Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

On 13 January 2016, the Moscow Times reported the following:

“Russian army personnel are being briefed for deployment to Syria, according to military brochures obtained by Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper. … One brochure is emblazoned with the logo of the Red Army — a red, white, and blue star — and features a Russian-Arabic phrase book, a map of Syria and the Middle east, and an illustrated guide to military equipment and ranks within the Syrian army. … Military experts say the brochures are similar to those handed out to Soviet troops before and during the Afghan war, Novaya Gazeta reported.”

On 10 December 2016, the Kabul-based outlet TOL Onenews Online published the following statement by Russia’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Alexander Mantytskiy.

“… Daesh [the Islamic State] is trying to reach Central Asia, Russia, and China, and Russia has formed a relationship with the Taliban to secure [Russian] citizens’ lives. [Russia’s leaders claim] our interests are the same as the Taliban’s in fighting Daesh. It is clear that Taliban fight Daesh. We never said that we back up Taliban in fighting Daesh … [but] America has failed to tackle insurgents and Russia is ready to help Afghanistan.”

In a time of massive military and economic troubles for America that have been caused by a half-century of interventionist, war-causing U.S. foreign policy, along comes a beacon of end-of-tunnel light in the form of Russian President Putin. Readers of this space may recall that it was recommended to President Putin that he hit the Islamic State and the other anti-Asaad Islamist groups as hard and as indiscriminately as possible, convince the Islamist that the game was not worth the candle, and then immediately high-tail it back to the steppes.

But, like countless foolhardy U.S. leaders, Mr. Putin ignored that wise advice and now is well and truly stuck in Syria. Worse for Russia, Putin, his military, and their country are seen throughout the Sunni Muslim world as the champions of territorial expansionism by the hated apostate Shia and Alawites, as well as being the well-armed architects who are helping the apostates to build a belt of Shia-control — which will yield massive oppression of Sunnis — from the Western border of Afghanistan to the lovely beaches of the Lebanon’s Mediterranean Coast. Alas, Mr. Putin — at least for your country’s sake — you did not listen to commonsense, and have proven that you are no Uncle Joe Stalin when it comes to the kind of warfare that makes the enemy’s pips squeak.

But Mr. Putin’s now self-defeating excursion into Syria is a splendid opportunity for the incoming Trump administration to bid an unfond adieu to the catastrophic-for-America war that George W. Bush and his sidekicks unnecessarily stated, and which Barack Obama continued, in Afghanistan; restarted in Iraq; and quietly expanded through most of Arab and Black Africa. Behold that entire region, and you will not see a single life-and-death U.S. national security interest.

Indeed, what you will see are useless — now that America is energy independent — one-way, war-causing alliances with the Gulf Arab and African tyrants, and a supine, slavish, extortionate, and war-causing relationship with Israel. Mr. Putin, bless his little Bolshevik heart, has given the U.S. national government a chance to get out of a sucking quagmire into which far too much America wealth, blood, prestige, and opportunity costs have been wastefully poured. If Mr. Trump and his team recognize this astoundingly advantageous opportunity — and then move quickly homeward — they will miss out on having to deal with the approaching collapse of Egypt and Tunisia, the regrouping and expansion of the Islamic State in southern Libya and central Africa, the solidification of the above-noted, Shia-controlled belt of formerly Sunni territory, and that long-awaited and much to be desired regional Sunni-Shia war.

And like cable television commercials that offer “buy one, get two garden hoses,” Mr. Putin’s generosity toward the United States does not end in Syria-Iraq, it extends to Afghanistan. While Syria was, for Russia, an unnecessary war, in the next few years Mr. Putin will have to send the Russian army — not just its air force and Special Forces — to Afghanistan because the Islamists there are approaching the status of an existential threat to the Russian Federation (RF). Why? Because, first, the Islamists in Afghanistan have easy access to overwhelmingly Muslim Central Asia via the open borders of the region’s states that are contiguous to Afghanistan. In turn, the borders of the RF’s provinces/republics that are contiguous with Central Asian states are likewise largely unguarded, and ease the entry into Russia of Central Asian Muslims looking for work, as well as Islamists looking to proselytize, recruit, or attack. (NB: Those porous borders, needless to say, also give the mujahideen a path along which to send aid and veteran fighters to the Muslim Uighurs in western China. The Uighurs are resisting Beijing’s longstanding campaign to reduce them to a cultureless minority in their historic lands by inundating them with Han Chinese.)

Second, Mr. Putin’s policies in the Middle East have given the Islamists and the Sunni world generally the motivation to wage war more intensely against Russia. Putin’s brutal but, sadly, not-intended-to-win intervention in Syria has sharpened what has been a deep but dormant Sunni hatred for Russia, which is based on Moscow’s invasion and occupation of Muslim Afghanistan (1979-1992) and its now more than 20 year-old war against Islamist fighters in the North Caucasus. (NB: Since the 19th century, Russian leaders have had a debilitating blind spot when it comes to recognizing that the Russian/Soviet military is a very long shot to come out the winner in wars waged against Muslims in cold and mountainous countries.)

Third, Putin, even more clearly than Obama, has allied his country with Sunni Islam’s number one enemy, Shia Muslims and their various sub-sects. By the twin actions of killing Sunnis Muslims in Syria and conquering their historic cities — Aleppo, for example — and turning them over to Shia or Shia-like governance, Putin and his generals have provided extremely effective motivators for uniting Sunni Muslims worldwide against Russia. Putin’s interventionism has put at risk not only Russia’s overseas presence and interests, but also has made a highly negative impression on Russia’s own Muslim population — the media claim it may be as large as 20 million — an increasing part of which believes itself to be discriminated against by the Russian government, and persecuted by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Mr. Putin’s military intervention in Syria, the Russian intervention soon to come in Afghanistan, and the negative impact each will have on the RF’s increasingly restive Sunni Muslims are a godsend for those Americans sick of unnecessary, costly, and always-lost wars, and who oppose the interventionist U.S. foreign policies that have invariably produced them.

Mr. Trump, the man you have never met— Mr. Putin — has created a not-to-be-missed chance for your administration to unload two hopelessly lost and unnecessary wars, and allow other nations — all America’s enemies — to bear the human, economic, and domestic insecurity costs of a regional struggle that will resemble a war of all against all. Such a war will do nothing but kill the republic’s enemies; strengthen U.S. national security; afford a respite for our military and intelligence services to be rebuilt and cleansed of “there is no military solution” generals and lying and Democrat-butt-licking senior CIA leaders; and to build the border wall that should have been the national government’s first, post-9/11 national-security priority.

So, get on with it, Mr. Trump. Withdraw the U.S. military from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and let Americans watch Russia writhe in the pain that is always produced by unnecessary foreign military intervention. And as that writhing worsens, use your twitter sermons to remind the citizenry that U.S. withdrawal has allowed the republic’s enemies to fight and kill each other, as well as to begin to re-school them on the republic-preserving nature of General Washington’s recipe for a foreign policy grounded in promoting trade, non-intervention, and neutrality.

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s (IC) public report on Russia’s Putin-ordered hacking of the computers of the Democratic National Committee reads like one of those papers that a lazy or doped-up freshman buys from an online research shop and submits in hopes of scoring a C or D. Anyone worth the title of intelligence officer — even a half-assed old bureaucrat like me — could have written a more compelling paper based exclusively on newspaper articles, conjectures, OpEds, and the hysterical fantasies about “the mortal threat” posed by Russia that have been concocted by Senators McCain and Graham, and sung by the one-note, Neocon choir they lead.

The IC paper is so poorly argued and professionally embarrassing that DNI James Clapper was the perfect choice to present and champion it before the committee and the media. You remember Ol’ “Honest Jim” Clapper don’t you? He is the distinguished former general officer who perjured himself under oath when he told Congress that there was no large scale NSA effort to collect the electronic communications of Americans. Now, is that a man anyone would trust?

All you need to say to encompass the essence of this case of Russian hacking is:

• Under Putin’s direction Russian intelligence is doing a lot more hacking and other media operations — and so is every other power on earth, including, hopefully, the United States.
• Putin’s aim, in part, is to use media operations to discredit the U.S. political system in the minds of the citizenry. In this case, however, the publication of the DNC’s e-mails clearly did Americans a service by exposing many excellent reasons not to trust the Democratic elite or the media that works with it and savors its behind. All nation-states with an offensive intelligence capability conduct this sort of political warfare with much the same goal — serving their own interests. If you read, for example, the data published or “leaked” in the past year by the U.S. and NATO governments about Russia, Iran, Syria, China, many other countries, and the Islamic State, it will be obvious that they are playing the same game as Putin, but perhaps not as well.
• Putin and his boys surely hacked the DNC’s e-mails with ease, although they probably were a bit harder to hack than the e-mails that once resided residing Hillary’s home-made and treasonous server, and which Moscow, Assange, and probably dozens of other governments and individuals now have. The point here is that the DNI’s public report does not prove that the Russians gave the documents to Julian Assange. What the report does is assert that there is a Russia-Assange joint operation against — not America — but Hillary Clinton. This is the sort of sophomoric phenomenon that is often seen in the work of novice intelligence analysts, and it is usually called “Analysis by Assertion.” Given his really quite impressive, if despicable, track record, Assange clearly is capable of getting the DNC’s e-mails off his own hook, perhaps from the DNC official who was gunned down in Washington last summer. Countless numbers of governmental and private-citizen hackers have the same ability and probably have had the same success.
• As an attempt to slant the election in favor of Mr. Trump, the release of the DNC e-mails cannot be considered as anything Americans — except tireless, war-mongering mad-hatters like McCain and Graham — need to worry about. The e-mails are irrelevant to U.S. national security and so they endanger nothing important, and they cannot effect the citizenry’s faith in the republic’s “democratic system” because Americans long ago lost faith in the national government and both parties. On this point, Putin and Assange were pushing a ball downhill from the start, and had no chance of harming the United States. At most, the e-mails sketch a more sharply defined portrait of Hillary Clinton as the greedy, lying, lawless, and reckless creep she long ago proved herself to be. Also sketched was a more complete view of senior Democratic Party leaders as men and women who share Hillary’s greed, recklessness, and other shining attributes. Reading the e-mails also leaves a not so faint whiff of what may be a rife sexual depravity prominent among the Clintons and the party hierarchy they created.

So it is time to relax and let the Democrats and their war-loving Neocon, Republican, and Israel-First friends go piss up a rope. They are as mangy a lot of miscreant mongrels as the republic has ever seen, and they will remain so even as their head hound travels to his beloved Chicago, a city where the strict gun laws he adores have obviously created an utterly non-violent Utopia.

For the rest of us, it is time to let Mr. Trump have his at-bats and see if he can begin to keep his promises to undo the damage Obama-and-crew intentionally inflicted on this country, by implementing policies to fix the economy and applying a reliable refusal to intervene in other peoples’ wars, politics, and societies. As that process unfolds, we must do what can be done to keep Mr. Trump up to mark, but we can also hope that either Assange or Putin — or even the Clapper-McCain creation of that ace and dreadful evildoer “Putsange” — will publish all of the classified e-mails from Hillary’s server. Putin no longer can use the e-mails to blackmail “President” Clinton, and Assange probably wants to finish what he started. If either or both do the necessary, Americans will read the e-mails and know they have been far better and more fully informed by the nation’s foes, than they ever would have been by their own government.

“The external politics of the United States is eminently expectant; it consists much more in abstaining than in doing.”

Alexis de Tocqueville (1)

The U.S. abstention on the UN Security Council’s resolution condemning Israel’s building of settlements in the West Bank was absolutely the right action, but it was taken for wrong, sophomoric, and really rather dastardly reasons.

The motivation for the abstention was not a clear view of genuine U.S. national security interests — which do, on this issue and many others, including UN membership, benefit from permanent abstention — but rather it came from Obama’s hatred for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the arrogant and colossal error that Netanyahu, the Republicans, and Israel First made in staging the former’s address to a joint session of Congress on the Iran deal; and Obama’s all-too-appropriate anger at Mr. Trump’s all-too-inappropriate intervention in his conduct of foreign policy. (NB: One must be careful here, as Mr. Trump, not being a dumb-head, certainly knew that the thin-skinned, arrogant Obama would press ahead and abstain. Could that be what Trump wanted when he spouted off?)

But not unlike the arrival of newborns, most correct and praiseworthy foreign-policy decisions come into the world in an orderly, intended, and legitimate manner, while some others arrive haphazardly as bastards. Obama’s abstention clearly is a bastard, but perhaps it is a quite wonderful bastard, and the first step toward a sane, America First foreign policy in the Middle East.

The point for Americans here is not that Israel is the bad guy and that the Palestinians are the good guys, or vice versa. The point is that neither party, nor their respective actions, make a lick of difference to the republic’s genuine national security interests as long as the U.S. national government stays out of the affairs of of each. If Israel drives all the Palestinians from the West Bank and builds an only-for-Jews metropolis there, or if the Palestinians find a way to kill Israelis in numbers like those of the Palestinians killed by Israelis, it amounts to precisely nothing that impacts the life-and-death interests of America and nearly all of its citizenry. The exceptions being, of course, those elite Jewish-Americans who prefer the survival of Israel to the welfare and survival of their fellow countrymen, and, who, after all, are expendable citizens who pose nothing but a threat to the republic’s survival. They are worthy only of being ostracized.

The truth is that any chance of a two-state solution in the Israel-Palestine conflict is a decade dead, and only more violence and perhaps war will be forthcoming over the issue of what each side considers its and its faith’s territory. Why would the United States want to stay involved in the bloody business that will ensue as the two states are left to work out their own problems and fanaticism? If the rest of the world lines up on the side of the Israelis or that of the Palestinians, and want to play in this nearly 70-year old, cruel but childish war, let them do so and pay and bleed as America has done for far too long.

Again, Obama, his team of juvenile diplomats, their gangsterish mother hen Hillary Clinton, and now the ketchup-king John Kerry are a reprehensible lot, who for eight years have conducted themselves as if it is still the malodorous 1960s, acting as if they are noble, Che-like agents who are duty-bound to make penitent amends for the supposed sins of colonialism and imperialism, while forcibly imposing the far worse sins of globalism, which will require global fascism to maintain. These people are war-causing imbeciles who were Ivy-League educated (indoctrinated?) with ideas, aspirations, and modes of behavior that reward the violent; cannonize the deviant, libertine, anti-religious, non-white, and subversive; and seek to destroy all the West has created since Athens and the Roman republic were pups.

In less than 25 days these lamentable creatures will be a nothing but a mostly annoying memory. But Obama’s abstention at the UN and then Kerry’s attack on Israel’s absolute right to self-defense via settlement building gives the Trump administration a base on which to begin to build an America-serving, non-interventionist foreign policy, though giving Mr. Trump that chance was not the motivation of either act.

After all, abstention or just plain silence on overseas issues and events that are none of the republic’s concern — such as, in this case, a two-state solution or an end to Israeli-Palestinian violence — always has been the key to the fullest possible preservation of the republic’s independence, security, sovereignty, and domestic liberties. Wars, necessary and unnecessary, are the enemies of each of those properties, and a foreign policy championing abstract ideas leads to both kinds of war. Today, as has been the case since 1941, such fatuous slogans as “permanent allies,” “the four freedoms,” “special relationships,” “exceptionalism,” “human rights,” “the right to exist,” “humanitarian intervention,” “democracy expansion,” and “the responsibility to protect” remain popular among adolescent politicians, and serve as sturdy obstacles to an accurate determination of America’s very few life-and-death national interests. Just note the rhetorical and weepy reactions of leading political and media figures as they damn Obama’s abstention and Kerry’s interventionist speech by littering their statements with slogans pertinent to those worthless and damnably war-causing abstractions.

It is always the U.S. national government’s absolute obligation to abstain from intervening, via words, funds, or deeds, in other peoples’ wars, tribal/religious/political/ethnic spats, domestic political arrangements, or any other matter that might wound the delicate sensibilities and foreign loyalties of some U.S. citizens, but threaten no genuine American interest. Sadly, our bipartisan governing elite is addicted to abstractions and delighted to get our soldiers and Marines killed and maimed fighting for the unattainable goals they encompass, most especially when they can be voiced in defense of anything and everything Israel and Israel First want done.

John Kerry’s slogan-filled speech on 28 December 2016 is a fine example of mindless U.S. interventionism, a policy that has long displayed a vast ignorance of how a world of nation-states must work. Kerry’s blithe dismissal of the argument that asserts Israel needs more settlements in Palestinian territory to strengthen its national security may be true. That, however, is not what the Israeli government believes, and, as it is that government that must manage Israel’s absolute right of self-defense. Israel’s cabinet would have to be a gang of morons to heed the interventionist words of the hapless Kerry or any other U.S. politician.

Might more Jewish settlements mean more war between Israel and Muslims? Without a shadow of a doubt, but that is a risk Israel is willing and has an unquestionable right to take in defense of its survival. The important thing is not that settlements might cause more war; after all, no one who dies or is maimed, looses or wins such a fight will adversely impact U.S. security or prosperity. The important things here are (a) that the United States not be involved in deciding how Israel is to defend itself, or, for that matter, how the Palestinians intend to defend themselves, and (b) to make crystal clear that the U.S. military is not coming to the rescue of any party in that worthless-to-America sandpit lying at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

So while Obama’s team correctly abstained from vetoing the UN resolution on Israel, it did so not because it was irrefutably none of America’s business, but because of that adolescent gang’s life-long love affair with violent and anti-Western Third Worlders. Their abstention was the act of self-centered scoundrels, but be that as it may, on the day of Mr. Trump’s inauguration the UN-approved resolution will be nearly a month old and will have had zero impact on anything even remotely important to the United States. And if the resolution stands for the next thirty years its impact on genuine U.S. interests will be precisely the same.

But you would never now that fact from hysterical and anti-U.S.-national-security reaction of the grandees of Israeli Firstism to the abstention, and then to Kerry’s speech. Jewish-Americans like Elliott Cohen, Daniel Kurtzer, Charles Krauthamer, and Alan Dershowitz; most members of both houses of the AIPAC-owned Congress, and one brain-dead announcer on FOX News last Sunday (25Dec16) — whose name I missed — who confidently identified Israel as “America’s greatest ally,” are all on the verge of apoplexy, deathly afraid of missing the chance to give away more tens of billions to Israel and to get more American military personnel killed and maimed in wars that are either waged on Israel’s behalf, or are waged against America, in part, because of the republic’s shameful status as Israel’s indentured servant.

That the reactions of the individuals noted in the foregoing paragraph show how correct the U.S. abstention was is clear, but, tragically, it names only a few of the many hundreds of U.S. citizens, perhaps the many thousands, who are self-confessed, Israel-First enemies of the republic’s security and survival. The comment about Israel being the republic’s “greatest ally,” however, merits a bit more notice.

This great ally deliberately attacked and nearly sank a U.S. naval ship, and killed, wounded, and maimed scores of U.S. sailors in the process. It has transferred U.S. technology to America’s enemies, has suborned U.S. citizens to spy on their government, and has refused U.S. requests to use its airspace in wartime. It has tried to force the national government into a war with Iran and other of the nation-state enemies Israel cultivates. Its U.S. citizen supporters have ruined the careers of dozens of intelligent and loyal citizens who have cited and fought the destructive impact of Israel First’s unrelenting intervention in and corruption of the U.S. political system, Congress, media, and federal civil service. Israel and its U.S. citizen supporters are not America’s allies, they are its nemesis, willing grave diggers, and endlessly greedy beneficiaries. Indeed, the sorts of activity in which Jewish-American Israel Firsters engage can only be described as the work of parasites and traitors.

America’s true allies are few, and none are named Israel. Britain, Australia, and Canada — until a teenager became the latter’s prime minister — fought valiantly with U.S. forces in the necessary Afghan war, but, like our own troops, they were shackled and made targets by political leaders who did not intend to win the war. Poland’s brave soldiers also were strong wartime allies, as was their and other Eastern European governments. Even General Pervez Musharraf’s Pakistan aided the United States with more substantive military assistance — that cost thousands of dead and wounded military personnel — than did most of the NATO countries put together.

But where was Israel — our “greatest ally,” per FOX News and most of the media — over the last two decades of military disasters? Certainly, it was nowhere near America’s battlefields, save by geographical proximity. Why? Well, first, because any visible Israeli military participation in a U.S.-led war waged on Muslim land would further unite the Islamic world in their loathing for both the U.S. government and Israel; draw tens of thousands of additional mujahideen to the theaters of war; and stimulate a flow of untold billions of Gulf-Arab dollars as donations with which to arm and support those fighters.

That reality, in turn, would quickly expose almost every post-1996 American president, senator, and congressman, and every NATO political leader, for the devious and cynical liars they are. Since Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda declared war on the United States in 1996 — citing U.S. support/subservience to Israel, and Israel’s maltreatment of the Palestinians as principle motivations — the political elites in North America and Europe have told their citizens that the West’s unquestioning support for Israel had absolutely nothing to do with motivating the Islamists to wage war against the West. The Islamists’ only motivation, the Atlantic world’s governing elite’s asinine assessment claims, is fanatic hatred for freedom, liberty, hooch, democracy, and the West’s countless numbers of sluttily dressed and behaving females. But this crackpot analysis would never again hold water if Israeli military units were seen serving in U.S.-led coalitions, and helping to kill Islamists and Muslim civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

As noted above, Israel’s military participation on the side of the republic and its few genuine allies would have generated a much more intense, united, geographically dispersed, and murderous Islamist war effort. But much more lethal would have been its impact on the ability of Israel and Israel-First to continue to buy the national government’s slavish support and to extort enormous amounts of U.S. taxpayers’ dollars; most recently, $38 billion dollars, which one — even Mr. Trump — might think would be better and more morally spent at home, say in cancer research, road building, or veterans’ health care. Israeli military participation with American, Canadian, British, Polish, Pakistani, and other forces would have shredded the thin gauze Western leaders have used to cover their lie that neither the West’s actions in the Muslim world nor its support for Israel were main motivators in the Islamists’ war that for decades has been killing and maiming the soldier-children of North American and European parents.

If this hard, but long-true fact became apparent to U.S. and Western citizens, not even such bastardly, Israel-First-enslaved liars as Senators McCain, Graham, and Schumer would be able to persuade or — their trademark — rhetorically bully U.S. parents into silently acquiescing in their government sending their children to get killed fighting in wars to protect a nation that is irrelevant to U.S. security interests, lives on a dole funded by U.S. taxpayers, and cultivates treasonous behavior among some Americans.

Again, the Obama administration’s ego-satisfying and vengeful abstention from voting on the UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements is a mark of its terminal ignorance about the proper America-centric goals of U.S. foreign policy. But, as noted, the abstention did produce a marvelous bastard of an offspring, one that gives Americans an opportunity to think about how in the world Israel’s nil worth as the republic’s ally can reasonably justify the pointless expenditure of tax dollars and human lives, an endless war with Islam, and unnecessary involvement in irrelevant overseas issues. All of these, at this point, can only distract the new administration from a campaign to repair the widespread economic, political, and social wreckage that is the signal and only achievement of Obama and his party.

On reflection, Americans — especially those who elected Mr. Trump — might well conclude, as did de Tocqueville, that for the good of themselves, their families, their republic, and their posterity, U.S. foreign policy from here on out ought to be one that “consists much more in abstaining than in doing.”

Endnote

1. Mansfield and Winthrop (Eds. and Trans). Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 219.

Mr. Trump, stop being played as a dumb-ass by Jewish-Americans. Every American soldier, Marine, and U.S. civilian who has died or been wounded or maimed since Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 has been the victim — in significant part — of the record of slavish and largely unquestioning U.S. support for Israel’s national security interests.

This kind of policy requires the utter abandonment of all the tenets inherent in the concept of America First. Together, your selection for ambassador to Israel — a supporter of West Bank settlements; that is, the brazen theft of Palestinian land — and your promise to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem will do four disastrous things: they will kill and maim more U.S. military personnel; decrease U.S. national security; prolong America’s Islam war by decades; and irreparably rupture the trust of your political base’s faith in your promise of putting America first. Proceed in the direction you are setting and you will be from the first day of your presidency nothing more than one more post-1945 U.S. president who is a slave to Israel’s national security interests, and the hapless pawn of disloyal Jewish Americans, their organizations, and their journals.

The only obligation the United States has to Israel is to never stand in the way of that country’s right to defend itself according to its own best lights. Building West Bank settlements, driving all Palestinians into Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or making war on Iran and Hizballah are all decisions that can only be made by Israelis and their government.

The key point is that while no other nation has the right to intervene to stop Israel from exercising its right to self-defense, neither does any nation have any obligation — legal or moral — to allow itself to be tarred with the brush of disaster which may accompany Israel’s foreign policy or military actions.

And, Mr. Trump, that is precisely the spot in which Israel and and the leadership of the American-Jewish community want to put you in: namely fighting wars on their behalf.

As long as you choose to tie the United States to such things as Israel’s settlement building, and volunteer to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, you will be further uniting the Muslim world in their hatred for the republic, telling American parents that their soldier-children should die for Israeli rather than U.S. interests, and advising U.S. taxpayers that they will continue to be forced by a small and disloyal American-Jewish cabal to shell out billions of dollars to build and defend Israel, money that, as you said during the campaign, is needed to accomplish the same tasks in America.

The American republic was not formed to be the cats-paw of any foreign power — especially one irrelevant to U.S. interests, like Israel — or any disloyal gaggle of Americans. Neither is there anything manly or self-respecting in you authorizing such Israel First goals as are signified by your ambassadorial choice and the plan to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. Remember that the supporters of both goals are the same people and organizations who hysterically vilified you, lied about you, and advised all Americans to vote for Hillary Clinton. You owe them nothing, Mr. Trump, and America owes neither them nor Israel another dollar or another military life. It is time, Mr. Trump, to stop playing the fool for Israel, Israel First, the Neoconservatives, and at U.S. Congress that is controlled by all three.

A prolonged and ultimately losing war with Islam or America First, Mr. Trump? It’s up to you.

Just in passing, I thought it might be worth mentioning that one of the main jobs of the Russian and ALL intelligence services is to try to swing elections in a direction that is favorable to their country. I have no idea of whether the Russians actually tried to swing the 2016 election in favor of Mr. Trump, but I doubt it for the reason stated below. But if they or another nation did try, they were knowingly abetted by U.S. citizens named Hillary Clinton and Podesta.

As I have said before in this space, the Russian, Israeli, Iranian, Chinese regimes, all NATO governments, and probably dozens of others have — thanks to their intelligence services — every one of the e-mails that Hillary Clinton and here correspondents put on her non-secure personal server.

For foreign governments this kind of e-mail haul is the stuff dreams are made of, but it becomes worthless if Clinton looses the election. If she wins, however, the foreign regimes are on easy street as they can exert an unprecedented level of effective blackmail against a President Hillary Clinton because they have documentary proof that she is a liar, a traitor, a racketeer, and — given press reports of her sordid and unhinged behavior on election night — a coward, or a drunk, or a drug user. No wretches on earth at this point in history are more susceptible to successful blackmail operations — or more frantic to fully hide or at least obfuscate their crimes by blaming Russia — than Hillary Clinton and her husband. Thankfully, she lost.

It has long been important that the great bulk of Americans begin to become adults, and this episode ought to give them a shot of maturity. Where was their outrage when Hillary Clinton’s State Department intervened in elections in Russia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, and Ukraine? In case of the Ukraine, she and her EU counterparts caused the downfall of the country’s pro-Russia government, and thereby gave Putin every right — indeed, the clear patriotic duty — to annex Crimea to protect Russia’s facilities for its Black Sea Fleet. All of the troubles the West now has with Russia flows from this mindless Clinton-EU intervention to change the regime in Ukraine. In Iran, Clinton and her State Department halfwits — and probably some EU regimes — sought to swing the election against the Mullahs, but failed and accomplished nothing but making themselves the cause of all the dead Iranian young people who Hillary encouraged to challenge that murderous Iranian regime unarmed.

Part of becoming an adult, of course, is reading and understanding history, and so learning how the always zero-sum world always works. Today’s perpetually adolescent American citizens — had they been properly educated — would know that history shows U.S. intelligence services, as well as the intelligence services of all nations who have the capability to do so, try to guide, alter, or control elections so as to serve their nation’s interests. South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and Africa have all been places where scholars have shown that foreign intelligence services have covertly and repeatedly intervened in elections. There is absolutely nothing new about this practice, it is very old hat and a time-honored tradition.

The new part of what can be called “election interventionism” lies in the invention of technologies pertinent to manipulating elections. The makers of computers, social-media systems, mobile phones, and a thousand other kinds of communication tools have made the world an easier place to live. Too often, however, all that most people think about is the pleasant side of the technologies, chanting childish and patently insane words about making all the world one big, united, talkative, and happily multicultural community. That sounds good to adolescents, but adults would know that hell lays on the other side of that coin. In devising these technologies, their creators also have built electronic gear which greatly advances the likelihood that invulnerable tyrannies and police states will be built by people who — like Hillary Clinton and her party — want permanent power and no resistance thereto. After all, if the security and intelligence services run by Hitler, Mao, and Stalin had today’s technologies, there would be no way to even try to change the German, Chinese, or Soviet police states, or any other police state, from within. Communications technology, in short, will inevitably pave the road to tyranny.

The bottom line, then, is that libraries are full of books showing that elections are the targets of all intelligence services — including those of the United States — and some have more luck than others. This is the way the game of international affairs has been played since at least 1945, and it will be played this way for as long as we can stave off the would-be tyrants that Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerburg have so blithely assisted.

If there is a question, however, about why Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and those of the DNC were hacked, the answer is because both Hillary and John Podesta thought that their e-mails were impregnable, and that they had corrupted the U.S. election process to the point where “Madame President” was unbeatable. They were not only wrong on that score, but used security protection that could have been — and probably was — hacked by 18-year-old, geeky high-school dropouts from Hoboken. Quite simply, Clinton and Podesta were astoundingly negligent, the former criminally so.

Infuriating though it is, Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Russia — and China, Iran, Israel, dozens of other countries, Julian Assange, and a gang of yet to be heard from folks — who seized the all-but-unprotected e-mails of Hillary Clinton. They demonstrated for thoroughly adolescent America that its national government — in the person of Hillary Clinton, her correspondents, and all the other agencies that have been hacked in the past decade — is either willfully negligent in protecting sensitive data or technologically incompetent to do so. It is no wonder America is consistently defeated on the battlefield, when it is led by politicians who refuse to obey the simple-to-comply-with laws that are in place to protect the republic’s sensitive electronic communications.

The foreigners also have taught us another much-needed lesson; namely, that that the laws of the United States are irrelevant, even laughable, if they are not enforced. Yes, we learned from the e-mails that Hillary Clinton is a criminal in every sense of the word, but most Americans knew that, and many were ready to vote for a criminal. But the most important thing we have learned is that Hillary Clinton and those government officials who dealt with her via that e-mail server — all of them violators of the espionage acts — have so far both flaunted and escaped what is, and must be, the hard-hand of the law on this issue.

What can be done by the citizenry when the national government refuses to enforce laws meant to defend the republic against enemies, as the saying goes, foreign and domestic? Well, the voters peacefully and fairly voted the Clinton crime family out of power, and they put in a new bunch on the condition that they be significantly more law abiding. But in the back of many minds there must be a lingering question of what can be done if the new folks offer the same kind of lawlessness.

It is in such a situation that knowledge of America’s history is a most useful resource. That knowledge teaches that it was once possible for Americans to defend themselves against domestic enemies, if the government refused to do so, or was just incompetent to do so. Indeed, the theme of citizens enforcing the law when the government will not, still reverberates in some of contemporary America’s popular music, and it provides all Americans with with a bit of nostalgia, perhaps even some food for thought.

Grandpappy told my pappy, back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street,
For all the people to see

We got too many gangsters doing dirty deeds
We’ve got too much corruption, too much crime in the streets
It’s time the long arm of the law put a few more in the ground
Send ’em all to their maker and he’ll settle ’em down
You can bet he’ll set ’em down (1)

Endnote

1. Scott Emerick and Toby Keith, “Beer for my horses,” https://www.google.com/webhp?tab=nw&ei=6-pPWJyfDMTY-gGTg6qgDQ&ved=0EKkuCAUoAQ#q=beer+for+my+horses+lyrics

For both the individual and the nation, America’s Founders believed, it is necessary to regularly look around and ask why what is being done is being done, this to ensure that genuine interests are being addressed. For an individual such a review may lead to an assessment that all is well, or it may detect a need to change course, perhaps a decision to quit smoking, to recant support for the Boston Red Sox, or to refuse to hold your tongue for fear of hurting daintily effete sensibilities.

It is just as important for the national government to ask itself the “Why are we doing doing what we are doing?” question. There are numbers of the national government’s operations that merit this kind of examination, but none more so — at least in the foreign policy arena — than its ongoing military interventions in Syria and Iraq.

As has been noted here more than once, the Islamic State’s activities in those two nations have irremediably destroyed them, and so neither poses a serious threat to genuine U.S. security interests. Since 2011, moreover, the war there has taken the lives of only the few American civilians who chose to risk their own lives a war zone, and not many more U.S. military lives, the latter lost only because President Obama put U.S. forces back into an already lost and now unwinnable war. The war also has cost U.S. taxpayers a small fortune to arms and train Islamists to fight other Islamists — and then turn on the U.S. military — as well as to arm and train Kurds, who will soon be the cause of the finally crumbling of the Syrian and Iraqi states and the destabilizing of Turkey and Iran.

The truthful answer to this question, if posed by the president to his advisers, would be that what today’s U.S. policy in Iraq and Syria is doing is playing the brain-dead midwife to the birth of utter civil anarchy and sectarian and ethnic civil wars, a mess that is likely to be so broad and bloody that to claim the U.S. government’s now 13-year-old intervention there has advanced any of the abstract causes championed by Obama, the Bushes, and the Clintons — freedom, liberty, women’s rights, secularism, etc. — would be just about the blackest lie that could be told. None of these things can be achieved — or even begun — in an environment of intense chaos and accelerating violence, and that is exactly what the Bush administration ignited in 2003 and Obama has stoked since 2014.

Why should the U.S. national government continue to not only participate in, but drive this irrelevant-to-America war? Which genuine — that is, life-and-death — U.S. national security interests does the current level, or a future greater level, of U.S. military intervention in Syria and Iraq serve to secure or advance? The answer is none. Indeed, it does precisely the opposite.

The Syrian and Iraqi nation-states are decaying corpses. How many new states, or annexations to existing states, will come out of the wreckage is an open question. A new Kurdish State? A Shia Iraqi state so closely joined at the hip to Iran as to be a de facto single unit? A new version of the Ottoman Empire as Erdogan’s increasingly Islamist Turkey grabs territory in Syria and Iraq and seeks to annihilate the Kurds? A new Lebanese state that amounts to a de facto Iranian province, though not contiguous? The destruction of Jordan by the thousands of its Islamist nationals that are now serving with IS and other Muslim insurgent groups in Syria and Iraq?

What about the Sunni Arab populations in Syria and Iraq? Will they sit idly by as Shias, Kurds, Turks, and Alawites carve up the region and exclude them from power, drive them from the new states, or simply annihilate them? Not likely. Much more likely is a general series of prolonged and extremely violent activities which will see Turks fighting Kurds, the returned-to-insurgency Islamic State trying to claw back power in both disintegrating nations, the massacre of the region’s remaining Christians, and inter- and intra-tribal wars for territory and power. All of this will be worsened by an overarching anti-Shia regional war that will be waged by Sunni Islamists armed, supported, and provided manpower by Saudi Arabia, the other Sunni Gulf regimes, and other Sunni Muslim states and wealthy Sunni Muslims around the world.

And what if the foregoing is entirely wrong? What if IS is utterly defeated and gives up the fight; the Shia offer the hand of friendship, love, and reconciliation to the Sunnis and the Sunnis reciprocate; the Kurds politely agree to remain disunited and oppressed by the Turkish, Syrian, Iranian, and Iraqi regimes; Ankara swears off its re-Ottomanization plans; and Russia comes to its senses and goes home to prepare for its coming, necessary war in Afghanistan?

The answer is that America would still be loser, as the argument would be made by NATO governments, the UN, and the Arab tyrants that because George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq gave birth to the Islamists’ war that has destroyed so much of Iraq and Syria, the enormous bill for reconstruction ought to be borne by U.S. taxpayers. The Democratic Party would go whole hog for this idea, and neoconservative Republicans would agree because it would give them a chance to trade their cooperation for a guarantee that the United States will maintain a postwar military force in Iraq with the unattainable goals of training one group or another and ensuring U.S. funding is properly spent. What the Neocons really will be seeking, of course, is a permanent military base in Iraq that can help wage the war against Iran they and the Israel Firsters have so long and so ardently desired.

Obviously, Mr. Trump, what we are doing in Iraq and Syria is both counter-productive to the genuine national security interests of the United States, and stirring a potential vortex into which another enormous tranche of U.S. taxpayer money will be poured and wasted. If this is not the answer your advisers provide to the above-noted question, get new, adult advisers immediately. Find advisers who will be honest enough to tell you that anything more you do in Iraq and Syria will amount to the feckless reinforcement of utter defeat, but, on the other hand, getting the United States out of that lethal, near-the-boil, sectarian caldron will yield substantial near- and long-term rewards, among which are:

• An end to the trillions of taxpayer dollars that have been wasted and now stand as the only reliable product of George W. Bush’s unwarranted invasion of Iraq in 2003. Mr. Trump, you and your advisers must have better uses for these funds, no? On this score, a certain wall comes immediately to mind, as does the simple kindness of halting the pillaging of American taxpayers for funds to be wasted or stolen by anti-American foreigners.
• An end to the possibility of any additional U.S. military lives being wasted in the morass known as Syria and Iraq, which is certain to evolve into a Hobbesian war of all against all, a war that, ironically, will do nothing but benefit U.S. national security if the republic’s government is smart enough to stand aside and let it rip.
• A respite for the U.S. military as a whole to rest, digest lessons learned lessons, and reequip after the serial and mostly unnecessary and lost wars that U.S. presidents have illegally waged since the elder Bush’s insane military intervention in Somalia in 1992.
• A detachment from the Middle East that will permit the soonest possible flowering of an all-out sectarian war between Sunnis and Shia, thereby allowing the broad bloodletting such a war will engender and which will consume the focus, activities, funds, and manpower of Tehran, Baghdad, and Damascus, as well as of our Islamist enemies and their Sunni nation-state backers.
• An abandonment of the so-far effective efforts of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama to empower Shia regimes at the Sunnis’ expense. Bush, Cheney, and General Petraeus allowed the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, while Obama and Clinton have long facilitated Shia and Kurdish efforts to cleanse Arab Sunnis from Aleppo, Mosul, Damascus, Raqqa, and other historically Sunni Arab cities in Syria and Iraq. If you are not careful, Mr. Trump, you and your administration will be held responsible by Sunnis worldwide for leaving their brethren in Syria and Iraq with the choice of living in the desert or fleeing the homelands you have helped give to non-Arab, Shia apostates. This perception among Sunnis will do nothing but strengthen groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda in terms of funding, manpower, popular support, and hatred for the U.S. government’s intervention in Sunni affairs. This perception is very much worth avoiding.
• A refusal to give the Democrats a chance to distract or even wreck your administration early in its tenure. You surely have noticed, Mr. Trump, that despite Obama’s wide-ranging and unnecessary overseas military interventions, and his replacement of the CIA’s tremendously effective, non-lethal rendition/interrogation program, with slaughter-by-drone operations, the so-called “American Peace Movement” has been dead silent and brooding in its malodorous sties for both of his terms. That is because, as you must know, the U.S. “peace” movement is the wholly owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party and George Soros, and is used only when it is in their political interest to awaken it with lucre and then deploy it — and the mainstream media that is part of it and portrays it as apolitical — to wreck any administration they oppose, even one of their own, as in the case of Lyndon Johnson. This is an easily predictable and perhaps fatal domestic trap for your administration, Mr. Trump, and another one that is well worth avoiding.

Think about the foregoing, Mr. Trump. Expanded spending and military operations in Iraq and Syria will keep America on the losing end of the stick, and they may well sink your chance to put matters to rights back here at home in the republic.

Because, Mr. Trump, you will set your own foreign policy, the main tasks for the next secretary of state will be to execute that policy and to purge the Department of State of those who have, for so many decades, championed the causes of foreign countries and have plied those foreigners with taxpayer money that should have been spent at home. In simple terms, if American taxpayer money is to be spent to make life better for people, those people can only be Americans.

The next secretary also will have to find and remove the cadre of interventionists, socialists, one-worlders, environmental-quacks, anti-Christians, social engineers, and that corps of incompetent, bespectacled, and ill-spoken young feminists, who have shown beyond doubt that feminism’s only real power is to block a young woman’s growth into a mature adult. Two terms of the Obama administration have sewn this useless and destructive ideological menagerie into the department’s fabric, and, if the department is to be re-professionalized, it must be sent packing.

Of the current names being bandied about for the secretary’s position, not one can be expected to do the necessary in terms of either cleansing the institution of the just noted rubbish or of reliably executing your America First foreign policy.

Mitt Romney: He is a part of the bipartisan governing class that, over the past 40 years, has made the State Department a hive of Ivy League-educated bees who advocate republic-killing interventionist wars and the spending of taxpayer money on what Kipling would have called their favorite “little brown brothers.” Romney and the State Department together would be more of the same status quo doctrine — everything for foreigners whatever it costs Americans — unless you or another adult reviews and approves everything Romney wants to do. It also should be recalled that Romney is a coward. He lost the 2012 election — like McCain did the 2008 election — because they feared being tagged racists if they publicly dismantled a Black man named Barack Obama by proving in debate that he had no contact points with the real world. Romney’s 2012 campaign staff also was flush with Israel-Firsters who spoke and wrote to damn and slander Dr. Ron Paul and other American non-interventionists as “isolationists” and anti-Semites. Finally, Romney and his buddy Netanyahu would keep the United States mired in religious wars that concern none of the republic’s life-and-death national interests.

John Bolton: This man is the quintessential Neoconservative-interventionist-Israel First war monger. The only senior-level, foreign-policy posts for which he is fitted are located in the Israeli government.

Robert Corker: The Senator is Bolton-lite. As secretary of state, he would want more unnecessary military interventions, more aid for and protection of Israeli interests, and probably would ask to have Bolton as his deputy.

David Petraeus: The General lost two wars — Iraq and Afghanistan — and wasted U.S. military lives in his faux “surge” in Iraq, which was all show and no substance. The surge’s net result was to allow many of the Islamist fighters now serving with al-Qaeda and the Islamic State to escape to Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey and build networks and destabilize each before returning to the battlefield. He also happens to be a self-confessed felon who passed classified intelligence to his paramour. Petraeus should be neither appointed nor pardoned. Let him stew in his own self-made juices, and make sure that Hillary Clinton — a person Petraeus championed — stews in the same kind of juices for her multiple and similar felonies.

Rudy Giuliani: Do you recall his arrogant, scurrilous, and neoconservative attacks on Dr. Ron Paul for his reverence for the Founders, his America First philosophy, his non-interventionist policies, and his reluctance to make Israel his country of first allegiance? In so doing, Giuliani displayed his support for the Bush-Cheney-Obama doctrine of relentless militarily intervention in places where no genuine U.S. national interests are at risk; for going to war for the ludicrous and unattainable causes of spreading democracy, freedom, human rights, and feminism; and for continuing the enormous and unconscionable amounts of taxpayer funds that are expended on such wars, and on aid — monetary or military, or both — for such “noble” but unnecessary and generally useless allies as Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, most of NATO, and the other Gulf states.

These five men taken individually or together amount to a poisonous dog’s breakfast of intervention, war-mongering, deeper bankruptcy, and Israel First. There is not an America First-bone in any of them, and they would work against your often-stated goal of reforming U.S. foreign policy in the direction the Founders intended, and ending the influence of the passions of Neoconservatives and Israel Firsters for involving the republic in endless, unnecessary wars.

Able alternatives to these war-lovers are available and ought to be considered, two of whom come quickly to my mind, Senator Rand Paul and Professor Walter A. McDougall, perhaps as a team. The former is a consistent non-interventionist by inclination and birth-right, and the latter wrote the two best books ever written on the cost of a U.S. foreign that deviates from the Founders’ guidance: Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World Since 1776 (1997) and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (2016). MacDougall’s long survival in the academy as a non-interventionist and champion of the Founders’ wisdom also suggests a talent for in-fighting that would help to clear the State Department of the dross mentioned above.

Think it over, Mr. Trump. The five men you are reported to be considering for Secretary of State will do nothing but make America more hated around the world; begin and lose more wars that waste the lives and limbs of young Americans; and, perhaps, distract your government from addressing and funding all the work that needs to be done in the United States. Long-term security for America, after all, depends on stopping illegal immigration, ridding the nation of illegal aliens, unleashing business to create jobs and profits, restoring law and order, rebuilding the military, and completely removing our children’s education from the malign hands of the national government.

Avoiding the cost and distractions caused by war are keys to accomplishing these other, more important domestic tasks. If we have to fight somewhere to defend ourselves and our interests, you have General Mattis to do the job, and there is no better man for doing that task quickly and definitively. Give him a colleague at the State Department who will not seek unnecessary wars for him to fight.

Michael F. Scheuer
December 2, 2016

Image source: A billboard in Detroit stating ‘America First Not Israel’ is causing controversy and accusations of anti-Semitism. The advertisement was paid for by the Deir Yassin Remembered group, which aims to make American’s more aware of the plight of Palestinians. The billboard can be seen 8 Mile Road in the city, and was placed there by Deir Yassin Remembered, which is based in New York. — Blog.deiryassin.org, Oct.27.2016 / selected by wg.pco

Although Obama’s effort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by taking Mosul on the eve of the election failed, there is a good chance that Mosul will fall to the heterogeneous coalition that is attacking it. Be that event in six weeks, six months, or a year, the United States and its allies will rejoice over the event as if it is the death knell of the Islamic State (IS). They will be wrong to do so, showing again how deeply ignorant they are of the Islamist enemy and the religious war it is waging against them.

IS has lost in Palmyra, Anbar, Ramadi, and other territories, and yet its troops are putting up their hardest fight yet in Mosul. Why? Two reasons: (a) IS leaders prematurely declared the caliphate, ignoring Osama bin Laden’s guidance that the lasting re-creation of caliphate was impossible until the United States was driven from the Arab World; if he was alive, he would probably add Russia to that guidance; and (b) because in the minds of IS leaders, fighters, and their supporters, everything, good or bad, comes from Allah; victory is from Allah, and defeat is a trial sent by Allah to test His followers’ faith and perseverance. While far from irrelevant, IS’s defeats in 2016, in Islamist minds, are in part a consequence of a IS leadership mistakes, but overwhelmingly because Allah did not grant them victory at this time.

The stubborn defense of Mosul and other places in Syria and Iraq, as well as the not infrequent, often unexpected IS offensive actions occurring in tandem, are mujahideen operations meant to prove to Allah that they are working through His test and trying to prove that they are fighting His fight and are worthy of His assistance. This is not a new phenomenon. Between 1979 and 1991, the Afghan Islamists were constantly beaten up, tactically defeated, and generally beleaguered by the Red Army and Air Force, but they stayed in the field, fought the Soviets and their Afghan allies, and Allah ultimately gave them victory. More recently, the West and its African allies have twice dealt the Somali Islamists heavy blows and declared victory. Today, however, Al-Shabaab remains in the field and is advancing, and a nascent Islamic State outfit has joined the war.

Faced with an enemy that thinks in this manner, victory for the United States, Russia, and their respective allies requires nothing less than as a complete annihilation of the mujahideen and their supporters as is militarily possible. As noted here previously, the loss of the cities that IS held or holds in Syria and Iraq is a blow to the organization’s prestige, and is costly in financial and manpower terms. It does not destroy the eternal goal of recreating the caliphate, or the IS organization. Indeed, in the counter-intuitive ways of insurgent warfare — where losses are often wins — those defeats will make IS stronger, more elusive, and more appealing to young Muslims. The latter due to its fierce resistance against what is irrefutably the strongest Crusader force that has ever taken the field against Islam.

Without the cities, IS will no longer need to supply food, electricity, water, roads, health, education, and social services, or law-and-order for urban populations, all of which are expensive and manpower-intensive. Shed of this burden, IS forces will be reapplied. Much of IS’s remaining force will return to what they do best, which is to base in remote areas of Syria and Iraq and conduct a patient insurgent campaign, which will be fought by small groups, in a hit-and-run manner, and will be punctuated by ambushes, IEDs, and car-bombs in urban areas.

IS’s loss of the cities and return to its main fighting skills will coincide with a gradual recognition on the part of the U.S.-Russia-Iran-NATO coalition that its string of urban victories have yielded a catastrophic result. In the space of a year, for example, the coalition will have lost the only kind of targets in which it has prevailed against Islamists since 2001 — cities — and will then confront an enemy that requires quite large numbers of infantrymen for use in undertaking the long, bloody, costly, and usually unsuccessful counter-insurgency campaign needed to have any chance of annihilating IS and the other Islamist fighting groups. Oh yes, the Western members coalition also will have to pay through the nose — given that Syria, Russia, and Iraq do not have a pot to piss in — to rebuild the urban areas and infrastructure its air forces and IS have destroyed. They also will have to feed the hundreds of thousands who have lost their homes and jobs; who largely blame the current coalition’s Westerners, Russians, and Shias for their dire predicament; and who hold an enduring hatred for the U.S. government for invading Iraq in 2003.

An Islamist insurgency being waged from Damascus eastward to the Iranian border, however, will be only one part of the catastrophe which will be delivered by the coalition’s successful campaign to drive IS from the cities. As noted, IS will return to its strongest military skill, and it also will return to kind of warfare that requires less manpower. IS leaders, therefore, will be free to redeploy their fighters to areas of its choosing, and, as the history of the last 20 years has shown, the arrival of even a few veteran mujahideen can make a notable difference to the quality and lethality of local jihadi operations.

The European governments are already in a public and cowardly tizzy about IS’s foreign fighters returning to their home countries. Some will certainly return to Europe and stage attacks, but they will only serve as icing on the Islamists’ cake. The Europeans have already sealed their well-deserved fate by letting in a tidal wave of Arab refugees — in the name “Merkelism,” which is an insane, Western civilization-destroying brand of humanitarianism — in whose ranks were untold numbers of mujahideen in the guise of innocent refuge seekers. Indeed, the greatest threat posed by IS fighters returning home probably lies not in Europe, but in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Jordan, India, and western China, where the ample local supplies of would-be Salafi mujahideen are in dire need of military trainers, combat-experienced leaders, explosives experts, and talented organization-builders and logisticians.

The real rub for the victorious U.S.-Russia-NATO-Shia coalition will come when IS leaders deploy — as they now are — fighters to countries where other jihad struggles are ongoing. IS fighters from Syria and Iraq, for example, have been and will be sent to Afghanistan, among them Pakistanis and Afghans going home with significant combat experience and organizational and leadership abilities. This move will strengthen IS’s foothold in Afghanistan, and begin to pave the way for the priority IS goal of entering Central Asia and opening another front against Russia.

Other IS fighters will be deployed to Gaza to strengthen the growing Salafi movement, as well as to be filtered by HAMAS’s military wing into the Sinai Peninsula to fight the Egyptian military and attack Israel. IS fighters also will sent to assist the growth of Salafi organizations and military capabilities in the Tripoli region of northern Lebanon. IS leaders will continue deploying fighters, munitions, and explosives into Iran, and will surely move some troops to Yemen, either to fight there or to move across the Red Sea to serve in Somalia and East Africa, to reinforce IS fighters in Libya and the rest of North Africa, and to join IS-allies in Mali, where the regional Islamist tide again appears to be rising.

In this religious war, U.S. and NATO “victories” — such as the deposing of Saddam, killing Osama bin Laden and Muammar Gadhafi, and backing the coup that overthrew Muhammad Morsi — have very often led to more, rather than less war, as well as to sky-rocketing expenditures by that effete gang of war-without-killing bankrupts. The retaking of the Syrian and Iraq cities from IS seems likely to yield the same kind of result, only this time perhaps on a much broader international scale.

In view of the foregoing budding reality, and the long string of disasters that have preceded it, there never has been a better time for the U.S. national government to make a clearly America-First decision to complete the Mosul operation and then withdraw all U.S. troops, aircraft, and private contractors from Syria and Iraq. That action will let the nations from Europe, the Levant, and the Arab Peninsula who have what America has not — genuine life-and-death national interests in the ultimate outcome there — continue the war until they are successful or until they perish.

While that melodrama plays out, Americans can work on defending U.S. interests, in all of their dimensions, in the place it matters most, in North America. That is, after all, the clearest and most important of all the constitutional responsibilities assigned to the U.S. national government, as well as the one that won Mr. Trump the recent election.

Until inaugurated on 20 January 2017, Mr. Trump would be well advised to follow the pre-inaugural behavior of one of his predecessors, a fellow New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From November, 1932, until his inaugural on 4 March 1933, FDR refused to make any public statement that would tie him to the floundering policies of Herbert Hoover’s government. Roosevelt was about to undertake the monumental task of trying to get America out of still deepening economic depression and wanted no association with the administration that Americans — rightly or wrongly — perceived as the cause of their economic misery. FDR resisted requests for supportive statements from the Hoover administration and defied the bashing he received from parts of the media for not speaking out on the economy and the worsening banking crisis.

FDR always held his cards close to his vest — earning the nickname “Sphinx” — and Trump should follow his lead. The domestic and overseas ravages caused by eight years of Obama-Clinton policies and unconstitutional actions are coming home to roost and Trump ought to leave them to reap the whirlwind and wither alone. Obama, Clinton, and their party are also behind the violent post-election demonstrations America is now witnessing, and they are hoping that Trump will say something that can be used to blame for the spreading violence.

Mr. Trump has a few election-provided blessings to count, but his biggest task at the moment seems to be to keep silent on a number of domestic and foreign-policy disasters that he had no hand in creating, thereby letting those disasters fall squarely into the laps of Obama and Clinton.

Following are a number of silence-worthy topics, and two blessings to count.

Silence: The unusually fast expressions supporting a “peaceful transfer of power” from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently were meant to impress Americans with their even-handed handling of a stunning and well-merited electoral defeat. Do not be fooled. They knew that street violence was coming because their surrogates, led and paid by Soros-ites, had it prepared just in case the unimaginable happened and the American people prevailed. If Mr. Trump is smart he will say very little — preferably nothing — about the issue and sit back and see where the violence goes. Paid-for violence often takes on a life of its own, and if the anti-Trump violence continues, he should then say — absolutely nothing. If the violence grows and gets out of hand, Mr. Trump should led Obama, Clinton, Podesta, Pelosi, Schumer, et al. stew in their own juices. If Trump says anything at all, the Democrats will blame him for causing the violence and then simply pay for more of it. As did FDR before he was inaugurated, Trump should remain silent and let Obama and Clinton manage the problem they created, either by ignoring it and falsely publicly blaming it on Trump or by cracking down on their own paid goons. Either way, Trump and the republic win, and hopefully a goodly number of the Soros-paid mercenary thugs will get killed.

Blessing: Trump enters the presidency with the unqualified blessing of having seen Senator Mark Kirk (R-Illinois) and Senator Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire) defeated in their bids for reelection. Kirk and Ayotte are both ardent interventionists and even more ardent Israel-Firsters. The loss of two Republican votes in the Senate is more than compensated for by the departure of two war-mongering interventionists who would have been nothing but enemies and underminers of an America First foreign policy.

Silence: Trump and his team ought to silently make plans to close all of the White House space that has been used by journalists, either as work areas or for the daily press briefing. Almost all the U.S.-media worked as an extension of the Democratic Party during the recent election and manufactured coverage of Trump that was 91-percent negative. Trump owes the U.S. media nothing, and certainly not coddling inside the White House. Trump must not ignore the press, however, and so ought to have a covered platform built — with no walls — on the White House grounds where the journalists can gather for the daily press briefing, and from there can ask questions via a skype-like arrangement to the president’s spokesman who will be in his office inside the White House.

Blessing: The reelection of Republican Senator Rand Paul in Kentucky is unalloyed good news for non-interventionists and for Trump’s intent — if it is sincere — to conduct an America First foreign policy. Senator Paul’s victory gives him the chance to clarify and sharpen some of his foreign policy ideas and objectives — which seem to have drifted a bit from non-intervention — and to keep Mr. Trump up to mark on his foreign policy promises. Senator Paul’s presence, moreover, will give Trump a non-interventionist ally in a Republican senate caucus where the majority has never seen a war it did not want to get into, and which long ago hired on as well-paid shills for Israel First.

Silence: Mr. Trump should remain silent on the ideas coming from the media, and even some Republican quarters, that suggest he should “wipe the slate clean” and pardon Hillary Clinton and her coterie of fellow felons if the felon-in-chief Obama does not do so. If the possibility of pardoning Clinton and her gang remains viable at the time of his inauguration, Trump ought to slam the door shut on it on his second day as president. Although Gerald Ford is surely among the most decent men ever to be U.S. president, it was his pardoning of Richard Nixon that cleared the way for the Clintons’ criminal operations. Ford said the pardon of Nixon was meant to end a “long American nightmare,” but it really did nothing but demonstrate to the electorate that the U.S. political elite was above the law. Trump is likely to be faced by the same king of nightmare-ending arguments — as noted, even from Republicans — if he is sworn in with Hillary and her comrades in crime still unpardoned. At that point, the new president ought to appoint Patrick Fitzgerald — the Special Counsel who nailed the Bush administration’s Scooter Libby for leaking a CIA officer’s true name — and let him examine both the use of the unsecured server and the activities of the Clinton Foundation. If he finds no illegality, fine, but if he finds illegality, then indictments and a trial are mandatory to bring the lawless political elite to book. If their are valid legal grounds for indictment, trial, conviction, and incarceration, nothing could do more to help the citizenry to start to believe that the republic is returning to the concept of the equality of all before the law.

Silence: Trump also should remain silent on Iraq. The current siege of Mosul — which Obama timed to help Clinton win the election — is producing increasing numbers of reports that Iraq’s Shia fighters are indiscriminately killing and torturing Sunni civilians in retribution for similar behavior by the Islamic State. With any luck, this will be the proverbial final feather that turns Shia-Sunni violence into a full-blown sectarian war. If that happens, the 5,000-6,000 U.S. soldiers and Marines that Obama has pointlessly put on the ground there may have to fight their way to safety, as the inter-sect warfare expands. If those troops can get safely out of harm’s way, Obama will have to either send them back into the fight, in what would be a suicide mission; massively reinforce them, a move that would produce nothing but dead Americans; or bring them home. Such an all-consuming sectarian war that begins in Iraq has been the end toward which events there have been heading since Obama foolishly re-entered Iraq in August, 2014. Trump should remain silent on the issue, and let Obama reap the disgrace he deserves by repeating George W. Bush’s two-fold madness of (a) sending the U.S. military into Iraq and (b) deploying just enough troops to ensure U.S. defeat.

Let me first say how much I appreciate people taking the time to write, whether from a favorable or unfavorable view. I have learned a good deal from those who kindly take time to read what I write.

At some point in the last six-weeks, I received an e-mail telling me the blog has been defaced a bit. So far I have tried to cope with the problem — placing articles a bit farther down from the page top — but have not found a way to fix it.

Then, about 7 or 10 days ago, I received another e-mail saying that my responses to readers’ comments were not appearing on the blog. I checked and found that to be the case. I have not found a way to fix that either.

Anyway, below are the responses that I have so far written on some of the comments received about the last three blog pieces. I will continue to put responses in this format until I can fix the problems.

Again, many thanks for your comments. MFS

“The Jewish-American media elite intends to kill the republic,” 2 November 2016

In reply to Mike Phillips.

Thanks for writing. None of them is CIA inventions. They are the inventions of (a) devout Muslims and (b) the Russian invasion of Afghanistan (1979) and the USG’s pots-1945, bipartisan interventionist foreign policy that is thoroughly hated across the Muslim world, as well as by any right-thinking American. MFS

In reply to Jacques.

Thanks for writing. I have detested that elite most of my adult life. It has given Trump nothing but negative/lying coverage since the start of the primary season. Indeed, they have been more despicably anti-Trump than parts of the liberal media. Have you been on vacation for the past 18 month? MFS

“The choice in 2016: Liberty or the yoke,” 29 October 2016

In reply to Jacques.

Thank you for writing. I have, incidentally, answered everyone of the comments you have sent. Slavery was legal/constitutional at the time of the Civil War. The slaves were freed by a Civil War that prepared the ground for the 13th-15th amendments. The Civil war was not waged to free the slaves. Lincoln could not have fought the South to free slaves because he would have been fighting an unconstitutional war and he would have had almost no popular support. The slaves were freed by constitutional amendments, as it should be in a constitutional republic. Without question, the Confederate nation was opposing what it perceived as tyranny, and perception is always reality. As in, I perceive you as a hopeless fool. MFS

In reply to Warren.

Thank you for writing. Yes, the anti-Federalists almost to a man saw what the new constitution could and has lead to, and that is why the liberal academy has for so long tried damn them as complainers, cranks, and men with no alternative plan. The anti-Federalists are as, if not more, important than the Federalists because they never for a second forgot that man is a fallen creature and will behave tyrannically given half a chance. On the other side, Washington, Madison, and some others were of the exact same mind. Had the Founders lived forever we might have been okay, but here we are with a traitor/butcher/felon running for president and access to all the arbitrary power the anti-Federalist warned off. Time is running out. Finally, I am about have way through a new book on the anti- Federalists. The book is by William A. Watkins Jr. and called Crossroads of Liberty. I think it is excellent in showing how much liberty was lost at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. MFS

“Of course the 2016 election is rigged, here’s how, and what it may yield,” 17 October 2016

In reply to Jacques.

Thanks for writing. Do you have a script from the DNC that you use for these witty and compelling notes. I always try to be polite, but I’ll tell the truth. If your grandparents are alive today, they must surely regret the mess you have made of the opportunities they won for you at high personal costs. You and your kind wouldn’t get up off your asses to do anything for yourselves if it required going farther than the refrigerator, and so you depend on a criminal, Wall-Street whore like Hillary to take as much money as possible from people who work and give it to you worthless, narcissistic, and lazy creeps. Grow up and get to work, and learn what it feels like to have half of America get paid from what you earn. MFS

In reply to Z.V. Dongone.

Thanks for writing. The media is completely biased in favor of the left and of suffocating liberty and the republic at all times. Because they have neither respect for, nor knowledge of the citizenry, they covered Trump initially to bedevil the Republican Party establishment and — given Trump’s wealth — reinforce the idea that Wall Street owns the party. (NB: You’ll note the media has been largely silent now that we know that Hillary is Wall Street’s aged but bought-and-paid-for whore.) After it became clear that Trump had struck a nerve in the populace and had growing support, the coverage simply continued and grew increasingly negative toward Trump and vastly more pro-Clinton, especially in what they chose not to report about Clinton’s criminality. It is all of a piece really, and has been for nearly half a century. I read yesterday that the public record shows 96-percent of all the media people — reporters, editors, pundits, media owners, anchors, etc. — who can be identified as having made a contribution to a presidential candidate in the 2016 race gave their money to Hillary. I would say that the 96-percent figure is a pretty clear proof of bias if any more was needed. MFS

In reply to Charles Byrd.

Thanks for writing. For my money, Rand Paul never made clear where he stood and so came off as one who would trim as the situation demanded. I thought the material on his website was especially confusing in this regard. This may be unfair because part of the lens through which I see Rand Paul is his dad, whom I never had to worry about straying off course. I also think that Rand Paul and the 15 or 16 other candidates missed what is truly clear about the Republican Party; namely, that it, as well as the Democratic Party, are well and truly hated by much of the citizenry. There was Trump and 16 other candidates, and the latter group would have run Romney-like campaigns and would not have gotten down in the gutter where Hillary and her party live and thrive, and which is the only place in which they can be beaten. Hillary would have mopped the floor with any of the other fifteen, moreover, because all of them would have been made to look like Romney by the Clinton machine, and all would have played the role of the well intentioned but soon-to-be-defeated gentlemen because they would have not spoken frankly and in the blue-collar idiom, as Trump has, about her criminality, treason, greed, arrogance, run-away corruption, and the obvious hatred in her heart for non-elite white Americans and this republic. Anyway, I am no expert on any of this, but I am confident of one thing. Trump is the last chance for our republic, and much of the election depends on whether Christians and Protestants can see, and act accordingly, on the what I think is the irrefutable fact that if they turn their back on Trump — a fallen creature just as I and they all are — they in fact turn their collective backs on themselves and their children, and volunteer to see the closest thing to heaven on earth turned into a genuinely hellish tyranny that intends to finish banning faith from the public square and constitutional liberty and order from the republic and its citizens. MFS