Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 5

The Sequester and the Arab Spring

‘Sequester” may be your word for the week, but it’s not mine. I’ve been diverted from the Beltway theater by an enterprise equally fraudulent, the “Arab Spring.” No, the plot line does not feature an Armageddon of budget slashing after which, somehow, Leviathan manages to land on his drunken feet and binge up an even higher tab this year than last. The Arab Spring, instead, is the tyranny of Islamic supremacism cruelly masqueraded as the forward march of “freedom.”

On Tuesday, the dead-tree version of Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy, my book on the subject, finally hit the bookstores after previously being available only as an e-book. Despite the digital age, people still love their paperbacks, so I’ve had the good fortune to spend this week talking about it.

Though seemingly unrelated, the sequester contretemps have provided a useful context. In the tortured argot of Washington, “sequestration” connotes “a reduction in government spending.” It is thus an exquisite weasel word, the kind that fraud-construction thrives on. Of course, the disease sequestration is meant to treat is only too real -- our metastasizing cancer of debt. But the political class that lives today’s high life on tomorrow’s stolen prosperity naturally prefers the illusion of action to the pain that must accompany any real, surgical remedy. So it peddles placebos that have the ring of earnestness and effectiveness: “cuts,” “balanced approach,” and the like.

#ad#On examination, these words are seen for the nonsense that they are. In Washington a “cut” is not what your family does when it becomes over-extended -- a spending slash, a commitment to live within one’s means. It is a nominal decrease in the rate at which government plans, despite our straits, to increase spending. So a “cut” lards debt on debt#...#just not quite as quickly.

And a “balanced approach”? It sounds so admirably Greek -- as in the ancients, not the contemporary Athenians we sadly prefer to emulate. Balance, “moderation in all things,” is great#...#as long as you have a multifaceted problem. But what if your problem, very simply, is that you spend goo-gobs more money than you earn? That does not call for a “balanced” approach. If you think it does, try explaining to the waiter that you’ve decided to pay only half the check for the meal you just devoured because, after all, there should be more “balance.”

Like the sequester molesters, “Arab Spring” devotees have their own fantasy vocabulary. The whoppers are “freedom” and “democracy,” the ideals, we’re told, that have swept the Middle East, even as it sinks into repression, social unrest, and the persecution of religious minorities. Islam and the West use the same words, but we are not conveying the same concepts -- just as a “cut” in your budget means something very different from a “cut” in Washington’s.

Freedom? “Let it be known to you that the real meaning of freedom lies in the perfection of slavery,” explained al-Qushayri, a celebrated eleventh-century scholar of Islam.

I offer this bit of Islamist wisdom as an explanation, not a put-down. Not that the distinction matters much. As Spring Fever makes clear, the culture of Middle Eastern Islam is convinced of nothing so much as its own superiority. It does not judge itself by non-Islamic standards, particularly the standards of Western civilization, with which it sees itself in a conflict that will end only when one side prevails.

The dynamic, classical, supremacist Islam of the Middle East teaches that Allah has given mankind, His creation, the gift of sharia: the “path,” the all-purpose societal framework -- covering all aspects of life, not just spirituality -- for living in dignity through obedience. “Freedom,” in this context, is to make the “free” choice to surrender oneself entirely to this path.

That is the antithesis of a freedom to chart one’s own course, the freedom of the West. Here, Allah is not the sovereign. Our faiths may guide us, but the people are sovereign, with a right to govern civil society as they see fit -- including in contradiction of sharia’s provisions, which deny what the West sees as basic civil rights.

#page#Thus the folly of Arab Spring apologists, who envision a new generation of Muslim rulers, popularly elected and thus -- the fable goes -- responsive to the needs of their “constituents.” Responsive government, however, is the hallmark of societies in which freedom means self-determinism. In the Muslim Middle East, it is foolish to speak of “constituents.” The ruler’s fidelity is not to the people but to Allah. It is for the people not to dream but to obey, as long as the ruler is faithful to sharia. They don’t enjoy the prerogative of deviating from the path.

“Accommodation,” like “constituents,” is a term that echoes through the Arab Spring. Sharia must be accommodated -- given pride of place in the Middle East and growing deference in the West. “Accommodation” turns out to be Arab-Spring for “balanced approach,” the oh-so-reasonable packaging of an idea that is actually perverse.

Almost never do we hear that federal law must accommodate, say, the law of Tennessee. When people’s principles are the same, their legal systems -- a reflection of their notions about right and wrong -- will mesh easily. When there is a conflict, it is not because of a lack of accommodation; it is because either the federal government or the state government is in error. We don’t accommodate error; we correct it, either in the legislature or in the courts.

#ad#Calling for “accommodations” is a polite way of saying that cultural values and the legal systems they create are incompatible. When a culture cedes ground to a different culture’s antithetical principle -- when, for example, we are told free speech must “accommodate” sharia blasphemy laws that proscribe negative criticism of Islam -- that is not a reasonable compromise. It is a corruption of the good. That is how a culturally confident society sees it.

There is a reason why the Islamic supremacists who run the Organization of Islamic Cooperation insisted in 1990 on having their own “Declaration of Human Rights In Islam.” The purportedly Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written by non-Muslim diplomats after the Second World War, does not work for them. Islamist leaders understood that Western concepts of civil rights and human rights do not jibe with sharia. They wanted their own declaration, reflecting their own very different aspirations.

Neither does “democracy” work for the Islamists on the rise across the Middle East -- at least, not as we understand it in the West. For us, democracy is not a process but a way of life, a worldview implying basic assumptions about liberty and equality. To the Islamic supremacist, “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination,” as Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister, put it in 1998 when he was the mayor -- or, as he referred to himself, the imam -- of Istanbul.

The destination Erdogan had in mind is power. Not the empowerment of free people that is the genuine augur of spring. The power of the “Arab Spring” is the imposition of perfect slavery. 

— 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.

GOP Folderoo On Hagel Confirmation

Chuck Hagel has reportedly been confirmed by a vote of 58 to 41. But the real action was on cloture, where -- as Andrew reported -- 18 Republicans voted to let a final vote on the nomination proceed. No matter how they parse it, these Republicans voted to make Hagel the secretary of defense. They will tell the folks back home that they just voted yes on the "procedural" matter but really opposed Hagel's nomination. That will not be true. Since Democrats had the votes to confirm Hagel if the 60-vote barrier was surmounted, voting to surmount it assured that Hagel would be confirmed -- and everyone knew it.

If the roles were reversed, Democrats would never have let the nominee get confirmed. Thanks to the GOP, we have a Washington where stellar candidates such as John Bolton and Miguel Estrada do not get confirmed, but a pro-Iranian anti-Israeli dolt like Chuck Hagel gets through.

I have a question for Senator John McCain, leader of the pack that says Hagel is "not qualified" to be defense secretary but that nonetheless voted in a way that assured his confirmation. McCain opposes the sequester because, he argues, the cuts to the defense budget are "unconscionable." So . . . how can it be unconscionable for a country that is well over $16 trillion in debt to cut a defense budget that exceeds half-a-trillion dollars by around 8 percent (meaning baseline defense spending will still be higher than it was in 2007), while it is conscionable to vote to place in charge of the entire defense department a man who is not qualified for the job?

I am open to being convinced that aspects of the military cuts are irresponsible. But why would I pay any attention to doomsday predictions from people who have just knowingly made Hagel the guy responsible for setting priorities?

Twenty Years after the WTC Bombing

Today is the 20th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombing. It also marks three weeks since the attempted murder of Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish champion of free speech. These events are not unrelated.

Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort to limn the WTC bombers as wanton killers. They were, we were to understand, bereft of any coherent belief system, unrepresentative of any mainstream construction of Islam. In reality, though, they were devout Muslim operatives who belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the New York area by Omar Abdel Rahman -- whose notoriety as the shadowy “Blind Sheikh” obscured the basis of his profound influence over Islamists across the globe.

#ad#Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an internationally renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in the jurisprudence of sharia -- Islam’s societal framework and legal code -- from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination -- in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful to a terrorist organization#...#other than leading it.

It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s indisputable mastery of Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give present-day vitality to a seventh-century summons to holy war, that vaulted him to the forefront of the jihad.

The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic supremacism’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a blunt statement by the savage shock troops of a worldwide movement that America -- “the head of the snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us -- could be struck at home, right in the beating heart of economic liberty.

Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 -- back when our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam -- the dynamic Islam of the Middle East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time, while settling in non-Muslim lands -- is aggressively hegemonic. As proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated.”

And to dominate for a very specific reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition of sharia.

The rationale of jihadist terror is to diminish our resolve to resist the gradual erosion of freedom and the relentless demands of Islamists -- especially, Islamists of the Brotherhood variety. After the Blind Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have softened up the target, it is the Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably well-mannered and wearing neatly tailored suits, they flack for Hamas and maintain, straight-faced, that free speech is not so much a right to condemn their totalitarian ideology as a responsibility to suppress examination of it.

In that ideology, the implementation of classical sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society. Sharia is the architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that when elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia, then the sharia, and finally the sharia” -- a promise on which he has followed through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they terrorists, or faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue totalitarian ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses who celebrate 9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power.

We did not want to acknowledge the sharia logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing Muslim scripture.

There is no selling that fairy tale today, not after thousands of Americans have lost their lives. So the lie has become more aggressive, like Islam itself. While poseurs such as John Brennan -- President Obama’s counterterrorism czar and nominee for CIA director -- distort the meaning of jihad, Islamists and their fellow travelers seek not merely to suppress by intimidation but to criminalize by law the objective examination of Islamic supremacism.

#page#We’ve gone from willful blindness to coerced silence. We see the wages of it in the Middle East as supremacists, under the guise of a “springtime” for freedom, strangle the region with sharia. As I detail in Spring Fever: The Illusion of Islamic Democracy (my e-book about the “Arab Spring,” which was released as a paperback today), the path taken by the Muslim Brotherhood rulers of Egypt follows -- at a dizzying pace -- the trail already blazed by Turkey’s Islamists, who are transforming a once-democratic, pro-Western society into an authoritarian sharia state.

#ad#Worse, we see the wages of coerced silence in the West, where the campaign to demagogue truth-tellers as “Islamophobes” -- meaning, as racists -- has devolved into an Islamist effort, supported by the Obama administration, to make speech about Islam a violation of international law.

That is where Lars Hedegaard comes in. Persecuted in his homeland for purported “hate speech” -- his kangaroo conviction for noticing sharia’s assault on liberty was finally overturned by an appellate court -- Hedegaard miraculously survived a point-blank shooting in Copenhagen on February 5. His assailant’s identity remains unknown, but not his assailant’s motive: the sharia mandate to suppress negative criticism of Islam by any means necessary.

When a nation defends itself from sharia encroachment, it is smeared as being “at war with Islam” and its truth-tellers are smeared as racists. But as Hedegaard wrote last week in the Wall Street Journal, “we are not.” Instead,

we simply insist on our right to defend freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and individual and sexual equality. We also insist on our right to criticize religious fanatics of every stripe who try to impose theocratic laws and customs on free societies.

When I was a young Marxist during the 1960s and ’70s, these opinions used to be described as characteristic of the political left. Nowadays the defenders of such positions are routinely labeled as right-wing or as belonging to the "extreme right." Meanwhile, what used to be the left is cozying up to holy men who want adulterous women to be stoned, homosexuals to be hanged, apostates from Islam to be killed, and 1,200-year-old laws emanating from somewhere in the Arabian desert to replace our free constitutions.

It is as true today as it was on February 26, 1993: Freedom cannot defend itself. It requires vigilant defense by culturally confident people who see their heritage of liberty as worthy of passionate defense. The Sheikh Abdel Rahmans of the world do not lack for cultural confidence. They see themselves as winning -- they’ve seen it that way every day for the last 20 years.

Are they prophetic? When the West responds to the World Trade Center bombing and the war it launched by shunning their Lars Hedegaards, rather than emulating them, can it be otherwise?

— 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.

Obama's New Libya Update: American and Three Others Arrested in Benghazi for Preaching Christianity

The latest from "moderate" Libya: Four foreign Christians, including an American with dual Swedish citizenship, have been arrested on suspicion of being missionaries who have been distributing Christian literature. They were apprehended in Benghazi, the jihadist hotbed where U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were murdered in September. The missionaries could face the death penalty under Islam's sharia law, which forbids the proselytizing of creeds other than Islam, imposes capital punishment on Muslims who convert to Christianity, and similarly discourages any speech that might sow discord among Muslims. 

Ray Ibrahim picks up the story from the Guardian, quoting from an official from "Libyan security" -- the outfit the Obama administration relied on after the president's unprovoked, unauthorized war to topple the Qaddafi regime placed Islamists in de facto control of much of the country: 

Discussing this case, Libyan security official Hussein Bin Hmeid, trying to justify the Islamic ban on free speech, observes: “Proselytizing is forbidden in Libya. We are a 100% Muslim country and this kind of action affects our national security.” Indeed, Muslim governments—most notably Iran’s—constantly suppress any talk of Christianity, claiming it threatens “our national security.” ...

According to Benghazi lawyer and “human rights activist” Bilal Bettamer, Christians should not offend Muslims by trying to share their faith: “It is disrespectful. If we had Christianity we could have dialogue, but you can’t just spread Christianity.  The maximum penalty is the death penalty. It’s a dangerous thing to do.”

Of course, it bears observing that it was not just President Obama who backed Libya's Islamists in the cashiering of Qaddafi, who was then an American ally supplying what our government had described as vital intelligence about Libya's legions of anti-American terrorists. The Republican Beltway establishment also enthusiastically supported Obama's war, led by Senator John McCain, who called Benghazi's jihadists "my heroes."

Oh well, like the president said at the U.N., "The future must not belong to these who suppress the Gospel" -- oh, no, wait ... looks like I may have that wrong.

How Should We Treat American Jihadists?

If a plane full of 200 American citizens is hijacked by foreign jihadists, the law does not tell us whether the president should shoot down the plane or let it be plowed into a skyscraper and kill 3,000 American citizens. It is the kind of excruciating decision that war makes necessary. Legal niceties do not tell us how to resolve it.

That is the problem with our debate over the treatment of U.S. nationals who join the enemy’s forces in wartime -- most urgently, over the targeted killing of our fellow citizens. We want the legal answer. But the legal answer is not going to help us. Under the Constitution, Americans who join the enemy may lawfully be treated like the enemy, which includes being attacked with lethal force. That, however, tells us only the outer limits of what is permissible. It does not tell us what we need to know: What should we do?

The government’s war powers must be boundless, at least in theory. We must be able to marshal all our might to repel any conceivable existential threat. Yet the Constitution, the sole legitimate source of the government’s power to levy war, is, quintessentially, the citizen’s protection against aggression by that same government. Thus, the tension between government’s war powers and the citizen’s fundamental rights is a conundrum. It simply cannot be resolved with finality.

#ad#Neither side of our debate is satisfied with that. We want fixed rules. But fixed rules work only if they answer every conceivable hypothetical. So the debate lurches inexorably to worst-case scenarios.

Hypothetically, the country could be invaded by a foreign power abetted by a fifth column of American traitors; for the nation to survive, our armed forces would have to conduct combat operations that quite intentionally involved killing Americans on our own soil. It is also true, though, that a corrupt or reckless administration could wildly abuse a congressional combat authorization, or abuse the president’s inherent, unilateral power to respond militarily to attacks or imminent attacks. So, yes, hypothetically, a wayward commander-in-chief could assassinate his political opponents on the pretext that they threatened national security.

Now, neither of these doomsday scenarios is close to our reality. Fortunately, very few of our fellow citizens collaborate in the jihadist plots of our wartime enemies. As a result, over the last dozen years, only a handful of Americans have been given enemy-combatant treatment.

Of these, only three have been killed in drone strikes. All three killings occurred in a lawless country, Yemen, notorious as a haven for anti-American jihadists. Under the circumstances, the three killings were justifiable. Operating under Congress’s sweeping 2001 AUMF (Authorization for Use of Military Force), it was reasonable for the executive to conclude that Anwar al-Awlaki was an al-Qaeda operative. The other two Americans -- Awlaki’s companion, Samir Kahn, and 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki -- were in such propinquity to al-Qaeda operatives that their collateral deaths were, at worst, the fallout of proportional uses of force. (I say “at worst” because, while we are not privy to the intelligence, the circumstances suggest that the latter two may have been jihadists themselves.)

Over the years, three other American enemy combatants were confronted but not killed. John Walker Lindh and Yaser Hamdi were captured overseas and detained as enemy combatants. Lindh was given a civilian prosecution; Hamdi, after renouncing his citizenship, was transferred to Saudi Arabia. The third man, Jose Padilla, is the most instructive case for our present purposes.

#page#Padilla succinctly illustrates the difference between what may be done in theory and what should be done in the given situation. In the terror-laden atmosphere of the months right after 9/11, he was sent to the United States by al-Qaeda commanders to carry out a “second wave” of mass-murder attacks. He was engaged in that conspiracy at the moment he was confronted by government agents. So would it have been legitimate to strike him with lethal force? An interesting question on a law-school exam maybe, but as a matter of practical reality the answer is simple: No.

#ad#In the 2001 AUMF, Congress authorized the president “to use all necessary and appropriate force” against those he determined to be enemy combatants. What is “necessary and appropriate” is not a matter of hypotheticals and worst-case scenarios. It is determined by the actual circumstances. Padilla was encountered in Chicago, not Yemen. Our homeland was not then under attack, and the police -- local, state, and federal -- were ensuring order. Yes, Padilla was conspiring, but he was not in the act of carrying out a terrorist attack. There could be no credible claim that the attacks he was plotting were imminent -- he was captured coming off a plane at O’Hare, not mixing explosives in a safe-house on the South Side. The situation presented a relatively easy opportunity to apprehend him: Agents knew he was coming in on the flight, they prepared an arrest plan well in advance, and Padilla offered no resistance.

In short, Padilla’s case shows that we do not need to bog down in the futility. We can function effectively in the current conflict without trying to map an ultimate boundary between war power and due process. Padilla was captured, detained for a lengthy time as an enemy combatant, and eventually convicted at a civilian trial. That last development hardly proves that civilian trials always make sense for enemy combatants. Indeed, Padilla could not be tried for the second-wave plot because it was based on intelligence that could not be used in court. But we got lucky: He had been involved in a second jihadist scheme, about which investigators managed to cobble together a winning case. The point, however, is that Padilla was handled appropriately. Maybe more onerous measures could theoretically have been taken, but none should have been taken -- and none were.

It has been over a decade since Padilla’s 2002 arrest. We know much more now than we did then about the size and scope of our jihadist enemies, the areas where they operate, and the extent -- thankfully, very limited -- of American-citizen complicity in their schemes. It is thus past time for Congress to amend its 2001 AUMF to reflect our updated, superior understanding of the enemy.

Let’s move beyond pointlessly concocting ultimate limits on presidential war powers. They will only tie our hands in future conflicts. And for his part, the president should not be using internal Justice Department memoranda to inflate his war powers -- particularly, the power to kill Americans as an incident of war -- in order to defend his turf against congressional or judicial encroachments. The task is to apply what we now know to arrive at sensible guidelines for the current conflict.

I’ve argued here that, after a dozen years, the AUMF’s definition of the enemy needs overhaul. So, similarly, does its explanation of what force Congress is authorizing. Again, lawmakers need not address all the hypothetical situations in which it might be proper to target American citizens. But nothing prevents Congress from amending the AUMF to provide explicit protections for Americans suspected of colluding with this unique enemy. Congress could, for example, instruct that in the absence of an attack or a truly imminent threat, the president is not authorized to use lethal force in the United States against Americans suspected of being enemy combatants. Congress could also define what it means by “imminent” so it is clear that lawmakers do not endorse the Obama administration’s preposterous interpretation of that term.

#page#Is this really necessary? I doubt it. Even if he hypothetically could, it is highly unlikely that the commander-in-chief would use lethal force against anyone in the United States -- citizen or otherwise -- in this conflict. The Padilla precedent, as well as the arrest and military trial of Nazi saboteurs (including one American) after their capture here during World War II, demonstrate that, even in wartime, the executive respects our strong preference for due process in the homeland. But revising the AUMF in this way, while doing no harm to the war effort, might assuage Americans understandably perturbed by the Obama administration’s insouciance on the matter of targeted killings.

#ad#Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to extend such explicit protections to Americans situated outside the United States. American citizens do not carry the protections of the Constitution with them when they leave our country -- especially if they leave at a time when Congress has authorized military force, and if they then voluntarily travel to enemy havens. American law and the writ of the American courts, on which we rely for our protection at home, do not apply outside the United States. And after all, what if our forces locate al-Qaeda emir Ayman al-Zawahiri along with some of his top aides in a compound in, say, Peshawar or Aden? Are we supposed to refrain from a lethal strike because there might be an American jihadist in the room with them?

Still, there are additional things Congress could do. Lawmakers could reaffirm that Guantanamo Bay is operational and endorse its use in detaining enemy combatants captured in the future. Congress could further emphasize that, in this conflict in which interrogation intelligence is so critical to protecting American lives, we need a policy of capturing enemy combatants when that is feasible, as opposed to killing them -- particularly when the targeted terrorists are known to include Americans. As a condition of funding overseas operations, including drone strikes, lawmakers could require executive-branch disclosures about the circumstances of targeted killings in order to encourage capture and interrogation. These measures would not only reduce the likelihood of Americans being killed; they would also dramatically improve our intelligence, and thus our security.

It is not possible to wage an effective war against an international terror network while simultaneously foreclosing the possibility that American traitors will be killed in military operations. But by amending the AUMF to ameliorate legitimate concerns that the government has become too cavalier in its drone campaign, we can promote a more effective war effort -- preserving drone strikes as an invaluable weapon against terrorist hideouts; prioritizing intelligence over killing; and shoring up support from Americans who strongly oppose terrorism but worry that we are losing our way.

— 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.

Governor Christie (D., N.Y.)

. . . or is it Governor Cuomo (R., N.J.)? Ah, what's the difference? There really isn't one, according to Christie. As he reportedly told the upstate New York political director of the the United Association of Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters, "I'm not much different from Andrew Cuomo. I probably agree with him on 98 percent of the issues."

Yup. Like I've said before, he's not one of us. 

Are They McCarthyites in the Obama Administration, Too?

The editors are spot on this morning in debunking the ludicrous effort of leading Democrats and their rabid media shock troops to portray Senator Ted Cruz as a "McCarthyite" whose tough questioning of Chuck Hagel traded on flimsy "inference and innuendo." Cruz made much of the fact that, in connection with his nomination to be secretary of defense, Hagel refused to disclose to the committee all compensation he has received in excess of $5,000 over the last five years, the point being to probe Hagel's connections to foreign governments and their agents -- Hagel already being known to have troublesome ties to outfits like the National Iranian American Council, which is the Islamo-fascist Iranian regime's pom-pom squad.

Question 1: If it is reprehensible "McCarthyism" and "questioning Hagel's patriotism" for the Senate to probe these matters in connection with a nominee's qualifications for a position that is second only to the presidency in its significance to our national security, then what are we to make of the executive branch's use of Form 86? That is the lengthy questionnaire candidates for any governmental national security position -- including positions far less consequential than defense secretary -- must complete in order to be granted the security clearance required to perform such jobs.

Have a look at the form (here), and in particular at pages 59--83. It is a searching inquiry into every conceivable aspect of the candidate's connections to and financial entanglements with foreign countries and their agents -- and that's only after similarly exacting questions earlier in the form about the candidate's family connections to foreign countries and their agents (a topic we discussed back when Democrats, as well as some leading Republicans like Senator John McCain, were making similarly ridiculous "McCarthyism" allegations about inquiries into the Islamist connections of Huma Abedin, top adviser to former Secretary of State Cllinton).

Question 2: There is nothing in the Constitution about security clearances for national security positions. However, the Senate's advise-and-consent function for high government officials -- even those not responsible for national security -- is enshrined in article II, section 2. So why would the Senate even think about confirming a patently sub-par defense-secretary nominee who refuses to provide the relevant committee with far less information than he had to have provided to the executive branch to get the security clearance needed to perform the job of defense secretary?

Are We Still at War?

We remain a nation at peril, but are we still a nation at war?

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama signaled, yet again, that the war in Afghanistan is effectively over. Soon, in fact, it will be over by any honest measure: The presence of American troops will be halved to 34,000 in the coming months, and erased entirely by December 31, 2014. On this arbitrarily chosen date, the president claims, we will “achieve our core objective of defeating the core of al-Qaeda.”

This was just rhetorical fluff. The core of al-Qaeda will still be intact, even resurgent. It will simply have moved on to more hospitable climes such as northern Africa -- thanks in no small part to a windfall of new arms from Libya, courtesy of Obama’s unprovoked, unauthorized, and strategically disastrous war to topple the Qaddafi regime.

What, moreover, has Afghanistan got to do with “defeating the core of al-Qaeda”? We have been told for years that al-Qaeda has virtually no presence in Afghanistan. It has been a very long time since the mission of our troops there was to defeat al-Qaeda’s core. For several years, their mission has been incoherent: Prop up the ramshackle and often hostile sharia government we have birthed in Kabul, while simultaneously staving off and negotiating with the Taliban. You may think, as I do, that these are futile objectives and that it is irresponsible to put our troops in harm’s way for them. Or you may believe that, though difficult, they are worthy goals. One thing you cannot credibly believe, though, is that these are the aims for which we went to war in 2001.

#ad#It is essential to remember those aims because it is they, and they alone, that determine whether we are still, constitutionally and legitimately, a nation at war. That is a very real question. It is one we must confront because on it hinges such crucial questions as whether the intensified drone campaign -- the subject of heated ongoing debate -- is lawful.

Understand: Though war is political act, it is also a formal legal reality. Its existence and legitimacy, in our constitutional system, are up to Congress.

War is not a matter of rhetoric. Banter that “we remain a nation at war” is no more meaningful than claptrap about being at “war” with poverty or drugs. Many of us have long objected to the term “War on Terror” exactly because it is rhetoric that ducks identification of an actual enemy. As such, it invites such dubious mission creep as “Islamic democracy”–building in Afghanistan and elsewhere. If, in going to war, you don’t focus on the defeat of a concretely identified human enemy, all manner of foolishness can become policy under the guise of defeating a rhetorical abstraction such as “terror.”

Nor is war an exercise in deductive reasoning. The nation is not legitimately at war just because politicians and pundits can look around and draw the conclusion that the United States has enemies in the world. Merely to have enemies is not to be at war. We always have enemies -- foreign countries and factions that mean us ill. North Korea is our enemy, as is Hezbollah, but we are not at war with them.

In the same way, the international jihadist network spearheaded by al-Qaeda was our enemy before September 11, 2001. In fact, prior to that infamous date, al-Qaeda repeatedly declared itself to be at war with us. It even acted on these declarations by, for example, attacking our embassies in east Africa in 1998 and the U.S.S. Cole as it docked in Yemen in 2000. Here, however, is the salient fact: We were not at war with al-Qaeda, regardless of their jihad against us. This was unwise on our part, but that does not make it any less true.

#page#What changed after 9/11 was not our rhetoric or the unremarkable fact that we had enemies. What changed, what took the nation to war, was the formal Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress.

It was the 2001 AUMF, an act of Congress’s constitutional war power, that vested the commander-in-chief with authority “to use all necessary and appropriate force.” It was the 2001 AUMF that triggered combat operations in Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda was then headquartered. The AUMF is what rendered legitimate such wartime tactics as subjecting enemy combatants to drone strikes, indefinite detention, and military commissions.

#ad#Moreover, because the AUMF spelled out no geographical boundaries, it authorized combat operations anyplace in the world where the enemy could be found. Here, however, is where things get fuzzy because of the vast difference between our war rhetoric and what the AUMF actually says about the enemy.

The enemy is not “terror.” And, contrary to popular belief, the enemy is not even al-Qaeda. As I reiterated in last weekend’s column, the AUMF does not proclaim an open-ended license to attack anyone affiliated with al-Qaeda. In fact, the AUMF does not mention “al-Qaeda” at all. Have a look at it, here. It defines the enemy as follows:

Those nations, organizations, or persons [that the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.

The commander-in-chief’s license to wage war is plainly circumscribed by the 9/11 atrocities. Of course, that does not make the AUMF what any sensible person would call “narrow.” After all, it trusts the commander-in-chief to judge which “nations, organizations, or persons” were complicit in the 9/11 operation -- no additional congressional findings are needed.

While one person’s judgment can be quite elastic, the president’s need not be in order to make the AUMF extremely capacious. It is broad on its own terms. For example, al-Qaeda is the organization that was principally complicit in 9/11, and thus it may be attacked anyplace, anytime. The AUMF also undoubtedly authorizes warfare against the Taliban, al-Qaeda’s former host, even though the president, in his discretion, chooses not to regard the Taliban as an enemy -- indeed, our government has not even designated the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist organization, much less declared war against it. In addition, the AUMF would authorize war against Iran. The 9/11 Commission all but expressly implicated the mullahs in the 9/11 plot, despite the disinclination of President Obama, of President Bush before him, or of Congress to connect those dots.

Nevertheless, as broadly as the 2001 AUMF could be interpreted, it is not boundless. It clearly requires any use of force to be rooted in 9/11. Only those who plotted and executed the 9/11 attacks, or who harbored those who did so, are legitimate targets.

Some claim there is more play in the AUMF’s joints. They point out that the AUMF goes on to explain Congress’s desire “to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States.” But this is an explanation of Congress’s motive for the authorization spelled out in the AUMF; it does not expand that authorization. Of course it is true that, 9/11 aside, Congress does not want terrorists to attack us. But that does not alter the fact that, in the AUMF, Congress permitted combat operations only against terrorists culpable for 9/11, not against any terrorist who might ever attack us. Even the reference to “future acts of international terrorism” seized on by expansive constructionists is expressly limited to acts that might be committed “by such nations, organizations or persons” complicit in the 9/11 attacks or in the harboring of 9/11 attackers.

What does all this mean for drone attacks, the hot topic du jour? In recent days, the debate over these targeted killings -- and the collateral killings that inevitably attend them -- has strayed from its original focus on the assassination of American citizens who collude with al-Qaeda. Attention is now drawn to an equally urgent subject: the Obama administration’s startling intensification of the drone campaign.

#page#Obama may have campaigned in 2008 as the candidate who would return us to the Clinton era, when terror attacks were deemed crimes suitable for civilian prosecution rather than acts of war fit for military response. As president, though, Obama has authorized hundreds more drone attacks than did his supposedly war-mongering predecessor. In addition, he has dramatically extended the frontiers of the campaign, which now include not only Pakistan and Yemen but also a vast swath of the Maghreb.

#ad#Nor is that all. This week, Brandon Webb and Jack Murphy, two former special-ops warriors, published Benghazi: The Definitive Report. If the book is accurate, Obama delegated to John Brennan, his top counterterrorism adviser and nominee for CIA director, unfettered authority to conduct a covert war against terrorists in northern Africa -- an enterprise conducted outside the normal chain of command and without the knowledge of relevant American diplomatic and intelligence officials.

Let’s put aside for the moment that, had George Bush done something like this, only the peal of impeachment bells would have silenced the media outrage. The pertinent question is: Who are the targets of this alleged covert war?

Yes, there are heinous jihadists in Mali, Algeria, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia, and other African badlands. The problem is that the vast majority of them had nothing to do with 9/11 and their connections to al-Qaeda are murky at best. The problem is that, while some of them approve of al-Qaeda’s worldwide jihad, most of them lack the means, and many the desire, to attack the United States. Thus, according to at least some knowledgeable military and intelligence veterans, our drones are catalyzing threats against the United States that would not otherwise exist.

Do not get me wrong. We have seen the wages of abiding safe havens for al-Qaeda. In Afghanistan and Sudan, the network set up shop, trained recruits, and convinced many who’d been aggrieved locally to terrorize globally. When al-Qaeda and its affiliates establish these redoubts, as they are now trying to do in northern and eastern Africa, they plot mass-murder attacks against the United States and American targets throughout the world. That is why we must not allow that to happen anyplace. Naturally, we do not want to make the threat against us worse than it is. But ignoring it is not an option. The logic of jihadist ideology is global aggression, even if many of its adherents are not quite so ambitious#...#at least for the time being. We are therefore better off striking jihadist strongholds than refraining from striking them. The additional enemies we may inspire are more than offset by those our resolve discourages.

So President Obama is right to want our extraordinary military capabilities trained on emerging jihadist hubs -- and I applaud him for recognizing that effective national security need not entail extravagant nation-building projects that do not make us safer. But to have legitimacy, drone attacks and other special-operations initiatives against our jihadist enemies must be authorized by Congress. The Constitution calls for war to be waged by the commander-in-chief, but it must be approved by the sovereign -- and that is not the president. It is the American people, acting through their representatives in Congress.

Congressional authorization is not just what our law demands, it is what sound policy dictates. Under the Obama administration’s unilateral approach to war, on some days we are targeting jihadists in Abbottabad and in villages along the Gulf of Aden, while on other days we are somehow aligning with jihadists in Benghazi and Cairo (and maybe Aleppo).

The end of the war in Afghanistan is far from the end of the threat to America. It is past time to specify who the enemy is. It is past time to make clear that, while we have no desire to occupy foreign lands, we are resolved -- as a nation, not just as a presidential administration -- to pursue and defeat our jihadist enemies, wherever they are and however long it takes.

— 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.

Operation of Law or Operation of Lying?

Jonah hits on one of the things that drives me battiest about the GOP: leadership's legerdemain in attempting to avoid accountability for unpopular legislation that they lack the courage to fight against. And while there is something to be said for Dan's suggestion that some of this is just a matter of tailoring messaging to different constituencies, some of it is just flat out lying. 

To be fair, on the Bush tax cuts, I think Sen. McConnell and Speaker Boehner deserve to be cut some slack. When McConnell suggests that taxes went up spontaneously by "operation of law," he has a point. Republicans controlled the government, but just barely, in the years when the tax cuts were passed and accelerated -- 2001 (when senate was really 50-50) and 2003. Consequently, the GOP did not have the vote margins needed to make the Bush tax cuts "permanent" (i.e., enact them in such a way that it would have taken passage of a subsequent law to repeal them or otherwise raise taxes). Because the tax cuts were deemed to increase the deficit, the so-called "Byrd Rule" attached. That meant the cuts could be passed by a simple majority but would expire after ten years automatically (or, as Sen. McConnell puts it, "due to an operation of law").

In that sense, McConnell's claim is accurate: The law really did operate to sunset the cuts in the absence of any legislation to hike taxes. Now, could you argue that Republicans signed off on this arrangement and thus voted for the ultimate expiration of the cuts? Could you say that, in passing the Bush cuts, Republicans were affirmatively voting to increase taxes down the road? I suppose so, but only in the most technical sense. The reality is that if congressional Republicans and the Bush White House had not gone the Byrd Rule route, the Bush tax cuts would never have happened in the first place.

Obviously, the GOP hoped that their margin in the senate would improve. If it had, and they'd gotten a filibuster-proof majority, I'm confident they would have enacted new law to make the Bush tax cuts "permanent." The point, though, is that Republicans never tried to raise taxes and then cover up having done so. Yes, you could argue validly that they abandoned principle in the recent eleventh-hour deal that preserved the Bush cuts for most but not all taxpayers. But it is at least equally valid to argue that, as Jonah says, they were trying to make the best of a bad situation in which taxes rates would otherwise rise for everyone once the clock struck midnight. (I realize that is an oversimplification, but you get my drift.)

This is night-and-day different from what McConnell and Boehner pulled in 2011's debt ceiling debacle.

In that instance, as I explained at the time, Republicans insidiously camouflaged the fact that they approved $2.4 trillion in new debt, to be added on to the country's already staggering debt of over $14 trillion. The increase could not have happened without GOP cooperation -- new legislation was required to raise the ceiling, and the GOP had the numbers to block any new legislation. But although the party's conservative base was outraged at the prospect of more borrowing when spending and debt were already out of control, Republicans were afraid that they would be crucified in the media for purportedly causing the nation to default. So, they approved the ceiling rise but designed a byzantine procedure for executing it -- a procedure designed to make their approval look like opposition. 

Here's how it worked: The $2.4 trillion rise was fully authorized, but it would be doled out in installments. As debt continued mounting, the president would have to claim each installment accordingly. The president's claim would be enough to trigger the installment -- i.e., the installment was presumptively approved. But Congress tacked on a window-dressing process enabling lawmakers to vote "to disapprove" the installments as they came due. As Republicans well knew, this process was illusory, fully intended to mislead the public. They had the votes to block debt-rise legislation in its entirety; but once they had approved that legislation, they would lack the votes necessary to take back what they had already presumptively allowed. Thus, the "disapproval" was just theater to make it look like they were voting against what they had already voted for.

That's not a messaging problem. That's a mendacity problem.

Assassinations, Hypocrisy & Opportunity

A million thanks to my friend Roger Kimball for his kind post on my weekend column, which addressed the DOJ white paper on wartime killings of American citizen terrorists.