NAVY

Navy commodore to be relieved of command over Iran's capture of his sailors

By Lucas Tomlinson

 Published June 24, 2016 

 FoxNews.com

The commodore in charge of the two U.S. Navy boats that strayed into Iranian waters leading to the capture of his 10 sailors for 16 hours in January will be relieved of command likely putting an end to his career, Fox News has learned.

Capt. Kyle Moses, commodore of Commander Task Force (CTF) 56 was responsible for the two riverine boats and Kuwait-based crew. The Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, is set to release a long-awaited report on June 30th about the events surrounding the January incident now that the investigation is complete.

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces captured the two high-speed patrol boats near Farsi Island, a well-known Iranian base, hours after the boats left Kuwait on January 12 with the intended purpose of sailing to Bahrain. Five sailors were aboard each boat.

The Navy crew was inexperienced and running late to make a rendezvous at a refueling point in the Persian Gulf when the capture took place, according to officials.

The detention of the American crew came the same day as President Obama’s State of the Union address and came at a sensitive time for the administration days before formally implementing the nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers led by the United States.  

Days after the incident, Defense Secretary Ash Carter said the Navy patrol boats had “misnavigated” into Iranian territorial waters. The second in command of the riverine squadron, Cmdr. Eric Rasch, was fired from his job last month.

Multiple defense officials tell Fox News a “multitude of errors” led to the capture of the U.S. Navy crew.

First, there was no navigation brief, a major violation of Navy protocol. When any Navy ship gets underway, even for something as minor as shirting berths from one pier to another, it is standard for a Navy crew to conduct a navigation brief discussing issues such as hazards to navigation or, in this case, an Iranian base near the planned course.

Second, the chain of command was not well defined on the two boats. While a young lieutenant was the highest-ranking individual on either of the two 50-foot boats, when the order was given to evade the Iranian forces, the helmsman refused the order.

Third, defense officials tell Fox News the Navy had become too complacent with the its treatment by Iranian forces in the months leading up to the January capture.

“The story here is these guys had gotten so used to Iranians doing stupid s---, having weapons pointed at them all the time, they didn’t know they were being captured until the Iranians boarded their boats,” one defense official said describing the lack of situational awareness by the Navy crew. “They messed up pretty bad.”

It was not immediately clear whether Richardson would announce punishments during the release of his report or a short time later. Other sailors aboard the two ships likely face disciplinary action as well, but Navy officials have refused to disclose the number.

The detention of the U.S. sailors created an uproar on Capitol Hill as Iran released a videotaped apology from the Navy lieutenant. Many in the military questioned whether the Code of Conduct, which forbids any captured American troops from making such statements, was violated. Under terms of the Code, American service members are required to give only a name, rank, service number and date of birth to captors.

Other video clips showing some of the 10 sailors crying sparked additional international outrage. Secretary of State John Kerry had thanked the Iranians for their treatment of the Navy sailors before the video showing the apology and crying was released.

Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei awarded medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard crew who detained the American sailors. In February, a reenactment of the sailors' capture was displayed during parades around Iran celebrating the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

On the same day the Navy sailors were taken captive, Iran flew a drone over the USS Harry S Truman in the Persian Gulf. And, when the aircraft carrier sailed past the Strait of Hormuz in late December, a group of Iranian missile boats fired unguided rockets only 1,500 yards away, in a move the Navy called “highly provocative.”

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews

Why Brexit

BRExit
 
As in the United States, British working  class (middle class) have been ignored by the Political  Class and British Elitists.   The following excerpt from a BBC article explains the cause for Britain's populist voting to Exit the EU.

Note: Just replace Britain with US and insert Fly-Over America for British citizens.

  

Say it aint so, Barry......YAB

POSTED ON JUNE 20, 2016 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN IRAN, OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY

IRAN’S NUKE PROGRAM CONFIRMED

Omri Ceren writes to comment on Jay Solomon’s page-one Wall Street Journal article“Uranium provides new clue on Iran’s past nuclear arms work.” I thought that readers who have been following the story of our partnership with, and funding of, the Islamic Republic of Iran would appreciate this update, provided by Omri with the usual footnotes.

Readers may recall Obama’s assertions at the time he announced the deal: “Because of this deal, inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location. Put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary. That arrangement is permanent. And the IAEA has also reached an agreement with Iran to get access that it needs to complete its investigation into the possible military dimensions of Iran’s past nuclear research.” These assertions are now revealed to be something less than the truth, not that you didn’t know that already:

The Obama administration is now admitting that Iran did nuclear weapons work at its military facility at Parchin, based on a December IAEA report that described two “chemically man-modified particles of natural uranium” at the site. But the evidence is too sparse to figure out what kind of work the Iranians were doing, just that they were doing some kind of nuclear weapons work:

Current and former U.S. officials asked about the uranium finding said the working assumption now is that it is tied to nuclear weapons development… “The existence of two particles of uranium there would be consistent with our understanding of the involvement of Parchin in a past weapons program, but by themselves don’t definitively prove anything,” said a senior administration official briefed on the evidence.

One reason the IAEA can’t determine what happened is because – as part of the nuclear deal – the U.S. collapsed on long-standing demands that the Iranians fully come clean on their past weapons work, the so-called possible military dimensions (PMDs) of their nuclear program. Instead the Iranians were allowed to deny the Agency access to top nuclear scientists and to self-inspect at Parchin, passing on soil samples from pre-selected locations. That wasn’t enough for the IAEA to make a determination:

Iran didn’t allow the agency to interview top nuclear scientists believed to have overseen nuclear weapons development… Iran did allow IAEA inspectors to collect soil samples from Parchin in October that were tested for the presence of nuclear materials. The agency found two particles of man-made uranium… The amount of uranium was so small that the IAEA couldn’t conclude for certain that nuclear materials had been at the base.

Normally if the IAEA doesn’t have enough evidence about likely weapons work, it just goes back and gets more. But the nuclear deal blocks further inspections:

Normally, the IAEA requires additional samples to be taken when there are irregularities found in their tests… But under last year’s nuclear agreement, Tehran was only required to allow the IAEA’s inspectors to visit the Parchin facility once… Under the nuclear deal, Iran has committed to allowing the IAEA access to all of its suspected nuclear sites. But it isn’t clear if Iran would allow inspectors back into Parchin because it is a military base. Iranian officials have said last year’s visit wouldn’t be repeated.

So the Iranians were doing weapons work, the IAEA doesn’t know what kind of work it was, and the deal doesn’t force the Iranians to clarify. The result guts verification of the deal: IAEA inspectors can’t confirm Iran has halted its illicit weapons work, because inspectors don’t know what kind of illicit weapons work Iran was doing. There is no baseline to work from:

Critics of the nuclear deal have cited the presence of uranium at Parchin as evidence the Obama administration didn’t go far enough in demanding Iran answer all questions concerning its past nuclear work before lifting international sanctions in January. They also argue that it is hard to develop a comprehensive monitoring regime without knowing everything Iran has done.

Last June Secretary Kerry had previously argued that the U.S. didn’t even need Iran to come clean because the U.S. had “absolute knowledge with respect to the certain military activities they were engaged in” [a]. The claim was widely criticized by lawmakers and analysts for being false [b][c]. The AP subsequently revealed the self-inspection arrangement in August [d]. Defenders of the deal responded with an organized public attack on the outlet’s credibility, up to and including suggestions that the AP was running forged Israeli documents [e]. Administration officials separately argued that the Iranian inspections would be adequate to resolve the nature of the country’s past weapons work [f].

[a] http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2015/06/243892.htm
[b] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-06-19/no-u-s-doesn-t-have-absolute-knowledge-on-iran-s-nukes
[c] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2015/06/17/john-kerrys-ludicrous-statements-on-iran-and-syria/
[d] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a9f4e40803924a8ab4c61cb65b2b2bb3/ap-exclusive-un-let-iran-inspect-alleged-nuke-work-site
[e] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/24/iran-deal-truthers.html
[f] http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/19/politics/iran-nuclear-deal-inspections-parchin/

POSTED ON JUNE 21, 2016 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN SOCIALISM, VENEZUELA

THE VENEZUELAN HUNGER

If you seek to understand the catastrophe that has hit Venezuela, you can compare and contrast the views of New York Times reporter Nicholas Casey with those of Los Angeles Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully. Winner: Scully.

Even if he is clueless about causes, and he is, Casey can see what is in front of his nose. Give him that much. He is stationed in Caracas and he has the requisite reportorial skills.

Here is the opening of Casey’s most recent report from Venezuela — “Venezuelans ransack stores as hunger grips the nation” — this one datelined Cumaná:

With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.

This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.

In one of the nation’s worst moments, riots spread from Caracas, the capital, in 1989, leaving hundreds dead at the hands of security forces. Known as the “Caracazo,” or the “Caracas clash,” they were set off by low oil prices, cuts in subsidies and a population that was suddenly impoverished.

The event seared the memory of a future president, Hugo Chávez, who said the country’s inability to provide for its people, and the state’s repression of the uprising, were the reasons Venezuela needed a socialist revolution.

A socialist revolution? Wow, this might be a story that is relevant to us:

Now his successors find themselves in a similar bind — or maybe even worse.

The nation is anxiously searching for ways to feed itself.

The economic collapse of recent years has left it unable to produce enough food on its own or import what it needs from abroad. Cities have been militarized under an emergency decree from President Nicolás Maduro, the man Mr. Chávez picked to carry on with his revolution before he died three years ago.

“If there is no food, there will be more riots,” said Raibelis Henriquez, 19, who waited all day for bread in Cumaná, where at least 22 businesses were attacked in a single day last week.

But while the riots and clashes punctuate the country with alarm, it is the hunger that remains the constant source of unease.

A staggering 87 percent of Venezuelans say they do not have money to buy enough food, the most recent assessment of living standards by Simón Bolívar University found.

One keeps an eye on events in Venezuela with a morbid fascination.

Defining the American Progressive movement

Defining the American Progressive movement and targeting the hives *UPDATE*

JUNE 17, 2016 BY BOOKWORM 20 COMMENTS

I’ve been struggling to come up with a down-and-dirty definition of modern Progressivism.  I know that we can just call it socialism with an American accent, but that’s inaccurate. We need to define it correctly because doing so allows us to see and address Ground Zero — the creation point — of this toxic ideology.

As any good conservative knows — especially those who have read Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change — American Progressivism was a political movement that originated more than a hundred years ago. Some early Progressives liked to borrow some ideas and words from socialism, as was the case in Jean Webster’s 1912 classic Daddy-Long-Legs. In that quite charming book, the heroine, Judy Abbott, is a foundling sent to a posh college modeled on Vassar. Once there, she pronounces herself a Fabian, meaning (to her) a socialist who wants to bring about change slowly, without an actual revolution.

Despite borrowing a few linguistic trappings, though, American Progressives were never European-style socialists. The difference between American Leftists and their European counterparts was a matter of class — the Europeans had classes and, technically speaking, Americans did not. Sure, America had her rich and her poor, and some families who could trace their wealth back a few decades, but Progressivism arose in a time when America was still an economically dynamic country, one in which people’s status was based on wealth, not birth, and they could rise and fall depending on their luck, hard work, and financial acumen.

In this, Americans were unlike Europeans who had ancient, deeply stratified, practically immobile classes. As Alan J. Lerner wrote for My Fair Lady, “An Englishman’s way of speaking absolutely classifies him. The moment he talks he makes some other Englishman despise him.” England was not alone, of course.  Lerner could have written the same words about every European country, and indeed just about every other country in the world.

[Close it up again]

Classic Marxist socialism, which arose in mid-19th century Europe, envisioned a true revolution, with the social orders upended, and the lowest becoming the mightiest. The resulting socialist government’s final form would be statist — that is, individual rights and property would be nonexistent — but it would be the people dropping their “h’s” who ran the state, rather than those who spoke received English.

In America, the Progressive movement was entirely different. Sure, in America’s new ghettos, there were Italians, and Poles, and Russians, and Jews who imagined a socialist revolution, but they didn’t get it. In a country with no tightly defined classes and the possibility of social mobility, no one really wanted to change the system. Why blow up the casino if there’s a chance, no matter how small, that you might win?

The real revolutionaries were the middle classes getting educated at the Ivies, as well as all of those liberal arts colleges popping throughout America after the Civil War. The professors in these colleges believed that a confluence of classic education and science could perfect humankind.  Let the liberal arts define the perfect human being and the perfect society, and then let science and technology bring these ideas to fruition.

For example, these educated classes were in agreement that the perfect human being would look and behave remarkably like them:  white, Anglo-Saxon, fit, and educated. Science then provided the answer to achieve human perfection: Safe and legal abortion, along with sterilization for anyone deemed unfit — blacks, Hispanics, Jews, Italians, Asians, the mentally or physically infirm, alcoholics, and anyone else who didn’t fit the Aryan mold. (It really wasn’t that big a step for the Germans to conclude that abortion and sterilization were too slow and to opt, instead, for wholesale slaughter. The Germans, obviously, were not Fabians.)

In certain situations, strides in science and technology were indeed a boon. Farming, manufacturing, medicine, and technology brought wonders to the world:  cars, airplanes, radios, movies, television, safe surgery, sophisticated vaccinations, machines bringing relief from backbreaking field work while increasing food output, were all modern wonders. (Although I suspect that, if one looked into the background of many of these wonders, they did not originate in America’s colleges, but in individual workshops, factories, and homes. Take the Wright Brothers, for example. . . .)  The Progressives’ mistake was to believe that humans were just like widgets, and could be treated in the same way as these object-based advances.

Home economics was born, assuring American women that if they followed the expert instruction coming from male and female university professors who had never had a child or run a home, these women could have a perfect home, filled with perfect children, who would grow up to become perfect adults.  As part of this, mothers were told not to give in to human emotions when it came to their babies, because the scientific method, allied with that Progressive goal of perfecting humankind, mandated that babies experience a certain amount of rigor, combined with a lack of affection, to grow up properly.

Education in America, which could have followed Maria Montessori’s focus on children and how they actually learn, instead became an assembly line for producing educated citizens. Students were rolled from one year to another, subject to mass teaching, a system that instructed many of them, but educated few of them.

Woodrow Wilson was the embodiment and apex of the early Progressive movement. An intellectual and a university professor, he promised Americans that he would lead them to the American utopia — an expert-run country benefitting all. It’s ironic that something as awful as World War One prevented this first Progressive experiment from reaching a Germanic end. The war revealed the tyrannical statism lurking behind the Progressive movement. When the war ended, Americans no longer had a stomach for iron-fisted expertise. They craved the “normalcy” that Harding promised. They wanted to have fun and be imperfect.

Faced with Harding, Coolidge, flappers, and bathtub gin, Progressivism went to ground. And in the context of Progressivism, “going to ground” meant retreating to the Ivory towers of the myriad college and universities that dotted the American landscape.  Subject to a few terrible economic forays during the Roosevelt era, Progressivism basically festered in academia. In those hallowed halls, academics clustered together, assuring themselves and each other of their superiority when compared to the crude, ill-educated, boorish American in the street. These academics took their cues from the sophisticated Europeans — people so sophisticated that they started two world wars, resulting in the slaughter of sixty or more million people.

The same academics taught generations of students that America was a brash child of a nation that needed to be tamed to European norms. The unspoken part of this education was that once tamed, America could be socialized in the same way that modern Europe was being socialized. Sadly, these proud academics were too stupid to realize that Europe’s much-vaunted cradle-to-crave welfare system worked only because America entirely absorbed the defense costs that all sovereign nations have to pay . . . or die. (It’s funny how Europeans always got pissy when I reminded them that we hard-working Americans were funding their free health care, thirty-hour work weeks, six weeks paid vacation, and early retirement. They got even pissier when the Cold War ended, we stopped paying, and they started going broke.)

The post-war era — and, more specifically, the GI Bill — gave the academics a huge influx of students to whom they could teach these ideas. Unfortunately for the professoriate, the first batch of students was made up of men and women who had been tried in the Depression and the theater of war and were, therefore, (mostly) too tough for their ideological blandishments. They had seen first hand just how “sophisticated” Europeans actually were and therefore were a hard sell for the notion that Europeans should be emulated, not rejected.

However, as the war retreated, the academic Progressives gained ground in the American middle class, especially with spoiled and bored Baby Boomers who were susceptible to manipulation through guilt, fear, sex, and drugs.  But before we get there, we have to take a brief stop in 1952 and again in 1956, when the academic Progressives hatched their first candidate — Democrat Adlai Stevenson, a witty, charming Harvard-educated lawyer who appealed to the burgeoning class of college educated Americans but made the mistake, as he said, of running against a war hero.  

Incidentally, to show how far the Democrat party has come, I think everyone reading this blog would willingly cast a vote today for Stevenson. Here are just a few of his better-known statements, which will help you understand how far the Left has traveled in the ensuing 60 years:

The whole notion of loyalty inquisitions is a national characteristic of the police state, not of democracy. The history of Soviet Russia is a modern example of this ancient practice. I must, in good conscience, protest against any unnecessary suppression of our rights as free men. We must not burn down the house to kill the rats. [A nice counter to the new Left’s demands that those who do not parrot their ideas are haters and must be silenced.]

Communism is the corruption of a dream of justice.

What counts now is not just what we are against, but what we are for. Who leads us is less important than what leads us — what convictions, what courage, what faith — win or lose. A man doesn’t save a century, or a civilization, but a militant party wedded to a principle can. [In other words, don’t worry so much about who Trump is. Focus on the values he promises to advance, and the people who promise to keep him honest if he wins. Remember, Hillary is much, much worse.]

It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect. Men who have offered their lives for their country know that patriotism is not the fear of something; it is the love of something.

The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal chords.

Public confidence in the integrity of the Government is indispensable to faith in democracy; and when we lose faith in the system, we have lost faith in everything we fight and spend for.

There is no evil in the atom, only in men’s souls. [Tell that to the gun control crowd.]

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

If we value the pursuit of knowledge, we must be free to follow wherever that search may lead us. The free mind is not a barking dog, to be tethered on a ten-foot chain. [And tell that to the attorneys general who are trying to criminalize opposition to an inviolable climate change ideology whose devotees misleadingly claim it is “science.”]

Those who corrupt the public mind are just as evil as those who steal from the public purse.

Some of us worship in churches, some in synagogues, some on golf courses … yet we are all children of the same Judaic-Christian civilization, with much the same religious background basically.

The idea that you can merchandise candidates for high office like breakfast cereal — that you can gather votes like box tops — is, I think, the ultimate indignity to the democratic process.

We must recover the element of quality in our traditional pursuit of equality. We must not, in opening our schools to everyone, confuse the idea that all should have equal chance with the notion that all have equal endowments. [That statement alone would get him kicked out of today’s Democrat Party.]

The first principle of a free society is an untrammeled flow of words in an open forum. [I think Triggly-Puff should read this.]

It will be helpful in our mutual objective to allow every man in America to look his neighbor in the face and see a man — not a color. [An idea today’s Democrats, who are steeped in race, deplore.]

Nixon is the kind of politician who would cut down a redwood tree, then mount the stump for a speech on conservation. [Just think of Hillary and the $12,500 Armani potato sack . . . er, dress she wore to give a speech on income inequality.]

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff. [And he was talking about a kinder, friendlier media.]

A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you. [Not political. I just like it. As I get older and my looks fade, I try hard to be charming.]

Reading those quotations, you can see that Hillary Clinton, today’s Democrat Party candidate, is no Adlai Stevenson.  What she lacks in Stevenson’s wit, charm, and core values, she more than makes up for in cackle, corruption, and anti-Americanism.

So far, I’ve described the classic Progressive — a wonkish kind of person, most at home in the academy, who was convinced that expert scientific analysis could be brought to bear on social and political issues so as to create an improved world. He loved America but believed that science (including the new categories of social and political science) could make her an even better nation.

The classic Progressive vanished in the 1960s when socialism moved onto campus and into the hearts and minds of the guilty (early white privilege), fear-ridden (the draft), drug-ridden, sexually obsessed Baby Boomers. By “vanished,” I don’t mean stopped existing entirely. I mean that American Progressivism cross-bred with socialism and created today’s Progressive — a hardcore statist who is invested in the full socialist agenda, but dresses it up in academic clothes, complete with Lysenkoism (i.e., fraudulent science to support bad, or even dangerous, politics). An analogy might be the way in which Africanized Killer Bees crossbred with American honeybees, which resulted in Killer Bees occupying seemingly innocuous honeybee hives.

Today’s Killer Bee academics do have a few things in common with the old Progressives. They still believe in the rule of an academic elite. To them, Obama’s Harvard Law degree was, in and of itself, adequate proof to them that he had all the necessary accomplishments to become president. Likewise, Ben Rhodes’ English degree made him an ideal person to shape and then dishonestly push the Iran deal. After all, he’d almost certainly read lots of Alice Walker, Doris Lessing, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum, just to name a few of the Leftist, anti-white, anti-male, antisemitic writers who have flooded America’s liberal arts departments.

Unlike the old academics, though, the new Killer Bee academics share the socialists’ belief that science is not a discipline for discovering hard, immutable truths, but as a vehicle for political change — which means that scientific truth must always be subordinate to political goals. (Back in the old days in America, politicized science was mostly the province of racists.  Now it’s the province of all Leftists.)

And speaking of those racists, just like Wilson today’s Progressives still believe that blacks are inferior. The difference between then and now is that the Killer Bee academics dress that racism up in seemingly loving language so that they blame societal victimhood, rather than genetic inferiority, to address the fact that blacks do not thrive as they should in America. Having dressed their racism up in the garb of political science, they then use it as another vehicle to drive political policy.

Moreover, because it worked for blacks, academic Killer Bees have learned to use the same technique with other minorities, women, non-heterosexual people, and whomever else they can convince of victimhood in order to create a political pawn. (Conservatives, incidentally, side with Frederick Douglas, who said, essentially, “Get that government away from my people so that they can use their gifts to thrive, without either the government’s dangerous malevolence or even more dangerous faux-beneficence.”)

The biggest change in today’s academic Killer Bee Progressive is the hardcore Marxist socialism that’s invaded the university hive. These people want a true revolution. They believe in a totally state-controlled economy. They are determined to squash individual liberty — and to use guns in government hands against unarmed citizens to make sure that the liberties, once taken, never return. They have completed the transformation from honeybees, naive but patriotic, to Killer Bees, determined to use the tools of academic — the papers they publish, the students they control, the graduates they seed in America’s media and businesses — to destroy America and remake it in Marx’s image, with an academic elite at the helm.

So if you’re wondering how we got to where we are now, look no further than America’s universities. If I were to give Donald Trump advice, I would tell him that one of his first acts as President should be to do whatever it takes to withdraw all federal funding from America’s colleges and universities. After all, if the Obama administration was willing to withdraw those funds over potty rights for sexually confused people, Trump should certainly be able to withdraw them to save America from Killer Bee academics.

UPDATE:  I barely finish writing when I see that California, which has no money, found $5 million to fund a “gun research” institute at UC.  Now, do you seriously think it will do honest research about guns used both offensively or defensively, with an eye to constitutional rights, or will it simply use taxpayer money to advance the goal of destroying the Second Amendment?  If you want to see actual gun research, go here, where John Lott and his team let the data lead, rather than letting the ideology lead (with taxpayer funding yet).

“Détente through the looking glass” — Obama’s foreign policy

JUNE 19, 2016 BY BOOKWORM 4 COMMENTS

I’ll spell out my premise and then see if I can sell you on it: In the dystopian world Obama is creating, his foreign policy is the “looking glass” version of Kissinger’s détente. Obama sees himself creating a balancebetween the Middle East and the West that will lead to stability without war and eventually bring the Muslim nations closer in line with Western values, something he believes is a historic inevitability. In fact, his core Leftist ideology, coupled with his calamitous ignorance means that, rather than providing the West with breathing space to gather its resources even as our enemy’s inherent instability weakens it, Obama is pushing the West headlong into an Islamist-inspired Apocalypse.

Let’s start at the beginning.

By 1969, the Cold War had been going on for twenty-one years. Thehighlights of that twenty-one year period were as follows:

East Germany’s complete closure in 1949, withdrawing it from the West and enveloping it completely in the Soviet bloc.

The Korean “police action” from 1950 through 1953, during which 200,000 anti-communist troops died or vanished and an estimated 2.5 million Korean civilians (mostly in the north) had died. The communists lost an estimated 360,000 to 750,000 troops. It was no World War II, but it was a blood bath.

The Vietnam War, which began in 1955 and essentially took up where the Korean War left off — with the communists, both Soviet and Chinese, again making a play for control of East Asia, this time in Vietnam. U.S. involvement began under President Kennedy (Democrat) and escalated under President Johnson (Democrat). Although Kissinger and Nixon couldn’t know it at the time, the war would eventually cost almost 60,000 American lives, as well as the lives of another 480,000 to 800,000 anti-communist troops. On the Communist side, losses would total around 460,000 to 1,170,000 troops. Along the way, an unknown number of civilians would die, with the numbers ranging from 1,500,000 to 3,800,000 dead civilians. At the end of it all, Vietnam would fall, Cambodia would fall and, in a way, America would fall too. Again, not a World War II, but definitely a blood bath.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956, during which Hungarians failed to shake off Soviet control. The result was that the Soviet Union clamped down even tighter on Central Europe.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, which saw a game of nuclear chickenbetween Kennedy and Khrushchev escalate to a point just short of nuclear war. The bloodbath was avoided, but Americans were desperately afraid. Remember: Duck and cover!!

The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, which saw 250,000 troops from the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Hungary and Poland sneak into Czechoslovakia, stopping the nascent Prague Spring and ensuring that Czechoslovakia remained yet another nation firmly in the Soviet bloc.

In addition to the above events, the following other countries fell within the Soviet or Chinese communist sphere during that twenty-year period: Yugoslavia, Albania, Bulgaria, and Romania. Half of Europe was locked behind the Iron Curtain, the pressure was on in East Asia and, although this wasn’t apparent at the start of détente, large sections of Africa and Latin America would come under Soviet control in the 1970s.

Offsetting the continued post-WWII rise of communism was the fact that America was booming, thanks in part to her resources (both human and natural) and to the fact that after WWII, she was one of the few intact nations in the world. These resources meant that, during the Cold War years, America fought on every front: she funded the free Western nations so that they could overcome the devastation wrought by war, she paid defense costs for these same countries, and she threw her own troops into the battles in the Far East. With America’s power, money, and anti-communist commitment, this was truly the era of the Pax Americana.

But after twenty-one years, things were stagnant. In the late 1960s, Henry Kissinger took a good hard look at the Cold War situation. He concluded that the Soviet Union had become a superpower and that America and the rest of the Western nations were near the limits of both their financial and military abilities. The West could maintain a standoff, but it could not win definitively against the communist hydra. Moreover, given the Soviet Union’s and America’s nuclear arsenals, total war was a very bad idea.

Kissinger was an anti-communist to the bone, so he wasn’t going to end containment (hence the decision to continue the fight in Vietnam), but he decided it was time to pursue the policy known as détente, or “relaxation.” Détente’s goal was to thaw out the Cold War a bit, lest escalation led to Armageddon. What supported this approach was the Nixon administration’s belief that, despite saber rattling, the Soviet Union and other communist nations were no more anxious for Armageddon than America was.

It was, if you will, a balancing act. A little war here; a little friendliness there. Each side both ready to fight and desperate to avoid the fight.

It’s unclear, at the end of the day, whether détente was a successful foreign policy or not. As I noted above, the Vietnam war continued for years (bringing in poor Cambodia), and the Soviet Union was able to bring substantial numbers of African and Latin American states into the communist fold.

On the other hand, perhaps it was a necessary pause, allowing America to gather her resources. When the USSR went into the black hole that is Afghanistan, at a time when the Soviet economy had definitively run out of other people’s money, America was perfectly situated under Ronald Reagan to strike. The arms race broke the Soviet economy and the Soviets, with both their troops and their national morale vanishing in Afghanistan, were ill-situated to carry out the proxy wars that dominated the Cold War era.

Whether détente was a necessary breather or a fool’s paradise, it was a completely rational decision at the time. Kissinger was never allowed ideological beliefs to blind him to facts. He was the ultimate realpolitik intellectual — irritatingly so for those who longed for a more robust response to Soviet expansionism. They saw détente as making a deal with the devil; Kissinger saw it as a necessary reprieve from endless wars against an equally matched enemy. (As the unbalanced fatalities listed above show — that is, always more communist troop deaths than Western troop deaths — what the communists lacked in money and weapons, they were more than willing to make up in bodies thrown in front of enemy fire.)

Before I get to Obama’s looking-glass twist on détente, let me reiterate what motivated Kissinger: A realistic look at the facts on the ground in the late 1960s and early 1970s showed that America and the Soviet Union were fairly equally matched. Kissinger, therefore, opted for a strategic thawing to stave off a possible war of attrition, similar to that seen in World War I, where two fairly equally matched sides could neither win nor stop fighting. (It’s reasonable to believe that, given enough time, Germany would have won, but that outcome was not certain. What was certain was that the U.S. functioned in some ways as the Deus ex Machina, stepping in and striking a necessary definitive blow in a war that had expended hundreds of thousands of lives over the same few square miles of ground.)

Obama, like the ill-educated and Leftist-educated man he is, has only the most superficial understanding of what constitutes détente: His foreign policy, especially in the Middle East and with Iran proves that, to him, it simply consists of reaching parity with the enemy, followed by a thawing, followed by the arc of justice and historic inevitability. A + B + C, plus a little bit of that ol’ Obama magic, and you’ve got the lion sleeping with the lamb around the world.

Armed with this “magic” formula, Obama managed to miss or misunderstand all of the really important stuff. Most significantly, he completely misunderstood that the parity with the enemy had to precede détente; indeed, had to be the driving force behind détente.

Because of this misperception, Obama made the deliberate (and insanely stupid) decision to weaken America and strengthen her enemies. He reduced the number of our troops, called down our weapons, and turned the military’s focus to climate change and gender equality. At the same time, he invested billions of dollars in Iran, while making no demands in exchange; bolstered the Muslim brotherhood; and allowed Syria to turn into an Islamic terrorist breeding ground.

Voila! Parity, Obama style. It takes a truly terrible leader to so thoroughly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Obama also missed entirely that we’re dealing with a different enemy than the one America faced in the Cold War. By the late 1960s, Kissinger had realized that the Cold War leaders were pragmatists. They wanted power, but not at the cost of their own lives.

Détente’s mutually assured destruction and thawing both worked because there were lines — nuclear lines — that neither the Soviet nor the American leaders ever wanted to cross. It’s one thing to carry on an old-fashioned ground war in some godforsaken jungle, even if a whole bunch of grunts and civilians die; it’s another thing for Moscow to be immolated. In a nuclear age, even the Soviets understood that all victories would be Pyrrhic ones.

Obama, being cut from the communist cloth, understands how the Soviet politburo thought. He too wants power, not death (at least not his own death). What Obama cannot comprehend, because faith is alien to him, is that religious faith, with its promise of an afterlife, is a much more potent motivator than here-and-now communism can ever be.

As we’ve seen repeatedly over the last few decades, Islam is generally a religion that rejoices in death, not just of the enemy, but of any Muslim fighting in Dar-al-Harb (the House of War). Islam is so overwhelmingly powerful that it sucks out of its most ardent followers what we in the West think is an intrinsic aspect of all sentient life on earth — the will to live. It’s different with fundamentalist Muslims. With the brainwashing starting in the cradle, and teaching a range of thought and action running from violence to total submission to Allah’s will, Islamic fanatics embrace death.

In addition to the generic Islamist death wish, the Shia branch of Islam, which controls Iran (the country to which Obama has given the gift of a nuclear future) is apocalyptic in nature. And again, because Obama is a singularly ill-informed man who resists any efforts to enlighten him with actual knowledge, he fails to understand the unique nature of Islamic apocalyptic doctrine.

Devout Christians know the Apocalypse is coming, but they do not believe that it is incumbent upon them to be the engines of the Apocalypse. Contrast this with fanatic Shia Muslims (i.e., those in charge of Iran’s soon-to-be nuclear arsenal). They believe that it is their responsibility to bring about the Apocalypse.

Specifically, Iran’s leaders anticipate the return of the twelfth or hidden iman in the form of the Imam al-Mahdi, meaning “the [divinely] guided one.” This belief is the core of the Twelvers’ belief — and Iranian leaders are Twelvers.

The Imam’s return, the Twelvers claim, will establish Islam as the world’s only religion. That’s bad enough but, unfortunately for those in the West, a subset of this belief is the Twelvers’ further belief that it is their responsibility to initiate the chaos out of which both the imam, as well as an Islamized Jesus Christ, will emerge.

What this Apocalyptic doctrine means, and what Obama cannot comprehend, is that, unlike the old Soviets, Twelvers don’t worry about the fact that, should they fire a nuclear weapon at Israel or Europe or the U.S., their own country will swiftly receive like treatment. Not only don’t they fear it, it’s want they want. Just think about what’s going on in the Middle East today and compare it to the portents the Twelvers advance as the signs of the coming Apocalypse:

• The vast majority of people who profess to be Muslim will be so only in name despite their practice of Islamic rites and it will be they who make war with the Mahdi.
• Before his coming will come the red death and the white death, killing two thirds of the world’s population. The red death signifies violence and the white death is plague. One third of the world’s population will die from the red death and the other third from the white death.
• Several figures will appear: the Al-Harth, Al-Mansur, Shuaib bin Saleh and the Sufyani.
• There will be a great conflict in the land of Syria, until it is destroyed.
• Death and fear will afflict the people of Baghdad and Iraq. A fire will appear in the sky and a redness will cover them.

Syria is imploding, ISIS’s depredations are causing death and fear in Baghdad, Muslim hordes around the world are dealing out death and destruction, and Obama is helping Iran fund their red death.  That’s exciting stuff for someone dreaming of imminent Armageddon. To the extent that Obama thinks that by making nice with the Iranians he can bring them into the American sphere of influence, he shows a profound inability to understand belief systems other than his own.

Obama also fails to grasp that Kissinger during the détente years could rely on an American sphere of influence. Back in the day, we truly supported our allies in every way. We funded them (no wonder they could afford to play around with their cozy European socialism) and we had their back.

Obama, in his anxiousness to decrease America’s power, has alienated our allies. He’s insulted them, broken promises to them, and left them believing that America isn’t just a weak reed, but an utterly unreliable reed that must be shunned. Putin is taking advantage of this dismay about American perfidy and is quickly reshaping allegiances the world over.

Comparing the two policy approaches side-by-side, one quickly sees the defining differences:  Kissinger’s détente was built on the back of hard-headed pragmatism about the real world situation. Obama’s détente is built on a combination of ignorance and fantasy.

At best, Kissinger’s détente may have bought America time within which to strengthen her resources, even as the Soviet bloc, through a combination of hubris and the economic instabilities built into a centralized economy, fatally weakened. What started out as a military parity that Kissinger had no option but to address ended with America’s enemy in substantially worse shape than before. At worst, Kissinger’s détente allowed two pragmatic enemies, both of which were all right with killing each other but neither of which wanted to commit suicide, a chance to walk away from the precipice of all-out war.

Obama’s détente is the terrifying “looking glass” opposite of Kissinger’s. At the beginning of Obama’s administration, America, although tired from war was still at the top of her game:  She had the biggest, best-equipped military in the world. Her economy, though badly shaken, still had the ability to recover. The Europeans, despite their endless condescending snideness, still looked to America for leadership. America’s allies outside of Western Europe (allies such as Poland or Israel) knew that they could count on America to protect them from the dangers just outside their borders.  Iran had no nuclear weapons and the remainder of the Middle East was maintaining its usual messy stability.

Fast forward to today, when had seven years to create that parity he so badly wanted as a prerequisite for his version of détente:  Our military is weakened; our economy staggers under the weight of endless unemployment and almost incalculable debt; our allies cannot trust us; Europe is witnessing a slo-mo invasion by America’s (and Europe’s) existential enemies; our borders are open to, and the Obama government is shipping in, those same enemies; our core civil rights are on the verge of being erased; the Middle East has gone from ugly but stable to hideous and completely unstable; and we are funding our enemies in their war against both us and our values throughout the world.

If directly challenged about his foreign policy (something Obama will never allow anyone to do), Obama could very well offer as his defense the fact that he’s doing nothing more than Nixon and Kissinger did back when Obama was a child — creating a window within which peace can develop — and that his political enemies didn’t complain then, and are only doing so now because they’re racists. He would find incomprehensible the charge that, when it comes to détente, Obama got everything wrong except the most simplistic definition of the term.  Sadly, the price for Obama’s hubristic ignorance is one that America and the rest of the world may pay in decades of blood, pain, poverty, and death