers know one another? Have any other Afghan soldiers gone missing? When? Where? Inquiring, non-complacent minds want to know.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bowe Bergdahl Is Not One of Us</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bowe-bergdahl-is-not-one-of-us/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bowe-bergdahl-is-not-one-of-us</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:40:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deserter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Military]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[traitor]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234387</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/ysQl4aW7tME" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic; color: #8f8f8f;"><p>NOT ONE OF US</p>
<p>Hi everybody: I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p>Benedict Arnold is the most famous traitor in American history. He was a general who wanted the British to win the American Revolution. Charles Cornwallis was also a general who wanted the British to win the American revolution. So why why is Arnold despised while Cornwallis is not?</p>
<p>Well, Benedict Arnold was one of us. And General Cornwallis was not. General Cornwallis maintained his honor by fighting, in uniform, for a cause he believed in. General Arnold lost his honor – not just during his own time but down trough the halls of history – for wearing one color uniform on the outside and a different one on the inside. Traitors damage us in ways enemies cannot. A nation is a family, and traitors destroy their own family from within. It is the lowest form of treachery.</p>
<p>Bowe Bergdahl, an American soldier recently released after five years as prisoner of the Taliban, apparently had some fairly anti-war feelings for a long time. That alone doesn’t mean he’s not one of us: many Americans have anti-war feelings. But: when you put on the uniform of the Armed Forces of the United States of America, you join in a smaller family. A family that depends on you for their very lives. And you swear an oath to protect that family.</p>
<p>When people like Bowe Bergdahl willingly walk out on those brothers and sisters and into the hands of the people trying to kill them; when his absence weakens the security of his family members, and when six of his brothers go out into that world looking for him, and don’t come back – not that day, not ever – then Bowe Bergdahl does not deserve to come home to America because this is not his home. The six people who were killed looking for him deserve to come home – come home as heroes – but they won’t. Not ever. They were killed by Bergdahl’s real family.</p>
<p>We have, at the cost of many thousands of lives, killed or captured many of the Taliban that Bergdalh walked out to join. The very first American soldier killed in the war to avenge the three thousand members of our family killed on September 11th, 2001 was named Mike Spann. He was killed in a prison uprising on November 25th, 2001 while interrogating Taliban prisoners. The leader of that uprising, Mullah Mohammad Fazl, was captured and taken to Guantanamo bay. The man who killed the first soldier to die in Afghanistan was traded back to the Taliban, along with four other highly-skilled terrorists, in exchange for the soldier who caused six more Americans soldiers to be killed, searching for the brother that walked away.</p>
<p>When Barack Obama was up to his eyeballs in scandal regarding the appalling treatment of our soldiers at the Veteran’s administration – in Phoenix alone we let 40 members of our family die from the wounds they took on our behalf – he needed not a solution to the VA scandal, but a quick photo op that would wallpaper over that disgrace and let us know how much he cares about our soldiers.</p>
<p>Here’s the photo op.</p>
<p>So how did we end up swapping a deserter and traitor for five key terrorists? Did no one vet this deal? Does anybody actually work at the White House?</p>
<p>One person who works at the White House is National Security advisor Susan Rice. It’s ultimately her responsibility to look out for the National Security of the United States of America. In other administrations she would merely be an advisor, of course, and the ultimate responsibility would lie with the President. But this President is not responsible for anything.</p>
<p>In 1997, Susan Rice was a member of President Clinton’s National Security Council. The government of Sudan offered to turn over actionable intelligence on the precise location of a key terrorist to US officials. Susan Rice was instrumental in blocking access to that information, not once but repeatedly. That terrorist was not one of those traded for Bowe Bergdalh. That was named Osama Bin Laden. If Susan Rice had not repeatedly turned away that help, Spann, those six soldiers, the thousands of others lost in Afghanistan, and the 3,000 of our family members that died in fire and horror in New York Skyscrapers and the pentagon and on four crashed airliners would be alive today. She is not one of us. That’s why Bergdahl’s story didn’t cause her the revulsion the rest of us feel. She’s on a side – it’s just not our side.</p>
<p>And what about this man?</p>
<p>The man who grew up in Muslim schools in Indonesia. The man whose chosen mentor was a known communist and self-proclaimed pedophile. The man who thanked his pot-smoking gang, but not the grandmother who raised him, in his yearbook picture. The man that roomed with Muslim radicals at Occidental College. The man who was President of the Harvard Law Review but who never wrote a law review. The man whose political career started in the living room of domestic terrorist Bill Ayers – by the way, here’s a picture of the President’s sponsor coincidentally taken on the same day that the towers fell thanks to his future National Security Advisors ideological blinders. The man who orders his Attorney General not to secure our borders from armed invasion from narcotics traffickers and then ordered him to sue the states for trying to secure their borders on their own. The man who offered to surrender our missile defense shield to the Russians in exchange for personal political gain – in precisely the same way that Benedict Arnold offered to sell out the defenses at West Point in exchange for personal political gain. The man who with the wave of a finger illegally and repeatedly re-writes his own health care law in reaction to poll numbers. The man who stood in front of the United Nations and gave away our first amendment rights in exchange for the promise that the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. The man who decided not to attend six consecutive daily intelligence briefings prior to the Benghazi attack, who ignored the pleas for additional security, who ordered the rescue attempt to stand down then watched via surveillance drone as our family members Glen Dougherty and Tyrone Woods fought for two and a half hours in real time, then died on the roof of the Benghazi Consulate and who then went to bed to be fresh for the big Vegas fundraiser the next day.</p>
<p>That guy. What about him? Is he one of us?</p></blockquote>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:02:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[The Glazov Gang]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Shillman Fellow Daniel Greenfield explains the president's disastrous Afghanistan give-away.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama1.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234239" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama1.jpeg" alt="obama" width="339" height="168" /></a><strong>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Subscribe</a> to <em>The Glazov Gang</em> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">LIKE</a> it on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Facebook.]</a></strong></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <em>Glazov Gang</em> was joined by <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong>, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He writes the blog, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/the-point/">The Point</a>, at <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/">Frontpagemag.com</a>.</p>
<p>Daniel discussed &#8220;<span id="eow-title" class="watch-title long-title yt-uix-expander-head" dir="ltr" title="The Glazov Gang-Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died."><a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/">Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died</a>,&#8221; outlining the president&#8217;s disastrous Afghanistan give-away.</span></p>
<p>The dialogue also involved an analysis of Obama&#8217;s surrender of Iraq, more revelations on the Benghazi betrayal, the scandalous Taliban-Bergdahl swap, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/WUz9-fhF9uw" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Don&#8217;t miss this week&#8217;s second <em>Glazov Gang</em> edition, joined by <strong>Dr. Mark Durie,</strong> a theologian, human rights activist, pastor of an Anglican church, and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.</p>
<p style="text-align: left;">Mark discussed, &#8220;<em>Our Fear of Islam</em>,&#8221; analyzing the different psychological mechanisms the West is now engaged in its surrender to a totalitarian ideology, which includes the &#8220;Tend and Befriend&#8221; response. The dialogue also involved a focus on Islamic female genital mutilation and the world&#8217;s denial about its Muslim theological foundations:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xn0km52dCIg" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>To watch previous <em>Glazov Gang</em> episodes, </strong><a href="http://jamieglazov.com/"><strong>Click Here</strong></a><strong>.</strong></p>
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		<title>You Bet This Is Swiftboating</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/you-bet-this-is-swiftboating/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=you-bet-this-is-swiftboating</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 19 Jun 2014 04:01:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deserter]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John Kerry]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Swiftboat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vietnam]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234382</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Washington's disturbing response to real servicemen telling the truth about a dishonorable comrade. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-234383" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600.jpg" alt="bergdahl-videoSixteenByNine600" width="248" height="190" /></a>While the Obama administration tortures the Benghazi raid suspect into a false confession that a YouTube video made him attack our embassy, let&#8217;s review what his &#8220;capture&#8221; is meant to distract us from:</p>
<p>(1) The IRS&#8217; Lois Lerner claims her computer crashed, destroying all her emails to the White House, congressional Democrats and the Department of Justice, at the very height of the IRS&#8217; targeting of tea party groups. Six other IRS officials now claim their emails are also missing. (Have they tried shutting down their computers and restarting?)</p>
<p>Rosemary Woods erased part of a White House tape nearly half a century ago, and Chris Matthews is still talking about it.</p>
<p>(2) Soon after he became president, Obama pulled every last troop out of Iraq, despite the fact that the war was over and we had won. Now Iraq is on fire, torn apart by terrorist invaders. We still have more than 100,000 troops in defeated Axis powers Germany, Italy and Japan. But Obama couldn&#8217;t leave a few troops in Iraq simply to preserve our victory. Now it&#8217;s gone.</p>
<p>(3) In the worse deal in history, Obama traded five hardened terrorists &#8212; specifically chosen by the Taliban &#8212; for an American who is a probable deserter.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t whine about not &#8220;knowing&#8221; if Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl was a deserter. It&#8217;s not a big secret. The Pentagon investigated Bergdahl&#8217;s disappearance back in 2010 and concluded that he had walked away from his unit of his own free will. This guy did everything but fill out one of those &#8220;change of address&#8221; postcards redirecting his mail to the local Taliban post office.</p>
<p>The left has reacted to the embarrassing truth about Bergdahl by:</p>
<p>(a) Denouncing Republican congressmen who initially posted happy tweets about Bergdahl&#8217;s release, and then deleted those tweets &#8212; probably on orders from Fox News!</p>
<p>(b) Accusing Bergdahl&#8217;s displeased Army comrades of &#8220;swiftboating.&#8221;</p>
<p>Yes, exactly. This is precisely what &#8220;swiftboating&#8221; is: The truth about a serviceman from the people who actually served with him. Similarly, the attacks on John Kerry came from the men he served with, not the Republican Party.</p>
<p>To the contrary, John McCain, who never served with Kerry, called the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth &#8220;dishonest and dishonorable.&#8221; (You nominated him!) President Bush requested that they take their ads off TV.</p>
<p>The only prominent Republican to defend the Swifties was former Sen. Bob Dole &#8212; a genuine World War II hero &#8212; who told CNN:</p>
<p>&#8220;One day (Kerry&#8217;s) saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons. The next day he&#8217;s standing there, &#8216;I want to be president because I&#8217;m a Vietnam veteran.&#8217; Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served. He wasn&#8217;t the only one in Vietnam.&#8221;</p>
<p>It is precisely because the truth about Bergdahl didn&#8217;t come out until after he had been released that Republican members of Congress initially sent out those &#8220;Welcome back!&#8221; tweets. They didn&#8217;t know the truth about Bergdahl, and neither did most people, until his fellow soldiers spoke up. Even people in his own hometown ended up canceling a Bergdahl homecoming celebration in response to the accusations of his platoon.</p>
<p>Bergdahl&#8217;s comeuppance didn&#8217;t come from some right-wing Wizard of Oz in the fevered brains of MSNBC hosts: It came from members of Bergdahl&#8217;s own unit in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>The reason these soldiers hadn&#8217;t said anything until Bergdahl&#8217;s release was that, as a condition of leaving Afghanistan, they were required to sign gag orders prohibiting them from discussing Bergdahl. (It&#8217;s strange; liberals usually don&#8217;t like gag orders, but they don&#8217;t seem to mind this one.)</p>
<p>After Bergdahl&#8217;s release &#8212; heralded by a ceremony in the Rose Garden that included a shout-out to the Taliban &#8212; the soldiers decided those agreements were moot.</p>
<p>It apparently never occurred to Obama that the troops Bergdahl abandoned would not be popping champagne corks at the news of his release. (Nor did it occur to Rolling Stone. The 2012 article about Bergdahl spoke of the &#8220;hope&#8221; of Bowe&#8217;s old unit that &#8220;a deal could get done&#8221; with the Taliban for his safe return. Remember the good old days when you could get reliable military intel from a left-wing music magazine written by half-brights?)</p>
<p>Democrats should just stop talking about the military. Whenever they do, they sound like Republican men talking about rape.</p>
<p>Democrat adventures with the military have included that ridiculous photo of little Mike Dukakis in the tank. There was Bill Clinton&#8217;s letter explaining that he needed a nuanced way to dodge the draft during Vietnam in order to &#8220;maintain my political viability.&#8221; We had John Kerry, who thought it would be a great idea to remind Americans that he was the guy who came back and crapped on his fellow soldiers in Vietnam. John Kerry, reporting for duty.</p>
<p>And now we have Obama, who gazes upon deserter Bowe Bergdahl and thinks his return will be a feel-good American story.</p>
<p>So maybe the guy deserted. Hasn&#8217;t Obama pushed girls, gays and transgenders on the military? Why the pushback this time?</p>
<p>The Democrats&#8217; only concept of how to support the troops is to treat them like their other constituent groups &#8212; single women, blacks and the poor &#8212; and offer them more government benefits.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m fairly certain what the troops would really prefer is to be left alone by liberals.</p>
<p>How about no free college tuition &#8212; and not forcing the military to accept open homosexuality? How about fewer increases in military pensions &#8212; and no Defense Department-funded transgender operation for gay traitor Bradley Manning? How about skimping on PTSD therapists &#8212; and no girl generals?</p>
<p>The military doesn&#8217;t ask for a lot. Soldiers just want to do their job, which is to kill people and break things, not to be nurturing to women, gays and traitors.</p>
<p>The troops don&#8217;t complain much, but when they do, there is nothing more devastating than a real &#8220;swift boating.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>Al Qaeda Takes More Territory in Iraq, Obama Springs into Action and Releases Jihadists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/al-qaeda-takes-more-territory-in-iraq-obama-springs-into-action-and-releases-jihadists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=al-qaeda-takes-more-territory-in-iraq-obama-springs-into-action-and-releases-jihadists</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/al-qaeda-takes-more-territory-in-iraq-obama-springs-into-action-and-releases-jihadists/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2014 01:56:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=234129</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bergdahl deal was a precedent for freeing more Jihadists.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/future-must-not-belong-to-those-who-slander-prophet-islam-mohammad-barack-hussein-obama-muslim.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-234132" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/future-must-not-belong-to-those-who-slander-prophet-islam-mohammad-barack-hussein-obama-muslim-450x281.jpg" alt="future-must-not-belong-to-those-who-slander-prophet-islam-mohammad-barack-hussein-obama-muslim" width="450" height="281" /></a></p>
<p>Some have accused Obama of responding to the crisis in Iraq with empty words, followed by parties and golfing in Palm Beach and claiming that the Republicans are causing Global Warming at UC-Irvine.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s not true that Obama has remained uninvolved in foreign policy during this crisis. He has followed his tried and<a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2014/06/u-s-quietly-releases-12-jihadis-from-u-s-military-prison-in-afghanistan"> tested policy of meeting terrorism with appeasement</a>.</p>
<p>The Taliban and Al Qaeda have tried and tested the policy and they recommend it to 4 out of 5 infidel states in the Dar al-Harb.</p>
<blockquote><p>Barack Obama, in a letter to Congress released on Thursday, informed U.S. lawmakers that about 38 non-Afghan prisoners remained at the Parwan detention center outside of Kabul, down from around 50 a few months ago.</p>
<p>A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that a Frenchman, a Kuwaiti and 10 Pakistani prisoners were sent back to their respective home countries at the end of May.</p>
<p>The remaining detainees include Yemeni, Tunisian and more Pakistani nationals, and a Russian who the United States is also considering trying in a military or civilian court.</p></blockquote>
<p>As expected the Bergdahl deal was a precedent for freeing more Jihadists. The timing is terrible, from an American perspective, but the timing couldn&#8217;t be better if you were an Islamic Jihadist or one of their liberal anti-war allies.</p>
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		<title>Pragmatism, Obama and the Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/pragmatism-obama-and-the-bergdahl-swap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pragmatism-obama-and-the-bergdahl-swap</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2014 04:55:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detainee]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gitmo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Guantanamo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorist]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233712</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How ideology blinded a president to the public rejection of trading five terrorists for a deserter. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233714" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406-438x350.jpg" alt="article-2646603-1E5E6F6F00000578-125_638x406" width="293" height="234" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/OUR-WORLD-Pragmatism-Obama-and-the-Bergdahl-swap-355909">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">US President Barack Obama is an artist of political propaganda. Both his greatest admirers and his most vociferous opponents agree that his ability to manipulate public opinion has no peer in American politics today.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So how can we explain the fiasco that is his decision not only to swap five senior Taliban terror masters for US Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, but to take ownership over the decision by presenting it to the American people in a ceremony with Bergdahl’s parents at the White House Rose Garden? Clearly Obama overreached. He misread the public’s disposition.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This much is made clear by the immediate criticism his actions received from the liberal media. It wasn’t just Fox News and National Review that said Obama broke the law when he failed to notify Congress of the swap 30 days prior to its implementation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was CNN and NBC News.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">MSNBC commentators criticized the swap. And CNN interviewed Bergdahl’s platoon mates who to a man accused him of desertion, with many alleging as well that he collaborated with the enemy. It was CNN that gave the names of the six American soldiers who died trying to rescue Bergdahl from the Taliban.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What was it about the Bergdahl trade tipped the scales? Why is this decision different from Obama’s other foreign policy decisions? For instance, why is the public outraged now when it wasn’t outraged in the aftermath of the jihadist assault on US installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, in which US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were murdered? Politically, Obama emerged unscathed from failures in every area he has engaged. From Iraq to Iran to Syria to Libya to Russia and beyond, he has never experienced the sort of across the board condemnation he is now suffering. His political allies and media supporters always rallied to his side. They always explained away his failures.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So what explains the outcry? Why are people like Senator Dianne Feinstein, who have been supportive of Obama’s nuclear appeasement of Iran, up in arms over the Bergdahl swap? There are three aspects of the Bergdahl deal that distinguish it from the rest of Obama’s foreign policy blunders.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the Bergdahl deal was conducted in an unlawful manner and the White House readily acknowledged that it knowingly broke the law by not informing Congress 30 days in advance of the swap. This brazen lawbreaking angered Obama’s loyal allies in Congress who, like Feinstein, were insulted by his behavior.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Second, Obama initiated the story and made himself the sole owner of the swap.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama didn’t have to make the Bargdahl swap a story about his foreign policy. He chose to. As commentators have argued, if Obama had simply ordered the Defense Department to issue a press release announcing the swap the story probably wouldn’t have caused more than the normal amount of controversy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And whereas Benghazi was a story about jihadists attacking, and Obama was pilloried – and defended – for his response to an act of aggression initiated by US enemies, Obama presented the Bergdahl swap as his brainchild. So it is impossible to blame anyone else for this move, or wish it away.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the administration saw it, the public would rally around the leader over this feel-good story.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama obviously believed that the Bergdahl trade would help him to surmount his opponents’ criticism over the Veterans’ Administration scandal and other issues.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this is where his failure to understand the disposition of the American people comes into play.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The third aspect of the swap that distinguishes it from his other foreign policy failures is that by organizing the ceremony at the Rose Garden, and making it a story about himself, Obama denied his supporters the tools they have used in every other instance to explain away his failures and justify his counterproductive decisions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama sailed into office by presenting himself as a non-ideological pragmatist. Obama recognized that the public was tired of foreign policies based on ideology. George W. Bush lost public support for the war in Iraq, and for his foreign policy goal of bringing freedom to the Islamic world more generally, when his ideologically charged rhetoric of American exceptionalism stopped matching the situation on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A year after Bush declared an end to major combat operations in Iraq, the sight of US military contractors being lynched in Fallujah soured the public on American exceptionalism. In Obama, they hoped that they found the antidote to Bush – a man who promised to replace ideology with hard-nosed pragmatism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the event, Obama turned out to be even more driven by ideology than Bush was. Obama is the anti-Bush not because he matches Bush’s ideology with pragmatism. He is the anti-Bush because he matches Bush’s grand foreign policy based on American exceptionalism with his own grand foreign policy based on American moral deficiency.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He made this clear most recently at his commencement address at West Point last month where he stipulated that “American influence is always stronger when we lead by example. We can’t exempt ourselves from the rules that apply to everybody else&#8230; .”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As to American exceptionalism, Obama sneered, “What makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But while Obama’s critics have pointed out the radicalism at the heart of his foreign policy from the outset of his presidency, his supporters were always able to explain it away.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s appeasement of the Iranians was pragmatic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">We don’t want a war there, they say.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His support for the Muslim Brotherhood is not radical. It too is pragmatic, they soothe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And so on and so forth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for Benghazi, in the fog of war, the media preferred its commitment to Obama’s reelection over its responsibility to report the truth of what happened.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s success in getting away with serial foreign policy failures, and his success in hiding the radical ideological basis of his decisions has always owed to his supporters’ ability to plausibly deny both the failures and the ideological motivation for his actions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His Rose Garden announcement made such spin all but impossible. Americans are not particularly interested in foreign policy. But there are a few things that they won’t buy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They won’t buy that a man who comes to the White House sporting a Taliban beard and praising Allah in Arabic is a normal American father.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They won’t buy spin that describes a deserter as an exemplary soldier.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They don’t want to free five senior terrorists and mass murderers in order to buy Bergdahl’s release.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In believing that the public would side with him and Bergdahl and Bergdahl’s dad against critics of the deal, Obama showed that for all his propaganda prowess, he doesn’t understand the public.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The public didn’t oppose the war in Iraq because they thought the US is morally deficient. They opposed the war in Iraq because Bush wasn’t winning it. And the public believed that Bush’s push for the abstract goal of democracy lay at the heart of the failure on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For nearly six years, Obama and his supporters have managed to fend off allegations that his foreign policy is even more ideological – and far more radical – than Bush’s by channeling the public’s aversion to pie-in-the-sky rhetoric and obfuscating facts. But the Bergdahl announcement at the Rose Garden ended all of that.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The reason Obama is being denounced for the Bergdahl swap is because he orchestrated a radical spectacle. Try as he may to castigate critics of the deal as partisan and cynical, Obama cannot pretend away the fact that the ceremony he arranged and oversaw was an open celebration of an American defeat, by the US president and the unsympathetic parents of an accused deserter.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And worse still for Obama’s protestations of pragmatism, his decision to take sole ownership of the swap revealed his ideological myopia. Only someone blinded by a worldview in which America is morally deficient could have thought that Americans would join him and the Bergdahls in celebrating an American defeat.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And now everyone knows what makes him tick.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama Lied, Americans in Afghanistan Died</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-lied-americans-in-afghanistan-died</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:58:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Lies]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taliban]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233634</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bergdahl deal unravels Obama’s war lies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama.jpeg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233636" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/obama-450x223.jpeg" alt="obama" width="297" height="147" /></a>After presiding for six years over a war in which over 1,600 Americans were killed fighting the Taliban, Obama did not mention the enemy during his West Point Commencement Address.</p>
<p>That wasn&#8217;t unusual. Obama has a curious habit of avoiding the &#8220;T-word&#8221; in his official speeches. Even when delivering his Rose Garden speech about Bergdahl&#8217;s return, the Taliban were never mentioned.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s mentions of the Taliban vary by context. When speaking to the military he might say that the United States is at war with the Taliban. In international diplomatic settings however he emphasizes that the conflict is really a civil war between the Taliban and the Afghan government with the United States there to act as a stabilizing force.</p>
<p>The President of Afghanistan claimed that Obama had told him, &#8220;The Taliban are not our enemies and we don’t want to fight them.&#8221;</p>
<p>Joe Biden had expressed similar thoughts, stating, &#8220;The Taliban per se is not our enemy. That&#8217;s critical.&#8221; White House spokesman Jay Carney awkwardly defended Biden by arguing that the United States was fighting the Taliban, but was there to defeat Al Qaeda.</p>
<p>Al Qaeda in Afghanistan however had already been defeated by Bush.</p>
<p>During the campaign and once in office, Obama had proposed outreach to the &#8220;moderate&#8221; Taliban. Biden estimated that only 5% of the Taliban were incorrigible while 70% and then another 25% could be reasoned with.</p>
<p>According to Biden, these Taliban were expected to end all ties with Al Qaeda, accept the Afghan constitution and offer equal treatment to women. Obama issued the same demand last year. The Taliban who hold strict religious beliefs about the evils of democracy and the inferiority of women did not rush to take Obama and Biden up on their offer.</p>
<p>Obama&#8217;s dual views of the Taliban made for an incompatible policy. When playing the role of commander, he delivers applause lines about &#8220;pushing the Taliban back&#8221; and large numbers of American soldiers were sent to Afghanistan. But the rest of the time he views the Taliban not as an enemy, but like Boko Haram or Hamas, as a group that is acting violently only because their legitimate political needs are not being met.</p>
<p>Some might say that it was as a commander that Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan, but that it was as an appeaser that he brought him back. And yet both Obamas are the same man. Obama sent Bowe Bergdahl to Afghanistan for the same reason that he brought him back.</p>
<p>This is the discontinuity that bedevils modern liberal foreign policy which fights wars it does not believe in, rejecting war, while still attempting to use force as an instrument of diplomacy.</p>
<p>When Bush sent American soldiers off to war it was because he believed that there was a real enemy to fight. Obama, as we have seen, never believed that the Taliban were our enemy and his own intelligence people had told him that Al Qaeda only had a handful of fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Then why did he send thousands of American soldiers to die or be maimed fighting the Taliban?</p>
<p>The Afghan Surge had never been meant to defeat the Taliban. The American soldiers were there for political leverage while Hillary and Obama figured out how to seduce the Taliban into political participation. The military would batter away at the incorrigible 5% of the Taliban while a deal would be cut with the other 95%.</p>
<p>But the numbers didn&#8217;t hold up.</p>
<p>Obama had claimed that withdrawing from Iraq would force the Iraqis to work out their differences. It didn&#8217;t work in Iraq. By putting clear deadlines on the US presence in Afghanistan he hoped to pressure the Afghan government into becoming desperate enough to cut a deal with the Taliban. Instead he only made the Taliban aware that they had no reason to cut a deal because they could wait him out.</p>
<p>Like many peace initiatives with terrorists, the pressure used to convince another government to negotiate with the terrorists only succeeded in convincing the terrorists not to negotiate. Obama was recreating the Israeli-PLO Peace Process disaster, except that he was doing it using American, instead of Israeli, lives.</p>
<p>Obama and Hillary&#8217;s talk of an Afghan-led approach to reconciling with the Taliban completed the breach between the Afghan government and the US. By trying to play the middle man in a deal that no one wanted, Obama alienated the rest of the country. The US no longer had allies in Afghanistan. It only had enemies. The Green-on-Blue attacks increased dramatically. Even the people we were fighting alongside now saw Americans as the enemy.</p>
<p>Not only had Obama failed to turn the Taliban into friends, but he had turned friends into enemies.</p>
<p>Despite all the setbacks, Obama&#8217;s people continued to cling to the idea that trading Bowe Bergdahl for top Taliban commanders would open up the peace process. The idea was floated in 2011 and 2012 and set aside because of Republican opposition. Proponents of Taliban appeasement blamed the GOP for sabotaging the Qatar talks. They even suggested that Republicans wanted the war to drag on to damage Obama&#8217;s popularity rating.</p>
<p>Now that Obama has firmly embraced unilateral governance at home, the deal went through. He is determined to shut down the War on Terror, close Gitmo and end the War in Afghanistan before his term ends, but his policies have put the initiative into the hands of a rising network of Islamist groups, some openly associated with Al Qaeda, others more loosely aligned with its ideas.</p>
<p>Meanwhile the American people have been lied to about the war and the Bergdahl deal threatens to unravel some of those lies. Obama did not recommit to Afghanistan to defeat Al Qaeda, as he has claimed, but to engage the Taliban. The Bergdahl deal was a last ditch effort to revive a Taliban peace process that Obama believes will finally disprove the Bush approach to terrorism.</p>
<p>When Obama authorized the Bin Laden operation, he did so to arrest him and put him through a civilian trial in order to dismantle Gitmo. This perverse duality characterizes his entire approach to the War on Terror. A military tactic is joined to an anti-war aim. Force is used to prove that violence doesn&#8217;t work nearly as well as diplomacy and appeasement.</p>
<p>This is the disastrous policy that led to everything from the Bergdahl deal to the collapse of the US effort in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Obama has spent far more time thinking how to win over the Taliban than how to beat them. It&#8217;s no wonder that the Taliban have beaten him instead.</p>
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		<title>Bowe Bergdahl Dances With Wolves</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dawn-perlmutter/bowe-bergdahl-dances-with-wolves/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bowe-bergdahl-dances-with-wolves</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2014 04:52:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dawn Perlmutter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[honor code]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The heavy price a deserter paid for idealizing the Taliban as the "Noble Savage."]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/dw.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233567" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/dw-450x335.jpg" alt="dw" width="316" height="235" /></a><em>Dances with Wolves</em> is a 1990 film starring Kevin Costner as an army lieutenant who leaves his unoccupied American frontier military post because he is attracted to the lifestyle and customs of a Sioux Indian tribe. He learns their language, is accepted as an honored guest, and eventually abandons his post after he falls in love with one of their women. When U.S. army soldiers reoccupy the post the lieutenant is captured, arrested as a traitor, and charged with desertion. While being transported back east as a prisoner, the Sioux track down the convoy, kill the soldiers, and free the lieutenant. The film ends with him riding into the mountains with his Sioux wife. This liberal love story—similar to many others that demonize the white man and the military, as well as misrepresent the barbarism of their enemies—is the type of fairytale that may have inspired Bowe Bergdahl to walk off into the mountains of Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Like Kevin Costner in the film, Bergdahl began learning the native language of Pashto, and reportedly spent more time with the Afghans than he did with his platoon. A few days before he went missing, he told his parents in an e-mail that he “was ashamed to be an American,” and that “the horror that is America is disgusting.” Several news reports claimed that the night he disappeared from his base in Afghanistan he left a note in his tent saying “he wanted to renounce his citizenship and go find the Taliban.”</p>
<p>Bergdahl’s disillusionment seems to be based upon a combination of the belief in the mythology of the Noble Savage and liberal propaganda derived from postcolonial and anti-hegemonic theory that interprets history, politics, and culture in the context of Western domination and oppression. This form of disillusionment is perpetuated in Hollywood films and revisionist history that portray white men as the oppressors in every conflict regardless of factual historical accounts. <em>Dances with Wolves</em> depicted the Sioux as pacifists and environmentalists when they were the most bloodthirsty of all the Plains Indian tribes, raping, pillaging, and torturing people for entertainment.</p>
<p>Bergdahl seemed to have similar misconceptions idealizing the Taliban and not understanding the threat. His fellow platoon members contend that he was a deserter. If that is the case, then similar to the army lieutenant in the film <em>Dances with Wolves,</em> Bergdahl “Turned Injun,” a pejorative, but accurate expression for traitors who willingly convert to their enemies’ ideology and adopt their traditions, language, and customs.</p>
<p>“Turning Injun” should not be equated with “Stockholm Syndrome,” in which a person is taken hostage and may begin to sympathize and identify with their captives. The difference is significant: the latter relinquishes culpability. By choosing to abandon his unit Bergdahl was not a typical hostage who was taken captive eventually suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, rather he was a victim of liberal idealism who was mugged by reality. His suffering involved severe disillusionment &#8212; the result of bitter disappointment that the Taliban whom he idealized as the Noble Savage turned out simply to be savages.</p>
<p>Conflicting reports of Bergdahl converting to Islam and working with the Taliban while also trying to escape has provoked disagreement and contradictory interpretations of the situation. Understanding some of the Taliban sexual practices may explain some of the inconsistency in Bergdahl’s behavior. The Taliban are ethnic Pashtun who combine Islam with their Pastunwali honor code, often resulting in differences in perceptions of honor and shame particularly as it relates to sexuality. A practice that is designated as strictly taboo in Islam but widely practiced by the Pashtun and Taliban is sex between men. Pashtun reject the label of homosexuality and describe relationships with other men as something they do, not who they are. In addition, it is common for men to have sexual relationships with young boys. Pashtun men shun women both socially and sexually and one of their most popular sayings is “women are for children, boys are for pleasure.” For Pashtun men, having a young boy lover (ashna) is not only not taboo, but increases status and reputation. This is exemplified in a prevalent cultural practice called “bacha bazi,” or “boy play.”</p>
<p>Bacha bazi is essentially the practice of trafficking pre-teen and teenage boys to be used as sex slaves by Afghani Pashtun men of status. The young boys are kidnapped into the trade or sometimes sold by their parents who are desperate for money. The boys are forced to dance and sing, wear make-up, and dress like girls at parties where they are often shared with their owners&#8217; close friends for sex. Dancing boys are a lucrative business. Men pay a lot of money to purchase boys who are placed up for auction, kept as permanent sex slaves, traded, or resold. The practice was originally more common in northern Afghanistan but has spread to the South. Afghans view this tradition with pride.</p>
<p>The Taliban attempted to suppress homosexuality and eliminate the tradition of bacha bazi, but it was so pervasive among Taliban militants that there was little effort made to stop the practice or crimes related to the activity. In an attempt to mitigate the abuse of young boys, the Taliban came up with a set of 30 laws in 2007. Law #19 stated that Taliban fighters must not take young boys without facial hair into their private quarters. For the Pashtun it is simply a way of life not any different than the practice of child brides to older men, so it is neither immoral nor shameful. In fact, it is socially sanctioned, has historical precedence, and is glorified in Pashtun poetry and literature. The only instance where shame is attached is serving in the female role, and that is mitigated by growing into the male role.</p>
<p>Regardless of whether Bergdahl was a collaborator who naively joined the Taliban to help the Afghan people, or whether he was captured after wandering off base, he most likely was repeatedly raped. Bergdahl may have been relegated to one of the Taliban ‘Ashna’ boys that are groomed for sex—in prison parlance, he was their “bitch.” This may explain his attempts at escape and his clean shaven appearance during his handover to American Special Operations troops. In recent reports Bowe Bergdahl told military officials that he was tortured, beaten and locked in a shark cage in total darkness for weeks at a time as punishment for trying to escape. The Taliban also gang rape men, women and children as punishment. If he were raped by the Taliban or kept as a sex boy it is unlikely that it will become public knowledge.</p>
<p>This entire scandal can be analyzed in terms of honor. Bergdahl did not comprehend military honor as he did not have any loyalty for his fellow soldiers or allegiance to his country. He certainly did not have any comprehension of the Pastunwali honor code or he would have understood that the Taliban could never respect someone who betrayed his own people. If National Security Advisor Susan Rice had any concept of honor, she would not have stated that Bergdahl served with honor and distinction. The administration also obviously has no concept of military or Pashtun honor, as they would have understood that a prisoner swap only demonstrates weakness, shame and a loss of face for both the military and America.</p>
<p>The Bergdahl scandal exemplifies how political correctness has infected every aspect of the military, from suspending counter jihad training courses, to relaxing uniform rules to make religious allowances. The epitome of political correctness is exemplified in the fact that although Bergdahl left written notes indicating he abandoned his platoon, he was promoted in absentia twice from private first class to sergeant, and almost received a third promotion to staff sergeant.</p>
<p>Army basic training is supposed to transform civilians into disciplined infantrymen that possess the Army values, fundamental soldier skills, physical fitness, character, confidence, commitment, loyalty, and the warrior ethos ready to accomplish the mission of the infantry. Now, however, their hands are tied by a Commander-in-Chief who in one year fired nine senior commanding Generals and whose politically correct policies led to the degradation of traditional military culture. This resulted in a soldier who acted upon misguided ideals of social justice, viewed violent enemies as oppressed occupied victims of American aggression and who had no concept of loyalty and allegiance to his brothers in arms. The Army was supposed to teach Bowe Bergdahl about honor and shame; instead the Taliban did.</p>
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		<title>Taliban Rising</title>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2014 04:55:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the terrorist organization is so elated over the Bergdahl exchange.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Taliban-fighters-in-Afgha-001.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233436" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Taliban-fighters-in-Afgha-001.jpg" alt="Taliban-fighters-in-Afgha-001" width="310" height="227" /></a>While Obama administration officials and their media allies are furiously attempting to spin the swap of U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl for five high-level Taliban terrorists in their favor, the other side of the equation is weighing in as well. Taliban leaders are <a href="http://time.com/2826534/bowe-bergdahl-taliban-captors/"><span style="color: #042eee;">expressing</span></a> jubilation over the trade, hailing it as a major recognition of their status and boon to their cause. The Taliban is seeking to solidify legitimacy as a political force in Afghanistan in the face of the imminent U.S. drawdown, after which less than 10,000 soldiers will remain in the country. With the Bergdahl exchange, the Taliban has achieved a major propaganda victory that will further aid its ascendancy in the country &#8212; on top of the benefit the return of several of its top operatives will offer as a consequence of the deal.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Details of the internal assessment of the Bergdahl swap come from a TIME magazine interview with two Taliban commanders. &#8220;This is a historic moment for us. Today our enemy for the first time officially recognized our status,&#8221; one commander said. &#8220;[T]hese five men are more important than millions of dollars to us.&#8221; When asked if this exchange would inspire the Taliban to capture other Americans, he responded succinctly. “Definitely,” he said. “It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people,” the commander added, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. “It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">According to the magazine, the Taliban was well-prepared to engage in a media campaign of their own with regard to the swap. Those who were selected to hand Bergdahl over rehearsed messages they wished to deliver to the American public, and a videographer was assigned to cover the exchange to help shape the narrative. The white tunic and trousers that Bergdahl wore were also part of the equation, as a tailor was commissioned to create the clothes for the event as a “gesture of respect.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">TIME allowed a second Taliban commander affiliated with the Haqqani network that was holding Bergdahl captive to humanize the terrorist organization. “You know we are also human beings and have hearts in our bodies,” the commander said. “We are fighting a war against each other, in which [the Americans] kill us and we kill them. But we did whatever we could to make [Bergdahl] happy.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The resulting propaganda <a href="https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=1423156574629856&amp;set=vb.100008065809061&amp;type=2&amp;theater"><span style="color: #1255cc;">video</span></a> documenting the exchange also shows a woven scarf draped across Bergdahl’s shoulders. The commander says it was a parting gift, further explaining that Bergdahl had made several friends among his captors. “We wanted him to return home with good memories,” the commander said. Shortly thereafter, the video also shows something else that accrues mightily to the interests of the Taliban: the hero’s welcome the five released detainees received when they landed in Qatar, followed by a jubilant raising of the <a href="https://themuslimissue.wordpress.com/2013/09/28/lesson-know-your-terror-flags/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Taliban flag</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Despite its negotiations with the Taliban to free Bergdahl, the White House initially refused to define the group&#8217;s status. When asked Monday if the Taliban was a terrorist group, outgoing White House Press Secretary Jay Carney <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/white-house-taliban-terrorist-organization/story?id=23981888"><span style="color: #1255cc;">dodged</span></a> the question. “We don’t get to choose our enemies when we go to war,” Carney responded. “We regard the Taliban as an enemy combatant in a conflict that has been going on, in which the United States has been involved for more than a decade. In this case&#8211;as you know we dealt with the Qataris in order to secure [Bergdahl’s] release&#8211;it was absolutely the right thing to do.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The semantical gymnastics continued on Tuesday, when White House National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden explained that a 2002 executive order added the Taliban to the list of <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/ofac/downloads/sdnlist.txt"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Specially Designated Global Terrorists</span></a> (SDGT), while its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) is omitted from the list compiled by the State Department. Why remains a mystery, considering the fact that both the Pakistani Taliban and the Haqqani Network thought to be holding Bergdahl are on the list.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Unsurprisingly, the administration chose to sidestep the issue, choosing to push the narrative that Bergdahl was a prisoner of war (POW), rather than a hostage. “Sgt. Bergdahl was not a hostage, he was a member of the military who was detained during the course of an armed conflict,” Hayden continued. “The United States does not leave a soldier behind based on the identity of the party to the conflict&#8230; It was a prisoner exchange. We’ve always done that across many wars. With the Germans. The Japanese. The North Koreans.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Such an effort is at odds with reality. In the five years Bergdahl was missing, the Pentagon <a href="http://washington.cbslocal.com/2014/06/03/bergdahl-never-listed-by-pentagon-as-prisoner-of-war/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">never</span></a> listed him as a POW. When he first disappeared, he was listed as “duty status whereabouts unknown.” Two days later it was changed to “missing/captured,” where it remained until his release. Detainees at Guantanamo Bay have never been referred to as POWS either, largely reflecting the reality that terrorists are international gangsters rather than soldiers of a nation state.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The five released Taliban leaders were initially reported to be under house arrest in Qatar, but this was later discovered to be untrue. &#8220;All five men received medical checks and they now live with their families in an accommodation facility in Doha,&#8221; a Gulf source, who declined to be identified, <a href="https://ca.news.yahoo.com/qatar-allowing-freed-taliban-men-move-freely-country-130028784.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> <i>Reuters</i> Tuesday. &#8220;They can move around freely within the country.” Moreover, officials in the U.S. intelligence community note that Qatar has a long track record of turning a blind eye to terror financing taking place in the emirate, and that they failed to keep track of a Gitmo detainee sent there at end of the Bush administration. “We know that many wealthy individuals in Qatar are raising money for jihadists in Syria every day,” a senior U.S. intelligence official <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/05/u-s-spies-worry-qatar-will-magically-lose-track-of-released-taliban.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> The Daily Beast. “We also know that we have sent detainees to them before, and their security services have magically lost track of them.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, while the Obama administration continues to tout the merits of the deal, the deal itself has unraveled—a reality that further enhances the status of the Taliban, which poses greater danger to Americans in the process.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Weekly Standard’s Thomas Joscelyn <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/five-most-dangerous-taliban-commanders-us-custody-released-pow-exchange_794017.html?page=2"><span style="color: #1255cc;">outlines</span></a> exactly why, noting that Berghdal was swapped for &#8220;five of the most dangerous Taliban commanders in U.S. custody.” Former Bush administration Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-b-mukasey-the-ghastly-transaction-that-freed-sgt-bowe-bergdahl/2014/06/04/325d9780-ec04-11e3-93d2-edd4be1f5d9e_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> the perilous implications of releasing such men, noting that even as the president is withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in a way that will purportedly not jeopardize the safety of those left behind until 2016, he has provided the Taliban with skilled strategic planners. He further notes that, despite the administration’s stated objective of separating the Taliban from al Qaeda, he has freed men with close ties to that organization &#8212; dating back prior to 9/11.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Diplomat’s Zachary Keck attempts to save the Obama administration, <a href="http://thediplomat.com/2014/06/the-strategic-logic-of-the-us-taliban-prisoner-swap-deal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">insisting</span></a> that the details of swap itself are only tangential to the bigger picture. He contends the larger strategy behind the deal is the Obama administration’s attempt to implement a &#8220;new, more unilateral tone to its Afghan policy,&#8221; brought about in large part by the lame duck presidency of Hamid Karzai. Thus, it is necessary to build trust and goodwill with the Taliban. &#8220;With the prisoner swap agreement out of the way, the U.S. and the Taliban are likely beginning to pursue these more substantive talks. The U.S. side is undoubtedly hoping to persuade the Taliban to end the insurgency and join the Afghan government in some capacity.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Keck goes further, insisting the U.S. has won the war in Afghanistan, with “victory&#8221; consisting of eliminating the nation as a safe haven for al Qaeda. He believes the Obama administration will eventually allow the Taliban to resume power in that nation, as long as they deny al-Qaeda and other transnational terrorist groups a safe haven there. &#8220;This is an example of what President Obama meant when he discussed trying to hit singles and doubles rather than swinging for the fences,” Keck concludes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Sadly, he is probably right. Last Sunday Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/hagel-unannounced-afghan-visit-us-soldier-freed-114333904.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admitted</span></a> as much, characterizing the prisoner swap as a vehicle “that can produce an agreement,” with the Taliban. Much like Obama&#8217;s affinity for the Muslim Brotherhood, or his administration’s latest <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/michael-b-mukasey-the-ghastly-transaction-that-freed-sgt-bowe-bergdahl/2014/06/04/325d9780-ec04-11e3-93d2-edd4be1f5d9e_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">decision</span></a> to work with a Palestinian “unity&#8221; government that includes Hamas, this appalling level of indifference regarding the true nature of the Taliban will undoubtedly be portrayed as &#8220;21st century” diplomacy. Furthermore, allowing all the hard-won gains in Afghanistan to be squandered exactly as they have been in Iraq will undoubtedly be hailed as a “breakthrough,” despite the reality that the Obama administration is on the verge of doing something no administration in history has ever done before: withdraw from two different wars <i>on schedule.</i></p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Angry Republicans have rightly wondered what message freeing five high-level Taliban thugs for one possible deserter tells the terrorists. They would be far better served wondering what the mockery of over ten years of American blood and treasure in exchange for “singles and doubles” that include a possible re-instatement of the Taliban tells them.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">We know what it told Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban&#8217;s spiritual leader. &#8220;I extend my heartfelt congratulations to the entire Afghan Muslim nation, all the mujahedeen and to the families and relatives of the prisoners for this big victory,” he <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/taliban-declares-victory-prisoner-swap-article-1.1813274"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Apparently one side in the war on terror still believes in victory. Sadly, as the Obama administration has so amply indicated, it’s not America.</p>
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		<title>Partisan Politics, Bad Ideas &amp; the Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=partisan-politics-and-bad-ideas-a-recipe-for-foreign-policy-disaster</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:45:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233369</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the controversial exchange encapsulates everything that is wrong with Obama's foreign policy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233370" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png" alt="aaUSA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped" width="272" height="245" /></a>President Obama’s exchange of 5 high-ranking Taliban murderers for a soldier who possibly was a deserter and collaborator encapsulates everything that is wrong with this administration’s foreign policy. The serial failures of the past 5 years reflect a toxic brew of partisan politics and naïve ideology.</p>
<p>The staging of the announcement last Saturday in the Rose Garden obviously was intended to milk every drop of photogenic pathos and political gain from a decision rife with moral hazard and questionable legality. To reap political advantage from this disaster of a deal, lies and half-truths were necessary for creating the narrative behind the picture of Obama flanked by Bergdahl’s joyful, if somewhat bizarre, parents. Contrary to the president and his supporters, Bergdahl was not a “hero” or “prisoner of war.” Nor had he served with “honor and distinction,” or been “captured on the battlefield,” as the terminally mendacious Susan Rice said on a Sunday morning news-show.</p>
<p>In fact, evidence continues to mount that Bergdahl voluntarily left his post to connect with English-speaking Taliban, a move consistent with his renunciation of his citizenship and disgruntled anti-American emails. Whether he is just a flake, as his earlier biography and strange comments suggest, or had more sinister motives will become clearer as more information surfaces. He may even be a traitor. His team leader on the night he disappeared, former Army Sergeant Evan Buetow, has told CNN that radio intercepts revealed that Bergdahl was looking for the Taliban, and that after his capture, the Taliban’s attacks on Americans became “far more directed.”</p>
<p>The serious questions about Bergdahl were known to the administration, if only from a 2012 <i>Rolling Stone</i> article. Yet consistent with Obama’s foreign policy approach, facts are never an impediment to political advantage, as his record shows. The Benghazi disaster was created by politics and covered up for political reasons. Beefing up security for the diplomatic mission was nixed because it contradicted the political narrative that the multilateral “leading from behind” removal of Ghaddafi had started Libya on the road to Jeffersonian democracy and peace, when in reality it had unleashed hundreds of feral jihadists gangs now armed with missiles and other weapons. Likewise blaming the attack on an obscure video rather than an al Qaeda franchise reinforced the “al Qaeda on its heels” and “bin Laden dead” memes peddled during the presidential campaign in order to prove the success of Obama’s anti-Bush foreign policy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">So too the Bergdahl weeper is another episode in the “end the wars and bring the troops home” political narrative demonstrating the superiority of “</span>collective action” and “diplomacy and development, sanctions and isolation, appeals to international law, and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action,” as Obama said at West Point, over George Bush’s alleged trigger-happy, blood-for-oil, Halliburton-enriching unilateralism. Just don’t think about the 6 soldiers who died looking for Bergdahl, or the violation of legal protocols for releasing Guantanamo detainees, or the dismissal of the concerns of the intelligence community, or the snubbing of Congress in making the deal, or the moral hazard of paying ransom to hostage-takers. Never mind that under Obama’s watch Iraq is once again an inferno of sectarian violence and is fast becoming a satellite of Iran. Just forget that the Taliban, given a date-certain for our withdrawal, are poised to reassert control over large swaths of eastern Afghanistan, squandering the sacrifices made by our troops. Those facts must be obscured in order to achieve a political advantage. So too the enormous risk to our soldiers’ lives and our national interests that attends the release of 5 battle-hardened jihadist murderers does not figure in political calculations for firing up the base ahead of the midterm election.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Politics may be all there is to Obama’s foreign policy. With some justification, he may calculate that despite a few occasional bleats of protest, the ovine press corps will always watch his back and deliver the political dividends his actions seek. The scandal of Benghazi––both the incompetence that lead to 4 dead Americans, and the blatantly dishonest cover-up afterwards––that unfolded a few months before the 2012 elections should have put his reelection at risk. Yet with an indifferent press corps downplaying the story, and partisan hack Candy Crowley watching his back during the presidential debates, the worst scandal of his presidency had no effect on the election. So we shouldn’t be surprised that team Obama thinks this latest shameless political stunt will work too. As Guy Benson at <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/06/03/nyt-bergdahl-left-a-desertion-note-n1847046"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Townhall.com</span></a> analyzes the Obama crew’s thinking, “<span style="color: #000000;">They figured that the feel-good nature of the ‘POW’ returning home narrative would be blindly seized upon and enabled by a media exhausted by the egregious VA scandal story. Unpleasant details would be whitewashed or mostly ignored, and the only real outrage would emanate from the usual suspects on the Right. They thought they could counter critiques of the nature and terms of the trade with faux-indignant questions about whether skeptics were in favor of ‘leaving Americans behind.’” In short, the White House’s political <i>modus operandi</i> on every bonehead decision for the past 5 years.</span></p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Yet there is also an ideology behind Obama’s foreign policy, one shared by most progressives. This naïve view assumes the whole world is just like us, wants freedom, human rights, leisure, and prosperity as much as we do, and is kept from achieving those boons by environmental forces, lingering superstitions like religion, and the fallout from historical crimes most of which have been committed by the West. <span style="color: #000000;">Thus </span>it assumes America’s guilt and need to atone for its neo-colonial and neo-imperialist sins, and its racism, plunder of resources, and militarist adventurism, the very attitude struck in Obama’s infamous 2009 Cairo speech. Then follows the imperative for American withdrawal and retreat, a dangerous dereliction of global duty rationalized with the magical thinking of “international law,” “engagement,” “multilateralism,” “smart diplomacy,” “sanctions,” “international pressure,” and all the other camouflage for an unwillingness to make the tough, risky choices necessary in a hard world of bad men. This ideology bespeaks a monumental failure of imagination, and a parochial inability to understand that different peoples and cultures have different mores and goals.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Every one of Obama’s foreign policy debacles reveals this shopworn idealism. It explains the impulse to rely on negotiations and concessions with enemies like Iran, who only yield at the point of a gun; the reliance on bluster and bluff with killers like Bashar al Assad, who can read every tell announcing a weak hand; or the feeble threats of disapproval from an international community issued to Vladimir Putin, whose past brutal behavior in Chechnya and Georgia shows that he cares nothing for the estimation of some imagined “international community” that still wants to buy his oil. And now comes Obama’s absurd claim that releasing 5 seasoned killers will “<span style="color: #000000;">open the door for broader discussions among Afghans about the future of their country by building confidence that it is possible for all sides to find common ground.” That Obama thinks the Taliban––who brutally murdered their own people in a soccer stadium, stone homosexuals, throw acid in the face of schoolgirls, honor-kill their own wives and daughters, and blow up women and children–– can have any “common ground” with anyone not sharing their barbarous religious ideology is profoundly delusional. </span></p>
<p>As the Bergdahl fiasco shows yet again, partisan politics and bad ideas make for a world dangerous to our interests and security.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bowe Bergdahl, Just Deserts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ann-coulter/bowe-bergdahl-just-deserts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bowe-bergdahl-just-deserts</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:24:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[bowe bergdahl]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Bergdahl wasn't "left behind." He was left where he wanted to be. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/3065866291.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233364" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/3065866291-450x291.jpg" alt="306586629" width="340" height="220" /></a>Death Penalty Month at anncoulter.com has already been interrupted by the psycho in Santa Barbara, and now it&#8217;s being interrupted by the Buddhist in Bagram.</p>
<p>Keeping to the spirit of Death Penalty Month, let&#8217;s review the execution of Pvt. Eddie Slovik. Slovik&#8217;s offense: desertion in wartime. (See the tie-in?)</p>
<p>Unlike Bowe Bergdahl, who deserted his unit, according to the accounts of his comrades, Slovik never actually deserted. He also didn&#8217;t call America a &#8220;disgusting&#8221; country or say he was &#8220;ashamed to be an American.&#8221;</p>
<p>Slovik was just a chicken.</p>
<p>In October 1944, as Allied forces were sweeping through France, Slovik left his position on the front lines, walked to the rear of his unit and handed a note to the cook, confessing his desertion. The letter explained that he was &#8220;so scared&#8221; that he had already abandoned his unit once, and concluded: &#8220;AND I&#8217;LL RUN AWAY AGAIN IF I HAVE TO GO OUT THERE.&#8221;</p>
<p>Slovik was like Bradley Manning minus the lipstick and eyeliner.</p>
<p>A lieutenant, a company commander and a judge advocate all tried to persuade Slovik to shred the letter and return to his unit, warning him that he&#8217;d be tried for desertion otherwise. Slovik refused.</p>
<p>In the middle of World War II, the military court-martialed Slovik, tried him and sentenced him to death.</p>
<p>Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower denied Slovik&#8217;s pardon request, saying it would encourage more desertions, just as the fighting was getting especially hot. Slovik was executed by firing squad and buried among the numbered graves of court-martialed rapists and murderers in an American military cemetery in France.</p>
<p>Contrast Slovik&#8217;s story with the beloved troop whose return just cost us the release of five of the most dangerous terrorists in the world.</p>
<p>Three days before he walked off his base, Bergdahl emailed his parents:</p>
<p>&#8211; &#8220;I am ashamed to be an american.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; &#8220;The US army is the biggest joke &#8230; It is the army of liars, backstabbers, fools and bullies.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; &#8220;These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; &#8220;The horror that is america is disgusting.&#8221;</p>
<p>These emails were given to the author of a 2012 Rolling Stone article on the case by Bergdahl&#8217;s own parents.</p>
<p>The overwrought soldier&#8217;s father, Bob, emailed back: &#8220;OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!&#8221; And then, according to the Rolling Stone profile reporting these emails &#8212; as well as the Army report on the incident &#8212; Bergdahl &#8220;decided to walk away.&#8221;</p>
<p>Bergdahl&#8217;s unit commander, Evan Buetow, told CNN&#8217;s Jake Tapper that intercepted Taliban &#8220;chatter&#8221; soon revealed that Bergdahl was looking for a member of the Taliban who spoke English. (Other than his father.)</p>
<p>Buetow said he couldn&#8217;t prove it, but he believed Bergdahl began helping the Taliban attack his own unit. After that, Buetow says, the assaults were much more direct, and Bergdahl would have known the unit&#8217;s tactics and how they would respond to an attack.</p>
<p>U.S. forces in the area spent the next two months on a single mission: trying to find Bergdahl. It is beyond dispute that any American killed during that time was killed on a mission to &#8220;rescue&#8221; Bergdahl from his new comrades.</p>
<p>Over the years, the Taliban produced several propaganda videos with Bergdahl &#8212; eating, doing push-ups and criticizing American foreign policy.</p>
<p>During the Vietnam War, POW Navy Vice Admiral James Stockdale disfigured himself so that he could not be used in a propaganda video. He slit his wrists to avoid being tortured for information.</p>
<p>When captured Navy aviator Jeremiah Denton was forced by the North Vietnamese to make a propaganda video, he blinked the word T-O-R-T-U-R-E in Morse code, over and over again, as he said these words:</p>
<p>&#8220;I don&#8217;t know what is going on in the war now. My only sources are North Vietnamese radio, magazines and newspapers. But whatever the position of my government, I agree with it. I support it. I will support it as long as I live.&#8221;</p>
<p>It was the first confirmation the U.S. had that the North Vietnamese were torturing POWs.</p>
<p>These men &#8212; and many more &#8212; had limbs torn from their sockets, their legs and backs shattered by the North Vietnamese. As Denton said of the repeated torture, he&#8217;d rather lose an arm than his honor.</p>
<p>When right-wingers get choked up about &#8220;the troops,&#8221; these are the sort of men we&#8217;re thinking of. Not Bowe &#8220;America is disgusting&#8221; Bergdahl.</p>
<p>But to Obama, Bergdahl was the picture of American manhood and military honor.</p>
<p>He released five of the most dangerous terrorists in the world &#8212; captured at great cost to our military &#8212; in order to give Bergdahl an exit plan from his Great Adventure. (Before he ever set foot in Afghanistan, Bergdahl had told a fellow soldier, &#8220;If this deployment is lame, I&#8217;m just going to walk off into the mountains of Pakistan.&#8221;)</p>
<p>Bergdahl wasn&#8217;t being &#8220;left behind&#8221; or &#8220;left on the battlefield.&#8221; He was being left where he wanted to be, with the poor, innocent Talibanists, far away from this &#8220;disgusting&#8221; country that made him &#8220;ashamed to be an American.&#8221;</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Lawless Bergdahl Swap</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/the-lawless-bergdahl-swap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-lawless-bergdahl-swap</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:59:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Abdul Mutallab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[agitation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Alan Ginsberg]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[detainees at guantanamo bay]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233319</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Congress fumes over secret deal to trade a possible defector for five hardened terrorists. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/306586629.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233321" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/306586629-450x291.jpg" alt="306586629" width="328" height="212" /></a>Virtually no one in the nation&#8217;s capital now doubts that President Obama violated the law when he approved an unconscionable prisoner swap that repatriates an American deserter while freeing five Islamofascist terrorist field commanders.</p>
<p>Just throw it on the growing pile of impeachable offenses committed almost daily now by President Obama.</p>
<p>In yet another new historical first that paints a bulls-eye on the backs of U.S. citizens and military service members around the globe, Americans learned this week not only that Obama negotiates with Islamofascist terrorists &#8212; but that he does so with all the skill an 18-year-old boy who just won the lottery employs when dealing with a Porsche salesman.</p>
<p>Perhaps Obama thought that the release of Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl who was held for five years by the Taliban in Afghanistan would be a sure-fire good news story to distract from the Veterans Affairs hospital waiting list scandal. If so, he guessed wrong.</p>
<p>Bergdahl, it turns out, expressed dismay about the war and walked off his base overseas in search of terrorists to whom he could surrender. There are conflicting reports, but it appears Bergdahl became <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/06/03/oh-my-us-intel-officials-worried-bergdahl-may-have-been-active-collaborator-with-the-enemy-n1846705?utm_source=thdailypm&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=nl_pm">an active collaborator</a> with America&#8217;s enemies and fed them valuable information that helped them strike U.S. military targets in Afghanistan with enhanced efficiency.</p>
<p>Bergdahl, whom one of his former military colleagues described on TV as at best a deserter, and at worst, a traitor, was traded for five high-value Guantanamo Bay inmates in a clandestine transaction that might be the modern-day equivalent of swapping the high command of Nazi Germany&#8217;s armed forces for a <a href="http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/nazi-saboteurs">wartime saboteur</a> like Ernest Peter Burger or Herbert Hans Haupt.</p>
<p>Thanks to Obama and the same people who brought you <a href="http://HealthCare.gov">HealthCare.gov</a> and a growing list of governmental monstrosities, bearded unlawful combatants are now at liberty in Qatar where supposedly somebody is keeping an eye on them. They will, no doubt, return to plotting against the United States and orchestrating plans to kill Americans.</p>
<p>In carrying out the deal President Obama bypassed most of the congressional leadership and violated a statute he recently signed into law. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), ever the Obama water carrier, took time out from his ambitious hate speech campaign against the Koch brothers to claim the administration let him know of the operation in advance. Apart from Reid, just about nobody else on Capitol Hill makes the same claim.</p>
<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/defense/208081-boehner-white-house-kept-prisoner-trade-secret-because-congress-opposed-it">said</a> he was not notified of the unseemly transaction until it had already happened. Boehner said the administration gave congressional leadership a heads-up about a prospective prisoner swap over two years ago but did not revisit the issue with lawmakers.</p>
<p>&#8220;Unfortunately, the questions and concerns we had were never satisfactorily answered and they remain today,&#8221; Boehner said. &#8220;At the time, the administration deferred further engagement because the prospects of the exchange had diminished.&#8221;</p>
<p>As recently as June 21, 2013, White House spokesman Jay Carney said &#8220;we would not make any decision about transfer of any detainees without consulting with Congress.&#8221;</p>
<p>“There was every expectation that the administration would re-engage with Congress, as it did before, and the only reason it did not is because the administration knew it faced serious and sober bipartisan concern and opposition,” Boehner said in a statement. His office was reportedly notified of the swap, by that time a fait accompli, on Saturday at 11:52 in the morning.</p>
<p>Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) corroborated Boehner&#8217;s version of events, explaining that a prisoner exchange was discussed with congressional intelligence panels and met with more or less unanimous opposition.</p>
<p>Lawmakers reportedly worried such a deal would provide terrorist groups with an incentive to hold more U.S. soldiers and that the administration would be powerless to stop the released detainees from returning to the battlefield.</p>
<p>House Armed Services Committee Chairman Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), who is ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Journalism/2014/06/02/Palin-Challenges-Media-Find-Out-Why-Obama-Broke-Law-in-Very-Concerning-POW-Exchange">said in a joint statement</a> that the president &#8220;clearly violated laws which require him to notify Congress thirty days before any transfer of terrorists from Guantanamo Bay and to explain how the threat posed by such terrorists has been substantially mitigated.&#8221;</p>
<p>The 2014 National Defense Authorization Act mandates that the defense secretary advise the relevant congressional committees 30 days before freeing any prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Obama signed the measure into law and griped in an accompanying signing statement that such a requirement was unconstitutional.</p>
<p>&#8220;Trading five senior Taliban leaders from detention in Guantanamo Bay for Bergdahl’s release may have consequences for the rest of our forces and all Americans,&#8221; the two lawmakers said. &#8220;Our terrorist adversaries now have a strong incentive to capture Americans. That incentive will put our forces in Afghanistan and around the world at even greater risk.&#8221;</p>
<p>Two prominent left-wing legal commentators who are otherwise sympathetic to Obama&#8217;s policy agenda accused the president of <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/06/02/toobin-turley-yep-obama-broke-the-law-in-bergdahl-deal/">breaking</a> the law by executing the prisoner exchange.</p>
<p>“I think he clearly broke the law,” said CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin. “The law says 30-days’ notice. He didn’t give 30-days’ notice.”</p>
<p>“The law is on the books, and he didn’t follow it,” he added.</p>
<p>When asked if the Obama White House violated federal law, George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley replied, &#8220;they did.&#8221;</p>
<p>“I don’t think that the White House is seriously arguing that they’re not violating federal law. And to make matters worse, this is a long series of violations of federal law that the president’s been accused of. … This is going to add to that pile. I don’t think there’s much debate that they’re in violation of the law.”</p>
<p>President Obama “is essentially arguing the very same principle as George Bush, that when it comes to Gitmo, he has almost absolute power, that it’s his prerogative, his inherent authority, to be able to make these decisions as he sees fit.”</p>
<p>Strangely, the normally docile Speaker Boehner wants to do something about the Bergdahl swap, which he said “invited serious questions into how this exchange went down.” He said he supports calls for congressional hearings on the issue.</p>
<p>Because of Obama&#8217;s action, U.S. personnel abroad now face an elevated risk of being kidnapped by terrorists.</p>
<p>“One of their greatest protections — knowing that the United States does not negotiate with terrorists — have been compromised,” Boehner said.</p>
<p>Obama unleashed the White House propaganda machine over the weekend to spread false information about this stinker of a deal. Naturally, he used White House National Security Adviser Susan Rice as his TV talking head. Rice also served as reelection candidate Obama&#8217;s emergency first-prevaricator on the Benghazi coverup in fall 2012.</p>
<p>Rice went on TV <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/susan-rice-bergdahl-served-honor-and-distinction_794066.html">to spread</a> the administration&#8217;s bogus cover story. She said with a straight face that Bergdahl &#8220;served the United States with honor and distinction.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Sergeant Bergdahl wasn&#8217;t simply a hostage; he was an American prisoner of war captured on the battlefield.&#8221;</p>
<p>No doubt Rice won&#8217;t have any difficulty landing a job in public relations or academia after Obama leaves office in 2017.</p>
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		<title>Gitmo: Closing Up Shop?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/gitmo-closing-up-shop/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=gitmo-closing-up-shop</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Jun 2014 04:58:53 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=233270</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What the Bergdahl fiasco may be foreshadowing. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/man-in-suit.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-233273" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/man-in-suit-450x300.jpg" alt="man-in-suit" width="297" height="198" /></a>Lost in the furor surrounding President Obama’s decision to swap five high-level terrorists for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl is a potential ulterior motivation for the deal lurking in the background: fulfilling the president&#8217;s 2014 State of the Union <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/28/obama-s-new-guantanamo-deadline-unlikely.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promise</span></a> to completely shut down the prison at Guantanamo Bay.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;This whole deal may have been a test to see how far the administration can actually push it, and if Congress doesn’t fight back they will feel more empowered to move forward with additional transfers,” a senior GOP Senate aide <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/bergdahl-deal-could-be-first-step-to-emptying-gitmo.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">told</span></a> the Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin. “They’ve lined up all the dominoes to be able to move a lot more detainees out of Guantanamo and this could be just the beginning.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The principal domino is the notion, getting <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/guantanamo-a-perverse-incentive-to-keep-troops-in-afghanistan/371779/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">play</span></a> in the precincts of the left, that once a war ends, the prisoners of that war must be released. In an exchange with Fox News’s Megyn Kelly Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2014/06/03/Inhofe-Bergdahl-Swap-Part-of-Obamas-Obsession-to-Close-Gitmo"><span style="color: #1255cc;">addressed</span></a> the absurdity of that contention. &#8220;So they should have turned Hitler loose and that would have been the end of the war,” he said. &#8220;This isn&#8217;t right, and I just &#8212; it&#8217;s hard for me and people I talk to, a lot of people in Oklahoma, just this morning about this, they can&#8217;t figure out why in the world would we turn loose the five most dangerous people who hate America, who want to kill Americans, who have the equipment and the following to revive the Taliban and that&#8217;s what they are doing.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s part of an agenda a long time in the making. In October of last year, the <i>Washington Post</i> <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/hagel-appoints-new-envoy-to-rejuvenate-efforts-to-close-guantanamo/2013/10/08/6fc99800-301e-11e3-9e92-5dd16061dbe8_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reported</span></a> that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel appointed Paul M. Lewis, a Democratic lawyer for the House Armed Services Committee and a former judge advocate in the Marine Corps, to a newly-created Pentagon position as special envoy for Guantanamo closure. The appointment fulfilled a promise made by Obama the previous May to create special envoy positions at both the State and Defense Departments to pursue that agenda.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The strategy here was to perpetrate yet another end-run around Congress, which had <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/afghan-wars-approaching-end-throws-legal-status-of-guantanamo-detainees-into-doubt/2013/10/18/758be516-2d0a-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">blocked</span></a> the administration from releasing or transferring many of the then-remaining 164 detainees, and taking only a small number of them to trial. The administration was exploring the possibility that the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan would facilitate challenges regarding the United States’ legal authority to continue holding them. The declaration of the war’s end could force that determination to be made about Afghan Taliban captured on the battlefield and allow them to file new appeals in federal courts. “In the words of the Supreme Court, the authority to detain — if you’re detaining based on someone being a belligerent — can unravel as hot wars end. And I think that’s a real question,” Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, chief prosecutor for military commissions at Guantanamo said at the time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The word “end” is key. When the president announced his intentions to ultimately withdraw from Afghanistan in 2016, he nonetheless <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/obama-hails-approaching-end-of-us-combat-mission-in-afghanistan/2014/05/28/5f9ee2a2-e6ab-11e3-8f90-73e071f3d637_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">stressed</span></a> that our combat mission in that nation would end this year, even as 9,800 troops will remain until 2015, and half that number until 2016. An administration official briefing the press prior to that announcement stressed that 2014 would be the end of our “combat mission,” even as he further noted that the U.S. remain open to &#8220;training Afghan forces and supporting CT [counter-terrorism] operations against the remnants of Al Qaeda.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One is left to wonder what the legalistic difference is between “combat&#8221; and counter-terrorism “support,” but the overall motive remains clear: declaring the war over, regardless of events on the ground, paves the way for the release of enemy combatants—and in turn, the closure of Gitmo.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One is also left to wonder about the legality of the latest exchange as well. Current law, included as <a href="http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/06/02/obama-gave-congress-five-hours-notice-of-gitmo-transfer/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">part</span></a> of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for 2014, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bergdahl-release-arrangement-could-threaten-the-safety-of-americans-republicans-say/2014/05/31/35e47a2a-e8ff-11e3-afc6-a1dd9407abcf_print.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">requires</span></a> the Secretary of Defense to notify Congress 30 days prior to any prisoner transfers, to explain the reason for doing so, and to provide assurances that none of the released detainees would be able to re-engage in activities harmful to the United States or its interests. That law replaced one that was even stricter, and while Obama signed it, he issued a <a href="http://www.coherentbabble.com/Statements/SShr3304-PL113-66.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">signing statement</span></a> contending it was an unconstitutional infringement on his powers as commander in chief, allowing him to override it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironically, the move to a less strict statute requiring only that Congress be notified was due in some part to concern over Bergdahl’s well-being. And while both the Bush and Obama administrations have transferred prisoners to other countries, this swap was the first under the new requirements. Requirements that  were ignored by Obama for reasons best explained by a senior GOP senate aide. “The whole reason the administration ignores reporting requirements is because they know there is no consequence for ignoring them,” the aide said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">No legal consequences at any rate. As the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/trading-with-the-taliban-1401662373"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> presidential power &#8220;is never stronger than in the role of Commander in Chief,” and Congress’s attempt to restrict it may be unconstitutional. Furthermore, Obama already ignored the War Powers Act of 1973 to intercede in Libya and Congress did nothing more than grumble about it. Thus it seems likely that he would be more than willing to push the envelope in whatever way he deems necessary to empty Guantanamo Bay.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Congress is well aware of that reality, and several GOP Senators were working to restrict further releases of Gitmo prisoners before the Bergdahl swap took place. Obama <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/obama-win-guantanamo-prison-short-lived-23848782"><span style="color: #1255cc;">scored</span></a> an initial victory in his effort to close the prison when the Senate Armed Services Committee approved giving him the authority to transfer detainees to the United State if Congress votes to close the facility. Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) chairman of the Armed Services Committee hailed the provision. Inhofe, the top Republican on Committee, voted for the overall defense bill, but will work with the GOP-controlled House to kill it. During the session, two GOP senators won support for key amendments. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) won support for establishing a process in which any administration plan aimed at closing Gitmo would be subject to a joint resolution of disapproval from both houses of Congress, and Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) won support for a one-year ban on transferring Gitmo prisoners to Yemen.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ayotte’s amendment theoretically prevents the prison’s closure in 2014, because half the remaining prisoners are Yemeni and they would presumably be sent back home, despite the reality that other released detainees from that nation have <a href="http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2010/05/former_gitmo_detaine_4.php#"><span style="color: #1255cc;">resumed</span></a> their terrorist ways. Yet as Rogin notes, timing is key:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">The GOP effort, however, will take longer than seven months to have any effect because the defense policy bill won’t even be considered in the Senate until after the election. Typically, the defense bill is passed in late December. There’s no chance Congress will pass an appropriations bill this year, meaning Congress can’t remove the funding for transfers. That gives Obama plenty of time to use the current looseness of the law to push forward the releases of many more prisoners.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">Perhaps not. As the National Review’s Andrew McCarthy <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/379417/taliban-swap-and-high-crimes-and-misdemeanors-andrew-c-mccarthy"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a> pressure can be brought to bear, not because the president might be overstepping his authority with regard to the requirements of the NDAA, but because Obama &#8220;has returned five senior commanders to the Taliban and Haqqani network <i>while those violent jihadist organizations are still conducting offensive attacks against American troops</i>, who are still in harm’s way and still conducting combat operations pursuant to a congressional authorization of military force.” (italics original)</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This point is critical because it not only undermines leftist contentions regarding prisoner exchanges, it reveals the utter fecklessness of the president’s desire to end the war, even as our terrorist enemy remains willing to pursue it. &#8220;The Taliban and Haqqani have not surrendered or settled; they are still working hard to kill our troops,” McCarthy writes. &#8220;It is thus mind-bogglingly irresponsible for the commander-in-chief to replenish their upper ranks.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">House Armed Services committee chairman Buck McKeon (R-CA) has <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/katherinemiller/house-armed-services-chairman-there-will-be-hearings-on-berg"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promised</span></a> to hold hearings on the prisoner swap. As of now, he is focused on the violation of the 30-day notice in the NDAA. Any investigation would be far better served focusing on what McCarthy terms the Commander-in-Chief’s &#8220;profound dereliction of duty.” If Republicans pursue the prisoner exchange within that context, Obama’s efforts to continue transferring enemy combatants out of Guantanamo Bay prison becomes a political millstone of gargantuan proportions, even before the details of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/03/us/us-soldier-srgt-bowe-bergdahl-of-idaho-pow-vanished-angered-his-unit.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">dubious past</span></a> are  fully confirmed. Regardless, Obama likely remains determined to push the legal and political envelope in pursuit of that odious agenda. Republicans and perhaps even some thoughtful Democrats should be determined to push back just as hard. American lives may depend on it.</p>
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		<title>Five Jihadis For One Deserter</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2014 04:58:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Spencer]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226855</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Bergdahl prisoner exchange defied intelligence reports and endangers Americans.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/USA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-226856" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/USA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped.png" alt="USA_PFC_BoweBergdahl_ACU_Cropped" width="305" height="275" /></a>When he announced the exchange of five Guanatamo detainees for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who had been held by Islamic jihadists in Afghanistan since 2009, Barack Obama <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140531/NATION/305310043/U-S-soldier-freed-from-captivity-Afghanistan"><span style="color: #0433ff;">declared</span></a> that the swap was “a reminder of America’s unwavering commitment to leave no man or woman in uniform behind on the battlefield.” However, as ever more damning information came to light about both the deal and Bergdahl himself, it became increasingly clear that the prisoner exchange was actually a reminder of Barack Obama’s unwavering commitment to appeasing and aiding jihadis.</p>
<p>Many people have questioned the wisdom of this deal that sends five seasoned, committed, and ruthless jihadis back to Afghanistan, where they will undoubtedly resume their jihad against the American troops there. The freed jihadis include, according to the <a href="http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140531/NATION/305310043/U-S-soldier-freed-from-captivity-Afghanistan"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Associated Press</span></a>, “Abdul Haq Wasiq, who served as the Taliban deputy minister of intelligence”; “Khairullah Khairkhwa, who served in various Taliban positions including interior minister and had direct ties to Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden”; and “Mohammad Fazl, whom Human Rights Watch says could be prosecuted for war crimes for presiding over the mass killing of Shiite Muslims in Afghanistan in 2000 and 2001.”</p>
<p>Even more disturbing, however, are the questions swirling around Bowe Bergdahl himself. Former infantry officer Nathan Bradley Bethea, who served with Bowe Bergdahl, wrote in the <a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/02/we-lost-soldiers-in-the-hunt-for-bergdahl-a-guy-who-walked-off-in-the-dead-of-night.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Daily Beast</span></a> on Monday that “Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.” Refuting reports that Bergdahl got separated from his unit while on patrol, Bethea declared: “Make no mistake: Bergdahl did not ‘lag behind on a patrol,’ as was cited in news reports at the time. There was no patrol that night. Bergdahl was relieved from guard duty, and instead of going to sleep, he fled the outpost on foot. He deserted. I’ve talked to members of Bergdahl’s platoon—including the last Americans to see him before his capture. I’ve reviewed the relevant documents. That’s what happened.”</p>
<p>Corroborating this was an <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/us-concluded-2010-bergdahl-walked-away-185047684--politics.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Associated Press</span></a> report that was also published on Monday, stating that “a Pentagon investigation concluded in 2010 that Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl walked away from his unit, and after an initial flurry of searching the military decided not to exert extraordinary efforts to rescue him, according to a former senior defense official who was involved in the matter.” This official said that the evidence that Bergdahl had deserted was “incontrovertible.”</p>
<p>Why might Bergdahl have deserted? A clue may lie in the fact that <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305184/Bowe-Bergdahl-Taliban-claim-captured-U-S-solider-teaching-fighters-bomb-making-skills.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">the Taliban claimed in 2010</span></a> that Bergdahl had converted to Islam and was teaching bomb-making to its jihadists. His father, Robert Bergdahl, appears to be a convert to Islam, as during the ceremony with Obama in the Rose Garden announcing the exchange, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/01/obama-submits-to-taliban-demands-allows-praise-for-allah/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">he proclaimed</span></a>: “<i>Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim</i>” – the phrase, “In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful,” which is the heading of 113 of the Qur’an’s 114 chapters. (Journalist Neil Munro noted <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/01/obama-submits-to-taliban-demands-allows-praise-for-allah/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">in the Daily Caller</span></a> that “although Bergdahl quoted the Quran verse, the White House transcript did not translate it or even include the Islamic prayer. Instead, the transcript simply said Bergdahl spoke in the Pasho language, which is the language of the Pushtun tribe, which forms the vast majority of the Taliban force. In fact, ‘Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim’ is Arabic.” The lavishly-bearded Robert Bergdahl has also called for the release of the jihadists in Guantanamo and has implied that American troops are killing Afghan children in <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Robert-Bergdahl.png"><span style="color: #0433ff;">a tweet he concluded with “ameen,”</span></a> the Arabic form of “amen.”)</p>
<p>What’s more, it was also <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/05/31/the-bizarre-tale-of-americas-last-known-pow/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">revealed Monday</span></a> that in an email to his father just days before he deserted, Bergdahl wrote: “I am sorry for everything here. These people need help, yet what they get is the most conceited country in the world telling them that they are nothing and that they are stupid.” He thundered: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.”</p>
<p>His father thundered back: “OBEY YOUR CONSCIENCE!”</p>
<p>Apparently he did, by walking away from his unit and seeking out the Taliban. Nor was his action entirely unexpected. James Rosen reported at <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/06/02/sources-intelligence-community-investigated-bergdahls-conduct/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">FoxNews.com</span></a> Monday that Bergdahl &#8212; “both in his final stretch of active duty in Afghanistan and then, too, during his time when he lived among the Taliban — has been thoroughly investigated by the U.S. intelligence community and is the subject of ‘a major classified file.’” In conveying as much, the Defense Department source confirmed to Fox News that many within the intelligence community harbor serious outstanding concerns not only that Bergdahl may have been a deserter but that he may have been an active collaborator with the enemy.”</p>
<p>It strains credulity to imagine that Barack Obama was not apprised of the existence of this file and these suspicions about Bergdahl. In any case, high-level officials appear to have been aware of them and embarrassed by them for quite some time, as they have enforced a gag order on the members of Bergdahl’s unit, <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/06/02/Former-Officer-Soldiers-Were-Threatened-if-They-Questioned-Bergdahl-Story"><span style="color: #0433ff;">threatening legal action</span></a> against them if they revealed what happened on the night Bergdahl disappeared.</p>
<p>Why the cover-up? Were Obama Administration officials afraid that the story of a Muslim soldier (if the <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305184/Bowe-Bergdahl-Taliban-claim-captured-U-S-solider-teaching-fighters-bomb-making-skills.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Taliban claim</span></a> is true) deserting his post and joining up with the enemy would have negative repercussions for Obama’s disastrous fantasy-based policies in Afghanistan and elsewhere? Did they think that such news would provide a fresh basis to challenge the “diversity” in the military that military brass value more than life itself – as Army chief of staff George Casey demonstrated <a href="http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/us-army-general-lack-of-diversity-in-army-is-worse-than-mass-murder"><span style="color: #0433ff;">when he said</span></a> right after the Fort Hood jihad massacre that “as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse”?</p>
<p>Whatever his reasoning may be, Obama has now traded five battle-hardened jihad warriors for someone he was in a position to know was a deserter and possibly a traitor, who had said that he was ashamed to be an American. If the mainstream media and the Democratic Party covers for the President in this, the latest in his long string of insults to the American people, it will be an outrage. But there is no doubt that they will do so. And quickly this incident will be forgotten, like all of Obama’s earlier insults. But if there are any free people left in America, they will not let this incident be forgotten – and will use it as the linchpin to begin the massive change we so desperately need in the political and media culture.</p>
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		<title>Our Bad Habit of Negotiating with Terrorists</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/our-bad-habit-of-negotiating-with-terrorists/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=our-bad-habit-of-negotiating-with-terrorists</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2014 04:52:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bergdahl]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cuba]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[deal]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226712</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Destructive tactics of a destructive foreign policy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hy.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226787" alt="hy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/hy-450x229.jpg" width="288" height="146" /></a>Every parent should be happy for the Bergdahl family, whose son was returned to them after five years of captivity among the Taliban. But every parent is not the president of the United States, whose primary responsibility is to protect the security and interests of all Americans, both now and in the long-term. The release of 5 “high-risk”––a phrase meaning they’re eager to kill Americans–– Taliban jihadists held in Guantanamo Bay is nothing more than ransom paid to kidnappers, and an invitation to the enemy to take more Americans captive and to hold them as bargaining chips for more concessions. And the release of hardened, high-ranking Taliban terrorists means there will be more dead Americans after theses soldiers of Allah return to the battlefield.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We shouldn’t give credence, however, to the criticism that Obama’s action uniquely violates the principle that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists.” Obama’s administration has already been negotiating with the Taliban in order to craft some chimeric “peace agreement” with the Afghan government after we leave. And talking with Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, is de facto “negotiating with terrorists.” But before Obama we have negotiated with terrorists on numerous occasions, and each time we have confirmed the moral hazard that attends trying to talk with fanatic ideologues that, like Auric Goldfinger, don’t expect us to talk, but to die.</span></p>
<p>How else did we secure the release of the 52 Americans held for 444 days by the Iranians starting in 1979, other than by negotiating ransom with hostage-takers? The hostages came home after Jimmy Carter issued a series of Executive Orders that released billions of dollars of frozen Iranian assets in American banks, and that indemnified the Iranians from any lawsuits suing the regime for the destruction of American property and the abuse of the diplomats. So much for Carter’s bluster that “we will not yield to blackmail.” During the negotiations the Iranians serially humiliated the Americans. For example, Carter aide Hamilton Jordan donned a fake moustache and wig to meet with the Iranian negotiator in Paris. After weeks of negotiations, with a deal seemingly close, Ayatollah Khomeini killed it with a public speech in which he called the embassy kidnappings “a crushing blow to the world-devouring USA” and left the decision to the new Iranian parliament, which was months from being seated. Negotiations continued with a series of concessions offered by Carter, all of which were contemptuously slapped down by the Iranians. As a result, the prestige of Iran as the foremost jihadist foe of the infidel West expanded across the globe, providing inspiration and material support to other jihadist groups convinced by America’s weakness that we were a civilization with “foundations of straw,” as bin Laden put it, and ripe for destruction.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Then there’s the sorry spectacle of the 1985-86 Iran-Contra affair that unfolded during Reagan’s second term. This was a Rube-Goldberg plot to secure the release of 7American hostages taken by Iranian terrorist proxies, and to improve relations with the Iranian regime by providing them with 2200 TOW anti-tank missiles and over 100 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles in violation of an arms embargo, with the profits going to arm the Nicaraguan Contras. These were the same Iranians, by the way, that only a few years earlier had trained and funded the jihadists who had murdered 241 American military personnel in the Beirut Marine-barracks bombing, and that were funding numerous other jihadist groups like Hezbollah. The naïve belief in improved relations with these murderers and so-called “moderates” has no better symbol than a cake in the shape of a key––apparently the “key” to better American-Iranian relations–– that the American emissary brought to Iran along with a Bible signed by Reagan, both items bespeaking a criminal ignorance about the nature of the Iranian theocrats with whom they were dealing. In the end, only 3 hostages were released, only to be immediately replaced by three other kidnapped Americans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Once again, the willingness to provide advanced weaponry to a regime that publicly and frequently expressed its desire to destroy us only confirmed the mullahs in their belief that we are weak and can be manipulated. Indeed, the intervening years suggest their insight has been correct, as they have murdered with impunity Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, trained and funded numerous terrorist outfits, and continue to pursue nuclear weaponry even as they engage in specious negotiations spiced with contemptuous public statements.</span></p>
<p>Worse than even these examples are the decades we have spent negotiating with the Palestinian terrorist gang known as the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was rebooted as the Palestinian Authority after the 1993 Oslo Agreements. A whole atlas could be filled with the cities hosting these futile negotiations, many of which delivered nothing but concessions to terrorist murderers. Camp David, Madrid, Wye River, Sharm el-Sheikh, Taba, Annapolis––all have been the sites of negotiations with terrorists for whom violence against Israeli civilians is a negotiating tactic used to complement the tactic of attending “summits” and “conferences” at which the Palestinian leadership has no intentions of negotiating in good faith, instead extracting concessions from gullible Westerners. PLO honcho Yasser Arafat, a die-hard terrorist whose creed was “jihad, jihad, jihad,” was feted and hosted at capitals around the globe and treated as a legitimate chief of state instead of as the head of a murderous, kleptocratic gang that he was. During the Clinton years he visited the White House more often than any other world leader, only in the end to betray Clinton at Camp David by refusing the offered “national homeland” he supposedly wanted, and then launching the Second Intifada that killed 1000 Israelis.</p>
<p>And it isn’t just talk we have shared with the Palestinian terrorists. As the <a href="http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mideast/RS22967.pdf">Congressional Research Office</a> documents, since the Oslo Accords the U.S. has transferred $5 billion to the Palestinians, with much of the money that escaped the Swiss bank accounts of the PA “leadership” going to fund terrorist outfits. This is in addition to funds channeled through the United Nations Relief Works Agency, the only U.N. entity committed to one refugee group and self-identified as an advocate for Palestinians. The U.S. has provided a quarter of the agency’s funds, which since 1950 has totaled nearly $5 billion. Then there’s the money given since Oslo to train, arm, and support the PA security forces, presumably to fight against terrorists. In fact, these “security forces” have participated in or facilitated terrorist attacks. As Caroline Glick writes in her indispensible <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Israeli-Solution-One-State-Peace-Middle-ebook/dp/B00F1W0DK4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1401636671&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=the+israeli+solution+a+one-state+plan+for+peace+in+the+middle+east"><i>The Israeli Solution</i></a>, “The more aid the Palestinian authority receives from the international community, the more terror attacks the Palestinians carry out against Israel.” We’re not just negotiating with terrorists; we’re funding them as well.</p>
<p>There are many reasons for this compulsion to try to talk or bribe out of their hatred enemies who have no intention of peaceful coexistence. Politics, of course, is ever a factor in such bad decisions. For Obama, ransoming Bergdahl deflected attention from the VA scandal with a photogenic feel-good story. Pursuing futile negotiations with the Iranians creates the illusion of action when the administration has no intention of doing anything concrete to keep a malignant theocracy from acquiring nuclear weapons.</p>
<p>More broadly, the modern West clings to the hoary notion that negotiation and diplomacy are the best means of resolving conflicts and creating peace. Obama recycled this received wisdom in his recent West Point address. In addressing global disorder, Obama said, “we must mobilize allies and partners to take collective action. We have to broaden our tools to include diplomacy and development, sanctions and isolation, appeals to international law, and, if just, necessary and effective, multilateral military action.” But as his disastrous foreign policy record demonstrates, negotiation works only with those who sincerely share our goal to end violence, coexist peacefully, and create peace. The jihadist gangs from the Taliban to Iran, and our geopolitical rivals like Russia and China, have other plans. With those actors, negotiation works only when backed by a credible threat of force, something Obama has serially squandered with his “red lines” bluster and bluff. Yet ever the foreign policy naïf, Obama claimed in his statement about Bergdahl’s release, “While we are mindful of the challenges, it is our hope Sergeant Bergdahl’s recovery could potentially open the door for broader discussions among Afghans about the future of their country by building confidence that it is possible for all sides to find common ground.” If sincere, this statement represents a massive failure of imagination, ever the hallmark foreign policy failure. The Taliban have one aim: to impose once more their hegemony over Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Exchanging Bergdahl for 5 seasoned jihadists is a shortsighted, dangerous deal, but it isn’t unprecedented. It’s a recurring bad foreign policy habit driven by politics and idealism.</p>
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		<title>The Obama Undoctrine</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-undoctrine</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 04:58:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Foreign policy that stands for everything and nothing. And has accomplished nothing.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226482 alignleft" alt="BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/BN-CX877_Obama0_G_20140523133623-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Afghanistan is lost, Iraq and Libya are in the middle of civil wars, Russia is carving off pieces of Ukraine and China is escalating its conflict with the rest of Asia. There isn’t a single element of Obama’s foreign policy that has proven successful. Instead it’s been one international disaster after another.</span></p>
<p>Obama just smiles into the camera and announces that “America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.” Anyone who disagrees is engaging in partisan politics. Or reading statistics.</p>
<p>Having signed off on Iran’s nuclear program while its Supreme Leader boasts that the holy war will only end with America’s destruction, he claims that the “odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low.”</p>
<p>“From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations,” he proclaims. Meanwhile Russia and China humiliate our European and Asian allies for their worthless alliance hub.</p>
<p>“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he boasts.</p>
<p>And yet the masked men go on occupying buildings and Boko Haram goes on killing Nigerians. America has never been stronger than under Obama. And yet it’s incapable of actually doing anything, except maybe joining New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Chile in providing disaster aid to the Philippines.</p>
<p>And if that doesn’t work, he can always sanction the typhoon. It should do as much to stop the wall of water it as it did to stop Russia and Iran.</p>
<p>Obama’s speeches come from a world that exists only inside his own teleprompter. Another leader might have been reeling from a string of international failures, but he boldly triumphs over reality. The worse things are, the bigger the party he throws to celebrate his victories.</p>
<p>Obama’s speech focuses on Afghanistan, but never mentions the Taliban. Imagine an FDR speech that pretended that Japan didn’t exist. That’s the depth of denial it takes for Obama to claim victory.</p>
<p>After using up the lives of 1,600 American soldiers fighting the Taliban without ever defeating them, he takes a victory lap for defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the CIA had told him back in 2009 that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.</p>
<p>Thousands of Americans have been lost to an enemy whose existence Obama won’t even acknowledge as he takes another victory lap for losing another war.</p>
<p>With the VA scandal reminding everyone that he doesn’t just throw away the lives of soldiers abroad, but also at home, Obama is changing the subject with one Mission Accomplished speech after another. Like a politician caught with his mistress who begins taking his wife everywhere, he is suddenly in love with the military and can’t get enough photo ops with anyone wearing a uniform.</p>
<p>Even if they work for the post office.</p>
<p>In Obama’s teleprompter reality, a withdrawal is equivalent to success. Setting a withdrawal timeline with no regard for results deserves a victory parade. He wants credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of his term. Not only is he repeating the timeline mistake of his disastrous surge, but the timeline is once again pegged to a political, rather than a strategic, date.</p>
<p>Obama takes credit for troop removals, rather than outcomes. But if he doesn’t care that Al Qaeda in Iraq is more powerful than ever or that the Taliban control the future of Afghanistan, why didn’t he immediately withdraw the troops? Are we supposed to cheer his inability to either commit to winning a war or pull out? Is indecisiveness the virtue of a great leader?</p>
<p>Do we really need more applause lines about how long it took him to lose a war?</p>
<p>The West Point commencement address dresses up past failures as new successes and lays out a vision for the future by a lame duck leader who has failed at every foreign policy initiative. The address is an expanded version of his 2002 anti-war speech as a Chicago state senator that first brought him to the attention of his future backers. It straddles an awkward line between anti-war and interventionism.</p>
<p>Twelve years later, Obama hasn’t changed.</p>
<p>He’s still posturing as a fake centrist by setting up interventionist and isolationist straw men on both sides. Instead of defending his policies on their merits, he tries to make them seem reasonable by depicting his critics on the right and the left as extremists. After six years of foreign affairs failures, Obama is still talking as if he’s the &#8220;reasonable&#8221; centrist trying to steer a&#8221;‘sensible common sense&#8221; path.</p>
<p>At least those are the favorite buzzwords that his speechwriters throw in to influence the “folks.”</p>
<p>Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants applause for being an interventionist and for being a non-interventionist. In one sentence he sounds like JFK and in another like Eugene McCarthy.</p>
<p>He wants to send in the troops and then get credit for pulling them out. He wants to threaten other countries and then appease them at the negotiating table. He wants to set red lines he doesn’t stand behind and apply sanctions that mean nothing. And he wants to pass off this game in which the bad guys always win and America always loses as his smart power doctrine.</p>
<p>That’s not a doctrine. That’s an undoctrine.</p>
<p>The Obama Undoctrine is all things to all people. It respects international opinion, except when it doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in military solutions, but sometimes it does. It believes in taking military action to protect our interests, rather than foreign human rights, except when it believes the opposite.</p>
<p>In Libya, Obama sent in the jets when Libyans in Benghazi were threatened, but not when Americans in Benghazi were threatened.</p>
<p>The world may look to America for help, but Americans shouldn’t.</p>
<p>The shiny new Obama Undoctrine proposes such groundbreaking ideas as partnering with countries fighting terrorism. This is a bold new idea from the &#8217;50s. Other bold new ideas include using international institutions like the League of Nations, ahem, the United Nations, to stop new wars from starting.</p>
<p>Anyone who wants an example of the “leadership” and “strength” of the Undoctrine should look at Iran. That’s not some nasty Republican sneering at the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>It’s Obama’s assertion in his address.</p>
<p>After admitting that any nuclear agreement with Iran is a long shot, he says of his appeasement, “This is American leadership. This is American strength.”</p>
<p>Obama’s idea of American leadership and strength is being repeatedly humiliated and led around by the nose by a bitter enemy determined to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the United States.</p>
<p>If that’s Obama’s idea of leadership and strength, just imagine his idea of weakness.</p>
<p>Then there’s NATO. He describes it as “the strongest alliance the world has ever known.” That would have sounded more impressive before NATO staked out Ukraine for the bear and went home.</p>
<p>And if you want something more effective, try the UN. While Obama cuts the military to the bone, he will be “investing” more money in UN peacekeeping operations.</p>
<p>If we’re going to spend all that money on a military, it should be one that doesn’t run away at the first sign of trouble. That way we would at least be getting some bang for our buck. But maybe a small army of child molesters spreading cholera that runs away at the first sign of trouble embodies the Undoctrine.</p>
<p>“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” Obama declared. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”</p>
<p>Or as his nursery school teacher probably put it, “You’re special. Just like everyone else.”</p>
<p>This mess of contradictions is the Obama Undoctrine. It stands for everything and nothing. And it has accomplished nothing.</p>
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