Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Americans and Westerners generally have been bombarded with good news, bad news, worried news, optimistic news, and no news about the negotiations of the United States and its partners with Iran aimed at denying Tehran the ability to complete its pretty much built nuclear weapon. The multiple rounds of talks have provided much fodder for the media in their endless search for two things that do not exist: (a) the diplomatic brilliance of President Obama, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton and (b) a gang of powerful fools in Tehran who are willing to allow their nation to be defenseless against three nuclear powers — the U.S., the UK, and Israel — that have threatened Iran’s destruction daily for thirty years. It is funny how we always hear about the Ayatollah’s threat to destroy Israel, but very seldom about Hillary Clinton’s promise to incinerate Iran if it touched a hair on Israel’s pretty little head.

It is extremely likely that Iran will — as its genuine national interests clearly demand — string out the negotiations with Obama, Kerry and their fellow ahistorical European colleagues until it can surprise the world by testing a nuclear device. In speaking about U.S.-Cuba relations this weekend, Obama said that he is uninterested in events that occurred before he was born. This of course is his choice, but it is a choice that could be made only by the kind of a badly educated and naive fool that Obama is seeking but will not find in Iran.

What the world is seeing played out in these negotiations is quite similar to what happened in the 1980s and 1990s when the United States, Britain, and other European nations worked to prevent Pakistan from acquiring a nuclear device. There were public and secret negotiations, inconvenient and at times painful Western economic, military, and political sanctions — that perennial tool of cowards; covert operations to disrupt Pakistani attempts to acquire nuclear components; bribes in the form of more foreign and conventional military aid; and, as always, sanctimonious rhetoric from Western leaders instructing their little brown Pakistani brothers to be good non-nuclear boys. In the end, Pakistan acquired all of the necessary components, tested a device, and is now a nuclear power.

The only question that ever existed about whether Pakistan would attain a bomb was whether it could acquire all the needed materials. Two granite-like and universally known facts existed from the start of the West’s campaign to stop Pakistan from acquiring nuclear weapons that should have made Western leaders know beyond all doubt that their effort would be a pointless failure: (a) a Pakistani leader had stated publicly that Pakistanis would “eat grass” and otherwise willingly sacrifice to procure a nuclear weapon and was wildly applauded in his country, and (b) there were at the time about 140 million conventionally armed Pakistanis facing a billion Indians led by a nuclear-armed government in New Delhi. Because Pakistan viewed Hindu India as its most lethal enemy — as India viewed Islamic Pakistan — leading Pakistani politicians and their senior generals would have to have been suicidal mad men to stop seeking a nuclear deterrent for their nation’s arsenal. In the case of Pakistan and its nuclear weapon, however, the mad men were those negotiating and threatening Pakistan for the U.S., the UK, and other Western states. Pakistan got its weapon.

As was the case with Pakistan, the U.S. and its partners are faced with — and have, again, ignored — two granite-like and universally known facts vis-a-vis Iran: (a) the nuclear-armed U.S., Britain, and Israel have been publicly gunning for the Iranian regime since 1979 and have publicly insisted that they will tell Tehran what it can and cannot do in providing for its own defense, and (b) the Shia Iranian regime and the international Shia community as a whole — which is composed of about 10-13 percent of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims — is locked in a life-and-death battle with the worldwide Sunni community, which in the nation of Pakistan has an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Faced with these two facts, U.S. and Western citizens have again been deceived by their political leaders and the media. There is precisely no chance that Iran will stop the construction of a nuclear weapon. At this point in history, Iran probably does not have much military fear of the U.S. and Britain, which in recent decades have amply demonstrated that they have only three clear military skills: losing wars; completely failing to train Muslim armies; and cutting their militaries to the bone. The Israelis are another matter, however, and the Iranians certainly believe that Israel will — as it must, if push comes to shove and its survival is at stake — use its nuclear weapons against the Islamic republic. Thus, there is no other sane policy for Tehran to pursue than one that builds a nuclear arsenal.

The second fact is at least as compelling as the first for the Iranian regime. Faced with a Muslim world that has 9 or more Sunnis for each Shia; where Shia minorities are persecuted in almost every Sunni majority country; where the Iranian nation-state is surrounded by the Sunni world and U.S. military bases; where a regional Shia-Sunni war that has been in the making since the seventh century A.D. is now rapidly developing in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria; and where a contiguous Sunni nation named Pakistan has a nuclear arsenal — the Sunni bomb, if you will — that the viscerally anti-Shia Saudis helped to fund, the Iranians would, again, have to be quite insane not to arm themselves to the hilt against a Sunni world that has long hated the Shia far more than the West. Not being insane folks, the Iranian regime probably also assumes — and certainly to be prudent it had better assume — that because the Saudis helped pay for the Pakistani nuclear program, the Riyadh tyranny may well have nuclear devices that can be delivered by aircraft of short-range missiles.

None of the foregoing is meant to support the Iranians; they are tyrannical gang of brutal, violent, and deceitful bastards who cause more trouble than they are worth. That said, they do rule a nation-state and every nation-state has the right to defend itself as, and with whatever weapons, it deems fit. For this reason — and not simply because they are untrustworthy (who is more untrustworthy than Obama?) — Western leaders with even a moderately good education and a minimum of commonsense should have known that Iran will seek a nuclear weapon as long as they face existential threats to their nation’s survival. To think even for a moment that they will negotiate away a chance to get that weapon while the lethal treats they face remain constant is a thought process worthy only of a dope-soaked, Harvard sophomore wandering about San Francisco in the late 1960s and expecting to attain perpetual peace by flashing the piece sign and tearing-up a draft card.

In 1775, the great conservative Edmund Burke told the British Parliament, the ruling ministry, and King George III that the American colonists who opposed Britain’s unrelenting intervention in their commercial, economic, judicial, and political affairs could not be talked out of their discontent. “No body of men,” Burke said in his speech, “will be argued into slavery.” History shows that Burke’s conclusion was valid about the Americans, and history also will show that the Iranians — bastards though they are — will not be argued into the slavery that would be shackled onto their nation by any treaty that effectively prevented them from becoming a nuclear power while the existential Israeli and Sunni threats continue to exist.

For those reasons, Obama, Cameron and their other well-educated sidekicks went wide-eyed into a set of negotiations armed with the absurd belief that any and every problem can be solved by compromise, and there they encountered across the table Iranian negotiators who only knew how to play a zero-sum game, and were experts at it. Obama, Cameron, and their diplomats are far outclassed in this contest and will lose, even if a treaty is signed. Iran is sure to become a nuclear power.

One of the more reality-free themes to come out of the story of the Islamic State’s growing strength and purposeful expansion in Libya and North Africa generally has been the frantic claims by European statesmen — especially those from Italy — that IS intends to use North Africa as a “gateway” to invade Europe. These hysterical fears have even moved the Italians to offer to lead a NATO intervention into Libya to defeat the Islamists. This is the same Italy, remember, that skedaddled from Iraq after a few of its soldiers were killed there by the Islamist fighters. One can only surmise that a Rome-led NATO invasion of Libya would go just fine so long as the invading force suffered no casualties.

The truth in this affair is that Italy and most of the other European countries long ago surrendered their internal security to a two-man Islamist force. The names of those two Islamist Goliaths are Abu Khalid bin Diversity and Abu Mukhtar al-Multiculturalism, those great shredders of the West’s social cohesion and internal security. The Europeans’ enraptured if lunatic love affair with the two Abu boys has opened the European continent to an enormous number of Muslim immigrants from across the Middle East and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Some came to Europe as economic migrants truly searching for a better life, but many others came to escape the oppression and violence that Arab police states — Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Syria, Egypt, Libya, etc. — routinely direct against their populations. In particular, many of those who came to Europe and were mindlessly granted resident or asylum status were men who had joined and/or fought in Islamist groups opposed to the tyrannical Arab governments which are — or were — among the most beloved allies of Europe and the United States. Addled by the theories of diversity and multicultural, Europe, in essence, welcomed as easily assimilated and soon-to-be loyal citizens those who had been persecuted by tyrants that Europe had long supported and armed. This approach to immigration, for those few Americans and Europeans still having a trace of commonsense, seems to present a prima facie case for a diagnosis of severe mental pathology.

By welcoming large numbers of Muslim men and their families who had been oppressed by Europe-supported Arab tyrants, European governments long ago established the beachhead and gateways for the entry into Europe of the Islamist movement’s vanguard, al-Qaeda, and now for the Islamic State (IS), which increasingly appears to be the jihad’s main force. Indeed, both al-Qaeda and IS command a force-in-being in Europe thanks to its governments unrelenting and suicidal allegiance to the policies of the two Abus. These forces are now quickly growing in numbers and military skill as many thousands of Europeans — born-Muslims and converts to Islam — travel overseas for military training and combat experience, and then return home patient and prepped for further combat. Europeans leaders need not worry that IS and al-Qaeda are setting up gateways to and beachheads in Europe because they themselves have been building them for decades. What they need to worry about is when they will be activated to produce insurgent warfare in Europe, as well as how their populations will react to that violence and to the governments that willingly and knowingly facilitated it.

With the policies of the Abus holding sway in Europe — or, rather, enslaving the European mind — one more piece needed to fall into place to ensure the Islamists could carry their jihad easily into Europe. In a move that makes one to think that Allah may well be on the side of the mujahideen, the Marx Brothers of contemporary international affairs — Barack Obama, David Cameron, and Nicholas Sarkozy — militarily intervened in Libya and eliminated Gadhafi and his regime. (NB: No offense is intended to the endlessly creative Marx Brothers. Their just-noted and highly educated successors may produce more antics and mayhem, but they are attended only with stupidity, tragedy, and death, never intelligence, mirth, and joy.) The three leaders thereby destroyed one of the West’s more important Arab counter-terrorism assets and gave — as time will surely show — all of North Africa and the Sahel states to the Islamists, as well as a Mediterranean coastline stretching from Egypt to Morocco from which to smuggle fighters and weapons into Europe at a thousand different points and at times of their own choosing.

For the Islamist movement, all’s well that ends well — and in the Islamist’s North African theater things could have not gone much better. And when the mujahideen entrench themselves and dominate North Africa and the Sahel and then begin an insurgency in Europe, the new Marx Brothers — with Hollande replacing Sarkozy — will tell the soldiers they send to fight them that they are fighting and dying for such unobtainable abstractions as freedom, liberty, democracy, and women’s and human rights for Muslims. That is, of course, precisely what the U.S. and NATO militaries were told when they were sent to fight and die in the Afghan and Iraq wars that their nation’s leaders never had any intention of winning.

How much more honest and precise it would be if today’s Marx Brothers used the estimable Groucho’s words and told each man and woman in their militaries sent to fight the Islamists that “You’re a brave man (or woman). Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you’re out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we’ll be in be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”

As Groucho surely knew, and we in the West must begin to recall, there is never a justification for war based on the Western elite’s self-satisfying fervor to obtain abstract goals for foreigners. Foreign policy and war must only be about protecting life-and-death national interests. Going to war to install abroad such abstractions as democracy and human rights clearly reveals U.S. presidents and European prime ministers as the murderers of each soldier sent to fight the Islamists, men and women who are, again in Groucho’s words, risking “life and limb through shot and shell.”

This writer carries no brief for Israel. All that is written and argued about “Israel’s right to exist” is nonsense. Neither Israel nor the United States nor any other nation has a right to exist. A state’s ability to survive depends solely on its own social cohesion, economic viability, and domestic political, international, and military behavior and actions, not on some non-existent right the Israel-First lobby dreamed-up to use to propagandized the American people into eternally supporting a nation that is completely irrelevant — and, indeed, bloodily counter-productive — to genuine U.S. national security interests.

That said, Israel and all nation-states have an absolute right to defend themselves in the manner they deem mandatory for their survival. In the now-dying Western democracies that defense includes the process of national elections to choose national political leaders. For a foreign nation to interfere in such elections — as the disloyal U.S. citizen Israel-Firsters and Mexican governments routinely do in U.S. elections — is to undermine the intervened-in nation’s absolute right of self-defense. The Obama administration’s State Department apparently identified disloyal Israeli citizens in Israel and transferred to them at least $350,000 for to use in a campaign meant to defeat Mr. Netanyahu in the recent Israeli election. Such intervention is tantamount to an act of war, just as it is criminal negligence for any government to refuse to identify and aggressively prosecute those of its citizens who use foreign money to influence a national election. And this is at least the second time that the Obama administration has deliberately compromised the ability of the Israelis to defend themselves. Recall that it was Obama’s White House, in spring, 2012, which leaked information about a deal that Israel had worked out with Azerbaijan to use Azeri airfields if it decided that its security required an attack Iran’s nuclear facilities. (See, www.non-intervention.com, 2 April 2012)

The Israelis will not attack the United States, of course, but a well-merited retaliation against America is simple enough to execute and probably will be. Netanyahu’s government can cut back on whatever intelligence is shared with the U.S. intelligence community; continue to pass sensitive U.S. technologies to other nations; pick up the pace of recruiting penetrations of the U.S. government’s intelligence and defense communities; and, as always, seek to influence U.S. elections and further corrupt U.S. politics via the money of disloyal Jewish-Americans and their organizations.

What makes matters worse for U.S. security is that this intervention in Israel’s national security affairs is only a part of the campaign that Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton inaugurated to intervene in the domestic affairs of other countries in the name of spreading democracy, while actually seeking to establish abroad the kind of liberal-authoritarian government they are trying to build in the United States. And Republican hands are not clean on this funding for counterproductive interventionism unless all of them voted against the State Department appropriations that allowed the democracy crusaders Obama and Clinton to fund the disastrous-for-the-United-States actions that follow.

• The funding of Iranian oppositions groups, the result of which was scores of dead young Iranians, more Muslim hatred for U.S. interventionism, and less domestic political freedom in Iran.
• The funding — along with EU funding — of opposition groups in the Ukraine that ultimately led to overthrow of Ukraine’s government; justified Putin’s annexation of the Crimea to protect Russia’s national security interests; started a Ukrainian civil war; and inaugurated a U.S.-led Western effort to economically strangle Russia that has created a European environment in which war between NATO and Russia is again being discussed and warned of.
• The funding of Egyptian groups opposed to Mubarak’s regime, which resulted in Mubarak’s fall; the election of an Islamist government; a U.S.-EU approved military coup to overthrow the Islamists ,which restored a Mubarak-like dictatorship; and the beginning of the destabilization of the region that has been, quite literally, an Allah-send for the Islamist movement.

U.S. interventionism always ends up costing America lives and money and earning it enduring hatred and war, and never more so than when it is conducted by reality blind and terminally adolescent theorists like Obama and Hillary Clinton.

I have long argued that the United States has no compelling national security concern that requires more than a nominal relationship with Israel, perhaps an exchange of Consul-Generals, at most. Our current bilateral relations with Israel cost American taxpayers untold billions of dollars that could be much better spent — or saved — at home; prompted President Bush’s Israel-First war against Saddam’s non-U.S.-threatening Iraq, the intensely negative repercussions of which have only started to be felt; provides one of the half-dozen major motivations for the anti-U.S. Islamism that has grown from Usama bin Laden’s 40-man al-Qaeda in 1988 to today’s worldwide Islamist movement; and facilitated the opportunity for Israel-First U.S. citizens and their organizations to corrupt both houses of Congress and much of the U.S. political system. For these issues and others, U.S. ties to Israel out to be reduced to the lowest possible level. Preferably they should be cut altogether.

This termination process can and should be done in a publicly forthright, manly, and dignified manner; of course, no one would ascribe such character traits to Obama or any of his senior lieutenants. But the termination of relations must be done solely in the interests of the United States, not in a punitive manner that makes the United States an agent of Israel’s destruction, although constant U.S. intervention in the Muslim world — championed by Obama, Hillary Clinton, McCain, Wolfowitz, Graham, Firth, AIPAC, Cheney, all the Bushes etc. — has already contributed massively to what seems likely to be Israel’s inevitable demise.

In all of this, two facts stand out. First, the United States has no national-security reason to be involved in Israel’s problems or in its protection. Second, Israel has every right and an unquestionable responsibility to defend itself as it sees fit and, in doing so, work out its own destiny. Iran is Israel’s problem and Israel will address it as its leaders and voters deem necessary. The United States should neither play the part of Israel’s Muslim-hating protector, nor should it lift a finger to — as it already has done twice — to make Israel’s ability to defend itself more difficult. Obama would do much better if he and his advisers began to prosecute those disloyal Jewish-Americans and Mexican diplomats who seek with money and media to influence U.S. national elections.

Finally, Obama’s absurd anger over Netanyahu’s comment about the worrying “drove” of Arab-Israelis who went to the polls speaks to all Americans about the depth of incompetence, naiveté, and ignorance that resides in and fairly oozes from Obama and his team of advisers. Does Obama really think that the Israelis believe that their Arab citizens are their equals and that Israelis will someday be ready to be governed by a Muslim majority? Does Obama not recognize that, of all of Israel’s problems, demography — the rapid growth of the country’s Arabs population — is one of the most lethal? Does Obama believe that there is even the most remote chance that two peoples who have been murdering each other for nearly seventy years are simply going to forgive and forget and agree to live amiably together simply because he and fatuous “International Community” believe they should? Can Obama, his party, and the Republicans possibly believe that the two-state solution remains plausible even as it lies dead, mutilated, and rotting in the full glare of the public spotlight? Can Obama conceivably believe that the walking-dead peace process is just between Israelis and Palestinians, rather than between Israel and the entire Islamist movement that his arrogant and amateurish interventionism has motivated and nurtured?

The answer to each of these questions is a resounding yes, and that affirmative goes far to explain the U.S.-produced or -assisted disasters not only in Israel and Palestine, but also in Iran, Ukraine, and Egypt. Obama’s inability to understand the diversity of the world’s peoples, cultures, and faiths; his ignorance of the eternally unchanging nature of human nature; his hatred for all religions that are not what he believes they should be; and his refusal to recognize that hatred and revenge are as much valid and timeless human characteristics as love and forgiveness, and that none of the four can be banned or mandated by a governmental diktat or international agreement, are hardly the traits that make a competent national or international leader. They are, however, the traits of a wholly unqualified national leader who, with arrogance and always simmering hatred for those he believes cross him, may well bumble his nation and perhaps the world into a great war.

The Senate Republicans’ letter to Iran’s Ayatollah is addressed as much to Barack Obama as to the cleric; neither man has a clue about how the American constitutional system works. In his self-righteousness, intellectual arrogance, and thin skin, Obama resembles no other president so much as Thomas Woodrow Wilson. In fact, one must wonder if Wilson has not returned from the grave, this time as a Black man but still determined to do as much damage as he can to America in the fields of foreign affairs, national security, and fidelity to the Constitution.

Wilson, of course, used the U.S. military to intervene in Mexico and other South American nations — using the bayonet to teach Mexicans to “elect good men” — and took the United States into a war in which America had no genuine national interest at stake, a little European fracas known as the Great War (1914-1918). He also established and championed the theoretical “right” of self-determination, a right from hell that caused multiple, and enormous blood lettings through the rest of the 20th century, and does so right up to today. Wilson and all succeeding U.S. presidents have touted this as a “universal right,” but of course have only been willing to apply it if they approve of and support the group or nation that is seeking self-determination. In recent decades, for example, no Muslims need not apply for the right.

Wilson also tried to single handedly orchestrate the making of the peace treaty that ended the Great War, taking to the Paris Peace Conference as his assistants only those who were made in his image: a gaggle of theory-palsied and common senseless professors from the “best” American universities. He took few elected officials with him, and no Republicans at all. He also failed to keep the Senate informed about what was going on in Allied councils — the “Big Four” were the leaders of the U.S., Britain, France, and Italy — as the peace conference unfolded. The hapless Woodrow and his professorial lackeys, as matters turned out, were thoroughly slicked by the common sense, lethal political acumen, and willingness to flatter Wilson of Britain’s David Lloyd George and France’s Georges Clemenceau. The brilliant and narcissistic Woodrow then put his signature to a treaty that did nothing but ensure the occurrence of a second and more murderous great war.

If this was not absurd enough, the wondrously unrealistic Woodrow also pushed for the United States to join the League of Nations organization that was formulated at the Paris conference and became part of the Treaty of Versailles. In the League of Nations’ Covenant, Article 10 obliged the United States to automatically go to war in support of any member of the League that was the target of “external aggression.” Had Article 10 been ratified by the U.S. Senate it would have negated American sovereignty and independence of action on the most important question the nation can face: When, against whom, and for what will the United States go to war?

Senate Republicans, already smarting from Wilson’s refusal to either keep the Senate informed or take Republicans with him to Paris, refused, all praise to God, to ratify the treaty and the League Covenant. They thereby protected America’s sovereignty and independence of action until a later Senate surrendered both by joining NATO and the UN in the wake of the second Great War, a conflict that Wilson had helped mightily to facilitate. By exercising their legitimate constitutional role Senate Republicans also, hopefully, helped to bring on the stroke that disabled that curse of a man. Interestingly, Wilson’s stoke yielded in the form of Mrs. Wilson the first — if de facto — female U.S. president. She seems to have treated the national government as her fiefdom, controlled access to Wilson, and was a thoroughly unpleasant and haughty woman to those who questioned what she had unilaterally decided were her sole prerogatives. An early but eerily similar version of Hillary Clinton, I suppose.

The letter sent by Senate Republicans to Iran’s Ayatollah, therefore, is just another means of playing that body’s completely constitutional role. I say this knowing full well that most of the Senators — including Democrats who agree with but did not sign the letter — want a war with Iran. The Senators want war for Israel’s’ sake, and Obama’s amateur, Jimmy Kimmel-style diplomacy could make Israel decide to attack Iran — for which Muslims would blame the United States. Perhaps our genius politicians are creating another component of what seems to be their specialty, an endless caravan of lose-lose situations for America.

Nonetheless, the Senate, on both sides of the aisle, has been ignored and its constitutional prerogatives derided by Obama, Kerry, Biden, Rice, and their detestable lickspittles at the New York Times on the issue of an agreement with Iran. In addition, Obama and his team of amateurish diplomats have given every indication that Obama will try to negate the Constitution’s requirements for treaty making by side-stepping the Senate and taking the Iran deal directly to the terminally anti-American UN for ratification.

In this train-wreck of an episode the only thing that may be salvageable is the rule of law. The Senate Republicans know and, at times, respect the Constitution far better than Obama — who all but drips contempt for its provisions — and destroying any Kerry-made treaty that does not serve genuine U.S. interests would be a good and undeniably constitutional day’s work. If Obama does not bring the agreement to the Senate for advice and consent, it should be deprived of funding for implementation. As a bonus for America, such a result might also produce the same impact on Obama as the Senate’s non-ratification appears to have had on Woodrow Wilson.

Since the Islamic State (IS) arose in Syria and then Iraq in 2011 it has killed few Americans. Most of those killed chose to be on or near the battlefield, either reporting the war or working in civilian activities. They were where they wanted to be, knew the chances they were taking, bet they would survive, and lost the bet. In other words, these Americans were killed because they wanted to be in a battle zone dominated by a brutal enemy, knew the danger attendant thereto, and paid the price of going to a war as a non-combatant. Too bad, but hardly surprising.

The wild, nearly hysterical political, media, and clerical responses to the deaths — especially the executions by decapitation — are mildly amusing and very, very ironic. “The savage IS barbarians cut the heads off of innocents!” tearful politicians and commentators screech, even though most of them would defend to the death the same method of execution if it was conducted under the term “abortion.” Perhaps IS legal experts should go to an Islamic court and argue for a ruling that mirrors Roe-vs-Wade. If successful, IS leaders would have a legal order defining Americans, Westerners, and non-Muslims generally as non-humans — as the U.S. Supreme Court did for the unborn in 1973. Even with such a judgment in hand, however, IS would have a hard time killing the nearly 60 million “non-humans” that to date have been murdered by American women, the ISIS-like members of the American Medical Association, and the always compassionate and life-affirming Democratic Party — as long as the life needing affirmation is not that of infant or a U.S. Marine, soldier, or diplomat serving overseas.

The point here is not only to cite the blatant, mindless, and, may I say, barbaric hypocrisy of those who wail and weep over the Americans who were murdered by IS only because they knowingly went to ply their trades in a war zone, but to point out that no U.S. political leader in either party has precisely described what direct threat IS poses to the United States here in North America. That there is one is certain. But that threat is authored by the U.S. government and its dereliction in controlling U.S. borders and immigration; its adherence to policies that are not only palpably worthless but socially and economically destructive, namely, diversity and multiculturalism; and its chronic addiction to intervention and losing wars in the Muslim world. The threat posed to America by IS and other Islamist groups is the result, to paraphrase George W. Bush, of “fighting and losing to them over there while allowing them to easily come here.” The mujahideen will cause much destruction and death inside the United States, and the U.S. military, with the help of local police, will have to do whatever is necessary to utterly annihilate them and their supporters. Many in both categories will be U.S. citizens.

So there is a threat to the United States from IS and other such groups, but that threat was only made possible by the prolonged indolence, ignorance, political correctness, and wishful thinking of U.S. government under both Republicans and Democrats. Currently, America is unprepared to handle the Islamist violence that is coming its way, but that lack of preparation can be rectified if voters can find and elect a man with common sense, without an Ivy League-education, and who is not a lawyer. As additional parts of the preparation, at least four other steps also are necessary:

1. Get out of Iraq and Syria with all possible speed. (N.B.: Ditto for Yemen and Nigeria). IS cannot be defeated without a massive ground force, and such a force can only come from the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia, none of which has a force of sufficient size, ruthlessness, and effective leadership to do the job. The Arab tyrants we support are scared to death to put their infantry into the field because they know that high desertion rates to IS would result. All of the Arab tyrants’ militaries have been thoroughly infiltrated and propagandized by the Islamists; many of their soldiers identify U.S. interventionism as an attack on Islam and only lack an opportunity to join the mujahideen and fight it; and putting them on the battlefield to kill fellow Sunnis in the interests of the United States, Europe, and Shia Iran would open the floodgates for desertion. A multinational Arab field army on the ground in the Syria-Iraq theater ultimately would be a plentiful source of arms, reinforcements, and intelligence for the Islamic State and other Islamist groups, and any U.S. forces on the ground there would become the deserters’ targets. The beginning of wisdom for America is to get out and let the Sunni-vs-Shia war continue to develop and engulf the region.
2. Disengage from the Europeans and let them handle their own Islamist problems. They are now going to have to pay for their own border-and-immigration negligence, their deep, anti-Muslim racism, and their elite’s moronic adherence to the theories of diversity and multiculturalism, even after it has become clear that the policies’ chief products have been the unraveling of Europe’s social cohesion and the specter of seeing their diversity-loving Muslim citizens kill their own countrymen. Let the Europeans also handle Russia. It was their EU’s mindless democracy-mongering that ensured the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, provoked Putin to retake the Crimea, and yielded an on-again, off-again civil war. Putin is no threat to the United States unless Washington allows America to be dragged into a European-caused war with Russia. The European governments, America’s Neoconservatives, and the media on both sides of the Atlantic would push for the United States to lead a military coalition of the so-called “Free World” against Russia, but Americans would do all the spending, fighting, and dying because European governments have systematically gutted their militaries since the Cold War’s end, believing the United States would always rescue them. America helped to save Europe’s bacon twice in the dirty 20th century. Leave them fend for themselves the third time out in what Obama and his European colleagues like to describe as the enlightened 21st century.
3. Close the southern border of the United States using the U.S. military.
4. Once regular and probably widely dispersed Islamist attacks begin in the United States, the U.S. military, National Guard, and local and state police forces will be unable to be in all the places they are needed to engage and defeat the mujahideen. Had the national government not unconstitutionally deprived the states of their militias, those units would have been a most useful complement to the forces just mentioned. Without them, it will up to the citizenry to defend themselves and their homes, families, communities, and businesses until the cavalry arrives. Fortunately, some parts of the country already have local voluntary militias that are well-armed and determined, if they are needed, to fight terrorists, foreign enemies, and/or lawless domestic foes that ignore the U.S. Constitution. But many more are needed, and Americans must arm themselves as fully as possible, especially with automatic weapons, and especially now that President Obama is banning ammunition for some of those weapons, and so deliberately decreasing the ability of citizens to defend themselves and their property. Obama also is unconstitutionally filling the country with millions of unwanted and unneeded illegal aliens — some of whom are, or soon will be felons — and, in doing so, adds to the Islamists another U.S. government-generated enemy that American citizens will have to defend themselves against.

Pertinent to this issue, the revolutionary patriot Josiah Quincy once said that “supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands and are disciplined in the use of them.” It is time for Americans to take those words and the words of the 2nd Amendment to heart and get cracking in terms of arming, organizing, and training. They must also seek the expert assistance for that effort that can come from America’s many retired and U.S. government-abused military veterans.

Time is growing short.

Mayor Giuliani and all Neoconservatives too often confuse the sound of their own voices with the voice of God and therefore expect the great unwashed American citizenry to believe what they have said and do what they have ordered without a second-thought. When Giuliani said that President Obama does not love America, he may have expected the citizenry to collectively stand up and agree. Well, much of it has not done so, and probably will not unless Giuliani can tie an unmeasurable — “love” — to some recognizable metric. Needless to say, he will not be able to do so. One could, I suppose, turn the table on Mayor Giuliani and his Neoconservative brethren and argue that they do not “love” the United States and are disloyal to it because they are always eager to expend American lives, honor, and treasure to support Israel, a nation which is irrelevant to U.S. national security. American patriots, after all, generally do not knowingly waste American money and lives to serve foreign interests that are counterproductive for U.S. national security.

Anyway, George Washington and his founding colleagues believed that the only way to judge a man’s character, loyalties, and intentions is to observe and evaluate his words and actions, as well as the company he keeps. If Mayor Giuliani had kept the Founders’ admonition in mind, he would have been able to make a telling and easily provable point. He first would have referred to the following passage in the U.S. Constitution: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Setting aside the sentence’s non-pertinent first clause, Giuliani could have focused on the clause that explains that treason can be identified and punished in individuals or groups found to be “adhering to their [America’s] Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” The specifics that support this charge against President Obama are abundant and have been witnessed by tens of millions of Americans.

It was this tack that I took in June 2014 when writing the essay I have included below. Since that essay’s publication, President Obama has continued to adhere to enemies of the United States, and has undeniably given them “Aid and Comfort.”

• He has released at least nine additional Islamist fighters from Guantanamo Bay and sent them to governments that have a substantial and urgent national security interest in getting those fighters out of their territory as quickly as possible, even if that means allowing them back on the battlefield to kill Americans and others.
• He has continued to deliberately lie to Americans by denying that the Islamists are waging a genuine religious war against the United States. By saying publicly that the mujahideen have nothing to with Islam Obama attains a lose-lose result; he reassures the enemy that the leader of the world’s greatest military power does not have a clue about the foe his is up against, and he offends the tens of millions of Muslims who believe that the mujahideen have everything to do with protecting Islam. By angering those Muslims the president certainly hardens their support for the Islamists. The only winners from the president’s seemingly pathological deceitfulness are several of the Democratic Party’s fundamentally anti-American interest groups: the Muslim Brotherhood organization in the United States; the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the faculties of Ivy League and other universities that are inexplicably described as elite.
• He and his White House staff have leaked plans for a U.S. military orchestrated and supported Iraqi-Kurdish spring offensive against the Islamic State-held city of Mosul, thereby giving the Islamists several months to prepare to defend the city and pin a humiliating defeat on the to-date feckless Iraqi and Kurd military forces. Indeed, the forewarned Islamic State took its first defensive measure today by seizing nearly 100 Assyrian Christians in Syria. Odds are that if Obama launches his offensive against Mosul, the lives — and perhaps the heads — of those Christians will be forfeit.
• He today vetoed the Keystone Pipeline Bill which will — as part of his larger campaign to prevent U.S. energy self-sufficiency — keep America closely involved with and protective of the Arab tyrants who rule the oil-rich, Arab Peninsula police states. This will promote additional support, volunteers, and donations for the mujahideen which they will use to wage their religious war against America and those tyrants. (NB: The veto also keeps 40,000-plus unemployed or underemployed Americans from getting the kind of solid, middle-class jobs that Obama deceitfully claims he wants for all citizens. Of course this result does not equate to treason, only to a wicked and savage heartlessness.)

What Obama “loves” — beyond himself — is ultimately an unknowable. What is known and provable is that with his actions President Obama has knowingly aided America’s most lethal enemies, and with his words he has comforted that enemy by deliberately misleading Americans about their foe’s religiosity, motivation, and size, as well as about the treat it poses. Perhaps a politician — or better yet a prosecutor — more serious and able than Mayor Giuliani ought to give it another shot?

See also:

Despair for America’s future security is a difficult sentiment to subdue as events in the Middle East continue unfolding. The U.S. military can neither win wars — hopefully because of political restraint — nor effectively train Arab armies. The leaders of both U.S. political parties refuse to recognize that ISIS, al-Qaeda, and like organizations are indeed — according to 20-years of their own public words and a quick check of the Koran — waging an increasingly popular religious war against the United States, in large part as a response to Washington’s relentless intervention in the Muslim world. The same political leaders and President Obama and his administration have set themselves up as expert Islamic theologians to endlessly assert that the Islamists are madmen and nihilists who have nothing to do with Islam, which is, more than anything else, a signal that they are determined to help the United States commit suicide by refusing to level with Americans and tell them that they are up to their hips in a deadly religious war in which their own government is the enemy’s main motivator.

Since 2002, I have written four books dealing with Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Islamist movement in general. Each of them is primarily based on the words of writings of bin Laden, his lieutenants, and other important Islamist fighters and leaders. One of the goals of each book was to correlate the convergence of the Islamists’ words and deeds; that is, did bin Laden et al. do what they said they were going to do. Each book found a very high correlation between words and deeds; indeed, it seems likely that the United States has never had an enemy that was and is so willing to tell us in advance what he is going to do, why he is going to do it, and what ends he means to attain. Because of this reality, the Islamist enemy is not at all difficult to understand. When Western political leaders speak of what a complex problem we are facing in the war the Islamists are waging, you can be sure they have either not read what the enemy has publicly said and taken it seriously — a repeat of their predecessors’ catastrophic failure to take Mein Kampf seriously — or that for reasons of political necessity, ideology, or, most likely, faulty educations they simply cannot credit the idea that anyone would be willing to fight and die for their faith in the “enlightened” 21st century.

Because the Islamist leaders have detailed their movement’s motivation, and have then proceeded to do what they said they would do, there is no such thing as “unintended consequences” in this war. The impact of every major post-2001 action taken by both sides in this war was perfectly predictable. For the West that means each of its decisions and actions have yielded perfectly predictable negative consequences. Those consequences could be detailed at length, but it is enough to say that the Islamists’ war against the United States and the West is largely motivated by their interventionist policies and actions in the Muslim world, and the U.S. and Western response to the war the Islamists started has been increased intervention undertaken without any intention of winning and with a willingness to curtail civil liberties in the West in the name of internal security  — a response quietly predicted in the speeches and writings of bin Laden.  The West, in essence, has followed to the letter a script written for its demise, one that has been easily available for reading by all Western leaders since late-summer 1996.

While it is quite late in the game it is worth recalling what bin Laden believed was the one factor that could derail the Islamists’ war against the United States, and perhaps their whole agenda. Bin Laden was very clear that the strategy the mujahideen had to follow to victory could be divided into three parts. First, to cause enough human and especially economic pain to the casualty-averse, legally hamstrung, and radically impatient United States to drive it as far as possible out of the Islamic world. Second, to thereafter focus on destroying the Arab tyrannies and Israel. Third, to settle the scores with the Shia Muslim heretics. Today, driving the United States from the Islamic world is goal that is close to being accomplished; America has lost two wars there, will lose Obama’s re-intervention in Iraq, and anti-U.S.-Government hatred has grown across the region. On the second point, several of the Arab tyrannies, with U.S., UN, and EU help, are gone, and Jordan and Lebanon probably will be the next to go. These Western-aided victories for the Islamists — and the ones to come — have substantially eroded Israel’s security and yielded a steady flow of new fighters and enormous quantities of modern weapons from the tyrants’ emptied arsenals. Third, in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon it appears that a regional Sunni-Shia sectarian war is being kindled. And that fact would be the great and deeply troubling rub for bin Laden if he was still alive.

For the three-part strategy described above to succeed, bin Laden argued, the parts had to be accomplished seriatim, not in parallel. In short, the al-Qaeda chief believed that the Arab tyrants’ power and ability to rule depended on them continuing their half-century-plus de facto alliance with the United States and its European allies. Thus, the Islamists should push the United States as far out of the region as possible and then turn and work to destroy the Arab tyrannies and Israel. The first part of the strategy is largely complete, and the second is now underway and, I suspect, is further along than the mujahideen themselves can believe.

Notwithstanding this astonishing success, the problem that bin Laden appeared to fear most and believed could be fatal to the Islamists — taking two steps in the strategy at the same time — also is now underway. Bin Laden constantly preached that settling scores with the Shia had to wait until America was driven from the region and Israel and the Arab tyrannies were destroyed. His words of warning took on substance in 2005-2006 when al-Qaeda’s commander in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, began a campaign that focused on indiscriminately murdering Iraq’s Shia, as well some Sunnis, especially those who worked for the U.S.-led occupation and others who would not obey Zarqawi’s orders. Zarqawi’s murderous behavior — including videotaped decapitation — earned him and al-Qaeda enormous enmity from much of the Sunni Muslim world; indeed, the negative Muslim reaction to Zarqawi’s actions has been the only serious strategic threat to al-Qaeda since 2001, for more dangerous than any action that the United States and its allies have been able to generate against it. Fortunately for al-Qaeda, U.S. forces killed Zarqawi. They saved al-Qaeda from having to do so, and allowed bin Laden and his lieutenants to begin a remedial campaign to retrieve Muslim sympathies and support. (NB: It is important to note, I think, that there has been very little outcry in the Sunni Muslim world about the ISIS attacks on Shias in Iraq. There has been much Muslim gnashing of teeth and weeping over the beheading/burning of Western prisoners and the Jordanian pilot — some part of it posturing to placate the West — but nothing similar to the protests that greeted Zarqawi’s binge of Shia slaughter a decade ago. Perhaps times have changed, perhaps ISIS has deliberately refrained from killing Sunnis at the pace practiced by Zarqawi, or perhaps there is support in the Sunni world for finally eradicating Islam’s hated heretics.)

Today, as noted above, the fire has been lit — and lit by Muslims — for a Sunni-Shia war that has been a millennium in the making and will be far larger than anything Zarqawi could have managed. Bin Laden believed that such a sectarian war would derail the jihad against the United States and its allies because: (a) Sunni fighters — especially Salafis and Wahhabis– consider the killing of Shia heretics as an extraordinarily worthy and Allah-pleasing endeavor, and (b) the Sunni Arab governments would become the much-needed sources of the funds, armaments, and safe havens for the Islamist groups fighting the Shia, something that the tyrants are as much in favor of as the mujahideen. These two factors, bin Laden knew, would turn Muslim eyes, efforts, and resources inward toward the Islamic world and so could leave the Arab tyrannies intact and perhaps stronger and even popular if their support allowed the Sunni Islamists to prevail.

Given the combination of the West’s inability to recognize the obvious, that there can be nothing but a military solution to the religious war started by bin Laden and the Islamists, and bin Laden’s well-grounded fear of the mujahideen moving against the Shia while still at war with the West, Israel, and the Arab tyrants, the developing Sunni-Shia war may well be a God-send for the security of the United States and the West. President Obama momentarily slowed the development of the war by re-intervening in Iraq in 2014, but a second chance has now appeared in Yemen, just as ISIS has resumed its offensive. The Sunni mujahideen and the Sunni Gulf tyrannies will not tolerate a Shia state in Yemen. And Iran, while knowing that the Houthis — crammed in northwestern Yemen and only a third of Yemen’s population — will eventually be destroyed, will now have to bear the cost of its rhetoric about being the protector of Shia by supporting an undeniably lost cause in Yemen (along with those in Iraq and Syria).

The stage is thus set for a regional sectarian war, which after nearly twenty years of U.S. and Western Islamist-motivating intervention accompanied by military, diplomatic, and political incompetence, may be the best near-term means for improving U.S. and Western security. For now, the U.S. and NATO governments ought to step aside, let the Sunni-Shia sectarian war take its course, and urgently address the pathetic and steadily worsening mess they have made of civil liberties and domestic security in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Now, if someone told you that the Congress of the United States invited a foreign leader to address it without coordinating with the president and seeking his approval, the natural reaction, I think, would be to respond that while such an invitation might be legal, it clearly is a case of the legislative branch arrogantly ignoring the executive’s prerogatives in the conduct of foreign policy. Even though the Obama administration does not have a coherent or commonsense foreign policy, the Congress’s action can only make the Obama-made overseas mess worse and thereby further undermine U.S. security. Constitutional prerogatives ought to be honored — in letter and spirit — by all three branches of government, and so this unilateral congressional invitation ought to set off some alarm bells.

Now, if the same someone went on to tell you that the foreign leader invited to address Congress is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and that he is going to deliver a speech meant to promote the involvement of the United States in an unnecessary war with Iran, the ringing alarm bells ought to become a deafening nationwide clanging. Our elected interventionist representatives are giving a war-wanting foreign leader a superb platform from which to intervene in U.S. politics, and from which he will try to drag/push/force the United States into Israel’s war with Iran. If Netanyahu succeeds at some point in the future, it will be the soldier-children of American parents who will be killed fighting for Israel in a war in which the United States does not have a horse. Iran has third-rate military that is not capable of successfully attacking North America; that is, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards will not be victoriously goose-stepping down the main street of any American city. And, lest we forget, the U.S. military is still the earth’s preeminent military power and if we are attacked by Iran it could render Persia uncomfortably radioactive. If Israel wants a war with Iran, let it rip, but Washington’s only duty in the case of such a war is to stay completely away from it, support neither side, and refuse to publicly comment.

Another reason why Washington must avoid participation in an Israel-Iran is the catastrophic disaster that our immigration and border policies have wrought in terms of allowing Iran’s intelligence operatives, Revolutionary Guards, and their murderous colleagues in Lebanese Hizballah to establish a strong presence in the United States. Iran has been deploying its fighters here pretty much at will since the early 1980s, and now controls a wide-ranging set of capabilities with which to attack in the United States. (NB: These capabilities are supported by the similar ones that Iran has built in Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, and parts of South America.) The odds are very much against Iran using these capabilities unless we join in Israel’s war against the Islamic Republic. In that event, Tehran probably would use its U.S. based fighters to cause damage and death in the United States at a level the conventional Iranian military could never achieve. Joining Israel’s war against Iran, then, means Americans will fight a two-front war — one in Iran, the other at home — and would certainly come out the loser in both.

It is important, however, that Americans not misplace blame for this episode by damning either Netanyahu or Israel for taking advantage of the opportunity that the Congress has offered them. Netanyahu is responsible only for Israel’s national security, and that consideration apparently demands that the United States be on-board and fighting when Israel attacks Iran. The Israelis have an absolute right to defend themselves by whatever means they deem necessary, but the United States has no obligation — legal, moral, or security — to join them in their war on Iran. The U.S. government too has an absolute right to defend itself against perceived threats in any manner necessary, but it has an even greater duty — legal, moral, and security — never to become involved in other people’s wars in which no life-and-death U.S. interests are at stake and can only yield ruin for America.

There is much blame to be laid, however, and that blame lies squarely with pro-Israel Jewish-Americans and their organizations. They have been outspokenly critical of both the Obama administration’s failure to supinely do Israel’s bidding and the president’s apparent personal dislike of Netanyahu. The invitation for the Israeli prime minister to speak clearly is meant to demonstrate to the U.S. governing elite the power that the disloyal Israel-Firsters have acquired with — apparently — almost all members of both houses through their campaign contributions, their ability to arrange exclusion from the media, and their vicious eagerness to identify as anti-Semites all Americans who advocate a non-interventionist foreign policy and a resolute hands-off approach to the Middle East. The Israel-Firsters have long experience in deliberately damaging genuine U.S. national interests and silencing American citizens, beginning with their public and covert work with Britain’s information and intelligence services to push the United States into war with Germany before genuine U.S. interests were threatened, and their simultaneous defaming and ultimate destruction of the reputation of America’s last great hero, the courageous non-interventionist, Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.

What is on the table for Americans to see, then, is constitutional disorder — who runs foreign policy? the extraordinary hyping of Iranian power, which is a marginal threat to the United States; the criminal, multi-decade negligence of U.S. governments in regard to immigration policy and border control that has yielded a serious threat from Iran’s resident operatives in America; and the astounding, disloyal, and possibly illegal anti-American activities of so many Israel-First U.S. citizens, men and women for whom Israel is their country of first allegiance and who have no qualms about suborning 535 U.S. congressmen and senators to serve as agents of a foreign power willing to involve the United States in Israel’s wars.

“Lieutenant al-Kasasbeh’s dedication, courage, and service to his country and family represent universal human values that stand in opposition to the cowardice and depravity of ISIL, which has been so broadly rejected around the globe.”

Barack Obama, 3 February 2015 (www.whitehouse.gov)

President Obama’s reality-free statement about the Islamic State’s (IS) burning to death of a Jordanian Air Force pilot who had bombed the mujahideen before he crashed and was captured is par for the course. In a world where, under Obama’s watch, the military and media power, armaments, manpower, ideological appeal, and geographical reach of IS and other Islamist groups have grown exponentially, the president claims IS and the Islamist movement have been “broadly rejected around the globe.” Over the weekend, Obama also was quoted by Real Clear Politics as saying the United States and the West make too much of the Islamist movement because, after all, it is not an “existential threat.” This statement came after a month in which the West saw three important NATO leaders — Cameron, Harper, and Hollande — respond to the lethal Islamist attacks in Paris and Ottawa, not by killing the enemy mercilessly, but by seeking stronger internal security measures that will further constrict the civil liberties of their own citizens. That shoe does not yet seem to have fallen in the United States, but probably only because Obama and Eric Holder — with broad Republican support — have already shattered the protections afforded to civil liberty by the 4th Amendment.

If common sense might for a moment be used in place of Obama’s theoretical fantasizing, the ever tightening noose around civil liberties in the United States and Europe — the latter is too bad, but irrelevant to U.S. interests and typical of the authoritarian EU — seems to indeed pose an existential threat to the ability of the American people to live as they want to, rather than as they have to. An existential threat does not necessarily have to be nuclear in nature. Americans have had three consecutive presidents — Clinton, Bush, and Obama — who have been confronted by the Islamists’ mortal and growing threat to the United States and each has refused to kill it with the most powerful and expensive military the world has ever known. Nearly twenty years into this war, it seems crystal clear that the combination of the Islamists’ piety, determination, talent, and ruthlessness with the politically correct moral cowardice of U.S. presidents — not to mention Obama’s tyrannical bent — does indeed yield an existential threat to the American people, their property, their way of life, and their Constitution.

Much more could be said on this issue, but all of it would arrive at the same bottom line; namely, if we are neither prepared to abandon the U.S. foreign policies that are the main motivators of the Islamists nor ready to militarily annihilate the Islamist groups, their civilian supporters, and whatever infrastructure they control, U.S. citizens must accept the fact that continuing Islamist attacks will be used by the U.S. government — under either party — to slowly eliminate their civil liberties in the name of domestic security. Americans gradually will be enslaved in their own land because their presidents and leading politicians prefer that end-product to having to admit that their unchanged policies and deliberately lost wars have allowed the Islamist movement to grow from a lethal nuisance to an existential threat. For Americans, the reality is that of a two-front war, one which they will have to wage against a de facto alliance of their own politicians and the Islamists. Both are equally their enemy; both merit the most severe punishment.

Winston Churchill once said that the Lord always looks after drunks and the United States of America. And though we hardly deserve it, Providence may have again stepped into the breach and given the United States a second chance to take advantage of a hard, murderous, but very real opportunity in the Middle East.

The overthrow of the Yemeni government sets the stage for a Sunni-vs-Shia conflagration on the Arab Peninsula. The late Yemeni regime is a zero loss to the United States. What President Obama once described as a vital regional ally — media pundits are now echoing this lie — was nothing more than a Arab strong man and his gang who ruled the Yemeni capital of Sana and almost nothing else, men who generously agreed to take hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. military equipment, cash, training, and who knows what else. In return, the Yemeni regime allowed what it could not stop in any event: U.S. drone and Special Forces’ attacks that violated Yemeni sovereignty. Silence was the Yemeni regime’s main contribution as Obama’s vital regional ally, and now with that government gone, and none ready to take its place, the attacks can continue because there is no sovereign government to object to them.

What good such attacks would do is another matter. They have killed some important Yemen-based Islamist leaders and may have destroyed some arms caches, but the fact is that Al-Qaeda-on-the-Arab-Peninsula (AQAP) is stronger than ever before. The U.S. attacks in Yemen — as well as those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and elsewhere — amount to nothing more than make-Americans-feel-good tactical victories that, as always, leave the strategic advantage and momentum with the Islamists.

Today’s reality in Yemen again demonstrates the extraordinary fecklessness of the U.S. government, both U.S. political parties, U.S. and NATO generals, and their EU sidekicks. Expensive support from all of them brought no stability to Yemen; U.S. and NATO-country military training did not create a force that could defend the regime; and Special Forces’ and CIA pin-prick attacks and drone strikes did nothing to slow the enemies’ growth. In addition, two Islamist insurgent organizations — the Houthis and AQAP — have grown larger, stronger, and better armed since the United States and Europe started supporting and publicly praising the Yemeni regime, while simultaneously lying to Americans and Europeans about how our now-deceased key regional ally was beginning to pull its own weight and was a shining example of the success of U.S. and Western policy.

There is, however, one bright spot in this otherwise dismal story. The arrival of the Shia Houthi insurgents as a potent rival of the Sunni AQAP gives the United States another — even if unmerited — chance to step back and watch the marvelously positive impact a regional Shia-Sunni sectarian war would have on U.S. national security. Such a war would hurt the U.S. economy a bit because Obama, Cuomo, and their deeply anti-American party have blocked U.S. energy self-sufficiency, but otherwise there is nothing but upside for the United States.

First, in Yemen, as in Syria and Iraq before Obama intervened and hurt U.S. interests, all the people that U.S. governments have for forty-five years identified as “enemies” would be killing and maiming each other. In addition, Saudi Arabia would aid AQAP and Iran would aid the Houthis, so the benefactors of al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Lebanese Hizballah, Bashir al-Asad’s Syria, Iraq’s Shia militias, and the Houthi fighters would be drawing each others blood and spending wastefully. While all of this lethal mayhem is proceeding, the United States could simply watch and “officially regret” a religious war that has been in the making for a millennium, and which, with a little luck, will bleed each side white and move the United States a bit off the Islamists’ bull’s eye.

Second, the United States should withdraw all of its personnel and moveable physical assets from what the Obama called the Yemen success story. This should be done, of course, because we do not want our personnel to have to fight their way out with the help of the U.S. Marines. But more important, Washington could use Yemen as the opportunity to begin a policy of non-intervention in the Middle East, and thereby begin to sap the Sunni Islamists motivation to attack America. We could publicly say that our withdrawal is evidence of America’s granite-like support for self-determination — a lie, our governing elite loathes the idea for Americans or anyone else — but Obama’s arrogance will need some noble-sounding reason to abandon his now in-flames success story.

Third, Washington should build on a successful de-intervention in Yemen by beginning the same process in the Syria-Iraq theater. Obama and the Europeans clearly have no intention of defeating the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda there — and U.S. generals clearly have no talent whatsoever in training Muslim armies, witness Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. — and so whatever funding, weapons, and lives that are expended there amount to pure waste. Once U.S. forces leave, the road will be open for a resumption of the Sunni-Shia religious war in the Levant and Iraq that was perking along and expanding nicely until Obama and British Prime Minister Cameron saw themselves as the second coming and launched their avenging if always war-losing angels to save “innocent foreigners” at the expense of decreasing the security of their own nations and citizens. Who knows, two quick de-interventions might cause everyday Americans to press their bipartisan governing elite to abandon the knee-jerk, ruinous, and war-causing habit of intervening in countries where no life-and-death U.S. interest is at stake, as well as to reestablish the tradition of quickly and utterly annihilating those few enemies who pose a genuine threat to U.S. national security.

Because multiple second chances to redress errors, as Churchill said, come only to drunks and the United States, Obama’s Washington ought not to miss the Yemen opportunity to do something that would contribute to rather than erode U.S. national security. Relentless interventionism and open borders have, respectively, earned America a war with an increasing portion of the Muslim world and allowed our Islamist enemies into the United States undetected. A de-interventionist foreign policy and closing the southern U.S. border would head the United States toward a much more effective and Americans-protecting foreign policy summed up in the time-honored and commonsense phrase “America First.”