Monthly Archives: September 2013

Rewriting History

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One of the problems with the Internet is that whenever you say something it can be instantly checked.

McClatchy is reporting that today President Obama stated that he did not draw a red line concerning the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government.

The article reports the statement:

“I didn’t set a red line, the world set a red line,” Obama said. “My credibility is not on the line. The international community’s credibility is on the line. And America and Congress’ credibility is on the line because we give lip service to the notion that these international norms are important.”

Well, there is an inconvenient video that was posted on YouTube a year ago:

The statement about the red line comes at about 1:54 in the video.

It would have been nice if a grown-up President had confirmed his previous statement and stood by it. I don’t support military action in Syria, but I certainly would have more respect for the President if he were more honest about his previous statements.

The problem with the statement made today is that the President typically refuses to take responsibility for his previous statements. There is no reason to assume that in the future he will take responsibility for his actions.

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Congress As A Last Resort

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On Monday, Byron York posted an article at the Washington Examiner about President Obama’s decision to seek authorization from Congress for military intervention in Syria.

The article points out that President Obama first sought approval on the world stage. When it became apparent that the world stage was not interested in giving its approval, President Obama sought approval from Congress.

The article reports:

It was only after it became clear to Obama that he could not win acceptance in other, preferred, circles that he chose to go to Congress. Would he have sought congressional authorization if he had won United Nations approval for a Syrian attack? Highly unlikely. Would he have sought congressional authorization if the British Parliament had voted to join Obama’s action? Also unlikely. Even approval from the Arab League might have been enough for Obama to act.

So where are we?

Yahoo News posted an article today with the following statement by Vladimir Putin:

He said he “doesn’t exclude” backing the use of force against Syria at the United Nations if there is objective evidence proving that Assad’s regime used chemical weapons against its people. But he strongly warned Washington against launching military action without U.N. approval, saying it would represent an aggression. Russia can veto resolutions at the U.N. Security Council and has protected Syria from punitive actions there before.

It will be interesting to see how Congress votes on this.

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One Possible Explanation For Recent Foreign Policy Missteps

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President Obama’s foreign policy has been a disaster. President Bush’s foreign policy was slightly better, but was not successful in promoting democracy, freedom, and American interests around the world. President Bush attempted to promote democracy, but any gains were lost when President Obama pulled the troops out of Iraq. Generally speaking, in recent years, when given a choice, America has made the wrong decision.

On Monday, the Middle East Forum posted an article entitled, “Gulliver Tied Down by Lilliputians.” The article details some of the reasons for America’s recent lack of success in dealing with the Middle East.

The article reports:

One in five applicants for jobs at the Central Intelligence Agency have ties to Muslim terrorist organizations, according to the latest round of Snowden leaks. And Israel is a major target of American counterintelligence. Washington is insane.

Three years ago, the Washington Post sketched the elephantiasis in the U.S. intelligence establishment without, of course, access to the detailed numbers leaked by Edward Snowden last week. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend if you can’t hire people you can trust. If you spend $52 billion in the “black budget,” you create so many conflicting bureaucratic interest groups as to cancel out any possible signal with a wave of noise.

I have very mixed emotions about Edward Snowden and what he has done, but this is information that should be made public. Obviously common sense has departed from the CIA hiring process.

The article at Middle East Forum contrasts the fact that America intelligence services cannot find Arab translators and are forced to hire people whose backgrounds they cannot  verify with the fact that Israel routinely teaches Arab languages in high school and thus has more translators than they can use. Admittedly, Israel is in the midst of the danger, but we can still learn a lesson from them.

The article concludes:

The U.S. has relied extensively on friendly Arab intelligence services, above all the Egyptians, to fill the gap — except that the Obama administration did its best to bring down the Egyptian military in 2011 and install the Muslim Brotherhood. The Israelis have plenty to tell, but little that Washington wants to hear: Israel never fell victim to the mass delusion about the so-called Arab Spring, and has warned throughout (along with Saudi Arabia) that Iran’s nuclear ambitions must be crushed. Israel therefore is treated as an intelligence target rather than as a collaborator, while the Arab intelligence services who most might help us — Egyptian and Saudi — must regard us with skepticism in the best of cases and hostility in the worst.

America is flying blind into a hurricane. Americans who write about the Middle East now depend on what other countries choose to leak to us. Washington isn’t in the loop any longer.

Whether we are willing to admit it or not, America is involved in a war for her survival and for the survival of western civilization. Our enemies will fight this war whether we choose to fight it or not. It’s time to wake up and defend our freedom.

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Confusing The Issue By Adding Facts

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There have been a lot of charges made lately by Democrats that Republicans want to suppress the black vote by passing voter identification laws. There is no mention of the fact that you need a driver’s license or such to enter a federal building, board a plane, case a check, etc., but that’s another story. But occasionally, when charging people with racism, inconvenient facts get in the way.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posted a story today showing that when Georgia became the first state in the nation to enact voter identification laws, the black and Hispanic voter turnout increased. From 2006 to 2010, voting by black and Hispanic voters increased dramatically, outpacing population growth for those groups over the same period.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution also posted an article today dealing with the same subject.

The The Atlanta Journal-Constitution article reports:

Under Georgia’s law, an in-person voter who arrives at the polls without a photo ID may cast a provisional ballot. The provisional ballot is counted only if the person returns with proper identification by the Friday following the election.

Records show that since 2008, 2,244 provisional ballots were cast by voters lacking photo ID. Of those, 658 returned with an ID and 1,586 did not — meaning their votes did not count.

That disturbs Laughlin McDonald, director of the Voting Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the original plaintiffs who challenged the law.

“If one person is deprived of their right to see their vote count, that’s a violation of the Constitution,” McDonald said.

I guess I have become a little cynical of late, but I am not thoroughly convinced that the 1,586 voters who chose not to return with identification were legal voters. Just a thought.

There is no way to prove that voter fraud was stopped by voter identification laws. However, we can show that the laws do not suppress votes. In terms of stopping fraud, one blatant example of voter fraud was found in Houston, Texas, by a group called True the Vote. (See rightwinggranny.com) When True the Vote examined the voters registered by a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who had previously worked for the  Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they found that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. I don’t know if 23,000 votes is enough to change the outcome of an election, but this clearly seems to be an example of voter fraud.

Anyway, hooray for voter identification laws–the keep our elections honest!

 

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President Obama’s Riechstag Fire Moment

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A man by the name of Yossef Bodansky posted an article on the website Global Research asking, “Did the White House Help Plan the Syrian Chemical Attack?” At first glance that seems like an absurd question, but Mr. Bodansky makes an interesting case.

The article opens with the following thought:

There is a growing volume of new evidence from numerous sources in the Middle East — mostly affiliated with the Syrian opposition and its sponsors and supporters — which makes a very strong case, based on solid circumstantial evidence, that the August 21, 2013, chemical strike in the Damascus suburbs was indeed a pre-meditated provocation by the Syrian opposition.

The extent of US foreknowledge of this provocation needs further investigation because available data puts the “horror” of the Barack Obama White House in a different and disturbing light.

In mid-August US Intelligence was meeting in Turkey with representatives of Qatari and Turkish Intelligence.

The article reports:

Very senior opposition commanders who had arrived from Istanbul briefed the regional commanders of an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development” which would, in turn, lead to a US-led bombing of Syria.

Not all Syrians believe Assad was responsible for the attack:

Several Syrian leaders, many of whom are not Bashar al-Assad supporters and are even his sworn enemies, are now convinced that the Syrian opposition is responsible for the August 21, 2013, chemical attack in the Damascus area in order to provoke the US and the allies into bombing Assad’s Syria. Most explicit and eloquent is Saleh Muslim, the head of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) which has been fighting the Syrian Government. Muslim doubts Assad would have used chemical weapons when he was winning the civil war.

I am not familiar with this website. This story could have the level of truth found in Snow White. However, there are a lot of things here that make sense. I think America needs to be really sure of what is going on before we agree to get involved.

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New Adventures In The Law Of Unintended Consequences

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Yesterday Breitbart.com reported that 40,000 Longshoremen, members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), have formally ended their association with the AFL-CIO. In a letter to Richard Trumka, ILWU President Robert McEllrath cited quite a list of grievances as reasons for the dissolution of their affiliation, but prominent among them was the AFL-CIO’s support of Obamare. The AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is a strong supporter of President Obama and worked hard for the passage of ObamaCare. Like the rest of us, Mr. Trumka is now realizing what ObamaCare will do to America‘s healthcare system and to union healthcare programs, and is no longer supporting ObamaCare.

The article reports two areas of disagreement:

The Longshoreman leader said, “President Obama ran on a platform that he would not tax medical plans and at the 2009 AFL-CIO Convention, you stated that labor would not stand for a tax on our benefits.” But, regardless of that promise, the President has pushed for just such a tax and Trumka and the AFL-CIO bowed to political pressure lining up behind Obama’s tax on those plans.

McEllrath also went on to say that they support stronger immigration reform than the AFL-CIO is supporting.

The article reminds us that only 11.3 percent of the Americans belong to unions. In 2012, 35.9 percent of public-sector workers belonged to unions, and 6.6 percent of private sector workers belonged to unions. Unions need to expand their membership in order to fund their pension funds.

As previously reported at rightwinggranny.com:

In a column in the Washington Examiner in April, Mark Hemingway pointed out that the average union pension plan had only enough money to cover 62 percent of its financial obligations.  Pension plans that are below 80 percent funding are considered “endangered” by the government; below 65 percent is considered “critical.”  Union membership is declining, which means that less people are paying into these funds.

The fact that the ILWU is walking away from the AFL-CIO is significant. This is a serious blow to the unionization of America.

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The Other Side Of The Story

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I have posted a number of articles and comments by people opposed to American intervention in Syria. Now I would like to post an article expressing support for American intervention.

On Thursday, Bloomberg News posted an article by Fouad Ajami detailing his reasons for supporting American action in Syria. Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of “The Syrian Rebellion,” published by Hoover Press.

The article reminds us:

In his first term, his four principal foreign policy advisers — the secretaries of state and defense, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — supported arming the rebellion in Syria: He overrode them. Earlier this year, he himself promised the rebels weapons that were never delivered.

History will record for Obama that it was Bashar al-Assad who dragged him into this fight. Obama had made much of the distinction between wars of choice and wars of necessity. He is said to have pondered theories of just and unjust wars. To this Syrian ordeal, he came late in the hour, after the barbarisms, after the veritable destruction of Syria’s nationhood, after the jihadis had carved out their emirates. It doesn’t matter much whether this entanglement is one of choice or of necessity. This is only partly a hand that Barack Obama was dealt. To a greater extent, he has shaped the conflict with the passivity he opted for in a standoff with a petty dictator who should have been thwarted long before.

The argument here is that had America intervened at the beginning, it would have been easier to shape the rebel forces, hopefully influencing them toward democracy.

When Bashar al-Assad eventually falls (and I believe he will), there will be few tears shed anywhere. However, there does not seem to be a coalition willing to remove him. Mr. Ajami points out that one of the problems in the Middle East is that dictators get attacked, survive, and claim victory, even after having everything around them destroyed in the attack.

Because of this, Mr. Ajami suggests:

The Syrian regime must then be denied the dividends of an inconclusive military campaign. The regime itself — its barons, its secret police, its elite military units and its air bases — ought to be legitimate targets, and the same is true of Assad’s presidential palace. There should be conviction and courage in this fight with the Assad dictatorship.

President Obama has given no indications that he is capable of conviction and courage. There has been so much dithering in deciding how to deal with Syria, it makes my head hurt.

Again, I wanted to post an opinion in support of American intervention in Syria. Fouad Ajami is someone I respect and who has a very complete knowledge of how the Middle East works. However, I am still not convinced. We didn’t do too well in Egypt when we supported the ousting of a dictator–we got the Muslim Brotherhood. Unfortunately, it will be years before peace reigns in Egypt. Are we ready to do that again? It seems that all America accomplishes with her good intentions in the Middle East is to destabilize the region. Until I am convinced that American action in Syria will actually move the region toward peace and democracy, I can’t support action.

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America’s Foreign Policy Decisions Impact Countries Other Than America

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Yesterday The Times of Israel reported on Israel‘s reaction to President Obama’s handling of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war.

The article explains Israel’s reaction to President Obama’s recent statements:

It is worried, furthermore, at the ever-deeper perception of Obama’s America in the Middle East as weak, hesitant and confused — most especially in the view of the region’s most radical forces, notably including Bashar Assad, Hezbollah, and Iran.

 And it is profoundly concerned that the president has set a precedent, in seeking an authorization from Congress that he had no legal requirement to seek — and that Congress was not loudly demanding — that may complicate, delay or even rule out credible action to thwart a challenge that dwarfs Assad’s chemical weapons capability: Iran’s drive to nuclear weapons.

I don’t know whether or not Congress will decide to take military action against Syria. I do know that the fact that President Obama did not call Congress into session to vote on Syria now indicates a lack of urgency which I do not believe is appropriate in the situation. It would seem to me that the gassing of upwards of a thousand innocent people might be a reason for quicker, more decisive action.

The article in The Times of Israel concludes:

Jerusalem is worried, too, of a direct line between requesting Congressional approval for military action against Syria — a relatively straightforward target — and feeling compelled to honor the precedent, should the imperative arise, by requesting Congressional approval for military action against Iran — a far more potent enemy, where legislators’ worries about the US being dragged deep into regional conflict would be far more resonant.

Israel remains hopeful that, to put it bluntly, Obama’s America will yet remember that it is, well, America. The alternative, it rather seems, is something the leadership in Jerusalem finds too awful to so much as contemplate just yet.

When America is weak and has a weak President, the world is a more dangerous place. Because we have lost the respect of the world, our having overwhelming force is not enough to deter other countries from doing bad things. Unfortunately, because we are weak, we may have to use our weapons to prevent further bad things from happening.

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More Thoughts On Syria

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As I have said, I have very mixed emotions as to what America needs to do regarding Syria. Today Michael Yon, an independent war correspondent posted a story on his website entitled, “Syria–Outrage is Not a Strategy.” The article details some of the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan and the fact that many of the statements made by the American government during the time he was there as a reporter were simply false.

Regarding Syria, Michael Yon quotes a letter written to him by Member of Parliament Adam Holloway. The letter states, “Outrage is not a strategy.”

I have a lot of respect for Michael Yon. If you are not familiar with Michael’s work, I strongly suggest that you visit his blog, Michael Yon – Online Magazine, and read some of what he has been doing in recent years.

Outrage is not a strategy. The gassing of innocent civilians warrants outrage, but the question becomes, “What is the best thing to do with that outrage?” That is where the discussion begins.

What would our goal be in attacking Syria? What would America’s strategy be in attacking Syria? What would be considered a ‘good’ outcome of an American attack on Syria? How would an American attack on Syria bring peace to either Syria or the Middle East? What would be the exit strategy?

Those are the questions I hope will be answered in the coming weeks.

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Some Good News Out Of Iran

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What you are about to read is actually good news. You have to kind of bend your thinking a little bit to see it that way, but it is good news.

The Iranian Christian News Agency is reporting that Iran is desperately seeking a way to solve the problem of Iranian Muslim youth converting to Christianity. First of all, I am thrilled that there is an Iranian Christian News Agency.

Their website explains their mission:

Mohabat News will continue to act as a cultural and social bridge between the world community and the peoples of Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan and to better inform the worldwide Church of Jesus Christ and Christian ministries around the world about the life and the welfare of Christian minorities in these Farsi-speaking countries.

Yesterday they reported the following story:

The Islamic regime’s think-tank, in association with the Iranian intelligence service held its first of a series of meetings called “Free thinking and critical speech”. The meeting was held to discuss “conversion from Islam” and analyze why Iranian youth tend to convert to Christianity.

According to Mohabat News, the regime-backed Sharq website reported that the Public Relations section of the “Sarcheshmeh” (Martyrs of Islamic Revolution) Cultural Center announced that the first in a series of meetings called “Free thinking and critical speech” was held to discuss “conversion from Islam” and analyze why Iranian youth tend to convert to Christianity.

The report indicates there were several special guests in the first meeting as well. The guests were Dr. Christian Bruno and Dr. Yassin from France and another guest from Italy. The guests spoke about Christianity and a few reasons why some young people tend to convert to it.

The announcement states that religious minorities and Iranian Christians are free to take part with no admission costs. It also indicates that due to the sensitivity of issue and limited seats, those interested need to sign up in advance.

The meeting dedicated to investigating the reasons for conversion of Iranian youth to Christianity will be held on September 6, 2013, in the Sarcheshmeh Cultural Center.

There is good news here. Iran has persecuted Christian Pastors and leaders of house churches in an attempt to stop the spread of Christianity. It has not worked. Iran has put Pastors in jail, and the spread of Christianity continues. I am not sure what the purpose of this meeting actually is, but it is good news that Christianity is growing among the young people of Iran. When you combine that with the fact as of 2012, more than half of Iran’s population was under the age of 35, the spread of Christianity among the young is wonderful. Iran lost a generation of men (and some children) in its eight-year war with Iraq which began in September of 1980. There were an estimated 1 million casualties (killed or wounded), and civilians deaths continue as a result of Iraqi chemical weapons.

Because of that war, there is a gap in the population of Iran, and the under-35 generation will replace the current aging regime as they pass away. It is fantastic news that Christianity is spreading among that generation.

I don’t see the Shiite government of Iran giving up power anytime soon, but it’s good to know that Christianity is growing despite their best efforts to stop it. Just for the record, under Sharia Law, conversion from Islam to Christianity is punishable by death.

 

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