Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 3

Shhhh, Don’t Tell Anyone: Hamas Won

Barack Obama brought enough Chicago-style community organizing to Israel that Benjamin Netanyahu knew what he would have to do. If he hoped to keep the tepid support of his country’s essential but icy ally, Israel’s prime minister would have to do what he’d spent nearly three years steadfastly refusing to do. Netanyahu would have to apologize to a state sponsor of terrorism that openly, notoriously, and enthusiastically supports Hamas.

He would have to apologize to Turkey -- to its prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Obama’s close friend and confidant.

#ad#He would have to apologize for military action taken in his country’s righteous defense against violent jihadists with close connections to Erdogan’s ruling party and, seamlessly, to the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as al-Qaeda.

As I recount in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, the violent jihadists in question were from the grotesquely named “Humanitarian Relief Foundation” or IHH (İnsan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve İnsani Yardım Vakfı). The IHH is an Islamic “charity” based and basted in the Islamic supremacism of Erdogan’s Turkey. It is part of the Union of Good (sometimes referred to as the “Union for Good”), a jihadist umbrella enterprise that was designated by the United States government, during the Bush administration, as an international terrorist organization. Under the direction of a top Muslim Brotherhood honcho, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Union of Good’s main purpose is to transfer funds to Hamas, another designated terrorist organization. Besides being the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch, Hamas boasts Turkey, our NATO “ally,” as its chief benefactor.

In late May 2010, IHH terrorists attempted to break Israel’s lawful naval blockade of the Gaza Strip. The blockade is necessary to stem the flow of weapons to Hamas, Gaza’s rulers having responded to Israel’s painful peace offering -- its withdrawal in 2005 from territory it had captured in a war of Arab aggression -- by stepping up their terror campaign against the Jewish state. In seeking to break the blockade, an act of war, the IHH was willfully abetted by the Turkish government.

Israeli officials had pleaded with their Turkish counterparts to prevent the terrorists from embarking on their “peace flotilla.” Members of Erdogan’s government and party not only turned a deaf ear; they sold the jihadists the offending vessel, the Mavi Marmara. They allowed the jihadists -- armed with flares, night-vision goggles, 150 bulletproof vests, 200 gas masks, several dozen slingshots, 200 knives, 20 axes, 50 wooden clubs, 100 assorted iron bars, etc. -- to board the ship without inspection. When the inevitable high-seas confrontation occurred, the Israeli Defense Forces tried to subdue the terrorists with paintball guns. The IDF resorted to lethal force only after being premeditatedly and savagely attacked -- with several of its sailors seriously wounded. In that response, nine of the terrorists were killed.

Squeezed by Obama, Netanyahu would have to apologize for the killing of those terrorists.

More often than not these last five years, Israel’s prime minister has felt President Obama’s heel on the back of his neck. In stark contrast, Turkey’s prime minister has enjoyed Obama’s warm embrace. In Ankara, Erdogan hosts the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah as foreign dignitaries. He accuses Israel of turning Gaza into a “concentration camp.” Only days before Netanyahu’s coerced apology, Erdogan -- whose history of anti-Semitism is infamous -- publicly pronounced that Zionism is a “crime against humanity.”

This heinous accusation, “crime against humanity,” has become something of a verbal tic with Erdogan. He cavalierly applies it to Israel’s self-defense from thousands of jihadist rockets fired into its territory, and to the suggestion by European governments that the millions of Muslims who’ve immigrated to the West ought to assimilate into their new societies. Nevertheless, Obama openly regards Erdogan as one of his most trusted partners on the world stage. “The bottom line is that we find ourselves in frequent agreement upon a wide range of issues,” said Obama of Erdogan in March 2012, upon seeking him out at a South Korea summit for advice on the crisis in Syria, the tumult in Egypt, the nukes in Iran -- even the challenges of raising daughters.

With Obama on the phone egging him on, Netanyahu abased himself. Not only did he apologize to Turkey, he further capitulated to Erdogan’s demand that Israel pay compensation to the Mavi Marmara “victims.” After the apology, Erdogan briefed his Hamas confederates and announced he would be visiting them in Gaza next month. Predictably, he has since announced that Netanyahu’s humiliating act of contrition will not be sufficient to restore diplomatic relations between the two nations. Just as predictably, other Islamic states are now preparing demands for apologies and compensation for sundry exercises of Israeli self-defense against jihadist terror.

#page#There has been no shortage of speculation about why Israel caved. Perhaps it was anxiety over Iranian nukes and Syrian tumult -- the hope that rapprochement with Turkey would give Washington more maneuvering room to protect Israel’s interests. Perhaps there were financial considerations, including billions potentially to be made in the exportation of natural gas. None of these explanations is very satisfying. But that is beside the point. For Americans, what matters is not what this episode says about shifts in Israeli policy. It is the sea-change in U.S. counterterrorism that most concerns us.

#ad#We now know that Hamas has won.

In 2011, Erdogan made a startling pronouncement on Charlie Rose’s PBS program:

Let me give you a very clear message. I don’t see Hamas as a terror organization. Hamas is a political party. And it is an organization. It is a resistance movement trying to protect its country under occupation. So we should not mix terrorist organizations with such an organization.

Really? Is this what we now mean by regular politics: In the 1987 charter by which it proclaimed its existence, Hamas explained that it formed in order to “join its hands with those of all jihad fighters for the purpose of liberating Palestine.” Clarifying that Hamas is “one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers#...#the Muslim Brotherhood Movement … the largest Islamic movement in the modern era,” the charter elaborates:

Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave, so much so that it will need all the loyal efforts we can wield, to be followed by further steps and reinforced by successive battalions from the multifarious Arab and Islamic world, until the enemies are defeated and Allah’s victory prevails.

Invoking Islamic scripture, the charter further asserts:

Hamas has been looking forward to implement Allah’s promise whatever time it might take. The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him! [Citing authoritative hadiths.]

In its 25 years, Hamas has made good on its promise to kill. Yet Erdogan has been telling Obama since early 2009 that the United States must “redefine” what it means by “terror and terrorist organizations.” It is increasingly obvious that portraying Hamas as a “political party” and a “resistance movement,” rather than a terrorist organization, is one among the “wide range of issues” on which the president finds himself in agreement with the Turkish prime minister.

Yes, nominally, it is still a crime in the United States to provide material support to Hamas. But these days you have a better chance of being prosecuted under those immigration statutes the administration declines to enforce.

Hamas prosecutions went out with the 2008 Holy Land Foundation trial. Since then, the investigation of outfits proved by the Bush Justice Department to be cogs in the Muslim Brotherhood conspiracy to fund and otherwise encourage Hamas’s jihad against Israel have been dropped. Worse, some of those outfits, such as the Islamic Society of North America, are regular guests at the Obama White House. They are consulted in the formulation of Obama foreign policy, which -- lo and behold -- just happens to favor lavish financial and military support for the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt. As for Obama national-security policy, Islamic-supremacists have been invited to censor the materials used to train our law-enforcement and intelligence agents.

Realistically, how could anyone expect the Obama Justice Department to prosecute the financial support of Hamas when the Obama administration is actively engaged in the financial support of Hamas -- sluicing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, fully aware that it is under Hamas’s totalitarian control. In this, too, Obama is in concord with Erdogan, whose regime has similarly backed Hamas with hundreds of millions of dollars -- news that comes to us courtesy of Turkey’s grateful friends at the Union of Good.

Until 2009, U.S. policy was straightforward: Hamas was a terrorist organization and America would not deal with it unless and until it acknowledged Israel’s right to exist and convincingly renounced violence. All that has changed, though. Under Obama’s governance, Islamic-supremacists are bankrolled even as they act on their pledge to destroy Israel. Israel, in turn, is expected to apologize.

Our military’s killing of Osama bin Laden, complemented by the controversial drone campaign, has given President Obama cover. The occasional terrorist is taken out, the administration beats its chest, and few notice that al-Qaeda is resurgent, that the administration spends far more time appeasing Islamists than killing terrorists, and that Hamas has won.

Welcome to the next four years.

— 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 .

Tony Blair's Islamic-Supremacist Life Peer At It Again

Speaking of the Islamic sheikhdown racket from the United Kingdom, how nice to see Nazir Ahmed back in the news. When we last encountered this native Pakistan Islamic-supremacist, made a life peer by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1998, Lord Ahmed was putting out a bounty of £10 million for the capture of President Obama and President Bush in retaliation for the United States government's announcement of a $10 million reward for aid in the apprehension of Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, emir of the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization (or is it political resistance organization?). Now, the Right Honorable Lord Ahmed has been suspended by Labour for blaming -- what else? -- Jewish control of the media for the twelve-week jail sentence he received for dangerous driving.

On Christmas Day, 2007, Lord Ahmed crashed his car into the stationary car of Martyn Gombar, killing him. Ahmed blamed the court's light prison sentence (he was looking at a possibility of two years' incarceration) not on the fact that he was texting as he sped along the M-1 before the crash but "because I went to Gaza to support Palestinians. My Jewish friends who own newspapers and TV channels opposed this.''

As the Telegraph reports, Lord Ahmed has apologized for getting caught making these comments, emphasizing that he is "particularly sorry to all my colleagues in the House of Lords and in the House of Commons because one thing many of them know is that I'm not anti-Semitic or a conspiracy theorist.''

Heavens, no.

Public Good and the General Welfare

Our Exchequer's excellent post on "Public Health and Public Trust" addresses the relative propriety of types of federal spending from the point of view of economics. It has me wondering whether this could help us identify and enforce constitutional spending limits.

Kevin argues that that "when government spends money, it should spend money on public goods." This makes sense because, as Kevin explains, "public good" is a term with a fixed meaning in economics -- it is a good that is available to everyone without exclusion and whose use by some does not deny it to others (e.g., missile defense and border patrol, but not entitlements).

This question of how Congress should spend money is different from, though closely connected to, the question of how Congress may spend money. As I've noted here before (see, e.g., here), Congress's authority to tax and spend is limited -- in theory -- by the Constitution's General Welfare Clause, found in the preamble to article I, section 8. Unfortunately, there has never been consensus on what "general welfare" means.

Hamilton claimed that it was essentially boundless -- close to the "stuff that is good for the public" or "stuff that the public likes" that has gotten us into the debt hole where we find ourselves and that, Kevin points out, is not what "public good" means. Then there is the Madison/Jefferson interpretation that I prefer, which holds that the preamble's reference to "general welfare" is not a standalone, general grant of spending authority but is limited by the specifically enumerated powers of Congress that follow in section 8, (The theory is that, besides being financially ruinous, a general grant of authority would have defeated the purpose of specifying -- and thus limiting -- what Congress was authorized to do with public money, so it could not have been what the framers intended). Finally, there is the Monroe middle position: "general welfare" is not limited to spending in furtherance of section 8's enumerated powers but neither is it boundless; it must instead be "general" -- meaning beneficial to all citizens, not to some at the expense of others.

I'd be interested to know what Kevin thinks, but it seems to me that "public good" is pretty close to Monroe's construction of "general welfare" -- the construction the New Deal-era Supreme Court seemed to adopt in United States v. Butler. The flaw in the latter, I believe history proves, is that "general" is such an elastic term (especially when complemented by jurisprudence requiring courts to accord congressional acts a presumption of constitutionality) that it is illusory as a limitation on Congress -- we end up with Hamilton anyway (a fact that Hamilton himself recognized). Is "public good" just as elastic, or would its standing as a term of art in economics make it a more meaningful limitation on congressional spending?

British Ambassador Meets With Peace-Loving Supreme Guide of Muslim Brotherhood

The Middle East Monitor reports that James Watt, the British Ambassador to Egypt, took great pleasure in meeting in Cairo with Mohammed Badi, the Supreme Guide of the Muslm Brotherhood. For his part, Badi reportedly "thanked the ambassador for his visit and praised his condemnation of all forms of violence," stressing that "the Muslim Brotherhood denounces violence."

Sigh ... It was just a few months ago, as I recount in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, that Badi was calling for violent jihad for the purpose of destroying Israel: 

“Every Muslim,” he declared, “will be asked about the Zionists’ usurpation of al-Aqsa Mosque. Why did he not seek to recover it, and wage jihad in [Allah’s] way? Did he not care about the fatwa of the ulema [scholars] of the Muslims: ‘Jihad of self and money to recover al Aqsa is a duty on every Muslim’?” He exhorted “all Muslim rulers” to make “the Palestinian cause a pivotal issue,” and predicted new “freedom flotillas” would break the “murdering Zionist criminals.”

These remarks were no aberration. The Global Muslim Brotherhood Daily Report related in November that Badi reminded Muslims that "jihad is obligatory" in response to President Mohamed Morsi's indication that Egypt's new Islamist government, at least for now, will continue to abide by the terms of the 1979 Camp David peace pact with Israel. Alluding to Israel, Badi explained at the time that "the enemy knows nothing but the language of force."

Moreover, as Spring Fever elaborates:

In October 2010, just before the “Arab Spring” dominos started falling in Tunis, the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, Mohammed Badi, [gave] a speech calling for violent jihad against the United States. Specifically, Badi admonished that Muslims must remember “Allah’s commandment to wage jihad for His sake with [their] money and lives, so that Allah’s word will reign supreme and the infidels’ word will be inferior.” Applying this injunction, Badi exclaimed that jihad, or “resistance,” “is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny.” On went the invective: The United States had been wounded by jihadists in Iraq and Afghanistan; thus, Badi gleefully surmised, America “is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise.”

As frequently noted here, the Brotherhood's Palestinian branch is the terrorist organization Hamas, the promotion of whose jihad against Israel is a top Brotherhood priority -- such that the Brotherhood is vigorously campaigning (with alarming success) to have Western governments accept Hamas as a "political movement" engaged in "resistance," rather than a jihadist movement engaged in terrorism. Even if you buy that nonsense, the Brotherhood quite obviously does not reject violence, regardless of how its leaders pretend to "denounce" it.

It is well-known that the Brotherhood lies about its intentions and methods -- indeed, that it believes strategic lying is both scripturally endorsed and a key to the advancement of Islamic supremacism. What is not clear is why the West is so anxious to be deceived.

Re: Re: Married by the Judge

Mike, I hear you, but I still think we have to identify the system in which the bug/feature lies.

Clearly, if you're a movement progressive, the burden of swaying one lawyer your way is more appealing than that of convincing the electorate that has to live with the decision. But I don't believe Marbury is what creates that opportunity -- not in the main. Marbury asserts that it is the task of the judiciary to say, definitively, what the law is. That, however, is only if there is a case or controversy properly before the court. For the most part, the Constitution leaves up to the political branches to decide what issues are grist for judicial resolution.

Seems to me that the question in a country that is supposedly center-right is: Why are we content to allow all major issues to be decided by unaccountable judges if we have at our disposal the means to take issues out of the judges' hands? The only answer I can come up with is that, for all the complaining our elected representatives do about judicial arrogance, they don't perceive any benefit to be had in doing something about it. If I'm right, that says more about us than it does about the judges.

Why Are Nine Glorified Lawyers Defining Marriage?

Mark, you and Paul Mirengoff are exactly right to bemoan the absurdity of a system in which what Paul describes as "nine glorified lawyers" get to define the meaning of an ancient institution that is the fundamental building block of society. I've dealt with this in the context of national defense's judicialization, which is similar: It shapes a fundamental aspect of sovereignty; it involves principles and customs many centuries older than the United States; and, therefore, it amounts to a transfer of the body politic's core decision-making from politically accountable officials to the branch of government insulated from politics -- a self-defeating result for a people that fancies itself free and self-determining.

Although this is the system we have, it is not the system we were started with. For the most part, the Constitution makes Congress the master of the jurisdiction of the federal courts; indeed, there would not be district and appellate federal courts (other than the Supreme Court) except for Congress's establishment of them. Congress could enact a law tomorrow that removed the power of the federal courts to rule on questions concerning marriage. Such a statute would be consistent with assurances by proponents of the Constitution's adoption that, as Madison put it:  

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

During the primary season, Newt Gingrich tried to make judicial overreach a campaign issue. He offered a number of proposals that didn't get the attention they deserved -- in part because some of his ideas were unsound, as I said at the time. The better proposals were geared toward encouraging Congress to use its constitutional authority to rein in the judges -- not because lawmakers are smarter than judges but because (a) they are accountable to voters and (b) when they get things wrong, it is easier to amend or repeal a bad statute than it is to undo a bad court ruling. A Congress that used its power to limit the subject-matter jurisdiction of the courts would free us from dependence on which side of bed the swing justices arose from on that day. (I say "swing justices" -- plural -- because the Obamacare decision illustrates that Justice Kennedy is not alone.)

Sadly, the chance that great public questions will be removed from judicial resolution is vanishingly small -- witness how Newt was savaged for daring to suggest it. In part, this is because judges can be willful. As I noted in writing about Newt's proposals, courts have ignored occasional congressional efforts to limit their jurisdiction, and the political branches have acquiesced in these power grabs. But I daresay Congress, more than the courts, is where the problem chiefly lies. Lawmakers often do not want to be accountable for hard decisions. Moreover, because the legal community is more leftist than the public, progressive lawmakers often realize their agenda is better advanced by steering issues to the courts (e.g., by writing ambiguous or otherwise sloppy laws) -- judicial gloss may result in law that leans more to the left than anything the lawmaker could have gotten passed. The bigger Leviathan gets, the safer the incumbents get, the less engaged the public is, the more incentive lawmakers and presidents have to pass the buck.

For the most part, decisions the courts have no business making for us wind up in the judges' laps because we choose not to avail ourselves, through our political representatives, of the power to govern -- power that is there for the taking. In this, as in so may other things, we've grown content to be dependents. 

Why Nine Glorified Lawyers Defining Marriage?

Mark, you and Paul Mirengoff are exactly right to bemoan the absurdity of a system in which what Paul describes as "nine glorified lawyers" get to define the meaning of an ancient institution that is the fundamental building block of society. I've dealt with this in the context of national defense's judicialization, which is similar: It shapes a fundamental aspect of sovereignty; it involves principles and customs many centuries older than the United States; and, therefore, it amounts to a transfer of the body politic's core decision-making from politically accountable officials to the branch of government insulated from politics -- a self-defeating result for a people that fancies itself free and self-determining.

Although this is the system we have, it is not the system we were started with. For the most part, the Constitution makes Congress the master of the jurisdiction of the federal courts; indeed, there would not be district and appellate federal courts (other than the Supreme Court) except for Congress's establishment of them. Congress could enact a law tomorrow that removed the power of the federal courts to rule on questions concerning marriage. Such a statute would be consistent with assurances by proponents of the Constitution's adoption that, as Madison put it:  

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government, are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

During the primary season, Newt Gingrich tried to make judicial overreach a campaign issue. He offered a number of proposals that didn't get the attention they deserved -- in part because some of his ideas were unsound, as I said at the time. The better proposals were geared toward encouraging Congress to use its constitutional authority to rein in the judges -- not because lawmakers are smarter than judges but because (a) they are accountable to voters and (b) when they get things wrong, it is easier to amend or repeal a bad statute than it is to undo a bad court ruling. A Congress that used its power to limit the subject-matter jurisdiction of the courts would free us from dependence on which side of bed the swing justices arose from on that day. (I say "swing justices" -- plural -- because the Obamacare decision illustrates that Justice Kennedy is not alone.)

Sadly, the chance that great public questions will be removed from judicial resolution is vanishingly small -- witness how Newt was savaged for daring to suggest it. In part, this is because judges can be willful. As I noted in writing about Newt's proposals, courts have ignored occasional congressional efforts to limit their jurisdiction, and the political branches have acquiesced in these power grabs. But I daresay Congress, more than the courts, is where the problem chiefly lies. Lawmakers often do not want to be accountable for hard decisions. Moreover, because the legal community is more leftist than the public, progressive lawmakers often realize their agenda is better advanced by steering issues to the courts (e.g., by writing ambiguous or otherwise sloppy laws) -- judicial gloss may result in law that leans more to the left than anything the lawmaker could have gotten passed. The bigger Leviathan gets, the safer the incumbents get, the less engaged the public is, the more incentive lawmakers and presidents have to pass the buck.

For the most part, decisions the courts have no business making for us wind up in the judges' laps because we choose not to avail ourselves, through our political representatives, of the power to govern -- power that is there for the taking. In this, as in so may other things, we've grown content to be dependents. 

Two Sides of Rand Paul

After listening to Rand Paul speak at National Review’s Washington office, Bob Costa concludes that the senator is leading one side of what is “nothing less than a fight for the soul of the GOP on foreign policy.” Let’s hope so.

Whether what emerges is also a conservative foreign policy depends as much on which Senator Paul wins as on whether he wins. If it is the Rand Paul who perceived the common hegemonic denominator between Soviet totalitarianism and Islamic-supremacist totalitarianism in a provocative speech at the Heritage Foundation last month, there is cause for optimism. Not as hope-inspiring is the Rand Paul portrayed in Bob’s NRO report. It is already clear, though, that Senator Paul’s agitations serve conservative ends more consistently than does the erratic adventurism of his opposite numbers in the GOP’s intramural brawl: John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

#ad#Bob describes these Beltway establishment figures as “the foreign-policy grandees in the Senate Republican conference,” standard-bearers of what is said to be “the Bush-Cheney approach to foreign policy.” The latter claim is not entirely fair, particularly to the Cheney component of the ledger; but that is a story for another day. For now, the point -- mine, not Costa’s -- is that Senators McCain and Graham are not conservatives. They are progressive-lite populists who bend with the wind, an occupational hazard of service to a fuzzy global-stability agenda rather than to vital American interests pursued within a constitutional, limited-government framework.

Paul proudly claims the conservative tag that seems to embarrass the media-manic McCain except during those dolorous primary seasons when even a maverick must appeal to the GOP base. And once Paul outmaneuvered them (and the Obama administration) in the recent dust-up over U.S. drone-missile strikes, McCain and Graham became strident in their efforts to marginalize the Kentuckian -- branding Paul “ill-informed” and a “wacko bird” of the Right. But Paul is far from a “wacko” -- or, for that matter, the “extremist” I once made the mistake of describing him as. I was referring to a libertarian position he took against indefinite detention for American citizens suspected of being enemy combatants. The “extremist” descriptor did not fit the man, and it exaggerated the position he’d taken, which extended discussion showed to be less detached from wartime exigencies than it initially seemed.

In the senatorial name-calling, one senses a certain desperation, a fear on the part of McCain and Graham that the ground beneath them is shifting. There’s good reason for that.

You won’t ever hear Paul echoing McCain’s assertion that the way to get foreign policy “back on track” would be to put John Kerry and Joe Biden in charge of it. You won’t find Paul, like McCain and Graham, toasting Qaddafi one minute, then in the next calling for his head; or condemning the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia totalitarianism one minute, then in the next calling for Americans to work with and subsidize the Brothers. You won’t find Paul, in vertiginous McCain fashion, blathering about democracy-promotion and global stability while championing the secession from Serbia of a Muslim state -- Kosovo, which now stands as a breakaway inspiration to Islamic-supremacist insurgents the world over. You won’t find Paul lamenting, à la Graham, that “free speech is a great idea, but we’re in a war”; to the contrary, Paul appears to grasp that if you are prepared to subordinate the First Amendment to a desire not to pull the hair-trigger savagery of your enemies, then you have already lost the war.

In this sense, Dr. Paul perfectly diagnoses the GOP’s sorry condition after years on the McCain/Graham regimen: “When you saw the debate between President Obama and Romney on foreign policy, they sounded pretty similar. In the vice-presidential debate, Biden was more assertive, but Ryan didn’t disagree with most of his positions.”

Bingo: It has been a while since Republicans were led by a Reagan -- by someone who looks totalitarianism in the eye and calls it what it is. You don’t hear today’s GOP saying of the Muslim Brotherhood and its sharia-supremacist allies, “We win, they lose.” Today’s GOP is more likely to tell the Muslim Brotherhood, “We’re here to partner with you.” Today’s GOP looks at ideologues who promise to conquer the West and sees not an “evil empire” but a “Religion of Peace.” Yes, it was Obama who opted to arm and fund the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt -- where a new sharia constitution has been imposed, women are thus reduced to a lower caste, and minority Christians are systematically persecuted. But it was Republicans who voted decisively to approve these measures.

#page#To his great credit, Senator Paul tried to stop our government’s transfer of F-16 aircraft and Abrams tanks to Egypt. He certainly has that half of the equation right. At Heritage, he observed that while “the war is not with Islam but with a radical element of Islam -- the problem is that this element is no small minority but a vibrant, often mainstream, vocal and numerous minority.” I’d say “minority” is hopeful -- at least in the Middle East, where, as Paul further noted, the enemy ideology grips “whole countries, such as Saudi Arabia.” Islamic-supremacism -- what he called “radical Islam” — is, as he described, “no fleeting fad but a relentless force.” To empower Islamic supremacists is a grave mistake.

#ad#In his National Review interview, Senator Paul rightly faulted the 2012 GOP ticket for banking on the fallacy that victory lay in allowing no daylight between its own positions and Obama’s abominable foreign policy. But his critique then skipped the rails. The Romney/Ryan platform, he complained, “was sort of like, ‘We’ll#...#come a little bit slower out of Afghanistan.#...#’ But Biden had a good response, ‘We’re coming home.’ And I think that’s what people want; I think that’s what people are ready for, that we’re coming home.” And why does Paul think Americans want to come home? Because of “war weariness.”

Americans are clearly not pining for our troops to come home from Europe, Japan, Korea, the Persian Gulf, or other locations where their presence assures the peace through strength on which our prosperity depends. In Afghanistan, Americans are not weary of war; they are weary -- as they were in Iraq -- of our government’s misconception of the war, the very thing Paul’s Heritage speech undertook to correct. They are weary of expending the lives and limbs of our best young people -- and of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in a time of existentially threatening debt -- on nation-building experiments premised on the fiction that Islamic and Western cultures desire the same things.

Like Senator Paul, Americans are not anxious for war. But when it is necessary and fought for our vital interests -- particularly our liberty and security -- we are extremely supportive. Paul is right that war should be a limited-duration exercise. What he described at Heritage as a foreign policy that balanced our vital interests, our desires, and our strapped resources, is indeed one that, as he put it, “would target our enemy, strike with lethal force,” and exit expeditiously.

If that is truly where he is coming from, though, he ought to study what former Bush Justice Department official John Yoo actually says instead of using a Yoo caricature as a piñata -- the tack he took in the NR interview, regrettably reminiscent of the way McCain and Graham have disserved Paul himself. I doubt my friend Professor Yoo would dare dabble in ophthalmology, but in trying his hand at constitutional law, Dr. Paul predictably commits malpractice. He has confused Yoo’s scholarship on the “unitary executive” with advocacy of the executive lawlessness known as the “imperial presidency.”

Yoo’s take on the meaning of the power to declare war that the Constitution vests in Congress is more narrow than mine, but, contrary to Paul’s intimation, Yoo most certainly does not “believe there is no limitation” on executive power. (Senator Paul might peruse “The Presidency Redefined,” Yoo’s essay in the March 11 edition of National Review, in which he contends, inter alia, that “conservatives would be more consistent in their quest to rein in the administrative state if they foreswore the vigorous use of executive power.”) What Yoo argues is that once war is commenced -- whether by unilateral presidential response to threats against U.S. interests or by congressional authorization -- the “target our enemy, strike with lethal force” approach that Paul commends is an executive responsibility. On that, both law and American history are firmly on Yoo’s side.

Any successful conservative foreign policy is going to marry the clarity about the enemy that animated Rand Paul’s Heritage speech with the clear distinction John Yoo draws between fighting war and fighting crime. And we’d better get about it because the stakes are high.

Foreign policy, inextricably intertwined with national security, must be a core concern of the political Right. It must derivatively be seen by voters as an issue on which trust is better reposed in the GOP -- the major party that, in theory at least, is responsive to the Right. If this is not the case, then, as David Horowitz persuasively contends, Republicans are sure to lose elections. Ronald Reagan made the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism central to his campaigns. Mitt Romney regarded the struggle against Islamic-supremacist totalitarianism as something too politically incorrect to mention amid platitudinous five-point economic plans. There are reasons why eminently winnable elections are lost.

— 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, which is published by Encounter Books.

'Political Demolition Masquerading as Journalism'

Roger Kimball also had some worthy thoughts on the Tanenhaus epic, highlighting commentary from Peter Berkowitz (as well as from James Piereson, who previously dissected The Death of Conservatism).

Refuting Tanenhaus

Bravo! Stellar work by Ramesh and Jonah.