Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

In looking at the trade President Obama made of five senior Taliban political, intelligence, and military officials for the return of a U.S. Army deserter, Sgt. Bergdahl, one is struck most forcefully, I think, by Obama and his lieutenants’ uncaring attitude toward U.S. national security.

The five returned Taliban leaders will significantly assist Mullah Omar’s organization in destroying the Afghan government the U.S. and NATO installed in Afghanistan. That destruction may take a while — all events in Afghanistan take much longer than anticipated — but it will occur, and Afghanistan will become not what it was on 10 September 2001, but something much worse, a state governed by a government that is deeply Islamic, one which is supported by Pakistan and all of America’s allies in the Gulf, and, most important, one that will believe Allah has given it complete victory over the world’s only superpower. From the backwoods, unsophisticated, and almost medieval regime it was in 2001, the Taliban organization that will return to power in Afghanistan will be living, visible proof for all Muslims that Osama bin Laden was correct: The Americans are cowardly paper tigers; that they are so effete that they could not tolerate the loss of less than 200 lives a year; and that the trust of the mujahideen in Allah and their own efforts on His behalf were more than enough to defeat the greatest power in history.

And when the Taliban regime returns to power, it will make Afghanistan a much bigger base than it ever was before in which Islamist fighters from the world over can train, get to know each other, and plan attacks against the United States, its allies, Israel, and the Arab tyrannies. The Taliban and the Islamists they host will be sure that U.S. ground forces will never return, and they will know that the forces Washington may use against them — drones, Special Forces, and CIA covert operations — have already shown themselves utterly unable to stall the growth, spread, and effectiveness of Islamist forces, let alone win a war. The deadly pin-pricks Washington may apply against the new Taliban regime and their Islamist guests will certainly will be a lethal nuisance to them, but they will not slow the growing power and numbers of the mujahideen, and they will remind all Muslims that the world’s greatest power is not manly enough to defend itself in any meaningful way.

The foregoing scenario is not, of course, inevitable, nothing in human affairs is inevitable. Still, it is more than likely to occur, and if it does it will be a long-term national security disaster for the United States. At the moment there seems to be nothing we can do militarily to prevent this event, so the next best option is for Americans to accept that we have suffered a humiliating and comprehensive political-military defeat in Afghanistan and to bring to account those responsible for it, starting — and perhaps ending — with Barack Obama.

How to do this? Well, first, impeachment is out of the question. The Congress is completely unable and unwilling to do anything to protect the American people from what has become the everyday-lawlessness of Obama and Eric Holder. An impeachment proceeding would immediately be identified by the Democrats and their slaves in the mainstream media as an effort by the nasty, racist Republicans to unseat the noble Black man who aspires to help all citizens by becoming America’s first, post-1776 monarch. Impeachment also is the road to perdition because it would give the Democrats’ various colonies of automatons — Ivy Leaguers, Blacks (even though Obama has been their economic scourge), school teachers, illegal immigrants, abortionists, environmentalists, gays, movie stars, most journalists, animal righters, socialists, the voting-rights-for-felons crowd, etc. — a cause to rally around in defense of their liege lord. Indeed, even a successful impeachment would be a defeat for America because the Democrats would not hesitate a second before bringing America to the brink of a race or civil war.

So forget impeachment and, in an odd way, even be grateful that Obama was twice elected to the presidency. His two terms have proven to all Americans that a Black president can be just as big a liar, just as big a child in foreign policy, just as big an incompetent, just as big a pawn of Wall Street, and just as big a demagogue as any White president.

How, then, to proceed against Obama? One way would be for would-be prosecutors to look at Article III, Section 3, of the U.S. Constitution. That short section reads: “Treason against the United States, shall consist in only levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.”

It would, I think, be quite hard, though not impossible, to prove that Obama waged war against the United States. To wage war against America, Obama would have to have some semblance of manliness — he has none — and he would need one of those guns he hates. Indeed, any fair-minded jury looking at a man like Obama could only conclude that he was fit to wage war only against those who cannot defend themselves, like unborn Americans and U.S. soldiers, Marines, and intelligence officers sworn to defend the Constitution.

But treason, as the U.S. Constitution states, can also consist of a citizen of the United States “adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” This is the clause that could allow a patriotic prosecutor to help Americans and their wounded country by bringing Obama to book. Consider the following of Obama’s actions — and they are his and his alone — which irrefutably have given aid and comfort to America’s Islamist enemies, and each of which has the constitutionally requisite “two Witnesses to the same overt Act.”

1. Ending the CIA’s rendition program and enhanced interrogations with nothing to replace them, thereby partially blinding the U.S. Intelligence Community and allowing the mujahideen to operate more securely and with more aggressiveness.
2. Initiating the unconstitutional war that destroyed Qadhafi’s Libyan regime, an important ally in the war against al-Qaeda, and which facilitated the growth of Islamist militancy across the North African region and into Sub-Saharan Africa.
3. Authorizing rules-of-engagement for our soldiers and Marines that made them more targets than killers, costing many unnecessary American deaths and leaving countless mujahideen alive to attack us another day.
4. Almost completely ending drone strikes since mid-December, 2013, allowing the Taliban, al-Qaeda and their allies time to safely regroup, refit, and meet to plan next steps.
5. Giving the Taliban and its allies, in 2010, a promise that most U.S.-NATO forces would be withdrawn without victory by the end of 2014, thereby declaring America’s acceptance of defeat by its Islamist enemies.
6. Giving the Taliban and its allies, in 2014. a guarantee that there would be only 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and only 1,000 by the end of 2016, thereby reconfirming his 2010 pledge to Mullah Omar that he would facilitate America’s defeat.
7. Returning to the Taliban five senior leaders who will substantively contribute to the Taliban’s destruction of all America and NATO has endeavored to accomplish in Afghanistan since 2001.

Each of the foregoing actions clearly presented a gift of “aid and comfort” to our Islamist enemies. There can be no quibbling on that score. There also can be no credible argument that Obama took the actions with good intentions and never thought that they would produce such intensely damaging “unanticipated consequences” for the United States. The negative impact of each of the foregoing actions on U.S. national security was completely predictable before it was taken, and Obama certainly was warned of that fact by U.S. intelligence officers. Should Obama, under oath, argue that the consequences of the actions were not predictable, he would simply add perjury to his troubles.

In his still invaluable Farewell Address (1796), George Washington warned his countrymen always to be on their “[g]uard against the postures of pretended patriotism.” In my lifetime, no U.S. president has been more of a sham patriot than Barack Obama, a man with zero respect for the U.S. Constitution and a man always ready to flout the law with his “phone and pen.” The charge against Obama of giving aid and comfort to our Islamist enemies is an open and shut case. The question for Americans now, I suppose, is whether there is a prosecutor in the country who is ready to do the right thing for our republic, or do all U.S. lawyers and law professors share Obama’s contempt for the Constitution and clear preference for tyrannical government?

Memorial Day was originally intended as the day Americans would remember and honor the 620,000 men and boys who died in the four years of our Civil War. It now rightly stands as a day when we recall those men and women who have died in all America’s wars. Local groups decorate veterans’ graves with flags and flowers; special religious services of all faiths are conducted; towns hold parades and community picnics; and Arlington Cemetery hosts those who come to visit the graves of fallen family members, and others who come to honor those they never met but to whom they owe much. It is a day on which we should all pay a quiet, honest, and thoughtful respect to our veterans.

Sadly on this Memorial Day the United States is led by a vastly inexperienced, political ideologue from Chicago. In his weekly radio speech on Saturday, President Obama heaped praise on America’s military and the veterans thereof, both living and dead, and then on Sunday arrived unannounced in Afghanistan to preen and grandstand before our remaining military personnel in the country. This, of course, is the kind of thing that all presidents do on Memorial day, but no president has ever done so with less sincerity or more hypocrisy. The speech sounded soothing and the visit made for good television, but neither can hide the disaster Obama and his lieutenants have been for U.S. military personnel.

Obama’s speech comes in the midst of his administration’s use of what appear to be exactly the kind of “death panels” that opponents of Obama Care warned of while that legislation was being debated in Congress. It appears that Obama’s bureaucrats simply decide who among our veterans will and will not receive timely and effective medical treatment. They also apparently create lists of those whose treatment will be delayed long enough to ensure that the sick or wounded die. The pro-Obama media and Democratic politicians and spokesman have been quick to come to the president’s aid, insisting that our veterans’ problems have been long in the making and are not in any way Obama’s fault.

While it is certainly true that the Veterans Administration has long been troubled, Obama’s team has arranged and then presided over the return home of U.S. armies from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — both of which Obama decided to lose. He and his lieutenants knew well before the first returning Marine’s boot hit American soil that the homeward-bound veterans were afflicted with unprecedented numbers of mental problems and with a percentage of amputees that America probably has not seen since the War of the Rebellion. Armed well in advance with a clear idea of the specific kinds of care the veterans would need, Obama and his lieutenants, over five and one-half years, did precisely nothing to prepare to handle the task effectively — save to take the opportunity to try out their plans for “death panels” behind the curtain provided by the opaque bureaucratic maze that is the Veterans Administration.

If this was the sole Obama administration abuse of our military personnel it would be plenty to make Americans wretch and pray that he and his lieutenants eventually rot in hell. But this abuse is only the latest in a series or assaults on the U.S. military that Obama has presided over since 2008. At the most petty level, Obama and Attorney General Holder categorized the terrorist attack at Fort Hood as an instance of workplace violence, a decision that was extraordinarily absurd even for Ivy League graduates. The Obama-Holder decision long delayed proper aid to the Fort Hood victims and their families and it was made for the same reason as Obama and Mrs. Clinton refused to send a larger protective force to defend Americans in Benghazi; namely, they wanted to make sure that their lie to Americans claiming that the Islamist threat was receding remained plausible.

Obama also has handled the wars he inherited from George W. Bush with the goal of making their termination useful electoral tools for his party. The Iraq war was ended in time for it to be used as a positive prop for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign, and he planned to end the Afghan war at a time when that event would be helpful to the Democrats in the approaching mid-term elections. In reality, of course, neither Bush nor Obama intended to win the Iraq and Afghan wars; neither man has nearly enough moral courage to use the U.S. military to win wars. But Obama’s cynicism and cruelty far and away outpace anything we saw from Bush.

Since Obama’s election in 2008, every U.S. soldier, sailor, or Marine who was killed, wounded, or maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan was a casualty of Obama’s desire to end both wars only when their conclusion would yield the most political advantage for the Democrats. Those who died in the wars during these years had their lives knowingly wasted by their president, and those who will have to go through the rest of their lives with prosthetic devises and/or psychiatric assistance are likewise his victims. In essence, since 2008 our military personnel have been under constant attack from the front by the mujahideen, and from the rear by Team Obama.

And so as this year’s Memorial Day arrives, we should perhaps be twice thankful for the efforts and forbearance that our veterans have displayed in defending our republic. First for their willingness to fight and die or be crippled in wars they know their commanders-in-chief do not intend to win. And a second time for their not yet being the kind of men and women who return home from war and deliver to their political leaders — Democratic and Republican — the retribution they so richly merit, and which would, in its application, destroy what little remains of our republic.

The vitriol with which Democrats are denouncing the ongoing investigation of al-Qaeda’s lethal attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi comes from a motivation much deeper than that single event. By pulling on the Benghazi string the Republicans will find an enormous foreign policy failure and a governmental lie of nearly epic proportions — both of which they also are fully responsible for. It will be interesting to see if the newly formed House select committee will shine a light bright enough to reveal to everyday Americans how thoroughly they have been lied to and endangered by the falsehoods fed to them since 1995 by both parties and three presidents.

In case the Republicans pull their punch to avoid showing both parties’ culpability, let me take a crack, first, at explaining why Benghazi is an issue vital to Americans. Then, second, to suggest a warning — based on many of the same reasons — not to let our policy regarding Nigeria and the abducted school girls be guided by the likes of Michelle Obama, whose interest in Nigeria is to rile up the base of Democratic feminists, not to improve U.S. security, for which any intervention in Nigeria will yield a disaster.

I picked the year 1995 as a staring point for this piece for the simple reason that it was in the summer of that year that the CIA’s officers of my unit, along with their extraordinarily able colleagues overseas, began the much-despised, President Clinton-championed, rendition program. As long as this most successful U.S. counterterrorism program was in place — and it was in place because multiple administrations refused to fully use the U.S. military to defend America — the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) was able to stay in the fight against our Islamist foes. The later advent of the drone program sharpened the point of the IC’s spear by making it possible to kill as well as capture/interrogate America’s enemies — both jobs that rightfully belong to the hamstrung-by-the-presidents U.S. military.

This said, neither of these IC programs ever were or ever will be war winners; only a fully employed U.S. military and the severe curtailment of U.S. government interventionism overseas can bring victory. These options appear never to have been considered. We willingly lost both the Afghan war and the never-should-been Iraq war and we continue to intervene, aching now to get into Nigeria. In addition, Obama, with Republican acquiescence, has partially blinded the IC by ending rendition and has given al-Qaeda a partial respite by cutting back drone attacks. Simply put, both parties have since 1995 led America on a relentless retreat from victory against the Islamists.

This brings us, first, to Benghazi, another in a long string of U.S. defeats at the Islamists’ hands. It allows us to reflect on how far along the road to defeat America has traveled since 1995.

The Obama administration’s performance on Benghazi has involved intentional deception; prioritizing Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s political careers over American lives and security; and — most inexplicably — sheer ignorance of America. The first two points are definitive and require no further explanation, except to again stress that Hillary Clinton knowingly facilitated the killing of four Americans in Benghazi by refusing to protect them. The Obama-ordered lies about Benghazi — the cover-up could have started with no one else — shows how deeply ignorant Obama is about the people he purports to lead. Even a half-wit would have known that almost all U.S. citizens would have rallied to the president’s support over Benghazi had he simply said: “We have been attacked again, we have much more work to do against this enemy; and they will pay dearly for this second 9/11 attack.” Only Ivy Leaguers like Obama and Clinton — elitist, full of theory, but devoid of common sense — would have chosen a politically damaging and corrosive lie over firing-up American patriotism.

Benghazi also is important because it reveals that both parties have been deliberately lying to Americans about the Islamists’ motivation since at least 1995. Since that date, there has been a bipartisan decision to portray the attacks of al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies on America as motivated by our country’s freedom, democracy, liberty, pornography, Miller Lite, gender equality, and early presidential primaries in Iowa. Abetted by most of the media, Americans have come to believe that Islamists are simply crazy people who blow themselves up because of the above ephemera or such other vital strategic issues as whether my daughters go university. As a result they initially bought the White House/State Department lie about Benghazi being a violent spontaneous demonstration inspired by a badly made anti-Muslim video. In the hands of master liars like Obama, Mrs. Clinton, and Susan Rice even idiot explanations seem plausible at first.

Sadly, this “big lie” has worked for the most part and has disguised what the politicians and media know — unless they are utterly stupid — to be the truth: The Islamists are motivated to attack because of what the U.S. government does and who it supports in the Muslim world, not because of how Americans live at home. In this regard, why were the mujahideen able to kill four Americans in Benghazi? Because the Obama administration, with Republican and media backing, unconstitutionally intervened in Libya in the name of democracy and instead created a nascent, anti-U.S. Islamist state. Clearly, the Libyan people were better off or at least safer under Qadhafi and there would have been no Americans in Benghazi to be killed if Obama had not intervened.

Thus, Benghazi is important because, as just noted, it is a typical example of the disasters that result from the U.S. government’s intervention in the Muslim world. These disasters are generally termed “unintended consequences,” a clever statement meant to hide from Americans the fact that the negatives that intervention is sure to produce are almost always easily predictable. In addition, the fact that Obama and his Republican partners intervened in Libya — which is in Africa not South Asia — underscores an obvious but little mentioned reality: The Islamist threat to the United States and its allies has expanded enormously since 2001 in terms of its geographic dispersal, manpower, and available weaponry — the last two improvements largely courtesy of the West’s mindless support for the so-called Arab Spring.

So on the issue of Benghazi we have a clear dereliction of duty and deliberate deceit on the part of Obama and Mrs. Clinton: They sent U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials overseas to pursue and protect U.S. interests and then refused their repeated requests for additional security as a means of protecting the so-called successes of Obama’s anti-terrorism and cozy-up-to Muslims policies. Then, Obama and Clinton lied to all Americans about what happened and are still doing so, the latter even asking “What difference does it make?” when asked about who killed our public servants. And, now, we have nearly every leading Democrat politician, party official, and media hack claiming that the truth about Benghazi is already known, and that the dastardly Republicans are persecuting poor, noble Barack and Hillary.

Surely there should be no persecution, but just as surely there should be a subpoena for Obama to testify under oath before the select committee; an intense public humiliation of Mrs. Clinton; and a clear recognition among Americans that any time they put a Clinton in power the product will be either ignoring America’s enemies — Bill Clinton refused ten chances to kill bin Laden in 1998-1999 — or letting them die, as did Mrs. Clinton in Benghazi.

Now on Nigeria. Seeking to reinvigorate the stale and really very tiresome feminist ideology that has long been foisted on Americans, we see Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and the rest of the sisterhood demanding U.S. intervention in Nigeria to secure the release of 200-plus school girls abducted by the Islamist group Boko Haram. There surely is no American who does not want the girls freed, but that humane aspiration does not justify any U.S. intervention in Nigeria — even if the Nigerian regime asks for help. This is a Nigerian problem that can only be solved by Nigerians.

What can U.S. intervention do for America besides buck-up the Democratic sisterhood and exhilarate the Hillary-loving Neoconservatives? Well, it would do at least two major negative things for U.S. security and strike yet another blow against our constitutional republic:

1. First, intervention will do for Boko Haram what it is hard-pressed to do on its own; namely, make itself an international player in the Islamists’ war on the United States. Since 2001, we have witnessed a pattern among Islamist groups in Africa and elsewhere. The groups start their campaign of violence based on purely local issues. Once solidifying a local base, they turn their attention to regional issues. From that stage they move on to try to make themselves international players in the Islamists’ war. This last stage requires each group to find a fool to play its foil. The groups always do, and they always find it in an intervention by the United States and/or another Western country. This has occurred in North Africa, in Somalia, in Mali, and, if the female Democratic war-wanters have their way, it will occur in Nigeria. Indeed, the abductions by Boko Haram and its leader’s promise to convert the girls to Islam or sell them into slavery are quite clearly lures designed to promote a U.S./Western intervention that will give Boko Haram international stature, allow it to draw on manpower and resources from other Islamist groups in Africa and beyond, and ensnare U.S. forces in another costly overseas involvement from which Obama eventually will accept defeat and flee.
2. Second, the United States gets a large proportion of its foreign crude from Nigeria, and in Nigeria there already is fighting between Islamists and Christians, Islamists and the government, and between those who have benefited from oil revenues and those who have not. While probably not yet qualifying as a civil war, U.S. or Western intervention in Nigeria would be akin to throwing more gas on an already lit fire because it will appear to many Nigerians as not only the unwanted return of Western colonialists, but as irrefutable evidence that the Nigerian regime is not only corrupt but also impotent and the colonialists’ tool and therefore must be overthrown. A full-fledged civil war in Nigeria could not help but disrupt the country’s oil production and export and thereby deal an damaging blow to the still-struggling U.S. economy.
3. Third, an Obama-ordered, U.S.-led Western intervention in Nigeria will be another unconstitutional war started by the president without the approval of the American people or the formal majority vote of their elected representatives. With Obama’s Benghazi lies — along with his lies about the IRS, gay marriage, health care, energy, the economy, etc. — having shredded his administration’s credibility with the much of the electorate, U.S. military involvement in Nigeria would focus Americans on the fact that their republic continues to slip fast toward despotism, a situation that will require correction by ballot or by other, less pleasant means. Obama now wields more personal power than George III and has none of that monarch’s positive character traits or love of country. His decision to involve America in Nigeria’s internal affairs would again underscore Obama’s lust for personal power and so bring Americans closer to the point where they will have to decide what they want — a republic or a tyranny —and then act accordingly.

Once again Americans are watching their government involve itself in an issue in which the United States has nothing at stake economically and no genuine national security interest at risk. Ukraine is a place that is worth neither a single American dollar nor more than a brief scan of the headlines by U.S. citizens. And yet Obama and his fellow European interveners and democracy mongers are conducting themselves in a bellicose manner that could lead to some kind of military conflict in Eastern Europe. Indeed, they already are conducting warfare against Russia via economic sanctions, a punitive exercise they promise to make more severe in the next few weeks.

And for what? When all is said and done Obama and Team Democracy appear to prefer a war to publicly admitting that it was their democracy crusading last winter in Kiev that brought on this worrying and sharpening confrontation. Into a increasingly bitter political battle between the Kiev regime and its domestic opponents, the EU as an organization and individual European governments sent a steady flow of diplomats, officials, and money to help the Ukrainian opposition prevail over the Kiev regime. This foreign intervention in a purely internal domestic dispute was clearly designed to overthrow the legitimate Ukrainian government. It is the kind of imperialist exercise that the UN was created to condemn and stop, but that organization’s recent history shows that it now exists solely to support unjustified — and usually unjustifiable — U.S. and Western political and military interventions.

We will never know how the internal Ukrainian dispute would have worked itself out if the Ukrainians had been allowed an exercise in self-determination, but what we do we do know is that the EU’s arrogant intervention in the country’s internal affairs tipped the scales in the opposition’s favor and led to the Kiev regime’s collapse. And we know that Obama, Kerrey, and Biden steered clear of the problem until they saw that the EU’s intervention might succeed. Faced with that reality, these U.S. leaders put their best interventionist foot forward and joined the Europeans to wreck both Ukraine and European stability in the name of a democracy that will never see the light of day in Kiev. Washington, NATO, and Brussels are now well on their way to creating in Ukraine the same kind of democratic paradise they previously delivered in Egypt, Libya, and South Sudan.

They are also striding cluelessly along a road that could lead to a war in Eastern Europe. Why? Simple. The democracy mongers operate on the assumption that only the United States and Europe have legitimate national interests. Actions taken by non-Western states to defend what they perceive to be life-and-death national interests are labeled by Washington and NATO as illegitimate, aggressive, war-causing operations. But hold on for a moment. Was it Russia that intentionally fomented revolution in Ukraine? No, there is no evidence of that. Was it Moscow that publicly threatened the Ukrainian opposition with force and trials for war crimes? No, it was the West and the UN who treated the legitimate Ukrainian regime in that manner. So it was, in fact, Washington, NATO, and the EU who took a solely internal Ukrainian conflict and, by intervening in favor of anti-Russian Ukrainians, made it into a showdown between the West and Russia.

About Mr. Putin. One must say that he is not a particularly likeable man, and he is, after all, the legatee of a political system that killed and starved-to-death 60-plus million people. (NB: Odd, is it not, that the West spends years and billions of dollars tracking down a handful of two-bit Serbian and African murderers, but never utters a word about Russian and Chinese genocide-merchants who have killed far more than 100 million people?) Anyway, what has Putin done that makes him and Russia the sole bad guys in this sorry Ukrainian drama?

Well, Mr. Putin had the gall to see that the aggressive but always effete democracy mongers were mindlessly intent on a regime-change operation in Kiev that would put an anti-Russian regime in power, increase animosities between the country’s ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians, and destabilize Ukraine and perhaps have a knock-on destabilizing impact along much of Russia’s western border. Faced with this prospect, Putin unleashed his armored columns and took Kiev and all Ukraine, right? No. Faced with what the West was doing to make Ukraine an anti-Russian bastion and promote civil war in the country, Putin simply did what genuine Russian national interests required, he took what always has been and always must be Russia’s, the Crimea and its naval bases. Any Westerner who claims he was surprised by this action — or the cause of it — is either a liar or ignorant of Russian history. Given the state of Western education, the latter is at least as likely as the former.

So Putin takes Crimea and it votes to join Russia. End of crisis? No. Even though it is obvious that U.S.-NATO-EU intervention caused the crisis in the first place, the democracy mongers sanction Russia for protecting its national interests and then pick-up the pace of intervention by pumping funds into the anti-Russian regime in Kiev, deploying U.S. military forces in NATO’s Eastern European members, and Obama trying to prove he is not the terminal adolescent that Putin knows he is by waging war against Russia via sanctions. And, of course, there on the sidelines, are America’s Neoconservatives urging the West to threaten the use military force against Russia and at least heavily arm the illegitimate government now operating in Kiev.

Like the terminal adolescents they are, the leaders of both parties in the United States and their counterparts in NATO and the EU cannot bring themselves to admit the clear and simple fact that they are responsible for the festering problem in Ukraine. They have encountered in Putin a man who is unsavory and no hero but one who is a thorough-going nationalist who will not roll over and play dead and abandon his country’s security interests because the intervention-addicted Western democracy mongers demand he do so. Western pride, historical ignorance, and hubris makes admitting a mistake impossible, so we continue meandering toward war.

A final word on sanctions. Western interventionists ought to recall that (a) economic sanctions are attacks on the targeted nation that amount to acts of war, and (b) economic sanctions that savage an already fragile economy — like Russia’s — can make the attacked state opt for war as a last resort. Americans still debate whether FDR’s sanctions against Japan were an attempt to change Tokyo’s foreign policy or to force Japan to start a Pacific war FDR wanted to fight but the American people overwhelmingly opposed. Which side of that debate is accurate is irrelevant here, and perhaps it is unknowable. What is irrefutable fact, however, is that FDR’s sanctions forced Imperial Japan to decide between war and the withering away of its economic and military power and the eventual termination of its status as a Great Power. Even the West’s ill-educated leaders must know the decision Imperial Japan took as the result of FDR’s sanctions.

Last week, Real Clear Politics quoted Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) saying that “[Mr.] Cliven Bundy doesn’t believe that the American government is legitimate.” Mr. Bundy’s largely accurate belief apparently came as a shock to Senator Reid.

Now, before proceeding, let us recall that the Founders intended the limited national government they created to do no more than (a) promote commerce and prosperity by keeping the decks clear for American enterprise; (b) protect the republic from foreign and internal enemies; (c) obey the Constitution and enforce the laws made pursuant to it; (d) conduct foreign relations; and (e) ensure the nation’s sovereignty and independence.

With these parameters in mind, it seems clear that the attitude ascribed to Mr. Bundy by Senator Reid has merit. Legitimacy in government or any other of life’s endeavors comes from successful deeds, not vacuous words and certainly not from words meant to deceive, as in “mission accomplished” and “you can keep your doctor.” But it seems that Senator Reid and most members of both parties do not recognize — as Mr. Bundy and many other Americans do — that the federal government no longer adequately performs the tasks assigned to it by the Founders, tasks they believed, if effectively executed, would make the national government legitimate, respected, and even loved by its citizens.

That Senator Reid does not understand this is shocking in its own right. Indeed, so blatant is federal illegitimacy, that one wonders how Senator Reid could think that all ordinary working Americans would consider the current national government legitimate or worthy of respect and affection, especially given the hundreds of examples of its deliberate, knowing failure to execute its responsibilities? The following half-dozen items are examples of such intentional and stupefying failures. They may not be the most destructive examples that could be cited, but they will do for starters.

• Forty-one years after the first oil embargo, both parties have failed to move the United States to energy self-sufficiency, and today’s administration is blocking the private sector from exploiting a real chance to achieve that status so that the Democratic Party can keep campaign contributors contributing. As a result, economic activity and employment are deliberately suppressed here at home, and our independence of action is compromised by continued dependence on Arab tyrants.
• U.S. political leaders from both parties have taken the republic into numerous wars since 1945, most unnecessary and all illegal and unconstitutional. They also have failed to win a single one. In so doing, they have deliberately negated one of the constitution’s main protections against tyranny — making sure one man can not take the republic to war. These wars also have helped us to achieve the bankruptcy in which we are now mired; committed us to go to war for useless allies and interests unrelated to U.S. security; and killed and maimed tens of thousands of our soldier-children.
• Both parties have failed — or is it refused? — to maintain an indispensable component of national sovereignty and national defense, the control of borders. As a result, we have more than 10 million undocumented felons in the country — they broke the law to get here — some portion of which means to harm this country and its people. Without effectively defended borders assertions of American sovereignty, independence, and national security are sick jokes.
• Both parties have taken no effective action to legally regulate immigration to ensure needed immigrants are admitted and to halt the admission of unwanted and unneeded immigrants. The result has been to tear the republic’s social fabric by accumulating millions of immigrants who are neither needed nor wanted; who have no intention of assimilating or speaking English; and whose loyalty goes first to another nation. If, as the Founders believed, national unity and a cohesive society are keys to the republic’s survival, the lack of an immigration policy that promotes those two items amounts to a death wish.
• Both parties have adhered to a mindless free-trade policy that has emptied America of manufacturing jobs, thereby blocking the road into the middle class for Americans of all races and making us dependent on the willingness of foreigners to make and sell us what we need — even in the sphere of national defense. And the current administration is doing its best to prevent the accelerated development of the republic’s abundant natural gas and other energy resources which would help mightily to rebuild U.S. manufacturing and reopen a vital door through which workers can advance to the middle class. For Washington, under both parties, prairie dogs, crayfish, and tortoises always are more important than the citizenry
• Much of America’s transportation infrastructure is in an advanced state of decay, a process of deterioration that has been underway and recognized for more than 40 years. Although Washington spends huge amounts of taxpayer money in this area, bridges still collapse, traffic remains gridlocked, and the improvements supposedly bought by the expenditures seem marginal at best. And yet, both parties continue to pump tens of billions of dollars into foreign countries ruled by tyrants, juntas, theocracies, militaries, and thieves, preferring to curry favor with irrelevant foreigners — who mostly hate us but love our money — than to improve our transportation system which would, in turn, promote commerce, jobs, and prosperity here at home.

In point of fact, what should have astounded Senator Reid was not that Mr. Bundy thought the national government illegitimate, but that he himself thought that most ordinary American could conceivably consider it a legitimate and likeable entity rather than an increasingly clear enemy. Washington today appeals mostly to a jangling and intolerant coterie of whining, often unsavory minority groups, the growing number of slackers encouraged by politicians to live off of other peoples’ labor, and Ivy League ideologues who hate and intend to destroy Americans’ traditions, regional affections, and Christianity, as well as their stubborn devotion to family, community, and Constitution.

Senator Reid and his unperceptive bipartisan colleagues ought to be schooled in the reality that the strongest respect ordinary Americans have today for their national government lies in their fear of its consistent readiness to use massive and unbridled executive, bipartisan-legislative, judicial, and law-enforcement power to smash its tiniest opponents — like Mr. Bundy and the Little Sisters of the Poor. Americans know that any dissent from plans laid by Washington’s bipartisan tyranny will yield attacks on them and their children through politically motivated IRS actions, attacks on the 2nd Amendment, hate-speech laws, punitive tax levels, FBI entrapment operations, unconstitutional foreign interventions and wars, incompetent, politically biased judges, the use of eminent domain, and, perhaps most of all, its control and implementation of an educational doctrine mean to degrade and eventually erase students’ knowledge of and love for their republic’s history, and which inculcates a pervasive passivity to an increasingly tyrannical central government.

One doubts whether Senator Reid or any of his colleagues from either party would be willing or able first to learn and then accept the reality that growing numbers of Americans’ view them as the power-grabbing enemies of their republic, society, security, livelihoods, children, and religion. But a short history lesson might help them. “[For a government] to usurp dominion over a people … or to grasp more power than they are willing to entrust,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in February 1775,

“is to violate that law of nature which gives every man a right to his personal liberty and can, therefore, confer no obligation to obedience. … When the first principles of civil society are violated and the rights of the whole people are invaded, the common forms of municipal law are not to be regarded. Men may then betake themselves to the law of nature; and if they but conform their actions to that standard, all cavils against them betray either arrogance or dishonesty.”

Because Senator Reid and his colleagues from both parties regularly and blithely violate “the first principles of civil society” and invade the rights of citizens, while championing those of illegal aliens and convicted felons, Mr. Hamilton and the other Founders, in their wisdom, left Americans a remedy for such tyranny. Let us hope that Senator Reid, et. al, can be persuaded to accept that they are seen by many Americans as the enemy and must reform. If they do not, they will eventually be subjected to the rage of Americans, first at the polls — if they are lucky — or perhaps because the Founders left to ordinary Americans that last-resort protection against an arrogant, destructive, and centralized tyranny, namely, the 2nd Amendment.

Among the most striking aspects of the current debate over U.S. foreign policy is the almost complete lack of perception among Americans about their country’s actual economic and military capabilities and its international influence. Whether it is Ukraine and Russia, the intensifying Islamist offensive on several continents, or the blatantly Potemkin Middle East peace talks, U.S. political leaders, academics, pundits, and most of the media speak as if today’s America is the America of 1945, 1984, or 1991, times when the United States was a nation of almost unlimited military and economic power and telling international influence.

Today, we are barely a shadow of that powerful nation. Indeed, while Washington under either party speaks as if it is the world’s voice of power and all-knowing authority, we are really the very picture of an overused, late-middle age Madam who eagerly displays her sagging wares but doesn’t seem to realize that she has lost her looks, allure, and persuasiveness, and is much more laughed at than lusted over. When an American president speaks on foreign policy, the world and Americans hear meaningless bravado, absurd prating about freedom and other universal values — quite obviously the only universal value is power — and an endless, self-righteous hectoring that orders all peoples in all countries to abandon their heathen ways and improve themselves according to Washington’s dictates.

And what sort of power is available to back-up the words of recent American presidents. Well, today, there is not much power to crow about.

• America is bankrupt with a debt of nearly $17 trillion and apparently damned to eventual economic catastrophe by an oblivious governing elite that will not control its spending and values office more than country. Our rivals and enemies rest comfortably knowing that America will keep spending and thereby keep degrading its ability to generate economic and/or military power. The absurdity of this situation is apparent in the reality that Washington could not fight a war against China unless Beijing was willing to lend us the money we need to attack her. It also clear in the decision to cut the U.S. Army — to save funds for use in building the Democratic base — to 440,000 soldiers. Knowing that, at best, only 1 of 3 soldiers is a shooter, our rivals and enemies — even if they are as stupid as Washington arrogantly claims they are — know that an army of less than 150,000 combat soldiers is not even remotely akin to a formidable deterring or war-fighting force.
• And speaking of war, we must keep in view that the United States has not won a war since that September day in 1945 when Japan surrendered. Next to the Chicago Cubs, the U.S. military has the longest losing record of any organization in North America. Our recent lost wars, of course, must be attributed to the same politicians in both parties who today are spending us into oblivion. Americans have paid their taxes to support their military, and have sent their kids to join the services. In turn, courageous men and women have given their lives or been maimed fighting often unnecessary but always losing and unconstitutional wars. In truth, these taxes and young citizens have been wasted by politicians who are eager to start wars, but do not care if they win them. Putin’s confidence in moving into Crimea, for example, was in part based on his observation of the callous and cowardly leadership and policies of the Bush and Obama administrations that produced war-losing performances by the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• Finally, we lack the independence of action necessary to protect genuine U.S. national interests — which must be defined as life-and-death issues — and that allows us to decide for ourselves when and when not to go to war. We are, for example, still tied tight to the NATO alliance twenty-three years after the sole reason for its existence dissolved. We are therefore obligated to automatically wage war in defense of Estonia, Poland, and dozens of other countries in which we have no national interest. America is likewise bound to Israel in a way that is even more laughable and humiliating than the scenario Swift created in which the mighty Gulliver was tied down by the Lilliputians. In both these cases — NATO and Israel — America has given away her independence and sovereignty; other much lesser and often irrelevant nations can now decide when she goes to war.

Thus the substantive hand Washington has to play in foreign policy is far weaker than the threatening rhetoric thundering forth from the lips of Obama and Kerry, as well as from those of the again noisy, bipartisan Neocon war-mongers like McCain, Graham, Giuliani, Bolton, Krauthammer, Kristol, and Hillary Clinton. Because they are Democrats, Obama and Kerry now they are lying; the war-loving Neocons, however, actually seem to believe that today’s America still wields the power it held in 1945. And if you want to measure America’s weakness and lack of influence in the near term, watch this just-mentioned bipartisan group and see if they free the incarcerated traitor Jonathan Pollard and send him to Israel as a bribe to keep in motion the never-to-be-successful Israel-Palestinian peace talks. If that happens, the Lilliputians will once again have humiliated and hamstrung Gulliver, and America’s Gullivers once again will have sold out their country.

As always, the Founding Fathers were far better than contemporary U.S. leaders when it came to gauging the extent and limits of American power and then formulating appropriate national-security policy. In the 1790s, for example, George Washington knew that the new United States was — as it is today — broke, militarily weak, and vulnerable to manipulation and domestic subversion by foreign powers. His successful recipe for handling such a situation was called neutrality, and it is just as pertinent today as it was then.

Until (if?) we can recover economically, prevent our presidents from starting wars, rest and refit our military, and rid ourselves of war-causing alliances that eliminate our independence and freedom of action, we should, unless attacked, seek to be a bemused and neutral observer of the world’s broils. We desperately require a prolonged respite because Americans are, as Washington said long ago, “a people … already deeply in debt, and in a convalescent state from the struggle[s] in which we have engaged in ourselves.”

One wonders how deep a hole the United States and the EU are going to dig for themselves in Ukraine. It was, of course, U.S. and EU leaders — and their media acolytes — who caused the problem we face today by intervening on behalf of self-styled “democrats” in Kiev who without foreign intervention could not have overthrown the Ukrainian president. It is getting to be that any half-baked gaggle of protestors at any location on the planet need only to chant the word “democracy” and the West will come running to their aid with diplomatic assistance, money, and a fierce disregard for either the target nation’s sovereignty or regional stability. Indeed, it may well be that the whole Ukraine protest movement was primed for action by funds, advisers, and computer systems paid for by Hillary Clinton’s State Department in a program similar to those she ran in several Arab countries.

The difference in the Ukraine intervention from others the West has conducted is that the terminally adolescent political leaders who run the West have run smack dab into a decisive, realistic, and nationalistic adult, in the person of Vladimir Putin, and they do not know what to do. They are learning that the Ukraine is not Libya or Egypt in that Putin will not to let the West make of Ukraine — or at least of Crimea — the same unholy mess its earlier unwarranted interventions made of Egypt and Libya. Putin has a very clear view of Russia’s genuine national interests, and reliable access to the Crimean base of the Black Sea fleet is one of them, it has been for centuries, and it will remain so in the future.

Western leaders, on the other hand, have not a clue about what constitutes a genuine national interest. In this regard, their intervention in Ukraine speaks volumes. Neither the U.S. nor the EU can point to a national interest in Ukraine; their obsession with spreading “democracy” is childish, ahistorical, destabilizing, and potentially war causing.

Washington and its EU partners increasingly behave like the wildmen who ran the French Revolution. Those miscreants took that revolution’s cant — liberty, equality, and fraternity — and sought to use it to change governments in Europe and the United States if they did not bow to the demands of the French revolutionaries. They fomented insurrection across Europe and did so with incendiary propaganda printed in all the appropriate languages, as well as with covert action operations — like that conducted by Citizen Genet, with Jefferson’s acquiescence, in the United States. In the end, the practice of revolutionary French interventionism ignited what can be seen as world war that lasted most of fifteen years.

This French model — but today using the term “democracy” as its mantra — is now regularly applied by the United States and the EU around the world — Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Cuba, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Iran, Sri Lanka, North Korea, and now Ukraine — and it amounts to throwing gasoline on smoldering fires which tend to leap into flames that destroy governments and often regional stability. Such intervention-to-promote democracy is an arrogant, reckless, sophomoric, and war-causing method of conducting international relations, and it is a Satan that has spawned two other war-promoting interventionist causes — human rights and women’s rights. The U.S. and the EU commitment to endless intervention for unobtainable abstract ideals that have nothing to do with their legitimate national security concerns are today the greatest motivation for much of hatred and violence directed by non-Westerners at American and European citizens and interests.

Such intervention also is an additional drain on the already bankrupt treasuries of the United States and the EU. The democracy-addled U.S. congress and president threw a billion dollars into the hands of the amateurs now running affairs in Kiev, and the EU seems intent on providing those Potemkin democrats with $15 billion. For what purpose? Ukraine has one of the world’s worst fifty or so economies, so the money will not right the economy and there will be no way to account for how Western monies are spent — the Afghanistan and Iraq models of feckless U.S.-EU waste all over again. The only things certain in this Western policy are that the 16-plus billion dollars that Washington and the EU take from taxpayers will make their citizens poorer, will drive the donators’ economies further into debt, and will disappear into a well-developed maw of corruption, theft, and waste in Kiev.

Overall, U.S. and Western leaders should be lining up to thank Vladimir Putin for a painful but thorough lesson in how the adult leader of a nation protects his country’s genuine national interests. And, it must be noted, Putin is not teaching rocket science. Had Western leaders received a decent education — especially in the fields of history and human nature — they would have been absolutely certain from the start that any destabilizing Western intervention in Ukraine that even remotely threatened Russia’s assured access to its Crimean naval bases would provoke precisely the kind of Russian response that occurred. They also would have known that West and the UN could bleat forever about the requirements of various treaties and international law, but that a nation acting to protect what it perceives to be life-or-death national interests — as is Putin’s Russia — is both insane and suicidal if it refrains from acting because of a raft of documents designed to address Cold War conditions that no longer exist.

The lesson of the Ukraine crisis — if it ends without war — for the U.S. and the EU will be crystal clear: Hoe your own row, and mind your own business. If it ends in a civil or European war, they will have only themselves to blame.

“The pretext of propagating liberty can make no difference. Every nation has a right to carve out its own happiness in its own way, and it is the height of presumption in another to attempt to fashion its political creed.”

Alexander Hamilton to George Washington, 2 May 1793

It always seems to start with the BBC. Months ago when the Ukrainian president patiently explained that his country’s economic and energy realities — which Vladimir Putin underscored — required that it stay close to Russia and not yet enter into a closer relationship with the EU, the BBC flooded Kiev with correspondents. These “independent” journalists began covering every angle of the crisis, or at least the angles that coincided with the view of pro-EU Ukrainian demonstrators and the BBC’s own, now thoroughly institutionalized, worship of the divinity known as the EU. As one rule of thumb, any non-EU government that is dealing with domestic unrest ought to immediately close all BBC facilities in its country and issue no visas for BBC correspondents who want to enter the country and “cover” — a word that always means “support” — the demonstrations. The BBC — except for five minutes at the top and bottom of the hour — has long since ceased being a news organization. It is now better seen as a “campaign group,” the name the BBC itself uses for reckless, irresponsible, and violence-and-anarchy causing international groups like Amnesty International and other components of the human-rights mafia.

With the BBC positioned and intending to make Ukrainian matters worse, the EU Commission and individual EU states began to send their senior officials to sympathize with and support the anti-government forces in Kiev, as well as to threaten, belittle, and ridicule the Ukrainian president, his government, and their decision about what was economically best for the Ukraine. The prize ass of this herd of incendiary EU officials was without question the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt. On numerous visits to Kiev, Bildt openly supported the demonstrators, damned the Ukrainian president and his government, and threatened EC sanctions if the Ukrainian regime did not surrender to the rabble in the street.

Two points come immediately to mind on this issue. First, why would any Europeans in their right mind listen to anything that a senior Swedish official had to say? Sweden’s 20th century behavior speaks for itself. In two world wars it stayed neutral so that it could make enormous profits by selling nickel ore, iron ore, and other strategic minerals to Imperial Germany and Hitler’s Reich, entities which in turn used the metals to kill millions of other Europeans. This simple fact alone, one would think, should be enough to ensure no Swedish official gets a hearing anywhere in Europe, ever.

The second point is another rule of thumb. Any non-EC government that is dealing with domestic unrest ought never to issue visas for EU or U.S. diplomats to visit their protesting citizens. Such a government also should not allow resident EU and U.S. diplomats to involve themselves with the demonstrators, and should expel those who seek to do so. These EU and U.S. official visitors and resident diplomats do not intend to negotiate an even-handed end to the government-protestors confrontation. They mean to force the government to surrender, and, if that does not occur, to foment increased resistance among the demonstrators, even if such encouragement leads to violence. No matter. EU and U.S. diplomats will easily get away with recklessly stoking violence because whatever happens in Kiev’s streets will be reported by the BBC as the Ukrainian regime’s fault.

In the past two weeks, a new dimension of the West’s civil war-stimulating intervention in Ukraine has appeared in the form of those self-proclaimed if clearly addled avenging angels of freedom — Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Although late to the intervention party, Biden and Obama have made up for lost time by starting to beat the drums of economic war against Ukraine, a country that probably neither could find on a map. Obama also has threatened that the Ukrainian president would be “held responsible” by Washington for the violence in his country; this from the first U.S. president who is responsible for absolutely nothing that occurs on his watch.

If it was not clear that their words and threats are already getting Ukrainians killed, these two dilettante American diplomatists would be hilarious. Indeed, the Biden-and-Obama team could be the next Laurel and Hardy, except that neither is smart enough to make up for the other’s hopeless arrogance, historical ignorance, and naiveté. In this regard, the death-causing propensities of the Biden-Obama team in conducting U.S. foreign policy mirrors that of the other well-know team of U.S. war-causers, McCain and Graham.

As civil war inches closer in the Ukraine — with an outside chance of an European war — it is clear that its arrival will be the responsibility of the EU and the United States who, through their intervention in Ukraine in the name of democracy, have ensured many dead Ukrainians, much less democracy and a ruined economy there, and greater influence for Russia in Kiev. What Alexander Hamilton called the “height of presumption” is the standing operating procedure for U.S. and EU political leaders and diplomats, men and women who are out to teach the world’s nations how to be behave — as long as they are weak nations — and who absolutely know that no nation can solve its problems without their brilliant assistance and close instruction.

There is nothing Americans can do to stop the EU empire-builders and their BBC cheerleaders from causing war in the Ukraine, but Washington must not help them. For the sake of U.S. security, as the ever-reliable Dr. Ron Paul has said, Americans should just shut up and watch because the United States has no genuine national interest at stake in the Ukraine that would require any involvement whatsoever by our government. “That’s their [the Ukrainians’] business, and it certainly isn’t ours,” Dr. Paul said. “We’ve tried it for too long [to tell others what to do], and the American people are sick and tired of it, and we’re also out of money.”

Cogent and ardently patriotic as always, Dr. Paul is a too-long under-appreciated national treasure, except among some citizens and most U.S. military personnel, men and women who know that he would defend America but not waste their lives in unnecessary wars fought for unsavory allies. Indeed, Dr. Paul stands forthrightly in the tradition of America’s greatest citizen, whose birthday happens to be today.

Always the deadly foe of U.S. interventionism, General Washington fathered the non-interventionist path that Dr. Paul and his admirers and supporters follow. “I have always given it as my decided opinion that no nation has the right to inter-meddle in the internal affairs of another …,” Washington told James Monroe, who wanted U.S. intervention to aid French revolutionaries who would cause a world war, in July 1794, “and that, if this country could, consistent with its engagements, maintain a strict neutrality and thereby preserve peace, it was bound to do so by motives of policy, interest, and every other consideration.” That is the path of sanity and security for the United States, and it mandates no U.S. involvement in the Ukraine.

Finally, a Well Done to Dr. Paul, a great American, and a Happy Birthday to General Washington, the greatest American.

Most decent people always feel some sympathy and perhaps even pity for those who make mistakes because they are not aware of their own ignorance of issues, people, and history and therefore cannot gauge the calamity their actions are courting. For those who consciously know the mistakes they are making, and so the fires of rebellion they are stoking, a decent person can only have a well-justified contempt as he or she prepares to resist. Today, Virginians are having to decide which of these is the proper emotion to assume in the face of recent events. It appears the latter will win hands down.

Last week in Virginia, two federal judges did the biding of President Obama and Attorney General Holder and ruled unconstitutional a properly adopted amendment to the state’s constitution in which Virginians defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman, not one between two people of the same gender. Obama, Holder, and the federal judges told Virginians, in essence, that the Constitution’s guarantee of republican government does not apply to them; that their Christian faith is nothing less than flagrant, archaic bigotry and that their Savior too is a bigot; that their state government exists to follow the national government‘s orders; and that from now on they will be told what to believe about religion, as well as how to behave and speak about it, by those who rule in Washington.

This sort of direct, degrading, and enslaving national-level assault on the right of Virginians to (a) govern themselves; (b) apply as they see fit the faith they have believed since childhood; and (c) decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong, is a much more ominous and palpable threat than anything their fellow Virginians faced in the spring of 1861.

One great and enduring tragedy of America’s Civil War is that eleven southern states left the union in 1860-61 because they were afraid of what Mr. Lincoln and his newly elected administration might do to the South, not because of what he and it had done. Notwithstanding Mr. Lincoln’s pledge not to interfere in the southern states’ internal affairs, the South had no patience and would not go slow until Lincoln‘s word could be tested. The southern states left the Union because they were fearful for their future, and thereafter more than 620,000 Americans died in our country’s worst and bloodiest war.

Virginians of today face a much different and much harsher reality. Unlike the Virginians of 1861, no contemporary Virginian has to wonder what is coming from the national government. They all have seen what Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder intend to do, which is, moreover, probably a pale imitation — recall these are the he-men who attacked the Little Sisters of the Poor — of what Mrs. Clinton intends if she succeed to the present tyrant’s throne and pen.

The intentions of Obama’s Washington are crystal clear, and Virginians are seeing for themselves how it intends to “reform” their faith, their lifestyle, and their society by installing a religion of worshiping the all-knowing national government. They themselves are to be subjects on which Democratic social theorists experiment. What Virginians are seeing is what Mr. Jefferson described as the danger to religious liberty that would always emanate from

“the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others.…” (1)

Since 2009, Obama and his lieutenants — flush with “impious” assumptions — have sought to impose their supposedly secular but really national-government-worshiping religion on all of America. Here in the Old Dominion, Virginians have seen their absolute 1st Amendment right to religious liberty, and their right to live their lives and order their society accordingly, mocked and undermined by the all-knowing Democrat boys and girls from the Ivy League. They have been told what doctor they can see, and what their children can and cannot be taught in school. They have seen determined White House efforts to destroy conservative political groups and media outlets, and they have heard the president okay the use of drugs by children. They also have seen hundreds of thousands of unborn Virginians murdered in the name of “women’s rights,” and they have been told by New York’s Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo that pro-life, pro-Constitution, and Christian citizens are “extremists” who have no place in New York State and, by implication, in the United States.

They also have seen the Democratic Party repeatedly try to destroy the Constitution’s 2nd Amendment so that Virginians and all Americans cannot — if elections do not remove despotism — defend themselves against the national government’s clear intention to destroy Christianity’s role in U.S. society, the traditional American family, the right of Americans to arm, and the ability of Americans to keep what they earn through hard work and not have the national government forcibly “share” it with slackers, those poor creatures too discouraged to seek work, Holder’s reconstructed felons, illegal aliens, and foreign nations.

As they press ahead, Obama and his operatives seem to think that Virginians and other Americans will forever sit still and accept whatever the national government designates as their mute supporting role in its plan for an areligious, libertine, multicultural, and multiethnic America. In this, they are most mistaken. Virginians, at least, will fight for what they believe is morally right, as well as for what they know are their inalienable constitutional rights.

With some Virginia Republicans, for example, the Roman Catholic bishops of Arlington and Richmond are pushing a legal challenge to the federal judges’ savage negation of Virginia’s sovereignty and their abuse of the 1st Amendment and of our Savior. What an unexpected but welcome sight to see Catholic prelates stand up for what they believe and, more important, for what the Lord teaches. Perhaps there is some fight left in the old church, even after seeing Notre Dame’s obsequious clergy welcome the abortion-crazed Obama to their campus; Georgetown’s appeasing Jesuits remove religious icons from a room so Obama would agree to speak at the university; and the foolish, publicity-seeking Cardinal of New York sit on the same dais with Obama on the eve of the 2012 election.

Encouraging though it is, the bishops’ challenge is not certain to overturn the decision of the national government’s judges that negates the rights of Virginians to self-government and to the free practice and application of their faith. How far will Obama and his fellow Ivy-League social theorists push Virginians toward slavery and resistance? How far will Virginians allow them to do so?

In one of the startling ironies often encountered in history, one of America’s greatest men, and by far its greatest and most successful traitor, General Robert Edward Lee, pretty accurately outlined in 1866 the substantive threat Virginians are witnessing today and the turning point it presents.

In the year after Appomattox, Lee, having surrendered the remnants of his magnificent army and begun working tirelessly to mend the South and the Union, reflected that there was no reason to believe that the result of the just concluded rebellion meant that Southerners or any other Americans would stand aside silently and allow the national government to do as it pleased in the future. “I can only say,” Lee wrote,

“”that while I have considered the preservation of the constitutional power of the General Government to be the foundation of peace and safety at home and abroad, I yet believe that the maintenance of the rights and authorities reserved to the states and to the people, not only essential to the adjustment and balance of the general system, but the safeguard to the continuance of free government. I consider it as the chief source of stability to our political system, whereas the consolidation of the states into one vast republic, sure to be aggressive abroad and despotic at home, will be the certain precursor to that ruin which has overwhelmed all those that preceded it.” (2)

The decision of the above-noted federal judges, and the actions and words of Obama, Holder, Cuomo, and others in the increasingly hot-for-tyranny Democratic Party fit exactly the pattern Lee feared would eventually appear, a pattern that features liberty-killing “administrative centralization” and leads to despotism. A quarter-century earlier, Alexis De Tocqueville also warned Americans of the danger to liberty posed by administrative centralization, and predicted it would be the tool of any politician aiming to install a despotism in the United States because it “contribute[s] admirably to the passing greatness of one man, [but] not to the lasting prosperity of the people.” (3)

And nearly as troubling as the illegal actions of Obama, his team, and most Democrats are their words, which are now, and for most of my sixty years have been intentionally demeaning toward those Americans who live by their faith; love their families, their country and its history; treasure the uniqueness and traditions of their region and locality; and believe that hard work, family, church, and a distant, barely active national government are the keys to a life well lived. Indeed, these are the Americans that Obama must suppress and eventually break because they are individuals “who resent being governed by anyone at all, and who are fully convinced that they are best equipped to manage their own affairs and control their own lives.” (4)

Listen to the words of Obama, Cuomo, Holder, Hillary Clinton and dozens of their arrogant Ivy League chums when they speak about “reforming” America, and what do you hear? Well, you hear male and female theorists of statism who have never worked a day in their life, who despise those who do, and who simply do not care what Americans think or want because they know — Harvard, Darwin, and Marx told them — what is best for all Americans. What these Democratic leaders cannot see is that Virginians and all other Americans who resist their tyranny already possess what matters most to them — liberty — and need nothing more from them; indeed, they want much less from such arrogant, soulless, and liberty-denying ideologues. “The big guys can hire armed men to defend their interests, lawyers to protect their wealth, and priests to sanctify it,” wrote the incisive and hard-edged Lee Harris in his indispensable book, The Next American Revolution.

“They can even retain philosophers to explain that it is eternally right and just that their interests should prevail over the paltry and trifling interests of the little guys. That is why the only way the little guys can resist being bullied by the big guys is if they are willing to get down and personal, to make the fight not about ideals, but about the realest of all things in their eyes, namely, their own lives, their own liberty, their own things, their own pursuit of happiness. … When the little guys rebel against the big guys, they are forwarding the cause of liberty and dignity in the only way they know how.” (5)

For America’s sake, then, Obama and his secularizing, libertine statists ought to be silent for a while and listen and understand what their opponents are saying, which is basically: stay in Washington and keep out of our hair; stop constraining our liberties, trying to run our families, and defaming all we hold dear; and — for the Union’s sake and your own health and longevity — let us govern ourselves. If Obama, et. al keep talking and hectoring as they have — as is likely — these highly educated and oh so sophisticated folks may soon find their hands full of a rebellion being conducted by Americans who will no longer listen to those who have for decades preened as their betters.

This scenario has occurred at least once before in American history. “The heart of the matter,” wrote Judah P. Benjamin, a brilliant Jewish-American lawyer, a U.S. Senator from Louisiana, and later a Confederate cabinet member, “was not so much what the abolitionists and the Republicans had done or might do to the South, as it was the things they had said about the South — and the moral arrogance with which they had said them.” (6) Benjamin’s words explain why Lincoln’s 1860-61 pledge of non-interference was never heard by Southerners. They had stopped listening and begun arming, and, as Mr. Lincoln later said, “the war came.”

Will history repeat itself? Who knows. But what seems certain is that Obama and his fellow statists have not a clue that here in Virginia, as well as in many other states, there are ever-growing amounts of what the always acute and acerbic localist Bill Kauffman calls “the two essential ingredients of any successful secession movement — love of place and resentment of the [national] capital….” (7) They also clearly have never read De Tocqueville’s warning to any U.S. political leader bent on ruling rather than governing. “One can therefore say,” argued the Frenchman, “that in America man never obeys man, but justice and law. Thus he [the American] has conceived an often exaggerated but almost always salutary opinion of himself. He trusts fearlessly in his own forces, which appear to him to suffice for everything.” (8)

Thus, Obama, Clinton, Holder, their trained-seal-like judges, and the rest of our “enlightened elite” may yet find, as did America’s Founders, that they live in a country “overflowing with natural libertarians.” (9) It was this fact, Lee Harris writes,

“that led the Founding Fathers to devise a severely limited government for their new nation. They did not choose to have a limited to government — they simply recognized that this was the only form of government that would be tolerated by America’s natural libertarians, who instinctively resented any kind of interference in their own affairs by outsiders.” (10)

So please keep an ear close to the ground, Mr. President. And when you begin to faintly hear a Virginian’s soft drawl, a Mainer’s clipped accent, a Texan’s western twang, or a Mid-Westerner’s flat tones singing …

We are a band of brothers, native to the soil fighting for our liberty with treasure, blood and toil And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far; hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag, that bears a single star.

… you had better wake up in one big hurry and focus on the same reality Mr. Lincoln encountered. Then you should quickly read a book or two about America — probably your first — describing the glories and errors of your country‘s history and the indelible, irascible, and fearless characteristics of her people. For this task, you could do no better than Walter McDougall’s brilliant, honest, and witty, Freedom Round the Corner, 1585-1828 (New York, 2005) and Throes of Democracy, 1829-1877 (New York, 2009).

With respect, Mr. President, because you did not get the straight skinny about America by listening to the scurrilous, America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright for twenty years, you are today headed straight toward a hell you are making for yourself and your country. Why not read Dr. McDougall’s books and begin to understand America? Better late than never … for all of us.

Notes

1. Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, 1786, http://religious.freedom.lib.virginia.edu/sacred/vaact.html
2. Robert E. Lee to Lord Acton, 15 December 1866, http://archive.lewrockwell.com/orig3/acton-lee.html
3. Mansfield and Withtrop, eds., Democracy in America, (Chicago, 2000), p. 83.
4. Lee Harris, The Next American Revolution, (New York, 2010), p. 88
5. Ibid., p. 222
6. Quoted in Don E. Fehrenbacher, Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism (Baton Rogue, 1995) p. 31
7. Bill Kauffman, Bye, Bye, Miss American Empire, (White River Junction, Vermont, 2010), p. 91
8. Mansfield and Withtrop, eds., Democracy in America, (Chicago, 2000), p. 90.
9. Harris, op. cit., p. 50 —10.) Ibid.

One of the few things all the Founders agreed on was that the conduct of America’s very few necessary wars would be the responsibility of the national government, with the assistance of state militias. (NB: By the way, has anyone found the Constitutional amendment negating the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of state militias? Me neither.) And it is important to note that when the Founders spoke of war, they all spoke — Federalists and the increasingly relevant anti-Federalists alike — of unavoidable “defensive wars,” none of them envisioned unnecessary offensive wars, on this their silence is deafening.

On reflection, this makes perfect sense. The national government alone could provide the leadership, resources, and direction needed in wartime. The Founders also believed that if wars had to be fought, they had to be won and had to be won quickly. Why? First, because any war their America would fight would be a matter of life and death; if you lose, you die as a nation, therefore winning is the only option no matter the cost. Second, the Founders knew that all wars but especially long wars frayed public support for the government, headed the country toward bankruptcy, and opened the door wide for the Executive Branch to expand its powers, constrict civil liberties, and take the first strides along the high road to tyranny. Therefore, not only victory but speedy victory were key essentials of American war-making.

If they were able to look down the long road from 1787 to 2013 and see U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the Founders, I believe, would be raising their wigs to scratch their heads and wonder how such an easy task could have been botched so badly, and at such a tremendous cost in lives, treasure, national prestige and influence, and civil liberties at home. Attacked by al-Qaeda on 9/11, and multiple times before that, the goal, as the Founders would have seen it, was to destroy as quickly as possible those who attacked America, their allies, and their supporters, and immediately return home. The Founders hated war, but they were largely Old Testament men who when forced to fight brought to their waging of a necessary war a very clear eye-for-an-eye methodology. This is true even for Jefferson if you gauge his maniacal hatred for Britain; his genuine, enthusiastic, and never recanted applause for the Jacobins’ charnel house; and his bloodthirstiness toward the Barbary pirates.

In several of my recent writings, I have been chastised — to say the least — for speaking of the Founders and those Protestant ministers and English republicans who instructed the Founders’ minds, as if they still had relevance today. Well, I suppose my answer to that could be lengthy and snarling — I am too prone to invective, I do love it and the rancorous debate it engenders — but in this case, reality suffices.

• After 13 years of war in Afghanistan, the United States of America is withdrawing, utterly defeated in what was a necessary war. Not one of our war aims has been accomplished: The Taliban is stronger than ever and will retake national power, probably after a civil war; al-Qaeda, quite clearly, is flourishing on several continents and its influence is growing in Europe and North America, Syria is the Gulf Arab-funded seedbed that is growing the warriors who will bring havoc to those locales; bin Laden died a complete success and his legend remains vibrant and motivating; and Pakistan is destabilized and in a few years will be the first nuclear-armed Sunni Islamist state.
• After 13 years of war in Afghanistan, every U.S. soldier, Marine, airman, or sailor who died there amounts to a life deliberately wasted by his or her government. Every one of them who was maimed there was crippled without reason. No war aim was achieved; America is broke and its leaders are eager to deepen that fatal abyss of debt; America is more vulnerable to al-Qaeda and its allies in more places in the world — including places with natural resources on which much of our economy depends — than it was in 2001; and the end of the ongoing war we still have with the Islamists — one they started and will press relentlessly — is so far over the horizon that it cannot be sensed let alone seen.
• And, after 13 years of war in Afghanistan, the willingness of American people to fight a war they must win to survive as a nation is, to say the least, flagging; really, they seem to have no understanding of that reality. Moreover, the 1st and, especially, the 4th Amendments of their Constitution have been shredded; their last two presidents have skillfully exploited the wartime environment to make and amend laws by decree and to make the Executive Branch the clear enemy of all Americans’ civil liberties; and their government and its military now stand as a laughing stocks, unable to stop ruinous over-spending; unable to defeat Islamists often armed with less-than-modern weapons, and absolutely unable to influence a mentally unbalanced Afghan leader dressed in cape leftover from a 1930’s Hollywood adventure film.

Afghanistan has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States that has left it extraordinarily more vulnerable to the al-Qaeda-led Islamists. But the foregoing is not a recommendation to continue to fight there. I have argued repeatedly and rather strongly since the national government announced its intention to lose in Afghanistan in 2010 that we should pull out immediately and not spend another life or another dollar there. Waging and winning the Afghan war a quick and easy task botched beyond recall by leaders — political, military, media, and clerical — whose knowledge, talent, patriotism, and, yes, intentions must now be considered suspect. (NB: If any reader wants to see how easy it was to predict what would happen in Afghanistan and avoid it, see my Imperial Hubris, pp. 47-58. Written in 2001-2002, those pages are exactly on the mark; are based on materials available in most public libraries; and are the work of a man who Republicans and Democrats alike have described as a dunce, an America-hater, an appeaser, a fat dufus, an anti-Semite, and a bigot. I prefer the adjectives honest, commonsensical, and, dare I say, America First.)

While getting out of Afghanistan — totally, not leaving behind 10,000 troops in soon-to-be surrounded and attacked fire-bases — is the right thing to do for U.S. interests and our worn-out military, Americans must recognize that this is an intermission, not the end of the play. The national government’s failure to follow the Founders’ advice for war-making has left our Islamist enemy intact and growing, and Afghanistan, two or three years after we have fled, will have returned to its 2001 status as the world’s premier base for the training, funding, and deployment of Islamist mujahideen to insurgencies around the world, and for the planning of attacks on the United States and its allies.

When all is said and done, Americans must ignore the theories and lies of presidents, pundits, and generals. If they think for themselves and read their nation’s history, Americans will know that their country is far worse off today than it was in 2001; their Islamist enemies are much stronger and more widely deployed around the world; their taxes are much higher and growing; and their civil liberties are far fewer. With such preparation and study, they also will not be surprised when the current situation markedly deteriorates in the years ahead and yields a new era that will be marked by significant attacks and combat in North America. When this occurs, U.S. land forces will be fighting at home and will return to Afghanistan — and perhaps before then be sent to Africa and the Levant — to do the job the politicians prevented them from doing between 2001 and 2014, namely, defeat the Islamists utterly.

Unless Americans read and understand their history, and begin to elect men and women willing — nay, eager — to abide by the Founders’ advice and the Constitution they wrote, this will be their future: wars abroad and increasingly war at home. And as always, these wars will be unnecessary wars that our political elites cultivate by ignoring the Founders’ advice and intervening in the affairs of other nations and peoples.