Speak softly and carry a limp stick

Way back in July, 2005 -- just days after the deadly terrorist attack on the London Transport system that killed 51 people -- I wrote a post at my blog entitled Britain's Homeless. The post was prompted by a report issued by the Royal Institute of International Affairs that linked the London attack to British support of the Iraq war, which the report's authors claim has made "Britain a more likely target for terrorism, claiming that there is “no doubt” that the 'invasion has enhanced propaganda, recruitment and fund-raising for al-Qaeda'. Unfortunately, in the almost four years since that post little has changed in Britain. Con Coughlin has recently written a provocative piece in the U.K. Telegraph entitled "Britain is fighting a war -- and we are too soft on our enemies". He cites that fact that there is growing evidence of the complicitness of UK Muslims in the war on terror that has put UK military lives in danger -- and that this information has been suppressed by UK authorities for fear of -- you guessed it -- inciting Muslim anger:

The active involvement of radical British Muslims in the Afghan insurgency has led senior officers to claim that they are engaged in a "surreal mini-civil war" in Afghanistan. And yet, for all the compelling evidence that British-based Islamist radicals are actively participating in a jihad against Britain and its coalition allies, the Government, together with those who have opposed our involvement in the War on Terror from the start, seems determined to give the Islamist radicals the benefit of the doubt.

Even when incontrovertible proof is found that British Muslims are aiding and abetting the enemy in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the Government's instinct is to try to cover up their involvement, for fear of further inflaming Islamist sensitivities.

Twice in the past year I have been admonished by our military establishment for revealing details about the support British sympathisers are providing to the Afghan insurgency, whether it involves actually fighting alongside the Taliban or providing them with the means to kill and maim British personnel. Officials did not question the reports' veracity. On both occasions, I was told that it was simply not helpful to expose such details, as they might cause offence to the Muslim community, or encourage Islamist radicals to intimidate British soldiers returning from combat.

This kind of thinking is appeasement, pure and simple. If we just be "nice to them" they will certainly leave us alone, won't they? Speak softly and carry a limp stick. I wonder whether the people of Britain are really as dumb as the UK government apparently thinks they are?

Tony Blair, to his credit, was steadfast in calling out the threat of Islamic terrorism and the importance of being honest about the nature of the forces working against us. In an important speech he gave recently to the Council on Global Affairs that I wrote about last month, Blair said that the "(radical terrorist" ideology, as a movement within Islam, has to be defeated. It is incompatible not with "the West" but with any society of open and tolerant people and that in particular means the many open and tolerant Muslims."

Alas, Tony Blair is no longer in power. In his place is Gordon Browne, a leader invested in accommodation who seems to be afraid of his own shadow. And lest you think that this is just a British problem, you should think again. The same policies of appeasement are winding their way through the Obama administration: We move to close Guantanamo without a reasonable alternative, we unilaterally give away our ability to even threaten the use of enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees, and we release selective memos and photographs that put the worst light possible on America's effort to protect itself. It is at the core of the left's "shared values" strategy: part self-flagellation as a way of purging guilt, part moral high ground for the purpose of showing the new face of our kinder, gentler foreign policy. For Barack Obama and his administration, it is clearly the most important part of America improving its image in the eyes of the world.

If this makes you feel safer, there is a bridge I have to sell you...

Torturing the truth more than our enemies

On September 11, 2001, a date which certainly ought to "live in infamy," 19 violent enemies of the United States carried out vicious airliner attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., killing nearly 3,000 persons. This is known to all, of course. Yet the ruling party today is determined to deprive us of the necessary means to prevent more attacks by abandoning the policies which protected us for the last eight years. President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress profess to be horrified at the specific tactics which the Central Intelligence Agency used to elicit information from three"high-value" targets. These men were seized in our successful campaign against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that harbored the Al Qaeda terrorists who carried out the 9/11 and other acts of mayhem, such as the previous bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.

I say "profess" because the "torture" to which these mass murderers were subjected did not elicit any outrage from Democrats when they were briefed on the techniques back in 2001. There appeared to be general agreement that no stone should be left unturned in the effort to gain whatever information that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri could provide.

Although Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi denies it now, others present with her at the briefings the Bush Administration gave to congressional leaders have said that she not only knew of the enhanced interrogation techniques but approved of them, even urging that the CIA go beyond them if necessary. She was responding then as virtually every other American would have in her circumstances, given the enormity of the evil inflicted upon us and the undeniable evidence that these three men were either directly responsible for or fully informed about the 9/11 outrage.

The most useful information obtained was that an airliner attack was planned for Los Angeles. Was thwarting that attack not worth the CIA’s best efforts?

Webster’s Dictionary defines torture as "the infliction of severe pain, as to force information or confession." While any definition is only as accurate as its correspondence to reality, and that depends upon the judgment of those who understand what it is, a dictionary provides an impartial reference point.

However, the Wikipedia definition of waterboarding, which is based upon the contributions of "editors" who may or may not be impartial, describes waterboarding as "a form of torture" which "consists of immobilizing the victim on his or her back with the head inclined downwards, and then pouring water over the face and into the breathing passage." It adds: "In contrast to submerging the head face-forward in water [the technique used in the Spanish Inquisition], waterboarding precipitates a gag reflex almost immediately. The technique does not inevitably cause lasting physical damage."

This is torture?

The rest of this story is that waterboarding has been used on American servicemen for years to prepare them for the abuse they will be subjected to should they be captured by enemy forces. There is no evidence that they have ever been subjected to the unspeakable methods favored by despotisms.

Few of us do not know that mutilation and decapitation have been resorted to by Islamist terrorists. It beggars belief that men who are that brutal will be inspired to change their ways by our refusal to use a harsh method that actually falls short of real torture.

Meanwhile, two Bush Administration legal advisors who thought through the constitutional and legal implications of enhanced interrogation techniques and wrote extensive memos about them, have been treated as evil men who provided cover for the government’s allegedly brutal policies. This is second-guessing at best and witch hunting at worst.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist Papers, "A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of the objects committed to its care, and to the complete execution of the trusts for which it is responsible, free from every other control but a regard to the public good and to the sense of the people."

The first duty of the government is public safety which, if it is to be adequately provided for, cannot be restricted as to means unless those means are immoral. It is not clear that subjecting a highly select group of known terrorists to maximum discomfort amounts to torture. If our government actually shrinks from its duties, the torture for millions of people will be far worse than that on three al-Qaeda operatives.

Presidential hectoring hurts economy

When Richard Nixon was in the process of damaging the American economy back in 1971 via wage and price controls, closing the gold window, etc., he used aggressive rhetoric to support his actions. I remember specifically his demonizing of financial "speculators". He virtually spat the word: Speculators! The epitome of evil, right? This week Obama was doing much the same thing to hedge fund managers and others, bullying them, calling for them to sacrifice, implying that they are unpatriotic, giving them the full load of overbearing denunciation. As if he had any clue what he was talking about.

Well, it turned out that the "speculators" were right and Nixon was wrong. And today, for the most part, the financial managers are right and Obama is wrong. When it comes to the economy, regardless of political party, the rule is: The politicians are always wrong. Regarding the economy, government has a reverse Midas touch: everything it touches turns to c**p. In recent years Congress touched the housing market via subprime loans, and we are now living with the result. Now the government is aggressively touching the financial markets in general, and the auto industry in particular. The results are predictable.

Republican leaders today, including the establishment wing of leaders on their "listening tour", tell us that the GOP must offer an affirmative alternative to Obama's massive taxing, spending and borrowing policies. They can't combat something with nothing, they say.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The correct approach is to educate the voters to the truth, rather than to compete with Democrats in pandering to their ignorance. The truth is that the free market, if allowed to operate, will ruthlessly correct the financial imbalances more quickly and more thoroughly than any government programs will. Government interference will just prolong the disease and the pain, and will mess up the economy for years. That's what FDR did in the 1930's, and that's what Obama is doing now.

Government has a legitimate role in enforcing contracts and in prosecuting fraud, insider trading, and other criminal activity, and in enabling a level playing field. But politicians have no ability to manage anything at all. When government attempts to override the market and to manage the economy on a large scale, the resulting economic system is called fascism. I recommend reading all about this in Jonah Goldberg's recent book, "Liberal Fascism".

Here are two informative rebuttals to Obama's hectoring of financial managers and his damaging actions in the financial markets. There's this one by Bill Frezza at Real Clear Markets. And this one by Cliff Asness at Business Insider.

If economics bores you or you think you can't understand it, please give these two articles a shot. The authors make the issues quite clear.

The Iranians are coming

As the Obama Administration works to promote its version of socialist democratic rule at home, the Islamic Republic of Iran is looking to expand its power base in the Middle East. Without a doubt, the President Obama's long-time opposition to our efforts in Iraq and his stated intent to lessen our footprint in the region is having an effect: it is signaling to our enemies that we are not serious in our opposition to those who wish to destroy the United State and Israel. Of course, Obama is among those who believe that the U.S. presence in the Middle East is part of the problem, not the solution -- so this should come as no surprise. For years the left's opposition to our presence in Iraq was based principally on the notion that we were making things worse -- an occupying force, rather than an army of liberation -- and that if we would "just leave", the forces of evil that were routinely blowing up children and civilians would retreat back into the shadows. It is the single animating theory of liberal non-interventionism: America's values (liberty and democracy) are no better than any others, we have no business trying to promote it abroad, and the use of force in their defense is never justified.

This kind of world view will lead quickly to a power vacuum where one can least be afforded. From Egypt to Syria, Lebanon to Israel, Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan, the message being sent is that the United States is in retreat. As Amir Taheri wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal, the Islamic Republic of Iran is preparing actively to fill the void:

Convinced that the Obama administration is preparing to retreat from the Middle East, Iran's Khomeinist regime is intensifying its goal of regional domination. It has targeted six close allies of the U.S.: Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrain, Morocco, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which are experiencing economic and/or political crises.

The move of Iran into the vacuum of American isolationism is calculated policy by those who run Iran -- which is trying now to portray the country as a "rising superpower" in the region, with the United States being the "sunset power" in decline, seeking to remove its troops from Iraq while seeking an acceptable exit strategy for Afghanistan. As Taheri notes, the message is "The Americans are going, and we (Iran) are coming".

And why should this not be an effective message -- with it increasingly clear that the U.S. government has been taken over by the Pelosi radicals who reject the notion of America exceptionalism, and an Obama administration that is so clearly in love with the idea of diplomacy? Gone is the Bush-era certainty that American foreign policy stands for the "liberty doctrine" of spreading democracy and freedom -- even it it requires confronting evil with force. In its place now is the nuance the left craves, with talking-heads from the UN, Europe and other multi-lateral institutions trying to find some fictitious "common ground" with a revolutionary regime that wants to remake the world in its image. It's a case of naivete meeting wishful thinking.

Taheri quotes a senior Lebanese political leader as saying "There is this perception that the new U.S. administration is not interested in the democratization strategy". As he notes in the conclusion of his piece:

"That perception only grows as President Obama calls for an "exit strategy" from Afghanistan and Iraq. "Power abhors a vacuum, which the Islamic Republic of Iran is only too happy to fill."

Airborne arrogance

You've seen that frightful image: a 747 flying low across New York City tracked by Air Force fighter jets. Still-traumatized New Yorkers understandably fled. Then we learned that an Obama administration official authorized that costly, insensitive folly as an unnecessary Air Force One "photo op" despite the numberless archived images of the presidential airliner. Why be surprised? Did we trust that these ultra-liberals actually meant their campaign propaganda about compassion and fiscal responsibility?

Consider the underlying psychology of an ultra-liberal. Liberals are motivated by a profound, yet pathetic craving for kudos and control. Their professed concern for our needs, fears and hopes extends only to claiming our votes. Once in power, they reveal their true self-absorbed disregard for you and me.

The liberals' pose invokes a powerful allure, manipulating our emotions (and bypassing our reason). They call up our fears and propose to ease our anguish. But beneath their pretense of concern lies a hidden but massive insult.

Ultra-liberals strive to sell us the notion that we are victims. They cast us in the role of hapless, ineffectual schmucks. What greater insult could they invoke? Simultaneously, they gain the ego-boost of seeming superiority as our rescuers. And we get to pay the enormous bill!

Personally, I don't buy it not their designation as victim nor their stupendous vote-buying expenditures. Paying their debt would indeed make me THEIR victim.

That Air Force One incident illustrates their total lack of respect or regard for us. You might want to remember this illustrative incident the next time an ultra-liberal proclaims his/her dedication to our welfare.