Is the UK Finished?

. . . will it become an Islamic land?

or are there enough stalwart Brits with the gonads to keep England for the English, Wales for the Welsh, Scotland for the Scots, and Ulster for the Ulstermen?

Click on Is the United Kingdom (UK) Sliding into Islamization Without a Whimper?

Can We Trust Obama to Defend and Protect?

Asleep at the switch--once again. Obama diddling on the golf course, enjoying the privileges of his exalted postion gained honestly or not, once again, while the jihad makes inroads. The "failure" of the Nigerian intent on killing Americans should not fool us. His handlers have learned a bunch.

The point of this post, however, is not the failure of the mechanism that Obama has set up (or failed to do so efficiently), but of the man whom the voters (or whoever dishonestly slid him into office) made president.

This man Obama does not recognize who the enemy is (it is Islam on its centuries-old fight against the non-Islamic world) , refuses to do so. Why is that?

Maybe he wants to be "President of the World" instead of only the United States? Maybe because he has a soft spot for --or never left--the Islamic ideology? Who know? who cares?

Fact is, this president is unfit for office. No matter how much he poses and preens and speaks with studied diction.

Does he know how to respond? Or is he unsure and confused?

Obama has appointed people unfit for office to safeguard our nation. Our nation, not his.

The failure is his. The buck stops with his (the president's) office, as Harry Truman so wisely said.

Should We Use Airline Profiling?

The Case for Airline Profiling

We have this "sacred" revulsion to profiling airline passengers before boarding. Not "racial" profiling--not all "Asians" nor "Africans" nor "Middle-Eastern-appearing" passengers, but depending on immediately prior flights, point of origin, layovers, etc.

Continue reading at http://islamicdangerfu.blogspot.com/2009/12/case-for-airline-profiling.html

Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, or The 'Yeah, Whatever' School of Counterterrorism

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from internet haganah:

December 28, 2009

ABDUL FAROUK ABDULMUTALLAB, OR THE 'YEAH, WHATEVER' SCHOOL OF COUNTERTERRORISM

I'd like to be able to say with confidence that if this had happened in the USA, if Abdul's dad had walked into his local FBI office and told an agent that his kid was radicalized and was last known to be Yemen and had cut off all contact with the family, that this case would have been handled differently. In reality it probably depends on the particular office, and whether the analyst the matter was referred to understands that Yemen truly is the Waziristan of Arabia. In any event, whatever can be uncovered about Abdul after he tried to bring down NW Flight 253 could likely have been uncovered prior to his boarding the flight. If the current rules don't allow such an investigation to occur, they need to change. And to the extent current leadership in the various agencies discourage the pursuit of such leads, those people need to leave - preferably on a commercial airline flight.

My preliminary bibliography is here...Posted on 28 December 2009 @ 15:29 GMT

@ osint.internet-haganah.com• Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, or The 'Yeah, Whatever' School of Counterterrorism
http://osint.internet-haganah.com/archives/001698.html

ALSO SEE

Did Anwar Awlaki--the imam of the "Palestinian" Arab killer-psychiatrist of Fort Hood--bite the dust?
at internet haganah's Is that a dead Anwar Awlaki I spy under the tree? Main

America's Anti-Jihad Strategy: Building More Islamic "democracies" - Will it Work?

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First, we look at the immediate--the local--situation in Afganistan, as portrayed in The Captain's Journal:

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis). It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side. Both suggestions are preposterous.

That there is an indigenous insurgency (the so-called ten dollar Taliban) that bootstraps to the real religiously motivated fighters is irrelevant. We had to fight our way through this group in Iraq too, and it is the nature of these insurgencies. Complaining about it is acceptable – but using it as an excuse to abandon the campaign is not. That every contact isn’t with Arabic or Chechen or Uzbek jihadists is irrelevant. That doesn’t mean that Afghanistan is not a central front in the transnational insurgency called Islamic Jihad. The Taliban are important inasmuch as they gave and would continue to give safe haven to globalists.

For this reason the campaign in Afghanistan must be successful. Pakistan will take their cue from us and follow our lead.

http://www.captainsjournal.com/2009/12/16/the-battle-for-kandahar-and-helmand/

What about the bigger picture? How do we intend to defeat the jihad that is being forced on us? How are we trying to accomplish that in Afghanistan? Why are we there at all?

Immediately, it comes to mind that Osama bin Laden's training camps were there prior to our cleaning them out post-9-11.

They can be there once again, if we are not there to stop the jihadists. Pakistan is not a reliable ally.

What, however, is our goal for Afghanistan? Build up and secure another Islamic "democracy," as was thought to have been secured for Iraq?

What was the U.S. policy for combatting the jihad of the Islamics, financed by the Saudis?

Forward Strategy for Failure

It was not Obama who devised the current strategy for stopping the jihadist drive to defeat the United States.

It was the American strategy employed shortly after the attacks of 9-11.

The Objective Standard article "America's Self-Crippled Foreign Policy" goes to the core of this crippling foreign policy:

From examining the intentions and actions of our military in the field, it becomes obvious that what animated Bush’s policy was the notion of bringing elections and social services to Iraq and Afghanistan—not protecting American lives. And while Obama wants to be seen as the anti-Bush, his approach is animated by a similar goal. In his high-profile speech in Cairo last summer, he promised to fund and create “centers of scientific excellence in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.” What’s common here is the moral idea behind these policies—the idea that America must serve the meek and needy of the earth. We argue in the book[*] that this conventional outlook on morality has shaped American foreign policy, and that the effect has been inimical to our liberty and security.

The article then zeroes in on the cause of America's failure to defeat the jihad:

The “forward strategy of freedom”—Bush’s misleading name for his crusade to bring elections to the Middle East—lived up to the name we give it in the book: the forward strategy of failure. It served only to empower our enemies—the Islamists—by granting them legitimacy and political control, for example, in Iraq and the Palestinian territories. Near the end of Bush’s time in office, some of his supporters began trying to salvage his reputation by claiming that the “surge” of U.S. troops in Iraq has worked a miracle. But a look at the facts refutes that idea. In chapter 6[*] we explore what actually happened. Washington’s policy was to throw around wads of cash so that insurgents who were murdering Americans would switch sides—for as long as the money flows.

Further, many Islamists used Iraq as a training ground and have taken their battle-tested expertise to other fronts, including Afghanistan. Suicide bombings were once unheard of in Afghanistan; now they’re commonplace. There were thirty such attacks in the first five years of the Afghanistan war. In the first six months of last year, there were more than twelve hundred. The Afghan-Pakistan border is now a hotbed of jihadist training camps. Many terrorist plots, like the plot to blow up airliners crossing the Atlantic, trace back to that part of the world. The Islamist threat not only endured but grew worse under Bush—who watched as the most active sponsor of Islamist terrorism, Iran, chased nuclear weapons. This is what passes for “success”?

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[*]Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism (Lexington Books)
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More at http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-fall/america-self-crippled-foreign-policy.asp

Dying for the Enemy - Afghanistan, A True Story

. . . the team of Navy SEALs was on difficult terrain in an area rife with Islamist fighters. The four men set off after their quarry. But sometime around noon that day, the men were boxed into an impossible situation. Three Afghan men, along with about one hundred goats, happened upon the team’s position. What should the SEALs do?

***

. . . the men of SEAL Team 10 knew one more thing. They knew that doing the right thing for their mission—and their own lives—could very well mean spending the rest of their days behind bars at Leavenworth. The men were subject to military rules of engagement that placed a mandate on all warriors to avoid civilian casualties at all costs. They were expected to bend over backward to protect Afghans, even if that meant forfeiting an opportunity to kill Islamist fighters and their commanders, and even if that meant imperiling their own lives.

The SEALs were in a bind. Should they do what Washington and the military establishment deemed moral—release the herders and assume a higher risk of death—or protect themselves and carry out their mission—but suffer for it back home? The men—Lt. Michael Murphy; Sonar Technician 2nd Class Matthew Axelson; Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Danny Dietz; and Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Marcus Luttrell—took a vote.

They let the herders go.

Later that afternoon, a contingent of about 100–140 Taliban fighters swarmed upon the team. The four Americans were hugely outnumbered. The battle was fierce. Dietz fought on after taking five bullets, but succumbed to a sixth, in the head. Murphy and Axelson were killed not long after. When the air support that the SEALs had called for finally arrived, all sixteen members of the rescuing team were killed by the Islamists. Luttrell was the lone survivor, and only just.2

The scene of carnage on that mountainside in Afghanistan captures something essential about American policy. What made the deadly ambush all the more tragic is that in reaching their decision, those brave SEALs complied with the policies handed down to them from higher-ups in the military and endorsed by the nation’s commander-in-chief [Bush, at the time]. Their decision to place the moral injunction to selflessness ahead of their mission and their very lives encapsulates the defining theme of Washington’s policy response to 9/11.

More at http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-fall/an-unwinnable-war.asp

Muslim Fellow-Travellers, Sympathizers, and One of Them is a Crypto-Muslim

Are these two guilty of treason?


By allowing enemy combatants the protection of U.S. courts, this pair is committing treason against the United States.

Never mind that one of them was elected president, he is hiding his Muslim antecedents, and if nothing else is partial to the enemies of the United States.

What does he deserve?

And how about his attorney general?

Twisted Ideologies? (Quoting Obama)

Commenting on the five "American" students arrested in Pakistan, Obama--first at a loss for words (no teleprompter)--stammered and hemmed-and-hawed before coming out with that these "twisted ideologies" are available on the Internet.

Twisted Ideologies? Now come on, haven't you read your koran lately Mr. president? Jihad is plainly called for, not "twisted" from some "peace-loving ideology."


. . . and ooh---uh--aah--'bout that "peace prize," see how we that momentous occassion is being celebrated at Gates of Vienna

Because We Have Cripppled Ourselves, We Are Fighting an Unwinnable War

From "America's Self-Crippled Foreign Policy"
An Interview with Yaron Brook (YB), Elan Journo (EJ), and Alex Epstein (AE)
By Craig Biddle (CB)

CB: The Wall Street Journal recently reported that General McChrystal’s strategy in Afghanistan “puts a premium on safeguarding the Afghan population rather than hunting down militants.” What do you make of that strategy?

EJ: This same strategy was at the heart of Bush’s policy—and it meant that U.S. forces were never allowed to fight all out to defeat the Taliban. The Taliban and its jihadist allies scattered, then regrouped, and now are fighting to control Afghanistan and also Pakistan. U.S. casualties in the first eight months of 2009 are already higher than all of 2008, and more than double the toll during the first three years of the campaign. A key point we make in Winning the Unwinnable War is that this “compassionate” policy is self-destructive of American lives and security. It’s central to what has made the war seem unwinnable. Now we’re seeing that policy being implemented to the nth degree, and many more Americans—on the battlefield, and perhaps at home—will pay the price for it.

YB: In a chapter on “Just War Theory,” Alex and I discuss the moral ideas informing the policy you’re seeing unfold in Afghanistan. Those ideas—primarily the embrace of selflessness as a moral ideal—are why America today is unwilling to wage real war to defeat its enemies. Americans used to fight to win; think of General Sherman during the U.S. Civil War or Patton or MacArthur in World War II. But our policy in Afghanistan—seeking to win the love of Afghanis, rather than defeating the Islamists—can only serve to further embolden our enemies.

CB: With President Obama planning to pull most of our troops out of Iraq by next August and to increase the number of U.S. troops stationed in Afghanistan, politicians and pundits are mired in a debate as to whether or not this is the right course of action: Should we or should we not be pulling troops out of Iraq and deploying them to Afghanistan? How would you answer this question?

YB: Just as Bush did on several occasions, Obama warns us not to expect “victory” in Afghanistan. And top U.S. military officials tell us the Taliban are winning. It is immoral to send any troops to fight in any war that our leaders believe to be—and through their policies have made—unwinnable. More broadly, it is outrageous that the mighty United States should find itself with two unresolved conflicts like these. In a sense we’re in an impossible fix, because neither option you mentioned is particularly good, nor is it clear which option is the least bad. This is precisely the kind of situation that our foreign policy should never get us into.

As for Iraq, what purpose do American troops serve there today? In what way does their presence make Americans safer or help in winning this war? Leaving the Middle East today would be horrible—it would embolden our enemies and make it more difficult to deal with future threats. But staying only places our troops in harm’s way, with no real benefit to U.S. security.

EJ: The options you bring up in the original question, Craig, are emblematic of the dominant approach to foreign policy. This is the ad hoc, crisis-management approach of dealing with each flash point or crisis in isolation, and throwing some policy at it to see what “works.” And “works” here means something like “makes the crisis momentarily less urgent.” The view we convey in the book is that America can achieve victory, but only if it adopts a principled, integrated approach [*]. We can crush Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Islamists in Afghanistan-Pakistan. We can deal with Iraq. We can deal with sundry hostile nations in the region. To do that, though, requires a larger project that begins with defining and defeating our primary enemy—the Islamist regime in Tehran, which inspires and leads the Islamist movement. Our goal should be to defeat that movement and its followers, so that the Islamist goal of imposing sharia rule comes to be widely acknowledged as a lost cause. Read the whole thing
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*Also see There is nothing more un-realistic than trying to create a plan without knowing where we are going—or assuming that no plan is possible since reality is "really" always in flux and more in the last paragraph of Winning is not an Option; It is the Only Way to Defeat an Enemy Determined to Defeat You
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Fighting "An Unwinnable War"

. . . the “strictly correct military decision would still be to kill them [the Afghan goat herders] without further discussion, because we could not know their intentions.” Working behind enemy lines, the team was sent there “by our senior commanders. We have a right to do everything we can to save our own lives. The military decision is obvious. To turn them loose would be wrong.”

But the men of SEAL Team 10 knew one more thing. They knew that doing the right thing for their mission—and their own lives—could very well mean spending the rest of their days behind bars at Leavenworth. The men were subject to military rules of engagement that placed a mandate on all warriors to avoid civilian casualties at all costs. They were expected to bend over backward to protect Afghans, even if that meant forfeiting an opportunity to kill Islamist fighters and their commanders, and even if that meant imperiling their own lives.

--Brief excerpt from the article "An Unwinnable War?" by Elan Journo in The Objective Standard http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-fall/an-unwinnable-war.asp

From the introduction to Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism. The book is being published by Lexington Books and is scheduled for release this November

Craig Biddle writes: I recently interviewed Dr. Brook, Mr. Journo, and Mr. Epstein of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. Mr. Journo is the editor of a new book, Winning the Unwinnable War: America’s Self-Crippled Response to Islamic Totalitarianism (Lexington Books, 2009. 250 pp. $27.95 [paperback]), which contains essays by all three men. The book is scheduled for release this November and can be preordered through the Ayn Rand Bookstore (http://www.aynrandbookstore.com/). This interview was conducted orally and retains the character of an informal discussion. —Craig Biddle

Read the whole article at http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2009-fall/an-unwinnable-war.asp


FOR MORE on SEAL Team 10 and Marcus Luttrell, see

Answer to "Compassion in Combat"

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COMPASSION IN COMBAT

Winning is not an Option; It is the Only Way to Defeat an Enemy Determined to Defeat You

To win in war, you must break the enemy's will to fight. This is not the goal of the war against Islam, that we are fighting today.

Yes, "Against Islam," not against militant Islam nor Islamic fundamentalism nor Islamists (as differentiated from Islamics), because it is the ideology of Islam that is being tried to be imposed on us by Moslems--and the name of that ideology is Islam.

I do not care what the present president of the United States thinks of "victory," it is either that or "defeat."

Which shall it be?

Excerpts from 'No Substitute for Victory': Replies to Criticisms
Posted by John David Lewis in The Objective Standard:

Regarding my article "No Substitute for Victory": The Defeat of Islamic Totalitarianism in The Objective Standard, readers have brought up several questions that I'd like to answer. Among them are two of great importance: (1) Isn't the enemy stateless, i.e., without the kind of centralized political state that controlled Japan? and (2) Can religion and state be separated in Islam, which is a social-political-legal system as much as it is a religion?

***

. . . we do need to demonstrate the will to remove an Islamic government that we deem a threat, without apologizing every time a civilian is hurt. This demonstration would sweep across borders and be seen by every government in the world. It would show that while Islam might be stateless, we recognize that Islamic dictatorships are not, and that to side with such a state is to become a target of the most powerful military in the world.

Islam itself is stateless; it respects no borders. It was designed precisely to unite all those who submit to Allah, regardless of where they live and what tribe they belong to. We have to adopt the same attitude, only with freedom and individual rights as our uniting ideals. By defining the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism—government imposition of Islamic Law— we exempt no such state from our reach and yet enable every state to avoid the title and our wrath.

***

Islam . . . . is an all-encompassing way of life. But it is not true that unserious Muslims cannot live under non-Muslim laws; the majority in western countries do—they compromise Islamic law to obey the laws of civilized society.

Identifying the enemy as Islamic Totalitarianism would enable us to end attempts to import Islamic Law into our own country, and it would empower our allies to end such attempts in their own countries. It would enable individual Muslims to comply with our demands, and it would expose those who refuse. It would also demonstrate the failure of Islam as a political movement, and thus challenge the premise, in the minds of many, that the Islamic Totalitarians are some kind of misguided idealists, right in principle but going too far.

As to the issue of realism: There can be no realistic discussion of a proper "strategy" (a means to attain policy ends) without a proper statement of the end that the strategy is intended to achieve. There is nothing more un-realistic than trying to create a plan without knowing where we are going—or assuming that no plan is possible since reality is "really" always in flux. The realism that we need is the recognition that those supporting Political Islam—rule by Islamic Law—are the real enemy. I'll gladly listen to anyone who has a different strategy for eliminating Islam as a political power and ending the threat it poses to us—but I've not yet heard anyone offer such a strategy.

John David Lewis

Obama and Afghanistan

Obama skims over some Afghan realities

FACT CHECK[S]: from the Associated Press article:
　
The problem with Afghan forces is not just their lack of numbers. And it's not an unwillingness to fight. The problem too often is their effectiveness, once trained for combat. Too many get into the fight but don't remain or don't perform.

Obama's confidence skirts years of mostly empty-handed American efforts to get others, including allies in NATO, to deepen their commitment to combat in Afghanistan.

It's true the Pakistani army this year has launched offensives against extremist elements in the areas cited by Obama. What he did not mention, however, is that the groups being targeted by the Pakistanis are those that threaten the Pakistani government--not those, also based in Pakistan, that are focused on attacking U.S. and Afghan forces on the other side of the porous border.

Click to read the whole thing. Worth your time.
　

"INNOCENTS ABROAD"

Depending on the Afghans

The Main Question: Can Afghanistan and the Afghans be compared to Iraq and the Iraqis? Will the Afghans be able to be trained to field and army and a quasi-dependable police force? Iraq's are still being shored up by U.S. troops.

Iraq was once a coherent whole, able to feild an army and a police force.

Afghanistan appears to be incoherent as far as its population and more difficult than Iraq as far as its tribal structure is concerned.

The U.S. Generals

There are Generals and then there are Generals. It took Lincoln a while--dithering about with General after General, until he found those who could get the job done. (Include Sherman in the last-mentioned category, but not McClellan.)

I am not casting aspersions at any present General or Generals. But as the old saw goes, "The proof's in the pudding." So, with the rest of us, I'll just sit back* to wait and see. Not that I want to see the proposed policies in Afghanistan fail. After all, I am in the same Lifeboat as the rest of us and the captain--ah well--the Captain of that leaking vessel, does he know what he's doing?

For another view on Obama and Afghanistan, see Assessing the Afghan Surge - Dr. Kimberly Kagan's interview with the Council on Foreign Relations
To read the full Council on Foreign relations opinions article, visit http://www.cfr.org/

As an aside, the Obama speech at West point was more about himself than about the men who would be risking their lives in war. See how many "I"s he was able to insert in this speech at: http://radarsite.blogspot.com/2009/12/george-w-bush-west-point-speech-vs.html
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*not comfortably, because U.S. Marines, soldiers, and sailors are getting killed and maimed. But then so were men getting killed in the Civil War, until General Sherman found a way to end it by waging Total War, which is the only way to achieve victory.