Archive for 2015

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: 60 Minutes: Lone vet returns to Iraq to fight ISIS. “I’m not here serving my country — I’m here serving Christians.”

UPDATE: More, from Power Line: “The emergence of ISIS in Iraq is attributed to the withdrawal of American forces by President Obama in 2011 by one of Logan’s eloquent Christian interlocutors at one point.” Do tell.

Plus, John Hinderaker’s thoughts: “My own view is that our government should dispatch whatever forces are necessary to Iraq and Syria and destroy ISIS, as promptly as possible. Lest there be any misunderstanding, I mean that we should ‘kill ourselves out of this war’ by annihilating every person who resists on behalf of that devilish movement.” Works for me.

ONWARD, CHRISTIAN SOLDIERS: The Knights Templar Maps a Plan to Fight ISIS and Win.

The only successes against ISIS have come at the hands of expressly ethno-sectarian troops—not states you could identify on a Google map: the Shiite militias and Iranian advisors that accompany the Iraqi army into battle, the Alawi Syrians and their Hezbollah allies, or the Kurds fighting, with a wink, for the Iraqi state. Even the first time ISIS was defeated, in 2007-2008, it was by expressly sectarian Sunni militias in Anbar, not by the Iraqi army.

There is no state army winning in the Middle East; nor, really, against radical Islam elsewhere, which has exploded since 2001. . . .

ISIS has arisen to fill that gap, but something else will arise to push back against it, since states cannot. That something won’t be the Templars, exactly, but it will also not be a state. It will instead be new non-state networks to funnel money and fighters against ISIS.

There are already reports of Americans and other Westerners going to join the Kurdish militias; how long before the Christian communities in Iraq and other ethno-sectarian communities under assault begin to attract adherents as well?

The war against ISIS and radical Islam may not always be state versus non-state, but perhaps eventually non-state versus non-state. Popularized violence and popularized sovereignty; more efficient, certainly, to cut out the middleman.

Hmm. Maybe we can start a Kickstarter?

Related: Vatican To Clear Knights Templar After 700 Years. Hmm. Curious timing, that.

Meanwhile, note that this sectarian-violence phenomenon does not represent an improvement in the human condition: Christians Have Destroyed Almost All the Mosques In the Central African Republic. It is, rather, a symptom of the failure of our feckless international system to promote civilized values and ordered liberty.

ABOLISH HIGH SCHOOL? Well, as I’ve observed elsewhere, when you take a bunch of teenagers and warehouse them together, they look for recognition not from adults who know more, but from other teenagers, and this produces distorted values.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Under Health Care Act, Many Tax Filers Are Discovering Costly Complications. “This filing season, for the first time, millions of Americans are facing tax implications — and new forms that even seasoned preparers are finding confusing — related to their health insurance status. The changes are not only complicating things for tax filers, but also costing many of them money.”

HOT CASH AND COLD CONSENT: Never consent to a search. “That the feds are now in the business of penny-ante forfeitures speaks volumes about both the lack of serious crime as well as the perverse incentives to allocate personnel to try to steal pennies from travelers. Sure, it can be rationalized as part of a grand scheme to take the profit out of crime, one dollar at a time, but that’s mere tough on crime marketing nonsense. It was never the justification for the DEA existing, no less becoming embroiled in such low rent operations. . . . That those of us who object to such improper law enforcement abuses decry such tactics is one thing, but to have the Inspector General join in attempting to stop this abuse is huge.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why We Need Law Schools. “Law school is absolutely essential — not for lawyers with clients, but for our society as a whole. The reason has everything to do with what makes law distinct as a social phenomenon.”

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Decoding Obama’s Mandatory Voting Fantasy.

All of this starts to sound, dare I say, rather un-American. See, mandates are the ways of totalitarians. Americans believe in freedom. If you don’t want to vote, don’t. Some elections just aren’t worth your vote. Some elections, you might not find a single candidate to be acceptable. If you choose not to vote, you still have made a choice.

But this is a President that seems all too comfortable with mandates, rules, edicts, and all too uncomfortable with freedom. Years ago, Dorothy Rabinowitz called Obama the “alien in the White House.” She wasn’t talking about where Obama was born. She was talking about how Obama doesn’t fit into the American experience of freedom or love of country.

Obama playing with the deeply offensive idea of mandatory voting only adds to this assessment.

So why do progressives want to force everyone to vote? It’s critical to understand this, because mandatory voting isn’t the only process scheme they’ve cooked up to transform the nation.

Obama’s comments flow from how progressives view voting. They don’t view elections as individual Americans carefully assessing candidates and casting an informed ballot for the candidate for whom they believe is the most qualified.

Instead, to progressives, elections are about flexing collective political muscle.

Always the collective with these people.

JUST SIX MONTHS AGO, IT WAS AN OBAMA “SUCCESS STORY.” Losing Yemen.

The last US special forces have been withdrawn from Yemen without exciting much notice from the US press. Max Boot tweets: “All US SOF evacuating Yemen. Huge win for AQAP, huge defeat for US. How many foreign policy disasters can we handle?” Reuters reports, “the United States has evacuated its remaining personnel, including about 100 special operations forces, from Yemen because of the deteriorating security situation there, U.S. officials said on Saturday.” This means that the last vestiges of what the Obama administration only recently touted as their model counter-insurgency operation are gone. The collapse has flown largely under the media radar.

Last week Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post reported that $500 million dollars in American supplied weapons are now in the hands of “Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda”. The Islamist blitzkrieg is living off huge quantities of captured US materiel.

And, really, it was just 6 months ago that Obama was touting Yemen as a success.