RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mark Helprin, author, journalist, and military-affairs instructor, was being interviewed by Frank Gaffney, hawkish defense expert, when Helprin summed up in one sentence what I hear so many people say to me in coffee shops and after church and at the park and in the grocery store: “Everything that made us what we once were is under attack.”

Part of the attack is cultural, with radicals running our colleges, anti-competitive nonsense peddled in our elementary schools and playgrounds, filth dominating the entertainment industry, traditional faith sneered at (and increasingly disfavored by public policy), and the idea of American exceptionalism (along with appreciation for its constituent parts) denied from the Oval Office itself.

And our president — “a particularly virulent manifestation of this kind of ideology,” said Helprin — is leading the assault. Barack Obama acts lawlessly, makes choices alien to the American tradition, denigrates achievement, tramples religious liberty, encourages our borders to be massively and illegally overrun, and burdens us with unfathomable public debt. And, of particular and rightful interest to Gaffney and Helprin — even though too little of the public thinks it important — Obama has aggressively overseen what Gaffney called “the hollowing out of the United States military.”

Reductions in force, cancellations of weapons programs, and mistreatment of our armed personnel and veterans: All have been adjoined to a foreign policy that A) is usually feckless and B) on those few occasions when it is energetic, aggressively undermines traditional American interests and allies.

All of which has resulted, as we read recent headlines, in what might best be described (apologies to P. J. O’Rourke) as “all the trouble in the world.”

While we’re waiting for Baghdad to fall and now that President Obama, fresh from his Saigon-evoking photo-op in front of a helicopter, has departed to play golf in Palm Springs for the weekend, I thought I’d dust off a few pieces not irrelevant to the present situation. This first is from a review of Robert Kagan’s book The World America Made that I wrote for National Review two years ago. Certain points are worth re-considering in the light of Iraq’s implosion, shortly to be followed by Afghanistan’s. “The world America made” is like that US Embassy in Baghdad – lavish, money-no-object, but about to be abandoned and left to others:

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation, and even more of it in the nation’s publishing catalogue. Robert Kagan has noticed the resurgence of declinism; he doesn’t care for it; and The World America Made is his response to it. He is an eminent thinker, consulted by Romney, quoted favorably by Obama, but don’t hold either against him. I have a high regard for him, too. In the early years of the century, he came up with a line that, as geopolitical paradigmatic drollery goes, is better than Jon Stewart’s writing staff could muster: “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” Granted, even at the time, one was aware that many Americans were trending very Venusian, but the gag was worth it just for the way it infuriated all the right Continentals.

Nothing so deftly distilled emerges from The World America Made, an extended essay that paints with a very broad brush. What few specifics there are raise far more questions than Kagan assumes they answer. For example, on the very first page:

In 1941 there were only a dozen democracies in the world. Today there are over a hundred.

Back in 1941, you couldn’t have had a hundred democratic nations, because there weren’t a hundred nations. The European empires were still intact. One continent, from Marrakesh to Mbabane, was (excepting a pocket or two) entirely the sovereign property of another. And that latter continent, in 1941, was itself colonized, the German army’s sweep west having temporarily extinguished some of the smallest but oldest democracies, from Denmark to the Netherlands. All in all, it’s an odd starting date for the point Kagan is making — that the spread of democracy around the planet is “not simply because people yearn for democracy but because the most powerful nation in the world since 1950 has been a democracy.”

‘If it’s consensual, it’s okay.”

“I wouldn’t say it’s abuse, because it’s consensual.”

Would you give that advice to a 15-year-old girl?

The latest video from the pro-life activist group Live Action, which specializes in investigating what’s going on inside America’s “women’s health clinics,” highlights a Planned Parenthood educational video and personnel advising teens about BDSM — a catch-all for sexual violence: bondage, discipline and domination, submission and sadism, and masochism.

“Sadists like to inflict pain and masochists like to receive pain,” a teen’s tour guide to sadomasochism explains with great enthusiasm. It’s the darkness of Fifty Shades of Grey — which one Planned Parenthood staffer recommends as a good primer on whips and clamps — and of a culture bored with sex after having so much of it, without holding out much hope for actual love and something more than instant gratification.

Planned Parenthood benefits from a general sense that planning family life is good, and that it is there to help. But Planned Parenthood, which is America’s leading abortion provider, assumes the nonexistence of innocence. It also assumes that the desire for family life where women and men flourish together not just in love for one another but also with an openness to babies has become archaic. Its philosophy is the antithesis of Pope Francis’s recent exhortation that married couples be drawn out of themselves for love of new and vulnerable life. When we live for nothing but ourselves and our comfort, our own souls and our culture suffer and die.

I actually thought about our future with some hope, though, as I skimmed through Hillary Clinton’s new book, Hard Choices, almost universally considered to be a pre–presidential-campaign prop. I confess that I have long been intrigued by the prospect of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States.

Maybe it’s a kinship I felt upon learning that we had both been named “good citizens” by the Daughters of the American Revolution while juniors in high school. There’s a certain sisterhood in that. Whatever we may disagree on, we have at least this common ground: We want to be good citizens. We know that politics is our moral obligation, and that how we engage with politics can do good or harm to the human spirit.

Or maybe it’s the thought that my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru put in my head in his book Party of Death. He tells of a dream he had about the former first lady and former senator. “She is at the podium, well into a campaign speech.” It’s definitely a friendly crowd for her. Maybe a Democratic assembly — a national convention, perhaps. Or maybe a feminist gathering. In her own book, she recounts her famous speech to a U.N. conference in Beijing, where “women hung over banisters and raced down escalators to shake my hand.” That kind of crowd.

Who knew that the Obama administration had a penchant for black humor? Earlier this year, in February, President Obama told Bill O’Reilly during an interview on Fox News that there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS scandal involving the targeting of conservative nonprofit groups. In July 2103, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew foreshadowed his boss’s nonchalance by insisting that there was “no evidence” that any political appointee had been involved in the scandal.

Now we may know why. After months of delay in responding to congressional inquiries, the IRS now claims that, for the period of January 2009 to April 2011, all e-mails between Lois Lerner — the IRS official at the center of the scandal — and anyone outside the IRS were wiped out by a “computer crash.” As House Ways and Means chairman Dave Camp wrote in a statement, this loss means that “we are conveniently left to believe that Lois Lerner acted alone.” After all, there isn’t a “smidgen” of e-mail evidence to suggest otherwise.

A growing number of computer professionals are stepping forward to say that none of this makes sense. Norman Cillo, a former program manager at Microsoft, told The Blaze: “I don’t know of any e-mail administrator [who] doesn’t have at least three ways of getting that mail back. It’s either on the disks or it’s on a TAPE backup someplace on an archive server.” Bruce Webster, an IT expert with 30 years of experience consulting with dozens of private companies, seconds this opinion: “It would take a catastrophic mechanical failure for Lerner’s drive to suffer actual physical damage, but in any case, the FBI should be able to recover something. And the FBI and the Justice Department know it.”

In March of this year, John Koskinen, the new IRS commissioner, testified before Congress that all the e-mails of IRS employees are “stored in servers.” The agency’s own manual specifies that it “provides for backup and recovery of records to protect against information loss or corruption.” The reason is simple. It is well known in legal and IT circles that failure to preserve e-mails can lead to a court ruling of “spoliation of evidence.” That means a judge or jury is then instructed to treat deletions as if they were deliberate destruction of incriminating evidence.

* As her husband’s official media glorifies kidnapping of Israeli boys with anti-Semitic cartoons, Abbas’ wife convalesces in top Tel Aviv hospital in “apartheid Israel”

* U.S. and EU-funded Fatah posts cartoon mocking kidnapped teens as rats (picture link below)

* A special chocolate wrapper to glorify child abduction, with the faces of the boys mocked on them (picture link below)

* No “Bring back out boys” photo tweeted yet by Michelle Obama, regarding the kidnapped Israeli schoolboys

* Human Rights Watch head Roth struggles to condemn kidnapping of Jewish teenagers – and also appears to “understand” ISIS in Iraq

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On Thursday night three Israeli teenage boys were kidnapped in Judea (part of the West Bank) and have not been seen since. Although Israel has been riveted on the story, it hasn’t gotten much play in the international media, overshadowed by the events in Iraq and by the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil.

Also tending to diminish interest is the fact that the three kidnap victims are identified as “settlers,” a heavily stigmatized group that much of the West does not regard as having human rights in any case. Actually, only one of the three lived in a community over the 1949 armistice lines. All three, however, were religious Jews and were attending a yeshiva in Judea, which, unfortunately, is not the way to gain world sympathy.

Israelis are also well aware that a headline such as “Settlers Kidnap 3 Palestinians” would kick up much more of a storm.

Israel is also having trouble getting world governments interested in the fact that the kidnapping, as confirmed by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, was carried out by Hamas. It was just two weeks ago that the new Fatah-Hamas unity government was sworn in. Jerusalem was dismayed when the Obama administration announced it was ready to “work with” the new government. The European Union and the United Nations, of course, fell all over themselves in welcoming it.

Jerusalem warned at the time that the new “unity,” however tenuous, would likely give terror a boost. With Hamas already ruling Gaza, “unity” would give it greater inroads in the West Bank. The new arrangement would also make Hamas anxious to show the Palestinian masses that it had not gone soft and not given up “resistance” to Israel.

Last Wednesday 88 senators informed President Obama that they shared Israel’s view, expressing “grave concern” over Hamas’s inclusion in the government, noting that it “has openly called for Israel’s destruction,” and warning that “these troubling developments…have undermined congressional support for U.S. assistance to the Palestinians.”

The upshot was that the U.S. could find itself funding an explicitly terrorist government.

Many of us declared the Arab Spring dead and buried. But the Arab Spring really came in two phases.

The first phase was the political destabilization of formerly stable Arab countries by liberals and Islamists. The second phase was an armed conflict by Islamists to take over entire countries.

These phases overlapped in some cases and the second phase has been underway for a while already. In Libya and Syria the first phase of the Arab Spring became the second phase. When protests didn’t work, the Islamists turned to force. When elections didn’t work for them in Libya, they turned to force for a second time. The Benghazi attack was arguably a collateral effect of Islamist attempts to take over Libya after a poor election performance that same summer.

Advocates of the Arab Spring promised that political Islam would lead to an end to Islamic terrorism, but armed Jihad and political Jihad are two phases of the same Islamic struggle. Now the shift to the second phase is complete. The real beneficiaries of the Arab Spring were always going to be those who had the most guns and cared the least about dying in battle. And that was always going to be Al Qaeda.

Libya and Syria’s civil wars had a ripple effect as weapons were seized and recruits assembled. The lessons of the Afghan wars should have made it clear that the Jihadists involved in those conflicts would not simply go home and live normal lives once the fighting was concluded.

Instead they would find other wars to fight.

The War on Terror was fed by veterans of those wars. So were a dozen more minor Jihadist conflicts that don’t normally make the news. Those conflicts produced their own veterans and spread the war around.

The Arab Spring was supposed to use “moderate” political Islamists to thwart “extremist” terrorists, but that was never going to happen. There is no such thing as a moderate Islamist. There are only Islamic activists more focused on one phase of the conflict. Like the distinction between the political and armed branches of terrorist groups, these distinctions are tactical. They are not ideological.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a policy fellow at the National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a columnist for PJ Media. He was a top federal prosecutor involved in some of the most significant cases in recent history. Decorated with the Justice Department’s highest honors, he retired from government in 2003, after helping launch the 9/11 investigation. He is one of America’s most persuasive voices on national security issues and author of the bestsellers Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad and The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America. He is the author of the new book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment.

FP: Andrew C. McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

McCarthy: Jamie, it’s a pleasure to speak with you again.

FP: Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.

McCarthy: Presidential lawlessness and derelictions of duty. I guess that, in light of my background, it’s not surprising that I’m intrigued by how our Constitution deals with modern challenges—or, more accurately, modern iterations of eternal challenges like abuse of power. President Obama’s lawlessness is unprecedented in its scope, starkness, and purpose to undermine the separation-of-powers. The Framers rightly believed the latter was the key to safeguarding liberty—preventing the accumulation of too much power, and especially the joining of executive and legislative powers, in a single set of hands. Because they so worried about the specter of executive lawlessness and overreach, they gave Congress tools to address it decisively. But there are really only two of them: the power of the purse and impeachment.

So I wrote the book to say, “Look, presidential lawlessness is a significant threat to our liberties and to our aspiration to be a Republic under the rule of law. The system gives us weapons to combat it. If we don’t use them, that is a political choice that can be made, but let’s make it with our eyes open because it has serious consequences. I means we will no longer be the same kind of country.”

FP: What exactly are “high crimes and misdemeanors” and can you give a few brief examples of how has Obama committed them?

Masada—for many, the name evokes the image of a cliff rising dramatically above an austere desert landscape. The name is famously associated with the Masada siege, the final stand between the Jewish rebels and the relentless Roman army at the end of the First Jewish Revolt in 73/74 C.E. Trapped in the desert fortress-palace Herod built in the previous century, the rebels chose—as Jewish historian Josephus tells us—to commit mass suicide rather than be captured and enslaved by the Romans.

This final scene in the siege of Masada has been celebrated and immortalized as an act of heroic resistance on the part of the Jewish rebels. But what do we know about the Roman siege itself? In “The Masada Siege—From the Roman Viewpoint” in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Gwyn Davies examines the assault from the Roman perspective.

After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., the Romans turned their attention to stamping out the last of the rebels holding out at the fortresses of Herodium and Machaerus as well as in the “Forest of Jardes” (which has not yet been identified). The last remaining site occupied by the Jewish rebels was at Herod’s desert fortress-palace on the cliff-top of Masada.

Led by Roman general Flavius Silva, the Legio X Fretensis—a veteran military unit—began the siege operation against the rebels in 72 or 73 C.E.

Second Front Opens in the Sunni-Shia War

The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) organization swept into the city of Mosul in western Iraq last week. No one has any right to be surprised. ‬

ISIL has held a large swath of western Iraq since January – including the city of Fallujah. The organization was clearly planning a larger scale offensive action into Iraq. ‬

In January it had carried out a strategic withdrawal from large swaths of Idleb and Aleppo provinces in Syria. This was intended to consolidate its lines in northern Syria, so as to move fighters out toward Iraq. ISIL controls a contiguous bloc of territory stretching from western Iraq up through eastern and northern Syria to the Turkish border. ‬

Its “Islamic State” is already an existing, if precarious fact, no longer a mere aspiration. So, like a state at war, it moves its forces to the front where they are most needed‬.

The rapid collapse of Nouri al-Maliki’s garrison in Mosul in the face of the ISIL assault should also come as no surprise. These forces are hollow. ‬

Saddam Hussein maintained a huge army by coercion. Shirkers and deserters could expect to be executed. But Maliki’s army consists of poorly paid conscripts and often corrupt officers. The Shia among them in Mosul saw no reason to fight and die for what seemed to them to be Sunni, alien territory. Sunni officers among the garrison, meanwhile, may well have been working with ISIL itself or with one of the other Sunni Islamist or nationalist formations fighting alongside them. ‬

So what will happen now? The pattern of developing events is already clear, and much may be learned from the experience of Syria. ‬