Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 2

From Dehumanizing Word Games to Gosnell

In Philadelphia, at a human abattoir on Lancaster Avenue, is where it ends, not where it starts. It starts with the perversion of language. It starts when the icons of a dissipated culture reduce a baby to a “fetus.” From there, Yeats’s blood-dimmed tide rolls rapidly in. Before long, a baby is not a person but a punishment, as President Barack Obama framed the matter in his familiar off-the-cuff iciness.

Of course, to describe newborn children in their boundless possibilities and wonder would be to acknowledge, foremost, their humanity. That is why, instead, abortion enthusiasts must grope for words when circumstances force them to speak publicly about their gruesome business.

“That fetus, or child -- however way you want to describe it,” Mr. Obama once stammered. This was back when, as a state senator, he was unnerved by the natural resistance of babies to the unnatural insistence of their mothers -- of the culture -- that they just disappear. If you’ve ever watched a hit man testify, you’ve heard the same stammer: the faint glimmer of a long-forgotten but stubbornly indelible line between right and wrong.

It is the line that makes killing much easier to do than to talk about. It is the line that now impels a self-imposed media embargo against news about the shocking trial of Kermit Gosnell.

#ad#Gosnell is a 72-year-old abortionist. The formal charges against him -- the murders of a woman and seven babies -- are but drops in a sea of carnage. Mounting evidence reveals him to be a mass murderer of epic scale and Mengele methods. It also spotlights the evil -- the apparently unspeakable evil -- of legalized abortion in all its coarsening gore. Plainly, the vaunted journalists of our debased mainstream have determined that there must be no meaningful coverage. No time in the 24/7 cycle to notice the inexorable path from dehumanizing the vulnerable through word games to mass-murdering them with casual sadism.

Better to shove the evidence into a dark closet. That’s what they did in Chicago. There, despite the best efforts of “physicians” (they of the “do no harm” oath), many “however way you want to describe its” were “not just coming out limp and dead,” as Obama haltingly put it. The abortionists’ answer was to stick the helpless survivors in a utility closet where they could die, out of sight and out of mind. Obama, in the pitiless logic of legalized abortion, labored to preserve this oft-practiced but never discussed form of infanticide against the Illinois legislature’s proposed “Born Alive” ban. (See senate transcript, April 4, 2002, beginning at page 29.)

A decade later in Philadelphia, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.” So said Stephen Massof, one of Kermit Gosnell’s fellow butchers, as he described for the jury the chamber of horrors that was the “Women’s Medical Society” on Lancaster Avenue. There, scores of babies -- perhaps hundreds of them -- were willfully mutilated after being born alive.

Standard fare was the “snip.”

“Snip” is a terse, antiseptic word. Like “choice,” it is tailored to those rare, discomfiting occasions when the intentional killing of a “however way you want to describe it” must be spoken of rather than silently done. It is an effort, as much mentally as verbally, to evade the monstrousness we abide in the United States, where nearly 60 million children -- a population roughly equal to that of France or the United Kingdom -- have been aborted since the Supreme Court’s 1973 fatwa in Roe v. Wade.

In a “snip,” the abortionist, sharp scissors in hand, grasps the squirming and sometimes squealing baby he has just delivered. He stabs the child in the back and then, snapping the blades, severs the spinal cord from the brain. Massof described the snip as “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.”

He was testifying in exchange for a plea bargain that discounts his participation in numerous such “procedures” to a mere two instances of third-degree murder. After all, most of what he did at the “Women’s Medical Society” was perfectly legal.

#page#The euphemistic "snip" calls to mind the Supreme Court’s opinion in Gonzales v. Carhart, another case about “choice.” Like Gosnell, LeRoy Carhart was an abortion “physician.” In the high court, he joined his progressive friends at Planned Parenthood and the City of San Francisco to defend the “choice” known as “partial birth” abortion -- a name soothingly rebranded to “late term” abortion once it became clear that “partial birth” conveyed too much information.

#ad#In an uncharacteristically de trop outburst, the five justices in the narrow Carhart majority described varying abortion procedures with startling clinical precision. Most common is the first-trimester “suction curettage,” in which the “physician” vacuums the unwanted “embryonic tissue” from the womb. By the time the second trimester is reached, this “tissue” has matured into the unmistakable shape of a child. Thus the “dilation and evacuation” procedure is often called for.

Employed millions of times in this most civilized country over the last half century, “D&E,” the court explained, involves the “physician’s” use of forceps “to tear apart” the “fetus” by “ripping” it from the cervix and then “evacuating the fetus piece by piece#...#until it has been completely removed” from the mother. Often, the justices observed, the D&E “physician” finds it more congenial to “kill the fetus a day or two before performing the surgical evacuation,” since “medical” experience has shown that, “once dead#...#the fetus’ body will soften,” becoming “easier” to dice and remove. Oh, another helpful tip: “Rotating the fetus as it is being pulled decreases the odds of dismemberment.”

By the time Carhart was decided, Roe v. Wade had been on the books for over a generation -- the generation, to be more specific, that is now ruling the roost. It goes without saying -- for we wouldn’t want to say it -- that, in a nation that has absorbed this generation’s preening “values,” D&E already enjoyed the stamp of judicial approval. The only question before the Carhart Court was whether “partial birth” abortion -- “intact D&E” -- was beyond the pale.

This “medical procedure” is triggered by an advanced stage of maturation, in which the child’s well-developed head tends to “lodge in the cervix.” Relying on the instruction of Martin Haskell, another experienced abortionist, the justices related:

The right-handed surgeon slides the fingers of the left [hand] along the back of the fetus and “hooks” the shoulders of the fetus with the index and ring fingers (palm down). While maintaining this tension, lifting the cervix and applying traction to the shoulders with the fingers of the left hand, the surgeon takes a pair of blunt curved Metzenbaum scissors in the right hand. He carefully advances the tip, curved down, along the spine and under his middle finger until he feels it contact the base of the skull under the tip of his middle finger.

The surgeon then forces the scissors into the base of the skull.#...#He spreads the scissors to enlarge the opening.#...#The surgeon [then] removes the scissors and introduces a suction catheter into this hole and evacuates the skull contents. With the catheter still in place, he applies traction to the fetus, removing it completely from the patient.

“Evacuates the skull contents” may be more bracing than “snip,” but it doesn’t quite do justice to the process and the frightful insouciance behind it. That was left to a nurse who had watched Haskell perform the “procedure” on a six-month-old “however way you want to describe it.” She recalled that, once all but the head had been delivered,

the baby’s little fingers were clasping and unclasping, and his little feet were kicking. Then the doctor stuck the scissors in the back of his head, and the baby’s arms jerked out, like a startle reaction, like a flinch, like a baby does when he thinks he is going to fall.

The doctor opened up the scissors, stuck a high-powered suction tube into the opening, and sucked the baby’s brains out. Now the baby went completely limp.#...#He cut the umbilical cord and delivered the placenta. He threw the baby in a pan, along with the placenta and the instruments he had just used.

Four justices of the United States Supreme Court would have upheld this barbarism. They would not have described it. It is not to be spoken of, only done. After all, to speak of it would infringe upon “choice.”

Speaking of “choice,” if President Obama has the opportunity to choose one more Supreme Court justice over the next four years, the Carhart dissenters will be the majority. Welcome to Philadelphia.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy .

Re: Re: Prosecuting Gun Criminals

Robert, two points.

1. You're exactly right about these non-prosecution decisions. In my last five years at the Justice Department, I ran the satellite U.S. attorney's office that covers the six upstate counties (three on each side of the Hudson) just north of the Bronx. (The mothership of the Southern District of New York, where I spent most of my government career, is down at Foley Square and handles the Bronx and Manhattan.) One of my responsibilities was to review investigative agency decisions to close cases without charges. About once a month, an ATF supervisor would call or visit me and go through several investigations the agency believed were not worth pursuing. Typically, many of these cases involved attempted illegal gun purchases. Though memory fades, so I may be forgetting one or two disagreements, I'm pretty sure I concurred in all ATF's recommendations. Almost always, these infractions involved sympathetic actors who almost certainly did not know they were ineligible to own guns.

A couple of noteworthy things about this. First, the way this non-prosecution issue is being framed, people could get the misimpression that gun offenses were not taken seriously. Quite the opposite. You can only take so many cases -- I supervised 10 to 15 lawyers with heavy caseloads that featured terrorism, drugs, racketeering, various types of fraud, etc. In the scheme of things, most attempted illegal purchases are not weighty offenses. When I said Senator Cruz was right to highlight the paltry number of prosecutions (44 out of 15,000), I was careful to note that this is unreasonable only because the government has simultaneously turned up the heat on gun owners who have done nothing wrong -- if you're not going to go after the guilty, it makes no sense to harass the innocent.

But that is not to suggest that most attempted illegal-purchase cases are worrisome. Let's say a person fully recovered from some long-ago mental illness attempts to buy a gun and is unsuccessful; an agent interviews him, makes a responsible determination that the guy, besides enduring the anxiety of knowing he is under federal investigation, now understands he's not eligible and won't try again; and a reasonable period of time goes by during which the guy, in fact, does not try again. That is not a case worth expending resources on when you are actively prosecuting a slew of serious gun crimes involving real criminals shooting guns, obliterating serial numbers, using guns in connection with drug and violent crimes, etc. (The same sort of resource allocation leads federal prosecutors to focus on drug-distribution crimes and basically ignore drug-possession crimes -- the latter are not nearly as serious and can easily be handled by the state.)

There is also the significant matter of the jury pool. Precisely because these attempted illegal-purchase cases often involve sympathetic would-be defendants, it is not unlikely that a large number of them would go to trial (rather than plead guilty) if indicted. Attitudes about guns in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange, Duchess and Sullivan Counties, where most jurors serving in upstate cases lived, were markedly different from attitudes in Manhattan and the Bronx, where most jurors who serve in the Foley Square courthouses live. It is highly, highly likely that a sympathetic defendant in a gun case involving a non-transaction -- i.e., no one has actually obtained a firearm, much less used one -- will be acquitted in upstate New York. Under those circumstances, a Justice Department that expended resources on such cases, and therefore denied those resources to more worthy cases, would be doing a disservice to the public. And if such charging decisions were made due to political passion, that would be a perversion of justice.  

2. Getting back to Senator Cruz, I've just heard a sound bite in which he seems to walk back the constitutionally problematic proposal that Congress direct the Justice Department to indict these cases involving attempted illegal purchases of firearms. Instead, he says he will sponsor legislation creating a Justice Department "task force" dedicated to prosecuting such cases. Respectfully, I think this is not a good idea.

The problem Senator Cruz has rightly homed in on is the baseless harassment of innocent gun owners. The small number of prosecutions for illegal purchases is worth stressing because it highlights the injustice being done to the innocent, whose rights the federal government ought to be protecting. Far from curing the injustice, it would only make things worse to both start prosecuting people who really shouldn't be charged and waste taxpayer money on yet another federal "task force." As I contended in the previous post, starving the beast is a better approach.

Violating the Constitution Is Not the Way to Safeguard Constitutional Rights

Senator Ted Cruz is quite right that the only things the federal government should be doing in the area of firearms are safeguarding the Second Amendment rights of law-abding citizens and enforcing the law against criminals. Personally, I think firearms enforcement should primarily be a state-level concern. If you are going to have federal gun laws, though, Senator Cruz is also right that it makes no sense for the Justice Department to prosecute only 44 out of 15,000 criminals at a time when Washington is harassing lawful gun owners.

Nevertheless, in our constitutional system, the decision whether to prosecute someone is exclusively an executive function. Congress has no power to "direct" the Justice Department to indict anyone. By all means, Congress ought to flex its muscles here. The best ways to do that are (a) to hold the administration politically accountable, as Cruz is doing very effectively; and (b) to start slashing the administration's budget. If the Justice Department is not going to spend the money Congress gives it wisely, Congress should give it much less money. If the administration is declining to do things Congress believes should be done, Congress should turn up the heat by taking away funding -- lots and lots of funding -- for the administration's priorities.

Senator Cruz, who was the solicitor general of Texas for several years, is a very fine constitutional lawyer. Notwithstanding his statements to Sean, I'd be very surprised were he actually to propose that Congress try to dictate the exercise of prosecutorial discretion.

Why Are the Feds Trying to Identify All Gun Owners in Missouri?

They keep telling you they have noting but good intentions, that to worry about the feds coming for your guns makes you part of "the black helicopter crowd." But then things like this happen: In Missouri, federal investigators have demanded and obtained from the state government -- apparently twice -- the entire list of Missouri concealed weapon permit holders.

As Matt Drudge notes, the Columbia Daily Tribune reports that in November 2011 and January 2012, the state highway patrol asked for and received the list of about 185,000 concealed weapon permit holders from the motor vehicle department -- the only state agency to store all the names, because an indication that one is a permit holder is noted on driver's licenses. The information is supposed to be held confidentially by the state, but it was turned over -- once on-line, once on a disk -- to the highway police, which then proceeded to share it with the federal Social Security Administration Office of Inspector General. State senators trying to get to the bottom of what happened, have been told there was no written request for the information. The state highway patrol says, "The information was provided to law enforcement for law enforcement investigative purposes" -- not a very enlightening explanation of why every single licensed concealed weapon owner needed to be investigated by state and federal police. 

Rob Schaaf, a Republican state senator who is pursuing the matters summed it up this way: “Now we know two things. We know that somebody out there, probably in the federal government, wants the list of all the concealed carry holders in Missouri. We know that now. We know one other piece of information – we know the [highway patrol] department is actively and purposefully concealing that information from us."

Don’t Intervene in Syria

Those clamoring for American intervention in Syria -- I should say, even more American intervention in Syria -- have a lock on two influential drivers of conservative opinion, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. They are also bedfellows on this issue with our Muslim Brotherhood–enthralled president, even if Mr. Obama’s skittishness about going all in has them a bit testy.

All of this puts the media wind at their backs. Repeated often enough and reported uncritically enough, the interventionists’ shallow story has thus become the narrative. And so we have: The Vacuum.

The Vacuum theme goes like this: The Middle East may be in flux, but our threat environment remains frozen in time -- a Nineties warp in which Iran, singularly, is the root of all evil. In Syria now, we have a golden opportunity to hand the mullahs a crushing defeat. All we need to do is commit to toppling their client, Bashar al-Assad. Media spin thus suggests that Assad’s minority Alawite regime is responsible for each of the 70,000 killings and half a million displacements that Syrians have endured since the civil war began -- as if the Sunni majority, led by the local Brotherhood affiliate with al-Qaeda as the point of its spear, were not carrying out reciprocal mass murders and an anti-Christian pogrom.

#ad#Alas, misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have left the Obama administration gun-shy about leaping with both feet into another Muslim mess. The president thus prefers to “lead from behind” the Sunni supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. This failure of American will has created The Vacuum: a leadership lacuna in the anti-Assad opposition. Into this purported breach, Islamic supremacists -- seemingly out of thin air -- have rushed in to hijack the forward march of freedom.

As a result, the narrative continues, untold legions of Muslim moderates, secular democrats, and religious minorities who would otherwise be charting Syria’s democratic destiny are being elbowed aside. Even worse, by failing to intervene forcefully -- meaning, to fuel the jihad with high-tech combat weapons and an aerial campaign to soften up Assad’s remaining defenses -- the administration is frittering away the opportunity to strike up pragmatic alliances with the Vaccum-filling Islamists. Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought -- eager to help the Brotherhood, but too concerned about arms falling into terrorist hands -- Obama is forfeiting our chance to influence the outcome.

Right. I mean, look at how ably our decade of heavy investment has steered Iraq and Afghanistan in a pro-American direction. And behold how they love us in Benghazi!

Syria hawks counter such scoffs by putting on their best Paul Krugman: The “freedom” stimulus was not a harebrained idea, it just wasn’t big enough. Put aside the fortune expended and the thousands of American lives sacrificed. It is not the nature of the Middle East but a void of American leadership that has the region waving al-Qaeda’s black flags. The Vacuum turns out to be the best all-purpose rationalization of failure since Barack Obama discovered George W. Bush.

Baghdad, you are to understand, would look like Bayonne right now if only American troops hadn’t skipped town, creating The Vacuum that ceded the place to, er#...#Iraqis.

The Vacuum explains the Benghazi debacle, too. Some amnesia is required: You are not supposed to remember that Eastern Libya has for decades been a hotbed of rabidly anti-American jihadists. History goes back only as far as 2011, when Obama and the interventionists decided Qaddafi -- their erstwhile ally -- had to go. Presto, Benghazi’s Islamic-supremacist battalions were suddenly our guys, the heroic, freedom-fighting “rebels” -- and let’s not dwell on the droves of them that had raced to Iraq for the terror war against our troops.

#page#So how come we didn’t have all that profound influence over the outcome after helping the rebels kill and mutilate Qaddafi? How come our diplomatic posts were attacked? How come our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered? Why, The Vacuum, of course. It’s not that the clock struck twelve and the rebels turned back into jihadists. It’s that by “leading from behind,” Obama left a leadership void that enabled violent jihadists -- apparently beamed down from the Starship Enterprise -- to grab control before Libya’s rising tide of democracy devotees had a chance to roll in.

#ad#Hate to break this to you, but there is no vacuum. The Vacuum is a spring-fever hallucination, another empty grasp at the illusion of Islamic democracy.

Syria, like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Middle East, is predominantly Islamist. There need be no leadership vacuums to invite the Islamists in. They are there by the millions. Their supremacist ideology dominates the region.

But that’s not how the interventionists see it. On her way out the door in January, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton clung to the fiction that passes for bipartisan Beltway wisdom. She told a Senate panel that we must distinguish between jihadists and “non-jihadists.” The latter are our hope. Therefore, she maintained, we must be “effective in partnering with the non-jihadists,” even if they fly al-Qaeda’s “black flag.”

Clinton’s words were chosen carefully. The term “non-jihadist” connotes nonviolence. She was trying to distance the administration’s Muslim Brotherhood friends from the terrorists -- consistent with the lunatic Beltway consensus that the Brotherhood, whose Palestinian branch is the Hamas terrorist organization, is a nonviolent organization. All right, let’s indulge that whopper -- let’s, as Mrs. Clinton likes to say, suspend disbelief. Accepting the Brothers and their followers as “non-jihadists” tells us only what they are not -- namely, terrorists. Mrs. Clinton avoided telling us what they are -- namely, Islamists.

Islamists are Muslim supremacists who want to impose sharia. The Associated Press has a point in instructing that “Islamist” is not -- or, at least, is not necessarily -- a synonym for “Islamic fighters” or “militants.” The AP is all wet, though, when it further posits that Islamists are neither “extremists” nor “radicals.” If the vapid term “moderate” means anything, then “extreme” and “radical” precisely describe Islamists. They seek to impose sharia, a totalitarian, liberty-averse social system. They want Israel annihilated (even if they’d have someone else do the honors). They are implacably hostile to the United States -- at least while Americans remain champions of freedom and equality. There is nothing moderate about any of this.

Even if you believe these Islamists really are “non-jihadists,” the stubborn fact remains that they wave al-Qaeda’s flag because they want the same thing al-Qaeda wants. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that they prefer to establish a sharia state through political processes rather than violent jihad (in reality, it is political processes leveraged by violent jihad). Islamists still want the opposite of what we want. If we are truly promoting liberty, we can never “partner” with them.

No one is saying there is a total dearth, in Syria and the wider region, of secular democrats, non-Muslims, and Muslim moderates averse to sharia fascism. The point is that these factions are vastly outnumbered. They are, moreover, very far from uniformly pro-American. The radical Left is well represented among them. And even those who long for Western liberty regard us with increasing contempt thanks to the administration’s infatuation with the Brotherhood. So if ousting Assad is your priority, you are stuck with Islamists and jihadists. Unless you’re in favor of a very long-term American occupation of Syria, no one else could get the job done -- and, in fact, many secularists and religious minorities prefer Assad, the devil they know, to the prospect of Egypt 2.0.

It is no longer 1996 -- the year Iran bombed the Khobar Towers and killed 19 American airmen. The Syria hawks are quite right to argue that Iran remains a major threat to American interests. They are wrong, however, to treat Iran as the only such threat. The Sunni supremacist crescent that the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and their allies would run from Anatolia through the Persian Gulf and across North Africa would be no less hostile to the West than the Shiite competitor Iran is trying to forge. If Assad falls and the Brothers take over, that defeat for Tehran will not be a boon for the United States.

It is not isolationism to insist that American interventions be limited to situations in which a vital American interest must be vindicated. There is no such interest in Syria.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy .

On Abortion, the 'Gruesome' Is Only to Be Done, Not Spoken Of

My friends at the American Freedom Law Center (I'm on the advisory board) have filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court urging the justices to reverse a Colorado state court ruling that bans public display of "gruesome" abortion images on the remarkable ground that pictures of children who have been aborted might . . . offend children. 

Imagine if we had told the anti-war Left that photos of the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison could not be publicly displayed. You know, "We'll just describe the whole thing as 'enhanced detention' -- or, maybe, 'choice' -- no need to get more graphic than that." How long do you suppose that would have been tolerated?

In this instance, pro-abortion activists filed a lawsuit against anti-abortion protesters, claiming that the display of graphic images of first-term abortions amounted to an actionable nuisance. The Colorado courts agreed. As the AFLC amicus brief explains, this flies in the face of First Amendment precedent holding that the Constitution does not permit the suppression of legitimate political expression "solely to protect the young from ideas or images that [the government] thinks unsuitable for them." Given that we are not living in a sharia state, moreover, political argument may not be prohibited merely because it expresses ideas that members of society may find "offensive or disagreeable" -- as the Supreme Court reaffirmed in the 2011 case of Snyder v. Phelps.

Here's hoping the justices have the good sense to take the Colorado case. And here's hoping that we learn an important lesson on the right: As we've seen in countless contexts (abortion becomes "choice," marriage becomes "[hyphenated-]marriage," tax becomes "revenue," spending becomes "investment," etc.), the Left is simply better at the language game than we are. That is the nature of the beast. Progressives are trying to transform, we are trying to conserve; they are forever thinking of strategies to move the culture away from its traditions, we are standing athwart, yelling, "Stop!" The system works only because of liberty. Free speech gives us the ability to react vigorously with effective arguments that expose the weakness and, at times, misdirection of the other side's claims.

If, at the front end, you're going to concede the Left's clever use of language to establish the terms of the debate, and then, on the back end, you're now going to concede the Left the capacity to limit or even suppress your response, you are guaranteed to lose -- which means, lose everything.

To Intervene Or Not Intervene In Syria

I'm against, Michael Ledeen is for ... and Bill Bennett helped us hash it out yesterday. It's here if you're interested.

Perfect! Obama-Orchestrated Apology to Turkey Has Israel Providing Material Support to Terrorism Against Itself

My column last weekend dealt with the travesty of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's apology to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan, under great pressure from President Obama, for Israel's self-defense against Turkey-based jihadists who attempted to break its lawful blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Netanyahu not only apologized but added to the humiliation by agreeing to Erdogan's demand that Israel compensate the "victims" of the 2010 confrontation. Nine jihadists were killed and several others injured when Israeli Defense Forces responded to the jihadists' savage, premeditated attack on them. Erdogan, taking yet another page out of the playbook written by his friends at the Muslim Brotherhood, has pocketed Netanyahu's apology while backtracking on any reciprocal commitment to normalize relations with Israel -- and promptly announced that he'll be taking a victory lap later this month in Gaza, where he'll huddle with Hamas, the terrorist organization he supports politically and financially.  

Now comes the latest indignity. According to the Turkish media, "activist" Mehmet Tunc, one of the "victims," has announced that he will donate the compensation he receives from Israel to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), another violent jihadist pledged to Israel's annihilation. [Thanks to Andrew Bostom for the heads up on this report from Hurriyet Daily News.]

Both Hamas and PIJ are formally designated foreign terrorist organizations under federal law. Supplying either of them with material support -- the utterly predictable result of President Obama's intercession on Turkey's behalf -- is a serious crime in the United States (or at least it is when the Justice Department chooses to prosecute it).

In other news, Erdogan, who has championed Iran's development of nuclear power, is exporting gold to Iran in order to help the mullahs circumvent the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other Western governments. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is partnering with Erdogan to help Syrian "rebels" -- led by the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda -- overthrow the Syrian regime ... on the theory that this would be a major blow to Iran. Got that?

President Obama cites Prime Minister Erdogan as one of his most partners in international affairs -- one with whom he finds himself "in frequent agreement on a wide range of issues." 

Talking Syria . . .

. . . right now on Bill Bennett's radio show with the great Michael Ledeen.

Stay Out of Syria

Those clamoring for American intervention in Syria -- I should say, even more American intervention in Syria -- have a lock on two influential drivers of conservative opinion, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. They are also bedfellows on this issue with our Muslim Brotherhood–enthralled president, even if Mr. Obama’s skittishness about going all in has them a bit testy.

#ad#All of this puts the media wind at their backs. Repeated often enough and reported uncritically enough, the interventionists’ shallow story has thus become the narrative. And so we have: The Vacuum.

The Vacuum theme goes like this: The Middle East may be in flux, but our threat environment remains frozen in time -- a Nineties warp in which Iran, singularly, is the root of all evil. In Syria now, we have a golden opportunity to hand the mullahs a crushing defeat. All we need to do is commit to toppling their client, Bashar al-Assad. Media spin thus suggests that Assad’s minority Alawite regime is responsible for each of the 70,000 killings and half a million displacements that Syrians have endured since the civil war began -- as if the Sunni majority, led by the local Brotherhood affiliate with al-Qaeda as the point of its spear, were not carrying out reciprocal mass murders and an anti-Christian pogrom.

Alas, misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya have left the Obama administration gun-shy about leaping with both feet into another Muslim mess. The president thus prefers to “lead from behind” the Sunni supremacist governments of Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. This failure of American will has created The Vacuum: a leadership lacuna in the anti-Assad opposition. Into this purported breach, Islamic supremacists -- seemingly out of thin air -- have rushed in to hijack the forward march of freedom.

As a result, the narrative continues, untold legions of Muslim moderates, secular democrats, and religious minorities who would otherwise be charting Syria’s democratic destiny are being elbowed aside. Even worse, by failing to intervene forcefully -- meaning, to fuel the jihad with high-tech combat weapons and an aerial campaign to soften up Assad’s remaining defenses -- the administration is frittering away the opportunity to strike up pragmatic alliances with the Vaccum-filling Islamists. Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought -- eager to help the Brotherhood, but too concerned about arms falling into terrorist hands -- Obama is forfeiting our chance to influence the outcome.

Right. I mean, look at how ably our decade of heavy investment has steered Iraq and Afghanistan in a pro-American direction. And behold how they love us in Benghazi!

Syria hawks counter such scoffs by putting on their best Paul Krugman: The “freedom” stimulus was not a harebrained idea, it just wasn’t big enough. Put aside the fortune expended and the thousands of American lives sacrificed. It is not the nature of the Middle East but a void of American leadership that has the region waving al-Qaeda’s black flags. The Vacuum turns out to be the best all-purpose rationalization of failure since Barack Obama discovered George W. Bush.

Baghdad, you are to understand, would look like Bayonne right now if only American troops hadn’t skipped town, creating The Vacuum that ceded the place to, er#...#Iraqis.

The Vacuum explains the Benghazi debacle, too. Some amnesia is required: You are not supposed to remember that Eastern Libya has for decades been a hotbed of rabidly anti-American jihadists. History goes back only as far as 2011, when Obama and the interventionists decided Qaddafi -- their erstwhile ally -- had to go. Presto, Benghazi’s Islamic-supremacist battalions were suddenly our guys, the heroic, freedom-fighting “rebels” -- and let’s not dwell on the droves of them that had raced to Iraq for the terror war against our troops.

#page#So how come we didn’t have all that profound influence over the outcome after helping the rebels kill and mutilate Qaddafi? How come our diplomatic posts were attacked? How come our ambassador and three other Americans were murdered? Why, The Vacuum, of course. It’s not that the clock struck twelve and the rebels turned back into jihadists. It’s that by “leading from behind,” Obama left a leadership void that enabled violent jihadists -- apparently beamed down from the Starship Enterprise -- to grab control before Libya’s rising tide of democracy devotees had a chance to roll in.

#ad#Hate to break this to you, but there is no vacuum. The Vacuum is a spring-fever hallucination, another empty grasp at the illusion of Islamic democracy.

Syria, like Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and most of the Middle East, is predominantly Islamist. There need be no leadership vacuums to invite the Islamists in. They are there by the millions. Their supremacist ideology dominates the region.

But that’s not how the interventionists see it. On her way out the door in January, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton clung to the fiction that passes for bipartisan Beltway wisdom. She told a Senate panel that we must distinguish between jihadists and “non-jihadists.” The latter are our hope. Therefore, she maintained, we must be “effective in partnering with the non-jihadists,” even if they fly al-Qaeda’s “black flag.”

Clinton’s words were chosen carefully. The term “non-jihadist” connotes nonviolence. She was trying to distance the administration’s Muslim Brotherhood friends from the terrorists -- consistent with the lunatic Beltway consensus that the Brotherhood, whose Palestinian branch is the Hamas terrorist organization, is a nonviolent organization. All right, let’s indulge that whopper -- let’s, as Mrs. Clinton likes to say, suspend disbelief. Accepting the Brothers and their followers as “non-jihadists” tells us only what they are not -- namely, terrorists. Mrs. Clinton avoided telling us what they are -- namely, Islamists.

Islamists are Muslim supremacists who want to impose sharia. The Associated Press has a point in instructing that “Islamist” is not -- or, at least, is not necessarily -- a synonym for “Islamic fighters” or “militants.” The AP is all wet, though, when it further posits that Islamists are neither “extremists” nor “radicals.” If the vapid term “moderate” means anything, then “extreme” and “radical” precisely describe Islamists. They seek to impose sharia, a totalitarian, liberty-averse social system. They want Israel annihilated (even if they’d have someone else do the honors). They are implacably hostile to the United States -- at least while Americans remain champions of freedom and equality. There is nothing moderate about any of this.

Even if you believe these Islamists really are “non-jihadists,” the stubborn fact remains that they wave al-Qaeda’s flag because they want the same thing al-Qaeda wants. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that they prefer to establish a sharia state through political processes rather than violent jihad (in reality, it is political processes leveraged by violent jihad). Islamists still want the opposite of what we want. If we are truly promoting liberty, we can never “partner” with them.

No one is saying there is a total dearth, in Syria and the wider region, of secular democrats, non-Muslims, and Muslim moderates averse to sharia fascism. The point is that these factions are vastly outnumbered. They are, moreover, very far from uniformly pro-American. The radical Left is well represented among them. And even those who long for Western liberty regard us with increasing contempt thanks to the administration’s infatuation with the Brotherhood. So if ousting Assad is your priority, you are stuck with Islamists and jihadists. Unless you’re in favor of a very long-term American occupation of Syria, no one else could get the job done -- and, in fact, many secularists and religious minorities prefer Assad, the devil they know, to the prospect of Egypt 2.0.

It is no longer 1996 -- the year Iran bombed the Khobar Towers and killed 19 American airmen. The Syria hawks are quite right to argue that Iran remains a major threat to American interests. They are wrong, however, to treat Iran as the only such threat. The Sunni supremacist crescent that the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and their allies would run from Anatolia through the Persian Gulf and across North Africa would be no less hostile to the West than the Shiite competitor Iran is trying to forge. If Assad falls and the Brothers take over, that defeat for Tehran will not be a boon for the United States.

It is not isolationism to insist that American interventions be limited to situations in which a vital American interest must be vindicated. There is no such interest in Syria.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and the executive director of the Philadelphia Freedom Center. He is the author, most recently, of  Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy .