Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

“Will you never look at the facts rather than at those who put them to you?”

Titus Livy

“You might as well appeal against a thunderstorm as against these terrible hardships of war. War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”

General William T. Sherman

The sheer incompetence and ignorance of so much of the American media is appalling, and Livy’s damning question, noted above, ought to be asked by all Americans of their country’s journalists.

We have heard endlessly from U.S. officials, generals, and politicians from both parties that “there is no military solution” to the war the Islamists are waging on the United States. This is, of course, the purest nonsense. There is always a military solution if someone, some group, or some nation-state attacks you. The question should never be, “Is there a military solution to this problem,” it should always to be, “Is this problem a legitimate threat to genuine U.S. national interests that requires war?” (NB: The IS beheading of two journalists, or fifty for that matter, poses no threat to genuine U.S. national interests.) If the answer to the second question is yes, then military solutions are available, and not to use them is plainly a case of criminal negligence by the president, the congress, and the U.S. general officers corps. Why, then, have we almost never heard a journalists ask one of these charlatans why there is no military solution?

Last week Americans heard a refinement of the “there is no military solution to the Islamist problem” mantra from the admiral who is a public spokesman for the Pentagon. This wise fellow told a gathering of journalists something akin to, “We are fighting an ideology, and military power cannot defeat an ideology.” Again, at least as far as I have been able to tell, not a single one of the brilliant journalists present asked a question that challenged this admiral’s rank piece of stupidity. One must conclude that neither the admiral nor the journalists have ever heard of an ideology called National Socialism — Nazism for short — that was utterly defeated by the military power of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain. And, closer to home, did the just-mentioned gathering of geniuses ever hear of the American Civil War wherein fellows named Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan used unrelenting military force to annihilate the purveyors of an ideology whose pillars were secession and the right of people to own other human beings? Perhaps the admiral and all his auditors were educated at Ivy League schools. That would explain a lot.

On Wednesday, Americans are to hear President Obama’s 3-year strategy for dealing with the Islamic State (IS) (NB: Five will get you ten that IS will be” contained” in time for Obama to pretend we won before the 2016 election.) My guess is that we will hear some form of the phrase “there is no military solution to this problem,” and again it will be a lie. The Islamic State is right up the U.S. military’s ally. While our politician-palsied military is not worth a tinker’s damn in fighting the mujahideen on the ground, we have in IS an organization that holds a large array of physical assets that can be more or less permanently destroyed from the air. In Iraq and Syria, IS controls oil and gas fields and refineries; cotton and flour mills; power plants and dams producing electricity; and other industrial and agricultural facilities. All of these produce substantial profits for IS operations, and Obama, Kerry, McCain, Cameron and other NATO leaders have all portrayed the current wealth and significant money-making potential of IS as the chief reason we in the West need to be afraid of this particular brand of mujahideen. If this assertion is true, then the supposedly non-existent “military solution” is immediately — and quite obviously — at hand.

So listen to Obama when he speaks and if you do not hear that his strategy is the simple one of having U.S. air power — with or without our vaunted allies — annihilate the profit-making physical assets of IS, as well as whatever IS personnel and civilians who are in the way, you will know that Obama and the Republicans again do not intend to win the war they are getting us into, and that more debt will be accrued and more of our military men and women will be killed and maimed for nothing. It will also mean that Obama and our bipartisan political elite are not seeking to destroy IS, but rather to appear to be doing something about IS while ensuring they do not alienate America’s makers of prosthetic devices or raise the ire of the effete Europeans, the clueless U.S. media, and those so badly educated that they cannot grasp that war means killing the enemy until he is eradicated or gives up.

None of the foregoing should be construed as an endorsement of a U.S.-led war against the IS organization; as long as Washington keeps intervening in the Muslim world, U.S. borders are open, and we are aligned with Saudi Arabia, Israel, and any Shia-dominated Iraqi regime America will be virtually undefended no matter how many mujahideen we kill. And anything more or less than the campaign of annihilation-from-the-air against the targets noted above, means that Obama and both parties are sending the U.S. military not to defend genuine U.S. national interests, but to do the bidding of foreigners and to lose another war, an event that will further motivate Muslims to join and fund IS, al-Qaeda, and other militant groups.

Because under Obama and Bush the United States has been deliberately impotent in the military sense — only fools think America has used its full military power against the Islamists — our best defense at the moment is to do everything we can to encourage but not become involved in the emerging Sunni-Shia sectarian war in the Arab world, and especially that part of it occurring in Syria and Iraq. We must delight in seeing the two Muslim sects tear each other’s guts out, and pray that it long continues. This will give American voters a short window to search for and elect candidates who know that: (a) bipartisan U.S. interventionism and democracy crusading have gotten us into this mess in the Islamic world; (b) that genuine U.S. national interests are few in number, are material matters not abstractions like freedom and women’s rights, and are rarely threatened, so few U.S. wars are necessary; and (c) that when forced to fight, as General Sherman explained, America and mercy are best served by the overwhelming application of lethal force to eradicate the enemy and his supporters in the shortest possible time.

“Those Americans who refuse to plunge blindly into the maelstrom of European or Asiatic politics are not defeatist or neurotic. They are giving evidence of sanity, not cowardice, of adult thinking as distinguished from infantilism. They intend to preserve and defend the Republic. America is not to be Rome or Britain. It is to be America.”

Gore Vidal, 2004

Last Wednesday afternoon (27 August 2014), Fox’s Neil Cavuto hosted a former senior U.S. government official on the subject of Iraq’s Islamic State organization. For my money, Mr. Cavuto has one of the most informative programs on Fox or any other network, but on this occasion the guest provided no light and only added to our national muddle by describing the Islamist fighters and their leaders as frustrated, angry, and under privileged youth who are in essence brain-washed by cynical Islamist leaders to join the jihad. Sound familiar? Well it ought to. U.S. politicians from both parties and most of the U.S. and Western media have been spewing this nonsense since the early 1990s. Mr. Cavuto’s guest than piped in with the usual mantra that the war against the Islamists cannot be won militarily but only by an ideological confrontation with them that will show young Muslim males how much more pure, noble, and well-meaning America is than are those he called “Islamo-Facists.”

I am not using Mr. Cavuto’s guest’s name because it is irrelevant. The guest could have been almost any American politician, pundit, general, admiral, or senior civil servant and the words would have been nearly identical, and surely identically wrong. This bipartisan U.S. political elite is simply too arrogant, authoritarian, and ill-educated in the discipline of history to craft and conduct a foreign policy that will protect U.S. national security. They leave Americans no choice but to search out and elect men and women who will champion U.S. neutrality and refuse to intervene in matters that are none of America’s concern. In that regard, let us hope Senator Paul gets his meandering policy views straightened out so that he can get squared away with the many millions of his dad’s supporters who are eager to support him.

To begin, we cannot win an “ideological confrontation” with the Islamists. We have already tried that — though Mr. Cavuto’s guest said we had not — and it was an utter failure. The Islamists simply will not buy what Washington’s hucksters present as an alternative to their beliefs and agenda. The Islamists are fighting a religious war against what they deem to be authoritarian regimes that both oppressively rule much of the Arab world — recall Iraq’s Maliki was an elected Shia tyrant and our foreign policy gurus now want to ally America with Syria’s Asaad and the tyrants of Jordan and the Gulf states — and prevent the unity and religious orthodoxy that the Islamists believes Allah demands. Think what you will of the Islamists and their brand of war-making, but they have been in the field fighting since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and their movement has never been larger, more popular, more geographically dispersed, or as well-armed as it is today — 35 years later. Our political elite needs to get a grip on this reality. These men are not fighting for money, fame, or upcoming mid-term elections. They are fighting for their faith and for freedom and self-determination as they define it. And they believe Allah is smiling on their efforts, having allowed them to humiliate and defeat superpowers in Iraq and twice Afghanistan.

And what points, pray tell, could we argue that would drive the Islamists away from these beliefs and perceptions? Should we tell them of the glories of secularism when it is legislatively imposed on a once believing and pious American nation? The glories of a democracy that is controlled from start to finish by money and foreign lobbies? The desirability of making women equal to men by giving them the “right” to kill other human beings? The inspiring reality of a lawless president and attorney general bent on destroying the 1st, 2nd, and 4th Amendments? By offering to share with them the world’s biggest and wealthiest pornography industry? By showing them the uselessness of a government that has wasted all of its citizens resources and now wants to tax them even more? By urging them to abandon faith in God and begin to call their religious leaders “life coaches” as the U.S. military apparently intends to rename their chaplains? If this is what we are trying to sell men fighting for their faith, we are well and truly licked before we start.

So we need to trash the idea of an ideological confrontation that we can win. What to do? Begin by understanding that today’s worldwide Islamist movement would not have been born, or once born gelled, or once gelled steadily grown without unrelenting U.S. and Western intervention in the the Muslim world. Moscow started it by invading Afghanistan in 1979 and then Washington, Britain, France, Germany, and the UN picked up the dictatorial Soviet baton by installing a regime in Kabul that all but excluded the men who had fought for 15 years and finally defeated the Red Army and the Afghan communists. Having watched the mujahideen beat the Soviets, the Muslim world then saw the West intervene to deny the Afghans the fruits of the victory Allah had given them. That Western intervention, by the way, facilitated the rise and then the victory of the Taliban, the organization that is about to accept another Allah-provided victory over the hapless and averse-to-killing-our-enemies U.S. and NATO militaries.

Although Afghanistan is the poster boy for the disasters that always accompany U.S.-led interventions in the Muslim world that are conducted by American presidents who have no intention of winning the wars they start, the list of self-defeating U.S. interventions continues to grow and now also includes:

• The 2003 invasion of Iraq and its famous surge, which, respectively, allowed the flow of mujahideen from South Asia to the Levant and trained the military backbone of the Islamic State.
• The U.S.-backed Ethiopian military intervention in Somalia that destroyed the Islamic Courts regime and opened a path for the rise of al-Shabab and propelled the Islamization of East Africa.
• The U.S.-led Western rejection of the fairly elected Hamas government, ending for all Muslims any belief in the American and European democracy mongers who endlessly preach that the results of “free and fair” elections are final and must be respected by all.
• The U.S.-led Western support for the overthrow of Mubarak in Egypt, which — along with Saddam’s overthrow — created a destabilized political environment in which Christians and other religious and ethnic minorities are now being casually slaughtered.
• U.S. support for the removal of a fairly elected Islamist government in Egypt via a military coup, followed by U.S. and Western silence as Egypt’s new military dictator stamps out what Obama and others call “universal Western values.”
• U.S. support for the mujahideen’s effort to oust Asaad’s regime in Syria, which yielded the forces that are now known as the Islamic State
• The Washington-led Western destruction of of Qadhafi’s Libya, which is now delivering oil-rich Libya to the Islamists, and whose looted arsenals and prisons — with those of Egypt and Tunisia — have supplied mujahideen around the world with enormous stocks of modern weaponry and a substantial augmentation of veteran combat leaders, bomb-makers, and money handlers.
• Flamboyant U.S. support for three Israeli wars in the Levant and the very public resupply of Israeli forces with U.S.-made ordnance to be used to kill Palestinians. (NB: The Israelis, of course, have every right to kill as many Palestinians fighters and civilians as they believe their national security requires, but what does America gain by publicly aligning itself with Israeli military actions that kill hundreds of Palestinian kids and are deemed by a billion-plus Muslims — including those young American Muslim men who now fight in the Islamic State’s ranks — as just as barbarous as Americans deem the beheading of Mr. Doyle? By the way, Mr. Doyle’s demise has worked exactly as the Islamic State intended. It wanted the U.S. government to re-intervene in Iraq on the side of those the Sunni world sees as heretical Shia. Using the decapitation of Mr. Doyle as a lure did the trick nicely, making Pavlov’s Obama-Kerry-McCain-Graham dog respond as desired.)
• U.S. support for the French invasion of Mali and Washington’s simultaneous establishment of drone bases in Niger, which provided Malian Islamists and other Islamists across northern and central Africa with a Western military intervention that they have used as their foil in promoting unity among diverse Islamist groupings as well as a spur to their recruitment and fund-raising operations.

There are other examples but the foregoing are enough to provide even aspiring-to-be-Fascist Neoconservatives with an understanding of why so many Muslims — militant, moderate, and nominal — perceive the United States and its allies as being determined to determine how (or if?) Muslims will live, organize their societies, conduct elections, interpret their religion, and supinely refuse to oppose the imposition by military force of what Obama, McCain, Cameron, Netanyahu, et al describe with straight faces as “Western values.” The examples likewise are sufficient to show that the above-named interventions have been costly failures that have left local, regional, and international Islamist forces stronger than when the interventions began. Finally, a close and thoughtful look at the above list will strongly suggest that if Washington refrained from all of the interventions America’s national security would be far less threatened, and everyday life, economics, and social affairs inside the United States would have been unaffected no matter how the overseas problem worked itself out.

So what do Americans do? As in August, 1996, when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States, we have only two choices:

1.  To continue to maintain the status quo in our foreign polices in the Muslim world — meaning steadily intervening and backing tyranny there — and thereby motivate ever greater numbers of Muslims to join the war now being waged by Islamist forces against the United States, its European allies and Israel, and its favorite tyrants in the Islamic world. If these policies and interventions are essential to genuine U.S. national security interests, they, of course, must be maintained and perhaps strengthened and expanded. If national security requires the eternal maintenance of this status quo, it will also mean an endless, increasingly widespread, and unprecedentedly bloody war with Islam. It will also require a massively costly rearmament effort by the U.S. government and the immediate reintroduction of conscription. The Islamist enemy we witlessly motivate has long been too large, talented, and religiously dedicated to be defeated by killing or capturing one jihadi at a time with drones, Special Forces, rendition/interrogation, and thundering but toothless threats that the Islamists will face justice. We are far past facing terrorists. Rather, we are in the midst of fighting an international insurgency, and we are on the way to a world war that the United States will have to fight at home and abroad if the foreign-policy status quo is retained.
2.  Or, we can seek America’s survival;
   • By closing our borders and strictly enforcing exiting immigration laws;
   • By moving to the energy self-sufficiency that plainly is within our reach;
   • By bidding the Saudis and the Israelis farewell, henceforth letting them find their own destiny, and further insulating America from their malignant influence by terminating the Saudis’ ability to direct the religious education of young Muslims in the United States and forcing AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups to register as what they are, agents of a foreign power;
   • By creating a military that can, after a formal Congressional declaration of war and without “coalition partners,” respond with the utmost barbarity — perhaps as Huns, as Kaiser Wilhelm II once recommended to his magnificent army — against the Islamists and their civilian supporters if they dare attack America or its genuine interests;
   • By withdrawing from NATO and letting the arrogantly effeminate, U.S.-resource draining, and militarily feckless Europeans deal with the Russians over the war that the EU’s democracy crusading in Ukraine has yielded.

Such a neutral and non-interventionist policy would be historically appropriate for Americans, would strengthen our national security, and would give our genius political leaders time to do something useful, like solving a genuine national security problem by organizing the construction of a transportation system that can get the water to California that has long been desperately needed for crop irrigation.

As Mr. Reagan use to say, America’s national government is often more the problem than the solution, and nowhere is this more true than in the foreign-policy realm where Washington and the leaders of both political parties are the most dangerous enemies of our country’s national security. In the Republic’s early years, John Adams warned that the revolutionary regime in France presented an unprecedented threat to the world. “I know of no government ancient or modern,” Adams wrote, “that ever betrayed so universal and decided a contempt of the people of all nations, as the present rulers of France. They have manifested a settled opinion that the people have neither sense or integrity in any country, and they have acted accordingly.” My guess is that Mr. Adams never imagined that his words could be used today by simply replacing “the present rulers of France’s” with “the present rulers of America and their vassals in Western Europe.”

“But when we err with our eyes wide open and involve ourselves in great tribulations through sheer lack of judgment, then everyone agrees we have no one to blame but ourselves. It follows therefore if a people’s failures are due … to their own folly, then all men of sense will blame and reproach them.” — Polybius

Listening to President Obama speak of Iraq on 18 August 2014 underscores the point made above by Polybius, and it also validates the brilliant diplomat George F. Kennan’s argument that America is virtually incapable of conducting an effective foreign policy because of our leaders’ minimal knowledge of how the world works and the dominance of domestic considerations on the policies they pursue overseas. In Obama’s short statement on Iraq both of these negative factors were clearly evident.

• Obama — as well as his lieutenants, the leaders of both parties, and much of the media — continue to call the Sunni Islamic State (IS) organization a “terrorist group.” In the 25-plus years since al-Qaeda initiated what has become a worldwide armed Islamist movement, U.S. leaders have never once tried to explain to Americans that we are fighting a growing international insurgency that can never be defeated by using counter-terrorism tactics such as Special Forces raids, drone and aircraft strikes, and capture and interrogation operations. If you use these tools to kill the insurgents one at a time you end up where we are today; that is, with a nice and well-publicized body count but also with an enormously bigger threat than we faced in 2001. Indeed, Americans ought to be told that there are indications that the IS insurgents are evolving into what the great guerrilla-war theorist Mao Tse Tung called the final stage of insurgency, the point at which elements of the insurgent forces begin to transition into units that are battle-hardened, well trained and led, well armed, and resemble conventional force units.
• Obama, McCain, Graham, Hillary Clinton, and much of the media continue to talk the absolute rot of building an “inclusive government” in Iraq in the place of Maliki’s regime. This is not going to happen in the lifespan of any of our leaders, nor even in the lifespan of their children. Despite impressive educations, these men and women seemed to have missed the class where the teacher described the intense, violent, evergreen, and millennium-plus-long hatred of Sunnis for Shias, and vice versa. The current bout of this sectarian war is occurring because George W. Bush sought to make Iraq safe for democracy and instead opened the doors there to slaughter, anarchy, sectarian civil war, and regional destabilization. The current IS offensive is only the most recent and bloody episode of a civil war that began in March, 2003. The post-Maliki government and the Kurds may extort more money and weapons from the United States and its equally brain-dead allies, but there will be no peace and no inclusive government. When the West pulls the plug on another lost war in Iraq — and it will — the Sunnis will have more reason than ever to kill Shias who begged for help from the hated and perceived-to-be-Christian Americans and Europeans to kill Sunnis.
• Obama and the above named leaders likewise seem to believe they have an “Iraq problem,” when that country is nothing more than one part of a world war now being waged against the United States and its allies by the vastly bigger, post-9/11 Islamist movement. Obama, Bush McCain, Graham, Clinton, and others in both parties too numerous to count have yet to begin to tell the truth to Americans about the size, motivation, and intentions of the growing Islamist enemy they face. But, at the same time, they are following an interventionist foreign policy that supports Israel, the Saudi tyranny, and Iraq’s Iran-allied Shia dictatorship and so cultivates Sunni enemies for America around the world. Because most politicians in both parties are owned by either the Fifth Column of Israel Firsters or by the combined policy of the Saudis and U.S. arms and oil companies to “take care” of their political and federal civil service friends after they retire, Americans can expect no truth from their political leaders. What they can expect, however, is that those leaders, by abiding by wishes of their disloyal domestic and foreign paymasters, will ensure our that Islamist enemy keeps growing and killing U.S. civilians and military personnel.

Today the United States government cannot be said to be back on square one — which is dated August, 1996, the date bin Ladin declared war on America — but only because it has never moved from it. Eighteen years into our war with the Islamists, the U.S. government has given no public sign that it has the slightest awareness of what its enemies are fighting for and why, and so it has developed no strategy with which to prevail against them. The policies and actions of Republican and Democratic administrations have yielded a few tactical victories, but, overall, they have produced strategic disasters: The anti-U.S. jihad is now self-perpetuating; U.S. military forces have lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. treasury is bankrupt; our senior political leaders have only lies to tell the citizenry about the Islamists’ motivation; and the Islamist movement has grown spectacularly in geographic reach, trained and eager-to-be-trained manpower, and sophisticated armaments. The hard but indisputable truth is that America’s strategic position in the Middle East, its political influence there, and its military effectiveness have deteriorated massively since 9/11.

Our Islamist enemies know this and are turning it to their advantage. Even now they are playing with us. The beheading of the American journalist is a good example. After the killing, the Islamists demanded that Obama stop U.S. air attacks in Iraq. Not only did the Islamist leaders know that Obama would not stop the strikes, they did not want him to. As always, the Islamists could not possibly acquire a better recruiting and fundraising tool for use in the international Sunni community than a U.S-led Western intervention in a Muslim country, especially one that is perceived as an intervention to attack enemies of Israel and to keep the hated Shia in power.

The Islamists believe — and history is on their side here — that they will benefit in the long-run from the current U.S. intervention in Iraq, and will benefit even more if the size of the intervention increases. They are confident — and should be — that neither Obama nor any other Western leader intends to annihilate the IS forces and so absolutely nothing suits their purposes better than to have another chance to drive the doomed-to-defeat-by-U.S.-politicians American military forces out of Iraq. And Obama and other Western leaders again seem set to do their best to exceed the Islamists’ requirements.

“A country without a memory is a country of madmen.”

George Santayana, 1906

The truly amazing thing about America’s interventionist elite is that they never, ever learn from their always egregious errors and half-baked plans. President Obama’s decision to re-intervene militarily in Iraq to “protect” the Azidi and Christian minorities will do nothing more than delay their doom. Neither he nor the British prime minister — old me-too Cameron, the U.S. lap dog — have the slightest intention of defeating the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and its allies, which would require the aerial slaughter and and boots-on-the ground demolishing of the mujahideen and that portion of the population that supports them. Both men are too sensitive, sophisticated, and well-educated to engage in such blue-collar nonsense as “winning a war” and so they will do a little military diddling and make sure the now-doomed Azidis and Christians go to their graves with full bellies.

What has not seemed to cross the mind of American and British interventionists is that Iraq’s Azidis and Christians are in their present terminal fix because the United States and the UK started the unnecessary Western invasion of Iraq, removed Saddam Hussain’s effective if brutal government, and installed a Shia tyranny. Under Saddam, the Azidis and the Christians had, to be sure, a tough row to hoe, but Saddam’s security forces kept their torment to a moderate level. We removed Saddam and all bets were off. The Shias now merrily kill Sunnis, and vice versa, and they both murder Iraq’s now unprotected — thanks to President Bush and Prime Minister Blair — religious minorities.

To a greater or lesser extent, the same thing is occurring in Afghanistan (Targets: Shia and Sufis); Pakistan (Targets: Shia, Sufis, and Christians); Syria (Target: Christians) and Egypt (Target: Coptic Christians). In each of these countries the religious minorities are suffering to a greater extent than previously because of U.S.-led interventions which were undertaken either without any intention of utterly defeating the Sunni Islamist malefactors — as in Afghanistan — or with what seems to be a near-complete ignorance of the country’s internal political dynamics, as in Syria, Pakistan, and Egypt. As always, America’s bipartisan interventionists proved to be military dilettantes and historically unlearned — not knowing Mubarak did what he could to protect Egypt’s Copts — thereby ensuring disaster for those they claimed to be helping.

In Iraq, Obama’s feckless intervention will do three things. First, it may slow the advance of ISI forces as they try to avoid exposing key assets to U.S. air strikes and lie low until the U.S. and Britain again depart. Second, it will increase the anti-minority rancor of the ISI fighters due to the sharp but not crippling losses they will suffer from U.S. airstrikes. When Obama and his fellow bipartisan interventionists call it quits — say, if there are American casualties — the mujahideen will conduct a pretty thorough cleansing of the country’s minority sects. Third, Obama and the interventionists are positioning the United States to again appear to the Muslim world as being militarily impotent and lacking in courage. This will cause Muslims all over the planet to again reflect that Allah must be genuinely pleased with the work of the ISI, Al-Qaeda, and myriad other Sunni Islamist insurgent groups if they can consistently defeat the strongest and most technologically proficient Western militaries. After all, Muslim believers are sure that victory in jihad can only come from Allah, and no victory would come if He was not pleased with the Islamist combatants fighting in His name.

If this was not bad enough, there also is a chance for worse. What if U.S.-UK military intervention barely slows the progress of the ISI fighters, the minorities continue to get murdered at the same or higher pace, and all of this is covered by the media for the public in both countries and the rest of the world. In such a situation, Obama’s action in Iraq will be seen for what it is: another in a long-series of U.S.-led interventions in the Muslim world that has given added strength and momentum to the Islamist movement — remember Libya and U.S. support for the military coup in Egypt? At that point, Obama, with mid-term elections 90 days off, will recognize how foolish, inexperienced, and weak he looks as a leader and for tactical political reasons — don’t give the national security issue back to the Republicans — and his own wounded ego may well decide to expand rather than end his intervention in Iraq.

In danger politically and again exposed as an incompetent, Obama might well intensify the air bombardment and begin arming what he will tell Americans are the democracy-loving “good Iraqis,” the Kurds and Shia. The increased air war would be a loser from the word go, as the only time in history that air power won anything was when two B-29s dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. And the Kurds and Shia have no record of doing anything effective against the ISI except whining for more and better U.S./Western weaponry and then abandoning it to the enemy on the battlefield or in arsenals as soon as contact is made with ISI units. There is no reason to think this would not happen again, only this time — if Obama arms them — ISI will reap a harvest of much better weaponry than it has previously picked up from the good Iraqis as they flee battle.

Then what? Well, there are only two options. In the first, Obama could deploy the U.S. ground forces he and Bush have wrecked through over deployment and their refusal to win wars, and which Obama has cut to the bone in terms of budget and manpower. In such a move, Obama, his party, and the Republican interventionists would again send U.S. soldiers and Marines to war as targets rather than killers; we would soon hear from Obama and his pliant generals the claim that “there is no military solution in Iraq”; and shortly after that Obama would announce our re-departure from Iraq, marking the third U.S. surrender to the Islamist movement in less than a decade. This is the bipartisan interventionists’ much tried and always successful method of bankrupting the United States, killing America’s soldier-children, and growing the international Islamist movement to unprecedented size and geographical reach.

The second option is to immediately stop throwing young lives and good money after bad. It is too bad that the Azidis and Christians in Iraq are going to be butchered, but their approaching demise was set in motion by the unnecessary war the Bush administration and the pro-Israel neoconservatives started in Iraq in 2003, and by Obama’s decision to surrender to the Iraqi Islamists by giving a date-certain for U.S. withdrawal-without-victory from Iraq. Surely enough American lives, limbs, and money have been wasted in Iraq already. Why waste more of each in a certain-to-fail re-intervention designed to make the humiliated U.S. bipartisan interventionists feel better about themselves for having tried to save the Iraqi minorities they have so blithely consigned to death over the past decade?

There must be few occasions in history when a Fifth Column was as openly disloyal and flamboyant as is Israel First in the United States, advocating at every turn that Americans become involved in wars that are none of their concern. These Jewish and non-Jewish Americans have so corrupted the U.S. political system and media that they feel perfectly at ease in acting in ways that are certain, in the future, to get some of their fellow citizens — civilian and military — killed by Islamist insurgents. They also aggressively seek to turn more of the Muslim world against the United States, thereby deepening the war America already is losing to the Islamists. And all of this is done in the name of a country that could not be more irrelevant or more detrimental to genuine U.S. national security concerns.

In the past weeks, Americans have seen Michael Bloomberg travel to Israel to lend his support to his country of first allegiance. Bloomberg is the great, rich, soda-pop forbidding buffoon of American politics, but apparently that kind of thing sells well in Israel. He probably is only the first of the Jewish-American politicians and businessmen who will travel to Israel to showboat and tell Israelis they are there to express America’s everlasting and unanimous support for their struggling and only democracy in the Middle East. Bloomberg’s words and those of other Israel-Firsters will have no impact on the war — Israel will kill who it must, for as long as it needs to. Their words, however, will, and are absolutely meant to, further incite the Islamic world and the growing army of Islamist fighters to hate and kill Americans. The applause that the words of Bloomberg and his ilk will earn in Israel and among disloyal U.S. citizens at home will be repaid by the Islamists with bullets, bombs, and a budget-draining, bankrupting war both overseas and in North America.

Bloomberg and his comrades want Americans to believe the United States and Israel are in the same boat, that they are brothers in arms fighting ever-growing numbers of Muslim madmen. Hogwash. If the United States is in the same boat as Israel it is because Bloomberg and the American Fifth Column of Israel Firsters have worked tirelessly to put America there — and they have succeeded through corrupting U.S. politics, and especially the U.S. Congress. If you need proof, simply look at what the Congress was up to last week. It is preparing to give Israel $200 million for its air-defense system, while not directing sufficient funds or manpower to close America’s southern border, which is being flooded with illegal aliens, violent gang members, terrorists, and other sorts of scum. For the Congress, it’s damn Americans to hell as long as the Israel-First organizations keep their “campaign contributions” flowing.

We also have heard, according to Real Clear Politics, the radio person Howard Stern say that to be “anti-Israeli is to be anti-American.” Now, one cannot expect too much from someone who considers vulgarity as entertainment and depravity as a worthy lifestyle, and truth to tell, he was in the right ball park. Stern had all the right words, but they were mixed up. Correctly arranged the words would have come out of his mouth saying that to be pro-Israel is to be someone who is anti-American and who delights in seeing Islamists kill U.S. service personnel and civilians.

Bloomberg and Stern are typical of the dregs who are Israel-Firsters. Wealthy, elitist, and influential here in America, they push for Israel to kill as many Arabs as possible and worry not a bit that their advocacy kills both Israelis — now — and Americans — later. Neither will ever move to Israel and share the dangers of the country and people they supposedly love, and when the Islamists’ war comes to America they will be able to hire security personnel to make sure their worthless hides survive.

And then there is Rand Paul, another first-term politician who mistakenly believes — like Obama — that he has the talent and experience to be president. Because of his father’s vast negative experience with the uniformly pro-Israel U.S. media and the much-censored American political system that pro-Israel Americans have corrupted, he has eagerly sold out out to the Israel-Firsters and the bipartisan interventionists. Siding with both, Rand Paul has supported U.S. and European involvement in the Ukraine, sponsored the “Stand With Israel Act” in Congress, and, generally, has done nothing that will help prevent future U.S. intervention in wars in which we have nothing at stake — like Israel-vs-Palestine. I seem to recall that Mr. Paul attended the Kentucky Derby with Rupert Murdoch, who may well have advised him that Israel is more important than U.S. security and American lives. And one has to believe Mr. Paul has since met with Roger Ailes and other FOX NEWS senior managers and got briefed on how he must behave and speak, and who he can publicly associate with, if he is to avoid being ignored by FOX as his father was to America’s detriment. I guess Rand Paul is proof that the apple sometimes does fall pretty far from the tree.

Finally, I do owe Senator Paul a thank you. He recently was criticized for having a non-interventionist book list — described as anti-Israeli by his critics — on his website and, magically, it disappeared almost immediately. Among the books on the list was one of mine, and I can only say how delighted I am to no longer have a place on Senator Paul’s website. As long as Senator Paul is marching in lockstep — or is it goose step? — with the Israel Firsters and against America, he and I have far different national security concerns and, even more, far different national allegiances.

“Modern war with all its consequences is too tragic and too devastating to be approached from anything but a purely American standpoint. We should never enter a war unless it is absolutely essential to the future welfare of our nation.”

Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, 15 September 1939

This week, some of the world is engulfed in bloodshed that is playing out against the background music of Woodrow Wilson’s howling madness. Wilson’s “Making the World Safe for Democracy” symphony and “Self-Determination” nocturne have now been playing for almost 100 years, and few works by other men have caused more human costs or more unnecessary wars. Wilson’s demented mind produced a product which, rather than spreading democracy as promised, has simply spread war. The equation is simple: spreading democracy causes war. This morning, for example:

1. Rival militias are fighting and killing each other near the international airport in Tripoli in another episode in the unrelenting economic and human disaster that has been caused by the Obama/McCain-led, NATO campaign to install democracy in Libya.
2. A Malaysian airliner and its passengers lie scattered across fields in eastern Ukraine in another racheting-up of the war started in that country by the ignorant but arrogant interventionists and the democracy crusaders of the EU and the Obama administration. This situation, of course, has led the Neocons to call for “stronger action” against Russia to protect what does not exist, Ukrainian democracy, and to stand up to that non-threat to the United States, Vladimir Putin and Russia. (NB: The culprit here is Malaysian Air — and any other airline — that flies passengers over war zones to save money on fuel.)
3. Iraq is disintegrating into sectarian civil war as the very predictable consequence of the Republican/Neocon removal of Saddam Hussein and a decade of democracy building in that country. We can look forward to the same situation after we and the West Europeans help the great democracy-loving Syrian resistance — better entitled the mujahideen — destroy Asaad. Then, using Western-provided weapons and supplies, it will turn on and destroy the Jordanian regime.
4. The war in Gaza burns right along as always with Israelis and Palestinians merrily murdering each other. This war has gone on for 60-plus years because Washington and its European allies keep intervening, first in favor of Israel, then in favor of the Palestine, then back to Israel, and so on and so on. Now is the time to stand back and let the two sides fight it out to the finish. Democracy in Israel or Palestine is worthless to American interests. Let the better war-fighter win, and then let America have no ties to the winner.

All of these wars and near-wars have been brought to us by the contemporary American and European believers in Woodrow Wilson’s academic theorizing and ignorance of of the world outside the American South. Wilson also was a profound bigot who was as cock-sure as today’s most ardent racists in Western capitals that he could and should force Slavs, Africans, Latinos, and Arabs to behave as he wanted them to behave, either through eloquent persuasion or gunboats and the Marines’ bayoneted rifles.

The Founders did not create the United States to act as Wilson and his policies have acted; that is, as the catalyst that foments unnecessary wars. But a catalyst for war is exactly what our bipartisan political elite has been for the last thirty years and more. The sad truth is that many of our politicians, diplomats, generals, and religious leaders are war-causers. None will leave well enough alone; none trust foreigners to work out their own futures; and none seem to care how much the unnecessary wars they cause will cost Americans in lives, dollars, and affection/respect.

These men and women take it as their righteous mission to intervene in the affairs of others and work to make them into people just like themselves, whether in terms of worshiping secular democracy, self-determination, women’s rights, religious tolerance, human rights, or some other one-size-fits-all abstraction that no young American man or woman should ever be called on to fight and die for overseas. This Wilsonian practice amounts to insanity and was long ago recognized as such by one of the greatest Americans. “The improvement of our way of life is more important than the spreading of it,” Colonel Lindbergh told his countrymen. “If we make it satisfactory enough, it will spread automatically. If we do not, no strength of arms can permanently impose it.”

The vital point that these men and women deliberately ignore — along with most of the media and the academy — is that most of the violence and warfare that goes on in the world has absolutely no impact on genuine, life-and-death U.S. national interests. It is no skin off America’s nose if all the Israelis kill all the Palestinians, or vice versa. Likewise, there would be no material impact on North America if the Obama-EU intervention in the Ukraine ended in a civil war in that country, with the Europeans and Russians arming their respective allies. Only a tenured, Ivy League academic could argue with a straight face that what happens in Libya is important to the United States. And Iraq’s shattering is likely to lead to a Sunni-Shia regional war which — because the U.S. political elite keeps intervening in the Muslim world and cowers at the idea of killing Islamist fighters in requisite numbers —may be the best way of temporarily protecting America against what has become a truly international Sunni insurgency, against which we will one day be forced to rearm and fight to the death.

Tomorrow morning, in fact, President Obama’s national security adviser could honestly inform him that the rest of the world’s wars have put no life-and-death American interest at stake; that none of the combatants merit our aid in money, arms, or rhetorical support; and that no U.S. military personnel need to be put at risk. That adviser also might suggest to Obama that the negative impact the wars have on investors and the markets is due not to the wars themselves, but to the fear that he and his NATO chums will involve themselves in the current wars and — given their Wilsonian mindset — inevitably make things worse.

A clear and simple statement that America will not become engaged in the ongoing wars — followed by prolonged presidential and senatorial silence on the issue — would steady the markets and rightly define the wars as being none of America’s concern. If Obama is too busy fund-raising to write such a statement, he could borrow some words from Mr. Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William Henry Seward. Being as brazen with the truth as he is, Obama could even tag the statement as the “Obama Doctrine” and be confident that the close-to-worthless U.S. educational system has not made one American in ten thousand knowledgeable about Secretary Seward.

The president could begin his statement by saying he and all Americans regret that so many of the world’s peoples are killing each other, but we all must accept the simple fact that man is a fallen creature who is hard-wired for war. He could then penitently acknowledge that the interventionist U.S. political elite — which includes himself — has been instrumental in causing each of the wars now dominating the headlines. He could finish by admitting that the majority of Americans despise their political leaders’ financially disastrous and always bloody interventionism and so henceforth — in Secretary Seward’s words — Washington will follow the lead of its citizens, and this means that “the American people must be content to recommend the cause of human progress by the wisdom with which they should exercise the powers of self-government, forbearing at all times, and in every way, from foreign alliances, intervention, and interference.”

Now, that would be Obama’s first good day’s work since becoming president.

“[The United States has] a fateful tie to the Israelis from which we have, in contradistinction to the Israelis, everything to lose, and nothing to gain.” — George F. Kennan, Diaries, 25 April 1978.

“Our form of government, inestimable as it is, exposes us, more than any other, to the insidious intrigues and pestilent influence of foreign nations. Nothing but our inflexible neutrality can preserve us.” — John Adams, c. 1809.

As the renewed Israeli-Palestinian war rages in Gaza, America is presented with an ideal moment to run — not walk — away from its suicidal commitment to both sides. Surely, no sane American — except the Neocons, whom it would be absurd to consider either sane or loyal Americans — could have missed the fact that what is going on in the current war has had absolutely no immediate impact on the United States.

The war is occurring in a far away place that is no longer of any strategic interest to the United States because the combination of Washington’s relentless, war-causing and Islamist-motivating interventionism and Obama’s cowardly surrenderism have already given the entire region to the Islamists and ensured — thanks to Jewish-American Neocons — Israel’s ultimate doom. Therefore it matters not a lick to any but disloyal Americans whether the Israelis kill all the Palestinians, the Palestinians kill all the Israelis, or, in the best case scenari0, they mutually destroy each other. At the end of the war they all simply will be dead foreigners of whom we had no need and for whom we need not bid any teary farewells. Peoples who want to fight religious wars deserve whatever they get, and these two peoples are determined to fight their religious war until one side or the other is destroyed. Well, so be it, let us get out of it now.

There is a rub for the United States, however, and that reality makes complete U.S. disengagement more urgent than ever before. That rub lies in the fact that each bomb or missile the Israeli air force uses in Gaza will eventually yield a dead American soldier or Marine and/or a dead civilian. This is not a fact that President Obama or Secretary of State Kerry will use to inform the American people about what is at stake for the United States in the long run, because they — along with most of their party and the Republican Party — really could not care less about our nation’s security as long as campaign contributions and media support keep flowing from disloyal Israel First, U.S. citizens and their fundamentally anti-American organizations. As long as that graft keeps flowing their way from the Israel Firsters, they are all more than willing to motivate our Islamist enemies by backing Israel to the hilt.

All of these officials will seek to hide their corrupt relationship with U.S. citizen, Israel First leaders by blathering on about the need for a cease-fire, a two-state solution, and restraint from both sides. What is it, do suppose, that makes senior elected and appointed American officials live in the fantasy world that sees an amicable solution to this problem as a possibility. The answer is bribery, as these people are all listed as members in good standing on Israel First’s bountiful payroll list. Because of the dire need to uphold what is left of the Constitution, we must permit these enemies of America to prattle on, but recognizing their flagrant disregard for genuine U.S. national interests we ought to just ignore them.

It is exquisitely clear, that Israelis and Arabs are going to fight each other until one or the other is annihilated, so let them fight. But we must get our fingerprints off of this non-problem for the United States. A good first step is to stop listening to all of the media pundits — I wonder how many hold Israeli passports? — who justify Americans eventually being killed because of Israel’s current military actions by arguing that Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East” and therefore must be supported no matter the cost. What kind of an insane argument is that? What possible impact would it have on genuine U.S. interests if there were no democracies in the Middle East? How much worse off would our national security be? Would the end of the only democracy in the Middle East threaten U.S. security one-thousandth as much as the failure of the last three presidencies to control U.S. borders? Of course it would not. The absence of the Israeli democracy — and U.S. support thereof — would go unnoticed vis-a-vis genuine U.S. national security interests, save us a ton of money, and terminate one major source of our Islamist enemy’s motivation to attack America.

One of the newer and more troubling angles that has emerged in this iteration of the Israel-Palestine war also must be terminated. That is the increasing support among American intellectual and church leaders for the Palestinians. Presbyterians disinvest in stocks if they benefit Israel and university professors rain down hate on Israel because it defends itself against Palestinian attacks. These religious and academic folks are as big fools as are most senior U.S. officials. None seem capable of recognizing reality: THERE WILL BE NO SOLUTION TO THE ISRAEL-PALESTINE CONFLICT UNTIL ONE SIDE WIPES OUT THE OTHER.

The Palestinians are not going to accept eternal Israeli domination of their day-to-day lives, economy, politics, and foreign-and-defense policies, nor will they peacefully accede to the constant Israeli theft of their land. Nor should anyone expect or urge them to. Israel, on the other hand, has every right in the world to defend itself in whatever manner it deems necessary to protect its territory, populace, borders, and apparently endless quest for Lebensraum. And no one should expect or demand the Israelis to stop pursuing what they adamantly believe to be their nation’s security and survival.

BUT THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND HERE, and there is no U.S. interest in intervening in the affairs of these peoples who love and feel duty bound to make war in the name of their respective God. Because no nation-state on this planet — including the United States — has a “right to exist,” let these two states kill each other until one proves that the other had no right to exist. We best look out for the durability of own country’s existence, which at the moment — thanks to the policies of our bipartisan interventionists and the traitorous behavior of the the Neocons, Israel Firsters, and those U.S. citizens who support both — seems not to be something we can count on for very much longer.

America’s Founders knew that the viability of the nation they created was very far from a sure thing, and that involvement in unnecessary foreign wars rapidly eroded that viability. They therefore sought — and urged their posterity to seek — to ensure that they did not formulate policies or take actions that enmeshed America in other peoples’ wars; indeed, they sought to ensure that America would never engage in war unless genuine national interests were at stake.

The Founders’ sound, neutrality-dominated approach to foreign affairs is nicely summarized in a sermon preached by a Harvard-educated, Protestant pastor — Harvard and Protestants still loved America at that point — in Boston in June 1793. “God in his Providence,” Peter Thatcher, D.D., said,

“has placed us in a remote part of the world, and if our own brethren in other countries ‘fall out by the way’ we will endeavor to reconcile them, but we will not become partners in their quarrels. They have a right to choose their own governments and manage their own affairs without interference. God does not call us to war. We are not attacked or endangered; until we are, we have no right to spill our own blood, or that of our children. Let us then study the ‘things that make for peace.’ Let us unite in repressing those restless spirits who cannot see a quarrel going on without inserting themselves in it.”

Amen, Rev. Thatcher, Amen and bravo.

“But as liberty consists only in being subject to no man’s will, and nothing denotes a slave but a dependence upon the will of another; if there be no other law in a kingdom than the will of a prince, there is no such thing as liberty.” — Algernon Sydney, 1698 (1)

In just the past weeks Americans have been treated to retired Supreme Court Justice Stevens, Hilliary Clinton, and Fox News’ Bob Beckel decrying the continued existence of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. What is it with such supposedly intelligence people? Do they really believe that the 2nd Amendment is unnecessary? Do they think it is only about guns for hunting and personal defense? Can they possibly believe that the Founders would have included this amendment in the Bill of Rights just so Americans could stock up on venison?

Let as assume that Stevens, Clinton, and Beckel are not the arrogant, near-addled liberal ideologues they appear to be in public. And then let us simply and charitably conclude that they — poor things — are typical products of the grotesquely inadequate and utterly failing U.S. educational system, and that they have neither familiarity nor respect for the intentions of the Founders when they wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Let us then move on to explain to them the absolutely clear intent of the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

The 2nd Amendment is an offshoot of the English Bill of Rights (1689), which included an article making it the right of each Protestant Englishmen to be armed; the Protestants’ trust of Great Britain’s Papists at the time being correctly minimal. Our Founders, being determined to create a nation truer to British liberty than Britain then was, took the article from the English Bill of Rights and improved it by making its application universal for all citizens regardless of confession.

In the 2nd Amendment, the Founders clearly recognized that citizens needed weapons for the defense of persons and homes, for hunting, for participating in the state militias the Constitution mandated (and which should be reestablished), for repelling marauding Indians and the atrocities they routinely practiced, and, most important, for rebelling against and eliminating any politician or political grouping that, having won power at the polls, proceeded to to build a tyranny. This, it seems, ought not to be too hard a concept to grasp even for the likes of Stevens, Clinton, and Beckel, and yet they show no sign of knowing or caring anything about the Founders’ intent or American history.

Now, the Founders, in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, were seeking to create an effective and durable national government, one that would be able to govern and defend the nation and promote its prosperity without violating fundamental liberties. They also sought to create a three-branch government with each branch armed with enough power to check any tyrannical tendencies emerging in the others. The Founders expected this structure to work as long as it was made up, by and large, of honest men of good will who respected the views of all and sought consensus where it was possible. Nonetheless, they knew that history proved that such a result was far from a sure thing, and they feared that the separation of powers might one day be ignored and one branch might usurp powers from the others and become a tyranny. If a tyranny emerged, the Founders knew that Americans would have at hand two tools for use in righting the situation. One was the motivation Americans would have to rebel against tyranny because of the absolute right to self-defense that is found in Natural Law. The other was the arms-to-kill-tyrants they would always possess because of the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment.

Needless to say, the Founders did not see this right to rebellion as a measure to be used with any kind of frequency. Indeed, they were prudent men who expected and demanded obedience to the law from the citizenry as long as the national government obeyed the law, promoted prosperity, and defended the nation. Rebellion was a legitimate option in the face of growing tyranny, but it was to be used by Americans only as their last resort, and only after the accumulation of a lengthy record of actions that clearly denoted tyrannical intentions.

What would such a record look like? Well let us imagine a package of actions taken over a several-year period that might qualify as proof of intended tyranny. And to ensure that the nervous nellies do not go off half-cocked and claim this article is calling for rebellion now, let us constitute the package with actions so outrageous that no sane, intelligent, or competent person would undertake them unless he/she really did intend to create a tyranny to replace our constitutional system.

Let us imagine, then, that in less than a decade a specific political grouping and its leader:

1. Preached the need to help improve the prosperity of the U.S. middle class, but refused to sanction a project that would create more than 40,000 high-paying jobs because a rich man offered that grouping $100 million for partisan political purposes if they stymied the project.
2. Refused opportunities to move to energy self-sufficiency, thereby freeing the United States from all dependence on and military commitments to foreign tyrants who hate America and fund those who attack the United States and its allies.
3. Lied to Americans about the nature and motivation of the most lethal enemy they currently face, and down played the threat that foe presented to the United States, even as it grew in numbers, motivation, media savvy, weaponry, and geographic reach.
4. Drove the national government’s deficit to unprecedented heights to promote its political prospects, and made no effort whatsoever to bring that ruinous expansion to an end.
5. Boasted constantly that they would ignore the U.S. Constitution, enforce only laws they approved, bypass the peoples’ representatives, rewrite laws, and rule outside the Constitution by something akin to dictatorial decrees. And then fulfilled the boasts.
6. Took the country to war, or injected it into in situations that could lead to war, without the formal congressional declaration of war mandated by the U.S. Constitution.
7. Intervened politically, militarily, and economically in places of no genuine interest to the United States, thereby earning sharpened hatred for America and increases in both the U.S. debt and the chance of war.
8. Allowed official representatives of the United States to be killed while serving in a foreign country because, for electoral reasons, they did not want Americans to know that a major aspect of their foreign policy had failed.
9. Used the government’s tax collection agency to violate the 1st Amendment by harassing and suppressing political opposition groups and then destroyed the evidence of those actions.
10. Intended to use health-care legislation to erode religious freedom guarantees under the 1st Amendment.
11. Waged an endless war against the peoples’ absolute right to lawfully keep and bear arms because that right provided Americans the means with which to eliminate tyranny.
12. Intentionally failed to control U.S. borders and so created an economic and social disaster for the U.S. citizens living in America’s southwest, and allowed the unopposed entry into America of foreign groups who refuse to assimilate, and unknown numbers of impossible-to-identify people who intend to stage domestic attacks.
13. Deliberately shredded the 4th Amendment’s requirements by ordering national government agencies formed to destroy America’s foreign enemies to unconstitutionally collect the electronic communications of all U.S. citizens.
14. Initiated a brazen and well-publicized plan to have cabinet ministers — led by the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer — develop ways that the political grouping’s leader could evade the U.S. Constitution and rule by diktat.

Clearly, only an imagined political grouping that was bent on installing a tyranny in the United States would have undertaken in so short a time such Constitution-wrecking measures or, as Mr. Jefferson said, such “a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object” — namely, tyranny. Thank goodness, we do not have such a grouping loose in America.

But what if we did? What if — though it is surely hard to imagine — Americans in the future encounter a governing political grouping and its leader behaving as if political power was given to them permanently by the people, and not as a trust to be held as long as they ruled lawfully and followed the will of the people? Would Americans be bound to accept the tyranny and suffer under its despotic mandates? Well, let us consider the words of one of our Founders most revered instructors in political philosophy, the Englishmen John Milton. Writing in 1651, Milton argued

“Certainly, if no people in their right wits ever gave power over themselves either to a king or to any magistrates for any other purpose than the common good of all, there can be no reason why, for exactly the inverse purpose, to prevent the utter ruin of them all, they may not take back again the powers they gave, and this as well from a king as from other magistrates: nay, and it may be with far greater ease be taken from one than from the many. And to commit to any mortal creature a power over themselves on any other terms than upon trust were extreme madness; nor is it credible that any people since the creation of the world, who had freedom of will, were ever so miserably silly as either to part with the power absolutely and entirely, or having once entrusted it to their magistrates, to recall it unto themselves without weightiest reasons. But though dissensions, though civil wars, arise thence, surely no royal right arises thence to withhold by force of arms that power which the people reclaims unto itself for its own.” (2)

So Milton’s answer, and that of our Founders, is that no free people are required to meekly and effeminately acquiesce in the face of a political grouping and its leader that the people perceive as being bent on betraying the public trust and installing a tyranny. Indeed, again as Mr. Jefferson put it, “it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw of such Government. and to provide new Guards for their future Security.” Armed rebellion to confront and destroy tyranny, then, is a legitimate option if a people perceives that their political leaders intend to establish tyrannical rule.

It is for this reason that the Founders left all Americans an inheritance as precious as the 2nd Amendment. For they believed, as did Seneca, one of the ancient Roman writers they valued most highly, that “There can be slain/No sacrifice to God more acceptable/Than an unjust and wicked king.” (3) Perhaps John Milton said the same but more clearly when explaining that “Justice don[e] upon a tyrant is no more but the necessary self-defense of the whole Commonwealth.”

Endnotes

1. Thomas G. West, (Ed.). Algernon Sydney. Discourses on Government. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1996, p. 402.
2. John Milton. Areopagitica and other Political Writings of John Milton. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1991, pp. 237-238.
3. Ibid., p. 224
4. Ibid., p. 94

“But we in this country have a right to think of the welfare of America first…. The time has come when those of us who believe in an independent American destiny must band together and organize for strength. We have been led toward war by a minority of our people. This minority has power. It has influence. It has a loud voice. But it does not represent the American people.” — Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh, 23 April 1941

The fine strategic analyst Lt. Col. Ralph Peters (ret’d) wrote in one of his early books that because the end of the Cold War had made the world safer for conventional war, insurgency, and terrorism, Americans would have to look after their own security and learn to watch others die with equanimity. Because we have not done the former, we can now only do the later. Our failure to secure North America — read, control our borders — ensures that the Islamists will bring their war here. President Bush’s argument that we needed to fight them overseas so we would not have to fight them at home was always meant to be a distraction, a plausible-for-the-gullible argument that allowed him to fight two wars he wanted to fight but never intended to win. President Obama used the same style of rhetoric, but like Bush never intended to win either war; indeed, he fairly panted in his frantic search to find a way to surrender to the Islamists.

At bottom, neither of these oh-so-sensitive, humane, 21st-Century men could state the clear and cruel truth — after all what would the media and their European friends say? — that the way to win a war is to kill the enemy and its supporters in whatever numbers are necessary to move them to acknowledge that the game is not worth the candle. Killing on this scale is a lousy option, but as long as our Islamist-motivating foreign policies remain the same — especially having forces on the Arab Peninsula and playing the always compliant, cowering lap-dog to the Saudi Arabia and Israel — we have no choice but killing until the Islamists quit (unlikely) or are eradicated (doable).

For now, however, the beginning of wisdom is to look at what is going on in Iraq and Syria and see it clearly. In both places all of those folks that multiple U.S. administrations have identified as enemies of America are killing each other. In Syria, the Assad regime, Iran, and Lebanese Hizballah are killing Sunni mujahideen from all over the world, as well as their local allies and supporters. In turn, the Sunni Islamists in Syria are killing Assad’s troops, Iranian Revolutionary Guards, and Hizballah fighters. This is a perfect circumstance for the United States, all our enemies are killing each other and it is not costing us a cent or a life.

Over in Iraq, we see much the same marvelous phenomena occurring. Multinational Sunni mujahideen and Saddam’s former military personnel are fighting and killing Maliki’s dictatorial regime, its Shia military forces, and their Iranian military supporters. And, as in Syria, Maliki and his gang are killing our Sunni Islamist enemies. In Iraq there also is the potential for a delightful bonus coming to fruition. If the United States stays out of the affair, the renewed war in Iraq may trigger a widespread Shia-vs-Sunni civil war in which our Muslim enemies — as they are defined by our bipartisan political elite — may begin to kill each other for a prolonged period and at unprecedented levels, and, again, at no cost to us in lives or dollars.

So let us take both a deep breath and Lt. Col. Peters advice and sit back and watch what is going on in Syria and Iraq with equanimity and absolutely from the sidelines. Cheer for neither side, answer no one’s call for help — especially not one from the near-frantic Neocons who now know they sank their beloved Israel with the 2003 invasion of Iraq — and pray that Obama does not cooperate with Iran to restore Maliki’s Shia tyranny and thereby earn the eternal enmity of all of the Sunni world.

But even if this recipe is followed America is far from out of the woods. We have two options:

1. A Sunni-Shia religious war would be a useful thing for U.S. national security interests — though the higher energy prices it brings will hurt more than necessary because Obama halted our move to self-sufficiency — but only because it would buy us some time to prepare for more war against the Sunni mujahideen. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are willing to stop intervening in the Muslim world in a demented effort to export that least exportable and so most useless of commodities — democracy. As a result, the time we garner from a sectarian war in the Muslim world must be used to rearm our broken military and to reinstate conscription so that we can field a million or more military men and women in a particular region — my guess is West Africa is next on tap — and, like the Huns of yore, desolate that region and inhabitants in a manner Kaiser Wilhelm II would have heartily endorsed, or,
2. We can find an adult man or woman capable of being a leader who can deal constitutionally with reality. He or she must recognize and explain to Americans that Obama and his party — with Republican assistance — have wrecked this country economically and militarily; have all but destroyed its social cohesion; have deliberately stoked racial animosities; and have remade the federal regime nearly into a tyranny. This means we have a lot of work to do at home if the republic is to be resuscitated, and this reality makes mandatory a foreign policy of non-intervention, a quick contracting of our international commitments; and — especially — a drastic curtailing of the ability of foreign nations to dictate our international behavior. Four actions would constitute a first step in the right direction:
   1. Give 12-months’ notice to the Europeans that the United States is leaving NATO and then begin withdrawing our military forces from Western Europe. Seventy years of protecting Europeans who hate us, actively work against our interests, and who have gutted their national-defense capabilities because they prefer that the United States protect them is enough self-flagellation for all Americans.
   2. Build the XL Pipeline, issue as many drilling permits on federal lands as possible, and introduce additional tax incentives to accelerate the attainment of energy self-sufficiency. This would soon allow us to tell the Saudis and their fellow Gulf tyrants to do the only thing they might be capable of doing well — to go and pound sand.
   3. Immediately end all diplomatic, military, and economic relationships with Israel and Palestine. Ties to both undermine U.S. national security, motivate our Islamist enemies, and cost America lives and money; indeed, the disappearance of one or both would go unnoticed in terms of genuine U.S. national interests and would save us some money to boot. An essential corollary to this action is to constitutionally break the back of the disloyal Israel-First U.S. citizens and their organizations which have corrupted our political and media systems. One way to do this is to determine how many of them carry Israeli passports. With that data in hand, we should give them a choice to surrender the citizenship denoted by one or the other passport, and then permanently bar from any position of governmental or public trust those who choose U.S. citizenship but had knowingly obtained the other passport by pledging allegiance to Israel. (NB: This process, of course, should be followed for all U.S. citizens who have made the effort to obtain a foreign passport, be it a passport from Ireland, Armenia, Mexico, Lebanon, or anywhere else.)
   4. When steps a, b, and c are complete, Washington should declare America’s intention to end foreign intervention and war-making unless clear and irrefutable U.S. national interests are at stake, and also state that the United States henceforth will be neutral in all wars that do not impact those interests. At the same time, warn the world that if we are attacked or if military action is needed to protect genuine U.S. interests we will wage war quickly, without pity, and via the application of unrelenting and overwhelming lethal force. The U.S. Marines motto should become that of the nation: “No better friend, no worse enemy.”

A political leader cognizant of reality; capable of explaining it to Americans; and willing to execute the above actions through our constitutional system might just have a shot at pulling the shreds and tatters of our shattered republic back into whole cloth, as well as to avoid the catastrophic situation toward which both parties are now leading us; namely, an endless, worldwide war with Islam in which we would first complete our bankruptcy and then be defeated. But time is short because, as George F. Kennan once warned his countrymen, “[p]rovidence has a way of punishing those who persist long and willingly in ignoring great realities.”

Today in Iraq, Kenya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and across North Africa “long and willingly ignored great realities” are not just knocking at America’s door. Rather, the Islamists are preparing to tear it down and will continue to do so as long as Washington keeps intervening in matters that are none of its business, irrelevant to U.S. security, and of interest only to lobbies and organizations whose first loyalty is not to America. It is time for the United States to cut loose from outdated and unneeded international commitments; cynical, exploitive, and resource-draining allies; and disloyal citizens. It also is time to secure North America and to begin a national debate on whether we want to survive as a free and prosperous nation or prefer to die as fools by playing the avenging angel for countries and causes that do not merit the expenditure or an American life or dollar.

As Colonel Lindbergh said in 1941, Americans “have a right to think of the welfare of America first.”

The media’s frenzy over the Sunni mujahideen advance toward Baghdad is a stark reminder to all Americans of the dire costs exacted from them by the U.S. government’s unnecessary interventions in the affairs of other countries and peoples. Today’s stories from Iraq underline the total waste flowing from the 2003 U.S. intervention in Iraq, the costs of which exceed $1 trillion, 5,000 dead U.S. service personnel, many more thousands of soldiers and Marines wounded and maimed, and an unending and apparently un-endable war with the Muslim world.

It was easy, from the start, to see where U.S. intervention in Iraq would lead. Even a dumbass like myself correctly predicted the mess we are now seeing there in the substance of several books published between 2002 and 2011. Such predictions were not rocket science, a little knowledge of human nature and history were all a person needed to know that today’s events were all but inevitable. And if you did not have time for studying human nature or history, you merely had to recall what the Founding Father’s said about the unavoidable lethal consequences for the American nation that would flow from unnecessary U.S. intervention abroad.

In a nutshell, here is what the bipartisan U.S. interventionists and Neoconservatives — remember Hillary Clinton, Joe Lieberman, and most pro-Israel Democrats wanted war — managed in the space of little more than a decade.

1. They took a stable and effectively if brutally governed Iraq and destroyed it, and had nothing in hand or mind to maintain that status quo ante.
2. They destroyed, ironically, Israel’s last, best hope of survival by eliminating Saddam’s regime, which blocked the westward movement of Sunni jihadis. Now Iraq and Syria are verge on being controlled by Islamists, and, once that is a reality, Jordan will be knocked off. The bipartisan U.S. supporters of the Iraq war — many of whom are dogmatically pro-Israel — brought the jihad to Israel’s borders.
3. They supported the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad’s Sunnis and gave the city and country to an oppressive Iran-supported Shia regime, thereby knowingly planting the seeds of Iraq’s current sectarian/civil war and disintegration.

Quite a decade’s worth of negative achievements for the fundamentally anti-U.S. American interventionists, is it not? They invaded and occupied a country where American had no genuine national interests at risk as long as Saddam held sway. Though never intending to win in Iraq, they merrily plowed the lives and limbs of our soldiers and Marines into mostly sterile soil of a place irrelevant to the United States, but invaluable to the U.S. oil and arms industries and the domestic and foreign lobbies that poison and manipulate our political system.

What to do now? First, stay out of Iraq completely and utterly. To re-intervene would cost more American money and lives, and it would drive-up oil prices even faster. It also would amount not only to the United States again intervening in an oil-rich Muslim country, but intervening in a Sunni-Shia religious war on the side of the Shia, who are fiercely hated by the overwhelmingly Sunni Islamic world. Since the Obama administration — like its predecessor — would not intend to win or finally settle anything if it re-intervenes, the Sunni mujahideen will prevail; their victory will be seen by most Muslims as the Islamists’ defeating the United States In Iraq for a second time; and that victory will reinforce bin Laden’s promise that no nation-state can defeat the mujahideen if God finds their efforts worthy, which He seems to have done in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Second, the national government must act to defend the United States here at home in North America by getting the hell out of the way. Because Obama and his fellow environmental ideologues have done nothing since 2008 to move the United States toward energy self-sufficiency — all successful efforts on energy have been private sector-led — Americans are going to have to tighten their belts and ride out the higher gas prices that are coming because of events in Iraq. But, now, the XL Pipeline must be immediately started, and permits for drilling on Federal on- and off-shore lands must be issued as quickly as possible. Energy self-reliance is still years off but now is the time force Obama and his lieutenants act for the first time as American patriots, rather than elite professors who regard Americans as laboratory animals upon whom they can conduct their social, economic, environmental, and interventionist experiments to see how much tax they can pay and how much pain they can stand.

Third, Americans must look sharp and finally see that the Republican and Democratic interventionists — they are majorities in both parties — are killing the United States economically and politically; are earning us nearly innumerable enemies; and are involving us willy-nilly in unnecessary wars to protect, with American blood and money, the interests of countries from Eastern Europe to the Middle East to Sub-Saharan Africa, countries where a change in government or even their demise would have no quantifiable impact on the genuine national security concerns of the United States.

The truth is that since the end of the Soviet Union, unrelenting bipartisan U.S. interventionism under the two Bushes, Clinton, and Obama has earned America only defeat, hatred, death, limb-less soldiers and Marines, bankruptcy, and diminished national security. History will show that Dr. Ron Paul was right about the nation-killing costs of foreign intervention score at every step of the way. Perhaps the current disaster in Iraq will show whether his Senator-son is a chip of the old block and eager to defend America, or an acquiescent interventionist willing to tack in any direction necessary to have a shot at the presidency.