Islamic totalitarianism — VOICES for REASON

Later this week world leaders and diplomats will meet in London to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. In my earlier post I talked about the U.S.-Afghan drive to appease the Taliban; now, in the lead-up to the international conference, the NYT reports:

The leader of the United Nations mission here [Kabul] called on Afghan officials to seek the removal of at least some senior Taliban leaders from the United Nations’ list of terrorists, as a first step toward opening direct negotiations with the insurgent group.

What’s next, a plea-bargain for Osama bin Laden? That’s crazy talk, yes. But on 9/12/01, erasing Taliban fighters from terrorist watch lists would have sounded outlandish, too. Here we are, though, eight-plus years later, currying favor with enemies we have failed to defeat in the hopes they’ll deign to talk to us.

Last week President Obama claimed that “our intelligence community failed to connect those dots” signaling a plot to blow up Flight 253. But ritual flogging of the intelligence community has diverted attention from a larger failure — this one belonging squarely on Obama’s shoulders.

Zoom out from the plentiful red flags outlining what we already know about the Christmas Day attack. Now observe the connection between it and two (of many) other “dots”: the suicide bombing by a double agent at a U.S. base in Afghanistan; and the (latest) failed assassination attempt on Kurt Westergaard, who drew the Mohammad-with-a-bomb-in-his-turban cartoon.

On the face of it, these have little if anything in common. Unlike the Nigerian bomber on Flight 253, the bomber in Afghanistan used an explosive-packed vest; the assassin in Denmark wielded an ax. The Nigerian was a recent college graduate, scion of a wealthy family; the killer in Afghanistan was a doctor of Jordanian descent; the Danish assassin, an immigrant from Somalia. Not their origin, not their specific targets, not their choice of weapon, not their age or income-level — none of these are the same. Nor is there any evidence that they ever met.

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In the wake of the national security debacle of the Christmas Day attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253, the Obama administration is being justifiably pummeled — and the Republicans are piling on with zeal.

GOP opinion leaders such as former Vice President Dick Cheney have seized on the attack to question President Barack Obama’s grasp of foreign affairs. Republican Party officials have sent fund-raising appeals that take aim at Mr. Obama’s response to the episode.

The Republicans’ goal, the WSJ reports,  is to “regain [their] traditional advantages on security issues.”

Regain it? When have Republicans deserved that reputation? Definitely not during the eight years of George W. Bush.

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One of the worst foreign policy developments of 2009 was also one of the most underreported—the Obama administration’s decision to do away with the official use of the term “global war on terror” in favor of “Overseas Contingency Operation.” The term “global war on terror” was awful, to be sure—it named our enemy vaguely and evasively. But instead of correcting that mistake by a clear identification of the enemy that threatens us with terrorism and nuclear attacks, President Obama’s new designation denies the existence of any enemy. We went from worse to worser.

Correctly defining the enemy is indispensable in any war. In Chapter 4 of Winning the Unwinnable War, Alex Epstein and Yaron Brook write:

To fulfill the promise to defeat the terrorist enemy that struck on 9/11, our leaders would first have to identify who exactly that enemy is and then be willing to do whatever is necessary to defeat him.

Who is the enemy that attacked on 9/11? It is not “terrorism”—just as our enemy in World War II was not kamikaze strikes or U-boat attacks. Terrorism is a tactic employed by a certain group for a certain cause. That group and, above all, the cause they fight for are our enemy.

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Bret Stephens at the WSJ skewers Obama’s team for failing to recognize — time after time — that so-called diplomatic overtures will not induce Iran to end its nuclear program. Reflecting on the last six years of attempted negotiations, he observes:

Yet even as Tehran’s rejections piled up, a view developed that all would be well if only the U.S. would drop the harsh rhetoric and meet with the Iranians face-to-face. So President Obama began making one overture after another to Iran, including a videotaped message praising its “great civilization.” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei replied that Mr. Obama had “insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day.”

But there’s far more to this story. If we expand the timeframe from six to 30 years, it is not just Obama’s administration that ought to be rebuked.

Thirty years ago tomorrow, November 4, 1979, the U.S. embassy in Tehran was invaded and its personnel taken captive. That turned out to be the first act of war against us by what became the Islamic totalitarian regime in Iran. Read the rest of this entry »

President Obama is weighing how to deal with the seemingly unwinnable war in Afghanistan, but have the right questions been asked about how we got to this point? In a post that I contributed to the blog of Rowman & Littlefield (the publisher of my book), I suggest that our policymakers (and all Americans) should re-think their assumptions about what went wrong in Afghanistan.

The official publication date for my book, Winning the Unwinnable War, is October 28, but you can learn more about it right now by visiting the book’s just-launched website: WinningTheUnwinnableWar.com. It currently features an excerpt from the book and an interview with the contributors (Alex Epstein, Yaron Brook, and me) published in the latest issue of The Objective Standard. You can also find audio and video from several media interviews that I’ve taken part in recently. We’ll be adding more material in the days and months to come.  You can receive updates — via Twitter, Facebook, RSS and email — by signing up at the site.

The site offers links to several online booksellers that are taking pre-orders for the book.

Four years ago this week, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published twelve cartoons featuring Mohammad. What followed, some months later, was an outright assault by Muslim activists and regimes on our freedom of speech. Aftershocks from that crisis continue to erode free speech in the West. A recent example was the decision by Yale University Press to cut all images of Mohammad from a book on the cartoons crisis(!). The stated reason for that move was the publisher’s fear of violent Muslim reprisals.

In an interview with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Flemming Rose, the editor behind the notorious cartoons, talks about the incident at Yale and free speech. One of his comments — about the response of U.S. publishers to a book he’s writing on the crisis — was particularly illuminating:

[FR] Yes, I am still in the process of writing this book. Hopefully it will be published in Denmark next year. In fact, I already have had contact with some top publishers in the U.S., but it was my impression—though I can’t prove it—that they were quite positive to the book, but when I said that I couldn’t imagine a book without the cartoons, they lost interest.

I wonder just how much self-censorship is going on today.

Regarding the Yale U.P. book that was stripped of all visual depictions of Mohammad, Mr. Flemming quips that it seems “…Al-Qaeda has been appointed editor-in-chief of Yale University Press.” To me that aptly names the stakes: until our government takes a principled stand and firmly upholds our right to free speech in the face of intimidation and threats, we in effect subordinate our liberty to Islamic religious dogma.

Team Obama intends to use sanctions to dissuade Tehran from getting a nuke. So expect Tehran to ramp up work to arm itself (and perhaps its surrogates) with a nuke. The renewed push for “sanctions with bite” — following last week’s news of yet another clandestine Iranian nuclear facility — can serve only to abet Iran.

By “sanctions” our policy-makers do not mean the kind of painful, air-tight economic restrictions on trade that aim at imploding the regime, and so doing away with the threat it poses to us. No, the steps they have in mind aim at little more than inconveniencing the hostile regime — for example, travel bans on some Iranian government officials tied to the nuclear project, and (readily circumvented) limitations on foreign trade with certain Iranian banks. The point of such toothless sanctions is to cajole Iran into considering our syrupy offer of yet another second chance . . . to accept our latest appeasing deal.

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GlobalPost reports that “one of the richest sources of Taliban funding is the foreign assistance coming into the country” — and since America is a leading donor, our dollars now flow to the Islamists killing our soldiers in Afghanistan. (Watch the CBS video for an overview.) Read the rest of this entry »