Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 63
April 1, 2011
How the most transparent administration in history gets a transparent congressional debate on war in Libya
Andrew C. McCarthy
Greetings from sunny southern California, where I'm nearing the end of a week of speechifying.
... Speaking of which, that sure was some senate debate on whether we should go to war with Libya, didn't you think? No? You didn't hear it? Funny thing, neither did anyone else apparently ... even though I'm told the State Department has started telling anyone who'll listen that the administration has won congressional authorization for its "kinetic" intervention.
So what happened? Well, the Senate, as the Senate is wont to do, passed a chest-thumping resolution a few weeks back, "strongly condemning the gross and systematic violations of human rights in Libya." It was the predictable blather, duly decrying that "Muammar Gadhafi has ruled Libya for more than 40 years by banning and brutally opposing any individual or group opposing the ideology of his 1969 revolution, criminalizing the peaceful exercise of expression and association, refusing to permit independent journalists' and lawyers' organizations, and engaging in torture and extrajudicial executions," etc. -- and conveniently failing to mention that, for the last eight years, the thug has been doing all these things while being subsidized by the U.S. Congress and lauded by senior senators as a "valuable ally" of the United States against terrorism. The resolution called on Qaddafi to cease and desist, in addition to praising the U.N. for referring Qaddafi to the International Criminal Court, imposing sanctions, and so on.
Pretty tame stuff, and completely non-binding, which is probably why it passed by unanimous consent on March 1, without debate or the presence of very many senators. Except, it didn’t pass as it was teed up. I’m told that unbeknownst (and certainly unnoticed) by most senators was a paragraph the principal sponsor, New Jersey Democrat Bob Menendez, tucked into the final version. It declares that the Senate “urges the United Nations Security Council to take such further action as may be necessary to protect civilians in Libya from attack, including the possible imposition of a no-fly zone over Libyan territory.”
The resolution has no force of law … except, as we’ve seen in other contexts, the Obama administration takes the position that bothersome technicalities like the constitutional procedures for how bills become laws, how international agreements get ratified – and, apparently, how military force gets authorized – are too quaint to bother with. If the progressives on some governmental or international body resolve to support some Obama position, the Obama administration rationalizes that “authority” for its policy has been created – whether through hocus-pocus like “customary international law” or some other device. Thus, it’s now saying Congress (the Senate is "Congress," right?) has approved the deployment of the U.S. armed forces for purposes of a no-fly zone and for any other action that may be necessary to protect civilians.
I am hearing that many in Congress are not amused. Let’s see if they actually do anything about it.
March 30, 2011
Middle East Howlers
A “howler,” the Wall Street Journal called it in an editorial yesterday. That certainly is a fitting description of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s latest mindboggling foray into Middle East analysis. It makes sense, she maintains, for American armed forces to get “kinetic” in Libya but not in Syria because Moammar Qaddafi is a brutal dictator while brutal dictator Bashar Assad is really a “reformer.” Perhaps she has been watching too much al-Jazeera, this former first lady who was so instrumental in her husband’s airbrushing of the terrorist kleptocrat Yasser Arafat -- a peace-seeking statesman . . . at least between intifadas.
#ad#Al-Jazeera is the Islamist communications hub. The network’s brightest star, Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi of the Muslim Brotherhood, fresh from his triumphant return to Egypt to dance on the grave of the pro-American Mubarak regime, recently issued a fatwa calling for Qaddafi’s murder. And in the network’s showcase cause, the annihilation of the Zionist entity, Assad and his Hezbollah confederates are just what central casting ordered. Yet, according to Secretary Clinton, al-Jazeera is the place to which people turn for the “real news,” the serious analysis you just can’t get from the talking heads on U.S. television.
Another howler . . . or is it? Fox News, for example, is fast becoming the Arab Spring Channel.
On its weekend talking headliner, Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace spent several minutes grilling Newt Gingrich on his marital infidelities. “Man to man,” the host hectored, the former House Speaker must have had some glass-house qualms. After all, he was cheating at the very moment when he was leading the charge against Mrs. Clinton’s intern-chasing husband. Gingrich -- who is not yet even a declared presidential candidate -- is a long shot for a nomination that won’t be decided until over a year from now. Yet Wallace thought it essential, right now, to get to the bottom of indiscretions that are nearly two decades old.
Tough questioning -- fair, but tough and unyielding. That is Mr. Wallace’s trademark -- or at least it was until Sunday’s program shifted to the breaking news in Libya. Without congressional consultation, much less endorsement, the Obama administration had just dispatched the nation’s armed forces to take sides in a civil war. Problem? Not at all, not for Mr. Wallace’s giddy guests. One after the other, Sens. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I., Ct.), longtime Islamic-democracy-project enthusiasts, gushed over the “rebels” and the joys of America’s finally being aligned with the “Arab street” (i.e., the people who celebrated the 9/11 attacks and, just this month, the murder of the Fogels, a family of Jewish settlers in the West Bank). Without a hint of challenge from the formerly dogged Wallace, McCain and Lieberman seemed to compete over who could ooze more affinity for the “freedom fighters.”
The pattern continued through the program’s concluding panel of pundits, in which Fox’s Brit Hume, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol, and Fortune’s Nina Easton glowed over the “rebels” of the “Arab Spring.” But who are the rebels? There was apparently no need to tarry over that seeming irrelevancy. It could only distract from the truly urgent question of whether we are doing quite enough for them -- whether President Obama’s Alinskyite play of helping these “freedom fighters” while claiming not to help them will be enough for them to prevail.
Perhaps not, the consensus seemed to be. It will probably take arming them and providing other logistical support. It was left to the house lefty, Juan Williams, of all people, to point out that we really don’t know much about the rebels -- except that some of them seem to be anti-American Islamists. Maybe, he suggested, we ought to find out more before we start passing out matériel that could one day be turned against us.
Williams had stumbled, at long last, on the fact so inconvenient that it must not be spoken: The “Arab Spring” is actually the Islamist Spring. Islamists as “freedom fighters”? Now that’s a howler. The very concept of “freedom” in Islam is markedly different from the “freedom” at the root of Western democracy. Islam envisions not individual liberty but its antithesis, perfect submission to Allah’s law -- and the Judaeo-Christian notion of equality is nowhere to be found. There is a reason why Islam has no democratic tradition.
#page#The Islamist mission is to impose this law, sharia, a totalitarian code to be enforced by rulers who would be just as authoritarian as the despots they are replacing. There is too much evidence to permit the Arab Spring heralds to refute this proposition head on, so they deflect. They spin Middle East developments as a major defeat for al-Qaeda and its philosophy of extorting change through violence.
#ad#This, however, confounds ends and means. Al-Qaeda’s approach -- holding that even Muslims should be killed if they won’t hew to the terror network’s construction of Islam -- has always been an outlier, attracting only a fringe of Muslims. In contrast, its goal of imposing sharia as the gateway to Islamicized societies is not merely an al-Qaeda goal; it is a majority position in the Muslim Middle East. It is not al-Qaeda that is trying to put Muslim apostates to death in Kabul; it is the U.S.-backed Afghan government. It is not al-Qaeda that is administering “virginity tests” in Cairo; it is the U.S.-built Egyptian military.
The biggest difference between Qaddafi and the coming Islamist despotism is that the latter, faithful to its ideology, promises to be intractably anti-Western and disdainful of non-Muslim religious minorities. Thus Arab Spring enthusiasts tend to develop laryngitis when it comes to the taxonomy of their “rebels.” Nor, other than the mantra that troop surges have succeeded, is there much chatter about the spring that came early for Iraq and Afghanistan -- where non-Muslims are persecuted, homosexuals are abused under the guidance of the clerics, Iran’s influence grows, and the “Zionist entity” is dutifully reviled. (Anybody want to bet me on whom the new Iraq will support in kinetic Islam’s next faceoff with Israel?)
Only days before Secretary Clinton’s Assad howler, we had the Arab Spring’s first blooms in Egypt. In a referendum, Egyptians voted by more than 3 to 1 (an overwhelming 77 to 23 percent) to adopt a framework for swift new elections -- the opposite of the deliberate transition process that would have given non-Islamist democrats a fighting chance to build effective secular democratic parties and institutions. The plan voters endorsed quite intentionally will enable the Muslim Brotherhood to achieve electoral success in parliament this September. The Brothers will then be poised to rig the presidential election three months later, and to control the drafting of any new Egyptian constitution. We already know that one part of the current constitution will remain sacrosanct: the article establishing Islam as the state religion and sharia as fundamental law.
Arab Spring fans told us the urbane Egyptians were even more determined “freedom” seekers than the tribal Libyan “rebels.” They scoffed at those among us who warned against having too much confidence in the Egyptian military -- which has been mentored by American counterparts for the last 30 years -- as a hedge against the slide toward Islamism.
In the event, the military -- which, like the Brotherhood, mirrors Egyptian society -- predictably favored the Brothers. To stoke the illusion of a true democratic uprising, Secretary Clinton sought to meet with the anti-Mubarak vanguard. They rebuffed her. It’s not hard to understand why: She is an American, and they despise Americans; she is tilting at windmills, and they are hardheaded Islamists. Meanwhile, campaigning Muslim clerics and activists publicly framed a “yes” vote as a call for more sharia and a denial to the Coptic Christian minority of an equal role in civic life (for in Islam there is no separating civic life from sharia). The Islamists won going away.
So what we can expect from the “rebels” if they oust Qaddafi? What can we learn from the Egyptian election -- coupled, in Iraq and Afghanistan, with rampant anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and abuse of non-Muslims despite years of U.S. democracy-building? You won’t find out from watching the talking heads. They’ve decided not to ask.
— 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.
Andrew C. McCarthy
March 28, 2011
What part of this wasn't true when Obama was lining Qaddafi's pockets?
Andrew C. McCarthy
President Obama tonight:
For more than four decades, the Libyan people have been ruled by a tyrant – Moammar Gaddafi. He has denied his people freedom, exploited their wealth, murdered opponents at home and abroad, and terrorized innocent people around the world – including Americans who were killed by Libyan agents. Last month, Gaddafi’s grip of fear appeared to give way to the promise of freedom. In cities and towns across the country, Libyans took to the streets to claim their basic human rights. As one Libyan said, “For the first time we finally have hope that our nightmare of 40 years will soon be over.”
Was all this not true when Obama was embracing the Bush policy of considering Qaddafi a valuable ally against terrorism and when Obama was pouring taxpayer funds into Qaddafi-run charities?
Menendez: Obama must call Qaddafi a terrorist
Andrew C. McCarthy
I was just watching Bret Baier's show on the Fox Freedom Agenda Channel, and he reported that Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) is urging President Obama to refer to Col. Qaddafi as a terrorist, in light of the fact that the Lockerbie bombing included victims from New Jersey.
I wholeheartedly agree, and hope the president will do this. I hope, though, that President Obama will thus also explain why he thought it was perfectly fine not only to maintain the Bush U.S. policy that Qaddafi was a valuable U.S. ally against terrorism but actually to have his State Department (under our new Qaddafi scourge, Hillary Clinton) contribute $400,000 to foundations run by Qaddafi's children. And lest there be any doubt, that contribution came after Qaddafi's son Saif -- recipient of half the State Department contribution -- escorted Lockerbie terrorist Abdel Baset al-Megrahi home to a hero's welcome after Qaddafi, with full U.S. knowledge, pressured the U.K. and Scotland to secure Megrahi's release.
I'm also hoping Sen. Menendez will be good enough to share with us whatever objections he made to the Bush policy of embracing Qaddafi, the Bush State Department policy of funding Qaddafi, and the Obama policy of shoveling U.S. taxpayer dollars into Qaddafi run "foundations." I somehow can't recall any, but I'm sure he'll enlighten us.
It's Not that Qaddafi Was Right, It's that We Knew He Was Right
Andrew C. McCarthy
Jonah and Mark went back and forth over the weekend on the question of whether Qaddafi has been right in saying that the "'rebels' are al Qaeda." In particular, Jonah pointed to the reports about the "rebel" commander Abdul Hakim al-Hasadi (alternatively referred to as al-Hasidi), a member of the Qaeda-connected Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIGF) who was detained by the U.S. for several years after his capture in 2002. (I discussed al-Hasadi in my weekend column.)
I'd suggest that the real issue here is not whether Qaddafi was right, it's that our government knew he was right . . . unless you think they were lying to us throughout the Bush years. Here, for example, is Secretary of State Condi Rice in 2006, explaining the Bush administration's decision to restore diplomatic relations with Qaddafi:
We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001.
The cooperation she to which she was referring primarily involved intelligence about al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists (like the LIGF) in Libya. It was important because, as the Defense Department found, more Libyans (the kind of Libyans who are to be found among the "rebels") traveled to fight against U.S. forces in the war on terror than the citizens of any other country by percentage of population.
By the time of Condi's gushing 2006 tribute to Qaddafi's cooperation, this provision of intelligence had been ongoing for three years. (And it didn't just involve us -- the report I cite above says, "Libya began working last year [i.e., 2005] with Britain to curtail terrorism by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and had extradited a suspect in a Cairo bombing to Egypt.") The sharing of intelligence against Libyan jihadists also explains, in part, the Bush administration decision to take Qaddafi off the list of state sponsors of terrorism at that point -- he was deemed to be an ally against jihadist terror, notwithstanding his blood-soaked history as an anti-American terrorist. It further explains why congressional Democrats like the late Tom Lantos strongly supported the Bush administration's cozying up to Qaddafi (Lantos in 2006: "Libya has thoroughly altered its behavior by abolishing its program to develop weapons of mass destruction and ending its support for terrorism.")
The cooperation continued apace, according to our government. That's why, with great fanfare in 2008, the Bush administration formally settled past hostilities with Libya. At her meeting with Qaddafi that year, Secretary Rice again stressed the dictator's cooperation against terrorists. She affirmed that "the relationship has been moving in a good direction for a number of years now and I think tonight does mark a new phase." The important thing, Rice insisted, was "moving forward. The United States, I've said many times, doesn't have any permanent enemies."
Need more? In 2008, when the Bush State Department proposed to start pouring foreign aid into Libya, State's justification to Congress asserted that Libya "has changed course from a country fomenting international terrorism to an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism[.]" Aid to Libya was, of course, approved by Congress -- without apparent objection from the many senators and House members now describing Qaddafi as a longtime, incorrigible terrorist enemy of the United States.
Our government knew all along that Qaddafi was a thug. A determination was made, however, to overlook his past atrocities for what was said to be the greater good of his abandonment of his weapons programs and his cooperation against the anti-American jihadists we well knew were in his country and the wider rough neighborhood.
We can continue pretending that these jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other anti-American Islamists are not a significant part of the Libyan mujahideen that commentators keep calling the "rebels" and the "freedom fighters." Similarly, we can keep pretending it's an "Arab Spring" of "democratic revolution" in neighboring Egypt ... and never you mind those "virginity tests" or that election they just had in which nearly three-quarters of Egyptians voted for a process that will shift control of the country and the writing of its next constitution to the Muslim Brotherhood. But pretending won't change who the "rebels" really are and what this "Arab Spring" is really about.
It's not that Qaddafi was right, it's that we knew he was right
Andrew C. McCarthy
Jonah and Mark went back and forth over the weekend on the question of whether Qaddafi has been right in saying that the "'rebels' are al Qaeda." In particular, Jonah pointed to the reports about the "rebel" commander Abdul Hakim al-Hasadi (alternatively referred to as al-Hasidi), a member of the Qaeda-connected Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIGF) who was detained by the U.S. for several years after his capture in 2002. (I discussed al-Hasadi in my weekend column.)
I'd suggest that the real issue here is not whether Qaddafi was right, it's that our government knew he was right ... unless you think they were lying to us throughout the Bush years. Here, for example, is Secretary of State Condi Rice in 2006, explaining the Bush administration's decision to restore diplomatic relations with Qaddafi:
We are taking these actions in recognition of Libya's continued commitment to its renunciation of terrorism and the excellent cooperation Libya has provided to the United States and other members of the international community in response to common global threats faced by the civilized world since September 11, 2001.
The cooperation she to which she was referring primarily involved intelligence about al Qaeda affiliated terrorists (like the LIGF) in Libya. It was important because, as the Defense Department found, more Libyans (the kind of Libyans who are to be found among the "rebels") traveled to fight against U.S. forces in the war on terror than the citizens of any other country by percentage of population.
By the time of Condi's gushing 2006 tribute to Qaddafi's cooperation, this provision of intelligence had been ongoing for three years. (And it didn't just involve us -- the report I cite above says, "Libya began working last year [i.e., 2005] with Britain to curtail terrorism by the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and had extradited a suspect in a Cairo bombing to Egypt.") The sharing of intelligence against Libyan jihadists also explains, in part, the Bush administration decision to take Qaddafi off the list of state sponsors of terrorism at that point -- he was deemed to be an ally against jihadist terror, notwithstanding his blood-soaked history as an anti-American terrorist. It further explains why congressional Democrats like the late Tom Lantos strongly supported the Bush administration's cozying up to Qaddafi (Lantos in 2006: "Libya has thoroughly altered its behavior by abolishing its program to develop weapons of mass destruction and ending its support for terrorism.")
The cooperation continued apace, according to our government. That's why, with great fanfare in 2008, the Bush administration formally settled past hostilities with Libya. At her meeting with Qaddafi that year, Secretary Rice again stressed the dictator's cooperation against terrorists. She affirmed that "the relationship has been moving in a good direction for a number of years now and I think tonight does mark a new phase." The important thing, Rice insisted, was "moving forward. The United States, I've said many times, doesn't have any permanent enemies."
Need more? In 2008, when the Bush State Department proposed to start pouring foreign aid into Libya, State's justification to Congress asserted that Libya "has changed course from a country fomenting international terrorism to an increasingly valuable partner against terrorism[.]" Aid to Libya was, of course, approved by Congress -- without apparent objection from the many senators and House members now describing Qaddafi as a longtime, incorrigible terrorist enemy of the United States.
Our government knew all along that Qaddafi was a thug. A determination was made, however, to overlook his past atrocities for what was said to be the greater good of his abandonment of his weapons programs and his cooperation against the anti-American jihadists we well knew were in his country and the wider rough neighborhood.
We can continue pretending that these jihadists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other anti-American Islamists are not a significant part of the Libyan mujahideen that commentators keep calling the "rebels" and the "freedom fighters." Similarly, we can keep pretending it's an "Arab Spring" of "democratic revolution" in neighboring Egypt ... and never you mind those "virginity tests" or that election they just had in which nearly three-quarters of Egyptians voted for a process that will shift control of the country and the writing of its next constitution to the Muslim Brotherhood. But pretending won't change who the "rebels" really are and what this "Arab Spring" is really about.
March 26, 2011
Decoding Libya
For nearly 20 years, we’ve willfully blinded ourselves to the Rosetta Stone that decodes our enemy’s war doctrine. But the jihad (or shall we call it “kinetic Islam”?) is catalyzed not by al-Qaeda but by sharia -- by Muslim law. So is the “Arab Spring,” now playing in Tripoli (and elsewhere) after rave reviews in Cairo.
I have been opposed to our country’s starting a war against Libya. And starting a war is exactly what we have done, exactly what we would call it if the shoe were on the other foot -- the “kinetic” and “limited” obfuscations of intervention proponents notwithstanding. My opposition is fourfold.
First, as a constitutional matter, Congress has neither declared war nor otherwise authorized combat operations. When there has been no attack on the United States, no imminent prospect of attack against us, and no vital American interest implicated, our system obliges the president to have approval from the people’s representatives before entangling the people in a foreign conflict.
#ad#Second, and more weighty than the legal prerequisites for war (about which there is considerable dispute), is the prudential policy implicit in this constitutional guidance (about which there should be no dispute). The American people are a free and self-determining body politic. It is we, not the president alone, who should make the most important decision a body politic can make: the decision to go to war.
Yes, the Framers understood the necessity of reposing in one official, the president, the power to unleash all the nation’s strength in the event of a real threat to our country, as quickly and decisively as the circumstances demand. After all, in the late 18th century, it was anything but clear that the United States would survive. That’s a big part of why the Articles of Confederation, with their potentially suicidal security-by-committee approach, had to be supplanted by the Constitution and its powerful commander-in-chief.
Nevertheless, the Framers also grasped the other side of the coin: creating a commander-in-chief made it possible for a single official, just as suicidally, to launch unprovoked wars, inevitably provoking retaliatory strikes against us. They checked this danger by endowing Congress, too, with war powers -- with the means to starve executive recklessness of legitimacy and funding.
Bottom line: In a country where the people, not the president, are sovereign, it is foolhardy to go to war without public support. If the people are expected to pay for and die in a military expedition that we initiate against a country that has not threatened us, it is essential to have strong public support. That support is won -- or not -- by forthrightly seeking congressional authorization. Intervention proponents claim that it is manifestly in our interests to topple Colonel Qaddafi on behalf of the “rebels.” If they are right, it should be easy for the administration to get a legislative green light. President Obama hasn’t tried, despite marathon negotiations with NATO, the U.N. Security Council, and the Arab League. Nor does his rah-rah chorus seem especially anxious that he try. This testifies eloquently to the fact that there is strong public opposition, no matter how artfully polls confirming that opposition are depicted as signs of potential support.
Third, and no doubt at the root of much public opposition, is the fact that we are broke. After a decade’s misadventures in Islamic nation-building, we can safely say that “kinetic military actions” against kinetic Islam are prohibitively expensive. A people whose unborn children and grandchildren will start out life trillions in hock begins to realize that they can’t afford to go to war unless they have to go to war. Moreover, the real war inside our nation right now is against the Left’s unsustainable welfare state. Any more billions we pour into unnecessary wars are billions denied to necessary security spending -- such as border security, as NR’s Kevin D. Williamson points out. More to the point, they are also billions the Left will use as a cudgel to beat back vital spending cuts. Can’t you hear it now: “We’re blowing a fortune to wage dubious kinetic military actions in the Middle East, but conservatives claim we don’t have comparative pennies for education, health care, mortgage relief, our bankrupt states, preserving our safety net, NPR, etc., etc.”
#page#Fourth, and perhaps most significant, is the reason why war with Libya is dubious: We understand neither whom we are fighting for nor the consequences of invading a Muslim country. To apprehend these things requires a rudimentary grasp of sharia. You don’t need a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence. As I contend in The Grand Jihad, the basics will more than suffice. The problem is that, since the World Trade Center was first bombed in 1993, the government has been telling us that Islam has nothing to do with the jihadist campaign against us, so we have studiously avoided informing ourselves about Islam and its law.
It has come to light in just the last few days that commanders of the “rebels” (you know, those secular freedom fighters who are supposedly better for us than Qaddafi) include one Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi. And, I’ll be darned, it turns out that Hasadi is a jihadist who fought the United States in Afghanistan, and was detained for years until our forces turned him over to Libya. That was during the Bush years, when, through democracy-project alchemy, Qaddafi was transformed into a valuable U.S. ally against terrorism. Our new friend Qaddafi promptly#...#released him in 2008, in a deal designed to appease his Islamist opposition -- a common practice in the Middle East, where, because Islam dominates life, even dictators must alternately court and repress jihadists in order to hang on.
#ad#Hasadi is worth studying, and not just because he puts the lie to the interventionist fable about the noble rebels, those Benghazi Madisons just waiting to happen. Hasidi belongs to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), which is an al-Qaeda ally. He also has many a fawning thing to say about Osama bin Laden. Yet, Hasadi condemned al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks. In his mind, strikes against a non-Muslim country were counterproductive, both because they were indiscriminate, and therefore sure to kill some Muslims (as they did), and because they were certain to provoke a vigorous onslaught that would kill even more Muslims.
Interesting thing about that: Hasadi’s take on 9/11 is precisely the same as the Muslim Brotherhood’s. Like Hasadi, high Brotherhood officials are frequently complimentary of bin Laden (especially before Arabic-speaking audiences). And like Hasadi, the Brotherhood is in complete agreement with al-Qaeda on the ultimate goal of forging sharia states and, eventually, a global caliphate. The Brotherhood’s disagreement with bin Laden, like Hasadi’s, is strictly about tactics, especially in the West. In the United States and Europe, the Brothers think the best way to advance the sharia cause is stealth jihad, not violent jihad. They prefer having their sharia soul-mates (e.g., CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America) masquerade as civil-rights activists, the better to exploit Western freedoms and win the sympathies of the media and the academy.
But what about attacking Americans and other Westerners in Islamic countries? Sharia makes that a much different story. Like Hasadi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia guide, Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi -- the world’s most influential Sunni Muslim cleric -- condemned the 9/11 attacks. Yet, after the United States responded by invading Islamic countries, he issued a fatwa calling for the killing of American troops and support personnel in Iraq. Why the difference?
That brings us back to Hasadi#...#and sharia. Hasadi was captured by coalition forces on the Afghan-Pakistani border region in 2002. He was there because, like many Libyans, he went to Afghanistan, and later to Iraq, to fight against the invading American-led forces.
“But wait a second,” you say. “If he condemned 9/11, why would he oppose the U.S. response to 9/11?” It’s very simple: He is an Islamist, and he was following the dictates of sharia. When non-Muslim forces invade or occupy Islamic countries, Muslims must fight them as ruthlessly as necessary to drive them out. It does not matter if Muslims realize that the Western forces had a perfectly understandable reason for attacking. Even if they believe a Muslim has acted in a manner harmful to Islamic interests, sharia forbids Muslims to take sides against other Muslims for the benefit of kaffirs (unbelievers). Disputes within the ummah must be settled internally. Indeed, recall that the Taliban refused Bush-administration requests to hand bin Laden over to the United States, but said that if we provided them with our evidence, they would consider putting him on trial themselves.
#page#Obviously, not every Muslim follows sharia’s injunctions, and individual Muslims may even temper adherence to them based on the situation. Recall that there was more violent jihadist opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (which many Muslims saw as unprovoked) than to our retaliation in Afghanistan. And there is more opposition to our operations in Afghanistan now than there was ten years ago: A decade ago our cause was understandable vengeance, but now it is primarily nation-building, and, under sharia, no infidel project is more condemnable than another civilization’s attempt to sow its institutions and its way of life in Islamic territory. That is why the Afghans fought the Soviets so ferociously.
The main point is this: What I have described here is a mainstream interpretation of sharia, not some purportedly twisted al-Qaeda construction. It is the Islam of hundreds of millions of Muslims. The fact that most of these Muslims disagree with al-Qaeda’s strategy of attacking the West in the West (however much they may applaud it post facto) is beside the point. All of these Muslims believe that non-Muslim forces must be fought aggressively if they occupy Muslim countries, especially if those non-Muslim forces get kinetic inside Muslim countries. It’s a very good reason to have as little as possible to do with Muslim countries.
#ad#My opposition to intervention in Libya has been misstated in the last few days. Some commentators claim I’ve said the rebels are really al-Qaeda. That misstates my argument. As I’ve repeatedly said, the rebels are a mixed bag. The strongest faction, particularly in ideological influence, is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been in Libya for 70 years. There are also militant groups, such as Hasadi’s LIFG, that have ties to al-Qaeda, though they do not necessarily agree with bin Laden’s decision in the 1990s to take the violence global. In addition, there are Islamist organizations (such as the National Front for the Salvation of Libya) that claim to be non-violent and that oppose Qaddafi because they have come to regard him as non-Muslim, an apostate whose eccentric brand of Islam is seen as heterodox, and who persecutes his Muslim people. Moreover, there are undoubtedly al-Qaeda operatives in the mix, because al-Qaeda goes wherever the action is.
To describe these factions is not to discount the existence of some secular opposition to Qaddafi: some leftists who see an opportunity, and even some Western-influenced freedom fighters. Interventionists delude themselves, though, when they portray the latter as predominant, as the face of the rebels. Libya is a tribal Islamic backwater. That is why Qaddafi has always had to couch his despotism in Islamist rhetoric. It is why Libya, more than any other country by percentage of population, supported the insurgency in Iraq. In fact, rebel leader Hasadi claims to have recruited more than two dozen jihadists to that cause.
Qaddafi’s opposition is not driven by al-Qaeda. It is driven by sharia. Various factions want Qaddafi out so that they can install sharia and build a real Islamic state -- one that is virulently anti-Israeli, anti-Western, and anti-American, a mirror image of what the Muslim Brotherhood is now poised to sculpt in Egypt. For now, Islamists have encouraged military Western help because they lack the resources needed to oust Qaddafi themselves -- just as Bosnian Muslims could not defeat the Serbs, Iraqi Muslims could not defeat Saddam Hussein, and Afghan Muslims could not defeat the Soviet Union without American help. But as we’ve seen time and again, the embrace of American support never translates into an embrace of Americans.
The Muslims of the Middle East will gladly use us, but they will turn on us the second our temporarily useful assistance becomes an intolerable transgression against sharia. That’s why the Islamists of the Arab League were all for a no-fly zone when it was pitched as a mere verbal warning to Qaddafi’s air force, but quickly condemned it when it turned out to require a bombing campaign that was sure to kill some Muslims.
We’ve seen this show before. The rebels are not rebels -- they are the Libyan mujahideen. Like the Afghan mujahideen, including those that became al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the Libyan mujahideen comprise different groups. What overwhelmingly unites them, besides opposition to Qaddafi, is sharia. The Libyan mujahideen will exploit us but never befriend us. If they succeed, so be it. But we have no vital interest in orchestrating that success, even if it would mean a thug like Qaddafi finally gets his just deserts. If we empower them, we will eventually rue the day.
— 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.
Andrew C. McCarthy
March 23, 2011
A Political Dispute, Not a Legal One
On the Corner, NR editor Rich Lowry notes that Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith, formerly chief of the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (and author of the invaluable book The Terror Presidency: Law and Judgment Inside the Bush Administration), has offered characteristically valuable insights on the question of whether President Obama acted constitutionally in starting a war with Libya. In an NRO column last weekend, I contended that the president acted unconstitutionally.
As is often the case, legal commentary goes both ways on the question of when a president may unilaterally -- i.e., without congressional approval -- enmesh the country in armed conflict. Still, with due respect to Professor Goldsmith and other legal experts, I think there is an invalid assumption in their analyses of the Constitution’s assignment of war powers: namely, that the resulting issues are justiciable. They aren’t, nor were they intended to be.
#ad#That’s why I argue that, although President Obama’s unilateral commencement of a war against Libya is constitutionally wrong, he clearly has the power to do what he has done, for there are no legal remedies. This is a political dispute, not a legal one. Congress, if it is so disposed, will have to flex its competing constitutional muscles to rein the executive branch in. The courts should not, and almost certainly will not, intervene.
I don’t believe the Framers ever arrived at a consensus when it came to the war powers. The statements in the debates over the Constitution are all over the map. Some wanted congressional approval to be the necessary trigger for taking the nation to war. That’s why early drafts of the Constitution called for vesting Congress with the power to make war. Others realized this would be suicidal, leaving the country vulnerable to an annihilating attack while the president waited for Congress to act. That’s why the power to make war was ultimately watered down to the power to declare war.
In his excellent book The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs after 9/11, University of California law professor John Yoo, another alumnus of the Bush Office of Legal Counsel, argues that the power to declare war is basically just the authority to fix the rights and privileges of belligerents and combatants under the laws of war (e.g., legitimating attacks on persons and property, permitting seizures of contraband supplied by neutrals, etc.). This enumerated congressional power would not, on this interpretation, be much of a limitation on presidential war-making -- especially when the goals of a military operation are limited and fall short of “total war.”
I usually defer to Professor Yoo on matters of executive authority, but I’m not with him on this one. The Framers wanted both Congress and the president in the mix when it came to involving the country in armed hostilities. Settling on a congressional power to declare war was a compromise between those who wanted legislative dominance and those who wanted a freer presidential hand. The compromise did not resolve the tension, but it is indicative of an intention to give the people’s representatives a substantial role.
#page#Putting aside the power to declare war, this intention is elucidated by the pains the Framers took to put Congress in charge of whether and when to raise an army, and to limit any appropriations for an army to two years. Obviously, the Framers did not presume the need for a permanent army. That certainly cuts against the idea of freelance executive warmaking. Moreover, the Framers left it to Congress to provide for a navy and to call forth the militia in the event of invasion or insurrection. Manifestly, these are substantial war powers -- not meant to overwhelm those of the commander-in-chief, but clearly meant to be relevant.
This is consistent with a design of government for a free, self-determining people whose president was to be a chief of state but not a ruler. Barring an emergency that requires bringing force to bear in our defense, We the People should not be taken to war unless we the people -- through our representatives -- agree that we must go to war. No doubt that is why Sen. Barack Obama, as a presidential candidate and former Harvard Law Review editor flaunting his claimed expertise in constitutional law, proclaimed that “the president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”
#ad#Prudently, the Framers did not settle on a procedure for starting wars, because the circumstances leading to war and the stakes of war are, respectively, unpredictable and incalculable. It would be perilous to hamstring the country with ironclad rules. Instead, the Framers gave both branches relevant powers that work best when they are employed harmoniously -- i.e., when the country is united in going to war -- and that enabled Congress to check executive excess. And what greater executive excess could there be than a president’s unilaterally taking the country to war under circumstances in which there has been no attack and there is no imminent prospect of attack against the United States, and the vital interests of the United States are not at stake?
Let’s pretend that there were no standing army, as the Framers assumed there mightn’t be. Would Congress tax Americans to raise an army to fight a war in which no vital American interests were at stake? Of course not -- and the fact that we happen to have an army is no reason to do something we wouldn’t raise an army to do.
You don’t need to be able to articulate every close case in which unilateral presidential warmaking might be constitutionally justifiable in order to know that the Constitution frowns on the president’s unilateral use of military force in the absence of a material threat to the United States. If we are going to go to war despite the lack of obvious national-security reasons for using military force, Congress should authorize it to ensure that the most consequential decision a body politic can make is actually made by the body politic. That’s why I contend, as NR’s Ramesh Ponnuru notes, that President Obama’s commencement of war against Libya is unconstitutional.
Agree or disagree with my reasoning, how can it be, given the Constitution’s manifest vesting in Congress of powers over the decision to go to war and the compulsion of means for fighting war, that a president can think he needs approval from the U.N. or the Arab League but not from the representatives of the American people?
— 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.
Andrew C. McCarthy
March 22, 2011
CAIR Sought Qaddafi Millions
Andrew C. McCarthy
Apparently, the United States government is not alone in having a recent change of heart about Colonel Qaddafi. At the same time we were airbrushing the terrorist as an ally against terrorism, top officials of the Hamas-tied Council on American Islamic Relations were gushing praise for the dictator and seeking millions of dollars from him to underwrite their American activities.
It was 2009, as Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism recounts, and Qaddafi had just stunned the "international community" with a rambling 100-minute tirade (a tad beyond the 15-minute speech limit) at the U.N. General Assembly -- during which he railed "about everything from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy to his belief that the U.N. Security Council was similar to al-Qaida, calling it a 'terror council.'"
Afterwards, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad hailed Qaddafi as "the world Islamic popular leader," adding, "Your speech has had an impact in the hearts of many people in the world," and that "we appreciate your efforts over the years, and wish also to extend your interest . . . to Muslims in America, God willing." CAIR then hit Qaddafi up for money, which the strongman is said not to have come up with. So, naturally, CAIR now says, what's the big deal? They've decided "the world Islamic popular leader" is a mad man after all, and a brutal human rights violator -- which even the State Department (however grudgingly) was acknowledging that he was and had always been in its 2009 report on countries receiving U.S. aid.
Steve further details how CAIR continues to intimate that it does not accept foreign contributions, despite recently being shown soliciting $50 million from those human rights paragons, the Saudis. The whole IPT report is worth a gander, here.
CAIR sought Qaddafi millions
Andrew C. McCarthy
Apparently, the United States government is not alone in having a recent change of heart about Colonel Qaddafi. At the same time we were airbrushing the terrorist as an ally against terrorism, top officials of the Hamas-tied Council on American Islamic Relations were gushing praise for the dictator and seeking millions of dollars from him to underwrite their American activities.
It was 2009, as Steve Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism recounts, and Qaddafi had just stunned the "international community" with a rambling 100-minute tirade (a tad beyond the 15-minute speech limit) at the U.N. General Assembly -- during which he railed "about everything from the assassinations of Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy to his belief that the U.N. Security Council was similar to al-Qaida, calling it a 'terror council.'"
Afterwards, CAIR executive director Nihad Awad hailed Qaddafi as "the world Islamic popular leader," adding, "Your speech has had an impact in the hearts of many people in the world," and that "we appreicate your efforts over the years, and wish also to extend your interest ... to Muslims in America, God willing." CAIR then hit Qaddafi up for money, which the strongman is said not to have come up with. So, naturally, CAIR now says, what's the big deal? They've decided "the world Islamic popular leader" is a mad man after all, and a brutal human rights violator -- which even the State Department (however grudgingly) was acknowledging that he was and had always been in its 2009 report on countries receiving U.S. aid.
Steve further details how CAIR continues to intimate that it does not accept foreign contributions, despite recently being shown soliciting $50 million from those human rights paragons, the Saudis. The whole IPT report is worth a gander, here.
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