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Mark Steyn notes we now have threatened to bomb the Libyan rebels. You know, the ones we were helping by bombing Gadhafi’s forces.
… So, having agreed to be the Libyan Liberation Movement Air Force, we’re also happy to serve as the Gadhafi Last-Stand Air Force. Say what you like about Barack Obama, but it’s rare to find a leader so impeccably multilateralist that he’s willing to participate in both sides of a war. It doesn’t exactly do much for holding it under budget, but it does ensure that for once we’ve got a sporting chance of coming out on the winning side. If a coalition plane bombing Gadhafi’s forces runs into a coalition plane bombing the rebel forces, are they allowed to open fire on each other? Or would that exceed the U.N. resolution?
Who are these rebels we’re simultaneously arming and bombing? Don’t worry, the CIA is “gathering intelligence” on them. They should have a clear idea of who our allies are round about the time Mohammed bin Jihad is firing his Kalashnikov and shouting “Death to the Great Satan!” from the balcony of the presidential palace. But America’s commander-in-chief thinks they’re pretty sound chaps. “The people that we’ve met with have been fully vetted,” says President Obama. “So we have a clear sense of who they are. And so far they’re saying the right things. And most of them are professionals, lawyers, doctors – people who appear to be credible.”
Credible people with credentials – just like the president! Lawyers, doctors, just like Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida’s No. 2. Maybe among their impeccably credentialed ranks is a credible professional eye doctor like Bashir Assad, the London ophthalmologist who made a successful midlife career change to dictator of Syria. Hillary Rodham Clinton calls young Bashir a “reformer,” by which she means presumably that he hasn’t (yet) slaughtered as many civilians as his late dad. Assad Sr. killed some 20,000 Syrians at Hama and is said to have pumped hydrogen cyanide through the town: there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, as the ophthalmologists say. Baby Assad hasn’t done that (yet), so he’s a reformer, and we’re in favor of those, so we’re not arming his rebels. …
Craig Pirrong in Streetwise Professor posts on Jennifer Rubin’s reaction to Gates’ recent testimony.
Jennifer Rubin says that SecDef Robert Gates should resign for his statement that ground troops will not be committed to Libya while “I’m in this job.” Rubin interprets Gates’s remark as a threat to the president.
That is a very plausible interpretation. What should we make of it then?
The first thing to note is that Gates is not in the habit of making threats. He is not a grandstander. He is not a prima donna. He has a long record of service as a loyal servant in several administrations. His remarks are an exception. There must be an exceptional reason for him to make them.
Recent events provide clues for Gates’s outburst–which his remarks were, compared to his very low key norm. In particular, the let-the-rebels-do-it “strategy” has proved to be utterly fantastic and farcical. As a Patton, not a Gates, would have put it, these rebels couldn’t fight their way out of a p*ss-soaked paper bag. Testimony by Gates and Admiral Mullen revealed that there are perhaps 1000 with any military training. They have no heavy weapons. No discipline. They are prone to indiscriminate killing–so much so that NATO has threatened to bomb these ostensible “allies” in the fight against Khaddafy unless they knock it off. Good luck with that.
Recognition of this is predictably leading to a serious potential for mission creep. For instance, since the effectiveness of air power is sharply limited in supporting offensive operations by the lack of targeting assets on the ground, a proposal is afoot to have US troops train rebels as forward observers.
Please. FO is a very demanding job that takes intensive training. …
Charles Krauthammer reacts to the administration’s attitude towards Syria’s Assad.
… During the worst days of the Iraq war, this regime funneled terrorists into Iraq to fight U.S. troops and Iraqi allies. It is dripping with Lebanese blood as well, being behind the murder of independent journalists and democrats, including former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri. This year, it helped topple the pro-Western government of Hariri’s son, Saad, and put Lebanon under the thumb of the virulently anti-Western Hezbollah. Syria is a partner in nuclear proliferation with North Korea. It is Iran’s agent and closest Arab ally, granting it an outlet on the Mediterranean. Those two Iranian warships that went through the Suez Canal in February docked at the Syrian port of Latakia, a long-sought Iranian penetration of the Mediterranean.
Yet here was the secretary of state covering for the Syrian dictator against his own opposition. And it doesn’t help that Clinton tried to walk it back two days later by saying she was simply quoting others. Rubbish. Of the myriad opinions of Assad, she chose to cite precisely one: reformer. That’s an endorsement, no matter how much she later pretends otherwise.
And it’s not just the words; it’s the policy behind it. This delicacy toward Assad is dismayingly reminiscent of President Obama’s response to the 2009 Iranian uprising during which he was scandalously reluctant to support the demonstrators, while repeatedly reaffirming the legitimacy of the brutal theocracy suppressing them. …
Tony Blankley suggests a long term view of the turmoil in Islam.
In 1427, a ship captain sailing for his Portuguese prince, Henry the Navigator, discovered the Azores Islands. If the question of the significance of this event had been posed at the time to Sultan Murad Khan, the leader of the Ottoman Empire, to Itzcoatl and Nezahualcoyotl, the co-rulers of the Aztecs, or to Rao Kanha, one of the princes of Jodhpur in India – it is unlikely that any of them would have responded that it was an early indication of an historic explosion of cultural energy in Europe that would lead to European exploration and conquest of most of the known world. Nor would they have foreseen a renaissance of European thought that would give rise to scientific, industrial and scholarly dominance of the planet by European culture for at least a half a millennium.
Today, no European or American leaders with whom I am familiar have tied together the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the various Islamist bombings around the world, the push for Shariah law in the West, and the current disturbances in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Syria and Bahrain as symptoms of one larger phenomenon. …
John Fund does a good job outlining the stakes in Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin.
… Liberal groups are doing all they can to politicize this judicial race. An American Federation of Teachers local has sent a letter to its members asserting that “a Kloppenburg victory would swing the balance (on the court) to our side. A vote for Prosser is a vote for [Gov.] Walker.” It is time, the letter says, “to get even.” Ms. Kloppenburg certainly isn’t discouraging such thinking. She told the Madison Capital Times that “the events of the last few weeks have put into sharp relief how important the Supreme Court is as a check on overreach in the other branches of government.”
Why are the unions and their liberal allies so desperate to block Mr. Walker’s reforms? It’s all about the money. Unions can’t abide the loss of political clout that will result from ending the state’s practice of automatically deducting union dues from employee paychecks. For most Wisconsin public employees, union dues total between $700 and $1,000 a year, much of which is funneled into political spending to elect the officials who negotiate their contracts.
Union officials recognize what can happen if dues payments become voluntary. Robert Chanin, who was general counsel of the National Education Association from 1968 to 2009, said in a U.S. District Court oral argument in 1978 that “it is well-recognized that if you take away the mechanism of payroll deduction, you won’t collect a penny from these people, and it has nothing to do with voluntary or involuntary. I think it has to do with the nature of the beast, and the beasts who are our teachers . . . simply don’t come up with the money regardless of the purpose.” …
Corner Post from Brian Bolduc on the same subject.
NY Times Caucus Blog catches Schumer giving marching orders.
Um, senators, ever heard of the mute button?
Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process. …
And the National Journal caught Howard Dean telling the truth.
Howard Dean, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, sees an upside to a looming government shutdown – at least politically.
“If I was head of DNC, I would be quietly rooting for it,” said Dean, speaking on a National Journal Insider’s Conference panel Tuesday morning. “I know who’s going to get blamed – we’ve been down this road before.” …
Jim Lacey goes after the president’s energy speech.
If you want to lower the price of something, the best solution is to produce more of it. This is basic Econ 101 stuff. But nowhere in the administration’s new energy proposals, presented by the president this Wedesday in a speech at Georgetown University, is the idea of pumping more oil in the United States addressed, except to say it is impossible.
To reach this conclusion, the president had to speak a gross untruth, one he tells so often that he even felt a need to apologize before saying it again: that the United States sits on only 2 percent of the world’s oil supplies, while using 25 percent of the world’s oil. As I pointed out in an article recently, the Department of Energy, which most assuredly vetted this speech before it was released, has known for years this is wrong. In just one 35-miles-square area of the Midwest there is more recoverable oil than in the entire Middle East.
This may be just the tip of the iceberg. Oil shales throughout the region may hold trillions of barrels more. There may even be hundreds of billions more barrels off our coasts and in other areas from which they can be recovered relatively cheaply. …
Ditto Steven Hayward in the Journal.
The Obama administration’s energy policy is in the midst of transition from being stubbornly ideological to being wholly incoherent. That much was clear when President Obama unveiled his Blueprint for a Secure Energy Future this week. …