Obama "confident" of getting Congressional support to aid al-Qaeda militarily in Syria
From Jihad Watch / Posted by Robert Spencer

He probably will get Congressional approval. When has the hopeless John Boehner ever stood up to him? And no one seems to care that we would be fighting on the side of al-Qaeda in Syria -- what could possibly go wrong? This is what we lack in the U.S. today: an effective and genuine opposition.

All we have instead is weak and shallow me-tooism. There is no actual anti-jihad, anti-Islamic supremacism party in the U.S. at this point.

"Obama ‘confident’ of getting Congressional support for Syria strike," from Al Arabiya, September 3:

U.S. President Barack Obama said on Tuesday he was confident that Congress will support his decision to take military action against the Syrian regime. 

Obama said he is open to changes to his resolution to obtain Congressional approval, as long as the resolution sends a clear message to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and impedes his ability to use chemical weapons.

Obama told reporters during a meeting with lawmakers at the White House that he wants the American people to know that “this is not Iraq, and this is not Afghanistan.” He said action in Syria will be limited and proportional, Associated Press reported.

The meeting in the White House Cabinet room was attended by congressional leaders from both parties in the House and Senate.

Obama called for a prompt vote on Capitol Hill and reiterated that the U.S. plan would be limited in scope and not repeat the long U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“What we are envisioning is something limited. It is something proportional. It will degrade Assad's capabilities,” Obama said, according to Reuters.

“At the same time we have a broader strategy that will allow us to upgrade the capabilities of the opposition,” he said.

Will al-Qaeda send a thank-you note?

Touchy Topics

Walter E. Williams / Townhall Columnist 

 

Here's a question: What is the true test of one's commitment to freedom of expression? Is it when one permits others to express ideas with which he agrees? Or is it when he permits others to express ideas he finds deeply offensive? I'm betting that most people would wisely answer that it's the latter, and I'd agree. How about this question: What is the true test of one's commitment to freedom of association? Is it when people permit others to freely associate in ways of which they approve? Or is it when they permit others to freely associate in ways they deem despicable? I'm sure that might be a considerable dispute about freedom of association compared with the one over freedom of expression. To be for freedom in either case requires that one be brave enough to accept the fact that some people will make offensive expressions and associate in offensive ways. Let's explore this with an example from the past.

In 1958, Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a black woman, two Virginia residents, traveled to Washington, D.C., to marry. Upon their return to Virginia, they were charged with and found guilty of violation of Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws. In 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, held that laws banning interracial marriages violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the 14th Amendment. The couple's conviction was reversed. Thus, Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws not only violated the U.S. Constitution but also violated the basic human right of freedom of association.

Now let's ask ourselves: Would Virginia's laws have been more acceptable if, instead of banning interracial marriages, they had mandated interracial marriages? Any decent person would find such a law just as offensive -- and for the same reason: It would violate freedom of association. Forced association is not freedom of association.

Before you say, "Williams, where you're going with this discussion isn't very good," there's another case from our past. Henry Louis Mencken, writing in The Baltimore Evening Sun (11/9/48), brought to light that the city's parks board had a regulation forbidding white and black citizens from playing tennis with each other in public parks. Today most Americans would find such a regulation an offensive attack on freedom of association. I imagine that most would find it just as offensive if the regulation had required blacks and whites to play tennis with each other. Both would violate freedom of association.

Most Americans probably agree there should be freedom of association in the cases of marriage and tennis, but what about freedom of association as a general principle? Suppose white men formed a club, a professional association or any other private association and blacks and women wanted to be members. Is there any case for forcing them to admit blacks and women? What if it were women or blacks who formed an association? Should they be forced to admit men or whites? Wouldn't forced membership in either case violate freedom of association?

What if you wanted to deal with me but I didn't want to deal with you? To be more concrete, suppose I own a private company and I'm looking to hire an employee. You want to deal with me, but I don't want to deal with you. My reasons might be that you're white or a Catholic or ugly or a woman or anything else that I find objectionable. Should I be forced to hire you? You say, "Williams, that's illegal employment discrimination." You're absolutely right, but it still violates peaceable freedom of association.

Much of the racial discrimination in our history was a result of legal or extralegal measures to prevent freedom of association. That was the essence of Jim Crow laws, which often prevented blacks from being served in restaurants, admitted into theaters, allowed on public conveyances and given certain employment. Whenever one sees laws or other measures taken to prevent economic transactions, you have to guess that the reason there's a law is that if there were no law, not everyone would behave according to the specifications of the law.

The Wrong Target on WMDs

Mona Charen/ Townhall Columnist

Complacency is a state of mind that exists only in retrospective: It has to be shattered before being ascertained. --Vladimir Nabokov 

After 9/11, the prevailing view was that "nothing would ever be the same." The sight of bodies plunging 100 stories from the flaming towers of the World Trade Center seared into our psyches the reality that America has cruel and wanton enemies. The USA Patriot Act, which sought to repair some of the intelligence lapses that permitted the 9/11 attacks to go undiscovered, passed the House by a vote of 357 to 66 and the Senate by 98 to one.

Twelve years is a long time, though, and the best you can say about "things will never be the same" is that it's a truism. The ordinary human tendency to relax one's watchfulness creeps back surprisingly quickly -- especially when the president of the United States implies that we can unilaterally declare a war "ended" because we're tired of vigilance and we want to spend money on Obamacare, universal preschool and food stamps.

The Obama administration is flailing on the subject of national security, declaring the war over in one breath and thundering against Syria's use of chemical weapons in the next. After 12 years of excoriating Mr. Bush for attempting to deal with a tyrant in control of WMDs, Mr. Obama, though calling himself "war-weary," nonetheless sounded exactly like his predecessor in his frustration with the so-called "international community."

"My preference obviously would have been that the international community already acted forcefully," he lamented on Friday. "But what we have seen ... is an incapacity at this point for the Security Council to move forward."

What caused that "incapacity"? Russia's willingness to veto any resolution that would impose costs on Syria. Thus does the law professor encounter the real world, in which promising "resets" and "flexibility" to "Vladimir" leads not to international cooperation against evil but to the opposite.

If the president were thinking strategically, and not just about avoiding personal humiliation because he improvidently painted himself into a corner with warnings about "red lines," he wouldn't be wasting energy on Syria, which is the client of another power. As Michael Ledeen of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies has tirelessly pointed out, Iran is the chief fount of terror in the world. Ledeen is feeling deja vu, watching another president focus on the wrong country regarding WMDs.

The president's claim that Syria's use of chemical weapons "threatens our national security interests" is clearly absurd. The danger Syria poses is simply to Obama's diminishing credibility. Chemical weapons are ghastly, but our revulsion at their use doesn't amount to facing a threat. Besides, the president's proposed military wrist-slap will probably have no effect -- except to further erode the world's respect for American power.

Iran, by contrast, is a menace. Iran hasn't used chemical weapons on its own people (it tortures and kills in other ways), yet as the chief supporter and weapons supplier to Hezbollah, Hamas and other terror groups, and as a sometime partner to al-Qaida, it does threaten us. Since taking our diplomats hostage in 1979, the Islamic Republic has kept up attacks on the U.S. directly (in Iraq), expanded Hezbollah into South America, allied with American foes like Venezuela and attacked us through terror proxies (as in the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon).

President Obama is relying on the same "international community" that has proved so useless on Syria to deter Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Yet he doesn't seem worried, which is worrying.

If Bashar Assad gases the Syrian people with Sarin, it offends our sensibilities. But if the mullahs of Iran achieve their goal of getting nuclear weapons, it is conceivable that nuclear terror could threaten the American people.

Would Iran be deterred as the Soviets and Chinese were by the threat of retaliation? Maybe, but would you trust the lives of your children to that guess? The point about arming terrorists -- as the Iranians have been doing for 35 years -- is that it provides deniability. If a dirty bomb were detonated in Chicago, would we retaliate against Tehran on the suspicion that the mullahs provided the uranium? We cannot even agree that our intelligence proves Assad used poison gas.

Every foreign policy action should be judged, not by whether it advances a naive fantasy of a world community punishing a miscreant, but by whether it advances American security. That means thwarting Iran by all means necessary.

Preserving Obama’s Precious Peace Prize

by John Myers / Personal Liberty Digest

UPI FILE

On Dec. 10, 2009, President Barack Obama received the Nobel Prize medal and diploma during the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo, Norway.

President Barack Obama spoke Saturday from the Rose Garden at the White House, advocating military action against Syria. He also said he is abstaining from such action as he awaits Congressional approval. In typical fashion, Obama wants to have his cake and eat it, too. Under such orchestration, he can blame Congress if his attacks against Syria have a calamitous outcome. Of greatest importance to the President is his legacy.

Nearly four years after he won the Nobel Peace Prize (for exactly what, nobody seems to know), Obama has acted more like a war criminal than a humanitarian. Yet the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which handed him the award, said it was “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” When he accepted it, the President said he was “surprised” and “deeply humbled.”

Certainly, he was surprised. His biggest contribution to world peace at the time had been as a Chicago community organizer. That Obama was deeply humbled verges on impossible. He is a man without a scintilla of humility. If the President has his way, he will accept all of the credit or none of the blame regarding Syria.

Yet we shouldn’t have been surprised that Obama was bestowed his prize by socialists in Oslo, Norway. In 1919, the dubious award was presented to President Woodrow Wilson. He was commander in chief during World War I. During the war, 100,000 Americans were killed (if you count disease and accidents) and another 320,000 were wounded. It was also Wilson’s regressive peace plan that led to Adolph Hitler.

According to the Cato Institute, Obama has already spent more than $400 billion in the past five years on waging foreign wars or what the Defense Department prefers to call “overseas contingency operations.”

In January, Dave Lindorff wrote the following in a blog post entitled “Hey, Hey, Barack! What Do You Say? How Many Kids Have You Killed Today?”:

The result of this policy of state terrorism has been a wretched, criminal slaughter of children — a slaughter that has been hidden from view, and denied wholesale by the Pentagon and the president. Over 3000 [sic] people have been killed, the vast majority of them non-combatant “collateral damage” deaths. Over 172 of these have reportedly been children.

Obama Is Plumb Out Of Friends

It turns out Obama, who treasures his image as a peacemaker, is not a friend-maker. The lack of international support for Obama’s military intervention against Syria is astonishing.

• Canada is no friend of Obama’s: His incessant delay on the Keystone XL pipeline has infuriated the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and angered Canadians. Most Canadians believe that Obama will refuse the pipeline and that he is simply jerking around Canada so it cannot make commitments to other oil importers.
• Great Britain is no friend of Obama’s: Last Thursday, the British Parliament rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal to join the United States in a joint action against Syria, despite Cameron’s pleas. Many British are angry that Obama is not backing the country’s claims on the Falkland Islands, which are again threatened by Argentina. Since the Suez Crisis in 1956, Britain has been America’s staunchest ally. Obama never seems to see any relationship as a two-way street.
• Russia is no friend of Obama’s: Russian President Vladimir Putin is not one to let bygones be bygones.  He and Obama have had several disagreements. The conflict came to a head last month over Russia’s granting asylum to National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden. Because of that incident, Obama said “nyet” to a personal summit in Moscow with Putin this month. Now, Moscow defends Syrian President Bashar Assad.

And it goes beyond nations. In his book The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House, Edward Klein claims that Obama has few to no personal friends in part because he is always eager to shift blame of failed policies to others.

Even Hermene Hartman, the publisher of N’DIGO, Chicago’s leading black magazine, and the past president of the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs, a powerful group of blacks in Chicago, has said: “Barack is not necessarily known for his loyalty.”

The Networks’ Weapons Of Mass Distortion

The good news for Obama is that TV anchors and analysts revere him, at least when it comes to a good war — or, if necessary, a bad war.

MSNBC, CNN and FOX News have been showing why war is unavoidable with videos of dead and dying Syrian children. Given beforehand is the perfunctory: “Warning! The images we are about to show you may be disturbing.” That always gets people’s attention. I haven’t seen such compelling TV since 22 years ago, when newscasts were showing empty Kuwaiti incubators after Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard had reportedly ripped babies from them. Only later was it reported that no such thing happened — that and the fact that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Liberals Have A Krystal Ball

The hardest part of my job is watching MSNBC. It’s good to know what the not-so-loyal opposition is thinking, which is mostly nothing. Case in point was last Thursday. On “The Cycle,” Krystal Ball (that really is her name) opined that America “owes it to Syria” to intervene. Ball added that the reason President Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon in 1983 after 241 Marines were killed in their barracks by a suicide bomber was because at that time “America lacked the moral courage” to do the right thing.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that Reagan was unwilling to waste the lives of America’s young people in a religious conflict where U.S. intervention could only make matters worse and could start a global war.

For Ball, it’s as though the Iraq war never happened. It’s as if 4,500 American troops did not die there.

Obama Is Driven By What Is Best For Obama

The situation in Syria is grim. Children are dying, and chemicals are probably being used. Do the dead care if they were killed by chemicals or by lead? Let us not forget it was grim in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge killed more than 2 million people in Cambodia. It was grim during the Rwanda genocide that killed more than 1 million people. If we didn’t intervene then when the Nation could afford it and we were not facing an Islamic backlash, why are we intervening now? It can’t be WMDs. The only foreign WMDs that are a clear and present danger to our national security are the nuclear warheads being stacked high in North Korea and unstable Pakistan.

Obama doesn’t seem to care about such threats, in part because the only advice he values comes from his all-powerful troika: first lady Michelle Obama, Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett and Attorney General Eric Holder. They are determined that Obama’s initiatives promote Obama’s legacy.

 Anything else is unimportant.

Op-ed:

Going to war for all the wrong reasons

By: Diane Sori

Syria…yet another muslim civil war with NO muslim country coming to the aid of their brethren.
Even the Arab League has turned its back on them, and it’s time the American people wake up to the fact that we need to consider more carefully just why Obama is so determined to send America back to war again.

I’ll tell you why…it’s three-fold. One…Syria keeps our collective mind off the Obama scandals and especially keeps us from focusing on Benghazi. Two…this president wants to arm the al-Qaeda backed rebels…rebels who are the ones gassing the Syrian people and he knows it. The phony staged photos of ‘supposedly’ dead children (and using photos from when Saddam gassed the Kurds) might pull on the heartstrings and fool some but NOT all for we know Obama wants the rebels the victors…wants al-Assad to fall…for this is really a war between Russia and Iran vs. the United States, and if the rebels oust al-Assad, Obama gains a de-facto victory over them both, and his ego gets the same boost as after bin-Laden was taken down, and for a narcissist like Obama that is all important. And three…in a word…oil. More on that later.

And least we forget that Israel is the loser if we stick our nose in where it doesn’t belong, and Obama could NOT be happier about that for he refuses to answer questions about what he’d do…actually NOT do…if Israel is attacked in retaliation.

And while al-Assad is NO angel…he’s a brutal dictator…history has proven time and again that it takes a dictator to keep islamic extremists in line. It takes a dictator to keep their country’s minorities safe…as did Mubarek with the Coptic Christians and the Jews living in Egypt…as did al-Assad with the Christians living in Syria. Once a dictator is challenged the first to suffer are the minorities…again as witnessed by the fate of the Coptic Christians in Egypt and Syria.

And when you have a president who bloviates over and over about ‘red lines’ that he NEVER had any intention of following through on…when you have a president who is now pushed into a corner to either put-up or shut-up…you will find we have a president who purposely sends the wrong message to rogue regimes every time he opens his big mouth.

So, in a symbolic gesture to save face, and asking only as a last resort after neither the British nor the Arab League would support him, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is now turning to our US Congress to bail him out of a mess of his own doing.

And yesterday, after giving Congress about 15 minutes of his oh so precious time before issuing the all important photo-op statement, and then jetting off to the G8 Summit in Russia…slinking away like a coward is more like it as taking America to war should have had him cancel on this useless summit…Obama is still adamant in his support of the Syrian rebels…the Free Syrian Army…a group loyal to al-Qaeda.

And while Obama’s words were re-bloviated by a visibly nervous Secretary of State John ‘Swiftboat’ Kerry at round one of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings…the same dangerous rhetoric of wanting a missile strike that would ‘supposedly’ be proportional, targeted, and limited with NO boots on the ground…being par for the course this is yet another lie from this administration for there would have to be boots on the ground if the remaining chemical weapons are to be secured if the military strikes against Syria are successful…and we know they’re coming with or without Congressional approval…otherwise the remaining weapons will be dispersed throughout the country.

And while Obama also keeps spewing the lie that this is NOT about regime change, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told the Committee that the objective of military action would be to hold Syria’s government accountable for using chemical weapons, degrade its ability to mount more attacks, and deter it and other adversaries… such as Iran and North Korea…from using weapons of mass destruction against anyone.

Sounds like regime change to me.

Now of course anyone with even one working brain cell knows that in the time Obama is dancing around his phony ‘red lies’ rhetoric, both the rebels and al-Assad have moved their weapons elsewhere. So any bombing we do will accomplish NOTHING in Syria…NOTHING that is except possibly igniting World War III for al-Assad’s allies…Russia and Iran…will NOT take too kindly to Obama arming those they oppose.

And so with a new joint resolution being written in the Senate giving Obama 60 days to use military action against Syria with a 30 day extension tacked on it if needed, it’s obvious this miserable excuse of a president has every intention of taking us into war…a war that will spread throughout the entire Middle East for if we attack Syria it’s just like attacking Russia or Iran.

Oh, and by the way, as I said in reason number three, I am smart enough to know that Obama’s wanting to take America to war is NOT about a chemical attack on civilians but is about Obama supporting his buddies in Saudi Arabia…the ones he bowed down to…in their war against al-Assad. Saudi Arabia is siding with the rebels and is asking for Obama’s support, and Obama doesn’t make it a habit of telling them NO…NOT if he wants their oil that is.

Also, remember the source of the latest allegations against al-Assad’s ‘supposed’ use of chemical weapons was Doctors without Frontiers, a group financed by global so-called ‘corporate elitists’, who manipulated the media to concentrate on the children killed, purposefully having them ignore the Syrian soldiers caught in the same attack.

And so in the case of Syria, there is no outcome…NO resolution…that we could impose that would be any better for Syria by us interfering…in fact, us interfering in Syria’s civil war could backfire, because if al-Assad wins in the end he will NOT forget those who crossed him…and remember, there is no definitive proof that al-Assad, who has a 70% approval rating among the Syrian people and that comes from NATO, gassed anyone.

So Obama’s so-called ‘little war’…a war with a country that strategically means NOTHING nor poses any threat to the United States…is just a ploy to ‘save face’ for if Congress says NO will Obama abide by Congress’ vote and stand down…I seriously doubt it…NOT if he wants to stay on the Saudi’s good side that is.

Think about it and then you’ll start to see all the pieces of the puzzle fitting nicely together, and you’ll know the truth why Obama wants to take us to war.