Detached from reality

Here is the statement of Arkansas senator Tom Cotton re: Obama's speech tonight:

“President Obama is a wartime president who doesn't seem to realize it. Fourteen Americans were slaughtered by Islamic terrorists, but the President is dangerously detached from reality, lecturing us about political correctness and ineffective gun control. Radical Islamic jihadists are not contained and are advancing on every front—killing innocent civilians from California to Paris to Mali, blowing an airplane out of the sky in Egypt, and inflaming the entire Middle East from Tehran. Imagine if these terrorists get their hands on uranium instead of gunpowder. Radical Islam is at war with America; our only choice is to win or lose, and the longer we debate whether we’re at war, the closer we come to losing it. One cannot help but wonder how many more Americans will die before President Obama recognizes this fundamental truth. He must implement a real strategy to defeat the Islamic State and remove Bashar al-Assad, take the handcuffs off our military in Iraq and Syria, and restore and strengthen vital intelligence programs. We needed to hear from the president tonight how to win this war. But we only heard how we will continue losing it.”

Islamic State terrorists entering Europe

Bill Gertz writes at the Free Beacon,

The Pentagon’s Joint Staff warned in a recent intelligence briefing that Islamic State terrorists are entering Europe “mostly unimpeded,” according to defense officials.

...According to the International Organization for Migration, a Geneva group, a total of 868,282 migrants have reached Europe since January, most of them through Greece from Turkey.

On Sunday, European and Turkish leaders concluded an agreement that seeks to reduce the refugee flow. Europe will provide $3.2 billion in aid in return for tightening its borders from the refugee outflow. Some 2 million Syrians fled to Turkey as a result of the conflict.

Turkish authorities detained 1,300 migrants on Monday, a sign of the new policy, Agence France Presse reported from Istanbul.

President Obama has accused Republicans of Islamophobia and charged them with being “scared” of refugees from Syria. He also said anti-immigration sentiment was fueling terrorism.

...Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has introduced legislation that would bar any refugee from a country with territory controlled in substantial part by the Islamic State, al Qaeda, or other designated terrorists.

...The military intelligence assessment follows the Nov. 13 terrorist attack in Paris that investigators say involved one Islamic State terrorist who infiltrated Europe through Greece by posing as a refugee.

...According to European authorities, the Islamic State also obtained passport-production machinery and stamps used to validate them. The passports have been sold to smugglers in Turkey, who have sold them to Syrian refugees.

Read more here.
H/t David Adams

Going where Obama has not

French jets took off a week ago for Raqqa,

the Islamic State group's de-facto capital in Syria on Sunday night, destroying a jihadi training camp and a munitions dump in the city of Raqqa. (Nov. 15)

From AP

ISIS planning attacks Sunday?

David Gilbert reports at International Business Times that a hactivist group calling themselves Anonymous released information to the FBI and CIA, as well as foreign intelligence agencies, that the Islamic State is planning attacks Sunday at a WWE event in Atlanta, three events in Paris, one in Indonesia, one in Rome, one in Milan, and one in Lebanon. Anonymous later backed off the claims, perhaps because they are worried about being attacked themselves by the Islamic State.

Anonymous declared war on the Islamic State group last week, vowing to track it down online as part of its Operation Paris (or OpParis). It has since released a guide for all those looking to take part in the operation, which already has identified tens of thousands of Twitter accounts it said are associated with the militant group while also taking some websites offline. The Islamic State group has responded to the threat by Anonymous, warning of a retaliatory attack on the activist group.

Read more here.

It's not ISIS that gets Obama angry; it's those in America who criticize his policies!

Michael Barone notes in National Review that in Obama's

self-described goal, “to degrade and ultimately destroy,” the word “ultimately” looms uncomfortably large. Most Americans want people who behead Americans destroyed considerably sooner than that. They wonder why the world’s greatest military can’t do that.

Such action, Obama suggested, might be bad public relations. ISIS has “a twisted ideology” and we play into its “narrative” by treating it as a state and using “routine military tactics.” ISIS “does not represent Islam” and treating it as a “Muslim problem” will lead to “greater recruitment into terrorist organizations over time.” It’s not clear why the significant minority of Muslims with positive feelings to ISIS will accept an American president’s definition of their faith.

“A political solution is the only way to end the war in Syria,” he said, looking forward to negotiations between Syrian factions, encouraged that “countries on all sides of the Syrian conflict agree on a process that is needed to end this war.” But he felt obliged to acknowledge continuing disagreements over “the fate of Bashar Assad” — no small item.

He described Americans who counsel a different course as “folks (who) want to pop off” and who think their advisers are better than the Joint Chiefs or soldiers on the ground. This ignores the fact that Obama has repeatedly rejected the advice of career military leaders and his own appointed civilian leaders who recommended more active policies.

... Obama’s decision, in Walter Russell Mead’s words, “to stand aside and watch Syria” by rejecting advisers’ proposals to send in troops or enforce a no-fly zone, has led to the outflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

This is not a president who has prioritized human rights in Middle East policy, as evidenced by the cold shoulder given to Iran’s Green Revolution protesters in June 2009 and the long inaction in addressing the problems of Syrian refugees, now flowing into Europe.

All of which makes more grating Obama’s denunciation of Americans who are critical of his call to admit 10,000 refugees here. In Antalya he accused them of closing their hearts to victims of violence and of being “not American” in suggesting prioritization of the Christian refugees who have been singled out for torture and murder.

He could have acknowledged people’s qualms as legitimate and argued at greater length, as former ambassador to Iraq and Syria Ryan Crocker did in the Wall Street Journal, that we have processes in place that would effectively screen out terrorists. Or have proposed, like Speaker Paul Ryan, a pause before accepting any.

But that would have meant not taking cheap shots against the political opposition at home — the people who really make him angry.

Choices

Lead, or resign!

Michael Goodwin writes in the New York Post,

...Is America ready to stop multiple assault teams of suicide bombers? Is New York ready? Or Chicago, Los Angeles or Washington, DC?

Because Paris was a grand success to the terrorists, the propaganda value acts as an incentive for attacks on other western cities. While sparing no effort to stop them here, we must simultaneously destroy them in their foreign bases.

World War III began when Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States, though we did not grasp the significance until 9/11. The collapse of the Twin Towers, a smoking hole in the Pentagon and a downed jetliner in Pennsylvania revealed the price of our inaction.

The single greatest attack ever against America galvanized the nation and defined a new generation of policy makers and warriors.

Yet Obama always remained curiously cool about the whole endeavor, denouncing the invasion of Iraq as dumb while holding up Afghanistan as a necessary war. Once he got to the White House, though, he showed no conviction about Afghanistan either, surging troops only to demand that they return home quickly.

The pattern has never changed, and his relationship with a rotating cast of military leaders remains rocky. Robert Gates, secretary of defense under both President Bush and Obama, said in his memoir that Obama’s distrust of the military was destructive of the very mission he had given the troops.

After a heated 2011 meeting on Afghanistan, Gates concluded that Obama “doesn’t believe in his own strategy, and doesn’t consider the war to be his. For him, it’s all about getting out.”

Another former military leader, Gen. Jack Keane, notes that Obama never once agreed to the full request of his commanders. If they ask for 10,000 troops, Obama agrees to 5,000, 3,000 or none.

The raid that got bin Laden marked the high point of Obama’s commitment. He turned that achievement into political gold in 2012 and declared the “tide of war is receding” to justify his decision to withdraw from the field of battle.

It was a convenient figment of self-interest, as if his wish would make it true. Instead, the strategic dominos fell quickly as war metastasized. The hard-won gains in Iraq were reversed, Syria descended into hell and Islamic State was born in the vacuum.

Its ruthlessness and success in capturing territory enabled it to supplant al Qaeda as the most dangerous terrorist network. It has become the proverbial “strong horse,” with each terrifying attack bringing more recruits and more financing.

In the last two weeks, it shot down a commercial Russian airliner over Egypt and carried out bombings in Beirut. And then came Paris.

Its ability to inflict unprecedented casualties in such far-flung locations mark a growing strength and sophistication. The terrorists smell weakness and have increased the pace of their aggressive expansion. Their aim of global conquest must be taken seriously.

...So we are back to square one again, facing a stronger and more emboldened enemy. The time has run out for half measures and kicking the can down the road. The enemy must be destroyed on the battlefield before there can be any hope of peace.

If Obama cannot rise to the challenge of leadership in this historic crisis, then, for the good of humanity, he should resign. Those are the only options and it is his duty to decide.

Read more here.

Contained

President Obama spoke to ABC's George Stephanopoulis on Thursday in an interview that was aired on Friday just hours before the coordinated attacks in Paris.

'What is true is that from the start, our goal has been first to contain and we have contained them,' Obama said in the interview.

Read more here.

Is it time to defeat the jayvee team?

A team of Associated Press writers have put together a report detailing the Islamic State attacks in Paris. Don't forget that the Islamic State has also claimed responsibility for bombong a Russian plane over Egypt, killing 224 people on Halloween, twin suicide bombings in Beirut killed at least 43 people and wounded more than 200, and 26 people died Friday in Baghdad in a suicide blast and a roadside bombing that targeted Shiites. Read more here.

Dick Morris is calling for 100,000 additional ground troops:

Now, having let ISIS build up, refusing to keep a military presence in Iraq after we left, and only annoying the terrorists with limited air strikes, we must send in ground troops.

Hopefully, France will make a major contribution, but all of the western nations must act. We need to send upwards of 100,000 troops, from all nations combined, to end ISIS.

This need not be a U.S. led invasion. France has resources of its own and, with supplementary troops from the US, Germany, Britain and the EU, it should be able to do the job. It makes no difference for French president Hollande to "declare war against ISIS." He and we need to attack and kill it.

After the Paris attacks, a third war in the region is now inevitable and necessary. We cannot let this cancer grow and expand its capacity to wreak havoc. The stakes are just too great.

Read more here.

Russia strikes ISIS command posts, stores of weapons

Nick Gutteridge reports at Express,

RUSSIAN bombers have OBLITERATED nine Islamic State (ISIS) outposts in just 24 hours as Vladimir Putin steps up his huge bombing campaign in Syria.

...Soviet jets pounded terrorist targets in Syria overnight using bunker busting bombs to blow up an ISIS command centre, potentially killing dozens of fighters.

Confirming the successful raids, Andrei Kartapolov from the Russian army General Staff, said: We will not only continue strikes... We will also increase their intensity."

And Russian Defence Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said: "Over the past 24 hours, Sukhoi Su-34 and Su-24M fighter jets have performed 20 sorties and hit nine Islamic State installations.

“A bunker-busting BETAB-500 air bomb dropped from a Sukhoi Su-34 bomber near Raqqa has eliminated the command post of one of the terror groups, together with an underground storage facility for explosives and munitions.

"These and other highly exact means of attack in recent days have been used to target objects of Islamic State terrorists: command posts, stores of weapons and oil products, workshops where weapons of suicide bombers are made."

Read more here.

No match?

US airstrikes avoiding ISIS training camps

Bill Gertz reports at the Washington Free Beacon,

The Pentagon has not conducted airstrikes against an estimated 60 Islamic State (IS) training camps that are supplying thousands of fighters each month to the terror group, according to defense and intelligence officials.



The camps are spread throughout Islamic State-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria and are off limits in the U.S.-led international bombing campaign because of concerns about collateral damage, said officials familiar with planning and execution of the yearlong bombing campaign.

Additionally, the IS (also known as ISIS or ISIL) camps have been so successful that Islamic State leaders are considering expanding the camps to Libya and Yemen. Both states have become largely ungoverned areas in recent years.

The failure to target the training camps with U.S. and allied airstrikes is raising questions among some defense and intelligence officials about the commitment of President Obama and his senior aides to the current anti-IS strategy of degrading and ultimately destroying the terror group.

“If we know the location of these camps, and the president wants to destroy ISIS, why are the camps still functioning?” one official critical of the policy asked.

The camps are regarded by U.S. intelligence analysts as a key element in the terror group’s successes in holding and taking new territory. The main benefit of the training camps is that they are providing a continuous supply of new fighters.

An additional worry of intelligence analysts is that some of the foreign fighters being trained in the camps will eventually return to their home countries in Europe and North America to carry out terror attacks.

Read more here.

All in a days work for ISIS: chemical weapons, rape, sex slaves

What's going on with ISIS? Bridget Johnson reports at PJ Media,

The Islamic State was confirmed to have used chemical weapons against Kurds this week.

...Last month ISIS attacked Peshmerga with agents “consistent with a chlorine chemical” — Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapon of choice after the Obama administration claimed they successfully liquidated the dictator’s stockpile.

The New York Times reported then that ISIS was manufacturing tainted shells with “toxic industrial or agricultural chemicals repurposed as weapons.”

In May, the Organisation for the Prohibition and Chemical Weapons inspectors found traces of sarin and VX nerve agent at a military research site in Syria that was not declared as a chemical weapons storage or production facility.

Read more here.

Meanwhile, Rick Moran reports at PJ Media,

Just when you think the Islamic State can’t do anything that would outrage civilized humanity any more than we already are, along comes this story in the New York Times that goes into excruciating detail about how rape is being used to recruit ISIS members and the twisted justification for it that ISIS says comes directly from the Koran.

The report also details how the sex-slave market works — its bureaucracy, its logistics, and its organization.

Sex slaves: pure Islam

Slavery of Christian women and girls continues in the Islamic State

Nina Shea writes at The American Interest about

The Islamic State’s Christian and Yizidi Sex Slaves. Women, children, even toddlers—the Islamic State’s goal is to sell them on an open market to men of all means, especially the young jihadis on whom the caliphate depends.

Unlike Muslims, who can conform and wait out ISIS until the day it is defeated, Christians, along with “polytheist” Yizidis, can don veils and give up cigarettes and alcohol, but, as non-Muslims, their very presence is an intolerable offense to the year-old “caliphate.” These minority religious groups in Iraq and Syria, lacking protecting armies or militias of their own, find themselves in unique peril. During his Bolivian trip this month, Pope Francis called it “genocide.”
ISIS demands nothing less than the conversion of all Christians and Yizidis to Islam under penalty of death for men and enslavement for women and children. (Another frequently cited option for Christian “People of the Book”, the payment of jizya, is a ruse, for the tax is raised until it becomes unpayable and property and lives are taken after all. Hence, last summer, Mosul’s bishops chose exile for their communities, rather than attend an ISIS meeting to learn of its jizya terms.)

The beheadings, crucifixions, and other means ISIS uses to slaughter unarmed Christian and Yizidi men—from priests and bishops to destitute migrant workers—have been proudly displayed by the ultra violent group on social media and have drawn condemnations worldwide. But the Islamic State’s “revival” of the institution of chattel slavery—sex slavery of Christian and Yizidi women and girls no less—has faded from public attention.

Read more here.

Four horsemen of Apocalypse

Victor Davis Hanson writes at National Review,

The U.S. and its allies are faced with four major threats, and they are as diverse and yet as akin as the proverbial apocalyptic horsemen.

Vladimir Putin has a tsarist idea that he can reclaim insidiously the periphery of the old Soviet Union — Georgia, Crimea, Ukraine, the Baltic states — on the principle of protecting Russian-speaking minorities in these breakaway republics. More practically, he feels that any security guarantees extended by the West to these entities are about as valid as an Obama red line or a Greek assurance of financial reform.

...Putin is not greatly worried that the U.S. will reenergize NATO, rebuild its own nuclear deterrent, work with the Eastern Europeans on missile defense, or start exporting its plentiful natural gas to a Russia-dependent Europe. Right now Putin is digesting Eastern Ukraine and sizing up Obama’s responses to others’ aggressions. But next year, in the last twelve months of the Obama administration, we should expect him to move on another former Soviet republic, as well as to emphasize new partnerships with China, a few Eastern European or Balkan nations, or an ascendant Iran.

...When China and Russia look at U.S. efforts to negotiate with Iran, or to deal with the Middle East, or to confront radical Islam, they see a confused administration whose one constant is either embarrassment over or ambiguity about America’s long post-war role of global preeminence. China, then, believes there is little chance that the United States will line up its Pacific allies, reassure them of our support in extremis, and configure a joint Pacific military front, much less that the U.S. will triangulate with Russia and India to assure a balance of power that would remind China that it is already surrounded by nuclear Russia, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and soon-to-be-nuclear Iran, and that a nuclear Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan could be added to that lineup in the not too distant future.

Iran is the third horseman, and one both similar to, and also altogether different from, China and Russia in a number of ways...It will be a nuclear power quite soon, but it has no experience, as China and Russia both do, in the accustomed behavior of nuclear states. And also unlike both, it is a self-proclaimed revolutionary theocracy, with periodic fits of end-of-days rhetoric. Whether these are genuine expressions of a looming twelfth-imam apocalypse or simply feigned bouts of lunacy that are useful strategies in nuclear poker, no one quite can be sure. If China has evolved somewhat in its obsession over Taiwan, Iran has not matured in its fixation on Israel, which, unlike Taiwan, is itself already nuclear. Iran also is actively subverting nearby states such as Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, in the hopes of crafting some sort of Shiite regional hegemony. Petrodollars, the bomb, and terrorists are scary assets, and Iran believes that it will soon complete that triad, and be free at last to recreate its Middle East empire without much interference from the United States.

ISIS, the fourth horseman, is the weakest of our current threats, but ironically the one with the greatest likelihood of conducting a major attack, albeit terrorist and asymmetric, against Europe or the United States or both. In creepy fashion, its barbarity — from immolations and beheadings to crucifixions and drownings — gains it world attention, and appeals to listless, video-game-playing Middle Eastern expatriate youth bored in the West. Its diplomacy is paradoxical as well. ISIS fights against enemies of the West like Bashar Assad’s Syria, Hezbollah, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and against erstwhile Western allies like the Kurds, Jordan, Egypt, and the Gulf States. Hitting ISIS would empower Syria and Iran; not hitting ISIS weakens our moderate Sunni former friends.

...A different administration might have destroyed any and all ISIS vehicles and hardware with round-the-clock bombing, supplied the Kurds with plentiful arms, and sent in U.S. ground forces to organize a regional resistance force.

If this administration is not careful, by next year it may find ISIS at the gates of Baghdad, Russian forces massing on the border of Estonia, Japan and China shooting at each other over disputed air and sea space, and Iran stockpiling its growing enriched-uranium supplies for a not too distant multi-bomb nuclear rollout. We think the world is growing tense; in fact, it is only the calm before the storm.

Read more here.

Foiled plot to behead French military chief

© AFP archives I French soldiers on patrol in front of the Eiffel Tower

Mehdi Chebil and Steven Jambot report at France 24,

A foiled plot to attack a military base in southern France and decapitate the officer in charge has raised fresh concerns over the Islamic State (IS) group’s attempts to strike the French military on their own soil.

When their IS group contact told them to “strike in France”, Ismael K., Antoine F., and Djebril A. set their sights on the Mediterranean military post Fort Bear, where one of them used to serve. Their plan was to kidnap the base chief and film his decapitation, according to the Paris prosecutor’s office.

The trio, whose ages range between 17 and 23, used encrypted messaging systems and applications to organise their attack. They were arrested in a dawn raid on July 13th. Two judges are expected to decide on Friday whether to file charges and extend their detention.

Read more here.

American military commanders are blocking arms transfers to Kurds

Con Coughlin, Defense Editor of The Telegraph, reports that

US blocks attempts by Arab allies to fly heavy weapons directly to Kurds to fight Islamic State. Some of America’s closest allies say President Barack Obama and other Western leaders, including David Cameron, are failing to show strategic leadership over the world’s gravest security crisis for decades.

They now say they are willing to “go it alone” in supplying heavy weapons to the Kurds, even if means defying the Iraqi authorities and their American backers, who demand all weapons be channelled through Baghdad. “If the Americans and the West are not prepared to do anything serious about defeating Isil, then we will have to find new ways of dealing with the threat,” said a senior Arab government official. “With Isil making ground all the time we simply cannot afford to wait for Washington to wake up to the enormity of the threat we face.”

...The Peshmerga have been successfully fighting Isil, driving them back from the gates of Erbil and, with the support of Kurds from neighbouring Syria, re-establishing control over parts of Iraq’s north-west.

But they are doing so with a makeshift armoury. Millions of pounds-worth of weapons have been bought by a number of European countries to arm the Kurds, but American commanders, who are overseeing all military operations against Isil, are blocking the arms transfers.

...The US has also infuriated its allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states, by what they perceive to be a lack of clear purpose and vacillation in how they conduct the bombing campaign. Other members of the coalition say they have identified clear Isil targets but then been blocked by US veto from firing at them.

.
Read more here.

Islamic State now decapitating civilian women

Showing it supports equality, Islamic State is now decapitating women civilians in Syria. For a long time it has been pushing gays off tall buildings, and decapitating journalists, aid workers, and any man it deems to have violated Shariah law. Now it is giving women equal treatment. Read more here.

Is this 1939 or 2015?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in Jewish World Review to show us how Hitler, Mussolini, and Japan all first forged new empires before Hitler started World War II by invading Poland in September 1939.

The contemporary world is starting to resemble the 1930s, and maps again must be redrawn.

The Islamic State plans to take Baghdad to make it the capital of a radical Sunni caliphate from what is left of Syria and Iraq.

Its enemy, theocratic Iran, is forging its own Shiite empire. Through its proxies, Iran now effectively runs much of Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. When Teheran gets a nuclear bomb, it will urge on Shiite minorities to overthrow the Sunni monarchies in the rich, oil-exporting Persian Gulf nations.

Russian President Vladimir Putin thinks he can reconstitute the empire of the czars and the later Soviet Union. American "reset" diplomacy green-lighted his annexation of the Crimea and his occupation of areas of Ukraine. Should Putin wish to absorb Estonia or other Baltic States, NATO probably would not stop him.

China is vastly increasing its strategic air force and navy -- and reminding its neighbors from South Korea to Australia of its new military clout. It has recently instigated various territorial disputes with Japan, Malaysia the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. As a clever way to control key sea lanes and oil-rich areas in the South China Sea, the Chinese are building new military bases by turning small coral reefs into islands of sand.

Is this 1939 or 2015?

In 1945, after some 60 million had perished in World War II, the Western democracies blamed themselves for having appeased and empowered fascist empires. That sadder but wiser generation taught us two lessons: Small sacrifices now can avoid catastrophic ones later on, and dictatorial regimes on a roll never voluntarily quit playing geostrategic poker.

If the present trajectories continue, a reconfigured Middle East will be bookended by radical Islamic empires -- the Islamic State caliphate and a new Persian empire. China will control most of the Pacific and adjudicate trade, commerce and politics west of Hawaii and to the south and east of India. The client states of a new Russian empire will border central Europe and be under constant pressure to leave the EU, NATO or both.

How does all this end? One of two ways.

America and its allies can reawaken, gradually restore deterrence and re-establish the old postwar order without a global war.

Or the United States will not be bothered -- at least until this new generation of dictators bothers us at home.

Read more here.