Tag: Foreign Policy

Our Bad Habit of Negotiating with Terrorists

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by Bruce Thornton // FrontPage Magazine

Photo via Wikicommons By Chris Brown
Photo via Wikicommons By Chris Brown

 

Every parent should be happy for the Bergdahl family, whose son was returned to them after five years of captivity among the Taliban. But every parent is not the president of the United States, whose primary responsibility is to protect the security and interests of all Americans, both now and in the long-term. The release of 5 “high-risk”––a phrase meaning they’re eager to kill Americans–– Taliban jihadists held in Guantanamo Bay is nothing more than ransom paid to kidnappers, and an invitation to the enemy to take more Americans captive and to hold them as bargaining chips for more concessions. And the release of hardened, high-ranking Taliban terrorists means there will be more dead Americans after theses soldiers of Allah return to the battlefield.

Continue reading “Our Bad Habit of Negotiating with Terrorists” →

Benghazi Constructs 

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Much is still murky, but the Obama team was at the least guilty of negligence and deception. 

By Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online
Photo via Wikicommons
Photo via Wikicommons

Almost everything the administration has alleged about Benghazi has proven false. Yet also, in Machiavellian fashion, the Obama group successfully peddled useful fictions, effectively deluded the country, adroitly ensured President Obama’s reelection, and cast aspersions on those who sought the truth.

In that sense, so far, the lies about Benghazi have won, the truth has failed.

So what really happened?

The Obama administration felt that it was behind the curve concerning the 2011 unrest in Libya. The so-called Arab Spring revolutions had toppled other governments in North Africa, and it seemed that protesters would do the same in Syria and Libya.

Continue reading “Benghazi Constructs “ →

Tweets Won’t Stop Modern Barbarians 

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Boko Haram and the Sultan of Brunei couldn’t care less about Western outrage.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

Photo by: inquisitr.com
Photo by: inquisitr.com

Nigeria’s homegrown, al-Qaeda linked militant group, Boko Haram, brags openly that it recently kidnapped about 300 young Nigerian girls. It boasts that it will sell them into sexual slavery.

Those terrorists have a long and unapologetic history of murdering kids who dare to enroll in school, and Christians in general. For years, Western aid groups have pleaded with the State Department to at least put Boko Haram on the official list of terrorist groups. But former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s team was reluctant to come down so harshly, in apparent worry that some might interpret such condemnation as potentially offensive to Islamic sensitivities.

Instead, Western elites now flood Facebook and Twitter with angry postings about Boko Haram — either in vain hopes that public outrage might deter the terrorists, or simply to feel better by loudly condemning the perpetrators.

Continue reading “Tweets Won’t Stop Modern Barbarians “ →

Nigerian ‘Sex-Slaves’ Disrupt Obama Narrative on Islam

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by Raymond Ibrahim // RaymondIbrahim.com

Islamic law permits the possession of concubines, or sex slaves.  This has been demonstrated countless times, including through Islamic clerics quoting Islamic scriptures, and through ordinary Muslims, past and present, acting on it.
Photo via RaymondIbrahim.com

That said, Islamic sanctioned sex-slavery does not perturb the Western world simply because the powers-that-be—specifically academia, media, and government—ignore it, and all other unsavory phenomena associated with Islam, out of existence.

Interesting, therefore, are the responses from the authorities—comical one might even say—when one of these everyday anecdotes actually does surface to the general public.

Continue reading “Nigerian ‘Sex-Slaves’ Disrupt Obama Narrative on Islam” →

Victor Davis Hanson on the Bill Martinez Show (VDH interview begins at 27:10)

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Click Here to Listen to the Interview now! 

VDH interview begins at 27:10 (Begins again after the break at 41:30)

VDH discusses his article What Drives Vladimir Putin?

He also discusses his latest article Tweets Won’t Stop Modern Barbarians 

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#BringBackOurGirls and the Left’s Empty Moral Outrage

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by Bruce S. Thornton // Front Page Magazine 

downloadThe outrage over the kidnapping of nearly 300 schoolgirls by the Nigerian jihadist gang Boko Haram reeks of Western hypocrisy and moral idiocy. Boko Haram has for years been slaughtering Christians – up to 2500 this year alone – and burning churches in a classic Islamic jihad against infidels. These depredations apparently weren’t enough to get the group designated a terrorist organization by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. But this indifference to what under international law is a genocide has been indulged as well by our celebrities and the mainstream media, who rarely mention that the group is specifically targeting Christians, and before the girls were kidnapped displayed little interest in the suffering of those Christians. So why this sudden attention?

Continue reading “#BringBackOurGirls and the Left’s Empty Moral Outrage” →

Neglected Prophet: J.B. Kelly

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by Bruce S. Thornton // Front Page Magazine 

jk (1)
Photo by Amazon.com

The received wisdom and unexamined assumptions underlying the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts to forge peace between Israel and her enemies are as predictable as the ignominious collapse of this latest attempt. We are now well into the seventh decade of this false knowledge and the spurious narrative dominating American foreign policy under administrations of both parties. Just how old and worn this narrative is can be seen in the late John Barrett Kelly’s The Oil Cringe of the West, a collection of reviews and essays that originally appeared in the critical decade of the 1970s after the Six Day and Yom Kippur Wars. Continue reading “Neglected Prophet: J.B. Kelly” →

America’s New Anti-Strategy

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Our allies and our enemies have seriously recalculated where the U.S. stands.

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

It was not difficult to define American geopolitical strategy over the seven decades

Axis & Allies board game djensen47 via Flickr
Axis & Allies board game
djensen47 via Flickr

following World War II — at least until 2009. It was largely bipartisan advocacy, most ambitiously, for nations to have the freedom of adopting constitutional governments that respected human rights, favored free markets, and abided by the rule of law. And at the least, we sought a world in which states could have any odious ideology they wished as long as they kept it within their own borders. There were several general strategic goals as we calculated our specific aims, both utopian and realistic.

(1) The strategic cornerstone was the protection of a small group of allies that, as we did, embraced consensual government and free markets, and were more likely to avoid human-rights abuses. That eventually meant partnerships with Western and later parts of Eastern Europe, Great Britain, and much of its former Empire, such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In Asia, the American focus was on Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan. The U.S. military essentially guaranteed the security of these Asian nations, and they developed safely, shielded from Soviet or Chinese Communist aggression, and more recently from Russian or Chinese provocations. Continue reading “America’s New Anti-Strategy” →

A New Obama Doctrine?

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With his presidency in tailspin, Carter radically changed course. Will Obama do the same?

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

By the beginning of 1980, Jimmy Carter was in big trouble. Almost everything he had said or done in foreign policy over the prior three years had failed — and he was running for reelection.388px-JimmyCarterPortrait

Carter had come into office in 1977 promising a new American stance abroad predicated on human rights. He bragged of an end to our supposedly inordinate fear of Soviet-inspired Communism. He entertained the hope of not losing a single American soldier in combat during his tenure. And he rejected the realpolitik of the Nixon-Kissinger years.

The State Department would end the excessive influence of the bellicose National Security Council. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance would put a kinder, gentler face on American diplomacy. We championed Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe over more moderate black reformers. We broke with the Shah of Iran, who fled his country in January 1979. We for a while praised the Ayatollah Khomeini and sought ways to reach out to him. Carter’s U.N. ambassador, Andrew Young, called Khomeini “some kind of saint.” Young met secretly with PLO representatives in Kuwait. In an interview, he falsely alleged of his own country that “We still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons.” Continue reading “A New Obama Doctrine?” →

Obama: Ike Redivivus?

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Obama admirers have created a complete distortion of “the Eisenhower era.”

by Victor Davis Hanson // National Review Online 

In critique of the George W. Bush administration, and in praise of the perceived foreign-policy restraint of Obama’s first five years in the White House, a persistent myth has arisen that WAR & CONFLICT BOOK ERA: WORLD WAR II/PERSONALITIESObama is reminiscent of Eisenhower — in the sense of being a president who kept America out of other nations’ affairs and did not waste blood and treasure chasing imaginary enemies.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, Andrew Bacevich, Fareed Zakaria (“Why Barack Is like Ike”), and a host of others have made such romantic, but quite misleading, arguments about the good old days under the man they consider the last good Republican president.

Ike was no doubt a superb president. Yet while he could be sober and judicious in deploying American forces abroad, he was hardly the non-interventionist of our present fantasies, who is so frequently used and abused to score partisan political points.

There is a strange disconnect about Eisenhower’s supposed policy of restraint, especially in reference to the Middle East, and his liberal use of the CIA in covert operations. While romanticizing Ike, we often deplore the 1953 coup in Iran and the role of the CIA, but seem to forget that it was Ike who ordered the CIA intervention that helped to lead to the ouster of Continue reading “Obama: Ike Redivivus?” →