No strategy ~ No clue

From the Warning Signs of Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

The Wednesday, June 10 Wall Street Journal headline at the top of the page was “Obama Set to Expand Troops in Iraq.” We were 589 days into the two terms Barack Hussein Obama has served in the office of President of the United States and he is as clueless now as he was when he arrived on January 20, 2009.

“President Barack Obama is poised to send hundreds more American advisers to a new base in a strategic Iraqi region to help devise a counterattack against marauding Islamic State militants, U.S. officials said Tuesday, a shift that underscores American concern over recent battlefield losses.” It’s 450 “trainers.”

We have had losses because:

(1) Obama was elected on a promise to end the conflict in Iraq and
(2) reelected by pulling out troops to the point that the remaining Iraqi troops—Shiites in the south—decided it wasn’t worth dying for their leaders. 

Can’t say I blame them, but dying at the hands of ninth century Islamic fanatics is the fate that threatens the entire Middle East, not just Iraq or what’s left of it.

This is how we lost the war in Vietnam. There was a time when Americans utterly destroyed their enemies on the battlefield. In the latter half of the last century, starting in Korea, we forgot how to do that and why that’s how wars are won.

In all candor, like a lot of Americans, I went back and forth about the Mideast conflicts. Looking back, I think George H.W. Bush showed remarkable insight when, after driving Iraq’s Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, he stopped at the border and came home. George W. had the notion he could somehow introduce democracy to the region. He couldn’t and it will likely never really occur there because Islam is the only law and it has kept the region ignorant, backward, and under the thumb of tyrants for centuries.

The Islamic State troops must be stopped at some point, but Obama is not the President who will do it. Whatever U.S. backed combat occurs will be just enough to present enough television news images to convince the gullible that progress is being made.

Obama arrived in office without any strategy and has spent the last six and a half years “muddling through” as the British say. He and the Democratic Party had only one goal; to win the elections. After that, they wanted to “fundamentally transform” the greatest nation on planet Earth. They have largely made a mess out of everything they touched from ObamaCare to Common Core.

There’s a reason why Obama will send more troops and that’s because every one of our allies has told him that, if the U.S. does not again assert its role of global leadership, they are not going to cooperate with him in a thousand different ways.

Our allies in the Mideast have told him they lack the military strength (and will) to conduct any kind of war with ISIS. The U.S. and much of the rest of the world cannot afford to sit by and let the enormous oil wealth and reserves of the Mideast come under the control of ISIS.

So, once again we read headlines about U.S. troops returning to the Mideast.

What that means is that the 2016 elections are more critical to the future of the nation than all previous ones.

I think Americans, liberals, conservatives and independents alike have had more than enough of President No Strategy. I think there are enough older Americans who remember and take pride in a nation that was unabashedly the world’s leader in the pursuit of peace and democracy. And I think that the thirty percent or so of brain-dead liberals are not sufficient to affect the outcome of a 2016 election devoted to restoring the nation’s economy and leadership.

It can be done. John F. Kennedy was on his way to doing so. Reagan did so. In 590 days from now, we can begin to do so again.

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Kirsten Powers slams Obama

From the Files of Los Angeles Examiner corespondent, Tori Nissen

Meet Kirsten Powers

Kudos to Liberal journalist, Kirsten Powers, who today stood up to the Obama administration for not criticizing Christian persecution in the Middle East.

In USA TODAY, Kirsten writes that… when a throng of Muslims threw a dozen Christians overboard a migrant ship traveling from Libya to Italy, Prime Minister Matteo Renzi missed the opportunity to label it as such.

Standing next to President Obama at their joint news conference Friday, Renzi dismissed it as a one-off event and said, "The problem is not a problem of (a) clash of religions."

She is referring to an incident last week off the coast of Italy. The original group of 105 people left Libya on Tuesday, April 14, in a rubber boat. Sometime during the trip north across the Mediterranean Sea, the alleged assailants -- Muslims from the Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal -- threw the 12 overboard, police said after a fight broke out.

The Christians died simply because they were Christian, originally from Nigeria and Ghana. Italian authorities have arrested 15 people on suspicion of murdering the Christians at sea.. Other people on the voyage told police that they themselves were spared "because they strongly opposed the drowning attempt and formed a human chain," Palermo police said.

More than 10,000 people have arrived on Italian shores from Libya since last weekend alone, according to the Italian coast guard.

Kirsten went onto say that As Renzi was questioned about the incident, Obama was mute on the killings. He failed to interject any sense of outrage or even tepid concern for the targeting of Christians for their faith.

If a Christian mob on a ship bound for Italy threw 12 Muslims to their death for praying to Allah, does anyone think the president would have been so disinterested?

When three North Carolina Muslims were gunned down by a virulent atheist, Obama rightly spoke out against the horrifying killings. But he just can't seem to find any passion for the mass persecution of Middle Eastern Christians or the eradication of Christianity from its birthplace.

Religious persecution of Christians is rampant worldwide, as Pew has noted, but nowhere is it more prevalent than in the Middle East and Northern Africa, where followers of Jesus are the targets of religious cleansing. Pope Francis has repeatedly decried the persecution and begged the world for help, but it has had little impact.

Western leaders — including Obama — will be remembered for their near silence as this human rights tragedy unfolded. The president's mumblings about the atrocities visited upon Christians (usually extracted after public outcry over his silence) are few and far between.

And it will be hard to forget his lecturing of Christians at the National Prayer Breakfast about the centuries-old Crusades while Middle Eastern Christians were at that moment being harassed, driven from their homes, tortured and murdered for their faith.

A week and a half after Obama's National Prayer Breakfast speech, 21 Coptic Christians were beheaded for being "people of the cross." Seven of the victims were former students of my friend and hero "Mama" Maggie Gobran, known as the "Mother Theresa of Cairo" for her work with the poorest of the poor.

She told me these dear men grew up in rural Upper Egypt and had gone to Libya seeking work to support their families. They died with dignity as they called out to their God, while the cowardly murderers masked their faces.

Rather than hectoring Christians about their ancestors' misdeeds, Obama should honor these men and the countless Middle Eastern Christians persecuted before them.

Kirsten says that Monday, there was more horrifying news: ISIL terrorists released a video purporting to show more religiously motivated killing.

According to CNN, before beheading and shooting two groups of Christians in Libya, a speaker said, "The Islamic State has offered the Christian community (the opportunity to convert to Islam or pay a tax for being Christian) many times and set a deadline for this, but the Christians never cooperated."

So they kill them. Indeed, let's talk more about the Crusades, writes Ms. Powers.

Kirsten Powers is an Evangelical Christian who, early on, never pictured herself as one. Yet, believing in God and reading the Bible changed the way she envisioned the world around her.

She’s one of the few voices standing up for persecuted Christians.

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They should be murdered or crucified

Read the Koran and Decide for Yourself from the art studios of Dan Youra at Utoons.com

Get a Daily Dose of Humor or Reality from Dan Youra at Utoons.com

Dan Youra is one of the outstanding conservative cartoonists in the trade today who follows in the footsteps of the great political cartoon masters, whose quotes inspire a new generation of followers.

"Outside of basic intelligence, there is nothing more important to a good political cartoonist than ill will." ~ Jules Feiffer, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist.

"Too many of today's artists regard editorial cartooning as a trade instead of a profession. They try not to be too offensive. The hell with that. We need more stirrer-uppers." ~ Bill Mauldin.

Youra was one of the first recipients of a Fulbright Scholarship and worked in Latin America. He served as an editor of Current Thought on Peace and War at the United Nations in New York.

"As long as there are politicians who continue to try and fool the voters, there is no chance of ever running out of material to work with because they create it themselves and about themselves," says Dan Youra.

Dan is the small business owner and operator of the Youra Studios located in the State of Washington.

Visit the Youra Studios at Utoons.com

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Leave ISIS alone - They will go away

UCLA Professor: Leave ISIS Alone - They'll Go Away from Ben Shapiro's Truth Revolt

UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a panel last Thursday, presenting its perspectives on the Islamic State and its massacre of the Yazidi minority group.

The panel was comprised of UCLA Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History James L. Gelvin and Dartmouth College professor Zeynep Turkyilmaz.

This department has been under recent attack for its anti- Israel bias.

According to a recent study by the AMCHA initiative, 93% of Israel-related events hosted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies were anti-Israel and 75% of them contained anti-Semitic material. The report concluded:

The 28 Israel-related events examined were not only overwhelmingly biased against Israel and lacking diverse perspectives and a wide range of views, but anti-Semitic in many of their aspects, according to categories of anti-Semitic activity derived primarily from the U.S. Department of State’s definition of anti-Semitism.

An analysis of the 31 speakers chosen to speak at these events also demonstrated that the vast majority were biased against Israel and had engaged in anti-Semitic activity.

Professor Gelvin began the discussion acknowledging these accusations of one-sidedness and anti-Israel classroom indoctrination, saying, “Let me start out with an apology. The Center for Near East Studies has been criticized on numerous occasions for lack of balance and, of course, one-sided programming.”

The rest of the event proved to be yet another demonstration of this.

Professor Gelvin presented a brief history of how the Islamic State was formed, the differences between the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and reasons for the group’s success thus far. He went on to explain that Islamic State’s infrastructure would self-destruct without any foreign intervention.

Accordingly, he concluded, “In spite of international coalition waging war against the Islamic state, it is extraordinarily fragile and will very likely collapse anyway under its own weight.

And finally, as a result of that assertion, I believe that Barack Obama is repeating George W. Bush’s mistake, inflating a minor problem into something that is an existential threat to the United States.”

The gist of the argument seemed to be: America should essentially sit back, relax, and enjoy the show as innocent American citizens are beheaded on television.

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Muslim Brotherhood declares Jihad

Muslim Brotherhood Issues a Call for Jihad Two Days After a Meeting at the State Department from the files of Colonel Allen B. West

Ready For Brotherhood Independent Army?

There’s nothing like some good ol’ inspiration to get any team motivated to go out and win. We’ve all seen movies where inspirational speeches somehow enable a team to dig just a little deeper into themselves

However, you never see an instance where the leaders of one team go over to the opposing team to provide them with a highly spirited charge that will instill in them a desire to beat their own team.

Could you imagine Sunday, the coaches of the Seattle Seahawks inviting the New England Patriots team into their locker room to pump them up?

Well, apparently that’s what the United States did this past week.

As reported by the Washington Free Beacon, “The Muslim Brotherhood called for “a long, uncompromising jihad” in Egypt just days after a delegation of the Islamist group’s key leaders and allies met with the State Department, according to an official statement released this week.

The organization released an official statement calling on its supporters to “prepare” for jihad, according to an independent translation of the statement first posted on Tuesday.”

“The State Department meeting was attended by a deputy assistant secretary for democracy, human rights, and labor and other State Department officials. The Muslim Brotherhood statement also was issued just two days before a major terror attack Thursday in Egypt’s lawless Sinai region that killed at least 25.”

We reported on this a few days ago and the official State Department response was “We meet with representatives from across the political spectrum in Egypt.”

And why not? I’m quite sure they don’t consider the Muslim Brotherhood an Islamic terrorist organization — just “unarmed political insurgents” – kind of like the Taliban. As a matter of fact, I’m quite sure the Obama White House considers the Tea Party a greater threat to the United States than the Muslim Brotherhood.

Hey, that reminds me of something — has Obama or his minions ever invited Tea Party leaders to the White House? Quite telling would you not say, that President Obama and his administration has had Islamic clerics who issued fatwas on our troops and individuals linked to the Muslim Brotherhood in the White House but not any of the Tea Party leaders targeted by his IRS? Whose side is he on?

Or here’s an obvious one: has Obama ever had Chris Kyle’s wife Taya to the White House? I think you get my point.

Here is what the Obama administrations BFFs at the Muslim Brotherhood had to say:

“It is incumbent upon everyone to be aware that we are in the process of a new phase, where we summon what is latent in our strength, where we recall the meanings of jihad and prepare ourselves, our wives, our sons, our daughters, and whoever marched on our path to a long, uncompromising jihad, and during this stage we ask for martyrdom,” it states.”

“Preparation for jihad is a key theme of the Brotherhood’s latest call for jihad. An image posted with the statement shows two crossing swords and the word “prepare!” between them. Below the swords it reads, “the voice of truth, strength, and freedom.”

According to the statement, “that is the motto of the Dawa of the Muslim Brotherhood.” The statement also invokes the well-known Muslim cleric Imam al-Bana, who founded the Brotherhood and has called for the death of Jews.”

Now, I seem to remember one now CIA Director John Brennan, telling us that “jihad” was a legitimate tenet of Islam — y’all know, that “religion of peace.” Folks telling us that jihad is some personal struggle, well, I ain’t feeling the personal struggle aspect from the above quote from the venerable granddaddy of Islamic terrorism, the Muslim Brotherhood.

Seems to me they’re calling for a struggle against others which they pray ends up in martyrdom — you know, where they kill folks and get taken out as well. Then again, according to Al Jazeera English, I’m all wet.

After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Yes, that’s it! The Muslim Brotherhood stands for freedom — the freedom to kill those who don’t follow the ways of the Ikhwan. And if you don’t know what that is, well, you should read more.

“The fact that the Brotherhood issued its call to jihad two days after its meeting at the State Department will be grist for endless anti-American conspiracy theories about a supposed partnership between Washington and the Brotherhood,” said Eric Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). “The State Department should have foreseen what an embarrassment this would be.”

I don’t think anything embarrasses the Obama administration. We know things could have had a far different and peaceful settlement in Libya — but for some odd reason, seems like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton wanted the Islamic jihadists to win.

The new disclosed tapes tell us so — and then ol’ Hillary outsourced the Special Mission Compound in Benghazi security to an Islamist militia, February 17 Martyrs — the rest is history.

However, as Hillary would say to all of this, “What difference at this point does it make?” The difference is we are truly starting to wonder — well, at least those of us not drinking the kool-aid — if the policy of this administration is to openly embrace Islamic terrorists. Because it sure seems that way.

“Muslim Brothers have been committing violent acts for a very long time,” Trager explained. “Under Morsi, Muslim Brothers tortured protesters outside the presidential palace. After Morsi’s ouster, they have frequently attacked security forces and state property.

But until now, the official line from the Brotherhood was to support this implicitly by justifying its causes, without justifying the acts themselves,” he added. “ So the Brotherhood’s open call to jihad doesn’t necessarily mean a tactical shift, but a rhetorical one.”

So something occurred at the State Department meeting earlier this week which has emboldened the Muslim Brotherhood to openly advocate the actions they were previously unwilling to embrace — but were conducting.

Something happened at Foggy Bottom that gave the Muslim Brotherhood the “green light.” Funny, Obama has dispatched campaign staffers to defeat Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. They’ve met with Muslim Brotherhood leaders while shunning Egyptian President al-Sisi.

But this administration will not call out Turkey’s President Erdogan – another Obama BFF — or the treacherous Qataris. And we know Obama gets REALLY mad if Congress talks about reinstating sanctions against Iran — Valerie Jarrett’s “homeboys.”

I don’t know. This is getting all too easy to decipher. It’s like President Obama doesn’t care anymore about hiding his affections and affiliations — and he’s daring the American people to stop him. Will we?

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Wars: Past - Present - Future

Wars, Past, Present and Future from the Warning Signs by Alan Caruba at Facts-not-Fantasy

No Caruba's Warning Signs

No, Pearl Harbor is not ancient history. It’s part of my history and many others who were alive at the time. I was just an infant, but the Japanese sneak attack on our Hawaii naval base led to early memories of being on trains filled with young soldiers, many of whom did not live to return home.

The attack was on December 7, 1941 and a day later in a speech to Congress, Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it a “date that will live in infamy.”

War was declared on Japan and on Germany. Four years later both enemy nations were conquered, largely due to America’s capacity to gear up to provide everything our armed forces needed. It was won, too, because it was a war to protect freedom from authoritarian, anti-Democracy enemies.

A new book, “Blinders, Blunders, and Wars: What America and China Can Learn”, has been published by the Rand Corporation that describes itself as a “research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, health and more prosperous.”

It was formed after World War II to connect military planning with research and development decisions. It is an independent, non-profit organization. The study looks at eight strategic blunders.

As David C. Gompert, the lead author of the book and senior fellow at Rand, said, “Leaders who blunder into war tend to have unwarranted confidence in their ability to script the future and control events. They favor information, analysis, and advisors that confirm their beliefs over those that contradict them. In essence, blinders cause blunders.”

While Americans are still debating whether we should have gone to war in Iraq in 2003 or whether our troops should have been withdrawn by 2011, the cold fact of Islamic aggression has seen President Obama reintroduce and increase our “boots on the ground.”

Enemies cannot be ignored. At best they can be “contained” until, like the former Soviet Union, they collapse or change in some fashion. Assuming, as our current negotiations with Iran suggest, that they do not harbor extremely dangerous intentions can be fatal.

The authors of the Rand study call Japan’s decision to bomb Pearl Harbor “a blunder of the highest order.” It followed a succession of decisions the Japanese leadership, largely military, had made to invade China and southern Indonesia in the quest to secure the oil and raw materials it needed for its industrial sector.

They saw themselves as a people superior to others in Asia and the world. As Herbert Feis, the author of “The Road to Pearl Harbor” wrote, “The Japanese people came to believe that the extension of their control over this vast region was both natural and destined.”

World War II had its roots in the sanctions meted out to Japan and Germany after World War I. In Japan’s case, its invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and China in 1937 put the U.S. on guard and produced sanctions that included halting exports of scrap iron, steel, and aviation fuel, as well as arms, ammunition, and critical raw materials. The U.S. began to build up its naval forces as well. It was a good decision.

Read Caruba On-Line at Facts-not-Fantasy

The attack on Pearl Harbor sealed Japan’s fate. “On December 7, 1941, Yamamoto, commander of the carrier task force north of Hawaii, order the attack. Two waves of Japanese aircraft, 353 in total, damaged all eight battleships in Pearl Harbor. Four were sunk, two of which were raised eventually. Six of the eight returned to service later in the war.”

“Significantly, the three U.S. aircraft carriers were at sea on routine maneuvers. No U.S. submarines were destroyed. A third wave of attack was not ordered by Yamamoto due to fuel shortage; consequently, facilities such as dry docks, ammunition dumps, power stations, and fuel storage facilities were not destroyed…Despite the tragic losses, Pearl Harbor and most of its fleet were able to recover fairly quickly.”

The Japanese leaders had seriously misunderstood Americans. “America instantly took a war footing. Six months later, at Midway, Japan sought to finish off the American carriers. Instead, aided by code breaking and some luck, planes from three U.S. carriers sank four of the six Japanese carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor.”

The arrogance and miscalculations of the Japanese leadership led to the loss of 2.3 million of their people, the firebombing of its major cities, the invasion of Okinawa, and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs.

The Rand study has lessons for America today. “Japan saw the United States as having weak will and capability. The U.S. military had been allowed to deteriorate over a twenty-year period; isolationism and neutrality reflected America’s interwar mood.”

Today, our military is as small or smaller than it was at the beginning of World War II. A President elected on the promise to remove our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan is having second thoughts, but is emptying out our detention center in Guantanamo, returning its inmates to the battlefield in the Middle East. After six years in office, he is about to appoint his fourth Secretary of Defense.

We have been in a state of war with Islamic fascists since even before September 11, 2001. They have even declared themselves to be the Islamic State.

There have been three generations of Americans born since the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and that is time enough for many of them to either never have learned or to have forgotten the lessons of that event.

The Obama administration has done everything in its power to deflect any anger toward the Muslim fanatics killing people in the name of their holy war. We are constantly warned against “Islamophobia.”

To avoid a sneak attack, you have to know who your enemy is and why. Despite a previous attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, we let down our guard. We cannot do that again for a very long time to come.

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