RUTHFULLY YOURS

In rolling out his new memoir in media appearances, former defense secretary Leon Panetta has explained that from the start of the Benghazi terrorist attack, he told President Obama it was, in fact, a terrorist attack. This conflicts with the president’s implausible account. Mr. Panetta, moreover, has acknowledged the obvious: namely, that unanswered questions about the attack, including why no meaningful effort was made to rescue Americans under siege, demand additional congressional attention.

It has been five months since the House established a select committee to investigate this act of war in which our enemies attacked a sovereign American compound, killing our Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans, and wounding many others. Yet the public continues to get more significant information about the episode from Fox News programs than from the panel created to establish what happened and ensure accountability for governmental decisions made before, during and after the attack. Consequently, I’ve joined several other concerned citizens, including several former government officials, in the following open letter to select committee chairman Trey Gowdy, calling for more energy and more expeditious inquiry.

Dear Mr. Chairman:

As you are well aware, on May 8, 2014, the House of Representatives adopted H. Res. 567 “Providing for the Establishment of the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi, Libya”. With the publication this week of former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s book, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leaders in War and Peace, the need for such an inquiry has become both indisputable and even more urgent.

In particular, it is clear that there is more – and likely much more – that has yet to be established about the murderous September 11, 2012 jihadist attack on American facilities in Benghazi and those assigned to them. Indeed, former Secretary Panetta is providing an account of the Benghazi attacks that differs dramatically from what President Obama and his spokesmen presented in the hours, days and weeks after the attack.

For example, when shown a video clip of the former security contractors who defended the CIA Annex, who described how they were told to stand down that night by their superiors, Mr. Panetta agreed that Congress needed to investigate their story. Secretary Panetta has claimed that he set in motion a number of military units that night. Why was none of them directed to actually reach Benghazi? Who gave the ultimate order to U.S. military forces not to come to the rescue of our people in Benghazi that night? Was it the Secretary of State? The President? Or someone else? If so, on whose authority?

The newly elected Swedish government of Prime Minister Stefan Lofven began its term with a clear pro-Palestinian tilt. In his inaugural speech on October 3, 2014, PM Lofven declared that his left-center Social-Democrat party led government would recognize the state of Palestine. “The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be solved with a two-state solution, negotiated in accordance with international law. The two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to co-exist peacefully. Sweden will therefore recognize the state of Palestine.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the Swedish government’s statement the following day saying that “Unilateral steps would not advance peace, but would, rather, push it off.”

The US was also unhappy with the unilateral Swedish move. US State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki called international recognition of a Palestinian state “premature,” and said, “We believe that the process is one that has to be worked out through the parties to agree on the terms of how they will live in the future of two states living side-by-side.”

Responding to the Swedish Prime Minister’s announcement, Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman wrote an exclusive Op Ed in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. “This announcement” Lieberman wrote, “was not intended to serve as a genuine solution to a foreign problem. It was intended, so it seems, to placate a certain sector in Swedish public opinion. It is to be regretted when internal considerations determine a counterproductive and irresponsible foreign policy.”

Lieberman added, “With the entire Middle East aflame, not to mention other regions in the world experiencing strife and instability, the undue focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict runs counter to all logic. Beyond reflecting internal matters, it seems that this focus serves to compensate for the many failings that the organized international community has encountered in attempting to resolve the many complex problems on the global agenda. For some reason, five words are spoken of time and again as both an imperative and as a magical solution to many other problems in the region: resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”

Only thirteen years after 9/11, the Bill Maher/Ben Affleck kerfuffle has broken the media logjam preventing open discussion of whether Islam is a uniquely violent religion, and finally brought that question into the mainstream of the public discourse. The mainstream media and Leftist intelligentsia, badly rattled by Maher’s defection, is circling the wagons with a series of articles about how Maher is wrong, ignorant, bigoted, and after all just a comedian anyway – including a New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof (a bit player in the Maher/Affleck brawl), predictably entitled “The Diversity of Islam.”

Islam’s glorious diversity, of course, is something that we are all supposed to acknowledge and celebrate, on pain of charges of “Islamophobia” and “bigotry.” For Leftists and Islamic supremacists, it is a cardinal sin to essentialize Islam – that is, to dare to suggest that it actually teaches and stands for anything in particular. It is even worse to say anything that might give anyone the impression that Islam is a monolith. The political and media elites insist that we must see Islam as a marvelously diverse, multifaceted thing – as long as we don’t whisper anything to the effect that its diversity includes mass murderers and rapists acting in accord with mainstream understandings of its texts and teachings.

One irony (among many) of all this is that Islam is, in point of fact, one of the least diverse entities on the planet. A few years I came across a group photo of a summit meeting of Southeast Asian government officials. The Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, Cambodian, Thai, Burmese and Chinese officials all had names indigenous to their nations; the Malaysian and Indonesian ministers had names like Muhammad and Abdullah – names indigenous to Arabia. Converts to Islam the world over give up a bit of their cultural diversity to take on Arabic names, and in many cases feel compelled to adopt the dress of a seventh-century Arab. This is not diversity, it’s homogeneity.

By the time World War II was over entire cities had been devastated and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed by the Allies in one of the last wars whose virtue we were all able to agree on. The civilians were not limited to enemy German and Japanese civilians, but included French civilians in occupied territory, Jewish prisoners and numerous others who were caught in the war zone.

To the professional pacifist these numbers appear to disprove the morality of war, any war, but they were the blood price that had to be paid to stop two war machines once they had been allowed to seize the strategic high ground. There was no other way to stop the genocide that Germany and Japan had been inflicting on Europe and Asia except through a way of war that would kill countless civilians.

A refusal to fight that war would not have been the moral course. It would have meant that the Allies would have continued to serve as the silent partners in genocide. The same thing is true today.

War is ugly. It is made moral by why it is fought, not by how it is fought. If we are fighting a war to prevent mass murder, our moral obligation is to win it as quickly as possible. Not as cleanly.

Our attempt to streamline the ugly parts into a drone taking out a terrorist target with no collateral damage is a moral fiction. Civilians die in drone strikes as in any other form of attack and believing that we can have our moral cake and eat it too has convinced some that any other kind of war is immoral.

If we had set out to win World War II as cleanly as possible the price for our morality would have been paid by our own soldiers as well as by the countless victims of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

As we can see the way that American soldiers and Afghan civilians paid the price for Obama’s morality.

As I wrote in The Great Betrayal, “the number of Afghan civilian casualties caused by American forces had dropped between 2009 and 2011, but civilian casualties caused by the Taliban steadily increased… 2009 proved to be the deadliest year for Afghan civilians with over 2,400 killed… with the Taliban accounting for two-thirds of the total. While the percentage of casualties caused by US forces fell 28 percent, the percentage caused by the Taliban increased by 40 percent making up for American restraint. This fell into line with the increase in NATO combat deaths which rose from 295 to 520.”

Of course, we’re pretending that the money will go to rebuild homes and businesses. But everyone above the age 5 knows what the money is really buying.

Reuters:

Out of this conference must come not just money but a renewed commitment from everybody to work for peace that meets the aspirations of all, for Israelis, for Palestinians for all people of this region,” Kerry told the conference.

“And I promise you the full commitment of President Obama, myself and the United States to try to do that,” he said.

At the conference Kerry also announced an additional $212 million in U.S. aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which was badly damaged during a conflict with Israel in July and August in which 2,100 Palestinians died, most of them civilians.

An estimated 18,000 homes and vital infrastructure were destroyed in the seven-week war. The Palestinians have put the cost of reconstruction at about $4 billion over three years.

Qatar said it would provide $1 billion in reconstruction assistance for Gaza, while fellow Gulf Arab states Kuwait and United Arab Emirates promised $200 million each.

Germany on Sunday also announced it would contribute 50 million euros ($63 million) to reconstruction efforts in Gaza.

“We can’t allow the people in Gaza to sink into despair,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said in a statement. The British ambassador to Egypt, John Casson, told Reuters London would provide $32 million for reconstruction.

Wall Street has always been divided between producers and overhead. The same is true in every for-profit profession and business. When “overhead” overwhelms production, profits collapse and the business fails. Technology has allowed for-profit and not-for-profit businesses to reduce overhead staff, thereby increasing the ratio of producers to staff.

That is not true in government where profit is not necessary for viability. Government does not manufacture goods or produce services to sell. The purpose of government is to secure and protect the rights of its citizens – to protect the people against loss of life, liberty and the unlawful seizure of property. Obviously, government’s role has become far more complex, which is one reason bureaucracies have grown, but it does not explain why they have become bloated.

Over the past eighty years government’s role in the economy has become increasingly intrusive. When state and local governments are included, total government spending exceeds 41% of GDP. A hundred years ago, that number was 7%. At that time, state and local spending exceeded that of the federal government. Today, the latter has the lion’s share.

As insidious as burgeoning bureaucracies (and related to it) is cronyism, which exists between government, big business, favored industries and public sector unions. Banks too big to fail are protected against failure, giving them a cost advantage versus their smaller, regional competitors. Industries are favored because of long term relationships or because products and services coincide with an Administration’s agenda. Unions are interested in expanding their reach. Big bureaucracies are in their wheelhouse. With private sector unions in decline, the public sector represents their only growth opportunity. Taxpayers, small businesses and fans of small government stand on the outside and ogle the party to which they were not invited.

Wall Street has always been divided between producers and overhead. The same is true in every for-profit profession and business. When “overhead” overwhelms production, profits collapse and the business fails. Technology has allowed for-profit and not-for-profit businesses to reduce overhead staff, thereby increasing the ratio of producers to staff.

That is not true in government where profit is not necessary for viability. Government does not manufacture goods or produce services to sell. The purpose of government is to secure and protect the rights of its citizens – to protect the people against loss of life, liberty and the unlawful seizure of property. Obviously, government’s role has become far more complex, which is one reason bureaucracies have grown, but it does not explain why they have become bloated.

Over the past eighty years government’s role in the economy has become increasingly intrusive. When state and local governments are included, total government spending exceeds 41% of GDP. A hundred years ago, that number was 7%. At that time, state and local spending exceeded that of the federal government. Today, the latter has the lion’s share.

As insidious as burgeoning bureaucracies (and related to it) is cronyism, which exists between government, big business, favored industries and public sector unions. Banks too big to fail are protected against failure, giving them a cost advantage versus their smaller, regional competitors. Industries are favored because of long term relationships or because products and services coincide with an Administration’s agenda. Unions are interested in expanding their reach. Big bureaucracies are in their wheelhouse. With private sector unions in decline, the public sector represents their only growth opportunity. Taxpayers, small businesses and fans of small government stand on the outside and ogle the party to which they were not invited.

It was tragically comical that the commander in chief in just a few weeks could go from referring to ISIS as “jayvee” and a manageable problem to declaring it an existential threat, in the same manner he upgraded the Free Syrian Army from amateurs and a fantasy to our ground linchpin in the new air war. All that tragic comedy was a continuance of his previous untruths, such as the assurance that existing health plans and doctors would not change under the Affordable Care Act or that there was not a smidgeon of corruption at the IRS.

But lately the Obama confusion has descended into the territory not of tragedy or even tragic comedy, but rather of outright farce.

Last week we learned from the Washington Post that an investigator looking into the Secret Service prostitution scandal [1] was ordered by the inspector general “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.” The “embarrassing” information was the allegation that a member of the White House staff advance team had solicited a prostitute while prepping Obama’s Colombia visit [2] — a fact denied by then-White House Press Secretary Jay Carney [3] in April 2012, when he assured the press that no one from the White House was involved in the scandal that brought down lots of Secret Service and military personnel.

But here is where the farcical kicks in. The squelched investigation was focused on White House staffer Jonathan Dach. And who is Dach? He was at the time a young Yale law student and White House staffer, and is now a State Department activist working on — what else? — “Global Women’s Issues.”

It’s hard to tell what’s happening in the battle against the Islamic State or ISIL, as the administration insists on calling it. (They seem to have spent as much time deciding which acronym to use as how to fight the terror organization/state.) As I write, the Daily Mail [1] reports ISIS toe-to-toe with Kurdish fighters in Kobane with Turkey (not surprisingly) refusing to step in. U.S. — or should I say coalition — bombings continue.

But we don’t know much — hardly anything about the bombing, who was hit, how much damage, collateral or otherwise, occurred. Have there been civilian casualties? How many?

Compare this to a few weeks ago and the non-stop coverage of the Gaza War. Almost every day we had reports on the supposedly huge civilian toll from Israeli attacks coupled with admonishment from State Department porte-paroles Jen Psaki and Marie Harf that Israel should restrain itself, implying, of course, that the Jewish state was being excessive in defending itself against Hamas. Psaki, Harf and others repeatedly warned Israel that they were harming too many “innocent” civilians even though those civilians had been put there as human shields by their terrorist adversaries. Death and wounded statistics provided by Hamas and then parroted by the UN were almost always accepted at face value by the mouth pieces of our government.

Barack Obama gets no such treatment. Weeks into the bombing of ISIL, we know next to nothing. The reportage is vague at best. Some, like the left-wing UK Independent [2], say Obama’s strategy has been a fiasco. [2] Who knows? Unlike Hamas, which has always exploited human shields to the hilt for propaganda purposes, ISIL prefers to keep reporters out (or slice their heads off) and employ social media for publicity and recruitment purposes. But still the bombs fall and innocents and not-so-innocents die or get maimed for life.

So why does the State Department blame Israel for using excessive force, even though the IDF appears to make even more effort than the U.S. Army or Air Force to avoid civilian casualties? Why does it judge Israel by a different standard from the U.S. — or anybody, for that matter?

A Kurdish official has written to Defense Secretary Hagel pleading for the U.S. to honor its promises of military aid.
In President Obama ’s Sept. 11 speech about combating Islamic State jihadists, he said that America “will not get dragged into another ground war in Iraq.” But the president said that U.S. military advisers “are needed to support Iraqi and Kurdish forces with training, intelligence and equipment.”

If this is the plan, little in terms of weaponry or training has reached Kurdish Peshmerga forces in Iraq—and they are begging Washington to make good on its promises.

In the meantime, in the front-line town Khazar, between Islamic State-held Mosul and the Kurdish capital, Erbil, Peshmerga forces drive unarmored pickup trucks and carry AK-47s as they face off against Islamic State, aka ISIS, fighters armed with U.S.-made tanks, armored Humvees and heavy artillery. The imbalance is replicated across the entire border of almost 650 miles that Kurds share with ISIS in Iraq.

In three trips to the Kurdistan Region since ISIS invaded Iraq in early June, I have seen the situation improve as a result of U.S.-led airstrikes, but little has changed in terms of the supply of equipment and training for our Kurdish allies.

The coalition that supports the airstrikes should take immediate action to provide the Peshmerga with the offensive and defensive equipment they need to match the firepower of ISIS. Failing to do so increases the likelihood—despite President Obama’s vows not to involve U.S. forces—that America and other coalition countries, which include France, Australia and the U.K., will have to send in troops to defeat ISIS.

In a letter sent on Oct. 2 to U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel that until now has not been made public, the Kurdistan Regional Government’s Minister of Peshmerga Affairs Mustafa Sayid Qadir pleaded for help, saying that his forces still carry “outdated AK-47s, Soviet Dragunov rifles and other light arms.”

The letter, which I was given access to by the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, tabulated the surprisingly small amount of equipment received from international allies. In addition to AK-47s, the U.S. has provided fewer than 100 mortars and just a few hundred rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. The Peshmerga haven’t received a single tank or armored vehicle from coalition countries. The problem is compounded by the fact that Iraqi security forces denied the Peshmerga access to the thousands of tanks and armored vehicles the U.S. left behind for Iraq when the military pulled out in 2011. Meanwhile, ISIS fighters have commandeered U.S.-provided tanks and Humvees abandoned by Iraqi forces fleeing from battle.

For the price of $6,995, the New York Times is offering 13-day tours of Iran guided by Times journalist Elaine Sciolino. Promotional material for the tour on the Times website promises “luxurious hotels” and describes Tehran as a city where “the young and fashionable adopt a new trendy joie de vivre.” Also on the itinerary: “a pleasant evening stroll around the colorful bazaars,” along with insights into the “accomplishments” of the late Ayatollah Khomeini.

The U.S. Treasury Department website advises that notwithstanding the American economic sanctions on Iran, “All transactions ordinarily incident to travel to or from Iran, including the importation of accompanied baggage for personal use, payment of maintenance and living expenses and acquisition of goods or services for personal use are permitted.”

The State Department, however, warns: “Some elements in Iran remain hostile to the United States. As a result, U.S. citizens may be subject to harassment or arrest while traveling or residing in Iran…The U.S. government does not have diplomatic or consular relations with the Islamic Republic of Iran and therefore cannot provide protection or routine consular services to U.S. citizens in Iran.”

Travelers dissatisfied with their experience on the trip may have a tough time if they try to sue. The “terms and conditions” for the trip include a “binding arbitration clause” that gives arbitrators, “not any federal, state, or local court or agency,” “exclusive authority to resolve any dispute” related to the trip. A 2010 New York Times editorial described such binding arbitration clauses as “pretty unfair” and advised readers to “beware” them.