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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Appeasement</title>
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		<title>Iran&#8217;s No China</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/irans-no-china/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-no-china</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245973" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran-450x337.jpg" alt="iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran" width="322" height="241" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Irans-no-China-382727">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. On the eve of the extended deadline in the US-led six-party talks with Iran regarding Teheran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that courting Iran is the centerpiece of US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. Come what may in Geneva, this will not change.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be clear, Obama does not seek to check Iran’s rise to regional hegemony by appeasing it. None of the actions he has taken to date with regard to Iran can be construed as efforts to check or contain Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Their goal is to cultivate a US alliance with Iran. As Obama sees things, Iran for him is what China was for then US president Richard Nixon. Nixon didn’t normalize US relations with the People’s Republic of China in order to harm the Chinese Communists. And Obama isn’t wooing Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries in order to harm them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for the world, China is not a relevant analogy for Iran. Nixon sought to develop ties with Beijing because he wanted to pry the Chinese out of the Soviet orbit. Courting China meant harming Moscow, and Moscow as the US’s greatest foe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There is no Moscow that will be weakened by the US’s empowerment of Tehran. The only parties directly and immediately harmed by Obama’s policy of courting Iran are America’s allies in the Middle East. The Allies’ appeasement deal with the Nazis in 1938 had three victims: Czechoslovakia, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s policy of courting Iran also has three victims: Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s initiation of the six-power nuclear talks with Iran harms Israel because the talks facilitate Iran’s nuclear program. That is, Obama is enabling Iran to develop the means to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to press reports of the content of the negotiations, the US has already abandoned its major red lines. It has abandoned its demand that Iran dismantle its centrifuges. Late last week the US was reportedly about to abandon its demand for Iranian transparency to the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding its past work on atomic bomb development.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the deal the US was hoping to conclude this week with Iran, and will now continue negotiating next month, involves taking no serious action to curtail Iran’s progress in developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And in exchange for taking no action to curtail its nuclear progress, Iran demands and will likely receive a complete abrogation of binding UN Security Council economic sanctions against it. Those sanctions were passed in response to Iran’s illicit nuclear progress. The deal the US is now willing to sign renders Iran’s nuclear program legitimate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there are the rest of the states in the region. The Saudis and their Sunni brethren are not the Czechs. They are Poland, Belgium France and Holland. Like the Nazis and the European states in late 1938, Iran threatens all Sunni states in the region.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Americans have engaged in obsessive-compulsive nuclear negotiations with Iran, the Iranians have divided their attention between nuclear development and regional expansion. In September they took over Yemen.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Houthi militia from northern Yemen took over Yemen’s capital city Sana’a that month. The Houthi are Shi’ite, and are to Yemen what Iran’s Lebanese Shi’ite proxy Hezbollah is to Lebanon. The Houthis, who are already a major force in the US-trained Yemeni armed forces, are demanding control over them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In addition to its proxy’s takeover of Yemen, as Middle East analyst Tony Badran reported earlier this month, the Iranian leadership is orchestrating a major information campaign to present itself as the regional hegemon to regional actors.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani has had his picture taken with Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq as well as with Iraqi regular military forces. Iranian security chief Ali Shamkhani went to Lebanon in late September and offered to arm the Lebanese Armed Forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran, these photo-ops and visits signal – is the new boss of the region. Yemen shares a 1,700 km border with Saudi Arabia.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Houthis already fought a border war with Saudi Arabia in 2009. The Iranian proxy’s control over much of the border today is a clear threat to Saudi sovereignty. In light of the close ties the Houthis have spent the past decade cultivating with Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority, it is also a threat to the internal political stability of the kingdom.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Obama administration has erased red line after red line in the nuclear talks, and sided with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and other Iranian Sunni allies against US allies, Iran’s leaders have gloated that their hegemony over Yemen raises to four the number of Arab states under their dominion, that list including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran’s control over Yemen is a direct threat to the world economy. Before the Houthis marched on Sana’a, Iran was able to threaten global oil markets with its sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz that controls naval traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. With the Port of Aden, Iran will also control maritime traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is true that massive increases in US oil sales due to its shale oil development will reduce some of the Middle East’s power to dictate oil prices. But Middle Eastern oil sales still constitute 40 percent of the world market and will continue to be a massive force in the global economy in the coming years. As the force controlling the flow of that oil, Iran will exert massive influence over the global economy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Add to that the fact that Iran’s Hezbollah has sleeper cells in every major city in Europe and in several hubs in North America, and that Iran has strategic alliances with Venezuela and Nicaragua, a nuclear- armed Iran exerting hegemonic control over the Middle East and its oil exports will become a strategic danger to the global economy and global security.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the many eyebrow raising aspects of Obama’s courtship of Iran is that it isn’t tied to a US retreat from the region. The US isn’t retreating.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has ordered hundreds of air strikes on Islamic State targets to date, and more will undoubtedly follow. The US participated in the NATO overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. US power remains a major factor in regional affairs, and Obama has not shied away from using it during his tenure in office.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem is that in all cases, his use of US power has helped Iran more than it has helped US allies. And in the case of Libya, US power has directly threatened US allies and empowered al-Qaida and it associates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With the rise of China today, some US analysts question the wisdom of Nixon’s opening to Beijing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But there is little argument that his China gambit caused strategic damage to the Soviet Union and contributed to the US victory in the Cold War.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only will Obama’s Iran opening not redound to the US’s benefit in the short term. Its inevitable result will be a decade or more of major and minor regional wars and chronic instability, with the nuclear-armed Iran threatening the survival of all of America’s regional allies. It will also lead to shocks in the global economy and massively expand Iran’s direct coercive power over the word as a whole.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only is Obama no Nixon, compared to him, Neville Chamberlain looks like a minor, almost insignificant failure.</span></p>
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		<title>Appeasement: Obama&#8217;s Secret Letter to Khamenei</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-puder/appeasement-obamas-secret-letter-to-khamenei/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=appeasement-obamas-secret-letter-to-khamenei</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:40:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Puder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[ali khamenei]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245318</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president feeds the crocodile. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MW-CY442_obama__20141105115645_ZH.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245319" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MW-CY442_obama__20141105115645_ZH-426x350.jpg" alt="MW-CY442_obama__20141105115645_ZH" width="284" height="233" /></a>The <i>Wall Street Journal</i> headline on November 6, 2014 stated that “Obama Wrote Letter to Iran’s (Ayatollah) Ali Khamenei (Supreme Leader of Iran) About Fighting Islamic State.” The article described the letter as “secret,” and goes on to say that the October, 2014 letter to Khamenei “[m]arked at least the fourth time Mr. Obama has written to Iran’s most powerful political and religious leader since taking office in 2009 and pledging to <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/obama-wrote-secret-letter-to-irans-khamenei-about-fighting-islamic-state-1415295291"><span style="color: #0433ff;">engage</span></a> with Tehran’s Islamist government.”</p>
<p>President Obama’s “secret” letter has raised deep concerns among U.S. Middle Eastern allies including Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Emirates, who have expressed their concern that America’s desperate efforts to reach an agreement on the nuclear issue with Tehran might appear as appeasement, and that the U.S. might soften its demands for Iran’s nuclear disarmament. They are worried that the Obama administration&#8217;s eagerness to get an agreement might leave the radical Iranian regime with the capability to produce a nuclear weapon.</p>
<p>Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to the revelation concerning the “secret” letter to Khamenei, saying, “I think the struggle with ISIS doesn’t need to come at the <a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-reportedly-knew-of-obamas-secret-letter-to-khamenei/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">expense</span></a> of preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear arms.”</p>
<p>Reacting to Obama’s “secret” letter, Linda Heard’s column in the Saudi based <i>Arab News </i>(November 11, 2014), stated that</p>
<blockquote><p>Iranian tanks rumbling over Iraqi soil is guaranteed to throw a match on the embers of sectarian conflict, would serve as a recruiting tool for Daesh [the Arabic term for ISIS], and inflame Sunni tribes. Furthermore, this does nothing to allay the concerns of Gulf States that the U.S. may be cooking up a Grand Bargain with Iran to act as its geopolitical proxy. Those fears are exacerbated by America’s pivot east, not to mention that the luster of Arab oil has diminished now that the U.S. is on its way to becoming the world biggest oil producer. The question uppermost is this; <a href="http://www.arabnews.com/columns/news/658051"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Is Obama throwing Sunni States under an Iranian bus</span></a>?</p></blockquote>
<p>During his first six months in office, President Barack Obama wrote two letters to Khamenei calling for improvement in Iranian-U.S. relations. To many Iranian liberals who sought more freedom from the oppressive clerical regime, it amounted to appeasement of the Ayatollahs. Moreover, it only served to heighten Khamenei’s contempt for the U.S. and President Obama.</p>
<p>Ayatollah Khamenei rejected Obama’s overtures for improved relations, and in the words of Jeffrey Goldberg of <i>The Atlantic, </i>the latest letter smacks of “Obama chasing after Khamenei in the <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/a-troubling-letter-to-an-unbending-ayatollah/382505/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">undignified</span></a> and counterproductive manner of a frustrated suitor.” Suzanne Maloney, writing for the  Brookings Institute (November 7, 2014) concludes:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is simply no plausible scenario in which a letter from the President of the United States to Ali Khamenei generates greater Iranian flexibility on the nuclear program, which the regime has paid an exorbitant price to preserve, or somehow pushes a final agreement across the finish line. Just the opposite – the letter undoubtedly intensified Khamenei’s contempt for Washington and reinforced his longstanding determination to extract maximalist concessions from the international community. It is <span style="color: #0433ff;"><a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2014/11/06-letter-khamenei-ayatollah-iran-obama-nuclear-isis">a blow</a></span> to the delicate end-game state of play in the nuclear talks at the precise moment when American resolve was needed most.</p></blockquote>
<p>The November 24, 2014 deadline for the final nuclear agreement between the five permanent representatives on the UN Security Council (U.S., Russia, China, Britain and France) and Germany with Iran is fast approaching. U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and the outgoing EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton met in Muscat, Oman last weekend with Javad Zarif, the Iranian Foreign Minister.</p>
<p>It is likely that the U.S. administration, through John Kerry, urged the Iranians to be more flexible and indicated its desire to reach an agreement, even if it leaves Iran with the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. The Iranians are bent on retaining their right to enrich uranium and keeping their existing nuclear infrastructure intact. Kerry, on the other hand, seeks to create the impression that the U.S. will adhere to President Obama’s pledge to stop Iran’s nuclear ambitions.</p>
<p>Former U.S. Representative Dan Burton wrote in the <i>Washington Times</i> (2/19/2014),</p>
<blockquote><p>Based on Iran’s history of lies, deception and hostility, why should we believe they are playing square now? Giving Iran $7 billion in cash while leaving in place one of the most sophisticated enrichment programs in the world is not an act of faith; it is an act of appeasement.  <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/obama-wrote-secret-letter-to-irans-khamenei-about-fighting-islamic-state-1415295291"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Appeasement</span></a><span style="color: #365f91;"> </span>did not work in the 1930’s with Adolf Hitler. It did not work in the 1990’s with North Korea. It will not work in 2014 with Iran.</p></blockquote>
<p>Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), who co-authored a bill with Bob Menendez (D-NJ) that imposed tough sanctions on Iran, reacted to President Obama’s letter saying that “The best way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is to quickly pass the bipartisan Menendez-Kirk legislation &#8212; not to give the Iranians more time to build a bomb.” John Boehner (R-OH), Speaker of the House, said, “<a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/obama-wrote-secret-letter-to-irans-khamenei-about-fighting-islamic-state-1415295291"><span style="color: #0433ff;">I don’t trust</span></a> the Iranians &#8212; I don’t think we need to bring them into this.” Referring to the continuing nuclear talks between Iran and world powers, Speaker Boehner said he “would hope that the negotiations that are under way are serious negotiations, but I have my doubts.”</p>
<p>In an ironic twist, Khamenei actually blames the U.S. for creating ISIS and al-Qaeda as a way to weaken the Islamic world. It is perhaps a more honest response than the Taqiyya (a form of religious dissimulation or deception of one’s enemy) artists such as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who have appeared to have charmed the Obama administration and the British government that recently reopened its Tehran embassy.</p>
<p>The Obama administration appears to have concluded that the Islamic Republic of Iran would be the best American deputy to guard the region and insure the region’s stability. For the Ayatollahs, this couldn’t be a better prospect. For a long time, Iran has sought to become the hegemon of the region. With the U.S. destroying Iran’s rivals, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, it paved the way for Tehran to spread the Shiite arc. <span style="color: #232323;">Haider al-Abadi’s </span>Iraq, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Hezbollah controlled Lebanon are now tributaries of Iran. The Arab Gulf states can expect increased intimidation from Iran. Israel faces an existential threat from a nuclear armed and hegemonic Iran.</p>
<p>And yet, other than in the realm of terrorism, Iran has little ability on its own to project power. Its air force is antiquated, and its regular army is relatively weak. Khamenei’s threat that “if America makes the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/world/middleeast/05diplo.html?pagewanted=print&amp;_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">wrong move</span></a> toward Iran, the shipment of energy will definitely face danger” is rather hollow given U.S. capabilities. In fact, the U.S. Navy has the capacity to eliminate the entire Iranian navy in an hour. It is America’s consistent appeasement of Iran despite its unpunished attacks on Americans in Lebanon, (241 U.S. Marines killed in 1983, U.S. embassy in Beirut bombed) Saudi Arabia, (Khobar towers bombing 19 American servicemen killed and hundreds wounded), and Iraq (Improvised Explosive Devises killing numerous American soldiers) that has emboldened the Ayatollahs of Iran. President Obama’s letter to Khamenei appears to smack of further appeasement.</p>
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		<title>Obama Midwifes a Nuclear Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/obama-midwifes-a-nuclear-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-midwifes-a-nuclear-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:45:33 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244867</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president's Munich moment draws near. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244883" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-419x350.png" alt="obama" width="340" height="284" /></a>The news that President Obama has sent a secret letter to Iranian leader Ayatollah Khamenei––apparently promising concessions on Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for help in defeating ISIS–– is a depressing reminder of how after nearly 40 years our leaders have not understood the Iranian Revolution. During the hostage crisis of 1979, Jimmy Carter sent left-wing former Attorney General Ramsay Clark to Tehran with a letter anxiously assuring the Ayatollah Khomeini that America desired good relations “based upon equality, mutual respect and friendship.” Khomeini refused even to meet with the envoys.</p>
<p>Such obvious contempt for our “outreach” should have been illuminating, but the same mistakes have recurred over the past 4 decades. But Obama has been the most energetic suitor of the mullahs, sending 4 letters to Khamenei, none directly answered. In May of 2009 he sent a personal letter to Khamenei calling for “cooperation in regional and bilateral relations.” Khamenei’s answer in June was to initiate a brutal crackdown on Iranians protesting the rigged presidential election. Obama’s response was to remain silent about this oppression lest he irritate the thuggish mullahs, who blamed the protests on American “agents” anyway. Even Carter’s phrase “mutual respect” has been chanted like some diplomatic spell that will transform religious fanatics into good global citizens. In his notorious June 2009 Cairo “apology” speech, Obama assured Iran, “We are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect.” This latest letter repeats the same empty phrase.</p>
<p>But our president is nothing if not persistent. In October of 2009, it was revealed that Iran had failed to disclose a uranium enrichment facility in Qom. Obama commented on this obvious proof of Iran’s true intentions, “We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran,” and promised that the “offer stands” of “greater international integration if [Iran] lives up to its obligations.” Iran answered by increasing the pace of enrichment, helping the insurgents in Iraq kill our troops, and facilitating the movement and communications of al Qaeda with other jihadists.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Indeed, every concession and failure to respond forcefully to Iranian intransigence and aggression confirm its belief that Iran is strong and America weak. As Khamenei has said, </span>“The reason why we are stronger is that [America] retreats step by step in all the arenas [in] which we and the Americans have confronted each other. But we do not retreat. Rather, we move forward. This is a sign of our superiority over the Americans.”</p>
<p>Given this long sorry history, how long will it take for our foreign policy geniuses to figure out that Iran’s theocrats don’t want better relations, or “mutual respect,” or “international integration,” or anything else from the infidel Great Satan and its Western minions, other than capitulation? The mullahs and their Republican Guard henchmen may lust for wealth and power as much as anyone, but the foundation of their behavior is a religious faith that promises Muslims power and dominance over those who refuse the call to convert to Islam and thus by definition are enemies of the faithful to be resisted and destroyed.</p>
<p>Given these spiritual imperatives, the material punishment of the regime through economic sanctions, particularly limited ones, is unlikely to have much effect. During the hostage crisis, mild sanctions and the threats of more serious ones were brushed away by Khomeini. The <i>Economist</i> at the time pointed out the obvious reason why: “The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” Khomeini made this same point after the humiliating disaster of Carter’s half-hearted attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980, when mullahs were televised worldwide poking their canes in the charred remains of 8 dead Americans. Speaking of the sandstorm that compromised the mission, Khomeini preached, “Those sand particles were divinely commissioned . . . Carter still has not comprehended what kind of people he is facing and what school of thought he is playing with. Our people is the people of blood and our school is the school of Jihad.”</p>
<p>With their eyes on Allah’s intentions for the faithful, the leaders of Iran see the acquisition of nuclear weapons as the most important means of achieving the global power and dominance their faith tells them they deserve as “the best of nations produced for mankind,” as the Koran says. Thus duplicitous diplomatic engagement and negotiation are tactics for buying time until the mullahs reach “nuclear latency,” the ability quickly to build a bomb. Every concession or offer of bribes from the West are seen not as an inducement to reciprocate in order to meet a mutually beneficial arrangement, but rather as signs of weakness and failure of nerve, evidence that the mullahs can win despite the power and wealth of the West. That’s because the Iranian leadership views international relations as resting not on cooperation or negotiation, but on raw power. As Suzanne Maloney of the Brookings Institute <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/iran-at-saban/posts/2014/11/06-letter-khamenei-ayatollah-iran-obama-nuclear-isis"><span style="color: #0433ff;">quotes</span></a> from a hardline Iranian newspaper, “Our world is not a fair one and everyone gets as much power as he can, not for his power of reason or the adaptation of his request to the international laws, but by his bullying.” And the Iranians believe that their power politics serves the will of Allah.</p>
<p>Obama is not the first president who has completely failed to understand the true nature and motives of his adversary. FDR misunderstood “Uncle Joe” Stalin, and George Bush misread the eyes of Vladimir Putin. This mistake of diplomacy reflects the peculiar Western arrogant belief that the whole world is just like us and wants the same things we want––political freedom, leisure, material affluence, and peaceful relations with neighbors. Some Iranians may want those things too, but a critical mass wants obedience to Allah and his commands more. Obama’s endemic narcissism has made this flaw worse in his relations with the rest of the world, for he can’t believe that the leaders of other nations, many of them brutal realists indifferent to the opinions of the “international community,” aren’t as impressed as he is with his alleged brilliance and persuasive eloquence.</p>
<p>As a result we are on the brink of a dangerous realignment of the balance of power in the Middle East. Despite Iran’s continuing defiance of International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors, and its long record of lies and evasion, Obama allegedly has offered to raise the number of centrifuges enriching uranium from 4000 to 6000, bringing the mullahs closer to “nuclear latency”––in a regime that has officially been designated the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism; that has threatened genocide against Israel, our most important strategic asset in the region; and that for the last 40 years has stained its hands with American blood.</p>
<p>Rather than the ornament of his foreign policy legacy, as Obama hopes, his pursuit of a deal that will make Iran a nuclear power will be remembered as his Munich.</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>Obama’s Appeasement Leads to War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obamas-appeasement-leads-to-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-appeasement-leads-to-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:50:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cairo]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220636</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[He blamed America first and put America last.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obapp.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220664" alt="Barack Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/obapp-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the shield of the Strategic Air Command a steel mailed fist grips a lightning bolt and an olive branch. The motto of the organization that was the nightmarish obsession of every Cold War leftist was “Peace is our Profession.”</span></p>
<p>To the moviegoers who sat through Dr. Strangelove, to the earnest leftists who saw the world going up in a puff of atomic smoke because the military industrial complex was obsessed with killing people, to the pseudo-idealists who passed on atomic secrets to Moscow to avoid an American monopoly on the bomb, the SAC’s motto was a demented joke. They knew that the only way to stop war was to disarm.</p>
<p>After the Soviet Union collapsed in the face of relentless pressure from Ronald Reagan, against their fervent opposition, their jeering of SDI defense and their clamor for total appeasement, they did not change their minds. They are even now penning earnest essays in <i>The Nation</i> explaining, as they did of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, that we are the warmongers who are making threatening moves.</p>
<p>In the spring of 2009, Obama delivered a speech in the Czech Republic calling for an end to nuclear weapons. Rather than celebrating the patriotic dedication of Americans throughout the Cold War which had made the freedom of the Czechs possible, he dug up the hoary leftist cliché of how “generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light.”</p>
<p>Obama vowed “to put an end to Cold War thinking”, eliminate nuclear weapons and guarantee the defense of our allies “including the Czech Republic”.</p>
<p>That fall, Obama abandoned missile defense for Poland and the Czech Republic to appease Russia.</p>
<p>At his inaugural address, Obama had declared, “the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve”, “as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself” and “America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.”</p>
<p>The new era of peace was not to come. That same spring, his Cairo speech with its abandonment of American power and alliances would devolve the Middle East into murderous civil wars fought over lines of tribe and Islamist regimes rejecting common humanity with non-Muslims and even fellow Muslims.</p>
<p>Throughout his campaign, Obama had assured the country that Sunnis and Shiites would come together and negotiate a working arrangement once Americans troops were out of Iraq. Instead the Shiites seized power and Al Qaeda came surging back as the murderous champion of the Sunnis.</p>
<p>In Iraq, as in Ukraine and Syria, the lines of tribe held and common humanity was nowhere in sight.</p>
<p>The Democrats had exploited the Iraq War, which they had supported, to reinvent themselves as the anti-war party. John Kerry had gone from throwing his medals over the White House fence, to running for president on his Vietnam War service to mocking American soldiers by telling students, that if they didn’t study, they too would end up stuck in Iraq.</p>
<p>Gore had run against Bush by promising to be harder on Iraq. Kerry had run against Bush by promising to be harder on Iran. But then the Democratic Party’s ideological shift bore fruit and Hillary Clinton was suddenly too much of a warmonger to be president. The man who knocked her out of the race had become famous for delivering a confused anti-war speech to elderly Marxists in Chicago in 2002.</p>
<p>The Democrats had made it their priority to freeze Bush’s second term foreign policy by making it impossible for him to do anything about the terrorists streaming into Iraq out of Syria, Russia’s invasion of Georgia or Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile eager champagne drinking leftists held their glasses in the air, waiting for the ascension of their candidate who would “fix the world”.</p>
<p>By embracing the attacks on the Iraq War, the Democratic Party had reverted its foreign policy back before Reagan to the Carter era. Peace through strength was gone. Soft power was in. America would appease and apologize its way out of any foreign policy problems and surrender its way to peace.</p>
<p>By the time Obama’s 2009 world tour was done, American foreign policy lay in tatters. It would take years for the full damage to reveal itself, for the forces he had set in motion to crystallize into events such as the Syrian Civil War or the Russian invasion of Ukraine.</p>
<p>The men of the Strategic Air Command during the Cold War had understood, as the scribblers in <i>The Nation</i> did not, as the audiences giggling over Dr. Strangelove did not, that it wasn’t America power that would bring on war, but the elimination of that power.</p>
<p>They knew that they were standing against the long night. Now the night has come.</p>
<p>Obama deliberately abandoned American power. He threw it away with the same disdain that Kerry had tossed the medals over the White House fence. Unilateralism was over. It was a post-American world now with no more lines of tribe or border to get in the way of our uncommonly common humanity.</p>
<p>The message that he sent the world was that the Democratic Party’s opposition to the Iraq War had not been a temporary fluke or an opposition tactic. It was now government policy.</p>
<p>Obama abandoned Iraq to Iran and Afghanistan to the Taliban, snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory in both wars. Each time his foreign policy went up in flames, he rose from the ashes having learned nothing whatsoever from the experience.</p>
<p>Last year, Chuck Hagel’s Vision Zero group unveiled a parade of celebrities reciting Obama’s Czech speech. &#8220;I demand zero,&#8221; Matt Damon, Morgan Freeman and Whoopi Goldberg sonorously recited. They meant zero nuclear weapons, but they could have just as easily meant reducing American power to zero.</p>
<p>On Feb 24, Hagel unveiled a new series of drastic defense cuts that would take the US Army back to its smallest size since before the Cold War.</p>
<p>Three days later, Russia invaded Ukraine.</p>
<p>Obama and his ilk with their faith in international law and soft power had forgotten what Woodrow Wilson, that Democratic Party champion of international law, had said, “A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.”</p>
<p>Obama had put his faith in the submission of American power to autocrats, perverting Wilson’s already flawed vision. Distrusting American power, he had instead trusted in the willingness of Iran and Russia to meet his flexibility with friendship.</p>
<p>He blamed America first and put America last.</p>
<p>America has so far only paid the lightest price for the treason of the Democrats. The greater part of the price has been paid by the tens of thousands dead in the conflicts touched off by their foreign policy. But if the post-American foreign policy continues, then millions around the world, including Americans, will pay the price.</p>
<p>Every liberal today wants peace. Every diplomat wants to be a peacemaker. But their brand of peace, whether it is the negotiations with Russia, China, Iran, North Korea or Palestinian terrorists, is worthless. The only peace that counts is the one protected by the men of the Strategic Air Command who live the knowledge that the profession of peace can only be practiced with the tradecraft of war.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Daniel Greenfield </strong>on this week&#8217;s <strong>Glazov Gang</strong>. He discusses <em>Why Lois Lerner Pleaded the Fifth</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Belief that Abbas is a Peace Angel</em>, <em>Obama&#8217;s Helplessness Over the Ukraine</em>, and much, much more:</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6Se7vaS-INo" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></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><b>Make sure to </b><a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to Frontpage&#8217;s TV show, <i>The Glazov Gang</i>, and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.</b></a></p>
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		<title>A Message from the Ghost of Neville Chamberlain</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ronn-torossian/a-message-from-the-ghost-of-neville-chamberlain/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-message-from-the-ghost-of-neville-chamberlain</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:15:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Neville Chamberlain]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212087</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What would the Hitler-appeasing premier say to Obama regarding the Iran nuke deal?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Picture-1.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212119" alt="Picture 1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Picture-1.png" width="256" height="239" /></a>Sympathies must go out to the Iranian people for the economic strain they were placed under as a result of sanctions.  Now that there has been an offer to Iran by the U.S. and five world powers, commerce can begin once again. The 35 percent inflation and 13 percent unemployment for the poor, oppressed Iranian people will soon be alleviated.</p>
<p>America should understand that Iran will continue to pursue its right to nuclear energy – naturally, for peaceful purposes.  No one can deny the right of Iran to continue to do what other countries do in their people’s best interests. America should realize that one can only make peace with one&#8217;s enemies. With one&#8217;s friends there is no need to make peace.  There is no military solution to the problems of any conflict and bloodshed is never an option.  As we know already, there is really no need to discuss “red lines.” After Syria, we should make certain that we don’t even discuss threatening people. Military force serves no role in the post-modern universe. It is passé.  It is archaic.</p>
<p>And as President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has told us, American threats to leave the region are a bluff. As he said, “The U.S. has come and will not go, brother. It does not go. Therefore, ask for your demands and don’t worry.”  The United States does not want to leave – so let’s stop bluffing.</p>
<p>America must encourage the entire world to continue to give in to anyone who threatens force, and it should consider rescinding foreign aid as punishment for any country that challenges Iran.  This will begin to restore Iranian honor, which is so important in that part of the world. America and the world must meet all the demands of the Iranian people in full.  In addition, Iran must be offered many billions of dollars for even discussing its nuclear program. Today, consumer interests dominate the world, and the Islamist activists of the earth will surely make peace in exchange for profits from participating in global trade.</p>
<p>Civilized nations &#8212; America and the United Kingdom and others &#8212; must negotiate even while under attack.  Conditioning negotiations on an end to violence is a no-win situation.  It will simply extend the bloodshed.  If someone were to actually attack enemies, it would simply expand and enlarge the cycle of violence.</p>
<p>Retaliation will no doubt injure some innocent children and civilians, which will enrage the rest of the world and make the victims seek revenge. Violence will only create more violence, and hence, lose the window of opportunity to make peace. America should immediately declare a unilateral ceasefire.  The entire world will congratulate America, surely.</p>
<p>Give peace a chance, and you’ll of course win repeated Noble Peace prizes. Do not allow yourself to be drawn down into the gutter of retaliation. Violence never achieves anything.  History has no lessons. History is the dead past. Demonstrate humanity by paying pensions to any widows and orphans of terrorists who harm America.</p>
<p>Peace in our time is attainable.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> on<strong> The Glazov Gang </strong>discussing his new collection of conservative writings, <strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times:</a></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><strong></strong> <iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></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>
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		<title>Iran Getting Set to Con the West</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/iran-getting-set-to-con-the-west/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=iran-getting-set-to-con-the-west</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 10 Oct 2013 04:45:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[P. David Hornik]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Will leaders fall for the Islamic Republic's deception? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/143022.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-206876" alt="143022" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/143022-415x350.jpg" width="291" height="245" /></a>The difference between ordinary people and Western leaders is that while the former are wary of con men, the latter seem to seek them and need them. As State Department official Wendy Sherman <a href="http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-state-congress-iran-sanctions-20131003,0,1909747.story">said last week</a>, “We know that deception is part of the [Iranians’] DNA.” It seems all the more reason for Western leaders to hurry to Geneva for the October 15-16 nuclear talks with Iranian representatives.</span></b></p>
<p>Chamberlain was eager to be conned by Hitler, paving the way to 60 million dead in World War II. In the early 1990s the Israeli left anointed Yasser Arafat as Israel’s peace partner even though not a single <i>Arab </i>leader would have believed a word out of his mouth. Israel then lived with Arafat’s terror right up to his death over a decade later.</p>
<p>The North Korean case was highlighted in Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s <a href="http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=62001">speech to the UN</a> last week. North Korea, he noted, detonated its first nuclear device in 2006—a year after “agreeing” to give up all its nuclear activities. It remains a dangerous nuclear power to this day.</p>
<p>What U.S. and European leaders seek from con men is the message that there is no such thing as implacable, ideological hostility and never a need for military operations or even credible threats of them. There are no enemies out there, just grievances that can be satisfied. Everyone is ultimately reasonable and shares Western values, and the easy, luxurious life of Western elites can go on unruffled.</p>
<p>On Wednesday the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304441404579123593924760138.html">reported</a> that Iran was preparing proposals for the mid-October talks. They are said to include ceasing uranium enrichment to the 20% level, allowing “more intrusive” international inspections of its nuclear sites, and possibly closing down its underground enrichment site near Qom—in return for the easing of Western sanctions.</p>
<p>Israeli intelligence minister Yuval Steinitz <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Steinitz-Irans-P51-proposals-are-a-joke-328238">called</a> the proposals “a joke.” He pointed out that “closing the Qom facility means Iran will be able to produce five instead of six nuclear bombs in the first year, and giving up enrichment at 20% is less meaningful now that Iran has 20,000 centrifuges.”</p>
<p>In other words, even if Iran really did give up 20% enrichment, it now has such numerous (and such advanced) centrifuges that it could quickly and clandestinely convert part of its 3%-enriched stock to bomb-grade material.</p>
<p>And yet Western voices are already starting to sing in harmony with the seductive song. The <i>Wall Street Journal</i> article quotes a “former Western diplomat who has discussed the incentives with senior Iranian diplomats in recent weeks,” and who says “The Iranians are preparing to go to Geneva with a serious package.”</p>
<p>The <i>Journal</i> notes that:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>By falling short of a complete shutdown of enrichment, the anticipated Iranian offer could divide the U.S. from its closest Middle East allies, particularly Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who have cautioned the White House against moving too quickly to improve ties with Tehran. </i></p></blockquote>
<p>The momentum, however, may once again be on the appeasers’ side. AP already <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/british-foreign-secretary-were-taking-steps-toward-reopening-uk-embassy-in-tehran/2013/10/08/48b0e1f2-302c-11e3-9ddd-bdd3022f66ee_story.html">reported</a> this week on a possible thaw in British-Iranian relations, with Foreign Secretary William Hague telling the House of Commons:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>It is clear that the new president and ministers in Iran are presenting themselves and their country in a much more positive way than in the recent past. There is no doubt that the tone of the meetings with them is different.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>Hague added:</p>
<blockquote><p><i>We must not forget for one moment that as things stand today Iran remains in defiance of six UN Security Council resolutions&#8230;and is installing more centrifuges in its nuclear facilities. In the absence of change to these policies we will continue to maintain strong sanctions.</i></p></blockquote>
<p>But with an opportunity to be conned beckoning, can prudence prevail over recklessness?</p>
<p>That will be the question as the P5 + 1 countries and Iran convene in Geneva on Tuesday. Sunni Arab states—which are themselves part of the conning culture and can’t be conned by Iran—and Israel—which has existed in the region long enough to shed Western illusions—will be watching. It is hard to be optimistic.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>What Terrorists Want</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/what-terrorists-want/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-terrorists-want</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 12 Aug 2013 04:36:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[al Qaeda]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=200206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Romancing jihadists -- the liberal way.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/militantes.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-200210" alt="militantes" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/militantes.jpg" width="255" height="209" /></a>Freud famously said that what women want was the one question that he was never able to answer. The modern liberal, having abolished gender and the family, no longer worries about what women want. Instead he worries what the terrorists, who despite his best efforts to appease them, to respect their culture and religion keep blowing him up, want.</p>
<p>Recently it came out that the creative director of the September 11 Museum opposed including the famous photo that shows New York City firefighters raising the flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center. When reached for comment, the creative director said that he did not want to simplify 9/11.</p>
<p>&#8220;Its simplicity,&#8221; he said, &#8220;would actually distort the complexity of the event, the meaning of the event.&#8221;</p>
<p>Liberals are great lovers of nuance. Ask an ordinary New Yorker who saw the planes hit the towers what the terrorists want and he will say, “To kill us all.” But to the left that is an excessive simplification that leaves out such key elements as American foreign policy, the role of automation in a global economy and the price of tea in China.</p>
<p>The great critique of the Bush years was that the Texas cowboy lacked nuance. He saw people who were killing us, instead of people aggrieved by our carbon crimes, our support for governments that terrorists don’t like and our undercutting of the Beijing tea market.</p>
<p>Out went the cowboy on his steed and in rode the diplomat on his ass. Reset buttons were pushed, and pushed again, speeches were given and concessions were made.</p>
<p>The left got its way with a foreign policy based on nuance and giving the terrorists what they want by empowering political Islam. And the Middle East has never been more unstable, more dangerous or more on the verge of exploding than in the Age of Nuance.</p>
<p>To understand how we got here, it’s instructive to look at a book that was typical of the left’s Bush-era terrorist revisionism.</p>
<p><i>What Terrorists Want</i> by Louise Richardson attempted to do for terrorists what Freud could not do for women. And despite her impressive credentials as a former IRA member and Harvard executive dean of Advanced Study, she got terrorists as wrong as Freud got women.</p>
<p>Richardson’s ideas weren’t unique. They were part of the dominant liberal critique of the Bush years. And since then, their false assumptions have become bad policy. Terrorists couldn’t be defeated. Instead they had to be isolated through complex programs of appeasement. America had to prioritize its alliances and liberal values over the messy bloody act of actually killing terrorists.</p>
<p>The ex-terrorist and Harvard faculty member suggested that the United States negotiate with Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri. And if negotiating with the leader of Al Qaeda in order to isolate and defeat Al Qaeda isn’t nuance, what is? What is the sound of one hand clapping? If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound? If we appease Al Qaeda to defeat Al Qaeda, do our nuanced one-handed handshakes with our new pal Ayman make a squishing noise?</p>
<p>Back in 1998, Ayman Al-Zawahiri had proclaimed in a fatwa with Bin Laden, &#8220;We, with Allah&#8217;s help, call on every Muslim who believes in Allah and wishes to be rewarded to comply with Allah&#8217;s order to kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they find it.&#8221;</p>
<p>It would take a river of denial the size of the one in Al-Zawahiri’s Egyptian homeland to find any nuance in that, but Richardson wasn’t just swimming in a river of denial; she and her agreeable liberal readers and reviewers were drowning in an ocean of the stuff.</p>
<p>&#8220;Its [Al Qaeda's] interest in weapons of mass destruction was driven more by a desire to intimidate us and defend itself against us than by the desire to deploy them in the United States,&#8221; Richardson wrote. That statement would have been bad enough in 1998; it was downright criminally inexcusable after September 11. Any book that contained the claim should have been laughed off the lowest shelves.</p>
<p>And yet Richardson’s thesis was widely accepted. If only we would talk to the terrorists, find some common ground, convince them to run for office, then the problem would be solved.  The terrorists don’t want to kill us. Even if they’re brandishing a dirty bomb, it’s only in self-defense.</p>
<p>Six years later, the experiment was attempted. Obama threw everything America had into “smart” programs for “Countering Violent Extremism.”</p>
<p>A “Hearts and Minds” program was deployed in Afghanistan that cost the lives of countless American soldiers. In the Middle East, friendly governments were edged aside to make way for the political Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood who were meant to serve as moderate role models for Al Qaeda by showing them that terrorist groups can take over a country by winning elections … instead of planting bombs. At home, every arm of the government, including NASA, was retasked to handle the formidable challenge of enhancing Muslim self-esteem to keep Muslim teenagers from becoming surly acne-ridden suicide bombers.</p>
<p>The liberal prescription of defeating Muslim terrorists by isolating them through the appeasement of every other Islamist group was and is the single most insane foreign policy ever perpetrated. And it has now culminated in arms being sent to Muslim Brotherhood terrorists.</p>
<p>The withdrawal of American support didn’t lead to friendly Islamist rule, but political civil wars between the Islamists and the liberals with both sides blaming and hating America more than ever. Domestically, pandering to Muslims did not stop the “Lone Wolf” attacks perpetrated by Muslims in America.</p>
<p>Six years later, Louise Richardson hasn’t written a sequel to “What Terrorists Want.” There is no, “What Terrorists Want Even More,” “50 Shades of Terrorism” or “Chicken Soup for the Terrorist Soul.” It’s doubtful that this is because Richard knows that she was wrong. More likely it’s because she has nothing more to add.</p>
<p>Obama, Inc. doesn’t appear to have carried out some of Richardson’s wilder proposals, such as negotiating with Al Qaeda, but the general outline of his program is the one that liberals, including Richardson, were calling for.</p>
<p>But what do terrorists really want? They want to win, while we seem to want to lose. The foreign policy prescriptions of liberal experts like the idea of us losing.</p>
<p>&#8220;The way America will look best, the way we can really do best, is to not be Americans so vigilantly and so vehemently,&#8221; the creative director of the September 11 museum said.</p>
<p>There’s no way that we can stop being Americans, but we can start feeling bad about that. We can stop thrilling at the sight of an American flag rising over the rubble of Ground Zero and learn to feel bad about it. We can stop wanting to win and start trying to lose.</p>
<p>And then maybe we’ll finally understand what the terrorists want. What they really, really want.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Families of Seal Team VI to Reveal How Islamic Appeasement Led to their Murder</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/families-of-seal-team-vi-to-reveal-how-islamic-appeasement-led-to-their-murder/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=families-of-seal-team-vi-to-reveal-how-islamic-appeasement-led-to-their-murder</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2013 15:26:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[SEALs]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=188783</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Military brass, while prohibiting any mention of a Judeo-Christian God, invited a Muslim cleric to the funeral for the fallen Navy SEAL Team VI heroes who disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen by damning them as infidels to Allah. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/seal-team-6-2-ts300.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-188784" alt="seal-team-6-2-ts300" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/seal-team-6-2-ts300.jpg" width="413" height="275" /></a></p>
<p>The event appears to be set for tomorrow at the National Press Club and<a href="http://press.org/events/navy-seal-team-vi-families"> it may have revelations as shocking as those</a> about Benghazi.</p>
<blockquote><p>Three families of Navy SEAL Team VI special forces servicemen, along with one family of an Army National Guardsman, will appear at a press conference on May 9, 2013, to disclose never before revealed information about how and why their sons along with 26 others died in a fatal helicopter crash in Afghanistan on August 6, 2011, just a few months after the successful raid on the compound of Osama Bin Laden that resulted in the master terrorist&#8217;s death.</p>
<p>Accompanying the families of these dead Navy SEAL Team VI special operations servicemen will be retired military experts verifying their accounts of how and why the government is as much responsible for the deaths of their sons as is the Taliban.</p>
<p>The areas of inquiry at the press conference will include but not be limited to:</p>
<p>1.    How President Obama and Vice President Biden, having disclosed on May 4, 2011, that Navy Seal Team VI carried out the successful raid on Bin Laden’s compound resulting in the master terrorist’s death, put a retaliatory target on the backs of the fallen heroes.</p>
<p>2.    How and why high-level military officials sent these Navy SEAL Team VI heroes into battle without special operations aviation and proper air support.</p>
<p>3.    How and why middle-level military brass carries out too many ill-prepared missions to boost their standing with top-level military brass and the Commander-in-Chief in order that they can be promoted.</p>
<p>4.    How the military restricts special operations servicemen and others from engaging in timely return fire when fired upon by the Taliban and other terrorist groups and interests, thus jeopardizing the servicemen’s lives.</p>
<p>5.    How and why the denial of requested pre-assault fire may have contributed to the shoot down of the Navy SEAL Team VI helicopter and the death of these special operations servicemen.</p>
<p>6.    How Afghani forces accompanying the Navy SEAL Team VI servicemen on the helicopter were not properly vetted and how they possibly disclosed classified information to the Taliban about the mission, resulting in the shoot down of the helicopter.<br />
7.    How military brass, while prohibiting any mention of a Judeo-Christian God, invited a Muslim cleric to the funeral for the fallen Navy SEAL Team VI heroes who disparaged in Arabic the memory of these servicemen by damning them as infidels to Allah. A video of the Muslim cleric’s “prayer” will be shown with a certified translation.</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.freedomwatchusa.org/navy-seal-team-vi-families-to-reveal-government-s-culpabilit">This is a Freedom Watch event </a>and I don&#8217;t know why it isn&#8217;t getting more attention, aside from the poor timing as it comes too close to the renewed wave of interest in Benghazigate.</p>
<p>The last allegation, if true, is certainly obscenely despicable and a final insult.</p>
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		<title>North Korea: A Window into the Future on Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/north-korea-a-window-into-the-future-on-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=north-korea-a-window-into-the-future-on-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2013 04:50:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=185896</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The consequences of appeasing the Islamic Republic's fanatical designs are clear. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/north-korea-a-window-into-the-future-on-iran/large-12/" rel="attachment wp-att-185905"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-185905" title="large" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/large-450x296.png" alt="" width="270" height="178" /></a>Rarely do we get to see the dangerous consequences of appeasing one aggressor unfold at the same time we are appeasing another in exactly the same way. But that’s what we are witnessing today, as our leaders respond to Iran’s push for nuclear weapons with the same appeasement playbook that turned a two-bit failed state like North Korea into a nuclear-armed aggressor.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/dprkchron">chronology</a> of the U.S.’s dealings with three psychotic Kim regimes makes for depressing reading. Start in 1991, when President George Bush Sr. withdrew 100 nuclear weapons from South Korea as part of a deal with Mikhail Gorbachev. That same year South Korea formally abjured the production or use of nuclear weapons, a deal the North cheerfully went along with, fully intending to violate it. The next year the North signed the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and allowed in inspectors. A mere two months later the U.S. had to impose sanctions on two companies in the North involved in developing missiles.</p>
<p>In little more than a year, the pattern of North Korea’s defiance and duplicity, and Western appeasement and inaction, had been set. The North would make an announcement promising to let in inspectors in order to head off sanctions, or threaten to withdraw from the NPT to wring concessions from the West, and then would come the revelation that the North had taken yet another step towards creating a nuclear weapon. Then “bilateral talks” would be announced and conducted, “agreed frameworks” and “moratoriums” signed and touted, promises of suspension of forbidden activities made by the North, “appropriate compensation,” i.e. bribes––like food aid, South Korea’s “sunshine policy” of détente and economic cooperation with the North, “economic normalization,” and free light-water nuclear reactors (!)––for such duplicitous concessions delivered by the West, all followed by more sanctions imposed when the North was caught out lying and cheating.</p>
<p>We know the result of this <em>pas de deux</em> of appeasement. North Korea today possesses several atomic weapons, and is preparing to test a missile that can reach America’s bases on Okinawa and Guam. A Defense Intelligence Agency report stated there was “moderate confidence” that North Korea “has nuclear weapons capable of delivery by ballistic missiles.” The next step will be nuclear-armed missiles capable of reaching the west coast of the United States. This was the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community in a report from 2001, which warned that before 2015 North Korea would have ICBMs that could reach our shores.</p>
<p>In response to this latest iteration of a decades-long pattern of failure, our new Secretary of State John Kerry has gone on a nostalgia tour marked by toothless threats, diplomatic happy-talk, and pathetic begging of China to rein in its pit-bull client. In Beijing, Kerry told the Chinese that the U.S. would pull back deployment of anti-ballistic missile batteries on Guam and on Aegis cruisers in the waters near North Korea if China would restrain Pyongyang. China responded by warning the U.S. against provoking North Korea. Kerry also offered to negotiate directly with Kim Jong Eun over his nuclear arsenal, sanctions on his nation, and food aid. The offer of talks to Kim will likely go nowhere, judging from his rebuff of South Korea’s offer to talk, calling it a “crafty trick.” Like his father, Kim considers such offers as signs of weakness to be met by an escalation of aggression. Last year, after being offered food aid in exchange for international monitoring of his nuclear program, Kim launched a long-range missile in defiance of a U.N. Security Council resolution.</p>
<p>This repetition of decades of failed attempts to use diplomacy and non-lethal sanctions to change North Korean behavior is depressing enough. North Korea has been the most-sanctioned nation in the world for years, and during that time it has become a nuclear power. Giving food aid to a regime has not been any more useful, given that the regime cares little or nothing for the starving people it brutalizes and imprisons in gulags, and welcomes the opportunity to sell the aid. As bad as all that is, much worse is our current repeating of that failure in dealing with Iran. Outreach, talk, sanctions, and empty bluster, the formula for failure in North Korea, are still the only options the U.S. seems to have.</p>
<p>Obama’s attempts at “outreach” and discussions “without preconditions,” for example, begun as soon as he took office in 2009, have been met with Iranian contempt and aggression. A videotaped greeting for the Persian New Year in March 2009 was followed by Ayatollah Khamenei’s announcement that “the path of Iran’s nuclear progress could not be blocked.” In May 2009, a personal letter sent by Obama to Khamenei calling for “co-operation in regional and bilateral relations” was followed by the brutal crackdown on protests against the rigged presidential election in June, protests Khamenei blamed on American “agents.” Groveling responses to Iranian bad behavior fared not better. After Iran failed to disclose the uranium-enrichment facility in Qom, Obama reassured the mullahs, “We remain committed to serious, meaningful engagement with Iran.” As for multiple stern “deadlines” set for Iran to change its behavior, all have been ignored with impunity.</p>
<p>Four years later, the same pattern of answering outreach with aggression was repeated earlier this month. After fruitless multilateral talks in Kazakhstan, Iranian president Ahmadinejad announced that Iran was expanding uranium production, and crowed, “Iran has already become a nuclear country and no one is capable of stealing this title.” He also disclosed that Iran had opened two new mines for extracting uranium, and a factory to manufacture yellowcake, semi-refined uranium that can be processed into nuclear fuel. The U.S. response? More sanctions and more bluster from Obama about not allowing Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Sound familiar?</p>
<p>I can’t think of another historical example of a great power appeasing one aggressor at precisely the same time it is appeasing another with exactly the same failed policy. But we shouldn’t be surprised, given the delusional assumptions on which our foreign policy establishment bases its treatment of our geopolitical rivals. A massive failure of imagination keeps them from acknowledging that there are peoples and regimes in the world that value power, prestige, and aggression over peace and cooperation, and that scorn as weakness and fear our Western ideals of rational discussion, give-and-take negotiation, peaceful coexistence, and tolerance for the other side’s perspective. Worse yet, our foreign policy mavens seemingly can’t quite understand that those aggressors <em>know</em> full well that we are hesitant to act and often use diplomacy and negotiation to create the pretense of action when the will is lacking. So our enemies manipulate our ideals and engage in our empty diplomatic rituals in order to misdirect us and buy time for achieving their goals.</p>
<p>But let’s not forget the other factor in this dismal dance of appeasement. Our politicians of all stripes know that the use of force, with all its unforeseen consequences, incalculable risks, and telegenic death and destruction, comes with a high political price. We had enough outrage and anger over 9/11 to start the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but eventually grew weary and impatient enough that Obama could precipitately withdraw from both conflicts without paying a price. The result is an Iraq transforming before our eyes into a satellite of Iran even as sectarian violence continues to tear it apart, and an Afghanistan that most likely after our departure will see the Taliban restored as a major faction and font of terrorist disorder.</p>
<p>No politician either Republican or Democrat has been punished for letting North Korea go nuclear. And Obama hasn’t been punished so far for repeating that blunder with Iran, even though the consequences of a nuclear-armed jihadist regime in the middle of nearly two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves will be vastly more serious. We can blame our leaders and castigate the State Department, but at the end of the day in a democracy it’s the voters who refuse to hold them accountable who must shoulder the blame.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>The Post-American World War</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-post-american-world-war/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-post-american-world-war</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2013 04:50:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The battle will either end with the destruction of the U.S. or its reemergence as a world power.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Iran-test-fires-short-ran-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-186080" alt="Iran-test-fires-short-ran-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Iran-test-fires-short-ran-007.jpg" width="253" height="192" /></a>World War III may already be here. The left spent decades warning that our warmongering would bring on a new global war; but it was their peacemongering that did it instead.</p>
<p>World War II did not begin when the German army entered Poland, but when Britain and France began to appease Hitler. The war was only a matter of waiting around for the inevitable. And now we are the ones watching and waiting for the inevitable.</p>
<p>For half a century, the United States kept the peace through the force of its existence. There were some difficult times, but for the most part it was the sheer bulk of its military budgets and the ranks of nuclear warheads that prevented not only the big war, but also most of the little wars.</p>
<p>The left complained incessantly about those budgets and those missiles. It draped itself in peace signs and slapped on bumper stickers like &#8220;Cukes Not Nukes&#8221;. Its entertainers made movies ridiculing generals who believed in the balance of power as maniacs. Its pundits wrote books explaining why every problem in the world was caused by American power being used to aid fascist dictators and keep down progressive rebels like Che and Pol Pot.</p>
<p>And then American power finally collapsed. There had been early warning signs under Carter and Clinton, but with Obama it finally happened. The message went out that there was no longer a great power to serve as a stabilizing influence. If anyone wanted to discuss global warming or a fund to empower women in Southeast Asia, they could come down to Washington, but if they wanted to discuss how to use the balance of power keep the world from falling apart, they were out of luck.</p>
<p>The message was received. It was received in Cairo where the Muslim Brotherhood got to work overthrowing allied governments and replacing them with theocracies. It was received in Asia where China and North Korea set to work moving in on American allies.</p>
<p>The Middle East is burning. Asia looks like it might be next. The experts offer all sorts of proposals from giving more free stuff to North Korea to giving free stuff to the Syrian rebels instead, but stability against aggression can’t be achieved with giveaways. Even soft power requires hard power behind it. When there’s no hard power then the soft power is helpless.</p>
<p>Asia and the Middle East are the Post-American wars of a Post-American administration. They are the conflict of the power vacuum that Obama left in his wake.</p>
<p>The Middle East is a grenade. American power was the pin. When Obama pulled the pin, the unstable elements went off and the natural conflicts between Shiite and Sunni broke out again. And those won&#8217;t be the last conflicts. The region is a tinderbox of ethnic and religious tensions. American power couldn&#8217;t keep a lid on all of them, but it provided a stabilizing element that is gone now.</p>
<p>In his Cairo speech, Obama ceded American influence in the Middle East. And the fight was on to fill the vacuum as leaders allied with the United States lost their support from Washington.</p>
<p>The Islamists smashed the left. The Sunni and Shiite Islamists began waging a bloody war over Syria, Bahrain and soon enough, Lebanon and Iraq. And with Iran developing nuclear weapons and Turkey fighting a proxy war with it in Syria, the fighting won&#8217;t end there.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter whether Obama gets tugged by UK’s Cameron and France’s Hollande into throwing the weight of whatever firepower survived four years of military budget cuts into the game on the side of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1955 that would have been a power play; now it&#8217;s just pathetically currying favor with the forces that took down our regional allies.</p>
<p>The Middle East is in the middle of a Post-American war. The humanitarian crises, the bombings, murders and rapes that the media splashes across every channel and paper are the wages of Hope and Change.</p>
<p>American power was never the problem. American weakness was. Carter couldn&#8217;t figure out international power politics and gave us Iran. Clinton couldn&#8217;t figure it out and gave us Al Qaeda. Obama topped them both by taking down almost every allied government in the region.</p>
<p>The man who lectured cheering Socialist grandees before the Iraq War on only fighting smart wars failed to understand that sometimes you start wars through aggression and other times you start them through weakness.</p>
<p>The Arab Spring was a pipe dream. The future of the region will not be decided by elections. It will be decided by bullets. Everyone in Syria knows that, but Washington D.C. is still slow on the uptake. The future does not belong to Social Democrats, not in the Middle East or even in Europe, it belongs to roving gangs carving out spheres of power and defending them against weak governments.</p>
<p>The next Post-American War looks to be breaking out in Asia. American power froze the natural conflicts of the region. Now with American power subtracted from the equation, the postponed conflicts between Japan and China and between South Korea and North Korea have returned.</p>
<p>Obama’s pivot toward Asia consists of sending Hanoi John to reassure South Korea and Japan that the United States will support them in trying to negotiate with Kim III. Japan and South Korea are willing to take the cheap photo ops, but their governments are not formulating their plans based on American support. Japan and South Korea have shifted more to the right because they know that the days when they could count on American power are gone.</p>
<p>Like the Islamists in the Middle East, China and North Korea are moving against countries that had grown dependent on a regional stability built on American power. South Korea and Japan are adapting themselves to a world in which America is good for little more than sending out emissaries to propose more negotiations while its diplomats pay more attention to Global Warming and the Palestinian peace process than to North Korea’s threats of war.</p>
<p>The withdrawal of American power has implications beyond Asia and the Middle East.</p>
<p>How much of its old sphere of influence will Russia try to claw back from NATO? Obama sold out Poland on missile defense and sent the message that Russia can do whatever it pleases and Obama will try to do his flexible best not to notice.</p>
<p>The Latin American left is more toxic and dangerous than it has been in a long time. Cuba may be tottering and Chavez may be dead, but the left isn&#8217;t. There&#8217;s more south of the border than just cheap labor and cheap votes. Brazil is a powerhouse and Iran is poking its nose into Venezuela.</p>
<p>Africa is toppling toward the abyss of a religious war between Christians and Muslims. The Muslims are backed by the wealth and power of the Gulf. The Christians are backed by no one. The Post-American world order is creating a more dangerous world where power is secured through brutal violence and those who emerge victorious will not, in the long run, leave us alone.</p>
<p>The Post-American World War has begun. It will either end with the destruction of the United States or its reemergence as a world power.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>How Stalin Fooled the World and Why It Matters Today</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Mar 2013 04:46:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[churchill]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[curse]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Stalin]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=181924</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Every time appeasers push "diplomatic solutions," we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/how-stalin-fooled-the-world-and-why-it-matters-today/joseph-stalin-us-army-public-domain/" rel="attachment wp-att-182235"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-182235" title="Joseph-Stalin-US-Army-public-domain" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Joseph-Stalin-US-Army-public-domain.jpg" alt="" width="253" height="205" /></a>There are two ways that liberal historians usually look at Stalin. The most leftward of these is to see Stalin as a victim of German and American imperialism who struggled to maintain the peace in the face of aggressive expansionistic efforts by Nazi Germany and the United States.</p>
<p>Such a revisionist history would seem to have been thoroughly discredited in this day and age, despite its persistence in the early days of the Cold War, but it continues resurfacing, most recently in an Oliver Stone documentary series.</p>
<p>But for the most part, Khrushchev’s disavowal of Stalin completed a process that began once the Soviet dictator cut a deal with Hitler, triggering a growing Destalinization cascade on the left. Stalinists still persisted in the West, but their influence on the authoring of history steadily diminished. Instead they embraced a different version of history that would salvage the ideological integrity of the left.</p>
<p>In this more conventional version of history, Stalin was not truly a Communist, but a non-ideological dictator who had seized control of the Soviet ship of state and transformed a promisingly progressive revolution into a backward feudal tyranny.</p>
<p>This version of history had been developed by the Trotskyites and a number of disaffected groups on the left and with the Cold War; it became the conventional version of history. After the fall of the USSR, it was embraced by nationalists looking to resurrect Stalin as a monarch, rather than a party man.</p>
<p>Stalin indeed appeared to have jettisoned bits of the old international Communist agenda and zeroed in on domestic purges. The constant civil bloodshed convinced many of his potential enemies that Stalin’s USSR was mainly a threat to its own people. They viewed Stalin as a domestic tyrant, rather than an international Red Emperor.</p>
<p>But as Robert Gellately argues in <em>Stalin’s</em> <em>Curse: Battling for Communism in War and Cold War</em>, accepting the view of Stalin as a pragmatic tyrant may have been the worst mistake that they ever made.</p>
<p>Gellately takes on both versions of Stalin, contending that the Soviet tyrant was not the victim of warmongering, but the author of the Cold War who had deliberately sought a global conflict for the sake of Communist ideology and Communist power.</p>
<p>The linkage between these two elements is vitally important. By reducing Stalin and his Soviet Union to mere tyrant and tyranny, revisionist liberal historians could successfully argue that they just wanted to be left alone. And if Stalin had been no more than a tyrant and the USSR no more than a pedestal for his cult of personality, that reading of history might have some plausibility.</p>
<p>Only by rediscovering Stalin as an ideological tyrant and the USSR as a Red Empire, as Gellately does, is that revisionist reading of the Cold War rendered null and void.</p>
<p>As early as 1920, Stalin was already envisioning a Red Empire, in Gellately’s words, that would encompass Russia and much of Eastern Europe. Stalin’s actions in both World War II and the Cold War were aimed at realizing that Red Empire.</p>
<p>Gellately takes note of Stalin’s self-definition as a “professional revolutionary and party organizer” and connects it to his international ambitions. The Stalin who emerges in <em>Stalin’s Curse</em> does not represent a break with the leftist history of the revolution, but a continuation of it. While liberal history insists on viewing Stalinism as a break from Leninism, Gellately makes a convincing case for the reign of Stalin as a natural extension of the reign of Lenin.</p>
<p>Most compellingly, <em>Stalin’s Curse</em> argues for recognizing Stalin’s strategic acumen in outwitting FDR and Churchill, as he had been unable to outwit Hitler, using the familiar narrative of Russian victimhood in a war that he had clumsily stumbled into to demand territorial concessions all the way up to Germany.  And yet Stalin’s achievements largely came from the willingness of his Western allies to lose sight of what he was and what he represented.</p>
<p>In one telling moment, that has a dreadful modern resonance, FDR, while staying in the bugged Soviet mission, is warned by Churchill that Stalin was preparing “a Communist replacement for the Polish government.”</p>
<p>The Soviet agent overhearing the conversation listens to FDR accuse Churchill of preparing an anti-Communist government and recalls “thinking how strange it was&#8221; for the president to “put Churchill and Stalin on the same plane” and to think of himself as “the arbiter between them.”</p>
<p>That moment is not the only one in Stalin’s Curse that bears such historical echoes. The National Front coalitions that the Soviet Union used to take over Eastern Europe bear a strong similarity to the Islamist coalitions used to take over the Arab Spring. And the willingness of the West to believe the comforting lies that they were told remind us that our disastrous foreign policy did not emerge yesterday.</p>
<p>While Stalin casually disposed of hundreds of thousands of lives, he took few major strategic risks, relying on attrition to do his work for him. As a canny negotiator, Stalin used every peace offer as an opening bid to expand his control replicating his battlefield strategy at the negotiating table</p>
<p>When FDR and Churchill thought that they were shaping a final settlement for Europe, they were actually engaging in an endless bargaining session that would only be settled with the Red Army.</p>
<p>History concerns itself with dry facts, but has less to say about human minds, and so it is difficult to know whether FDR and Churchill were fooled or whether they chose to be fooled. When FDR and Churchill praised Stalin’s integrity and sincerity, had they been deceived by the world’s greatest actor or did they allow themselves to be deceived so that the terrible compromises they made seemed more palatable?</p>
<p>This question, like so many of the others in <em>Stalin’s Curse</em>, remains applicable today. While Stalin is dead, there are many lesser Stalins like Morsi, small vicious men with an unlimited capacity for bloodshed and an even more unlimited ability to fool Western leaders into believing in their sincerity and goodness.</p>
<p>The negotiations that allowed Stalin to gobble up so many countries have been repeated again and again. And every time that diplomats call for a diplomatic solution in North Korea and Iran, we find ourselves back sitting across the table from Uncle Joe.</p>
<p>And that may be Stalin’s true curse.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>America Has No Foreign Policy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/america-has-no-foreign-policy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=america-has-no-foreign-policy</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2012 15:42:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[foreign policy]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=167350</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The United States of America has a State Department, it has row after row of people who speak badly every language from Arabic to Swahili badly, and it has rich donors who take on the task of acting as ambassadors to some foreign country every four to eight years. There are think-tanks, actual tanks and [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>The United States of America has a State Department, it has row after row of people who speak badly every language from Arabic to Swahili badly, and it has rich donors who take on the task of acting as ambassadors to some foreign country every four to eight years. There are think-tanks, actual tanks and institutes dedicated to turning out papers on foreign policy. And despite all this, or perhaps because of all this, the country still has no foreign policy.</p>
<div><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YKUUYG4sWNk/ULblKtaWwDI/AAAAAAAAKQU/SqgvpcVTmck/s1600/uncle-sam_8123_1.jpg"><img class="alignleft" style="border: 0px none;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YKUUYG4sWNk/ULblKtaWwDI/AAAAAAAAKQU/SqgvpcVTmck/s320/uncle-sam_8123_1.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="320" border="0" /></a></div>
<p>Americans are by nature isolationist. American leaders, since Woodrow Wilson dumped ashes from his pipe on the Oval Office carpets and dumped America into the international game of empires, are bent on getting involved in world politics. Unfortunately everything they know about world politics comes from the back of cereal boxes. And yes that includes our current precious genius who comes to us from eating dog and living the life of a privileged member of Indonesia&#8217;s upper classes, but knows almost as little about the world outside Chicago, as he does about economics.</p>
<p>The big problem with American foreign policy is that there isn&#8217;t one. Our current foreign policy can be boiled down to three words. &#8220;Don&#8217;t Hate Us.&#8221; The current administration has introduced an innovative fourth word. &#8220;Please.&#8221;</p>
<p>It&#8217;s a long way from a century ago when American leaders still had no foreign policy, besides warning European countries to stay out of their hemisphere, but had begun to think that being involved in the affairs of other countries was a prerequisite for global good citizenship.</p>
<p>Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Prize for trying to get the Russians and Japanese to end a disastrous war in which the Japanese had the suicide determination and the Russians had the machine guns, but barely broke even.</p>
<p>Roosevelt, like many of his successors, had no true foreign policy beyond articulating American greatness on the world stage. But the deeper those successors involved themselves in international politics, the more they came to see American greatness as the obstacle, not the point. The more the United States became involved in organizing global alliances to hold back one threat or another, the more that same national greatness began to be seen as an obstacle to maximizing those alliances.</p>
<p>A hundred years ago, American presidents thought that their country should be a world power because of the manifest destiny of its national greatness. A century later they were minimizing that national greatness to preserve world power status.</p>
<p>Roosevelt&#8217;s &#8220;Pedicaris alive or Raisuli dead&#8221; became &#8220;Let&#8217;s Pull Together&#8221; and &#8220;Don&#8217;t Hate Us&#8221; during the Cold War. And today the motto, in a world where a whole lot of people want to do it, is, &#8220;Please Don&#8217;t Kill Us.&#8221;</p>
<p>The United States does not appease in pursuit of its objectives, appeasement has become the objective. Being hated is the ultimate national security threat. Being loved is the ultimate national security objective. These aren&#8217;t even sarcastic observations. They are actual policy.</p>
<p>CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) through outreach to Muslims is our foreign policy and like global warming and gay rights, it encompasses every single area of our government, to the absurd extent that NASA&#8217;s top priority under the dog-eater-in-chief was designated as improving Muslim self-esteem. NASA&#8217;s former priority of boosting American self-esteem was no longer appropriate because that would just make people hate us even more and make us act in such a way that they would hate us.</p>
<p>Americans and American leaders now both want the same thing. To be left alone. But American leaders remain convinced that the best way to be left alone is to appease those who might want to attack their country by minimizing national power and contributing more lunch money to their international cause of free lunches.</p>
<p>America is often accused of bullying other nations, but our policies are not those of a bully, they are those of his victim cowering in the corner with broken glasses and smeared tears, one hand extended with his crumpled up lunch money inside. Our lunch money total comes into the many billions, but as our bullies and their advocates remind us, we&#8217;re rich enough to be able to afford it.</p>
<p>The kid in the corner has been bullied enough that his only policy is avoiding another incident. That is our foreign policy, driven by CVE or Here&#8217;s Some More Halal Lunch Money, finding ways of getting the bullies to leave us alone. Even the more militant elements of our military campaign are defensive, ripe with ways to convince the bullies to leave us alone, using drones to minimize civilian casualties and nation building exercises to turn our bullies into friendly peaceloving countries.</p>
<p>Reactive foreign policies are a recipe for defeat, but America has never had any foreign policy beyond progressive world citizenship and coalition building against global threats. And that has made American into the world&#8217;s social worker and the world&#8217;s policeman for so long that it has hardly any sense of what it might want for itself, as a country.</p>
<p>America is still involved in global citizenship projects even though the dictatorships who are the plurality of the global polity and the progressives who define global citizenship innately hate it. while working hard at maintaining global coalitions that do not exist against a threat that not even it is prepared to name. Whatever relevance these had, they no longer have any relevance when the conventional clash of nations of the Cold War gave way to the ride of the barbarians in the Islamic Wars of Terror.</p>
<p>The United States has been suckered into playing the same game as Israel. The impossible game of winning wars without alienating anyone. And that game is played by not winning wars and being more hated than if they had won all those wars. If we are forced to fight because we are hated, then the only way to avoid fighting is not be hated which means fighting just enough to survive, but not enough to earn us any more than the minimum amount of hate balanced against the minimum amount of survival. And if we win, maybe they&#8217;ll leave us alone. If they don&#8217;t, we&#8217;ll fight back even less.</p>
<p>During the Cold War the United States sacrificed its economy, its trade balance and its manufacturing sector to score coalition points and contain Communism. With Communism defeated and capitalism thriving in Russia and China, the United States is now stripping away civil liberties to counter Islamic terrorism. But that doesn&#8217;t just mean strip searches in airports, it means outlawing anything that offends Muslims. And if we survive that, and the Muslim world becomes a mecca of free speech, then we&#8217;ll have won yet another Pyrrhic victory at our own expense.</p>
<p>Countering external threats is a legitimate foreign policy interest, but it cannot be the only interest. That way leads to a purely reactive foreign policy and down the garden path to Stockholm Syndrome politics that accept responsibility for the actions of an aggressor to maintain the illusion of control over his actions. Our leaders, the ones who eat dogs and the ones who just pose for photos with them, are already there. If we reach European critical velocity, then we&#8217;ll be there as an entire nation, not just members of our chattering and spending classes.</p>
<p>America needs a foreign policy that is bigger than its defensive needs but smaller than progressive ambitions of global citizenship. It is a foreign policy that cannot be defensive or altruistic, but that actually resurrects the long buried question of American interests, rather than American obligations or needs. And to get there, the country&#8217;s policymakers have to get in touch with their 19th Century selves and stop asking what America is obligated to do for the world or what it desperately needs from the world, but what it would like to do with the world.</p>
<p>That is the way that Russia or China think. It&#8217;s the way that most countries, from the largest rivals to the smallest islands, approach the outside world, not as a place that they are obligated to or whom they dare not offend, but as a place for extending their ambitions and sense of self into. That does not mean going on a spree of territorial expansionism, necessarily, but that too would be a healthier way to function than the listless apathy of appeasement that has overtaken American foreign policy.</p>
<p>A foreign policy is assertive. It seeks to gain things, rather than to minimize losing things. It is not as concerned with the feelings of the world, as it is with the feelings of its own citizens. To the question of what it wants, it does not answer with the time-honored response of Miss America contestants, to make the world a better place, but rather it answers to make America better, bigger, richer and stronger. That answer is not idealistic, it is realistic. It is how other countries expect us to think and it is how they react no matter how altruistic our policies may be.</p>
<p>American foreign policy needs goals and horizons to gain definition. It needs to want something more than a way to avert the next big explosion or to feed the hungry people of Warlordistan to have a foreign policy that is based on substance, rather than cobwebs of fears and dreams. It needs to stand not for a better world, but for a better, stronger and richer America.</p>
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		<title>Why Our Forces Were Told to &#8216;Stand Down&#8217; in Benghazi</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/why-our-forces-were-told-to-stand-down-in-benghazi/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-our-forces-were-told-to-stand-down-in-benghazi</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2012 04:55:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163108</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In a post-American administration, American lives come second to winning over Muslims.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/why-our-forces-were-told-to-stand-down-in-benghazi/obama-libya_web_20121015_0001_r640x400/" rel="attachment wp-att-163112"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163112" title="obama-libya_web_20121015_0001_r640x400" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/obama-libya_web_20121015_0001_r640x400.gif" alt="" width="315" height="239" /></a>To understand what went wrong in the Benghazi mission, it’s important to begin by looking at what was so unique about it.</p>
<p>When the Islamist mobs began their September 11 rampage, they found embassies with high walls, heavy security and police protection. Even in Tunis and Cairo, where the Arab Spring Islamist regimes have been accused of collaborating with their fellow Salafists, there were credible military and police forces capable of preventing the kind of full scale assault that took place in Benghazi.</p>
<p>The mission in Benghazi, however, was an American diplomatic facility with few defenses in a city where the police were virtually helpless against the Islamist militias and where the national government had announced that it would allow the Salafists to destroy Sufi tombs rather than intervene.</p>
<p>On September 1, I <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/libyan-interior-minister-i-will-not-stop-islamist-violence/">wrote that the real implication</a> of these remarks was that the Libyan government had given the Islamists a free hand and would take no action no matter what they did. And bloodshed was sure to follow. Ten days later it did.</p>
<p>After the fall of Saddam, American diplomatic facilities in Iraq did not remain unguarded or protected only by local militias. It was always understood that American diplomatic facilities in a country whose government had recently fallen were sitting ducks and needed heavy protection. The State Department cables show that this was something that quite a few of the Americans on the ground also understood. The Benghazi consulate had been attacked, and its next attack would only be a matter of time.</p>
<p>When Al Qaeda decided to commemorate September 11 with a wave of attacks on American diplomatic facilities across the Muslim world, from Tunis all the way to Indonesia, in a recreation of its own 1998 embassy attacks, its planners paid special attention to the one facility that was a soft target and surrounded by jihadist fighters. A facility that was a perfect target because it was completely exposed.</p>
<p>Benghazi should have either had the same protection that a similar facility in Iraq would have or it should have been closed down. Instead the State Department chose to rely on its friendly relations with the jihadists, having forgotten the story of the scorpion and the frog, trusting in an Islamist militia linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and to its future Al Qaeda-affiliated Ansar Al Sharia attackers to protect it.</p>
<p>The State Department was not being cheap. Its budget had climbed steadily under Obama and it could have set up another Green Zone in Benghazi if it chose to. But that would have been a flashback to the Bush era that represented everything the appeasement lobby had hated about those eight years.</p>
<p>Libya was meant to be a new kind of war. Not a display of American arrogance and unilateralism, but a show of submissiveness to the goals and ambitions of the Muslim world. In post-American diplomacy, the Americans did not arrive with a show of force, surrounded by Marines and heavy fortifications, but bent humbly under the defensive shield of the Islamist Ummah. Rather than exporting the Dar Al Harb, the Americans would ask for the protection of the Dar Al Islam.</p>
<p>The reason that the Navy SEALS were denied the support of a Spectre C-130U gunship was the same reason that the consulate had been left nearly unguarded. And it was the same reason that so many soldiers had died in Afghanistan because they had been denied air and artillery support or even the permission to open fire.</p>
<p>What happened in Benghazi was only extraordinary because it caught the attention of the public, but American soldiers in Afghanistan had been suffering under the same conditions ever since it was decided that winning the hearts and minds of Afghan civilians was more important than the lives of American soldiers.</p>
<p>The four Americans killed in Benghazi lived and died by the same code as thousands of Americans in Afghanistan. And that code overrode loyalty to one’s own people in favor of appeasing Muslims. The two former SEALS broke that code, violating orders by going to protect the consulate and were abandoned in the field by an administration that prioritized Muslim opinions over American lives.</p>
<p>From the post-American diplomatic perspective, the lives of a few Americans, who knew what they were getting into, was a small sacrifice to make when weighed against the potential of turning the entire Muslim world around. A Spectre gunship blasting away at an Islamist militia in the streets of Benghazi would have ended the fiction of a successful war in Libya and infuriated most of the Islamist militias. Worst of all, it would have made Americans seem like imperialists, instead of helpful aides to the Islamist transition of the Arab Spring. It would have ruined everything and so it was shut down.</p>
<p>Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were not the first Americans to be abandoned by their country for diplomatic reasons. They will not be the last. And while we investigate and expose the decisions that their government made, it is important for us to remember that such decisions come out of a mindset that says there are diplomatic goals that are more important than American lives. This mindset did not begin with the War on Terror and it will not end until it is exposed for what it is.</p>
<p>During Israel’s descent into peace madness, its left-wing government coined a phrase for those Israelis killed in terrorist attacks, calling them, “Sacrifices of Peace.”</p>
<p>Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods are our government’s sacrifices of peace. They died so that we might go on in our futile effort to win over the Muslim world. And they are not the only ones. There is no way of knowing how many of the 1,500 Americans who were killed in Obama’s surge died because they were prevented from firing first or denied air support. But the number is likely to be in the hundreds.</p>
<p>Similarly 3,000 died in the attacks of September 11 because our diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia were too important to close the revolving door that allowed the terrorists such easy access to our country. They too were sacrifices of peace, burned on the altar of appeasement by a diplomatic establishment that puts the opinions of our enemies first and American lives last.</p>
<p>What went wrong in Benghazi is the same thing that went wrong in Afghanistan. It is the same thing that went wrong on the original September 11. It is the same thing that has gone wrong throughout the War on Terror. If we are to learn any lesson from what happened in Benghazi, it should be that American lives come before Muslim diplomacy and that any government which does not put American lives first, which does not take whatever measures are necessary to save their lives, regardless of what Muslims may think, is not an American government, but a post-American government.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Obama Still Trying to Appease North Korea</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama-still-trying-to-appease-north-korea/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-still-trying-to-appease-north-korea</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/obama-still-trying-to-appease-north-korea/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 22 Oct 2012 15:47:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soft power]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=148635</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When a nuclear bomb goes off in an American city twenty years from now, the blame will belong to the Clinton Administration whose staffers are deeply embedded in the Obama Administration and pursuing its old policies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?attachment_id=148636" rel="attachment wp-att-148636"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-148636" title="A North Korean soldier stands guard in f" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/north-korea-missiles-450x299.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="299" /></a></p>
<p>When a nuclear bomb goes off in an American city twenty years from now, the blame will belong to the Clinton Administration whose staffers are deeply embedded in the Obama Administration and pursuing its old policies.</p>
<p>Without North Korea there would be no Islamic nuclear bomb. Clinton&#8217;s failure on North Korea and on Pakistan has made the murder of millions of Americans nearly inevitable. And all this time later, we&#8217;re still appeasing North Korea. <a href="http://thecable.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/15/north_korea_rebuffs_us_at_secret_meeting_in_china">To no avail</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Two North Korean government officials told a top U.S. official dealing with North Korea that the hermitic Stalinist state would not continue on its path to denuclearization, as promised in 2005, until the United States ends what it sees as America&#8217;s hostile policy to the DPRK.</p>
<p>Clifford Hart, the Obama administration&#8217;s special envoy to the now-defunct Six Party Talks, met with Han Song-ryol, North Korea&#8217;s deputy ambassador to the United Nations, and Choe Son Hui, the deputy director-general of the North American affairs bureau in the DPRK foreign ministry, late last month in China</p>
<p>No progress was made on toward resuming negotiations over North Korea&#8217;s nuclear program, both officials said.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama&#8217;s appeasement of Iran gets top billing in national security dialogue. His appeasement of the Muslim world in general is often talked about. But Obama doesn&#8217;t limit himself there. He&#8217;s a man who will go anywhere and bow to anyone&#8230; or send off his subordinates to do it for him.</p>
<p>The moment that Lil Kim crooks a finger and offers to possibly one day allow inspections of North Korea&#8217;s nuclear program, Obama will rush to shower him with everything he could ask for. Because the Democrats just don&#8217;t change.</p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bYz4oNPfuhE?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" width="540" height="360"></iframe></p>
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		<title>How Obama Reset American Power to Zero with Putin</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/how-obama-reset-american-power-to-zero-with-putin/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-obama-reset-american-power-to-zero-with-putin</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/how-obama-reset-american-power-to-zero-with-putin/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:34:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Medvedev]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Putin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[soft power]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=148930</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The great fallacy of progressive foreign policy is the assumption that other nations and ideologies are reactive. If we treat them well, they reciprocate. If we treat them badly, there's blowback. That's why the Reset Button didn't work in Russia, but it did set the stage for a series of Russian humiliations of Obama]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/how-obama-reset-american-power-to-zero-with-putin/obama-and-putin-via-afp/" rel="attachment wp-att-148936"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-148936" title="Obama-and-Putin-via-AFP" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Obama-and-Putin-via-AFP-450x252.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="252" /></a></p>
<p>The whole premise of Obama and Hillary&#8217;s Russia reset was that relations between Russia and the United States had been bollixed up before, since Russia was still being run the same way, the implicit premise was that Bush had somehow messed up what should have been a good relationship and now that Obama was in office, the reset button would be pressed and everything would be reset.</p>
<p>The great fallacy of progressive foreign policy is the assumption that other nations and ideologies are reactive. If we treat them well, they reciprocate. If we treat them badly, there&#8217;s blowback. The United States is the only true player and the goals of other nations, such as Russia, or ideologies such as Islam, only exist as reflections of our actions.</p>
<p>The Reset Button didn&#8217;t work in Russia, but it did set the stage for a series of Russian humiliations of Obama, <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/16/how_the_russian_reset_explains_obama_s_foreign_policy">some of which Douglas Feith lays out in Foreign Policy</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>In August 2011, Putin, then the prime minister, accused the United States of living &#8220;like a parasite&#8221; on the world economy. At a May 2012 international missile defense conference in Moscow, Russia&#8217;s top military officer Gen. Nikolai Makarov denounced U.S-NATO plans to build defenses against ballistic missiles launched from the Middle East. Referring to potential Eastern European sites for such defenses, General Makarov made a remarkable threat: &#8220;A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And Feith points out how the seeds of that lay with the Reset Button.</p>
<blockquote><p>Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served Obama as the head of Policy Planning at the State Department, wrote a February 2008 Commonweal article called &#8220;Good Reasons to be Humble&#8221; in which she said that the United States &#8220;should make clear that our hubris &#8230; has diminished us and led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.&#8221; Current White House adviser Samantha Power, while a Harvard University lecturer, wrote in the New Republic&#8217;s March 3, 2003 issue: &#8220;Instituting a doctrine of mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.&#8221;</p>
<p>The Obama administration has had plenty of time to test its diplomatic theories. It was back in July 2009 that the president told the New Economic School in Moscow that the U.S.-Russian relationship required a reset. &#8220;There is,&#8221; he said, &#8220;the 20th-century view that the United States and Russia are destined to be antagonists, and that a strong Russia or a strong America can only assert themselves in opposition to one another. And there is a 19th-century view that we are destined to vie for spheres of influence, and that great powers must forge competing blocs to balance one another.&#8221; Obama called these assumptions mistaken, and added: &#8220;In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama failed to appreciate Putin&#8217;s interest in reasserting Russian influence in the Middle East. Russia&#8217;s predominant interest is in high oil prices and Middle Eastern turmoil serves that interest, yet Obama simply assumed that Russia would cooperate with American efforts to promote Middle Eastern stability.</p></blockquote>
<p>And Obama&#8217;s eagerness to seduce Vladimir led to human rights hypocrisy and the betrayal of oppressed nations that still fear the Russian bear</p>
<blockquote><p>When Obama offered blandishments to Russia in Europe, he did so at the expense of U.S. allies in Poland and the Czech Republic&#8230; Obama, however, apparently decided that those agreements were less important than the goodwill he might buy with Russia by cancelling them.</p>
<p>Obama pursues new arms control agreements so eagerly because he sees them as steps toward &#8220;nuclear zero,&#8221; a world entirely without nuclear weapons &#8212; a grandiose goal he endorsed early in his presidency. It was quite a turnabout for a man who criticized U.S. policy during the Cold War because he said opposition to communism blinded successive U.S. presidents to the human-rights violations of regimes with which they cooperated in pursuit of security. Now, in pursuit of nuclear zero, he refuses to acknowledge the significance of the Putin regime&#8217;s human-rights abuses.</p>
<p>Why? Obama&#8217;s multilateral foreign policy assigns high importance to the legitimacy the U.N. Security Council supposedly bestows on American actions in the world. Acknowledging Putin as an untrustworthy and brutal authoritarian would not serve Obama&#8217;s interest in claiming that Security Council approval &#8212; that is, Putin&#8217;s approval &#8212; is the acid test of international legitimacy.</p></blockquote>
<p>And that&#8217;s the bottom line of multilateralism.</p>
<p>Putting the UN and its democracy of dictatorships ahead of the United States requires acknowledging and respecting the legitimacy of tyranny. That was the great flaw in the Democratic opposition to American unilateralism and it has gone beyond turning a blind eye to Saddam and into the territory of turning a blind eye to any tyranny that has genuine influence in world government institutions.</p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Dangerous Consistency</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/obamas-dangerous-consistency/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-dangerous-consistency</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/caroline-glick/obamas-dangerous-consistency/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Sep 2012 04:49:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cenorship]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=145205</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The toxic plan continues to appease a culture's hatred of our way of life.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/obama99.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-145226" title="obama99" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/obama99.jpg" alt="" width="276" height="184" /></a><em>Originally <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=285733">published</a> in The Jerusalem Post. </em></p>
<p>Last week, Egypt&#8217;s chief prosecutor issued arrest warrants against eight US citizens.</p>
<p>Their purported crimes relate either to their reported involvement in the production of the Internet movie critical of Islam that has received so much attention over the past 10 days, or to other alleged anti-Islamic activities.</p>
<p>One of the US citizens indicted is a woman who converted from Islam to Christianity.</p>
<p>According to the Associated Press, Egypt&#8217;s general prosecution issued a statement announcing that the eight US citizens have been indicted on charges of insulting and publicly attacking Islam, spreading false information, and harming Egyptian national unity.</p>
<p>The statement stipulated that they could face the death penalty if convicted.</p>
<p>The AP write-up of the story quoted Mamdouh Ismail, a Salafi attorney who praised the prosecution&#8217;s move. He claimed it would deter others from exercising their right to free expression in regards to Islam. As he put it, the prosecutions will &#8220;set a deterrent for them and anyone else who may fall into this.&#8221; That is, they will deter others from saying anything critical about Islam.</p>
<p>This desire to intimidate free people into silence on Islam is clearly the goal the heads of the Muslim Brotherhood seek to achieve through their protests of the anti-Islamic movie. This was the message of Muslim Brotherhood chief Yussuf Qaradawi. Three days after the anti-American assaults began on the anniversary of the September 11 jihadist attacks on America, Qaradawi gave a sermon on Qatar television, translated by MEMRI.</p>
<p>Qaradawi struck a moderate tone. He called on his followers to stop rioting against the US. Rather than attack the US, Qaradawi urged his Muslim audience to insist that the US place prohibitions on the free speech rights of American citizens by outlawing criticism of Islam &#8211; just as the Europeans have done in recent years in the face of Islamic terror and intimidation.</p>
<p>In his words, &#8220;We say to the US: You must take a strong stance and try to confront this extremism like the Europeans do. This [anti-Islamic film] is not art. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech. This is nothing but curses and insults. Does the freedom to curse and insult constitute freedom of speech?&#8221;</p>
<p>Both the actions of the Egyptian prosecution and Qaradawi&#8217;s sermon prove incontrovertibly that the two policies the US has adopted since September 11, 2001, to contend with Muslim hatred for the US have failed. The neoconservative policy of supporting the democratization of Muslim societies adopted by President Barack Obama&#8217;s predecessor George W. Bush has failed. And the appeasement policy adopted by Obama has also failed.</p>
<p>Bush&#8217;s democratization policy claimed that the reason the Muslim world had become a hotbed for anti-Americanism and terror was that the Muslim world was not governed by democratic regimes. Once the peoples of the Muslim world were allowed to be free, and to freely elect their governments, the neoconservatives proclaimed, they would abandon their hatred of America.</p>
<p>As a consequence of this belief, when the anti-regime protests against the authoritarian Mubarak regime began in January 2011, the neoconservatives were outspoken supporters of the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak, despite the fact that he had been the US&#8217;s key ally in the Arab world for three decades. They supported the political process that brought the Muslim Brotherhood to power. They supported the process despite the fact that Qaradawi is the most influential cleric in Egypt. They supported it despite the fact that just days after Mubarak was ousted from power, Qaradawi arrived at Cairo&#8217;s Tahrir Square and before an audience of two million followers, he called for the invasion of Israel and the conquest of Jerusalem.</p>
<p>In the event, the Egyptian people voted for Qaradawi&#8217;s Muslim Brotherhood and for the Salafi party. The distinction between the two parties is that Qaradawi and the Muslim Brotherhood are willing to resort to both violent and nonviolent ways to dominate the world in the name of Islam. The Salafis abjure nonviolence. So while Qaradawi called for the riots to end in order to convince the Americans to criminalize criticism of Islam, his Salafi counterparts called for the murder of everyone involved in producing the anti-Islamic film.</p>
<p>For instance, Salafi cleric Ahmad Fouad Ashoush issued a fatwa on Islamic websites last weekend calling for American and European Muslims to murder those involved with the movie. His religious ruling was translated by the SITE Intelligence Group on Monday.</p>
<p>Ashoush wrote, &#8220;Those bastards who did this film are belligerent disbelievers. I issue a fatwa and call on the Muslim youth in America and Europe to do this duty, which is to kill the director, the producer and the actors and everyone who helped and promoted the film.</p>
<p>&#8220;So, hurry, hurry, O Muslim youth in America and Europe, and teach those filthy lowly ones a lesson that all the monkeys and pigs in America and Europe will understand. May Allah guide you and grant you success.&#8221;</p>
<p>These are the voices of democratic Egypt. The government, which has indicted American citizens on capital charges for exercising their most fundamental right as Americans, is a loyal representative of the sentiments of the Egyptian people who freely elected it. The Salafi preacher is a loyal representative of the segment of the Egyptian people that made the Salafi party the second largest in the Egyptian parliament. Qaradawi&#8217;s call for the abolition of freedom of speech in America &#8211; as has happened in Europe &#8211; and to ban all criticism of Islam is subscribed to by millions and millions of Muslims worldwide who consider him one of the leading Sunni clerics in the world.</p>
<p>Free elections in Egypt have empowered the Egyptian people to use the organs of governance to advance their hatred of America. Their hatred has been empowered, and legitimized, not diminished as the neoconservatives had hoped.</p>
<p>The behavior of the Egyptian government, Qaradawi and the Salafis also makes clear that Obama&#8217;s policy of appeasing the Muslim world has failed completely. Whereas Bush believed the source of Muslim hatred was their political oppression at the hands of their regimes, Obama has blamed their rage and hatred on America&#8217;s supposed misdeeds.</p>
<p>By changing the way America treats the Muslim world, Obama believes he can end their hatred of America. To this end, he has reached out to the most anti-American forces and regimes in the region and spurned pro-American regimes and political forces.</p>
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		<title>Muslims Commemorate 9/11 by Killing American, US Apologizes to Muslims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/muslims-commemorate-911-by-killing-american-us-apologizes-to-muslims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=muslims-commemorate-911-by-killing-american-us-apologizes-to-muslims</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:47:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[us embassy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[us state department]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=143683</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Muslims staged attacks on US embassies and consulates in the Muslim world. In Cairo they tore down the American flag and tried to replace it with a black obscenity that read, "There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger". In the newly liberated utopia of Libya, they murdered an American consulate employee.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/700_7ee6acfbb65ac53643b58cd465a9f2a3.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-143689" title="700_7ee6acfbb65ac53643b58cd465a9f2a3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/700_7ee6acfbb65ac53643b58cd465a9f2a3-300x187.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="187" /></a></p>
<p>Stop me if you&#8217;ve heard this one before because it&#8217;s an old tune, but it has a certain ominous resonance on September 11.</p>
<p>Muslims staged attacks on US embassies and consulates in the Muslim world. In Cairo they tore down the American flag and tried to replace it <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/11/world/meast/egpyt-us-embassy-protests/index.html">with a black obscenity that read</a>, &#8220;There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his messenger&#8221;. In the <a href="http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2012/09/11/u-s-consular-official-killed-in-benghazi-libyan-government-says/">newly liberated utopia of Libya</a>, they murdered an American consulate employee.</p>
<p>This was the scene in Cairo;</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/09/11/egyptian-protesters-scale-us-embassy-wall-in-cairo/#ixzz26D81p73m  ">The crowd grew throughout </a>the evening with thousands standing outside the embassy, chanting &#8220;Islamic, Islamic. The right of our prophet will not die.&#8221; A group of women in black veils and robes that left only their eyes exposed chanted, &#8220;Worshippers of the Cross, leave the Prophet Muhammad alone.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/11/libya-us-embassy-idUSL5E8KBMJ020120911">this was the scene in Benghazi</a>, the city that Obama insisted we had to go to war to protect;</p>
<blockquote><p>Gunmen attacked U.S. consulate offices in Libya&#8217;s eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday, and fought with security forces in protest against a U.S. film they say is blasphemous, a security official said.</p>
<p>He said a fire was burning inside the consulate and that staff had been evacuated.</p>
<p>A Reuters reporter saw three injured members of the Libyan security forces taken away in an ambulance. A Libyan security official who declined to be named said one U.S. security guard was injured in the clashes.</p></blockquote>
<p>Other media reports suggest that the consulate was hit by an RPG. This makes for the first American casualty in Obama&#8217;s Libyan War.</p>
<p>Naturally the State Department jumped into action with a swift condemnation of Americans who upset Muslims.</p>
<blockquote><p>The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims – as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions&#8230; Respect for religious beliefs is a cornerstone of American democracy. We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.</p></blockquote>
<p>The Embassy statement just stopped short of calling for censorship, that&#8217;s what CNN is for. State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland offered some meaningless reassurances about Egypt&#8217;s business climate.</p>
<blockquote><p>MS. NULAND: Well, I think we can always do more. The Egyptians can always do more. But I think the message is getting through, as more and more partners across Egypt want to work with us. It’s rarely the case that you please all of the people all the time in any country, and we certainly respect the right of peaceful protest, as long as it’s peaceful.</p>
<p>Please.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Do you think that Egypt’s becoming increasingly hostile towards the United States?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: I haven’t seen the polling data in the recent period, Said, but I don’t have any reason to think that this is a dangerous trend, if that’s what you’re asking.</p>
<p>QUESTION: This breaching of the wall is a serious thing.</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: No, of course.</p>
<p>QUESTION: I mean, remember when, let’s say, they did that to the Israeli Embassy. It was an initiative from this building, I believe, that called the Egyptians and urged them to defuse the situation, and they did. So what do you do in this case?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: Well, obviously, in this case, we’re working with the Egyptian security forces to restore order. It sounds like – and I don’t have full details – that this came up pretty quickly, relatively modest group of people, but caught probably us and the Egyptian security outside the Embassy by some surprise.</p>
<p>QUESTION: This was a thousand people. I don’t really think that’s necessarily modest, do you?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: Well, as compared to some of the things that we’ve seen.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Were there any injuries, do you know?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: Not that I know of, but we’ll have to see how it develops.</p>
<p>Please in the back.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Change of subject?</p>
<p>QUESTION: No. Hold on. You said you haven’t seen the polling data. Have you commissioned a poll?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: Well, I don’t have it here at my disposal.</p>
<p>QUESTION: You have?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: There are plenty of – there’s plenty of public polling on this issue.</p>
<p>QUESTION: No, no, no. I’m not talking about public polling. I’m talking about when you said you haven’t seen “the polling data,” so I’m just wondering if “the polling data” refers to a poll that you guys have &#8211;</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: No. I didn’t mean to imply that we had a new poll of our own.</p>
<p>QUESTION: Change of subject?</p>
<p>MS. NULAND: Yeah.</p></blockquote>
<p>The sheer ineptness here has to be pure entertainment for the Muslim Brotherhood and the rest of America&#8217;s enemies. If we go back a few decades, we&#8217;ll find similar conferences on Iran just before the end came.</p>
<p>Multiple attacks on US embassies and consulates on September 11 are no accident, and despite what the media insists on reporting, had nothing to do with any movies about Mohammed. The &#8220;movie&#8221; was just the impetus for getting protesters out into the street at the right place and time. The coverage of the movie by the Egyptian media, which was recently taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood, was timed for exactly this effect. It&#8217;s not a coincidence and was almost certainly a planned action by the Brotherhood regime in Cairo.</p>
<p>Luckily the Brotherhood has the inside track in the State Department directly to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by way of Huma Abedin. That means its leaders know exactly how the United States will react to a crisis like this and can shape the response. This capability is unfortunately not unique. Soviet infiltration of the American diplomatic corps was far more extensive, but the Brotherhood is better at exploiting that advantage to create confrontation.</p>
<p>The Muslim Brotherhood knows that the attacks will only strengthen their position as the &#8220;moderates&#8221; who are the only ones who can control the extremists. It knows that the State Department will blame American critics of Islam and call for more of the censorship and blasphemy laws that Hillary Clinton has been working toward. Most of all it knows that under Obama, America will not defend itself or fight back.</p>
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		<title>FACT CHECK: Obama&#8217;s National Security Claims</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/fact-check-obamas-national-security-claims/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Sep 2012 13:53:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Barack Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[national security]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[war in afghanistan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=142008</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Even though Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to make the world love us again, this time around he's taking a page from Bush by ignoring the world and trying to run on a national security record. His multiple failures in global diplomacy don't give him the option of running on his record empowering Islamists, but his national security record is just as bad.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Obama-Marine-one-salute.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-142555" title="Obama-Marine-one-salute" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Obama-Marine-one-salute-300x162.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="162" /></a></p>
<p>Even though Obama ran in 2008 on a promise to make the world love us again, this time around he&#8217;s taking a page from Bush by ignoring the world and trying to run on a national security record. His multiple failures in global diplomacy don&#8217;t give him the option of running on his record empowering Islamists, but his national security record is just as bad.</p>
<p>On his campaign website, Obama&#8217;s boasts are ambiguous and dishonest at the same time. Fact checking them is child&#8217;s play.</p>
<blockquote><p>When President Obama took office, the U.S. was engaged in two wars and faced terrorist threats at home and abroad.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>Misleading</em></p>
<p>This ambiguous statements implies that this is not the case today.  And it isn&#8217;t. Now the US has lost both wars. The terrorist threats have not gone away and were mainly faced by passengers on planes and the maligned NYPD.</p>
<blockquote><p>President Obama is committed to strengthening America’s leadership by maintaining a strong military and staying true to our values and ideals.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: False.</p>
<p>Obama has<a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/alan-w-dowd/a-smaller-defense-by-design/"> actually pushed some of the deepest cuts </a>of the military to date. Those cuts have been described as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/post/obama-cuts-defense-to-the-bone-and-then-some/2012/01/05/gIQACn7HdP_blog.html">going right down to the bone</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>President Obama fulfilled his promise to responsibly and safely bring our troops home from Iraq, and is making sure returning servicemembers have the support they need.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>False</em></p>
<p>Iraq is in the throes of a civil war and Al Qaeda bombings are taking a heavy toll. <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/daniel-greenfield/the-center-for-american-progress%E2%80%99-war-on-veterans/">Obama&#8217;s proposed cuts to Tricare</a> would <a href="http://freebeacon.com/obama-to-soldiers-pay-up/">also devastate health care for returning servicemembers</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>On May 1st, President Obama signed a historic Strategic Partnership Agreement between the United States and Afghanistan that will help us to complete our mission and end the war in the Afghanistan as fast as we safely and responsibly can. By 2014, America’s combat mission in Afghanistan will end.</p></blockquote>
<p>Verdict: <em>Misleading/False</em></p>
<p>If the mission is defeating the Taliban, then the mission has indisputably failed. If the mission was signing a meaningless agreement, then it succeeded. But we could have signed the agreement without losing over a thousand soldiers in Afghanistan. The Taliban have not been defeated and no one contends that they have been.</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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		<title>The Vicious Cycle of Western Apologies and Muslim Violence</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/the-vicious-cycle-of-western-apologies-and-muslim-violence/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-vicious-cycle-of-western-apologies-and-muslim-violence</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-bawer/the-vicious-cycle-of-western-apologies-and-muslim-violence/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Feb 2012 04:30:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Bawer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Afghanistan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[apology]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[koran burning]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim world]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=123721</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How we descended from rational human interaction into the abyss of appeasement.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/156613-koran-burning-protest.gif"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-123732" title="156613-koran-burning-protest" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/156613-koran-burning-protest.gif" alt="" width="375" height="246" /></a>A newspaper in a small European country publishes a few cartoons of Muhammed, and millions of Muslims erupt in outrage – or in what we have become accustomed to seeing described as outrage.  An obscure pastor of a tiny church in Florida threatens to destroy a Koran, and millions of Muslims erupt in that selfsame outrage.  Some NATO soldiers inadvertently burn a few copies of the Koran, and millions of Muslims erupt, yet again, in outrage.</p>
<p>And the next thing you know, large numbers of people have been killed, Western embassies have been vandalized, mischief and mayhem of every imaginable kind has taken place.  And meanwhile, the air is thick with apologies.</p>
<p>Not, of course, apologies by Muslim leaders for the primitive, brutal, and murderous conduct of their coreligionists, but apologies by Western leaders because somebody, somewhere, drew a picture or destroyed a book.</p>
<p>It is sheer absurdity.  And yet innumerable Western politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and other highly placed clowns have long since accustomed themselves to discussing this balderdash in the most solemn of tones.  A Muslim somewhere on this planet asserts that the burning of a copy of the Koran thousands of miles away causes him indescribable, excruciating personal torment.  And in a world awash in authentic reasons for emotional distress, this statement is taken not as a baldfaced lie, or as evidence of mental instability, but as a sincere expression of legitimate anguish worthy of the attention of, among others, the President of the United States of America.</p>
<p>In short, the Western world – the civilized, modern world, the world built on the pillars of reason and Enlightenment values – has, in recent years, in the name of multiculturalism, decided to react with respect to statements and behaviors that we would laugh off as patently nonsensical if they originated from within our own civilization.</p>
<p>And so, as I say, the apologies flow like Niagara – apologies by everyone from the President on down: generals, ambassadors, cabinet officials.  And the more ardent and numerous and overblown the apologies we offer this time for the present “offense,” the more “sensitive” the “offended” parties become, so that the next time they identify an excuse to take offense, the louder their cries of purported anguish will be and the more violent their acts of anti-Western remonstration.  They&#8217;ll expect even more urgent and passionate apologies, and they&#8217;ll get them. And so it continues in a seemingly endless cycle: as we become ever more contrite in response to their remarkably exquisite “sensitivity,” the more and more “sensitive” they&#8217;ll become, and the more deeply we&#8217;ll bow and scrape, and so on.</p>
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		<title>Terrorism, Witch Hunting the CIA, and National Security</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:20:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andrew McCarthy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Andy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[candid conversation]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cole]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congressman Royce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[counterterrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[david horowitz freedom center]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[democratic party officials]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Don]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[era]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eric Holder]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[issue]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[john yoo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Justice]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Karen Lugo]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[lapel pin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[MANHATTAN]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Marc]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Massachusetts]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mohammed]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[panel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[paul vallely]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[president reagan]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[profound truth]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[prosecution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[response]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Royce]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[santa barbara california]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Scott Brown]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[TIME]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=59206</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A unique discussion featuring John Yoo, Marc Thiessen and Andrew McCarthy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59288" title="mccarthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><em>Editors&#8217; note: At the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Santa Barbara Retreat this past weekend, one of the panels featured John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy in a fascinating and candid conversation about the effort on the part of Left-legal activists and Democratic Party officials to weaken American security by trying to broadly define as “torture” many of the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration to extract information from captured terrorists that would keep the American homeland safe.  Each of the three was crucially involved in major, behind-the- scenes decisions about national security over the last several years.  Each has remained a steadfast witness to the dangers America faced from terrorists and continues to face from those who would try to punish those who kept us safe since 9/11 &#8212; and, by so doing, to make us vulnerable to another attack.</em></p>
<p>David Horowitz Freedom Center<br />
Santa   Barbara, California<br />
April 23<sup>rd</sup> &#8211; 25<sup>th</sup>, 2010<br />
Karen Lugo, John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, Andrew McCarthy<br />
<strong>To watch the video, <a href="http://www.davidhorowitztv.com/retreat/2010/296-courts">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: First, I’d like to do a quick little, proud and very shameless plug for Muffin and Paul Vallely’s Soldiers Memorial Fund.  If you have not yet purchased your Swarovski crystal for the ladies, or men’s lapel pin, please see Paul and Muffin Vallely over there.</p>
<p>This panel that is about to present some thoughts and ideas, first on the problem, and then second, hopefully, a little bit about the solution &#8212; we’ve changed our title for today.  Originally, we were going to be addressing something about America or terrorism in the courts.  And so, we’ve expanded the title so that our panelists will be able to address a broader range of issues within the age of Obama.  And the subtopic is &#8212; when foes are treated like friends, when allies are alienated, and when jihad is not a word.</p>
<p>I think that when many of us originally heard that President Reagan had said that democracy, potentially, is always just one generation away from extinction; it was kind of recognized as a profound truth.  But many of us have had an epiphany within the last year, in acknowledging that it will be our generation that will be challenged to respond to this truth.  It will be our generation that must educate our peers &#8212; and, importantly, educate our children &#8212; as to what it is that’s at stake, and how that within one generation, we do stand to lose treasured, fundamental and irreplaceable liberties if we do not act &#8212; and that is, act between now and the next election in November.</p>
<p>We that fight Obama’s statist agenda of domestic entitlement and international appeasement have surely first recognized what Obama and Congress are destroying.  As we are the great resistance, and a rising army of patriots, we have learned of our extraordinary heritage of Judeo-Christian-inspired consensual government and a culture that once inspired initiative and independence.  We know the importance of keeping commitments to our allies and commanding respect &#8212; and, yes, some fear &#8212; in potential enemies.  We will hold our President accountable for the common defense of the nation.</p>
<p>Today, our panelists will discuss where this age of Obama is taking us, both in terms of domestic national security and international foreign policy standing.  You are all undoubtedly very aware of their backgrounds.  You’ve seen many of them on Fox News and read them, probably, almost daily.</p>
<p>So what I’d like to do is especially recognize books that they’ve written and that two of the authors will have for sale here  at the conference this weekend.  These three books &#8212; if that was all one would read between now and the election &#8212; could serve as a blueprint for America’s awakening, if only we read, and share, and educate.</p>
<p>So today, our panelists will share insights as to the challenges we face.  They will also spend a few minutes talking about how they see solutions that may be brought to bear on these challenges.</p>
<p>First of all, I would like to introduce Professor John Yoo.  Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty at Berkeley in 1993.  He has clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court and served as General Counsel of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee; also as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs and, yes, also worked on the definition of torture.  His third book, in a trilogy, is called “<em>Crisis in Command</em>.”  It is just out.  And it describes the history of Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush when faced with national security challenges, and what their Constitutional response was.</p>
<p>I’d also like to say very briefly about John Yoo &#8212; we talk a lot within this organization about education.  And I’ve been privileged to work with John Yoo and his students at Boalt on several projects where we have written amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court.  He’s worked with students at Boalt, I’ve worked with students at Chapman.  And in fact, this last year, we submitted an important brief on national security issues.  So this is something that is not discussed much.  But to understand that most of these organizations that do such things are on the Left &#8212; and I think we’re one of two or three operations in the United   States that uphold original understanding of the Constitution.  So I’d like to publicly thank John Yoo for that and introduce him now.</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Well, I’d like to thank Karen, and David Horowitz, for the invitation to come spend the morning with you.  I welcome any chance to leave the People’s Republic of Berkeley and venture to more conservative places, like Santa Barbara.</p>
<p>It’s also a great honor to be here.  Because finally, for the first time in my life, I get to be the most liberal person on a panel. This will probably be the first and last time that’s ever going to happen to me.</p>
<p>Before I start, I’d like to address a question that pretty much almost everyone I met during the cocktail hour last night asked me about, which is how did I beat John Stewart on “The Daily Show?”  So for those of you who didn’t see my appearance &#8212; and I also have a lot of thoughts about Marc Thiessen’s appearance, too, which followed a little bit after mine.  But I went on at the beginning of the book tour, back in the first week of January.  I think I so befuddled and confused him &#8212; after 30 minutes of jousting about what the definition of torture was, and when enhanced interrogation methods, as I would call them, can be used on terrorist leaders to reveal information about pending attacks &#8212; that he just kind of gave up.  And then, on the next day’s show, he said that I had beaten him.  And my students told me that was the first and only time he’s ever said that a guest on his show had beaten him.</p>
<p>So I went back and looked at the tape, and I tried to figure out, how did I defeat the great liberal talk show host of our day?  And I thought about it for a little bit.  And I think it has to do with the fact he’s probably never had a law professor on his show before.  Because if you think about what my job is &#8212; and has been for the last 17 years &#8212; it’s I confront an audience of 100 25-, 26-year-old people three times a week who are very smart, very clever &#8212; sometimes, occasionally funny &#8212; but are utterly unprepared for class and have done no reading.</p>
<p>So I think if any of you have the misfortune of being on “The Daily Show,” just treat him like a 21-year-old student, and you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>So my job on the panel today is try to put what we’re going to talk about in a historical context, which is to talk about where Obama sits in the course of the history of the presidency.  And my basic theme is that President Obama has brought to office what I think of as an upside-down or an inverted view of the presidency, where his view was that the presidency should be fairly weak office when it came to foreign affairs and national security, that should defer to the other branches; but that he should be a leader of domestic change, and domestic revolution in terms of the economy and society.  And this is the exact opposite, I think, of not just the framers’ design for the office but what his greatest predecessors have done.</p>
<p>So just to start off, in writing this book and giving some context, it’s important to figure out what we mean by greatest Presidents.  So the views of scholars and regular people are quite different on this question.</p>
<p>So one way to measure what regular Americans think &#8212; and I don’t have access to the sophisticated polling data of the last panel &#8212; but one way I approach such questions is to look at that great barometer of popular opinion, <em>Parade Magazine</em>.  So in January<strong>, </strong><em>Parade Magazine</em> did a poll.  And they asked regular Americans &#8212; which President should be added to Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>So I’d like to ask you all, who do you think the most Americans gave as the fifth President to be added to Mount Rushmore, after you correct for the fact that many Americans gave the names of Presidents who already were on Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>Who do you think Americans, regular people, thought ought to be the next President added to Mount  Rushmore?  Most people did not put Reagan.  I heard Obama.  Obama did make the list; he was number five.  I’ve always thought it would be hard for a sculptor to do the Nobel Peace Price on the stone, but yes.  Exactly right.  John F. Kennedy was ranked by Americans the next President who should be added, right?  Glamorous, young President, image of activity.</p>
<p>In 2005, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page did a poll of 300 scholars &#8212; I was one of them &#8212; to rank every President in order.  Kennedy was below average.  In fact, if you think about it, the more we learn about Kennedy, the worse his reputation tends to get.</p>
<p>Reagan was on the list, FDR was on the list, Clinton was on the list and, as I said, Obama was on the list.  This is somewhat at odds with whom we think of as the great Presidents, or these scholars do.  There’s wide agreement on who the top three are &#8212; Washington, Lincoln and FDR.  As you know, Washington and Lincoln are already on the monument.  The fourth and fifth greatest Presidents are Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, who are also on Mount Rushmore.</p>
<p>Reagan made sixth.  And actually, that’s a remarkable change.  Because if those of you who can remember back to 1988, when he left office, and remember what academics and people in the media were saying about Reagan, he was widely considered a mediocre President by the intellectual elites.  And now, it’s stunning that a poll of academics rates Reagan the sixth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The seventh is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention &#8212; was Harry Truman.  Right?  He left office with his opinion poll ratings in the low 30s, in the middle of an unpopular war.  He could have run for reelection and chose not to.  But now, we appreciate Truman because he set the basic foundations for our long-term strategy in the war against the Soviets.  I won’t ask any of the smart people here whether that reminds you of anybody.</p>
<p>The eighth greatest President was Dwight Eisenhower &#8212; again, a President who was criticized in many of the same terms that Reagan had been criticized, as sort of out of touch, grandfatherly; we like him, but not his policies.  Eisenhower’s considered now the eighth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The ninth greatest President is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention.  But if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be enjoying our nice day here on the coast in Santa   Barbara, James Polk, who deliberately triggered a war with the Mexicans in 1848.  He turned a border skirmish on the Texas-Mexican border between about 100 troops into a justification for launching an amphibious invasion of Mexico, capturing Mexico City and engaging in what we call regime change, and then taking away the one third of the best part of the country, and annexing it to the United States.  A guy who was so unpopular that when he ran for office, he had to go around promising he would not run for reelection.</p>
<p>Tenth greatest President &#8212; Andrew Jackson, whose face, of course, is on the $20 bill, who would be horrified at the idea that he would be on the $20 bill, since his great mission was to destroy the Bank of the United   States at the time.</p>
<p>Let me ask you one more question.  In this ranking of great Presidents, who do you think was ranked the worst President in American history? Carter, no.  Carter, actually, is about average these days, among scholars.</p>
<p>Buchanan.  So I just want to be clear &#8212; when I speak in college audiences, and I say Buchanan, the students pause, because they think I’m talking about Pat Buchanan -that he might’ve been President when they were kids, they don’t really know.  But we are, in fact, talking about James Buchanan, who was the President right before Lincoln.  Right.  And that’s the basic message of the book, and the basic context I want to set out, is &#8212; why is Buchanan the worst President, by universal acclaim, among scholars?  And why is Lincoln almost tied with Washington for being our greatest President?  It has everything to do with emergency and the power of the office.</p>
<p>Buchanan and Lincoln were both Presidents during the worst emergency that we have faced &#8212; the Civil War.  And Buchanan responded to it by saying &#8212; many people don’t know this &#8212; Buchanan thought that secession was unconstitutional.  He actually thought that the states could not leave the Union.  But he said, As President, I have no constitutional power to stop it from happening.  The presidency is powerless.  And he actually said, I call on Congress to reach a solution.</p>
<p>Those of you who’ve worked with a legislature can guess what Congress did.  They formed a special commission to study the problem.  Lincoln comes into office a few months later.  The period between election and inauguration was much longer then.  Lincoln says, I agree with President Buchanan &#8212; secession is unconstitutional.  But I have the power as President to protect the country, to protect its security.  And he took extraordinary measures to do that.  He raised an army and a navy, he took money out of the treasury, without congressional permission.  He started offensive operations against the South.  He suspended the writ of habeas corpus through the country, all with the goal of protecting the United   States during period of emergency.  His most famous act, and the one for which we as Republicans remember him the most &#8212; the Emancipation Proclamation &#8212; was what people today would call a unilateral exercise of executive power.</p>
<p>Does anybody remember what the Supreme Court’s opinion about emancipation was in 1863, at the time of President Lincoln’s order?  Supreme Court’s opinion still was Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which said no federal or state government law could eliminate slavery.  Lincoln brushed that aside.  He said, To win the Civil War, we have to free the slaves, which is actually why the Emancipation Proclamation only applied in the South, but not in the peaceful areas of the North.</p>
<p>So in the time I have remaining let me turn to President Obama.  Because the lesson, I think, that comes from the history of our great Presidents and their time during periods of emergency are twofold .  One is that the framers designed the presidency in the weird way they did.  They designed the executive branch with one person in charge, where all the power and responsibility goes to that one person, so that he could act quickly, swiftly, secretly, decisively, as the Federalist Papers talked about.</p>
<p>When it came to domestic policy, however, the framers thought that the presidency would be a modest office.  They were worried about Congress when it came to domestic policy.  Fact, they specifically gave the President the veto power, so that the presidency would moderate the legislative branch.  The framers were extremely worried about the idea that Congress, which had access to the power of the purse, would take money from one group of citizens and transfer it to another group of citizens.  Where would they have gotten that crazy idea from?  The President’s job was to stop Congress from enacting special-interest legislation and to pursue the national interest.</p>
<p>Just let me close by saying &#8212; and now set it up for Marc and Andrew, my good friends &#8212; look at what Obama did when he came into office.  Right?  He saw his job as pushing Congress to go farther.  And because of that, he’s undermining the legitimacy and power of the presidency, by combining it too closely with Congress, as we’ve seen with health care.  His job was to restrain Congress from passing health care, not to prod it to going farther.</p>
<p>At the same time, I’d say in national security matters, he has tried to retract the power of the presidency.  That’s the way to understand his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who thought up the idea of the 9/11 attacks in civilian court in New York City.  There’s a lot of crazy reasons why this is not a good idea, not the least of which is spending $250 million a year on security in downtown New York, when it only costs, I think &#8212; I checked &#8212; only $108 million to build the Guantanamo Bay base.</p>
<p>But if you think about it, when you transfer the trial of terrorists to civilian courts, you are, as President, giving up the power to set terrorism policy on a lot of matters to another branch of government, something Presidents Washington and Lincoln and FDR never would have done.  Obama doesn’t want the responsibility, he doesn’t want to make the decisions about the war on terrorism.  But at the same time, he’s, I think, damaging the presidency by pulling the powers of the institution back, and hoping someone else will make the hard choices.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that’s why we have a President.  If these jobs, these decisions, were easy, we wouldn’t need the President to make them.  And I worry that because of his efforts to avoid these hard choices when it comes to the most important function of government, which is protecting the security of its citizens, that President Obama will not use the powers of his office, as his greatest predecessors did, to protect the security of the country.</p>
<p>So thank you very much, and I turn it over to Marc and Andrew.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen:</strong> Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Actually, the subtitle of my book could have just as easily been “How John Yoo Kept America Safe.”  So I’m proud to be on a panel with John Yoo. And there are two other people who are responsible for my screed, who are here today.  And they are David Horowitz and Peter Collier.  And the reason is that back in the 1980s, when I was an aspiring young leftist at Vassar College, I was purged from the Student Coalition Against Apartheid for having raised a question about necklacing, which was a practice that the African National Congress used to punish &#8212; I won’t go into the details of it, it was horrific.  And I was informed one night that there had been a vote, and I had been purged.  Because that’s what communists do, they purge people.</p>
<p>And so I was a leftist without a home.  And a conservative friend said, You’ve got to read this book, “<em>Destructive Generation</em>,” by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.  And I got it, and I read it overnight.  I’ve been going to the right ever since, and never turned back.  So as a result, here I am, having written a book in defense of the enhanced interrogation program.</p>
<p>You’ve undoubtedly heard the myth that Barack Obama is continuing the national security policies of the Bush Administration.  Because he’s doing Predator strikes, he hasn’t eliminated the Patriot Act or the National Security Agency’s listening program, using the state secrets defense, supporting indefinite detention, keeping a responsible drawdown in Iraq that Bush had set in motion, and he’s launched a surge in Afghanistan.  And so he’s continuing these terrible policies, as the Left says.</p>
<p>Imagine, if you would, that in the midst of World War II, Neville Chamberlain had come to power, and in the middle of World War II.  And he continued to fight the war, and he continued the bombings of Germany, and he continued the battle in North Africa and Italy, and launched the D-Day invasion.  But he eliminated the Ultra program that had broken the German codes.  And he spoke out and said that this &#8212; but listening in to the Germans was against our values, and then released the secrets behind this program to the public, and thus to the Nazi leadership in Berlin.</p>
<p>We wouldn’t say that Neville Chamberlain was continuing the policies of Winston Churchill, would we?  This is essentially what Barack Obama has done, in eliminating the CIA interrogation program, and then releasing all the secrets of how we interrogated terrorists and got them to tell us their plans for new attacks to the enemy.  Today, we are in growing danger of experiencing another 9/11 attack.  Because we are no longer capturing, detaining and interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>Think back for a minute to the period after 9/11.  We knew that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but we didn’t know who.  We didn’t know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 or the operational commander of al-Qaeda.  In fact, Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, says that he wasn’t even in our flowchart of senior al-Qaeda leaders at the time.  We didn’t know who his key accomplices were.</p>
<p>And unbeknownst to us, there were two terrorist networks out there, active, that we didn’t know the members of or what their plans were &#8212; the KSM network that had launched the 9/11 attacks, and the network called the Hambali network, which was a Southeast Asian terror network that KSM was working with to develop follow-on attacks against America.</p>
<p>We didn’t know who they were or what their plans were.  And in fact, we later found out that they had in fact set in motion plans for a series of terrorist attacks.  These included a plot to repeat the destruction of 9/11 in Europe by hijacking airplanes in Europe and flying them into Heathrow Airport and buildings in London’s financial district.  They included a plot to blow up our consulate in Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan in an attack that would have replicated the East Africa Embassy bombings in Pakistan.  They had set in motion a plot to blow up our marine camp in Jabuti using explosive-laden water tankers.  They had deployed a cell that was developing anthrax for attacks in the United States.</p>
<p>And most nefariously of all, they were working with Hambali.  KSM knew that after 9/11 we’d be on the lookout for Arab men.  So he developed a cell of Southeast Asians, thinking we wouldn’t be on the lookout for them, working with this terrorist Hambali, to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which is the tallest building on the West Coast, just south of here.</p>
<p>We didn’t know any of this.  None of it.  And then, the CIA began capturing and interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaeda.  We captured Abu Zubaydah, who was a senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he gave us information that led us to Ramzi bin al Shibh, who was one of the senior key operatives in the 9/11 attacks.  And together, they gave us the information that led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest of these terrorist gave us information that led to the roundup of dozens of members of these two networks, and put them &#8212; dismantled them both and put them out of business, and stopped the attacks that they had set in motion.</p>
<p>These people were captured.  In fact, it’s ironic &#8212; I know Andy’s going to talk about the trials in New York &#8212; every single one of the people that Barack Obama wants to put on trial in New York City were captured as a direct result of CIA interrogations.  If it had not been for the CIA program, Barack Obama would have no one to put on trial.</p>
<p>So this is one of the most important intelligence programs, probably &#8212; certainly in the war on terror, and possibly in the history of the United States.</p>
<p>Now, fast-forward to beginning of 2009.  Barack Obama becomes President of the United States.  And he, on his second day in office, eliminates this program.  Almost simultaneously, as he is doing this, there is a new terrorist network forming on the Arabian Peninsula, called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a merger between al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which were two local &#8212; small, local terrorist networks that were basically focused on killing &#8212; attacking Western interests there.  And they form a transnational terrorist network, who has the intent and capability of striking the United States of America, here in the American homeland.  And the Obama Administration admits, by its own admission, that we did not know that they were either capable or had the intent to strike us here at home.</p>
<p>But on Christmas Day, one of their operatives got through all of our defenses and was on a plane, circling Detroit, and almost blew that plane up in what would have been the most catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil since the 9/11 attacks.  Why were we caught blind?  Because we were not trying to capture, detain and interrogate the leaders of al-Qaeda, who could’ve told us about this new terror network.  We didn’t know anything about it.</p>
<p>In fact, not only were we not interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda who could’ve warned us about this &#8212; when a high-value terrorist fell into our laps, like manna from heaven, we read him his rights and told him he had the right to remain silent, and gave him a lawyer.  It’s insanity.  It’s absolute insanity.</p>
<p>Christmas Day, we avoided disaster by pure luck.  Pure luck.  This was not a foiled attack.  The bomb malfunctioned.  If it hadn’t, he was planning to blow that plane up over Detroit.  So not only the couple hundred people on that plane but thousands of people on the ground would’ve died as a result of it.  You cannot keep this country safe unless you interrogate senior terrorist leaders.</p>
<p>Now, why is interrogation essential?  The failure to stop the Christmas Day attack was a failure to connect the dots.  You’ve heard that phrase.  In my book, “<em>Courting Disaster</em>,” I interviewed Mike Hayden, the former Director of the CIA.  And he explained it to me this way &#8212; why is interrogation important.  Intelligence, he said, is like putting together a puzzle.  And you got all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you.  And you have to connect the pieces, connect the dots.  But you’re not allowed to look at the cover of the box to see what the picture looks like.  That’s the challenge of intelligence.</p>
<p>There’s only one way to find out what that picture looks like &#8212; capture the people who know what the picture on the cover of the box looks like and get them to tell you.  When you capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it’s not that he’s giving you pieces of the puzzle that you could get another way.  He’s telling you how the pieces fit together.  He’s giving you the picture on the cover of the box.</p>
<p>And today, this is the capability we have voluntarily given up &#8212; the ability to see the picture on the cover of the box.  And so this is why we’re in danger of another attack.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, the <em>Washington Post</em> reported, on its front page, that the US had tracked down the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa, which is a virulent terror al-Qaeda offshoot.  This was a big deal to find this guy.  And they knew where he was, and they were tracking him.  And so they went to the White House.  And they gave the President three options.  They said, We can capture him alive and interrogate him, we can kill him with a Predator strike, or we can send a helicopter in with commandos and kill him, and then repel down and get the DNA to confirm that he’s dead.  And the military said, We want to capture him alive.  The President said kill him.  And so they killed him with the third option, sending a helicopter team.  So we could’ve reached him, because the commandos went in and actually got his DNA to confirm that he was dead.</p>
<p>And think of the intelligence that was lost with that man, vaporized with that man being killed.  The information this guy had.  If President Bush had made that decision when we located Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there would be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York City.  A dead terrorist can’t tell you his plans for new attacks.  We have to capture these people alive and bring them in.</p>
<p>Now, why did the CIA interrogation program work so well?  All right, I’m winding down.  Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey is here.  He would probably have to report me to the CIA Security Office if I told you this story a year ago.  But now that Barack Obama’s released all the details, I can tell it to you.</p>
<p>The first guy that we captured was a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah, senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he was the first one who was waterboarded.  And after he was waterboarded, he said something remarkable to his interrogators.  I got to &#8212; one of the things about my book is it’s the first time you’ll hear from the actual interrogators.   I talked to them, the people who were in the room for these interrogations.  And Zubaydah &#8212; after he was waterboarded &#8212; they actually said to him, after he broke, you know, We don’t want to do this waterboarding.  Is there something else we can do?  He said, No, no, no.  You must do this for all the brothers.</p>
<p>Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell &#8212; he thanked us for waterboarding him, and said you must do this for the other brothers, you cannot stop waterboarding.  Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell us that?  What he explained was that the jihadi philosophy is that they &#8212; Allah is going to prevail, no matter what happens.  The victory is predestined.  His responsibility to Allah is to resist as far as he can.  And then, once he’s met the limits of resistance, he’s free to spill his guts and tell us everything he knows.</p>
<p>So if you know this, do you give him Snickers bars?  Do you try and develop a rapport with him?  No, you have to give him something to resist.</p>
<p>So what the CIA did was they developed this program, where they would give him &#8212; they gave him something that did not cross the line into torture &#8212; John, you made sure that was the case &#8212; with the least coercive technique first, escalating up to maximum of waterboarding, which is not torture, the way it was done by the CIA.  And they gave him a chance to resist something.  And almost &#8212; of the people who run the CIA program &#8212; there were 100 people brought into CIA interrogations &#8212; only 30 had any enhanced interrogation techniques used on them.  The rest said I’ll talk to you, CIA, I will tell you anything you want to know.  Thirty of them had enhanced interrogation techniques, and three made it to waterboarding.</p>
<p>And they developed techniques that were safe, that would not harm them, but got the information.  And it was the most successful program in &#8212; possibly in the history of the United States, in intelligence.  And Barack Obama has eliminated it.</p>
<p>Just in closing, a quick point -we are in danger because we don’t have this capability anymore.  And we’ve been asked to sort of give you the silver lining in the dark cloud.  It’s a pretty dark cloud, when it comes to the war on terror.  The silver lining is the American people are with us on this issue.  If you look at the polls &#8212; and I cite some of them in the book &#8212; 71 percent of Americans support enhanced interrogation.  Seventy-one percent.  Scott Brown, who they mentioned &#8212; Congressman Royce mentioned him in the early panel &#8212; campaigned as an open supporter of enhanced interrogation, and he won election in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.  If that does not tell you that Americans are with us on this issue, then I don’t know what does.</p>
<p>But for some reason, Republican legislators and Republican lawmakers are afraid to talk about this.  Because they don’t want to be tagged as supporting torture.  Well, it’s not torture.</p>
<p>In my book &#8212; I explain it in great detail, why &#8212; what the laws are on torture, you can read the Yoo memos &#8212; it’s not torture.  And the Democrats are vulnerable on this, because they’re putting us in grave danger.  And we need to be able to speak out about this.  Christmas Day was a wakeup call.  We almost suffered another 9/11 in our midst.  And it was just four months ago.  It’s been forgotten.  When’s the last time someone mentioned it to you?  This almost happened.</p>
<p>I hope and pray that it does not take al-Qaeda succeeding in a mass-casualty attack on our country for us to wake up.  But hope and prayer are not a sufficient national security policy.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you, Marc.</p>
<p>Andrew McCarthy is Senior Fellow at the National Review &#8211;</p>
<p>&#8211; “<strong>Willful Blindness</strong>.”  I highly recommend that.  His new one is coming out &#8212; unfortunately will not be here in time for him to sign this weekend.  But the new one, called “<em>The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,</em>” I’m sure will be highly instrumental in educating people as far as what’s at stake for this next election.</p>
<p>So again, thank you very much for all of the work that you do, Andy.  And we welcome you to make comments this morning.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> Thanks so much.  And thanks, Michael, for inviting me here.  Imagine being placed on the extreme right of this panel.</p>
<p>But I think, actually, John’s too kind.  Because I guess we could’ve sat anyone anywhere, on this panel.</p>
<p>What I’d like to talk about is this whole issue of the civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 plotters.  And I think it’s important to talk about it.  Because what you’ve heard in the public domain about this is really, in my mind, a significant misrepresentation of what really is at stake, and what the position is of those of us who have opposed having a civilian trial in Manhattan &#8212; or, frankly, anyplace else &#8212; of these particular enemy combatants, or indeed of enemy combatants in general.</p>
<p>I don’t want to be presumptuous.  But I would suggest to you that if you’re being told that Eric Holder is more in favor of prosecuting bad guys than I am, you probably ought to check that, see if that makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>We’re talking here about a very small category of &#8212; whether you would call it war criminal or defendant.  I hear the Attorney General say, Don’t take this tool away from us, we need this tool, prosecution’s an important tool.  Nobody &#8212; least of all, me &#8212; is saying that we shouldn’t be doing prosecutions in the civilian courts, or that prosecutions in the civilian courts are not part &#8212; and must not &#8212; or, not that they must be part of a total government counterterrorism strategy.  What we’re talking about is an approach to counterterrorism in the post-9/11 era that learns from the mistakes of the pre-9/11 era.</p>
<p>In pre-9/11 times, during the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department wasn’t just the tip of the counterterrorism spear; it was pretty much the entirety of the spear.  I mean, the intelligence community was doing some things.  But for the most part, the government’s national security strategy against terrorism during the 1990s was prosecution in the civilian system.</p>
<p>And what we learned from that experience, I think first and foremost, is that it is a provocatively weak response.  I’m not saying that we can’t prosecute people in the civilian system; we know we can.  We did it repeatedly in the eight years between the time the World Trade Center was bombed and when it was destroyed.</p>
<p>But think about what the bottom line of all that is.  Basically, in about nine trials, we took out 29 people, which is sometimes less than what our military does in a single day, in the post-9/11 era.  Most of the most important terrorists &#8212; bin Laden, Zawahiri, the rest of them &#8212; but for a very small number of those 29, the people that we took out by prosecuting were the lowest of the low-ranking players.  They were the low-hanging fruit, the most easily replaced terrorists in any of the cells or the organization.  I mean, there were a few differences &#8212; my guy, the Blind Sheikh, Ramzi Yousef, two or three others.  But of the 29, most of them were the most easily replaced.</p>
<p>And in fact, I think more than half of them were out of the 1993 Trade Center bombing itself.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Khobar Towers attack which killed 19 members of our air force.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Cole attack which killed 17 members of our navy.</p>
<p>So I think what we learned from that approach is that it is too limited, and it has too many downsides to it, to be a significant response to a national security challenge.  Osama bin Laden, for example, has been under indictment by the Justice Department since June of 1998.  That’s before the embassy bombings, before the Cole, before 9/11.  He’s still at large.  But the point is that obviously, the response of bringing al-Qaeda to court was not something that stopped al-Qaeda from not only continuing to attack but continuing to attack in a way that was much more &#8212; that became more aggressive and more audacious over time.</p>
<p>So how do we change after 9/11?  We don’t say no more prosecutions in the civilian court.  We say instead that the Justice Department has to have an appropriately subordinate role in what is a total government response to what is a national security challenge &#8212; a war, not a crime wave.  So there will be times, as we go forward in this struggle &#8212; and we will go forward for quite a long time, I think &#8212; but there will be times when it will be primarily a military task, an intelligence task.  There will never be a time, I don’t think, when our Treasury resources are unimportant, so that we’re tracking terrorism finances, not just to try to dry up the funding, but actually as a source of intelligence &#8212; to be able to follow the money, see where it goes, and try to figure out who is it who’s attached to the money.</p>
<p>After all, the only defense that we have in this war is really intelligence.  There’s never going to be a moment when we sit on a navy ship and sign a treaty with al-Qaeda.  Our defense in a war of this type, against a transnational enemy that attacks in stealth and that defies the laws and customs of war, is intelligence.  We have to know who they are, where they are, and what their plans are, what they’re next most likely to hit.</p>
<p>In that framework, the Justice Department still plays a crucially important role.  But it’s a subordinate role.  We heard a lot of debate, particularly in the three or four years right after 9/11, about the Patriot Act, and the powers that it gave to the &#8212; particularly the intelligence side of the executive branch, and, you know, whether that was appropriate, whether it was over the line.</p>
<p>Having actually had to deal with these cases, I think that the most important law that has been enacted with respect to counterterrorism is actually the 1996 overhaul of terrorism law, which gave prosecutors tools that were unavailable to me, for example, back in 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed.  After 1996, they gave us, you know, a terrorism conspiracy statute.  They added some bombing conspiracy provisions.  Most importantly, they put in a new offense called Material Support to Terrorism, which became a staple of counterterrorism prosecutions after that.</p>
<p>After those laws were put in in 1996, you could still have a healthy debate about whether, philosophically, we ought to be approaching this challenge as a war or a crime.  But prosecutors could no longer complain, as we complained back in 1993, that the tools we had were not adequate to the task.</p>
<p>But why are these tools so important?  Because what Material Support to Terrorism allows you to do is to strangle terrorism cells and terrorism plots in the cradle, before they gain momentum and before they’re able to strike.  And that really has to be what the role is for the Justice Department in a post-9/11 era, when we’re trying to move from prosecution to prevention.</p>
<p>The idea is now that we want to stop these things from happening well in advance, rather than try to content ourselves with prosecuting people after Americans and other innocents have already been killed, which was the 1990s model.  We don’t want less prosecutions in the civilian courts.  We want more prosecution in the civilian courts.  But they’re not going to be the same kind of cases as they were before 9/11.</p>
<p>And sometimes, frankly, they’re not going to be very attractive cases.  I think what we’re asking prosecutors to do now is, frankly, a lot harder than I was asked to do back in the early to mid-1990s.  I don’t mean to say that these cases aren’t difficult.  They present challenges that other sorts of cases don’t.  But it’s not the most difficult thing on the planet to prosecute even a bunch of terrorists after there’s been a mass-murder attack against Americans.  Even the <em>New York Times</em> could get behind a prosecution like that.</p>
<p>But what we’re asking prosecutors to do today is something that’s much more difficult.  Can you imagine what the <em>New York Times</em> would’ve said if the Justice Department had tried to bring a case against Mohamed Atta on the information that was known prior to 9/11?  Not only Atta, but any of the 9/11 hijackers?  They would’ve said it was overreach, they would’ve said it was profiling, they would’ve said that it was baseless.</p>
<p>What we’re actually asking prosecutors to do now, along with law enforcement and along with our intelligence community, is to anticipate what these guys will do next and stop them from doing it.  And those cases are going to have some ambiguity to them.  They’re not going to be as solid as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  They’re not going to have the same kind of public support as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  But it still is a very important role.  And it’s one that has to be done if we’re actually going to stop things from happening.</p>
<p>So I think that the important thing, from my perspective, that I’d like you to take away about this controversy over the civilian trial, is that what we’re talking about is whether it’s appropriate to bring into court actual war criminals who have either plotted to carry out or have actively carried out war crimes against the United States.  I would suggest to you that it’s not only a provocatively weak response, it not only is inappropriate, given the amount of intelligence that we have to turn over for due process purposes while we’re at war; it’s a betrayal of the very impetus for doing it, which is international humanitarian law.</p>
<p>The whole idea behind humanitarian law and behind the Geneva Conventions is to civilize warfare.  It’s not an automatic system, it’s an opt-in system.  You have to opt in by conduct.  You have to comply with the laws and customs of war.  And what we’re doing when we bring these particular offenders into civilian court is we’re taking the worst of the worst, the people who actually target civilians for mass murder, and carry out those mass-murder attacks.  And rather than handling them as military enemies, we are clothing them in all of the rights of Americans, in all of the rights of the people that they’re sworn to kill.</p>
<p>And let me just close by saying it’s not tripe; I think it’s a truism, to say that when you reward bad behavior, you’re only apt to get more of it.  And when we give this kind of a reward &#8212; the entrance into our own civilian justice system with all of the protections of the Bill of Rights &#8212; to people who are actively trying to make war &#8212; who are actively, actually, making war against the United States &#8212; we are inviting more of what we need to be preventing.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you very much, Andy.</p>
<p>Andy mentioned the importance of being able to prosecute terrorist activity under this Material Support statute.  And in fact, the case that I worked on &#8212; the brief that my students and John Yoo’s students helped to draft, and Andy’s Center for Law and Counterterrorism cosigned &#8212; has to do with an attack on the statute under constitutional speech rights, in claiming that an individual who is supporting a charitable effort sponsored by a named terror organization has his speech rights infringed upon if he is not able to &#8212; if there is an ability to prosecute his activities in supporting the terrorist organization, but charitably.</p>
<p>So it’s going to be interesting to see how this one’s resolved.  Because from the line of questioning the day that the arguments were made, it’s hard to tell exactly what the split will be.  But the name of that case is Humanitarian Legal Project.  And there should be a decision on that within the next few weeks.</p>
<p>So I’m going to ask the panelists if they will talk for just a couple of minutes about what their solutions are &#8212; what they would advise that we do as citizens to see that national security is kept to the forefront, as far as on our national agenda.</p>
<p>John?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Thanks, Karen.</p>
<p>So, three ideas.  One is, even though I think that the presidency has this great power of national security, it’s not to say that it’s without check.  Even in wartime, when the President’s power is at its height, Congress is still in control of funding and the size and shape of the military.  And I think electing members to Congress who are going to take a much more pro-national security stance is one of the most important things we can do.</p>
<p>President Obama wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay.  He gave an order in his first week of office to do that within a year.  Congress prohibited the use of any funds to transfer prisoners into United States and has so far managed to block his efforts to do that.  Perfectly within Constitution.  This is a Congress with huge Democratic majorities.  So I think more of that would be possible.</p>
<p>Second thing is judges, which we don’t think about much when we think about national security.  But the greatest obstacle, I think, to the effective fighting of the war on terrorism, unfortunately, has been our own judges.  If you look at a lot of the policies in the war on terrorism, the presidency and Congress, at least under the Bush Administration, actually agreed on enhanced surveillance.  [Congressmen], actually &#8212; as Marc shows in his book &#8212; did approve of the interrogation programs, although they don’t want anyone to know about it.  The judges are the ones who first started trying to pull down the policies in the war on terrorism.</p>
<p>Just to give you a small anecdote &#8212; I wrote a piece in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> last weekend about Justice Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Court.  When Justice Stevens was a young intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II, he was allowed to listen in on the operation to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, which was made possible by the breaking of the code secret &#8212; the Japanese naval codes.</p>
<p>Justice Stevens thought that it was wrong for the United States to specifically target and shoot down Admiral Yamamoto.  He later gave a speech, many years later, saying that he thought it violated humanitarian norms for the American military to specifically try to kill another member of the enemy.  And in fact, he then said, And that’s why I’m pretty much against the death penalty now, too.</p>
<p>Think about what Justice Stevens would think about the Predator drone program.  Justice Stevens has been the leader on the Court at trying to do what Andy has described would be the wrong answer, which is to give all terrorists the same constitutional rights as you and I would, if we were prosecuted for any garden-variety crime.</p>
<p>Last thing I’ll just say quickly is &#8212; aside from electing members of Congress, aside from pressing the Senate not to confirm judges who are weak on national security &#8212; third thing, I think, is that &#8212; collectively could do outside the arm of the government is to create some kind of [fund] organization to protect officers of the CIA.</p>
<p>Because &#8212; I think we probably would all agree to this, I don’t know &#8212; but there’s going to come a witch hunt against the men and women who are the subject of Marc’s book.  And I don’t think they’re getting a lot of support right now.  These people &#8212; I mean, they make $50,000, $60,000 a year.  And they’re going to come under the worst legal expenses and political harassment you can &#8212; I lived through this for the last year.  And luckily, I survived.  I was lucky to have one of the best attorneys in America volunteer to represent me for free.  Also, I made myself a real pain in the ass in the media.  And I think that actually scared them off a little bit.</p>
<p>But there’s going to be dozens of CIA officers who are currently, and will be, investigated for what they did to protect the country.  And I think that’s one thing we could all do that doesn’t involve the government, you know, would be to help defend those guys.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: I agree with all that.  Couple things &#8212; I would say the most important thing is for us as conservatives to speak out.  When the American people are with us as strongly as they are, speaking out works.  I mean, the fact is, there is no trial going on right now for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York because of public opposition.  And so we have the power, if we speak out, to stop these things from happening.</p>
<p>Andy laid out a number of the reasons why the trial was a bad idea.  Those legal &#8212; I’m the only one who’s not a lawyer here.  I’ll give you a different reason.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed disappeared from the face of the earth when he was captured in 2003.  He was in a CIA [black site], completely cut off.  Then he’s been Guantanamo ever since.  If he were to be put on trial, and suddenly emerge this heroic leader, with his flowing turbans, and all that, the effect that would have on the jihadi movement, the shot in the arm that would be, that after all &#8212; everything we did to him, that he’s still standing, and would put us on trial, it would make &#8212; that trial would make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a traffic court hearing.  So we know this is a bad idea.  We’ve stopped it so far, we got to keep the pressure on them.</p>
<p>Second thing is &#8212; push for the restoration of the CIA interrogation program &#8212; not the one that John approved, and that was in place in the first years of the Obama Administration; but the program that actually Barack Obama inherited.  There’s a myth out there that Barack Obama eliminated waterboarding.  Waterboarding had already been taken out of the CIA program when he came into office.</p>
<p>Mike Hayden &#8212; I told the story in my book, how Mike Hayden and Admiral McConnell, the head of &#8212; the Director of National Intelligence, scaled back the program, specifically to create a program that could be supported by even a Democratic administration coming in.  When Obama came into office, the techniques that were left were the tummy slap, the facial hold, a diet of liquid Ensure, which &#8212; I’m sure the makers of Ensure would love to know that their product was considered torture &#8211;and mild sleep deprivation, maximum of four days.  No one would consider that torture.  These were the techniques.  The program still worked.  Because the terrorists didn’t know that.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you another story that &#8212; Jim Woolsey’s going to be busy on the phones with the Security Office and the CIA.  When the program was scaled back, a terrorist named Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was captured.  You probably never heard of him.  He’s one of the most &#8212; he’s a very, very senior al-Qaeda leader.  He was a major in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined al-Qaeda, interestingly enough, and was one of bin &#8212; he was a member of the Shura Council &#8212; very senior guy.  And he was being sent by bin Laden to Iraq to run al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, and he never made it.</p>
<p>And he was brought into a CIA interrogation site.  And they took off his hood, and they said, We’re the CIA.  And he said, I know, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.  And he did.  Why?  Because he didn’t know what he would face.  He didn’t know that all he was going to face was the tummy slap and liquid Ensure.</p>
<p>So the idea that this is torture, and that we can do &#8212; we have to follow the Army Field Manual, which is the manual &#8212; local police &#8212; district attorneys have more authority to interrogate terrorists than the Army Field Manual provides.  A district attorney, on a daily basis, will say to a criminal in an interrogation, I’m going to put a needle in your arm if you don’t give up your accomplices.  You’re going to see the death penalty.  You can’t do that under the Army Field Manual.  We can’t threaten a terrorist in any way.  It’s crazy that we’re following the Army Field Manual for all interrogations.  So we got to push for a restoration of this program that is absolutely &#8212; there’s no reason why Barack Obama and the most liberal Democrat administration in history couldn’t even support using this program.</p>
<p>And then, I agree wholeheartedly with John about standing by these CIA interrogators.  These people are not torturers; they’re heroes.  They don’t deserve subpoenas; they deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  They kept this country safe and stopped the next 9/11.</p>
<p>One last story, just to tell you something about these people.  One of the interrogators who I spoke with &#8212; I tell the story in my book.  I call him Harry.  It’s not his name, but that’s the name I use for him in the book.  And he’s the guy who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And one night, he went into KSM’s cell.  And after the interrogation part was over, he actually had a very good relationship with KSM.  KSM called him Emir, which is a title of great respect in jihadi ranks.  They’re seen as respected adversaries in war.</p>
<p>And he came in.  KSM greeted him warmly, said how are you.  And they were talking.  And he said, And then KSM turned to me.  And he said, Just so you know, if I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill your wife, I’m going to kill your sisters, I’m going to kill your whole family.  Because that’s what I do.  And he said, You know, this job is hard.  And sometimes I get down about it.  But then I think back to those two people standing on the ledge of the 90<sup>th</sup> floor of the World Trade Center, who held hands and stepped off into space.  I think of them, and I just go back to work.</p>
<p>This is the kind of people we have, who’ve been protecting our country.  And we’re threatening them with prosecution?  It’s insanity.  These people are heroes, and we need to stand up for them.  So I think that’s what [we should do].</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> I want to say one general thing, and then maybe one specific legislative proposal that I think is important.</p>
<p>The general comment is I think that we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing.  What I think has emerged, particularly in the last year, is that the Left badly misread the election not only of 2008 but, I think, also of 2006, in the sense that they took what I think they were entitled to take as a very ambivalent attitude of the American people toward the war in Iraq.  And they read into that a generalized ambivalence, or even opposition, to the war on terror, to the actual threat by al-Qaeda and its affiliates to the American people.</p>
<p>And I think that was a very bad misreading.  I don’t believe there’s ever been a time, particularly after 9/11, that the American people have been anything other than completely supportive of the idea that we need to take aggressive measures &#8212; whether they’re surveillance, prosecution, interrogation, what have you &#8212; to protect the American people from attack.</p>
<p>And because this war still resonates with the American people, look at where we are.  Despite everything that Obama said in the run up to the election, Gitmo is still open.  And it’ll be open for some time.  We’re still using military commissions.  They did a couple of cosmetic tweaks on them, but they haven’t changed them.  And in fact &#8212; think how crazy this is &#8212; actually, they’re using the military commissions to prosecute the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole, even though the Cole was attacked at a time when we didn’t have military commissions and President Bush hadn’t even issued the order yet for military commissions.</p>
<p>So you might ask yourself, you know, rationally, what’s the predicate, what’s the foundation, for trying those guys in a military commission?  You know, the answer to that is 9/11.  But of course, we’re taking the 9/11 guys, and we’re putting them in a civilian trial.  You can’t even wrap your brain around how crazy that is.</p>
<p>But my point is that the military commissions are still up and running.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not getting a trial in Manhattan.  And if I were a betting man, I’d bet he’s not going to get a trial in a civilian court, either.  I think ultimately, just because of public support and public protest, those trials are ultimately going to take place in a military commission, which is exactly where they should’ve taken place in the first place.</p>
<p>Remember the issue a few months back of the CIA photos, the so-called prisoner abuse photos?  The Justice Department wanted to get those out into the public domain, even though everybody knew that they would be used by the enemy for propaganda and recruitment purposes.  Everybody knew it was a bad idea.  Justice Department wanted to put it out, anyway, in this ceaseless impulse that they have that there has to be a reckoning against the Bush Administration, which is something that Holder and Obama both talked about in the run up to the election.</p>
<p>Well, those photos never made it out.  They never saw the light of day, and they probably never will see the light of day.  And the reason is because there was very strong public protest.  Basically, the Justice Department had to back down.  Obama had to reverse Holder.  And despite the fact that you have very large Democratic margins in both houses of Congress, we managed to get legislation through that enabled the Secretary of Defense to sign a finding that made sure that those photographs wouldn’t see the light of day.</p>
<p>And the point is that even though the legislative numbers are daunting against us, this issue is still an issue that powerfully motivates the American people to make themselves heard, when they become aware that there is something to be heard about.  And we have managed, for that reason, to be able to stop them from doing a lot of things that they otherwise wanted to do.  So I think it’s very important that we continue to stay motivated and continue to do the things that we’ve done, which have stopped them from really acting on their worst impulses.</p>
<p>As far as a concrete legislative proposal is concerned, the worst thing about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision &#8212; and we could spend hours talking about how bad it was &#8212; is that it dumped all of these habeas corpus cases, these detention cases, onto the district courts with no guidance about the rules or procedures that would govern those proceedings.</p>
<p>And as a result, district judges have actually been releasing people who obviously ought to remain held, and doing it under circumstances where we know at least one in five are going back to the jihad.  And I suspect it’s a much higher number.  I think Congress has to get into the game here and prescribe some strong procedural rules to guide the courts in how these habeas proceedings are going to take place.</p>
<p>In the criminal &#8212; in the regular criminal civilian courts, we don’t let judges make it up as they go along.  They have to follow the federal rules of criminal procedure and the federal rules of evidence, and all sorts of prescriptions that Congress gives them.</p>
<p>This is much more important.  We’re dealing with people who, if liberated, want to mass-murder Americans.  And I think it’s really incumbent on Congress to act to stop the judges from doing what they’re doing, which is releasing a lot of people who want to go back to killing Americans.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: We have time for three questions.  So I think I’m going to try to address one to each of the panelists.  And this one would be starting with Andy &#8212; what is the &#8212; what are the appropriate criteria to determine if alleged terrorists should be tried in federal courts or in military commissions?  And do you favor a national security court?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy</strong>: I do favor a national security court.  And I could go on at great length about why.  But let me just try to answer the first part of the question, which is &#8212; I think when we’re talking about military commissions, we’re talking about war criminals &#8212; people who have either carried out or been caught in the act of carrying out, or plotting, war crimes against the United States.  Those people need to be tried by military commission.  If I had my druthers, I would stop having the big fight about, you know, should it be civilian or should it be military court, and try to develop a court that was more tailored to the threat that we’re dealing with.</p>
<p>But given that that’s not in the cards right now, those people belong in military commissions.  And I think other people who are &#8212; particularly if they’re captured inside the United States, doing things like Material Support to Terrorism &#8212; presumptively, they belong in the civilian courts.  And those are cases that we not only should do; we should do as many of them as we can.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Thank you.</p>
<p>And to John Yoo, since you’ve already mentioned your brilliant column about Justice Stevens, and what Obama should do next as far as Supreme Court Justice &#8212; what do you think we can do, as far as influencing the decision on approval or confirmation of the next Supreme Court Justice?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> That’s a great question.</p>
<p>You know, I think Obama is going to have to nominate, for his own base, someone who’s pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action.  You know, those are the hot-button issues of the last 20, 30 years in Supreme Court nominations.  I don’t think anything anybody can do is going to change that.  But I think he has a lot of flexibility in who he chooses, in terms of their views on national security.</p>
<p>And so, if Republicans press for that issue, and pick that out as the most important issue to fight about, I think you could push Obama into picking someone much more centrist on those, even though they might not share the views Republicans have on those other two issues.  That’s one.</p>
<p>The second thing is, Democrats, I think, in the last election &#8212; I mean, the last administration declared open season on judges.  I think there’s no longer any deference that the Senate provides to President’s choice of a judge, which used to be, I think, the unbroken practice for many, many decades, where Justice Byron White &#8212; who was appointed to the Court by President Kennedy &#8212; didn’t even have a hearing when he was confirmed  &#8211; he showed up at the Judiciary Committee doors, ready for his hearing.  And they said, You don’t need a hearing.  And then they voted him, and sent him on to the Senate.  Then they confirmed him, all in one day.</p>
<p>That’s all out the window.  And so, I think that if the Democrats have opened up the floodgates on this &#8212; as they first started with Judge Bork, I’m afraid, and then with my old boss, Justice Thomas; but then, even lower court appointees in the last administration &#8212; I think that judges &#8212; for good or ill, but this is the way it is now &#8212; are subject for normal political activity and campaigning, [like] any other issue.</p>
<p>And so I think as part of that, then, what you and I can do is place pressure on our senators.  Right?  We can put up a filibuster now.  And I think that if we thought there was going to be someone who was going to approve the kind of policies we’re worried about in the war on terrorism, I think that would be legitimate grounds for a filibuster.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Marc, I wish you had many more than a couple of minutes to address this &#8212; how do you feel President Obama’s speeches overseas have affected our national security?  In what way has his self-effacing tone of these speeches helped or harmed our national security?</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: Depends on the speech.  His speech in Cairo was a debacle.  I don’t know how many people saw it.  But he stood before a Muslim audience, speaking to the Arab world, and said that we had tortured people.  I mean, in one speech, he confirmed all of the al-Qaeda propaganda and lies that have been spread to the Arab world.  The damage that is done in such a speech is irreparable.</p>
<p>So yeah, he’s done a great deal of damage to our national security in confirming this propaganda.  The United States didn’t torture anybody.  We did what was necessary to protect our country.</p>
<p>And on top of that, the other thing that he doesn’t talk about &#8212; the word that almost never passes his lips &#8212; is freedom.  Whether you’re for the Iraq war or against the Iraq war, &#8212; they now have had an election where they’re having debates over &#8212; a big political fight over who’s going to be the next prime minister.  I mean, it’s a messy, functioning, young democracy, in the heart of the Middle East.  And we’ve done great damage to al-Qaeda by helping the Iraqis stand up this young democracy.</p>
<p>The other day, they killed &#8212; the Iraqi military, which is trained by the United States, with the help of the United States &#8212; killed the top two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.  Wasn’t on the front page of the <strong>Washington Post</strong>, wasn’t on the front page of the <em>New York Times</em>.  And when the White House went and made a statement about it, the President sent Joe Biden out to make the statement in the press briefing room, announcing it.</p>
<p>I remember very well, when I was working for President Bush, getting the call late one evening that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed; not to tell anybody, but that I needed to draft a statement for him to deliver the next morning in the Rose Garden.  It’s considered a huge victory.  It’s a victory &#8212; the Iraqi people hated al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>I mean, think about what happened with the surge in Iraq.  Al-Qaeda came in to drive America out of Iraq and rally the Sunni masses against us.  And the Sunni masses joined with America to drive al-Qaeda out.  That’s a huge defeat.</p>
<p>And so the killing of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Iraq is a great moment.  The President couldn’t be bothered to even say something, or [issue a] paper statement on it.  He doesn’t care about freedom.  He doesn’t care about the war on terror.  He wants to be the Secretary of Health and Human Service. He was elected to be the Commander in Chief.  And being the Commander in Chief requires marshalling words.</p>
<p>President Bush always told us, when we were writing his speeches, that there were three audiences that he was always thinking about when he was speaking.  The first was the American people.  Actually, four audiences.  The first was the American people.  The second were our allies around the world, and what message they took from what he said, when we had troops around the world being contributed from all these countries &#8212; how they were going to take the message.  The third was the American troops &#8212; were they going to get a message of resolve from him.  That’s why he was always criticized for never acknowledging mistakes, or so on, so forth.  He wasn’t going to stand up &#8212; as he used to say, I’m not going to get up there as the Commander in Chief and wring my hands in front of our troops on national television.  And the last one was our enemies.  Our enemies are watching.</p>
<p>And so when the President doesn’t project resolve, when he’s apologizing for America, when he doesn’t talk about victory, or freedom, or the principles of our country, and this war, all of those four audiences are harmed, and are &#8212; their courage is undermined, and [he said] their morale is undermined.</p>
<p>So the President of the United States has the responsibility, as Commander in Chief, not only to run the war on terror but to rally the troops, rally our allies, and rally the American people to support the cause of freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: These men would all continue to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on behalf of this country in doing what they do.  But let’s thank them for what they’ve done for our nation.</p>
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