WARS PARADOXES - VDH

War’s Paradoxes: From Pearl Harbor to the Russian Front to the 38th Parallel

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On December 12, 2012 @ 12:25 am In Uncategorized | 272 Comments

From time to time, I take a break from opinion writing here at Works and Days ^[1] and turn to history — on this occasion, I am prompted by the 71st anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Here are a few of the most common questions that I have encountered while teaching the wars of the 20th century over the last twenty years.
I. Pearl Harbor — December 7, 1941
Q. Why did the Japanese so foolishly attack Pearl Harbor?
A. The Japanese did not see it as foolish at all. What in retrospect seems suicidal did not necessarily seem so at the time. In hindsight, the wiser Japanese course would have been to absorb the orphaned colonial Far Eastern possessions of France, the Netherlands, and Great Britain that were largely defenseless after June 1941. By carefully avoiding the Philippines and Pearl Harbor, the Japanese might have inherited the European colonial empire in the Pacific without starting a war with the United States. And had the Japanese and Germans coordinated strategy, the two might have attacked Russia simultaneously in June 1941 without prompting a wider war with the United States, or in the case of Japan, an immediate conflict necessarily with Great Britain.
But in the Japanese view, the Soviets had proved stubborn opponents in a series of border wars, and it was felt wiser to achieve a secure rear in Manchuria to divert attention to the west (the Russians, in fact, honored their non-aggression pact with the Japanese until late 1945) — especially given the fact that the Wehrmacht in December 1941 seemed likely to knock the Soviet Union out of the war in a few weeks or by early 1942.
In the Japanese mind, the moment was everything: it was high time to get in on the easy pickings in the Pacific before Germany ended the war altogether.
While the United States had belatedly begun rearming in the late 1930s, the Japanese were still convinced that in a naval war, their ships, planes, and personnel were at least as modern and plentiful, if not more numerous and qualitatively better than what was available to the United States. The growing isolationism of the United States that had been championed by the likes of icons like Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh, the persistent Depression ^[2], and the fact that the United States had not intervened in Europe but instead watched Britain get battered for some 26 months from September 1939 to December 1941 suggested to many in the Japanese military command that the United States might either negotiate or respond only halfheartedly after Pearl Harbor. Especially after the envisioned loss of the American carrier fleet.
Japanese intelligence about American productive potential was about as limited as German knowledge of the Soviet Union. In Tokyo’s view, if Japanese naval forces took out the American Pacific carriers at Pearl Harbor, there was simply no way for America, at least in the immediate future, to contradict any of their Pacific agendas. Nor on December 7 could the Japanese even imagine that Germany might lose the war on the eastern front; more likely, Hitler seemed about to take Moscow, ending the continental ground conflict in Eurasia, and allowing him at last to finish off Great Britain. Britain’s fall, then, would mean that everything from India to Burma would soon be orphaned in the Pacific, and Japan would only have to deal with a vastly crippled and solitary United States. In short, for the Japanese, December 1941 seemed a good time to attack the United States — a provocation that would either likely be negotiated or end in a military defeat for the U.S.
II. The Russian Front — June 22, 1941
Q. Why did the Germans attack the Soviet Union so recklessly at a time when they had all but won the war?
A. Once more, what seems foolhardy to us may not have seemed so to Nazi Germany ^[3]. True, the Germans each month were receiving generously priced Soviet products, many on credit; but Hitler (wrongly) felt that he could nevertheless steal food, fuel, and raw materials from the east more cheaply than buying them. And while the Germans were paranoid about opening a two-front war — like the one that had plagued them between late 1914 and 1917 — Hitler argued that the western front was all but somnolent. British strategic bombing in 1941, remember, was still mostly erratic and ineffective.
In any case, Hitler was more paranoid about a British embargo and blockade that might cut off fuel and food in the manner of 1918; with the acquisition of the great natural reserves of the Soviet Union, especially its Caucasian oil, the Nazis believed that they would become immune from the effects of a maritime blockade.
In addition, the war was never intended to be entirely rational in the purely strategic sense; instead, it was seen also as a National Socialist ideological crusade in which the complete destruction or enslavement of Europe’s supposed Untermenschen was impossible without access to the huge populations of Jews and Slavs in Russia. To Hitler, Marxism was a Jewish perversity and Operation Barbarossa meant that he could kill two birds with one stone. The perverse notion that a Germany with 30% more territory and a population of 80 million — similar to its population today — still could not live without “Lebensraum” apparently appealed to many German elites who had visions of eastern estates and baronies, worked by serfs, with vacation trips on super-autobahns to the Crimean beaches — at least if all that cost only a month of war.
With the conquest of the Balkans by June 1941, the ground war in Europe was all but over. Great Britain was alone and isolated, and had scarcely survived the Battle of Britain. There was no reason to believe that the United States would enter the war; if America had not declared war to aid Britain, it most certainly would not do so to save the communist Soviet Union.
Moreover, the German army had proved almost superhuman in its invasion of Poland and Western Europe; even the messy conflicts in the Balkans, Crete, and the recent deployments to North Africa had not slowed the Wehrmacht’s progress. Hitler, just to be sure, took no chances and assembled the largest invasion force the world had yet seen, over three million Germans and 500,000 allies. Operation Barbarossa was truly a multilateral effort, with contingents from most of Eastern Europe, Spain, and Italy joining the German effort. By mid-1941 there was nothing comparable, at least in adequate numbers, in the east to the ME-109, the Panzer Mark IV, or the .88 mm flak/anti-tank gun. Such technological superiority blinded Hitler to the reality that there were few modern roads in Russia, and most of the invasion would still be powered by horses, with inadequate air, train, and truck transport.
Still, in contrast to Germany’s string of successes, the Soviet Union’s recent military record was dismal. Stalin had liquidated many of the officer class (although not as large a percentage as was once thought). The Red Army had not performed well in carving up Poland in September 1939 and appeared almost incompetent in the early stages of the Soviet invasion of Finland in late 1939 (Hitler foolishly did not distinguish between the Red Army when fighting on home soil and when it was deployed abroad). Such impressions confirmed Hitler’s racialist views that the Russians were backward and incapable of waging modern mechanized war — an inferiority supposedly only enhanced by bankrupt Leninism. Given poor German intelligence about the quality and production of Russian artillery, tank (cf. the new T-34 ^[4] that was about to go into full production), and aircraft, the Germans assumed that Russia would fall rather easily — relying on a comparative World War I calculus. France had held out for four years, while Russia had fallen in about three; thus, the next time around in 1940, France’s fall in about seven weeks suggested a Russian collapse in about four.
Japan, at war in the east with Russia during 1938-1939, had felt betrayed when its Axis partner had signed without warning the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, effectively ensuring the Soviets could focus on one front against the Japanese. A defeated Japan repaid the treachery in kind, by signing a similar neutrality pact with Russia in April 1941. That bargain assured Stalin, in turn, that the Soviets would have only a one-front war should Hitler break his agreements — a fact that might have saved Moscow as reinforcements from the east poured in.
In short, had Hitler maintained his pact with Stalin and focused instead on North Africa and the Persian Gulf oil fields, perhaps in conjunction with the Japanese advancing toward India and Suez, Great Britain would have probably lost the war. But by invading Russia, and declaring war on the United States on December 11 (when Army Group Center seemed on the verge of taking Moscow, when Japan seemingly had destroyed the Pacific fleet and had ensured both Britain and America a two-front war, and when U-boat commanders assured the Nazi high command that with free rein to attack the East Coast of the United States they could destroy the shipping lanes of the convoy system between North America and Great Britain), Hitler chose about the only two courses of action that could have lost him the war.
III. A Divided Korea?
Q. Why did the United States stop after spring 1951 at the 38th Parallel, thereby ensuring a subsequent sixty-year Cold War and resulting in chronic worries about a North Korea armed with nuclear weapons and poised to invade its neighbor to the south?
A. Americans were haunted by the nightmare of November 1950 to February 1951. After the brilliant Inchon invasion, and MacArthur’s inspired rapid advance to the Yalu River and the Chinese border, the sudden entrance of an initial quarter-million Chinese Red Army troops, with hundreds of thousands to follow, had sent the Americans reeling hundreds of miles to the south (in the longest retreat in American military history), back across the 38th Parallel, with Seoul soon being lost to the communists yet again. Matthew Ridgway had arrived in December 1950 to try to save the war, and had done just that by April 1951, when he was replaced as senior ground commander by Gen. Van Fleet and in turn took over the theater command from the relieved MacArthur. But the Americans had been permanently traumatized by the Chinese entry and the North Korean recovery after the all-but-declared American victory of October 1950.
Ridgway, after the UN forces’ amazing recovery in early 1951, was in no mood to go much farther across the 38th Parallel. From his study of MacArthur’s debacle in Fall 1950, he knew well that the peninsula in the north became more rugged and expansive and would swallow thousands of troops as they neared the Chinese and Russian borders, and had to be supplied from hundreds of miles to the rear. Such a second advance through North Korea was felt, accurately or not, to risk a regional nuclear war with the Soviet Union, to draw in hundreds of thousands more Chinese Red Army troops, and to ensure another year or two of war at a time when the American public was thoroughly tired of this new concept of a “police action” and an “accordion war.” And while critics railed at silly political restraints on U.S. airpower that might have destroyed Chinese or Russian staging areas across the border, they did not appreciate that such attacks might also have prompted similar enemy attention on U.S. supply centers in Japan.
Moreover, the UN coalition had been created under quasi-coercive premises in Fall 1950. The war was seen as about over, and allied deployment might well amount to only garrison duty. European participation in Korea was also predicated on ensuring an American commitment to keeping the Soviets out of Western Europe. But by the time UN troops arrived in Korea, the Chinese were invading and slaughtering the coalition in the retreat to the south. Most European participants simply wanted a truce at any cost and an end to the war.
Further, the U.S. had been drawn into a depressing propaganda war. We were responsible for rebirthing Japan, Italy, and Germany as pro-Western democracies, while Russian and Chinese communists posed as the true allies of the war’s victims that were continuing their war against fascism, against a capitalist American Empire that had joined the old Axis. In the case of Korea, Americans took over constabulary duties from Japanese militarists and supported South Korean authoritarians, while Soviet and Chinese-backed hardened communists in the North posed as agrarian reformers — or so the global leftist narrative went. For many Americans, the thought of fighting a nearly endless civil war was less desirable than an armistice and an end to the hostilities, even though after three years of fighting and 36,000 American dead (and over a million Koreans lost), the borders remained almost unchanged.
Was that stalemate wise, given the later trajectory of North Korea to the present insanity? Perhaps not — but the American effort nonetheless jumpstarted the South, which eventually evolved into a nation with consensual government and the world free-market powerhouse of today.
Lessons?
As historians we must remember not to evaluate what happened solely on the basis of what we now know in hindsight, but rather weigh the information available to the warring parties of the time — albeit with ample attention paid to their own shortcomings and prejudices.
Moreover, most blunders in war follow from the fruits of perceived success (e.g., Germany after victories in the West, Japan after sensing the colonial powers were all through in the Pacific, MacArthur after Inchon, the Chinese after successfully crossing into Korea, and perhaps even the United States in Iraq after the quick victory over the Taliban and the three-week disposal of Saddam Hussein’s regime), when the winning side rarely evaluates its ongoing success in terms of tactical means and strategic ends, the changing tides of war, and the advantages that will soon begin to accrue to the defenders. Few dared challenge the purported genius Hitler in 1941, or the supposedly all-knowing Isoroku Yamamoto in late 1941, or the brilliant MacArthur after Inchon.
Finally, no one can quite predict what will happen when the shooting starts, as even the past can be a deceptive guide. Hitler believed that the Czar’s Russians, who did not fight as stubbornly as the French in World War I, would collapse like the French did in June 1940. When the Chinese crossed the 38th Parallel, they did not anticipate that their communist supermen were subject to the same facts — long, vulnerable supply lines, bad weather, and an enemy with easier logistics — that had plagued the Americans on the way to the Yalu. And while Hitler may have had grounds to doubt the initial effectiveness of the U.S. Army, its sudden mobilization, and its inadequate equipment, he had no appreciation of lethal American fighter-bombers or a growing strategic bombing arm, no appreciation of the brilliance of American generals at the corps and division level, and no appreciation of what Henry Kaiser and Charles Sorensen were up to back in the United States.

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Article printed from Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/20th-century-war-paradoxes/
URLs in this post:

[1] Works and Days: http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson

[2] the persistent Depression: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx

[3] to Nazi Germany: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375701133/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0375701133&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20

[4] the new T-34: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34

Face of the Enemy - Klaven

The Face of the Enemy

December 16th, 2012 - 9:11 am

I avoided watching television this weekend. I didn’t think I’d be able to stand the stock phrases, the helpless tears, or the journalists losing track of themselves in order to grab useless interviews with traumatized 8-year-olds. (I needn’t add “shame on them.” I suspect that, deep down, they’re already ashamed.)

Most of all, I couldn’t tolerate the politicians, celebrities and commentators using the slaughter of innocents to promote their pet causes.

It’s not about guns: Connecticut has very tough gun laws. It’s not about the culture: Hitler enjoyed watching Disney’s Snow White. Put your ever-so-urgent issues back in your pockets and let the mourning bury their children.
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When, prior to writing this, I checked on the commentators I respect, I found, with no surprise, that Charles Krauthammer, speaking on the Fox Special Report panel, had said best what little there is to say:

The first thing I think we have to say is: in trying to look at this or analyze this requires a huge amount of humility. The true factors that we do not know often — even after these events are analyzed and thought through, we really don’t know. This is the problem of evil and it’s been struggled with forever.

The problem of evil, right. Whenever my fellow Christians talk about Satan — the devil, the enemy, the adversary — I always get a little uncomfortable. Difficult enough for a cultural cove like myself to pierce the veil of sophistication in order to accept a personal God.  Much harder to think of evil as having a will and consciousness of its own. But as I’ve said before, whether or not the devil exists, the world behaves exactly as if he does. And I know of only one valid response to that:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Without those two commandments — and unless we see all our scriptures, all our philosophies, all our actions in the light of those commandments — our religions are worthless, our politics are meaningless, our laws are helpless, our good will means nothing.
Without those two commandments, the world belongs to the enemy.

Islamic Totalitarianism

Printer Friendly November 16, 2012 The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism by Bruce Thornton FrontPage Magazine The murder of four Americans in Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, and the subsequent attempts by the Obama administration to blame the attacks on a YouTube video critical of Islam, exposed the delusional assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy. This notion that Western bad behavior — whether colonialism, support for Israel, or insults to Islam and Muhammad — is responsible for jihadist violence, however, has vitiated our approach to Islamist terrorism for over a decade now. Our main mistake has been the belief that al Qaeda and other jihadist groups are outliers among Muslims, a tiny minority of fanatics who have “hijacked” the faith that under both Republican and Democratic administrations has been called the “religion of peace,” and so we must reach out to that majority of moderate Muslims and convince them how much we admire and respect their religion. But this desperate search for these moderates has lead to dangerous policies, such as considering the Muslim Brotherhood “moderate Islamists,” an oxymoron that blinds us to the Brotherhood’s long-term goal to recover the global dominance that is Islam’s divinely sanctioned birthright. Andrew Bostom, a professor of medicine at Brown University, has for a decade relentlessly exposed the distortions of history and Islamic theology that have accompanied these policies. In The Legacy of Islamic Jihad, he exposed the lie that jihad is merely a spiritual struggle to be a good Muslim, amassing evidence from Islamic theology, scripture, and jurisprudence to show that jihad has in fact predominantly denoted the use of violence to subject unbelievers to Muslim hegemony. In The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, he swept away the rationalizations for widespread Jew-hatred among Muslims that blamed it on imported Western anti-Semitism, once more letting Islamic texts speak for themselves to show that since the 7th century, Jews have been hated, despised, massacred, and subjugated in both Islamic theology and practice. Now Bostom, in the 43 essays collected in his new book, Sharia Versus Freedom: The Legacy of Islamic Totalitarianism, has turned to the totalitarian foundations of Islam codified in Sharia law, the totalizing system that controls every dimension of human life — political, economic, civic, familial, and personal. The great virtue of Dr. Bostom’s work is the collection of primary documents and secondary commentary that taken together provide a more accurate picture of Islam than the fantasies concocted from ignorance or political expediency, or the postmodern propaganda manufactured by Edward Said and his followers. The notion of jihad, for example, has been distorted by apologists like Georgetown professor John Esposito, who wrote in the Washington Post that in the Koran jihad “means ‘to strive or struggle’ to realize God’s will, to lead a virtuous life, to create a just society and to defend Islam and the Muslim community.” Under the Bush administration, the National Counterterrorism Center similarly advised its employees never to use the term “jihadist,” since “jihad means ‘striving in the path of God’ and is used in many contexts beyond warfare.” But these assertions cannot stand next to the abundant evidence Bostom collects, such as Al-Tabari’s 10th-century “Book of Jihad,” which shows that for 14 centuries jihad refers to war waged against the unbelievers, the “harbis” (denizens of Dar al Harb, the “House of War”) whom it is legal to kill, enslave, and plunder. Even those, like the influential scholar Bernard Lewis, who accept the martial meaning of jihad sometimes assert that such wars are conducted under limitations similar to the Western laws of war, limitations so-called Islamist extremists ignore. Yet Islamic jurists such as the 8th century founder of the Hanifi school of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifa, Bostom writes, affirm “the impunity with which non-combatant ‘harbis’ — women, children, the elderly, the mentally and physically disabled — may be killed.” According to Hanifa, there is nothing wrong with using catapults against “the polytheists’ fortresses . . . even if there are among them a woman, child, elder, idiot” or anyone suffering from a physical disability. Illustrating the continuity of modern Islamist ideology with traditional Islamic theology and jurisprudence, Bostom quotes Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the “spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Jazeera television star whose program reaches 60 million people: “It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb . . . is not protected . . . in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in war.” Hence even those not actually fighting are fair game, an argument similar to the one bin Laden made after 9/11 when he justified attacking civilians. These traditions give the lie to the “religion of peace” claim made by apologists, and also explain why, as Bostom quotes Samuel Huntington, “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” Moreover, jihadist raids and attacks across those borders were, Bostom writes, “designed to sow terror” in order to make future conquests easier by breaking the spirit of the enemy, as recorded by the 17th-century historian al-Maqqari when discussing such attacks: “Allah thus instilled such fear among the infidels that they did not dare to go and fight the conquerors; they only approached them as suppliants, to beg for peace.” Such passages suggest how the Islamists interpreted Obama’s 2009 groveling Cairo speech: as the supplications of the infidel begging for peace. Bostom provides a similar correction to the oft-repeated claims that anti-Semitism is not inherent in Islam. On the contrary, Bostom writes, “There is voluminous evidence from Islam’s foundational texts of theological Jew hatred: virulently anti-Semitic Koranic verses whose virulence is only amplified by the greatest classical and Muslim Koranic commentaries . . . the six canonical hadiths collections, and the most respected sira,” biographies of Muhammad. In this tradition Jews are minions of Satan, cursed because they resisted Islam, killed prophets, and transgressed the will of Allah. They are destined to be transformed into apes and swine, and to be humiliated, abased, and eternally damned for their deceit and treachery. Again demonstrating the continuity of this 14-century-long tradition with the anti-Semitic calumny of modern Islamists, Bostom quotes from a sermon given by an Egyptian-government appointed cleric delivered at a mosque at Al Azhar, the most prestigious and venerable institution of Sunni learning: “Muslim brothers, God has inflicted the Muslim nation with a people whom God has become angry at [Koran 1:7] and whom he cursed [Koran 5:78] so he made monkeys and pigs [Koran 5:60] out of them. They killed prophets and messengers [Koran 2:61/3:112] and sowed corruption on Earth [Koran 5:33/5:64]. They are the most evil on Earth [5:62/63].” And Bostom reminds us that Muhammad’s jihadist career began with the conquest and massacres inflicted on the Banu Qurayza, Banu Khaybar, and Banu Nadir Jews. As Bostom summarizes, “Muhammad’s brutal conquest and subjugation of the Medinan and Khaybar Jews and their subsequent expulsion” by the “Rightly Guided” Caliph Umar “epitomize permanent, archetypal behavior patterns Islamic Law deemed appropriate to Muslim interactions with Jews.” Given this theological sanction, we should not be surprised to find the grimly consistent record of Muslim pogroms and massacres of Jews that Bostom documents from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Nor should we be surprised that Jew-hatred continues to dominate the modern Middle East, and is foundational to the Arab hatred of Israel. Hence the quotation of the apes and swine Koranic verse in the charter of the terrorist Hamas organization, or the quotation of Koran 5:64, which calls Jews the sowers of corruption, by “moderate” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007 during a speech urging Muslims to “aim their rifles at Israel.” The exposure of these “Islamophilic” distortions of Islam provides the necessary backdrop for the discussions of Islamic Sharia law that follows. Our misunderstanding and downplaying of the threat to liberal democracy represented by a legal code that subjects every facet of human life to its strictures have been facilitated by the same political and ideological prejudices. Meanwhile, the imposition of Sharia is the highest goal of the various Islamist organizations, whether actively violent or not, roiling the Middle East and North Africa today. Bostom’s essays remind us what history also teaches: that totalitarian threats to our freedom and way of life will not be neutralized by the refusal to see clearly the illiberal ideology driving the Islamist agenda.

Time to Leave the GOP - McCarthy

Time to Leave the GOP

Today is a monumentally important day that is being treated as a fait accompli by the Beltway ruling class and its partners, the legacy media. This morning, the Congress is scheduled to select its leaders for the coming session. If all goes according to plan, Republicans will double down on stupid – ignoring the conservatives who gave them control of the House and reappointing the same leadership team that turned the triumph of 2010 into the disaster of 2012.
In the historic 2010 midterm elections, conservatives gave Republicans a chance to prove that they’d repented of their huge-spending nanny-state ways. It was not that conservatives were won over by a Republican establishment that, during the Bush years, had run up an astounding $5 trillion of debt while creating new entitlements and launching an ill-conceived experiment in sharia-democracy building. Instead, it was that we needed to stop Obama’s doubly expensive gallop to the left, to a post-American rejection of our liberty culture. In the short term, Republicans were the only game in town.

Over the long haul, however, there were two alternatives: Either (a) the Republican Party would prove that it had become an effective vehicle for advocating and using its power to begin putting into effect the dramatic change necessary to reverse – not just halt, reverse – the debt abyss and the metastasis of the central government; or (b) the Republican Party would prove that it was not up to this challenge, would substitute lame excuses (“We only control one-half of one-third of the government”) for steely spines, and would therefore demonstrate that conservatives would be better off abandoning the GOP and establishing a new vehicle.
We’ve now seen enough to draw a conclusion: the Republican Party says what it believes must be said to entice conservative votes at election time, but it is not remotely serious about implementing limited government policies or dealing with the two central challenges of our age, existentially threatening deficit spending and Islamic supremacism.
Under the leadership of progressive-lite House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow professional Washington moderates in the GOP Senate leadership, congressional Republicans agreed to budgeting that internalized into its baselines Obama’s exorbitant stimulus spending. They signed off on a reckless extension of the government’s line of credit to an astounding $16.4 trillion, then cynically insulted our intelligence by attempting to obscure and deny their approval of it – and presently, they are laying the groundwork to raise this “debt ceiling” to a mind-boggling $19 trillion, the next stop on the road to $22 trillion and beyond. As Mark Steyn observes, the federal government now borrows a staggering $188 billion million per hour, adding $1 trillion to the debt every nine months. Contrary to what the GOP tells you, none of this could happen without the approval of the Republican-controlled House.
To get some perspective, it took over 200 years for the country to run up $5 trillion in debt. Under current Republican leadership, $5 trillion was added in just the eight years of the Bush administration. Another $5-plus trillion has been added in just four years under Obama. With over a trillion dollars in purportedly “extraordinary” stimulus spending now baked in the ordinary budget cake, Leviathan’s spending now doubles the $1.9 trillion stratosphere it hit just eleven years ago. In the Bush years, the GOP zoomed it to $3 trillion before the economy tanked in 2007-08, largely thanks to the bipartisan insanity of financing mortgages for people who couldn’t afford them. On the current trajectory pushed by Obama with Republican acquiescence – and without accounting for catastrophes both foreseeable (e.g., a rise in interest rates, war, the real costs of Obamacare) and unforeseen – expenditures will top $4.5 trillion at the end of Obama’s second term.
Yes, Obama is driving this suicide train, but he has lots of company up front. The vaunted Ryan budget plan – over which Republicans thump their chests – would escalate spending to $4.9 trillion by 2022. It claims what Republicans always claim: they’re going to get serious … tomorrow … or maybe the next day – or the next decade. Indeed, Congressman Ryan would balance the federal budget by … wait for it … 2040. That is, in some future decade, long after many of us die fat and happy on the stolen prosperity of our children and grandchildren, the skies will open and the mythical disciplined political class will descend to impose responsible governance. Until then, Party on dudes! And never you mind that as Ryan and Boehner and McConnell and the rest well know, today’s session of Congress cannot bind future Congresses. The guys who can’t even control 2013 never have any trouble telling you how well they’ve arranged things to run in 2040.
In weaving their story that Obama alone is the catalyst of our crisis, the Republican establishment counts on the constitutional illiteracy of the electorate. The inescapable fact, however, is that all taxing and spending bills enacted by the federal government must originate in the House. The GOP’s all purpose abdication mantra, “We’re only one-half of one-third of the government,” would be laughable if our straits were not so dire. When was the last time you heard the left-leaning bloc of Supreme Court justices say, “We can’t impose our policy preferences on the country. After all, we’re only one-half of one-third of the government”? When was the last time President Obama restrained himself from issuing executive orders conferring, say, privileges on illegal aliens, by explaining that he is only is only one-third of the government (a third, mind you, with zero constitutional authority to confer anything).
In constitutional law, the pertinent issue is never what percentage of total power is allocated to a branch. The question is: Which branch is given supremacy over the relevant subject matter. On the subject matter of taxing and spending – including the task of setting the parameters of the government’s authority to borrow and spend – Congress is supreme and the House has pride of place. It is certainly true that congressional Republicans cannot force President Obama to sign bills and cannot, given the number of Democrats in both chambers, expect to override presidential vetoes. Nevertheless, spending requires legislative authority that originates in the House. It is not a matter of executive diktat. President Obama would not have a dime to spend unless the House and the Senate agreed to give it to him. The government could not borrow more money for President Obama to spend unless the House and the Senate both authorized the borrowing.
It is not that Republicans are powerless to tackle our debt crisis. It is that they lack the will. Just as they are stuck politically in 1964 – having forgotten the Reagan landslides, they’ve convinced themselves that embracing conservatism leads inevitably to Goldwater thumpings – Republicans are frozen in 1995 when it comes to spending. Even though the national debt is now well over three times (soon to be four times) what it was when Bill Clinton and the pre-Fox media successfully demagogued them for shutting down the government, the Republican establishment clearly believes it lacks the competence to make a convincing public case that there is no more money left.
On that, perhaps, we should agree – it is time to explore other options.
The spendaholic government that the Republican establishment has colluded with Democrats to give us has created a debacle in which mandatory spending (entitlements plus interest on the debt) now outstrips revenues by a quarter of a trillion dollars (and rising fast). That is, we are already in a perennial, structural $250 billion debt hole before the government proceeds to pile on its enormous discretionary spending – including $700 billion in military spending and added tens of billions in other national security spending that Republicans would increase if given their druthers, along with another $600 billion and change spread over an endless array of matters that Republicans, in apparent agreement with Democrats, have decided that the states and the people cannot handle without federal instruction.
The Middle East, meanwhile, is aflame. A heavy contributing factor is the American policy of embracing and empowering the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamists allies, very much including al Qaeda. The Brotherhood is a committed enemy of the United States. In 2007-08, the Justice Department proved that it considers the destruction of Western civilization from within to be its principal mission in the United States.
In 2011, President Obama launched an unprovoked war in Libya against the Qaddafi regime, which Republicans had been telling us for eight years had mended its ways and become an American ally – such that Republicans in Congress supported transfers of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Tripoli. Obama’s Libya war was guaranteed to put Islamists in power and put Qaddafi’s arsenal at the disposal of violent jihadists. By refusing to foot the bill, congressional Republicans could have aborted this counter-productive aggression – in the conduct of which the administration consulted the U.N. and the Arab League but not the branch of the U.S. government vested by the Constitution with the power to declare and pay for war. Instead, Republicans lined up behind their transnational progressive wing, led by Senator John McCain, which champions the chimera of sharia-democracy – McCain called the Islamists of Benghazi his “heroes.”
That pro-Islamist policy is directly responsible for the heedlessness of establishing an American consulate in Benghazi. It led to the attacks on our consulate and the British consulate, and ultimately to the terrorist murder of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya (weeks after British diplomats had the good sense to leave town).
The scandal brings into sharp relief an alarming fact that has long been obvious: notwithstanding their abhorrence of America and the West, Islamists are exerting profound influence on our government. Known Islamists and officials with undeniable Islamist connections have infiltrated the government’s policy councils; simultaneously, American policy has moved steadily in favor of Islamists – such that the government supports and funds Muslim Brotherhood affiliates that are hostile to us; colludes with these Islamists in purging from agent-training materials information demonstrating the undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and jihadist terror; collaborates with these Islamists in the effort to impose repressive sharia blasphemy restrictions on our free speech rights; and, we now learn, knowingly misleads the American people on the cause of murderous Islamist tirades, of which the atrocity in Benghazi is only the most recent example.
A few months back, long before these policies resulted in the killing of our American officials in Libya, and even before these policies abetted the Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt (albeit after these policies assured our NATO “ally” Turkey that there would be no blowback for openly supporting Hamas), five conservative Republicans called for an investigation of Islamist influence on our government. Five members of the House – i.e., less than one percent of the Congress – was willing to stand up and confront a profound threat to American national security. The Republican establishment had the opportunity to back them, to prove that the GOP could at least be serious about a profound threat to our national security. Instead, senior Republicans – the Islamist-friendly transnational progressives to whom the party disastrously looks for foreign policy leadership – castigated the five. Speaker Boehner followed suit.
As the weeks went on, and event after event proved the five conservatives right and the apologists for Islamists wrong, the Republican establishment went mum. When the Islamist empowerment strategy coupled with the Obama administration’s shocking failure to defend Americans under siege resulted in the Benghazi massacre, the Republican establishment was given a rare gift: an opportunity, in the decisive stretch-run of a close presidential contest, to exhibit national security seriousness and distinguish themselves from Obama’s dereliction of duty. To the contrary, Gov. Romney and his top advisors decided to go mum on Benghazi; and congressional Republicans essentially delegated their response to Senators McCain and Lindsey Graham – the very “Islamic democracy” enthusiasts who had championed U.S. intervention on the side of Libyan jihadists in the first place (only after having championed the American embrace of Qaddafi).
This has to stop. The current crop of Republican leaders has shown no stomach for the fight. In fact, notwithstanding that President Obama lost a remarkable ten million votes from 2008 in his narrow reelection last week (i.e., 13 percent of his support), House Speaker John Boehner is treating him as if he has a mandate to continue his failed policies – as if the country and its representatives have no choice but to roll over on the immensely unpopular Obamacare law and concede on feeding Leviathan even more revenue and borrowing authority without deep cuts in spending (see Jeff Lord’s account, here); as if the country shares Boehner’s insouciance about the Islamist threat.
By reappointing Boehner and his leadership colleagues today, Republicans are telling us that their answer to failure is more of the same. They have a right to make that choice, but there is no reason why Americans who are serious about our challenges should follow along. The Republican establishment is content with more government, more debt, and more entanglement with our enemies. When called on it, they tell us they are powerless to stem the tide. But the problem is the lack of will and a sense of urgency, not lack of power. It is time to find a new vehicle to lead the cause of limited, fiscally responsible, constitutional government. The Republicans are telling us they are unwilling to be that vehicle. If that is the case, it is time to move on.
****

Gross Misconceptions

GROSS MISCONCEPTION

 

By Thomas Sowell

11/7/2012

 

This country is at a historic crossroads, and the path we choose can determine our future far beyond the next four years. Our children and grandchildren may someday bless us or curse us for what we do this Tuesday. Against that background, it is painful to see the petty talking points and gross misconceptions that seem to dominate this year's election campaign.

Take the question of jobs. How many times have we heard about how many jobs have been added during the Obama administration?

Yet few people bother to find out whether these are net additions to jobs -- which is what is crucial.

The government can always increase some jobs, either directly by hiring more people or indirectly by policies that increase employment in particular industries or regions. But the real question is whether the government's actions create more jobs than they destroy -- that is, whether there is any net addition to jobs.

Yet who in the media even asks that question?

Instead, they focus on the unemployment rate. But people who have given up looking for a job are not counted as unemployed. The proportion of the working age population that is not working is higher now than it has been in many years.

Another gross misconception on the job front is that jobs created during a given administration are a result of the policies of that administration, as are any other signs of economic recovery. But this assumes that the economy is incapable of recovering on its own, without government intervention.

Yet the American economy recovered from downturns on its own for more than a century and a half, until President Herbert Hoover intervened after the stock market crash of 1929. Indeed, this was one of those bipartisan interventions so much hoped for by the media -- and the results were catastrophic.

The media misconception today is that what we need to speed up economic recovery is to end gridlock in Washington and have bipartisan intervention in the economy. However plausible that may sound, it is contradicted repeatedly by history.

Unemployment was never in double digits in any of the 12 months following the stock market crash of 1929. Only after politicians started intervening did unemployment reach double digits -- and stay in double digits throughout the 1930s.

There is nothing mysterious about an economy recovering on its own. Employers usually have incentives to employ and workers have incentives to look for jobs. Lenders have incentives to lend and borrowers have incentives to borrow -- if politicians do not create needless complications and uncertainties.

The Obama administration is in its glory creating complications and uncertainties for business, ranging from runaway regulations to the unknowable future costs of ObamaCare and taxes. Record amounts of idle cash held by businesses and financial institutions are a monument to the counterproductive effects of Barack Obama's anti-business policies and rhetoric. That idle money could create lots of jobs -- net jobs -- if politics did not make it risky to invest.

We often hear that President Obama inherited the worst recession since the Great Depression. But just how do you define that? By how high the unemployment rate went? By how long the recovery takes? Or don't you bother to define it at all?

The annual unemployment rate was as high under Ronald Reagan as it has been under Barack Obama. The difference is that Ronald

Reagan did nothing, despite media cries for action, and Barack Obama did virtually everything imaginable, to the cheers of the media.

The economy recovered a lot faster under Reagan.

If this is "the worst recession since the Great Depression," it is the worst solely in terms of how long it is taking to recover. But how long this has lasted is precisely what critics of Barack Obama are complaining about. Yet clever political rhetoric turns Obama's failure into an excuse for failure.

Contrary to political and media spin, President Obama did not "inherit" his unemployment from President George W. Bush. The annual unemployment rate never got above 6 percent during the eight years of President George W. Bush's administration.

Unemployment has never been that low under President Obama. Passing the buck backwards is a very poor excuse -- especially for someone using "forward" as his campaign slogan.

WAIVING FREEDOM- BO Abuses Constitutional Freedom

 WAIVING FREEDOMs

 

By Thomas Sowell

11/6/2012

 

Among the objections to ObamaCare, one that has not gotten as much attention as it should is the president's power to waive the law for any company, union or other enterprise he chooses.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution provides for "equal protection of the laws" for all Americans. To have a law that can cost an organization millions of dollars a year either apply or not apply, depending on the whim or political interest of the President of the United States, is to make a mockery of the rule of law.

How secure is any freedom when there is this kind of arbitrary power in the hands of one man?

What does your right of freedom of speech mean if saying something that irritates the Obama administration means that you or your business has to pay huge amounts of money and get hit with all sorts of red tape under ObamaCare that your competitor is exempted from, because your competitor either kept quiet or praised the Obama administration or donated to its reelection campaign?

Arbitrary ObamaCare waivers are bad enough by themselves. They are truly ominous as part of a more general practice of this administration to create arbitrary powers that permit them to walk roughshod over the basic rights of the American people.

The checks and balances of the Constitution have been evaded time and time again by the Obama administration, undermining the fundamental right of the people to determine the laws that govern them, through their elected representatives.

You do not have a self-governing people when huge laws are passed too fast for the public to even know what is in them.

You do not have a self-governing people when "czars" are created by Executive Orders, so that individuals wielding vast powers equal to, or greater than, the powers of Cabinet members do not have to be vetted and confirmed by the people's elected representatives in the Senate, as Cabinet members must be.

You do not have a self-governing people when decisions to take military action are referred to the United Nations and the Arab League, but not to the Congress of the United States, elected by the American people, whose blood and treasure are squandered.

You do not have a self-governing people when a so-called "consumer protection" agency is created to be financed by the unelected officials of the Federal Reserve System, which can create its own money out of thin air, instead of being financed by appropriations voted by elected members of Congress who have to justify their priorities and trade-offs to the taxpaying public.

You do not have a self-governing people when laws passed by the Congress, signed by previous Presidents, and approved by the federal courts, can have the current President waive whatever sections he does not like, and refuse to enforce those sections, despite his oath to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

Barack Obama, for example, has refused to carry out sections of the immigration laws that he does not like, unilaterally creating de facto amnesty for those illegal immigrants he has chosen to be exempt from the law. The issue is not -- repeat, NOT -- the wisdom or justice of this President's immigration policy, but the seizing of arbitrary powers not granted to any President by the Constitution of the United States.

You do not have a self-governing people if President Obama succeeds in having international treaties under United Nations auspices govern the way Americans live their lives, whether with gun control laws or other laws.

Obama's "citizen of the world" mindset was revealed back in 2008, when he said "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that every other country is going to say okay."

The desire to circumvent the will of the American people was revealed even more ominously when Barack Obama said to Russian President Medvedev -- when he thought the microphone was off -- that, after he is reelected and need never face the voters again, he can be more "flexible" with the Russians about missile defense.

There are other signs of Obama's contempt for American Constitutional democracy, but these should be more than enough. Dare we risk how far he will go when he never has to face the voters again, and can appoint Supreme Court justices who can rubber stamp his power grabs? Will this still be America in 2016?

Thomas Sowell - BO Conman

By Thomas Sowell

10/30/2012

 

Confidence men know that their victim -- "the mark" as he has been called -- is eventually going to realize that he has been cheated.

But it makes a big difference whether he realizes it immediately, and goes to the police, or realizes it after the confidence man is long gone.


So part of the confidence racket is creating a period of uncertainty, during which the victim is not yet sure of what is happening. This delaying process has been called "cooling out the mark."


The same principle applies in politics. When the accusations that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton first surfaced, he flatly denied them all. Then, as the months passed, the truth came out -- but slowly, bit by bit. One of Clinton's own White House aides later called it "telling the truth slowly."


By the time the whole truth came out, it was called "old news," and the clever phrase now was that we should "move on."


It was a successful "cooling out" of the public, keeping them in uncertainty so long that, by the time the whole truth came out, there was no longer the same outrage as if the truth had suddenly come out all at once. Without the support of an outraged public, the impeachment of President Clinton fizzled out in the Senate.

We are currently seeing another "cooling out" process, growing out of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi on September 11th this year.

The belated release of State Department e-mails shows that the Obama administration knew, while the attack on the American consulate was still underway, that it was a coordinated, armed terrorist attack. They were getting reports from those inside the consulate who were under attack, as well as surveillance pictures from a camera on an American drone overhead.

About an hour before the attack, the scene outside was calm enough for the American ambassador to accompany a Turkish official to the gates of the consulate to say goodbye. This could hardly have happened if there were protesting mobs there.

Why then did both President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice keep repeating the story that this was a spontaneous protest riot against an anti-Islamic video in America?


The White House knew the facts -- but they knew that the voting public did not. And it mattered hugely whether the facts became known to the public before or after the election. What the White House needed was a process of "cooling out" the voters, keeping them distracted or in uncertainty as long as possible.


Not only did the Obama administration keep repeating the false story about an anti-Islamic video being the cause of a riot that turned violent, the man who produced that video was tracked down and arrested, creating a media distraction.


All this kept the video story front and center, with the actions and inactions of the Obama administration kept in the background. The

White House had to know that it was only a matter of time before the truth would come out. But time was what mattered, with an election close at hand. The longer they could stretch out the period of distraction and uncertainty -- "cooling out" the voters -- the better. Once the confidence man in the White House was reelected, it would be politically irrelevant what facts came out.


As the Obama administration's video story began to slowly unravel, their earlier misstatements were blamed on "the fog of war" that initially obscures many events. But there was no such "fog of war" in this case. The Obama administration knew what was happening while it was happening.


They didn't know all the details -- and we may never know all the details -- but they knew enough to know that this was no protest demonstration that got out of hand.


From the time it took office, the Obama administration has sought to suppress the very concept of a "war on terror" or the terrorists' war on us. The painful farce of calling the Fort Hood murders "workplace violence," instead of a terrorist attack in our midst, shows how far the Obama administration would go to downplay the dangers of Islamic extremist terrorism.


The killing of Osama bin Laden fed the pretense that the terrorism threat had been beaten. But the terrorists' attack in Libya exposed that fraud -- and required another fraud to try to "cool out" the voters until after election day.