Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 49

Bachmann Is Not the Radical in the Room

There is a dismaying symmetry about the debt-limit controversy. Today’s Left creates phony crises to rationalize action on its radically transformative program; today’s Right creates phony rationalizations to avoid addressing actual crises. Incrementally, yesterday’s radicalism becomes today’s norm.

The Right talks a good game about small government, constitutional government. But that is all it is: talk. When it gets down to brass tacks, like now, with our nation sinking into a death spiral of unsustainable, incalculable debt, the Right’s solution is to grow government while trusting that government will constrain government -- at some future date, of course. And when someone has the temerity to say, “No, enough,” mainstream Republicans, aided by some in the conservative commentariat, are as quick as the Obama Left to marginalize that someone as an “extremist.”

#ad#So it was that Sen. John McCain, the very model of a progressive Rockefeller Republican, lambasted a surging GOP presidential hopeful, Rep. Michele Bachmann, for her uncompromising stance on the debt ceiling. By McCain’s Big Gummint lights, Bachmann is an extremist for refusing to indulge the notion that we should inflate by $2,500,000,000,000 (that’s not a typo) the credit line of a bankrupt nation that is officially $14,300,000,000,000 in the hole. (The true debt is more like $130,000,000,000,000 if we look beyond Uncle Sam’s Enronesque accounting practices.) And mind you, the $2.5 tril is just what’s necessary to get us through President Obama’s reelection, McCain’s 2008 campaign having already done its bit to ensure Obama’s election. Once the president’s second term is won, there would be nothing but trillions more in debt and debt-ceiling raises until, sooner rather than later, creditors stop the music and the country collapses.

Ironically, McCain’s manner of helping Obama this time is to frame Bachmann as Obama. As a senator running for president (which is pretty much all he did as a senator), Obama was famously intransigent in 2006, when Pres. George W. Bush sought an increase in the debt ceiling in order to finance the metastasizing welfare state wrought by insatiable leftist Democrats and Republican statists such as McCain. So now, McCain says Bachmann sounds like Obama, because she insists that the debt limit oughtn’t be raised by a dime. She needs to get with the program and agree to the borrowing of more trillions today in exchange for the promise of spending cuts#...#someday, no doubt the same day that fence gets built on the Mexican border.

But there is a huge difference. Senator Obama’s objection was crass political opportunism. He is as radical a redistributionist as has ever held high elected office in the United States, and his only real problem with Bush’s exorbitant spending and entitlement expansion is that they weren’t nearly enough for his tastes. When it came time to pay the freight -- when it was certain the ceiling would be raised, so a nay vote made no practical difference -- Senator Obama caviled about how bumping the debt limit signaled a failure of presidential leadership. His speech is so comically cynical in light of the last three years that it can’t be repeated often enough:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America's debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can't pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our government's reckless fiscal policies#...#Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that "the buck stops here." Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

On March 20, 2006, when Obama performed this little soliloquy, Congress raised the debt ceiling from a little over $8 trillion to a little under $9 trillion. The move epitomized an orgy of government profligacy, responsible ultimately for the electoral routs that cost Republicans control of Congress and the White House. For all its outrageousness, though, the Bush-era binge doesn’t hold a candle to what followed.

In the five years since Obama’s Senate speech, the Democrats he leads have raised the debt ceiling by almost $5.5 trillion. To get a sense of what that means, it took over two centuries -- from the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 until 1998 -- for the United States to accumulate $5.5 trillion in debt. There has been a debt ceiling only since 1917 (and its current configuration did not take shape until 1939), but even by that shorter measuring stick, it took almost 80 years (i.e., until 1996) to bump up against a debt ceiling of $5.5 trillion. Obama has doubled that unfathomable amount in the blink of an eye.

And it’s not enough. It will never be enough. President Obama wants to add $2.5 trillion to our tapped-out credit card because, at the rocket speed of government borrowing, that is the minimum needed to get him through the election without any additional debt-limit crises. Such episodes would only call more attention to his promised “fundamental transformation” of the U.S. economy. If he gets his way on the debt ceiling and then wins a second term, that $2.5 trillion will be chump change: It will be impossible to calculate the additional trillions confiscated from the producers, the young, and the unborn for redistribution to Leviathan’s clientele of cronies, unionized bureaucrats, and subsidized sloth.

#page#Our debt is not just a political problem -- it is an existential threat. Contrary to McCain’s bluster, the position taken by Bachmann and her allies is not political posturing. It is a defensive stand to save us from Obama’s transformation -- which is to say, from doom. It is a stand that says the government needs to figure out how to make do on $14.3 trillion. Only a short time ago, conservatives considered it extreme for government to need a $9 trillion credit line. Now, with the credit line at $14.3 trillion and rising, somehow Bachmann is the extremist, and we’re to see as the adults in the room the guys who say, “Let’s give Obama two or three trillion more, as long as we can pretend we’re not responsible for the catastrophe we all know is inevitable.”

#ad#That the political class makes this call is to be expected. Its members are, after all, the ones who got us here. And, as night follows day, their “solution” is the ritual that got us here: Increase borrowing now to cover unaffordable spending now, with the illusory promise that, somewhere down the road, a future Congress they cannot bind will summon the fortitude to make the painful cuts they cannot bring themselves to make. In the interim, they’ll fantasize about “growing” our way out of the death spiral and make believe that tax cuts will magically generate the revenue necessary to sustain the unsustainable.

What surprises is the degree to which the punditocracy is swallowing the Kool-Aid. Take the normally sensible Kimberley A. Strassel. Her weekly Wall Street Journal column praises a proposal by Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. The McConnell plan, which the Journal’s editors also endorsed, is said to be a master stroke that would transfer to Obama unilateral power to increase the debt in exchange for his being tagged with unilateral blame for the disastrous fallout.

Put aside the suspension of disbelief Senator McConnell and Ms. Strassel would have us entertain -- namely, that the Obamedia, having cowed Republicans into agreeing to this scheme, would stand silent while their guy takes the eventual political hit, never reminding the public that it was possible thanks only to congressional Republicans. What’s truly remarkable is Ms. Strassel’s reasoning for why this gambit is purportedly better than refusing to authorize more borrowing:

Despite campaigning on the Constitution, most [House Republicans] appear to have missed the whole "separation of powers" bit. You know, the part that provides a presidential veto. Republicans cannot run government from the House alone, yet many have bought into their own debt-limit rhetoric. Rather than see this as the failed gamble it is, they truly believe they have the leverage to make this president give them all they want.

It is Ms. Strassel who appears to have missed class the day they taught that “whole ‘separation of powers’ bit.” McConnell’s scheme is designed to do what the Constitution forbids: endow the chief executive with Congress’s enumerated power “to borrow money on the credit of the United States.” This malfeasance, moreover, would be achieved by a convoluted procedure that makes a mockery of the Constitution’s legislative process: Congress never affirmatively acts to approve the presidential debt-limit increase; it merely declines to reject his “request” for a higher ceiling. That is the fig leaf under which McConnell figures Republicans can hide their authorization of our national suicide.

The genius of separation of powers is that it enables each branch to thwart the excesses of the others. The Constitution puts Congress in control of both the purse and the government’s borrowing authority. When the House exploits these powers, it is neither “running government from the House alone” nor ignoring the president’s veto power. It is telling the president, “no.” As Ms. Strassel’s usually excellent columns often demonstrate, the president still exercises plenty of power over the running of government. Nor need he accede to House Republican budget-cutting priorities -- he still has his veto. But lawmakers don’t have to underwrite his Goliath vision of the Nanny State. They get to tell him that he’s got “only” $14.3 tril to work with.

On that score, my friend National Review editor Rich Lowry, in the course of rightly advising Republicans not to cave on Obama’s demand for a grand deal that gets him through the election, laments that a flat refusal to extend the debt ceiling is impractical. He criticizes naysayers who roll their eyes at proposals for a raise in the ceiling accompanied, dollar-for-dollar, by significant spending cuts. “Too many [House Republicans],” he concludes, “are opposed in principle. Never mind that none of them has a plan to cut federal spending by roughly 40 percent in two weeks’ time, which is what running up against the debt limit entails.”

Here is the problem with that: There will never be a plan to cut federal spending by 40 percent. Nor, absent absolute necessity, will the ruling class ever adopt a plan to cut the even greater amounts required to pay down our ocean of debt (rather than just pay the interest) and live consistently within our means while remaining reasonably prepared for aggression by enemies known and unknown. (You may recognize the latter as the thing for which you actually need a federal government.)

To know this, all one need consider is the Ryan budget passed by the House. Rep. Paul Ryan went as far as the political climate would allow to inject some sanity into federal spending. But if we peel away the atmospherics and get down to reality, the plan is modest at best.

#page#While the Left derides Ryan for “cutting” trillions in spending, all he actually cuts -- at least in the first decade or so -- is the ungodly rate of deficit spending Obama envisions. We would still be adding trillions to the debt, such that, as I’ve noted before, the Republicans who voted for the Ryan budget have already implicitly called for raising the debt ceiling to more than $20 trillion, notwithstanding their current protestations against raising it beyond $14.3 trillion. Ryan’s plan does not even purport to balance the budget until 2040 or so, which is about 15 Congresses from now, not a single one of which would be bound to adhere to Ryan’s “Roadmap.” The Ryan budget is thus nothing more than a step in the right direction, and nothing close to a solution.

#ad#Yet, following Obama’s lead, the Left and the press have flayed Ryan. He made a mild attempt to turn the Titanic around while assuring every constituency that their goodies are safe for another decade or two. And so he’s been made a villain. His proposal has no chance of passing in the Senate, let alone of becoming law.

Even the good guys in government are in denial about the depth of our extremis. This is human nature: Nothing happens without hard deadlines. Overwhelming, seemingly intractable problems are never confronted until we are cornered.

Bachmann’s stance on the debt has political overtones, of course. But it is not essentially political, as was Senator Obama’s in 2006. It is it is adult acceptance of the facts that Obama’s spending will ruin the economy, that Congress has the power and the duty to rein in spending, and that the only plausible way to stop a spendaholic is to cut off his access to more credit. Unlike Senator Obama, Representative Bachmann is not thoughtlessly saying “no” to a credit hike. She is saying that the government takes in about $172 billion per month, out of which it can easily avoid default by paying the nearly $30 billion of interest due to bondholders.

Of the remaining $142 billion, more than two-thirds (about $100 billion) would pay entitlements (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid). No one will touch those, leaving about $42 billion left for everything else. That gets exhausted quickly when one realizes that, before all the dubious roles government has taken on, $35 billion would be needed for national defense -- i.e., payments to military vendors and for troop salaries -- to be fully funded.

In the end, would there be deficit spending and a consequent need to raise the debt ceiling? Undoubtedly -- but not right away, and not until it became obvious that we can easily do without much that government does. And here is the difference: This scenario drastically alters the underlying assumption of funding government; the baselines revert to zero. Funding has to be justified, item by item. We don’t just hope and pray that cuts will happen someday -- they have to happen now, because there simply won’t be money for everything.

President Obama will be politically accountable. If he raids the defense budget to pay for “green energy” or the priorities of his union cronies, he will have to run on that record, just as Republicans will have to run on the merits or demerits of forcing him into this predicament. Meanwhile, the credit markets get to see that we are serious about putting our house in order, which is crucial, because, if our borrowing costs rise to more historically normal levels, our interest payments will more than double.

That is the only kind of plan that has a chance to work: a crisis that makes reduced spending unavoidable. The Framers did not rely on the good intentions of Washington politicians, however earnest. They divided authority and empowered accountable public officials to check each other’s recklessness. The duty of Republicans in Congress is not to set the table for the next election. It is to use their power to stop President Obama’s destruction of the economy. If we are ruined, what good will it do for Republicans to natter that it was all Obama’s fault?

Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief-of-staff, who got out while the getting was good, perspicaciously observed that a crisis should never be allowed to “go to waste.” “It’s an opportunity,” he explained, “to do things you could not do before.” The difference now is that the crisis is real and potentially fatal. It is time to do what could not be done before, not rationalize why not doing it is good politics.

—  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.

Iran Is at War with Us

‘You can clearly see what they are doing in Iraq.” Sen. Lindsey Graham was talking about the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically the death trade plied by the mullahs, their Revolutionary Guard Corps, their Hezbollah operatives, and the assorted jihadists under their control. And while the plying is being done “in Iraq,” it is being done against America.

Senator Graham elaborated that Iran is setting the stage to frame the long-scheduled withdrawal from Iraq as a case of the United States being “driven out,” a cowardly retreat under fire. Nor is this happening solely in Iraq. Iran’s fortification of the Afghan Taliban also continues at a steady clip. It may even be spiking now as the planned drawdown of American forces gets under way. Again, the mullahs are determined to pose as Allah’s avengers, casting the infidels out of Dar al-Islam.

#ad#They are getting plenty of help from the Obama administration. The U.S. withdrawal is being driven by the political calendar, not conditions on the ground. Thus our enemies -- and Iran has always been our principal enemy -- get to make it look like whatever they want it to look like.

So, as 33,000 U.S. troops begin making their quietus, the Taliban and its jihadist allies are emboldened, not vanquished. In fact, Fox’s Jennifer Griffin reports that superior Iranian rockets enable our enemies to fire from 13 miles away, twice the range of the Taliban’s former arsenal. With U.S. air power paralyzed by the demagoguery of Iran’s new best friend, Hamid Karzai -- the Afghan president minted by our government’s Islamic-democracy project -- it gets awfully difficult to defend against such attacks.

Defending themselves is about all our troops will be able to do in the coming months. Karzai and the mullahs have finalized a joint defense and security agreement -- in the jihadi pincer, Iran arms both the sharia “democracy” and its Taliban opposition; it’s the American troops getting squeezed. Meanwhile, fresh off the anti-American duet Iraq’s Pres. Jalal Talabani crooned with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the mullahs’ recent “anti-terrorism” summit, Iran’s vice president visited Baghdad this week to call on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, another democracy project success story. As they forged deeper economic, security, and cultural ties, they also marked a month in which 15 Americans were killed in Iraq, making it the worst month for U.S. forces in over two years.

You may recall that time in 2009 as the fleeting period of euphoria after President Bush’s troop surge transformed Iraq just as it was about to become a humiliating American failure. According to received Washington wisdom, the surge was a triumph -- indeed, so spectacular a triumph that even President Obama now claims the Iraq mission as his own, as if we all share the Obamedia’s amnesia about their hero’s prominence in Harry Reid’s anti-surge legion of “This war is lost” Democrats.

To be sure, Iraq is Obama’s kind of foreign-policy triumph. The strategy was not to defeat the enemy but to stabilize a sharia democracy and protect a population that remains rabidly anti-American. So we have built Baghdad into a reasonably stable Iranian client state, pulled ever deeper into the mullahs’ orbit.

Iran has spent eight years killing Americans in Iraq. We responded by doing nothing. Attacking the source of the problem might have jeopardized Iraq’s fragile new government, whose leading factions are beholden to Tehran, a complication we chose to paper over. In fact, even as democracy-project enthusiasts crowed about Iraq’s purported evolution into a key American ally against the jihad, the Bush administration acceded to Maliki’s demand that Iraq not be used as a staging ground for U.S. operations against other nations (translation: against Iran, the kingpin of the jihad). It seems the only country we’d be permitted to attack from Iraq is Israel. And that’s no joke: Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski actually suggested that the U.S. would shoot Israeli bombers down over Iraq if they dared try to take out Iran’s ripening nuclear arsenal.

#page#Of course, the 15 Americans killed in Iraq last month are fewer than the 19 Americans that Iran killed in Saudi Arabia in 1996, in the Khobar Towers bombing. And it is considerably less than the nearly 3,000 Americans killed on 9/11. Noting that the mullahs had been supporting al-Qaeda since the early 1990s, the 9/11 Commission gingerly related sketchy evidence of Iranian involvement in the suicide hijackings that vaulted the U.S. to war: the provision of safe conduct into and out of Afghanistan for al-Qaeda operatives, the “remarkable coincidence” (to borrow the commission’s phrase) that Hezbollah leaders ended up on the same Iranian transit flights as the future hijackers, etc. Iran even harbored al-Qaeda leaders, including two of Osama bin Laden’s sons, in the years after 9/11.

#ad#Yet, these were dots the commission was content to leave unconnected. And no one -- not the Bush administration, not the Obama administration, and not Congress -- has shown much interest in revisiting them, despite the hundreds of Americans Iran has since killed, and continues to kill.

Here at home, a phony debate rages over whether conservatives are becoming “isolationist” -- whether we are the Right’s version of George McGovern’s “Come Home America” Left. But most of us have never been isolationist. We’ve been realists about the enemy -- specifically, about the need to defeat rather than court the enemy.

In the days after 9/11, President Bush outlined the only plan that had a chance of achieving victory: Hunt terrorists down wherever they operate and treat terror-abetting regimes as terrorists. That should have been the mullahs’ death knell. Instead, we’ve tried to fight a war the enemy prosecutes globally as if it were happening in only two countries, neither of them Iran.

Putting aside the merits of a Marshall Plan analogue for the Muslim Middle East, the original Marshall Plan was undertaken only after total victory was achieved over America’s enemies. There could be no free, independent, pro-American Europe without Normandy and D-Day and Hitler’s annihilation. If you leave the enemy undisturbed while indulging in self-congratulation over democracy and the Arab Spring, you’re choreographing a farce. I’d call it “Springtime for Khamenei,” except the tragic joke is on us.

“Intervention” in 2011 has become what “negotiation” was in the Obama hey-day of 2009 -- something purportedly good for its own sake. The inconvenient reality is that, if it is not based on a strategy designed to defeat America’s enemies, it is inevitably counterproductive. It gives our enemies countless opportunities to show, quite dramatically, that we lack both resolve and a cogent plan.

It is not isolationist to conclude that if we are not in it to win, we are wasting time, billions of dollars that we don’t have, and precious lives. I may be wrong to deem it highly unlikely that true democracy will ever take in Islamic soil. I may be wrong in concluding that the Arab Spring is diplo-lipstick on a pig better seen as the Islamist Ascendancy. But I do know one thing for certain: Freedom has no chance of advancing in the Middle East, any more than it would have advanced in Europe, unless we conquer the enemy.

There was a moment in time when we knew that. It was long ago, though, and perhaps beyond recapturing by a war-weary, financially tapped-out nation.

If we’re not in it to win it -- for victory, not for tilting at windmills -- we should come home. But regardless of what we do, what was true in 1983, when Hezbollah bombed our Marines, remains true today: Iran is at war with us, whether we choose to engage or not. If we are not going to win, we are going to lose. Happy talk about democracy and springtime won’t obscure the fact that there is no middle ground.

Re: Graham: "We Have a President, Not a King"

Sen. Lindsey Graham could not be more correct: The Constitution does not permit the president unilaterally to launch us into more astronomical levels of deficit spending. That would ignore Congress's core constitutional powers. And, putting the Constitution aside, "the right policy decision to make, [and] the correct political decision as well," is to demand congressional authorization.

Just think of how much more credibility Senator Graham would have in making these excellent points if he were not content to have a king, not a president, unilaterally taking the country to war in Libya -- on which, notwithstanding Congress's core constitutional powers, notwithstanding the obvious policy wisdom of having the people's representatives vote on whether the nation should be at war, the senator says, "Congress should just sort of shut up." 

If you can't do the time . . .

I'm proud to be one of what seems to be the very few lawyers in America who didn't follow a bit of the Casey Anthony case. Okay, okay, one time, when I was in the car headed to something that was of actual interest to me (my son's baseball game), I heard some radio report that she was a mother on trial for the murder of her child, and that the prosecutors (I think) had called as a witness some guy she got a tattoo from very shortly after the child's death. I don't recall the details -- although I do remember that my stud hurled four shut-out innings and struck out nine in a big win.

I make only three observations (besides the caution, that should always apply but apparently hasn't in the coverage of this case, that talking-head lawyers should avoid addressing the merits of cases they know little or nothing about):

1) Forensic cases are very, very difficult for the prosecution. I distinguish forensic cases from the broader general category of circumstantial cases. Notwithstanding the media nattering about how some trial or another involves "only a circumstantial case," most prosecutors prefer a solid circumstantial case because the strands that point to the defendant's guilt are too numerous to explain away convincingly. A good circumstantial case also undermines the defendant's best advantage in a criminal trial: the burden of proof. Even good defense lawyers get lured into trying to provide an alternative (innocent) interpretation of circumstantial evidence -- and, even though the government still bears the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, once it becomes the prosecutor's story versus the defense lawyer's story, it's often a big advantage for the prosecutor. (Prosecutors are narrative builders and defense lawyers are narrative destroyers -- and each can get in trouble trying to play on the other's turf.) By contrast, cases based on "direct" evidence usually rely on an eyewitness or, more commonly, an accomplice, whose credibility is deeply suspect -- if there is not strong corroboration, those cases are apt to blow up on the prosecutor unless the problem witness holds up well on cross-examination. (These cases play more to the defense counsel's strength -- he can compellingly tell a jury, "You can't in good conscience send someone to prison based on this scoundrel's testimony," without having to come up with a plausible alternative explanation of the prosecution's evidence.)

I always found forensic cases especially frustrating because the various "sciences" involved are not always generally accepted by the scientific community and, worse, the experts always hedge -- no matter how bulletproof their scientific testing seems to be. There were a number of cases in which I decided, for example, not to get fingerprint analysis done on guns that were seized from places I could tie to defendants. The reason: if it didn't have prints, that would not mean the guy hadn't used the gun (the pros know how not to leave prints); yet by ordering the tests, I would have given the defense the argument that I knew my case was weak so I tried to shore it up with prints and didn't find any. And even if I was lucky enough to get a print, the fingerprint expert would often testify that he was 90 to 95 percent certain it was the defendant's -- which, to some jurors might say, "that means there's a 5 to 10 percent chance it wasn't him" . . . even if the other evidence in the case made that implausible. That is, sometimes, even where it seemingly increases the probability of the prosecution's theory of guilt, forensic evidence can suggest doubt. If you have a case that is built primarily on forensics, good defense lawyers are going to be able to sow doubt all over the place. I don't know whether that's what happened in this case -- I just gather from the commentary this morning that forensic evidence played a huge role in the case. 

2) Juries, in general, are much more responsible than they are given credit for being. They tend to follow judges' instructions very conscientiously. In high profile cases, judges tell them not to taint their fact-finding by reading, watching, or listening to the coverage, and they comply. More significantly, they really do follow the directive that the defendant has a right not to testify and that they therefore cannot draw an inference of guilt from a defendant's decision not to take the stand. This is a truly remarkable thing. Before absolving someone of committing a terrible crime, people want the defendant to look them in the eye and convince them that he/she did not do it. Yet, we tell jurors that to take that commonsense position is to violate a defendant's constitutional rights. So, hard as it is, jurors usually bend over backwards not to hold a failure to testify against the defendant.

Just to be clear, I've never liked this interpretation of the Fifth Amendment, which is a "refinement" of the criminals' rights revolution of the sixties and seventies. To me, the Fifth Amendment means an accused has a right not to be compelled to testify, not that the accused has an additional right to deny the jury, the prosecutor, and the court the ability to draw the perfectly reasonable conclusion that, if there were a plausible explanation consistent with innocence, the accused would have provided it. But that ship sailed half a century ago, and even though it remains a perfectly reasonable conclusion to draw, the law says jurors can't draw it . . . and it is a law that jurors scrupulously follow in my experience.

3) Last thing: I love the bumper sticker Rush suggested at the top of the show today: "If you can't do the time, do the crime in Florida!"

What July 4 Means to Us (V)

This year more than ever, it meant remembering that freedom isn't free and that we owe a great debt to those who fight for it, and who spend their nights sleepless so we can rest peacefully. My friend Tommy Corrigan, a great New York City Police Detective and one of the case agents on the Blind Sheik prosecution, died on the Fourth of July after a terrible -- and, typical of Tommy, a gutsy -- battle with leukemia.

Tommy was a longtime member of New York's Joint Terrorism Task Force, and he was everything a good cop ought to be: A guy who knew almost everything but was always mindful that there was so much he wanted to learn; a guy who loved his country and zealously protected her; a guy never without a smile and a wink in his eye, a constant reminder of why we should be proud of our mission; a guy who made witnesses want to help us -- at great risk to themselves -- because in Tommy they saw the America that put the lie to everything the bad guys were selling.

In our country, we have a strategic counterterrorism dispute over how best to approach and defeat America's enemies. A lot of it centers on whether they ought to be regarded as military enemies or criminal defendants. In the back-and-forth of our public debate, especially on my side -- the side that is pained by the innate limitations of the justice system against foreign national security threats -- we sometimes fail to make clear that whether the courts are the best place to confront foreign enemies is a separate matter from the heroism of the law-enforcement agents who labor to save American lives while honoring the restrictions imposed by American principles. I'm especially grieved today because, knowing Tommy, and having been privileged to work with him and many men and women like him, it's a mistake I should never allow myself to make. 

Requiescat in pace.

Obama Official Denies Calling Hezbollah a "Liberation Movement" -- Says It Is a Terrorist Organization

A couple of days ago, I posted (here) about the Obama administration's decision to engage in official communications with the Muslim Brotherhood. In the course of recounting some of the administration's relevant history, I wrote that "Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Arif Alikhan (who has referred to Hezbollah as a “liberation movement”) was named assistant secretary for policy development at Obama’s Homeland Security Department."

Mr. Alikhan has responded as follows:

Mr. McCarthy:

Your allegation in this article that I have "referred to Hezbollah as a 'liberation movement'” is absolutely false. I have never stated, nor do I believe, that Hezbollah is a liberation movement. It is a terrorist organization and I have never made any statement to the contrary. In fact, I have spent the vast majority of my professional career as a public servant dedicated to protecting the United States from the harm that criminal and terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah, seek to inflict on our country. I respectfully request that you retract this gross inaccuracy in your article.

Sincerely,
 Arif Alikhan

In referring to Mr. Alikhan, my post linked to an article in Human Events by Robert Spencer. Robert, who is a careful scholar and analyst, had written:

[I]n April 2009, Obama appointed Arif Alikhan, the deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as assistant secretary for policy development at the Department of Homeland Security.  Just two weeks before he received this appointment, Alikhan (who once called the jihad terror group Hezbollah a “liberation movement”) participated in a fund-raiser for the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

Robert is the director of Jihad Watch. There, on November 22, 2009, he posted an item about Mr. Alikhan, in which he excerpted a report, posted the same date, "by Judicial Watch via Right Side News," which included the following:

Earlier this year President Obama appointed Arif Alikhan to be the nation's Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at the Department of Homeland Security and Kareem Shora to the agency's influential advisory council, which provides recommendations and advice directly to the Secretary of Homeland Security.

Alikhan, who leads a Homeland Security team responsible for developing policy issues to secure the country against terrorism, has referred to the renowned terrorist organization Hezbollah as a "liberation movement" and was responsible for killing a Los Angeles Police project that monitored terrorist activities in the city's notoriously radical mosques. The defunct Muslim terror tracking plan was designed to identify hotbeds of extremism in an area where several locals offered the September 11 hijackers support.

The Judicial Watch report relies on a Canada Free Press post, dated November 11, 2009, by a writer named Alan Caruba, who discussed Mr. Alikhan's appointment to the DHS post, and stated: 

In his new job, Alikhan will be the Assistant Secretary for the Office of Policy Development. In his former job, he was in charge of public safety for the city and observers noted that he was responsible for derailing the LA Police Department’s plan to monitor activities and individuals within the Muslim community.

Vincent Gioia, a retired patent attorney, living in Palm Desert, California, first called this to public attention in late September on his blog. Gioia noted that Los Angeles is home to “numerous radical mosques” and where “some of the 9/11 hijackers had received support from local residents. “Alikhan is strongly anti-Israel; he has referred to the terrorist organization Hezbollah as a ‘liberation movement’” despite the fact that is on the U.S. official terrorist list.

So the quote from Mr. Gioia seems to be the root of various reports which, for two years, have asserted that Mr. Alikhan called Hezbollah a "liberation movement." If Mr. Alikhan sought a correction of any of these reports from any of these publications, it is not apparent.

Moreover, Mr. Alikhan is variously reported to have had some sort of relationship with the Muslim Public Affairs Council. (Besides the above, see this from the Investigative Project on Terrorism and this from Jihad Watch.) MPAC's leaders have notoriously referred to Hezbollah as a liberation movement and sought to justify Hezbollah's 1983 Beirut bombing against the U.S. marines and navy as a "military operation" rather than a terrorist attack. I do not know the nature of Mr. Alikhan's relationship with MPAC, but if he wants people to understand he regards Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, he ought to choose different company.

That aside, though, and the two years of reports notwithstanding, I am delighted to be able to report that Arif Alikhan has publicly, clearly and unequivocally called Hezbollah exactly what it is, a terrorist organization. I applaud him for doing so, and I wish more American Muslim leaders would follow his lead on that score.

Pawlenty's Foreign Policy

Tim Pawlenty winced audibly when The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg made the obvious explicit. In the race for the GOP presidential nomination, the columnist posited, “I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing.”

The former Minnesota governor was troubled enough to go out of his way to deflect the characterization he couldn’t deny. “I prefer that it not be that,” was the initial parry. Later, he tried to lay his self-made burden on the media: “I wish you could think of another way to describe this wing of the party, other than McCain and Lindsey Graham.”

#ad#How about the “Incoherent Wing”? At any rate, with visions of Reagan conservatives fleeing for the exits, Governor Pawlenty seemed to grasp that Republicans are not in the market for a McCain-Graham nominee. We’ve had enough of a foreign policy that has us one moment cavorting in Moammar Qaddafi’s tent with promises of aid for his armed forces, then, in the next, insisting that both the dictator and his U.S.-taxpayer-supported military be incinerated by U.S.-taxpayer-supported bombs -- the better to usher in a new regime of#...#um, well, we don’t really know what.

Rival Michele Bachmann is suddenly surging in the GOP polls by marketing herself as a “constitutional conservative.” Pawlenty grasps this indicator that his campaign cannot bear the weight of Senator Graham -- who, when not lecturing that “Congress should just sort of shut up” about President Obama’s unauthorized instigation of war on Libya, complains that this whole free-speech idea is something we need to rethink. And as Pawlenty himself was chagrined to admit, embracing Senator McCain is “like saying we’re embracing Nelson Rockefeller on economics.”

He is right, of course. Regrettably, though, Pawlenty’s problem is not with his embracing incoherence but with your noticing that he’s embracing incoherence. Mr. Goldberg’s question, after all, was asked only after listening to Pawlenty’s speech at the Council on Foreign Relations -- a McCain redoubt where dreams of a progressive world order frequently substitute for the world that is.

Fitting then that, while explaining how we’ve purportedly got Tehran nearly “isolated,” Pawlenty pronounced that “Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally.” This was said with a straight face only two days after the president of Iraq -- an Arab country that Americans have sacrificed thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars to try to turn into the Incoherent Wing’s fantasy of a pro-American Islamic democracy -- proudly reaffirmed his nation’s alliance with Iran.

Iraqi president Jalal Talabani sounded his paean to the Islamic Republic during the “World Without Terrorism Conference.” His hosts were the muckety-mullah, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Iran’s Holocaust-denying, 9/11 Truther of a president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, each of whom has made a career out of railing, “Death to America.”

Nor was Iraq the only Iranian ally on hand. Some 60 nations sent representatives. Prominent among them was Pres. Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, in whose country the United States has about 100,000 troops fighting to prop up his regime against jihadists backed by Iran. Also in attendance was Pres. Ali Zadari of Pakistan, whose country takes billions in U.S. aid while harboring anti-American terror kingpins (like Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar) and covertly aiding the Taliban (an organization Pakistan created in the 1990s).

And what antiterror confab would be complete without Pres. Omar al-Bashir of Sudan? He is under International Criminal Court indictment for genocide, though this has not dissuaded the obliging mullahs from their commitment to share with him the fruits of their ripening nuclear program. Bashir’s status as a mass-murdering fugitive certainly did not dampen the mood: United Nations general secretary Ban Ki-moon sent emissaries and issued a statement gushing with praise for Iran and its efforts in “the global fight against terrorism.”

Speaking of terrorism, the conferees ended up concluding that its real causes are -- you’ll never guess! -- the United States and Israel. Still, Talabani agreed with his Iranian hosts that U.S. power was thankfully in decline, boasting that Iraqis stood united in demanding that Americans get the hell out of their country. What his people really want, the Iraqi president made clear, is deeper ties with Iran, including Iranian aid.

#page#In this, Talabani echoed made-in-America Karzai, whose regime has just inked a joint defense and security agreement with Iran. In the interim, that other U.S. counterterrorism “ally,” Pakistan, is urging the Afghans to dump the United States and look not just to Pakistan and Iran but also to China for help striking a deal with the Taliban and shifting to a very different kind of nation-building.

Pawlenty’s apparent answer to all this is to make believe it’s not happening. Like McCain and Graham, he’d have you believe Iran is cornered because the dynamic force in the region is the forward march of freedom, not Islamism. Indeed, the governor’s speech, entitled “Now Is Not the Time to Retreat from Freedom’s Rise,” mentioned the word “Islam” a grand total of one time -- modified, naturally, by the adjective “radical,” in service of the delusion that the region is teeming with secular democrats who would seize the “Arab Spring” if we could just excise this tiny fundamentalist fringe.

#ad#Anyone who begs to differ is a knuckle-dragging “isolationist” -- if Pawlenty may quote McCain (without, of course, mentioning that he’s quoting McCain). As Pawlenty put it, pandering to his receptive CFR audience, “parts of the Republican party now seem to be trying to out-bid the Democrats in appealing to isolationist sentiments. This is no time for uncertain leadership in either party.” Or, as Graham eloquently reasons, “Shut up, already.”

This is about as cockamamie as it gets. Yes, there is a Ron Paul wing of the GOP that would have America retreat from the world. But it is a small wing. The rest of us are not opposed to interventions. We’re opposed to stupid interventions -- the kind that make Representative Paul’s critique sound persuasive until you start thinking about how prosperous the United States stands to be once we radically slash the armed forces that guarantee global trade and stability.

The “uncertain leadership” that Governor Pawlenty decries can be avoided only when leaders have certainty and the gumption to act on it. We do not have much certainty at the moment, except when it comes to that which our leaders have no stomach to face: mainstream Islam is anti-freedom, it is not a “radical” fringe, and it is on the rise in today’s Islamic Middle East. It is also rabidly anti-American, which is why America-bashing has become the daily political rhetoric of nascent Islamic “democracies,” where popular elections are a poor substitute for real democratic culture.

To be sure, there are pockets of resistance: Muslim reformers, secular democrats, non-Muslim libertarians, and so on. But when our admiration for them deludes us into misjudging their relative strength, that is not certain leadership -- it is leadership certain to serve Islamist interests over American interests.

Real leadership would concede that what we have been doing ever since the Bush Doctrine devolved into the Forward March of Freedom has failed. It is empowering our enemies, and expecting that to turn around on its own is as futile as continuing to rely on the international institutions that our adversaries now dominate.

Real leadership would also entail diagnosing the Middle East as it truly is. It would acknowledge Islam as a fact of life in the region but understand that this does not mean we have to pretend it is an asset. It is a volatile antagonist with diverse elements -- some to be courted, some to be competed with, and some that must be defeated because they are implacably hostile.

Real leadership would do its best to figure out which is which, approaching each of them as an unapologetic champion of Western principles -- not as a supplicant who will supple those principles into whatever sharia needs them to be.

Real leadership is always prepared to engage, but doesn’t do so simply for the sake of engaging, or out of wishful thinking. It is guided by American interests. It does not put itself on the line until it is convinced that the beneficiaries will serve American interests -- which means those beneficiaries are never going to be Islamists.

Real leadership is not just knowing that you don’t want to be lumped in with the Incoherent Wing. It is knowing why.

—  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.

As Night Follows Day . . .

The Muslim Brotherhood has enthusiastically accepted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's offer of official contacts with the Obama administration (about which I posted yesterday). Brotherhood spokesman Mohammed Ghozlan told the AP that the Islamist organization "welcome[s] dialogue with America to remove any misunderstandings and bridge gaps." There should be no misunderstandings at this point -- the Brotherhood has made clear that its goal is to destroy Israel and the West. And the gap has already been bridged: the Obama administration has decided that there's no reason the Brotherhood's goal should disqualify the organization from having a productive relationship with our government. 

Secretary Clinton's overture is having the predictable effect. Formal talks with the U.S. will cement the Brotherhood's status as the power player in Egypt, signaling the public that there is no reason for concern about a negative American reaction to the Brothers' ascendancy and thus increasing the likelihood that they will "take over power," as Egyptian analyst Ammar Ali Hassan put it. It may not be change you can believe in, but it's change you can take to the bank.

Re: Gooooo JETS!

Jonah, a characteristically stellar column ... but, c'mon! Everybody knows the correct cheer is "J-E-T-S JETS, JETS, JETS!"

Re: Republicans and Libya

It gets tedious to continue pointing this out, but Qaddafi was every bit as much a "homicidal dictator," to borrow Max Boot's phrase, when a Republican administration decided to embrace him and regard him as a key ally against terrorism.

Republicans like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Condoleezza Rice supported propping Qaddafi up with U.S. aid, including aid to his military. If Max was offended by that arrangement, if he inveighed at these U.S. government officials for supporting an incorrigibly anti-American homicidal dictator, I guess I missed it. Nevertheless, one of the reasons the Bush and Obama administrations regarded Qaddafi as a key ally was the fact that he was providing us with intelligence against Islamist operatives in his country -- particularly, in eastern Libya -- which, by percentage of population, was sending more jihadists to kill American troops in Iraq than any other country.

Many of these anti-American Islamists are part of the "rebels" -- the polite name for the Libyan mujahideen who are Qaddafi's opposition. Eastern Libya is their stronghold. They are supported by the Muslim Brotherhood, whose chief jurisprudent, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, has issued a fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Qaddafi, with the goal of toppling him and setting up a sharia state that would be just as anti-American as Qaradawi is. Furthermore, John Rosenthal has reported here on NRO in recent days that even Libya's National Transitional Council admits that the rebels include Islamic extremists (though its spokesman lowballs them as "no more than 15 percent" of the rebels -- as if that would make us feel better if it were true). As Mr. Rosenthal has also recounted, French analysts who have studied the "rebels" conclude that only a small minority of them are "true democrats" -- in fact, the "rebels" are thoroughly infiltrated by al Qaeda and its affiliates.

Like most conservatives opposed to our Libya intervention, I've been asked a lot lately how it feels to be aligned with a hard Leftist like Dennis Kucinich. It feels better, I think, than I if I found myself on the same side as al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Contrary to the assertions of Max and other Arab Spring enthusiasts, those of us who oppose U.S. intervention in Libya are not isolationists and we despise Qaddafi as much, if not more, than Max does. In point of fact, a few of us actually complained loudly when the Bush administration airbrushed Qaddafi into a U.S. ally and capitulated in a U.S.-Libya settlement premised on a moral equivalence between Qaddafi's anti-U.S. terrorism and President Reagan's retaliatory attack on Tripoli. We thought it was disgusting to find the U.S. secretary of state schmoozing a terrorist thug with American blood on his hands.

But we also recognize that al Qaeda, its affiliates, and its Islamist allies are incorrigibly anti-American and have killed many more Americans than the detestable Qaddafi has. We don't see any good reason to support Qaddafi's opposition unless and until the pro-interventionists satisfy our grave concerns that he will be replaced with something even worse. Don't lecture us about supporting Qaddafi. We're not supporting Qaddafi -- in contrast to the U.S. officials and administrations that supported Qaddafi from 2003 into 2011 despite knowing full well that he was, every second of that time, a died in the wool terrorist murderer of Americans.

For now, we must assume the concerns we have expressed about the "rebels" cannot be answered. With no vital U.S. interests at stake, and with our country engaged in multiple military excursions while teetering on the financial brink, pro-interventionists have made a mockery of domestic and international law. President Obama has a constitutional obligation to seek congressional support for an unprovoked military invasion under circumstances where the United States was under no threat of attack and there were no vital U.S. interests at stake. Even if one were to disagree on this constitutional bottom line, there was absolutely no good reason from a policy perspective not to seek congressional authorization and lay out the case for intervention in a good faith fashion.

The Obama administration has steadfastly refused to do this, and the pro-interventionists have cheered the president on -- despite the facts that (a) there is no international authorization for a war against Qaddafi, (b) the president has shamefully claimed that we are only in Libya to protect civilians even as U.S.-backed NATO forces wage war on his military and seek to kill him; (c) while ignoring Congress, the Obama administration consulted closely with the United Nations and the Arab League; and (d) the "responsibility to protect" doctrine that is guiding the Obama administration in Libya (see Stanley Kurtz's essential essay, here) is a transnational progressive nostrum that ought to be anathema to conservatives and those who see American power as reserved for American interests.

This would be breathtaking under any circumstances, but here we are talking about an invasion of a country with which the U.S. was at peace -- a country that the U.S. claimed to regard as an ally against terrorists, and a country whose military regime U.S. taxpayers were supporting at the insistence of those who now tell us Qaddafi must be deposed. The administration has stubbornly refused to give the American people the benefit of congressional hearings so that our representatives could probe who the rebels are and why our military should get involved in Libya's internal strife. Rather than calling on the administration to make its case, the interventionists have been happy to go along. 

There is not a place on this planet where I would oppose the use of American power to defend American lives. I'm confident that most conservatives and most Republicans feel the same way. We believe in maintaining American military dominance and using it in furtherance of vital American interests. We are not the Ron Paul legions. What we don't support is pretending that our enemies are our friends. We don't support using our military to conduct experiments in Islamic nation-building that are unlikely to succeed and will not, in any event, make us safer from jihadists -- who are expert at using the freedoms available in truly democratic societies in order to conduct their war against America and the West.

It is beyond absurd to suggest that this view of American power in the world is "isolationist." All we're saying is that American officials have done enough foolish things in the name of intervention -- like making nice in Qaddafi's tent. We need to know who the players are and how we're likely to be affected before we plunge into these escapades.