Michael Scheuer | Non-Intervention

After weeks of media stories, myriad photos of oil-coated birds and fish, the president throwing tantrums like a bewildered teenager nearing adulthood, and the Congress disguising its failures by venting its hypocritical spleen at British Petroleum (BP) executives, Mr. Obama will give Americans his views on the Gulf oil leak on Tuesday evening. Before the president speaks it might be helpful to fix blame for the Gulf mess where it belongs. Three questions and answers ought to turn the trick:

Question: When was the first Saudi-supported oil embargo aimed at crippling the U.S. economy?

Answer: 1973.

Question: What problem were Americans alerted to by the embargo?

Answer: The health and stability of their economy was in the hands of America-hating Arab tyrants and other Third World dictators.

Question: What did the U.S. Congress do about this national security threat in the ensuing 37 years?

Answer: The U.S. Congress moved Daylight Savings Time (DST) up three weeks.

There you have it. Both political parties have utterly failed to protect U.S. national security in the energy realm. Private industry has developed new fossil-fuel and alternative energy sources; car makers have improved gas efficiency and reduced emissions; and many millions of Americans are purchasing cars that use less fuel and are better for air quality. And the Congress? DST is three weeks earlier; no new nuclear energy plants have been built in 30-plus years; and, with two presidents, Congress has pandered for oil to a Libyan leader who killed U.S. citizens on Pan Am 103. As usual, all hands are contributing something to improvements on the energy front except the elected officials whose main job it is to defend America. Instead, they and their appointees have kept America vulnerable to foreign decisions about oil.

Regarding the current Gulf oil leak, BP should be held responsible for any regulation breaking that is proven. If there is criminality involved, those culpable should be prosecuted. But before scapegoating BP and driving it to bankruptcy, it is worth asking why BP was drilling by remote control in over 5,000 feet of water? Yes, part of the reason is that it is a profitable endeavor. And, yes, another part of the reason probably is that BP used campaign contributions to make federal offshore drilling regulations less stringent than they should be.

But the real reason BP and other companies are drilling in the Gulf is because U.S. national security absolutely requires them to do so. The Congress has left Americans and their economy in front of a gun pointed at them by OPEC leaders, some of whom are U.S.-hating tyrants. As discussed here before, the Congress for nearly four decades has kept the United States dependent on oil sources we do not control, and for which we will fight to secure if production is seriously disrupted or stopped. Among such vital-to-the-U.S. producers are Saudi Arabia, Mexico, and Nigeria. In 2012, in fact, we will get 20-percent of our crude oil from the Niger Delta.

Given this reality it is hard to make heads or tails of President Obama. The correct response to the BP disaster, I think, would have been “accidents happen,” especially when you are drilling in 5,000 feet of water with robotic equipment. Obama should have reassured Gulf Coast citizens about clean-up and stressed that criminal activity contributing to the leak would be prosecuted.

But he should also have explained to Americans that offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, off the Pacific coast, and elsewhere is mandatory because his political predecessors failed to wean America from energy sources we do not control and for which we will have to fight if they are shut by war or political decisions. Most of all, Obama should have made a powerful appeal for public support for alternative and nuclear energy to prevent wars for oil, gain more control over our energy supply, and eventually negate the need for offshore drilling. This is an accurate, credible position and it would have been politically advantageous for Obama. It also is about the full extent of Obama’s — or any president’s — capabilities.

But instead the president came out snarling like a clone of Rahm Emmanuel; that is, he acted as an attack-dog/punk. He savaged BP and its executives, apparently encouraged his party members to do the same in Congress (where they were joined by the me-too Republicans), called for “kicking ass” like a teen-age bully, rallied anti-BP sentiment in the Gulf states, and strolled the Gulf Coast beaches looking for oil balls, dead fish, oil-fouled birds, and photo opportunities. This adds up to nothing in terms of stopping the leak or putting America on the road to energy security.

Then, tragically, Mr. Obama decided the United States was not hurt enough by the BP leak and so suspended drilling in the Gulf. Again, drilling in the Gulf and elsewhere offshore is absolutely necessary and will remain so for decades as we work for greater energy self-sufficiency. By halting Gulf drilling Mr. Obama simply put off the day when drilling can be ended for good. He also gave the extremist environmental lobby a powerful tool for preventing the resumption of drilling. If we know anything about Congress, we know that Obama’s drilling ban will hold because the legislators can now have it both ways: They can blame him for the ban while cynically sympathizing with both environmentalists and oil companies. Overall, Mr. Obama took a disaster and with support from his party, the Republicans, and the environment-crazed media made it worse.

Whatever Mr. Obama tells the American people about the BP leak on Tuesday night ought to include the hard truth that we are in this fix because of the near total failure of both parties to remove the threat foreign oil producers pose to our economy and national security. He must not simply draw and quarter BP — that firm is responsible for profit not U.S. national security — and he must not take the cheap and media-pleasing politician’s way out by trying to parlay the leak into some kind of U.S.-led, U.S. taxpayer-funded global environmental campaign. Indeed, Obama would be well advised to tell Americans he will launch an FBI investigation into any U.S. scientist or professor who is accused of deliberately falsifying or manipulating data used to justify the actions proposed at the 2009 Climate Summit.

Mr. Obama has a chance to do what no president or federal legislator has had the courage to do in nearly 40 years. He has an opportunity to use the bully pulpit to force America onto the road toward energy self-sufficiency and away from potential wars for oil. Mr. Obama also has a historic opportunity to perform, as did Theodore Roosevelt per Douglas Brinkley’s brilliant book, The Wilderness Warrior, as an able defender of the environment and as a common-sense user and steward of America’s natural resources. We will all see tomorrow night whether Mr. Obama’s “vision” for America amounts to anything more than getting elected and reelected.

Israel-First’s media shills moved quickly to destroy another defenseless target in the form of the octogenarian journalist, Ms. Helen Thomas. Too bad she had not been on a relief boat, they could have just shot her in the head.

Let me say, that I carry no brief for Ms. Thomas. Listening to her consistently Liberal-biased questions at the White House was always a trial and often migraine inducing. But the liberal and conservative journalists who formed a lynch mob after she said the Israelis should “get the hell out of Palestine” and “go home to Germany, Poland, and America” shows the complete unity of the “unbiased” U.S. press corps when it comes to the topic of Israel. Ms. Thomas was hung because Israel’s interests required her hanging — no debate about U.S. support for Israel is permitted among Americans — and the media’s Israel-First U.S. citizens (or do they carry Israeli passports, too?) eagerly did the lynching.

About this event, people should read a story by Howard Kurtz called “Out of Questions” in the Washington Post (8 June 10). Kurtz says Ms. Thomas’s “hostility toward Israel has been no secret inside the Beltway,” which seems to mean the mass of Israel-First journalists with whom she shared a profession resented her opinion of Israel but lacked the manliness to confront her. They waited for a skulking Long Island Rabbi and his candid camera to set up Ms. Thomas and then slither home to put the tape on his website. They then piled on like the girly-men they are. For her fellow journalists, of course, Ms. Thomas’s views toward Israel were biased and hate-filled, whereas their own abject fawning over Israel is the way God planned things, and anyone who disagrees is preordained to get kicked by the boot the U.S.-citizen Israel-Firsters lick.

With his own skewering of Ms. Thomas, Kurtz adds quotes from a couple more first-team, Israel-First grovelers who had stepped to the plate to take swings at Ms. Thomas. From the so-called conservative side, the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg claimed “She’s [Ms. Thomas] always said crazy things,” insinuating Ms. Thomas always has been an enemy of Israel and/or that you have to be crazy not to love Israel and want America to fight its wars. From the liberal camp came the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg saying that “Helen Thomas offered the official Hamas position” — apparently accusing Ms. Thomas of being a terrorist is part of the lynchers’ toolkit. Kurtz finishes by quoting the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait who wrote in 2006 that Ms. Thomas was prone to “unhinged rants” such as asking “Why are we killing people in Iraq? Men, women, and children are being killed there. … It’s outrageous.” One would think it hard to judge this as a rant in that half of all Americans in 2006 were asking the same question. But then again the Iraq War was waged to protect Israel’s interests at the cost of thousands of dead Americans, and so, for Kurtz and Chait, anyone who questions the wisdom or cost of the Iraq war clearly is “ranting.” For all these Israel-First shills the bottom line is “Free speech be damned when it comes to Israel.”

Now, there is no reason that anyone should agree with Ms. Thomas’s words about Israel, or even pay any attention to them. But there is no basis for or justice in the way she was treated for speaking her mind. Having your ears seared and your stomach turned by things you do not want to hear is what free speech is about. Until the 1970s America’s public square was a wide open, raucous, intelligent, and fun. Today, however, it is hedged around by hate-talk police like Mr. Kurtz, et al who think if they can suppress the speech they find offensive and lynch the offenders we will have a much better world, or, more likely, a world which they in their genius approve.

Well, they are wrong. Efforts to suppress free speech, as in Ms. Thomas’s case, always backfire on the society they are mistakenly meant to perfect. That is why the Founders — who knew man cannot be perfected — wrote the First Amendment, and why they manfully absorbed attacks on themselves that far surpassed in venom anything that Ms. Thomas said about Israel. Anti-free speech efforts — like those the Israel-First fifth column specializes in — may for a time quiet people who prefer to avoid public vilification by the media’s lynching teams, but over time they will only harden minds and hearts. Indeed, the debates the hate-speech police and their laws mean to prevent will inevitably resurface in a more dangerous form, for when all issues cannot be openly, frankly, and even harshly debated and settled in the public square, violence always ensues.

Finally, in case you wondered who calls the shots in Washington, did you notice that neither the president, his cabinet, nor a single one of the 535 members of the federal legislature said a word in support of Ms. Thomas’s right to say what she thinks? Didn’t all these U.S. officials swear to “preserve, protect, and defend” the U.S. Constitution? Well, maybe they are just following orders.

Washington’s bipartisan groveling to and knee-jerk support for Israeli actions are nearing an epic success. They are shattering the last of the thin veneer of Westernization in Turkey; reminding the Turks they are Muslims; pushing the Turks into the Muslim world; and encouraging Islamism in Turkey. This is a nightmarish achievement of Homeric dimensions and was caused by Israel and its U.S.-citizen friends corrupting, intimidating, and ultimately dictating policy to U.S. politicians and media. With an economy on the rocks, two wars being lost, and Obama’s lynch-law-style chase of BP unfolding, we find the decision about war in the Levant, and whether the United States joins it, is in the hands of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his ability to divine what God wants done to protect His chosen people. This is insane.

The solution to the problem is for America to stop intervening. No U.S. politician should tell the Israelis how to defend themselves. If Israel’s leaders believe their country’s security depends on the IDF boarding and shooting up relief convoys then that needs to be done. Israelis alone are responsible for shaping their security requirements and living with the consequences. On the Palestinian/Arab side, Washington should stop telling Muslims what to do or not do in dealing with Israel. The Israelis and Muslims are locked in a religious war where compromise means turning your back on God. God, Mr. Netanyahu says, gave the Israelis an eternal deed to Palestine, and innumerable Muslim leaders claim God did likewise for Muslims. We should walk away and let them test the validity of their God-given deeds in a war sure to ruin both.

From the U.S. perspective, moreover, non-intervention would allow us to stop saying “yes” to the question: “Are we really obligated to be endlessly damaged politically and diplomatically, put at increasing disadvantage on the battlefield, and drained of financial resources to protect Israel, a nation whose actions in and toward the United States — espionage, technology theft and transfer, political corruption, humiliating and rousing dissent against a sitting president, etc. — can only be seen as an enemy’s behavior?” Once we can answer in the negative, most Americans will see how crazy it is for the world’s greatest power to be involved in the Levant. If we stand aside, what possible impact can an IDF raid on a relief convoy or strafing of Palestinians have on U.S. security? Or what possible impact can a Hamas suicide bomb in Israel have on U.S. security? If Israel goes to war against Syria or vice versa, so what? Israel and its Muslim neighbors want to fight this religious war for their God. Let them. Stability is a much over-valued commodity; in fact, more stability would be found in a post-war period after both sides burned out their lust for religious war.

Israel particularly merits Washington’s cold shoulder because it has bred a fifth column in the United States. I hope many Americans have read or heard the messages delivered by their war-wanting, fellow U.S.-citizens since the IDF raid. In print and on television and radio, Americans have been lectured by Israel-First propagandists like Charles Krauthammer, Eliot Cohen, Mark Steyn, Daniel Pipes, and Steven Rosen on their absolute duty to support Israel, and on how questioning or opposing Israel’s actions weakens U.S. security and connotes anti-Semitism. They argued, in other words, it is the duty of Americans to shut up and feel honored to see their taxes aid Israel’s territorial aggrandizement and have their soldier-children die as Israel’s cannon fodder.

If Americans doubt where the primary loyalty of the Israel Firsters is fixed, I would recommend listening to Steven Rosen’s discussion with Peter Beinart last week on NPR’s “On the Media.” Rosen spoke as if there is a codicil to the 1st Amendment that forbids Americans from even mild criticism of Israel; he left no doubt he would support such a ban on his fellow citizens. Steyn and Pipes, on the other hand, made a strange attempt to paint Turkey as a U.S. enemy because Istanbul took exception to the IDF killing its nationals. Cohen and Krauthammer were more traditional, using the stale but always reliable make-Americans-feel-guilty-about-the-holocaust ruse.

Cohen: “The folly here is to think that leaving the Israelis open to these kinds of diplomatic attacks [from other nations] will buy goodwill in the Middle East that gets its opinions from Al Jazeera and a venomous media that routinely prints outrageous lies and hate literature that echoes Nazi Germany.”

Krauthammer: “The world is tired of these troublesome Jews, 6 million — that number again — hard by the Mediterranean, refusing every invitation to national suicide. For which they are relentlessly demonized, ghettoized and constrained from defending themselves, even as the more committed anti-Zionists — Iranian in particular — openly prepare a more final solution.”

Using Cohen’s words more accurately, the “folly here” to think the existence of Israel or Palestine matters to U.S. national security. For forty years, Washington has spent untold time, diplomatic resources, and money promoting peace between Muslims and Israelis who want war. For the effort, Americans have: (a) earned the undying hatred of many tens of millions of Muslims; (2) led Israeli politicians to believe we are a rich, militarily powerful automaton they can cynically manipulate by using terms like “holocaust” and “Nazi” and “final solution” whenever their acts bring war near; (3) convinced Arab tyrants we will intervene at the last second to stop all-out war when their murderous surrogates spur Israel to defend itself; and, worst of all, (4) allowed the growth of a fifth column of U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters (see above) that corrupts our politics, opposes free speech, and wants to take all Americans to war for their own personal religious beliefs.

This is too high a price for the United States to pay for anything that goes on in a sandpit at the Mediterranean’s eastern end.

America first … and a pox on all in the Levant.

Memorial Day has become an increasingly sad and cynical affair. Politicians from both parties and members of the the media, universities, peace groups, churches, and veterans organizations join with ordinary Americans on this day to pay tribute to the men and women who have died or been maimed fighting America’s wars. And while the fallen and wounded fully merit the reverence shown them, many of those showing it are hypocrites of the first rank.

For most of the post-1960 period, our military personnel have been used as expendable pawns by presidents with one eye on the war they started and the other on opinion polls, the media, and the attitude of Europe’s elite. As a result, the U.S. military has been used more to meet reelection needs than as the tool to protect U.S. interests by scoring clear victories.

Indeed, the civilians constitutionally charged with defending the United States have abolished the word victory from their vocabulary. They never order U.S. forces to annihilate the enemy so America wins and can bring them home. Political leaders have forgotten that in wartime — especially if America is attacked first — each American life is worth infinitely more than any number of foreign lives. And if victory takes killing untold numbers of those who attacked us, as well as the civilians who support or sympathize with them, then so be it.

The only mercy in war is its speedy conclusion, and nothing brings that end more quickly than utterly destroying the enemy, his supporters, and his material infrastructure. If it is true, as General W.T. Sherman said, that “war is cruelty,” the only moral policy is to make sure that such cruelty lasts for as short a time as possible, and that can only done by using our military to win completely and quickly.

On this Memorial Day, many of the civilians and civilian groups who will cry crocodile tears for our dead service personnel are as much hypocrites as the politicians. Much of media, for example, loathe the U.S. military and report wars only to: (1) discredit the sitting president; (2) find fault, failure, and/or purported criminal activity by our troops and then sensationalize it to undermine morale, national resolve, and the war effort; (3) disclose classified data that helps the enemy kill Americans; and, (4) rally anti-war and anti-U.S. sentiment at home and overseas against America and its national interests.

Much the same can be said of many peace and church groups. On Memorial Day many are hypocrites and on every other day they are — with the politicians and media — purveyors of long, useless, unwon wars. The peace and church people labor day and night to make the U.S. military’s work more difficult and thus they help prolong wars. The weepy folk from these groups who turn out for Memorial Day services today, will tomorrow be back trying to paint the U.S. military as war criminals, seeking to ban weapons that save the lives of U.S. service personnel, and adamantly arguing the nonsense that in wartime an enemy life is worth as much as an American one. Much of the Christian evangelical and Jewish communities, in fact, will dry their Memorial-Day tears and go home to work even harder to support a foreign nation by fomenting another unnecessary war — this one with Iran — so they can have even more dead to hypocritically cry over next May.

The church and professional peace-lovers will be endorsed by monkish “Just War” professors in U.S. universities. These tenured elitists argue it is moral to conduct endless tit-for-tat wars, to use U.S. force only in proportion to the enemy’s use of his (and so we never win), and to avoid casualties among the enemy’s civilian supporters and sympathizers even if U.S. soldiers and Marines die as a result. To the extent that church, peace-group, and Just-War leaders influence those responsible for conducting U.S. wars, exactly to that extent will the wars be lengthened, made more expensive in lives and money, and, ultimately, made unwinnable.

Generals and the leaders of veterans organizations are the toughest to get a fix on as to why they silently go along with the Memorial Day charlatans. From Vietnam to Iraq (twice) and Afghanistan, the predecessors of these men and women have had their lives sacrificed or stunted by political leaders who start unnecessary wars they do not mean to win. Do U.S. military academies teach that fighting U.S. enemies on terms set by the enemy and their domestic abettors in the United States is the smart way of waging war? Or that fighting in this manner keeps faith with the men and women they command or their parents? One hopes these are not the lessons taught, but the multi-starred men and women who lead our soldier-children into war do silently abet the politicians’ orders to tie one-and-a-half of America’s military arms behind its back and to bind our fighters with rules of engagement that favor the enemy. Have none of them ever heard of the concept of resigning in protest?

Afghanistan today is a prime example of this phenomenon, and proof that it occurs even in necessary wars. Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have limited air support for and night operations by our troops to protect the Taliban’s civilian sympathizers and supporters. And for what? The much heralded U.S.-NATO operation in Helmand province this spring temporarily cleared the Taliban and its allies from Majrah district, but the latter are now returning and rebuilding their dominance. It seems pretty clear that the Taliban fighters can only be returning because they were not killed, and that the Helmand operation provided a fleeting media victory for the Obama administration but had no lasting impact. It also means the U.S. and NATO lives and treasure expended there were wasted.

One wonders what the predecessors of Petraeus and McChrystal would think of their approach to war? How would today’s new-age generals be seen by those who always brought America victory because they knew the history of war, recognized man’s unchanging character, and understood that victory required “as hard blows against the enemy’s soldiers as possible” and actions that would “cause so much suffering to the inhabitants of the country that they will long for peace….”?

Today, then, let us indeed remember, revere, and commend to God’s care the U.S. military personnel who have died in all of America’s wars. They did what they were ordered to do by the country’s political leaders and their generals and admirals. But let us also remember that those who died in Vietnam and since have been cynically used by politicians and political generals who ignore history’s iron-clad law that wars are won by killing the enemy until he and his supporters are eliminated or give up. These men and women instead pursue a more “humane” kind of war where military punches are pulled, fighting is prolonged by years, enemy hearts and mind are sought but never won, and Westernization is imposed. In so doing, they may protect their political futures and appease the most malodorous segments of U.S. and European society, but they wantonly waste the lives of our soldier-children.

For 50 years, then, U.S. leaders have equated a U.S. soldier’s life with the life of an enemy or his supporter and have waged war without seeking definitive victory. Such men and women are fit candidates for the noose, not for re-election. It is our shame as a people that we keep putting them in office. And it is for this shame, as well as in loving memory of our lost servicemen and servicewomen, that tears should be shed on this Memorial Day.

Mr. Lee Harris has written a marvelous, provocative, and thoroughly troubling book called The Next American Civil War. The Populist Revolt Against the Liberal Elite, (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2010) Of the many issues Harris discusses, I was most struck by his clear and cogent analysis of the cultural war raging between what he calls America’s “cognitive elite” and all other Americans.

Harris argues that members of the the cognitive elite — educated in our in-bred, prestigious universities — firmly believe they know what is best for all Americans, and regard opposition to their plans as evidence of ignorance, stubbornness, poor education, or just plain stupidity. Harris argues that to shape America and the world as they want it, members of the cognitive elite resort to what he calls the “noble lie” to trick those they deem inferior — that is, most Americans — into believing their actions are really in the interests of all. In fact, they are interested only in holding power and running America and the world as they see fit, with as little as possible input, interference, or opposition from non-elite Americans.

The idea of the “noble lie” stuck with me and I read recent speeches by President Obama and his terrorism adviser John Brennan with it in mind. Obama’s speech was delivered at West Point on 22 May; Brennan’s on 27 May in Washington. Not not surprisingly, they abounded with multiple noble lies:

Obama: “The war began [on 9/11] only because our own cities and civilians were attacked by violent extremists …”

Fact: We were attacked on 9/11 by Islamists who represent the hatred of most of the Muslim world for U.S. foreign policy. These men may have been, in our eyes, “extreme” in their actions, but they were in the mainstream of anti-U.S. government opinion held by more than 75-percent of the Muslim world. Among Muslims, there is nothing extreme in a fiercely negative view of U.S. foreign policy; the intra-Muslim argument is only over how to respond to U.S. intervention.

Brennan: “The president’s national security strategy also outlines how we will strengthen other tools of American power…. This includes addressing the political, economic, and social forces that can make some people fall victim to the cancer of violent extremism. … Through new partnerships to promote development in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, we are working to foster good governance, reduce corruption and improve education, health, and basic services, all of which helps undermine the forces that can put the disillusioned and dispossessed on the path to militancy.”

Fact: We are not fighting Muslims who are motivated by hunger, illiteracy, joblessness, or any other supposed socio-economic malady. We are fighting Muslims inspired by hatred for Washington’s actions in their world, many of whom come from the Muslim’s world’s best, brightest, and most devout.

Obama: “We will continue to advise and assist Iraqi security forces…. And a strong American civilian presence will help Iraqis forge political and economic progress. … We will need the renewed engagement of our diplomats, from grand capitals to dangerous outposts. We need development experts who can support Afghan agriculture and help Africans build the capacity to feed themselves. … We need law enforcement that can strengthen judicial systems abroad and protect us here at home.”

Fact: It seems that neither the Democrats or Republicans will ever learn that the more we intervene abroad, the more wars we will fight. Obama, in this case, wants to increase U.S. intervention abroad — and the wasteful spending attendant to it — in all non-military areas. These programs all will have a tail attached to them: U.S. aid will be conditioned on the degree to which recipients embrace Western values. Some foreigners will accept the deal, most will prefer their own traditions, faiths, histories, and values and will become America’s enemies. And there is something exquisitely ironic in Obama’s administration being so very Kiplingesque, eagerly playing the role of superior and condescending Westerners lavishing money — which they have to borrow from China — in a selfless effort to remake their little brown brothers in their own elite image.

Brennan: “Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself and one’s community.”

Fact: This statement can only be described as a bald lie meant to mislead Americans. In the Koran and the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad references to jihad are overwhelmingly martial, and the war that is waged when conditions for a defensive jihad are met — as they are today — amounts nearly to a form of worship. Those who support Brennan’s point rely on a supposed saying of the Prophet that a personal jihad is more important than a military jihad to defend Islam and Muslims. That saying has utterly failed to pass Islam’s very stringent process for verifying the accuracy of sayings attributed to the Prophet, and it has been rejected outright by leading Islamic scholars.

Obama: “And so a fundamental part of our security has to be America’s support for those universal rights that formed the creed of our founding. … Together with our friends and allies, America will always seek a world that extends these rights so that when an individual is being silenced, we aim to be her voice. Where ideas are suppressed, we provide space for open debate.”

Fact: This is the most dastardly of the “noble lies” because it uses truth dishonestly. By invoking the words of the Declaration of Independence Obama rightly refers to the Founders’ belief that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are universal values. The lie comes front and center when he refrains from saying that the Founders, to a man, believed that U.S. leaders who decided they had a duty to impose these rights on foreign nations and peoples would ultimately destroy their own nation.

There are many more “noble lies” in the two speeches but the foregoing is a representative sample. Once seen as reservoir of noble lies, the speeches are a clear sign that our “cognitive elite” in both parties intend to continue their bankrupting and war-causing fifty-year binge of interventionism. Whether in military, agricultural, educational, judicial, or economic terms, Obama is bent on intervening in all spheres of life in any country that suits his fancy. He will do this in the name of all Americans, but the intervention will be nothing more than Obama and his elite colleagues trying to remake the world in their elitist image. Regardless of the financial, human, and security costs to the rest of us non-elite Americans and our soldier-children, Obama and Brennan are ready and eager to shoulder a burden likely to ruin America. Kipling would be proud.

Living near Washington gives one a first look at how the federal government slicks Americans into thinking they are well defended. Yesterday, for example, I received an e-mail from the Center for Security and International Studies (CSIS) announcing a talk by “John O. Brennan, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism.” The talk is part of CSIS’s “Statesmen’s Forum” series and is entitled “On Securing the Homeland by Renewing America’s Strengths, Resilience, and Values.” The title of the talk ought to make you put your hand on the wallet and then prepare to defend yourselves.

Mistaking Mr. Brennan for a statesman is like mistaking a gelding for a stallion; they might look similar but to expect identical performances from each is madness. Indeed, the speaker and the talk’s title tell us volumes about the Obama administration’s incompetence and detachment from reality. Defending America by “renewing its strengths, resilience, and values” is not to defend the country at all. There is nothing about our strengths, resilience, and values that needs renewal; Americans are hard-working, fair-minded, religious, stoic, and suitably blood thirsty when it comes to protecting their country, family, and liberty.

What Mr. Brennan will talk about is Obama’s belief that these are the wrong values. The values Americans need to have renewed, Brennan will say, are the Obama values of (a) never naming the enemy, (b) pretending the war we are fighting has nothing to do with Islam or Washington’s interventionism, and (c) sending our soldiers and Marines into harm’s way on terms favorable to the enemy. The accurate slogan for Obama values is: “Defenseless at home, impotent abroad.”

The coming U.S.-NATO campaign in Kandahar probably is the reason for Brennan’s talk, the first piece in a media operation intended to continue slicking Americans. The Kandahar campaign was announced more than two months ago by General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who has been ordered by his commander, General Petraeus, to prefer dead U.S. service personnel to dead civilian supporters of the Taliban.

Now even a fellow like me, lacking a West Point education, can legitimately ask why a senior U.S. general would give America’s enemies 90-days warning of the operation. Did General Eisenhower call Field Marshall Rommel in February, 1944, and say: “Hey, Erwin, we’re coming to see you in June”?

When I heard the announcement, I thought (hoped?) McChrystal was lying and would switch the attack’s focus at the last moment to fool the enemy. But that now is unlikely as White House leakers have given secret data about the campaign to the Washington Post and the New York Times, and both have published stories about how the Kandahar campaign will determine future U.S. policy in Afghanistan. The writers of the articles played their part, sounding as if there is something unknown about how the operation will turn out. There is nothing unknown about it, except the number of U.S. lives that will be wasted in the coming episode of political theater.

One of three real things will happen in Kandahar:

1. Gifted with 90 days advance warning, the Taliban and its allies will have moved most of their men and ordnance out of the area of U.S.-NATO operations and will have left behind a battle zone laced to the hilt with IEDS, landmines, booby-traps, and suicide bombers.
2. The Taliban will have moved out large amounts of men and ordnance, but will have left behind the above noted panoply of explosives and a cadre of fighters who will put up a stiff fight before escaping. This is what happened at Marjah in Helmand Province earlier in 2010.
3. The Taliban will put up a minimal resistance knowing that they own the territory and will get it back when U.S.-NATO forces move on to their next campaign.

Several false things will be said by U.S. officials in the aftermath of the real events:

1. The White House will say the Marines and soldiers killed in the operation died to bring freedom to Afghans and improve U.S. security. Wrong: They will have died for nothing except a temporary removal of the main Taliban force from Kandahar that will last only as long as the full U.S.-NATO force is deployed there. Once the troops are gone, the Taliban will return. This is what is now happening at Marjah, a place General McChrystal calls a “bleeding ulcer.”
2. The White House will claim the Taliban was dealt a shattering blow from which recovery will take many months. Wrong: As noted, the Taliban’s equipment and ordnance stocks already have been moved or hidden. And even if U.S.-NATO forces do destroy a larger-than-expected amount of Taliban materiel, America’s “allies” on the Arabian Peninsula — or at least their wealthy citizens — will pay to more-than-replace all losses.
3. The White House will say the campaign was triumphant because Afghans yearn for freedom, democracy, and women’s rights and rushed to the coalition once the Taliban were driven away. Wrong: The presence of the coalition is opposed by all but the most corrupt and Westernized Afghans because it is seen: (1) as a foreign, infidel occupier; (2) as a Christian enemy threatening Islam; and (3) as an agent of a political system meant to destroy Afghanistan’s tribal culture. The campaign will appear triumphant only because the insurgents ran away so not to die uselessly fighting overwhelming military power.
4. The White House will say that the Afghan army carried the brunt of the fighting, proving it is almost ready to control the country so Western forces can begin leaving. This will be announced about a month before the mid-term congressional elections. Wrong: The Afghan army agrees with most other Afghans that the U.S. and NATO are anti-Islamic, anti-tribal, and infidel occupiers. Once we are gone, the Army will break-up along tribal and ethnic lines to participate in a civil war.

What Brennan and the Kandahar campaign seem to be about is helping Obama hold the Democratic majority in Congress this fall. Brennan will tell the CSIS audience that our “extremist” enemies are people too, and that we need to use “our values” to win them over. He will celebrate Obama’s use of such “values” to terminate covert action operations that helped protect America; to revitalize the ludicrous idea that we can defeat the extremists with law-enforcement activities; and to assert that victory will flow from the administration’s refusal to use the terms Islamic, Islamist, and jihad when referring to our mortal enemies.

General McChrystal’s role in this melodrama seems to be to orchestrate a Potemkin victory that makes the United States look strong (pleasing conservative Democrats) and kills few people (pleasing most Democrats, the media, and the Europeans). McChrystal’s “successful” Kandahar campaign also will allow Obama to claim things are looking up in Afghanistan so we can begin withdrawing troops (in preparation for the 2012 election when he will he need every vote possible from his party’s pacifist, effete, Europe-loving, media-filled, anti-American base.)

Brennan and General McChrystal are an odd team. Brennan, a career-long sycophant who, with George Tenet, is largely responsible for bin Laden being alive today; McChrystal, a decorated veteran soldier who until now merited his country’s sincere thanks and respect. Both men now find themselves in the same place: they are playing at war and causing American deaths for political purposes. Both men know — or ought to know — that the only post-9/11 success attainable in Afghanistan was to kill as many of the Taliban and al-Qaeda as possible, and destroy as much of their physical and human infrastructure as possible, and then get out. Our current Afghan problem is the result of not following that simple formula. We have lost the Afghan war because, to paraphrase an old Roman emperor: “We came too late, we ignored reality, we did not conquer, and we stayed to fail at nation-building.”

U.S. and NATO forces are now pawns in this political game. Most of Afghanistan has turned against us, not wanting to trade atheist, anti-Islamic Soviet occupiers for Christian, anti-Islamic ones. As a result, the Taliban-led insurgency is growing in numbers and nationwide capabilities. We attack in Marjah, the insurgents attack Kabul and in northern Afghanistan. We prepare to attack Kandahar, the insurgents hit Kabul again and attack the airbases at Bagram and Kandahar. The insurgency is everywhere and U.S. and NATO troops appear able to concentrate on only one small area at a time. The latter is not surprising given we have about 90,000 troops — a total yielding 30,000 combat troops — in a country bigger and more mountainous than Texas with an entire population in arms.

One can only hope General McChrystal soon recalls three things he must have learned at some point in his long career: “If you do not kill the enemy, he will kill you;” “Never reinforce failure;” and “Politicians and their lap-dog advisers will always set soldiers up to take the fall.”

The attacks by MSNBC’s extremist Rachel Maddow on Rand Paul clarify a good deal for me. Ms. Maddow’s position is based on a sort of warmed over version of the 1920s’ Bloomsbury ideology: effete, secular, socialist, pacifistic, elitist, and libertine. The ideology is shared by her fellow MSNBC extremists Olberman and Matthews and by Mr. Obama and his acolytes. Anyone disagreeing with her and them is not just wrong but perverse, racist, badly educated, antiquarian, and could only come from the scum of the earth. What passes for political thought and philosophy among MSNBC’s neo-Bloomsbury extremists and team Obama reminds one of cheeses and flowers — those that stink the most, last the longest.

But, to be honest, MSNBC’s extremists and the Obamaites are not much different from Republicans in being arrogant elitists who regard Americans as ignorant rubes who are unaware of what is best for themselves and their country. What do we hear from the Republicans: they talk anti-abortion, do-nothing; talk controlling borders, do nothing; talk debt reduction, spend more; talk energy self-sufficiency, kiss the Saudis’ butt; talk support for the troops, get more killed in useless wars; talk about America’s independence, and lap up humiliation from Israel and Mexico.

Ms. Maddow-of-Bloomsbury, then, represents both parties in the sense that they both are telling Americans: “Trust us. We know what is best for you. Vote for us, shut up, and go home and watch television.”

Maddow’s assault on Rand Paul also cleared my mind in regard to the First Lady. For more than two years, Mrs. Obama’s claim that she was first “proud of America” when her husband was elected an Illinois senator has been in my mind. Her meaning was not clear at the time, and, of course, most media rushed to her defense and stopped follow-up discussion. But now, on the basis of observing the Obama administration’s first 16 moths, those who are the president’s closest advisers, and the behavior of its media shills like Ms. Maddow, I think I know what Mrs. Obama meant.

Mrs. Obama’s words had nothing to do with race, spousal love, political affiliation, or populism; her words had to do with elitism.

What Mrs. Obama meant, I believe, was that Illinois voters had at last recognized their betters; namely, those individuals of all races who attend Ivy League and other “prestigious” universities. At the schools, these men and women learn that a powerful, pervasive, and coercive central government — that they run — is the best regime for Americans. They also learn that once they gain power, they must make into law the centralizing dogma they were taught, while finding ways — using the fawning media — to placate or mislead the commoners they despise; those who, as Mr. Obama said in his campaign, bitterly cling to religion and the 2nd Amendment.

If I am right about Mrs. Obama’s words, the much-touted “hope” her husband campaigned to encourage is the hope that he and his fellow elitists, to paraphrase Edmund Burke, would be able to destroy the traditional edifice of the American society they loathe, and replace it with the coercive federal power they worship and lust to apply. It is not, I think, a coincidence that Obama’s senior lieutenants are called “Czars.”

For the rest of us riff-raff, however, the victory of Mr. Obama’s “hope and change” crusade means our own “hopes” for America probably are not attainable in the federal political system as it stands. What Obama-ism appears to mean is that Americans with one, two, or all of the following political, economic, or religious beliefs cannot expect redress for their grievances; indeed, they seem to have no recourse to effective political means for changing how they are governed no matter which party holds power.

Non-interventionists: Mr. Obama and his crew are as interventionist as their predecessors in both parties. Since taking office, Mr. Obama has sent more troops to the undeclared, already lost Afghan war; has started a new, undeclared war in Pakistan; is running ordnance to his proxies in Somalia and Yemen; is spending hundreds of millions to make Washington a central player in Mexico’s narco-war; continues to intervene in a Muslim-Israel war that is irrelevant to U.S. interests.; and is following Israel’s lead to war with Iran. These actions will yield more wars for America, and they will be fought by the children of non-interventionists because those of Mr. Obama and his followers seldom deign to risk their lives for their country. And to helpfully underline this point, Obama, on 22 May 2010, told West Point’s graduates — as did George W. Bush — that they would be fighting and dying needlessly for his elitist, mindless, Wilsonian quest to shape a “new international order.”

Sovereigntists: I use this non-word to describe those who know and support the absolute requirement that a sovereign nation must control its borders. Surely, it is already clear to U.S. citizens in the southwestern states that Obama intends to do what Bush, Clinton, and Bush did about open borders — absolutely nothing. Americans whose lives, property, and peace-of-mind are threatened or destroyed by illegal aliens can expect no help from Washington, but they can expect to be prosecuted more harshly by federal lawyers if they defend themselves, families, and property against attack and pillage. Still, the first natural right is self-defense, and it would be a tragedy — but sadly an increasingly likely one — if Americans must arm themselves to protect their kith and kin against the brigands flowing across the southern border and the federal officials eager to prosecute U.S. citizens and defend the brigands.

Pro-Lifers: One of Obama’s first presidential actions was to restore U.S.-taxpayer funding for abortions overseas. At some point, the Democrats will move “The Freedom of Choice Act” in Congress, federal legislation to compel doctors opposed to abortions to perform them. Whatever position one takes on abortion, it is well to keep focused on the durable and mounting rage of tens of millions of citizens who think abortion is murder. These Americans, like the antebellum abolitionists, are ignored or ridiculed by the media; the murderous and unaccountable Supreme Court; and most leaders in both parties. They are, however, determined to alter a situation in which they believe members of the American Medical Association have, since 1973, murdered for profit 47-plus million unborn Americans.

Low-tax Advocates: Obama seems to intend to force federal tax rates to soar by using the supine Congress and the collectivist U.S. media to mandate obscene levels of federal spending on health care, education, stimulus programs, foreign aid ($28 billion last year), and undeclared wars. Perhaps none of Obama’s actions show more disdain for ordinary Americans than his spendthrift ways. Most Americans care deeply — as did the Founding Fathers — about the kind of country and economy they leave to their posterity; few are eager to be recalled as the bankrupters of the Founders’ republican system. Obama and our bipartisan elite, on the other hand, live for today; for the applause of Hollywood, Europe, and the media; and, most of all, for permanently fixing extortionate tax rates that will impose on Americans and their posterity a paternalistic socialist state that will order their lives as the elite deems proper.

2nd Amendment Defenders: Secretary of State Clinton subtly declared war on 2nd Amendment rights when she said the narco-terror war in Mexico is mostly due to the availability of weapons in the United States. There is no reason to doubt that Attorney General Holder is drafting legislation and preparing federal law-enforcement agencies to assault gun owners, gun-and-ammunition dealers, ordnance manufacturers, and other 2nd Amendment proponents in the name of helping Mexico defeat narco-terror gangs. For the media, the academy, and many politicians this deceitful federal gambit would be welcome and acceptable. Such an anti-2nd Amendment attack would sound, and could be marketed as a measure to “protect” Americans from drug violence in Mexico, rather than for what it would be — the tyrannical negation of an unquestionable constitutional right and an attempt to put control over all tools of violence in the federal government’s hands to use for whatever ends it deems necessary.

American parents: While rightly proud of their soldier-children, American parents have seen the past four administrations waste their kids’ lives by committing them to combat hamstrung with rules of engagement that make our soldiers and Marines more targets than killers. The United States has fought necessary and unnecessary wars in the past 35 years, but all have two common denominators: (a) we lost each time we fought and (b) the Republican and Democratic leaders who sent U.S. troops to war preferred to see many die rather than seek victory and thereby risk hysterical criticism from the media, the academy, Europe, and Hollywood because of the high casualties attendant to a strategy of destroying America’s enemies and their supporters. How long will American parents tolerate the waste of their children by our political leaders’ tender concern for those who, at best, contribute nothing to America’s defense and, at worst, seek to undermine it? Perhaps we will soon see. The U.S. commanding general in Afghanistan has made rules of engagement more restrictive — to protect our enemies’ and their civilian supporters — and so is knowingly getting more U.S. troops killed and maimed. Obama supports this, and this weekend at West Point promised more wars to make the world more like him and his elite colleagues.

Now, none of these groups, by itself, is a majority. Neither do the groups agree with each other on all things; for example, some low-tax advocates do not oppose open borders, and some non-interventionists are pro-abortion. But all share one fundamental motivation that could promote unity among their considerable numbers. That is the desire to stop and reverse the growth of Washington’s coercive political, social, and economic power that has occurred over the last four administrations. Opponents of this growth had “hoped” to use the political process to stop it and restore the constitution. But since Mr. Obama’s election, that hope amounts to what Patrick Henry called the proper definition of “hope” — a “phantom illusion.”

So what can Americans do when words, appeals, patience, demonstrations, elections, and petitions have long lacked impact; have no current impact; and appear to have no chance of future impact? That question is yet to be decided. But in thinking about such things, one can fruitfully turn to the Founders. In the great stock of wise guidance they left for posterity, for example, one finds powerful and sobering words written by John Dickinson and Thomas Jefferson in 1775. After describing Britain’s flagrant violation of the colonists’ rights, and recounting the King’s refusal to hear and rectify the colonists’ repeated and peacefully presented grievances, Dickinson and Jefferson wrote a paper that, in part, said:

“We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to the tyranny of [the king’s] irritated ministers, or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we have received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness that inevitably awaits them, if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them …

With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare, that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, [and] the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance, employ [them] for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die Free-men rather than live Slaves.”

As Americans move forward, then, their heritage as free men; the responsibilities imposed by their duty to posterity and the Declaration of Independence (1776); and the Founders’ wisdom together constitute a formidable arsenal for fueling a campaign that seeks peaceful political change by any and all possible means, or — as a very last resort — armed redress of grievances. It also is an arsenal that is timeless and indestructible; it cannot be invalidated by the words or actions of our coercive political elites and their media and academic apologists. Whether and when Americans draw on this repository of sanity, self-reliance, courage, and liberty to restore the constitution is up to them.

And, by the way, Dickinson and Jefferson entitled their paper “A Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms.” And far from being the conclusion of just the two men, the paper was published by the Continental Congress on 6 July 1775 — in the name of all Americans.

This morning’s news photos of President Obama smiling and standing with the president of Mexico is a clear reminder that America is a land of laws — unless our president, Congress, and Supreme Court decide to ignore them because they are inconvenient. As Obama’s people spend large numbers of taxpayer dollars to entertain Mexico’s latest thief-in-chief, you have to wonder what the people of our Southwestern states are thinking — and how can much longer they will tolerate being associated with the U.S. federal government.

In this Mexican president — as in his predecessors — we have a dire enemy of the United States. He and his political peers encourage their citizens to become criminals by entering the United States illegally, and use their diplomatic posts in America to help illegals, advise them how to evade U.S. law, and organize them to support the U.S. political party most eager to abet Mexico’s criminal behavior. They also interfere in our domestic politics by pushing U.S. federal officials to attack the 2nd Amendment, and cooperate with narcotics traffickers who are — in their own way — attacking the United States. And the man at the head of this activity is being wined and dined by Obama, who is more than eager to throw U.S. citizens in the Southwest to the dogs if he can hold the Hispanic vote for his reelection.

And not only that, Obama has decided to stand with an enemy of the United States against the one person in America who seems to care about U.S. sovereignty and national defense, the governor of Arizona. Obama and his Mexican reelection helper have condemned the Arizona government for doing what the lawless Washington establishment refuses to do — protect the people of Arizona. It seems that after decades of illegal aliens from Mexico entering Arizona and killing farmers and ranchers; destroying animals and buildings; robbing possessions; overwhelming police systems; and stretching health services to the breaking point, Obama and all of official Washington — including the war hero McCain — believe the Arizona law is “misguided,” though they condescendingly “understand” that Arizonans are frustrated by the lack of progress on immigration reform.

Frustrated? Well I suppose Arizonans are frustrated, along with folks in California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and New Mexico. But they are certainly not frustrated over the lack of immigration reform. They are frustrated to the point of rage by the complete lawlessness of the federal government. What they need, and what by law and membership in the Union they are entitled to is the federal government acting to control the nation’s borders, and most especially the one with Mexico. Americans in the Southwest and elsewhere do not need new laws; they need the president to stop breaking the oath he took at the inauguration in which he pledged to enforce the law. Like his law-breaking predecessors, Obama is smilingly refusing to protect the people of the Arizona and the Southwest, treating them as if their states are not equal partners in the Union but rather shreds and tatters not worthy of the same aid and protection he rushed to the people of Haiti.

Obama has the misfortune of holding the presidency at a time when non-elite Americans — that is, most of us — are at the end of their tether with elected and appointed federal officials who are unresponsive to the needs and legal rights of citizens outside the Washington-Boston corridor, and with cowardly state officials who sit and blame Washington for their troubles but take no action to help those who elected them. I trust that Arizonans appreciate their governor’s courage and that they will support her when the federal courts rule the law in question unconstitutional. When that happens, her answer should echo Andrew Jackson’s response to Chief Justice John Marshall: “Judge Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.” Arizona’s leaders should defy federal courts at every level up to and including Chief Justice Roberts and his crew of autocrats and thereby make the president act. You can bet Obama will talk tough about using federal power to enforce the court’s decision. Let him talk and let him use it. All Americans will then know that Washington is always on its own side and the side of its foreign friends, never on the side of Americans.

Obama is playing with a fire that could rekindle thinking about secession. When eleven Southern states left the Union in 1861 they had no substantive reason to do so. They withdrew because they feared what the Lincoln administration might do in the future to hurt their material interests and negate their interpretation of the constitution.

Obama, his party, and the Republicans will find, however, that the people in Arizona and across the southwest have substantive material grievances that have gone decades without the redress they have politely and repeatedly asked for from Washington. The question that must soon occur to Southwesterners is: “What point is there to our states belonging to a Union whose federal government will not enforce its laws and protect its citizens?” It is a very good and very pertinent question, and Mr. Obama ought to start thinking about a good response. The Arizonans’ last-resort option — and the last-resort option of all Americans — is found in a 234-year-old document and reads:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, 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. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown 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.”

One hopes Mr. Obama and all federal officials will soon take time to reread and remember this passage from America’s most important document. They need to do so because their actions suggest they have forgotten that the federal government was created to serve Americans, not for Americans to serve it. This is a mighty dangerous thing to forget.

I keep getting e-mail from a man named David Horowitz who wants me to give money to his movement to stop what he calls “President Obama’s war on Israel.” The notes are much like the earlier one I wrote about here from the Republicans’ congressional leader John Boehner asking for money to help his party protect Israel against Obama.

Now what in the world could these two men be talking about?

Obama is completely owned by the Israelis, just as his predecessors were. U.S. taxpayers continue to see their money channeled to the war-wanting Israeli theocracy, even as the number of jobless and homeless increase domestically. Our soldier-children are still on the hook to die for Israel — without a declaration of war — if Netanyahu divines that his holy book tells him that Israel’s God-given deed for all of Palestine needs protecting by attacking Iran. (NB: Odd isn’t it, how Washington routinely uses the separation-of-church-and-state tenet to attack U.S. Christians, but believes it is inapplicable when the U.S. federal government financially supports or militarily defends overseas theocracies like Israel and Saudi Arabia?)

In addition, Obama has an Israeli military veteran as his chief of staff, and almost certainly as a conduit for making sure his friends in that military are up-to-date on U.S.-collected intelligence. And 76 U.S. senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Clinton in April, 2010 — after Netanyahu publicly humiliated Obama and Biden — urging unqualified support for Israel because it is a “reliable ally and friend and has helped advance American interests.” This explains a lot about America’s problems if 76 senators believe Israel’s suborning U.S. citizens to spy on their country; selling U.S. high-technology to U.S. enemies; and corrupting the U.S. political system — at least to the extent of 76 AIPAC-owned U.S. senators — are the traits of a “reliable ally and friend.”

“Obama’s war on Israel” must meet a new-age definition of war that I have yet to learn. For all intents and purposes, Obama is an Israeli operative, as were his predecessors. Indeed, in this one area of policy U.S. presidents are very close to being agents of a foreign power, more interested in protecting Israel’s interests and territorial ambitions than in defending America.

Anyway, the war that more concerns me at the moment is the looming “Obama/McCain, Democratic/Republican war on the lives of America’s soldier-children and economy in the name of helping Israel destroy Iran.” That’s a long name for a war, and even an acronym would be too big a mouthful. If the war occurs, maybe we can just call it by its proper name: “TREASON.”

After meetings last week in Washington among President Obama, his generals, Secretary Clinton, and Afghan president Karzai, it is worth focusing on what it means for the United States to lose the Afghan and Iraq wars.

The meetings, we should be clear, were about Washington’s slow-motion return of power to the Taliban and its allies. Karzai knows Obama must withdraw most U.S. forces from Afghanistan to better his 2012 reelection chances and so wants to bring the Taliban into the government. Karzai is well-suited to the task; he once urged the U.S. to recognize the Taliban and agreed to be its UN ambassador. And the simple reality is that if Karzai wants to stay in a post-U.S. Afghanistan and hold a share of power he must move to the Taliban’ side.

While Karzai and his U.S. interlocutors met, Iraq had another shot of what seems a trend of steadily increasing sectarian violence. That spasm was a glimpse of what probably is on tap after U.S. forces depart. As we lose in Afghanistan, we also must recall the Iraq war is a disaster-producer that is far from spent. Even if he had WMD, Saddam was no threat to America when we invaded. Likewise, Saddam and Syria’s Bashir al-Asad were key if de facto U.S. allies in the war against the Islamists. Those fascist, secular regimes were the cork in the bottle’s neck; they kept the jihad in South Asia. When we popped the cork to destroy Saddam, we also fatally weakened Syria and so facilitated the Sunni jihad’s westward move into the Arab heartland, the Levant, and Gaza.

Thus, the Obama administration’s decision, with Republican support, is to lose in Afghanistan and Iraq. This means monumental victories for the Islamists led or inspired by Osama bin Laden. Since the Afghan mujahideen beat the Soviets in 1989, only bin Laden consistently has predicted that Islamists would have an easier time defeating the second superpower. He has argued U.S. leaders are soft, risk averse, impatient, and unwilling to use the full measure of U.S. military power. With twin U.S. defeats, bin Laden will be proven correct and many Muslims will join the jihad; as Osama said on another occasion, people follow the strong horse.

More important, the defeats will enhance bin Laden’s status as the unchallenged and prescient leader of Sunni militancy. Many of his Islamist peers damned the 9/11 attacks, claiming they would bring the U.S. military down on the Islamist movement, set it back for decades, and perhaps annihilate it entirely. And many in the U.S. corps of Islamist experts used the same line; Fawaz Gerges’s book The Far Enemy, for example, spoke for many by maintaining the 9/11 attacks and ensuing U.S. military response would make bin Laden yesterday’s news.

Today, however, we are seeing bin Laden’s peers proved wrong and most of America’s Islamist experts exposed as wishful thinkers. After 9/11, bin Laden’s response to criticism was not combative but soothing and patient. He simply said: Wait, the Americans have no stomach for insurgency, cannot stand casualties, and will lose interest if there is no quick victory. Indeed, 9/11 worked like a charm for al-Qaeda. The raids got a U.S. army on the ground in Afghanistan — an event bin Laden labored for since 1997 — and earned an enormous if unexpected bonus by allowing the pro-Israel ideologues around Mr. Bush to start the Iraq war.

By March, 2003, then, bin Laden had caused Washington to deploy two U.S. armies to Muslim lands where they are being treated by largely non-al-Qaeda insurgents to the kind of attrition that beat the Red Army. Democratic and Republican leaders now say America tried the military option and it failed. This is an absurd notion. The killing power of the U.S. military is unimaginable; we have barely scratched its surface in either war. It is more accurate to say U.S. leaders are eager to intervene and start wars, but for 50 years have refused fully to use the military Americans paid for because they fear public condemnation from the media, human-rights groups, and the so-called international community if they seek victory.

In the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush and Obama administrations have never been serious about winning; and each has been supported by the party out of power. They have, for example, sent inadequate numbers of troops; put them under rules of engagement that make them targets not killers; and caused our soldier-children to die so Mrs. Muhammad can vote in rigged Afghan and Iraqi elections. In short, our interventionist leaders are happy to pay for their democracy-building ambitions with the lives of America’s young and the nation’s financial solvency.

So, it is time to leave Iraq and Afghanistan, but we must face facts. The price of military intervention is always exactly the same; if you do not irrefutably win, you will surely irrefutably lose. After 9/11, Afghanistan was a mandatory target for a short, decisive punitive military expedition; Iraq was a fool’s errand from the start. We will lose in each place because we are unwilling to win, but no one should believe withdrawal without victory will bring peace. Most wars should never be started, but once a Great Power starts one it must not be lost, especially to a weaker enemy. Losing emboldens the enemy, and today the emboldened enemy is a growing number of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims.

Our bipartisan leadership’s fatal combination of interventionism and defeatism have created an Islamist foe more dangerous today than on 9/11. More remarkable, it has made Osama bin Laden appear a master strategist, one who, it increasingly appears, is on the verge of bringing his emboldened jihadis to the cities and streets of the United States.