Russia recently announced that it seized 10 caches of arms on May 4 and 5 in Abkhazia which were to be used in dramatic terrorist attacks in Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics are to take place. The stockpiles included: 10,000 rounds of ammunition; 15 kilograms of TNT; 50 grenade fuses; 39 hand grenades; 36 mortar shells; 29 grenade launchers; 15 landmines; 12 improvised explosive devices; 3 surface-to-air missiles; 2 anti-tank missiles; 2 assault rifles and a sniper rifle, mortar and flamethrower.

The Russian government says that the man responsible for the planned wave of attacks is Doku Umarov, a Chechen terrorist leader involved with Al-Qaeda. He ordered an end to attacks on Russian civilians earlier this year. Georgian intelligence helped Umarov’s terrorists smuggle the weapons through Georgian territory from Turkey, the Russians claim. Georgia dismisses the accusations as “absolutely absurd.” The accusation provides a clear rationale to remove Saakashvili from power.

This development comes while Russia is preparing for a possible strike on Iran. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin explained, “Iran is our neighbor. If Iran is involved in any military action, it’s a direct threat to our security.” Reportedly, Russia has drawn up plans to send forces to Armenia in such an event, which requires going through Georgia, toppling Saakashvili on the way.

In 2008, Russia’s annual Kavkaz exercises were used as a cover to deploy and train the forces that invaded Georgia the next month. This year’s exercises are to take place in September. Russia announced that Spetsnaz units will be sent to the North Caucasus region for the exercises and airborne assault forces and attack helicopters will deploy to Base 102 in Gyumri, Armenia. One report claims that the families of soldiers at the base have already been evacuated.

It is quite possible that Russia will provide assistance to the Iranian regime from Armenia in the event of a conflict. After all, Saddam Hussein awarded medals to former Soviet advisors for helping him to prepare for the 2003 invasion. Russian Spetsnaz units were deployed to Iraq and are suspected of having helped cleanse the country of documents and incriminating materials. The Russians also gave Saddam Hussein details about the U.S. war plan, retrieved through a spy at CENTCOM. Russia continues to arm Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and deployed an “anti-terror” unit to assist him in March.

The Israeli left is dead. It’s politically dead, conceptually dead and brain dead. But like the fabled Norwegian blue parrot, there is an industry dedicated to assuring us that it’s still alive and well, just pining for the peace process.

The left in Israel is one of the few in the world to exist on foreign subsidies. Without generous funds from the European Union, the State Department, George Soros and assorted members of the Shadow Party, the last remnants of the Israeli left would have packed up their suitcases, their degrees in art philosophy and their framed photos of Amos Oz and Leon Trotsky and moved to Paris or San Francisco.

Israelis are about as eager to vote for the left as chickens are to saunter into a KFC restaurant.  Israel’s equivalent of the Democratic Party, the once dominant Labor Party has shrunk to being only the fifth largest party in the country. Meretz, the Israeli equivalent of the Green Party, the vanguard of the left, has three seats in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. Only the Arab parties seem to be doing well, led by Hadash, the Arab Communist Party, where Israeli leftists who think Meretz is too moderate go.

And just to remind Israelis of why they left the left behind, a few hundred left-wing activists gathered in front of the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv to protest against any strike on Iran. The old slogan of the left, “An entire generation demands peace” had given way to signs reading, “The nation demands Iranian friends”, which sounded more like a nursery school slogan. Equally idiotic signs read, “Social justice does not equal war with Iran” and “No to pre-emptive suicide”.

The entire event was a cliché complete with red banners, colored scarves and dopey participants who seemed to have no knowledge whatsoever of the world outside Tel Aviv. A number of protesters urged negotiations with Iran, apparently unaware that Iran does not recognize Israel as a country making any negotiations impossible. Iran’s Islamic leaders have repeatedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, which is not the behavior of a regime interested in negotiating anything.

The rally followed the even more ridiculous, “Israel Loves Iran” Facebook campaign which combined the grandiosity of social media with the empty mindless sentimentality which has characterized the rhetoric of the Israeli peace camp.

“Iranians We Will Never Bomb Your Country: We Love You”, read posters that looked like they were designed by teenage girls. There are photos of narcissistic young couples staring into the camera, Israelis kissing Iranians, Iranians kissing Israelis, Israeli hippies kissing other Israeli hippies and bored Europeans looking to fill a vacuum after the Arab Spring trying to join in the fun.

“Israel Loves Iran” turned out to be the perfect campaign for those too lazy to stand in front of the Habima Theater for an hour holding up a hand-lettered sign and made for excellent headlines. News stories reported on the 50,000 likes for the Facebook group, a small number even in a country as small as Israel, and much of the activity on the group appears to consist of German and Spanish language posters.

On cue the Pravda press rushed to their iPads to begin tapping out the appropriate denunciations of Republican candidates, Netanyahu and American Jews for their warmongering. However, at that same press conference, Obama was careful to draw a distinction between Syria and Iran.

When asked whether his “window of diplomatic opportunity” and serious-face remarks about the “costs of war” applied to Syria as well as Iran, the peacemonger suddenly became the warmonger, asserting, “What’s happening in Syria is heartbreaking and outrageous, and what you’ve seen is the international community mobilize against the Assad regime.  And it’s not a question of when Assad leaves — or if Assad leaves — it’s a question of when.”

In Iran, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei get an endless window to repress their own people and build their nukes, while in Syria, Assad is told that it’s only a question of when he leaves. That’s not the kind of talk you use unless you mean to make him leave, one way or another, using the fig leaf of the international community, which can’t get a war vote through the UN, but can organize yet another Coalition of the Willing.

To the untrained ear this may sound a lot like the beating of war drums, but sophisticated types know that it’s actually the cowbell of peace jangling with the groovy beat of humanitarian vibes. Sure it may all end in bombs falling on Damascus, but they’ll be peace bombs painted rainbow colors by marines who have married each other in a special commitment ceremony.

Republicans make war, while Democrats make explosive peace, just like they did in Kosovo where there are still more American troops than there are in Iraq, a legacy of the Clinton Administration’s humanitarian bombmaking peace.

Now after years of sneering at Republicans, the Democrats have their own Axis of Evil list, they just  refuse to admit that they have it. Bombing countries on the list is a friendly act, which is why the current name for the Coalition of the Willing in Syria, is “Friends of Syria,” a name that would have given Orwell a fit. Bombing countries that aren’t on the list is irresponsible warmongering.

It’s a matter of transparent hypocrisy that the same voices who keep denouncing warmongering in Iran, want us to go into Syria. The difference between warmongering and a righteous humanitarian effort is a matter of political orientation, much like the difference between Iraq and Libya where we bombed a country to rid it of its dictator only to leave behind chaos and feuding factions. Or between Kony 2012 and drone strikes in Somalia.

Democrats don’t like the military, but they like their wars. Until the Gulf War, every significant war in the previous century had been initiated by Democratic presidents. They just didn’t like calling them wars. Korea was a “police action” and in Vietnam we were just there as advisers. No wars to see here. Libya officially wasn’t a war, it was just one of those things where we bombed a country for several months until we tracked down and helped kill its leader. If we go into Syria, it certainly won’t be as a war, we’ll be keeping the peace through a war, bombing the village to save the village.

In the 20th century, there has hardly been a single Democratic president who didn’t bring America into a war. Woodrow Wilson had WW1, Franklin Roosevelt had WW2, Truman had Korea, JFK and LBJ had Vietnam, Bill Clinton had Yugoslavia and Obama has Libya. Only Carter was the odd man out, though he did begin supplying the Afghan Mujahideen with weapons which helped bring us into the current conflict.

With a record like that you would think that the Democrats would at least leave the peace signs and flowers at home. Some of their wars were necessary and some weren’t, but they are responsible for the lion’s share of the wars that we have been in.

It’s not as though they haven’t tried this before. Whenever Democrats have trouble riling up voters about their agenda – as they are now – they quickly revert to their tried and true playbook. Specifically, page 138: “Drive a wedge between women and men. Women tend to vote liberal; if you can alienate them from men, they vote even more liberal.”  It comes right after the rule on page 137: “Use scare tactics about Social Security to get the votes of seniors.”

There’s only one problem: the scare about women isn’t  going to work.

The premise of an alleged Republican  war on women is faulty as well as sexist: it assumes that women are the mild and weak and require men to pay for their services. The Democrats, including columnists like Sally Kohn, lament the fact that in February 2011, “anti-choice Republicans pushed a rogue measure to cut off all federal funding from Planned Parenthood, even though less than 3% of services provided by Planned Parenthood are abortions, none of which are paid for using federal grant dollars. Still, Republicans saw an opportunity to fire up their fringe base while undermining a liberal-leaning advocacy organization.”

Meanwhile, stealth activist Sandra Fluke famously appeared before Congress to explain why a Catholic institution should pay for her birth control: “In the media lately, some conservative Catholic organizations have been asking what did we expect when we enroll in a Catholic school?
We can only answer that we expected women to be treated equally, to not have our school create untenable burdens that impede our academic success.”

But all of this assumes that women are incapable of providing their own contraception or pay for their own health care. This is sheer nonsense. Birth control costs $9 per month (and poor Fluke can afford it – she spent time recently in Spain and Italy with her boyfriend). Planned Parenthood is hardly the only health care provider. Independent women are willing for us to hear their roar – as they  tell everybody else that they can handle their own bodies, thank you very much. Even so, liberals still  contend that Republicans are fighting a war on women while they themselves try  to subsidize women to keep them  dependent.

Wars begin in a thousand ways. Some begin with lies, others with truth. Some with aggression and others with appeasement. But behind those many beginnings are some familiar qualities. Arrogance, incompetence, ignorance and cowardice.

Those qualities should be familiar because we can hardly go a day without seeing them displayed behind the teleprompter in its familiar place in Washington D.C. or on the endless road trip to the Muslim world that is the Obama Doctrine. We have seen them in Istanbul and Cairo, and we can see their consequences in Tehran and Tunis. In a world where America has kept the peace, they are swiftly leading us to war.

Bombs Away in North Korea

The words “North Korea” and “diplomacy” are a running joke even in diplomatic circles, and seeing a headline like “Clinton hails North Korea food deal” doesn’t give you enough information to determine whether you are seeing a news story from 2011 or 1994. Sadly, the answer is 2011, as the Hope and Change crew have put their faith in their own diplomacy, rather than in history or common sense.

North Korea is more than just a Communist mafia with nuclear weapons; it’s the starting point in the supply chain for any Muslim country that wants its own nuclear weapons. Its ability to blackmail the West encourages nations like Iran to push for their own nuclear programs to be able to have their own atomic blackmail card… and brings us closer to the day when a bankrupt North Korea decides that America really is a paper tiger and our soldiers find themselves fighting a second Korean War.

A Cold Day in Hell in Iran

If the world were a playground, Iran would be the school bully who has been beating us up since 1979. The United States has occasionally fought back; mostly it has tried to be the bigger man in the conflict. All that changed with this administration which has signaled loud and clear that it will not fight back no matter what.

It takes a lot to get a compliment out the Iranian leadership, which views America as the Great Satan, but Obama’s “diplomacy” did the trick when the Supreme Leader of Iran said, “Two days ago, we heard the president of America say: ‘We are not thinking of war with Iran.’ This is good. Very good. These are wise words. This is an exit from illusion.”

There are diplomats in D.C. patting themselves on the back for that achievement when they should be hanging themselves instead. These aren’t words of peace, this is the leader of a theocracy that has been at war with the United States from Day One, gloating that the Great Satan has finally accepted that it can’t defeat the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution.

The United States has been the last remaining restraint on Iran after the fall of Saddam. Now that restraint is gone and the Ayatollahs are off the leash and all that more eager for a fight now that they’re sure we can’t fight back.

In The Caliphate’s Corner  

There’s a reason that Chamberlain merited eternal infamy for his pandering to Hitler, but even he didn’t actually invade Czechoslovakia to hand it over to the Nazis. Carter’s support for the Ayatollahs created a major threat but even he didn’t turn over half the Middle East to them. Obama has managed to combine the worst of both men and then some by backing a series of revolutions that have put the Muslim Brotherhood in the driver’s seat.

The Al-Nahda Party in Tunisia, which has taken power, has been quite clear that it is the new caliphate. In Egypt, the Caliphate has proven popular with Egyptian voters who came out in droves for the Salafis and the Brotherhood. And that’s just the beginning. Libya and its oil wealth are still up for grabs and the reforms and new elections in the wake of the Arab Spring will go on swinging Arab countries into the hairy arms of the Brotherhood.

The Brotherhood is not going to be any better at running those countries than their former governments were. Even Saudi money can only buy so much free food for the masses. But there’s a time honored way to distract the people from how little they have to eat—with a war.

The first target of a Caliphate that wants to dominate the region will be us. They already have our weapons and our money. When their popularity dips, they’re going to thank Obama for putting them in power in the traditional manner… with a war.

Facing the Dragon with an Empty Hand

The last time that we got into a war with a major Pacific power it was because Japan thought we were stunting its regional ambitions. This time around swap China for Japan and we are likely to be facing the same war all over again. Except China is in a better position than Japan was and Obama’s drastic cuts to the military, particularly to the navy and air force, put us in a much weaker position to play defense.

Last year Obama showily insisted that the United States is a “Pacific Power”, even while he was stripping away our ability to be one. It’s one thing to provoke the dragon, but another to do it when you don’t have the weapons to fight him.

Obama has insisted on baiting China while weakening the United States. It’s a bad combination that can only lead to disaster.

All Quiet on the Denial Front

As a “Man of Peace”, Obama has maintained his image by selectively altering reality. Wars are no longer called wars. Terrorist attacks are no longer described as terrorist attacks. But there’s a reason why we describe certain things as “Acts of War”, it’s because the enemy is meant to know that doing them to us will result in a war. That’s no longer the case.

The crisis in the Middle East continues to intensify, and there is a growing probability of armed conflict with Iran in the near future. With its growing international isolation and continued drive toward nuclear weapon capability, the likelihood of Iran initiating hostilities is also a very real possibility.

A fulcrum of confrontation between Iran and the West is the Strait of Hormuz. On January 9, 2012, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, Iran’s defense minister, stated that Iran has the ability to block the Strait if it deemed it necessary. In testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Lt. Gen. Ronald Burgess, Defense Intelligence Agency director, stated that “Iran can close the Strait of Hormuz.” Recent Iranian military exercises have emphasized sea denial of the waterway. In response, U.S., British and French warships have transited the Strait to and from the Persian Gulf to assert freedom of navigation. In January, the U.S. Navy reported four cases of harassment of its warships by Iranian naval vessels in the Gulf. Two U.S. carrier strike groups are deployed in the region, and a buildup of U.S. forces is underway.

The importance of Hormuz to global stability is paramount. According to a report from GlobalSecurity.org, almost 25 percent of the world’s oil supply transits the Strait daily–some 16.5-17 million barrels according to 2006 estimates–approximately 40 percent of all seaborne traded oil. Over 75 percent of Japan’s oil is carried through this waterway. By 2020, it is estimated that daily traffic will increase to some 30-34 million barrels.

Another thing about the Strait: it’s narrow, between 34-40 miles wide. Furthermore, there are just two 2-mile wide channels, one each for inbound and outbound traffic. Also, this traffic consists mostly of supertankers carrying over two million barrels each, meaning that fewer ships with more oil are carrying this supply.

If Hormuz were closed, as much as one-fifth of the world’s oil supply would be lost (assuming maximum output through pipelines from Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea, Turkey (through Iraq). and, possibly, Lebanon.) For the United States alone, this would have severe effects. According to a GAO report of October 5, 2006, such an occurrence could cause oil prices to increase $175 per barrel. Globally, the effects in such regions as Western Europe and East Asia would be even worse.

If Iran decided to move to close the Strait, it would have a variety of forces at its disposal. Its navy has three Russian-built Kilo-class submarines along with several midget submarines capable of laying mines, ideal for use in the Strait. Its surface forces include four guided-missile frigates and some 150 coastal combatants (another 50 are manned by the Revolutionary Guard Corps.) About 25-30 of these small vessels are equipped with the Chinese-made C-802 anti-ship missile, with a range of 60 kilometers. In addition to ships, there are some 60 C-802s deployed on Qeshm Island, covering the Strait, along                     with large numbers of other anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles there and on other small islands just to the west. Iran also has some 3,000 mines, including around 100 EM53′s, which are rocket-propelled and only strike when activated. There is also Iran’s air force, which fields about 50 F-14 Tomcat and MiG-29 fighters and 24 Su-24 strike aircraft, with some 200 other attack jets. Among the weapons they carry are C-801K anti-ship missiles, similar in capability to the C-802.

In 2007, Israeli Air Force jets crossed into Syria and destroyed an Iranian-backed nuclear reactor. The operation had the backing of the United States and employed intelligence derived from an Iranian defector. There was no regional war afterward. Not even an exchange of fire at the Israeli-Syrian border.

In 1981, Israel struck deep inside Iraq, destroying Saddam’s Osirak reactor. The attack was universally condemned at the United Nations and even by Israel’s allies. Had Saddam used it as the basis for a war, Israel would have had no international support at all. But again no war followed.

Today, Iran and opponents of any attack on its nuclear program hold up the specter of a regional war that will drag in the United States, devastate the region and drive up oil prices. This is the only card in their deck until the mullahs have their own bomb, and it’s an effective card to play. But is any of that a serious risk?

Let’s start by looking at the current state of the Iranian regime. The regime is wildly unpopular at home. It had to use its Revolutionary Guard corps to violently suppress protests against the regime, it does not trust its own military and without troops loyal to it close to home, the regime would be gone faster than you can say Nicolai Ceausescu. (If you have trouble saying that, substitute the fallen dictator of your choice.)

Iran has repeatedly attacked American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; its terrorists have attacked Israel and Jews around the world, but those attacks amount to terrorism and guerrilla warfare mostly carried out by secondary actors. It’s quite different from committing to a major conflict, which will give the regime a choice between either keeping its loyalist Revolutionary Guard at home and sending unreliable conventional troops off to fight and possibly turn on it, or sending off its trusted troops and leaving its leaders naked to the people’s wrath.

Another option is more terrorist attacks, which are already being carried out anyway. And as their recent attacks showed, Shiite terrorists aren’t all that much better than the Sunni kind. Their latest round of attacks mostly ended with dead terrorists killed by their own bombs. And it is only common sense that a regime this violent and stupid can no more be allowed to have nuclear weapons than Corcoran State Prison should allow Charles Manson to build his own flamethrower.

The only card in the Iranian deck is a naval conflict. The last time it tried one of those, the result was a decisive defeat for Iran, but that was back in the late ’80s. The Persian Gulf is vital to Iran’s assertion of power over the region. It has invested in developing its navy and a strategy that will allow it to take on greater powers.

This scenario is only plausible if we assume that Iran will begin a conflict that it is bound to lose in order to avenge the loss of a nuclear program that it no longer has.

There are two possible attack scenarios. First, Israel carries out a unilateral attack on Iran’s nuclear program. This is the most likely scenario under the Obama administration, which has made it clear that it wants a conflict with Syria, but will not back any Israeli attack on Iran. Second, in a very unlikely scenario the administration, for some reason, changes its mind and decides to take out Iran’s nuclear program.

In the first and likeliest scenario, Iran would have to begin a war with the United States over an attack carried out by Israel. A war that it’s bound to lose. Like the lunatic with the lug nuts, the folks in Tehran are crazy, but they’re not stupid. If they were going to begin a war with the United States over something Israel did, they had plenty of opportunities with Stuxnet and the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.

In the three years since President Obama has been in office he has attempted to “engage” Iran, invoke “sanctions” with multiple loopholes, and sign into law even “tougher sanctions” too late to be relevant. While he has “removed nothing from the table” – a euphemism for military action – it nonetheless appears that the administration, by its terminal foot dragging, neither wants to attack Iran under almost any circumstances, nor wants Israel to attack.

In an interview last week, Mr. Obama said that he did not believe that Israel had made a final decision to attack Iran, and wouldn’t attack without first coordinating with the US. He added that Israel and America were “in lockstep” on the Iranian issue. Really?

Recently another in a series of administration orchestrated leaks was released to NBC News by unnamed “US officials” claiming that deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service. Why the US would publicize such an unsubstantiated allegation, true or not, makes no sense unless the point is to damage Israeli freedom of action.

This week, President Obama announced an additional sanction on Iran: the freezing of the Iranian government’s assets in the US. But it was another in Obama’s sleight of hand purported sanctions against Iran. At this stage, Obama still refuses to accept the Senate’s decision, passed by a majority of 100-0, to impose paralyzing sanctions against Iran’s central bank and its oil industry. With time running out, Mr. Obama is still playing the delaying game while giving a false impression to his gullible supporters – especially liberal American Jews – that he is supposedly doing everything to stop Iran short of military attack.

The harsh truth is that President Obama and his policy advisors have gone into ostrich mode and collectively stuck their heads in the sand.  Aside from the fact that the purportedly “tougher sanctions” demanded by Israel to avoid the necessity of armed conflict with Iran should have been implemented years ago, it is questionable whether such sanctions would stop Iran’s clerical leadership from pursuing their path to creating a nuclear arsenal.

Sanctions didn’t stop North Korea and the Korean mindset is somewhat closer to the West. Mr. Obama and his advisors appear incapable of comprehending with whom they are dealing. As Professor Niall Ferguson recently noted in The Daily Beast, there are those who believe “a nuclear-armed Iran is nothing to worry about….[and] States actually become more risk-averse once they acquire nuclear weapons.” This wishful thinking prefers to view Iran as if it were the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the threat of MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – is still a viable alternative.

Professor Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle East historians for more than half a century, put his finger on the problem in his keynote address at the international Jerusalem Conference back in 2008: “Iran’s leadership comprises a group of extreme fanatical Muslims who believe that their messianic times have arrived,” he warned.  “Though Russia and the US both had nuclear weapons, it was clear that they would never use them because of MAD.  Each side knew it would be destroyed if it would attack the other.  But with these people in Iran,” Professor Lewis explained, “MAD is not a deterrent factor, but rather an inducement.  They feel that they can hasten the final messianic process. This is an extremely dangerous situation of which it is important to be aware.”

Iran’s Shi’ite theocratic leadership headed by its “Supreme Leader” the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his acolyte, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, sincerely believe that this is the apocalyptic age, which will result in the triumphant return of their messianic figure, the Twelfth Imam, or “the Mahdi.”

There are two possible conflicts on the table in Washington. One is with Iran and the other with Syria. The Iran conflict is the one that Washington doesn’t want. Its most likely trigger at this stage is an Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Like most of the wars centering around Israel, this one is existential and of no interest to the philosopher kings in D.C. who wage wars with the grand purpose of making the world a better place.

Washington does not particularly care whether Iran gets nukes or doesn’t get nukes. It cares about History. With a capital “H.” Libya got bombed because it was on the wrong side of history. Syria is about to get bombed because it’s on the wrong side of history. There are people in the administration like Samantha Power who would like to bomb Israel for being on the wrong side of history, but they don’t think that even J Street and Peter Beinart could spin that as a pro-Israel move.

Being on the right or wrong side of history is one of those topics that primarily interests Islamists and nation builders on the right and the left who subscribe to a progressive version of history. Things don’t just happen, they happen because a country and a people are riding the history escalator up or down, to the top floor of the mall of the world where the cultivated stores like Starbucks, Nordstrom and the now defunct Sharper Image are located, or the bottom where K-Mart, Payless and Gap take up space.

The Arab Spring was on the right side of history because of its transformative qualities. Supporters of it were on the right side of history. Opponents of it needed to be bombed if they were Arab dictators or disinvited from the right cocktail parties if they were merely columnists and analysts. And at the end of it all through the sublime majesty of democracy and people power, the Middle East would look exactly like Europe, but with a more exotic cuisine.

Israel has always been the hedgehog in the soup of Arab democracy, agitating them, empowering their rulers and causing them to distrust Western benevolence. Now Israeli jets threaten to spill the soup of the Arab Spring by bombing Iran, which may reinforce support for Syria, which will hold up the Arab Spring and halt the progressive escalator of history.

Washington needs the Syrian war to happen, and it needs to keep a conflict with Iran from happening. The great diplomatic problem of Israel has always been that its leader insist on viewing conflicts in practical terms. Israel does not fight wars to make the world safe for democracy, it fights wars because there’s someone shooting missiles as it. This is an unacceptable reason for a war in a postmodern world where wars are fought to preserve the international order, protect civilization, make the world safe for democracy and prove that human rights violations will be punished by the duly constituted body of international jurisprudence.

Self-interest is Israel’s original sin. It was the sin that countless titans of the left from H.G. Wells to Lenin berated the Zionists for. Instead of contributing to the welfare of mankind and participating in the international brotherhood of workers, they went off to rebuild a country that existed only in their holy books and stirred up all kinds of trouble doing it. And since they have kept on stirring up trouble, not in the name of some grand idea, but out of their tawdry interest in defending themselves.

With angry Muslims boiling in European cities, Koran touting terrorists blowing up the modern infrastructure of the world’s capitals and turmoil roiling the hundreds of millions of Muslims who still haven’t managed to get refugee status in the UK or the US, the progressive vision is in big trouble and the only solution is to somehow stabilize the situation. Democracy is the only panacea that the progressive prescription plan covers.

Israel’s insistence on a purely existential view is dismissed as selfish and narrow-minded when the Middle East is headed toward a brave new world where nukes no longer matter because no one is angry anymore because there are no more dictators and democracy is everywhere. While the Israelis see the Middle East as basically static, the progressives see the Middle East as constantly on the verge of a great leap forward to a new more enlightened age.

As a result any affinity between the neoconservatives and Israeli leaders was always going to be limited. The neoconservatives were impressed by Israel’s modernism, but they assumed that it could be copied over to their neighbors and came to resent Israel as an obstacle for not playing a more meaningful role in their grand theory of history. While outwardly the progressives see Israel as very modern, they reject it for not possessing the most vital element of modernism. Transnationalism.

While Israel has more than its share of leftists, its animating philosophy is an ethnic nationalism that is repugnant to the transnationalist. They can find no meaningful globally applicable philosophy that defines its success. Like Japan, Israel is a self-contained wonder. It is a nation, not a philosophy. Its identity is rooted in an infuriating recent and ancient history. It is modern in defiance of the progressive understanding of history– which is why its technology, its human rights and its basic decency are dismissed.

If a war begins in the neighborhood of the Persian Gulf, it will likely have less to do with a slugging match between Israel and Iran, than a simmering Sunni-Shiite war that is about to flare up into regional violence through a combination of factors dating back decades and recent events in the region.

The rise of a fanatically violent Shiite Islamist state has done more to destabilize the region than anything else. As much as Sunni Arabs prattle on about Zionist conspiracies, a few million Jews sandwiched in a narrow strip of land against the Mediterranean are no threat to them. But a rival version of Islam that is spearhead by a non-Arab ethnic group and placed at the service of a powerful military machine and an oil economy is what keeps them up at night.

The fall of Saddam put Iraq up for grabs and raised the prospect of a Shiite superstate with a vast military and massive oil reserves. It also tipped Syria and its leftover Baath Party run by a variant Shiite sect directly into Tehran’s paws. Add nuclear weapons to the Iran-Iraq-Syria trinity and you are looking at the worst nightmare of every Sunni Arab prince living in polished oil mansions near what he still insists on calling the Arabian Gulf.

A Shiite superstate will checkmate the Sunni oil monarchies and leave them no choice but to beg America to garrison them with so many troops, air bases and nuclear missiles that they might as well be the 51′st through 59th states. Using foreign soldiers to protect themselves isn’t all that objectionable to the fat lazy oil monarchies who already use armies of foreigners to do everything for them. But the American troops who saved the Saudis and Kuwaitis from Saddam also gave Bin Laden a pretext for turning the conflict on its axis.

The Gulf Sunni Arab princelings know that a massive infusion of American troops will bring out more Bin Ladens, and even the American military hierarchy which knows to salaam to the princes will lose patience fast when the Khobar Towers bombing repeats itself enough times. Americans fighting their own people will quickly turn their countries into another Afghanistan. On top of that the Americans won’t stay there forever.

The Gulfies could develop competent armies, but no Muslim state trusts its own military. If all those billions and billions in state of the art American military equipment were put into the hands of competent generals, instead of the cousins and nephews of the royal family, then very shortly the generals would be running the country. And even if they could trust the generals, the locals have no reliable military tradition except as caravan raiders and have gotten a little too used to the good life to fight for any other reason than an outburst of Koranic fanaticism by the third son of the family.

The Persians have a long proud military tradition. The Egyptians and the Syrians picked up something from their European colonizers. But the Gulfies are not good for much except beating their Filipino maids and getting high on hashish and blowing themselves up to get to paradise. The Iranian military even in its current state would clean their clocks faster than you could say, Alakazam and they know it.

What the Gulfies lack in military skills, they more than make up for in underhanded cunning. If they can’t import an infidel army and they can’t build their own army, then they will follow the honorable tradition of finding a counterbalance to the enemy. The Gulfies have been nurturing the Muslim Brotherhood and funding Al-Jazeera. Combine the two with an American administration eager to win over the Muslim world by reforming American foreign policy and the Gulfies got their own Arab Spring.

The real purpose of the Arab Spring was to create a Sunni Islamist superstate or regional alliance to counter the threat of a Shiite Islamist superstate. With the Muslim Brotherhood sweeping across North Africa all the way to Egypt, the harvest includes semi-secular states with competent armies and if Syria can be tipped into that camp, then Iran will lose its puppet and the Sunni superstate will have a military tipped with top of the line American and Russian equipment, funded by Gulfie oil money and backed by the lunatic fanaticism of Islamist fighters.

With America in decline, the Gulfies touched off the Arab Spring to create Janissary armies, but this time composed of devout Muslims, to keep the Shiites at bay. Iran pushed back contesting Saudi influenced territory in Bahrain and the Emir of Qatar is demanding that his slaves in Washington get cracking and “liberate” Syria for membership in the Sunni Caliphate.

That just leaves one wild card. Not Libya, which has been swung into the Sunni Islamist camp the hard way with NATO jets and Libyan Islamic Fighting Group terrorists. Not Turkey, which has repressed the last of its secular military, and is now pushing for Sunni regime change in Syria. The regional wild card is the only non-Muslim state in the area. Israel.

The theological relationship of Sunni and Shiite Islamists to Israel is murderous. The ascendance of Mohammed and the triumph of his Caliph successors was supposed to put an end to an independent Jewish existence. The triumph of Islam was directly measured through the subjugation of Christians and Jews. As the more apocalyptic of the duo, the Shiites would like to wipe Israel out to showcase their own private little armageddon. Turning the Jewish state into dust, or at least its inhabitants, would help lock in their case to being the rightful successors of their genocidal prophet who had purged the Jews from his part of the desert.

The Sunnis tend to be more patient. They want Israel gone, but they also recognize it as a valuable pawn in their own games. Rather than being a disruptive influence on the region, like Iran, it’s a unifying force that gives Muslims a common enemy and a common aspiration. Israel is a theological enemy, but useful in practice. And whatever happens they cannot allow the Shiites to wipe it out. Like comic book supervillains, they have to be the one to kill the superhero or their existence is meaningless.

Whoever is blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists and facilities, it isn’t likely to be roving teams of Mossad agents, most likely it’s Iran’s own internal divisions being exploited by some combination of Western intelligence, Israeli intelligence and the intermediaries between the local Iranian opponents of the regime carrying out the attacks and foreign intelligence agencies who are almost certainly Iran’s own neighbors.

On May 10^th, 1994, just a few months after signing the Oslo Accords (September, 1993), Yasir Arafat addressed an assembly of Muslims in a Johannesburg mosque  where he justified his actions by explaining: “This agreement, I am not considering it more than the agreement which had been signed between our prophet Muhammad and Quraysh.”  And he concluded by calling on the worshipers “to come and to fight and to start the jihad to liberate Jerusalem.”

What did those words mean?

Muhammad signed a 10-year truce with the Arabian pagan Quraysh tribe in the city of Mecca (the Treaty of Hudaybiyah, 628 AD). At the beginning of the second year of that ten-year period he found a pretext to justify breaking the truce. He pounced on the Quraysh in a surprise attack, conquered Mecca and defeated the Quraysh, who were not prepared for more hostilities since they were honoring the 10-year accord and assumed that Muhammad was too.  Since then this agreement between Muhammad and the Quraysh has been an example for Muslims world-wide of how to trick the enemy in wartime. In other words, Arafat explained to his Muslim audience that he gave his word to President Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin, and signed the Oslo Accords, only because he planned to annul his commitments and attack Israel as soon as it was expedient for him to do so.  He lied to Clinton and Rabin; but once he was out from under the scrutiny of western media and in the comfort of a Muslim group whose support he could assume, he told the truth to his Muslim audience.  He was not aware that his speech was recorded.

Arafat’s lies to Clinton and Rabin were an excellent example of a 1,400 year old Muslim tradition of Taqiyya: tricking the enemy in wartime by offering a false peace or truce, but preparing to attack once the enemy lets down its guard.

Taqiyya (lit. ‘caution’) denotes the deceit or dissimulation used by Shiites, who may lie and even commit blasphemous acts to conceal their religion when they are under threat of persecution from majority Sunnis. It has long been used in its other manifestation, as an integral part of Muslim military strategy, employing trickery and deceit to mislead the enemy (for a detailed discussion see John Esposito’s The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, Oxford University Press, 2003).

The Qur’an in a variety of verses (2:225, 3:28, 3:54, 9:3, 16:106, 40:28, and 66:2) establishes the religious legitimacy of breaking oaths, lying, unilaterally violating treaties, and generally scheming against non-Muslims.  Allah Himself is described as “the best of schemers” (3:54, 8:30, 10:21), and Muhammad declared, as a justification for murdering unarmed prisoners after offering them safe passage, “war is deceit” (see the Hadith collection of  Bukhari, vol. 4, book 52, nos. 268-271).  So during the negotiations of Oslo I and II, Arafat’s willingness to acquiesce to Israeli demands was merely his acting as a good Muslim warrior, using taqiyya, deceit in warfare, to put his enemy at a disadvantage.

Arafat’s taqiyya began long before Oslo. For decades he told the West that he was just a scruffy little guy doing his best to keep his rough-neck boys (Fatah, the PLO, the el-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hamas, inter alia) under control so that he could make peace with Israel; even as he called in Arabic for a million martyrs to march on Jerusalem to destroy Israel and create their “Palestine…from the river to the sea”.  Similarly he told the west that he was trying to rein in Hamas and enforce the ban on terrorism to which he had agreed in the Oslo Accords.  Yet, as became apparent when Israel invaded his muqata (military compound) in Ramallah during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, and translated thousands of documents taken from his files and computers,  he in reality had partnered with Hamas, funded Hamas, armed Hamas, and aided in Hamas’ terrorism.  Far too many in the West fell for his “good cop – bad cop” act.

Hamas too uses the taqiyya ruse at will, frequently telling the West that it really wants peace, but reminding its followers in Arabic that they must continue the ‘struggle’ (the terror war against Israel) until victory or martyrdom.

Examples of taqiyya are endless.  To the west the PA explains its refusal to negotiate with Israel as a result of Israel’s settlement construction.  But the reality is revealed in the Palestine Strategy Group’s 2009 proposal for a strategy of “intelligent resistance”  (i.e., the priority of law fare, boycott campaigns and other anti-Israel propaganda over terrorism) as a means of continuing the struggle against Israel.

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through Nigeria, not a creature was stirring except for the members of the militant Islamic sect Boko Haram, preparing to bomb Christian churches across the country and setting on fire the cars of worshippers inside a church just outside of Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state.

Christmastime in the United States now brings with it a new tradition that is becoming as familiar as eggnog, mistletoe, and the Macy’s Parade: skirmishes in the ongoing cultural war on Christmas. But as the recent attacks in Nigeria prove, in Muslim lands around the world there is also a very real and very violent war on Christmas, or more specifically on Christians themselves minding their own business in peaceful celebration of the birth of Jesus.

In Iraq, for example, all Christian services and masses were scheduled for daylight hours. Why? “Midnight Christmas Mass has been canceled in Baghdad, Mosul and Kirkuk as a consequence of the never-ending assassinations of Christians,” bluntly stated Chaldean Archbishop Louis Sako of Kirkuk in northern Iraq. In Egypt, where we are witnessing the outright, state-assisted genocide of the dwindling Coptic Christian population, churches were also threatened with violence. Christian prisoners in Pakistan, incarcerated for such crimes as blasphemy against Islam, were refused Christmas Day visits from their families.

America itself has not been exempt in the past from Islamic Grinches determined to dampen Christmas spirits. Recall the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber, for example, and the failed Portland bomber who had hoped to slaughter and maim thousands of families gathered to watch the annual lighting of a community Christmas tree. Racist Islamophobes managed to prevent both those men from carrying out their jihadist obligations against Christmas celebrants. (FrontPage contributor Daniel Greenfield catalogues past Islamic Christmas assaults here).

But on this Christmas Day, Nigeria was the scene of the greatest holiday devastation. A series of coordinated bombings perpetrated by Boko Haram, which seeks to impose sharia across the country, struck three churches during services. Conflicting reports of casualties suggest that 40 or more were killed, at least 27 at a single location, and of course dozens more were wounded.

The New York Times reported that rescue workers faced not only a shortage of ambulances for the dozens wounded in the bombings, but also “an enraged crowd that initially blocked them from entering the church until soldiers arrived to restore order.” The Times didn’t specify what kind of enraged crowd would seek to block rescue workers from attempting to assist the suffering and dying Christians.

Setting off deadly holiday fireworks is becoming an annual tradition for Boko Haram, a sort of African Taliban, who carried out another series of lethal Christmas Eve bombings last year. It is often noted that the group’s name translates to “Western education is sacrilege,” but in fact its more official name in Arabic means “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.” As part of that solemn commitment, Boko Haram has propagated at least 465 killings in Nigeria this year alone while spreading the Religion of Peace. Misunderstanders of Islam, as scholar of Islam Robert Spencer, tongue in cheek, might call them.

The multiculturalist Left wants to dilute Christmas into a vacuous, stern celebration of Winter, divorced from culture and religion.  Not content with banning crèches, trees and carols, anti-Christmas zealots are often even threatened by Santa Claus.  The transcendent authority behind Christmas, even in its commercialized form, is an unwanted challenge to the Left’s preference for all authority vested in the state and its secular clerisy.

Fox News has delighted in lampooning the ongoing absurdities of the “War on Christmas,” which sometimes even include banning green and red from classrooms.  The American Family Association, a para-church group, has also challenged the anti-Christmas campaign by affirming companies that affirm Christmas.

Naturally the Religious Left is troubled by this defense of Christmas, especially by Fox News or conservative Christians, both of whom it despises.  So the Religious Left has decided that the cultural defenders of Christmas are instead betraying Christmas by actually promoting commercialism.

“The Fox News Christmas proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to every conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and the gospel of American dominance,” insists Evangelical Left activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners at his most rhetorically lugubrious.

A colleague of Wallis at Sojourners has even labeled Fox News the “Headquarters of the Lord’s Resistance Army against the War on Christmas.”

Although this colleague noted that anti-Christmas crusaders were even warring against the display of Poinsettias,  Wallis is still blind with rage against his least favorite cable network:  “The Fox News Christmas heralds the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power, the adulation of money and markets, and the regular belittling or attacking of efforts to overcome poverty.”

Wow, who knew that Christmas, as supposedly defined by Fox News, is so cosmically evil?

Wallis claims that Fox is leveraging its “War on Christmas” campaign to discredit “atheists, agnostics, liberals, leftists, progressives, and separation of church and state zealots — i.e. Democrats.”  The long-time activist for leftist causes, and recipient of George Soros philanthropy, has his own politicized definition of Christmas.  Jesus was born in an “occupied country” under an “imperial power,” adding “political context” to the Christmas season.  “In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets,” Wallis announces.  “That Jesus was born poor…radically defines the social context…and clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.” Wallis rejoices that Jesus will “end our warring ways.”

Below is Colonel Allen West’s speech at the Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club on October 21, 2011. He is first introduced by David Horowitz. To see the video of the introduction and speech, click here.

David Horowitz: Colonel Allen West, one of the bravest and wisest members of Congress, and already — even though he’s only a freshman still — a leading voice in the Republican Party.

Colonel West is also the number-one congressman the Democratic National Committee has targeted for defeat.  In the coming national election, which promises to be the ugliest in our lifetime, he will be a prime focus of the Democrats’ incoming fire.

Have you noticed that the Republicans most viciously targeted by the Democrats are women and blacks?  There’s a reason for that.  Democrats will tell you that it is because they care about women and blacks.  But that just tells you what you already know — that Democrats are hypocrites and liars.

Democrats control the school systems of every major inner city in America, from Harlem to Detroit to South Central Los Angeles.  They control them 100 percent and have for more than 50 years.  There is no greater oppressor of poor black and Hispanic Americans than those responsible for these failing schools.  Democrats run them as a jobs program for adults and a cash cow for their leftwing union base.  Every year, the lives of millions of poor black and Hispanic children are destroyed by the Democrats who run these schools and fail to teach in their classrooms.  But Republicans are too polite to mention it.

Democrats view politics as war conducted by other means, a fact that Allen West is the only Republican I have known to recognize.  Democrats view women and blacks as cannon fodder in their war.  They are not ends in themselves, but a means to power.

If Democrats lost just 10 or 20 percent of the black vote nationally, they would lose virtually every state in the Union.  That’s why they hate and fear Colonel West.  They hate him because he is black, and they fear him because he will not fold under fire.

Democrats have stamped everyone in this country with a racial or gender tag, doled out privileges on the basis of the tags, and deployed the so-called race card as a weapon of choice.  “Race card” is a euphemism for the reflexive racism that is the Democrats’ first and last resort.

Republicans respond by pretending not to notice race.  Or gender, for that matter.  The Republican Party of California does not have a single female elected official.  How politically obtuse is that?  Why are there so few black elected officials in the Republican Party?  Because Republicans think that they are above noticing race or gender and make no sustained effort to recruit blacks or women.  That would be acting like Democrats.

Well, politically speaking, if you want to understand the art of political combat, study the Democrats.  They are very good at it.  Democratic attacks are always directed at rich, white Americans and their Republican defenders, and are always conducted on behalf of poor Americans and minorities, particularly black Americans, the victims.

Here’s why Democrats are terrified of an articulate black Republican like Colonel West, who will not be intimidated by their racist tactics.  He will blow their cover and destroy their game.

I loved it when Colonel West joined the Congressional Black Caucus, uninvited.

In effect, he said — you’ve got a race club, and I’m the correct race, so here I am.

Until that moment, the Congressional Black Caucus was a group of extremist left-wingers, which said to Americans the Left cares about black people, and the Democrats represent black people, and Republicans don’t.  In one gesture, Colonel West blew the lid off this charade and said — well, no.  Actually, black people can make up their own minds, just like everyone else.  And this black man understands that Democrats are bad news for African Americans, as they are for all Americans.

In an event last night, Colonel West pointed out that the head of the Congressional Black Caucus recently said that if Obama, a black Democrat, wasn’t in the White House, they would be marching on Washington.  Why?  Because while the nation is suffering from a disgraceful 9 percent unemployment rate, as Colonel West pointed out, 17 percent of black Americans are out of work — 20 percent of black males and 45 percent of black teenagers.  Obama and the Democrats have pursued policies that have devastated the black community.  But most Republicans are too proper, too above-it-all, to mention that black America has suffered more from Democratic policies than any other group; that Democrats’ policies have racial consequences.

Republicans are very good at talking about the current economic crisis in terms of numbers and ratios and deficits.  But they are very poor at talking about it in terms of the people that Democratic policies hurt.  They know that the subprime mortgage crisis was created by Bill Clinton and Barney Frank, and Obama’s ACORN criminals.  That’s a good beginning.

But what about the victims?  Who are the number-one victims of the Democratic housing tsunami?  They are poor, largely black and Hispanic Americans who were snookered into buying homes they couldn’t afford, and then lost them.  How traumatic is that?

But even worse is the devastation visited on the black middle class.  If you are rising on the economic ladder in America, your chief investment is your home.  That’s where your money is.  And because of the mortgage crisis created by Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and Obama’s ACORN, home values have dropped 30 percent.  In this crisis, middle-class African Americans have lost $100 billion.  Democrats don’t want any Republicans, and especially articulate black Republicans, telling black America that.

I’ve introduced many speakers on this platform, and many elected officials, but none who’ve inspired me or given me such confidence in the American future as Allen West.  Colonel West was born into a military family in Atlanta, Georgia, the home of Martin Luther King.  Four generations of the West family have served in the United States military, defending our country.

Colonel West joined the army after graduating from the University of Tennessee, and also has a master’s degree in political science from Kansas State.  In the army, he was a member and training officer in the 325th Airborne Battalion Combat Team, and then assigned to the First Infantry Division, where he was a commanding officer in the 6th Field Artillery Regiment.

During this service, he was promoted to captain and was then deployed to Iraq during the Gulf War, where he participated in Desert Shield and Desert Storm.  He returned to the United States to participate in the Reserve Officers Training Program and was named ROTC Instructor of the Year in 1993.  He was then assigned to the 2nd Infantry Division and promoted to major.  He was then made the executive officer of the 377th Field Artillery Regiment.  In 2002, he was promoted to colonel and made a battalion commander in the 4th Infantry Division.  He was then deployed to Iraq for the final battle against Saddam Hussein and his monster regime.

While in Iraq, Colonel West was nearly court-martialed for attempting to pry information out of an Iraqi police officer who was suspected by an intelligence specialist of participating in a plot to ambush Colonel West and his men.  Colonel West’s crime was using rough methods to get information which might save the lives of his men.  This included the charge that he fired his weapon next to the man’s head and threatened to kill him, a method which immediately produced the information.

Colonel West was eventually fined $5,000 by his own government for the incident and retired after 22 years of service.  At his hearing, Colonel West was asked if he would act differently if the same circumstances came up again.  He said — if it’s the lives of my soldiers at stake, I would go through hell with a gasoline can.

The most important characteristic of a political leader is his moral fiber.  If our leaders can’t stand up under fire, if they won’t protect us and our country, we are lost.

Allen West was nearly court-martialed during a Republican administration, which was already folding under the attacks from the Left.  After voting for the war, the Democratic Party turned against it and conducted a five-year scorched-earth campaign against our men and women in arms.  They portrayed their own country as an aggressor without principle and their Commander-in-Chief as evil — a man who launched a war for no reason and lied to get hundreds of thousands of men and women killed.  The Democrats accused their country of wantonly murdering Iraqi civilians and of deceiving the American people to lure them into a war against an adversary who was no threat.  And no Republican fought back.

The Commander-in-Chief remained silent and never defended himself.  The Democratic saboteurs who conducted a psychological warfare campaign against their own military and their own country, who called their commander a traitor and their military personnel torturers and killers, got away with it, with no consequences.

With leaders on the one side who will attack our country and on the other who will not defend it, we are lost.  We have a long way to go and a lot to make up to get back to an America that we can be proud of, to an America that is proud of itself.  If there are men and women who can lead us back and restore our nation, Colonel Allen West is certainly one of them and is a model to others and to all of us.

Colonel West.

Allen West: Thank you.  Thank you so much.

You know, it is really an honor to be here.  And, you know, having gone to the University of Tennessee, and now being in Beverly Hills, I kind of understand how Jed Clampett felt when he finally got to move to Beverly Hills.

This is special.  Because four years ago this time, I was packing up my gear, getting ready to end a two-and-a-half-year assignment in Afghanistan down at Qandahar.  Here today, I’m standing before you all, here in Beverly Hills.  And I just want to tell you — that is a testimony to the greatness and exceptionalism of the United States of America.  Because parents who were born in 1920 and 1931 in South Georgia probably never thought that their young son, who was born in 1961 in that inner city, would ever have the opportunity to be here at the Four Seasons Hotel, speaking to such a distinguished group of Americans here in the city, which everyone recognizes as the capital of the entertainment industry of the world.  So, that’s what we must never forget, is the greatness of this nation.

But today, we’re here to talk about — how do we secure the greatness of this nation?  And I want to thank Mike so much for bringing me here to the Horowitz Freedom Center, to have this opportunity to speak to you all.  And I just want to understand one simple thing — the moxie that it takes to make an ideological pivot, which is what Mr. David Horowitz did.  To sit now and be such a strong champion of conservative values, to publicly denounce the things that you once stood passionately for — that’s not easy.  Because now he has taken on that great liberal establishment in places where its foothold is the strongest.

But I know one simple thing about Mr. David Horowitz — that he is committed to ensuring that our young people — the future of this United States of America, these great states, this great Constitutional republic — enjoy the freedom, and decide for themselves what they can believe in.  And he recognizes how crucially important it is that our schools and universities be places that are wholly and deeply welcoming for all perspectives, and not just those of the Left, the center Left and far Left.

So David, from the bottom of my heart, thank you for what you’re doing.

Before I get started, I want to give everyone a framework about our discussion today about national security.  Cuts to military [in strength] — today, the United States Army has 569,400 soldiers.  With the force budgets that we put in place, about $478 billion over the next 10 years, that will take the military, the army, down to 481,000.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, it will take the United States Army down to 426,000.  The United States Marine Corps today sits at 202,000 Marines.  Under the current force structure and budget cuts, they will go down to 173,000.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, they will go down to 145,000.

In 1990, the Army had 172 combat maneuver battalions.  Today, we have 100.  Under the current funding, we will go to 78.  If the Super Committee does not do their job, we go down to 60 to 70.

Naval warships — in 1990, 546.  Today, we have 285.  We’re going to go down to 263.  And if the Super Committee fails to do their job, we will go down to 238.

United States Air Force fighters — 4,355 in 1990.  Today, we have 1,990.  We could go down to 1,512.  Strategic bombers — in 1990, we had 282.  If the Super Committee fails to do their job, we will go down to 101.  Strategic and tactical airlift — in 1990, we had 872; with the current funding, 572.  And if the Super Committee fails to do its job, we will go down to 494.

Those numbers are what is happening in the United States of America when we talk about our national security.  And for those of you that don’t know, I do sit on the House Armed Services Committee.  I sit on two subcommittees — the Military Personnel and Emerging Threats and Capabilities, which does have the oversight of our Special Operations forces.

So with that being said, came here to talk to you about what I think is still the most important issue for the United States of America.  And that’s our national security.  How do we stand strong in the face of internal and external threats that seek to tear us down?  There are those who are uncomfortable talking about the threat of radical Islamic terrorism.  But I think it’s critical that we have that conversation.

You see, our enemies believe that the things which make us great — they think it actually makes us weak.  They see us as tolerant, pluralistic and inclusive.  And they believe that those values will be our undoing.  If we avoid mentioning the dangers we face for fear we’ll offend someone, then we let our oppressors win.  Because when tolerance becomes a one-way street, it will lead to cultural suicide.  And if we continue to show them that they’re right — and that we are weak and unable to defend ourselves — then we are not holding true to our American way.

We must not fall prey to the need of being PC, politically correct, to those who are morally devoid.  Instead, we must demonstrate that we can still be strong when it comes to protecting those principles and values for which we stand — that we are doubly capable of rooting out evil and bringing it to justice.  Our values animate us and give us the legitimacy that allows us to exist in this republic — and that far from bringing about the downfall of this great experiment in democracy that we call America, those are the reasons why we thrive.

We must be ever-vigilant, for there will always be those who are seeking to bring about our destruction.  And for us to believe otherwise would be foolish, and totally unbefitting of what we tend to be, which is a superpower.

But vigilance requires realism on our parts — not blowing the threat of terrorism out of proportion, but accepting it for what it is — a very real danger to our cherished way of life.  There should be no question whatsoever on the lips of the world about America’s commitment to eradicating evil.  And it must be absolute.

And the first step in combating evil is being honest with ourselves about the scale of that which we are facing and who’s behind it.  We have to now understand that it is an Islamic totalitarianism, a great black cloud that stains our age, and it’s up to us to rise to the occasion of defeating it.  We must come to the grips with a theocratic political ideology that is fundamentally the antithesis to our American principles, way of life, and our values.

In our Declaration of Independence, it says — we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights — among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  And if we fail to protect the first of these rights, we fail to protect them all.  Because without your life, there is no other safeguard that will matter.  And that is why national security is, and must remain, America’s number-one priority.

And we have to do a better job in supporting our men and women on this present 21st century battlefield.  That means not just with bumper stickers, but with proper funding and supplies, with assistance for their families, with high-quality healthcare when they’re injured, and with good-paying jobs for them when they come home, when their tours of duty are complete.  Because an 11.7 percent unemployment rate for our veterans is unacceptable.  It is reprehensible, and we should not allow that to happen.

It is easy in the aftermath of conflict periods to become complacent, to lose sight of the reason for investing in our troops.  And we have seen this play out in our history.  We have seen it after the World Wars.  We saw it after the Cold War.  And we’re again seeing it today.  We spend and spend as the wars rage on, and then watch as our military atrophies for the lack of funding as soon as they’re over.  We cannot continue with the practice that I call the peaks and valleys of military readiness, where we try to ramp up for an operation and then, as soon as we believe that that operation’s complete, we look to the military to be the bill-payers for the fiscal irresponsibility of this nation.  And we put their readiness and their preparedness at stake.  That type of thinking cannot be any more misguided.

The bottom line is this — if you wait until your forces are called upon to fight before you think about their needs, then the war is already over.  You’ve already lost it.  Our servicemen and -women are the very embodiment of everything that’s right about America.  And after 22 years of serving beside them, after having a father who served in World War II, an older brother who served in Vietnam, and a nephew who is serving now, I think I know a little bit about the steel and the spines of the American fighting man and woman.

The young people who comprise the armed forces of the United States are, without a doubt, today the strongest and most competent soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines and coastguardsmen the world has ever known.  They serve willingly and with valor.  And they are imminently deserving of our gratitude and our support.  As long as we are faithful to the cause and to those who fight it, as long as we recognize what we are up against and resolve that we will not be defeated, there’s no doubt in my mind — and should not be any doubt in any of your minds — that we will come out on top.  Because there’s a resiliency in the American fighting spirit that cannot be broken, even in the face of the impossible.

We are a nation that was forged in the heat of a revolution, that has truly been through hell and back, that has been through civil wars, world wars, regional combat conflicts.  But the flame of our fighting spirit continues to burn as bright as ever.  Even through the darkest days and the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil, we somehow rose to that challenge.  And that is why I have great faith in our ability to weather any storm.  Because that is, after all, the American way.

But for some, that means just weapons and ammunition.  But what I have to tell you today — it means strategic foresight.  American troops, when you study our history, have never lost at the tactical level on the ground.  But if we do not have leaders that can provide for them well thought-out objectives, they can win every single battle, but we will still lose the war in the end.  For those who served in Vietnam, they can tell you that is exactly what happened.

So let me ask you a question — when was the last time you heard anyone, any leader, over the past 10 years or so, say — these are our strategic objectives as we prosecute this war?  War on terror is a horrible misnomer.  Terror is a tactic.  A nation cannot fight a tactic.  But yet, we are [ruttle a ship].  Because when you read the most recent national security strategy coming out of the Obama Administration, it talks more about global warming, and it never mentions radical Islamism, jihadism or violent Muslim extremism.  It wants our soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines to fight the weather.

See, the problem is you haven’t heard that.  You haven’t heard anyone talk about this new 21st century battlefield, which is so different from the battlefield that I participated on in 1991 as a young captain in Desert Shield-Desert Storm.  We have to recognize the emergence of the non-state, non-uniform belligerent that does not respect borders and boundaries.  We have to understand that we must move away from a Cold War-era forward-deployed military, and get back toward a power projection military that can go into all of these geographic areas of responsibility and deny the enemy sanctuary, to cut off his flow of men, material, resources and supplies.  It means that we have to go back to those numbers that I gave you first and foremost.

And we’ve got to do something that we have not done since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  We’ve got to go geographic area of responsibility by geographic area of responsibility, and look  at the requirements that are necessary based upon an analysis of the enemy and an intelligence assessment that sets our capability and our capacity for the next 20 to 30 years.

But I can tell you, that’s not what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  When you read things like Francis Fukuyama, who wrote that this is the end of the world as we know it in all type of ideological conflict — he had it absolutely wrong.  If you had instead read Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” — Huntington had it right.  But yet, once again, we saw the military as the bill-payer of such things such as midnight basketball.

We have to get away from nation-building and occupation-style warfare, and understand that it’s the strategic mobility and maneuverability that is the strength of these great United States of America and our military, so that we can then be in those places where the enemy is not suspecting us to be, and we can strike him quickly, and we can pull back.  On this modern-day battlefield, we don’t have any need to think that it’s our responsibility to rebuild.  Because that’s not what this enemy understands nor respects.  They understand strength, they understand you going in, they understand you kicking his tail and then being ready to kick his tail again.  That is what strategic-level thinkers need to be considering.

We need to look at our rules of engagement.  When we have rules of engagement that say we cannot engage the enemy until he shows you some hostile intent — well, having been in a few firefights, in two to three seconds, someone starts to lose their life.  And if you’re telling our fighting men and women that they have to wait those two to three seconds, that they have to wait for this enemy to show that he is a bad guy, that he has hostile intent, then we do not have the initiative on this battlefield.  We have to have the rules of engagement that allow our men and women to be able to be successful on the battlefield, and be on the offense.  Because you don’t win on the defense.

It means that we must starting sitting back and looking at all of these different countries.  We must look at Iran and understand that we’ve been at war with Iran since they took our hostages, that Iran is the one that is the number-one state sponsor of terrorism.  They are the center of this Islamic totalitarianism.  And the fact that now we have had a President that says we’re going to zero out our combat force in Iraq — I can tell you that Muqtada al-Sadr, the Mahdi Army, are just waiting for 1 January.  And it will be a bloodbath.

We have to understand that now the Kurds in Northern Iraq will once again look and say — we’ve been abandoned for the second time, just the same as we did after Desert Shield-Desert Storm.  That affects your credibility as a strategic superpower.

We need to look at Afghanistan and Pakistan, and understand that you will never have a secure Afghanistan until you contend with the enemy that has sanctuaries over in Pakistan.  The Hikani network is now far more powerful than al-Qaeda is.  And we know where their sanctuaries are.  If they don’t respect the borders and boundaries, then we must not, either.  And the ISI are not on our side.  But yet, we continue to spend and send $3 billion of aid over to a Pakistan which really is deteriorating into a radical Islamist state.

We have to look at China and understand that we are already in an economic war with China.  When you have a China that owns 27 percent of your national debt, that affects your foreign policy, that affects your national security.  And the trade and balance that China now has is not going towards building up a better infrastructure, the standard of living for the Chinese citizen.  Just recently, their first aircraft carrier rolled out.  Their strategic air force is being built.  And a lot of that technology they’re starting to get from us, even.

We have to understand that China poses an economic threat to us which will eventually become a military threat.  Because, don’t forget — when was the last time a major Asian nation invested in its naval force?  I think we all remember what happened then.

We must understand that Russia is still more so Soviet Union than it is a modern Russia.  And if you are to be fooled, Vladimir Putin is still KGB.

We must understand that you have a Stalinist regime in North Korea.  But once again, they are able to act out and continue to have international extortion because they believe that China has their back.  And as long as China owns 27 percent of our debt, they will continue to act out.  We must understand that Taiwan is very nervous about the military growth and development of China.

We must understand in Egypt that since Hosni Mubarak has been deposed, nothing has gone right in Egypt.  Ask the Coptic Christians.  Ask Israel what is happening.  The number-one strongest political entity in Egypt is the Muslim Brotherhood.  A lot of people are cheering today about Muammar Khadafi losing his life.  But what happens next?  Someone tell me, where are the chemical weapons, the biological weapons, the 30,000 shoulder-fired [man pas] that are missing from that country?  My concern is that somehow they will make it through Egypt, and the next thing you know, they’ll be over in Gaza Strip.

We must look at Syria and understand that that is still a satellite of Iran.  And they do not want to see that fall.  Because so goes Syria, then so may affect that link to Hezbollah.

We have to look at what is happening south of our border, in Mexico.  Illegal immigration is a national security issue.  Because there are certain elements that are coming across our border that are not favorable to us.  And we know that Iran was working with drug cartels to execute this assassination in Washington, D.C.  And the drug cartels are getting stronger and stronger.

We must be concerned about Venezuela, and the influence that they are having in South America, as well as the alliances that they are developing with Iran.  We must be concerned about Turkey.  Prime Minister Erdogan is taking that country down the road of being a radical Islamist.  And the deteriorating relations that we see between Turkey and Israel should cause us a lot of concern.

We must be worried about Yemen and Somalia.  Because we are playing whack-a-mole with this enemy, who will always try to establish himself anywhere that he can find a volatile, unstable situation.

We must understand that a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.  And freedom is under attack every day on faraway streets.  We have to be fearless in our support of our closest ally in the Middle East, which is the modern-day state of Israel.  Because anything less –

Anything less will weaken Israel, and there are threats from all sides.  Israel and America are united by a common enemy — this Islamic totalitarianism and terrorism.  And our shared commitment of liberty and freedom, and freedom of worship and democracy, are what brings us together.  But I am concerned, when you look at Gaza Strip and you see what happens with Hamas and Hezbollah.  Because the UN Mandate 1701 is not being strictly enforced.  So now you have 50,000 rockets and missiles that are stationed in Southern Israel, all pointed south toward Israel — Southern Lebanon, I’m sorry — pointed toward Israel.

And I must admit there’s an incredible precedent that has been established, when you trade one soldier for 1,037 terrorists.  If the recidivism rate is 10 percent, think about what that brings about.  We have now told a terrorist organization that a modern-day nation state is willing to go into negotiations.  That is not a good thing.  What happens if they get two soldiers next time?

Who is Davidi Gilo? That’s the question the San Jose Mercury News asked ten years ago. The question wasn’t an unreasonable one. Davidi Gilo had seemingly appeared out of nowhere to flutter to the top of the contributors list for the Democratic Party. At 1.2 million dollars, not only was he the single biggest Silicon Valley donor, but he was also the third largest donor to the Democratic Party in the country.

There was no reason for Gilo to be throwing that much money around. That same year Forbes had placed him at the very bottom of its list of tech industry high rollers. But though Gilo was 99th on the Forbes list, he managed to be at the top of the liberal donors list, tossing something like 1 percent of his net worth to the party.

Davidi Gilo was a member of Soros’ Democracy Alliance, which was set up to direct large amounts of money into the causes of the Left. A number of other board members of the Democracy Alliance also ended up closely involved in J Street, including Patricia Bauman, Gail Furman, Deborah Sagner, as well as Herb and Marion Sandler.

Glance today at the J Street bio page and you’ll see that Gilo’s name is one of the rare few that doesn’t come with any supplementary information. No titles or background. No “Former President of X” or “Board Member of Y” or anything at all despite the fact that Davidi Gilo is not just another name at J Street. He’s the chairman of the board of J Street.

Besides being the chairman of the board of J Street; he’s also a major donor. And before J Street, he was on the executive committee of the Israel Policy Forum. The IPF was a J Street predecessor with enough overlap that J Street could be considered a rebranding of it.

J Street is the front group for the agenda of powerful liberal billionaires, one of many groups that serve this purpose. Like the old Communist Party front groups, different groups are targeted at different demographics. J Street was created to provide a left-wing Jewish lobby that would demand concessions from Israel on behalf of the terrorists.

But the Gilo story goes back long before all that. The son of an Israeli government bureaucrat at a time when the bureaucracy was a network of left-wing associates, Gilo cut his teeth on left-wing activism in student union leadership and then in protests against the Lebanon War.

For Israeli leftists, the Lebanon War was the equivalent of the Vietnam War, allowing them to build a strong anti-national movement. As a Peace Now member, Gilo participated in an organization whose co-founders had a vision of bringing down Israel and gunning down those who didn’t comply. Or as Peace Now co-founder Yigal Tumarkin put it: “My true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil and killed them.”

Still Peace Now wasn’t radical enough for Gilo. One of his comrades said that they viewed the organization as too anemic and together tried to see how they could become even more militant.

Moving through the United States and Europe, Gilo made his fortune selling tech companies to multinationals with deep pockets. But when the multinationals didn’t show up to make an offer, then problems arose.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed that Hezbollah possessed chemical and biological weapons. The news comes as the IDF contends the terror organization has now amassed more than 50,000 missiles and rockets, heightening Israel’s concerns over its vulnerability to a Hezbollah assault.

The assertion by Gates followed reports in April 2011 that Libyan rebels had ransacked chemical weapons storage depots in and around the Libyan city of Benghazi. There they obtained at least 2,000 artillery shells carrying mustard gas and 1,200 nerve gas shells, which they sold to both Hezbollah and Hamas.

Not surprisingly, Iran was believed to be the broker of the deal. Of course, Iran has long been accused of supplying Hezbollah with chemical weapons, the last time in 2009 when chemical traces were discovered in a Hezbollah weapons warehouse.

Although Hezbollah denies having chemically-armed missiles or rockets, it doesn’t deny their importance to the terror organization. According to Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah, “These are our pride and dignity… no one will be able to grab them, neither in Lebanon nor in the world.”

Unfortunately for Israelis, Hezbollah’s precious stockpile has now surpassed over 50,000 missiles and rockets according to the IDF. The IDF has also determined the number of pre-designated targets of Hezbollah launch sites to have grown from around 200 in 2006 to now somewhere in the thousands.

In fact, in April 2011 Israeli officials had already identified 550 underground bunkers, 300 surveillance sites and 100 other facilities south of the Litani River in southern Lebanon, the zone where Hezbollah is supposedly banned from keeping weapons under the UN-sponsored truce that ended the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war.

The entire situation has added to growing Israeli concern over its increasing vulnerability from Hezbollah’s already enormous and growing stockpile of weaponry, which according to former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens can now “reach every corner of Israel and threaten its entire civilian population.”

Even though Israel has a newly deployed Iron Dome anti-missile system, that system remains vulnerable to massive salvos fired from Hezbollah’s short-range missile systems. For example, during the 34-day war in 2006, Hezbollah unleashed nearly 4,000 missiles and rockets — around 120 a day — into northern Israel.

However, 2009 Wikileaks documents reveal Israel expects a new war with Hezbollah to last two months, with 500 missiles a day, including 100 that would reach Tel Aviv.  More worrisome is that Israel’s Home Front Command admitted in April 2011 that only 31 percent of Israel’s 7 million people had been supplied gas masks.

Added into this troubling equation are reports surfacing of Hezbollah busily moving weapons from the chaos in Syria and distributing them immediately to its forces so they don’t fall into the wrong hands.

The death of Osama bin Laden has driven a stake into the heart of the Left, causing progressives to bleed and moan as their unholy alliance with radical Islam absorbs the devastating May 2 blow.

The radical Islamic half of the romance is in agony as it sheds bitter tears for the mass murderer. Indeed, Hamas, Hezbollah, the armed wing of Fatah, and tens of thousands of radical Muslims around the world have prominently displayed their sorrow and anger for the world to see.

The alliance’s leftist half is, meanwhile, also deeply grieving. The guru of the leftist political faith, Noam Chomsky, is responsibly leading the way. Having distinguished himself, among other intriguing ways, as a Jew who has traveled to Lebanon to embrace personally the leaders of Hezbollah, whose stated top priority is to rid the world of Jews, the M.I.T. professor emeritus has not disappointed the faithful, progressive flock. Furiously responding to the assassination of the Left’s idol, Chomsky fumed in his recent article: “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

The al-Qaeda leader’s killing is an outrage, in Chomsky’s mind, because Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” Chomsky is outraged not only that the operation was clearly “a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,” but also that its victim had never been legally proven to be the perpetrator of 9/11. Undoubtedly, Chomsky’s Gulag Denial mindset continues unabated, for having shamelessly attempted to deny the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust in Cambodia was clearly not enough to satiate Chomsky’s totalitarian odyssey.

Following in the leftist guru’s tracks, Glenn Greenwald fumed over at Salon.com that Americans were cheering and feeling patriotic that “someone just got two bullets put in their skull.” This is terrible in leftist eyes because that “someone” is not George W. Bush but rather America’s most wanted enemy-terrorist. Greenwald is also very upset that a question lingers over whether bin Laden really had to be killed and not taken prisoner instead.

Heaven forbid! A targeted assassination of the leader of al-Qaeda, a jihadist terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent American citizens. Oh, the unjustness of it all! One wonders whether Greenwald will be able to soldier on.

Meanwhile, Curtis Doebbler, a leftist “human rights” lawyer who teaches at a Palestinian university, grieves that the “West is now celebrating the death of someone who, however misled and wrong-minded, was a person who was willing to fight for the poorest and the most vulnerable people in the world to the very end of his life.” He continues: “That the US had to kill him in violation of international law makes all the more believable Osama Bin Laden’s claims of Western hypocrisy and the need for a better alternative.”

The “alternative” that Doebbler is dreaming of and that Osama had in mind? Well, it’s not that complicated: it’s what Islamists are offering leftists – and that which leftists are salivating over – in their unholy alliance: Sharia law.

Let’s also not be too confused over why “progressive” feminist Naomi Klein called out for bringing “Najaf to New York” in her infamous 2004 column in The Nation, in which she reached her hand out in solidarity to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Islamo-fascist Mahdi Army in the Iraqi Shi’ite stronghold of Najaf. Klein understands very well what bringing Najaf to New York means: the Shi’ite stronghold, where Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army at one time ran their torture chambers and sowed their terror, replicated on America’s shores.

The list of leftists weeping over the death of Osama is endless: Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun complaining that killing Osama is “not justice”; Laura Flanders at The Nation condemning the raid as “Americans seeking sense and getting vengeance”; former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt denouncing Osama’s death as “clearly a violation of international law”; and the terrorist-loving Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin unable to disguise her agony over at the Huffington Post, counseling us not to sink “into a false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Bin Laden’s passing.”

It is no surprise that members of the political faith are mourning over the death of Osama. The context for their grief is perfectly explained, as I have documented in United in Hate, by how much they celebrated 9/11. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to regain the picture. It is important to understand the Left’s sadness right now by briefly recreating the chilling scene of a decade ago.

September 11, 2001, clearly represented a personal vindication for leftists everywhere. The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked glee from them – as they clearly saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with American citizens. For leftist believers, the jihadist terror war now promised to succeed where Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself.

In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.

Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, Chomsky exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.

Leftist academics across the country echoed Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions. History professor Robin Kelley of New York University stated: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.” History professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina asserted that “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.” Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, the renowned Marxist historian, expressed his personal confusion about “which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University, felt 9/11 was a justified response to the “fascism” of U.S. foreign policy. Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, thought the WTC buildings were justifiable targets because they were a “symbol of today’s wealth and trade.” Robert Paul Churchill, a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, rationalized that the terrorist attack was justified. “What the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the poor and its starving; the expression of a soulless pop culture . . . and a domineering attitude that insists on having our own way no matter what the cost to others.”

Of course, the infamous Ward Churchill, as we know, outdid all the others, blaming not only Bush and America but the “little Eichmanns” themselves for the attacks.

Churchill, Chomsky, and their kin on the academic Left were joined by prominent figures in the progressive culture at large. Norman Mailer stepped forward to opine that the suicide hijackers were “brilliant.” In his view, the attack was completely understandable, since “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Oliver Stone affirmed that he saw 9/11 as a “revolt” and compared the ensuing Palestinian celebrations with those that had attended the French and Russian Revolutions, while Susan Sontag held that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” From the religious camp, Tony Campolo, a leading Christian evangelist who served as one of former President Clinton’s “spiritual advisers,” believed that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the Crusades.

The American flag, a hated symbol to the Left, also became a target. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver was incredulous that her daughter’s kindergarten teacher instructed the students to come to school the next day dressed in red, white, and blue. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt had the same reaction regarding her teenage daughter’s impulse to fly an American flag outside the family home. Pollitt told her that she could “buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This was, Pollitt explained, because the American flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war.”

The death of Osama bin Laden has driven a stake into the heart of the Left, causing progressives to bleed and moan as their unholy alliance with radical Islam absorbs the devastating May 2 blow.

The radical Islamic half of the romance is in agony as it sheds bitter tears for the mass murderer. Indeed, Hamas, Hezbollah, the armed wing of Fatah, and tens of thousands of radical Muslims around the world have prominently displayed their sorrow and anger for the world to see.

The alliance’s leftist half is, meanwhile, also deeply grieving. The guru of the leftist political faith, Noam Chomsky, is responsibly leading the way. Having distinguished himself, among other intriguing ways, as a Jew who has traveled to Lebanon to embrace personally the leaders of Hezbollah, whose stated top priority is to rid the world of Jews, the M.I.T. professor emeritus has not disappointed the faithful, progressive flock. Furiously responding to the assassination of the Left’s idol, Chomsky fumed in his recent article: “We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.”

The al-Qaeda leader’s killing is an outrage, in Chomsky’s mind, because Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” Chomsky is outraged not only that the operation was clearly “a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law,” but also that its victim had never been legally proven to be the perpetrator of 9/11. Undoubtedly, Chomsky’s Gulag Denial mindset continues unabated, for having shamelessly attempted to deny the Khmer Rouge’s Holocaust in Cambodia was clearly not enough to satiate Chomsky’s totalitarian odyssey.

Following in the leftist guru’s tracks, Glenn Greenwald fumed over at Salon.com that Americans were cheering and feeling patriotic that “someone just got two bullets put in their skull.” This is terrible in leftist eyes because that “someone” is not George W. Bush but rather America’s most wanted enemy-terrorist. Greenwald is also very upset that a question lingers over whether bin Laden really had to be killed and not taken prisoner instead.

Heaven forbid! A targeted assassination of the leader of al-Qaeda, a jihadist terrorist organization that has killed thousands of innocent American citizens. Oh, the unjustness of it all! One wonders whether Greenwald will be able to soldier on.

Meanwhile, Curtis Doebbler, a leftist “human rights” lawyer who teaches at a Palestinian university, grieves that the “West is now celebrating the death of someone who, however misled and wrong-minded, was a person who was willing to fight for the poorest and the most vulnerable people in the world to the very end of his life.” He continues: “That the US had to kill him in violation of international law makes all the more believable Osama Bin Laden’s claims of Western hypocrisy and the need for a better alternative.”

The “alternative” that Doebbler is dreaming of and that Osama had in mind? Well, it’s not that complicated: it’s what Islamists are offering leftists – and that which leftists are salivating over – in their unholy alliance: Sharia law.

Let’s also not be too confused over why “progressive” feminist Naomi Klein called out for bringing “Najaf to New York” in her infamous 2004 column in The Nation, in which she reached her hand out in solidarity to Muqtada al-Sadr and his Islamo-fascist Mahdi Army in the Iraqi Shi’ite stronghold of Najaf. Klein understands very well what bringing Najaf to New York means: the Shi’ite stronghold, where Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army at one time ran their torture chambers and sowed their terror, replicated on America’s shores.

The list of leftists weeping over the death of Osama is endless: Dan Rodricks at the Baltimore Sun complaining that killing Osama is “not justice”; Laura Flanders at The Nation condemning the raid as “Americans seeking sense and getting vengeance”; former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt denouncing Osama’s death as “clearly a violation of international law”; and the terrorist-loving Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin unable to disguise her agony over at the Huffington Post, counseling us not to sink “into a false sense of triumphalism in the wake of Bin Laden’s passing.”

It is no surprise that members of the political faith are mourning over the death of Osama. The context for their grief is perfectly explained, as I have documented in United in Hate, by how much they celebrated 9/11. Let’s take a trip down memory lane to regain the picture. It is important to understand the Left’s sadness right now by briefly recreating the chilling scene of a decade ago.

September 11, 2001, clearly represented a personal vindication for leftists everywhere. The images of the innocent people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers evoked glee from them – as they clearly saw only poetic justice in American commercial airplanes plunging into American buildings packed with American citizens. For leftist believers, the jihadist terror war now promised to succeed where Communism had failed: to obliterate the capitalist system itself.

In the blink of an eye after the Twin Towers went down, leftists were beating their breasts with repentance for their own government’s supposed crimes and characterizing the tragedy that their nation had just suffered to be some form of karmic justice.

Immediately following the 9/11 attack, leftist academics led with a drum roll. The very next day after the terrorist strike, Chomsky exonerated the terrorists, stating that the Clinton administration’s bombing of the pharmaceutical plant in Sudan constituted a far more serious terrorist act and warning that 9/11 would be exploited by the United States as an excuse to destroy Afghanistan.

Leftist academics across the country echoed Chomsky’s themes, cheering the 9/11 terrorist acts, which they deemed a just retribution for America’s transgressions. History professor Robin Kelley of New York University stated: “We need a civil war, class war, whatever to put an end to U.S. policies that endanger all of us.” History professor Gerald Horne of the University of North Carolina asserted that “the bill has come due, the time of easy credit is up. It is time to pay.” Professor Eric Foner of Columbia University, the renowned Marxist historian, expressed his personal confusion about “which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” Barbara Foley, a professor of English at Rutgers University, felt 9/11 was a justified response to the “fascism” of U.S. foreign policy. Mark Lewis Taylor, a professor of theology and culture at Princeton Seminary, thought the WTC buildings were justifiable targets because they were a “symbol of today’s wealth and trade.” Robert Paul Churchill, a professor of philosophy at George Washington University, rationalized that the terrorist attack was justified. “What the terrorists despised and sought to defeat was our arrogance, our gluttonous way of life, our miserliness toward the poor and its starving; the expression of a soulless pop culture . . . and a domineering attitude that insists on having our own way no matter what the cost to others.”

Of course, the infamous Ward Churchill, as we know, outdid all the others, blaming not only Bush and America but the “little Eichmanns” themselves for the attacks.

Churchill, Chomsky, and their kin on the academic Left were joined by prominent figures in the progressive culture at large. Norman Mailer stepped forward to opine that the suicide hijackers were “brilliant.” In his view, the attack was completely understandable, since “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Oliver Stone affirmed that he saw 9/11 as a “revolt” and compared the ensuing Palestinian celebrations with those that had attended the French and Russian Revolutions, while Susan Sontag held that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” From the religious camp, Tony Campolo, a leading Christian evangelist who served as one of former President Clinton’s “spiritual advisers,” believed that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the Crusades.

The American flag, a hated symbol to the Left, also became a target. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver was incredulous that her daughter’s kindergarten teacher instructed the students to come to school the next day dressed in red, white, and blue. Nation columnist Katha Pollitt had the same reaction regarding her teenage daughter’s impulse to fly an American flag outside the family home. Pollitt told her that she could “buy a flag with her own money and fly it out her bedroom window, because that’s hers, but the living room is off-limits.” This was, Pollitt explained, because the American flag stands for “jingoism and vengeance and war.”

As last week’s SEAL strike on Osama bin Laden continues to sink in, the military codenames given to earlier efforts to eliminate this one-man terror superpower come to mind: Operation Infinite Reach was the Pentagon’s codename for the 1998 missile attacks on bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan and a purported chemical facility in Sudan with tenuous links to bin Laden; and the original codename for the post-9/11 campaign actually was Operation Infinite Justice—not Operation Enduring Freedom. To be sure, these codenames are just words. But set against the backdrop of the last decade—and especially last week—these words have a deep meaning that is not lost on America’s enemies.

In short, the enemy is learning that the U.S. military has staying power—and gets its man. This is an important message to get across because America’s enemies—especially bin Laden and his ilk—grew to doubt both propositions over the last few decades.

From bin Laden’s vantage point, America talked tough but seldom if ever followed through. “When tens of your solders were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he yelped. “The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim and a remedy to the chests of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.”

For the record, he was referring to the suicide bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 Marines and forced President Reagan to abruptly pull out a U.S. peacekeeping force; the “Blackhawk Down” debacle in 1993, which ended with 18 Americans killed in an ambush, the man responsible for the ambush—Farrah Aidid—granted safe passage and U.S. forces hastily withdrawn by President Clinton; and the 2000 USS Cole attack in Aden, which claimed 17 sailors and went unanswered. Add to this list Iran’s attack on the U.S. embassy in 1979, a humiliation which was never punished or avenged, and Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which was reversed by a U.S.-led coalition but left Hussein in power and left many in the Middle East with the impression that America didn’t have the nerve to finish the job.

This is the prism through which bin Laden saw America. This is why he concluded, with a smirk, that America was a paper tiger lacking both the stomach and the staying power for the kind of war he unleashed on 9/11.

He was wrong.

Indeed, in my discussions with active-duty officers, many say the reason we had to go into Afghanistan and Iraq—boots on the ground—was not only to topple terror states like the Taliban’s Afghanistan, not only to remove regimes with the means and motives to do worse than maim Manhattan, not only to begin the long-overdue process of remaking the Middle East, not only to end the cynical realism that propped up Hussein and his kind, but to obliterate this notion that America could not or would not fight.