I had referenced this article earlier here, but reading it again it deserves to be reposted in its entirety as often as possible. Just doing our part.

Russ

Via Human Events

By Col. Oliver North (Ret.)

The commander in chief’s December 1 lecture at the U.S. Military Academy has to go down in history as one of the strangest presentations ever offered by a war-time president. The robotically-delivered address is defended by administration officials as the culmination of a carefully thought-out “strategy review,” in which Obama proffered the “rationale” for deploying additional troops and explained “The Way Forward in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Unfortunately, it failed to do any of this.

Though he was standing before West Point’s Corps of Cadets, the president’s remarks were devoid of strategic vision, lacking any definition of victory and empty of the rhetoric elected leaders employ to rally democratic people to a cause requiring the sacrifice of blood and treasure. The speech did, however, provide another Obama “first.” Giving the enemy a timetable for withdrawing American troops while simultaneously committing additional combat forces to a war zone is unprecedented. No commander in chief has ever done such a thing before -- because it makes no sense from either a political or military perspective.

To his credit, Obama said, “I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan.” These additional troops, trainers and mobility assets are desperately needed. But he offered no rationale for how he arrived at a number that is 25 percent less than what his hand-picked commander, General Stanley McChrystal requested. Then he devoted five additional passages to defending his statement that, “After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.”


Since Tuesday, Obama has stopped talking about the war in Afghanistan and moved on to “Creating Jobs” -- a topic he raised four times in his West Point speech. He left Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Admiral Mike Mullins, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a host nameless “administration spokesmen” to explain the extraordinary announcement that we will “begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

The contortions required to support this statement were particularly evident in Congressional testimony this week -- particularly for Mr. Gates. When the Defense Secretary appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) said to Mr. Gates: “You said in April 2007, with regard to Iraq, ‘I’ve been pretty clear that I think the enactment of specific deadlines would be a bad mistake.’”

Pence summed up the good sense of most Americans by noting, “I’m someone who believes it never makes sense to tell the enemy when you’re going to quit fighting in a war. Mr. Secretary, I wonder…what’s changed in your view here? What am I missing?”

The defense secretary’s response offers a glimpse into the deceptive double-think so prevalent in the Obama administration: “First of all, I have adamantly opposed deadlines; I opposed them in Iraq and I opposed deadlines in Afghanistan.” Gates continued, “But what the President has announced is the beginning of a process, not the end of a process; and it is clear that this will be a gradual process and -- as he said last night -- based on conditions on the ground. So there is no deadline for the withdrawal of American forces in Afghanistan.”

The following day, in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Gates said that “July 2011 is the beginning of a process, an inflection point if you will, of when Afghan forces will assume greater responsibility.”

Thus, a publicly announced “troop withdrawal timeline” and a “timeframe for our transition to Afghan responsibility,” won’t tell the Taliban and al Qaeda how long they have to go to ground or hide out. According to the O-Team, July 2011 is just “the beginning of a process,” an “inflection point.” If that’s what they really believe, they aren’t just trying to mislead us -- they are deceiving themselves.   

Finally, Obama’s self-centric West Point remarks -- he referred to himself no less than 57 times -- also prove that he and his speechwriters don’t know history either. He claimed that Afghanistan would not become “another Vietnam,” because “Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Whoever wrote these words is simply wrong.

The Republic of Vietnam wasn’t lost to a “popular insurgency.” By April 1969, the Viet Cong had been eliminated as a military threat. The frail, flawed democratic government in Saigon collapsed in April 1975 -- three years after the last American combat troops were withdrawn -- because in December 1974 the country was invaded and subsequently conquered by a hostile neighbor -- North Vietnam -- only after the U.S. Congress rebuffed President Gerald Ford’s request for $522 million in emergency aid.

A head of state who distorts the lessons of history is a peril. A leader who tries to deceive himself and his people is dangerous. We can only pray that this commander in chief isn’t committing a hundred thousand young Americans to a mission impossible in the shadows of the Hindu Kush.

Just a very quick note about this article. I happen to disagree with Barone when he says that "these acts seem to me an indication that Obama takes seriously his responsibilities as a military commander and that he steels himself to do his duty even when it is unpleasant (as George W. Bush did, though he did not see fit to mention it in his major speeches)."

As you'll read below, "these acts" are nothing more than words he spoke at West Point. His only real "action" is sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan for an 18-month tour. That action is hardly one of a man who takes his duty as CiC seriously. He has laid out our game plan for the enemy and committed less than half of the troops his Generals requested. It took him three months to make the worst decision possible. Obama does not take his duties as Commander seriously. It is political and nothing more. I offer this article, however, so that you can draw your own conclusions as to whether you think Obama has been the 'dutiful' Commander in Chief.

Russ

Via Townhall.com

By Michael Barone

Every time I visit the White House, I am struck by its military environment.

Military guards are on duty, the staff has lunch in the White House mess and there's a helicopter pad for Marine One out on the lawn. You see nothing like this in any governor's office I have visited or in the offices of members of Congress, and certainly not in the headquarters of a political campaign or a community organizer.

This military atmosphere may have seemed congenial to a president who made a career in the military like Dwight Eisenhower, and it was not unfamiliar to those who served in World War II, as his seven successors did. But it can be off-putting to those without military experience, such as the Bill Clinton staffer who refused to speak to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a snub that required an apology from the president, who had once declared that he loathed the military.

This atmosphere may seem jarring as well to Barack Obama, our only president who lived most of his adult life in university neighborhoods, the part of our society most hostile to the military. But now Obama, who was an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago Law School, is commander, in chief and in a time of war, he must issue commands that will result in the deaths of men and women in uniform.

Watching his Dec. 1 speech announcing his new policy on Afghanistan, I thought I saw two Obamas speaking, the professor and the commander in chief.

He chose a venue even more military than the White House, the Eisenhower Theatre at West Point, and spoke gravely and unsmilingly to the assembled cadets.

"It is in the vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan," the commander in chief informed them. And then he added, as if speaking to the faculty club, "After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home." The professor continued, in a paragraph twice as long, to recall his opposition to the war in Iraq, to describe what he considered its baleful effects and to segue to a discussion of the "worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" -- something that Franklin Roosevelt, who was much closer to that economic crisis, seldom if ever mentioned during World War II.

The commander in chief then noted that the military and their families have "already borne the heaviest of all burdens." And he mentioned some of his own: The condolence letters he has signed, the visits to Walter Reed, greeting the caskets at Dover Air Force Base.

These acts seem to me an indication that Obama takes seriously his responsibilities as a military commander and that he steels himself to do his duty even when it is unpleasant (as George W. Bush did, though he did not see fit to mention it in his major speeches).

I suspect the rest of us cannot fully appreciate the psychic burden of ordering into harm's way men and women whom you see in front of you and shake hands with. Only the most cynical person, more cynical than any of our presidents, could fail to be affected by this, and this commander in chief devoted several paragraphs to explaining why he believed the war in Afghanistan was worth the sacrifices it must entail.

Then the professor also chimed in, addressing complaints he might hear on campus. This time, he said, the allies will provide more troops (though they haven't promised to do so), we'll clamp down on corruption in Afghanistan, and no, this is not another Vietnam. And we won't spend so much on guns to cut down the supply of butter to the big government programs Democrats favor at home.

But there was one word the professor would not allow the commander in chief to utter.

Presidents often refer to the words of their predecessors, and in his peroration Obama said, "We will go forward with the confidence that right makes might." Alas, this is not always so: Think of the millions who died under Nazism and communism.

Still, the rhyme does echo a ringing phrase in Franklin Roosevelt's speech to Congress the day after Pearl Harbor, which triggered the most tumultuous applause of the day. "The American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory." Too bad we didn't hear that last word from this commander in chief at West Point.

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

President Obama is making so many foreign-policy blunders that he is starting to make us yearn for the national-security acumen of the Carter administration. His official announcement scrapping the planned missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic was long expected but still landed with a thud. It is hard to remember a strategic choice that is so obviously wrong on so many levels.

The Kremlin is delighted. The United States unilaterally backed down in face of a Russian demand with no promise of reciprocity. This move decidedly strengthens Moscow's hand without any appreciable gain for the United States. There is no reason to expect any gratitude. The Russian line will be that Mr. Obama made a pragmatic choice based on the faltering economy and his unwillingness to challenge mighty Moscow. It is a huge win for the Kremlin that adds to Russia's current momentum and reinforces the president's growing appearance of international impotence.

As usual, Moscow's gain is Eastern Europe's loss. Poland and the Czech Republic have a difficult recent history with Russia, by which we mean 40 years of communist military occupation and political repression. They knew Moscow would object to them hosting an American missile-defense system but decided to take the risk. Warsaw and Prague are good allies to America and have sent troops to assist the coalition efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. They deserved better than a midnight call telling them "thanks, but no thanks."

The White House picked an auspicious day to wave the white flag on missile defense. The president's national-security team may say they didn't notice that the announcement came on the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939, but everyone in Eastern Europe did. For an administration whose claims of heightened cultural sensitivity border on sanctimony, the timing was an unforgivable faux pas. The anniversary gift compounds the message that Washington is bent on courting Moscow regardless of the broader implications for global security.

Mr. Obama said he was concerned about the emerging missile threat from Iran, but it is hard to see how his new approach will cause any heartburn in Tehran. The announcement coincided with the leak of the classified annex of the most recent International Atomic Energy Agency report on Iran, which concludes that Tehran has "sufficient information" to build a nuclear weapon and is likely to "overcome problems" on developing a delivery system. In other words, this is exactly the wrong time for the one-time defender of the Free World to be backing off on missile defense.

The president offered the convoluted logic that the Iranians are not making progress on long-range missiles but only on short- and medium-range systems, so the planned defense in Eastern Europe was not needed at this time. The premise is hard to accept. In February, Iran launched its first orbital satellite, which the administration said at the time was "certainly a reason for us to be concerned about Iran and its continued attempts to develop a ballistic missile program of increasingly long range." Even if the Iranians had temporarily eased off on long-range missile programs, it may have been because they were dissuaded by the very system that Mr. Obama is canceling. Now that the United States is unilaterally disarming against the long-range threat, there is no reason for Iran not to push ahead on that aspect of its missile program. The mullahs would be foolish not to.

The White House trumpeted that it has proposed a "stronger, smarter and swifter" program that is "more comprehensive" because it can cope with the growing short- and medium-range missile threat from Iran. That sounds nice, but it's hard to defend the notion that dropping long-range defense somehow makes a plan more comprehensive. A reported second phase of the president's plan would place new missiles in Europe in 2015, which opens a six-year window of vulnerability and places us back at square one with Russia. That doesn't sound like a smarter plan to us.

A truly comprehensive and smarter plan would have left the scheduled long-range defense in place and augmented it with short- and medium-range defenses. This would give Iran nowhere to turn in its research and development efforts, and it would send a signal of strength rather than diffidence. Other countries building missile capabilities, like North Korea, Syria and Venezuela, might think twice about their defense priorities.

Instead of capitulating, the United States should call attention to the fact that Russia never has had a legitimate objection to missile defense. Unless Moscow is planning a strike on Poland or the Czech Republic, what's the problem? There's only one correct answer to Moscow's charge that a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe could be used against Russia's long-range offensive ballistic missile arsenal: "That's right. Deal with it."

By Russ Cote

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard of Honduran ex-President Manuel Zelaya’s bold attempt at a coup d’état in Honduras. In talking with a friend of mine recently, I was literally shocked to hear that he supported Zelaya’s version of events and not the people of Honduras. Now, my friend being an intelligent, rational Capitalist, I was particularly intrigued by how he could have come to such a demonstrably erroneous conclusion on this issue; the conclusion in fact reached by the White House, which, for my fellow craps players out there, should have immediately triggered the “bet the DON’T PASS line!” synapse in the brain. A mystery was afoot.

Even accepting for the sake of argument that Zelaya’s expulsion from the country may have exceeded the constraints of Honduran law, how on Earth could any rational person side against the overwhelming majority of Hondurans, their entire elected legislature and their Supreme Court, and with a Chavez-stooge bent on illegally re-writing the Honduran Constitution to effectively pull a Hugo and make himself “President for Life”? I must admit here that I occasionally become so bogged down in the facts and reality of a given issue that I forget there’s an entire industry out there called the “mainstream media” which operates on a business model consisting of embarrassing dead-celebrity worship and lie-peddling of a magnitude that would make a fake Rolex hustler blush.

I think the reason is a combination of the “mainstream media’s” slavish infatuation with Obama and their lust for overweight South American strongmen. How else could an ideology that professes an unyielding love of democracy side with one man over an entire country’s desires? A third, more obvious element to this mystery is that liberals in general have no conception of actual history prior to 1967.

Apparently this “mainstream media” I’ve been hearing so much about either hasn’t noticed the checkered Marxist history of South American countries over the past century, or has noticed but thinks socialist coup d’état’s resulting in tragic consequences for millions of people is the way to go. Again, I think it’s a little bit of both, depending on how fully any given liberal believes.

The ultimate point, for our purposes here, is that our Commander-in-Chief botched yet another foreign policy issue so completely as to make some of us wonder whether he thinks socialist coup d’état’s are the way to go. Hmmm. Recognizing that I’m a bit behind the news cycle on this one, I have to point out that Obama’s recent Russian footsie party makes his Honduran blunder seem downright quaint by comparison.

The rather flip tone of this post is not intentional. I’m just honestly having trouble believing that the President of the United States can be so utterly clueless when it comes to making official U.S. foreign policy pronouncements. Iran, Israel, Honduras, Russia... what’s next? A champagne soiree with Kim Jong-Il? More distressingly, if it in fact is not cluelessness but something more sinister, such as that Obama really believes that he’s making the right call, well then we have truly entered a parallel universe where up is down, left is right and where Keith Olbermann is charming and funny.

I can now safely say, after watching this Administration operate for the past seven months, that you can set your clock just as precisely by drawing the exact opposite conclusion as does Obama on any given issue as you can set a metronome by counting the number of Nancy Pelosi’s blinks per minute.

Just 1284 more days to go...

 

By Russ Cote

Let me start this essay by stating unequivocally that I believe that Ron Paul is by far the most consistent member of Congress in the last fifty years and maybe longer. Let me state my unequivocal agreement with Rep. Paul’s approach to economics, being myself a firm supporter of the Austrian School-(check out Mises.org from the link to ‘The Right Friends’). Finally, let me be on record agreeing with Rep. Paul’s belief that the United States is far too entangled with far too many other nations through various forms of financial aid and other more clandestine types of assistance.

All that said, my issue with Rep. Paul is his belief, shared by the Austrians that I’ve read, that the United States has no business defending itself at an armed level in places beyond our borders. Reading his book, “A Foreign Policy of Freedom”, I gleaned that his ‘threat’ threshold is extraordinarily high. The bombs must be literally en route to our shores before a defensive maneuver is morally justified and constitutionally permitted. I invite our Paulian readers who take issue with that characterization to make their case.

One example is the Vietnam War. I disagree with Rep. Paul’s conclusion that the War was unjustified and illegal. A subject that is obviously beyond the scope of this article, I’ll just say that I do not agree with Rep. Paul’s reading of our nation’s history concerning the criteria for what makes an armed conflict “illegal”. Suffice to say our history is replete with justifiable, justified and congressionally undeclared armed conflict. The Vietnam War, in particular, was an effort to stop the onslaught of Soviet expansion in Southeast Asia; a threat Ronald Reagan called “the most dangerous enemy that has ever faced mankind in his long climb from the swamp to the stars”. Considering the death toll racked up prior to 1960 by Communism in general and the Soviets in particular, it would have been morally derelict on our part not to intervene. The problem with Vietnam, as I see it, is that we didn’t win when we could have.

In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson said that a goal of the United States was, in part, to strive for “peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none”. In fact this is the headline to Rep. Paul’s book. I sincerely believe this as much as Rep. Paul. However, continue reading his address and we see that Jefferson also said that “the preservation of the General Government in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad” was as much a governing principle. I posit that ‘in its whole constitutional vigor, as the sheet anchor of our peace at home and safety abroad’ is as much a recognition that the United States will fight threats to our safety abroad as they arise, as the former clause is a recognition that the United States should not entangle itself in the affairs of others that have no direct or indirect affect on the safety and security of the American people.

Perhaps our disagreement is more one regarding the limits of the “general government in its whole constitutional vigor” in the context of its power to engage in foreign conflicts-its obligations vs. ideals. For brevity’s sake, my own view is that our history-including Jefferson’s own actions respecting the Barbary pirates, as strong a denunciation of any theory of appeasement as one can find -tends to counsel that armed conflict is not as severely circumscribed as Rep. Paul believes. I am not debating that, from an economic vantage, war is extraordinarily costly. My quarrel with Rep. Paul and pure libertarianism is that man’s nature makes conflict inevitable; this is especially true in a world where not everyone shares the United States’ commitment to “peace, commerce and honest friendship”. Because of this simple historical fact and because of the United States’ unique place in the world, our leaders should not hesitate to militarily engage the forces of tyranny wherever the occur, counseled first by the central government’s constitutional and primary obligation to ensure our “peace at home and safety abroad” and second by the ideal of not entangling ourselves where it is truly not necessary.

Rep. Paul is a patriot; of this I have no doubt. I welcome this debate on foreign policy with adherents to his Libertarian School of thought because, at essence, I believe both sides honestly aspire to preserve those indispensable conditions for Liberty that offer the only real chance for our pursuit of happiness.