Category: News

While in the midst of pledge drive, I nearly missed one of the few sources of joy in this business: Watching Ali Gharib and Eli Clifton smoke out suit wearing think tankers who would clearly be more comfortable wearing sheets.

In a two part series at Think Progress, we learn that the American Enterprise Institute hosted professional supplicant and fantasist Ayaan Hirsi Ali who boldly asserted that

one of the justifications for Norwegian anti-Muslim terrorist Anders Breivik‘s attacks, explaining that Breivik said “he had no other choice but to use violence” because his fringe views were “censored.”

G-d bless her. Really. Anyone who can say that with a straight face deserves an AEI field trip with

…The David Horowitz Freedom Center, named for right-wing activist David Horowitz, is organizing a trip to Turkey featuring AEI’s Michael Rubin and Robert Spencer, an Islamophobic blogger featured in the Center For American Progress report “Fear, Inc..”

Cost, not including plane fare: 4,650$ (US)

Gharib and Clifton wax a bit earnest with “highlight[ing] AEI’s relationship with these extremist views and raises questions about whether bigoted anti-Muslim sentiment should hold even a tangential place in the Washington discourse.”

Tangential place? It’s the center piece of our foreign policy. Anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, anti-Persian bigotry is mainstream, respectable and frankly necessary to maintain The Empire. One cannot continue public support for brutal occupations, the destruction of entire cultures and flying robots which kill children without a sustained campaign of bigotry, ignorance and dehumanization.

Update: Robert Spencer wrote me via Twitter. You can find the exchange here. While none of his offense addresses the issue of racism or the point of the blog entry, he did pen this essay, Time to Get Out of Afghanistan, in March of this year.

Spencer writes,

In ten years, American troops (through no fault of their own, although the same cannot be said of their superiors) have accomplished little or nothing in terms of establishing a stable and democratic government in Afghanistan. This is true despite the loss of thousands of lives of noble and courageous American military personnel who deserved better from those in command, and the wanton waste of billions of dollars. The Taliban is still a potent force — so strong that both Karzai and Obama have made overtures to it. The Taliban’s claim of Islamic authenticity strongly resonates with the Afghan people and provides an ever-renewable wellspring of material, financial, and moral support for these vicious thugs as they bomb girls’ schools, music stores, and other outcroppings of jahiliyya — the infidels’ society of ignorance.

Also:

With the withdrawal of the American troops, there will be many Taliban murders, many more jihads, many more women and non-Muslims victimized. That is an abomination. But we could have never ultimately have prevented it anyway. America’s misbegotten Afghan adventure shows the catastrophic human cost of our national unwillingness to face the unpleasant truths about Islam. It costs us lives and money, and makes us even more vulnerable to jihad attacks than we already were. It’s time not just to bring the troops home from their foredoomed mission, but to begin a searching and encompassing re-evaluation of all our national policies regarding Islam and Islamic states.

Well, I’m humbled. Robert Spencer: Successor to Dorothy Day. My apologies to Mr. Spencer and the entire peace movement for imputing any bigotry or hysterical monomaniacal hatred or suggesting that there is anything untoward in Mr. Spencer’s attitudes toward his brothers and sisters in the middle east and central Asia.

Via Marc Lynch, “a useful addition to the growing body of analysis and argument” in opposition to any direct intervention in Syria from Prof. Eva Bellin and Prof. Peter Krause in the Middle East Brief from Brandeis University (PDF).

Here’s their takedown of why a direct military intervention is a bad idea (this reiterates arguments I’ve made repeatedly):

The Syrian military, while no match for the fullfirepower of the U.S. or NATO, is nevertheless not an insignificant force—and,more critically, it is enmeshed in densely populated civilian centers. To disarmit without inflicting huge human casualties would require not simply an aircampaign, as was the case in Libya, but rather, by some estimates, two to threehundred thousand boots on the ground. Such force would be crucial to fullydefeat the regime’s security forces, enforce civil peace, and prevent the subsequentunleashing of retaliatory massacres by opposition groups. Furthermore, to havelasting impact, such an intervention would have to be prolonged and would require extensive investment in state-building, at great cost.

They also argue that limited intervention, like aiding and arming the Syrian opposition fighters, is likely to exacerbate the conflict, increasing and prolonging the suffering of the Syrian people (and they are sure to point out that the Obama administration is misguidedly aiding the opposition with both lethal and non-lethal aid):

The distillation of historical experience with civil war and insurgency, along with a sober reckoning of conditions on the ground in Syria, make clear that limited intervention of this sort will not serve the moral impulse that animates it. To the contrary, it is more likely to amplify the harm that it seeks to eliminate by prolonging a hurting stalemate.

The paper covers many other points, like the disorganized and fractured state of the opposition and the fact that elements of al Qaeda could exploit Western aid for their benefit.

They also reason that the best way to try to resolve the conflict is to pressure the Russians to drop their support for Assad. As I mentioned in today’s news section (and in previous months), the only way I can see the Russians agreeing to do that is if they have some assurances that Washington won’t swoop into the middle of the political transition and try to replace the Russian client Assad with some American client dictator that better serves their interests. In this sense, what we have here is really a problem of intervention: foreign powers are meddling in Syria on behalf of all sides and this is prolonging the conflict. Such outside support (namely Russian) for internal forces (namely Assad) could stop and so end the violence, but it persists because Russia doesn’t trust that the U.S. will stay out of it. And the U.S. probably wouldn’t stay out of it. So the Syrian people continue to suffer, stuck in the middle of a violent insurgency and a brutal dictatorship.

Scott Shane from the New York Times has issued a clarification on their blog regarding last week’s story about President Obama’s role in deciding who to add to his ever-growing “kill list.”

The clarifications are two-fold, mostly lashing other sites that took the story and ran with it for missing some of the minutae, like a single mention near the end of David Axelrod attending Tuesday counter-terrorism meetings, like the one described at the start of the article. Axelrod was apparently pressed on his attendance at kill list meetings and denied it, embarrassing the times, and forcing this “but those are two different types of meetings” retraction.

But really, who cares? The story isn’t about David Axelrod, who could be pleasuring himself in the Rose Garden during these meetings for all we care. The real story uncovered was that President Obama is directly involved in every single decision on drone strikes and other assassinations, including those of American citizens.

The other half of the clarification involves the opening of the article, in which Obama et al. are discussing whether or not to assassinate a 17 year old American girl. Shane faults Prison Planet for taking the paragraph to its logical conclusion, since it focused on the 17 year old girl and the kill list, and concluding that she had been tapped for assassination.

Yet the narrative that opens the New York Times article just sort of trails off without an on-paper conclusion. There’s a girl of 17 on the “yearbook-style” list of pictures for Obama to consider, but whether she is or isn’t on the hyper-secret list of who the president intends to summarily execute for imagined crimes is never reported in the article.

Which is worthwhile to note, but also a secondary issue. President Obama may have marveled at the youth of this particular “nominee” but its already well-established that he’s comfortable murdering children, as with the assassination of Anwar Awlaki’s 16 year old American-born son, who was never even accused of a crime in the vague, hysterical manner of his father.

Whether or not the girl actually wound up on the list is interesting, but the very existence of the list, the fact that it is known to have contained children (American children no less) and that President Obama has personally approved the assassination of children and has been presented with more opportunities to do so, that’s the real story.

The original NYT article focused more on the faux-moralizing of the president, and reports from his aides that he’s keeping on top of things and limiting the program’s growth. Yet his direct order of every single drone strike makes him directly responsible for over 1,000 deaths in Pakistan alone since taking office, and his existing kill-happy record along with this cadre of insiders constantly “nominating” more victims for him is the real “news” of the NYT piece, one that its authors apparently missed.

The great Robert Higgs lists Axioms of Political Geometry. My two favorites:

• The shortest distance between a free society and a totalitarian society passes through war.
• The whole of society is greater than the part that government officials can comprehend, and much greater than the part that they can manage for the attainment of a desirable end.

According to Bonnie S. Glaser at the Center for Strategic International Studies (no relation), next year “could see a shift in Chinese foreign policy based on the new leadership’s judgment that it must respond to a U.S. strategy that seeks to prevent China’s reemergence as a great power.”

Signs of a potential harsh reaction are already detectable. The U.S. Asia pivot has triggered an outpouring of anti-American sentiment in China that will increase pressure on China’s incoming leadership to stand up to the United States. Nationalistic voices are calling for military countermeasures to the bolstering of America’s military posture in the region and the new U.S. defense strategic guidelines.