The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results

by

1

tribal council 3

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

“If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” – Sir Winston Churchill

“There is no substitute for victory….It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.” – General Douglas MacArthur

“Sons of Islam everywhere, the jihad is a duty – to establish the rule of Allah on earth and to liberate your countries and yourselves from America’s domination and its Zionist allies, it is your battle – either victory or martyrdom.” – Ahmed Yassin, AKA The Blind Sheik

“We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.” – Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini

“My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” – General William Tecumseh Sherman

 joshua2

A lot has been said about The Islamic State, not least by our president who laid out last night what he considers a strategy…although of course, as our Secretary of State John Kerry told CNN, we’re not, you know, actually at war. The day before, I finished a piece I’d been working on for a while at atJoshuapundit, Defeating The Islamic State that puts forth the proposition that we are very much at war and have been for some time as our leaders continue to deny it – and how to go about winning it.

Here’s a slice:

President Obama has revealed – surprise! – that he has no strategy for even combating, let alone defeating Islamic State. His excuse is that he’s ordered his military advisers to give him “a range of options,” which is another confession of how inept this president is.

He’s known about Islamic State (formerly ISIS) for a long time now now, and even had a significant part in Islamic State’s growth, arming and training them with the assistance of Turkey and Qatar.The mess with Islamic State is very much of Barack Obama’s making. And let’s not forget that his illegal intervention in Libya to save the jihadis and al-Qaeda militias in Benghazi, that allowed all of Khaddaffi’s arsenal fall into jihadi hands and created a failed state now known as ‘jihadi central’ where groups like Islamic State’s allies al Nusrah, al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) and others now have a base to arm and train.

Yet, after all that, this president never bothered to have our military put together a contingency plan to deal with any possible blowback, and is just now consulting with the military and ‘waiting for options!’

In the president’s actual statement, he of course substituted ‘we’ rather then ‘he’, because as you know,nothing is ever his fault.I actually know children who are more responsible when they’re confronted by an error.

But  the problem of defeating Islamic State is not as simple as it seems. The president’s dysfunctional buffoonery aside, there are a lot of considerations here that need to be looked at.

The first part of making any decision is actually having definable foreign policy goals, something this president seems to lack except for his fetish for empowering and protecting Islamists.

So job one, the way I see it, is to formulate such goals. I think eliminating imminent security risks to America is a good one. And if that’s the goal, simply bombing the hummus out of Islamic State, something I’ve heard a lot of people push for, won’t do it. The reverse in fact.

It has apparently never occurred to them that odious as Islamic State is, they are a counterbalance to an almost equally odious Iranian regime. Taking out Islamic State only helps Iran and the likes of Hezbollah consolidate their goal of a nuclear armed Shi’ite bloc.

That, by the way, is one of the main reasons why taking out Saddam Hussein was such a dumb idea, and why old hands like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld tried to talk George W. Bush out of it.

Iran has been gulling the West on their rogue nuclear weapons program for almost a decade now, and here has been no progress in terms of diplomacy in getting them to stop, while the centrifuges keep spinning. Nor will there be. Iran is the key to this situation, and a much more serious threat than Islamic State.

So, how to accomplish the goal of eliminating these security threats to America?

The first thing, of course, is to be honest at long last and finally let the peoples of the West know what we’re fighting. Call it Islamism, Islamic fascism, Radical Islam, jihad, whatever you will. But identifying it without tiptoeing around it and letting the peoples of the West know what’s at stake is key. We are fighting an ideology. And it’s an ideology that has to be shamed, demonized and ridiculed, especially in the West, with no false notions about political correctness. Propaganda works both ways:

j

The West need to understand what characterizes jihad, and that while Islamic State is a Sunni organization, the same applies to Iran, the other, Shi’ite side of the same coin. We are not dealing with rational actors as we understand the term, and we need to understand the dedication and fanaticism of our enemies, just as we did in WWII. And we need to also understand that this needs to be a war, not an ‘operation’  or a few desultory airstrikes. This video, from Islamic State about the taking of Mosul and surrounding areas is valuable in achieving that perspective:

j1

Much more at the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Victor Davis Hanson with Obama’s Untruth, Inc.submitted by Joshuapundit, a classic recounting and cataloging of the many lies this president has told the American people…and quite possibly, himself as well.

Here are this week’s full results. The Colossus of Rhodey, Ask Marion, Simply Jews and Rhymes with Right were unable to vote this week. None were affected by the mandatory 2/3 vote penalty:

Council Winners

Non-Council Winners

See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks’ nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher’s Council content.

And don’t forget to like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter..’cause we’re cool like that, y’know?

One thought on “The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks’ Watcher’s Council Results”

  1. Pingback: FMJRA 2.0: Not Now John : The Other McCain

Leave a comment