Hey, Iraq, you might not want to mess with Trump!

Ian Talley in Washington and Isabel Coles in Beirut collaborated on a report for the Wall Street Journal.

The Trump administration warned Iraq this week that it risks losing access to a critical government bank account if Baghdad kicks out American forces following the U.S. airstrike that killed a top Iranian general, according to Iraqi officials.

The State Department warned that the U.S. could shut down Iraq’s access to the country’s central bank account held at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a move that could jolt Iraq’s already shaky economy, the officials said.

Iraq, like other countries, maintains government accounts at the New York Fed as an important part of managing the country’s finances, including revenue from oil sales. Loss of access to the accounts could restrict Iraq’s use of that revenue, creating a cash crunch in Iraq’s financial system and constricting a critical lubricant for the economy.

The prospect of U.S. sanctions against Iraq arose after the Jan. 3 U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. The Iraqi parliament voted Sunday to urge Prime Minister Adel Abdul-Mahdi to work toward the expulsion of the approximately 5,300 U.S. troops.

In response to the nonbinding resolution, which was backed by the prime minister, President Trump threatened to impose sanctions against Iraq if the U.S. was forced to withdraw its troops.

Read more here.

"We're not leaving until you pay us back the billions we spent!"

In News Thud, Paul Goldberg reports,

Just days after Iraqi parliament passed a bill to expel US forces, Iraqi prime minister indicated he may already be backing down, now specifying training and logistical support for the Iraqi military could stay.

President Trump warned that the United States would not leave Iraq until the country paid the United States for the military base built there.

“We have a very extraordinarily expensive airbase that’s there. It cost billions of dollars to build. Long before my time. We’re not leaving unless they pay us back for it.” Trump said.

Read more here.

Egg on their faces in the Pentagon!

In Breitbart, Joshua Caplan provides us with two updates:

Update # 1 — 4:09 P.M.: Department of Defense Secretary Mark Esper on Monday disputed a letter indicating the U.S.-led military coalition against ISIS will leave Iraq, stating there is “no decision whatsoever to leave” the country.

Update # 2 — 4:34 P.M.: Gen. Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the letter is a “mistake” and a “poorly” worded draft. He added it was being worked on with Iraq and reiterated that U.S. troops will remain in the country.

Read more here.

Something is happening in Iraq. Maybe an invasion from Iran?

Something is happening in Iraq. Maybe an invasion from Iran? Instapundit links here.

Over 70 people dead in Iraq

Over 70 people are dead in Iraq after clashes between citizens and law enforcement. The BBC explains why this is happening (but no reporter signed his or her name to the report).

Corruption, unemployment and poor public services are at the heart of the discontent faced by young Iraqis today. The unrest began spontaneously with no formal leadership in mostly Shia areas in the south, and quickly spread.

Iraq has the fourth-largest reserves of oil, but 22.5% of its population of 40 million were living on less than $1.90 (£1.53) a day in 2014, according to the World Bank. One in six households has experienced some form of food insecurity.

The unemployment rate was 7.9% last year, but among young people it was double that. And almost 17% of the economically active population is underemployed.

...The country is also struggling to recover after a brutal war against the Islamic State group, which seized control of large swathes of the north and west in 2014.

Living conditions remain dire in many conflict-affected areas, with insufficient services.

Read more here.

War zones

ISIl almost gone, so what now in Iraq?

Strategy Page reports on Iraq and Iran.

...Iran has reserves of 158 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia 266 billion and Venezuela 300 billion. These four nations have the largest reserves which are about 60 percent of the world total. What is keeping the world oil price low is fracking. That new American technology is making much more oil and gas available and it is expected that the U.S. and Canada will soon have “proven reserves” equaling a third of the current world total. The fall in oil prices since 2013 (from over $100 a barrel to as low as $30) has cut foreign currency reserves to about $48 billion, compared to $53 billion in mid-2016. The ISIL crisis has forced Iraq to be more prudent with its finances, and government operations in general. The Americans are no longer being blamed for all that goes wrong. Taking responsibility does indeed make it easier to deal with problems.

...Some problems are particularly difficult to deal with. The Iraqi Kurds still control the northern provinces they have held since the early 1990s and are threatening civil (and guerilla) war if the federal government does not control (preferably expel) the growing number of Iranians (mainly Quds Force personnel) and curb the power of the Iran backed Shia militias. It’s not just the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs who fear the Iranian influence. Most Iraqis do, including most Shia Arabs.

The PMF (Popular Mobilization Force) militias were organized in 2014 after the Iraqi army fell apart in the face of the ISIL advance that took Mosul and about a third of Iraq in a few months. By late 2016 p arliament passed (after much Iranian pressure) a law making the PMF a part of the armed forces. These militiamen were already on the government payroll (for about $500 a month). Now the militia leaders were demanding a share of the military budget and enough money (nearly half a billion dollars to start with) to build their own bases. That did not happen and it reminded all Iraqis what the Iranians were up to. The signs were already there. By 2015 there were about 100,000 of these largely Shia militia and they were already a contentious issue in Iraq.

...The Iraqi Shia Arabs don’t want to be dominated by non-Arab Iran (where Arabs are openly despised, especially the few percent of Iranians who are Arab) but also don’t want to be dominated by their Sunni Arab neighbors and especially not by their own Sunni Arab minority (which created ISIL and has been a major supporter of Islamic terrorism since 2003).

...the IRGC is quite open about what they are doing to encourage Iraqi Shia to organize armed groups so they can work with Iran someday to impose the same kind of religious dictatorship in Iraq that has existed in Iran since the 1980s. That is equally unlikely (because of popular opposition inside Iraq) but the Iranians tend to think long-term.

...There are still over a thousand Iranians providing training, advisory and support assistance to the PMF Shia militias. The Iraqi government fears that these IRGC advisors and trainers are secretly building pro-Iran armed militias in Iraq. That’s simply not true because the IRGC is quite open about what they are doing to encourage Iraqi Shia to organize armed groups so they can work with Iran someday to impose the same kind of religious dictatorship in Iraq that has existed in Iran since the 1980s. That is equally unlikely (because of popular opposition inside Iraq) but the Iranians tend to think long-term.

...October 22, 2017: American and Arab officials from Iraq, Saudi Arabia and several other Gulf Arab states gathered in the Saudi capital for the first meeting of the Saudi-Iraqi Bilateral Coordination Council. This is part of an effort to enable Iraq to more easily participate in Saudi and Gulf Arab economic ventures. The Iraqi prime minister attended the meeting. The question of how to handle an increasingly ambitious and aggressive Iran was not an official part of the agenda but was a frequently discussed item between American and Arab officials. The American Secretary of State was trying to encourage Arab unity. At the moment Qatar and Iraq are increasingly dependent on Iran, as Syria has been since the 1980s. Iran is trying to expand its power and influence “for the good of Islam” as well as potential economic benefits to everyone. But Iran also proclaims (loudly and constantly) that America and Israel must be destroyed because, according the Iran, these America and Israel are the cause of all the woes in the Middle East. Most Arab states used to at least give lip service to that but attitudes have changed in the last two decades and now most Arabs see Iran as the threat while the Americans and Israelis are useful allies. Meanwhile American efforts to get Qatar and the rest of the Gulf Arab states to settle their differences are not progressing. Qatar grows closer to Iran but wants to avoid becoming too dependent on Iran.

Read more here.

War zones

How Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton lost 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Nations in the Middle East that once aligned with America are now indifferent. Interests who opposed the United States grow defiant. Fence-sitting countries that calibrated their policies to the perception of U.S. strength are leaning toward our adversaries. Chaos is the result.

...The American estrangement from the Gulf States is a result of near U.S. independence in gas and oil production, the collapse of the global oil market, and the Obama administration’s tilt toward Iran. That American realignment was interpreted in the Gulf as staged indifference to radical Shiite efforts to undermine the Gulf Sunni monarchies. Most Sunni states are prepping for the likelihood of a new Middle-East arms race in a soon to be nuclear neighborhood.

The only upside is an emerging de facto alliance between Israel and the so-called moderate Arab monarchies. That odd coupling assumes that Iran threatens both more than they do each other, and that the United States is no longer a reliable patron to either.

...Three landmark events over the last four years fueled the general Middle East chaos.

The Libya Disaster
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, UN Ambassador Susan Rice, and National Security Council staffer Samantha Power all pushed for an easy air campaign against Libya. The Obama administration had recently been flummoxed by unrest in Egypt and embarrassed by its disastrous tilt toward Mohamed Morsi, who by spring 2012 had sought to manipulate democratic elections as a means of turning Egypt into an Islamic state.

Yet Libya’s strongman Moammar Khadafy was a monster in rehabilitation, slowly passing power over to his Westernized progeny. That fact was ignored by the administration. Almost everything imaginable went wrong after the United States began bombing Libya. The U.S. violated UN resolutions to limit its intervention to no-fly zones and humanitarian assistance. Instead, it provided close air support to anti-Khadafy insurrectionists. Yet the administration had no intention of filling the void after the collapse of the Khadafy government.

The logical consequence of America’s bomb-and-run Libyan policy was a terrorist wasteland, an ISIS recruiting ground, the Benghazi disaster—with the ensuing wages of scandal and disinformation that continue to this day. Unwise chest-pounding such as “lead from behind,” Secretary Clinton’s crude Caesarian boast over Khadafy’s corpse (“We came, we saw, he died”), her later callous quip “what difference does it make” in congressional testimony about the American dead, and the scapegoating and jailing of a U.S.-resident video maker—these all became iconic of the entire sordid mess.

The Iraq Withdrawal
...the abrupt disappearance of thousands of American peacekeepers—40,000 were still posted there in midsummer 2011—created a catastrophic void.

...Disaffected Sunnis and scattered al Qaedists reformulated under the new ISIS brand—exploiting the furor at Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government. Without U.S. troops, Maliki had sensed no more pressure to honor commitments to the Sunni minority or to the Kurds, and thus invited in Iranian interests, essentially destroying the Iraqi military.

Obama seemed stunned by the sudden implosion of Iraq. At first in denial, he serially dismissed ISIS for the next two years, even as it insidiously carved up the Syrian-Iraq borderlands. In an infamous January 2014 interview, Obama assured the New Yorker that ISIS was a mere jayvee team: “The analogy we use around here sometimes, and I think is accurate, is if a jayvee team puts on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

In short order, an abandoned Iraq became what South Korea probably would have looked like in 1955—had an opportunistic President Eisenhower, up for reelection in 1956, sought to blame the war on Harry Truman’s unwise intervention years earlier, and had he promised to yank out all U.S. troops from the DMZ.

Empty Redlines to Syria
The third milestone was the “red line” ultimatum to Syria’s President Bashar Assad to cease using weapons of mass destruction or face U.S. bombs. As Obama put it in August 2012, in the final stretch of his reelection campaign: “A red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation… We have communicated in no uncertain terms with every player in the region that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front or the use of chemical weapons.”

When Bashar Assad—who had been ordered earlier by Obama to abdicate—used chemical weapons, Obama abruptly called off promised air strikes. Worse, Obama almost immediately denied that he had ever set a red line in the first place. On September 4, he instead blamed the United Nations and Congress for putting him on the spot: “First of all, I didn’t set a red line; the world set a red line. The world set a red line… Congress set a red line when it ratified that treaty. Congress set a red line…”

Obama appeared stunned by the notion that Assad unexpectedly had called his bluff—thus forcing an anti-war, Nobel Peace Prize laureate to preempt and bomb Syria right before the election. Yet Obama was also worried that his failure to back up his own ultimatums might confirm to the electorate perceptions of impotence.

The net result of talking loudly while carrying a twig was that friends in the region no longer counted on American assurances. Enemies sought to escalate their provocations without worrying about the consequences. Observers saw all three disastrous decisions as amateurish political miscalculations, cynically intended to win Obama dividends in the upcoming reelection bid.

In short, 70 years of American postwar deterrence in the Middle East was lost, and we have yet to see the end of the frightening consequences.

Read more here.

Are we really now adopting the 2003 MoveOn.org theory of the Iraq war?

Aco of Spades writes,

...the reason we all thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs is that we heard it from four different presidents, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and then Bush the Younger, and in fact we know he actually used them during Reagan's term (against Iran) and the Elder Bush's term (against his own people, or, rather, the Kurds, whom he ruled, but considered to be subhuman).

There was a 60 Minutes episode about the after-effects of a Hussein bombing of a Kurdish town with VX nerve agent. It was pretty horrifying to see young men, hopping around, palsied, scorched by permanent nerve damage, now turned into shambling, quivering spastics by Hussein's VX.

Read more here.

Why is Putin in the Middle East? The enemy of your enemy can also be your enemy!

Russian leader Vladimir Putin and President Obama in Antalya, Turkey, Nov. 16. Photo: pool/Reuters

Remember Garry Kasparov, the brilliant Russian chess player? Wikipedia tells us,

Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on 10 March 2005, after which he devoted his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration and policies of Vladimir Putin.

Kasparov has written an important article today in The Wall Street Journal in which he asserts,

The U.S. and its allies can defeat ISIS. Joining with Putin, Assad and Iran’s regime would be immoral.

Three days after coordinated terror attacks in Paris killed at least 129 people and put the lie to President Obama’s recent claim that Islamic State was “contained,” Mr. Obama took to the podium on Monday. Speaking from Antalya, Turkey, where he was attending a G-20 meeting, he threw the full weight of his rhetoric behind solidarity with France and behind the French military response against Islamic State, or ISIS. But he offered no policy changes. In other words, once again America is leading from behind.

Mr. Obama’s remarks in Turkey came after he sat down for an impromptu discussion with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who has shipped troops and military hardware to Syria to prop up the Bashar Assad regime and to produce desperately needed new war propaganda back home. A suggestion gaining currency in recent days—encouraged by the Putin-Obama photo op—that the U.S. and NATO cooperate with Mr. Putin against ISIS is ludicrous on many levels. The most obvious one being that Russian forces aren’t in Syria to fight ISIS.

Even after the death of 224 people—most of them Russian tourists—in the Oct. 31 Metrojet crash in Egypt that was almost certainly an ISIS terror bombing, Mr. Putin remains focused on his goals. He is in Syria to help Iran and Mr. Assad destroy any legitimate alternatives to the status quo. What is that status quo? The Assad regime and its Iranian backers controlling the region by force.

The Kremlin also wants to maintain a stream of Syrian refugees pouring into Europe. The migrant crisis is useful to Mr. Putin in two ways. It distracts European attention from his continuing military campaign against Ukraine. And the flood of refugees will enhance the fortunes of far-right European parties that openly embrace Mr. Putin, increasing pressure on the European Union to lift sanctions against Russia. If one of the terrorists in the Paris attack slipped into Europe with Syrian refugees, so much the better.

President Obama and other Western leaders desperate to resolve the conflict in Syria should keep in mind that the enemy of your enemy can also be your enemy. For the U.S. and the West, allying with Iran, Mr. Putin’s Russia and the Assad regime would be morally repugnant, strategically disastrous and entirely unnecessary. The immorality of such an alliance is self-evident: The U.S. officially designates Iran and Syria as state sponsors of terror.

The argument in favor of such an alliance cites the World War II precedent that the Allies joined Stalin to defeat Hitler. The comparison is inapt. First, NATO doesn’t need the help of Mr. Putin or Iran to defeat ISIS; NATO simply needs the resolve to do it. Second, such an alliance would only undermine the effort. Seeing the U.S. working with Mr. Assad and the Shiites of Iran—who essentially control Baghdad, too—would further convince the region’s Sunnis that they have no choice but to turn to ISIS for protection.

Americans above all should realize the importance of the Sunnis. The 2007 U.S. military surge in Iraq was so successful because it included the protection and recruitment of Sunni tribes to fight Sunni extremists. The Obama administration’s hasty exit from Iraq left the Sunnis at the mercy of a hostile Shiite government in Baghdad. Conditions were made ripe for the rise of Islamic State.

Even with France’s stepped-up bombing campaign against ISIS in Syria, and U.S. vows to intensify its own bombing effort, the fact remains: You can’t win hearts and minds from 30,000 feet. The problem with an air-power-only offensive is not only that you don’t always kill the right people, but that you can’t protect anyone. The people of Syria and Iraq need the protection and stability that will starve ISIS of its main source of recruits. No bombs, whether American or French, can provide that. Airstrikes will inspire as many ISIS volunteers as they kill, while also creating countless new refugees. Destroying infrastructure makes the refugees’ eventual return less likely.

“Boots on the ground” is the phrase that must never be mentioned, but mention it we must. Anything less than a major U.S. and NATO-led ground offensive against ISIS will be a guarantee of continued failure and more terror attacks in the West. It is immoral to continue putting civilians—Syrian and Western alike—instead of soldiers on the front line against terrorists.

Pacifying the region and protecting its people from the predation of terrorists and brutal dictatorships is the only path left. It is also the only way to ever repatriate the millions of refugees the Syrian civil war has created. We must support these people now, not watch from afar as they are slaughtered and enslaved, paying attention only when the horror makes its way into our capitals. Our fate is tied to theirs.

Heartfelt expressions of solidarity and candlelight vigils for the victims won’t stop ISIS unless that goodwill is turned to action. Playing defense is hopeless. The world today is too small, the threats too big. The only solution is to fight the problem at its source. You cannot have liberté, égalité, fraternité without sécurité.

h/t American Power

Iran, Russia, Syria, and Iraq form joint war room

Adam Kredo reports at Washington Free Beacon that Iran is warning the US that it has missilespointed at US targets.

The threats of attack on the United States were issued as Iran unveiled new high-tech torpedoes and the formation of a joint war room along with Russia, Syria, and Iraq.

...The Pentagon confirmed to the Washington Free Beacon last month that Iranian warships confront the U.S. Navy on a “daily basis.”

Meanwhile, Iran unveiled a new high-tech torpedo that it claims can hit targets both in and out of the water. The technology for the missile has been borrowed from the Russians, according to Iranian officials who spoke to Fars.

Read more here.

What should we do?

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

Putin, with China’s indulgence, is obviously attempting to fortify a sphere of anti-American influence across the Middle East. Anti-Americanism in this Islamic-supremacist region long predates Putin, of course. What has changed is that the United States is governed by a man of the hard Left — a president who is sympathetic to the Islamist narrative about American imperialism, ambivalent at best about American power, and determined to diminish America’s regional commitments, and thus American influence.

...Obama, however, is different. He was going to befriend the Islamists by paying homage to the Islamists . . . and then leaving them to their savagery and dysfunction without American interference. This would be fine if (a) the United States had no vital interests at stake, and (b) Obama had not executed this strategy by materially supporting the ascendance of Iran, the jihadist revolutionary state that is America’s mortal enemy.

Obama’s fantasy world, in which Iran is a potential ally and Russia a potentially stabilizing influence, created the opportunity for Putin to move in. He loves to humiliate Obama, so he is having his moment now. It should be remembered, however, that the Soviet Union, though far mightier than the pale imitation that is Putin’s basket-case, was devastated by its failed invasion of Afghanistan. That was a less ambitious project than the one today’s Russia appears to have set upon.

Clearly, there is some real upside for Putin in this. It is an object lesson to the Baltic states that Putin covets: The United States is unwilling to fight so take no comfort in NATO’s empty security guarantee. But for Putin, propping up Assad by making his bed with the snakes in Tehran is no sure thing. If the Kremlin found Afghan jihadists to be a problem, wait until it experiences the pain the more formidable al-Qaeda and ISIS can inflict.

...the backbone of Assad’s opposition has always been Islamist: the Muslim Brotherhood and the even more extreme jihadists with whom they seamlessly make common cause. They are not moderates; they want to overthrow Iran’s despicable cat’s paw, Assad, in order to do to Syria what the Brotherhood tried to do to Egypt — and what Islamists have done to Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, etc.

It is not true that Obama failed to back the Syrian “rebels.” In fact, after the mutual Obama-Beltway GOP strategy of siding with Islamists against Qaddafi blew up on us in Libya, a reprise was attempted in Syria. Alas, the “rebels” we backed kept aligning with the jihadists (just as they did in Libya); the weapons we gave them kept ending up in jihadist hands. That was not just because the “rebels” were insufficiently “vetted”; it was because there was no way to overthrow Assad without the Islamists’ playing a major role — and, probably, a leading role.

This contributed to the ascendancy of ISIS, but was not the cause of that ascendancy. The cause is the dominant regional culture — Islamic supremacism. If Washington won’t face up to that fact, then it will of course continue strengthening our enemies in the delusional hope that they will someday become our friends.

Then, to make matters worse, Washington forgot that it had gotten enmeshed in Syria in order to oust Assad. Obama desperately wanted his deal with Iran, which wanted Assad left alone. So the Syria misadventure turned on a dime from targeting Assad on behalf of Sunni Islamists and jihadists to targeting Sunni jihadists — ISIS — to the benefit of Assad. Does anyone wonder why the U.S. has no credibility in the region?

Our interests in the region are to defeat both Russia/Iran/Assad and ISIS/al-Qaeda/Muslim Brotherhood.

...Our vital interest in Syria (and Iraq and elsewhere, for that matter) is to prevent its being used as a platform for the launching of attacks against the United States, our allies, and our interests. Moreover, this, it is crucial to remember, is an American problem.

That means it is going to take a large commitment of American forces on the ground as well as in the air to achieve our vital interests. But there is no political support for that in our country at the moment. That, no doubt, is why a candidate like Marco Rubio, who is smart enough to see the writing on the wall, seems reluctant to come out and say it.

Even if there were political support for using American force, it would be a losing cause to take up unless and until we finally start seeing Iran the way Iran sees us: as the enemy.

There are not good guys and bad guys in this equation. There are bad guys and other bad guys. And quelling the threat these bad guys collectively pose to the United States is our responsibility — not something we should do out of humanitarian concern for Middle Easterners, or because we are somehow obliged to slake their purported thirst for freedom.

Make no mistake, though: This challenge is not going away. The threat to our national security posed by radical Islam — both the Sunni and the Shiite varieties, plus their state sponsors — is intensifying. It will have to be dealt with, hopefully before it deals with us in a catastrophic way.

Read more here.

Miscalculated

Jennifer Griffin reports for Fox News on an exit interview given by Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, weeks away from retirement after 39 years in uniform.

The Army’s top officer told Fox News Tuesday it’s “frustrating” to watch the gains he helped achieve in Iraq disintegrate at the hands of the Islamic State, saying in an exit interview that the chaos now unfolding “might have been prevented” had the U.S. stayed more engaged.

“It's frustrating to watch it,” Odierno said. “I go back to the work we did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 and we got it to a place that was really good. Violence was low, the economy was growing, politics looked like it was heading in the right direction.”

...Odierno, though, is most worried about the deep cuts to the Army over the past four years – from 570,000 troops in 2010 to near 490,000 today, a reduction of 14 percent. And the cuts are getting deeper.

“In my mind, we don't have the ability to deter. The reason we have a military is to deter conflict and prevent wars. And if people believe we are not big enough to respond, they miscalculate,” Odierno said.

...While Odierno says he supports the recently announced nuclear deal with Iran, he warned that Iran will not change its behavior in the region.

“Iran has continued to do malign activities throughout the Middle East [and] they will continue,” warned Odierno, who blamed Iran for contributing to the unraveling of Iraq and the rise of ISIS.

Read more here.

"No complete strategy" to combat the Islamic State

Al Weaver reports in The Daily Caller on this exchange on Fox News between host Bret Baier and Dr. Charles Krauthammer:

Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer had some fun with President Barack Obama’s Monday statement that there is no “complete strategy” to combat ISIS in the Middle East.

Appearing on “Special Report,” Krauthammer told host Bret Baier that Obama committed a Michael Kinsley gaffe, saying that he “occasionally stumbles on the truth.” The conservative commentator also wondered how, in pure amazement, people could actually believe Obama has a strategy when he says he indeed does not at this point.

BRET BAIER: Is this a traditional Washington gaffe, the Michael Kinsley gaffe?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Obama occasionally stumbles on the truth and this is a Kinsley gaffe in which he said the truth. 71 percent of Americans knew it even before he said it. You have to wonder what are the other 19 percent thinking who think he has a strategy when he admits he doesn’t.

John McCain had the best line. He said when Obama says he doesn’t have a complete strategy, perhaps he will tell us what his incomplete strategy — a partial strategy, any idea of a strategy is and the answer is there’s nothing here. The reason is Obama’s entire strategy rests on the notion that trained Iraqis under this government are going to carry the fight to ISIS. They tried it in Mosul. They tried it in Ramadi, in Fallujah, and they keep — as General Dempsey said, they weren’t driven out of Ramadi. They drove out of Ramadi! The idea that it’s a lack of training — it’s obviously what [Secretary of Defense] Ashton Carter said, a lack of will.

Obama delicately said we have a focus problem. The Iraqis — they are not ready, they are not trainable, they are not showing up to be recruited, and they have to be more focused — focused for it to work. Can you imagine FDR saying, you know, the problem with allies against Hitler is the Russians and the British are is they are not focused on the war against Germany. this is a country that was abandoned by Obama in 2011, and threw in its lot with other players, and now we are trying to reclaim that. It cannot be done.

In the Middle East, the time of the True Believers appears at hand.

So writes Patrick J. Buchanan at CNS News. Buchanan analyzes who has the will to fight, and who does not.

In almost all of the wars in which we have been engaged, those we back have superior training, weapons and numbers. Yet, for whatever makes men willing to fight and die, or volunteer for martyrdom, the Islamic State, al-Qaida, and the Taliban have found the formula, while our allies have not.

To be a martyr for Allah, to create a new caliphate, to expel the infidels and their puppets, these are causes Islamic man will die for. This is what ISIS has on offer. And the offer is finding buyers even in the West.

What do we have on offer? What do we have to persuade Iraqi Sunnis to fight to return their Anbar homeland to the Iranian-backed Shiite regime in Baghdad?

Of our Arab allies, the Qataris, Saudis and Gulf Arabs are willing to do air strikes. And the Kurds will fight -- for Kurdistan.

But if the future belongs to those willing to fight and die for it, or to volunteer to become martyrs, the future of the Middle East would seem fated to be decided by Sunni tribesmen, Shiite militia, ISIS and al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

In the Middle East, the time of the True Believers appears at hand.

Read more here.

The new normal

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

For a time, reset, concessions, and appeasement work to delay wars. But finally, nations wake up, grasp their blunders, rearm, and face down enemies.

...Hitler figured that for a decade America had been unarmed and isolationist. Britain repeatedly had appeased the Third Reich. The Soviets initially collaborated with Hitler.

...Hitler met no opposition after militarizing the Rhineland. He annexed Austria with impunity. He gobbled up Czechoslovakia without opposition. Why shouldn’t Hitler have been stunned in 1939 when exasperated Britain and France finally declared war over his invasion of distant Poland? Six years of war and some 60 million dead followed, re-establishing what should have been the obvious fact that democracies would not quite commit suicide.

By 1979, the Jimmy Carter administration had drastically cut the defense budget. Carter promised that he would make human rights govern American foreign policy. It sounded great to Americans after Vietnam — and even greater to America’s enemies. Then Iran imploded. The American embassy in Tehran was stormed. Diplomats were taken hostage. Radical Islamic terrorism spread throughout the Middle East. Communist insurrection followed throughout Central America. The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. China went into Vietnam. Dictators such as the Soviet Union’s Leonid Brezhnev and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini assumed that Carter no longer was willing to protect the U.S. postwar order. Or perhaps they figured that the inexperienced American president was too weak to respond even had he wished to do so.

Then, Ronald Reagan defeated Carter in 1980 on the promise of restoring U.S. power. At first, both America’s friends and enemies were aghast at Reagan’s simplistic worldview that free markets were better than Communism, that democracy was superior to dictatorship, and that in the ensuring struggle, the West would win and the rest would lose.

Barack Obama, like Carter, came into office promising a sharp break from past U.S foreign policy. The public was receptive after the costly wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the recent financial meltdown on Wall Street.

Troops were withdrawn from Afghanistan on pre-announced deadlines. The post-surge quiet in Iraq fooled Obama into eagerly yanking out all U.S. peacekeepers. A new outreach to radical Islam went to ridiculous lengths. The Muslim Brotherhood was invited to Obama’s speech in Cairo that claimed the West owed cultural debts to Islam for everything from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.

Terms like radical Islam, jihad, and Islamic terror were excised from the official American vocabulary and replaced by a host of silly euphemisms. In symbolic tours, Obama offered apologies for past American behavior in the Middle East and Asia. He bowed to both theocratic sheiks and the Asian monarchs. The defense budget was cut. Reset with Vladimir Putin’s Russia assumed that the Bush administration, not Putin’s prior aggression in Georgia and threats to Crimea, had caused the estrangement between Moscow and Washington.

Predictable chaos followed as the U.S. became an observer abroad. The Islamic State appeared to fill the vacuum in Iraq. Syria imploded. So did most of North Africa. Iran sent agents, surrogates, and special forces into Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, even as it pressed on to get a bomb.

China stepped up its violations of the waters and airspace of America’s traditional Asian allies. Putin did the same in Eastern and Northern Europe.

By 2015, America’s enemies had created chaos and defined it as the new normal.

The next president will face a terrible dilemma. To restore order, he or she will have to convince our allies that we are recommitted to their security.

Any red lines issued will have to be enforced. Aggressors such as Russia, China, Iran, and the Islamic State will have to be warned to cease and desist or face pushback from far stronger U.S.-led coalitions. Just as Reagan’s return to normal U.S. foreign policy was considered radical after the Carter years, so too the next administration will be smeared as dangerously provocative after Obama’s recession from the world stage.

The Obama foreign policy cannot continue much longer without provoking even more chaos or a large war. Yet correcting it will be nearly as dangerous. Jumping off the global tiger is dangerous, but climbing back on will seem riskier.

Read more here.

A not uncatastrophic president

White House press secretary Josh Earnest now admits,

There were clearly, as the Iraqis have indicated, some military command and planning problems that occurred. And we saw a pretty effective tactic used by ISIL. And all of that led to a not unsubstantial setback in Ramadi."

To which Ace of Spades adds, using the White House's own

passive-voice-style double-negative construction, Obama is a not uncatastrophic president.

it has to be noted that the Obama Team's first, best, and only response to any failure is to claim that it's someone else's fault.

The only thing this Administration actually does is shift blame.

Now, we could talk about why American planes are only making thirteen airstrikes a day in Iraq and Syria. (For comparison, we made 800 per day in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and more than 1300 per day in Desert Storm.)

We could ask, if the US is only bringing air power to this fight, why we are bringing so damned little of it-- almost as if Obama wants to be seen as if he's "trying something," but in fact is set upon losing the war (as usual).

Such talk would bother Obama, who has maintained, since he came into office, that he has not made a single mistake, except for failing sometimes to communicate how awesome his decisions and policies are. (No really -- the press was always asking Bush if he made mistakes. They've only asked Obama a couple of times, and Obama always says no, not one mistake, but he allows his communications may be better.)

So the Iraq forces just lost a major town, and the US forces were doing, basically, doodly-squat while it happened.

So of course Team Obama must go into overdrive insulting the Iraqis.

...The only wars this administration cares about are publicity wars.

Ace links to an editorial in the Washington Free Beacon in which Aaron Maclean concludes,

The only thing being degraded in the campaign against the Islamic State is American prestige.

Read more here.

War still raging in Afghanistan and Iraq

Robert Tracinski writes in The Federalist,

President Obama’s Memorial Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery contained an odd and disturbing message.

The president proclaimed this year’s ceremony to be “especially meaningful” because “Today is the first Memorial Day in 14 years that the United States is not engaged in a major ground war.” How so? “It is the first since our war in Afghanistan came to an end.”

Except that it hasn’t. Certainly, nobody told the Taliban that the war “came to an end.” I hope no one will try to tell that to our Afghan allies, either, since we’re depending on them to keep fighting after we’ve bugged out.

...what’s odd about Obama’s message is that it sounds almost triumphalist. It is offered up as if he is proclaiming a new era of peace—while the peace our servicemen gave their lives to achieve is actually crumbling at an accelerating pace.

Certainly, this must be something of a bitter Memorial Day for a many of the troops who served in Iraq. The crucial victory in that war was the battle for Anbar province and its capital of Ramadi in 2007, a historic victory in one of the most successful counter-insurgency campaigns ever fought. So it must be a tough moment for veterans of that campaign to see ISIS hoisting its black flag over Ramadi.

There are good men who gave their lives, or left behind an arm or a leg, to keep Islamic terrorists from establishing a home base in Iraq. Having achieved that victory, they then had to watch as it was all thrown away.

...it is disturbing to see the president touting the peace that we are supposedly enjoying after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have “come to an end.” That’s an appropriately passive expression, since President Obama can’t say that we’ve won those wars, only that they have “come to an end”—and only for us. I should also add: and only for now.

It’s one thing to celebrate the end of fighting when the war has been won on terms that secure a lasting peace. In that case, you are paying tribute to what our troops achieved when they risked their lives to protect us. But to applaud the fact that our men and women are out of the fight and standing on the sidelines, while the war is still raging and we’ve lost most of the strategic gains that they won, seems to imply that their deaths were unnecessary after all. They gave their lives for a strategic goal the current administration finds so unimportant that it’s not willing to take decisive action to defend it.

What should worry us is the time frame Obama cites since the last time we didn’t have a ground war: 14 years. What was happening fourteen years ago? Yes, that’s right. We were headed into the summer of 2001 blissfully unprepared, and our leaders were already ignoring a radical Islamic state that provided a base of operations for a jihadist terror group that had launched attacks on US targets and was vowing bigger operations. Returning to those pre-9/11 conditions is hardly something to celebrate.

It’s not that anyone should enjoy the idea of sending US ground troops back into harm’s way again. We would all be better off if the administration had exercised greater caution and vigor in protecting the gains our troops had already won. What’s tragic is that the administration is so eager to proclaim wars are over just because we walked away from them for a while—and that we’ll probably have to go back in again and pay for the same real estate twice.

Read more here.

"Knowing what you know now..."

Steve Huntley writes at Real Clear Politics that

the ISIS crisis, Russia’s interference in Ukraine, the festering Libya dilemma, the loss of U.S. credibility in the Middle East and other of today’s headaches are the result of decisions made when Clinton served in the Obama administration.

She is, in effect, running for president on the premise that she is the best person to clean up the foreign policy mess that she is in no small measure responsible for.

...Republican presidential candidates keeping running into the The Question: “Knowing what you know now, would you have invaded Iraq in 2003?” Democrats love it, viewing the answers by GOP leaders as in some way repudiating a Republican president. Still, Democrats might not be so enthusiastic if that type of question were asked Hillary Clinton.

And there are a lot of that type of questions for the all-but-anointed Democrat presidential nominee.

For starters, as a number of Republicans have wondered, why not ask her this one: Knowing what you know now about the rise of the Islamic State and its conquest of Ramadi and other victories in Iraq, would you have pulled out all U.S. troops from Iraq in 2011 against the recommendation of military advisers?

Then, there’s this one: Knowing what you know now about Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression against Ukraine, would you have gone ahead with the “reset” with Russia?

Or, knowing what you know now about the terrorist attack that killed four Americans in Benghazi, would you have rejected requests for more security for the U.S. ambassador to Libya? And would you have blamed an Internet video for the killings?

Speaking of Libya, Mrs. Clinton, knowing now about the chaos, strife and terrorism engulfing the country, would you have overthrown dictator Moammar Gadhafi?

And knowing about what Human Rights Watch calls the “contraction of democratic space and respect for fundamental human rights” in Myanmar, would you have become in 2011 the first U.S. official to visit the country in half a century, lifted most sanctions and allocated foreign aid to the country once called Burma? Myanmar policy was termed by Foreign Policy to be the “crowning achievement” of Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, but became, the magazine said last year, “Hillary’s Burma problem.”

Read more here.