The View From 1776

Mexico is in the business of exporting illegals to the United States and importing U. S. dollars, subsidized by illegals’ freeloading on our welfare system and overloading the justice system with Hispanic youth gang crime.

In Arizona it’s a big business that keeps five Mexican consulates busy aiding illegals to enter the United States and to provide them with ID cards as cover.

Obama encourages this, because Chicago politicians know how to transform illegals, even dead people, into live votes for Democrat/Socialist candidates.

Without question, respect is due to the office of the presidency, though not necessarily to the person who is the president.  It is also true that military command must remain subordinated to civilian control. 

But that leaves us to question whose judgment is to be respected: a seasoned and highly successful military field commander, or a Chicago south side socialist neighborhood agitator?  A commander dedicated to victory, or a leader intent upon promoting deference to Muslim dictators from Syria to Iran?

 
 
A Fired General - Rules of Engagement And Winning The War

Thomas D. Segel
Tom@thomasdsegel.com
http://www.thomasdsegel.com

 
Harlingen, Texas, June 23, 2010:  It is official, After personal comments about the civilian leadership had been voiced by General Stanley McChrystal and his Aides, he is gone and General David Petraeus will assume command in Afghanistan. 
 
This does not mean our military personnel on the ground in that war zone will develop any greater fondness for the civilian establishment there.  As was the case in Vietnam, most of our troops will view the civilians who command them with suspicion.  But, those same military personnel will be showing much more caution when speaking about their leaders in front of the media.
 
The unanswered question is;  Why do our men and women in uniform feel  so contumacious toward their civilian leadership?  Much of the anxiety may well be due to irrational rules of engagement that are forced on combat troops be the key civilians who view everything from a political spectrum. 
 
The Good Lord knows my combat strategy is really limited to what I could observe through the sights of my rifle in those long ago days of my youth.  My last combat command decisions were made more than 45 years ago when I was ordered to have my Marines defend the parameter of a Seabee base under attack by the Viet Cong.  With those two items as qualifiers, I can still state without reservation that no war was ever won on defense.  It is also a truth that no military unit can function at peak efficiency when it is saddled with unrealistic rules of engagement.
 
I for one, see shadows of Vietnam in just about everything we are doing in Afghanistan.  We are trying to prop up a very corrupt and unpopular government, drive out an enemy force that is a historical occupant of the territory under dispute, hold on to terrain without the troop strength to occupy the territory for any extended period and do all of these things while operating under a convoluted rules of engagement policy that few can either understand or defend.
 
Back in the early days of Vietnam, when it was just an “operation” and not a “war,” I remember how we would draw perimeter defense duty to protect our base in DaNang.  Even then, we had those crazy rules of engagement.  For example, all of us along the perimeter manned our posts without ammunition in our weapons.  Under the rules of that time, all ammunition was kept in a locked bunker.  There was an ammunition officer who had the only key.  Our instructions were, if we received enemy fire, the ammunition officer would unlock the bunker, issue the ammo and we would then engage the enemy.
 
Anyone with half a brain thought this was an insane approach to perimeter defense.  What if the first person hit or blown up was the ammunition officer?  What were we supposed to do if that happened?  Needless to say, there was not a person on the line who did not have a hidden stash of ammo on his person.
 
Troops who were stationed in Saigon at that time went to their duty assignments every day wearing helmets and carrying there assigned weapons and ammunition.  They were all cautioned that there was a war being fought and they must always be ready for battle.  However, they were also allowed to wander the city at night, frequent eating establishments, shops and bars.  When strolling those streets in the dark of night, they were NOT allowed to carry any weapons.  Go figure!
 
Today in Afghanistan our soldiers and Marines may only return fire when under attack, are refused air strikes and artillery support, and have even been denied smoke coverage when they needed to conceal their movements.  All of this is supposed to reduce any civilian casualties.  That may be one result, but, it is also true that more and more of our own military personal are being wounded or killed.  In addition, their movements are being restricted and they are being reduced to a defensive posture, not having sufficient strength of force to keep waging an ongoing attack.  Territory that should remain occupied to protect the civilian population is often left undefended. 
 
Of the 40,000 troops requested to meet the needs of a sustained offensive operation, the President only granted 30,000.  Even that number has not been received.  At last count there were still 10,000 promised troops who had not been deployed to Afghanistan and their ranks remain unfilled today.
 
So, now we have lost a general, promised troops have not arrived and those strangling rules of engagement remain in place. Dare we ask the big question? are we really winning the war?
 
 

If we are to experience liberal-progressives’ dream of world government, it won’t be under the direction of Ivy League academics, as they presume.  Despite the expectations of socialists, from Rousseau to Obama, human nature has not been transformed by the prospect of economic equality administered by bureaucrats.  There will always be brutal aggressor nations that can be stopped only by military force.

President Obama’s liberal-progressive vision of economic equality as the means of transforming human nature into universal benevolence is, instead, the sure and certain road to the totalitarianism we have seen in the Soviet Union, Mao’s Red China, and Castro’s Cuba. 

No matter how alluring Utopia may be for Ivy League egg heads and the the two generations of American students they have condemned to ignorance, the great mass of citizens want to keep the fruits of their own effort and won’t surrender them without the brutal force of a powerfully centralized political state.  Lenin was correct that socialism emanates from the business end of a gun barrel.

Kow-towing to Muslim dictators and Obamacare are just different facets of the secular paganism we know as socialism.

Through the office of Attorney General Eric Holder, President Obama actively supported a witch-hunt aimed at destroying the careers of Bush administration attorneys who provided legal advice about the limits upon interrogating captured Islamic terrorists.  Hating President Bush wasn’t enough.  It was necessary figuratively to spill some blood.

Between 1936 and 1938 Stalin staged public trials of of Soviet military and political leaders whom he regarded as rivals.  All of the trials resulted in convictions and executions for alleged treason. 

American liberal-progressives at the time applauded the show trials as necessary to stop opposition to socialistic progress toward perfection of human nature and political society.  In fact, liberal-progressives continued to defend the trials until after the fall of the Soviet Union and revelation of KGB documents. 

The common good, an abstraction called “humanity,” as defined by Stalin or American intellectuals, always trumps individual rights.

Parenthetically, this appears to be Obama’s attitude as he renews the effort to force passage of National Socialistic Healthcare, in the face of voters’ revulsion.  Liberal-progressives, it seems, still believe fervently in the superiority of their own minds and in their right to rule the rest of us, precisely the mindset of liberal-progressives during the 1930s.

What became widely known only after the fall of the Soviet Union was that the Moscow show trials were staged in the same way as the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility’s attack against Bush administration lawyers.  There wasn’t even the pretense of objectivity.  Defendants were first judged guilty, then evidence was rigged to portray guilt, and exculpatory evidence was suppressed.

Justice’s Office of Professional Responsibility is a direct descendant of the Stalin regime.

In the following op-ed article from the Wall Street Journal, one of Justice’s targets rebuts the Office of Professional Responsibility’s Moscow-show-trial tactics.

FEBRUARY 24, 2010
My Gift to the Obama Presidency
Though the White House won’t want to admit it, Bush lawyers were protecting the executive’s power to fight a vigorous war on terror.

By JOHN YOO
Barack Obama may not realize it, but I may have just helped save his presidency. How? By winning a drawn-out fight to protect his powers as commander in chief to wage war and keep Americans safe.

He sure didn’t make it easy. When Mr. Obama took office a year ago, receiving help from one of the lawyers involved in the development of George W. Bush’s counterterrorism policies was the furthest thing from his mind. Having won a great electoral victory, the new president promised a quick about-face. He rejected “as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” and moved to restore the law-enforcement system as the first line of defense against a hardened enemy devoted to killing Americans.

In office only one day, Mr. Obama ordered the shuttering of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, followed later by the announcement that he would bring terrorists to an Illinois prison. He terminated the Central Intelligence Agency’s ability to use “enhanced interrogations techniques” to question al Qaeda operatives. He stayed the military trial, approved by Congress, of al Qaeda leaders. He ultimately decided to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of the 9/11 attacks, to a civilian court in New York City, and automatically treated Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day, as a criminal suspect (not an illegal enemy combatant). Nothing better could have symbolized the new president’s determination to take us back to a Sept. 10, 2001, approach to terrorism.

Part of Mr. Obama’s plan included hounding those who developed, approved or carried out Bush policies, despite the enormous pressures of time and circumstance in the months immediately after the September 11 attacks. Although career prosecutors had previously reviewed the evidence and determined that no charges are warranted, last year Attorney General Eric Holder appointed a new prosecutor to re-investigate the CIA’s detention and interrogation of al Qaeda leaders.

In my case, he let loose the ethics investigators of the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) to smear my reputation and that of Jay Bybee, who now sits as a federal judge on the court of appeals in San Francisco. Our crime? While serving in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in the weeks and months after 9/11, we answered in the form of memoranda extremely difficult questions from the leaders of the CIA, the National Security Council and the White House on when interrogation methods crossed the line into prohibited acts of torture.

Rank bias and sheer incompetence infused OPR’s investigation. OPR attorneys, for example, omitted a number of precedents that squarely supported the approach in the memoranda and undermined OPR’s preferred outcome. They declared that no Americans have a right of self-defense against a criminal prosecution, not even when they or their government agents attempt to stop terrorist attacks on the United States. OPR claimed that Congress enjoyed full authority over wartime strategy and tactics, despite decades of Justice Department opinions and practice defending the president’s commander-in-chief power. They accused us of violating ethical standards without ever defining them. They concocted bizarre conspiracy theories about which they never asked us, and for which they had no evidence, even though we both patiently—and with no legal obligation to do so—sat through days of questioning.

OPR’s investigation was so biased, so flawed, and so beneath the Justice Department’s own standards that last week the department’s ranking civil servant and senior ethicist, David Margolis, completely rejected its recommendations.
Attorney General Holder could have stopped this sorry mess earlier, just as his predecessor had tried to do. OPR slow-rolled Attorney General Michael Mukasey by refusing to deliver a draft of its report until the 2008 Christmas and New Year holidays. OPR informed Mr. Mukasey of its intention to release the report on Jan. 12, 2009, without giving me or Judge Bybee the chance to see it—as was our right and as we’d been promised.

Mr. Mukasey and Deputy Attorney General Mark Filip found so many errors in the report that they told OPR that the entire enterprise should be abandoned. OPR decided to run out the clock and push the investigation into the lap of the Obama administration. It would have been easy for Mr. Holder to concur with his predecessors—in fact, it was critical that he do so to preserve the Justice Department’s impartiality. Instead the new attorney general let OPR’s investigators run wild. Only Mr. Margolis’s rejection of the OPR report last week forced the Obama administration to drop its ethics charges against Bush legal advisers.

Why bother fighting off an administration hell-bent on finding scapegoats for its policy disagreements with the last president? I could have easily decided to hide out, as others have. Instead, I wrote numerous articles (several published in this newspaper) and three books explaining and defending presidential control of national security policy. I gave dozens of speeches and media appearances, where I confronted critics of the administration’s terrorism policies. And, most importantly, I was lucky to receive the outstanding legal counsel of Miguel Estrada, one of the nation’s finest defense attorneys, to attack head-on and without reservation, each and every one of OPR’s mistakes, misdeeds and acts of malfeasance.

I did not do this to win any popularity contests, least of all those held in the faculty lounge. I did it to help our president—President Obama, not Bush. Mr. Obama is fighting three wars simultaneously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and against al Qaeda. He will call upon the men and women serving under his command to make choices as hard as the ones we faced. They cannot meet those challenges with clear minds if they believe that a bevy of prosecutors, congressional committees and media critics await them when they return from the battlefield.

This is no idle worry. In 2005, a Navy Seal team dropped into Afghanistan encountered goat herders who clearly intended to inform the Taliban of their whereabouts. The team leader ordered them released, against his better military judgment, because of his worries about the media and political attacks that would follow.

In less than an hour, more than 80 Taliban fighters attacked and killed all but one member of the Seal team and 16 Americans on a helicopter rescue mission. If a president cannot, or will not, protect the men and women who fight our nation’s wars, they will follow the same risk-averse attitudes that invited the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

Without a vigorous commander-in-chief power at his disposal, Mr. Obama will struggle to win any of these victories. But that is where OPR, playing a junior varsity CIA, wanted to lead us. Ending the Justice Department’s ethics witch hunt not only brought an unjust persecution to an end, but it protects the president’s constitutional ability to fight the enemies that threaten our nation today.

Mr. Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was a Justice Department official from 2001-03. He is the author, among other books, of “Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush” (Kaplan, 2010).

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The following op-ed piece from the Wall Street Journal spotlights Vice President Biden’s completely false claim.  Should we cut him slack and assume that this is just another of the endless string of verbal gaffes for which he is notorious?  Or is he deliberately endeavoring to mislead the American people?

***********************************
FEBRUARY 17, 2010, 10:36 P.M. ET
Joe Biden’s Iraq ‘Achievement’
The vice president claims credit for the success of the surge he opposed.

By OMAR FADHIL AL-NIDAWI AND AUSTIN BAY

The defeatists have finally acknowledged that Iraq is well on its way to establishing a peaceful democracy. But that recognition comes with a catch: The public is asked to forget everything these strategically benighted cads said and did—or didn’t do.

We are referring, of course, to Vice President Joe Biden’s recent comments on CNN. “This could be one of the great achievements of this administration. You’re going to see 90,000 American troops come marching home by the end of the summer. You’re going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government,” he said in an interview with Larry King.

Less than three years after Sen. Harry Reid (D., Nev.) declared the war lost, less than three years after then-Sen. Barack Obama—with the usual fierce moral urgency—opposed the Bush administration’s military surge, and within three years of Mr. Biden’s own recommendation that Iraq be divided into three parts, these Democrats are laying claim to Iraq’s extraordinary victory.

The vice president wisely made his victory assertion in the television studio of a left-leaning network experienced in fudging Iraqi history. CNN, by its own admission, muted coverage of Saddam Hussein for over a decade.

In the past, American liberals have relied on a sympatico press and leftist academics to obscure or whitewash their grievous historical errors. President George W. Bush, pursuing the global war on terror, encountered the same personal slander Ronald Reagan faced as he fought and won the last major political battles of the Cold War. Both were branded “cowboys” and “warmongers.” Now, Reagan’s victorious Cold War legacy is claimed by all Americans.

Honest historians will eventually discover signs of victory in Iraq during the worst moments of media-driven doubt. But some of us refused to be swept up in the faddish pessimism and reported what was actually happening on the ground.

In a piece from June 2005, one of us, Austin Bay, wrote that “the Baghdad of June 2005 is not the Baghdad I left in September 2004,” going on to detail the country’s progress. In March 2007, Omar Al-Nidawi and his brother Mohammad wrote in these pages about the stunning victory in Iraq: “the addition of more troops and the tough words of Prime Minister Maliki are doing the job.”

The defeatists in the media damned any such success. When President Bush said the surge was working, his critics labeled him out of touch. They charged that front-line observations like those made by the Al-Nidawi brothers were paid propaganda. Three years later, these same individuals are weaving victory laurels for politicians who promoted defeat for their own short-term political advantage.

Mr. Biden, here are the facts. The Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which former President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki signed, orchestrated the homecoming of U.S. troops. Mr. Obama didn’t do it.

The Bush plan called for a phased transition from “more” coalition security operations to “fewer,” based on the demonstrated improvement in the capabilities of Iraq’s military and police forces. “Rheostat” warfare is the term Gen. David Petraeus used in 2007, after the device that varies the strength of electrical currents. Securing and extending the authority of Iraq’s national government was an integral part of the process. Mr. Biden pushed his partition plan and relentlessly opposed the tough decisions and heroic efforts that created the conditions for SOFA.

Victory has a thousand fathers and Mr. Biden is but one of the many phonies. Historians may credit the Obama administration with a degree of reluctant follow-through on SOFA. But even this is a change from Mr. Obama’s own 2008 cut-and-run campaign platform, which, if implemented, would have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

Mr. Nidawi is an Iraqi commentator and political analyst. He blogs at iraqthemodel.blogspot.com. Mr. Bay served with the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004. His latest book is “A Quick and Dirty Guide to War: 4th Edition” (Paladin Press, 2008).

Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit http://www.djreprints.com