To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State. By John Bolton.

To Defeat ISIS, Create a Sunni State. By John R. Bolton. New York Times, November 24, 2015.

Bolton:

America is debating how to respond to the terrorist attacks in Paris. Unfortunately, both President Obama’s current policy and other recent proposals lack a strategic vision for the Middle East once the Islamic State, or ISIS, is actually defeated. There are no answers, or only outmoded ones, to the basic question: What comes after the Islamic State?

Before transforming Mr. Obama’s ineffective efforts into a vigorous military campaign to destroy the Islamic State, we need a clear view, shared with NATO allies and others, about what will replace it. It is critical to resolve this issue before considering any operational plans. Strategy does not come from the ground up; instead, tactics flow deductively once we’ve defined the ultimate objectives.

Today’s reality is that Iraq and Syria as we have known them are gone. The Islamic State has carved out a new entity from the post-Ottoman Empire settlement, mobilizing Sunni opposition to the regime of President Bashar al-Assad and the Iran-dominated government of Iraq. Also emerging, after years of effort, is a de facto independent Kurdistan.

If, in this context, defeating the Islamic State means restoring to power Mr. Assad in Syria and Iran’s puppets in Iraq, that outcome is neither feasible nor desirable. Rather than striving to recreate the post-World War I map, Washington should recognize the new geopolitics. The best alternative to the Islamic State in northeastern Syria and western Iraq is a new, independent Sunni state.

This “Sunni-stan” has economic potential as an oil producer (subject to negotiation with the Kurds, to be sure), and could be a bulwark against both Mr. Assad and Iran-allied Baghdad. The rulers of the Arab Gulf states, who should by now have learned the risk to their own security of funding Islamist extremism, could provide significant financing. And Turkey — still a NATO ally, don’t forget — would enjoy greater stability on its southern border, making the existence of a new state at least tolerable.

The functional independence of Kurdistan reinforces this approach. The Kurds have finally become too big a force in the region for Baghdad or Damascus to push them around. They will not be cajoled or coerced into relinquishing territory they now control to Mr. Assad in Syria or to Iraq’s Shiite militias.

The Kurds still face enormous challenges, with dangerously uncertain borders, especially with Turkey. But an independent Kurdistan that has international recognition could work in America’s favor.

Make no mistake, this new Sunni state’s government is unlikely to be a Jeffersonian democracy for many years. But this is a region where alternatives to secular military or semi-authoritarian governments are scarce. Security and stability are sufficient ambitions.

As we did in Iraq with the 2006 “Anbar Awakening,” the counterinsurgency operation that dislodged Al Qaeda from its stronghold in that Iraqi province, we and our allies must empower viable Sunni leaders, including tribal authorities who prize their existing social structures. No doubt, this will involve former Iraqi and Syrian Baath Party officials; and there may still be some moderate Syrian opposition leaders. All are preferable to the Islamist extremists.

The Arab monarchies like Saudi Arabia must not only fund much of the new state’s early needs, but also ensure its stability and resistance to radical forces. Once, we might have declared a Jordanian “protectorate” in an American “sphere of influence”; for now, a new state will do.

This Sunni state proposal differs sharply from the vision of the Russian-Iranian axis and its proxies (Hezbollah, Mr. Assad and Tehran-backed Baghdad). Their aim of restoring Iraqi and Syrian governments to their former borders is a goal fundamentally contrary to American, Israeli and friendly Arab state interests. Notions, therefore, of an American-Russian coalition against the Islamic State are as undesirable as they are glib.

In Syria, Moscow wants to dominate the regime (with or without Mr. Assad) and safeguard Russia’s Tartus naval base and its new Latakia air base. Tehran wants a continuing Alawite supremacy, with full protection for Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.

As for Iraq, Russia and Iran want the Sunni territories returned to Baghdad’s control, reinforcing Iran’s regional influence. They may wish for the same in Kurdistan, but they lack the capability there.

Sunnis today support the Islamic State for many of the same reasons they once supported Al Qaeda in Iraq — as a bulwark against being ruled by Tehran via Baghdad. Telling these Sunni people that their reward for rising against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq will be to put them back in thrall to Mr. Assad and his ilk, or to Shiite-dominated Baghdad, will simply intensify their support for the jihadists. Why would they switch sides?

This is why, after destroying the Islamic State, America should pursue the far-reaching goal of creating a new Sunni state. Though difficult in the near term, over time this is more conducive to regional order and stability.

Creating an American-led anti-Islamic State alliance instead of Moscow’s proposed coalition will require considerable diplomatic and political effort. American ground combat forces will have to be deployed to provide cohesion and leadership. But this would be necessary to defeat the Islamic State even if the objective were simply to recreate the status quo ante.

The Anbar Awakening and the American military’s 2007 “surge” provide the model, as do Kurdish successes against the Islamic State. Local fighters armed, trained and advised by the United States would combine with Arab and American conventional forces.

The military operation is not the hardest part of this post-Islamic State vision. It will also require sustained American attention and commitment. We cannot walk away from this situation as we did from Iraq in 2011.

The new “Sunni-stan” may not be Switzerland. This is not a democracy initiative, but cold power politics. It is consistent with the strategic objective of obliterating the Islamic State that we share with our allies, and it is achievable.

The Palestinian Death Cult. By Elder of Ziyon.

The death cult. Elder of Ziyon, November 25, 2015.

Elder of Ziyon:

Today, we learned the details of the interrogation of an 11-year old boy who decided to stab Jews on a light rail train two weeks ago:

The 11-year-old, a sixth grader from Shuafat, is the youngest assailant arrested to date in the current upsurge of Palestinian terrorism. He is too young to face charges under current Israeli law; the 14-year-old is facing charges of attempted murder. 

In their interrogation, the two children said they carried out the attack as an act of revenge, without planning in advance and with no encouragement from any adults. 

“We travelled from Shuafat to Damascus Gate in order to stab a soldier but did not do it because the soldiers were in groups and we didn’t find one standing alone,” recalled the 11-year-old. “Then he told me ‘let’s do an attack together to revenge the death of Muhammad Ali.’ He opened his bag and showed me the knife. At Damascus Gate I bought a pair of scissors and then we boarded the light rail and looked for Jews to stab.” 

Two light rail security guards boarded the train, but the boys decided “not to stab them because there were two of them. Later on one of them got off and we immediately attacked the one that remained.” 

“I stabbed him in his head, my cousin stabbed him in his chest and stomach until the guard pushed me and fired three bullets in my stomach,” said the 11-year-old. 

The two cousins had decided they were ready to die as shahids, or martyrs, he said.

Any person with a the slightest sense of morality would be aghast at the words from this child.

I have yet to find a single article in Palestinian media that shows the slightest regret that they have raised a generation of children who literally want to die for a chance to kill a Jew.

Think about that. Not a single Palestinian adult is willing to publicly express anything negative about children being brainwashed to die.

The children listen to music that extols death. They watch videos making murderers and even those who die failing to murder into heroes. Their teachers tell them that there is no higher calling than to be a martyr. Their preachers preach hate for Jews. Their newspapers publish cartoons that incite stabbings. Their friends brag about how they manage to throw rocks at soldiers.

But the worst part is not the hate and the incitement and the antisemitism. The worst part is the fact that there are no Palestinians willing to publicly say, in Arabic, that this is disgusting.

There is no debate about whether it is a good or bad thing for children to put themselves in danger to stab Jews. On the contrary – there are football tournaments named after the stabber children.

In the past eight weeks of reading Palestinian Arab media from all political viewpoints I have yet to find anyone who is willing to say anything negative about a culture that literally raises children to kill.

Not that every Palestinian parent supports their kids going off with the family knives to stab anyone with a kipah. Surveys show that roughly half are against violence and I have no reason to doubt them. But Palestinian society is set up in such a way that no one is willing to stand up and say the obvious – “We must stop raising our children on a steady diet of hate.”

Sure there are the exceptions like the Khaled Abu Toamehs and the Bassem Eids. But they prove the rule.  Their words carry no weight within Palestinian society precisely because they dare go against the party line. Because they are willing to take positions that are so obviously moral, they are ostracized, and as a result no one wants to join them for fear of being labeled a collaborator.

That is how a cult works – any independent thought that goes against the official line is silenced and the people behind it punished and blacklisted.

Palestinianism is a death cult.

If that statement is offensive to you, then kindly point me to the editorials or school curricula or cartoons or TV shows or music videos in Arabic that say that it is not a good idea to die while trying to murder Jews. I will happily retract and publish the articles that criticize a generation that glorifies death.

But you won't easily find them, because the such ideas cannot be safely said in Palestinian society.

The next issue is, why are so many Westerners coddling this death cult instead of criticizing it?

 

The Cold Realism of the Post-Paris War on Terror. By Emile Simpson.

The Cold Realism of the Post-Paris War on Terror. By Emile Simpson. Foreign Policy, November 20, 2015. Also here.

Simpson:

The time for supporting democratic regime change across the Muslim world is over. It’s accept Assad and his like, or embrace the chaos.

Like then-President George W. Bush’s declaration of a war on terror after 9/11, French President François Hollande declared France to be at war following the appalling attacks of Nov. 13 by the Islamic State, also known as ISIS. While the Paris attack provides a fresh impetus for the West to defeat the scourge of radical Islamic terrorism, it also shows how profoundly the post-9/11 war on terror has failed. After all, haven’t jihadi networks massively proliferated since 2001, leaving Western capitals and cities across the Muslim world perpetually on edge, poised for the next fresh carnage? Post-Paris, the war on terror won’t be part of a neoconservative project to remake the world in our own image, but a Burkean conservative posture that accepts the devils we know.

The fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the litmus test of this proposition: He’s a murderous butcher, but only his ground forces can realistically retake much of the ISIS-controlled territory. They haven’t been able to until now, because Western and Gulf states have backed a kaleidoscopic variety of rebels seeking to oust Assad, tying down much of the Syrian military. The fact that much of the territory lost by the Assad regime has wound up in the hands of ISIS and hard-line Islamists has created a climate of moral relativism, where neither Assad nor ISIS make for an attractive option. But this moral relativism has led to inaction and tragedy. Call it the Hamlet non-strategy.

But the Paris attacks will impose a cold strategic clarity. Whatever the objective threat, the West cannot tolerate the humiliation of terrorist attacks from an enemy that, so far, it has merely sought (and failed) to contain. For all the self-congratulatory talk of “historic” progress at the recent diplomatic talks in Vienna, a “political solution” cannot fix the problem of ISIS and hard-line Islamists — for neither Washington nor Moscow would ever accept a negotiated peace with them. The territory they hold must be cleared and held by infantry. But whose infantry? The Kurds can retake only so much ground, given their limited resources and lack of desire to expand substantially beyond ethnically Kurdish areas. Non-Kurdish rebels are small in number and fragmented. And in many cases their “moderate” credentials are dubious, at best.

That leaves the West, Russia, or the Assad regime and its Iranian proxies.

There’s no chance the United States, France, or NATO wants to hold ground on its own, or back Assad. So scratch the first option from that shortlist. Handing the moral and military quagmire over to the Russians — who will, in turn, back the Syrian Army — begins to seem like the only option.

Moreover, the anger and anguish of Paris comes on the heels of a refugee crisis of such magnitude and consequence for Europe’s fate that it makes dealing with the Greek debt crisis look like child’s play. The overwhelming urge to impose stability in Syria will mean that moral relativism transforms into moral necessity: eliminate ISIS before all else. Perhaps Russia will agree to allow Assad to transition out of power following the defeat of the Islamic State, in return for sanctions relief. We’ll see. The bottom line is that while the West can hardly support Assad, in the aftermath of Paris, his transition suddenly becomes a secondary matter.

This reality already seems to have sunk in. France appears to be at least agnostic towards Russian strikes in Syria, and may even be coordinating with Moscow. Speaking in Vienna the day after the Paris attacks, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry claimed that “it is time to deprive the terrorists of any single kilometer in which to hide.” Translation: We’re going to finish off ISIS, and tacitly accept Assad. For now.

Thus, Assad’s fate is a weathervane for the future of the wider war on terror. Syria has, in three respects, turned into the graveyard of the post-9/11 phase of this conflict.

For one thing, U.S. policy towards Syria begins to dispel the notion that the war on terror is part of a broader freedom-promotion agenda. In his address to Congress on Sept. 20, 2001, then-President Bush defined the war on terror as a moralizing revolutionary project. The refrain was still alive six years later. “This war is more than a clash of arms — it is a decisive ideological struggle,” Bush said in his 2007 State of the Union address. “The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity.”

And what is Washington’s bipartisan answer to this “great question of our day,” from the perspective of 2015? A decisive “no,” unless you think that the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regime in Cairo, which holds up to 40,000 political prisoners in its torture-ridden jails, is allowing Egyptians to share in the “rights of all humanity.” Or, perhaps, that our trusted ally Saudi Arabia doesn’t actually have a rancid human rights record after all. Or that the atrocities being committed against Sunnis by Baghdad’s Shiite militias in Iraq aren’t really happening. In truth, the freedom agenda was always gilded with hypocrisy, given that the Bush administration doubled down on its support to repressive regimes after 9/11, from Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt to Islam Karimov’s Uzbekistan. Now, we’re simply regressing to the mean.

Syria makes plain that we don’t, actually, have an alternative to Assad. Yes, the Syrian strongman himself may well ultimately be “transitioned” out of power, but his repressive regime will stay intact. Whatever Assad’s personal fate, dissolving his regime means removing any vestige of state order that remains in Syria, and replacing it with even more chaos. And surely we’ve learned by now that things can always get worse. Syria merely confirms the lesson the West should have learned from Iraq: that the freedom agenda in the Muslim world is dead.

Second, we now know that the notion that regime change leads to a better democratic or a humanitarian outcome is decidedly false. From Iraq, where the West tried a heavy footprint strategy, to Libya, where it opted for a light one, the idea that Europe or the United States can actually execute democratic change by force has been exposed as a fallacy. In Iraq, $2 trillion dollars, over 4,000 dead Americans, and over 200,000 dead Iraqis created a country run by an Iranian puppet who turned out to be a vicious sectarian maniac. In Libya, we simply have chaos, with much of the state run by hard-line Islamists. Those who say the United States should have intervened in 2011 to topple Assad are left having to explain either how they could have rallied U.S. public support for an Iraq-like occupation and rebuilding of Syria, or, in the absence of that, how Syria would have avoided Libya’s fate.

The role of intervention, post-Paris, will be exactly the reverse of the post-9/11 model. Interventions will occur, but only to back fragile governments — not unseat them — without attaching any guarantees of future democratic transformations. France’s successful intervention against al Qaeda in Mali in 2013 is a good example of this model.

Finally, we should no longer doubt that gaps in fragile states in the Muslim world will be filled by anything other than hard-line Islamists. Sure, there were always terrorist networks like al Qaeda that could set up bases in ungoverned space. But 14 years later, we see how the information revolution has massively catalyzed the formation of jihadist networks. The speed with which ISIS has risen, proselytized, and formed franchises all over the world, cannot be explained without accounting for the interconnectivity of contemporary communication. In Afghanistan and Iraq, radical Islamic terrorists took years to build up cells; in Libya, hard-line Islamists were part of the rebellion from the outset. The result in today’s networked age is that every potential armed opposition movement in the Muslim world now becomes a potential jihadi branch. The West can’t risk that.

Here, too, Syria represents the culmination of this trend. The moderate rebels of 2011 stood no chance of survival against the hard liners who managed to rapidly mobilize foreign fighters and take over the majority of the insurgency. The result is that, post-Paris, Western capitals will be skeptical of regime change of any sort. It will be clear that when intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign (albeit repressive) states becomes a vehicle for democratic change, that vehicle will probably be hijacked by radical Islamists, and will arrive at a substantially worse political destination than intended.

The post-Paris war on terror will affirm the West’s commitment to fighting radical Islamic terrorism, but, in the process, it will reject the idiom of revolutionary, moralizing democratic change inherited from President Bush. Syria was the end of the line for that approach. This new phase will assume that terrorists are nonstate actors, and will take the view that if you have an international system built around strong sovereign states — no matter how brutal or unconcerned with human rights — life becomes much harder for nonstate armed groups, including terrorists.

This is simply a reflection of the new realities we face, not a celebration of that shift.

Of course, privileging the idea of strong sovereign states above all else is simply another way of re-stating the basic principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other sovereign states, a principle that dates back to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and echoed in the U.N. Charter. In this sense, there is strong historical precedent for what we will see post-Paris: revolutionary moments that tend to spin out of control, leading to mass violence that requires a return to prioritizing stability over all else.

It’s worth recalling that the very word “massacre” comes to us from the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572 as depicted in Christopher Marlowe’s Elizabethan play, The Massacre at Paris. This savage episode of religious terror on the streets of Paris, sparked by a Catholic move against Protestants, was but one episode in a century of open-ended religious warfare in Europe, in which confessionally divided states sought to fashion each other’s internal affairs in their own image. To Catholic monarchs, protestant Queen Elizabeth I was the Saddam Hussein of her day, illegitimate leader of a rogue state, excommunicated by Pope Pius V as “the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime,” and targeted for regime change by Spanish King Phillip II’s Armada of 1588. This was but one strand of a chaotic web of ideologically driven interventions and counterinterventions, with an epicenter of violence in Germany and the Netherlands.

This was a path to social disaster. In Germany alone, religious wars from the mid-16th century to 1648 killed over a third of the population. The Westphalian system of nonintervention provided an exit from Europe’s “forever wars” of religion, because it abolished appeals to a higher moral or religious justification that trumped state sovereignty. But Europe arrived at that point only after a war so vicious that it convinced all parties to accept stability as an end in itself, and Thomas Hobbes devised the modern concept of the state in the Leviathan in 1651, published three years after the Westphalian settlement of 1648.

It has been fashionable to attack the state since the early 1990s, when liberal interventionists could make claims about the “responsibility to protect.” These claims made sense during the twilight of the pre-networked age. Meanwhile, the neo-conservatives were able to make hypothetical claims about democratic regime change that look ridiculous after the nightmare of Iraq. That world is now gone, and the state will reassert itself with a vengeance — that’s what Paris means.

Obama Has Just Begun. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Obama Has Just Begun. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, November 24, 2015.

Hanson:

How much damage can he do in his last year in office?

Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge.

By sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are now predominantly Republican. Obama’s own favorable ratings rarely top 45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were never appreciated in their time. So it is not surprising that he is not, as he presses full speed ahead.

Obama certainly has doubled down going into his last year, most recently insisting on letting in more refugees from the Middle East, at a time when the children of Middle Eastern immigrants and contemporary migrants are terrorizing Europe. What remaining unpopular executive acts might anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?

An Obama press conference is now a summation of all his old damn-you clichés — the fantasy strawman arguments; the caricatures of the evil Republican bogeymen; the demagogic litany of the sick, the innocent, and the old at the mercy of his callous opponents; the affected accentuation (e.g., Talîban; Pakîstan, Îslám, Latînos, etc.) that so many autodidacts parade in lieu of learning foreign languages; the make-no-mistake-about-it and let-me-be-clear empty emphatics; the flashing temper tantrums; the mangled sports metaphors; the factual gaffes; and the monotonous I, me, my, and mine first-person-pronoun exhaustion. What Obama cannot do in fact, he believes he can still accomplish through invective and derision.

In the 2016 election campaigns, most Democratic candidates in swing states will have distanced themselves from the last eight years. Otherwise, they would have to run on the patently false premise that American health care is more affordable and more comprehensive today than it was in 2009; that workforce participation is booming; that scandals are a thing of the past; that the debt has been addressed; that Obama has proved a healer who brought the country together; that immigration at last is ordered, legal, and logical; that the law has never been more respected and honored; that racial relations are calmer than ever; that the campuses are quiet; that the so-called war on terror is now over and won with al-Qaeda and ISIS contained or on the run; that U.S. prestige aboard has never been higher; that our allies appreciate our help and our enemies fear our wrath; that Iran will now not go nuclear; that Israel is secure and assured of our support; and that, thanks to American action, Egypt is stable, Libya is ascendant, Iraq is still consensual, and the Middle East in general is at last quiet after the tumultuous years of George W. Bush.

The hordes of young male migrants abandoning the Middle East for the West are merely analogous to past waves of immigrants and should be uniformly welcome. For Obama,  there is no connection between them and his slashing of American involvement in the Middle East — much less any sense of responsibility that his own actions helped produce the crisis he now fobs off on others.

If an American president saw fit to attack fellow Americans from abroad, and lecture them on their illiberality, there are better places from which to take such a low road than from Turkey, the embryo of 20th-century genocide, and a country whose soccer crowds were recently shouting, “Allahu akbar!” during what was supposed to be a moment of silence offered to the Paris dead. Surely an American president might suggest that such grassroots religious triumphalism about mass death is much more reprehensible behavior than are his own fellow citizens’ demands to vet the backgrounds of refugees.

If you suggested to Obama that, in his search for a contrarian legacy, he should do something to stop the slaughter in the Middle East and be careful about letting in more unexamined refugees, in answer, he would be more likely to do less than nothing abroad and vastly expand the influx of migrants. Getting under his critics’ skin is about all that is left of a failed presidency.

Many of our observers still do not quite grasp that Obama will end his presidency by seeking to get his opponents’ goat — and that his resentment will lead to some strange things said and done.

Few foresaw this critical element of the Obama character. The tiny number of prescient pundits who warned what the Obama years would entail were not the supposedly sober and judicious establishment voices, who in fact seemed to be caught up in the hope-and-change euphoria and missed entirely Obama’s petulance and pique: the Evan Thomases (“he’s sort of god”), or the David Brookses (“and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” “It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which [Obama] could be a great president.”), or the Chris Matthewses (“the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”), or the Michael Beschlosses (“Uh. I would say it’s probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.”), or the Chris Buckleys (“He has exhibited throughout a ‘first-class temperament,’ pace Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man”), or the Kathleen Parkers (“ . . . with solemn prayers that Obama will govern as the centrist, pragmatic leader he is capable of being”), or the Peggy Noonans (“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.”).

In truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would render immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile of America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.

Abroad, from Obama’s post-Paris speeches, it is clear that he is now bored with and irritated by the War on Terror. He seems to have believed either that Islamist global terror was a minor distraction with no potential for real harm other than to bring right-wingers in backlash fashion out of the woodwork, or that it was an understandably radical manifestation of what was otherwise a legitimate complaint of Islam against the Western-dominated global system — thus requiring contextualization rather than mindless opposition.

A lot of ambitious and dangerous powers are watching Obama assume a fetal position, and may well as a consequence act foolishly and recklessly this next year. Not only Russia, China, and North Korea, but also Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, and assorted rogue states may take chances in the next 14 months that they would otherwise never have entertained (given that America is innately strong and they are mostly in comparison far weaker) — on the premise that such adventurism offers tangible advantages without likely negative consequences and that the chance for such opportunities will not present itself again for decades to come.

At home, Obama feels liberated now that he is free from further elections. He thinks he has a legitimate right to be a bit vindictive and vent his own frustrations and pique, heretofore repressed over the last seven years because of the exigencies of Democratic electioneering. Obama can now vent and strike back at his opponents, caricaturing them from abroad, questioning their patriotism, slandering them for sport, and trying to figure out which emblematic executive orders and extra-legal bureaucratic directives will most infuriate them and repay them for their supposed culpability for his failed vero possumus presidency.

The more contrarian he becomes, and the more he opposes the wishes of the vast majority of the American people, all the more Obama envisions himself speaking truth to power and becoming iconic of something rather than the reality that he is becoming proof of nothing.

Hold on. We haven’t seen anything yet.

The University Gone Feral. By Victor Davis Hanson.

Melissa Click, the University of Missouri professor who called in the “muscle.”

The University Gone Feral. By Victor Davis Hanson. National Review Online, November 17, 2015.

“I Need Some Muscle”: Missouri Activists Block Journalists. By Austin Huguelet and Daniel Victor. New York Times, November 9, 2015.


Hanson:

On campus, social norms no longer apply.

The university, long exempted from social norms and rules, has gone wild in the 21st century — or rather, regressed to pre-puberty.

The University of Missouri campus police now request that students — a group not known for polite vocabulary — call law enforcement if someone disparages them with hurtful names.

On the same campus, a media professor shouts for students in the vicinity to strong-arm a student photographer to stop him from taking pictures in a way that she does not approve. Other staff members try to block and push away a journalist they find bothersome. Since when do thuggish faculty, in Michael Corleone fashion, call in muscle to intimidate students who are exercising their First Amendment rights?

Since when do quite privileged Yale students — in mini–Cultural Revolution style — surround and, teary-eyed, shout obscenities at their professor? Their target was declared to be guilty of some infraction against the people by an ad hoc court of whiny elites, poorly acting the role of the Committee of Public Safety. Apparently his offense was to suggest that students should not become hysterical when they see Halloween costumes they don’t like. Shouting down guest speakers, disrupting events, and mobbing individuals would not be tolerated at Disney World, so why on campus?

The assumed impoverished black student at the University of Missouri who went on a hunger strike to protest “white privilege” was raised in plentitude as the son of a multimillionaire corporate executive. The young woman who yelled obscenities at Yale over Halloween costumes is likewise a child of privilege. Campus outbursts reveal more about the anxieties and neuroses of the adolescent and pampered than about existential issues of hunger, violence, or bias.

Campus feminists demand new codes concerning sexual congress, largely as a result of an epidemic of rather callous campus hook-ups. They allege that one of four women on campus will inevitably be sexually assaulted. But if that were true, and parents believed it, then they would be unwise to send their children to Princeton or UCLA. Indeed, they would prefer that their kids party not at the University of Michigan but in the safer streets of Detroit. Apparently, the security concerns at USC involve not the nearby Watts neighborhood, but the student union on campus. Should frightened women at Stanford flee the quad for supposedly safer hangouts in East Palo Alto? Is there a “reign of terror” on campuses in Washington, D.C., similar to the one that is hitting neighborhoods around the Capitol?

The strangest campus derangement is the graft of Victorian prurience onto postmodern crudity. Students who are quite sexually active, and routinely use drugs and alcohol, nonetheless revert to virginal preteens who must be shielded from rough language or mere rudeness. They demand Victorian rules of sexual etiquette, but not commensurate 19th-century notions of abstinence, housing segregated by gender, dress codes that discourage randiness, or prohibitions against drug and alcohol use. Pick-and-choose campus feminists do not wish doors opened for them, but insist that sex codes delineate the stages of arousal, from foreplay to postcoital pleasantries. How strange that “adult” students want to dress up in little kids’ costumes on Halloween, and then act like children terrified of scary things in the night.

There is another common denominator to this epidemic of madness. Why are universities free from norms that apply to other American institutions? Is it the implied social contract that their educational mission is so sacred and so dutifully fulfilled that they simply cannot follow the rules or expectations that the rest of us do?

Free speech is guaranteed under the First Amendment, but not necessarily at universities. They assume that their own codes supersede the Bill of Rights and can limit any sort of expression that a minority of students arbitrarily defines as hurtful. Equal pay for equal work may be a national rallying cry. Yet for some reason, academia expects that it can pay a graduate-student teaching assistant or a PhD-holding part-time instructor a fraction of what it would pay a tenured full professor for teaching the identical class. The gulf between a full professor and a part-timer — in terms of money, power, and status — far exceeds that between the WalMart manager and his greeter at the door. And at least the latter pair have far different tasks. Is such disparity liberal?

Drug companies are sometimes rightly blasted as price-gougers. But rarely so colleges. Yet in lock-step fashion they consistently have raised their tuition charges at rates well above the annual rate of inflation. Strict rules govern how non-profit foundations spend their money; these rules usually include a set percentage of annual expenditure of total assets, which must be accompanied by reasonable overhead costs. Yet there are no commensurate rules for tax-free university endowments and budgets, which might explain why the numbers of non-teaching staff have soared, while administrative compensation has well outpaced faculty salaries.

Coal miners do not have tenure. Neither do carpenters. Wall Street CEOs have no guarantee of life-long employment. Nor do lawyers, doctors, or groundskeepers. Why do academics?

Does guaranteed job security ensure freedom of expression, diverse political views, and edgy theories? If so, why then do faculties donate overwhelmingly to the Democratic party, include few conservative voices, and conduct melodramatic witch-hunts against those who are skeptical of global warming? If tenure gave us all that, what might follow from no tenure — too much political diversity, too much free expression, too many divergent views?

Crony capitalism is a favorite charge against duplicitous corporations that use insider knowledge and friendships to leverage favors from government, both to profit inordinately and to stifle competition. But even the croniest of capitalists could not match the university Ponzi scheme of having the government guarantee student loans, which in turn guarantee that rising tuition will be paid in full without audit, even as the cost soars above the rate of inflation — all on the wink-and-nod expectation that millions of students will subsequently default and the government will cover the huge tab. How could a university admissions officer in good conscience extend a “package” of $100,000 to $200,000 in student loans over a four- or five-year stint on campus, with the full knowledge that it would be almost impossible for an unemployed or partly employed graduate to pay back what he had borrowed?

Consumer protection and truth in advertising are iconic in America. So how then do universities all but promise students well-paying jobs upon graduation, and instead turn out graduates who are neither educated nor — if employment statistics are accurate — especially employable? The Obama administration has a tendency to hunt down two-year for-profit tech schools that supposedly do not follow through on their big promises to find jobs for their federally indebted computer-technician or accounting graduates. But that is a small con compared to the gender-studies or environmental-studies major from Duke, Wellesley, or Swarthmore whose $250,000 college investment led to a low-paying internship or administrative-assistant billet — or a basement bedroom back home.

Diversity as defined by the Obama administration amounts to proportional representation: If a police force or DMV office does not have minority employees in the same ratio as their presence in the general population, then “disparate impact” is declared and remediation is required. There is no excuse that “merit” has led to a work force that does not look like America. Campuses agree, at least in terms of faculty and admissions, but why then is the football, basketball, or tennis team exempt? How can it be that there are almost no Asian linemen, no Latino basketball centers, no African-American swimmers?

Is that any more a ridiculous question than why there are not more African-American classics professors or Latino physicists? How can it be sinful that African-Americans are underrepresented in the library, while it is apparently admirable that in marquee football programs they are vastly overrepresented, at least by the metrics of the diversity industry? How Orwellian to see black scholarship football players threatening to boycott their next game unless the University of Missouri met their racial quotas for staff and faculty, when they inordinately represented 50 percent of the team — five times the proportion of African-Americans in the general population. Did they justify their “overrepresentation” on the politically incorrect doctrine that merit trumps the federal guidelines of “disparate impact”? Or was it more cynical: While less-important areas such as teaching, scholarship, and admissions must be subject to disparate-impact reasoning, existential activities such as football have to be exempt?

One-drop-of-blood racial paranoia characterized the Old South and became a linchpin of Jim Crow segregation. But as we saw in the Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, and Shaun King cases, under its new manifestations, we may have to issue DNA badges and dig up the old racial categories of antebellum Mississippi to express what defines minority status — one-16th, one-quarter, or one-half African-American, Native American, or Latino, but not three-quarters Arab or 100 percent Punjabi or Castilian? And how does one then prove one’s authenticity — a resort to Elizabeth Warren’s assertion of “high cheekbones,” or Ward Churchill’s headdress and buckskins?

Why does the country put up with these absurdities?

Of course, students are young, hormone-driven, immature, and impressionable, and must be given some slack. And, yes, many faculty members are delicate indoor orchids, who can pontificate only in the safety of the campus hothouse and would wilt if thrown outside to face the rat-race on the freeway or in the tire shop. But the reason for exemption is the argument that the university educates youth broadly to write well, read widely, have basic factual knowledge, think inductively, and master the elements of citizenship. Apparently, for that result, we were willing in the past to put up with a lot.

Unfortunately 21st-century American college graduates are the least educated in a century. Declining test scores illustrate this. Grade inflation and a therapeutic curriculum reflect it. The furor over implementation of BA exit exams suggests it. And employers lament it.

Universities went feral and broke their social contract. If campuses can no longer educate students, then why should they be exempt from the norms that the rest of the population must follow?

Campuses claim they are left-wing, but in fact they are no-wing: just fascist, authoritarian, infantile — and incompetent.

George W. Bush: Obama’s New Counterterrorism Guru. By Caroline B. Glick.

Obama’s new counter-terrorism guru. By Caroline B. Glick. Jerusalem Post, November 23, 2015. Also at CarolineGlick.com.

Glick:

Since the Islamic State attacks in Paris on November 13, we have seen the development of a new, and strange justification for the Obama administration’s insistent refusal to jettison its manifestly failed strategy of contending with IS specifically and with Islamic terrorism generally.

In broad terms, Obama’s strategy for dealing with radical Islamic terrorism and jihadist movements is to ignore their motivating ideologies, take minimal action to combat them, criticize other governments for failing to destroy IS and its jihadist brethren on their own, and attack Republicans for criticizing Obama’s strategy for defeating radical Islamic terrorism.

The new justification for Obama’s refusal to revise his strategy was first uttered by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton at the Democratic presidential debate on November 14. Five days later, the Democratic National Committee produced an ad attacking Republican presidential candidates based on this new rhetorical theme. Obama himself resonated the new message during his press conference in Malaysia on Sunday.

According to the new talking points, Republicans have no right to criticize Obama, or Clinton for their failure to contend with the nature of the enemy because in ignoring the enemy’s doctrine, ideology and strategic goals, they are merely following in former president George W. Bush’s footsteps.

During the Democratic presidential debate, Clinton argued that refusing to identify the radical Islamic nature of the enemy that attacked the US on September 11 and in the months and years that followed “was one of the real contributions — despite all the other problems — that George W. Bush made after 9/11, when he basically said — after going to a mosque in Washington — we are not at war with Islam or Muslims.”

In its new ad, the DNC attacks five Republican presidential candidates that have stated in recent days that radical Islam is the force that is warring against the US and its allies.

To prove that the candidates are “unpresidential,” for naming the enemy, the DNC ad includes a clip of Bush’s speeches in praise of Islam as “a religion of peace,” which he delivered in the days immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Democrats’ invocation Bush, as their counterterrorism authority and as a means to justify their refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” is more than a bit ironic, of course, since they have spent the past 14 years pillorying Bush’s counterterror policies.

But it is also extremely helpful. By aligning with Bush to justify their refusal to discuss the radical Islamic foundations of the terrorist scourge facing the free world and devouring large swathes of the Middle East, the Democrats have given us the opportunity to consider what that refusal has meant for the US’s ability to lead the free world in its war against the forces of radical Islam.

At the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and for the first five years of Bush’s war on terrorism that followed them, Michael Gerson served as Bush’s chief speechwriter. Gerson authored Bush’s statements about Islam being a religion of peace.

In November 2014, Gerson participated in a debate about the nature of Islam and the war on terror. Gerson explained that Bush’s decision to ignore the nature of the enemy emanated from a strategic calculation.

Bush believed that radical Islam was but a marginal force in the Muslim world. By embracing Islam as a whole, and insisting that the terrorists from al Qaeda and other groups did not reflect the authentic nature of Islam, Bush hoped to draw the non-radical Muslims to America’s side against the jihadists.

In Gerson’s words, “Every religious tradition has forces of tribalism and violence in its history, background and theology; and, every religious tradition has sources of respect for the other. And you emphasize, as a political leader, one at the expense of the other in the cause of democracy.”

Gerson continued, “That is a great American tradition that we have done with every religious tradition that comes to the United States — include them as part of a natural enterprise and praise them for their strongly held religious views, and emphasize those portions that are most compatible with those ideals.”

The flaws in this reasoning began surfacing immediately. When Bush made his remarks about Islam after the Sept. 11 attacks, he was flanked by Muslim leaders who were in short order exposed as terrorism apologists and financiers.

On the battlefield, by failing to acknowledge, let alone discredit the enemy’s world view, Bush made it all but impossible for Muslims who oppose radical Islam to stand up against it. After all, if the Americans didn’t think it was a problem, why would they?

Since the Americans refused to admit the existence of radical Islam, the US refused to favor non-radical forces over radical ones. And so, in the 2005 Iraqi elections, while Iran spent a fortune financing the campaigns of its supporters, the US did nothing to support the Iraqi forces that shared the US’s goal of transforming Iraq into a multi-denominational, pluralistic democracy.

The results were preordained. The elected government took its cues from Iran, and as soon as US forces withdrew from Iraq, all of America’s hard won gains were squandered. The Iraqi government became an Iranian puppet. And in areas where Iran didn’t care to assert its control, al Qaeda-aligned forces that now comprise Islamic State rose once again.

Obama’s refusal to discuss radical Islam stems from a different source than Bush’s refusal to do so. Unlike Bush’s position, Obama’s insistence that IS, al Qaeda, Hamas, Boko Haram, and their brethren have nothing to do with Islam, does owe to a strategic calculation on how to win a war. Rather, it stems from an ideological conviction that the US and the rest of the Western world have no right to cast aspersions on jihadists.

As Obama sees things, the problems in the Middle East, and the Middle Eastern terrorism plaguing the rest of the world, are the result of past Western imperialism and chauvinism. All anti-Western movements – including jihadist movements – are legitimate responses to what Obama perceives as the crime of Western power.

Obama’s peevish response to the massacre in Paris and his assaults on Republicans who argue that the religious convictions of Syrians requesting asylum in the US are relevant for determining whether or not to let them in have brought his refusal to identify the enemy to the forefront of the US debate on how to defeat IS.

This debate is clearly uncomfortable for liberal US media outlets. So they have sought to change the subject.

As the Democratic Party adopted Bush as its new counterterrorism guru, the liberal media sought to end discussion of radical Islam by castigating as bigots Republicans who speak of it. The media attempt over the weekend to claim falsely that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump called for requiring American Muslims to be registered in a national Muslim database marked such an attempt to change the subject.

The common denominator between Bush’s strategic decision to lie about the nature of the enemy, Obama’s apologetics for IS, and the media’s attempt to claim that Republicans are anti-Islamic racists is that in all cases, an attempt is being made to assert that there is no pluralism in Islam – it’s either entirely good or entirely evil.

This absolutist position is counterproductive for two reasons. First, it gets you nowhere good in the war against radical Islam. The fact is that Islam per se it is none of the US president’s business. His business is to defeat those who attack the US and to stand with America’s allies against their common foes.

Radical Islam may be a small component of Islam or a large one. But it certainly is a component of Islam. Its adherents believe they are good Muslims and they base their actions on their Islamic beliefs.

American politicians, warfighters and policymakers need to identify that form of Islam, study it and base their strategies for fighting the radical Islamic forces on its teachings.

Bush was wrong to lie about the Islamic roots of radical Islam. And his mistake had devastating strategic consequences for the world as a whole. It is fortuitous that the Clinton and the Democratic party have embraced Bush’s failed strategy of ignoring the enemy for justifying their even more extreme position. Now that they have, they have given a green light to Republicans as well as Democrats who are appalled by Obama’s apologetics for radical Islam to learn from Bush’s mistakes and craft an honest, and effective strategic approach to the challenge of radical Islam.

Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate. By Rich Lowry.

Donald Trump — The Jacksonian Candidate. By Rich Lowry. National Review Online, November 24, 2015. Also at Real Clear Politics.

Lowry:

After the Paris attack, conventional wisdom held that Republican voters would finally turn away from political outsiders and reward candidates representing sobriety and experience. No one stopped to consider that, actually, voters might be drawn to the guy who memorably said of ISIS that he would “bomb the [expletive] out of them.”

Not only has Donald Trump not been hurt by Paris, he has bumped up in the aftermath (Ben Carson, on the other hand, has indeed dropped). The cliché about Trump is that he’s defying the laws of political gravity. If Trump is cutting against the contemporary political grain — certainly, no one else could get away with being as routinely careless and insulting in his statements — he is also tapping into one of America’s deepest cultural and political wellsprings.

In large part, Donald Trump is a Jacksonian, the tradition originally associated with the Scotch-Irish heritage in America and best represented historically by the tough old bird himself, Andrew Jackson. Old Hickory might be mystified that a celebrity New York billionaire is holding up his banner (but, then again, Jackson himself was a rich planter). Trump is nonetheless a powerful voice for Jacksonian attitudes.

Historian Walter Russell Mead once wrote a memorable essay on the Jacksonianism that, so many years later, serves as a very rough guide to the anti-PC and fiercely nationalistic populism of the 2016 Trump campaign.

Trump has trampled on almost every political piety, and gotten away with it, even when he has been factually wrong or had to backtrack. “The Jacksonian hero dares to say what the people feel and defies the entrenched elites,” Mead writes. “The hero may make mistakes, but he will command the unswerving loyalty of Jacksonian America so long as his heart is perceived to be in the right place.”

Trump condemns the political system, and everyone who has thrived in it. For Jacksonians, Mead writes: “Every administration will be corrupt; every Congress and legislature will be, to some extent, the plaything of lobbyists. Career politicians are inherently untrustworthy.”

Trump is obsessed with how other countries are taking advantage of us. He is tapping into the Jacksonian fear of, in Mead’s words, politicians “either by ineptitude or wickedness serving hostile foreign interests.”

Trump is hell on criminals and unwelcoming to illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, reflecting what Mead characterizes as the Jacksonian’s “absolute and even brutal distinction drawn between the members of the community and outsiders.”

Trump never sweats the details. Jacksonians, according to Mead, believe “that while problems are complicated, solutions are simple.” In fact, the side in a public debate that “is endlessly telling you that the popular view isn’t sufficiently ‘sophisticated’ or ‘nuanced’ — that is the side that doesn’t want you to know what it is doing, and it is not to be trusted.”

Trump doesn’t believe in limited government. “Jacksonians believe that the government should do everything in its power to promote the well-being — political, moral, economic — of the folk community,” Mead writes. “Any means are permissible in the service of this end, as long as they do not violate the moral feelings or infringe on the freedoms that Jacksonians believe are essential in their daily lives.”

Trump isn’t ideologically consistent. The Jacksonian philosophy, Mead notes, “is an instinct rather than an ideology — a culturally shaped set of beliefs and emotions rather than a set of ideas.”

Finally, national honor is a paramount value for Jacksonians, a concern that can be heard in Trump’s signature promise to make America great again. He will out-bully and out-fox our adversaries and, as for ISIS, he will bomb and water-board it into submission.

It is tempting to see Donald Trump as something wholly new, the reality star who represents the merger of entertainment and popular culture. He is also something centuries old, the populist railing against a corrupt and ineffectual elite that will, through his chastisement, get the comeuppance it deserves.