Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

In this space I have generally refrained from singing my own praises, most especially because there are so few to sing. But on this occasion I am going to publish a commendation that was given to me by the Department of Justice, on its behalf and that of the FBI, for the work that my unit “Alec Station” — staffed mostly by female CIA officers, but also with excellent female officers from NSA and FBI — did against Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda between November 1995, and May 1999. I am doing so for two reasons.

First, in his recent book, The Great War of Our Time, the former Acting Director of CIA, Michael Morell, and his co-author — the latter shill also co-wrote George Tenet’s deceitful book — published a number of deliberate lies about me and the people who I was honored to serve with in the 1995-1999 era of the battle against al-Qaeda. Morell says, for example, that he was “shocked” that I was the chief of Alec Station because I was not a trained operations officer; he does not tell you that I took the job after no senior operations officer would accept it in late-1995 because none believed it would be career enhancing. Nor does he mention that I hold the William J. Donovan Award — one of the CIA’s Directorate of Operation’s top awards at the time I received it — for my pre-al-Qaeda work on Afghan covert operations. He says also that I always was coming to his office and complaining to him about not having enough officers to do the job; while the unit was greatly understaffed, I had not a single one-on-one meeting with Morell between 1995 and my resignation in 2004; indeed, he was nowhere in my chain of direct command. Morell also contends that my officers were untalented and that I was “a zealot” who was “constantly getting into fights with the FBI, the NSA, and his own bosses.” The DOJ document I am publishing here for the first time will make Morell’s lies clear on this score, but part of the reason that Morell describes my officers as untalented is because most were women and all were aggressive and successful in hunting bin Laden, traits that never sat well with the seniormost CIA officers while I was there. In his book, Morell describes those highly talented women in terms one would use to speak of Hillary-Clinton-like harpies. I also would note that about two years ago Morell came over to my table at a local Starbucks and, in essence, told me that he was writing a book that would tell the truth about Alec Station and its officers. Morell apparently lies about everything.

The second reason is an August, 2015, article by an Israel-First cheerleader named Gabriel Schoenfeld on the blog Lawfare. Schoenfeld has been defaming me for years as an incompetent, an-anti-Semite, and a liar. (NB: Readers of this space will recognize Schoenfeld’s name and recall a series called something like “Scheuer Watch” he wrote for Commentary, Israel-First’s flagship publication.) In his Lawfare posting, Schoenfeld — who has never met me and, like Morell, never asked me to comment on the accuracy of Morrel’s claims — wrote that

“the CIA had placed someone with an unhinged personality — a man with [per Morell] a ‘penchant for angering anyone who didn’t see things exactly as he did’ — into a critical job. Morell’s verdict is harsh. The inadequate work of Alec Station [per Morell] ‘significantly lowered the chances that we would detect an attack in preparation and disrupt it’ and indeed the shortcomings of the unit ‘helped lead to the bombings of embassies in East Africa’ in 1998.”

Apparently neither Schoenfeld or Morell know that President Clinton cancelled a JSOC-approved CIA operation to kidnap bin Laden two months before the East Africa attacks — and then ordered it restarted on the day of the attacks — or that Morell’s patron, former DCI George Tenet, refused to stop the FBI from recalling a female FBI officer from Alec Station two months before the East Africa attacks. This woman was the officer who had uncovered much of al-Qaeda’s East Africa network and knew more about it than anyone else in the U.S. Intelligence Community.

Schoenfeld, like Morell, also does not like the fact that female CIA officers successfully hunted down bin Laden. He writes with glee and approval of Morell’s lying slander that the

“inadequate work of Alec Station [mostly staffed by female CIA officers] ‘significantly lowered the chances that we would detect an attack in preparation and disrupt it’ … and indeed the shortcomings of the unit ‘helped lead to the bombings of embassies in East Africa’ in 1998. Matters only began to improve after the attacks, when Scheuer was removed from his post and Tenet put the agency on a war footing to meet the al Qaeda challenge.”

So completely misogynous are Schoenfeld and Morell, in fact, that neither mentions that until bin Laden was killed in May 2011, the only chances the U.S. government had to kill bin Laden — and there were ten of them — were given to President Clinton by Alec’s Station’s largely female staff and their courageous male and female colleagues risking their lives overseas.

The memo that follows, therefore, is meant to disprove the lying, slanderous, and anti-female words of Morell and Schoenfeld, the one a lying apparatchik, the other a man who claims to be a “journalist” but is merely an utterly disloyal Israel-First swine.

It is also meant to again emphasize that the female officers I served with and our colleagues based abroad succeeded completely in the mission they were assigned; that is, to dismantle al-Qaeda cells, and to provide a chance for CIA to capture bin Laden and/or to assist the U.S. military to take him out. That President Clinton turned down every opportunity to do either of the latter is also a fact Morell does not mention, perhaps because he is the one who made sure the Benghazi talking points disguised Mrs. Clinton’s clear culpability for the murder of four Americans in Libya, or perhaps it is because he is now rumored to be working for a firm that is very close to Mrs. Clinton.

As for myself, I can only say that, while I am under-brained and a reliably polite but quite frank son-of-a-bitch when dealing with senior U.S. officials who refuse to protect Americans, I did have enough commonsense to stay out of the way of the aggressive, tireless, and skilled female CIA officers and their overseas colleagues, who, had Bill Clinton not been a narcissistic moral coward, would have prevented 9/11 and probably the disasters that have followed in its wake.

U.S.. Department of Justice
United States Attorney
Southern District of New York
The Silvio J. Mollo Building
One Saint Andrew’s Plaza
New York, New York 10007

May 24, 1999

Michael F. Scheuer
Central Intelligence Agency
Langley, Virginia

Dear Mike:

I write to express my profound gratitude for your outstanding work and leadership over the last four years in the investigations of Usama Bin Laden and his terrorist network, al Qaeda.

As you know, this Office began a criminal investigation into Usama Bin Laden and the al Qaeda network three years ago, working in conjunction with the New York Office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (“FBI”). Since the first day, you and your colleagues welcomed members of our office to participate in discussions with you and your colleagues as to how the separate but related law enforcement and intelligence investigations could coordinate to make sure that neither did anything to compromise the other and, where legal and appropriate, to enhance each other. I know from first hand knowledge that early on in the case — when the Bin Laden network was not in the public eye — the prosecutors in my office were awed both by your incredibly diligent work ethic and your determination to make your mission a successful one, as well as the efforts you made early on in the case to coordinate your work with the law enforcement effort in a manner that in my experience was unprecedented in this country’s history. It was obvious from the work of your staff who labored hard with tremendous resolve that your diligence and determination were contagious. That effort — combined with the accommodations you made at critical times to allow the evidentiary needs of law enforcement to be protected — made it possible for Usama Bin Laden to be indicted by a federal grand jury in the Southern District of New York in June 1998. Without your diligence, leadership and cooperation, your law enforcement partners would simply not have been able to obtain such an Indictment and for that my Office and the public will always be in your debt.

The diligence and professionalism of you and your staff, and your willingness to work hand in hand with Special Agent Daniel Coleman and the prosecutors in my office where and as appropriate, also made it possible to charge many of the suspects indicted so soon after the horrific East Africa Embassy bombings. Law enforcement had a running start on that investigation because you had been not only willing, but eager, to share information with us from the beginning. I also know that no one has logged more hours than you did to work against the Bin Laden network. I know that your prodigious labors had to take much time away you could otherwise have spent with your family. Having recently met with many of the victims’ families, rest assured that your efforts to prevent terrorist acts, and your willingness to help us hold those who carried out past attacks responsible, have had a very real impact on your fellow Americans as well as the citizens of Kenya and Tanzania and other countries. I would be honored if you would allow me to present a plaque to you at a time which would allow both you and your family to be present as they have shared in your sacrifice. We would very much like to express our appreciation to them as well.

In short, you have been a leader and a valued colleague in the fight against international terrorism. I cannot overstate the significance of your staff’s work and their dedication to the preservation of our nation’s security. As a symbolic but heartfelt memento of the effort put forth by you and your staff, I present you with one of the original warrants obtained for the arrest of Usama Bin Laden on June 10, 1998. To my Office, it represents a watershed in how the law enforcement and intelligence communities ought to cooperate and we thank you for making it possible.

Sincerely yours,

MARY JO WHITE
United States Attorney

cc: The Honorable George Tenet Director, Central Intelligence Agency

• Morell, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism — From al Qa’ida to ISIS
• Schoenfeld, https://www.lawfareblog.com/soldier-great-war

Why do some U.S. politicians love to consort with foreigners who want the United States to fight their wars for them? Franklin Roosevelt and his clique palled around with the British in the years before Pearl Harbor, allowing free reign to their espionage and propaganda activities in the United States and working with them to get America into the UK’s war with Germany by using any unconstitutional tool that seemed to have promise.

The presidents Bush loved to relax, banter, and holiday with Saudi aristocrats, fought two wars partly for them against Iraq — how the Saudi princes must laugh over their ability to get U.S. Marines and soldiers to die for them — and, with Clinton, Obama, and all other postwar presidents, ignored or, in the case of the 9/11 report, covered up Saudi responsibility for nurturing the Islamist enemy that now is defeating the U.S. and its allies.

That neither Roosevelt and his senior lieutenants nor the Bushes and theirs were impeached for such conduct is a shame because such a clearly needed constitutional action would have been a most useful warning to those who are now starring in the republic’s longest running season of flamboyantly anti-American behavior, this one acted out by a cast made up of the country’s bipartisan governing elite, Jewish-Americans and their organizations, and Israel.

In recent months, we have seen most of the presidential candidates and dozens of elected U.S. officials from both parties line-up to do the bidding of the Israeli government and its disloyal Jewish-American advocates, collectively Israel-First. These U.S. officials are now thoroughly involved in supporting a foreign-government-sponsored political and propaganda campaign against their own president, government and, countrymen. They have been enlisted by Israel and its U.S. Israel-First fifth column to attack President Obama as an anti-Semite and to try to stop Congress from approving the U.S.-Iran deal on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Before the Congress reconvenes in September, the media report that a bipartisan group of nearly one hundred U.S. officials, Republican presidential candidates, and members of Congress will have visited Israel to connive with Israeli leaders about how to stop the Iran deal. Almost sixty of that number — all members of Congress — will travel to Israel as a group on a trip paid for and guided by that agent of a foreign power, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Because they have contempt for the intelligence of their fellow citizens, AIPAC officials claim the trip is simply the 2015 iteration of a visit that it sponsors at this time each year — an annual treason trip? — and has nothing to do with Congress’s pending vote on the Iran agreement. In another pure coincidence, an arm of AIPAC called Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran is ready to pay $40 million to run advertisements against the Iran deal in 35 states.

What is important on this issue is not whether Congress approves or disapproves the U.S.-Iran deal. As previously noted here, Iran will get a nuclear weapon no matter what deals, treaties, or sanctions are in place, and Israel, with the indispensable help of disloyal U.S. citizens, will drag the United States into another losing war, this time against Arab and Persian Shias.

Much more important and dangerous than anything Iran has or can do to the United States, is the well-documented ability of a minor foreign power — Israel — and disloyal U.S. citizens, their organizations, and hundreds of members of the U.S. Congress to proudly and publicly work together to try to make sure U.S. foreign policy meshes with Israel’s national-security priorities, no matter how much that forced meshing damages the national security of the United States.

The fact is that the United States shares no important common national-security interest with Israel. Indeed, the bilateral relationship does nothing but undermine and intensify Muslim hatred for U.S. foreign policy and the U.S. government, further deplete the already the bankrupt U.S. treasury, ensure the continuation of our now two-decade old war with Sunni Islam, and expose the bipartisan U.S. governing elite for what it is, the well-bribed, anti-American lapdog of the Jewish-American community.

What is it that makes this gaggle of disloyal Americans engage in near-treasonous public behavior which, if conducted by any other disloyal group of U.S. citizens and elected officials, would be handled clandestinely in the dead of night, hounded by the media, and have NSA tapping its communications? What has happened to the sense of national pride, patriotism, and commonsense of the more than three-hundred million other non-Jewish and non-politician Americans who seem content to watch Israel-First and the Congress sell-out U.S. security, put themselves above the law, and work toward goals that when achieved always get more of America’s soldier-children killed and maimed by fighting Israel’s wars — Iraq in 2003 and since summer 2014, for example — and powerfully motivates the manpower growth, hatred, and determination of our Islamist enemies?

A useful comparison, I think, is the extraordinary difference between the respectful, nearly fawning political and media treatment that today is accorded to clearly disloyal Jewish-Americans and their organizations, and the now four-plus centuries of hatred — now ebbing but still often and luridly present in the Washington Post and the New York Times — that has been directed by the U.S. media, politicians, and Protestant ministers against Catholic Americans.

Until almost the 1960s, Catholics were regarded by all three of those entities as the scum of the earth because they were believed to take orders from the Vatican and so could never be regarded as loyal and nationalistic Americans. It did not matter that the Continental Army was flush with Irish and other Catholics; that Catholics fought valiantly and died in large numbers for their respective countries in the American Civil War; that they rode, fought, and died with Sherman, Sheridan, and Crook in the dirty but necessary wars that cleared the murderous Indian tribes from the plains and protected those who settled the land and built the railroads; or that they fought with honor in both world wars and in America’s numerous and always losing post-1945 wars. With not a shred of evidence to prove their disloyalty, the bulk of America long regarded Catholics as the fifth-column automatons of the Pope who were bent on establishing the Vatican’s rule in the United States.

Given this fact, the almost complete and disloyalty-abetting silence of the U.S. media and most Americans — Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, atheist, etc. — in regard to both their fellow Israel-First citizens and their elected officials’ flamboyant anti-U.S. behavior cannot be considered anything less than tragically astounding. Why is it that there is no outrage at:

• The private meetings in Israel on U.S. foreign-policy intentions between U.S. senators and congressmen and the sitting Israeli prime minister, his cabinet ministers, and other political parties leaders, all of whom mean to intervene in U.S. internal affairs — via AIPAC and other such organizations — with media pressure, prime ministerial video presentations, and bribes disguised as campaign contributions.
• The Congress’s invitation to a sitting Israeli prime minister to come to America to speak to a joint session in an effort to propagandize Americans into opposing their own president for the desires of a foreign leader who wants the U.S. to wage a war that will kill and maim more Americans and further exhaust the nation’s finances. That visit was followed by a groveling visit to Israel by the Speaker of the House of Representatives — apparently Israel’s pro-consul in the United States.
• U.S. administrations that allow serving Israeli prime ministers to travel freely through the United States to raise the animosities of Jewish-Americans against the policies of their own government, as well as to collect substantial financial contributions from them, funds that most other U.S. citizens would contribute to charitable organizations attempting to fix domestic problems, such as feeding hungry American kids.
• The greed-driven eagerness of most senators and congressmen to attend the annual AIPAC convention in Washington D.C., an event whose blatant goal is to increase the amounts of U.S. taxpayer funds, technology, and ordnance flowing to Israel and to keep the United States at war with the Muslim world.
• The loud public support from famous Jewish-Americans for Israel and its military each time they smash the Palestinians with U.S. ordnance; the well-publicized travel to Israel of the same people — Michael Bloomberg, for example — during Palestinian-Israeli wars to applaud the damage and death being delivered by Israeli forces and to give the Muslim world the impression that all Americans thrill at Israeli actions; and the practice of some Jewish-Americans to carry Israeli passports and send their children to serve in Israel’s armed forces, not those of the United States. (NB: This is not a criticism of Israeli attacks on Palestinians. Only Israeli leaders — and Palestinian leaders, for that matter — can decide what military actions are needed to ensure their country’s survival. That decision and its consequences are nobody’s business or responsibility but theirs.)

In a world where the expanding reach, numbers, and lethality of the Sunni Islamist movement is the most dangerous threat to the republic’s security — in part, because it is being ignored by Washington — U.S. political leaders have spent 2015 focused on Obama’s Iran deal and the highly public and subversive efforts of Israel, the Israel-First fifth column in the United States, and many in both U.S. political parties to derail it. Whether or not the deal is approved, Americans should be enraged at ability of a foreign power and its U.S.-citizen advocates to divert attention away from the genuine Sunni threat to America and to the non-threat from Shia Iran, which threatens Israel and the Sunni States, but America only because its foreign policy reliably champions and protects Israel and the Sunni tyrants. This performance has shown all Americans (a) the depth of corrupt, independence-killing, and war-causing control foreigners and disloyal U.S. citizens exercise over Washington’s policies toward the Islamic world and (b) how few U.S. citizens have the courage to publicly damn this behavior which can only lead America to war and more war.

As an example of (b) let’s take a look at the much-heralded political outsider and presidential candidate, Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Carson may have never run for or held elective office, but on the issue discussed above he sounds like he has long been on AIPAC’s payroll. Two examples should suffice. In a recent op-ed in the Jerusalem Post, Dr. Carson claimed that a speech by Obama about the Iran deal was “replete with coded innuendos employing standard anti-Semitic themes.” Soon after, on FOX, Dr. Carson lectured Americans that any kind of speech “is anti-Semitic that is against the survival of a state [Israel] that is surrounded by enemies ….”

Now, one wonders, who is to decide what words are to be defined as “anti-Semitic” and “against the survival” of Israel? Dr. Carson does not say, but you can bet that the censuring role will be played — as it long has been played — by AIPAC and Israel-First and those politicians and pundits they have suborned. They are the ones who will be the almighty adjudicators of the 1st Amendment as it applies to public debates over how best to maintain and protect U.S. interests from the war and upheaval in the Islamic world.

So much for Dr. Carson the political outsider. He has had his required trip to Israel, he has argued against the applicability of 1st Amendment to those whose question the worth of the U.S.-Israeli tie, and he has told all Americans to go home, watch TV, pay your taxes on time so Israel gets its cut, and be proud that your soldier-children may be lucky enough to die or lose a limb in unnecessary wars that only Israel, AIPAC, and the Israel-Firsters want.

You know, it is amazing that Dr. Carson, in the first months of his first election campaign, sounds, on this issue, like nothing so much as a veteran, disloyal, inside-the-beltway, war-wanting politician who doesn’t give a good tinker’s damn about U.S. national security but is always on the make for funding for election campaigns. If nothing else, Dr. Carson appears to be a remarkably quick study.

Ah well, another heroic agent of change bites the dust.

Three of the U.S. national government’s self-imposed and surely lethal handicaps in dealing with the Islamist threat are (a) a fixation on looking at the problem in a state-by-state manner; that is, what do we do in Iraq? what do we do in Afghanistan? what do we do in Libya? etc.; (b) an enduring but long-disproved assumption that in its war with Islam the West has time its side; and (c) an addiction to an unwise, unnecessary, and bankrupting interventionism that is the main motivator of the international Islamist movement, a phenomenon which was fathered and is still nurtured by the West’s so-called “allies and friends,” Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, etc.

By forming and implementing interventionist policies for each nation-state where an Islamist threat is identified as needing to be addressed, Washington and its NATO allies miss the point that their main Islamist enemies — the Islamic State (IS) and al-Qaeda, and especially the former — think in a regional manner and then design and execute policies meant to establish bases from which they can further expand in a way that advances their ultimate goal of driving the West from the Muslim world and creating an unitary and worldwide Islamic state or caliphate. Whether or not such a state can be created is an open question, but for the time being the subject can be left for academics to endlessly, theoretically, and inconclusively debate, thereby leaving the sane to try to defend the United States.

What is important, at the moment, lies in the quite inexplicable inability of U.S. and NATO policymakers to see what the Islamic State is up to in terms of its regional planning, or how that planning is not only immune to but fueled by the relentless, seriatim intervention of the West in each Muslim country that displeases it — excepting, of course, the Muslim tyrannies the West fawns over, protects, and is bribed by. (NB: This is not to argue that a multi-Muslim-nation intervention by U.S.-NATO forces is needed. First, that mother of all Western interventions would be the single most powerful ally for IS’s goal of uniting the Sunni world. Second, the U.S. military is worn out after two decades of war-losing; is being neutered by Obama’s calculated-to-destroy budget cuts, manpower reductions, and effeminization; and the NATO militaries — save Turkey’s — are tiny, antiquated, underfunded, and could not stop Putin’s panzers from rolling down the Champs Elysees without using nuclear weapons. The only effective U.S.-NATO defense against the Islamists is to stop all intervention, and let the Sunnis, Shias, and Israelis settle their differences in whatever merrily murderous manner pleases them.)

Currently, IS leaders appear to have three strong regional beachheads from which they intend to expand, as well as one strategic economic target: four maritime choke-points that, if closed or even sporadically attacked, would disrupt the world’s supply of oil and hence its economy.

1. The Balkans: IS has established itself strongly in the Islamist communities of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania, and has a presence in each of the other Balkan states. In this effort, IS has capitalized on what is now a decades long campaign, that began with the USSR’s demise, in which Saudi Arabia, its Gulf partners, and their NGOs have converted large numbers of Balkans Muslims from being nominal believers to being Muslims well-schooled in the war-prone Salafi and Wahhabi doctrines. The Saudi-led effort has not yet made the Balkans a bastion of those doctrines, but it is yielding increasing numbers of Balkan Muslims who have become Salafis and Wahhabis. These converts have challenged and in several cases succeeded in displacing more moderate Islamic leaders, building Islamist organizations that have sporadically attacked individuals, security forces, and buildings, and have sent a steady stream of volunteers — with the aid of IS logistics units in Turkey, Greece, Spain, and Italy — to fight with IS forces in Syria and Iraq. As the IS presence in the Balkans continues to grow, a glance at the map will show the relative ease with which IS can secure access to EU countries and through the states of Eastern Europe to Russia.
2. Libya: IS is encountering strong local resistance to its presence in Libya but it is an organization that can do more than one thing at a time. While its fighters defend and slowly expand IS-held territory, other IS leaders and administrators are engaged in bringing order and repairing social services and public utilities in the areas they hold, a pattern seen previously in Syria and Iraq. IS also is both exploiting its new geographical position — via successful attacks in Tunisia, and support for the IS organization in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula — and preparing for further advances from Libya into Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, and Sudan. Libya also gives IS cross-border access to Niger and Chad, both of which facilitate direct contact with IS’s expanding Nigerian ally Boko Haram. In addition, Niger affords easy entry into Mali where desperate Islamist organizations might well be enticed to cooperate with IS so as to benefit from its military know how, reputation for success, ample treasury, and the return of veteran Malian mujahideen who have been fighting with IS in Syria, Iraq, and Libya.
3. Afghanistan: IS’s presence in Afghanistan is just a year old but its fighters are reported to be deployed in more than half of the countries 34 provinces, in and near the capital of Kabul, and in Pakistan’s tribal region, Baluchistan Province, and the city of Karachi. IS is far from dominating the country, but the trickle of defectors to it from the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban has become a steady flow since the long-hidden death of Taliban chief Mullah Omar was announced on 30 July 2015 and a new leader was quickly chosen by a small number of Taliban leaders who had helped hide the fact that Omar died in April, 2013. IS strategists sees Afghanistan as key to the expansion and completion of the IS Caliphate, as it provides potential revenue streams from the country’s heroin production and mineral wealth, and easy access Pakistan, and through it to India and Kashmir, as well as to the Muslim states of Central Asia, the Muslim Uighur population in China’s Xinjiang Province, and a base from which to potentially attack Iran, murder Shias willy-nilly, and force Tehran to fight a two-front war against IS forces and their allies.
4. Maritime choke-points: In its most ambitious strategic project, IS currently has the beginning of opportunities to establish its presence at four of the world’s most important maritime choke-points. The entrance to Bab-el-Mandab Strait at the southern end of the Red Sea lies between IS and other Islamist groups fighting for control of Yemen and the Islamist- and pirate-rich Horn of Africa; the Suez Canal is vulnerable to the IS branch now operating with near impunity in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula; the Strait of Malacca, which runs along the shores of Indonesia’s Islamist-dominated Aceh Province; the Jakarta government claims IS’s presence and appeal in the country is quickly growing; and the Strait of Gibraltar, which has long been an al-Qaeda target and is now bounded on the south by IS’s growing strength and reach in the Maghreb, and on the north by the ample IS presence in southern Europe and the reinforcements it is receiving from the IS fighters salted among the mass of illegal migrants entering Europe by sea from North Africa.

The foregoing summary describes the unambiguous price of a half-century of U.S. cultural, political, economic, and military interventionism, either unilaterally or with its NATO vassals. And this summary does not include the IS beachheads that are still under development in the North Caucasus and Yemen, which will in time enable IS expansion into Russia and into Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Gulf States.

In the face of IS’s substantial geographical and manpower expansion, U.S. leaders in both parties have maintained a basically law-and-order approach to the mujahideen and have downplayed — when not ignoring — IS capabilities, its motivation and intentions, and the religious war it is waging. They also have spent the last year wasting time on whining about IS beheadings, the nuclear weapon Iran cannot be prevented from attaining, and stoking war in Europe by aiding a Ukrainian government that cannot defend itself and uselessly sanctioning a Russian regime that will not return Crimea and knows that the term “paper tiger” has never been more applicable than when applied to the United States and NATO.

When the time comes — and it will — for U.S. leaders to look in the cupboard and find a tool with which to end the IS threat, they will find it bare. With two deliberately lost wars, a broken military, a governing elite and president unattached to reality, a bankrupt treasury, a political system corrupted by the U.S.-citizen agents of foreign powers, next-to-useless European allies, a Western world that prefers its own death to slaughtering its enemy, and an Islamist enemy far smarter and more talented than it is given credit for, the U.S. governing elite will have only one option.

Turning from the bare cupboard, these poor souls will know what commonsensical Americans untainted by Ivy League educations have known all along. Namely, that it is time to put America first and to return to General Washington’s foreign-policy legacy by immediately proclaiming the end of U.S. interventionism, the termination of support for all states and groups in the Middle East, the U.S. withdrawal from NATO, and the resumption of America’s most effective national security policy — strict neutrality.

And while doing this, we can all hope — perhaps with misplaced optimism — that it is not too late.

Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post on 28 July 2015 that there is no scandal in Mrs. Clinton’s use of a non-secure e-mail server to conduct State Department business.

Now this asinine assertion probably should not come as a surprise for a newspaper whose employee Dana Priest won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize (for Treason?) by revealing and thereby compromising an essential and extremely productive CIA covert-action program and endangering the officers involved. But as lawless as Ms. Priest’s and the Post’s actions were in regard to divulging classified intelligence operations, Mrs. Clinton’s are far worse, as is Ruth Marcus’s partisan, lighthearted pooh-poohing of what seems to be Mrs. Clinton’s clear and deliberate criminality.

While I have been out of the CIA since November, 2004, and know nothing about the content of her mails — save for those now published and identified as classified — I do know that Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct State Department business, and to receive and respond to e-mails from the White House and other government agencies would get any other executive branch employee disciplined or fired, and almost certainly indicted — unless the White House intervened to prevent the enforcement of pertinent laws and regulations.

Why is this case? Well, there are several reasons, none of which are too difficult to understand.

1. Mrs. Clinton convicted herself of breaking the law with words from her own mouth. She said that e-mails she turned over to the State Department had to be redacted before they were released. By definition, non-classified e-mails do not need to be redacted because there is nothing classified to remove. Mrs. Clinton’s e-mails may well be politically or personally compromising, but neither is a legal reason for redacting them. Mrs. Clinton chose to put her State Department work on her private e-mail server and if there is no classified material in the e-mails the public that paid her must be allowed see them in their entirety.
2. The national government mandates by law that its employees in the military, intelligence, and diplomatic communities use government-secured IT equipment to transact government business. This is not an option; to deliberately do otherwise is a criminal act for which an employee can be severely disciplined, fired, and/or indicted. Mrs. Clinton publicly admitted she chose to ignore the law and use a non-secure e-mail server for the sake of her own personal convenience. Again, she is convicted out of her own mouth, as are those who have publicly admitted they knew of and used her non-government, non-secure e-mail channel and did nothing to stop her activity or to alert security officers to her violations of the law. It is worth recalling that a former CIA director engaged in comparable illegal activity with IT devices and had to be pardoned by Mrs. Clinton’s husband to avoid punishment.
3. Mrs. Clinton’s tenure-long use of a private e-mail server coincided with extraordinarily costly hacks of secure U.S. government IT systems by individuals, criminal organizations, and foreign governments Notwithstanding her full awareness of these attacks — and the detailed detailed briefings she likely was given on the damage done by them — she chose to continue to deliberately risk the near-certain exposure of her work as Secretary of State to the nation’s enemies. In publicly commenting, Mrs. Clinton has shown precisely no remorse or even a smidgen of concern for knowingly putting her county and countrymen at risk by using an e-mail server far easier to hack than those of the U.S. government which have been hacked by America’s enemies.
4. Mrs. Clinton’s personal and classified e-mails are of top-priority interest to foreign governments and their intelligence services, as are those of the president, vice president, and cabinet members, as well as the department heads, senior-level bureaucrats, and flag officers involved in U.S. defense, intelligence, and diplomatic affairs. Foreign intelligence services surely want to know what policies the U.S. government is planning to adopt and implement and what military activities it is going to take. But almost as important to those services is any unflattering personal information that can be acquired and then be used to leverage — or, more accurately, blackmail — senior elected and appointed U.S. officials into agreeing to deals that are much less than optimal for U.S. economic and national-security interests. Given the Clinton family’s well-documented reputation for making unsavory and even felonious behavior its trademark, Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server would — to an outside observer — appear to be not only illegal in terms of the conditions of her U.S. government employment, but a case of adolescent and perhaps politically suicidal recklessness in terms of the myriad things the Clintons presumably intend to keep out of the public domain.

These four points, I think, constitute a prima facie justification for an immediate criminal investigation of Mrs. Clinton, as well as a damage assessment conducted by intelligence and law enforcement agencies that will inform the national government and the public of what damage Mrs. Clinton deliberately inflicted on national security by her arrogant refusal to use the government’s secure IT systems.

Any other U.S. government employee whose behavior mirrored that of Mrs. Clinton would already be indicted, awaiting trial, and plea bargaining.

President Obama’s visit to Kenya is a classic illustration of how some U.S. leaders simultaneously conduct arrogant and destabilizing cultural interventionism abroad, while seeking to create more disunity at home.

Asked before his arrival to refrain from causing the Kenyan regime domestic difficulties by publicly hectoring it on homosexual rights and women’s equality, Obama swaggered into the country and spent his time doing just that. Obama’s belief in patently non-existent “universal rights” always takes precedence over the concerns and even the survival of any person, entity, or government that has the temerity to disagree with his omniscience. Like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, Obama seems to believe that the only kind of culture or society that can be defined as “good” for all peoples and states are the ones he imagines in his theory-stuffed, reality-free brain, ones that exists nowhere on earth, and never will unless they are imposed by fascist regimes.

And if you want to know why more Islamists have picked up guns — and more Americans for that matter — during Obama’s tenure than during that of any other U.S. president, you only have to listen to the patronizing, self-righteous, and demeaning lecture he delivered to his Kenyan hosts. In his Kenyan performance and so many other travels during his presidency, Obama has played the part of the ugly American to perfection by deliberately deepening social tensions everywhere he turns up, thereby leaving a stench in the nostrils of his hosts that will have to be eliminated by his successors.

Worse than his dressing down of the Kenyans for their culture, faith, tribal society, and traditions, was Obama’s studied effort to inflict more economic damage on Americans, as well as to further divide them amongst themselves.

• The media report that Obama promised the deeply corrupt Kenyan government another $50 million from the bankrupt U.S. Treasury. Obama’s grand-standing generosity wastes taxpayer money on Kenya and its people — both irrelevant to U.S. interests, except as cannon fodder in the lost Somalia war — and drives America deeper into debt. This money, if spent at all, should be spent in the United States, perhaps to rebuild a few of the bridges nearing collapse, feed some of the growing number of America’s hungry or undernourished children, or prosecute either Hilary Clinton for what appears to be rank lawlessness, verging on treason, or Planned Parenthood for behavior that is, in its specifics and totality, far more anti-human, barbaric, and profit seeking than anything we so far have seen from ISIS. (NB: The chief of Planned Parenthood, on 26 July 2015, said that its so-called doctors and their harvesting and selling of organs taken from the infants they murder did not break any laws. The Gestapo, of course, could quite accurately have said the same thing about its similar activities.)
• The media also claim that Obama told his audiences — as always, the callow and hero-worshiping youngsters he loves to preen before — that Kenya’s “moral failure” to embrace the fantasy of universal rights is equal to the “moral failure” of Americans to abandon Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag, a banner that is an important part of U.S. history and the flying of which symbolizes the lengthy and — until Obama — successful post-civil war north-south reconciliation. Neither the Kenyans’ refusal to destroy their traditional society for the perfect Obamian model nor the Americans who honor the much-loved battle flag, Obama said, have any place in the 21st century that he and his ilk are perfecting, in part, by selling for profit the organs of the infants they help to murder.

Obama’s nearly complete ignorance of how other countries and peoples do and must work, and his obvious contempt for both foreigners and Americans who disagree, let alone oppose him suggests he is not the man either Americans or foreigners should be accepting advice from on matters of civics, governing, compassion, race relations, conscience, or judgment.

Others must of course decide this issue for themselves. For myself, I must say that I would infinitely prefer to hear what a great if flawed American like Robert Edward Lee had to say about such things, and trust to history’s storm sewer to sweep away all resonances of Barack Hussein Obama and his fanatically secular, lawless, racist, militantly atheistic, and authoritarian supporters.

“History will teach us … that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their careers by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Alexander Hamilton, 22 October 1787

The frenzied attacks on Donald Trump by the U.S. governing elite and their slavish media/academic mouthpieces for his harsh but entirely truthful assessment of Senator McCain must leave you wondering if there is a possibility the America’s governing elite does not know how deeply and savagely it is hated by the citizenry?

This seems too much to believe, but the attacks on Trump surely suggest that the elite’s collective authoritarian head is thicker and dumber than stone. If these men and women need a starting point to learn why most Americans would prefer to see their pictures on a bull’s eye at point-blank range, rather than on a grinning-like-Hillary selfie, they could consider the following dozen items.

1. The elite’s shredding of the 4th Amendment via the use of a national government agency to monitor the private electronic communications of all Americans.
2. The elite’s crippling of the 1st Amendment by using hate-speech laws and the doctrine of political correctness to silence dissent and force Americans to submit to the insanity of accepting its demand that they believe all forms of sexual deviancy; legal, educational, and employment preferment for non-whites; same-sex marriage; and nearly sixty million murdered-for-profit infants are simply legitimate, alternative kinds of normal behavior for human beings and a supposedly rule-of-law society.
3. The elite-inflicted tragedy for so many parents who see their qualified children unable to get into colleges of their choice because seats are reserved for the elite’s preferred categories: women, several score of ethnic, sexual, and racial minorities, and foreigners who are brought in to further disunite the country.
4. The elite’s eagerness to keep the United States involved in an endless and losing war with Islam because members of both parties are being bought off by U.S. weapons makers; the U.S.-citizen advocates of Israel; and/or wealthy Arab princes.
5. The elite’s fanatic support for unlimited and illegal immigration and destructive free-trade deals, which (a) have destroyed U.S. manufacturing and thereby largely closed access to an ever-narrowing middle class, and (b) have created the income inequality the elite weeps and prates about, but which its trade and immigration policies have caused.
6. The elite’s war on the U.S. constitution by supinely allowing presidents to illegally exercise powers they do not possess, such as going to war without a congressional declaration of war; choosing which laws will be enforced and which will not; refusing to cooperate in investigations of obvious governmental corruption; using government agencies for partisan political purposes; and unilaterally altering laws passed by Congress.
7. The elite’s lust for starting unnecessary wars it does not intend to win, but which will please their corporate, pro-Israel, and pro-Arab benefactors at what the elite views as the perfectly acceptable cost of killing or maiming many thousands of America’s soldier-children and creating a nation-killing debt.
8. The elite’s endless attack on U.S. history which extends from the recent demise of the Army of Northern Virginia’s battle flag and the ongoing scourging of the South; to the denigration of the Founders as dead white men and of their work as outdated, sexist, and racist; to the national-government imposed Common-Core history lessons that teach not what happened and why, but the lies, distortions, omissions, and ahistorical presentism of the political left; to the creation of an inane President’s Day that lumps together for same-day honoring the greats, Washington, Lincoln, and Reagan, the bigots, Wilson and Obama, and the perpetually adolescent philanderers, Clinton and Kennedy.
9. The elite’s ongoing war against Christianity, which includes the banning of public displays of some Christian symbols; renaming holidays like Christmas and Easter so they will not offend atheists and members of other faiths; and establishing “rights” that clearly make, and are meant to make, a mockery of the Christian God and his word — while constantly racing to protect the symbols and honor the holidays of the small numbers of Americans who are members of other faiths.
10. The elite’s endless give away of many billions of taxpayer dollars to foreigners to fund construction projects for roads, dams, bridges, irrigation systems, harbors, border-control facilities, and railways, rather than spending the money on the decrepit U.S. infrastructure, which increasingly endangers citizens and undermines economic growth.
11. The elite’s constant, unwanted, and rebellion-breeding intervention in the everyday lives of Americans, dictating what children can eat at school, what property owners can do with their land, what kinds of industries and jobs will exist and which the national-government will kill, what kind of health insurance people can buy, what percentage of a working person’s income must be taken to support slackers, infanticide, and illegal/felonious immigrants, what parents can do to teach their kids discipline, and why the lives of whites and U.S. military veterans of all races obviously matter much less than a noisily clamoring assembly of ethnic groups, races, feminists, jailed and unjailed criminals, and deviants of all kinds who demand preference and taxpayer subventions, not equality before the law and work.
12. The elite’s relentless effort to abrogate the 2nd Amendment which the Founders created as the guarantee that Americans always would have an appropriate and effective last-resort tool for stopping dead and then dismantling the kind of tyranny inherent in these twelve items.

Donald Trump — as is his wont — used quite hard and direct language to begin a renovation project that is long overdue, a dramatically corrected assessment of Senator John McCain (R-Arizona). I have no objection to describing and respecting McCain as a “hero” for his long and painful internment in a North Vietnamese prison. He was shot down, wounded, suffered, persevered, and lived to get home. But since returning home he has exploited, for his personal benefit and to his country’s cost, his status as a former POW more shamelessly and ruthlessly than any other POW I can recall. McCain has dined out on his imprisonment for decades, and has used the protection afforded by the citizenry’s respect for his military service to do nothing but harm to the nation that has revered him.

• As an Arizona senator, McCain has abetted the flood of illegal Mexican immigrants that has inundated the state and the rest of the southwest, and that has ravaged the region’s economy, social services, education systems, and massively changed its demographic stability and social cohesion in a way that has been resolutely opposed by local residents and their elected local and state officials. In his actions, McCain has made unmistakably clear his arrogant disdain for his constituents’ opinions and desires; his utter unconcern for the economic, social, human, and crime-growth costs brought by the plague of illegal immigration he has condoned; and his treasonable willingness to sap the strength of the American Union for his own political benefit.
• As an Arizona senator and purported expert on U.S. national security, McCain has been in found in the vanguard of support for every war the national government has gotten the nation into since he has been in office. With his bipartisan colleagues, McCain’s specialty has been to support the start of all of these necessary and unnecessary wars to the hilt, while never intending to win them, thereby letting many thousands of America’s soldier-children get killed, wounded, or crippled for nothing, imposing back-breaking debt on all Americans, and earning the country ever more hatred around the world for intervening in affairs that are none of America’s business. Ironically, in fact, McCain for decades has imposed on other U.S. military personnel and their families exactly the same kind of savage treatment that the administrations of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon ruthlessly imposed on him and his generation of patriotic young Americans by never intending to win the Vietnamese War they started.
• As an Arizona senator, McCain has shown that while he may have read the U.S. Constitution and defended it during his military services, he neither understands it nor respects the application of its provisions. From pro-peace advocates to those arguing that illegal immigration is ruining America, Arizona’s senior senator has refused to listen and described the citizens involved as “crazies” or worse. The lesson McCain teaches is that the 1st Amendment is for those citizens who agree with and provide campaign contributions to their betters in the national government, but all other Americans must be silent and do as their told while the national government’s domestic and foreign policies shreds their society and marches America to hell.

As an Arizona senator and a Republican presidential candidate, McCain behaved in a cowardly manner and refused to destroy what should have been the most easily defeated Democratic presidential candidate since the admirable, courageous, but misguided George McGovern — a man who flew 35 combat missions over Europe in World War II and never boasted of them. Because Barack Obama is Black, McCain refused to focus the debates on his appalling lack of any kind of work experience, his drug use, his racism disguised by the title “community organizer,” and the hatred for America he had so clearly shown by being a 20-year congregant of a racist Black pastor who denounced white Americans, virulently hated the United States, and preached its destruction. Again ironically, McCain’s gutless and simpering performance during the 2008 presidential campaign helped to put most Americans in an Obama-made prison that is as lawless and economically and spiritually painful as McCain’s North Vietnamese prison was lawless and physically and psychologically painful.

So choose your words a bit more carefully, Mr. Trump, but otherwise pour it on. You have torn the curtain aside from Senator McCain and shed light on the truth. Now move on to his accomplices in the domestic and foreign policies that are destroying America; namely, Hillary Clinton, Jeb Bush, and all the other presidential candidates in both parties, save for Walker, Paul, Webb, Carson — and a guy named Trump.

Let us first get the three most obvious points about the Iran nuclear deal out of the way.

• The agreement with Iran is meaningless in so far as it pertains to nuclear weapons. Iran will get a nuclear bomb because the demands of its national security absolutely require it, and because Iranian leaders are quaint enough to believe — unlike Western leaders — that their country and its faith are worthy of survival. As has been written here before, Iran’s sworn enemies — the United States, Britain, France, Israel, and Pakistan (as the nuclear-armed agent for the Sunni world) — all have nuclear weapons and, so long as that fact exists, Iran will not rest until it has a nuclear arsenal that can be both a deterrent and a credible first-strike option. If respected, the deal Tehran signed would leave it subservient and vulnerable to its Christian, Jewish, and Sunni foes and would be clear evidence that Iran’s Shia clerics had agreed to Iran becoming the slave of those who are infidels and apostates. It is unlikely Tehran will voluntarily commit simultaneous national, political, and spiritual suicide in this manner.
• The agreement frighteningly underscores the utter bankruptcy of U.S. and Western political leadership. On this issue, Western peoples again have come face-to-face with the reality that their governing elites are one of two things — liars or brain-dead. Because only a moron could contend that the proud, deeply religious, crafty, and history-conscious Persians would agree to become forelock-tuggers eager to bow to infidels and apostates, the oh-so-highly educated Western elites must be liars. Or, and this is a credible possibility, it may be that Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and the Sorbonne specialize in producing reality-free morons. (NB: There is a particularly hilarious section of the agreement that in time will allow Iran to purchase components needed to build ICBMs. Apparently, the West’s brains-trust thought it a friendly gesture to facilitate Iran’s acquisition of a delivery system for the nuclear weapons it cannot be prevented from attaining.)
• The agreement is defended by Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden, Cameron, and Hollande as the only option other than war. This is another lie. The other obvious and preferable option is to let those who actually have a dog in this religious war — Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Sunni states, and Israel — sort out their own problems in whatever murderous mode they would like. Because the West cannot stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and because U.S. national security is not threatened by Iran’s acquisition thereof, let the Middle Easterners cavort in their own lethal religious hatreds.

The only important part of the Iran deal lies in its stark delineation of the two sides in the approaching Sunni-vs-Shia sectarian war and its clear intention to fuel that war. All of the world’s nuclear-armed powers — the U.S., Britain, Russia, India, France, Pakistan, and China — have backed the Iran deal, thereby publicly demonstrating their full support for Shia Iran, its right to greatly strengthen its economy and military, and its ambition to defeat the Islamic State and al-Qaeda and make supplicants of the Arab world’s Sunni states. It also has explicitly shown that the Western Great Powers really care nothing for freedom, democracy, and the human, women’s, and other so-called universal rights they always are noisily preaching and trying to force on Muslim nations. They are now seen by Sunnis to far prefer the maintenance of Shia tyrannies in Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad, and have no problem with Iran’s Shia-tyranny-building efforts in Lebanon and Yemen. In essence, the West has put itself squarely on the side of the 15-percent of the Muslim world that is Shia, and has implicitly declared war on the 85-percent of the Muslim world that is Sunni.

The result of the West’s Obama-led de facto alliance with Iran will be, for starters, to bring the Shia-Sunni war closer and narrow the gap between the Sunni Arab regimes — especially Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states — and the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda (AQ), and other Islamist fighting groups, as well as between the Islamist insurgent groups themselves. All these entities oppose and fear the Iranian expansionism that already is underway, and will be incensed by the deal’s explicit Western carte blanche for Tehran to both acquire more modern weaponry — including a nuclear weapon at the time of Iran’s choosing — and to act as needed to bring more effective, if Sunni-persecuting-and-murdering Shia government to Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

Notwithstanding these realities, the Iran deal’s bottom line does not have to be a disaster that soon involves the United States in another war. Indeed, the Iran deal’s provision of the final spark needed to unleash a regional Sunni-Shia war may well be the agreement’s one positive impact for America. As noted here on occasion, the U.S. government under either party is far too womanish, uncomprehending of other faiths and cultures, and incompetent at war-making to believe that a third U.S. field army — if sent to defeat the Islamists in Syria and Iraq — would avoid the same defeat that the first two suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan. The depth of the strategic ignorance of the U.S. government is evident in the advice of the war-hawk/Neocon Republican Senators McCain and Graham. They have advised sending 10,000 U.S. troops — only 1 in 3 of whom, at most, would be shooters — to Iraq and Syria to defeat IS and other Islamist insurgent groups who all hate the United States and may have as many as 100,000 fighters. And that number would grow quickly if a McCain-Graham army is sent by Washington to re-invade Iraq. Male and female Sunni Islamists from around the world would travel to the Iraq-Syria theater to help kill the troops of a nation they believe has not only endlessly intervened in Islamic affairs but now wants to fasten an apostate Shia tyranny on as much of the Sunni world as possible.

So why undertake and then lose a third interventionist war in the Muslim world, another war that U.S. leaders will have no intention of winning and whose outcome would leave thousands more of America’s soldier-children dead and crippled, probably produce a final descent into irremediable national bankruptcy, and simply lead to another war and future repetitions of the cycle.

It is time for America to be smart and practice an enlightened, Lindberghian selfishness by putting its genuine national interests first. The Iran deal opens the door wide for a chance to bring a blessed end to decades of U.S. government intervention in the Muslim world, as well as the even greater blessing of reinstituting a policy of strict neutrality in all of America’s international affairs. Obama the liar, theorist, and world citizen — with his similarly configured colleagues in Europe — has bumbled into a grand opportunity for Americans to sit back and observe a very big and savage Shia-Sunni war. While watching the bloodletting, the national government must close and militarily secure its southern border; find, prosecute, and deport all illegal aliens living in the United States; install an immigration policy that accepts only those with skills America needs and whom we assess will assimilate; ends student visas for Arab students to eliminate one of the easiest ways for Islamists to enter America; and rebuild the U.S. military forces that Obama and the Democrats have, by all appearances, done their best to dismantle and unman.

At some point, even after recreating a nation that is a neutral, non-interventionist power, Americans almost certainly will have to fight what remains of the Islamists after the coming Sunni-Shia war. But that Islamist force will be a fraction of what it is now, and will not have what has been its most reliable and powerful asset, the motivating force reliably supplied by the U.S. governing elite’s mindless, war-causing interventionism. In addition, as a neutral, non-interventionist power that is more secure, united, and prosperous at home, less hated abroad, not militarily overextended, not burdened by useless, fundamentally anti-U.S. dependents like NATO, Israel, and Saudi Arabia, and led — pray God — by the a president who intends to win the wars America must fight, the United States can act from a position of strength. Then, if the Islamists continue to attack America, we can pick the time and place to deal speedily, definitively, brutally, and indiscriminately with them and their active and passive supporters.

Well, the New York Times editorial board, that reliable abettor of all the liars, haters, and fantasists (AKA: Democrats) who detest the American South and lust to rewrite America’s history into party-serving fiction, has endorsed dumping Andrew Jackson in favor of rewarding a woman with his place on the twenty dollar bill.

So fundamentally important to the nation is this switch that the Board’s reputedly adult members have decided that the only group sober and knowledgeable enough to decide how to destroy another piece of American history and further persecute the South is “the nation’s schoolchildren” who should be made to “nominate and vote on Jackson’s replacement. Why not give them another reason to learn about women who altered history and make some history themselves by changing American currency?” Why of course, what geniuses! And, then, why not let these kids — who cannot figure out that the brim of baseball cap goes in the front — go on to decide other pressing national issues. Maybe they can replace General Washington on the $1 bill with a Muslim woman and thereby end America’s war with Islam. As the saying goes, you could not make this stuff up.

Now Andrew Jackson was not the most unblemished of men, but he risked his life repeatedly for his country; killed its enemies; expanded U.S. territory in North America; defeated the British at New Orleans; was twice elected president; and faced down — and was prepared to hang — the South Carolina nullifiers when he believed they were seeking to undermine and break the Union.

But Mr. Jackson is one of those Southern fellows, and so he is now a target for banishment from our currency and eventually our history because he did not treat slaves and Indians as if they were his equals and, indeed, inflicted pain on both. But he also was — along with Thomas Jefferson, another insensitive chap toward Blacks and Indians — the longtime icon of the Democratic Party and its great self-praising and fund-raising feast, the annual “Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner,” which was, of course, a fervent tribute to those that General Jackson would have hanged without blinking — southern fire-eaters like Robert Barnwell Rhett, William Lowndes Yancey, Edmund Ruffin, who, with the anti-slavery fanatics John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison, made sectional compromise impossible and so lit the fuse that led to a civil war that nearly destroyed the Union.

Andrew Jackson then is a sturdy obstacle to the Democrats’ ongoing and increasingly frenzied campaign to erase from America’s history all the unsavory things their party has championed for most of its existence; namely, slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, socialism, and, most recently the slaughter of infants. And so their longtime hero Andrew Jackson has been, as Sam Spade once said, chosen to take the fall alongside the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to help erase the Democrats’ consistently reprehensible behavior and policies from the history books.

But there is a rub. None of the women the Democrats have so far raised as General Jackson’s replacement in any way merit representation in the pantheon of patriots, nation-builders, and military leaders that grace the few denominations of our paper currency. The names Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Margaret Sanger have been floated by the Democratic history-haters, but they are, at very best, bit players in the nation’s story, perhaps meriting, at most, another portrayal on a small-denomination postage stamp.

The only American woman deserving a place on U.S. paper currency is, of course, Anne Hutchinson, a devout 17th century Protestant New Englander who was a fearless champion of religious liberty, family, free speech, and equality — not preference — for women in religious affairs. Perhaps a new piece of currency could be created, one to which the attachment of her portrait would do honor.

Ms. Hutchinson, however, is out of contention in the Democrats’ virulent anti-Southern currency crusade because her character traits — and the fifteen children she had with one husband — just do not jive with being Modern Democratic Party Women, those who glory in, and seek legal, economic, and political preference for their talents in whining, vamping, aborting, as well as recognition for their indispensable and eagerly given help in making the United States one of the world’s industrial-scale producers of both pornography and the dismembered corpses of infants.

There may be something that can be done, however. The portrait of another Democratic icon named Woodrow Wilson now adorns the $100,000 bill, which appears to be to be used mainly in transactions between the Federal Reserve and the larger banks. Now, the Democrat Wilson was a dyed-in-the-wool bigot who as president tried to rid the national government of its few Black employees, save, of course, those who could be cooks, waiters, drivers, or fill other kinds of menial jobs. Wilson was, indeed, as great a bigot toward Blacks, as today’s Democratic president is toward whites, especially white males who see the need for bibles and rifles. (NB: Wilson also gave America two other enduring curses, the policies of starting unnecessary wars and ordering interventionist military campaigns to teach foreigners how “to elect good men.” Each policy is now firmly part of the foundation of both Democratic and Republican foreign policy, which is one reason why the United States is always at war. The Democrats also are zealous domestic interventionists, a tack they are now using to hammer the battle flag and Jackson as a way to neuter and shame the South and to please their subordinate and lapdog Black and feminist colonies.)

Surely in this enlightened age the Modern Democrat Party Women would support erasing Woodrow from the bill — if it pleases them, the engravers could dismember Wilson’s portrait — and replace him with the three portraits of Ms. Tubman, Mrs. Roosevelt, and Ms. Sanger. But the newly redecorated bill — and the one-dollar coin which is honored by the image of Sacajawea, the key guide for Lewis and Clark — would then have to sate the Democratic Party’s history-destroyers until Modern Democratic Party Women can produce, certainly in the far distant future, a female even remotely worthy of being considered in the same value-to-America discussion as Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Jackson, Grant, and Franklin.

But one problem remains. How can the conspiracy-minded Modern Democratic Party Women be assured that the switch was made? It is true that not many people would see the new bills and so some doubt might arise among the Democratic sisterhood about whether Wilson was really removed and then replaced on the bill by the three ladies named above.

There is only one sure-fire means of relieving the Modern Democratic Party Women of their doubts before the whining starts. That means is to have the Democratic National Committee direct its current icon, Hilary Clinton, to publicly report on who appears on the $100,000 note each time she and her husband receive a packet of those bills from one or another of the foreign governments for which they are apparently selling out American interests.

After all, if you cannot trust America’s graft-taker-in-chief, who can you trust?

As on all Independence Days, the media is trotting out the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence and suggesting that they are the only part of the document that matters and that they are passages that by themselves express what Jefferson and his 40-plus co-drafters called “the American mind.”

Actually, the media, the academy, and most members of both political parties stop reading the Declaration after the sentence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” They then use this sentence as justification for the disastrous interventionist foreign and domestic policies the U.S. government has pursued since Woodrow Wilson’s presidency.

The quoted sentence, of course, was meant by Jefferson and his fellow drafters to say that because British Americans were entitled to those rights they were likewise entitled to try to defend them against usurpation by a tyrannical government. (NB: This also is the crux of the 2nd Amendment.) There is not the slightest historical basis for reading into the drafters’ words an American responsibility — then or now — to defend those rights for any other people or nation. Such a defense was and is up to those foreigners who believe their “unalienable rights” have been taken, constrained, or denied. If they do so, fine. If they do not, fine. If they try and fail, tough. It is all their business.

Jefferson and especially his fellow penman had not a lick of the mentality of the universal-rights crusader in them. (NB: Jefferson, being a true Democrat, later had some sympathy for the French revolutionaries in their violent and terror-filled effort to remake all the world in their image.) The Declaration’s drafters were pessimistic, hard-headed, non-idealistic, and commonsensical men who were defending their own just-born nation by seeking to recover a constitutional inheritance — English and British liberties and the rule of law — that had been taken from them in just over a decade by the British imperial government. They had no intention of setting the world ablaze with a revolution that would guarantee their recovered rights to all other peoples, nor were they going to war to exterminate monarchy and other authoritarian forms of government from the world. They were solely hoeing their own row, and could not have cared less about what foreigners did or did not do to acquire similar rights.

The Declaration is a stridently nationalistic document that announces the decision of British Americans to wage a war to achieve independence from the British Empire and recover the rights and liberties their ancestors brought with them from the British Isles. Their war was waged to restore the status quo ante not to change the world so it would be a reflection of America and its ways.

The Declaration is vital for Americans today because it frankly explains that Americans were and are responsible for defending their own liberty and therefore obliged to fight any governmental effort aimed at usurpation and/or enslavement. The document justifies rebellion squarely on this basis, indicting King George III and his government for their unrelenting intervention in governing matters that had been handled nearly exclusively by colonial legislative assemblies for more than a century, as well as for their introduction of economic sanctions; their military occupation of Boston and the closing of its port; their violation or suspension of colonial charters; their limitations on of trial by jury and the colonial judiciary’s independence; and their appointment of General Thomas Gage to govern Massachusetts by martial law and arming him with the authority to seize the weapons of British Americans.

Faced with London’s lawless interventionism, and after having patiently, lawfully, and mostly peacefully opposed it for a dozen years, Jefferson and his colleagues wrote that enough was enough, and in the Declaration’s single most important sentence laid down a timeless guideline for proper, lawful, and manly American political behavior, writing that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

America’s Declaration of Independence is a fierce statement of the determination of British Americans to separate themselves from an imperial government that had become tyrannical and lawless by ignoring the political settlement of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent English Bill of Rights and by denying to British Americans the rights, liberties, and privileges that they guaranteed equally to the king’s subjects in the British Isles and North America.

The Declaration was meant to settle this intra-British crisis. Claims that it was meant to establish the new United States as a holier-than-thou, worldwide crusader promoting and imposing those rights by military force, as well as all the other absurd “universal rights” invented since Wilson’s second term, is a perverse invention by U.S. politicians, academics, preachers, pundits, and ideologues whose war-causing interventionist handiwork has made the U.S. government the most hated on earth, and to increasingly appear — given its “long train of abuses and usurpations” of the U.S. Constitution — as the enemy of Americans at home.

On this Independence Day it would be well for non-elite Americans to reflect on what their interventionist betters are doing at home and abroad that makes a mockery of the Declaration and the Constitution, and then take to heart the following sentiment that Robert E. Lee wrote to the British historian Lord Acton late in 1866, “I yet believe,” General Lee said,

that the maintenance of the rights and authority reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of a free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor of that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that have preceded it.