Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

1.) Question: Is it justifiable for America to go to war in Syria to get President Obama out of the box he created for himself by talking about a “red line” in the Syrian civil war, a conflict in which no genuine U.S. national interests are at risk?

Answer: No. Obama’s inexperience in foreign affairs and his seeming personal arrogance got him — and America — into this mess, and so little a man is he that he now refuses to accept responsibility for foolishly drawing the red line, instead blaming it on “the world.” Let him swing.

2.) Question: Will America’s credibility as a great military power be denigrated if it does not attack Syria?

Answer: No. We have already lost most of that credibility because Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, and their generals waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq they did not intend to win. The wanton waste of American military lives and money by these men, and their willingness to admit defeat to men armed with weapons from the Korean war, have largely destroyed America’s military credibility among allies and foes alike. Compared to failure in Iraq and Afghanistan, a failure to attack Syria is small potatoes.

3.) Question: Is it unacceptable for one side in a civil war — as in Syria — to use every weapon it needs to try to ensure its survival against an enemy who started the civil war and whose military power is supplied by the Islamist fighters who are at war with America and the West? In other words, must the legitimate government of Syria — which we and all the world recognized before the Syrian opposition started the civil war — commit suicide rather than defend itself and prevent the slaughter of Syria’s million-strong Alawite community?

Answer: No. The right to self-defense is the first law of nature and the Asaad government has as much right to exercise it as does — as Washington always and correctly insists to be the case — the Israeli government.

4.) Question: Is it acceptable for the great majority of Americans — who polls show are opposed to a Syrian war — to be ignored by both houses of Congress because they cannot offer the same slate of enticements that are available to their elected representatives from pro-Israel U.S. citizens and organizations, as well as from the Saudi and other Gulf regimes and their subordinates in the lobbies of the U.S. oil and arms-making industries?

Answer: No. Unless, of course, our country exists only to supply money and cannon fodder for attaining the foreign policy goals of Israel, the Saudis, and other Gulf tyrants while they stand safely on the sidelines.

5.) Question: Do American parents whose soldier-children were killed or maimed in Afghanistan and Iraq deserve to have their and their children’s sacrifice made a mockery of by having U.S. military forces ally themselves with and try to deliver victory to the same mujahideen who killed and maimed their offspring? Do the families of those killed and maimed on 9/11 merit the same treatment?

Answer: No.

6.) Question: Is it acceptable for Congress to fail to demand that the Executive Branch publicly explain to the American people the domestic threat that is posed by the substantial terrorist capability that Iran and Lebanese Hizballah have built inside the United States, a capability resulting from open borders and bipartisan political correctness, and one that could be activated if U.S. forces attack Syria?

Answer: No. If honest, such a briefing from the Executive Branch would make every American aware that border-control is a key national-defense requirement, as well as demonstrate to them how negligent both parties have been for decades in regard to their responsibility to protect the country by controlling its borders.

7.) Question: Does it make sense for Obama to undertake military action against Syria — which poses no threat to the United States — when he refused to use the U.S. military to try to save the lives of the Americans in Benghazi whom he and his lieutenants were watching on live video being attacked and finally killed?

Answer: No.

8.) Question: Would a decent man, respectful of the electorate’s wishes, distribute videos of the gas attacks in Syria in attempt to shame Americans into supporting his unnecessary war?

Answer: No. But Obama consistently has shown that he, his party, and their media accomplices will exploit the deaths of others — take the shootings in Colorado and Connecticut — to try to achieve their ideological goals, such as negating the 2nd Amendment.

9.) Question: Should the Congress and media continue to allow Obama to use his politically well-calculated ardor for an unnecessary war to distract Americans from his administration’s scandals, such as IRS attacks on Conservative groups and his administration’s expansion of NSA programs that have all but shredded the 4th Amendment?

Answer: No.

10.) Question: Given polling data that shows an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose an offensive war against the Syria regime, will the interventionists in both political parties begin to see that Americans are sick to death of both the unnecessary wars they start — such as Libya and Iraq — and the necessary wars they undertake but do not intend to win, such as Afghanistan? Will they begin to see what their constituents clearly see, that all unnecessary wars inevitably undermine the nation’s liberties, its economic prosperity, and its social and political cohesion?

Answer: No. As Secretary of State Kerry said this weekend, the bipartisan interventionists who want an offensive war against Syria are “humane and decent” people who — by implication — are much smarter and more moral persons than the people who elect and pay them, and whose children will die in their wars.

If you did not see Bret Baier’s program on FOX TV in the 6pm (Eastern) hour last night, and hear his Syria-focused discussion with U.S. Army General Jack Keane (ret’d), please try to pull it off the Internet and listen.

While mostly a rehashing all the we-must-attack-Syria things that have been said across the media in the past week, Mr. Baier had the common sense — and, may I say, the moral courage — to point out to General Keane that more than 60-percent of the American people oppose any U.S. military involvement in Syria. Mr. Baier asked if that finding ought to be an important influence in King Obama’s pending decision on whether or not to go to war.

A bit dismissively, General Keane responded that polls showing the strong and historically consistent non-interventionist beliefs of the American people should play no role in a U.S. president’s decision on an issue of national security. In essence, General Keane told Mr. Baier and all other Americans to be quiet, go home, eat a cookie, watch TV, and let the vaunted U.S. military — which, on recent evidence, could not beat the Mclean, Va, neighborhood watch committee — and our interventionist, bipartisan governing elite do as they wish regarding war with Syria. After all, these arrogant and self-proclaimed aristocrats always know what is best for a taxed-to-death riff-raff that is only needed every four years to elect someone running on a “no war” platform that will be utterly and cynically discarded once the presidency is won.

General Keane told all Americans, with admirable truth and bluntness, precisely how little influence they have on a federal government that is constitutionally their servant, and how little influence any American has on any president-cum-monarch’s ability to go to war whenever he pleases. Neither Keane, nor King Obama, nor that destroyer-of-Arizona John McCain give the ass of King Obama’s royal rat — they call the rodent “Holder” — about what the folks think who will be doing the paying and dying in the aristocracy’s coming war in Syria.

And the Congress, of course, has been almost silent while our current monarch leads us to war, having long ago unconstitutionally delegated its exclusive power to declare war to the president, and fearing a reduction in their stipends from Israel-First if they do anything that is, shall we say, America First, such as stopping the war and thereby obeying their constituents, defending the republic and it constitution, and taking a first step toward restoring legality and sanity to American war-making.

Very well done, Mr. Baier. Perhaps unconsciously, you let all Americans hear from the horse’s mouth a concise description of the fact that they are wholly irrelevant to the governing process, and even more impotent when it comes to the war-making process that will kill their soldier-children and increase and waste their taxes. You provided a short but memorable piece of television, and one which ought to leave its viewers with a voice speaking softly but clearly in the back of their minds, a voice saying an old American truism: “But when a long train of abuses & usurpations, evinces a design to reduce them [Americans] under absolute despotism it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, & to provide new guards for their future security.”

These days, truly food for thought.

The road leading to King Obama’s now apparently inevitable, U.S.-led offensive war on Syria continues to be marked by some mighty ridiculous occurrences:

• Polls show more than 60-percent of Americans oppose the zany notion that there is a U.S. national-security interest in Syria that must be defended with a U.S.-initiated offensive war. Pray, guess which courageous American politician has stood up to champion the people’s adamant opposition to war? You are right, none. Oddly, only Vladimir Putin — admittedly for Russia-specific reasons — is on the same wavelength as most Americans regarding Syria, with them opposing an offensive war that will yield a worse disaster for the United States and the world than King Obama’s glorious Libyan war.
• Our heroic, if addled Knesset-member-wannabees McCain and Graham warn that if we do not do “something” about the Syrian regime’s chemical weapons, Asaad may well turn them over to terrorist groups. Interesting point, but only if you say it fast and do not ponder it. If we destroy Asaad’s regime in favor of the al-Qaeda-led Syrian opposition, won’t those unkempt Islamist laddies inherit Syria’s chemical-weapons arsenal? As night follows day, if the U.S.-led West destroys the Syrian regime, our highly intelligent King Obama will have succeeded in arming al-Qaeda and its allies with Asaad’s chemical weapons.
• Just back from his latest date with plastic surgery and botox, Secretary of State Kerry says the chemical weapons attack in Syria was a “moral obscenity” that must be avenged. Kerry, it seems, is as lacking in basic logic as King Obama —that’s what they get for going to Harvard. But how can a few hundred opposition Syrians killed by chemical weapons in a war started by that opposition and its supporters be termed a “moral obscenity” requiring a U.S.-led offensive war, when no such description is made of the fact that the profit-craving AMA’s killer-doctors have murder 55 million unborn Americans in a worse-than-Hitler-and-maybe-Stalin holocaust conducted under the political protection cheerfully provided by Kerry, King Obama, Hillary, her bin-Laden protecting husband, and their other senior Democratic colleagues? At least Asaad was man enough to attack those who can and will fight back — something you will never, ever see King Obama or any Democrat do.
• Finally, still to be found at a yet-unreached bend in the road to King Obama’s offensive war against Syria is the real reason for all the over-acted agony expressed for Syrians killed by chemical weapons. Truth to tell, King Obama, Kerry, Susan Rice, McCain, Graham, the Brits Cameron and Hague, and most members of the House and the Senate could not give less of damn either about the dead Syrians or the weapons that killed them. What is happening is that the just-named pro-Israel automatons have, behind the scenes, heard the we-want war-with-Iran-now voice of their masters in Likud and, here at home, Israel-First. The coming U.S.-led offensive war on Syria will be designed to provoke Iran to attack some Western interest, an action that can, in turn, be used to “justify” a Western war with Iran. After failing for years to elicit the desired Iranian response with their computer worms, assassinations, and sanctions, King Obama and his domestic and foreign courtiers are hoping that their war on Syria will do the trick and facilitate an unneeded, unwanted (by Americans), and calamitous-for-U.S.-interests war with Iran, thereby pleasing that racist, bloodthirsty scoundrel Netanyahu, and ensuring the continued flow of campaign contributions to Republicans and Democrats from the anti-American U.S. citizens who run Israel-First.

Syria is getting to be an old and boring story, but it still is a deadly come-hither trap in which America may yet be bloodily ensnared by its bipartisan interventionists.

By now the story is familiar. A government in Damascus that is officially recognized by all the Great Powers, the UN, and other major international organizations is attacked by domestic dissidents who are supported and militarily powered by al-Qaeda and other mujahideen, and funded by the Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari regimes. The “International Community,” as usual, sides with any set of miscreants that can utter the word “democracy” and thereby ensures the currently ongoing bloodbath in Syria. President Obama, his party, and the Republicans also side with al-Qaeda and the Islamists against Asaad in a piece of thinking that is perfectly logical when you accept that none of that crowd cares about preserving America’s security and financial viability, or about how many American lives they waste.

Now, we have fresh reports that the Asaad regime has used chemical weapons against areas belonging to the Syrian government’s Islamist enemies and that we have — perhaps? maybe ? probably? certainly? — crossed Obama’s much-vaunted red line for sending the U.S. military to teach Asaad a lesson about how to be a good citizen of the world, or at least to be more kind to Syrian citizens than Obama ever intends to be toward U.S. citizens.

Obama is, of course, consulting with his interventionist brains trust — starting with the towering intellects of Biden, Kerry, Brennan, and Susan Rice — and the president will certainly order those senile Republican champions of all war, all the time, McCain and Graham, to demand a U.S. military assault on Asaad’s government.

Amidst the developing momentum for the U.S. to enter another war that will strengthen al-Qaeda and its allies — like the one Obama fought in Libya and the anti-democratic one in Egypt he authorized this month — perhaps it is worth reviewing three salient and crystal clear facts:

1st : The United States has no genuine national-security interests in Syria. If all Syrians turn up dead tomorrow morning it would have precisely no impact on security of the United States. Syrians share this characteristic with those living in most areas of the world outside North America, which is the main reason that America would fight very few wars if it ever begins to elect adults to the presidency and the Congress.

2nd: Unless America is attacked first, no U.S. president has the constitutional authority to take America to war without a formal declaration of war by Congress. Asaad surely is not going to stage an amphibious invasion of America, although a month-long visit from Syria’s Republican Guard could do nothing but good for the now-occupied Political/Hollywood summer-vacation cesspools in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard. Therefore, the Senate and House leaders ought to tell Ol’ Red-Line Barack that there will be dollars and American lives for a Syrian war only if (a) he formally asks for a declaration of war and (b) the Congress believes his justification for a war and votes in favor of taking 330 million Americans into an unnecessary war against the Syrian Superpower.

3rd : Today’s status quo in Syria benefits U.S. national-security interests without Washington having to take any action at all:

a.) The Syrian army, Lebanese Hizaballah guerrillas, and Iran’s soldiers are killing large numbers of America’s enemies among al-Qaeda, its allies, and their supporters. Iran and Syria also are spending themselves further into bankruptcy.

b.) At the same time, Al-Qaeda and its allies — America’s enemies — are killing large numbers of the Syrian army, Lebanese Hizballah guerrillas, and Iran’s soldiers, all of whom Washington describes as America’s true-blue enemies.

c.) And much of this mayhem is being at least partially facilitated by the money and expensive equipment being sent to each side by other of America’s enemies — Russia, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, for example.

For all of these realistic, common sense, beneficial-to-America, and — dare I say? — America First reasons, as well as for the even more important constitutional reasons cited above, Senate and House leaders ought to lay down the constitutional law — that is, no Congressional declaration, no war — to the supposed constitutional lawyer Obama and thereby make him obey the law for the first time in his presidency.

“The views of men can only be known, or guessed at, by their words or actions.”

George Washington, 1799

Before the Obama administration, I would have dismissed outright the idea that the Rolling Stone-journalist Michael Hastings might have been executed by the federal government because he was about to publish an expose about CIA chief John Brennan. Today, however, I am inclined to go a bit slower in dismissing the idea. I still doubt the possibility of such an abomination — partially, I admit, because I hope it is not true — but until the whole matter is thoroughly and publicly investigated and documented the idea should not be ruled out.

If I was asked why I would want to go slow before dismissing the idea that the federal government murdered Mr. Hastings, I would answer that the power of the examples set by Barack Obama, in his two terms, and by John Brennan, in his work for Clinton and Obama, give me pause. From my perspective, both men consistently have demonstrated themselves to be completely comfortable with creating situations, or permitting situations to exist in which Americans — civilian and military — are killed, in essence, by their own government’s decisions, actions, or inactons. And what would these situations be, one might ask? Well, let me start with the following ten items.

1. John Brennan prevented the capture or killing of Osama bin Laden before 9/11. He was perfectly at ease with staying America’s strong right arm — in the form of a CIA operation vetted and approved by U.S. Special Forces Command/Fort Bragg — in favor of letting his Saudi government “friends” get bin Laden for America. This was not a mistake, Brennan was currying favor with his Bedouin buddies, who in fact never did anything more than talk about getting bin Laden. One wonders if Brennan had read Bob Baer’s Atlantic essay in which he quotes Saudi Prince Bandar’s public admission that the Saudis always take very good care of their “friends” in the U.S. government after they retire? In any event, should anyone ever bother to look for the person who started building the trail that has led — so far — to the deaths of c. 3,000 people on 9/11 and all of the U.S. military personnel and civilians who since 9/11 have been killed or maimed by the mujahideen in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere, there is no need to look further than Mr. Brennan and President Clinton.
2. In a smug, self-righteous manner, Obama and Brennan ended the CIA’s rendition and interrogation programs, thereby cutting off an invaluable and continuingly refreshed channel of intelligence collection, one that allowed U.S. forces to counter some of the operations and growth of the al-Qaeda-led Islamist movement. This program was especially important because Obama, Rice, Biden, Mrs. Clinton, and their lickspittle senior generals sent U.S. soldiers and Marines to war as the targets for the mujahideen, not as their killers, and so renditions and interrogations were America’s major if still inadequate tool for protecting Americans at home and abroad. Obama and Brennan gleefully blinded the U.S. Intelligence Community by ending rendition — and then attacked U.S. civil liberties by enormously expanding the NSA collection program so as to replace the intelligence lost by ending renditions — because both men are quite at ease with the dead U.S. citizens that have and will result from the CIA’s lack of rendition-derived data. And, after all, for Obama and Brennan hurting Americans by destroying their Bill of Rights is much more fun than killing our Islamist enemies or, as Brennan would deceitfully refer to them, “Violent Extremists” who have nothing to do with Islam.
3. Obama and Brennan — with Mrs. Clinton and Susan Rice — have been consistent liars about the motivation, legitimate religiosity, intent, manpower, durability, growing lethal capabilities, and ongoing geographic spread of our Islamist enemies. Brennan, of course, is the crown prince of liars in this regard, glibly describing “jihad” to Obama’s media pets not as the thoroughly martial concept it is, but rather as an idea akin to some kind of benign Rotary Club-like activity. As a result, most Americans have yet to recognize that they are engaged in a full-scale and expanding war with militant Islam, and that many more of them will be killed by the Islamist fighting forces about which they have been duped by the American-killing lies of Obama, Brennan, Clinton, Rice, etc.
4. Obama was perfectly comfortable with his administration’s “Fast & Furious” program, a daft but inexpensive program that even a pea-brain should have seen held a near-certain likelihood of blow-back in which Americans would be killed. One has been killed; more will be. Obama and his Capo Holder clearly are comfortable with that reality.
5. Obama’s decision to announce a date-certain for U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan told the Taliban and its allies that America had decided to lose the war and was surrendering. Every soldier and Marine who has died or been maimed in Afghanistan since that announcement is the direct and unshirkable responsibility of Obama, who kept them there to protect his 2012 election prospects. And so too, every American who is killed or maimed by the mujahideen in the years ahead will be Obama’s responsibility because he knowingly is turning Afghanistan back to the Taliban, its al-Qaeda allies, and their funders and enablers in the governments of Pakistan and the Arab Peninsula. Obama seems comfortable with this reality and the American corpses it will yield.
6. To shine Obama’s apple, John Brennan disclosed to the media that the U.S. and its allies had a human source in an Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arabian (AQAP) group while it was preparing to install explosives in ink cartridges for printers and then place those bombs on cargo aircraft. Since the original AQAP operation already had been stopped, the only point of Brennan’s deliberate leak was to take credit for himself and his boss. He thereby publicly identified a source who may have been useful in stopping future anti-U.S. attacks. In short, Brennan — probably jointly with Obama — weighed future, successful anti-AQAP operations against winning more fawning praise from the media, and the latter won by a mile — and so more Americans will die.
7. Benghazi I: Anyone who has ever worked in the Intelligence Community — especially after 9/11 — will tell you that Obama, Brennan, and Mrs. Clinton all knew that the U.S. ambassador to Libya had called repeatedly and urgently for more protection for U.S. personnel and facilities in Benghazi. It also is certain that these three disgraceful individuals met on the issue, discussed a response, and jointly and knowingly decided to leave the Ambassador and his subordinates vulnerable to the Islamist attack that killed them. This result was more acceptable than jeopardizing the plausibility of the gross lie they were telling about how peaceful and near-to-democracy the “new Libya” was. Once again for Obama and Brennan, dead Americans are just fine as long as there is no erosion of Obama’s position in the political polls. And in the case of Benghazi, Obama and Brennan also were able to enjoy watching the murder of Americans on a live video feed. (NB: And who changed the talking points from CIA truth to Susan Rice’s lies? Well, the National Security Council’s Terrorism Czar’s main job under both parties — in my experience — is to make sure nothing gets blamed on the president. Mr. Brennan, of course, had the last review on the talking points that Susan Rice used to lie to the media. The talking points also included no mention of al-Qaeda or Islam in discussing the fatal attack, another standard tool Brennan uses to deceive Americans and ensure more of them die.)
8. Benghazi II: Nearly a year went by after the Benghazi attack before the American public learned that 400 surface-to-air missiles had been acquired by the Islamist fighters who killed the Americans in Benghazi. For all of those months, not a single member of the American flying public knew that those missiles were missing and had to be assumed to pose a threat to their lives whenever they stepped on an airliner anywhere in the world. Again, Obama and Brennan decided that the former’s election and subsequent political standing were much more important than alerting Americans to this new and highly lethal threat to air travel.
9. Egypt: Obama, Brennan, Mrs. Clinton, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham have been an effective bipartisan interventionist team, one that has ensured that many more Americans will be killed by Egyptian Islamists and their allies. Because America’s bipartisan interventionists are terminally arrogant, willing to cause unlimited numbers of American deaths by motivating Islamists to attack, and are to-the-bone ignorant about how the world works outside North America, Obama’s Egypt policy — if it can be called that — has admirably paved the road leading America to endless war with Islam. When put into plain English, Osama’s statements to Americans about what has gone on in Egypt since 2011 amount to the following:

Obama first said, “We support Mubarak but urge a peaceful resolution.”

Then, “Mubarak has to go.”

Then, “The Egyptian demonstrators are secular democrats.”

Then, “Mubarak is gone, the democrats won, and coming elections will solidify the ‘new, secular, and democratic Egypt’.”

Then, “The Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists won in a free and fair election.”

Then, a period of silence while Obama and his NATO peers probably authorized covert operations to organize, fund, and motivate the until-then-hapless “democratic” opposition to cooperate with the Egyptian military, stage large public demonstrations, and thereby create a situation where the Egyptian generals could — with clear if muted Western cheers — overthrow a legitimate, popularly elected government and imprison its leaders.

Then, Obama said, “It was not a coup and we urge new and peaceful elections.”

Then, “We urge the Brotherhood to negotiate and reconcile with those who stole power from them through the illegitimate non-coup.”

Then, “We are sending the our ace Muslim haters McCain and Graham to persuade the Brotherhood to seek reconciliation with the Egyptian generals.”

Then, “We hope the generals will not kill too many Brotherhood members while moving to eradicate all opposition to the newly installed and illegitimate non-coup regime which will rule until a round of dependably fixed-elections can be conducted.”

Then, late last week, “You Egyptian generals should be less nasty. We are going to delay military exercises with you, but worry not, you are our non-coupists and you will still get 1.3 billion in U.S. military aid.”

Thus, Obama, Brennan, Mrs. Clinton and their Republican allies have been wrong at every step in their continuous intervention to make sure that Egypt’s effort at self-determination recreates a regime Mubarakian in all but name. They have taken intervention to new extremes in order to destroy an operating democratic process that produced an outcome they abhorred. In doing so, they have made sure that no Muslim — radical, moderate, or nominal — will ever again be fooled by Washington’s public support for democracy in the Muslim world. And they have put countless American heads on the Islamists’ chopping block by greatly increasing the credibility of the Islamists’ core argument, which, in paraphrase, is “the Americans do not want democracy for Muslims, they want to destroy Islam and its followers.” This reality, however, will have no impact whatever on our bilateral interventionists. They will — with Obama, Kerry, Brennan, and some senior, senile Republicans in the van — continue pursuing an interventionist policy which benefits only the Islamist movement and America’s undertakers.

10.) Ibragim Todashev: Perhaps this young man’s apparent execution by the FBI and their law-enforcement colleagues is what tips the scales for me in terms of arguing that we should not rule out the possibility of the federal government having killed Mr. Hastings. As you probably will not recall — because the Obama-adoring media have buried the story — Ibragim Todashev is said to have known all about the Tsarnaev bothers who conducted the attack on the Boston marathon. During the FBI’s interview of Todashev in his Orlando, Florida, apartment, the FBI shot Todashev through the heart and in the back of the head. The media first described the incident as one in which Todashev attacked the sainted if reliably bumbling FBI. Then the story changed and the “authorities” said Todashev “lunged” at the FBI officers with a “weapon” in hand.. Then the story changed again, leaving the impression that there was no lunge, no weapon, but plenty of lead pumped into Todashev. Then the story disappeared. The media now reports that the FBI is blocking the return of Todashev’s body to his father, and also will not allow the Florida medical examiner’s report on Todashev’s corpse and cause of death to be made public. I wonder what Todashev knew about the Tsarnaev brothers, about who they were working with, about what other plans they had, or about what other Obama administration lie or fiasco the Tsarnaev brothers’ activities touched on? Were the brothers Tsarnaev about to be hired as IRS/ObamaCare Enforcers? After all their talents were perfect for that task. Anyway, and again, for Obama, Brennan, and company, the dead folks in Boston, as well as the deaths of Americans that may yet result from the unpublicized data held by Todashev are a worthwhile price to pay if killing him can foreclose the chance of any negative political fall out that might result if Americans learned what Todashev knew.

This list could, of course, be expanded, but the ten items above ought to do for starters in attempt to discern consistent patterns of behavior and the ends to which those behaviors have and will lead. Indeed, how else are we to judge the attitudes and intent of men like Obama and Brennan except, as our first president suggested, by their words and actions. Given how much more Obama, Brennan, and their senior colleagues value political power when weighed against American lives — and given the murderous extent they have shown themselves willing to go to keep that power — Mr. Hasting’s death indeed requires a very close investigation. For me, at least, I can no longer rest easy with just hoping that the federal government under Obama has not become a new Murder Inc. designed to kill Americans, or allow Americans to be killed, in order to protect its political viability.

AFTERWARD: Just as I finished this piece, I took a quick look at GOOGLE news to see if there was anything new about Mr. Hastings, and, lo and behold, it appears that Massa’ Barack cracked the whip up at the Big White House and his servile journalists have emerged from the slave quarters to attack those questioning the cause of Mr. Hasting‘s death. These forelock-tugging, Y’ez-boss reporters damned those looking into Mr. Hasting’s death, accusing them of being amateurish and scare-mongering. With Obama’s media goons now in action, Mr. Hasting’s death more than ever merits a thorough and public investigation. But, of course, that process cannot begin until the few remaining non-servile journalists and the adults in the reading public are able to halt the paralyzing waves of side-splitting laughter brought on by the idea of such Obama-worshipping rags as Mother Jones, the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and CNN having the monumental nerve to call other journalists “amateurs.”

A major factor in what seems to be the terminal decline of the United States lies in the reality that most Americans appear to have little or no pride in their country or any understanding of its need for an independent, flexible, and largely neutral foreign policy.

They elect, for example, presidents like George W, Bush, a good man who surrounded himself with greedy, war-wanting advisers and who, with them, invaded Iraq and thereby opened what is apparently an unstoppable slide toward bankruptcy and a war without end with the Muslim world. Or like Barack Obama, a decidedly ungood man who defines his party’s compassionate, humane, and equal regard for the well-being of “all Americans” by repeatedly interfering on the side of Black Americans in ongoing judicial proceedings, by continuing a violence-promoting presidential tradition of working against democratically elected Muslim governments, and by hiring 16,000 presumably armed IRS agents to grind every last penny out of the citizenry for a health plan he and they know will complete America’s bankruptcy. How any American proud of his county could elect either man — especially Obama — is hard to understand.

But let us leave aside presidential politics for the moment and look at the single issue that defines the mendacity, cowardice, and lack of respect for America and its independence that is harbored by the U.S. bipartisan governing elite — America’s relationship with Israel. In no other area of Washington’s foreign and domestic policies is there such a clear lack of concern and respect for genuine U.S. interests shown by the governing elite and those who vote them into office.

Now, before the U.S.-citizen-run-and-funded Israel-First thugocracy issues its traditional, lying, and debate-silencing description of the foregoing as anti-Semitic, let me say that personally I do not care what Israel does or not do in the Middle East. While neither Israel, the United States, the Maldives nor any other nation-state has a right to “survive” — this bit of fantasy was crafted by Israel and its Western apologists — Israel, like every other nation, has a legitimate, unquestionable right to defend itself via whatever means it decides are needed to try to ensure national survival, and this regardless of whatever that increasingly delusional farce known as “international law” has to say. If Israel’s national security requires that it must steal Palestinian land on which to build ever-expanding settlements, treat Palestinians as colonists, or even wage war until the Palestinians are convincingly defeated and pliable or are driven out of Palestine altogether, so be it. The Palestinians and their co-religionists, of course, have an equal, reciprocal right.

Nor am I offended or surprised with what Israel’s intelligence services, and its thousands of fifth column U.S. citizens and dozens of mouth-piece media pundits, do in the United States, where their activities include corrupting our political system; facilitating and paying for media lies about the “mutually beneficial” U.S.-Israel relationship; suborning U.S. citizens to spy for Israel; stealing U.S. military, nuclear, and industrial secrets; and openly making our last three presidents (Clinton, Bush, and Obama) and most members of the Senate and House appear to be — please pardon the expression — Israel’s bitches.

All of the foregoing activities are part of the age-old intelligence game which every nation-state plays. The only reason for Americans to complain is that any nation-state with an ounce of self-respect and the goal of maintaining its independence would do its best to eradicate such nefarious, national-security damaging operations conducted by an enemy nation — and Israel, just like Russia, China, or Iran, stands self-indicted as enemy of the United States because it conducts these intelligence activities in America. (NB: For an excellent, fact-based description and analysis of the extent and cost of the anti-U.S. activities conducted by the Israeli government and their U.S. citizen fifth-column, based on U.S. government documents acquired via the FOIA process, see the publications of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRMEP, http://www.irmep.org).

The tragic rub for America, therefore, does not come from the state of Israel doing what all nations have a right to do — self-defense — or from Israel conducting the intelligence operations which are part and parcel of each nation-state’s national-defense strategy. Indeed, this entire discussion has very little to do with the small, inconsequential, and probably transitory state of Israel.

Rather, it has everything to do with the devastating impact of the U.S.-Israel relationship on America, an impact which can only be attributed to the craven and venal readiness of our bipartisan governing elite, other nominal U.S. citizens, and a media that largely is Israel-First’s cat‘s paw, to grovel and accept from Israel and its U.S.-citizen supporters any kind of degrading insult and economic or national-security damage and not respond with any effective campaign by U.S. counter-intelligence forces. A nation with self-respect and a concern for its posterity would labor mightily to halt such actions, and to arrest, try, convict, and, pray God, execute the perpetrators — especially those who are U.S. citizens — who are found guilty of espionage and/or treason.

Regarding the hellish predicament in which elected U.S. officials have put America, one must note, for example, Sunday‘s announcement by the Israeli government that it will build 1,200 new houses in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem. There is no argument here that Israel lacks the right to build those houses, but it must be recognized that the timing of the announcement amounts to an attack on the United States and its all-but-dissipated international prestige and reputation for even-handedness. It also is an Israeli government reminder to the world that the current U.S. government is its reliable, bought-and-paid-for toady.

Israel’s decision comes on the eve of another U.S.-instigated round of Israel-Palestine peace talks, and just days after the U.S. Senate-cum-Knesset members McCain and Graham helped solidify the power of Egypt’s new, Israel-protecting military dictatorship by helping that military justify the exclusion from power of the legitimately elected Muslim Brotherhood. (NB: One wonders how much U.S. taxpayer money the Israel-First operatives McCain and Graham spent — with Obama’s approval — to bribe Egypt’s military to conduct Sunday’s helicopter strikes on the mujahideen operating near the Sinai-Israel border?)

It is hard to imagine how many more U.S. military and intelligence-service lives will be lost, how many more years of war the U.S. will wage against the mujahideen, and how many more hundreds of billions of dollars will be wasted because, in fortnight, McCain, Graham, Rice, Kerry, and Obama have knowingly done all in their power to reinforce the correct perceptions of America’s Islamist enemies; namely, that the U.S. governing elite will swallow and then smilingly acquiesce in any public degradation that issues from the Israeli regime and (b) that it will keep taking any and all actions that protect Israel even though such actions incite the Muslim world’s steadily deepening hatred for America, and ensure that American kids will be fighting and dieing in an endless war with Islam.

When Osama bin Laden was alive he argued that the leaders of the United States, its Western allies, and Israel regarded “Muslim lives as cheap” as compared to the worth of their own citizens’ lives. What he could not imagine, I think, is that at least U.S. leaders and those who vote for them have little or no regard for the lives of U.S. citizens, considering them cheap and expendable as long as the status quo in U.S.-Israel policy can be maintained and Israel-First kept happy and contributing money to Republican and Democratic election campaigns.

At day’s end, the U.S. governing elite and those who elect it have knowingly sacrificed America’s foreign-policy independence by committing the country to a set of pro-Israel policies drafted by multiple Israeli governments and paid for by U.S.-citizen Israel-Firsters, policies which motivate and multiply America’s Islamist enemies. This is a great, signal, and even enviable victory for the Israeli nation-state and its U.S. fifth column, but it is one that primarily is attributable not to those entities but to the near-traitorous behavior of America’s bipartisan governing elite, its media supporters, and voters who take no pride in their country and appear to care not a whit about whether it recovers the foreign-policy independence that is a sine qua non for survival in this increasingly Hobbesian world.

Amidst all the demands for harsh treatment for Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden — demands which I support — perhaps it is time to consider similar treatment for those presidents, senators, congressman and media pundits who eagerly act as the agents of a foreign power and not as the servants and defenders of our now fading Republic. What, after all, will cause the greatest damage to America, leaked intelligence programs or an endless, bloody, and bankrupting war against 1.5 billion Muslims fought overseas and, inevitably, inside the United States? The U.S.-citizen behaviors that lead to both disasters can only be described as disloyalty bordering on treason.

While the frequent, dastardly lies of President Obama, CIA Chief John Brennan, and their media acolytes about the demise of al-Qaeda and its allies unravel, Obama, Susan Rice, John Kerry, John McCain, and Lindsay Graham also are knowingly stoking the flames of Islam’s religious war against the United States by intervening in the Palestine-Israel war and Egyptian politics.

Take, for example, the newly begun Israel-Palestine “peace talks.” There is, of course, no chance of peace, unless all Palestinians are forever willing to be Israel’s obedient, impotent, and forelock-tugging subjects. First, the PLO represents half of Palestinians and the democratically elected Hamas government — which represents the rest — has not been invited to the talks. Second, no viable Palestinian state is possible because (a) for decades Israel has deliberately cut up Palestinian territory with roads, military positions, and settlements that leave little contiguous territory with which to compose a “state,” and (b) because it keeps seizing Palestinian land to build security walls and settlements. Third, more than half of Palestinians — and most of the Muslim world — will never accept peace with the Israelis, whom they regard as the U. S-protected enemies of their God and faith, as well as plundering and murderous land thieves. In addition, Hamas and other Palestinian Islamists — not to mention al Qaeda and its allies — know the Arab Spring has created an enormous, if still potential opportunity to draw large quantities of Israeli blood because it toppled or weakened the Arab tyrannies that border Israel and long helped the Israelis keep their borders secure.

At bottom, the Obama administration with the support of the Israel-First-supported shills on both sides of the aisle in Congress — there are about 535 of them — are foisting a charade on the American people. The talks will go nowhere, but when they fail Americans will give Obama credit for trying because they know such talks always fail. The one question that remains unanswered, then, is why did the Israelis and Palestinians agree to this round of useless talks? The answer is apparent if you listen closely. Those sounds you hear are the Israelis and Palestinians — both in the top rank when it comes to venality — slurping up funds in a cash trough filled by American taxpayers. (NB: After the Palestinians failed to walk out of the talks when the Pakistan-bound Kerry left the Israel-First Capo Martin Indyk in charge of the talks, one also must conclude the Palestinians will to accept any level of degrading public insult to grab U.S. cash.) The two parties provided the Potemkin talks Obama needed to remind Americans’ that he is statesman as well as a lawless thug, and so they will walk away with millions of dollars in weapons, training, subsidies for various programs in their own countries, and other forms of “aid” courtesy of the American taxpayer. And they will be back for more failure and swag whenever Obama or another Democratic or Republican president needs a boost for their foreign-policy credentials.

Another example of national-security damaging intervention can be seen in the presence in Cairo of Republican war-lovers McCain and Graham, at Obama’s direction, to negotiate a post-coup “democratic, power-sharing arrangement” with the Egyptian military. What that probably means, of course, is that part of the price Israel exacted from Obama for agreeing to a session of useless peace talks is an effort by the United States to stabilize Egyptian politics by making sure that the legitimately elected ex-president Muhammad Morsi, his Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and the increasingly popular Salafists get no meaningful power in Egypt’s new military dictatorship. The war-boys will also insist that the Egyptian military conduct an election that has the trappings of democracy but which will elect people — including a few women to please the crazed Ms. Rice and the crazier UN Ambassador Samantha Powers — who will do the Egyptian generals’ bidding. The cost, again, will be increased military and “humanitarian and economic” aid to Egypt from the American taxpayers.

The dangers for America in Obama’s interventions are clear. In the time-honored tradition of all post-Eisenhower presidents, Obama is getting the United States more deeply involved a pair of issues that are utterly unrelated to the genuine requirements of U.S. national security; indeed; both efforts undermine that security.

In the first case, not a single aspect of American security would be impacted if Palestine or Israel or both disappeared from the planet tomorrow. The correct position for U.S. interests on this issue is for official Washington to wish both countries a prosperous future; declare American neutrality regarding their war; offer to sell weapons to both sides on a cash-and-carry basis; and then offer a free airline ticket and an AK-47 to the war zone to all U.S. citizens who love Israel or Palestine as their country of first allegiance. This would keep us clear of a religious war in which we have no stake, and just might partially decorrupt the American political system by sending abroad a number of the pro-Israel fifth columnists who masquerade as conservative Republicans and mainstream Democrats but put Israel‘s interests before America‘s, people such as McCain, Graham, Schumer, Levin, Clinton(s), Obama, Biden, Lieberman, Limbaugh, Bloomberg, Romney, Cheney, Bush, Levin, Hannity, Bolton, Giuliani, etc., etc. etc.

In the second case, all Egyptian parties and players know that Washington’s only interest in Egypt is to destroy Islamism and to arrange a government that will shield Israel by its willingness to kill its own citizens and adhere to the Camp David agreements. Because Egyptians are not stupid simply because they are Muslims and have few Ivy League diplomas, all will see — and this includes Egypt’s Islamists, democrats, atheists, technocrats, Christians, etc. — that Obama and his war-loving senatorial allies do not care if the country is ruled by a military dictatorship as long as that tyranny conducts periodic, democratic-seeming sham elections; protects Israel by killing its own citizens to seal the border with Gaza; and wipes out Islamist fighters in the Sinai.

The ill-conceived nature of this intervention is two-fold: (a) genuine U.S. national security interests are unaffected by who rules in Cairo; the Suez Canal is our only national-security interest in Egypt and any Cairo regime will keep it open as it produces indispensable revenue; and (b) because those Washington favors — Egypt’s “democrats” and “liberals” — have no chance to prevail because they are as craven and effete as their Western counterparts — note perpetual adolescent Obama’s cowering refusal to meet Putin and assert U.S. interests — and will be annihilated when the now inevitable war begins between the Egyptian military and the Egyptian Islamists. When the Egyptian Islamists, aided by mujahideen from around the world, emerge on top — and they will, though it may take years — they will recall that while Washington’s Republican war-boys talked all-party democracy, Obama’s intervening administration and its Republican allies played the key role in ensuring the temporary consolidation of Egyptian military’s post-coup power.

Obama’s Republican-supported intervention in these two areas of non-interest to U.S. security again underscores that today there are only two parties in the United States: (a) the bipartisan and interventionist elite and their ideological, fifth-column, and globalist supporters and funders (AKA: The Tyranny), and (b) the rest of us who are taxed to death for the privilege of paying for, and seeing our children die in their unnecessary, intervention-caused wars. The real question at hand is how can Americans change this reality? It seems clear that intervention cannot be stopped at the ballot box, as the interventionists do whatever they want as soon as each election is over. What other options are there?

On the issue of options, there are many to consider. But one can get off to no better start in the pursuit of foreign-policy sanity than to reread the works of John Dickinson, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine written in 1775 and 1776. While only one of a range of options for dealing with the interventionists’ bloody and bankrupting tyranny, the works of these gentlemen have the virtue of proven success.

More than a decade ago, Osama bin Laden appeared in a brief video to speak about several issues. One of them was to advise the Islamic world that they should expect the U.S. military to be defeated by Islam, the Taliban, and its allies in Afghanistan. The other was to suggest that Muslims should be prepared to watch the U.S. government strangle the civil liberties of Americans in the name of prosecuting its war against the Islamist mujahideen.

A dozen years on, the late-al-Qaeda chief’s first prediction has come true. The U.S. military is leaving Afghanistan after an utter defeat inflicted on it by America’s two most lethal enemies, the Islamist mujahideen and Barack Obama’s administration.

And in the last week, we have learned that the bin Laden’s second prediction has come to pass in the Obama administration’s expansion of a Bush-era program to collect electronic information on U.S. citizens who are entirely unrelated to the war against the Islamists. The Obama-expanded program authorizes the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect, exploit, and store in databases all the electronic communications of all Americans. The administration’s defense of the NSA program is that this comprehensive collection effort against U.S. citizens stopped one terrorist attack; namely, that of Najibullah Zazi against the New York subway system. The media already have begun to chip away at this claim, noting that publicly available data shows the British and/or the Pakistanis intelligence services appear to have first brought Zazi to the attention of U.S. authorities.

Apparently realizing that the Zazi example might be a weak reed to lean on, Obama‘s Director of National Intelligence, General James Clapper, is telling the media about the “grievous harm” the leak of the ongoing NSA program has done to U.S. security. Clapper clearly is hoping to stoke the patriotism of Americans and win their support for the witch hunt to identify the leakers that NSA started by asking the FBI to conduct a criminal investigation. Using this tack, Clapper, NSA, Obama, the judges, and the senators and congressman of both parties who approved the collection operation are hoping to distract Americans from their intentional shredding of the 4th Amendment, as well as the last bits of trust Americans had in the federal government.

My own view is that Americans ought not to fall for this diversionary effort. Despite Clapper’s tearful whining about the terrible blow the leak has and will deliver to U.S. national security, he is being intentionally deceitful. He is playing to the stereotype most Americans hold of the mujahideen as men who are uneducated, medieval lunatics out to indiscriminately kill all Americans and destroy all of modernity. This, of course, is another sadly effective lie that has long been preached to Americans by both parties. That the Islamists view Western society and lifestyles as libertine and pagan is undeniable, but their skills in the use of such tools of modernity as weapons, communications gear, computers, the Internet, etc. are first rate —ask the U.S. generals defeated by them and Obama in Iraq and Afghanistan. The one place where there will be no surprise that the Obama administration is collecting all of the electronic communications of 309 million Americans is in the headquarters of al-Qaeda and its allies. They assumed that reality long ago, and have tired to adapt their communications security to respond to the challenge.

If Americans are surprised by Obama’s deliberate attack on the Constitution, they have only themselves to blame. From his first months in office, Barack Obama has consistently demonstrated his contempt for Americans and their Constitution, as well as an intention to have his administration — and especially Attorney General Holder’s Justice Department — treat them in a lying and lawless manner. For example:

• Holder’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, about the Fast-and-Furious Program, which was meant to be the opening act of Obama’s attack on the 2nd Amendment and which killed a U.S. Border Patrol officer.
• The Obama administration’s aggressive campaign of lies — led by Nancy Pelosi — meant to disguise the disastrous economic impact of Obama care.
• The use of Obama’s health care plan to violate the First Amendment rights of the tens of millions of Americans of all religious persuasions who oppose abortion.
• Obama’s shameless exploitation of dead movie-goers in Colorado and dead children in Connecticut to seek to destroy the 2nd Amendment (while protecting his wealthy, violence-inculcating Hollywood friends), perhaps sensing that his administration’s lawlessness would eventually drive any American with a lick of commonsense to have an AK-47 in the closet.
• Susan Rice’s lies about what happened at Benghazi. (Anyone who is or has been in the Intelligence Community knows Rice knew the truth about Benghazi but knowingly lied for Obama and Mrs. Clinton by using the talking points doctored-up with the okay of now-CIA Director John Brennan.)
• Holder’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, about his direct role in the Department of Justice’s operations against FOX’s James Rosen and the Associated Press.
• The IRS’s deliberate and probably White House-directed effort to prevent Tea Party groups and other American conservatives from effectively participating in the 2012 presidential election, perhaps ensuring Obama’s small victory margin. (Imagine for a moment, what Holder and the Department of Justice would be doing to destroy the IRS and lynch its leaders if it had hamstrung Black, feminist, pro-abortion, environmental, Hispanic, and pro-homosexual groups during the 2012 election.)
• Clapper’s perjury, if perjury is lying under oath or to the Congress, in telling the House’s intelligence committee that no “intentional” collection of U.S. citizens’ electronic communications was occurring.

This partial summary of the Obama administration’s lawlessness is deeply troubling, but pales in comparison to the Obama-authorized expansion of the NSA collection operation exposed last week. That operation strikes at the very heart of what the Founders believed was essential for the survival of our Republic; namely, Americans’ trust in and affection for their federal government. From here on out, not one American can be sure:

• That his/her communications with a doctor are not being read by the Health and Human Services Department, the IRS, and any other Obama goon who is playing in the enforcement of the administration’s heath care disaster.
• That his/her communications with a lawyer about a case involving the federal government are not being read by the Department of Justice, White House political operatives, federal judges, or other federal government officials. Indeed, how do we know that the Department of Justice did not read the e-mail of those who prepared the first challenge to Obama care that reached the Supreme Court? And how do we know they are not reading the e-mail of those who prepared the First Amendment-related challenge to Obama care now working its way toward the Supreme Court?
• That his/her communications with a priest, minister, rabbi, or imam are not being read by an administration led by a man and a party, and supported by the mainstream media, that lust to remove all traces of all religions from the public square.
• That his/her inquiry about or order for a weapon via electronic means is not being placed on a federal government register of gun owners.
• That his/her opinions expressed in the various means of electronic communication are not being inserted into a dossier that could be used to smear or blackmail him/her if it becomes politically useful to do so.

The foregoing are just the reaction of this non-lawyer to what seems to me to be the most fierce, varied, damaging, and prolonged attack on the U.S. Constitution that I have seen in my lifetime. Those smarter in the law and more politically savvy, I am sure, will try to find a brilliantly deceitful way to disguise the Obama administration’s well-documented authoritarian bent and actions, but I am not sure Americans are going to buy it this time.

What Americans will do about the attack on their Constitution it is another story. Impeachment and conviction of those elected officials — Democrat and Republican — and the judges who authorized, expanded, or condoned the all-inclusive NSA collection program seem absolutely necessary, as does the firing of those senior bureaucrats and military officers in the Intelligence Community, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and Department of Justice who designed the operation. Is this is enough to restore Americans’ trust in and affection for their federal government? Well, I guess we will have to wait and see. One thing does seem clear, however, and that is a failure to remove those responsible for deliberately violating the 4th Amendment would draw some very ominous battle lines in American society.

Egyptian president Mohammad Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood were elected a year ago in what the so-called “International Community” judged a free and fair election. They and Egypt’s Salafist movement garnered nearly 65-percent of the vote. On Friday, Egypt’s military intervened in the political arena and overthrew and detained Morsi.

Why? Because those who deservedly and miserably lost to the Islamists in 2012 did not care to wait for the next election to try to defeat Morsi. Those in the West who have contended that some Muslims are not capable of democracy have been proven right, although the proof lies in the behavior of those pro-democracy Egyptians the West praises and supports. Egypt’s Islamists, on the other hand, played by the political game’s rules and — if the military’s diktat holds — they have lost and war is now their main option.

What next in Egypt? After a period of post-coup semi-quiet, I think, the likeliest answer will be escalating violence for the foreseeable future. If the Brotherhood and their Salafist allies cannot hold the power to govern they legitimately won by an overwhelming margin, they will decide quite correctly that it is time to reach for the Kalashnikovs. They will be encouraged to make this decision by the Western-dominated International Community‘s tepid criticism of Morsi’s anti-democratic overthrow, which was made while it loudly applauded the Egyptian army‘s promise of new elections relatively soon.

Egypt’s increasingly popular and bin Laden-like Salafist movement was never happy with the idea of Western-style popular elections nor did they believe the West would tolerate a Sharia government. Still, they put their religious scruples on the backburner and participated in the 2012 vote. To the West’s shock and horror, they finished on the Brotherhood’s heals.

Today the Salafists know that all future Egyptian elections will be rigged against them and the Brotherhood. (NB: Egypt’s coup-against-democracy will be read the same way by Islamists worldwide.) The Salafists will tell Morsi and his colleagues “we told you so” and head for their arsenals, as well as to Egypt’s borders to welcome fellow Salafist fighters coming to their aid from Eastern Libya, elsewhere in Arab-Spring-ed Africa, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. And all of them will be supported with guns, money, and more volunteer mujahideen from the Sunni states of the Arab Peninsula.

The Brotherhood, on the other hand, is in an impossible situation; it can only opt for war. If Morsi and his lieutenants accept the military’s action and reward the losers of the election the Islamists won in 2012, they may form some kind of illegitimate temporary regime but only at the cost of their political and religious credibility.

In addition, such a blatantly corrupt and anti-democratic compromise will drive large numbers of the Brotherhood’s members — especially its young males, some of whom are in Egypt’s armed forces — into the arms of the Salafists. If this occurs, Egypt will have a civil war with part of the army siding with the Islamists and the other part with the effete, militarily useless pro-democracy forces. In such a scenario, the Egyptian Islamists will win, though, as in Syria, it may take a while.

What should concern Americans most about the near certainty of war in Egypt, and thus the broadening of the mujahideen’s overall war against the West, is whether Obama’s administration — in league with pro-Israel Republican and Democratic senators, Britain, and Israel — used its intelligence services to help the leaders of Egypt’s anti-democratic opposition to organize, fund, and train the democracy-killing forces that filled Cairo’s streets with demonstrations and prompted the Egyptian army to use that most democratic of all tools — a military coup.

Readers will recall that former-Secretary of State Clinton and her diplomatic minions — when they were not getting Americans killed in Benghazi — bank-rolled the intervention of a number of Western NGO-like groups to operate inside Egypt to build a secular, pro-democratic movement meant to overthrow the Islamists. When Morsi and his cabinet identified this violation of Egyptian sovereignty they — like Putin when he found the same U.S.-backed threat in Russia — arrested and jailed Clinton’s agents and then threw them out of the country.

Was that the end of it? Well if Obama, the Senate’s bipartisan Israeli shills, the British, and the Israelis were smart, they would have stopped right there. But events of recent decades suggest they probably just shifted gears and went from overt, NGO-type interventionist activity to covert action interventionist programs conducted by their intelligence services.

As the Western media — and no outlet more flagrantly than the BBC — have been busy cheerleading for Morsi’s removal, I have heard no journalist who has bothered to ask how Egypt’s spectacularly fractured pro-democracy movement — it fielded 17 disunited, feckless presidential candidates in the 2012 election Morsi won — has in a twelve-month become a better organized, better-funded, and more united and logistically effective force. While it is only a guess, my money would be placed on a bet that Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, McCain, Lieberman, Schumer, and Graham cooperated in devising a covert program that used their long-time friends in the Egyptian army and those Egyptians who this week proved themselves utterly incapable of democracy to invalidate Egypt’s free-and-fair 2012 election.

If this proves to be the case, the composite force of young Egyptians intolerant of the democratic process and Western and Israeli leaders who pretend Muslims do not hate their constant, cavalier interventionism will have ensured that al-Qaeda leader Zawahiri’s 2005 forecast that only jihad can defend Islam and install Sharia rule is accepted as truth by more tens of millions of Muslims. And then we will have to face an ever intensifying, Salafist-led religious war against the West, a war which America will end up fighting overseas and at home.

The first hot and humid weeks of Washington’s summer have produced some predictable foreign policy absurdities, but also one great opportunity to protect U.S. interests.

Senator McCain in Syria

It is bad enough that Arizona’s shame went to Syria to be made a fool of by the Islamists, but the worse news is that he came back. The doddering old codger never saw an unnecessary war he did not want our military kids to fight and die in, and he probably does not even realize that the people the Syrian resistance presented to meet him were the same sort of atypical folks that our media mindlessly slobbered over in Libya and Egypt — neatly coiffed, English-speaking, secular professionals who do not know one end of a gun from the other and will become the dearly departed if al-Qaedaism triumphs in Syria. McCain’s gullibility may have slowed the war a bit, though, as it surely caused an enormous amount of hilarity-to-the-point-of-tears for Islamist fighters, perhaps making them unfit to fight for a few days while recovering from the belly aches induced by their reaction to the good Senator.

Anglo-American jack-assery

President Obama and his foreign-policy team have yet to figure out that a British soldier died in London from a terrorist attack. This is par for the course from an administration led by an American (?) who is a perfect example of America’s disastrous 1960’s generation; that is, a man who never worked a day in his life, taught the anti-work populace how get free stuff from working Americans, and believes an Ivy League education empowers him to define reality and shred the Constitution. But much worse, the usually level-headed British — in the persons of Foreign Secretary William Hague and London Mayor Boris Johnson — summoned the nerve to call the soldier’s killing an act of terrorism, but then slipped into Obama-Bush deceitfulness and claimed the attack had nothing to do with the UK’s interventionist policy in the Muslim world. Like Oz’s wizard, Hague and Johnson told the British electorate to ignore what the two men said about exacting revenge for Britain killing Muslims in Iraq as they carved up the young soldier. They — the highly educated Hague and Johnson — claimed that they knew better than the Islamist killers about what motivated the attack. So at least in the field of trans-Atlantic, national-security wrecking lies, there seems still to be a “special relationship.”

Damn it, Obama and CIA Director Brennan told you the war against the mujahideen is over!

Well, maybe, but we might first want to consider what U.S. and Western interventionism motivated the “defeated” Islamists to do in May 2013: Two successful Afghan insurgent attacks on the most protected district in Kabul; the dead British soldier; two nearly simultaneous al-Qaeda car bomb attacks in Niger in response to Western intervention in Mali and the establishment of a U.S. drone base in Niger; a fully reinvigorated and aggressive Sunni Islamist mujahideen force — which includes al-Qaeda — bombing and ambushing effectively and at will across Iraq; the FBI apparently executing a an associate of the marathon-bombing Tsarnaev brothers, perhaps to stop him from bettering the American public’s knowledge of the coming Islamist storm that will have to be fought here at home; a French soldier stabbed by an Islamist while on patrol in Paris; the successes of al-Qaeda ally Boko Haram in northern Nigeria necessitating the invasion of the country’s northern states by the Nigerian army; and, a suicide car bomb by North Caucasus’s mujahideen that killed eleven in Dagestan.

Back to Syria, Part 1 — Turn about is fair play

There is a delicious irony in Russia asserting, in essence, that “Syria has a right to exist” and then arming the Asaad regime so it has a military chance against aerial attacks by those Moscow terms “international hotheads” — meaning Israel, the United States, and those one-upon-a-time Great Powers, Britain and France. The Russians, of course, know that no nation has a “right to exist”; both as the USSR and earlier as the Czarist state, in fact, Moscow spent a good deal of time brutally demonstrating that no state has a right to exist unless it can defend itself. Still, the Russians seem to have a fine sense for absurdity, hypocrisy, and most of all timing, As Washington and its interventionist allies keep chirping the absolute nonsense that Israel has a “right to exist” — it will exist if it can defend itself and if it stops deliberately making lethal enemies — they and their UN lackey are lined up to make sure the Syrian state stops existing, thereby adding another scalp to those of Libya, Egypt, and Tunisia. It seems the “right to exist” is an attribute that belongs only to Israel.

Back to Syria, Part 2 — Why look a gift horse in the mouth?

Given the above noted batch of Sunni Islamist military actions around the world — and the West’s self-defeating refusal to see how its interventionism motivates them — could the Syrian war be a Godsend to the addled who inhabit the White House and the Congress? You bet. Look at what is developing on the ground in Syria: (a) Asaad’s forces are killing Sunni mujahideen — including at least one female mujahideen from Michigan — who would otherwise be targeting the West; (b) Lebanese Hizballah and Iran are bleeding lives and money to kill Sunni Islamists who otherwise would be targeting America or another Western target; (c) the Sunni mujahideen in Syria are killing Hizballah, Iranian, and Syrian fighters, all of whom Washington claims are threats to the United States, the West, and Israel; and (d) Shias and Sunnis are merrily murdering each other in Syria in a contest which — when added to the impetus from the steadily accelerating sectarian violence in Iraq — is increasing chances for a region wide and massively bloody Shia-Sunni war, which, as Usama bin Laden predicted and feared, would do more than anything else to neuter his anti-U.S. defensive jihad. If all in Washington who are tasked with national security would for once think in terms of “America First,” they would leave town for a very long and secluded summer vacation and for the next 90 days allow messages to accumulate unanswered from the UK, France, Israel, and any other regime that is demanding America fight in Syria. The status quo in Syria suits American interests perfectly, and if things improve there during the summer — that is, if the current combatants maintain or increase their ardor to bleed themselves white — so much the better for the United States. And that, at day’s end, is all that counts.