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Charles Krauthammer compliments the president on airstrikes against ISIS.
Baghdad called President Obama’s bluff and he came through. He had refused to provide air support to Iraqi government forces until the Iraqis got rid of their divisive sectarian prime minister.
They did. He responded.
With the support of U.S. airstrikes, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have retaken the Mosul dam. Previous strikes had relieved the siege of MountSinjar and helped the Kurds retake two strategic towns that had opened the road to a possible Islamic State assault on Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan.
In following through, Obama demonstrated three things: the effectiveness of even limited U.S. power, the vulnerability of the Islamic State and, crucially, his own seriousness, however tentative.
The last of these is the most important. Obama had said that there is no American military solution to the conflict. This may be true, but there is a local military solution. (There must be: There is no negotiating with Islamic State barbarism.) And that solution requires U.S. air support.
It can work. The Islamic State is overstretched. It’s a thin force of perhaps 15,000 trying to control a territory four times the size of Israel. Its supply lines, operating in open country, are not just extended but exposed and highly vulnerable to air power.
Stopping the Islamic State’s momentum creates a major shift in psychology. Guerrilla armies thrive on a sense of inevitability. The Islamic State has grown in size, demoralized its enemies and attracted recruits from all over the world because it seemed unstoppable, a real caliphate in the making. …
John Fund starts out a look at Ferguson, Missouri.
America is a land of makeovers, but there should be limits. This week I had to rub my eyes in disbelief when I saw Malik Zulu Shabazz, the former radical head of the New Black Panther Party, on TV amid the rioting in Ferguson, Mo.
Shabazz is now head of something called Black Lawyers for Justice, and he has set himself up as a “peacemaker” in Ferguson. Last weekend, he hijacked the news conference of Missouri Highway Patrol captain Ron Johnson to take credit for keeping things under control: “My group and — thanks to you — my organizers, along with the New Black Panther Party and the Nation of Islam, we are the ones who put those men in the streets, and we controlled the flow of traffic.” Johnson agreed that Shabazz and his group had indeed helped out.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be asking a lot of questions about Shabazz’s presence in Ferguson. On the one hand, Shabazz blames “intentional provocateurs” and “outside infiltrators” for the violence in Ferguson. On the other hand, in the past it has been Shabazz and his ilk who have been the “outside infiltrators” creating chaos and stirring up hatred. Jesse Jackson is in Ferguson calling the Brown shooting a “state execution.” The egregious Al Sharpton is speaking at Michael Brown’s funeral. During the Trayvon Martin case, Sharpton called the acquittal of George Zimmerman an “atrocity.” Hashim Nzinga, the New Black Panther Party’s current leader, put a bounty on George Zimmerman’s head. He is now in Ferguson whipping up the crowds against what he calls President Obama’s weak reaction to Brown’s death: “He need to go back to his roots and stop people from killing Africans in the streets.”
In Ferguson, the New Black Panthers are apparently playing a double game. At some points they join with their former leader Shabazz to help direct traffic, but at others they fuel the flames of violence. …
Linda Chavez writes on Eric Holder.
… After visiting Ferguson this week to initiate a federal civil-rights investigation into the shooting, Attorney General Eric Holder declared that he understands the distrust of police that many blacks feel.
‘‘I understand that mistrust. I am the attorney general of the United States. But I am also a black man,” he told an audience in Ferguson.
Holder then met privately with the family of Mike Brown, the man shot, and later held a news conference in which he reiterated racial grievance:
“This shooting incident has brought to the surface underlying tensions that have existed for many years. There is a history to these tensions, and that history simmers in more communities than just Ferguson.”
Such words inflame racial mistrust — and, even more importantly, undermine justice.
Let’s start with the “unarmed black teenager” mantra.
Brown was 18 years old — an adult by all legal standards. He was also 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed nearly 300 pounds.
Surveillance video from a nearby convenience store taken shortly before the shooting shows Brown as a towering muscled male stealing goods and then grabbing and violently shoving a store employee who tried to question him.
The actual images of Brown on the video surely do not bring to mind a harmless teen. …
David Harsanyi on Al Sharpton.
The persistent whitewashing of Al Sharpton’s revolting past will always be a mystery to me. But if we’re to trust Politico’s reporting today, Sharpton has emerged as the go-to civil rights guru for the Obama administration. “If anything,” writes Glenn Thrush, “the Ferguson crisis has underscored Sharpton’s role as the national black leader Obama leans on most, a remarkable personal and political transformation for a man once regarded with suspicion and disdain by many in his own party.”
Draw whatever conclusions you like from this development. But if the point of the piece is to detail the revival of a once-reviled public figure, offering a single purified paragraph detailing the events that first made the man famous seems a bit disingenuous. Perhaps a little more context is necessary for those who didn’t live through his violent circus.
So let’s revisit. …
Ann Coulter sums up the mess.
It’s important to remember that, in police shooting cases like the one in Ferguson, Missouri, the initial facts are often wrong. You don’t want to end up looking like Rich Lowry, National Review editor, whose March 23, 2012, column on the Trayvon Martin shooting was titled, “Al Sharpton Is Right.”
Early accounts are especially unreliable when reporters think they have a white racism story. Stirring up racial hatred is how journalists make up for sending their own kids to lily-white private schools.
As detailed in my book Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama , the old media’s standard for any police shooting of a black person is: “Racist until proved innocent.” We got three-alarm racism stories for the shootings of Jose (Kiko) Garcia, Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart and Edmund Perry.
And then it turned out Garcia was a drugged-up coke dealer who pulled a gun on the cop, Bumpurs was a psychotic who came at the cops with a machete, Stewart fought the cops so violently he gave himself a heart attack, and Perry mugged an undercover cop.
Witness statements aren’t always 100 percent accurate. In Garcia’s case, innumerable neighbors gave the media florid accounts of Officer Michael O’Keefe beating and kicking Garcia, before repeatedly shooting the unarmed man in the back as he lay facedown on the floor. The Garcia family lawyer assured The New York Times that “this kid never was arrested; he wasn’t a drug dealer.”
It later turned out that Garcia was a convicted felon. He had a gun the night of the shooting. …