Published for The Enterprise Blog, September 2nd, 2010:
Yesterday, I noted President Obama’s comment in his Oval Office address decrying the fact that “We spent a trillion dollars at war, often financed by borrowing from overseas. This, in turn, has short-changed investments in our own people, and contributed to record deficits.” I pointed out the $1 trillion Obama cites includes not only the cost of the battle in Iraq (which he opposed), but also our military efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Arabian Peninsula, South Asia, the Horn of Africa, and other fronts across the world (which he not only supports but has even expanded).
But to put that figure in perspective, consider that from 2000 to 2009 the United States produced about $122.5 trillion of total gross domestic product (data here). So spending $1 trillion to prevent another terrorist attack comes to about four-fifths of 1 percent of the GDP the United States has produced over the past decade—less than a penny on the dollar. Seems to me that spending less than one cent on the dollar to stop another 9/11 is a pretty good investment—especially when one considers the human and economic costs of another catastrophic mass-casualty attack.
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Published for The Enterprise Blog, September 1st, 2010:
The speech last night had the feel of a mini-State of the Union address, and not a good one at that. The president talked not only about Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Middle East peace, education, energy, jobs, competitiveness, manufacturing, and veterans policy. It is hard to effectively cover all those topics in an hour-long State of the Union address; it is virtually impossible to do so in a 18-minute address to the nation.
The pivot to the economy was not only awkward, but revealing. President Obama rarely talks about the war on terror. This is an abdication of one of his principal responsibilities as commander in chief—to explain our mission, lay out the stakes, and rally the country to victory. When he finally takes a moment to meet that responsibility and deliver a high-profile address on the war, he cannot resist the temptation to turn it into a speech about his domestic agenda.
The president said that addressing his domestic priorities “must be our central mission as a people, and my central responsibility as president.” In fact, his “central responsibility as president” is to defend the country. And his failure to recognize this points to a central difference between George W. Bush and Barack Obama. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush saw that his highest responsibility was to prevent another attack on our country—by defeating the terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other fronts in the war on terror, and by defeating their hateful ideology by advancing the hopeful alternative of human freedom. President Obama does not see any of this as the central mission of his presidency. His central mission is to transform America—and the war on terror is a burden and a distraction from that mission.
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Published for The Enterprise Blog, August 31st, 2010:
The success of President Obama’s Oval Office address tonight comes down to a fundamental question: Is this a speech about ending wars or winning them? If it’s the former, the speech could be disastrous. If it is the latter, this could be an important, even historic, address.
Because Obama rarely speaks about the war on terror, the stakes tonight are especially high. Key audiences across the world will be listening to, and parsing, every word.
Clearly the president wants to take credit for ending the war in Iraq. In his radio address this weekend, he managed to mention “ending” the war seven times in a five-minute speech—a new land speed record. This was obviously intended to appease his left-wing, anti-war base, which does not support the fight in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
Tonight, however, Obama needs to focus on three other, far more important audiences: our troops, our allies, and our enemies.
When it comes to our troops, President Bush always told his speechwriters that a soldier on a street corner in Fallujah or Kandahar does want to hear the commander in chief talk about withdrawal—he wants to hear him talk about his commitment to victory. Our troops want to know President Obama has their backs—and that he fully backs the mission for which they are risking their lives. Tonight the troops will be watching to assess whether Obama cares more about prevailing than he cares about withdrawing.
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Published for The Washington Post, August 24th, 2010:
Much attention has been paid in recent days to a poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life showing that 18 percent of Americans incorrectly believe that President Obama is a Muslim. But the results of another Pew poll on religion released last December were far more shocking. It turns out that 36 percent of Democrats claim to have communed with the dead, and that 19 percent believe in casting a curse on someone using the “evil eye.” Think about that: According Pew, more Democrats believe in the “evil eye” than Americans believe Obama is a Muslim.
The fact is you can find 20 percent of people anywhere who believe in almost anything. As The Post’s Aug. 22 Outlook section noted, 20 percent of Americans believe that space aliens have made contact with humans on Earth.
The poll on Obama’s religious affiliation probably would have been a one-day story had the White House not launched a surprisingly aggressive defense of the president’s Christian bona fides. The White House immediately put out a statementdeclaring “President Obama is a committed Christian, and his faith is an important part of his daily life.” We soon learned from White House officials that the president reads a daily devotional on his BlackBerry each morning and that he dialed three Christian pastors to pray with him on his birthday. The White House even made one of those pastors, Joel Hunter, available to the media to discuss Obama’s Christian journey.
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Published for The Washington Post’s Post Partisan, August 17th, 2010:
In my latest column I interview Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is running in a special election for President Obama’s senate seat and pledges that if he is seated as the 42nd Republican senator in November he will oppose the Democrats’ plans to enact their legislative agenda through a lame-duck session of Congress.
I note in the column that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) could be seated in November as well, and I speculate that he might also oppose a lame duck since he voted last week for a resolution in the House that would bar that chamber from meeting between November and January. Well, Castle’s office has since confirmed that if elected to the Senate he would, indeed, join Kirk in opposing a lame duck. A Castle spokesperson told me in an e-mail, after reading Kirk’s comments in The Post, that “The Congressman agrees with Rep. Kirk that a lame duck session is no place for controversial legislating.”
And then there is this added wrinkle: Last week Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin also announced his opposition to a lame duck, declaring that such a session would “override the public’s will as expressed at the ballot box.”
So with Kirk-Castle-Feingold in opposition, it appears a center-left coalition is forming that would join with conservatives in blocking the Democrats’ plans to push major legislation through Congress in a lame-duck session. So why won’t the Senate GOP leadership step forward and put the lame duck out of its misery?
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Published for The Washington Post, August 17th, 2010:
Last week, House Republicans took a united stand against the Democrats’ plans to push through the most unpopular elements of their agenda in a lame-duck session after Election Day. Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) introduced a resolution barring Congress from convening between November and January, except in case of a national emergency. Every Republican save one supported the ban.
House Republicans have no power to stop a lame duck session. But thanks to the filibuster, Senate Republicans do. To have what Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) calls “one of the most significant lame-duck sessions in the history of the United States,” Senate Democrats need at least one Republican vote — which means that if all GOP senators stick together, the lame duck is a dead duck.
They have done so in the past, with 41 Republicans taking a united stand on issues ranging from judicial nominees to financial reform to health care. Common sense dictates they would do the same when it comes to a lame-duck session. After all, the GOP is expected to gain seats on Election Day — so Senate Republicans would be in a much a stronger position to address any issue that would be considered in a lame-duck session when reinforcements arrive in January.
But Republican leader Mitch McConnell has been strangely silent. His whip, Sen. Jon Kyl, has suggested voting on the new START treaty in a lame-duck session. And one of McConnell’s closest confidants, Sen. Judd Gregg (Lame Duck-N.H.), who is retiring, has called for the Senate to vote on the recommendations of President Obama’s bipartisan deficit commission (on which he sits), whose report is due on Dec. 1 and may include both entitlement cuts and tax increases. Controversial measures like these should not be enacted with the votes of defeated or retiring politicians — especially right after an election in which Americans are expected to register a vote of “no confidence” in the current Congress.
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Published for The Corner on nationalreview.com, August 10th, 2010:
The government won a significant victory yesterday when the judge at the military commission trying Omar Khadr at Guantanamo Bay ruled that Khadr’s confession to murdering Special Forces Sergeant First Class Chris Speer was admissible. Khadr’s lawyers had argued that the confession was the result of torture, and thus should be excluded. Canada’s National Post reports:
In a video shown at the hearing yesterday, Mr. Khadr was seen telling Guantanamo Bayguards trying to weigh him for the International Red Cross “God will take…revenge” on the United States.
“I am here in prison, but there are millions of people outside,” he says in the May 2006 clip. “What’s happening to you is not for nothing.”
In the February 2008 affidavit, Mr. Khadr, 23, alleged guards mistreated him during the weighing session, claiming they “pressed on my pressure points.”
The clip appears to show the guards acting with restraint as they push him toward the scale and point out all his “brothers” — a reference to other detainees — had been weighed without protest.
“Come on man, it’s not that bad,” says one after Mr. Khadr claimed the treatment was a “very small example of what’s really going on” at the facility.
“We’re not doing this to hurt you, torture you,” adds another, amid explanations his weight was needed for his health records.
The horror! After reviewing this and other evidence regarding Khadr’s interrogation, the judge ruled that this terrorist was not tortured, nor did his interrogation constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.
A victory for the prosecution — and a victory for the truth about Guantanamo Bay.
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Published for The Enterprise Blog, August 10th, 2010:
When I visited Guantanamo Bay last September, President Obama’s order to close the facility by January 2010 was prominently displayed in the detainee recreation area for all to see. No word as to whether the order is still posted, but apparently neither the terrorists nor Obama administration officials believe that the facility is going to close anytime soon—at least if you are following the military commissions convening this week on the island.
Consider this item from this morning’s Washington Post:
A former cook for Osama bin Laden’s entourage in Afghanistan has reached an agreement with the U.S. government that will allow him to serve any sentence at a minimum security facility at Guantanamo Bay.
Come again? Serve his sentence at Gitmo? The plea agreement for the cook, Ibrahim al-Qosi, has been sealed, and the length of his sentence had not yet been revealed. Still, it is telling that the administration is now cutting deals with terrorists to let them serve out their sentences at a facility that—in theory at least—it still claims to be closing.
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Published for The Washington Post, August 10th, 2010:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has made clear that his objective in releasing tens of thousands of classified documents was to “end the war in Afghanistan” and “oppose an unjust [war] plan before it reaches implementation.” He may well achieve his goal. Assange’s illegal disclosures are helping the Taliban to undermine Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy before it has a chance to work.
The documents Assange made public exposed the identities of at least 100 Afghans who were informing on the Taliban — in some cases including the names of their villages, family members, the Taliban commanders on whom they were informing, and even GPS coordinates where they could be found. The Taliban quickly announced that it was combing the WikiLeaks Web site for information to use to punish these Afghans.
Then, just four days after the WikiLeaks documents were published death threats began arriving at the homes of Afghan tribal leaders. A few days later, one such leader was dragged from his home and executed. It is unknown whether his identity was exposed in the WikiLeaks documents, but according to Newsweek, his execution and the death threats “sparked a panic among many Afghans who have worked closely with coalition forces.”
A Taliban intelligence officer warned that “the group’s English-language media department is actively examining the WikiLeaks material and intends to draw up lists of collaborators in each province, to add to the hit lists of local insurgent commanders.” He said that the message being sent to the Afghan people is: “America is not a good protector of spies.”
Full article here
Published for The Washington Post’s Post Partisan, August 5th, 2010:
Last week, I reported here on the growing threat to the American homeland from al-Qaeda’s new East African affiliate, al-Shabab. Al-Shabab has been recruiting Americans, and one of its top leaders, Omar Hammami, is an American citizen who grew up in Alabama.
Well, the Associated Press just reported on the arrests in Minnesota, California and Alabama of 14 people, most of them U.S. citizens, charged with supporting al-Shabab or traveling to Somalia to join the group. The AP also reports that “In another case unrelated to Thursday’s developments, a 26-year-old Chicago man who told an FBI informant that he didn’t expect to reach the age of 30 was charged with plotting to go to Somalia to become a suicide bomber for al-Qaeda and al-Shabab.”
These arrests are encouraging news. But the fact that this group seems to be actively seeking out suicide bombers with American passports is an ominous sign of its intentions to strike the American homeland. Which makes President Obama’s decision last September to kill, rather than capture, the leader of al Qaeda in East Africa — Saleh Ali Nabhan — all the more troubling. Nabhan could have been an intelligence goldmine, providing unique information about al-Shabab’s efforts to recruit Americans and its plans for new attacks. But now that intelligence has been lost forever.
The question is: Are those just arrested being questioned for intelligence information? Or have they already lawyered up?
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