Tag Archives: foreign policy

Mending Fences

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President Barack Obama‘s national security adviser castigated Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the Israeli leader’s plan to address a joint session of Congress next week has been “destructive” to the relationship between the two countries.

Most administrations would take advantage of the visit of a major ally’s head of state to work out programs, resolve differences (at least down to a dull roar), even to mend fences.

Not President Barack Obama and his administration.

This is fence mending ego-ridden style. Obama just can’t stand to have grown adults not saying, “Mother, may I?” to him.

His minions in the Senate are illustrative of how widespread Obama’s poison has become. Some Senate Democrats had “invited” Netanyahu to a private audience with them: Senate Minority Whip Richard Durbin (D, IL) and Senator Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) among others. Netanyahu declined the secretive meeting, noting (accurately, it turns out)

I believe that doing so at this time could compound the misperception of partisanship regarding my upcoming visit[.]

Durbin was displeased:

His refusal to meet is disappointing to those of us who have stood by Israel for decades[.]

No, Dick. If you were serious, you wouldn’t demand a secret meeting; you would attend the public joint session.

On Terrorist Wannabes

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Would-be ISIS terrorists are taking more roundabout routes to Syria in an effort to make European authorities’ attempts to catch them more difficult.

And

At least 3,400 European fighters are believed to have joined the ISIS army….

European authorities are concerned about that, looking for ways to stop the wannabes’ outbound travel. The authorities have this backward. They should let these folks go; Europe is better off without them. The authorities should, instead, focus their efforts on not letting the survivors back in.

Arabs’ Thoughts on Obama’s Iran Deal

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Arabia is worried, and with good reason.

The Obama administration initially said its policy was to completely dismantle Tehran’s nuclear infrastructure as a means to protect Washington’s Mideast allies.

Now, however, US officials say it is no longer plausible to eliminate all of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure, suggesting that any final deal would leave some nuclear capability in place. Iran denies that it is seeking to build a nuclear bomb, but a final deal providing for nuclear enrichment capacity could prompt a competition.

Indeed.

Arab officials have increasingly spoken about a possible nuclear arms race in the Mideast as the negotiations have continued for 18 months, having been extended twice.

Thus,

“At this stage, we prefer a collapse of the diplomatic process to a bad deal,” said an Arab official who has discussed Iran with the Obama administration and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

This is confidence our Arab allies and erstwhile allies have in the negotiating skills of the guys who sit in the President’s and the Secretary of State’s chairs. They’re not unduly pessimistic.

The John Kerry-Barack Obama Plan

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The guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair laid it out in his Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday.

Put simply, we are building a global partnership against violent extremism.

That’s so vapid and empty it doesn’t deserve comment. I include it only as an illustration of the depth of thinking and the level of importance Kerry attaches to this as sum and total of this Plan.

And this:

We must identify the zones of greatest vulnerability…. And then we must tailor our efforts and target our resources to meet the specific needs of those places. It may be training young people so they can get jobs and envision a future of dignity and self-reliance. It may be working to eliminate corruption and promote the rule of law, so that marginalized communities can enjoy security and justice.

The Community Organizer School of Realpolitik. Offering terrorists alternative career paths will set them free.

This Plan operates from a very fundamental false premise: that these terrorists don’t already see, quite clearly, their future of dignity and self-reliance, that the path they see to security and justice is not the path we prescribe. No, the terrorists of Daesh, of al Qaeda and its associates, of Boko Haram, of Jahbat al Nusra, of the Palestinian Authority, of Hezbollah, of… all see their path to dignity, to self-reliance, to their security, to their concept of justice is through the elimination of all nonbelievers and the destruction of Western Civilization, a polity they view as evil incarnate and with which they cannot coexist.

And their freedom lies in martyrdom in pursuit of that cause.

There’s also this…laugher (because the alternative is tears):

We’ve combated violent extremism before. We know there are tools that work. …we combined our efforts most recently to fight Ebola.

Oh, and this aside:

There is no room for Islamophobia or anti-Semitism.

No one is arguing otherwise, especially regarding Islamophobia. Decrying Islamic terrorists and Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islamophobia. That argument is of a piece with President Barack Obama’s statement that we’re not at war with Islam. The one is Kerry’s straw man, and the other is Obama’s. They’ll have to play with their dollies without me.

As a man said not so long ago, in America everyone has the right to be stupid.  But when it’s an American in State exercising that right, it’s downright dangerous for all of us.

5 questions every presidential candidate should answer: Terrorism Edition

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That’s the title of Michael Rubin’s article over at AEIdeas. Non-presidential candidate Hines essays some answers below.

1. How do you define terrorism? Terrorism is the use of mass killings, particularly of innocents, and associated destruction for the immediate purpose of causing terror in the hearts and minds of the target nation’s population. The intermediate and long range purpose is the use of that terror to cause the nation’s government—directly or by divorcing the population from the government through the former’s loss of faith in government—to accept in toto the terrorists’ demands.

2. Do you believe terrorism to be primarily motivated by grievance or ideology? Yes. Terrorists have an ideology—see Daesh, al Qaeda, Boko Haram for current examples, the Red Army Faction and the Baader-Meinhoff Gang for earlier examples—and they use the excuse of grievance to articulate their ideology. Daesh, for instance, espouses a very strict and harsh version of an ideology they center on Islam, with anyone who disagrees with them apostates and subject to killing on sight. Their grievance is that they’re oppressed and unable to press their ideology freely.

3. What is the theological component to terrorism? The question proceeds from a quasi-false premise. Terrorism is evil. Full stop. Quasi-false because while there are secular philosophies and ideologies that see very grave error, it’s primarily religion that has the concept of straight-up evil. In the end, though, there is no real theological component to terrorism; terrorism is outside of religion.

4. Should terrorism be treated as a criminal matter or a military threat? Yes. There are individual acts of terrorism, like the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. These are isolated incidents, and they’re properly treated as the fundamentally criminal acts that they are.

However, when terrorism is practiced as a matter of policy by a nation-state or a polity organized along networked lines, it becomes a state of war and a military matter. While the tools of law enforcement might be helpful here, those are in this context merely tools, and they must be used alongside and subordinate to military tools.

5. What countries do you believe are state sponsors of terrorism today? Any country that harbors terrorist organization(s) (note that a nation that has terrorist organization(s) within them but that is attempting to do something about that is not harboring them) is such a sponsor, as are nations that support terrorist entities and/or engage in terrorism themselves. Such nations include Russia, Iran, the Palestinian Authority (post-merger with Hamas), Turkey, Syria, northern Korea, Qatar, Venezuela, Cuba.