We hear a great deal about how America needs to be "changed" by people who don't seem to know America's history, understand our country's uniqueness, or appreciate how good we've had it as a people. Until you understand what made America a great nation to begin with, you have no business suggesting any changes to the policies, tradition, and culture that made us so uniquely successful. It's not an accident that America became a great power. It's because of these seven reasons...
President Obama spoke on Iraq earlier today, pledging to do nothing and essentially saying nothing, even as that nation is breaking apart, with Islamic militants overrunning Iraq and vowing to capture Baghdad.
In light of the unfolding disaster in Iraq, which is linked to the unfolding disaster in Syria, which is part of a broader failure in the Middle East, which is only one part of an across-the-board failure in foreign policy, which is separate from the failures at home--including healthcare.gov and ObamaCare more broadly, chronically high unemployment, the stimulus and "shovel ready jobs," a historically weak economic recovery, the lowest workforce participation rate since the 1970s, increasing income inequality, and record poverty--the following needs to be said. Even those of us who were highly critical of Mr. Obama early on, who twice voted against him and worked in campaigns to defeat him, could not envision how epically incompetent he would be.
The harm this man has done is immeasurable. And he still has more than two years left to go.
#1
The collapse of the United States of America is being expedited by the influx of hundreds of thousands of illegal nationals flooding across the Southern border from Central America. Adding to the deficit and the already sordid state of the job market. When Obomacare kicks in, so will a depression, collapse, and chaos never before seen in the history of this once great nation.
Posted by: Barbara ||
06/15/2014 14:50 Comments ||
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#3
Bullets will not stop a nuclear explosion. Obama has handed this nation over to America's most ferocious enemies. Like the ISIS leader said to the American troops, "See you in New York.". It is only a matter of when, not if.
#5
Interesting how they often select Big Blue targets (NYC, LA, etc). Hope they do it before a census year so that apportionment can be done without having to wait too long for the effect to take hold for the next election cycle.
#7
History speaks for us. Nations are ravaged by war, death and destruction on a daily basis. The United States has only begun to experience large scale loss of life recently after 150 years of peace among the civilian population in the land. The wars our soldiers fought during 150 years of peace here have been fought "over there".
But moral decay is so extensive that 7 years after 9/11 attack on our land by Islamists, the civilian population capitulated and willfully elected a man by the name of Barack "Hussein" Obama, as the "fall from grace" continues.
Just as all of America's work in Iraq was in vain as witnessed by the sudden assault by ISIS this past week as our President Barack Hussein Obama heads to vacation at his gay friend's home in California.
When the Mohammedan Caliph came with his sword in hand, he destroyed the idol temples, the churches of all Africa, of all Palestine, of all Asia Minor and Turkey and of Istanbul, and thrust through to the Philippine Islands on the east. It was against idolatry that the Mohammedan religion arose as a fierce and terrible antagonist. The sweep of the Mohammedan was the sweep of the fierceness of the wrath and the judgment of Almighty God. The late Dr W.A. Criswell, (a Christian theologian, December 19, 1909 January 10, 2002)
It's by Jennifer Rubin, their current token conservative. Her comment threads get vicious.
On the near-disintegration of Iraq under the onslaught of jihadists, Boehner said:
Back in January, I urged the president to get engaged with what's going on in Iraq. And this week we've seen big cities in Iraq overrun with terrorists.
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Posted by: Squinty ||
06/15/2014 00:00 ||
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Top|| File under: Islamic State of Iraq
#1
That's quite the bunch of rabid ankle biters in the comment thread. One wonders why they have comments on editorial columns, especially ones that have view counter to the ideological position of the paper. There are only a few themes: Bush/Cheney's fault, Obama's teh one, and why don't you go die somewhere. Trying to have a discussion would be futile.
In Syria, where for three years Mr. Obama has assiduously avoided meaningful engagement, civil war has given rise to the most catastrophic humanitarian crisis any of us have seen in a generation, Mr. Obamas United Nations ambassador Samantha Power said in February.
In Libya, Mr. Obama joined in a bombing campaign to topple dictator Moammar Gaddafi and then declined to provide security assistance to help the nation right itself. It, too, is on the verge of civil war.
In Iraq, Mr. Obama chose not to leave a residual force that might have helped keep the nations politics on track, even as the White House insisted there was no reason to worry. Denis McDonough, then deputy national security adviser and now White House chief of staff, told reporters in 2011 that Mr. Obama said what were looking for is an Iraq thats secure, stable and self-reliant, and thats exactly what we got here. So theres no question this is a success.
Now Mr. Obama is applying the same recipe to Afghanistan: total withdrawal of U.S. troops by 2016, regardless of conditions.
At West Point, the president stressed that not every problem has a military solution. That is obviously true. In fact, a goal of U.S. policy should be to help shape events so that military solutions do not have to be considered. The presence of U.S. troops in South Korea, for example, has helped keep the peace for more than a half century.
Total withdrawal can instead lead to challenges like that posed by Iraq today, where every option from staying aloof to more actively helping Iraqi forces carries risks. The administration needs to accept the reality of the mounting danger in the Middle East and craft a strategy that goes beyond the slogan of ending war responsibly.
While the comments are less ad hominem, there are still gems like
embecii Listen narcissistic sociopath; go suck on the Republican tet and take a nap.
and
Wars we never gotten involved in in the fist place.
#4
Mowhawk Valley to the Hudson, turn south. Windsor to Detroit, Cleveland, Columbus. Keep moving and hand out shinny shit to the locals. Don't negotiate, incarcerate. Keep the Super Bowl and the NBA but reduce each league to 10 games, introduce forced Bowling Leagues, require attendance (to everything). Mandatory library visits and Uke Lessons. Don't give an inch.
Regarding your June 13 editorial 'The Iraq Debacle' one wonders on what grounds WSJ editors consider Iranian intervention in Iraq to be a 'terrible strategic defeat' and for whom? The world is on the verge of watching only the latest chapter in the centuries old bloodletting between the Shia and Sunni sects of Islam, and this chapter will indeed be a vicious one. Picture two large, venomous snakes--the Sunni ISIS and the fanatical Shia mullahs in Teheran--coiling around each other, hissing, each sinking
their fangs into the other in some horrific display.
Is the Obama Administration really going to insert America's hand into this lethal, writhing combat to save one of the snakes? And if so, which one? Both hate America and are committed to our destruction, thus thrusting our military servicemen and women into this fight must inevitably help one of our enemies
grow stronger.
Better for the U.S. to let this fight play out, ensuring in the process our Gulf State allies are protected from an outright assault on
their territories. If the Persian Gulf oil routes become compromised to the extent Europe and Japan see their own interests threatened, the prudent American response is to ask 'What can we do to help you resolve your problem?' The U.S. has immense resources in this regard and 'leading from
behind' deserves far more credit as a policy than it has generally received to date, especially when the alternative is still more American blood and treasure squandered. What a tragedy, a disgrace if big oil interests and
our always-hungry military-industrial complex drive our country back into direct combat in support one of our mortal enemies.
#7
Where are foreign nationals in this country being housed, etc?????
Right in the middle of our military basis and forts within our borders. In other words, he might as well give them our tanks and machine guns to finish us off with. Right?????
h/t Gates of Vienna
...There is no coherent U.S. strategy in Iraq, or by inevitable association, in Syria. Both have been pushed to the back-burner in recent months, and both have been based either on wishful thinking or on pig-headed mendacity. The current chaos in Iraq reminds us of the extent to which U.S. interventions abroad are bad in principle if no vital American security and economic interests are involved.
[Ynet] Same hallucinating Americans who built failed Iraqi army drafted a security plan for Judea and Samaria as well.
The Iraqi army collapsed this week like a pack of cards upon the occupation of Iraq's second biggest city, djinn-infested Mosul ... the home of a particularly ferocious and hairy djinn... , by al-Qaeda and the Jihad.
The Americans built this army, trained it and have invested tens of billions of dollars in it in the past decade. But its thousands of soldiers have escaped without fighting, leaving their shoes and clothes behind, as well as advanced American military equipment, an airport, hospitals and prisons -- all the disposal of the al-Qaeda terror.
Nonsense: the army we built would have stood and fought. That army was dismantled, piece by piece and officer by officer, by Mr. al-Maliki and his cronies, who handed out combat commands to their weasel pals in the way things are done in a kleptocracy. Good officers were forced out, fools were put in.
Further, the good part of the Iraqi army was over-used: constantly moved from one trouble-spot to another with no time for rest, re-fit, and re-training. Their equipment was allowed to degrade. Intel was allowed to slide.
It's no surprise that the army in the northwest fell apart. But that's not the army we built for Iraq. This author is just grinding an axe.
Now the jihadists are 200 kilometers away from the capital of Storied Baghdad, and they will aspire to reach that city as well. Al-Qaeda gunnies are Sunnis, while the Iraqi army is comprised mostly of Shiites -- and so the Shiite puppet regime established by the Americans in Iraq, which Obama has been so proud of, is collapsing. Why he even ordered the American army to pull out because he believed the Iraqi army was already prepared to carry the burden.
And now, after al-Qaeda's takeover of the Sunni cities in western Iraq, it has also seized control of the northern Mosul. This Salafi "state" joins the Salafi state of Syria, and the soon-to-be Salafi state of Jordan -- and so the American illusions are collapsing and international borders are erased.
America will do nothing, and there is no one in the Middle East who thinks it will actually do anything. In other words, the regime of Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, generated the al-Qaeda states in the region -- a humanitarian disaster for millions of unfortunate people.
Why is this important to us? Because those same hallucinating Americans designated a security plan for us in Judea and Samaria, like the plan they designated for Iraq. US Secretary of State, with all his security experts, thought that it would be enough to have an American plan on paper in order to stabilize a regime and a state there.
What Mr. Obama and Mr. Kerry would do to you is independent of what good Americans tried to do in Iraq, and were succeeding in doing, before the rug was pulled from under them. You sir need to get your facts straight.
So what is the lesson from Iraq? The moment the IDF would have withdrawn from one meter in Judea and Samaria, the jihadist groups would have entered in its place, like what has already happened in the Gazoo Strip. They would have threatened Ben-Gurion Airport from above, and not a single plane would have landed here anymore, and later on they would have threatened Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa as well. That would have been the end of the story for the Jewish state.
Why in Iraq, with tens of thousands of trained soldiers, the Americans failed -- so how could they expect a number of Paleostinian gangs to succeed here?
See above.
The Judea and Samaria area is already filled with tens of thousands of jihadists, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and others, who are only waiting for an order to storm the Paleostinian Authority -- an artificial entity which they don't accept and never will.
Judea and Samaria are properly your problem: if it's teeming with jihadis, do something about it.
Even worse, an independent Arab area in Judea and Samaria means an addition of hundreds of thousands of jihadists imported from Iraq, Syria and Leb to the most peaceful area in the Middle East.
This is the exact meaning of the "right of return," which the world will applaud at first -- after all, they are not coming to "Israel" but to the evacuated area. But they will change the demographic balance and make life impossible here. Mosul will come here.
Those failing to see this jihadist threat to the Jewish state's existence are ignoring the new Salafi reality, what is taking place in Syria now -- a corpse count of almost 200,000 and irreversible destruction -- and the unruly conduct in Iraq.
Diplomatic agreements may have been relevant decades ago, with stable Arab regimes, but today, when everything around us is falling apart, talking about such agreement -- not to mention peace agreements -- is simply foolish.
The two-state agreement discussed before the Arab Spring had been buried in Mosul, in the world war which is only expanding between the Sunnis and Shiites, compared to which Israel seems like a strong anchor of stability and security.
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On the near-disintegration of Iraq under the onslaught of jihadists, Boehner said:
