Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 64

Courting Hezbollah . . . Again

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

While the Muslim Brotherhood consolidates power in Egypt and American air power is put in the service of the Libyan mujahideen (a/k/a "the rebels"), the Obama administration is once again courting Hezbollah. (H/t Jihad Watch.) That would be the forward militia of Iran.

Administration officials wishfully see Hezbollah as analogous to Sinn Fein, the socialist "political wing" of the Irish Republican Army. But the IRA is a terrorist organization of comparatively modest, parochial ambitions (and far more modest capabilities). It has a single real enemy, Britain, and it wasn't trying to destroy Britain -- just eject it from Ireland.

To the contrary, Hezbollah is part of a global jihadist movement, as its charter proclaims. Its goal is to Islamicize the world, not just destroy Israel. Unlike the IRA, it operates globally. It has committed terrorist atrocities in several countries and has been training other terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda, for years. Indeed, a distinction worth noting between Hezbollah and Hamas (the Muslim Brotherhood's Palestinian branch) is that the latter's constitution roots Hamas's hatred for Israel in Islamic scripture (as I noted in a recent column, Article 7 of the Hamas constitution maintains that "the time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them"). Hezbollah's charter instead points the finger squarely at us: "We see in Israel the vanguard of the United States in our Islamic world. It is the hated enemy that must be fought until the hated ones get what they deserve." 

Overlooking all this, the administration seizes on the fact that Hezbollah has political divisions and has actually been elected to political office in Lebanon (whose government it promptly subverted). Officials like John Brennan (Obama's top counterterrorism adviser) take this as an indication that Hezbollah is evolving, just like the political activity of Sinn Fein was taken to be an evolution of the IRA from terrorism into regular politics. But Hezbollah is ostensibly compartmentalized into armed units (which are sufficiently well-equipped to project power on the scale of a nation-state), political actors, and social-welfare operatives because the global jihad proceeds on every front -- violent operations, infiltration of a society's government and institutions, propaganda, control of the schools, etc. It is a civilizational jihad that cannot be satisfied by political concessions in any one place. Once it has exhausted what it can achieve at the bargaining table, it goes back to the other methods of attack, including the violent ones.

It is a strategy that Hezbollah, having studied us, knows will improve its hand the next time it is inevitably invited to the bargaining table. Looks like that time is now.

When Grievance Industries Collide

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

At Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch, we learn Canadian authorities and school officials don't know quite what to do about a McGill University Muslim student who has written that he'd like to "shoot everyone in the room" at a conservative student organization, that the organization is a "secret Zionist convention" to which he "should have brought an M16," and that -- in response to the club's showing of "Indoctrinate-U," a documentary about political correctness on college campuses -- "the jihad begins today."

We further learn that a gay couple in the Netherlands is suing the mayor and police in Utrecht for failing to protect them from young Muslim immigrants ("Moroccan youths") who repeatedly attacked their home and vandalized their car until the couple finally left town, the police having told the couple they were unable to take action against the aggressors. (The religion of peace holds that homosexuals should be killed -- "in the worst, most severe way of killing," says Ayatollah Ali Sistani, our country's cherished ally in the new Iraqi "democracy.")

When "youths" are aboard, even gay rights and "hate speech" codes have to ride in the back of the bus.

'Foreign Policy as Wishful Thinking'

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

That's the title of Bruce Thornton's characteristically incisive analysis of the Libyan misadventure, at the Hudson Hoover Institution website. [My apologies -- it was right in front of me, just blew it. Thanks to our readers for correcting me.]

Boehner: 'Before any further military commitments are made . . .'?

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Another question for our intrepid Speaker -- assuming he can spare a second away from patting congressional Republicans on the back for their fearless effort to "slash" what John Hinderaker memorably figures amounts to about a third of a french fry from the Big Mac meal that is federal spending. 

In admonishing President Obama that he'd better "define . . . what the mission is in Libya," he adds that this "better job of communicat[ion]" must be done "before any further military commitments are made." But what about the military commitments that have already been made? They include starting a shooting war against Libya -- unprovoked by any attack or threatened attack on the United States. As the leader of the United States Congress, does it not bother the Speaker just a smidge that the president felt he had to get approval from the Arab League (which has now reneged) and the U.N. Security Council, but there was no need to get the assent of the peer department of the United States government that is constitutionally responsible for declaring war and for paying for the war that Obama has launched?

I argued over the weekend that our Constitution should be construed to require congressional approval if the president wants to take the nation to war under circumstances where we have not been attacked or threatened and when our vital interests are not at stake. More importantly, let's say you think I am wrong on the constitutional law question (and as I concede in the column, this is more a political matter than a legal one). Does anyone doubt that it is terrible policy to launch a war without public support, and that the people's representatives should be heard from -- especially by an administration that takes pains to get the assent of foreign bodies?

A little more than a week ago, the Obama administration announced that it would henceforth be honoring parts of Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, a 1977 treaty that administrations of both parties have refused to ratify because it would endow terrorists with enhanced legal rights. In announcing this decision, Secretary of State Clinton stated that the administration was acting "out of a sense of legal obligation." That is a veiled way of saying that, because other countries follow Protocol I, the Obama administration has determined it is binding on the United States based on "customary international law." 

For the many who don't follow these things, "customary international law" is a game in which transnational progressives (mainly, U.N. bureaucrats, Eurocrats, Democrats, self-styled human rights activists, and leftwing international law professors) get together and decide which of their pieties are so widely accepted (by themselves, of course) that they should now be deemed legally binding, even on those benighted, self-interested rubes who have not given their consent. In essence, the Obama administration is saying that customary international law trumps the Constitution's treaty clause (which requires two-thirds Senate consent and formal presidential ratification), and overrides the gate-keeping function the Constitution otherwise assigns to Congress to decide which aspects of international law will be binding on the states and the American people.

Aren't these aggressive executive claims of unilateral power to start wars and impose transnational legal standards something the Congress and the Speaker of the House ought to be a tad concerned about?

The Libyan, er, 'Rebels': 'Now, the time of jihad has arrived!'

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Why do intervention proponents insist on calling them rebels when they call themselves mujahideen -- Muslim warriors fighting a jihad?

At Pajamas, John Rosenthal has details of a report by French jounralist Marc de Chalvron, who was embedded with the Libyan "rebels" before they were turned back by Qaddafi's forces. They refer to their battle as "the jihad" -- Islamic holy war. (At least that's what they interpret jihad to mean. They apparently haven't gotten the memo from Georgetown that jihad is really a peaceful internal struggle for personal betterment, a solemn commitment to brush after every meal, or whatever ISNA is calling jihad this week).

The French report shows the "rebels" proclaiming that "Now, the time of jihad has arrived!" and, of course, screaming, "Allahu Akbar!" as they fire their guns into the air.

But, as Speaker Boehner says, "the United States has a moral obligation to stand with those who seek freedom and self-government for their people." Sure it may be the Islamic notion of freedom (i.e., perfect submission to Allah) and the sharia form of self-government, but hey, details, details. By all means, let's put these guys in charge, the sooner the better.

Go to Congress First

Going into Libya is bad enough; doing it without congressional approval is worse.

Conservative infighting over whether the United States should intervene militarily in Libya is sign of good health. To remain vital, an ideological movement needs to have its basic assumptions challenged occasionally. We need to correct our wayward courses rather than allow mistakes based on faulty strategy to serve as precedents for the next missteps.

Many conservatives (particularly neoconservatives) are strong supporters of intervention, out of a deep conviction that the global advance of freedom promotes American security. I happen to disagree, at least insofar as the “freedom agenda” relies on the U.S. military as its agent. Regardless of where one comes out on the policy, though, we all ought to agree on at least one thing: The Constitution must control the implementation of whatever policy wins the day. Yet it has become necessary to ask whether even this principle, so fundamental to a free, self-determining people, is still unanimously honored.

#ad#On Thursday evening, the U.N. Security Council voted 10–0 (with five abstentions, including China, Russia, and Germany) to authorize the use of military force (i.e., “all necessary measures”) against Libya. Ostensibly, the resolution is designed to protect the Libyan people. But not to mince words, it is a license for war against the regime of Moammar Qaddafi. It would kick hostilities off with a no-fly zone over Libya. As a practical matter, American armed forces must do the heavy lifting if the strategy is to have a prayer, and indications are that President Obama intends to oblige.

There is a catch: The Security Council is powerless to “authorize” the U.S. military to do a damned thing. The validity of American combat operations is a matter of American law, and that means Congress must authorize them.

Our Constitution vests Congress with the power to declare war. That authority cannot be delegated to an international tribunal that lacks political accountability to the American people. The decision to go to war is the most significant one a body politic can make. Thus the Framers designed our system to make certain that the responsible officials are answerable to the people whose lives are at stake and who are expected to foot the bills.

Contrary to the insistence of many on the right and the left, this has never meant that military operations may not be launched in the absence of a declaration of war. Indeed, although the United States has engaged in many wars and lesser conflicts, war has been formally declared only five times. Still, the circumstances for departing from this formality are narrowly defined.

The first is obvious: an actual or imminent strike against the United States. There is no question that the government’s principal responsibility is the security of the governed. The president, as commander-in-chief, has not only the authority but the duty to order the use of any force necessary to protect the United States from hostile powers that attack or are preparing to attack. The principle is clear, and the Supreme Court has endorsed it since the 19th century.

But this is not a blank check for the president. At a certain point in time -- which may vary with the peculiar circumstances of different armed conflicts -- Congress must weigh in and either endorse or put a stop to presidential war-making. It may do the latter by refusing to support the president’s actions and calling for military operations to cease. If the president refuses to honor this expression of disfavor by the people’s representatives, Congress may use its power of the purse to defund military operations. If the president tries to persist, Congress may even impeach him. The central point is that the commander-in-chief’s brute power is not a limitless authority. To be valid, combat operations must at some early, practical point be blessed by Congress, even if the president has righteously ordered them in response to an attack on our country.

The other circumstance of departure from the formal declaration of war occurs when Congress functionally declares war by approving combat without using the magic words “declare war.” A good example of this is the authorization for the use of military force Congress enacted, and President Bush signed, in the days after 9/11. Some on the left -- largely to bolster their contention that terrorism should be treated as a law-enforcement issue -- take the position that sovereign nations cannot truly engage in war with sub-sovereign terrorist organizations. Furthermore, it was unknown right after 9/11 (in fact, it remains unknown today) whether any foreign nation knowingly assisted al-Qaeda in the 9/11 plot. To avoid bogging down over such matters, Congress substantially declared war without using those words: It provided the president with sweeping authority to attack the enemy and reaffirmed that authorization several times with funding.

Note that both situations warranting departure from the formal declaration of war involve actual danger to the United States (or, worse, completed attacks against the United States). That is common sense. Government cannot perform its essential security function unless the president can act in a true crisis. The nation could otherwise be destroyed. In due course, though, Congress must endorse or reject presidential action. The system is designed to ensure that the nation can protect itself but does not commit to war unless the American people consent.

#page#I would like to assume that conservative proponents of intervention in Libya agree with this proposition. Earlier this week, in taking issue with my colleagues at National Review over an editorial calling for military operations against the Qaddafi regime, I voiced surprise at the editors’ suggestion that a request from the Arab League sufficed as justification for dispatching American armed forces. To be fair, however, no objection specifically based on the lack of congressional support had been brought to the editors’ attention. The passage to which I objected may merely have been meant to address the separate question of whether it was necessary or prudent to wait for additional international support.

Transnational progressives and national-security conservatives may hotly debate whether any endorsement from some international body (in particular, the U.N. Security Council) is necessary before the United States may legitimately take military action. But there should be no debating that absent a hostile invasion of our country, a forcible attack against our interests, or a clear threat against us so imminent that Americans may be harmed unless prompt action is taken, the United States should not launch combat operations without congressional approval.

#ad#That is especially true in Libya. There is no realistic prospect of harm to the United States from Qaddafi’s regime.

Concededly, I do not believe there is sufficient justification to use U.S. military force -- I don’t even think it’s a close case, and I think proponents are seriously discounting the net harm using force could cause. But I am talking now about propriety, not policy. Let’s assume for argument’s sake that: a) U.S. interests are dangerously harmed by the instability caused when a dictator is allowed to murder his own people with impunity; b) Qaddafi’s opposition, even if it prominently includes anti-American Islamists, may turn out to be tolerably democratic and less anti-American than Qaddafi; c) the advance of freedom means the retreat of Islamic terror, and therefore promotes American national security; d) Qaddafi is a terrorist enemy of the United States who has committed acts of war that cry out for a response; e) in his current precarious straits, it will be in Qaddafi’s interest to renege on his commitment to abandon pursuit of mass-destruction weapons (WMD), and that could exacerbate a regional arms race, likely landing WMD in the hands not only of Qaddafi but of anti-American regimes and terrorist organizations; and f) the “international community” is more or less unified in asking the United States -- the lone global superpower capable of crushing Qaddafi quickly -- to act.

Even if all of that were true, there would be no good reason for President Obama to launch military action without congressional approval. Yet that appears to be exactly what he is doing. In his remarks Friday, committing to what he promised would be a limited military engagement (with no ground forces, basically just air power), the president never even hinted that he might seek Congress’s imprimatur. To the contrary, he asserted that the “use of force” was “authorized” by the “strong resolution” of the “U.N. Security Council,” which was acting “in response to a call for action by the Libyan people and the Arab League.”

Many of the Libyan people, to say nothing of the Arab League, do not mean the United States well. But even if they were strong allies, that would make no difference. Only the American people and their representatives in the United States Congress get to make the “call for action” that involves enmeshing our armed forces and our country in a war.

In terms of American national security, there is no emergency. The only threat here is to Libyans who oppose Qaddafi. If that threat is truly worthy of American military intervention, President Obama and intervention proponents should be able to make that case to Congress quickly and persuasively. The president’s party controls the Senate, and even though Republicans control the House, the GOP has consistently rallied to the support of Democratic presidents when American national security is clearly at stake.

But it’s not. Thus, it is highly likely that Congress cannot be persuaded, quickly or otherwise. But the dim prospect for success is not an acceptable reason to end-run the process. In the Libya situation, our constitutional system calls for seeking a congressional authorization of military force. Even if that weren’t so, it is terrible policy to go to war without public support.

If the president and proponents of intervention cannot win congressional approval, that is a reason to refrain from going to war, not a reason to refrain from asking for approval. I used to think we all agreed about that. I hope we still do.

—  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

The 'Focused' Mission in Libya

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

I'm not finding in President Obama's remarks the part where he seeks approval from Congress for military operations in Libya. Last time I checked the Constitution, the Security Council doesn't get to authorize that.

Rich is right that this is Kosovo II. But Kosovo I is not a precedent -- it is an example of illegitimate use of force. Congress refused to approve it. As I've argued before, I think it was proper for the courts to decline to resolve this political tug of war between the political branches, but that did not validate Clinton's actions. And certainly Kosovo was not thought a precedent when the Bush administration decided to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Notwithstanding that those situations actually involved vital U.S national security interests, congressional authorization was sought and obtained before our armed forces were dispatched.

In Libya, by contrast, there are no vital U.S. security interests. That argues more for seeking approval from the representatives of the people being asked to foot the bill, not less. 

More on this in tomorrow's column.

On the NRO Libya Editorial, I Respectfully Dissent

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

I respectfully dissent from Wendesday’s NRO editorial, which urges that the United States go to war with Libya.

The editorial doesn’t put it that way. Indeed, it doesn’t call for President Obama to seek a congressional declaration of war, or at least an authorization for the use of military force, as the Bush administration understood was required before commencing combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In this case, complying with the Constitution is almost certain to result in a resounding “no” vote from the people’s representatives -- and if you think getting the Patriot Act reauthorized was uphill, figure getting Congress to bless another adventure in Islamic nation-building as Olympus … squared. So apparently ensuring that the American people support a war against Libya is a step is to be dispensed with. The editors instead claim that “the request by the rebels and the Arab League [is] all the authorization we need,” a proposition that I imagine would have come as something of a surprise to Madison, Jefferson, et al.

In any event, they would have President Obama, post haste, launch our tapped-out nation into an open-ended military intervention, one that is to start with not only the “no-fly zone” that the editors recently opposed but a “no-drive zone” to protect the “rebels” in their tottering eastern stronghold of Benghazi. That sure sounds like a full-blown U.S. invasion of Libya, although the editors are less than clear about exactly whose boots would be hitting the ground. They assure us that they seek only a “meaningful” U.S. military commitment, not an “overwhelming” one “comparable” to the Islamic nation-building misadventures in the fledgling sharia states of Iraq and Afghanistan. But of course, no one was talking about occupying Muslim countries for a decade or more when those projects started.

It seems like a long time ago, but it is worth reminding ourselves that the only missions the American people supported involved destroying the terror network that attacked our nation on 9/11 and toppling its state sponsors. Unlike anything at stake in Libya, those are vital U.S. security interests. Iraq and Afghanistan became overwhelming commitments because of the conventional unwisdom that our security somehow hinges not only on defeating our enemies but on converting Muslim basket-cases into something resembling democracy. And this, despite the absence of any Islamic democratic tradition; despite the tension between sharia and the Western principles that undergird our notion of democracy; and despite the dearth of evidence supporting the theory -- and it is only a theory -- that Country A’s being a democracy makes Country B safer from trans-continental terror networks skilled at exploiting democratic freedoms. (In point of fact, the evidence cuts in the other direction -- unless you think places like Hamburg, Madrid, San Diego, and Westport, four of the many Western cities and towns where 9/11 was planned, are not democracies.)

The editors do not explain why dictates of the “freedom agenda” would not turn Libya into another exercise in nation-building. The plan is to leap in first (to “check Qaddafi’s offensive”) and “then we can consider other options.” But the three trial balloons they fly for a purportedly limited engagement (though they do not actually restrict themselves to a limited engagement) are utterly unrealistic: (a) if it’s important enough to intervene on behalf of the “rebels,” it’s unserious to suggest that we would go no further than shoring up their enclave “so they can fight another day”; (b) “decapitation strikes against the regime in Tripoli” would produce exactly the sort of chaos that became the justification for entangling ourselves in Iraq (can anyone forget Colin Powell’s bromide, “You break it, you own it”?); and (c) as Daniel Freedman points out in the WSJ-Europe, we and the “international community” have no credibility to, as the editors put it, “bargain Qaddafi out of the country,” having relentlessly undermined the deal by which Nigeria induced Liberian dictator Charles Taylor to step down in 2003. As Mr. Freedman recounts, the Bush administration joined Europe’s preening over the “need to bring Charles Taylor to justice.” Qaddafi, naturally, took notice of what he called this “serious precedent” -- a precedent that now has convinced him to fight until “the last drop of blood is spilled.” (Call Qaddafi crazy, but he often seems to understand how the world works better than our “progressive” diplomats do.)

#more#So what is the rationale for enmeshing our armed forces and sparse resources in Libya for the benefit of the “rebels” -- the nebulous term used to avoid the inconvenient fact that Qaddafi’s main opposition includes virulently anti-American Islamists (whom the editors gently refer to as “bad actors”)? The editors assert, “Qaddafi is a murderer of Americans with whom we still have a score to settle.” They also deride him as a dictator who “hatch[es] assassination plots against foreign leaders and ravage[es] Libyan society.”

Funny thing about that: Throughout the Bush years, Qaddafi remained a murderer of Americans with whom we still had a score to settle (viz., the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 that killed 270 people, including 189 Americans, in 1988). The assassination attempt to which the editors refer happened in 2003, when Qaddafi plotted with al-Qaeda financier Abdurrahman Alamoudi -- formerly the favorite “moderate” Muslim leader of the Bush and Clinton administrations, now a convicted terrorist -- to kill then--crown prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. It must, in addition, be recalled that Qaddafi never stopped ravaging Libyan society while George W. Bush was president, a fact Michael Rubin documented time and again here at NRO (see, e.g., here). Notwithstanding all of this, the Bush administration, anxious to show a positive development amid the deteriorating situation in Iraq, decided in its wisdom to give Qaddafi a clean bill of health in exchange for his commitment to forswear the development and proliferation of WMD. (A commitment from Qaddafi -- what could go wrong?)

Wouldn’t it have been sufficient exchange for the U.S. to agree that we wouldn’t depose Qaddafi as we had just deposed Saddam? Of course it would have … but then that wouldn’t have flaunted the full glory of the freedom agenda, right? So instead Qaddafi -- a terrorist who never changed a whit -- was suddenly portrayed as a reformer and a strong U.S. ally in the war against terror. The Bush administration removed him from the list of terror sponsors, opened the foreign-aid spigot for him, and cultivated ties between his regime and U.S. industry -- all to the deep dismay of the same opposition we are now told it is essential that we help. Even more infuriating, President Bush, at the apparent urging of Secretary Rice, agreed to satisfy Qaddafi’s damage claims arising out of the Reagan administration’s righteous missile-attack on Tripoli in retaliation for the despot’s terrorist bombing that killed American troops in Germany.

That seems like some pretty outrageous coddling of a murderer of Americans with whom we still have a score to settle. So I searched the NR archives to find an editorial in which we condemned any of this appeasement, called for Qaddafi’s ouster, demanded that the terrorist be made to answer for Flight 103, or at least protested Secretary Rice’s treacly sit-down with this anti-American monster. Unless I’m missing something, there is no such editorial. To be clear, I am not saying NR ever bought the Bush administration’s Qaddafi makeover or regarded the dictator as anything other than the thug that he is. My point is that, although Qaddafi is still the same guy he has always been, we did not make much of a peep over the Bush approach, yet now we want to go to war with the guy under circumstances where there has been no intervening Libyan attack on the U.S., or even a threat against the U.S.

(To be sure, as I have noted before, there were plenty of Libyans who transited Syria to join the anti-U.S. insurgency in Iraq. But we didn’t consider that kind of misbehavior a casus belli even against Iran, the maestro that was actually orchestrating much of the insurgency. Furthermore, the Libyans who joined it were at least as likely to be part of what the editors now call the “rebels” as they were to be Qaddafi loyalists.)

Apparently, the editors now want to get tough on Qaddafi not because it is easier for conservatives to push Obama than it was for them to buck Bush, but because there is now a real chance to oust Qaddafi. In favor of what? It is here that the editorial is at its weakest, resisting any admission that its proposed military intervention would, in all probability, just exchange one anti-American dictator with a new set of anti-American rulers. Claiming to have “no illusions” about the “rebels,” the editorial allows that they have their "share of bad actors." But the editors refrain from actually describing who those bad actors are.

There is a reason why, besides “freedom agenda” enthusiasts, no one wants Qaddafi “hanging from a lamp post” (as the editors put it) more than Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s sharia guide. He has just issued a fatwa calling for Qaddafi’s murder. The Brotherhood, once again, is all over this. As I summarized in a column last week:

As in Egypt, the main opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood — avowed enemies of the West whose goal is the establishment of sharia states. The National Front for the Salvation of Libya is also a largely Islamist opposition group — one that was stronger until many of its Islamist members split off because they objected to the group’s acceptance of U.S. support in the 1980s. There are other Islamist and leftist groups, including violent jihadists. Moreover, Libya is virulently anti-Israeli, and a disturbing anti-Semitism courses through the opposition. (See this Pajamas report, as well as this post by Andrew Bostom on the history of anti-Semitism in Libya.) Whatever regime comes after Qaddafi is likely to be anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli.

The editors slough this off with the contention that it really doesn’t matter in light of the “standard” they’d apply, which they say, “shouldn’t be particularly high,” to wit:  “Are [the ‘rebels’] better or worse than Qaddafi?” They then suggest that this is a slam-dunk, since “it will be hard to do worse, unless [the ‘rebels’] take over and immediately begin hatching assassination plots against foreign leaders and ravaging Libyan society.” This piles naivete atop absurdity.

First for the absurdity: The “standard” the editors suggests does not address the issue at hand. The question is not whether Qaddafi’s successors would be better than Qaddafi such that we should hope they succeed or even provide them the sort of moral support the Reagan administration gave to Poland’s Solidarity movement. The question is whether there are such clear and vital American national security interests riding on the supplanting of Qaddafi by these particular Islamist would-be successors that we should commit American military forces, i.e., invade another Muslim country that has not attacked us, in order to bring that outcome about. Even if we were to concede for argument’s sake that the rebels would be less anti-American than Qaddafi, that would argue for nothing more than wishing them good luck; it would not call for the sacrifice of American blood and treasure (or, more accurately, American blood and going deeper in hock to China).

And then the naivete: Is it really so obvious that the “rebels” would be better for us than Qaddafi? News flash: The Muslim Brotherhood has a history of not just plotting but actually carrying out the assassination of foreign leaders. Indeed, while we are not happy that Qaddafi is a foreign leader, he does happen to be one, and, as already noted, the Brotherhood’s top clerical leader is openly calling for him to be killed. If we just have a look at Gaza, Sudan, Somalia, and Iran, where Islamist governments reign (the one in Gaza is actually run by the Muslim Brotherhood), it’s fair to say that “ravage” is too gentle a word for what they do to their societies. Look at how Turkey is devolving after eight years of Islamist rule. Clearly, it wasn’t so obvious to the Bush administration that the available alternatives were manifestly preferable to Qaddafi. I don’t know why the editors are so confident on this point.

I repeat, the editors may well be right that a Libyan regime run by the “rebels” could end up being better for us than Qaddafi -- at least marginally. But it also might be worse -- Qaddafi hasn’t attacked us in many years; the Muslim Brotherhood is actively seeking to destroy the West. In either event, the issue is not what we ought to be hoping for or even working toward diplomatically. It is whether hastening the post-Qaddafi era is so clearly in our interests that it’s worth going to war over.

Besides attacking Libya directly, the editors further suggest that we should "work with our allies to provide logistics, training, and arms" to these “rebels.” Before we do something like that, should we not at least discuss how disastrous have been our efforts to train and arm Muslim forces in the recent past? Indeed, perhaps I should say the very recent past: Though I cannot vouch for them, reports are now circulating (see, e.g., here) that two members of the U.S.-funded and trained Palestinian security forces have been arrested on suspicion of providing logistical support for the massacre of a Jewish family in the West Bank town of Itamar last weekend (the massacre is the subject of my last column).

Besides arming the Palestinian Authority, which continues to maintain its own terrorist wing, our government has been funding Qaddafi (including “charities” run by his family) and the Pakistani regime that created the Taliban. We seeded the Afghan mujahideen with hundreds of millions of dollars that ended up going to al-Qaeda and jihadist warlords like Hekmatyar who are still at war with us. We intentionally looked the other way while Iran armed and trained the Bosnian Muslims, giving the jihad a foothold in Europe. The Egyptian military to which we have given tens of billions over the last 30 years could soon be coopted by an Islamist regime. Do we really want to keep arming and funding shady players in a place about which we know little except that there is teeming animosity for America and the West?

The editors also offer the now familiar argument that we need to act because President Obama has staked American credibility on Qaddafi's ouster. “All lies in jest,” the tune goes, “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Obama says a lot of things, many of them contradictory. (Mubarak must stay, Mubarak must be gone yesterday, Qaddafi is our friend, the violence must stop but no need to mention Qaddafi, Qaddafi is suddenly illegitimate, and so on. If Mr. Obama can pry himself away from his brackets, who knows what we’ll be hearing tomorrow?) The president refused to intervene in the Iranian uprising because he had committed us to diplomacy with the mullahs -- should we support that feckless strategy since, whatever misgivings we may have, Obama has staked U.S. credibility on it? I don't understand how it is that we can disagree with most everything Obama says but, when he occasionally takes a position -- however fleetingly -- that we find pleasing, we abruptly decide he must be defended because American credibility is now on the line.

As long as we're talking about American credibility, what about Bush's staking of it on the conclusion that Qaddafi was no longer an anti-American terrorist but, instead, an American ally in the war on terror whose regime should no longer be listed as a terrorism sponsor? The editors insist that Qaddafi is “a dictator with American blood on his hands,” and that we thus “still have a score to settle” with him. But didn’t President Bush pronounce that score settled in a diplomatic agreement in which American and, yes, Libyan claims were paid and deemed satisfied. You don’t like that result? Me neither … and, I said so at the time. But by the editors’ logic, wasn’t Bush’s agreement a staking of American credibility on both a settlement of Pan Am 103 claims and the re-entry of Libya into the “international community” -- notwithstanding his record of terrorism and dictatorship? How is it that if Obama doesn't act, U.S. credibility will be in tatters, but that U.S. credibility is not already in tatters because of our treatment of Qaddafi from 2003--2011? Won’t U.S. credibility be in tatters if our rationale for launching combat operations against Qaddafi is a terrorist attack that our last president determined was a closed chapter?

Contrary to the editors’ claim, a military campaign to pick a winner between Qaddafi (for whom we were vouching for up until a few weeks ago) and the "rebels" (who include anti-American jihadists) would not be "commensurate with our interests." It could not be, for such campaigns, as the editorial concedes, have "costs and risks." Our interests are calculated by weighing those costs and risks against the anticipated benefits. To justify the use of military force, the benefits have to be clear and substantial, and their pursuit must be supported by the public. The fate of Libya is just not that important. Qaddafi is a creep, but he hasn’t done anything to us since our government absolved him seven years ago. If he falls, no one will weep. But that doesn’t make it worth a single American life to move him out so the “rebels” can move in.

Arab League members have been lushly armed by the U.S. for years. Why don't we suggest that they band together to drive Qaddafi out, just like they have banded together several times to try to wipe out Israel? Why don't we let our great NATO ally Turkey take a time-out from trying to break Israel's blockade of Hamas to deal with its own backyard?

To borrow General McChrystal’s words about Afghanistan, Libya is not our war. The editors observe that “waiting for U.N. or even NATO approval is a formula for inaction,” but there are very good reasons for inaction. Putting aside Security Council authoritarians like China and Russia, who have their own reasons for protecting Qaddafi, many other countries see the potentially catastrophic downsides of getting involved and say, "No thanks." Why do we need to be the ones to take on the empirically thankless task of stepping in between warring Muslims who are united only by their disdain for America and the West? 

It is not easy to explain to our troops and their loved ones why the combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have devolved into increasingly pointless nation-building exercises, continue to be worth their sacrifice. But at least in those missions, there were clear U.S. national security reasons for the initial invasions. At least in those missions, we are still killing and capturing some terrorists who might otherwise attack the U.S. In Libya, there are no similar U.S. interests. Yet NR is not only undertaking to support a forcible intervention; the editors lay the groundwork for supporting "other options" to be considered once Qaddafi's offensive has been checked. Intended of not, that leaves the door ajar to yet another long-term, troop-intensive occupation, the editors’ protestations to the contrary notwithstanding. And is it not worth at least a mention that among the "costs and risks" of military intervention in a Muslim country is that, regardless of how well-meaning we are, mainstream Islam construes sharia to require attacks against Western forces that attack Muslim countries? By intervening -- even if some Muslim countries are asking us to intervene, history tells us -- we would guarantee intensified calls by influential Islamic clerics for jihad against us.

Finally, what about the cost? We are, after all, engulfed by debt -- increasing trillions of it that are appropriately the subject of ever more agitation on the pages of NR and NRO.  Although the editorial purports to explain why military intervention is "commensurate" with our interests, it omits from this calculation any mention of how much this "meaningful" intervention will cost our bankrupt country. Perhaps more importantly in our current dire straits, the editors do not grapple with how easily a costly intervention will be exploited by the Left to justify the preservation of wasteful Big Government spending that we also can't afford.

I appreciate that it is hard to say, "Butt out." Qaddafi is a monster and his opposition is murky enough (for now) to be portrayed as "rebels" and "freedom fighters." But I fear we’re being swept away by emotion and by what we should now know is the vain hope that making sacrifices for besieged Muslims is going to make the ummah like us better. It is essential to attack Islamic terrorists who plot against America, but our humanitarian military efforts in the Islamic world have been a disaster -- at staggering costs in lives and hundreds of billions of dollars that we don't have. We should be working on how to get the nation disentangled from Islamic countries, not leading the nation headlong into another conflict that we cannot win. With great respect, I believe the editorial is profoundly mistaken. 

It's Not Just Pakistani Law, It's Sharia

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

As Brian details below, Pakistan has released Raymond Allen Davis, the CIA contractor who, despite having diplomatic immunity, has been illegally detained on murder charges arising out of what he maintains was his killing in self-defense of two armed robbers. The Associated Press says the release in exchange for financial compensation to the families of his assailants was permitted under "Pakistani law." What it doesn't say is that this "blood money" provision is a Pakistani codification of sharia law.  

As Robert Spencer explained a few days ago at Jihad Watch, the sharia principle involved is qisas, or "retaliation," which allows blood money to be paid by one who causes an accidental killing, or even by a murderer, to the relatives of the deceased. It is essentially a guilty plea that suffices as punishment for the killing if the relatives agree to the arrangement and amount of compensation. As is always the case with Islamic law, qisas pegs the value of a Muslim's life substantially higher than that of a non-Muslim, and a man's substantially higher than a woman's. 

In other words, the message to Muslims here, as usual, is that the West can be extorted into elevating sharia principles over the rules of law that apply to everyone else. Davis had diplomatic immunity; Pakistan would have been well within its rights to expel him, but they should not have detained him, much less charged him with murder. Yet, the Pakistani government (our "ally") ran roughshod over the law in order to appease a Muslim population that despises the United States and screamed for Davis's prosecution. The Pakistanis then demanded what amounts to a sharia-compliant ransom from the Obama administration, which has now dutifully caved in.

When you tell the world you can be rolled, expect to spend a lot of time being rolled. We have guaranteed that there will be more extortions, and more sharia.

Why They Celebrate Murdering Children

Islam is as Islam does.

Do you think the State Department noticed that no one in Arizona, Mexico, or even Mars took to the streets to celebrate the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords? No one seemed to think it was a “natural” act -- the Islamic term du jour to rationalize the throat-slitting massacre of a sleeping Jewish family: 36-year-old Udi Fogel, his 35-year-old wife, Ruth, and, yes, their three children: 11-year-old Yoav, 4-year-old Elad, and Hadas, their 3-month-old baby.

There had been about a week between this most hideous Muslim barbarity and . . . well, the last hideous Muslim barbarity. On that one, the Obama administration could not bring itself to label as “terrorism” a Kosovar jihadist’s gory attack on American airmen in Germany.

#ad#Arid Uka had opened fire in a sneak attack at the Frankfurt airport, killing two and seriously wounding two others while screaming the obligatory “Allahu Akbar!” Wasn’t that a terrorist attack? Gee whiz, you know, the State Department’s chief spokesman just couldn’t say. After all, in P. J. Crowley’s mindless yet seemingly inevitable comparison, “was the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords a terrorist attack?”

Muslims are frequently found carrying out the Koranic directive to “strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers.” Actually, make that the Koranic theme, so often is it reiterated in the scriptures devout Muslims take to be the verbatim commands of Allah. (See, e.g., Suras 3:151, 8:12–13, 8:60, 9:5, 33:25–27, 59:2–4, 59:13.) And that is beside the hadith, scriptures in which Mohammed, taken to be the perfect Muslim role model, boasts, “I have been made victorious with terror.” (Bukhari 4.52.220 -- just scroll down from here, through the glories promised to Muslims who wage jihad against the infidels.)

Muslims, in fact, are more often exhorted by their scriptures to brutalize non-Muslims than Christians are urged by the gospels to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. Yet, though we assume the latter are meant to take the message to heart, we are somehow sure Islam doesn’t really mean what it says -- that when Muslims strike terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, it must be Israel’s fault, or America’s, or something, anything, other than Islam, the only common denominator in these attacks.

For U.S. officials, it is a bridge too far to acknowledge the welter of doctrinal grounding that supports these atrocities. Sort the deranged likes of Jared Loughner from the ideologically driven adherents of Islam? Observe the chasm between mentally disturbed killers and mentally conditioned killers? No way.

So here’s a suggestion: Maybe our paralyzed policy makers could see their way clear to noticing how Muslims respond to Muslim jihadists: Like the Muslims across the globe who cheered the 9/11 attacks; like those who littered Arid Uka’s Facebook with such commentary as, “Way to go, you old killer!” and “That is part of this beautiful religion. One is allowed to fight the unbelievers when attacked.”

Maybe then the American government could be as revolted as the American people are by the celebrations in Gaza over last Friday’s murder of the Fogel family (or nearly the whole family -- three of the children managed to survive). Gaza, of course, is controlled by Hamas, the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood. You may know the Brothers as the “largely secular” “moderates” the Obama administration and the European Union see as part of the solution to the strife currently rippling through one Islamic country after another -- a studiously underreported staple of which is Jew-hatred, with mob promises to conquer Jerusalem and depictions of dictators like Mubarak and Qaddafi as Israeli spies.

#page#As the Israeli press reported, jubilant Muslims crowded Gaza’s streets, handing out candy and sweets in the wake of the murders. Jennifer Rubin notes that the outpouring of joy over the slitting of an infant’s throat was, according to one resident, “a natural response to the harm settlers inflict” on Palestinians.

It is a natural response, if you are a monster. If you have been reared in a culture that worships suicide bombers, that dehumanizes Jews as the children of monkeys and pigs, and that insists Israel is not merely the enemy but does not have a right to exist. And these positions, it bears emphasizing, do not represent some fringe Islam of al-Qaeda terrorists who have purportedly hijacked an otherwise peaceful religion. This is mainstream Islam, the sorts of things you would hear in a classroom at al-Azhar University or a television show on al-Jazeera -- the place where, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, people turn for “real news,” the place where Muslim Brotherhood guru Yusuf Qaradawi lionizes suicide bombers in his popular weekly program, Sharia and Life.

#ad#“The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said, ‘The time [of judgment] will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: Oh, Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!” That’s not something Osama bin Laden made up. It is right there in the hadith, the authoritative accounts of Mohammed’s words and deeds. As Robert Spencer has demonstrated, variations of this end of times scenario run through the hadith collections of Sahih Muslim (Book 41, nos. 6980-86) and Bukhari (4.52.176 & 177, and 4.56.791.) That is why the story is repeated in Article 7 of the Hamas charter, the document in which the Muslim Brotherhood explains that annihilating Israel is a religious duty. That is why the story is a favorite of Sheikh Qaradawi’s.

In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of Muslim terrorists was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of them shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she’d ever see.  Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, used the butt of his rifle to bash in the four-year-old’s skull against a rock. Hours later, upon finally being “rescued” from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead – accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the jihadists searched for more Jews to kill. 

The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. Nevertheless, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release for decades, praising this vicious cretin as a “brave leader” and “model warrior.” In 2007, the Israeli government finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers. Kuntar was welcomed to the West Bank as a conquering hero. The Palestinian Authority granted him and another released terrorist honorary citizenship “as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic suffering in the occupation’s prisons.” It was business as usual: In the Palestinian territories and elsewhere in the Muslim world, it is a commonplace to name streets after jihadist killers. Mohammed taught that there was no higher form of service to Allah.

Rep. Peter King is to be applauded for forcing Congress to notice the phenomenon we so gingerly call Muslim “radicalization.” The question that really begs for hearings, though, is why we continue pretending not to know what causes it.

—  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