Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Sixteen years after the late-Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States, we are being treated in Mali to a rare and explicit glimpse of how deep the arrogance and incompetence of Western leaders are when it comes to the religious war al-Qaeda and its allies are waging on the West.

The worldwide presence of al-Qaeda and other Islamist fighting groups have grown greatly since 2001 for three main reasons: (a) the enduring resonance of al-Qaeda’s message invoking the religious requirement to wage jihad to stop Western intervention in the Muslim world; (b) the West’s continuing intervention in the Muslim world; and (c) the now clear and complete mujahideen victories over hapless U.S. and Western military forces in Iraq in Afghanistan. As an aside, it is worth asking whether there could be a more powerful galvanizing force toward jihad among today’s young Muslim males than to know that their fathers and brothers defeated the Soviet and U.S. superpowers?

One thing that has become apparent since bin Laden’s 2011 death is that — contrary to the predictions of U.S. and Western leaders and pundits — the momentum of the Islamist movement bin Laden helped give birth to more than 30 years ago has not slowed, let alone withered. There are far more Islamist fighters in the field, and in far more places in 2013, than there were in 20001. And they have been victorious everywhere: America defeated in Afghanistan and Iraq; dictators gone and Islamists in or near power in Yemen, Libya, and Egypt; mujahideen pressing Syria’s al-Asaad toward the abyss; a resurgent al-Qaeda-in-Iraq striking, with its allies, when and where it wants to across Iraq, often simultaneously in several cities on the same day; and a dozen Islamist fighting groups — including al-Qaeda-in-the Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM) — expanding across North Africa and into the Sahel and West Africa. This situation is what President Obama often describes as the receding Islamist threat, although he usually terms the fighters who are defeating us at every turn a limited number of “Violent Extremists.”

With al-Qaeda and like-minded Islamist fighters on a roll in Africa and the Middle East — an aggressiveness mainly motivated by U.S. and Western interventionism in the Islamic world — the French come up with the same old answer to the Islamist problem: more Western intervention. In mid-January, French President Hollande took the world by surprise and announced that France will respond positively to a request for help from its “Malian bothers” and deploy troops and other military assets to clear northern Mali of the mujahideen. Thundering martial vigor as if Napoleon reborn, Hollande than announced that France may send as many as 2,500 troops to assist the singularly incompetent and corrupt Malian government and military win the inevitable victory over the evil Islamists.

2,500 troops. Really? Do you think that Mr. Hollande or anyone in Paris knows that Mali is twice the size of France? Or that Mali does not control its borders and so additional mujahideen will flow in to support the already multi-national, Mali-based Islamist forces from all points of the compass? And even if each French soldier is a superman, are French leaders arrogant enough think that 2,500 of their troops and 10,000 or so African troops of dubious quality can do in Mali what 100,000-plus U.S. and NATO troops failed to do in Afghanistan? And, finally, do they recall that France has not won a major battle when fighting alone in almost two centuries?

And what was the response of France’s Western allies to President Hollande’s ill-considered and neocolonial-in-appearance adventure? Were they wise enough to stay clear and not make France’s intervention anymore of a unifying force among Mali’s disparate Islamist groups than it is already? Nope, they checked their brains at the door, got in line, and said: “me too.” The Americans, British, Danes, Canadians, Belgians, and the European Union immediately signed up to help the coming French-made Malian disaster and deployed — at least — transport and refueling aircraft and “support personnel” to assist the French military effort. In other words, Mali’s former and much-hated colonizer has returned in force and brought along its intervention-loving Western and war-approving UN friends, a reality that will move the Islamist fighters toward unity and will dismay those who support the Mali regime but hate the French for what they did when ruling Mali.

For Washington, the French intervention opens the door to U.S. military intervention in Africa unexpectedly early. The Pentagon’s African Command has been arming and training Malian and other African troops for several years in the hope that their counter-Islamist capabilities could be sharply improved so they could fight the Islamists with U.S. support but without U.S. troops. The U.S.- and Western-trained Malian army, however, has failed miserably against the Islamists during the past year, and with the French intervention, there is little time left for training.

And, sadly, President Obama and Defense Secretary Panetta did not hesitate for a second before offering U.S. military assistance to France. They thereby intervened in yet another war where America has no interests, but one which will harden and make more skillful the mujahideen that U.S. ground forces will have to fight when our soldiers and Marines eventually are deployed to West Africa to protect such life-and-death U.S. national interests as access to oil, sea lanes, uranium, and other strategic minerals. Our assistance for the French is thus another useless and wasteful intervention. It seeks to protect no recognizable U.S. national interest and will recall to Muslim minds bin Laden’s warning that the U.S. and its allies will intervene to kill Muslims anywhere they seek to establish God‘s law on earth.

If we want to keep Islamist victories coming, all we need to do is keep intervening in the Muslim world. Syria anyone?

Having listened to a campaign in which Governor Romney explained how he would fix the U.S. economy and carry a big stick around the world, and President Obama continually blame George W. Bush for all our economic problems and try to depict Romney as the evil-millionaire Mr. Potter from Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, voters can take their pick on Tuesday. But when doing so they must realize that no matter who wins, the next president’s biggest problem will be fighting wars overseas with a war weary populace and an undermanned and ill-equipped military. And no matter who is elected, the new president will only have himself and his interventionist party to blame.

With our war against Islamist militants now two months into its seventeenth year and with those forces still scoring victories over America — note their win in Benghazi — both parties continue to pursue a foreign policy that is increasingly suicidal. Both support Israel without qualm or respect for genuine U.S. interests — Obama just wants the Iran war after 6 November — and both approve of surrendering in Afghanistan, in the wake of our surrender in Iraq. You can bet the lesson of how easy it was to defeat the American superpower in both places will not be lost on the Islamists. We also continue to protect and champion the Saudi tyranny and the other Gulf despots as “good U.S. allies,” thereby making sure oil flows but building an ever greater hatred among ordinary Muslims for the states that oppress them and their U.S. protectors. (NB: Let’s hope that if Romney wins he keep his word and pushes for energy self-sufficiency, ending Obama’s reality-defying energy policy which has kept the Gulf tyrannies in high clover; American families extorted at the pump; and America locked in an endless war with Islam.)

Worst and most war-causing of all, both Obama and Romney are pro-Israel, interventionist democracy crusaders. Both men, for example, are awash with pro-Israel bribes — commonly known as “campaign contributions” — and are surrounded by war-mongering Neoconservatives, although those on the Democratic side are more quietly malign. Both men also buy into the lethal nonsense of American “exceptionalism” and the equally demented idea that the world is thirsting for Washington’s leadership and instruction on how to be good Westerners. They are cultural warriors to the core and men who are intent on using their rhetoric and your taxes to remake the world — especially the Muslim world — in their image. And if that does not do the trick, they will use U.S. military power to try to accomplish their policy of international cleansing and social/political/religious remodeling.

This said, it seems that facts, analysis, and substantive debate go largely unheeded in contemporary America. Whether you agree or disagree with the foregoing, though, there is a way to test my argument in a manner that seems more palatable to Americans; that is graphically. Given my at-best minimal computer skills, I cannot provide the graphics for you, but all it really takes to get a picture of reality is to imagine two simple political maps of the world, one for September, 2001, and the other for November 2012. What would be seen on these maps?

The map of September 2001

1. Al-Qaeda and its allies had only Taliban-governed Afghanistan as a major base in which to train, store weaponry, plot, launch attacks, and meet other Islamists from around the world. Yes, al-Qaeda and its allies had so-called cells in dozens of other countries around the world — and they still do — but only in Afghanistan could they operate openly and — thanks to the Clinton administration’s profound disregard for U.S. lives and interests — with little concern about being attacked while they prepared for 9/11 and what was to come. (NB: Interestingly, many Americans seem to have forgotten that in October, 2000, Clinton refused to defend America and Americans after the near sinking of the USS COLE, just as Obama has refused to do anything during or after the mujahideen’s recent easy victory in Benghazi. Both men clearly were more concerned with their party’s presidential prospects than with defending American lives and security.)

The map of November 2011

1. After more than decade of successfully resisting the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, the Taliban and its allies will in the next 18 months return to power in Afghanistan. Whether that new regime in Kabul is called the Taliban or not is irrelevant. It will be a Pakistani-and-Saudi-backed Islamist regime and it will welcome al-Qaeda and its allies to remain in its territories to train, plan, rearm, etc. The new Islamist Afghan regime also will have unprecedented access to and influence over the eastern third of Pakistan. Ironically, the Islamist Afghan state will be much larger, better organized, and better armed in 2014 than it was in 2001.
2. In addition to soon controlling an expanded Afghan state, the international spread of the Islamists’ presence and power since 9/11 has been impressive. While Americans and their media have been bore-sighted on the willfully lost wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the politically motivated silence of the Islamist-empowering Obama administration has allowed the creation of a half-dozen Afghan-like Islamist bastions to go mostly unnoticed. Soon after 9/11, Osama bin Laden began dispersing his forces from South Asia — and he helpfully told us what he was up to in a public statement — with the result being that today Islamist military bastions are firmly established in Yemen, throughout the North Caucasus, in East Africa, across North Africa, and reaching from the latter down into Mali and toward southern Africa. There are also the Islamist-redoubts that are growing and solidifying via al-Qaeda’s startling and forceful turn to Iraq, as well as in Libya and Syria where Mrs. Clinton’s and Senator McCain’s “freedom fighters” are in the process of installing Islamist regimes with the military aid of our Gulf “allies” and al-Qaeda.
3. While the sheer geographical dimensions of the mujahideen’s growth is very impressive, the places where they have ensconced themselves are even more impressive and strategically dangerous to U.S. interests. As al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks were designed to lure the U.S. military into Afghanistan — it being easier to kill soldiers and Marines there than in America — the post-2001 expansion of al-Qaeda and its allies is meant, among other things, to force the United States to fight in places where it has genuine, life-and-death national interests — not the nonsense of fighting for democracy and women’s rights. This becomes especially clear after a review of the activities of Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM), Al-Qaeda-in-the-Arab Peninsula (AQAP); Somalia’s Al-Shabab — which the West foolishly thinks is fully beaten after a series of tactical defeats — and Nigeria’s Boko Haram. The strategic bottom line for America is simple and clear: these four groups, with minimal inter-group cooperation, are near-to-threatening free U.S. and Western access to the Niger Delta’s oil resources and West Africa’s rich deposits of uranium and strategic minerals. The mujahideen also sit astride vital sea lanes off both coasts of Africa, at the Suez Canal, and in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. Free and reliable access to all of these are indispensable to the economic welfare of the United States and as they become increasingly threatened we will have to fight for them. This is, incidentally, why the brief discussion of U.S. naval power during the presidential debate should have been prolonged. The protection of maritime commerce and offshore resource production is a ship-intensive activity; numbers do matter — perhaps more than military punch each ship packs — and the number of U.S. Navy ships now available is simply inadequate to the potential requirements for them. The method of operation of Al-Qaeda and its allies is today what it has long been: spread out U.S. military assets so as to sap their reserves and flexibility. This is a strategy that might well work as effectively at sea as it has on land.
4. Perhaps the most important development in the U.S.-Islamist war in the last few years also has gone largely unmarked. The fall of Mubarak, Ben Ali, and Qadhafi has greatly eased the operational environment for Islamist groups and movements not only in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, but also in other Muslim states whose regimes have a tenuous hold on power. Think especially of Jordan in the latter regard. Where three years ago Islamists in all these places were constantly hunted by Arab security services and killed, incarcerated, or turned over to U.S. authorities, today they operate freely with little concern for local security forces so long as they do not attack within the country; nowhere is this more true than in Egypt. From the Pakistan-India border to Morocco’s Atlantic coast, the Islamists are encountering a freedom of movement and a degree of personal safety that they have never before enjoyed. The Islamist are also much better armed than ever before, thanks largely to the looting of military arsenals in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and Libya during the opening of the Pandora‘s box known as the Arab Spring.

So before voting, take a minute and imagine each of these maps and compare them. Then vote for whoever you want, but vote with the certainty that all Americans are joining you in voting for a president whose interventionism will bring all of us more war.

While both Democrats and Republicans deserve to be cursed by all Americans for their identical, war-causing, interventionist foreign policies, the duties of citizenship require informed citizens to vote. And though I loathe the fact that Romney has surrounded himself with Neoconservative war-mongers, I will vote Republican. Why? Because I have never been able to understand — let alone accept — why the establishment of the Democratic Party and its media acolytes so dislike Americans, seem so unconcerned about their welfare, and are always so eager to coerce them. On reaching doddering-hood at age 60, I can look back and recall numerous anti-America and anti-Americans positions that are long-standing Democratic positions, such as:

• A refusal to enforce the immigration laws, thereby allowing America to be afflicted with millions of undocumented aliens. This is a nightmare for law enforcement at all levels of governments; a boon for terrorists, criminals, and nation-states who mean us harm; a perpetual, draining attack on the states’ social-services infrastructures and on the resources of the Union as a whole; a well-focused effort to shred the country’s traditional social fabric; and an assignment to economic and societal disaster for Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Florida, and California. Very few Americans “hate foreigners” or oppose all immigration; their central request is that the Democrats follow immigration laws already on the books to allow for a legal and orderly immigration process.
• A determined, decades-long effort to erase a main characteristic of the America character, which is self-reliance. President Obama’s recent decision not to require work for those receiving welfare payments not only — and again — runs counter to laws on the books, but underscores what Democratic leaders are most concerned with; namely, creating dependent colonies of Americans that always vote for their party and live off the monies earned by self-reliant Americans and the sweat that falls from their brows while working for a living. That 50-percent of Americans pay no income tax speaks eloquently of the Democrats’ success in planting and nurturing Democratic-Party-dependent colonies across American society.
• A low key but effective four-decade campaign by the Democratic Party and their allies in the media and teachers unions to make sure that American students never, ever learn the hard fact that the key element at the Democratic Party’s core is and always has been an insatiable desire to coerce Americans. ObamaCare, of course, is the most recent example of this trait, but if U.S. history was truthfully taught, students would learn that it was a Democrat president and Congress that incarcerated Japanese-Americans during World War II; that it was Democratic President Woodrow Wilson who savagely attacked the civil liberties of Americans during and after World War I; and, most especially, that the Democratic Party throughout U.S. history has always been the party of the “Five S’s”: slavery, secession, segregation, socialism; and — most recently — the slaughter of infants.
• A seemingly endless campaign to destroy Christianity in the United States. From banning Christmas decorations, to preventing prayers at high school football games, to mindless Clintonian assertions that the United States is “not a Christian nation,” notwithstanding that more than 80-percent of the population is Christian, the Democrats have sought to de-Christianize the country. We are not, of course, a Christian nation in the sense of being a theocratic state, but to any but the most stupid person — or a liar, Democratic leader, or Harvard professor — we clearly are a nation of Christians. And if there were not votes and campaign contributions to be had in the Jewish-American and Muslim-American communities, the Democrats would be attacking those faith communities too. Indeed, if you want to see an augury of future Democratic coercion on matters of faith witness the HHS mandate regarding ObamaCare which essentially negates 1st Amendment protections for dozens of millions of Catholics, Jews, and Muslims who oppose abortion.
• A fascination with death, especially when it can be inflicted on Americans. Democratic leaders have long been the champions of abortion-on-demand at any stage of pregnancy — and this from even so-called “Catholic Democrats” like Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, the former who is rotting in hell, and the later who will join him. So far the Democrats and their operatives in Congress and on the Supreme Court have protected their allies in the “first, do no harm” American Medical Association as they have murdered-for-profit more than 50 million unborn Americans (NB: Get ready to move over Adolph, Joe Stalin, and Pol Pot, you lads have serious rivals.) And in the midst of this slaughter, Democratic leaders claim that this is the woman’s “right” that marks her full and equal citizenship. Really? Do they want us to believe all American women are that blood-thirsty, and also are so stupid that they haven’t heard of either self-control or birth control? And is there any logic whatsoever in the idea that if women are to be equal to men in U.S. society they must have the iron-clad “right” to kill other human beings? The Bill of Rights, even in a cursory reading, seems to focus on the protection of life and property, and does not give scope for reading segments of the American people out of their humanity, as did Roe-vs.-Wade for the unborn, and as Democratic Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Dred Scott Decision did for Black-American slaves. One wonders if any Democratic leader has read about — or even would be interested in — the medical discoveries regarding the undeniable “humanness” of Americans in the womb that have occurred since the Democratic-championed butchering of tiny Americans began in 1973.
• This fascination with death, of course, carries over into the Democrats’ close alliance with the immoral — or amoral — creatures who dominate Hollywood. Again, Obama seems to be the perfect example of this alliance. Faced with a shattered economy, dead Americans in Libya; and U.S. soldiers and Marines dying in Afghanistan until he sees if he can get re-elected, Obama has spent much of the last month hobnobbing with the U.S. entertainment world’s hedonistic cretins, men and women who through their movies, television shows, engrained anti-Americanism, video games, and personal example have for several generations inculcated young Americans with a taste for extreme violence, sexual behavior reminiscent of Caligula’s Rome, and a coarseness in language that astounds (note Obama’s and Rahm Emanuel’s in this regard.) It never seems to occur to Hollywood’s self-centered libertines that Obama and previous Democratic leaders cynically use them as just another of their mindless colonies, one that feeds their need for publicity and campaign cash and helps keeps several of their other colonies content on the party’s plantation.
• A reliable willingness to allow Americans to be killed overseas if it means that no foreigners will be killed. The mujahideen attack on our consulate in Benghazi is just the latest example of this Democratic propensity. Why did Obama and his White House watch or listen voyeur-like to seven hours of video and audio transmission from our drones and not move a muscle to help the soon-to-die Americans below? (NB: Has anyone asked why those drones were not armed so as to have an immediate response capability?) Well, because there might have been some civilian Libyan casualties if we tried to save the four Americans, and, as usual for Democrats, it is much better to have dead Americans rather than dead foreigners who the Democrat Party aspires to perfect and make just like itself — pagan, feminized, and effete. And Libya is just a microcosm of what is going on in Afghanistan, where every soldier and Marine killed since Obama announced the date for U.S. surrender there has died for only two reasons: (a) Obama’s fear of looking weak if he withdrew before the election and (b) Obama’s mindless rules-of-engagement that make our young men and women targets who have to be shot at before defending themselves, and even then can respond only if they are certain there are no civilians in the vicinity. The Democrats simply ignore the Founders’ and the Constitution’s clear intent that the first and most absolute responsibility of the U.S. republic’s government is to defend Americans at home and wherever their country has sent them overseas to serve its interests, no matter what cost must be exacted from those attacking Americans and those living nearby. In peace, Americans should be as gentle with and respectful toward non-Americans as they are with each other. In war, one American life is worth endlessly more than any number of foreign attackers and nearby civilians who are killed in order to save American lives. For the correctness of this interpretation see keywords: “Harry Truman,” “atomic bomb,” “Japan,” and — astoundingly — “Democratic president.”

So when the enduring excellence of America’s republican constitutional system is again shown in the 6 November 2012 general election, vote for the candidate of your choice. But when you do, have your eyes, mind, and — perhaps most important — your heart open, and never for a moment believe that Democratic leaders give a tinker’s damn about protecting you, your family, your social values, your faith, your soldier-children, or what we Americans have built here in North America over four centuries. They merely and only want to hold onto the political power that allows them to use coercion to try to perfect Americans, their country, and the world in their own pagan, anti-republican, lawless, and essentially vicious image.

Readers of this blog will recall several previous battles I have been engaged in with Israel-Firsters intent on getting me fired from various jobs and banned from the media. In these efforts, the Israel-Firsters have had some success.

Well, things on this score had been quiet for a while, but last week a new e-mail campaign began against me, one that is directed at FOX NEWS and Georgetown University. I commented acidly or flippantly to most of these notes, but it became clear that this campaign was different from the others in that the three e-mail writers — blewis3h@yahoo.com, mgilbertc@yahoo.com, and lisabandrea@yahoo.com — implied in their missives to FOX and Georgetown that a senior foreign policy adviser to Governor Romney named Gabrial Schoenfeld was either driving, involved in, or cooperating with their efforts. [NB: Readers of this blog also will recall that Mr. Schoenfeld slandered and lied about me repeatedly while he was a writer at Commentary, Israel-First’s flagship publication.]

Defamation of me by OpEd writers in the private sector is fair enough; after all, the public square is a rough place and when scurvy people the likes of Mr. Schoenfeld cannot refute a person’s argument with substance, he only has slander, lies, and defamation in his arsenal.

I was, however, a bit put out that someone advising and being paid by Governor “Jobs-for-All” Romney apparently was using his position to encourage an effort to again cost me employment. So, I sent a letter to Governor Romney’s campaign spokesman, Mr. Kevin Madden.

What follows is (1) a sample of the notes sent to FOX, as well as one sent to me which recounts Israel First’s earlier victories against my income and public voice; (2) the note I sent to Governor Romney’s spokesman, which includes three of the notes sent by lisabandrea@yahoo.com, two to Georgetown and one to me clearly suggesting Mr. Schoenfeld’s cooperation and/or participation in the attacks on me; and, (3) the non-response response I received from Governor Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden.

Readers can read the following material and decide for themselves what it means. For myself, I can only conclude that it validates this blog‘s long-held contention that there is not a nickel‘s worth of difference between the two parties on foreign policy, and that their interventionist policies in the Muslim world will keep America at war with an increasing segment of Islam for the foreseeable future.

TO FOX: from mgilbertc@yahoo.com, Sat, Oct 20, 2012 7:31 pm

Mr. XXXXXXXXXXXXX, it’s unfortunate you provided an outlet for Michael Scheuer to articulate his well-known anti-Semitic rants, such as his paranoid claim that “Israel owns the US Congress” Scheuer’s psychiatric disorder is infamous: The Weekly Standard, whose editor, Bill Kristol, appears regularly on Fox News, documents Scheuer’s sickness:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/249irrsq.asp

Jeffrey Goldberg, of the highly respected publication The Atlantic and a recipient of the National Magazine Award for reporting, wrote about Scheuer’s anti-Semitic hysterics:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2009/03/scheuer-emanuel-is-a-treasonous-israel-firster/9841/

You should have greater respect for your program and for the intellect of your audience. M.Gilbert

TO FOX: from mgilbertc@yahoo.com, Oct 21, 2012 9:50 am

Mr. XXXXXXXXXXXXX: Michael Scheuer, who recently appeared on your program, receives high praise from David Duke [links below], the notorious former klansman and bigot, racist and anti-Semite, for Scheuer’s anti-Semitic and Israel-bashing tirades. What were you thinking in having Scheuer on your show?

TO: scheuer@aol.com from mgilbertc@yahoo.com, Mon, Oct 22, 2012 11:27 pm

You won’t be autographing any employment contracts at Jamestown Foundation, Fox News, CNN and several other think tanks and news organizations aware of your psychiatric disorder and allegations of an incompetent career at the CIA and falsified statements made to the government and pertaining to your career, as highlighted by the highly respected Gabriel Schoenfeld, who holds a PhD in government from Harvard, in contrast to your bogus degree from a diploma mill. It’s a nightmare to be you. [M. Gilbert]

When mgilbertc@yahoo.com mentioned the Israel-Firster Gabriel Schoenfeld it rang a bell in that I had read several media pieces saying that he was a “senior foreign policy adviser” to Governor Romney. I also knew the name from his attacks on me when he a writer at Commentary. Then, in the next few days, several deans at Georgetown received notes from lisabandrea@yahoo.com regurgitating much of the defaming material contained in the notes sent to FOX by mgilbertc@yahoo.com and blewis3h@yahoo.com. In the lisabandrea@yahoo.com notes, however, there was a new twist that strongly suggested Governor Romney’s senior foreign policy adviser Gabriel Schoenfeld was involved in the campaign to get me fired from Georgetown and banned at FOX.

At this point I decided to write to Governor Romney’s spokesman to ask if the Romney campaign had approved this attack on me livelihood, and if it had put Mr. Schoenfeld in charge of the attacks. I sent a note it to Governor Romney’s spokesman, Kevin Madden, and put the matter to him as follows:

— Original Message —
From: scheuermf <scheuermf@aol.com>
To: madden <madden@jdafrontline.com>
Sent: Wed, Oct 24, 2012 9:47 am
Subject: Has Governor Romney authorized these actions by his adviser Mr. Gabriel Schoenfeld?

Mr. Madden:

For the past week or so a senior foreign-policy adviser to Governor Romney named Gabriel Schoenfeld appears to have been running an e-mail campaign that has described me as an anti-Semite and a liar in an effort to get me dismissed from my post at Georgetown’s graduate school, as well as to prevent me from appearing again on the FOX network. Other people are writing the defamatory notes to various Georgetown deans and to several of the most-senior anchors at FOX and they are offering Mr. Schoenfeld to testify against me. Mr. Schoenfeld has been involved in several of these campaigns against me when he worked for Commentary magazine. The last time this he and his colleagues did this, about two years ago; they got me fired from the Jamestown Foundation, banned from CNN, but were unable to move Georgetown or FOX. I don’t know how things will turn out this time.

The e-mail addresses being used by the people who are writing these defamatory notes — perhaps at Mr. Schoenfeld’s direction— are blewis3h@yahoo.com, mgilbertc@yahoo.com, and lisabandrea@yahoo.com. Following are the texts of three of the notes Ms. Andrea sent to two Georgetown deans apparently with Mr. Schoenfeld’s authorization. I have deleted the names of the Georgetown officials from the notes, pending your response, but will include all data in my published piece. I would of course be happy to send you copies of all the defamatory notes sent from the three e-mail addresses above if you would like to read them.

1.) TO: GEORGETOWN DEAN FROM lisabandrea@yahoo.com, Mon, Oct 22, 2012 3:45 pm

Dear Dean XXXXX, I’m concerned over the professional and personal conduct of a member of Georgetown’s Center for Security Studies faculty, Michael Scheuer, alleged in the Weekly Standard publication [link below] and how it reflects on the integrity of Georgetown University. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/084zuzpe.asp?page=1 I contacted Mr. Scheuer’s director, XXXXXX, about the article, written by a prominent public figure who holds a PhD in government from Harvard and who is an advisor to Mitt Romney, however, XXXXX dismissed it as inaccurate. Mr. XXXXX was asked for specific inaccuracies and flatly refused to do so. I look forward to your thoughts on this matter. Thank you, Lisa Andrea

2.) On 10/22/12 2:12 PM, Lisa Andrea wrote:

Mr. XXXX, I’m in touch with Gabriel Schoenfeld, whose article on Michael Scheuer you have called inaccurate. Mr. Schoenfeld has asked me to find out from you the specific inaccuracies of his article. Looking forward to your response. Lisa

3.) From: Lisa Andrea <lisabandrea@yahoo.com> To: scheuermf <scheuermf@aol.com> Sent: Tue, Oct 23, 2012 1:13 pm Subject: Re: Follow-Up To Dean XXXXX

Perhaps, you’ll need to defend yourself to Dean XXXXX. Gabriel Schoenfeld is amenable to defending his article about you and the allegations of professional failures and false statements made to the government and about your resume.

I writing to ask if Governor Romney has authorized this effort to make me unemployed. I cannot imagine that he wants to put an American out of work — given his campaign rhetoric — but since Mr. Schoenfeld apparently works closely with him, I wanted to ask whether the Governor has endorsed his adviser’s campaign before I publish an account of what has transpired on my blog and a dozen or so others.

I regret sending this note to you out of the blue, but I supported Dr. Paul during the primaries and had no contacts in the Romney campaign. I have cc’ed two journalists at XXXXXX on this note as that organization was kind enough to give me your contact data.

Respectfully,

Michael F. Scheuer Mclean, Virginia

With no answer from Mr. Madden, I resent my note to him on the next morning:

On Oct 25, 2012, at 6:21 AM, scheuermf@aol.com wrote:

Mr. Madden,

I am resending this note on the chance that my first mailing misfired.

I would very much appreciate a response from you today. I realize that you have much more important things on your mind, but I suppose you can imagine that continuing to earn a living and not being blocked in the exercise my 1st Amendment rights are foremost in my mind.

As they say, silence connotes consent, so if I do not hear from you I must assume that the participation of Mr. Schoenfeld in a campaign to deny me employment and a voice in America’s debate on foreign policy has the consent of Governor Romney and his advisers. If you look at Commentary’s website and search on my name and Mr. Schoenfeld’s name you will see that he has been defaming me for half a dozen years. When he was doing that in the public prints it was fair enough. I will not, however, silently brook such abuse from someone who is the paid foreign-policy adviser of a man who wants to be president, a man who would disagree with my views on foreign policy and might well prefer my silence.

Please let me know what you think. If you need more of the texts of the many recent defaming e-mails that have seen sent about me by what appears to be Mr. Schoenfeld’s team or at least his associates, I will be glad to send them to you. Or you can wait and read them on my blog and a good number of others in the next few days.

Respectfully,
Michael F. Scheuer
Mclean, Virginia

Mr. Madden answered as follows, and so far has failed to respond to a subsequent note from me asking who I should contact in the Romney campaign:

From: Kevin Madden <madden@mittromney.com>
To: scheuermf <scheuermf@aol.com>
Sent: Thu, Oct 25, 2012 7:35 am
Subject: Re: Has Governor Romney authorized these actions by his adviser Mr. Gabriel Schoenfeld?

Mr. Scheuer: I know nothing about this. I’m also not sure why the inquiry would be directed to me.

The mujahideen’s tactical victory over the United States in Benghazi is significant, but its importance pales in comparison to the strategic victory Obama and his predecessors have handed to the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

As justifiable furor continues over the Obama administration’s blatant negligence in Benghazi, the Washington Post, on 19 October 2012, helpfully published an OpEd entitled “The U.S. isn’t losing in Afghanistan,”* a disingenuous piece that tries to assist Obama by portraying as success the president’s abject willingness to accept — and even assist — America’s strategic defeat in Afghanistan.

The author is a man named John Nagl, a former Army officer, a self-proclaimed “expert” on insurgency, and now a professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. The core of his argument comes in the first sentence. “Americans,” Nagl asserts, “haven’t lost a war in so long we’ve forgotten what it looks like — and what it costs.” Nagl argues the only war we lost since 1945 is Vietnam. Really?

The truth plainly contradicts Nagl: U.S. military forces have not won a war since the day the Japanese surrendered in 1945. They may have scored a draw in Korea, but the remaining list of conflicts are all loses for the United States. I should add that the U.S. military has lost because its political leaders from both parties have been embarrassed by or ashamed of U.S. military power, and have not allowed U.S. forces to use their power to whatever extent necessary to destroy the enemy or convince him to retire from the field and henceforth steer clear of America. This pattern of cowardly political restraint must anger and frustrate U.S. general officers — who send their men to die knowing their presidents do not intend to win — but they seem to be getting use to it. Recall how utterly incapable General Petraeus and General McChrystal were in even suggesting that America sought “victory” in Iraq and/or Afghanistan.

Mr. Nagl’s analysis-by-assertion will not hold water, and it reinforces the view of the brilliant Israeli historian Martin van Creveld that most doctrine and assessments for counterinsurgencies are written my individuals who were on the losing side and whose ideas contributed to the loss. Van Creveld’s description fits Nagl precisely.

Without question, America has lost in Afghanistan. Our political leaders invaded Afghanistan with only one achievable mission. That was the military mission of applying as much force as was needed to destroy the Taliban, al-Qaeda, their civilian supporters and abettors, and Afghanistan’s infrastructure — and then get out lock, stock, and barrel with the full knowledge the exercise might need repeating. This was a mission that should have taken at most 15 months. Instead, President Bush and Secretary Rumsfeld sent too few forces, used too little lethality, and arrogantly believed al-Qaeda and the Afghan mujahideen would give up when challenged by a superpower — apparently their clever advisers did not tell them about the USSR’s 1979-1992 Afghan debacle.

So the Bush administration slackened its already feeble military effort, claimed victory, and undertook the secularization and democratization of Afghanistan, using U.S. soldiers and Marines as well-diggers, political organizers, and social workers. The soldiers and Marines did their job and gave Afghans more schools, medical clinics, electricity, and paved roads than they have had in the last 35 years. But guess what? As these armed social-workers succeeded, the al-Qaeda-backed Taliban returned from its hiatus in the Afghan mountains and Pakistan, and its insurgency began a gradual process of gaining strength, nationwide reach, and popular support that continues today and will lead to a new Islamist regime in Kabul. The lesson here is that Afghans hate all foreign occupiers and will ultimately defeat any foreigners historically ignorant enough to move into the country and try to change their religious, political, social, and tribal traditions.

President Obama’s administration took over from Mr. Bush and made things much worse. He and Mrs. Clinton — who cares not how many Marines die as long as Afghan women are feminized to her liking — increased the pace and expense of certain-to-fail secularization and democratization programs. Generals Patreaus and McChrystal, Mr. Nagl, and an Australian lad called David Kilcullen cooked up a “counterinsurgency doctrine” to abet the delusions of Obama, Clinton, et al, a doctrine which has ensured America’s defeat in Afghanistan. This doctrine, of course, included the train-the-Afghan-military-to-take-over-from-NATO-forces plank, which has now yielded several years of NATO-trained Afghans killing U.S. Canadian, and British military and intelligence personnel — attackers who Mr. Nagl in his essay truthfully says oppose the U.S.-led occupation — and an Afghan military wholly unable to operate on its own and certain to melt away after NATO leaves. Again, none of President Obama’s crack counterinsurgency advisers — like Mr. Nagl — seems to have told him that the Red Army tried the same tack in the 1980s and failed utterly.

In a perverse way, Mr. Nagl is right in saying we are not losing in Afghanistan — but only because we lost when we remained in that country longer than 15 months and decided to pursue anything more than a military mission.

He is wrong, however, about Americans not being able to recognize a lost war. Because Americans have seen a lot of them since 1945, they are easy to identify. In the case of Afghanistan and Iraq all the boxes of defeat are checked off: (1) a complete failure to accomplish any U.S. war aims, except for two scalps — Saddam’s and Bin Laden’s; (2) the surrender of each country to America’s enemies, the Iraqi Shia and their Iranian pals and the Afghan Islamists, al-Qaeda, their allies, and our so-called Gulf Arab friends; (3) about 8,000 dead U.S. soldiers and Marines — and many thousands more maimed, hobbled, and mutilated — in wars their presidents and kow-towing general officers never intended to win, and which are now seen by the coming generation of Muslim males as Allah having allowed the mujahideen to defeat the second superpower; (4) the Islamization of Pakistan thanks to the inexcusably prolonged and un-won Bush-Obama Afghan war, which in turn sets the stage for an India-Pakistan confrontation over Afghanistan after NATO leaves; and (5) the construction of something akin to an east-to-west highway for mujahideen traveling from Pakistan to the Levant, Turkey, and Africa, giving them easy access to the powerful Islamist forces and immeasurable mountains of arms made available by the Arab Spring.

The foregoing amounts to utter defeat, and Mr. Nagl‘s assertion that America can control the now-growing threat in Afghanistan with air power and Special Forces after the U.S.-led coalition departs is quite simply a self-serving, American-killing piece of nonsense. The commonsense bottom line is that U.S. counterterrorism doctrine failed in Afghanistan. We have lost the war there, and, soon after next January’s inauguration, our new president will find that the Islamist threat to America is greater and geographically broader than it was at 9/11; that the U.S. military and its equipment are worn out, while the mujahideen are thriving with upgraded weaponry; and that American parents are becoming decidedly less eager to contribute their sons and daughters to die in wars our presidents and generals never mean to win and apparently do not mind losing.

* http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-look-of-success-in-afghanistan/2012/10/19/94673f98-1a0b-11e2-aa6f-3b636fecb829_story.html

This Tuesday’s Romney-Obama foreign-policy debate will again show Americans that both political parties mean to maintain the lie that has kept the United States losing the war al-Qaeda and its allies declared on us in 1996. There will seem to be debate during the debate, but at day’s end there will be no difference between Romney and Obama: America is “exceptional,” and exceptionally entitled to intervene in other peoples’ affairs; what we do in the world is well-intentioned and benign; and Islamist militants are attacking us because they hate freedom, liberty, and Budweiser. In other words, both men will implicitly tell Americans that their government will not recognize the seriousness of our war with the Islamists, let alone that we are losing that war — hands down.

On Obama’s part, he is likely to continue being the simple ideologue he has been since taking office. He will continue to operate in his own world, one in which there is no room for genuine religious belief and motivation unless it comes from the mouth a half-baked, fiercely anti-American Chicago cleric. Obama and his Chicago political pals are suppose to be savvy and slick politicians and yet they are so ideologically blinded by their view of what the world should be that they have not — in four years — bothered to read polls that show that more than 75-percent of the world’s Muslims view U.S. foreign policy as either a threat to Islam or a plan aimed at destroying the faith. To add to this staggering problem for the United States, polling also shows that this interpretation is shared by men and women, young and old, and those who self-identify as moderates and militants.

Confronted by this reality, Obama and his oh-so-smart Ivy League crowd continue to insist that, from the attacks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, to the 1996 destruction of our embassies in East Africa, to the near sinking of the USS COLE in 2000, to the massive U.S. defeat on 9/11, to the bipartisan decision to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars, to the recent, easily predictable mujahideen victory in Benghazi, America has faced only a limited number of militants, criminals, nihilists, and madmen — non-legitimate Muslims — who can be killed one man at a time to achieve victory. Is it really possible that the tiny crew of misfits Obama and his team have identified as America’s enemies have been able to cause so many shameful U.S. defeats and, in the face of a superpower attacking them, to have — since 9/11— established fully viable bases outside South Asia in East Africa, Yemen, West Africa, Palestine, and Iraq.

In the coming debate, Obama will no doubt brag that he killed Osama bin Laden. Well good, about time, well done! But what has he done to stop the spread of militant Islam and its armed forces across South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa? This is a presence that now sits directly on sea lanes vital to the United States in the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, and is nearing oil reserves and deposits of uranium and other strategic minerals in West Africa that are indispensable to the U.S. and Western economies. Obama has done nothing but lie to Americans about the genuine religious motivation, numbers, and growing armed strength — thanks to his policy facilitated arsenal-looting in Libya, Egypt, and Syria — of al-Qaeda and its allies. At the end of Obama’s term, America is far weaker militarily and far more vulnerable to Islamist power than it was when he took office.

(NB: To show the depth of the Obama-ites’ reality-defying ideological rigidity, I would note that I recently attended a U.S. government conference on the growing threat posed by the Islamists’ war on America. I have worked on this topic for a long time but at first could not get what folks were talking about. My fellow conferees kept talking about “EVOs” and never using the terms Islam or Islamist. Much to my embarrassment, I finally had to ask the meaning of “EVOs.” I was told that the Obama administration had banned the use of the terms like Islam, Islamic, and Islamist in discussing the war the Islamists are waging on and in America, Because of the ban, the military, the intelligence community, and other government organizations now must use the meaningless term “EVOs” — “Extremist Violent Organizations” when discussing how to insure America survives the current war. I suppose that had Obama been in power during the 1941-1991 period the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Red Army, and the KGB would have been termed EGOs, or “Extremist Genocide-producing Organizations.” In addition, I was told there is a thoroughgoing “purge” being conducted of all counter-Islamist training materials heretofore used to train military, intelligence, and federal, state, and local law enforcement officials if the materials do not portray Islam as benign and/or if they identify those waging war as “Islamists.” If this is true, it fits precisely the Muslim Brotherhood’s long-term plans to lull the West into defenselessness as it prepares to Islamicize the world. If claims about this purge are true — and I have no reason to doubt the veracity of my interlocutors — Obama and his team could not be doing more to ensure the Islamists’ ultimate victory over the West if they were Muslim Brotherhood members in good standing.)

And, in foreign policy, Romney will be no better. Amazingly, Romney has surrounded himself with the same brain-dead, Israel-first Neoconservative cabal that brought on the war we lost in Iraq and which made bin Laden‘s defensive jihad self-perpetuating, the latter proven by the continuing post-bin-Laden geographical spread of war-making Islamist organizations, Islamist-controlled states, and Islamist-caused violence. Listen to the media and hear Bolton, Krauthamer, Hannity, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Keane, Lieberman, and the crazed war boys Graham and McCain mouth exactly the same America-defeating nonsense spouted by Obama, Rice, Brennan, Mrs. Clinton and their acolytes at MSNBC and the mainstream media: Muslims hate America and the West because of their freedom and liberties, gender equality, freedom of speech, and elections.

Whenever you find prominent political, media figures, and professors using this description of the Islamists’ motivation, you will find America’s truest enemies, men and women who want to continue an interventionist foreign policy and so are deliberately providing Americans with an enormous underestimation of the growing threat the Islamists’ pose. These are the men and women who are happy to get any number of America soldiers. Marines, intelligence and security officers, and ambassadors killed so they can keep trying to force Muslims by bayonet to abandon their faith, vote, abort, blaspheme, Zionize, feminize, and generally become pagans just like us.

So cock a non-partisan ear toward the Obama-Romney debate and hear the same worldview and foreign policy prescription presented by both men, although — thankfully — Romney will not be spouting Obama’s Islamist-abetting nonsense about Islam being benign even when it perceives itself under attack. When you clear your way through all the spurious hot air about “American exceptionalism” and “a world eager for U.S. leadership,” you will hear the ardent desire of two men, two parties, and almost all of the media to maintain and even increase the cultural and military interventionism in the Muslim world that has killed so many Americans at home and abroad in the past sixteen years; which has brought the United States numerous, shameful military defeats; and which has created nothing but the prospect of an ever larger and more costly war with much of Islam in the years ahead — a war which no American should be confident his/her country will win as long as the current bipartisan worldview prevails.

And there are perhaps two things to think about after the debate. First, notwithstanding what you hear from Obama and Romney, their followers, and the media on this issue, the fact will remain that (a) most Muslims do not hate Americans for their way of life, but do believe that the Islamic faith and Islamic civilization are under attack by Washington’s — and its Western allies’ — foreign policy and, for that reason, (b) most loathe the U.S. government and judge the late Osama bin Laden to have been a “good Muslim,” who, despite methods of war-making unacceptable to many Muslims, steadfastly defended his faith against the genuine threat posed by unrelenting Western intervention in an era when “Muslim regimes” not only would not resist but actually enabled that intervention.

Second, Americans are faced with a war with the Islamists they cannot avoid and must win. The United States is losing at the moment, and the talk of large cuts in the defense budget is merely campaign drivel. The way the defense budget is spent may change — more Marines and soldiers and fewer submarines, for example — but the last four U.S. presidents have created an environment in which we face war at every turn. Whoever is elected, defense spending will grow, probably starting with a U.S.-led intervention in Syria and a war on Iran.

How to cope? Accept reality:

• Interventionist foreign policy is an aggressive action that — like every aggressive action — earns an aggressive reaction; this is a lesson Americans learn in the grade-school yard but which is erased at university and by politicians and the media.
• We are at war with an increasing portion of the Muslim world, and that world’s fighters are motivated by what we do in the Muslim world and not by what we think or how we behave at home. This is a religious war from our enemies’ perspective, and that is the fact on which Americans must base their analysis and their government’s actions.
• The Obama administration has intentionally strengthened America’s Islamist enemies and undermined U.S. security by maintaining a foreign policy status quo and by deceitfully playing down the nature, severity, size, and geographical extent of the threat we face from them.
• The choice we face is hard but not complex. If maintaining the current slate of foreign policies in the Muslim world is essential to U.S. security, then we must maintain it and begin to kill far more of the Islamist enemy and its civilian supporters than we ever have before. The mujahideen will not get tired and go away, and given the nature of their religious motivation they will stay in the field and their numbers will grow unless we destroy enough of them and their kith, kin, physical assets, and infrastructure to convince them the game is not worth the candle.
• If this is an unappetizing prospect, we can combine more effective, sustained, and lethal military action with a decision to begin to reign in the unnecessary aspects of our bipartisan interventionism which now make sure the Islamists are successfully recruiting in the next Muslim generation. We can move toward energy self-sufficiency, and thus begin to curtail our ties to the Sunni tyrannies on the Arab Peninsula. We can end Washington’s feckless and war-causing campaign to spread secular democracy and women’s rights in the Muslim world; secularism at this point in history is a clear no-go in the Muslim world, and commonsense dictates that no U.S. Marine should die so Mrs. Muhammad can vote, vamp, and abort. We can wish Israel and Palestine well, stop taking calls from either, let them fight out the war they love until one prevails, and begin to clean up the corruption in the American political system wrought by the U.S.-citizen supporters of each and such organizations as AIPAC and CAIR.
• Perhaps most of all, we can begin to accept the fact that we Americans have an enormous amount of work to do to here at home to curtail the federal government’s power — especially that of the president in the area of war-making; to stop building debt; to inculcate civic responsibility in our children instead of an absurdly bloated sense of “rights”; to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure; and to accept that the road to America’s survival, prosperity, and peace is lit by the Founders’ belief that our republicanism is a model for others to imitate if they so choose, not a tool with which U.S. politicians are to militarily remake the world in their — not really America’s — arrogant and condescending image.

As Americans fixate on the presidential campaign, they also should note the status of President Obama and Governor Romney. Yes, both are presidential candidates, but both are also men who — with their predecessors and the Congress — have willingly surrendered American sovereignty and independence to Israel and its U.S.-citizen advocates (Jewish and Evangelical), their organizations, and much of the media.

In return for campaign contributions and positive media coverage, Obama and Romney have enslaved themselves and their country to Israel and some few thousands of disloyal Jewish-Americans and their equally disloyal Christian Evangelical allies. One has to wonder whether Obama and Romney refer to Israel’s prime minister as “Massa’ Benyamin,” or whether they shuffle and pull their forelocks when groveling for money from Israel’s Jewish-American and Evangelical operatives.

If independence and sovereignty mean anything for a national government, they mean that that government alone decides whether or not the country it governs will go to war. In the United States, more specifically, its means — constitutionally — that the Congress will decide via a formal vote whether it will declare war on behalf of the American people, who once upon a time were its constitutional masters. This is, at any rate, how the Founders meant the process to work.

Both houses of the craven U.S. Congress, however, have long since illegally delegated that decision to the president, and our current president regards the Congress with such contempt that he looks first to the UN to see if it is okay for him to bomb hell out of a country like Libya or some other offending party. If on the issue of war-making Israel has become America’s master — and it has, despite Obama’s cowardly ducking of a face-to-face with Massa’ Benyamin — the UN surely is becoming its overseer. Congress, at day’s end, simply and unquestioningly pays for the U.S. troops who go off to die in wars that have nothing to do with protecting genuine U.S. national interests, but do please Israel, the UN, or some figment of those militarist viragoes Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Rice, as well as of the pro-war boys McCain and Graham, such as the “democratic and human-rights-loving Libyan and Syrian freedom fighters.”

So each of us can vote as we see fit in November, but we all should recognize that neither candidate intends to restore U.S. sovereignty and independence. As president, either man will take America to war with Iran — Obama just wants it after 6 November — because that is what Israel and its U.S.-citizen advocates want. Iran, of course, poses no direct military threat to the United States, but it will exact a fierce and bloody revenge after we and Israel attack by using the intelligence/terrorist surrogates it has long maintained in the United States for just such a response. Iran’s response likewise will wreck much of what remains of the U.S. economy by disrupting the oil-tanker traffic in the Persian Gulf and perhaps elsewhere.

And all of this pain for what? Another unjustifiable and ahistorical reliance on air power to do what it has never done and cannot do without nuclear weapons — win a war. And so we will have yet another unfinished and lost war that will further stoke the fires of the aggressive cultural war both U.S. political parties are waging on the Islamic world.

When America was part of Britain’s Empire, Americans — as loyal British subjects — had no choice but to be at war when the British Crown was at war. In the two-plus centuries since we won independence from Britain, we have declined in manliness, commonsense, and allegiance to our Constitution to the point where we will go to war at the behest of a foreign nation and in direct violation of U.S. national interests. In addition, our major mainstream and cable networks use the public’s airwaves to routinely act as agents of a foreign power by supporting Israel’s prime minister against the U.S. president, while disloyal American citizens enthusiastically corrupt the U.S. political system in support of Israeli interests, Evangelical fanaticism, and the one-world fantasies of the super-national and super-corrupt UN … Who knows, perhaps we were better off with the Crown. It fought often, but only for genuine British interests.

Soon after the Denver shootings, President Obama said it was time to put stricter gun-control measures in place. With the failure of Attorney General Holder’s “Fast and Furious” ploy to void the 2nd Amendment, it seems Obama thought he might capitalize on the Denver shootings to further damage the Constitution. The negative public reaction to his words, however, sent Obama backtracking, and senior Democrats like Senator Reid and Representative Pelosi quickly made public remarks to bury the issue — for now.

Before moving on, it is worth noting that Obama said gun laws must be changed but only in a way that protected Americans’ cherished tradition of hunting. Well, hunting game is not the central concern of the 2nd Amendment. What is central is that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of Americans to be armed in case they decide there is a need, in Jefferson’s words, “to alter or to abolish [the government]” and “to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

In creating the 2nd Amendment, the Founders — through James Madison‘s pen — took their cue from the British Bill of Rights (1689) which recognized that an unarmed populace could not protect its rights, liberty, and economic welfare against a king backed by a standing army, and so it allowed for an armed populace. The Founders also recalled that when London cracked down on New England’s resistance to the Crown, one of British General Thomas Gates’ first moves was to try to seize the munitions and ordnance the colonists had stockpiled around Boston. One reason for the British Army’s ill-fated expedition to Lexington and Concord in April, 1775, for example, was to capture the colonists’ stores of cannon, muskets, and munitions.

Even before Jefferson’s declaration, therefore, what in today’s parlance is called “gun control” was seen by Americans for what it was and is, a policy instituted by an oppressive government that fears its population and therefore aims at ensuring that citizens cannot arm to resist its will. The 2nd Amendment is meant, in part, to make sure that if the federal government created by the Constitution turns oppressive, Americans will have arms with which to defend their liberties and welfare.

And this right is much more important today than it was when the 2nd Amendment was drafted because the federal government has over time deliberately and probably unconstitutionally eradicated the 2nd Amendment’s other anti-oppression provision, the one that made sure the several state governments had well-regulated — that is, well-trained — militias at their command. The state militias were of course meant to assist the U.S. government’s standing army in case of foreign attack or domestic insurrection, but they also were meant to defend the states and their populations if the federal government used its standing army to willfully violate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or acted in a manner harmful to the peoples’ security, economic welfare, and/or their society’s social cohesion.

Except for Alexander Hamilton and a few other of the Founders, both Federalists and Anti-Federalists were very wary of — indeed, many hated — the idea of maintaining a strong standing army in time of peace, seeing it as an all-too-easy-to-use tool of would-be tyrants. The 2nd Amendment took cognizance of this historically genuine danger and established two hedges against it, an armed citizenry and effective state militias. The much stronger hedge — state militias — is long gone, and only the weaker hedge of an armed citizenry remains. And there seems nothing outrageous about the idea that, as the 2nd Amendment allowed citizens to be ready to resist federal-government oppression by matching it musket-for-musket in the 1790s, today’s citizens ought to be free to face the same potential threat of tyranny assault rifle-for-assault rifle.

Now, in response to the foregoing, I am sure President Obama and other recent presidents, their administrations, and their media shills would argue there is no chance of the federal government ever acting in a manner so oppressive to the liberty and welfare of Americans that the latter would decide to take up arms against it. And they may well be right. I hope they are.

But just for the sake of argument, let us imagine a future circumstance — far off and wildly unlikely though it may be — in which the federal government did violate the Constitution, threaten the destruction of the U.S. economy, tore the fabric of American society, and made the American political system a cesspool of financial corruption. And to add to the unreality of our scenario, let us further imagine that these actions are much more substantively threatening than those which motivated the Founding Fathers to rebel against Britain and those that led to the creation of the Confederate States of America and a civil war.

Just imagine, for example,

1. That a single unelected federal bureaucrat issues a mandate that clearly violates the 1st Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom for more than 70 million American Catholics, Jews, and Muslims.
2. That multiple U.S. presidents take the United States to war without the formal declaration of war irrefutably demanded by the U.S. Constitution, and then intentionally fail to win the wars they start and so kill thousands of America‘s solider-children for nothing.
3. That the federal government each year reaches into its citizens’ pockets and takes between $40 and $50 billion dollars and then gives it to foreigners, even in times when 25-percent of America’s youngsters are malnourished, more than 8 percent of Americans are unemployed, and the country’s critical infrastructure is crumbling.
4. That senior elected officials in both parties, as well as senior federal bureaucrats constantly leak highly classified intelligence information to advance their partisan interests and thereby knowingly undermine U.S. national security.
5. That presidents and attorney generals from both parties pick and choose what laws they will enforce, in direct and flagrant violation of the oath to execute all laws that the Constitution mandates they swear on taking office.
6. That a long list of presidential administrations under both parties refuse to enforce laws designed to control U.S. borders, thereby knowingly compromising U.S. security and causing several U.S. states to have their economies damaged and social fabric weakened. In addition, imagine that those federal administrations also take legal action to prevent state governors from defending their populations.
7. That the Congress and the Senate regularly and knowingly act to bankrupt and destroy such essential national institutions as the Social Security Administration and the U.S. Post Office by siphoning off their funds for other pet or less-important projects.
8. That cabinet members and would-be cabinet members who do not file income tax returns, leak classified intelligence information, mislead Congress, and knowingly hire illegal aliens are never prosecuted.
9. That the federal government so overspends the public treasury that the national debt can never be repaid, and that in funding the debt it also compromises U.S. independence and citizens’ economic well-being via massive borrowing from malign foreign powers and by exacting half-a-year’s wages from each American taxpayer.
10. That the unaccountable U.S. Supreme Court interprets the Constitution in a way that makes the nation’s political system a cesspool of financial corruption, endorses the murder of more than 50 million-plus unborn U.S. citizens, and empowers the federal government to wage unrelenting war on religion, especially on Christianity.
11. That the federal government’s executive and legislative branches permit multiple lobbies to act as agents of foreign powers to corrupt our political system; to influence our foreign policy in a manner destructive of U.S. security and leading to war; and then protects them by not making them register as agents of foreign powers and by passing “hate-speech laws” — the latter a clear violation of the 1st Amendment.
12. That the federal education department ensures the school curriculum taught to U.S. children negatively distorts U.S. history, denigrates the Founding Fathers, and keeps students ignorant of the meaning and purposes of the country’s founding documents — such as the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights.

While it is hard, nay, nearly impossible to imagine that even one — let alone all — of these severely oppressive and destructive actions could be deliberately perpetrated by the federal government, we each learn over the course of a lifetime never to say never. And if the sorry day ever dawns when one or more of the above depredations occur, I would suggest Americans might well think about taking recourse to the arms guaranteed them by the 2nd Amendment, arms with which to defend their liberty, economic welfare, national independence, and their Constitution’s viability.

And who knows what the future will bring, some of the foregoing hard-to-imagine actions may not be all so far fetched. If one or more came to pass, I suppose the 2nd Amendment would be the last, best resort for Americans after, as Jefferson recommended, a patient and prolonged effort to peacefully undo the oppressive measures imposed on them. “Prudence, indeed,” Jefferson wrote, “will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

At day’s end, then, the 2nd Amendment exists to permit American citizens to perform the “duty” Jefferson describes by resisting and defeating with arms a federal government that knowingly produces a “train of abuses and usurpations” that is designed “to reduce them under absolute Despotism.” The 2nd Amendment should not be altered or diluted a whit, but should stand, as the Founders intended, as a stark reminder to all elected federal officials and their bureaucrats that, in extremis, the 2nd Amendment ensures that Americans have the right and the means with which to hunt down and remove those who use the federal government to oppress them.

While the presidential election campaign is focused on the economy and Barack Obama’s transparent desire for class war in the United States, Americans ought to take a quick look at the outside world to examine the approaching wave of interventionist-wrought disaster, a wave for which both parties are equally culpable.

Secretary of State Clinton’s drive to destroy the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad appears to be moving closer to a conclusion. The democracy-thirsty folks Mrs. Clinton champions have moved into parts of Damascus and Aleppo and last week conducted a suicide car-bomb attack that killed al-Assad’s minister of defense and other top security officials. This may not be the death knell of the Syrian regime but its deteriorating condition seems clear.

There is, of course, no appreciable number of pro-democracy advocates in the Syrian resistance; such people — as in Syria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere — exist only in the minds of Clinton, Obama, McCain, Graham, and Lieberman. Indeed, the correct spelling of the name of those fighting against al-Assad’s regime is “mujahideen.”

These fighters come from the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, which has been patiently waiting to exact revenge for al-Assad’s father’s early 1980s destruction of the city of Hama, and with it the death of 20,000 Brotherhood members, their families, and innocent civilians. In addition, al-Qaeda and its allies are heavily involved in attacking the regime and clearly have brought with them their admirable skill in conducting suicide operations and organizing the logistics needed to keep the resistance supplied and in the field.

Also fighting in Syria are Islamist fighters who transited the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-built highway through Iraq that now connects Syria with Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Finally, some of the other democrats Mrs. Clinton and Senator McCain supported in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya are fighting in Syria and brought with them many of the weapons they looted from the regimes they overthrew while bipartisan Washington mindlessly applauded and prated about the birth of “Arab democracies.”

If and when the al-Assad regime falls, Americans can watch the delights that will emanate from the Mrs. Clinton-led bipartisan effort to destroy it: (a) the slaughter of some portion of Syria’s Alawite and Shia communities; (b) the triumph of Islamist forces, although they may deign to temporarily disguise themselves in more innocent garb as has Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood; (c) the opening of Syria’s prisons and the release of thousands of veteran and hardened Sunni Islamist insurgents; and (d) the looting of the Syrian military’s fully stocked arsenals of conventional arms and chemical weapons; the latter is the largest in the Middle East and perhaps in the world.

And if this is not enough, there also is a little problem brewing in Bulgaria where an Islamist fighter — apparently carrying a U.S. passport — blew up an Israeli tour bus last week, leaving 7 dead, including 5 Israelis. Israel has blamed Iran and/or Lebanese Hezbollah — and that may turn out to be true — and Senator Graham and his stern, bipartisan gang of AIPAC-owned colleagues in the Congress and administration likely will jump on the band-wagon and screech for Israeli retaliation —even if it leads to a U.S. war with Iran and the implosion of the already crippled U.S. economy.

Now, it is too bad that some Israelis and other people got killed in Bulgaria, but Israel is at war with the Palestinians, other Sunni militants, and Iran; has been for a long time; and routinely kills Palestinians, Iranian scientists, and other Sunni fighters when the opportunity arises. Such is the nature of war. But only an idiot — or an Ivy-League-educated U.S. politician — could imagine that a bigger power can unrelentingly fight a war with a smaller one without eliciting a well-merited lethal response. And it is only the same crowd that could believe that civilian targets are illegitimate targets when the smaller enemy kills them, but perfectly legitimate when the bigger power kills them. For instance, how many thousands of such innocent Muslim civilians do you think have been or will be killed by the Islamists who Mrs. Clinton, et al have cheered on to victory in Libya and Egypt, and to near-victory in Syria?

In the midst of this mess perhaps U.S. voters ought to take a minute to think these situations through, and then ask what has all of this got to do with America? Here at home we have a wrecked economy, an important pending election, and a president intent on giving us Kenya-like government and class warfare — that ought to be enough for us unless Syria or the endless Israel-Muslim war has a direct impact on U.S. national interests.

Maddeningly, both Syria and the damnable Israel-Muslim war are having a direct impact on U.S. national security interests, but only because both parties have unrelentingly intervened in affairs in the Islamic world that have no impact on, and pose no threat to U.S. national interests. Given Syria’s possession of an enormous arsenal of chemical weapons, Washington’s obvious policy goal should have been to make sure al-Assad’s regime did not fall — or at least that it did not facilitate the fall — and thereby make that arsenal available to states and groups who mean to harm the United States.

Instead, in the name of a non-existent Syrian democratic movement, Mrs. Clinton has made sure that fading U.S. power has been lined up four-square behind Islamist forces eager to overthrow al-Assad and then damage U.S. interests and kill Americans with Syria’s enormous stocks of conventional and chemical weapons.

And the suicide-bombing in Bulgaria ought to call to mind a too-little-remembered event of July 1914: namely, the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in Sarajevo which set off a train of events leading to World War One. At base, the bombing in Bulgaria is the business of Israel, the bomber and his sponsor(s), and the Bulgarian government. The attack is just another small episode in the Israel-Muslim war that has been going on since the founding of Israel, and even before. Had the Founders common sense non-interventionism been adhered to by both U.S. parties, this small — and, to America, unimportant — episode in the Israel-Muslim war would not have merited more than squib in the media. Instead, we find AIPAC-corrupted media outlets and U.S. politicians in both parties ready to support Israel in retributive acts that may well lead to a U.S. war with Iran, one that will kill more of our soldier-children to protect Israel and drive the U.S. economy deep into depression.

Israel, of course, must be completely free to respond to the attack in Bulgaria in any way it deems necessary to protect its people and interests. But it is nothing short of criminal and demented that our interventionist politicians have created a scenario where war and depression may well be the lot of Americans because Israel — a nation in which we have no genuine national interest — decides to exercise its legitimate right to self-defense.

Maybe Americans will have time to think through this absurdity while they wait for al-Qaeda and/or its allies to gas their families with some of the Syrian chemical weapons Mrs. Clinton lusts to arm them with.

It would have been interesting to see Mrs. Clinton swagger across her office to take the phone and apologize to the Pakistanis for last year’s mistaken U.S. attack on their soldiers. For a woman usually so full of war-speak and arrogance it must have been hard for her to put on sack cloth and ashes. Even more, though, it would have been fascinating to watch the Pakistanis at the other end of the line as their tried not to howl with laughter as the Secretary of State of a once-great power cried uncle and said “we’re sorry” to a team of Third World poker players who knew they held the winning hand all along.

Well, the apology is out of the way and supplies will again begin to flow from Karachi, through Pakistani territory, to U.S.-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. As long as the resupply routes stay open, U.S. and NATO forces will be able to stay until 2014, the official date President Obama has set for our surrender to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. An orderly surrender to a far weaker enemy, I suppose, is always better than an unexpected surrender because your troops are out of bullets and bread.

But what about the American people? Where is their apology? For those who might ask what Mrs. Clinton has to apologize for to Americans, try the following on for size.

1. For the decision of Obama and Bush to delegate to Pakistan their constitutional responsibility to defend America and defeat its enemies. There is no constitutional provision for such a delegation, and no common sense in giving it to a country fully and openly opposed to our war aims in Afghanistan.
2. For the shameful acquiescence of Generals McChrystal and Petreaus and their predecessors for not resigning and then speaking to the American public about the madness of marooning a U.S.-NATO field army in Afghanistan by allowing resupply to remain patently vulnerable to Pakistani manipulation and the Russians’ desire to bleed the United States by allowing the transit of inadequate driblets of supplies through the Former Soviet Union.
3. For the policies of Obama and Bush — such as curtailing night operations — that left our soldiers and Marines crippled by rules-of-engagement that made them more targets than killers. [Ditto for Iraq.]
4. For the cowardice of both parties in bowing to ignorant Western public opinion formed by the wishes of a now-dead, half-witted British princess who opposed the use of land mines. No insurgency supplied and reinforced at will across a long foreign border — as is the case in Afghanistan — can begin to be defeated without closing that border tight with military forces and minefields.
5. For both parties’ insane obsession with building a secular democracy — complete with a parliament and Western-style rights for women — in a deeply Islamic Afghanistan. Obama, Biden, Bush, Cheney, Clinton, Powell, Lieberman, Graham, and McCain are all personally responsible for getting U.S. and NATO military personnel killed, wounded, and de-limbed for such demented goals as allowing Afghans to vote and Mrs. Mohammad to hold a parliamentary seat.
6. For the bipartisan decision not to “win” in Afghanistan and to never mention the word “victory.” This piece of genius will permit the Taliban‘s return to power and the continued basing of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. And the U.S. defeat in Afghanistan — when added to our earlier departure-without-victory in Iraq — is likely to galvanize the rising generation of young Muslim males in a pro-jihad direction, just as the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan in 1989 galvanized bin Laden’s generation.
7. For two administrations’ willingness to extend what should have been a 12-to-15-month punitive expedition into a 13-year lost war that wasted every American life and dollar that was spent in its pursuit and has left U.S. interests far more vulnerable to Islamist militants than they were in 2001.
8. For Obama’s decision to keep U.S. and British soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan after he decided to concede America’s defeat there, a decision that has allowed the U.S.-and-British trained Afghan army and police personnel to shoot their trainers, as happened to the British last week and to our soldiers this past weekend.
9. For Democratic and Republican election-year deceitfulness in claiming that the war against al-Qaeda and its allies is being won, when a quick look at the data and any map of the world will show that Islamist forces are far more numerous, well-armed — thanks to the Arab Spring, and much more geographically dispersed in 2012 than they were in 2001.
10. For the continuing bipartisan political, academic, and media lie that holds the United States is being attacked by Islamist fighters because of its freedom, elections, and gender equality. All leaders in these fields know the Islamists are waging war on America because of the impact of Washington’s interventionist foreign policy in the Muslim world. The politicians, journalists, and academics prefer, however, not to rock the boat that brings them benefits from domestic and foreign lobbies and so push the lie that will ultimately cause the United States to bleed to death in terms of lives, money, and prestige.

The foregoing seems to me more than enough to justify Mrs. Clinton strutting onto our television screens to offer Americans an apology on behalf of both parties and her own resignation. I suspect such an event is not in the offing, however, at least as long as Mrs. Clinton believes she has a chance to get more U.S. military personnel killed in an unnecessary war with Syria.

In thinking about all of this an anecdote came to mind that is appropriate at Independence Day. It is said that George S. Patton, when a young officer fighting Mexican bandits before the Great War, offered an Independence Day toast that amounted to: “God bless the United States of America, and god damn all of her enemies.” I suspect that the young Patton never envisioned a July 4th like the one just past, one on which many of America’s most dangerous enemies are to be found among elected federal officials.