Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

Readers of this site will be familiar with the ongoing efforts of a goodly number of U.S.-citizen champions of Israel to pressure media outlets to ban me from broadcasts, as well as to convince my employers to fire me for criticizing the U.S. relationship with Israel. Along with this comes a good deal of personal abuse. Last week, I again voiced my belief that America should not be involved in the Israel-Muslim war and — as night follows day — another tranche of witty, intellectual, and sophisticated notes went to FOX TV and to my e-mail.

I have included a sampling of this campaign below to again demonstrate that the Israel-Firsters will do nearly anything to break someone who questions their blatant disloyalty to America, and to note that my experience over the past eight years strongly suggests that many of the U.S.-citizen supporters of Israel are drawn from that part of American society that is best described as “the scum of the earth.” Indeed, I have written to Ms. Andrea and Ms. Lewis to say that I consider them “Israel-First Traitors.” True to her scum form, Ms. Andrea today has written to FOX and Georgetown University complaining that by speaking the obvious truth about her and Ms. Lewis proves me an “anti-Semite.” All Israelis and supporters of Israeli ought to be very proud of these two.

The “Larry Johnson” referred to several times below runs the blog http://www.noquarterusa.net/blog/. He seems to be a hero of the Israel-Firsters, which, I suppose, says a lot.

From: Lisa B. Andrea — lisabandrea@yahoo.com

—“You have shitty genetics You’re a fat, ugly failure and a loser in life unable to find a full-time job LOL”

—“You have shitty genetics. You’re an ugly, mentally ill loser.”

—“A member of the unlucky sperm club, ugly face. LOL”

—“I’m sure that I’m not the first female to call you creepy and creepy-looking. No doubt, you’ve been mocked by women your entire life”

—“Wow, you’re really as creepy as you are creepy-looking and creepy-sounding. I read your nickname at the CIA was Charles Manson. I see why.”

From: Lisa Andrea <lisabandrea@yahoo.com>
To: FOX NEWS Sent: Sunday, April 21, 2013 2:58 PM Subject: Boston Marathon

XXX: Michael Schuer was really not the best person to have on your show discussing the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing since 9/11 was planned and implemented on his watch. Seems Schuer is the problem, not the solution. Oh, and by the way, he is touted as a Phd but it turns out that his doctorate is in British diplomacy from some obscure Canadian college, not in international security or Middle East affairs from Harvard or Princeton. Lisa Andrea

— “Is “Bea” one of the voices in your head, psycho? You’re so creepy-looking and so ugly, but, you’re used to being mocked by females. LOL

From: Bea Lewis — blewis3h@yahoo.com

—“You’re a mentally ill coward and loser in life fired from his government job and from the Jamestown Institute and you’re unable to keep a fulltime job today. You were rejected for special ops at the CIA because you’re a fat loser and mentally unstable.”

—“Fat Mikey, you’re having a nervous breakdown because you’re an overweight mentally ill coward with zero military experience who was rejected for special ops in the CIA. You’re a massive loser in life.”

—“Israel provides immense military assistance and training to the US. You have zero military experience. You were even passed over for special ops, fat Mikey. LOL”

—“Judging from your physique that contributed to being rejected for special ops, impotence is your problem. And, you’re reduced to being an irrelevant blogger, having left your government bureaucrat job in disgrace after being asleep at the wheel when 9/11 was planned and implemented. Sucks being you, Mikey.”

—“Larry Johnson made special ops. Evidently, your pear-shaped physique and that dumb vacant look in your eyes worked against you. Unfortunately, they pushed you off into the bin Laden unit which didn’t work out so well for the country due to your total incompetence and lack of intellect.”

—“Trying to pretend you were in the military by calling interviewers “sir” isn’t amusing, it’s pitiful. Surely, you could have worked in the mess hall where you could have eaten the left overs.”

From: Bea Lewis <blewis3h@yahoo.com>
To: FOX NEWS Cc: mfs47 <mfs47@georgetown.edu> Sent: Sat, Apr 20, 2013 1:08 pm Subject: Viewer Comment

Mr. XXXXX, as covered in the Weekly Standard publication, below, your oddball guest Michael Scheuer actually makes the sick claim that the ulterior motive of the Holocaust Museum is really to influence US foreign policy toward Israel by making Americans sympathetic to Jews. Would you say this is merely delusional or anti-Semitic or an indication of a severe psychiatric disorder? And, what does putting him on your show say about you? Bea Lewis

—“Fatman, you’re an undistinguished coward and a loser who never served in the military and was rejected by special ops.”

From: Bea Lewis <blewis3h@yahoo.com>
To: FOX NEWS Cc: mfs47 <mfs47@georgetown.edu> Sent: Fri, Apr 19, 2013 4:20 pm Subject: Viewer Comment

Mr. XXXX, your guest Mr. Scheuer came across as rather peculiar and so a quick bit of research revealed this article appearing in the Weekly Standard, whose editors appear regularly on Fox News, painting a rather unflattering picture of Mr. Scheuer, including incompetence contributing to 9/11 and untruthfulness about his resume and in testifying before Congress … http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/014/084zuzpe.asp?page=1 Your audience deserves better, no? Bea Lewis

While the Tsarnaev brothers apparently conducted the Marathon bombings in Boston, the detonators of those bombs also have the fingerprints of most Democratic and Republican politicians all over them, and those men and women are in a measure responsible for each and every one of the Boston casualties. Why? Because once again it is blatantly obvious from the evidence the authorities have presented to date that the attackers were motivated by what the U.S. government does in the Muslim world and not because of our freedoms, liberties, and gender equality. So before President Obama and Secretary Kerry, Senators McCain and Graham, and most of the mainstream media swing into intense lying mode — which amounts to “those murderous Muslims are crazy and hate liberty” — here are several contact points with reality worth keeping in mind.

1. To the best of my knowledge, since Osama bin Laden declared war on America in 1996 no Islamist attacker or would-be attacker in the West has ever told the authorities after his arrest that he was motivated to attack by the West’s values, lifestyles, and freedoms. In addition, none of the recovered documents or taped statements by domestic Islamist attackers who died in action have yielded evidence of that kind of motivation. This sort of evidence consistently has shown that the attackers’ overarching motivation to be hatred for U.S. and Western foreign policy toward and intervention in the Islamic world.
2. Likewise, no major Sunni Islamist leader has preached jihad against the United States and the West because of its values, lifestyle, etc. That they loathe many parts of what has become the West’s semi-pagan society is clear; secular democracy and feminism are not coming to their precincts anytime soon, even if Obama, McCain, and Hillary Clinton continue to seek to impose them with bayonets. Nearly to a man, Islamist leaders have unrelentingly sought to focus Muslims on U.S. and Western interventionist policies and actions in the Muslim world. And those leaders have no lack of things to focus Muslim attention on. Since 2011 alone, for example, President Obama and the similarly interventionist NATO leaders have invaded two Muslim countries — Mali and Libya; established a new U.S. military base in Muslim Niger; and are on the verge of intervening in Syria. In addition, they arbitrarily stripped Muslim Sudan of 30-plus percent of its territory and 75-to-80 percent of its oil reserves and gave it to a new and Christian “South Sudan.” To paraphrase what Edmund Burke said about the resistance of American colonials to direct British intervention and taxation, Muslims who would not resist this sort of illegitimate intervention would be fit to be slaves.
3. On the U.S. and Western side of the equation we find a mindlessness that is startling; productive of dead and wounded Americans; and which increases the power of our Islamist enemies. Given points 1 and 2 above, it is nothing less than amazing that senior U.S. political leaders in both parties and much of the media — as well as their counterparts in Europe — continue to preach that Americans are being attacked because of their lifestyle and freedoms. One would think that someone in the media would ask them to produce the evidence for this contention, which of course they could not do. But no one has asked because these politicians, pundits, and journalists would have to admit that U.S. foreign policy — preeminently our support for the Saudi tyranny and Israel; our invasions of Muslim countries; and our efforts to impose Western political and social views on Muslims and neuter Islam — is the main motivation of our Islamist enemies and that, therefore, U.S. policy has helped to kill and maim military and civilian Americans abroad, as well as in Boston, New York, Arkansas, Fort Hood, Texas, Washington, and the rural fields of Pennsylvania.
4. U.S. and Western interventionism also is, in may ways, a two-for for Islamist leaders, their groups, and their ability to attract increasing numbers of young man to their banners. For example, we invade Libya and destroy a viciously anti-Islamist regime. Thereby, we assist in the freeing of thousands of Islamist fighters from Libyan prisons, skilled and experienced men who immediately return to the mujahideen; we facilitate the looting of dozens of arsenals — as we did in Egypt and Tunisia — and so we better arm the mujahideen across Africa; and we deliberately destroy a valuable intelligence ally in our war against the Islamists. And all this in the name of a secular democratic movement that surely exists in the deranged-by-feminism brains of Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice but to no considerable extent anywhere in the Arab world.
5. Just as damaging to the genuine national security interests of the United States and Western Europe is the combination of relentless interventionism and feckless, effeminate war-making. Whether the war was emphatically a necessity — as in Afghanistan — or a criminally whimsical choice —as in Iraq and Mali — the U.S. and its NATO allies always lose. And they lose not because their Islamist enemies are stronger or better armed — they clearly are not — but because the U.S. and the West will not kill the requisite number of the enemy and their supporters, and destroy enough of the foe’s resources and infrastructures, to make our the Islamists know for certain that the bloody game they started — their religious war against the West — is not worth the candle. As a result, we have suffered truly staggering loses in Iraq and Afghanistan, as we will in Mali as the Islamist insurgency there evolves and expands. However much President Obama and the war-boys McCain and Graham dress up the effectiveness and describe the success of the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan, all of the Muslim world — and especially the young male segment of that population — perceives that the much vaunted U.S. military had its ass kicked and is running home chased by Allah’s warriors, just as the Soviets were evicted from Afghanistan in the 1980s. What better recruiting tool could there be than a perceived reality among young Muslims — underpinned by the reality of U.S. withdrawal-without-victory in Iraq and Afghanistan — that the theoretically omni-powerful U.S. military is an organization that is made reliably contemptible because it is deliberately hamstrung by politicians who are more than willing to wail lamentations and cry crocodile tears over U.S. casualties, but are not willing to protect Americans because they cannot face the reality that the one and only thing that counts in war is victory.
6. So as Boston is cleaned-up and the casualties are buried and tended, all Americans have yet another chance to think about how long they will tolerate a war that Washington refuses to win, while it systematically and knowingly providing much of the motivation for those Islamists intent on killing of Americans. Through its bipartisan truckling to the Saudi and other Gulf tyrannies; its intervention in places like Libya and Syria, where we have no genuine national interest and are helping to put Islamists in power; its willingness to accept U.S. military defeat everywhere; and its unquestioning bipartisan support for Israel and thereby the corruption of U.S. politics by AIPAC and the campaign funds provided by pro-Israel U.S. citizens, Republicans and Democrats are helping to kill Americans, their families, and their children.
7. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, that the young George S. Patton — then fighting to defend the U.S. border with Mexico — raised a July 4th toast to America’s independence with the words: “May God bless America, and may He damn all of her enemies.” At that point in his career, Patton surely had Pancho Villa and his raiders in mind as enemies, not the bipartisan political leaders of the United States. Given where we stand today in our losing war against Islamist insurgents and terrorists, Patton, if alive, might well enlarge the compass of his definition of America’s enemies to include recent U.S. presidents, senators, and congressman — and he would be right to do so.

For more than two years the Syrian civil war has raged with no impact at all on the United States and its domestic or international interests. Notwithstanding the crocodile tears that have flowed from Mrs. Clinton, President Obama, the European Union, and the usual gang of senatorial war lovers — McCain, Graham, Lieberman, etc. — the Syrian civil war has not troubled genuine U.S. security interests a lick. But that reality is, of course, irrelevant to our bipartisan governing elite, and we now seem headed for yet another mindless foreign intervention.

As he stepped into the Secretary of State’s role, John Kerry must have wondered how he would ever surpass the record of Mrs. Clinton. In her four years in the position, Mrs. Clinton talked constantly, traveled endlessly, further institutionalized the insane, war-causing foreign policy goal of forcing the world to install her view of women’s rights; and scored a breathtaking diplomatic achievement — she bribed the Burmese junta into dealing with Washington and allowing an aging, gad-fly female poet to travel the world. Such of Mrs. Clinton’s predecessors as William Henry Seward, John Quincy Adams, and General George C. Marshall best make way for this unprecedented foreign-policy accomplishment.

After that performance poor Mr. Kerry had to move fast to make his name in history and what better method than that of intervening in a war in which no genuine U.S. national interest is at stake. Smacking his lips and muttering “Syria here I come!” Mr. Kerry met last week with the fundamentally anti-U.S. leaders of the “Syrian Resistance” — AKA: Al-Qaeda and its like-minded allies — and forked over $60 million in “non-lethal aid,” thereby laying the groundwork for greater U.S. participation in that none-of-our-business war.

In this action, Mr. Kerry demonstrated all the usual attributes of our bipartisan governing elite. As noted, we have no life-and-death interests at stake in Syria, so that is where Kerry and our leaders will focus their interest. This, rather than trying to fix, say, our open borders, which are facilitating the ability of Iran and the Sunni Islamists to wage war inside the United States. Kerry’s donation to the Syrian Islamists also underscores the utter contempt he and the governing elite have for the well-being of Americans. In a bankrupt country like today’s United States, Kerry gave away $60 million to America’s enemies, money that could be much better used or simply saved at home, and the waste of which elicited zero negative comments from all those wailing in despair over sequestration. Kerry like all of members of our governing elite defines his own worth and success by how much he can “help” foreigners, Americans be damned.

The swag Kerry delivered to the Syrian Islamists — there would be no telling military resistance to Asaad if it was not for this multinational mujahedin force — also was complemented by the requisite deception of the American people. The money Kerry squandered was accompanied by his bald-faced lie that the donation was non-lethal because it focused on communications gear, transportation assets, and humanitarian aid. In reality, all of this aid is absolutely meant to expand the lethality of Syria’s Islamist resistance. Sophisticated communications equipment makes it harder for Asaad’s forces to locate and destroy their foes; trucks and other vehicle make the Islamists more mobile, allowing them to stay a step ahead of the Syrian military and quickly reach targets that they formally had to take lengthy and dangerous hikes to attack; and humanitarian aid is always a key part of lethal assistance. It allows the mujahedin and their Saudi and other Gulf-state backers to care for the resistance’s civilian supporters with U.S. and Western donations and use their own to buy arms. That the aid Mr. Kerry delivered — with that given by the EU and other mindless, do-gooding interventionists — is entirely lethal in nature is clear. It makes us participants in the war and requires Kerry to deliberately deceive the American people by describing it as non-lethal.

So the good luck of Americans vis-à-vis Syria seems to be running out and yet another U.S. military intervention is on the horizon. In addition, Kerry’s ability to deliver $60 million to the anti-U.S. and Islamist Syrian resistance provides another glimpse into the far bigger problem of a federal government that increasingly believes itself beyond the control of the electorate that the Constitution designated as its master. Except for brief episodes of pandering to voters every four years, both parties operate as if the people and the federal government are distinct entities, and that the superior latter knows what is best for the inferior former. This is an idea that would have been abhorrent to the Founders. “Government is instituted for the common good,” John Adams wrote in 1776, “for the protection, safety, and happiness of the people; and not for the profit, honor, or private interest of any one man, family, or class of men …”

Kerry’s donation to America’s enemies is yet another example of our bipartisan governing elite’s — which is now, in Adams’s words, one “class of men” — stark unconcern for the nation, its people, and their posterity. Indeed, it is a direct and knowing assault on the citizens’ well-being because funding for the Syrian Islamists came, in part, from the Obama administration’s raising of payroll taxes on working Americans, a process that sadly amounts to business-as-usual for the federal government under both parties; that is: “Take from Americans who are barely getting by and give to foreigners who hate them.”

There is no decency or common-sense, let alone concern and respect for Americans, in Kerry’s action and the modus operandi of our political elites that it reflects. It is, however, more fuel for the growing notion that the resistance movement that America truly needs is one manned and led by U.S. citizens and bent on opposing a federal government that is increasingly and intolerably the open, active enemy of America’s Constitution, laws, economic solvency, and financial and political independence. When a government behaves in such a manner, Adams concluded, “the people alone have an incontestable, unalienable, and indefeasible right … to reform, alter, or totally change the same, when their protection, safety, prosperity, and happiness require it.” Some interesting food for thought from Mr. Adams in these troubling days.

Although this week’s report about the Chinese military hacking into U.S. government and business websites and last Sunday’s appearance of Senator Rand Paul on FOX News — calling for President Obama to acknowledge he cannot kill a U.S. citizen in the United States with a drone — seem unrelated to the issue of borders, they are really quite pertinent to that topic.

What the Chinese military seems to have done is to penetrate a border of sorts, an electronic one that is meant to protect sensitive U.S. defense and business materials stored on computer systems. That the Chinese are doing this is no surprise. They have been at it for a while, as have Western governments. Recall the reported U.S.-Israel cyber attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and the repeated attacks by amateur hackers on Western banks, credit card companies, media outlets, and government offices.

In the present case, the detailed report published about the Chinese attacks seems to be raising a good deal of ire in the American public and among some elected and unelected federal officials. And it should. Our sovereign electronic border — if you will — has been wantonly violated by a foreign power with the intent to cause America harm, or at least to prepare China to cause us harm in the future. The Chinese attack seems likely to cause a tightening of our electronic defenses, which is all to the good.

Most of the American ire over the wanton Chinese attack on our cyber border, however, disappears when it comes to the reality that so many other of our foes have wantonly and consistently penetrated our old-fashioned land and coastal borders. And this is where Senator Paul’s words are pertinent. On FOX News, Senator Paul was worried about President Obama — and presumably his successors — using a drone to kill a U.S. citizen inside the United States. This is a legitimate point, or would have been if the Senator’s concern was not coming at far too late a date.

Unfortunately for our country, Senator Paul’s worry about the use of drones inside the United States is already long overtaken by events. Thirty and more years of uncontrolled land and coastal borders means two things: (a) we have no idea how many of our enemies or their surrogates are in America, and (b) we have no idea what kind of weaponry those enemies already have cached either in the United States or just across the border in Mexico and Canada.

While American politicians have for 30 years argued over “immigration reform,” they have ignored the fact that the only important concern vis-a-vis U.S. borders is their fundamental and direct relation to national defense. That consideration comes first, last, and always; all other concerns about the border are overwhelmingly less important. And because we have done nothing to protect ourselves by controlling our borders, we will at some point in the not too distant future see the a president not only using drones inside the United States, but also using martial law to maintain order and causing federal law to be changed to allow U.S. military forces to operate inside the country.

If you think this is far-fetched it is only because you have been lulled to sleep by the mainstream media and the politicians, all of whom know but will not speak about the vital role controlled borders must play in national defense.

The truth is, though, that none of us need the media, the politicians, or ribbon-bedecked general officers to tell us the obvious. America lost the war in Iraq because we could not or would not close Iraq’s borders to incoming mujahideen. We lost the Afghan war because we failed to even consider closing the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have lost the war on drugs because we have failed to control our own borders. The Syrian regime of Bashir al-Asaad is losing its war because it can no longer control its borders and stop the incoming flow of Islamist fighters. Israel is facing a substantial future threat because the Arab tyrants are no longer there to control their side of the borders they share with Israel. In short, uncontrolled borders inevitably lead to disaster.

And America will be no exception to this hard-and fast rule. Beyond the millions of undocumented aliens now in America, the U.S. government has for the 30 years conducted an interventionist foreign policy that has threatened and bullied foreign countries and movements — many of which clearly merit bullying if not severe punishment — and has thereby earned an often intense enmity among them.

During the same period, the U.S. government left our borders uncontrolled, and unless our enemies are idiots — and they are not — they have taken advantage of those open borders to prepare for the day when they can (a) no longer abide U.S. bullying or threats or (b) Washington undertakes direct military action against them. Does anyone seriously believe that Iran and the Sunni Islamist movement have not taken advantage of our open borders to insert fighters and weapons into the United States? Does anyone really buy the FBI’s traditional mantra that “we have not found them in America so they are not here”? Isn’t it just commonsense that America’s enemies — who have not a ghost’s chance in a stand-up fight with the U.S. military — would prepare themselves to exact revenge by being prepared to cause carnage inside the United States? And would it not likewise have been commonsense for Washington to have controlled its borders as long as it was intent on conducting an interventionist foreign policy that it knows alienates much of the world?

At day’s end we can probably defend ourselves effectively against the Chinese cyber attacks. We are aware of and angered by them, and are pretty good at such warfare ourselves. But, alas, it is far too late to protect ourselves against the domestic violence that will occur in the United States because we have failed to control our borders. There is no doubt that our enemies’ fighters and ordnance are already here; the only question is when they will choose to use them. When they do, Senator Paul’s legitimate concerns about protecting the rights of U.S. citizens inside the United States will be washed away by martial law, dictatorial presidential power, and domestic U.S. military operations — all of which will be the yield of uncontrolled borders and the easy opportunities they gave our enemies to prepare for war in North America.

Watching the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) question John Brennan — President Obama’s nominee for CIA director — drove home the utter unwillingness of so many elected and appointed senior federal officials to defend the United States. For the most part, each senator used his/her allotted time to pose irrelevant questions to man whose answers in many cases were deceptive and evasive, when they were not outright lies. One senator hit a bull’s eye when he called Brennan to task for publicly divulging a human operation that had penetrated Al-Qaeda-on-the-Arabian Peninsula but then did not follow up when Brennan took offense at the question. Had any intelligence officer except a senior one like Brennan exposed and thereby destroyed a sensitive ongoing operation — as Brennan clearly did — he would be joining the former CIA officer who recently went to prison for disclosing the name of a colleague.

Another senator questioned Brennan about the rendition and interrogation of terrorists on the basis of a report prepared by SSCI staffers. The senator said that the study proved that no worthwhile intelligence came from the interrogation of detainees. Displaying his longtime trademark — a cowardly switching of sides when the pressure is on — Brennan renounced his earlier certainties and agonized with the senator over his claims. As if prepared to descend from Olympus and set things aright at the CIA, Brennan implicitly denigrated the honesty and integrity of such men as Leon Panetta, General David Patraeus Michael Mukasey, General Michael Hayden, as well as each and every CIA officer who has testified under oath to the great and life-saving utility of the rendition/interrogation program. Lapdog-like, Brennan took the side of a senator who is ideologically opposed to defending America and a report prepared by staffers of the same sort. What Brennan did was to display his — and Obama’s — subservience to the far left, anti-American wing of the Democratic Party, as well suggest that he will bring a Senate-approved witch hunt to the CIA against those who have so ably and legally defended the United States despite being led by the sorry likes of Brennan, Obama, Clinton, Graham, and McCain.

A third senator nailed Brennan on the failure of the Obama administration to seize the terrorist who apparently participated in the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya; the man was detained in Tunisia and then released. Brennan self-righteously explained that the individual could not be detained under Tunisian law, and then launched into the usual cant-of-cowards about America must always stand for law and order and so must abide by the decision of Tunisia’s Islamist regime. That means, of course, that it is okay if the fellow goes free and helps kill more Americans because the Obama administration has stood up and respected Tunisian law. Not a surprising response from a man like Brennan who — with Bill Clinton, the felon Sandy Berger, George Tenet, etc. — ensured that bin Laden was alive to destroy two U.S. embassies in Africa, nearly sink the USS COLE, stage the 9/11 attack, and then survive to steadily kill Americans for decade afterwards.

One would have thought that some senator would have been bright enough to ask Brennan why the Obama administration had not used the Special Forces and/or the CIA to kidnap the guy in Tunisia and take him for interrogation to Guantanamo or some U.S. Navy ship after the Islamist Tunisian regime decided to protect him. But none of the senators asked — they thereby lined up behind Brennan’s position that more dead Americans are preferable to breaking Tunisian law — and neither did any senator ask Brennan if he was disclosing classified information when he told the senators that Washington knew the likely Benghazi attacker was still in Tunisia. It was surprising, to say the least, that Brennan publicly warned a terrorist — a man U.S. forces presumably are hunting — that the Obama administration knew his location.

This recap of this feckless hearing could go on, but the important thing to end with is the apparent delusion Brennan and the senators are operating under. That delusion is encapsulated in the constant mantra they used claiming that America is always best defended by taking the moral and legal high ground. This may have been partly true decades ago — although the self-righteous mantra even then was backed by a huge nuclear arsenal — but today it is a lethal pipe-dream for which there is no basis in fact.

For more than a decade, the world, and especially the Muslim world, has seen that while American leaders from both parties spout and pontificate about their high-moral standards, they are simultaneously engaged in a bipartisan foreign policy of endless intervention in other independent nation-states; in an arrogant and near-racist policy that tries to make their little brown brothers overseas into the image of themselves; that is, secular democrats who are devoid of religion, decency, and commonsense; in a policy of free speech that has fatally corrupted our domestic political system and made America’s media the world’s powerhouse producer of pornography and incitement to murder; and in an addiction to a so-called individual right that has killed 55 million unborn U.S. citizens and has caused no remorse among our political leaders. These men and women who are, however, more than willing to whine and cry crocodile tears because U.S. forces killed a U.S. citizen named Anwar al-Awlaki, a man whose reason for living was to kill Americans. Overall, what the world has seen in recent decades is a brand of American leaders and policies that — as a wise acquaintance of mine recently said — would give amoral pagans a bad name.

In the world as it is today, America’s security is in no way assured by U.S. politicians mindlessly bleating about our high-moral standards and respect for the rule of law. Sadly, their own actions have devastated and rendered impotent any impact such a perception might have if it was abroad in the world — which it certainly is not.

Until this generation of politicians and civil servants of John Brennan’s ilk pass away, the moral high-ground is to be greatly valued — as another wise acquaintance of mine notes — but only because it provides U.S. military forces with the best field of fire.

France’s recent interventions in Mali and Somalia underscore the accelerating ability of Al-Qaeda-in-the-Islamic-Mahgreb (AQIM) and its Africa-based allies to threaten the continent’s nation-states, as well as access to natural resources — oil, strategic minerals, and uranium — that are essential to the French, U.S., and other Western economies. The growing power and geographical reach of AQIM mirrors the growth of all components of Al-Qaeda and other Islamist groups, save possibly the central component in Afghanistan-Pakistan. The bottom line here is that sixteen years after Al-Qaeda and its allies began their religious war, the United States and the West confront an Islamist enemy that is larger, better armed, smarter, and far more geographically dispersed than ever before.

Now, that paragraph merits a fuller and more data-supported explanation, but for now, let’s look at one of the men — John Brennan — who for nearly 15 years has ensured both that the above-described growth in the Islamists’ power has occurred, and that most Americans have no idea that a still-growing part of the Muslim world is at war with the United States.

This month, President Obama nominated John Brennan to be the next CIA chief. Mr. Brennan was a longtime Agency officer and held a number of senior appointments there. He also has held a number of senior positions outside the Agency in the nation’s national security apparatus. One might argue that all of these positions were based on Mr. Brennan’s unvarying willingness to say “Yes, my genius leader” to anything his boss of the moment said was a good idea. It also has been said that he was thoroughly detested inside the Agency while working for DCI George Tenet — primarily because his first question on the proposal of a covert operation to protect Americans was always was “How will this impact on Director Tenet’s reputation” — and for fully supporting the CIA’s overwhelmingly successful rendition program while Messrs. Clinton and Bush were in power, and then damning the Agency for the program and helping to destroy it when he snuggled up to President Obama and his consistently anti-CIA party. Indeed, there was a popular joke inside CIA in the 1990’s which ran something like: “Question: Why is George Tenet never photographed from behind? Answer: Because they have not found a way to dislodge John Brennan’s nose.”

Now, it surely would be unfair to deny any nominee a job because of how people reacted to his performance as professional sycophant or because of off-color humor made at his expense. But there are at least four substantive reasons to deny Mr. Brennan the job of heading the CIA. The following are those reasons, and one would think that if the Senate does not ask him about them, it will have failed to do its job.

1) 1996: When, in December 1995, the Agency set up a unit to dismantle al-Qaeda and capture or help the U.S. military kill Osama bin Laden, one of that unit’s first actions was to ask Mr. Brennan — who was then what George Tenet has described as “CIA’s senior officer on the Arabian Peninsula” — to secure from the Saudi intelligence service some very basic information and documents about bin Laden. The Saudis did not respond, and so the bin Laden unit sent frequent messages to Mr. Brennan asking him to secure the data. When we finally received a response from Mr. Brennan, it was to tell us that he would no longer pass the bin Laden unit’s requests to the Saudis because they were annoyed by them. DCI George Tenet backed Mr. Brennan’s decision, and when I resigned from CIA in November 2004, the Saudis had not delivered the requested data.

Comment: I speak on this from firsthand experience, as I was the chief of the bin Laden unit at the time. The messages from Mr. Brennan refusing to push the Saudis on bin Laden are in the archives of several government agencies, but, more important, they are in the archive of the 9/11 Commission. (NB: I know the documents are there because I supplied them to the Commission.) In the latter archive, the messages have been fully redacted to protect the CIA sources and methods and so ought to be easily available to the Senators and to the media via a Freedom of Information request.

2) May 1998: For most of the year between May 1997, and May 1998, the bin Laden unit — with fine support from too few other Intelligence Community agencies — prepared an operation to capture Osama bin Laden using CIA assets. During the preparatory work, none of the bin Laden’s unit’s bin-Laden-specific information requests to the Saudis were answered, and given Mr. Brennan’s above-noted attitude, the unit was not ever sure the requests were passed to the Saudi intelligence service. Just before the capture operation was to be attempted, Mr. Brennan convinced Wyche Fowler — then U.S. ambassador in Riyadh — and DCI George Tenet that the U.S. government should cancel the capture operation. Although the Saudis had yet to lift a finger to assist U.S. efforts to counter bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and because it is the merest common sense to know that Afghans never obey orders from any foreigner, Mr. Brennan, Ambassador Fowler, and DCI Tenet all assured then-National Security Adviser, Mr. Sandy Berger, that the capture operation should be canceled. Mr. Berger canceled the operation, only to demand — through his assistant for terrorism Richard Clarke — that the operation immediately be restarted 75 days later when bin Laden’s al-Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Tanzania.

Comment: I also speak on this issue from first-hand experience, as I was the chief of the bin Laden unit at the time, and also traveled in early May 1998, with DCI Tenet and the then-chief of CIA’s Near East Division to hear Mr. Brennan explain why this ludicrous reliance on the thoroughly unhelpful and often obstructive Saudis was a better way to protect Americans than by using CIA’s capabilities. Again, however, it is more important to note that the papers documenting this entire episode — including notes from Mr. Brennan, Ambassador Fowler, and DCI Tenet to Mr. Berger urging the cancellation of the capture operation — are in the archives of several government agencies, but, more important, they are in the archive of the 9/11 Commission. (NB: I know the documents are there because I supplied them to the Commission.) The latter archive the messages have been fully redacted to protect the CIA sources and methods and so ought to be easily available to the Senators and to the media via a Freedom of Information request.

3) May 2010: In a speech at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), John Brennan told Americans it is incorrect to attribute the words “jihad” or “jihadists” to the war being waged on America by bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and their allies. In the Obama administration, Mr. Brennan explained, we refuse to “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists’ or ‘Islamists’ because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community….” Brennan said it would be “counterproductive” for the United States to use the term, as it would “play into the false perception” that the “murderers” leading war against the West are doing so in the name of a “holy cause. Moreover, describing our enemy in religious terms would lend credence to the lie propagated by Al Qaeda and its affiliates to justify terrorism — that the United States is somehow at war against Islam.” Bearing out Mr. Brennan’s testimony about the Obama administration’s position are a host of government documents — including Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points on the recent death of four U.S. officials in Benghazi, Libya — which refer to al-Qaeda or other Islamist militants not as “Muslims” or “Islamists” but in the Orwellian and deceiving term “Violent Extremists.” And, not surprisingly, the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) last week validated that Messrs. Brennan and Obama are following its orders by claiming that the word “Islamist is a stealth slur. It exists as a piece of coded language.”

Comment: No one expects clarity or complete honesty from a politician, but when a senior U.S. bureaucrat speaks in public to Americans — who are, after all, his/her employer — about their nation’s national security, one has a right to expect that the speaker at least be in honesty’s ballpark. Mr. Brennan’s words above are — when considered objectively — as close as it is possible to come to a complete lie. Far more than 90-percent of the references to “jihad” in the Koran and the Hadith — the verified collection of the Prophet Mohammad’s sayings and practices — are martial in nature, and the one Hadith that provided the basis for Mr. Brennan’s lie has never been verified, is not included in the authoritative/verified Hadith collections, and is mainly used to mislead Americans by such apologists for militant Islam as the leaders of CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, and academics like Georgetown’s Professor John Esposito. The Senate, one would think, should ask Mr. Brennan to explain his lie, as well as to explain why the administrations he has served as a senior adviser — those of Mr. Clinton, Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama — have completely ignored the words spoken and written by Osama bin Laden and other Islamist leaders, even though there is a remarkably high correlation between the motivations and intentions they express and the actions they take in their religious war against America and its allies. A Senator might even find it appropriate to remind Mr. Brennan that the United States made a mistake similar to his in the 1920s when it ignored the motivations, intentions, and prescriptions for actions found in the words of former corporal in the Kaiser’s army.

4.) 2013: Since May 2011, when Osama bin Laden was marvelously killed through cooperation between the CIA and the U.S. Navy Seals, Mr. Brennan has consistently told Americas that the Obama administration’s policies have yielded a substantial reduction in the power, reach, and capabilities of al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies. To be fair, President Osama and Republican leaders repeatedly have said the same thing; most recently, President Osama said as much as he met Afghan President Karzai to finalize plans for America’s abject defeat in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s return to power in Kabul.

Comment: During his confirmation hearings, the Senators should display two maps for Mr. Brennan. The maps should be simple and clear political maps of the world — no rivers or mountains to make viewing arduous. One should represent September 2001, and the other should represent Spring 2013. The one for 2001 will show al-Qaeda and its allies overwhelmingly domiciled in their Afghanistan stronghold, along with a scattering of small cells around the world. The map for 2013, on the other hand, will show al-Qaeda and other Islamists still active in Afghanistan, but also has having established other large enclaves — where training, arms caches, and operational planning can be easily accommodated — in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq, Palestine, across North Africa, Nigeria, and, as noted above, in northern Mali. Given that even a cursory comparison of the maps will show the Senators and all Americans that the post-9/11 al-Qaeda-Islamist movement has grown significantly in numbers and geographical reach, Mr. Brennan might reasonably be asked to explain why he, as well as the Clinton, Bush, and Osama administrations he served, have invariably misled Americans by asserting that the Islamist threat is receding.

The foregoing four points, I think, provide a firm, substantive ground on which to evaluate Mr. Brennan’s fitness to be chief of the CIA, and will allow his reputation for servile toadyism and deception to be left aside. I would also add that there are at least three children who deserve to hear Mr. Brennan’s answers. Let me explain.

In late 1995, I interviewed and hired a young Agency officer to work in the bin Laden unit. Over the next decade-plus, she and her colleagues in the unit and overseas succeeded in defining the motivations and leadership ability of Osama bin Laden; the organizational structure of al-Qaeda and its ties to other Islamist groups; al-Qaeda’s highly lethal intentions and capabilities; and provided the Clinton, Bush, and Osama administrations with at least 12 chances (May-1998-May, 2011) to capture or kill bin Laden — only the 12th of which was taken.

Over these years, the young woman I hired performed brilliantly, while having had three beautiful children who are now motherless because their Moma was killed by al-Qaeda at Khowst, Afghanistan, in December 2008, still trying to find Osama bin Laden after all the other chances she helped deliver to U.S. presidents were ignored. Those three children, as well as the mothers, children, wives, parents, husbands, and fathers of those intelligence officers and military personnel who have been killed and maimed in the war against al-Qaeda and Islamism deserve to hear Mr. Brennan explain those of his actions that helped keep bin Laden alive to kill so many Americans, as well as why he and his political masters have consistently lied to all Americans about the threat they face from the growing Islamist movement. I trust that those three motherless children — and the deceased CIA officer who bore them — will be front and center in the minds of the Senators when they question Mr. Brennan.

Last Friday’s Wall Street Journal brought the inevitable. In an opinion piece, Shiraz Maher, a professor at King’s College, London — wrote that “the story of what is going on in Mali”actually begins in Libya, where the unintended consequences of the Arab spring are now roiling North Africa and West Africa. When NATO forces decided to support the Libyan rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, they could scarcely have predicted the impact of their intervention on the region’s labyrinth of competing economic and confessional interests.

Now, I have never heard of Professor Maher but, clearly, he is an intellectually dishonest jackass. Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is no way to truthfully argue that “unintended consequences” are at work in Libya, Mali, or elsewhere in Africa. The events that are occurring in North Africa and the Sahel presumably are not wanted by either the academy or the political leaders of the United States, Canada, the UK, and the rest of Europe, but they were perfectly predictable as a consequence of Western intervention in Libya. When the relentless, war-causing interventionists in those places decided to remove Gadhafi in favor of a “democratic revolution” that did not exist in Libya, or in Egypt, Yemen, Tunisia, Pakistan, Syria or anywhere else in the Arab world, they ushered in everything that has happened since, and if they knew anything about history, the region, and the Islamist movement they would have known it.

How could these genius Western interventionists know that they were deliberately opening Pandora’s Islamist Box? A few facts that should have been obvious to anyone with a bit of commonsense as the Islamist Spring unfolded make a claim of “unintended consequences” preposterous in the extreme.

• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were secular dictators. One thing each of these secular leaders did was suppress Islam and persecute, imprison, or kill Muslims who held too closely to their faith, spoke too publicly and vociferously in its support, or opposed by word or deed the un-Islamic actions of their government. It is worth mentioning that each of these leaders was paid handsomely by U.S. and Western governments for the persecution of Islam. Needless to say, when the tyrants departed, the people of each country became much freer to profess, live, and apply their faith. Islam, at last, had become the way.
• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were master jailers. Their prisons were full of convicts. There were many common felons and crooks, but there was just as many — if not more — mujahideen fighters, theorists, logisticians, clerics, etc. When the Islamist Spring took down the master jailers, the prisons were opened and the freed Islamist fighters and their supporters returned to local militant groups and traveled far and wide to join al-Qaeda and other such organizations. These men had maintained and probably strengthened their faith while jailed, and they likewise burned to avenge the treatment they had received while incarcerated. Not surprisingly, this result of the Islamist Spring brought mujahideen groups around the world large numbers of experienced, skilled, and angry reinforcements.
• The leaders of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were experts at keeping almost all weaponry under their governments’ control, just as President Obama seeks to do in the United States. At the time of the Islamist Spring, the militaries of Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were exceptionally well-armed with up-to-date weaponry, and their many arsenals — like those of Sadam Hussein in 2003 — were stuffed to overflowing with reserve weapons and ammunition. When the tyrants fell, each country’s internal-security apparatus naturally disintegrated and the arsenals were thoroughly looted by Islamists who ferried away massive amounts of modern arms and munitions for safe keeping in rural areas or in remote regions of nearby countries. Thus the Islamist Spring yielded an international mujahideen force better armed than at anytime since its inception in the 1980s.

Each of these important points was easily knowable before the Islamist Spring began in February, 2011. And the results of the Islamist Spring that the world is now seeing in North and West Africa were just as easily predictable. Honest and responsible Western leaders, professors, and journalists would have warned their citizens that the Islamist Spring would cause Islamist militant organizations — al-Qaeda, its allies, and groups no one had yet heard about — to soon grow larger, more lethal, bolder, more geographically dispersed, and more bitterly opposed to U.S. and Western interventionism than ever before. Instead, those Western leaders knowingly and deliberately lied, applauding the fictitious advent of secular democracy in the Arab world — of which there was never a chance — and, as President Obama likes to say, the substantial receding of the Islamist threat.

Why do I argue that the results of the Islamist Spring were knowable at least from the moment it began, and that the events that have occurred since were just as predictable? Well, because I knew and predicted them in such places as lewrockwell.com, antiwar.com, non-intervention.com; the Washington Post, the American Conservative, the National Interest, the BBC World Service, FOX News, and other media outlets. I even suggested the current unrest in Syria in my 2008 book and in a written article. A few others predicted the same things in many of the same places; I certainly had no corner on the market of the blatantly obvious that always eludes Ivy Leaguers.

I draw attention to myself on this occasion because I know that I am far from the brightest bulb in the shed. In their periodic efforts to get me fired from Georgetown University, in fact, my detractors among pro-Israel U.S. citizens tell the Georgetown deans that not only am I an anti-Semite but the school where I earned my Ph. D. — the University of Manitoba in Canada — is a “diploma mill” and that I am therefore unqualified to teach at the graduate level. Though, of course, I disagree with this conclusion and their slander of a fine university, let us suppose that they are correct and that I am a bear of little or even almost no brain. How then could I have been so right about the Islamist Spring and the disasters it would cause, while Mrs. Clinton (Yale); Senator McCain (U.S. Naval Academy); Prime Minister Cameron (Oxford); Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford), and President Obama (Harvard and Columbia) could be so nearly 100-percent wrong?

Simple. It is because I know that the Founding Fathers warned of the mortal danger interventionism posed to America’s survival; that U.S. and Western interventionism is the main motivation for the religious war our Islamist enemies are waging against the West; and that the men and women just mentioned are among the leading practitioners of war-causing intervention. In short, it was clear as night following day that the Islamist Spring would feed Muslim hatred for U.S. and Western interventionism and supply the Islamist movement fighting that intervention with men, guns, optimism, and momentum.

My exquisitely-educated betters and their media acolytes, on the other hand, are too intellectual — that is, too dogmatic and arrogant — to have any contact points with reality; they believe in the ludicrous notion of American Exceptionalism and its concomitant duty to force our little brown brothers to be secular — if not pagan — democrats; and they are willing to get any number of America’s soldiers and Marines killed to further their utterly unattainable dream of an all-democratic world. Maybe we should consider sending send our governing elite to the University of Manitoba for a few freezing months of reeducation?

Josef Stalin is reputed to have said something akin to “one death is a tragedy, 25,000 deaths are a statistic.” Surely, President Obama has proven that Uncle Joe was right almost every day since the shootings in Connecticut.

Remember the president’s “touching,” tear-filled statement after the shootings? Weeping crocodile tears over the deaths of those 20 youngsters, Obama played his scene with actor-like skill and sincerity. Indeed, he almost made you forget that he leads a party that has protected a “right” of American women — and their profiteering executioners at the American Medical Association — that has yielded the murder of more than 50 million other American youngsters since 1973. The deaths of those Connecticut youngsters were nothing short of a human calamity; that said, the death of those 50 million other youngsters is a human holocaust that makes Hitler look like an amateur murderer and puts Obama, Clinton, Carter, and their party in the running with Stalin and Mao for the top spot on history’s list of all-time mass murderers.

And Obama’s eagerness to use the deaths of the Connecticut youngsters to further his ideological quest to destroy the 2nd Amendment is not his sole use of dead Americans to further his ideological goals and lust for power. Every Marine and soldier who has died in Afghanistan since Obama’s administration announced U.S. forces would leave that country in 2014 has died for absolutely nothing. Their lives were wasted to further Barack Obama’s political career. In announcing that decision, Obama and his party declared America’s defeat, and, while history-ignorant Americans applauded the action, America’s enemies — the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, etc. — took the full measure of the man. They knew that Obama had white-flagged them, in essence saying “You win, we‘ll get out soon after I am re-elected.” Having re-won the presidency, Obama will complete the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and will waste every life the U.S. military losses from now until the withdrawal is completed. And what do you think will happen to Afghans who allied themselves with the United States and NATO? Well, they will be dead, killed by the Islamist militant groups that Obama’s administration — under orders from the Committee on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) — refers to as unIslamic, Violent Extremist Organizations. Before long, Americans will find that these groups, abetted by the Democrats and CAIR, will be waging war inside the United States.

Obama’s dabbling with the personal and political usefulness of gratuitous murder is never more apparent than in his and the Democratic Party’s intimate ties to the merchants of death who dominate the U.S. entertainment industry. Throughout the late presidential campaign, we saw Obama pass up no chance to appear with actors and directors who produce films and TV programs that condition America’s youngsters to accept large-scale murder and mutilation as commonplace, as well as to regard women essentially as whores. He also appeared with singers who use lyrics that celebrate and even advocate murder and describe women as sub-humans worthy only of servicing the desires of men, as well as with IT geniuses who specialize in producing video games that allow youngsters to kill huge numbers of people for multiple hours a day. Just this month, as Obama, Vice President Biden, and New York Governor Cuomo campaigned for abrogation of the 2nd Amendment, their pals and funders in Hollywood were raking in 40-plus million dollars a week from their most recent lets-kill-for-the-fun-of-it movies: Texas Chainsaw — 3-D and Django Unchained.

Obama and his party prate endlessly about education, but seem to carefully define it in the narrow sense of a classroom education, the milieu in which they and their teacher-union friends deliberately have taught several generations of grammar and high-school students to misunderstand and so grow to hate America; to dismiss religion as a form of superstition or even mental illness; to look to the federal government for life-long help and so avoid hard work; and to fanatically believe in the indefinable but society-destroying concepts of diversity and multiculturalism.

But as pathetic and perverse as is the substance of grammar and high-school education in today’s America, the more pervasive, powerful, insidious, and violence-enabling form of education our children receive flows from the main, death-oriented beliefs of Obama and Democratic Party:

• The “right” of female U.S. citizens to have human beings murdered at their discretion by the American Medical Association’s federal government-protected executioners-for-hire.
• The “right” of the federal government’s executive branch to enforce only the laws it likes; to aggressively seek to eliminate religious faith from the public square; to destroy U.S. national security by refusing to control our borders; and to send our soldiers and Marines overseas to fight in wars it does not intend to win and to keep them dying there until it is politically expedient to bring them home.
• The “right” of the entertainment industry to massively profit from products that return our children to a value system worthy of kill-at-will savages, while at the same time convincing them that misogyny, sexual perversion, and every variety of human depravity is simply another form of “normal” that they must not only tolerate but also celebrate as evidence of their allegiance to diversity.
• The “right” of the American educational establishment to abandon educating children in favor of serving as the Democratic Party’s in-school recruiting agents who propagandize kids to become dependent on the federal government; to demonize America’s founders as dead, white, male, slave drivers, and denigrate what they accomplished; to mindlessly support an interventionist foreign policy that is yielding an endless war with Islam — or, if you like to be politically correct, Violent Extremist Organizations — that will bleed America to death in lives, finances, and domestic stability.

In all, the America created over the past 60 years when power was held by Obama, his Democratic predecessors as president, and their party — and supported by the allies in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and the teacher unions — is one that is more divided on serious substantive issues than at any time since the eve of the Civil War. It also is a country whose Constitution is under direct attack by the Obama administration. First, Obamacare’s birth-control/abortion provisions have violated the 1st Amendment rights of America’s Catholic community, as well as parts of the Protestant, Muslim, and Jewish communities. And, yesterday, Biden told his allies in the whining, effete, and anti-gun media that Obama may abridge 2nd Amendment rights by executive order.

The possibility of arbitrary attacks on the Constitution and/or the Bill of Rights by the national government’s Executive Branch is precisely why the Founding Fathers made sure Americans had the right to be as well-armed as they deem necessary. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights can be amended by the Constitution’s formal amendment process, but it cannot be amended by congressional legislation alone or by executive decree. Amending via the Constitution’s guidelines is legal and commands the obedience of the populace, but amendment by legislation or by presidential diktat is simply rank despotism, the destruction of which the Founders would have favored and which they meant to facilitate by the 2nd Amendment.

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.