Hope For All C Students

April 13, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

The FBI file of Pulitzer-winning columnist and Nixon White House speechwriter, the late William Safire, has become public. The Associated Press’s Jessica Gresko describes the contents:

Some of the earliest material dates from 1969, when investigators did a background check on Safire, who was joining the Nixon White House as a speech writer. The FBI’s investigators learned that Safire, then 39, had been an “honor senior” at the Bronx High School of Science and served as circulation manager of the newspaper. As a student at Syracuse University between 1947 and 1949, he had an average “just short of a B” before quitting the school. Later, while running his own public relations firm, he had clients such as The Good Humor Corporation and Ex-Lax Inc. in Brooklyn.

The bulk of the file is only partly related to Safire, however, and includes an investigation into the wiretapping, which lasted from 1969 into 1971 and was apparently started because of leaks surrounding Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The talks between the U.S. and Soviet Union were on the subject of arms control. The documents show Safire was among more than a dozen people, including some at the White House and four journalists, whose phones were tapped. The wiretap on Safire lasted four months and found nothing.

“I have a thing about wiretapping,” Safire said on “Meet The Press” in 2006, describing what had happened to him and referencing wiretapping during the Bush administration. “I didn’t like that … it told me how easy it was to just take somebody who was not really suspected of anything for any good reason and listen to every conversation in his home.”

Anatoly F. Dobrynin, RIP

April 9, 2010 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cold War, Cuba, International Affairs, National Security, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, UN | Leave a Comment 

Yesterday, the death of Anatoly Fyodorovich Dobrynin, the Soviet Union’s ambassador to the United States from 1962 to 1986, was announced in Moscow. He was 90.

Few diplomats served as long in Washington as Dobrynin. (One who served longer was Ernest Jaakson, who was the representative of the Estonian government-in-exile in Washington, then of the revived nation of Estonia, from 1965 until 1993, and who replaced Dobrynin as dean of the capital’s diplomatic corps in 1986, rather to the latter’s irritation.) During those three-plus decades, he served five Soviet leaders (Khruschchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko and Gorbachev) during six Administrations (Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan).

The two most significant achievements of Dobrynin’s tenure in Washington came in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and ten years later, when he played a central role on the Soviet side in negotiating the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty. The Cuban crisis came six months after his arrival in DC, following a period serving as United Nations Undersecretary-General under Dag Hammarskjold. During the months before President Kennedy learned of Soviet missiles on Cuban territory, Dobrynin managed to establish contacts with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy that proved to be the basis of the back-channel negotiations that ultimately defused what, to date, has been the most dangerous military situation the world has faced since 1945. None of Dobrynin’s predecessors as Soviet Ambassador had shown anything approaching his diplomatic poise and skill; had he not been on the scene, events might have taken a tragic turn.

A decade later, Dobrynin, negotiating with National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger, helped to assemble the ABM treaty, which, for nearly forty years, has been the cornerstone on which the disarmament agreements between the US and USSR (and later Russia) have been built. He also considerably facilitated the process which led to the SALT I agreement of 1972, and helped further the meetings between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev which resulted in full-scale detente between the superpowers.

It should be emphasized that Dobrynin, despite his willingness to steep himself in American culture and his genial persona, was always a loyal representative of the Soviet regime and its ideology. When faced with the human-rights stance of President Carter, he gave no ground, and, in the years before Mikhail Gorbachev gained power, took many a hard-line position where Soviet actions abroad were concerned, especially in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. In his 1995 autobiography, In Confidence, he made it clear that he was unhappy to see the Soviet Union disintegrate. But it should be remembered that as a diplomat, he was committed to dialogue over confrontation, wherever and whenever he thought it possible, and that commitment helped the process which ultimately decreased and finally ended the dangerous tensions of the Cold War.

The Russian site RT.com offers these tributes from Dr. Kissinger, who so many times faced the Ambassador across a negotiating table, and Donald Kendall, a close friend of President Nixon’s:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger remembers Dobrynin when, during the Cold War, he was working in Washington DC, heading the Russian Embassy there. “First he was my professional partner,” says Kissinger, “and then gradually, he became my friend.” Even though, he says, the Soviet politics of those times which the ambassador was standing by, often went against the US policies, “he was always trying to achieve peace, to reduce tensions and to stand by a more peaceful life on the planet,” says the former US Secretary of State. “I think of him with respect and warm-hearted feelings,” concludes Kissinger.

“I hope Dobrynin will get the memorial that he deserves,” said Donald Kendall, former head of the PepsiCo in an interview to ITAR-TASS news agency. He suggested that both Russia and the United States should put a monument to Dobrynin, as a sign of honor and respect for his achievements.

Kendall is convinced that Dobrynin’s “fantastic diplomatic skills” have several times “saved the relationships” between Moscow and Washington. “I have stressed this many times, that if in those times there would have been a different ambassador in Washington, then there could have been a real war between the two countries.”

A Moment In History

February 20, 2010 by admin | Filed Under History, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 4 Comments 

On 13 June 1971, General Alexander Haig, then Deputy Assistant to the President for Military Affairs, was the first to discuss with RN The New York Times‘ publication —that Sunday morning— of the first installment of the study that became known as the Pentagon Papers.

RN refers to Mel Laird, who was Secretary of Defense, and General Haig refers to the McGovern-Hatfield Amendment that required complete withdrawal of all American troops from Vietnam by 31 December 1971.  Although it had been defeated in the Senate in October 1970, it remained the subject of discussion and controversy through 1971.  He also mentions Clark Clifford, the ubiquitous Democrat who was one of the legendary Wise Men as well as one of Wasington’s most famous  fixers.  He  had succeeded Robert McNamara as LBJ’s Secretary of Defense.  After initially  deciding to support Johnson’s policies in Vietnam, he turned against the war.

Follow The Money–It’s Going To China

February 19, 2010 by admin | Filed Under Asia, Barack Obama, China, Cold War, Economic issues, George W. Bush, History, International Affairs, Middle East, Money, National Security, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

The other day, President Barack Obama met with the Tibetan Dali Lama in the White House—doing so in the Map Room as opposed to the Oval Office in an apparent attempt to mute any “official” aura for the meeting. It was sort of like trying to kowtow to one audience while powwowing with another. Likely the nuance was lost on the government in Beijing. Of course, past presidents have received the Tibetan leader—a man who has become a symbol for freedom and a persistent reminder of the oppression of his people at the hands of the Chinese regime.

It was 38 years ago this week that President Richard Nixon played the historic China Card—a geopolitical masterstroke during the Cold War. It was all part of a strategic view of the world and effectuated from a position of strength. We were powerful; they were backward—technologically, culturally, and with obvious political deficiencies. That moment remains a high water mark in Nixon’s presidency—a moment in time that even the most determined critics concede positively to his legacy.

But what would Mr. Nixon think now?

These days, admittedly, the whole issue of U.S.-China relations is a sticky one for our current President. It is one of many examples of how different things are when you are governing as opposed to campaigning for office—although it is hard to tell which is which in Washington these days. Mario Cuomo famously talked years ago about politics being “poetry” and governing “prose.”

Dealing with potential adversaries—and even some friends—is always best when you do so from a position of strength. It’s true in military and national defense (“peace through strength”) and it’s true in economics, as well. The scriptures remind us, “The borrower is servant to the lender.” And when one party is deep in financial debt to another a certain measure of leverage is ceded to the lender.

How this dynamic will play out in the immediate future is anyone’s guess, but owing nearly $800 billion to the Chinese should raise a flag—a red one. And it should come as no surprise if and when those to whom we owe such copious amounts of money begin to squeeze us on the international stage.

President Obama has been making great pains to try to change our image before the world, one that he believes George W. Bush perpetuated and that has led to our virtual “blackball” by many nations. But in fact, what he really should be concerned about is not “blackball,” but rather “blackmail.” The Chinese dumped $45 billion of T-bills a couple of months ago—wave of the future? And why shouldn’t one nation operating out of its own interests use such leverage? We would.

In fact, we have.

In 1956, there were two hot spots with the potential of blowing up into World War III, a revolution in Hungary—and a crisis in the Middle East involving the Suez Canal. Seen now in hindsight against the backdrop of the Cold War and as the moment when the last vestiges of old world colonialism gave wave to complete bi-polar hegemony pitting the United States against the Soviets, the Suez Crisis was as much about the exercise of economic clout as it was a diplomatic-military affair.

Gamal Abdel Nassar had emerged as a leader in Egypt as part of a 1952 coup overthrowing King Farouk and by 1954 he was firmly in place as that nation’s maximum leader. He immediately undertook a complete transformation of his country with massive public works and the progressive nationalization of industry. He was enamored of the Soviet system and soon it became clear that his nation would be taking that side in the Cold War. One project near and dear to his heart was the building of the Aswan Dam, which America at first agreed to help fund. But when Nassar sold arms to Soviet satellite Czechoslovakia and then recognized the People’s Republic of China, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles withdrew our dam dollars.

In reaction to this, Nassar announced on July 26, 1956 a Nationalization Law freezing all the assets of the Suez Canal—in effect, a seizure of that vital passageway.

Opened in 1869, this 119-mile long man-made waterway connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Originally financed by the Egyptians and French, Britain became a major stakeholder and stockholder in 1875, and eventually the canal became part of the United Kingdom’s imperial portfolio in the region. Following World War II, and with the decline of the U.K.’s empire, the canal gradually became a diplomatic football—not to mention thorn. And the creation of the nation of Israel in 1948 caused tensions about the vital waterway to further increase.

In the aftermath of Nassar’s July 26 speech, Britain—led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden—and France, represented by Eden’s counterpart, Guy Mollet, began to plot how to ensure their access to the Suez Canal. Eventually, and in an alliance with Israel (a nation with the most to lose if the canal was closed to them), military action was planned and initiated.

Follow the money.

Meanwhile, the American President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the midst of a reelection bid, had already had a rough year in 1956—physically and politically. And shortly following election to a second term in the White House, he played some power politics of his own. Now, I should state here that I am not of the number in agreement with what he did in the Suez matter, anymore than I am about how we abandoned the freedom fighters in Budapest earlier that summer. I am simply using this story to describe a reality in all of life and politics—like it or not.

There is a golden rule in geo-politics: He who has the gold makes the rule.

Mr. Eisenhower did not want Britain, France, and Israel—all stated allies of the United States—creating a situation that might not play well with the Soviets and that had the potential to instigate a larger war. Here was the hero of Normandy putting the pressure on British Prime Minister Eden—a man who had worked closely with Ike while serving in Churchill’s War Cabinet.

“The borrower is servant to the lender.”

To apply pressure on Eden’s government to cease and desist, Eisenhower instructed U.S. Treasury Secretary, George M. Humphrey, to begin to sell off some of our government’s British bonds. Some of these bonds were holdovers from the U.K.’s World War II debt; others had been sold to us to help that nation’s economy rebound after the war. Eden’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, future P.M. Harold Macmillan, told him that the results would be devastating to the British economy.

Checkmate.

Anthony Eden was a broken man. He fled to a vacation-exile in Jamaica, spending time at Ian Fleming’s (of James Bond literary fame) estate there, but his health quickly deteriorated. He was taking amphetamines—had been for years under doctor’s orders after a botched gall bladder operation—and the drugs magnified his problems with insomnia and unraveling mental health. Soon, Mr. Macmillan took over at 10 Downing Street, but by then the Suez episode had hastened the sunset on the British Empire—and the Cold War morphed from a multi-national tag-team match into a virtual two-nation standoff.

Follow the money.

We are potentially in big trouble as a nation. Our security is threatened not only by Islamist terrorism—but also by some who have a lien on our title deed. Certainly, throughout our history we have dealt with nations and regimes in pragmatic and realpolitik ways, even having to hold our collective noses because of the stench of tyranny and oppression on the part of some of our momentary allies in a larger cause. But we have managed, for the most part, to deal with it—ugliness and all—because of the ability to approach everything from a position of strength: morally, militarily, and economically.

Now though, we not only depend on others for much of our energy, but we also owe an astronomical amount of money (the interest alone is unfathomable) to powerful entities. We should not be surprised that other nations no longer dance on cue—nor should we ever be surprised if and when some big bills come due with humiliating strings attached.

Or worse.

A Vital Political Question For 2010

February 5, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Annals of the Obama Administration, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Intelligence, International Affairs, Iran, Islam, National Security, Obama administration, Political Philosophy, Presidents, Terrorism, War on Terror | 1 Comment 

In the waning days of the 1980 presidential campaign, Republican nominee Ronald Reagan used his allotted time in the closing moments of his only debate with President Jimmy Carter to ask a question. It was one of the most effective rhetorical devices in American history.

“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

Because most Americans answered a resounding “No” that night, Mr. Reagan was able to pull the line out again four years later, this time as President and against Walter Mondale, who ran a quixotic campaign to oust him. And Americans answered by electing Reagan to a second term.

Over the years, the question about being “better off” has been used to great affect by many politicians, including later aspirants to the White House. It became, in effect, a rhetorical trump card.

Now there is another question in the room—one that was asked, in a manner of speaking, during several recent special elections and will be commonplace this November as all of us go to the polls in the “off-year” ritual. The question is: “Are you safer than you were four years ago?”

It is hard to find anything about President Barack Obama’s first term—at least anything of substance—that can be realistically characterized as successful. And by successful, I mean accomplishing one’s stated goals. Whether it was the healthcare bridge too far, cap-and-trade, or dramatically improving the economy, this administration has simply not delivered on what it promised. Of course, in the area of national security they have tried to make good on pledges, but have found the resistance to every move to be surprising strong.

And one gets the feeling that not only did they not see failure coming in the euphoria of those early halcyon days in charge—but they really don’t have a clue as to where to go from here. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of national security and dealing with the very real threat of Islamist terror. And nowhere are the stakes any higher.

The other day, Leon Panetta, Director of CIA, in concert with other leaders in the national security community, told Congress that a terror attack (the indication being that this would be an attempt of significant magnitude) is likely during the next three to six months. It was also suggested that this warning is based, at least in part, on information gleaned from the man who tried to blow up an American airplane en route to Detroit on Christmas Day, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Presumably, this so-called “underwear-bomber” has been cooperating with authorities lately, following the intervention of some of his family from Nigeria, such intervention being prompted by FBI visits to that country.

With its too-sad-to-be-farcical “you-could-have-had-me-at-enemy-combatant” Miranda prolonged delay, this episode is in a real sense a window into the thinking—some would say, lack thereof—of the Obama administration on the whole issue of terror, Islamism, “detainees,” and national security. It seems that there is this naïve insistence on seeing and framing the issues as something nuanced—an almost “shirts versus skins” game—instead of a very grave matter of life and death.

A President is sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and by extension, therefore, those under its cover. The founders and framers did not fashion a document for global governance, nor did they seek to extend its protection beyond “we the people.” But these days we are witnessing the most ambitious attempt ever to broadly interpret its provisions.

On the domestic side, “we” the people is giving way to “for” the people, as those wiser-than-the-rest-of-us seek to “fundamentally transform” (to use Mr. Obama’s words) America. And when it comes to foreign policy and international issues, apparently now this new-improved understanding of our Constitution—one that makes Franklin Roosevelt look like a paleo-conservative in comparison—reads, “they” the people. It covers not only illegal aliens, but also non-U.S. citizen enemy combatants, giving them more rights than any of us would ever receive in some Islamist majority country.

“Are you safer than you were four years ago?”

Iran moves arrogantly and confidently forward to develop the materials and technology to soon become a nuclear power. Just the other day, its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talked of delivering a blow to “global arrogance” as that nation marks the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution on February 11.

Sure we protest, but words from a teleprompter don’t make much impact on a man who thinks he gets his ideas directly from Allah. And at any rate—the whole first year of Mr. Obama’s administration and its mea culpa “we like you” overtures to the Islamic world, notwithstanding—there is no evidence that anyone who hated us when George W. Bush was in town, hates us any less now.

In fact, someone in the White House should take a look at something else the mahdaviatist President of Iran said the other day in that same speech:

“If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles.”

Did you see that? The enemy is “liberalism and Marxism.” So as the current administration tries to pursue some kind of rapprochement with Iran and other Islamist nations, while at the same time trying orchestrate a decidedly more liberal agenda domestically—one that smacks of “Marxist” thinking at many turns—something ironic is happening. The new “good guys” who tell us that America is now going be loved more around the world because bad old George Bush and the cranky conservatives are gone, have missed a key plot-point: Islamists hate democratic liberalism—with its socialist vision—even more than they hate militaristic neo-conservatism.

Oops.

Of course, I hope and pray that we are spared any such terror attack this, or any, year. And I pray that there remains a sufficient remnant of discerning men and women in key areas of expertise and responsibility across the land, people who have not bowed the knee to the Baal of liberal statism and diplomatic naïveté, in place to forestall such a disaster.

But I must admit, there seems to be an inexplicable zeitgeist, combining lackadaisical apathy with arrogance that makes me feel anything but safe.

Someone talked to me recently about how, if we are attacked, people will rally around our new president like they did George W. Bush in 2001. I countered that I wasn’t so sure. That was a different time—before we really knew what terrorism meant on these shores. Post game analysis back then revealed so many areas of weakness leading to that dreadful day of terror on Sept. 11.

If such a thing, or anything similar, were to happen these days, I am not sure that those in charge now would get the kind of good will that translates into a political pass—or future.

Buck Or Hot Potato?

January 8, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, Islam, National Security, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidential libraries, Presidents, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror, economy | 3 Comments 

In the old West, when the boys played poker at the saloon, or wherever, along with the cards, chips, money, and various beverages, the table was also adorned with a knife–one with a buckhorn handle. The knife was moved from place to place, depending on the person dealing. If a player didn’t feel like dealing the cards, he could pass the responsibility to the next guy, along with the knife.

It was called “passing the buck.”

The phrase is, of course, most commonly associated with President Harry Truman–in fact, his desk on display at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, has a famous sign bearing the words: “The Buck Stops Here.” One of his aides, Fred Canfil, had seen the phrase on a desk in El Reno, Oklahoma, and had the sign made for his boss. Interestingly, and largely lost to the legend according to biographer David McCullough, the 33rd President only kept the sign on his Oval Office desk for a short time while in the White House.

But the metaphor stuck.

It has been used by leaders–particularly presidents–ever since as the ultimate way of saying: “I’m in charge, it’s my responsibility.” Most recently, the phrase was brought out of White House mothballs and used by President Barack Obama in remarks about the Christmas Day 2009 foiled Islamist terrorist attack.

It remains to be seen whether or not the latest pronouncement about the proverbial buck will be remembered as Truman-esque, or more like the nervous stammer of Alexander Haig the day President Reagan was shot. I believe the President said the right things the other day–but will he and his administration really follow through, taking steps, making the tough calls, and keeping the issue of Islamist terror on their political radar screen?

A good indicator would be the willingness to call it what it is. We are not just fighting Al Qaeda as some kind of generic syndicate of bad guys, as with The Man From Uncle and “THRUSH” or Maxwell Smart’s “KAOS.” There is no way for us to win over an ideology, while being afraid or hesitant to call it what it is: Islamism.

To my mind, Mr. Obama is still not comfortable in his role as Commander-in-Chief, with its implied responsibilities of protecting the nation from “all enemies, foreign and domestic.” He is now saying many of the right things, but I wonder if his vocabulary and America’s dictionary are in sync? He forms phrases now like “we are at war” – but I can’t help but get the feeling that this is based more on manufactured energy than real passion. Does the President view what happened on Christmas and the whole megilla of security, intelligence, and such as important as, say, the economy, healthcare, and jobs?

In fairness, most presidents bring dreams to the job. Lyndon Johnson wanted to build a Great Society and Richard Nixon wanted to focus on foreign affairs, but both had to contend more than they would have liked with their less-favored part of the domestic-international presidential paradigm. Bill Clinton wanted it all to be about “the economy, stupid.” But the first priority of any president is to keep us safe so we can actually have an economy.

A strong sense of national security is, in itself, a potent economic stimulus.

Only time will tell if the new-found-but-pretty-darn-late war-speak (better: war-whisper) will really be about the buck stopping with the President, or mere words.

After the Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy faced the press and talked about victory having many “fathers,” but defeat being an “orphan.” He also acknowledged that he was “the responsible officer” in the government. It was, as was Mr. Obama’s recent admission, a statement of the obvious.

But accepting responsibility as a leader does not abrogate systemic culpability.

The old 1970s sitcom, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, had a character named Lou Grant (played by Ed Asner)–an irascible man who ran a newsroom. Mary’s boss once said: “Leadership is the art of delegating blame.” Actually, good leadership is somewhere between taking full blame and delegating it all away. Where there are mistakes there is blame to be found. To miss this is to ignore a vital piece of the puzzle preventing something else bad from happening.

Frankly, what needs to happen throughout the government is for various leaders in key areas to think about letting the buck stay with them for a while. When a president has to say “The Buck Stops Here,” it is at least a tacit acknowledgement that the buck has been aggressively mobile.

I think the buck stops every bit as much with Attorney General Eric Holder, as it does with the President. After all, haven’t we been given the impression that the whole send-the-Gitmo-gangsters-to-New York idea is really his and the President is above it all? Or does that buck make its way to Mr. Obama’s desk, too?

And how about Dennis Blair, our Director of National Security (DNI–one of the dumbest ideas to come out of the Bush administration)? Following Mr. Obama’s speech on Thursday, he issued a statement saying, in part:

The Intelligence Community has made considerable progress in developing collection and analysis capabilities and improving collaboration, but we need to strengthen our ability to stop new tactics such as the efforts of individual suicide terrorists. The threat has evolved, and we need to anticipate new kinds of attacks and improve our ability to stay ahead of them and protect America.

We can and we must outthink, outwork and defeat the enemy’s new ideas. The Intelligence Community will do that as directed by the President, working closely with our nation’s entire national security team.

Really? What has the guy been working on up to now–health care reform?

One of two things has been happening, as clearly indicated by the foiled Christmas Day Islamist terror attack: either subordinates are keeping bad or inconvenient details from the President of the United States, or the information has not, until now, been marked or received with requisite urgency. Whatever the case, heads should roll. Blair’s words are akin to those uttered by an erudition-challenged player after a football game, “Well, we needed to score more points to win.” Duh.

There really is no buck to pass in the Obama administration when it comes to National Security, there is only a hot potato few want to deal with or even acknowledge. Attorney General Holder, Janet Napolitano, and so many others in key roles these days have regularly dismissed or minimized the danger of our times, while forging ahead with the even-more-now absurd sending of Gitmo detainees back to Yemen (6 on December 20th), and making sure that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (pronounced: Abdulmutallab) is told he has the right to remain silent and to the full protection of the American justice system, as opposed to being treated as he should be: as an enemy combatant.

Sure, the President of the United States made a speech and said many of the right things, but what we need to figure out is if what we are really bearing witness to is a dynamic described to reporters by Former Attorney John Mitchell, back in 1969: “Watch what we do, not what we say.”

Wake Up Calls And Snooze Buttons

January 1, 2010 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, History, Intelligence, International Affairs, Islam and the West, National Security, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

On December 7, 1941, United States Senator Gerald Nye looked over his notes for a speech he was about to deliver to a packed house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nye was a Republican, but part of a progressive element in the GOP and he was no-doubt influenced by the politics of the late Robert M. La Follette. In other words, he was a fiscal liberal in domestic matters and a fierce isolationist when it came to foreign entanglements.

So speaking before a group known informally as the “America Firsters” (sponsored by the America First Committee, of which he was a member) was a piece of cake for him and he knew the lines that would draw the biggest applause. He only wished his hero could be there: Charles A. Lindbergh.

These men were part of a highly popular movement in those days, this success being reflected in Gallup Polls showing that less than a quarter of Americans favored entering the fires of war then engulfing much of the world. This group was largely anti-Semitic (and therefore, pro-German), and was joined by other luminaries of the day, including: flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker and movie actress, Lillian Gish.

During the first days of the last month of that tense year, their present preoccupation was the potential of war with Japan. To them, this was merely an excuse to enter the war in Europe through a back door. Therefore, the headline of their then-very-popular tabloid, the America First Bulletin, on December 6, 1941 was: “BLAME FOR RIFT WITH JAPAN RESTS ON ADMINISTRATION.”

After a glowing introduction, followed by furious applause, Nye, the Senator from North Dakota, plunged into his theme. But before he had gotten very far, he noticed someone in his peripheral vision approaching him from the stage wing bearing a piece of paper. He paused and read the note, which informed him of the breaking news about a Japanese attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor.

Buzz kill.

After fumbling and hemming and hawing for a moment he mumbled: “I can’t somehow believe this…” – and then proceeded to finish his speech. Telling the crowd about what the note said, the Senator ventured his own take, which included the predictable: “We have been maneuvered into this by the President,” and the old reliable: “This was just what Britain had planned for us.”

A few days later, on December 11th, members of the America First Committee met in Chicago and decided to disband. Lindbergh didn’t attend, but sent a telegram begging them not to go out of business. He was now isolated himself, though – by his own ignorant bias.

Pearl Harbor was many things: an infamous attack, an example of unspeakable treachery, a telling moment of vulnerable denial, but ultimately it was the one thing the Japanese had not counted on – a wake-up call.

Literally overnight, opinions changed and so did the course of history, because in moments of great peril, it is foolish, immoral, and ignorant to hit the snooze button when the alarm rings.

September 11, 2001 was a wake-up call, one that kept us vigilant for a period of time roughly equivalent to the length of our involvement in World War II. We had been attacked, we knew who the enemy was, and we were resolved to find and annihilate him.

But that was then.

Some understandably suggest these days that we are in a “pre-Sept. 11” mindset. This is, of course, somewhat true, but the cliché doesn’t tell the whole story. Because before that dreadful day when the world changed forever – or as so many of us thought – there had been other ominous moments and indications of terror to come. The bombing of the USS Cole and attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for example. However, these obvious acts of war were preceded by one on our very soil – the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. And the very mistakes we made following that attack (and those that followed before Sept. 11, 2001) we seem to be determined to make again.

History rhymes one more time.

The day after – September 12, 2001 – Daniel Pipes, director of The Middle East Forum, wrote passionately about how, though the moral blame for what happened fell upon those who planned and carried out the attacks, the tactical blame actually fell on the U.S. government, “which has grievously failed in its topmost duty to protect American citizens from harm.” His list of mistakes back then included:

• Seeing terrorism as a crime
• Relying too much on electronic intelligence
• Not understanding the hate-America mentality
• Ignoring the terrorist infrastructure in this country

Can anyone with a brain possible grade our efforts in these areas, now more than eight years later, as anything higher than, say, a D+? Bear in mind that self-given marks don’t count and in matters of life and death there is no grading on a curve.  It’s the same principle that says “almost” only works in horseshoes or hand grenades.

We are not really just in a “Pre-Sept.11th” mindset, we are actually approaching current Islamism-driven horror in ways reminiscent of how we did things in the 1990s.

How’s that working for you?

Will Mr. Obama Seize His Big Mac Moment?

November 27, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Afghanistan, American Politics, Barack Obama, Cold War, George W. Bush, History, Military, National Security, Obama administration, Presidents, Republican Party, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | 3 Comments 

This Tuesday, Barack Obama will travel to the United States Military Academy at West Point to deliver the most important address of his young presidency. He has obviously chosen the site for the speech with great care and in the hope that the backdrop – a storied scene on the Hudson – will engender an image of him as a strong and effective commander in chief.

It is probably a smart move, but one not without a measure of risk.

The President of the United States will be treated with respect and be received enthusiastically – all very appropriate and quintessentially American. But when the fanfare fades and the applause lines become fewer, he will have the tough job of articulating a compelling vision for the future of a war that has lost its name, if not its way.

Though Mr. Obama’s White House predecessor spoke at West Point twice – once in each term – not all presidents make this trip. Eisenhower, one of the two graduates of the academy who went on to become Commander in Chief (the other being fellow Republican, Ulysses S. Grant), never made a major speech there during his two terms as president. And his predecessor, the man from Missouri, avoided the place like the plague. President Truman saw West Point as a breeding ground for “stuffed shirts” – and at any rate, his firing of the academy’s former commandant – Douglas MacArthur – probably kept the presidential welcome mat in storage in the basement of the Thayer Hotel.

As Mr. Obama’s team prepares for this important speech, I wonder if the wordsmiths are taking time to consult the history of what has been said there by other presidents and prominent Americans?

Franklin Roosevelt gave the commencement address in 1939 to graduates who would soon be in harm’s way in Europe and the Pacific. He told that class:

During recent months international political considerations have required still greater emphasis upon the vitalization of our defense, for we have had dramatic illustrations of the fate of undefended nations. I hardly need to be more specific than that. Recent conflicts in Europe, the Far East and Africa bear witness to the fact that the individual soldier remains still the controlling factor.

However, when John F. Kennedy spoke to another graduating class on June 6, 1962 (inexplicably, for a president who prided himself on his sense of history, never mentioning that date as the 18th anniversary of D-Day), he shared a vision about changes in warfare, telling his honorable audience:

Your responsibilities may involve the command of more traditional forces, but in less traditional roles. Men risking their lives, not as combatants, but as instructors or advisers, or as symbols of our Nation’s commitments.

He, though, never lived to see how quickly “instructors or advisors” would become “combatants.”

The most recent president to make a major speech at West Point was George W. Bush, a man who usually does not fare well in the eloquence department, especially when compared to President Obama. Yet, what he had to say back in 2002 should be reviewed, not only by White House speechwriters, but also by all Americans – because the words still ring true:

Because the war on terror will require resolve and patience, it will also require firm moral purpose. In this way our struggle is similar to the Cold War. Now, as then, our enemies are totalitarians, holding a creed of power with no place for human dignity. Now, as then, they seek to impose a joyless conformity, to control every life and all of life.

America confronted imperial communism in many different ways – diplomatic, economic, and military. Yet moral clarity was essential to our victory in the Cold War. When leaders like John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan refused to gloss over the brutality of tyrants, they gave hope to prisoners and dissidents and exiles, and rallied free nations to a great cause.

Some worry that it is somehow undiplomatic or impolite to speak the language of right and wrong. I disagree. Different circumstances require different methods, but not different moralities. Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place. Targeting innocent civilians for murder is always and everywhere wrong. Brutality against women is always and everywhere wrong. There can be no neutrality between justice and cruelty, between the innocent and the guilty. We are in a conflict between good and evil, and America will call evil by its name. By confronting evil and lawless regimes, we do not create a problem – we reveal a problem. And we will lead the world in opposing it.

However, if I were on Mr. Obama’s speech writing team (corpulent opportunity), I would spend some time going over another famous speech made at West Point. It just may be the most relevant to current realities, not to mention one that we all need to hear again.

The date was May 12, 1962 and the speaker was retired General Douglas MacArthur. The Old Man was 82 years of age and his frail movements reflected it. But there was a spark of eloquence left in him; one that he fanned that day into a brilliant rhetorical flame.

When I watch Mr. Obama’s speech this Tuesday, it will be Big Mac’s speech that I use as the gold standard reference point. Here are some excerpts. The words speak for themselves:

Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and, I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.

And through all this welter of change and development your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable. It is to win our wars. Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purpose, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishments; but you are the ones who are trained to fight.

Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory, that if you lose, the Nation will be destroyed, that the very obsession of your public service must be Duty, Honor, Country.

The long gray line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.

Life At Age 72

November 21, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security | Leave a Comment 

Some weeks ago I wrote here about W. Kendall Myers, the State Department employee who, for nearly thirty years, spied for Cuban intelligence in this country, all the while appearing to his friends and neighbors (the latter including some retired “spooks”) to be no more than just another amiable, slightly scatterbrained scion of an old Washington family – in his case, the Grosvenors, some of whom played major roles in founding the National Geographical Society.

Yesterday, Myers, the great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, appeared in Federal court and pleaded guilty to plotting to commit espionage and to wire fraud. At the same tim his wife Gwendolyn pleaded guilty to plotting to gather and transmit national defense information. Under the agreement reached between her attorneys and the prosecution, she will serve six to seven and a half years in prison.

The couple also agreed to be fully debriefed by investigators about the specifics of their spying, and Myers agreed to forfeit all of the $1.74 million he earned as a State Department employee. In lieu of that sum, the couple agreed to turn over all their financial assets to the government, including the 37-foot yacht, docked in Annapolis, in which they once hoped, one day, to sail off to Havana to spend their sunset years.

But W. Kendall Myers will not be enjoying the blissful sunshine of Cuban beaches, nor the occasional phone call from Fidel Castro (who was so appreciative of the Myers’s work that he cleared a few hours in his schedule to meet them when they made their way to Havana in the 1990s). Instead, for what he did, he will receive the mandatory sentence – life imprisonment. And since he is 72, it really is life – the penalty imposed for betraying the trust of a nation’s secrets.

The Fertile Crescent

November 13, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Cold War, Culture, Domestic issues, Economic issues, Ethics, Faith, History, Islam, Islam and the West, Military, National Security, Religion, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

Every time I read, view, or hear the latest attempt to portray Nidal Malik Hasan as a “loner” or “victim of racism” or “psychotic” – or (this may be my favorite) someone suffering from something called “PRE-traumatic stress disorder,” I am torn between the desire to scream or laugh. My internal conflict increases when I hear Chicago Mayor Daley suggest the problem is that Americans love guns too much.

And then there’s the granddaddy of all recent rhetorical absurdities when Army Chief of Staff, Gen. George Casey uttered the incredibly clueless thought: “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

Can someone explain to me how the death of 14 (one of the victims was pregnant) can be trumped by the importance of a particular political agenda? The General should include a very real apology in his resignation letter.

It would be funny if not for the fact that it is all so dangerously sad. As I take it all in, it’s like the ghost of Groucho Marx is sitting on one of my shoulders making me smile at the outrageousness of such comments with his famous, “Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your own eyes?” This is all balanced by the difficult to ignore presence of the ghost of Gen. George S. Patton, who sits on the other shoulder and regularly fills that ear (this would be the right ear, by the way – in every sense of that word) with words I am not completely able to translate in this column.

Psychologists use the term “denial” to describe a way some people interpret reality. This manifests itself in denying something ever actually happened, or that it happened but it wasn’t to big of a deal (the “isolated event” approach), or even in something called “projection” which admits that something has indeed happened, but deflects blame and responsibility. We are a nation in official and pervasive denial.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis (c. 1962), if an American soldier would have opened fire on his comrades while wearing a Che Guevera T-shirt and yelling, “Long Live Lenin, Khruschev, and Castro,” it is doubtful that the guy’s communist sympathies would have been dismissed as irrelevant and peripheral. The commies were the enemy. And, if an investigation into his background would have yielded clues to his political feelings and fanaticism, there is no doubt that the case would have been a slam-dunk. And those who should have picked up on his radicalism before the awful fact would have been held accountable.

In fact, if some white-hooded fool were to open fire on a group today in the name of a fiery cross and a virulent racist perversion of certain passages in the Christian Bible, it is unlikely that such a terrorist would have any apologists reluctant to tie what he did to what he believed. Religious violence, be it of the cross or crescent, is always worthy of condemnation and contempt.

But when it comes to Islamism, the various contortions some use to distance what a Jihadist did from the ideology that so-obviously informed his actions are very difficult to watch.

Of course, I very much understand the complexities of this issue. We are a free society and among the most precious of those freedoms is that of religion. But as with another vital right – the freedom of speech – there are clear limits. You can’t yell “fire” in a crowded theater. And religious liberty notwithstanding, you cannot advocate the violent overturning of our constitutional way of life in this country in the name of any God.

Anyone, therefore, who embraces Sharia law and believes that it should become the code of a new America, should be disqualified from serving in the military. At any rate – how can they really take the required oath? Clearly one day long ago, the Fort Hood terrorist said:

I, Nidal Malik Hasan, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.

We are told “officially” that there are 3,572 Muslims in our military ranks. Although it’s interesting to note that The American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council has that number much higher, in fact, four times higher – at more than 15,000. What do they know that those in the barracks don’t?

Some might want to counter that bad things have been done – violently so – in this country and the world throughout history, in the name of my religion – Christianity. And, sadly, I must confess that this has been the case, on occasion. But it has never been the norm. And those who do such stuff certainly don’t get their instructions from Christian doctrine.

To get from the teachings of Jesus to murderous evil requires a tortured, twisted, ignorant, and monumentally long journey. Yes, people have done bad things in Christ’s name – but in doing so they have, in effect, denied him.

Some ideologies, however, are much more friendly to the evil that lurks in the hearts of men. For example, when it comes to economic theory, you are hard pressed to find any possible pathway from Milton Friedman’s monetary ideas to killing a bunch of people. On the other hand, when you take a look at the writings of Karl Marx (no relation to Groucho), history has shown that the distance from theory to bloodshed is not all that far. In fact, Marxism and violence are close cousins because you really have to force people to turn from self-interest – all for their own good, of course.

The thing that too many in our nation are simply ignoring is that when it comes to Islam, as opposed to any other religious idea extant, the journey from ideology to what happened at Fort Hood is also not a very long one. For any Christian to become so radicalized as to open fire people in the name of his or her religion would require a virtual repudiation of the faith. Could it happen? Sure – anything can happen. And if it did, the mainstream media in this country would have no qualms about wrapping the deed around the doctrine.

But the quantifiable fact is that such things really don’t happen with Christians the way they do with Muslims. And even when certain violent acts by professed Christians, such as the killing of a doctor who has performed abortions, make the news, usually among the first and loudest expressions of condemnation and outrage are from Christians.

Does anyone hear all that many Muslim voices condemning Hasan?

Much has been made of the fact that the Fort Hood Jihadist/Terrorist was harassed for his beliefs. First, let me be clear – I think it is wrong, un-American, and certainly un-Christian to at all persecute someone for what is believed and practiced in the context of our Constitutional freedoms. And when it comes to Christians – who have known the pain of persecution throughout the centuries – there is no Biblical mandate for a follower of Jesus to ever persecute another human being. If fact, in our way of thinking, and from the wonderful Jewish scriptures that inform our faith, we are ever admonished to love neighbor as self.

The Christian response to persecution is never to be that of reactive violence. The Apostle Peter gave instruction near the end of his life on this matter:

Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. ‘Do not fear what they fear; do not be frightened.’ But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander. – I Peter 3:13-16 (NIV)

Gentleness, respect, hope, and love – these are the watchwords of the follower of Jesus. But there is no “turn the other cheek” stuff in Islam. And at some point people in this country need to stop ignoring the obvious.

So I respect my Muslim neighbors and want them to be treated justly. This means, when there is peace, community, love of law, love of country, all will be well. And when these values are violently violated there must be justice of another kind – to punish evil, especially the egregious wickedness of terrorist murder.

But I also, taking another cue from Jesus, must be “wise as a serpent,” and this means I need to be aware that certain ideologies are more fertile when it comes to hate and violence. And, like it or not, they – and those who espouse such teachings – need to be watched very carefully.

Too many people have been looking the other way in America. It’s time to focus.

Ted Sorensen’s Alternate History

October 31, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, International Affairs, Interviews, National Security, Presidents, Richard Nixon, Russia, U.S. History | 2 Comments 

This week Theodore “Ted” Sorensen, who was John F. Kennedy’s closest aide from 1953 until the president’s assassination a decade later, appeared at Canada’s University of Western Ontario in London to speak about his career and to promote his recently published autobiography Counselor. While there, he was interviewed by Ian Gillespie of the London Free Press. Naturally, the 81-year-old Sorensen is asked what his most vivid memory is of the Thousand Days, and just as naturally, he replies that it was the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962. He speaks of the enormous weight he felt, as a “34-year-old kid,” when drafting JFK’s letter to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschchev – a document which, he knew, might make the difference between peace and nuclear annihilation. The article continues:

Sorensen says things might have turned out quite differently if Richard Nixon had defeated Kennedy in the presidential election campaign of 1960.

“In that same fall of 1962, when Kennedy showed the kind of patience, discipline and wisdom that I mentioned (in the book) and resolved the Cuban missile crisis without firing a shot, Nixon was having a self-destructive campaign for governor of California,” he says. “Imagine if he had been in the White House and faced with the challenge that faced Kennedy?”

Well, as tens of millions of TV viewers know, last month Seth MacFarlane had no trouble imagining what would have happened; in the season-premiere episode of his Family Guy series, precocious infant Stewie Griffin and his canine sidekick Brian, with the help of an alternate-realities machine Stewie’s invented, visit several worlds differing from our own. With a push of the button, the baby and dog find themselves in the twisted, crumbling ruins of their hometown, Quahog, Rhode Island. “What happened?” Brian asked. Stewie consults the machine and replies, with his authoritative British accent: “This is what would have happened if Nixon had been president in the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

In-deed, as Dr. Zachary Smith used to say long ago. Last year, I read the transcript of an interview, as yet unpublished, which had just been conducted with a pundit whose words often appear in the columns and on the airwaves of the US and UK.

The pundit was asked about the most tragic events in the career of President Nixon. In his reply, he emphatically said that RN’s defeat by JFK in 1960 was one of the most tragic events in American history. Asked to explain, the journalist (whose identify might surprise the reader, but who will remain unnamed, since the interview has yet to be published) expressed the view that, had RN assumed the Presidency in January 1961:

a) the Bay of Pigs operation would have received full air support, thus resulting in the overthrow of Fidel Castro’s regime;

b) as a consequence, there would have been no Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, and thus no Cuban Missile Crisis;

c) the resulting setback in Soviet power and prestige would have forced Khruschchev to agree to detente a decade before Dr. Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy set it in motion and thus might have hastened the end of the Cold War as early as the 1970s.

As for Sorensen’s (and Macfarlane’s) suggestion that having Richard Nixon in the White House in October 1962 would have produced disaster, it’s worth noting that the President handled himself very well when faced with unexpected and dangerously escalating events during the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973.

The New Realpolititik?

October 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Barack Obama, China, International Affairs, National Security, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Ever since President Obama’s took the oath of office twice last January, he’s been compared by pundits to every previous Chief Executive since Millard Fillmore or at least Chester Alan Arthur. For the last week the Nixon comparisons have flown hot and heavy; next week it may be time for “the new FDR” to have another go-round. A few hours ago, writing at the Atlantic’s site, former Congressman Mickey Edwards, a co-founder of the Heritage Foundation who made waves last year by supporting Obama’s election, has, wonder of wonders, managed to compare Obama to someone not a President. (Though an implicit comparison to a previous President’s foreign policy is made.) He argues that:

The thing about the presidency, though, is that one invariably finds issues more complicated than they might have appeared from the campaign trail. Here, while one’s heart may echo Jefferson, one’s responsibilities make Washington’s sense of caution more appealing. Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, is known as the most prominent modern proponent of a “realpolitik” approach toward foreign policy in which, in the end, the most important factor in deciding a national approach to other nations is quite simple: “What is in America’s interest”?

That alone is a difficult question. It was once thought to be in America’s “interest” to ally itself with some of the worst dictators on the planet: we not only allied ourselves with, but embraced, the Batistas, the Somozas, the Shahs, the Noriegas, and while those short-term alliances may have been of some use in dealing with Soviet expansionism (a real threat at the time), we have clearly paid a long-term price for such narrowness of purpose. But the world is not easy. One wishes for more democracy, more freedom, more protection from abuse in all the places where these rights are in short supply. But there are other considerations and they necessarily impinge on the decisionmaking process. In that intra-cranial showdown, it now appears that it is the “hard” side, the perceived necessity of setting aside one’s empathies, that has captured Barack Obama’s thinking.

Well….this discussion of the President’s “inner Kissinger” (as the post is titled) might come as news to the Nobel Peace Prize committee, which, when defending its surprising choice of Obama as this year’s laureate, seemed to think that his handling of foreign policy suggested a Wilsonian idealism far removed from what it evidently viewed as the unspeakable savagery of his predecessor. (Whereas President Bush’s reasons for leading a war to bring democrary to Iraq, and by extension to the Mideast, were thoroughly Wilsonian, predicated on a belief that ordinary Iraqis deserved the right to self-determination.)

Edwards cites, to prove his argument, such incidents as the President’s disinclination to meet with the Dalai Lama during the latter’s visit to Washington this month, and his efforts to engage with the government of Sudan over the Darfur issue. But for every such case, there can be found one that contradicts the idea that Obama’s foreign policy is always focused, in a hard-nosed way, on America’s best interests.

It would seem, for one thing, that our best interests do not involve strengthening Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarist” regime in Venezuela, with its habit of seeking to destabilize its neighbors. But in the last few months the State Department and the White House have sought to penalize Honduras after that nation removed its president, a Chavez ally seeking to override his nation’s constitution and serve an additional term in defiance of the country’s supreme court. This disregard of a new, pro-American government hardly suggests Realpolitik in action.

The Obama administration’s decision to remove missile defense installations from Poland and Czechoslovakia, which the Nobel committee cited as a reason to give Obama the prize for Peace (a reason heartily seconded by Russian officials), also does not conform to realpolitik in the classic tradition. When President Nixon and Dr. Kissinger made the historic move to bring the People’s Republic of China out of its isolation, they also maintained America’s defense agreements with Taiwan. The Nixon/Kissinger approach to realpolitik was to reach out to nations which had been in conflict with the United States, in order to make a world in which American interests were strengthened, while taking care to maintain productive ties to America’s allies. So far, Obama’s foreign-policy approach has produced no similar strengthening of American interests and some of our allies feel threatened and less secure as a result of the White House’s actions.

Alger And Priscilla Hiss, 2009 Model

September 26, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Cuba, Intelligence, National Security, News media | Leave a Comment 

In early June of this year readers of Washington’s two dailies woke up to the news of the arrest of a much-liked, sophisticated, rather affluent local couple. W[alter] Kendall Myers, when FBI agents put the cuffs on him, was 72 years old; a great-grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and scion of the Grosvenor family that guided National Geographic magazine for a century; and a former high official at the State Department and adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University’s ultra-prestigious School of Advanced International Studies. His wife, Gwenolyn Steingraber Myers, was a 71-year-old South Dakotan who had come to Washington as an aide to Senator James Abourezk in the 1970s and, in recent years, had been working at Riggs Bank and at a bookstore in DC’s Cleveland Park neighborhood. The couple lived in an elegant co-op at the Westchester on Cathedral Avenue, and, in 2007, acquired a 37-foot, state-of-the-art yacht which they named Helene. Both had reached retirement age, and, like many well-off couples in their sunset years, were just counting down the days until they could board their boat and head south for good.

Except in their case, they weren’t planning to dock their yacht in Boca Raton or Jupiter, or even Key West, and go looking for a comfortable little house. They meant to go all the way to Havana, to the nation for whose spy agency they had worked for nearly thirty years. It was for espionage that they were arrested by the FBI this summer.

At the time of the Myerses’s arrest, the Washington Post and the Washington Times published lengthy articles. The Post’s writing about the couple noted that in the mid-1970s, not long before meeting his Gwen, Kendall Myers, who had recently divorced his first wife and had trouble making his child-support payments, had drunkenly slammed his car into another vehicle one Thanksgiving Eve and that a teenage girl, Susan Slattery, who was in the other vehicle, died as a result, for which he received three years’s unsupervised probation. The tone of the quotes from Myers’s friends suggested that this unfortunate incident had somehow unsettled an otherwise upstanding citizen and had sent him down the path to espionage.

Ah, if only Alger Hiss had friends like that – or, for that matter, could have used something like that for an excuse. The new issue of Washingtonian magazine features a lengthy article by Toby Harnden, the US correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, which presents by far the most complete picture of the Myerses and their misdeeds set down on paper or cyberspace to date. (At this point the article is not online, so readers are urged to proceed to their nearest bookstore and newsstand and look for the October Washingtonian among the “city” magazines.)

Like any well-written account of the spy world, the article is thoroughly fascinating, from beginning to end. Among its most remarkable passages is one describing the other residents of the Westchester. As it happens, several of the Myerses’s neighbors, according to one resident, were or are in the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency – and an upstairs neighbor is an FBI agent. Not one of these neighbors remotely guessed that the tall, bespectacled, well-mannered, bright but rather glib Foreign Service officer in their midst had actually spent decades, with his wife, hunched over a Sony radio purchased with Cuban money, carefully deciphering messages from those “numbers stations” that pop up around the shortwave dial. None of them knew that a man who once had angled to be George W. Bush’s special envoy to Northern Ireland had, in 1995, spent four full hours with a grateful Fidel Castro. None of them knew that two agents working to the detriment of American national security were walking, every day, down the hallways where a former Westchester resident, Barry Goldwater, had once walked.

Instead, it was up to diligent FBI agents to listen to the broadcasts, carefully narrow lists of suspects, and look for clues. How about this one: the Cubans’s code name for Kendall Myers was “Agent 202″ – the DC area code. How many Scoobysnacks would the Great Dane need to puzzle that one out? And Gwen Myers’s handle was “Agent 123.” Impressive, no?

Probably the most arresting passage in Harnden’s article is the one describing how the Myerses were recruited to work for Cuba. They were not approached in some distant land which has diplomatic relations with the Castro government. They were not approached by someone who’d managed to go under deep cover in Little Miami and make his or her way up north. Rather, they were approached by a Castro lieutenant of long standing, who’d fought in the mountains with Fidel, Raul and Che, by the name of Carlos Ciano – an operative at the UN’s Cuban mission in New York, who, thanks to the Carter Administration’s conciliatory attitude toward the island nation’s diplomats, was moving completely at will between Manhattan and Washington in the late 1970s, meeting and “greeting” leading policymakers at various informal brunches and parties sponsored by sympathetic Capitol Hill staffers and others. It was at one of these that Ciano met Kendall and Gwen Myers.

Gwen Myers, as explained in the article, had a thoroughly left-wing background – one of her sons, according to a South Dakota neighbor, made no bones about being, literally, a card-carrying Communist – and it apparently was through her that Kendall Myers took the fateful step from being a liberal State functionary, like thousands who never give a thought to betraying their country, to becoming an operative for Cuba.(The resemblance to the influence that Priscilla Hiss’s views had on Alger in the early years of their marriage, as described in such books as Allen Weinstein’s Perjury and Sam Tanenhaus’s Whittaker Chambers, is quite striking.) It’s difficult to overstate the implications of all this as the Obama White House and various Democrats on Capitol Hill assure us that it’s time to let old quarrels with Havana be patched up.

Harnden also looks into the auto accident which is said to have had such a troubling psychological effect on Kendall Myers. It turns out that, for a man of almost forty, he handled the whole matter as if he were a particularly spoiled seventeen-year-old. He sent Susan Slattery’s family a letter that, although missing an apology, concluded: “It is a tragedy for me too.” During a recess in the civil case brought against him by her family, he told her father: “You people can’t touch me.” Harnden then wryly quotes a character in a David Ignatius novel, a CIA psychiatrist: “Treason is the ultimate mid-life crisis.” Be that as it may, Kendall and Gwen Myers appear set to conclude their lives in prison.

The nuttiest quote in the article comes from James Abourezk. The former Senator was the first person Gwen Myers called after her arrest, and he states: “If we had ended the embargo years ago, there would have been no spying and none of this stuff would have happened. To me, if the Cubans are spying, it would be a defensive thing.” Really?

There’s a lot more of interest in the article – the description of Kendall Myers’s deep Anglophilia, especially his fascination with those model modern Englishmen Burgess, Maclean, and Philby; the fact that his PhD thesis was a contrarian defense of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy; and a lot more. All in all, this is a fine, must-read work of journalism. Don’t miss it.

Gander Sauce Now Appearing On White House Menu

September 21, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, National Security, News media, Nixon Administration, Obama administration, Presidents, Public Opinion | Leave a Comment 

From the earliest days of RN’s administration he was plagued with leaks of highly classified material that ended up in the media.

RN condemned the leaks as undermining his ability to end the war and conduct the nation’s foreign policy.

The anti-war establishment justified them as acts of conscience, and the media celebrated them as examples of a free press at work and doing its very best.

Now everything old is new again, and it will be interesting to see how President Obama deals with the leaks that are already causing him problems.  The most serious appeared today as a story by Bob Woodward on the front page of the Washington Post:

The top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan warns in an urgent, confidential assessment of the war that he needs more forces within the next year and bluntly states that without them, the eight-year conflict “will likely result in failure,” according to a copy of the 66-page document obtained by The Washington Post.

Gen Stanley A. McChrystal says emphatically: “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near-term (next 12 months) — while Afghan security capacity matures — risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible.”

His assessment was sent to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates on Aug. 30 and is now being reviewed by President Obama and his national security team.

How will —how can?— the President maintain his former equanimity regarding leaks now that he is actually in charge and his policies will be at risk because of them?  Will the goose sauce he dished out so liberally as a Senator and a candidate be so tasty now that he’s the gander?

RN knew how the  accumulation of leaks had driven LBJ into an increasingly narrow corner.

In RN, he vividly recalled his visit with Johnson at the White House  on 12 December 1968:

I sat on one of the sofas in front of the fireplace in the Oval Office while he sat in the king-size rocking chair that he had brought in to replace Kennedy’s smaller one…..

Jabbing his finger at my chest, his voice raised, he said, “Let me tell you, Dick, I would have been a damn fool to have discussed major decisions with the full Cabinet present, because I knew that if I said something in the morning, you could sure as hell bet it would appear in the afternoon papers.  It’s the same thing with the National Security Council.  Everybody there’s got their damned deputies and note-takers with them sitting along the wall.  I will warn you now, the leaks can kill you.”

But RN didn’t take LBJ’s advice to hunker down and only deal with a minimum of aides; and he was soon being threatened with the death of a thousand leaks.

The leaks began almost with the start of my administration, and before long I experienced firsthand the anger, worry, and frustration that Johnson had described.  In the first five months of my presidency at least twenty-one major stories based on leaks from materials in the NSC files appeared in New York and Washington newspapers.  A CIA report listed forty-five newspaper articles in 1969 that contained serious breaches of secrecy.

Within a matter of days after the NBS held its first meeting on the Middle East on February 1, the details of the discussion that had taken place were leaked to the press.  Eisenhower, whom I had personally briefed on this meeting, considered any leak of classified foreign policy information, whether in war or peace, treasonable.  When he saw the news story he telephoned Kissinger and warned him in no uncertain terms.  “Tighten your shop,” he said.  “Get rid of people if you have to, but don’t let this go on.”

Not only did it go on; a trickle became a tsunami.

Today, forty years later, leaks are an inevitable part of the Washington scene, where agendas and egos first mix, then match, and then go looking for a friendly reporter.

It will be interesting to see how the Democrats, so long used to enjoying the leaks undermining and embarrassing the Republicans, will handle this particular reality of the power they now possess.

It Aint Over Til It’s Over

September 11, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under Healthcare, History, Intelligence, National Security, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror | Leave a Comment 

By the autumn of 1944, and in the wake of the very successful landings in Normandy the previous June, Allied troops and commanders in the field, and civilian authorities in Washington, D.C. and London, were confident of victory in Europe.

It was just a matter of time.

In fact, as our forces moved like a juggernaut across France and into Belgium en route to the Rhine and Germany itself, the Nazis were in full-scale retreat, ceding back territory they had aggressively devoured four years earlier. There was even some talk – and it was surely well received – that some of our boys might be home by Christmas. People had been crooning about it in a popular song for more than a year.

But all that changed when the Germans launched a massive, unexpected winter offensive that December, and a fierce conflict known famously to us as the Battle of the Bulge disabused the Allies of the notion of an expeditious victory. The war was by no means over and the enemy not at all vanquished. This brings to mind a musing from the mind of the great philosopher Yogi Berra, when he said: “It aint over til it’s over!”

You see, while many were prematurely preoccupied with postwar dreams, the good guys were given a brutal, bloody, and costly reminder that the ravages of war are ever possible until an enemy has actually been completely defeated. Eight years after the attack on Pearl Harbor, it was pretty easy for Americans to remember what had happened without fear, because the threat was no longer there.

Eight years after the attacks on Sept. 11th, we have no such luxury. We must remember with resolve. We must remember through vigilance.

Have you ever watched a movie where the bad guy gets away at the end or enough loose ends are left hanging that you just know the producers are going to make a sequel? Well, our enemies have been longing for just that. Whether or not they can do it, or will, is, of course, a fair and open question. But for anyone to suggest that such a thing can never happen again is not only ludicrous; it is perilous.

I certainly think that this eighth anniversary of that horrific day in 2001 should be remembered – but not as a long ago, of a different time and place, event. It must be remembered in the way a Marine on Guadalcanal would have remembered Pearl Harbor in late 1942, or as an Army Ranger would have while scaling the cliff at Ponte Du Hoc, two years later.

It’s a holy day in the sense of bearing witness to the terrible loss of life and the noble and heroic actions of so many in their diligent response. But there should be a fervency attached to it all. The armor of war should not be put away abroad, nor should the home front be lulled into ominous complacency by political distractions or naïve pronouncements.

The threat is still there. It will not go away by ignoring it anymore than a cancer in the body will. It will not go away by giving it a new name – or no name. It will not go away because we have smarter people in charge who supposedly never overreact to crises and keep their heads when all others are losing theirs.

The threat is still there in spite of the fact that there is a systematic undermining of our intelligence capacities in the nation, born of a petty and cynical desire for political gain. We are tying the hands of people who are charged with helping to keep us safe.

The chief role of government is to protect us and keep us free. Instead we live in a time when all the energy in the executive and legislative branches seems to be directed at creating a society of dependent sheep. We’ll be fed, burped, bandaged, and entertained – until we wake up one day and face the sad news that something bad has happened again via the hands of an enemy we have ignored for too long.

There is still a war on. It is a terror war, driven by Islamism – a pernicious ideology that uses religion as a pretext for world domination. There are very bad people out there – and here at home; people who despise us, our constitution, and our way of life. They must smile and roll their eyes as they watch us try to wrestle with issues such as healthcare reform; anything just as long as we don’t look too closely at what they’re doing.

But we hear less and less about it. Oh, occasionally a great communicator makes an offhand remark related to such a conflict, but usually only in the context of reminding us how sad it is to have wasted all that money “over there” when we could have used it to make everyone healthy and happy here at home.

In a time of war, you don’t make your side safe by marginalizing the conflict, minimizing the threat, or demoralizing those who are charged with crucial responsibilities.

In the century before the birth of Jesus Christ, a Syrian man named Publilius Syrus, who became popular in the days of Julius Caesar as a mime and actor, was known for his maxims and many survive to this day. Among the best is this:

“He is most free from danger, who, even when safe, is on his guard.”

In July of 1927, the New York Yankees were on the road and well on their way to one of the greatest seasons ever experienced by a baseball team. The biggest crowd drawn that month at their famous stadium, however, had nothing to do with baseball. It was the scene of a boxing match between two contenders for the heavyweight title: Jack Dempsey and Jack Sharkey.

Dempsey, of course, had already been a legendary champ, only beaten the year before by savvy boxer and bookworm, Gene Tunney – the smartest guy ever to hold the title. This fight was to see who would face Tunney next. And by all accounts Sharkey took the battle to Dempsey for several rounds, cutting him up and beating him to the punch.

So Dempsey went to work on the body and some of the punches strayed low – Okay several of the punches were south of the border. And at one point Sharkey turned to the referee to complain. At that moment, while Sharkey was looking at the official, Dempsey hit him with what he later referred to as the best punch he’d ever thrown.

It was over.

When in a fight, never drop your guard.

On The Verge Of An Intelligence Purge?

July 17, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, History, Intelligence, National Security, Presidents, Terrorism, U.S. History, War on Terror, economy | 4 Comments 

The current climate of suspicion, accusation, and posturing surrounding the relationship between various entities in our intelligence communities and two of three branches of the federal government should be a source of grave concern to Americans. While games are being played, we must ask: Are we safer today than we were two years ago, or four, or eight?

There are many indications that good people, who have been doing good – though sometimes necessarily unseemly – work, are becoming increasingly frustrated with the politicization of their jobs and careers. It’s witch-hunting season on Capitol Hill.

A few weeks ago, former Central Intelligence Agency Director, General Michael V. Hayden, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post entitled, Defenders At Risk. He decried a “troubling reality. A whole swath of intelligence professionals – the best we had, the ones we threw at the al-Qaeda challenge when the nation was in extremis – are suffering for their sacrifice, being held up to recrimination for many decisions that were never wholly theirs and about which there was little protest when we all believed we were in danger.”

That last phrase is haunting: “when we all believed we were in danger.”

Are we acting like a nation in danger? Well, when it comes to economics, yes we are. With a mind-boggling willingness to suspend rational thought and reason, not to mention our Constitution to fix things, we are all czared-up. The American economy is being reinvented and may one day soon become something even Fidel Castro could admire, should he live so long. Of course, the new super-important-political-potentates are virtually unaccountable to the same people who spend an inordinate amount of time these days insisting on knowing everything about everything from those who must, by the nature of their work, operate in the shadows.

But it’s the economy and yes, we are stupid.

In the 1930s, Josef Stalin conducted a paranoiac purge that impacted all segments of Soviet society, notably the military. Having killed off most of his best generals and military minds, he and his nation paid the price in the early years of World War II. He bought time with his pact with Hitler in 1939, but was still nearly defeated two years later at the beginning of the Nazi invasion of his country. Some of those dead, but smart and experienced generals might have helped old Uncle Joe.

Are we on the verge of a “soft” purge in our intelligence and national security communities? Are beginning to lose people – citizens who have sacrificed and served with excellence – people we would certainly need if, God forbid, we found ourselves dealing with a major terrorist offensive here at home?

The answer is yes.

When it comes to the economy we will do virtually anything to get “the best and the brightest” into key posts because they are indispensable. But are we playing by the same rules when it comes to national security? The answer to that one is no.

All indications are that morale is low – and understandably so – in the intelligence and national security communities. Why? Likely, it’s because we have allowed for the polarizing stigmatization of these patriots and their noble work, driven by misguided and malicious self-righteousness.

The heirs to “the best and the brightest” of the 1960s are now running things. The torch has been passed to a new generation of experts who want to remake America in their image. One result may be that the most competent and experienced people, those who have been in often-dangerous trenches keeping us safe and free, may be squeezed out feeling largely unappreciated and woefully disrespected.

Ironically, and largely overlooked by a nation increasingly disconnected from its history, the way our federal government is working these days with respect to the fundamental issues of the economy and national security is completely at odds with how things were done back at the beginning.

Early on, this nation was a place for people to fulfill dreams and live lives without a nanny-state. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, articulated the spirit of that age during his first inaugural when he said: “A wise and frugal government, which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned – this is the sum of good government.”

When it comes to national security however, more than two centuries ago men of vision understood the concept of danger. Why do you think it was that when those guys came up with oaths of office for various leadership roles they tended to talk about “all enemies, foreign and domestic?” It’s because there were then – as there are now – people who just don’t get us and who would really like to hurt us.

During the American Revolution, John Jay – later of Federalist Papers fame – wrote to Robert Morris (often referred to as “the financier of the revolution”): “Communicate no other intelligence to Congress at large than what may be necessary to promote the common weal [well-being], not to gratify the curiosity of individuals.”

In fact, in The Federalist, No. 64, Jay argued: “There are cases where the most useful intelligence may be obtained, if the persons possessing it can be relieved from apprehensions of discovery. Those apprehensions will operate on those persons whether they are actuated by mercenary or friendly motives; and there doubtless are many of both descriptions who would rely on the secrecy of the President, and would not confide in that of the Senate, and still less in that of a largely popular assembly.”

These days that last phrase might read: “a largely un-popular assembly.”

Now, I want to make an observation. I may be quite wrong on this, but stay with me anyway. While all the punching and counterpunching is going on between Congress and the intelligence communities, President Obama has been sending mixed signals. He certainly wants to please those who put him where he is, and his campaign promises with respect to national security issues were pretty clear.

But since taking office, his rhetoric has toned down, at least a bit. And there is no doubt that he has shown some willingness to act counter to what he said while running for office. Gitmo’s in; Gitmo’s out. We’ll release the photos; no we won’t. Shifting gears is part of par-for-the-course-political-speak in Washington, but logic suggests something else may be involved.

Why would a man who was elected on a platform that was decidedly critical of the outgoing president’s intelligence and national security record ever be tempted to change his mind and act contrary to the will of his core constituencies?

There is only one logical answer: Because he has since learned some things that have changed his mind. Things he didn’t know while he was running for office. Details he didn’t have.

Additional facts tend to influence subsequent behavior. There is no other conclusion to be drawn from Mr. Obama’s “softening” on some once-ridiculed Bush administration policies and practices. The man now knows what he did not know before. How he deals with the stuff he now knows and how he responds to political pressure from those who got him elected in the first place will define his presidency and impact us all.

It would be better for the economy and for our actual physical safety if those running the show these days would read their American history and learn from the founders. Let people live their lives in freedom without being tortured with excessive taxation and tyrannical statist intrusion. And let those who have been tasked with keeping America safe alone to do their honorable work – without having to have a lawyer on speed dial.

I write this from a conservative perspective, but even a liberal writer such as Evan Thomas, editor of Newsweek, can make the point. He said in February of 2004, on a local Washington, D.C. television show:

“I really fear these investigations, if they turn into witch-hunts. The worst things that can happen is a demoralized CIA that’s back on its heels, that thinks everybody is against them, that they have to hire lawyers [and] testify before Congress. If you’re constantly pulling up the flowers to see if they’re growing, you could do more harm than good.”

The County And The School Of Hate

July 10, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under History, Islam, Islam and the West, National Security, Religion, Terrorism, War on Terror | 2 Comments 

Last month, a Saudi Arabian man named Raed Abdul-Rahman Al-Saif, placed three bags on the Tampa, Florida airport security conveyor belt as he made his way toward his gate to board US Airways flight 1077 to Phoenix, Arizona and Portland, Oregon. He never made it to the gate.

A Transportation Security Administration representative saw something on his screen that made him curious. Upon further investigation, TSA officers found a knife “artfully concealed between the outside fabric and the expandable pull handles of the bag.” This bag, by the way, would have been easily accessed by Al-Saif had he made it on his flight.

It was a butcher knife.

It turns out that he has been living in the U.S. illegally for a while and had been previously arrested on drug-related charges and for driving without a license. He had been a student at the University of Tampa, but was dismissed this past May due to poor academic performance. Word is, though, that he was a much better student back in high school. In fairness, that likely had to do with where he went to school and what he was learning.

Raed Al-Saif is a 2003 graduate of the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), the same institution that gave us the likes of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who was the school’s valedictorian in 1999. If that name rings a bell, it’s because he’s the guy who was convicted in 2005 on charges that included “providing material resources to Al-Qaeda” and “conspiracy to assassinate President George W. Bush.”

Then there were Mohammed Osam Idris and Mohammed el Yacoubi, both former ISA students, who were denied entrance to Israel in 2001. It turns out that they had written farewell letters before the trip for some kind of “suicide mission in the name of jihad.” And, let’s not forget Mr. Abdall I Al-Shabran, the ISA director who was arrested last year for failing to report child abuse.

Islamic Saudi Academy operates under the direct authority of the Saudi embassy, one of 20 or so such institutions around the world. It is also funded by the Saudi government and uses Saudi government “curriculum, syllabus, and materials.”

It is also virtually in my backyard – at least part of it. And they want to grow, that is, if the Fairfax County Government Planning Commission continues down its current path of blind accommodation and politically correct assuagement.

There is another meeting on the subject this Monday, July 13th at the county government center, and it should prove to be interesting. Last March, a handful of concerned citizens tried to speak over the disconcerting protests of about 600 ISA supporters. The few brave souls argued against a “special exemption” to zoning regulations that would allow “for the building of an expansion to the Islamic Saudi Academy in Fairfax.” By the way, the school now operates on property leased directly from the county.

As the pastor of a church in Fairfax County, and having for many of those years managed a private Christian School in the area, I can speak first-hand about how difficult it usually is to navigate the processes of county government here on behalf of a religious institution. But in the case of ISA, there appears to be an almost fawning and subservient approach on the part of many county leaders. Perhaps they are afraid of being politically incorrect. Perhaps they are just afraid.

Most likely, however – they are simply naïve.

Some of those arrayed against ISA are doing so simply out of concerns about traffic and other logistics on a particularly picturesque stretch of Popes Head Road. But most opponents are involved because they see ISA as a training institution for Wahhabism, an ultra-dogmatic and extreme form of Islam. They see ISA as “a hate training academy.” One detractor has said of the school: “We feel that it is in reality a madrassa, a training place for young impressionable Muslim students in some of the most extreme and most fanatical teachings of Islam.”

Of course, one of the great challenges when dealing with issues like this is to think and work through it in the context of religious liberty and tolerance. But what happens when our best intentions to preach freedom and tolerance wind up being used as a cover for something more sinister – even deadly?

The Nazis twisted a cross and developed a quasi-religious cult, but such a group would be hard pressed to lease property directly from any county in America. Hitler and his henchmen, by the way, came to power in Germany by using their constitution, then once in power they shelved it.

The Ku Klux Klan used a fiery cross as its symbol of hate and preached a sordid synthesis of misapplied Christianity and mysticism. But the religious element of it all was clearly a cover story. Are Islamists today using our Bill of Rights as a weapon against us en route toward the goal of a nation governed by Muslims, Islam, and Muslim law?

The answer appears to be all too clear – at least for those who are really watching.

Islam may indeed be one of the world’s three great monotheistic religions, but Islamism is better compared to Nazism and the Klan in a religious sense, not to Judaism and Christianity in general. Are there fanatical people who hate in the name of Christianity and Judaism? Probably, but they would be statistically insignificant and considered criminally insane. Not so, when you compare Islam itself with Islamism.

Daniel Pipes is a widely read expert on the threat of radical Islam. He is a director of the Middle East Forum and calculates that, “10 to 15 percent of Muslims worldwide support militant Islam.” Let’s do the math: Estimates of the global Muslim population range between 1.3 and 1.6 billion – roughly one in five human beings. This means, if Pipes is right (and it is possible his estimates may be on the conservative side) – that there may be between 130 and 240 million people in the world who, in the name of Islam, hate America. These are the people who had a party on that sad September day seven years ago.

By the way, the total combined population of an earlier axis of evil enemies – Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan in September of 1939 – was approximately 194 million. That’s total – as in every man, woman, and child.

How about the statistics right here in the U.S.? Well again, the estimates are all over the place, but it is generally accepted that between three and five million of our neighbors are Muslim. Applying the Pipes formula to here at home, we come up with the potential for anywhere between 300,000 and 1,200,000 people in this country who may be less-than-enamored of the rest of us. Or worse, some may be longing for the day when the fruited plain becomes a Muslim caliphate.

At what point, if ever, will some Americans awaken to the idea that a fair amount of what is passed off as Islam is, in fact, a cloak of unrighteousness – designed to use the guise of religion to gain cultural and ultimately political hegemony here?

Sure, not all Muslims are advocates of the kind of hate that would overthrow a government and superimpose Sharia-rule over the rest of us. But the evidence is growing that the number of Islamists in the Islamic fold is significant. And the battles are now being fought with the issues blurred.

What is needed now in America more than ever is an emergent group of leaders who are discerning – people who are wide awake to the threat from within.

McNamara The Compassionate

July 8, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under In Memoriam, International Affairs, National Security, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

In Christmas 1963, at a family reunion in Johnson City, Texas,  President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s nephew Phillip Bobbitt (now a professor of law at Columbia) was quizzed by his uncle about members of the President’s cabinet. LBJ finally asked Bobbitt a very peculiar question: who was the most compassionate member of the cabinet? “You’ll never guess” the President said.

Lyndon Johnson was a good reader of men and he was right about Robert McNamara, who died this week at the age of 93, after seven years at the Defense Department and then 13 at the World Bank. Just a glance at Mr. McNamara’s tenure at the World Bank shows a man driven by a desire to help the poor.

During his presidency there, lending to the developing world grew from 60 loans totaling under $1 billion to 250 loans of almost $12 billion. His efforts to move governments to increase their contributions to the poorest countries earned him the reputation in the underdeveloped world as “the conscience of the West” (a phrase unlikely to be associated with him at home). At the time of the Cuban missile crisis, his was one of the few voices ardently opposed to invasion.

General Myers: We Need To Use All Elements Of National Power

May 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, Afpak, Military, National Security | 3 Comments 

The Former Chairman of The Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force General Richard B. Myers was at the Nixon Library Wednesday to discuss his new book Eyes On The Horizon: Serving On The Front Lines Of National Security. He also gave us some time for an exclusive interview that TNN readers will find interesting; among other items, the General discusses the “global insurgency” waged against America and its allies, the strategies we need to apply to fight it, and the ethical questions surrounding them, including a take on the current controversy over interrogation and detainment policy:

Night At The Supermax

May 22, 2009 by David R. Stokes | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, History, National Archives, National Security, Obama administration, Presidents, Terrorism, Vice President Biden, War on Terror | 1 Comment 

When Harry Truman was whistle-stopping his way into political history en route to his upset of Thomas Dewey in the 1948 presidential election, he used many set pieces again and again from the back of his train. And they always worked. One example was to accuse the Republicans of misleading the American people. Harry said that the GOP lived by the philosophy, “If you can’t convince them; confuse them.”

I wonder what Truman would make of his distant Democratic successor in the White House. Would the man known for his plain talking sign off on President Obama’s brand new method of communication – one that would impress even George Orwell?

It might be best called transcendent-speak – the art of talking above-it-all.

Our president describes things like abortion and his approach to national security in language that defines the new administration as kind of “hovering-yet-right-in-the-middle,” with just about everyone else described as finger-pointing partisans and fear-mongering extremists.

Barack Obama’s recent speech about national security, delivered against the backdrop of all things historic and constitutional, was a case in point. By now, we all know that while Mr. Obama was speechifying at the National Archives, former Vice President Dick Cheney was weighing in with an address of his own at the American Enterprise Institute. It was split-screen heaven for policy junkies. I am now waiting for someone to YouTube some sound bites from both men, with the music of “Dueling Banjoes” from the movie Deliverance playing. This analogy works on several levels.

Mr. Cheney, by the way, won that one on points. And don’t even get me started on how well he’d do against Joe “da-bunker’s-dis-way” Biden.

Digging through all the rhetoric in President Obama’s speech – trying to separate wood, hay, and stubble, from yet more wood, hay, and stubble, I found one true thing. He said: “My single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe.” He indicated that it is always on his mind (cue Willie Nelson song here).

Understanding responsibility and accepting responsibility are, however, two very different things. I find myself hoping against hope that he is not telling us everything – that deep down he gets it, or that he has his fingers crossed, or something. I want to believe that Mr. Obama is as much of a realist as most presidents quickly become on matters of national security (Jimmy Carter doesn’t count, of course). I am praying that he holds a few tough trump cards in reserve. But, let’s say I have my doubts.

You see, the president has a hard time even really talking about the enemy we are supposed to be vigilant against. He refers almost vaguely to “an extremist ideology” and talks about the high-tech threat from “a handful of terrorists.” And he says, in an effort to show how full his presidential-plate is, we are fighting two – count ‘em – two wars.

Two wars? Were we fighting two wars from 1941 to 1945? Or were the European and Pacific theaters possibly somehow related by a toxic affinity? When Italy was against us, were we then fighting three wars?

Of course not – there may have been several fronts, but it was the same war. And the leaders back then didn’t have a problem with naming the ideology. Roosevelt railed against the Nazis. Though Mr. Churchill talked about “Narzees” – raising the possibility that there was yet one more war, if you count it all that way.

In fairness, Mr. Obama did mention our historical success in overpowering “the iron fist of fascism,” even though in order to actually win, in those now long gone days, required a fist of our own – as opposed to an outstretched hand. But when he talked about us being “indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates,” I found myself thinking: “Affiliates? Affiliates?”

That’s it. Out with the war on terror, in with a war on those pesky “affiliates.”

Mr. Obama again defended his position on the closure of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay. He reminded us of his oft-used assertion that, “the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.” It’s a cool line, but impossible to prove.

“If you can’t convince them; confuse them.”

One of the president’s great ideas would be to send many of the current Gitmo detainees to one of our “federal, supermax prisons.” But if his goal is to see that these misunderstood men escape unpleasant confines, anyone who knows anything about Gitmo and the federal prison system will tell you that conditions and treatment are worse in a supermax facility than at Gitmo. How will this play when the “affiliates” find out how bad the new home is and then use the new conditions as a recruitment tool. Where next?

People who have been to Gitmo tell me that the detainees there are treated better than anyone in our federal system. In fact, some tell me that those bad guys have it better than many of our nation’s fighting heroes in Iraq and Afghanistan!

The biggest irony of all as Mr. Obama’s policies evolve, is that he is apparently acknowledging that some of the more dangerous detainees may have to be held indefinitely. So much for absolute principles – there is some wiggle room after all. But of course, it’s all part of the “mess” he inherited.

On the flipside, Mr. Cheney seemed to speak with a good deal more of the “common sense” the guy on the other side of the screen (presumably, the left side) talked about. He said: “In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.” He decried what he described as, “Recklessness cloaked in righteousness.”

This week, the Senate voted to deny $80 million for the closure of Gitmo. There is also legislation in the pipeline with wide support that would require a “threat assessment” for all of the remaining 240 detainees before any other decision about their future is made.

As for President Obama, he calls opposition to his approach fearmongering. He says that some are using, “words that are calculated to scare people rather than educate them.” And he adds, “Bear in mind the following fact: Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal ‘supermax’ prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists.”

He’s right. But the insertion of new and dangerous terrorists, complete with some of the structural changes that would be needed to create the image that these men will not be treated badly, raise the possibility of rendering the facilities a little more vulnerable. Not to mention the idea that some of the terrorists might be treated better than the other inmates because of political considerations, might just create, shall we say, unrest on the part of the all the regular criminals. In other words, it could all lead to a really bad night at the supermax.

Fearmonger – that’s an interesting term. It’s all the rage these days, like pandemic. The word, “monger,” means “a dealer in a specific commodity.” One can be a fishmonger, for example. Of course, using the suffix with fear is designed to create the idea that someone is spreading something destructive, even devilish.

Was it fearmongering when the government had us all freaked out a few weeks ago about the swine flu? Most of us would say “no.” Disease is serious stuff and we are wise to take heed to warnings and wisdom.

I suggest that a little fear in a dangerous world is quite wise. The problem, as I see it, is not fearmongering, but rather, pipe-dream-mongering. Americans should not be paralyzed by fear, but we should be concerned enough to know that we are not even close to being out of the terror-filled woods. When there is a toxic virus, you don’t send those infected to school with the other kids. When it comes to terrorist detainees, Gitmo is their home.

There’s no place like home.

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