Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 25

A Hundred Missiles Fired Into Israel From Gaza After Terror Attack Foiled

The Jerusalem Post reports that a hundred rockets have been fired into Israel from Gaza since Friday night. Gaza is controlled by Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. The barrage is in response to an operation on Friday, in which Israel's air force killed two terrorists from the Hezbollah-backed Popular Resistance Committees, PRC leader Zuhair Qaisi and senior aide Ahmad Hanini. They are alleged to have been in the last stages of preparing a large-scale attack on Israel.

Let Syria Be

‘We will hold sacred the beliefs held sacred by others.”

That’s the concluding rally cry of the U.S. Department of Defense’s newly issued guidance on the “Proper Handling and Disposal of Islamic Religious Materials -- Service Members/Civilian Training.” Here’s how it works: Mainstream Muslims throughout the Middle East believe, based on the Koran and other “Islamic Religious Materials,” that if an infidel force invades a Muslim territory, its members must be killed until the force has been driven out. They further believe that if non-Muslims commit some act -- even an inadvertent one -- that Muslims perceive as insulting to Islam, a campaign of murder and mayhem is justified.

Our response? We will hold sacred the beliefs held sacred by others.

So as Afghans kill Americans, as our “allied” Afghan trainees turn their guns on their American mentors, Americans policymakers debase themselves by ordering “training to increase awareness of cultural and religious sensitivities regarding Islamic Religious Materials.” As Afghans kill Americans, as the Afghan president demands that Americans be tried and punished for accidentally burning Korans that jihadists had already defiled, our president apologizes for our purported insensitivity. As Afghans kill Americans and explain that the Koran commands them to do so, U.S. policy is to give each captured jihadist a Koran. As Afghans kill Americans and derive support from the Koran’s injunction that Muslims “make ready [against non-Muslims] your strength#...#to strike terror into the hearts of the enemies of Allah and your enemies” (Sura 8:60), U.S. military commanders instruct our troops that the Koran, which non-Muslims are unfit to touch, “is regarded as the verbatim Word of God; the primary source of Islamic guidance.” And, of course, we will hold sacred the beliefs held sacred by others.

#ad#Just as this DoD “mandatory guidance” was made public, we began debating whether the United States ought to jump into yet another Muslim civil war -- this time in Syria, where the murderous Assad regime is embroiled in a fight to the death with its Islamist opponents, thousands of whom it has killed.

I’ve argued that we’ve had our fill of a region teeming with hatred of the United States and the West, that we have no vital interest in the outcome of internecine savagery between an anti-American Muslim dictator and anti-American Muslim supremacists, and that if they insist on slaughtering each other, we should just buy some popcorn (which is all our tapped-out nation can afford, anyway) and watch the show, accepting the grim silver lining that as they weaken themselves they become less threatening to us. This has prompted a characteristically thorough response from Michael Ledeen. Besides being one of my best friends in the world, Michael is one of the world’s smartest guys -- and the one who, for over a decade, has been more right than any other commentator about Iran and its paramount role in jihadist terror.

It is worth remembering why Michael was right when so many were wrong. American policymakers, he has long contended, lack a strategic vision regarding the threat. The terror masters in Tehran are the catalyst: spawning Hezbollah in the early Eighties; training, harboring, and abetting al-Qaeda since the early Nineties; collaborating with Syria, North Korea, China, and Russia; similarly backing Sunnis (not only al-Qaeda but Pakistani warlords, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas branch, and even Iran’s former bitter enemy, the Taliban) as long as they worked against American interests. That being the case, Michael persuasively contends, the war cannot be won without a strategy for defeating the mullahs.

#page#Michael is also a deep believer -- much deeper than I am -- in the power of freedom to overcome tyranny and cultural backwardness. He has, for example, long argued against a military invasion of Iran, opining that the regime is hollow and widely despised by the Iranian people. Providing the right kind of support -- moral and material -- to oppressed Iranians could bring about its demise. You may disagree; I myself am not convinced that the regime can be brought down from within. But I do know this: Michael has a better read on the challenge than most of the people we’ve hired to deal with it. It is the regime, not the nukes.

These points are worth stressing because, while Michael’s broad strategic approach is leaps-and-bounds superior to the wishful incoherence of American policy in the last decade-plus, it, too, has a critical blind spot. Moreover, I do not think he accounts for the principal freedom dynamic in the equation: the fact that we are losing ours, and losing it precisely because of the same deranged U.S. policymakers who would be responsible for, as Michael puts it, “shap[ing] the ideological outlook and future behavior” of Syria once we’ve helped the Muslim Brotherhood oust Assad.

#ad#Regarding the blind spot: Yes, Iran is the backbone of the jihadists, but Islamic supremacism is the backbone of Iran -- the animating ideology of its revolution and the force that unites the region against the West. Michael says Iran is “the prime mover of radical Islamic terrorists.” I respectfully disagree. The prime mover is their ideology and the fact that it is undeniably rooted in Islamic doctrine -- the veneration of which American policymakers promote, absurdly and tragically. To be sure, Iran is the most effective agent of this ideology, and thus, as Michael says, the “centerpiece of the enemy alliance.” Yet not all of our enemies are allied, the alliances that exist are not permanent, and the glue of those alliances is not Iran. Our enemies align because of a shared belief that Islam commands them to fight us -- something that would not disappear with Iran’s defeat. Iran is not the reason the United States is despised in the region, including in places where Iran is also despised. Iran is not the reason Afghan trainees shoot their American mentors. The reason is the interpretation of Islam predominant in the Middle East.

Michael is quite right that the region is home to some “friends of America and even would-be democrats, too.” But how much more evidence do we need that these friends and democrats are vastly outnumbered by enemies and shariacrats? More Egyptian elections in which Islamists win 80–20? More polling that tells us 80 percent of Pakistanis want sharia or that a substantial majority of the Iraqis we liberated -- who promptly installed a sharia government -- still think Americans are legitimate targets for violent jihad?

Michael suggests it is unlikely that our policymakers -- the guys who think the answer to jihadist atrocities is serial apologies and Koran-sensitivity training -- could make the “real mess of statecraft” it would take to render post-Assad Syria worse for us. The grounds for such confidence elude me. Commonsense statecraft would at least tacitly acknowledge that Islam is a problem. Our regnant bipartisan approach holds that Islam is the solution and that its sharia law must be enshrined in new constitutions. That this arrangement inevitably results in the persecution of religious minorities, apostates, and homosexuals never seems to provoke any rethinking of the arrangement -- only the slandering of anyone who inconveniently points out that the arrangement is lunatic.

#page#Our presidents and diplomats exhibit bottomless capacity to believe that by portraying jihadist violence as “anti-Islamic activity,” and mainstream Islam as “moderate” and “tolerant,” we will somehow make it so. And as for shaping the region’s ideological outlook: How’s that going? We’ve been in Afghanistan for more than a decade, and as soon as the current round of mayhem ends, next on tap is a negotiated settlement with the Taliban -- which our statecraft guys are orchestrating. After eight years of shaping Iraq, we’ve left behind an Iranian satellite. And the same people responsible for our statecraft in Libya and Egypt would be in charge of Syria policy. In Libya, we’ve replaced a dictator who was actually helping us against terrorists with an Islamist regime rife with al-Qaeda elements, one that instantly installed sharia while systematically slaughtering black Africans. In Egypt, where we spent 30 years and tens of billions of dollars cultivating the military as a bulwark against an Islamist ascendancy, we’ve got an Islamist ascendancy. What reason is there to believe our Syria statecraft will be any better?

Michael maintains that by getting “engaged in the fight” in Syria “we have a better chance of keeping the likes of [al-Qaeda leader Ayman] Zawahiri from penetrating the opposition.” But we did get involved in the fight in Libya, and far from being marginalized, the al-Qaeda operatives rose in the rebel ranks. This was inevitable given our policy: If we are going to farcically genuflect to the Koran, we naturally enhance the prestige of those who claim -- with accurate citations of scripture -- to fight the West based on the Koran’s injunctions; if we are going to encourage Islamists to rise up against dictators, then those trained, ruthless fighters are apt to become heroic figures.

#ad#Michael portrays our challenge as “an apocalyptic/messianic movement of the sort the bin Ladens, Zawahiris, and Khameneis [as in Iran’s “supreme leader,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] lead.” This, however, is just a part of the challenge, and not necessarily the most threatening part -- at least where our liberty is concerned. To suggest otherwise is reminiscent of the Bush and Obama administrations’ myopic focus on “violent extremists,” which assumes the rest of the ummah is “moderate” and “largely secular” -- to borrow the infamous meanderings of James Clapper, our incumbent national-intelligence director.

The Muslim Brotherhood and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation are not apocalyptic. They are the patient variety of Islamic supremacist. They are determined to defeat the United States and the West through an incremental campaign -- one that complements terrorism with the march of sharia through social institutions. While we worry about Iran and al-Qaeda, it is the Brotherhood and the OIC who co-opt our military, intelligence, and law-enforcement agencies, which then persuade our policymakers that appeasement is the answer to murderous offense and that Israel (an authentic, pro-Western democracy) is the real problem in the Middle East. It is the Brotherhood and the OIC who collaborate with the administration to curtail the First Amendment.

When the war began, our goal was to protect American freedom. A decade later, we find presidents, secretaries of state, commanding generals, senators, and various other officials positing that the cause of Muslim atrocities is not Islamic ideology but American free expression. Islamists here -- not in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, but here -- have intimidated American government officials from uttering the word “Islam” in any discussion of Muslim terrorism; intimidated the U.S. military into avoiding mention of Islam in a report on the Fort Hood jihadist massacre; intimidated the FBI into excluding information about Islamist ideology in its counterterrorism training materials; and are currently trying to intimidate the New York City Police Department -- guardians of the nation’s No. 1 terror target -- into ceasing its surveillance of Muslim neighborhoods.

What is the rationale for buckling under the intimidation? The notion that upsetting Muslims will trigger the violence to which they are prone in that part of the world, endangering our troops and undermining our precarious efforts to remake the region. But who asked anyone to remake the region? The American people never called for that -- there is certainly nothing about it in the authorization for the use of military force.

Like most Americans, I am all for crushing our enemies. I fully agree with Michael that Iran is already at war with us whether we like it or not -- and, unlike Michael, I am pretty convinced that the regime cannot be toppled unless we resort to military force. Nevertheless, I want to defeat our enemies and be done with them. I do not believe we owe it to them to rebuild their societies. The Marshall Plan is not the default model. Nation-building in Islamic lands does not make us safer, its costs in blood and treasure are prohibitive, and it does not work because they don’t want what we’re offering. Our security does not hinge on their freedom; it hinges on their knowing that we are not to be trifled with. If they square off against each other, the best thing for us to do is stay out of the way. I am not going to worry about freedom and security in Syria when freedom and security in America are being stripped away. That is a direct consequence of enmeshing ourselves ever deeper in the Muslim morass. We should stop.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

Re: Obama & the Crits

David's reading of Obama's political biography is characteristically thoughtful, but I'm going to disagree, respectfully.

In the taxonomy David offers, the modern Left is made up of "pure activists" and "moderates." I think he's leaving out a third category, especially important because it is the one into which Obama falls: Alinsky radicals. In Bill Ayers's terrorist incarnation, he was, I guess, what David refers to as a "pure activist." But Alinsky looked down on him and the other Weathermen, just as much as he looked down on progressive "moderates." On goals, Alinsky and Ayers, were on the same page, but Alinsky dismissed him as a clown because Ayers's methods were counterproductive.

In Alinsky's view, the only radicalism that had a chance to succeed was the one that could bore inside bourgeois institutions, co-opt the language, and move the mainstream in the radical direction -- but only as fast as political conditions would allow. Remaining radical but being coldly pragmatic kept the Alinskyite both effective and viable, allowing him to keep coming back for more. Ayers eventually learned this lesson -- the lesson that you can do more for the cause by running the classroom than by blowing up the classroom or occupying the campus. As Ayers himself says, he's just as radical today as he ever was -- he is no moderate progressive. But now he's actually accomplishing things, affecting thousands of minds. To borrow the words of Van Jones, another radical Leftist turned Alinskyite, he decided "to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends." 

Obama has never shifted. He's always been the same guy. But he adjusts to the conditions of his environment. He's not mainstream; he's about moving the mainstream.

Obamacare is a textbook example. As David says, many pure radicals pooh-pooh this astonishing triumph (from the Left's perspective) as a gutless half-measure -- they want single-payer, and they want it yesterday. But that was not politically possible. What Obama got done, though, was a nearly 3000-page monstrosity that gives bureaucrats limitless authority to take over the healthcare sector in an amount of time that will be much shorter than most people appreciate, and that gradually strangles private insurance out of existence. Obama got his hand on the controls, exploited the tools that were available, took the measure of his feckless opposition, and went as far as it was practical to go while maintaining a fairly good chance at being reelected (which would mean appointing hundreds more likeminded bureaucrats and federal judges, who will apply and interpret Obamacare for years to come). It is a radical masterstroke, and even if it will take time to flower fully, no pure activist could have done it better.

David writes: "radical, 'conviction' politicians don’t decry Gitmo then keep it open, promise to end the wars then reinforce the troops, express outrage at Bush war tactics then maintain rendition and triple the number of drone strikes." With due respect, that is way off the mark.

1 - Yes, Gitmo is still open, but only because it was politically impossible to close it and stay viable, not because Obama has somehow moderated. And as a practical matter, there are many fewer terrorists housed there than when he started, and there is certain to be a faster, more thorough house-cleaning (by repatriations and civilian trials) if he is reelected.

2 - Yes, Obama surged troops, but as few as he could get away with (many fewer than his commanders wanted), and only to grease the wheels to end the wars. He announced a drawdown simultaneously with the surge, has accelerated the pull-out, and -- even though the wars are ending badly for our country -- he is nevertheless ending them, just as he promised to do.

3 - Yes, Obama has been very tough on al-Qaeda overseas, but that has made it far easier for him to embrace the Muslim Brotherhood (both overseas and here at home). This makes perfect sense, actually: the Muslim Brotherhood is to al Qaeda as Alinsky was to the Weathermen -- the bloodthirsty and ultimately ineffective Islamists are giving way to the sophisticated, competent, highly effective Islamists.

I was interviewed by a reporter earlier today about the Gitmo bar's infiltration of the Obama Justice Department. The reporter made the same point David does: While most ordinary Americans may think it radical for a lawyer to volunteer his services to file offensive lawsuits on behalf of the enemy against the United States in wartime, this is not considered radical in the legal community -- there, it is "mainstream." Well, okay ... but that the radicals think of themselves as mainstream does not make them mainstream -- they are still radicals. And what's the upshot of all of this? Lawyers who thought our enemies were worth volunteering to help are now the lawyers who make counterterrorism policy for the country -- something so radical as to have been inconceivable just a short time ago, but something that is happening in the Obama administration. And by working it from the inside, these lawyers are incrementally but noticeably moving the mainstream in a radical direction. If the president is reelected, he and they will do much more. Like Obama, they haven't moderated; they are changing the society's perception of what "moderate" is -- and not in a healthy direction.

Romney, Romneycare, and the Nomination

Sorry for being mostly AWOL for the last few days, folks (and many thanks to those who noticed!). Past-due deadlines loom and the piper insists on being paid.

For what it's worth, I think there's a lot to be said for what Yuval argues -- too much of the Romney campaign is about how bad Obama is (we've got that), how wanting his competitors are (ditto), and how he's inevitable (so time to get on board, etc., etc.). The latest argument that his rivals can't get the necessary majority is really lame, as Yuval suggests. Quite apart from the stubborn fact that the failure of Rick, Newt, and Ron Paul to get a majority does not give Mitt one, there is something else that really grates. I feel like I'm watching so-so Team A beating so-so Team B in the semifinals of a football tournament. A is telling me that we're in the third quarter and A is far enough ahead that B can no longer win even if B scores on all of its few remaining possessions. I'm thinking, great -- but how does that convince me A is not going to clobbered by Team C? Team C, Obama, may not be particularly good, but is biding its time, resting up for the finals, and while it has weaknesses, A may not be able to exploit them.  

On that last point, as I've said before, I like Mitt but I am worried that Romneycare will render him ineffective in attacking Obamacare, which is our best issue. So I'd like to offer him some friendly advice -- or, rather, urge him to take somebody else's friendly advice.

Grace-Marie Turner has a terrific column at the American Spectator, explaining that much that is bad about Romneycare would not have been in Romneycare if Mitt had had a freer hand. She suggests that instead of praising Romneycare, trying (not very convincingly) to distinguish it from Obamacare, or trying (also not very convincingly) to posit a states' rights rationalization for Romneycare, Mitt ought to explain (a) how he tried to veto some of the worst parts of it but was overridden in the Democrat-controlled legislature, and (b) what Romneycare would have looked like if it had been more in line with the Romney vision of health-care reform.

I am not saying that reading what Grace-Marie wrote turned me into a Romneycare fan or even necessarily a fan of everything Mitt wanted to do but couldn't because Democrats controlled the legislature. Far from it. But it did make me feel a bit better about Romney's prospects as someone who could take the fight to the president on our most crucial issue, Obamacare.

Romney, Romneycare, & the Nomination

Sorry for being mostly AWOL for the last few days, folks (and many thanks to those who noticed!). Past-due deadlines loom and the piper insists on being paid.

For what it's worth, I think there's a lot to be said for what Yuval argues -- too much of the Romney campaign is about how bad Obama is (we've got that), how wanting his competitors are (ditto), and how he's inevitable (so time to get on board, etc., etc.). The latest argument that his rivals can't get the necessary majority is really lame, as Yuval suggests. Quite apart from the stubborn fact that the failure of Rick, Newt, and Ron Paul to get a majority does not give Mitt one, there is something else that really grates. I feel like I'm watching so-so Team A beating so-so Team B in the semifinals of a football tournament. A is telling me that we're in the third quarter and A is far enough ahead that B can no longer win even if B scores on all of its few remaining possessions. I'm thinking, great -- but how does that convince me A is not going to clobbered by Team C? Team C, Obama, may not be particularly good, but is biding its time, resting up for the finals, and while it has weaknesses, A may not be able to exploit them.  

On that last point, as I've said before, I like Mitt but I am worried that Romneycare will render him ineffective in attacking Obamacare, which is our best issue. So I'd like to offer him some friendly advice -- or, rather, urge him to take somebody else's friendly advice.

Grace-Marie Turner has a terrific column at the American Spectator, explaining that much that is bad about Romneycare would not have been in Romneycare if Mitt had had a freer hand. She suggests that instead of praising Romneycare, trying (not very convincingly) to distinguish it from Obamacare, or trying (also not very convincingly) to posit a states' rights rationalization for Romneycare, Mitt ought to explain (a) how he tried to veto some of the worst parts of it but was overridden in the Democrat-controlled legislature, and (b) what Romneycare would have looked like if it had been more in line with the Romney vision of health-care reform.

I am not saying that reading what Grace-Marie wrote turned me into a Romneycare fan or even necessarily a fan of everything Mitt wanted to do but couldn't because Democrats controlled the legislature. Far from it. But it did make me feel a bit better about Romney's prospects as someone who could take the fight to the president on our most crucial issue, Obamacare.

Obama Administration to Congress: You're Irrelevant

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gave testimony in the Senate yesterday that was just breathtaking: asserting that the Obama administration believes it can go to war against Syria by obtaining permission from an international tribunal -- the United Nations and/or NATO -- and that no authorization from Congress is needed.

The video is posted by Breitbart TV. Powerline's John Hinderaker also has it, in conjunction with a good argument that Obama goes even further than Sen. John Kerry's infamous "global test" for the use of force.

Let me say this about that.

1. Secretary Panetta disingenuously conflates two different principles in dodging Sen. Jeff Sessions' questions.

Principle I: No one disputes that the president may act without congressional approval when the national security of the United States is truly threatened -- I think even Ron Paul agrees that if our nation is attacked or is in imminent danger of being attacked, the president is obliged to use whatever force is necessary to overcome our enemies and protect our interests. 

Principle II: No one disputes that, if U.S. interests are so gravely threatened that the use of force is justified, and there is time to assemble a coalition of nations whose interests are similarly threatened, it makes sense to seek the endorsement of relevant international tribunals. 

Panetta, however, mashes these two principles together and comes up with something that everyone should dispute: Namely, that anytime a president decides to use force, regardless of whether the national security of the United States is actually threatened, he just needs to get the approval of an international tribunal -- with no need for congressional authorization, notwithstanding that Congress (our representatives on our behalf) would be expected to pay for the whole thing (with our money).

2. The United States never needs permission from an international tribunal to act in our national defense. Under the Constitution, the only authorization the commander-in-chief needs to make war comes from Congress, which has the power to declare war and the power of the purse. If our national interests are sufficiently threatened that the use of force is appropriate, it may well make political sense to join our allies in seeking a resolution from the U.N. Security Council. But our nation should view that as an endorsement we seek for political purposes, not an authorization we need for legal purposes -- and if the delay in obtaining it threatens operational success, we should be prepared to proceed without it. The U.N. and its Security Council are composed of countries that are hostile to the U.S. and seek to frustrate our policy. We should never concede that they have a check on our power to act in our interests. The only legal check on our military power is the one our Constitution gives to our Congress.

3. I do not agree with those who contend that some talismanic form of "declaration of war" is required before force is authorized -- the Constitution does not say any such thing. Congress can and many times has authorized the use of military force without a formalistic declaration of war. But this does not make the power to declare war irrelevant. The framers meant for Congress to have an important role in the decision to go to war. The presumption is that the president needs congressional authorization to use force, and this requirement is only waived when we are attacked or our vital interests are so imperiled that seeking pre-approval from Congress would increase the danger to our country (for example, because of the time it would take or because publicity would compromise the secrecy needed for military success).

4. When, as is the case in Syria, and as was the case in Libya, no vital interests of the United States are at stake, the president must seek authorization from Congress before legitimately using force. My own view is that the Constitution requires this authorization -- although scholars for whom I have great respect, like John Yoo, disagree. But regardless of our legal disagreement, there is little or no dispute that presidents should seek congressional authorization as a matter of policy. The less vital the American interests are in given a situation, the more important it is for an administration to explain its rationale for using force and obtain political support for achieving the objectives the administration seeks to achieve. Military expeditions that lack political support at home are apt to fail, and failure can be catastrophic. That means going to Congress for authorization. 

5. It would be preposterous to argue that imposing a no-fly zone in Syria by using or threatening to use military force is not an act of war. Moreover, since Syria is not being attacked from outside its borders, a no-fly zone does not make much sense ... unless its real purpose, as in Libya, would be to attack assets of the regime on the ground. If we were to support military operations in Syria, that would be making war, no matter that the Obama administration would attempt to rationalize it as something less than war.

6. Unfortunately, Republicans continue to take their national security cues from the McCain wing of the party. This wing substantially agrees with Secretary Panetta's wayward legal analysis. If the GOP wants to shake the "stupid party" label, it needs to rethink things -- or maybe I should say think about them for the first time.

Don Imus, House Pet

In 2007, radio host Don Imus called the Rutgers women's basketball team (then composed of eight black and two white players) a group of "nappy headed hos." The women hadn't done anything provocative -- no claims that society needed to pay up so they could play sports, much less that a Catholic University should be denied religious liberty and coerced into paying for contraceptives. Imus was just being Imus -- gratuitously insulting the women to try to be funny, just like he routinely insults people in the public eye to try to be funny. Sometimes he has a reason and sometimes he is funny, but many times he hasn't and he's not.

When Imus was fired by MSNBC and his radio station, WFAN in New York, many conservatives went to bat for him. What he'd said was condemnable, and it was condemned in very strong terms. But the punishment did not fit the crime: Nobody believed that Imus really thought the women were as he described them, and to destroy a career over a clumsy attempt at humor -- one that was only marginally more offensive than Imus's usual fare -- would have been wildly disproportionate.

It wasn't long before Imus had a national radio and TV gig again. And because he was still Imus, it also wasn't long before he was using the program to take shots at all the fair-weather friends who instantly turned into pious critics the second the media pile-on against him began. They weren't stand-up, solid guys -- the kind Don Imus would have you believe Don Imus is.

So naturally, Imus -- a recovering alcoholic and drug addict -- ripped Rush Limbaugh this morning as a "fat, gutless, pill-popping loser." Perfect. Of course, as Rush eloquently explained today in publicly apologizing, yet again, to Sandra Fluke, his error in judgment was to succumb to a temptation at odds with the personality fans have come to know, and the person friends have come to know, over the past 25 years: the temptation to resort to the base language of unfounded personal insult -- the language that is the Left's stock-in-trade and that Imus often seems unable to complete a sentence without. The post-Rutgers Imus, much like the pre-Rutgers Imus, is a well-trained house pet. He's got down perfectly when you need to grovel, when you can afford to be sanctimonious, and which targets are safe for his bile-laced tirades. What a profile in courage.

Here's the pathetic thing about this episode: We've been given the playbook and still we don't see we're being played. "Pick the target," Saul Alinksy said, "freeze it, personalize it, polarize it." So we're talking about Rush, the target over which the Left obsesses because he is so effective -- he is able to reach and to teach because, as he noted today, his good-natured humor can be biting and illuminating without being nasty. Meantime, it has long been the law of the United States that the existence of a right does not come with a companion right to make somebody else pay for it. And it has similarly long been our tradition, enshrined in our law, that government must respect the realm of conscience. It is President Obama's purpose to eradicate these principles, to usher in a new order in which "rights" become not what government must refrain from doing to you but rather what government must do for you -- meaning: what government may, of its choosing, confiscate from one group of Americans and redistribute to the Americans it favors, or, indeed, to others it prefers.

While Don Imus and the rest of the herd bleats over Rush, that is what is taking root. And if you don't like it, prepare to be the next target.

Romney Urged Obama to Adopt the Individual Health-Care Mandate

At BuzzFeed, Andrew Kaczynski breaks the news that, in a 2009 op-ed for USAToday, Mitt Romney encouraged President Obama that he'd be well-served by adopting elements of the Massachusetts Romneycare plan, particularly the individual mandate. [Hat tip, Erick Erickson at Red State.]

In the context of urging on the president "the lessons we learned in Massachusetts" that "could help Washington find" a better way to reform health care, Governor Romney explained, "We established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages 'free riders' to take responsibility for themselves, rather than pass their medical costs on others."

This seems very significant. A number of us have expressed concerns that Romney cannot effectively confront Obama on Obamacare, the wrongheadedness and unpopularity of which make it the Republicans' most crucial issue in the campaign. In response, Romney posits that he is a Tenth Amendment guy who saw what he was doing as right for his state, and perhaps other states, but certainly not a national model to be adopted at the federal level. For what it's worth, I've contended that those claims are utterly unpersuasive (some are downright frivolous). But that hardly matters now. The op-ed demonstrates that Mitt regarded Romneycare precisely as a model the federal government ought to adopt, and that the "tax penalties" by which Massachusetts's individual mandate are enforced were a good fit for Congress and the Obama administration to impose by federal law.

Besides the individual mandate, Governor Romney's op-ed also proposed government-managed cures to address the government-caused cost spiral generated by the government-designed fee-for-service structure. Patients, he suggested, should be "required to pay a portion of their bill, except for certain conditions" -- to be chosen, of course, by the government. Providers would be "paid an annual fixed fee for the primary care of an individual and a separate fixed fee for the treatment of a specific condition" -- said fixed fees to be fixed by the government.

Nowhere does the op-ed suggest that government involvement is the principal cause of cost inflation, and that maybe prices would come down if people paid all their ordinary health expenses out of pocket and had insurance, purchased in a truly free market, for catastrophes and other high-expense conditions. (Romney does argue that the current un-free market in health insurance is preferable to a "single-payer" system of government-provided coverage.) Nowhere does the op-ed consider whether the federal government's role ought to be limited to policing against interstate fraud, with the states left to deal with other issues -- without federal interference and without passing the costs of their solutions along to the rest of the country. And nowhere does the op-ed make any mention of the Constitution. 

I've asked this question before -- and it's one that ought to be addressed by all the GOP candidates, not just Mitt. But while Romney made much of Rick Perry's assertion that Medicare is unconstitutional, no one ever asked Romney to explain his theory for why it is constitutional. Do the GOP candidates all accept the premise that the federal government has an open-ended power to do anything in the "General Welfare," unrestrained by the specifically enumerated powers assigned to Congress in Article I -- none of which endows Leviathan with authority over the regulation of health care.

Romney Urged Obama to Adopt the Individual Healthcare Mandate

At BuzzFeed, Andrew Kaczynski breaks the news that, in a 2009 op-ed for USAToday, Mitt Romney encouraged President Obama that he'd be well-served by adopting elements of the Massachusetts Romneycare plan, particularly the individual mandate. [Hat tip, Erick Erickson at Red State.]

In the context of urging on the president "the lessons we learned in Massachusetts" that "could help Washington find" a better way to reform healthcare, Gov. Romney explained, "[W]e established incentives for those who were uninsured to buy insurance. Using tax penalties, as we did, or tax credits, as others have proposed, encourages 'free riders' to take responsibility for themselves, rather than pass their medical costs on others."

This seems very significant. A number of us have expressed concerns that Romney cannot effectively confront Obama on Obamacare, the wrongheadedness and unpopularity of which make it the Republicans' most crucial issue in the campaign. In response, Romney posits that he is a Tenth Amendment guy who saw what he was doing as right for his state, and perhaps other states, but certainly not a national model to be adopted at the federal level. For what it's worth, I've contended that those claims are utterly unpersuasive (some are downright frivolous). But that hardly matters now. The op-ed demonstrates that Mitt regarded Romneycare precisely as a model the federal government ought to adopt, and that the "tax penalties" by which Massachusetts's individual mandate are enforced were a good fit for Congress and the Obama administration to impose by federal law.

Besides the individual mandate, Gov. Romney's op-ed also proposed government-managed cures to address the government-caused cost spiral generated by the government-designed fee-for-service structure. Patients, he suggested, should be "required to pay a portion of their bill, except for certain conditions" -- to be chosen, of course, by the government. Providers would be "paid an annual fixed fee for the primary care of an individual and a separate fixed fee for the treatment of a specific condition" -- said fixed fees to be fixed by the government.

Nowhere does the op-ed suggest that government involvement is the principal cause of cost inflation, and that maybe prices would come down if people paid all their ordinary health expenses out of pocket and had insurance, purchased in a truly free market, for catastrophes and other high-expense conditions. (Romney does argue that the current un-free market in health insurance is preferable to a "single-payer" system of government-provided coverage.) Nowhere does the op-ed consider whether the federal government's role ought to be limited to policing against interstate fraud, with the states left to deal with other issues -- without federal interference and without passing the costs of their solutions along to the rest of the country. And nowhere does the op-ed make any mention of the Constitution. 

I've asked this question before -- and it's one that ought to be addressed by all the GOP candidates, not just Mitt. But while Romney made much of Rick Perry's assertion that Medicare is unconstitutional, no one ever asked Romney to explain his theory for why it is constitutional. Do the GOP candidates all accept the premise that the federal government has an open-ended power to do anything in the "General Welfare," unrestrained by the specifically enumerated powers assigned to Congress in Article I -- none of which endows Leviathan with authority over the regulation of healthcare.

It's a Pity Somebody Has to Win

Asked about the Iran-Iraq war that stretched for eight ghastly years after breaking out in 1980, Henry Kissinger is said to have quipped, “It’s a pity they both can’t lose.”

The pity is that we have lost that exquisite wisdom  concerning our national interest, despite a two-decade road to hell paved by good intentions -- at least compassionate intentions -- from Kosovo to Kandahar. If that isn’t clear enough from the latest killings of American soldiers stuck like sitting ducks between the Afghan Taliban and other Afghan Islamists, all doubt is removed by Elliott Abrams, the longtime Republican foreign-policy solon who served as a top National Security Council official during the heady days of the Bush “Freedom Agenda.” “Can there be a group anywhere in the world today more disappointed in United States foreign policy than those fighting the Syrian regime?” Abrams, a distinguished public servant whom I admire, asked this week in a post on the Corner.

#ad#Yeah: How about the American people?

Our entanglement in Afghanistan is now reduced to pleading with Taliban decapitators to come to the negotiating table while the Afghan forces our soldiers train and the Afghan civilians our soldiers protect kill our men and women -- and while officials of the government we prop up echo their clerics’ exhortations to violent jihad until our infidel forces vacate the country.

And Iraq? Destroying the Saddam Hussein regime’s capacity to project power and facilitate terror took just a few weeks, but based on the second Bush inaugural’s mellifluous nonsense that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” we stuck around another eight years to try to turn the place into a functioning democracy and counterterrorism ally. After more than 4,000 lives were lost and $800 billion expended, we have left behind an Iran-dominated sharia state best known for its internecine Islamic barbarism, its persecution of religious minorities, and its Islamist prime minister, who clings to power despite having lost the last election.

In Gaza and Lebanon, we called for “the success of liberty” through “democratic” elections -- democratic in the sense that the third grade holds a referendum to elect a class president, nothing resembling a culture of Western democracy. What we got for our trouble was the installation of Hamas and Hezbollah into positions of governmental power -- unreconstructed jihadists now swaddled in the cloak of democratic legitimacy. In Kosovo, we raced to recognize an Islamic government, eviscerating the Westphalian order’s bedrock principle that the borders of a nation -- even Serbia -- must be respected, while validating ethnic cleansing and the destructive notion that Islamic solidarity takes precedence over national sovereignty. In Libya, we threw overboard a regime that, for all its notorious faults, was lauded by our government as a key ally in the fight against jihadist terror and nuclear proliferation, abetting its replacement by a sharia regime in which anti-American terrorists hold key positions. And in Egypt, we pulled the rug from beneath the pro-American Hosni Mubarak’s feet and ended up with the Muslim Brotherhood -- extremists being pulled in a more extreme direction by the electoral success of still more doctrinaire Islamic supremacists. Meanwhile, Coptic Christians flee a country that is no longer even marginally safe for non-Muslims.

#page#Haven’t we done quite enough?

Apparently not, according to Mr. Abrams. He is exercised because the Obama administration, after bungling Egypt and Libya, is not of a mind to leap with both feet into Syria, the sharia ascendancy’s next stop. To be sure, Bashar al-Assad is a savage dictator in the mold of his late father, and the regime has slaughtered thousands of Syrians as it clings to power. This, in the Freedom Agenda mind, triggers an American obligation to intervene, bereft of any companion American national-security obligation to concern ourselves with what might follow after Assad falls.

#ad#Abrams thus accuses Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of “smearing” the Syrian “opposition.” (After the Libya misadventure, “rebels” is so de trop that “opposition” is apparently the euphemism in vogue for the 2012 Arab Spring.) Smearing them how? Madame Secretary had the temerity to point out that Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman Zawahiri, has thrown al-Qaeda’s support (which is to say, its mass-murder proficiency) behind the opposition, as have those proud democrats at Hamas -- who have just vacated their longtime Syrian redoubt for the comfier climes of Egypt and Qatar. (Hamas, being the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, gravitates naturally to the safe havens of a fledgling Muslim Brotherhood government and the playpen of Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, its sharia maestro.)

Certainly one could accuse Mrs. Clinton of being disingenuous. After all, what she is saying about Syria was true of Libya -- where the Obama administration nevertheless intervened even though the ink was not yet dry on the State Department’s request that Congress increase funding for the Qaddafi regime. But she could only rightly be condemned of a smear if you buy Abrams’s delusion.

Concededly, that has heretofore been the Obama delusion, too, just as it was the regnant bipartisan delusion of administrations stretching back 20 years ago, back when Mrs. Clinton was still baking cookies and fixing healthcare. It is the lunatic idea that the Muslim ummah consists of about two dozen terrorists engaged in “anti-Islamic” violence, regrettably strewn among 1.5 billion moderates yearning for freedom through a peaceful political process.

The reality is more like what we’re seeing in Egypt, where four out of five citizens want some measure of repressive sharia law. Or the Palestinian territories, where a decisive majority denies Israel’s right to exist -- as do Muslims throughout the region, including in made-in-America Iraq. Or Afghanistan, where being a Muslim apostate is a capital offense under the constitution midwifed by the State Department, and where the accidental burning of the Koran is deemed just cause for a murder spree -- and for calls by Qaradawi’s International Union of Muslim Scholars for the American soldiers, not the Afghan murderers, to be punished.

One need not carry a brief for Assad to take notice that it is not just al-Qaeda and Hamas backing the “opposition.” The hugely influential Qaradawi backs them, too. That is because the backbone of the opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood. Yes, Syria is a more diverse country than Libya. The regime is composed of an Alawite Muslim minority -- regarded as heretical by Qaradawi -- and it is backed by Shiite Iran. Its opposition includes an ethnic, religious, and ideological potpourri of Druze Muslims, Kurds, Armenians, Christians, Marxists, a few liberal democrats, some disgruntled former regime officials, and even a smattering of Jews. But all that said, three-quarters of the country’s 23 million people are Sunni Muslims -- the Brotherhood’s breeding grounds.

As the Wall Street Journal outlined in a lengthy 2007 report, the Brotherhood’s influence is so pervasive that Bush administration heavyweights like Elliott Abrams had to swallow hard and deal with them if they wanted to cultivate Assad’s opposition. They rationalized that this was worth doing by coupling their dreamy sharia-democracy promotion with the cold calculation that toppling Assad would be a severe blow to Iran’s ambitions.

While more admirably focused on American national interests, the second theory was, and is, wrong. Replacing Assad’s regime with the Brotherhood is not necessarily an improvement as far as American interests are concerned -- they are both deeply anti-American and the Brotherhood is even more vested in Israel’s destruction. But that aside, the premise is wayward. When America’s enemies face off against each other, it is not in our interest to choose one over the other. As they battle, they weaken each other -- and that has already had the salutary effect of weakening Iran, which now sees not only Assad teetering but its tenuous ties with Hamas fraying.

Of course it is tragic that some innocent victims and authentic liberal democrats are caught in the carnage. It is not our burden, however, to prevent that or to become enmeshed in other countries’ civil wars – not when there is no vital American interest in one side's prevailing over the other. It is certainly not in the vital interests of a country weary of war, out of patience with Muslim madness, and $15 trillion in debt to further insinuate itself so that anti-American dictators can be replaced by anti-American Islamists.

It’s a pity that they can’t both lose. But if they have to savage someone, better each other than us.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .