Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review offer all good martinis. They applaud President Obama for finally taking action against ISIS over its atrocities in Iraq. They’re also pleasantly surprised that New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker appears beatable in this year’s election. And they appreciate CNN actually covering the U.S. Attorney’s investigation into New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Archives for August 2014
‘This Meets the Test of Genocide’
The leading voice for human rights in Congress is blasting President Obama for doing nothing as Christians and other religious minorities face slaughter, starvation, rape and other atrocities at the hands of the Al Qaeda branch known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Virginia) says the evidence is clear that ISIS is on a murderous rampage throughout parts of Iraq and Syria and action is needed urgently.
“It’s very dire. The administration has known this and they’ve done nothing. In fact, the president put together a genocide prevention board back in April 2012. Well, genocide is taking place. This meets the test of genocide against an ethnic group. The ethnic group are the Christians. The ethnic group are the Yazidis. It also is a crime against humanity which meets the whole UN test. Yet, the administration has watched this and done fundamentally nothing,” said Wolf.
“We’re saying do something. Act. Act. Act. People are without food. They’re without lodging. They’re without medicine,” said Wolf.
Reports from aid groups and others in the region depict horrors on a grand scale aimed at Christians and others. Another group in great peril are the Yazidis, a sect with ties to Zoroastrianism and other religious traditions. Wolf contends some 200,000 Yazidis were forced to flee their homes. Tens of thousands of them sought refuge on Mt. Sinjar without provisions and with summertime temperatures soaring far above 100 degrees.
Nina Shea is an international human rights attorney and Christian religious freedom advocate with the Hudson Institute. In a piece written for National Review Online, she cited a shocking report from the Assyrian Aid Society of Iraq.
“Yesterday 45 children died of thirst. Some families throw their children from the top of Sinjar mountain in order not to see them die from hunger or thirst, or not to be taken by the terrorists. 1500 men were killed in front of their wives and families, 50 old men died also from thirst and illness. More than 70 girl and women including Christians were taken, raped and being captured and sold,” the group reported.
Chaldean Christians are also a major target for ISIS in northern Iraq. Businessman Mark Arabo detailed the grisly atrocities for CNN.
“There is a park in Mosul where they actually beheaded children and put their heads on a stick and have them in the park,” Arabo told the cable channel. “More children are getting beheaded, mothers are getting raped and killed and fathers are being hung.”
Additional reports suggest ISIS is making considerable military progress and seem to have captured a critical river dam near Mosul that controls much of the water supply to a wide area. All of this is even more frustrating when considering ISIS is making this advance largely with American-made tools of war that were abandoned by the Iraqis.
“They have humvees. They have automatic weapons. I heard they even have Black Hawk helicopters. I’m not sure they know how to fly them. But it is basically a nation-state now that you’re faced with and they have a lot of money.” said Wolf.
Rep. Wolf says strong leaders do not just sit back and allow these kinds of horrors to proceed.
“The administration says they’re going to lead from behind, which means they’re going to follow. I don’t know that I could tell you why they’re not acting. I think if we had somebody like President Reagan or President Truman. They would act. They would do something. We’re not talking about military activity. There’s a lot of things that can be done with regard to that, but the Christian community is waiting for someone to help them,” said Wolf.
“I think the president has to speak out. I think it was Martin Luther King who said, ‘You understand the silence of your enemies but you don’t understand the silence of your friends. I think the president has to speak out,” he said.
The congressman says ISIS needs to be confronted now or its agenda could succeed “all the way”. He says the immediate threat ISIS poses to the U.S. and our allies is much greater than many realize.
“Some of them are going to come to the United States perhaps. There are over 115 Americans with American passports that are fighting with ISIS, Americans who could fly back into the United States. There’ll be nothing on where they were and they won’t say where they’ve been. They fly to Turkey. From Turkey they go south and they joined ISIS. You have almost 2,000-3,000 western Europeans with British passports, French passports. They could fly here to the United States,” said Wolf.
So what could or should the Obama administration be doing?
“There are a number of things the U.S. could do. One, thank the Kurds for defending the Christians and the Yazidis and urge them to continue to do it. Two, help with some of the foreign aid. Re-program money, giving some to Catholic Relief, World Vision, Save the Children to bring the basic necessities there. Three, allow the Kurds to sell their oil,” said Wolf.
“This administration has a ship in the Galveston harbor. They won’t let it unload, because they say the oil belongs to the Maliki government in Baghdad. If the Kurds can’t sell the oil they can’t have any supplies. They can’t defend anybody and the last couple days, the Kurdish military have been withdrawing. As a result of that, you see what’s taking place yesterday and again today,” he said.
In addition to the obvious humanitarian crisis, Wolf says a tremendous amount of religious history for Christians and others is threatened or already destroyed by ISIS.
“More biblical activity took place in Iraq than any other country in the world other than Israel. Abraham is from Iraq. Esther ‘for such a time like this’, in Ninevah they blew up Jonah’s tomb over a week and a half ago in Mosul. Daniel, a great man of the Bible, is buried in Iraq. And yet, no one’s saying anything,” said Wolf.
On Thursday, Wolf sent another letter to the White House, demanding action from the president.
“We cannot pretend these atrocities aren’t taking place; there are now videos on the Internet being promoted by those sympathetic to ISIS proudly displaying their brutal and grotesque slaughter and abuse of Christians, Yezidis and other religious minorities in Iraq,” he wrote.
“Your administration is aware of what is going on, yet you are doing nothing. Just what is the point of having an ‘Atrocities Prevention Board” if it takes no action to prevent or stop atrocities? When was the last time this board has met? Has the board even been convened to address the genocide taking place in Iraq?” Wolf wrote.
“It is now clear to the nation and the world that your words were hollow; your ‘presidential directive’ apparently was nothing more than a token gesture. You will come to sincerely regret your failure to take action to stop the genocide in Iraq. Your conscience will haunt you long after you leave office. Mr. President, say something; do something,” Wolf concluded.
Three Martini Lunch 8/7/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see people like Ron Fournier of National Journal and the Washington Post editorial writers urging President Obama not to take unilateral action on immigration. They also recoil at the horrors ISIS radicals are inflicting on religious minorities and at the bland whispers coming from the Obama administration in response to this story and to Hamas using human shields. And they discuss Democrats fanning the flames of impeachment chatter far more than any Republicans are.
The Lessons of Afghanistan
The failure of the United States to recognize radical Islam as the driving force behind terrorist attacks in Afghanistan and beyond makes it impossible to address the problem and will quickly lead to instability there once we’re gone, according to a former Pentagon official who has spent countless days embedded with U.S. forces.
Bing West is a Vietnam veteran who served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration and was frequently embedded with American troops, usually Marines, in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to accusing the U.S. of turning a blind eye to radical Muslims, he is also ripping political and military leaders for what he considers their wrongheaded strategies and tactics throughout the past 13 years.
Security concerns arose again on Tuesday with the news that U.S. Army Major General Harold Greene was killed by a Afghan soldier during a training program. Despite multiple stories of this type of killing in recent years, West says the problem is not with the program but with the true motivation for these attacks.
“The problem in Afghanistan goes to the heart of the conflict that unfortunately the administration will not admit. This is a religious-based conflict. This is terrorism by dedicated Islamists who have committed to a jihad against the west and against all their enemies. They believe it ferociously and it is at the soul of their being,” said West.
West says there are plenty of trustworthy, hard-working Afghan soldiers, but he says even Afghan-Americans charged with obtaining intelligence from these Afghan fighters struggle to distinguish the good from the bad.
“I’ve spoken with a lot of them and said, ‘Look, can you tell a Taliban? Can you tell a genuine Islamist who’s out to kill you?’ And they said, ‘Absolutely not. They lie so well.’ Then they went on to say many times they don’t even know what they’re going to do themselves,” said West.
“You see a man praying, but just because he’s praying doesn’t mean he’s on a jihad, but some of them are, and the very best people we have cannot differentiate ahead of time,” he said.
He says the Obama administration is ignoring this obvious motivating factor at the nation’s peril for the sake of its cultural agenda.
“There’s this liberalism gone amok, notion of secularism where you cannot admit that religion plays any part in anyone’s life,” said West, noting that even the admitted terrorist attack at Ft. Hood by Maj. Nidal Hasan was labeled “workplace violence” by the Army.
“It’s extended far beyond the Obama administration, this denial that a person can be motivated by his religion. It’s It’s frightening. Therefore, if you say that, you’re considered to be some sort of bigot,” he said.
West says all Americans are suffering as a result of a relentless effort to protect the reputation of Islam.
“You have no way of making it legitimate to do investigations based upon religion or ethnicity. Therefore, everybody from a 90-year-old grandmother has to take her shoes off to go through the machines, etc. to get on an aircraft. We absolutely, resolutely refuse to look at the truth of who’s trying to kill us,” said West.
As the U.S. gets closer to removing the vast majority of our forces from Afghanistan, West believes it’s clear our long-term strategy was deeply flawed from the beginning and gave the benefit of the doubt to political and military leaders who didn’t deserve it.
“I think we went entirely too far in Afghanistan. I love our troops. I spent all that time out there. My next book is all about how brave the troops are. but I do not stand up and applaud our generals sent us down the wrong path,” said West, adding that even the most acclaimed military leaders are not held in high regard by the ones who matter most.
“We have certain generals like Gen. (David) Petraeus and Gen. (Stanley) McChrystal that we say are huge heroes. Well, down at the platoon level you have a different view. I believe that some of our famous generals were naive, so naive that the troops at the bottom know they are naive,” he said.
“They were just wrong about Afghanistan and Iraq…If you’re going to fight the tough guy, you have to want to go into that battle to kill him and to win, none of this stuff about saying you’re out to win the hearts and minds of people. That’s not war. You go into war, you have to be determined to fight,” said West.
What is likely to happen in Afghanistan when the U.S. leaves? West says the chaos will descend rather quickly.
“The fissures in that society run so deep that regardless of what we do as we pull out, there’s going to be continued violence. Pakistan is determined that they are going to have a government that they can tell what to do. Therefore, the idea that there’s going to be any kind of peace in Afghanistan simply isn’t true,” he said.
However, West is also confident that Afghanistan will not pose the same kind of threat to the United States that it did leading up to the 9/11 attacks.
“The notion that Afghans are going to be attacking the United States isn’t true either. If we have a problem with Afghans, just don’t give them visas. We don’t have to go through all this stuff of building nations to prevent somebody from coming to the United States and taking pilot lessons,” said West.
Three Martini Lunch 8/6/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see Democratic attempts to keep a Senate seat in Montana apparently on the road to failure. They also shudder as health insurance companies in Florida announce major premium hikes for 2015. And they discuss the tale of sleazy politics of former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and his wife.
Constitutional Showdown on Amnesty
A leading border security advocate says Democrats are panicking over the immigration debate because their number one argument for reform has imploded in recent weeks, and he says the bill House Republicans passed on Friday is vital because it sends a clear message to President Obama that Congress makes the nation’s laws.
House Republicans provided considerable drama on the issue last week. Leaders initially called off a vote on a border security bill because they didn’t have the votes. After members started heading for the exits, they were ordered to come back and consider an amended bill that eventually passed on Friday.
Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian freely admits the House bill will never become law, but he says it serves a far important function beyond this debate and this year’s elections.
“There’s a tug of war going on between Congress and the president over who gets to make the law. The Constitution’s pretty clear on that. That’s why it starts with Congress and the presidency only comes after Congress. Yet, the president seems to be saying that if Congress doesn’t pass the legislation that he demands, that he is just going to go ahead and do it on his own,” said Krikorian.
“So even though the House bills, especially the one on this executive amnesty, obviously are not going to be passed under this Congress because Democrats run the Senate, it was a very important political marker making clear that Congress is not going to just lie down for the president’s usurpation of the separation of powers,” he said.
While no legislation will pass anytime soon, Krikorian is convinced the immigration has changed drastically as a result of the recent flood of illegal border crossings. He says the news has Democrats badly flustered and looking for a new argument to pass comprehensive reform.
“The whole premise of it was that the border is pretty much fixed, that we more or less have control and that now we can move on to clearing the decks, fix the problems that were created by past bad policy and move forward. The problem is the border crisis exposes that as false. We haven’t yet fixed our immigration enforcement problems so how can we even talk about amnestying people who are already here. I think that resonates with lots of people, even people who are open to the idea, at some point, of amnesty down the road,” said Krikorian.
Last week, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) said he believed recent events at the border and on Capitol Hill triggered a genuine change in perspective for his party’s leaders.
“Our leadership has changed. I think they’ve come to a more realistic understanding of where the Republican constituency is,” he said. “I think that events have caught up with the decision makers in Washington. Now, at least the decision makers in the Republican Party are together and they’re going in the right direction,” said Rohrabacher.
Krikorian was a fierce critic of GOP leaders for much of the immigration debate. Now, he also believes they see the light.
“The Republican leadership in the House initially wanted a much softer approach, weaker language, all of that stuff. You know, just the kind of thing you would expect from (House Speaker John) Boehner and his crew. The backbench members of Republicans in the House as well as a pretty clear public push back, and not just from conservatives but lots of independents, convinced them this is really something they really needed to stand up to the president on. So I’d say Congressman Rohrabacher probably had that right,” said Krikorian.
In addition to the House bills making a statement about which branch of government makes the laws, Krikorian is also impressed by the principles they espouse. Two bills were passed and Krikorian says both would put the nation on the right track.
“One was some extra money plus some changes to the law to make it easier to return illegal alien minors than it is now. So that was a positive step and it was a much tighter piece of legislation than the one they had considered the day before,” said Krikorian, noting the other was aimed directly at the White House.
“The other thing they passed was essentially a rebuke to the president, who has unilaterally and illegally amnestied half a million people on his own authority and is threatening to do it for millions more without any input from Congress. They essentially said, ‘We want to cut money off for this. You’re not allowed to do that,'” he said.
No one in Washington holds out hope for the GOP-controlled House and the Democratic-led Senate to find common ground on the issue. President Obama is now vowing to act on his own, and Krikorian has some educated guesses on what Obama would like to do.
“The word that’s coming out is that he’s going to amnesty, and I mean amnesty by giving work permits, Social Security numbers and everything short of a green card, to potentially several million people. They’re talking about maybe as many as five or six million, which would probably be the most sweeping executive power grab in our history, certainly in peacetime,” he said.
However, Krikorian predicts Obama will tread lightly just weeks away from midterm elections that already look like bad news for his party.
“I think he’s going to do something smaller before the election so as not to rock the boat too much politically. After the election, especially if the Republicans take the Senate, he might then try to slip through a much larger amnesty by decree, without any input from Congress,” said Krikorian.
Three Martini Lunch 8/5/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are cautiously optimistic once again as expert number cruncher Nate Silver gives the GOP a 60 percent chance of taking back the Senate majority. They also react to the news of an Afghan soldier killing a two-star U.S. Army general. And they cringe as Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks accuses Democrats of waging a war on whites.
Rise of the Libyan Caliphate
Jihadists in Benghazi are declaring themselves part of an Islamic caliphate just days after tribal warfare forced American diplomatic personnel out of Libya over fears for their safety.
With most of the world focused on foreign crises like the Israel-Hamas conflict and the Russian influence in Ukraine, the State Department quietly announced the withdrawal of U.S. embassy staff on July 26. Barely a week later, the fate of the war-torn country appears even more bleak.
“There has been a rapid deterioration over the past couple of weeks. (Friday) in Benghazi, the Ansar al-Sharia group, which of course was involved in the attacks on our special mission compound in Benghazi, have announced an Islamic Sharia state, a portion of a caliphate. They have taken over Benghazi and declared Islamic law,” said author and reporter Ken Timmerman, author most recently of “Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi.”
Timmerman says the fighting between radical Islamic groups is steadily intensifying and the conditions on the ground simply became untenable.
“The country is descending into chaos. I think this was a foreseeable thing. I’ve been talking to people who have been at the U.S. embassy recently, who have been engaged in the security procedures. They told me this was a disaster waiting to happen,” said Timmerman, who did have a bit of praise for Secretary of State John Kerry while jabbing his predecessor.
“Secretary Kerry at least had the foresight to evacuate the embassy, unlike Hillary Clinton, who left our people out to dry on September 11, 2012,” he said.
According to Timmerman, the rapid unraveling of stability in recent weeks is particularly noticeable and alarming.
“In Tripoli you still have ongoing fighting. The international airport has been bombed and shelled repeatedly. Aircraft have been destroyed on the ground. Libyans are basically isolated from the rest of the world. The country is going to hell in a hand basket,” he said, noting that all of this was avoidable because there was no need to force Col. Moammar Gaddafi from power in 2011.
“The Obama administration engaged in the sabotage, an undermining of a regime in Libya that was no threat to the United States whatsoever. Gaddafi had given up his weapons of mass destruction. He had destroyed his ties to terrorist groups. He was helping the United States in the war on terror. Was he a nice guy? No, he wasn’t. Were people in political prisons? Yes, they were. Were thousands jailed? No. He was a thug. He was a dictator, but he was not a threat to the United States and, frankly, he wasn’t even a threat to the Libyan people,” said Timmerman.
“We overthrew him and the result of that was predictable. It was getting these Islamist groups, these jihadi groups, who we helped to arm by the way. We helped to arm them, in Benghazi and elsewhere. They took over the country, and since then they’ve been fighting for control,” he said.
Much of “Dark Forces” details how the toppling of Gaddafi led to a massive amount of American-made weapons winding up in the hands of the world’s worst actors. Timmerman says the risks posed to the U.S. and our allies may well end up being the most troubling legacy of our involvement in Libya.
“The weapons that we delivered to the Libyan opposition, the anti-Gaddafi forces, leaked into the Jihadi networks around the world,” said Timmerman, noting that surface-to-air missiles have been tracked to Sinai, Gaza and even the shooting down of an American helicopter in Afghanistan.
“This is a clear threat to U.S. security interests around the world and I think it’s something that’s got our officials in the intelligence community and even in the military very worried,” he said.
In his book, Timmerman details about 2,500 Russian-made surface-to-air missiles disappeared from Libya’s arsenal after Gaddafi was killed. He says what happened next was even more troubling.
“I was able to document in “Dark Forces” that about 800 of them wound up in this jihadi arms bazaar in northern Niger. That’s a country in Africa, just below Libya. They were upgraded with CIA batteries and then traded amongst various jihadi groups and wound up in the Sinai, Gaza and elsewhere. That’s 800 missiles that are out on the loose,” said Timmerman.
In early 2011, the so-called Arab Spring was proclaimed as a wave of freedom as protests engulfed nations like Egypt, Libya and, eventually, Syria. With chaos gripping Libya, civil war and an Islamic state raging in Syria and Egypt emerging from a two-year battle with the Muslim Brotherhood, Timmerman says the early evaluations of the Arab Spring are less than rosy.
“While it may have had some liberal, pro-western leanings in the beginning, it was quickly dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, quickly dominated by jihadi forces and, in fact, has ushered in an era of darkness across the Arab world,” said Timmerman.
Three Martini Lunch 8/4/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are cautiously enthused by an NBC poll showing voters more enthusiastic about GOP control of Congress than Democratic control. They also slam local governments and utilities for raising water prices after succeeding in getting residents to decrease demand. And they laugh about an ill-planned Obama administration plan to foment rebellion in Cuba.
Inside the House GOP Border Battle
One of the most prominent amnesty opponents in the House Republican Conference says he supported the original border bill, backs the new one as well and believes the legislation will give the American people a clear choice between the parties on immigration policy heading into the November elections.
Friday’s vote was scheduled after GOP leaders failed to muster enough votes to pass the original bill. Members were on their way home for summer recess when they were called back to work again on the legislation. Following a meeting of Republican members Friday morning, passage of a revised bill was largely expected by the end of the day.
Rep. Dana Rohrbacher (R-California) made headlines last year by suggesting House Speaker John Boehner should lose his leadership position if he ever brought an immigration bill to a vote without having a majority of House GOP members ready to support it.
The congressman says he supported the original legislation. By Friday afternoon, Rohrabacher was waiting to see the final language of the revised bill.
“It’s the same bill as what we had before and the other bill was a step forward. Many of us have been fighting the good fight against the nonsense we have in terms of immigration policy. I was going to vote for it,” said Rohrabacher.
For Rohrabacher, the plan included two of his top priorities. The first is stronger border security.
“We are going to make sure that the National Guard can play a legal role at the border when it’s necessary to call upon them. When they do, the federal government will take that expense because protecting the border is a federal responsibility,” said Rohrabacher, who is also pleased the bill rolls back recent laws mandating that every young person coming across the border be processed.
“It was eliminating a loophole in the law that had been placed there by legislation a long time ago that was aimed at human trafficking but set up a loophole that was actually giving due process rights to people who just ended up at our doorstep. That’s why we were ending up with such a flooding, a swarming of young people at our border,” said Rohrabacher.
He says the failure to pass the bill on Thursday was the result of some confusion other conservative members had over specific language in the bill.
“There was some wording of the bill that some of our more conservative members felt was not as effective as we could have had it and might lead to some confusion,” said Rohrabacher. “They insisted on getting together last night and they worked out the proper wording. That’s what we are going to vote on today and I have no doubt that it will pass.”
Rohrabacher says he still isn’t sure what the wording problems were.
“That was the biggest problem that I had with these people. When I asked for specifics, they really couldn’t give me things. When they tried to, it didn’t make sense to me,” he said.
Other conservative criticisms of the bill include the failure to address President Obama’s unilateral 2012 decision to offer legal status to young people in the country illegally, providing their parents brought them here against their wills while they were minors.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) also demanded that Central Americans entering the country illegally be treated the same as Mexicans committing the same offense. King says that provision was fixed in the updated bill.
While fellow anti-amnesty stalwarts such as Rep. King and Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) found the original language unacceptable, Rohrabacher says he respectfully disagrees with their tactics from Thursday.
“I don’t vote against a bill because of what’s not in it. I think that that’s irrational to do that. That way you would vote against every bill because there’s something you can add into every bill that’s going to be more positive. You take a look and you say, ‘Is that bill a step forward. Had they killed that bill for that particular reasoning, it would have been a great disservice to our country because then the positive things wouldn’t get in,” said Rohrabacher.
Thursday was largely a public relations nightmare for the GOP, with leaders briefly giving up on hopes of passing a bill they previously said was vital an planning to take it up again in September. However, Rohrabacher says this debate and the current border crisis are both serving to unify the House Republicans on the issue of immigration reform.
“The circumstances and historic events have been happening that have crystallized in people’s minds what this issue of illegal immigration really is. I have, time and again, said this is not just the president. The president hasn’t brought on this border crisis. It’s the president as well as the Republican leadership. We’re going down the wrong path,” said Rohrabacher, noting that he repeatedly told his GOP colleagues embracing concepts like legalizing young illegal immigrants would lead to a flood of kids at our southern border.
“Our leadership has changed. I think they’ve come to a more realistic understanding of where the Republican constituency is,” he said. “I think that events have caught up with the decision makers in Washington. Now, at least the decision makers in the Republican Party are together and they’re going in the right direction,” he said.
Passage of the bill, he says, puts Democrats in a very awkward position.
“The Democrats are going to suffer because of this because there are a lot of Democrats who are saying, ‘Hey, What’s the president’s answer? He’s going to give away work permits to millions of people who have come here illegally? What is that going to do to the working people of our country who are unemployed now?'” said Rohrabacher.
Senate Democratic leaders vowed to reject the original House bill and left Washington before the House voted on Friday. President Obama reiterated on Friday that he would veto either of the House bills if they somehow made it through the Senate.
So what can the GOP gain by staying in town to pass a bill that will never become law?
“The best thing we need to do as Republicans is say, ‘This is what we’ve passed. This is what our policies would be. Compare it to the Democrats and then you vote. American voters vote and decide what direction our country goes.’ In that way, this bill has served it’s purpose well,” said Rohrabacher.