The State Department Touts “Pivotal Foreign Policy Moments”

State Dept. flack John Kirby touted the “most pivotal foreign policy moments” of the year on the State Department’s “Dipnote” blog on Christmas Eve, perhaps hoping that people would be too busy celebrating Christmas to notice it.

Well it took a few days, but people are starting to notice it.

All the “pivotal moments listed” are worthy of special scorn and derision – especially the claim that the U.S. brought “peace and security to Syria.”

Syria: The conflict in Syria has continued to unfold in tragic ways over the course of 2015. From the humanitarian crisis endured by refugees fleeing violence, to the reprehensible human rights violations and violence carried out by the Asad regime, the Syrian people have borne a heavy load. The United States and many members of the international community have stepped up to aid the Syrian people during their time of need – the United States has led the world in humanitarian aid contributions since the crisis began in 2011. Led by Secretary Kerry, the United States also continues to push for a political transition in Syria, and under his stewardship, in December, the UN Security Council passed a U.S.-sponsored resolution that puts forward a roadmap that will facilitate a transition within Syria to a credible, inclusive, nonsectarian government that is responsive to the needs of the Syrian people.

Fox News’s Neil Cavuto had former US Army Special Operations expert Jason Beardsley to discuss Obama’s alleged success in securing Syria.

“That was a political statement at its best,” Beardsley said charitably. “Nobody takes that seriously.” He added, “this does discredit to folks inside the State Department who recognize the reality on the ground.”

Kirby also claimed that the Obama administration is “winning the fight against violent extremists.”

To justify this dubious claim, he cites “The White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” which took place last February if you remember. (I wrote about the appalling travesty here, here and here.)

If you remember, the WH Summit Countering Extremism was a ludicrous exercise in futility that refused to consider radical Islam as a possible cause for terrorism, and focused on anti-poverty prescriptions to counter the problem.  The summit made a point of giving equal time to “Christian” violent extremist groups while inviting actual supporters of violent Islamic extremism to participate in their summit on Countering Violent Extremism.

I get a headache just thinking about it.

This badly timed event closely followed the Paris Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in Paris in a year when Islamic terrorism was on the rise throughout the world – including here in America.

Amazingly, the State Department actually wanted to remind people of the embarrassing spectacle.

In February, the White House hosted the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), bringing together foreign leaders, senior officials from the United Nations and other international organizations, and private and civil society representatives to discuss the challenges facing nations working to prevent and counter violent extremism. This monumental summit launched an ongoing global CVE effort now underway that reaches throughout the world and across countless nations. Although challenges remain, we have made positive strides over the last year, including in our fight against ISIL. This forward progress will only continue as more countries pledge resources to the anti-ISIL effort and as citizens around the world increasingly reject ISIL’s misguided ideology. Moving forward we know that together the global coalition – active both on the battlefield and on the airwaves – can and will degrade and ultimately destroy extremist organizations, like ISIL. (More on CVE)

Stephen Coughlin, a former intelligence contractor at the Pentagon, whose specialty was “Islamic doctrine as it applies to ‘Jihad’ and the strategic objectives of our enemy,” recently gave a detailed explanation of the dangerous CVE deception on the internet show The Glazov Gang.

He said that the scrubbing of the word “Islam” from all government discourse was a long process that started at the end of the Bush years and accelerated under Obama.

Via PJ Media:

“I actually believe there is a deep, deep strategic initiative behind it, and where we are doing ‘countering violent extremism,’ we are not doing counter-terrorism,” Coughlin says. “As it relates to the United States, the CVE was established and set up at DHS with the assistance of the Muslim Brotherhood.”

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Ralph Peters: Obama Hates America, Doesn’t Care About American Casualties or Defeating ISIS

Lt. Col. Ralph Peters was on the O’Reilly Factor Thursday night to discuss the low marks the American people are giving President Selfie-Stick on foreign policy.

A new AP poll shows that 61% of the us disapprove of the way Ovomit is handling ISIS. 58% disapprove of the way he is handling foreign affairs. Although I would think a healthy and sane country would disapprove of such an obviously incompetent and corrupt boob in even higher numbers, (in the 90%-95% range) O’Reilly seemed to think 58% and 61% were significant.

He began by asking Peters if he thought it was an ISIS bomb that blew up the Russian plane over Egypt. Peters responded without hesitation, “Yes.”

He said that although there was still an outside possibility that there had been a technical issue, the circumstantial evidence seemed to indicate a bomb.

“The terrorists in the case got a three-for, Bill,” said Peters. “They got to derail Putin’s narrative and really, really embarrass him. They got to humiliate President al Sisi of Egypt – who has really cracked down on Islamic extremism, and they whacked – just about destroyed –  the Egyptian tourist industry which is 11% of their GDP.”

“President Obama’s response to ISIS is to send 50 Special Forces troops into Syria,” O’Reilly said rolling his eyes. “Fifty. 5-0. And I’m saying to myself – it’s almost like MAD Magazine’s foreign policy. I mean – 50???” He asked Peters, “does he not want to defeat them?

“That’s not a rhetorical question,” Peters answered. “No, he does not care about defeating them. He cares about making it to the end of his term without another major disaster that can be blamed on him. And that is it!”

“Why send anybody then?” O’Reilly wondered.

“Because it’s getting worse and worse and worse and he’s trying to do the absolute minimum to stave off an open catastrophe.”

O’Reilly wasn’t satisfied with Peters’ explanation.

“If you send no one, there’s no story because he’s already  not done much,” he argued.. “If he sends fifty – then that gets people like you and me going, ‘what???’ Fifty? That doesn’t even give our Special Forces enough power to protect themselves.”
“Stop thinking rationally! It does not work with the Obama White House!” Peters exclaimed. “That inner cabal that knows nothing about history, nothing about military affairs, denies that Islamic extremism has anything to do with Islam, they live in a fantasy world, in that fantasy world where they don’t take military advice – they just chatter to each other.”

Peters added that, “it will make a very local, tactical difference. It will not make a decisive difference – not a strategic difference.”

O’Reilly noted that putting a mere fifty troops in Syria is putting them in harm’s way for nothing…

Peters interjected, “do you think the president cares about that?!”

He continued, “Bill, we have a president whose vision of the world has been, remains and will remain divorced from reality.”

“He hates America,” Peters continued. “Despises it and doesn’t want to do what it takes to defeat ISIS.”

“The American people are not tired of war, they’re tired of losing!” Peters concluded.  “They’re tired of seeing their sons and daughters killed and maimed for the vanity of an inept and ineffective and cowardly president.”

SEE ALSO:

PJ Media: The Obama Administration Debuts Its Latest Euphemism

Frustrated Pilots Speak Out Against Obama’s Fubar Air War in Iraq

Members of the US Air Force are grumbling because their Commander in Chief’s “no-boots-on-the-ground” pledge is keeping them from fighting an effective air campaign against Daesh in Iraq and Syria.

Within the U.S. Air Force, there’s mounting frustration that the air campaign against ISIS in Syria and Iraq is moving far more slowly than expected. Instead of a fast-moving operation with hundreds of sorties flown in a single day—the kind favored by many in the air service—American warplanes are hitting small numbers of targets after a painstaking and cumbersome process.

The single biggest problem, current and former Air Force officers say, is the so-called kill-chain of properly identifying and making sure the right target is being attacked. At the moment, that process is very complicated and painfully slow. “The kill-chain is very convoluted,” one combat-experienced Air Force A-10 Warthog pilot told The Daily Beast. “Nobody really has the control in the tactical environment.”

That story was posted at the Daily Beast back in October of 2014 – and the situation hasn’t improved one iota in 7 & 1/2 months. Can you imagine the frustration of these pilots?

Here’s Fox News 5/28/2015:

U.S. military pilots carrying out the air war against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are voicing growing discontent over what they say are heavy-handed rules of engagement hindering them from striking targets. They blame a bureaucracy that does not allow for quick decision-making. One Navy F-18 pilot who has flown missions against ISIS voiced his frustration to Fox News, saying: “There were times I had groups of ISIS fighters in my sights, but couldn’t get clearance to engage.” He added, “They probably killed innocent people and spread evil because of my inability to kill them. It was frustrating.”

This crap has been going on for nearly a year, and they’ve been forced to watch Daesh slaughter their way through Iraq from the sidelines – only allowed to bomb one or two jihadis at a time.

Sources close to the air war against ISIS told Fox News that strike missions take, on average, just under an hour, from a pilot requesting permission to strike an ISIS target to a weapon leaving the wing. A spokesman for the U.S. Air Force’s Central Command pushed back: “We refute the idea that close air support strikes take ‘an hour on average’. Depending on the how complex the target environment is, a strike could take place in less than 10 minutes or it could take much longer. “As our leaders have said, this is a long-term fight, and we will not alienate civilians, the Iraqi government or our coalition partners by striking targets indiscriminately.”

 A former U.S. Air Force general who led air campaigns over Iraq and Afghanistan also said today’s pilots are being “micromanaged,” and the process for ordering strikes is slow — squandering valuable minutes and making it possible for the enemy to escape.

“You’re talking about hours in some cases, which by that time the particular tactical target left the area and or the aircraft has run out of fuel. These are excessive procedures that are handing our adversary an advantage,” said retired Lt. Gen. David Deptula, a former director of the Combined Air Operations Center in Afghanistan in 2001.

Deptula placed the blame squarely on the community organizer in the White House.

“The ultimate guidance rests in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” he said. “We have been applying air power like a rain shower or a drizzle — for it to be effective, it needs to be applied like a thunderstorm.”

Of course this is his doing. He wants to be the anti-Bush – and Bush was hammered by the left for the (highly inflated) civilian casualties during the Iraq War.

“But wait,” you say – there are many more civilian casualties as a result of us doing nothing. ISIS is slaughtering, torturing, enslaving hundreds of people at a time – in the most heinous and gruesome ways!

But of course Obama doesn’t care about any of that. He just doesn’t want to get blamed for it.. And he knows, that by taking this dovish, hesitant, womanly stance, he keeps his anti-war base happy. And that’s really all that matters.

They will continue to gain ground, strength and power because President Fubar refuses to deal with them. But it’s okay – this cluster-F won’t reach critical mass until he’s left office (he’s hoping.)

 Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., recently complained that 75 percent of pilots are returning without dropping any ordnance, due to delays in decision-making up the chain of command. A senior defense official at the Pentagon pushed back on the comparisons between the air war against ISIS and past air campaigns. “The Gulf War and Kosovo are not reasonable comparisons. In those instances, we were fighting conventional forces. Today, we are supporting a fight against terrorists who blend into the civilian population,” he said. “Our threshold for civilian casualties and collateral damage is low. We don’t want to own this fight. We have reliable partners on the ground.”

Riiiight – here they are “blending in” near Rutbah a couple of weeks ago after the fall of Ramadi:

Da’ish convoy in Rutbah, W. #Anbar province, celebrating events in Ramadi. Begs the question, where’s the coalition? pic.twitter.com/hIMO5cszF4

— Haidar Sumeri (@IraqiSecurity) May 18, 2015

Obama Whines About Being “Treated Differently” Because of the Color of His Skin in India

Good God, this president is mortifying:

NEW DELHI (AP) – President Barack Obama gently nudged India Tuesday to fulfill its constitution’s pledge to uphold the “dignity of the individual,” drawing on his own experience as a minority in the United States as he closed out a three-day visit to New Delhi.

Obama said that while he has had extraordinary opportunities, “there were moments in my life where I’ve been treated differently because of the color of my skin.” As he touted the importance of religious tolerance, he noted the persistent false rumors that he is a Muslim, not a Christian.

“There have been times where my faith has at times been questioned by people who don’t know me, or they’ve said that I adhere to a different religion, as if that were somehow a bad thing,” Obama said.

He forgot to mention how people judge him because of his “funny name.” Oy.

Yeah, Obama’s faith has been questioned by people who know him to be a pathological liar – someone who will lie about literally anything – including his own mother’s health insurance status when she was battling cancer. Not to mention about a gazillion other things – too numerous to catalog. It’s safe to assume at this point that about 75% of what comes out of the man’s mouth is utter BS.

Would such a man lie about his religious convictions?

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Enough said?

Hat tip: Weasel Zippers

SEE ALSO:

Jack Cashill, WND: YES, OBAMA HAS EXPERIENCED ‘CONSTANT BIAS’

The bias started early. Obama biographer David Mendell tells the reader that Obama “won” a full scholarship to Occidental, but as a bench-warming, B-minus student in his fancy Honolulu prep school Obama had to know what he had done to “win” it.

The bias continued in college. Biographer David Remnick tells us that Obama was an “unspectacular” student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school.

A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.” As to Obama’s LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa’s body will be unearthed before those are.

How such an indifferent student – he did not graduate from Columbia with any kind of honors – got into a law school whose applicants’ LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.8 and 4.0 is a subject Remnick bypasses.

The bias continued in law school. Obama, it seems, did not make the Law Review the old-fashioned way, the way HLR’s first black editor, Charles Houston, did 70 years prior.

To Obama’s good fortune, the HLR had replaced a meritocracy in which editors were elected based on grades with one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition.

This competition, the New York Times reported in 1990, was “meant to help insure that minority students became editors of the Law Review.”

If Obama’s entry in the writing competition had begun like this bogus passage from “Audacity of Hope” – “I know what it’s like to have people tell me I can’t do something because of my color and I know the bitter swill of swallowed back anger” – I suspect his odds of being chosen for the Law Review would have improved considerably.

“By the time Barack got to campus, in 1988,” fellow alum Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan would tell Obama biographer David Remnick, “all the talk and the debates were shifting to race.”

No one benefited more from this talk than Obama. In the same spring 1990 term that he would stand for the presidency of the HLR, the Law School found itself embroiled in a nasty racial brouhaha.

 

 

 

Ralph Peters: Obama Would Have “Easier Time Dealing With GWOT If Terrorists Were Southern Baptists or Israeli Jews”

That Lt. Col. Ralph Peters has been on quite a tear lately. And he must be good for ratings, because he’s been on Fox every day this week.

On Hannity, Wednesday night, the host wanted to talk about the apparent snubs by French President Hollande toward Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, which Peters felt was bad judgement but could be explained by France’s geopolitical interests.

“What I find inexplicable is President Obama and his cabinet’s refusal to go – to participate – the apparent order to even Eric Holder not to show up even though he was in Paris,” Peters said, repeating a suggestion he made earlier this week, that cabinet members were ordered not to go.

Sean pressed Peters to explain what possible reason Obama had to behave this way.

“I think it goes back to Obama’s insistence that there’s no such thing as Islamist terror,” Peters declared. “And Obama — once he makes up his mind about something — I suspect he made up his mind about Islam 30-40 years ago — you can’t move him. He can’t learn from new facts. And even though it’s six years into his office, he’s seen the proliferation of Islamist terror, literally around the world, he’s still clinging to this idea that Islam is somehow benign.”

He added, “You’ve got to look at the background of the man – in Indonesia, his nutcase left-wing mom, all his years in Chicago and elsewhere in the company of leftists… And I do believe …that the president romanticizes Islam, and he really sees the religion of Islam as oppressed while he sees Christianity and Judaism as the oppressors. I sincerely believe this president would have an easier time dealing with a war on terror if the terrorists were Southern Baptists or Israeli Jews.”

SEE ALSO:

NRO: Krauthammer’s Take: Islamic Terrorism Is Not on the Run, It’s Out in the Open

On Wednesday’s Special Report, Charles Krauthammer said the Obama administration’s distinction between “core al-Qaeda” and various groups of Islamic terrorists around the world has become functionally meaningless.

“What you’ve got is a competition between, on the one hand, ISIS, on the other hand, core al Qaeda with its core and its affiliates, and the fact that we focus on one or the other is beside the point,” Krauthammer said. “What’s new is the geography of this terrorism. Each of these now is developing its own sovereign territory.”

Andrew McCarthy, NRO: I’m Glad Obama Skipped Paris

Over the objections of the Egyptian government, the administration invited top officials of the then-banned Muslim Brotherhood to Obama’s Cairo speech — notwithstanding that the Brotherhood is rabidly anti-American and had just been proved in an American criminal trial (the Holy Land Foundation case) to be the driving force behind a multimillion-dollar Hamas-support conspiracy. After the Egyptian government fell, Secretary Clinton exerted pressure on the generals then in control to cede power to the elected Brotherhood government, which had vowed to implement a sharia constitution. When the generals agreed to step aside, and the Islamists predictably released terrorist suspects, stepped up the persecution of non-Muslims, and engineered adoption of a sharia constitution, the Obama administration continued to support it with lavish financial and military aid — aid it threatened to cut off only after the Egyptian armed forces, with broad public support, ousted the Brotherhood from power.

Obama is so preternaturally averse to acknowledging jihadist terrorism that he absurdly rebranded the War on Terror as “Overseas Contingency Operations.” His administration refused to acknowledge that the Fort Hood Massacre, in which a brazen jihadist mass-murdered thirteen American soldiers, was jihadist terrorism, insisting, instead, on the ludicrous label of “workplace violence” — belittling the heroism and ultimate sacrifice of those who were about to deploy to battle terrorists in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, when Afghan Muslims rioted and murdered over the accidental destruction of Korans, Obama . . . apologized to Afghanistan.

The president and his underlings purged information about Islamic supremacism and its instigation of terrorism from materials used to train intelligence, military, and law-enforcement personnel. Instructors who lectured on these materials were terminated, as were others who refused to conform to the administration’s delusional, counter-historical, counter-commonsense smiley-face jihad.

Consistent with the administration’s undermining of the First Amendment in the Istanbul process, the Justice Department refused to rule out proposals to criminalize speech unflattering to Islam. In congressional testimony, Attorney General Eric Holder refused to utter the words “radical Islam,” much less to concede the nexus between Islamic-supremacist doctrine and terrorist attacks by Muslims. Even this weekend, after the jihad mass murders in Paris made it politically impossible to resist the word “terrorism” and the discussion of Islam’s connection to it, Holderrejected the phrase “radical Islam” –  blathering, instead, about how terrorists “use a corrupted version of Islam” to rationalize their attacks (while conveniently omitting mention of the authoritative scriptures and mainstream sharia jurists endorsing jihadist terror).

 Gateway Pundit: ONE WEEK AFTER PARIS TERROR ATTACKS – Obama Releases Five More Gitmo Detainees

One week after the Paris terrorist attacks Barack Obama has decided to release five more Yemeni Guantanamo terrorists.

Al Qaeda in Yemen took credit for the Paris attacks in a video released Wednesday.

The terrorists will go to Oman and Estonia.

He is relentlessly evil.

Obama Regime Leading From Behind On ISIS – Wants Blank Check AUMF

In an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration wants Congress to approve an Authorization for Use Military Force that would specifically target ISIS, but without any geographic limitations or restrictions on  ground forces.

Kerry emphasized that President Barack Obama still has no intention of deploying ground combat troops but doesn’t think the Senate should “preemptively bind the hands of our commander in chief” in responding to unexpected contingencies in combating the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. Kerry’s testimony suggests Obama will be seeking broader authority than congressional Democrats — and some Republicans — will be willing to approve.

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey argues that the Regime is asking for a blank check to do whatever they want to do militarily, without a political paper trail.

Obama got elected by promising to end the war in Iraq, and then got re-elected by bragging that he’d done so by pulling out. All he did was set the stage for the war to expand exponentially, and with it the threat to the region and the West. Now Obama wants to avoid the political consequences of the failure of his policy by trying to get Congress to step in front of him while Obama prepares to re-enter the war he left behind. Republicans aren’t going to take the bait no matter how much they see the need for a forward strategy against ISIS, and neither are Obama’s Democratic allies.

The defining characteristic of this administration’s foreign policy has always been a failure to lead. It’s just becoming a lot more obvious these days.

Ace of Spades let our Nobel Peace Prize winning SCOAMF- who will never admit that he made a mistake – HAVE IT:

President Obama is a coward of impossible dimensions.

He is attempting to fight a war without alerting the public to the fact that it is a war, because he is ideologically committed to claiming that war is always a mistake, and yet for political reasons he must be seen as pretending to fight IS.

He knows he needs — get this — an actual resolution from Congress to fight this war. But, because of the political optics, he does not wish to be seen asking for one, nor engaging in the process of securing one.

Did you notice who was sitting behind Kerry at the Senate hearing holding a pink sign? Yeah, that’s right. Obama doesn’t want to upset or disappoint the likes of her.

So the Administration refuses to tell the Senate what should be in an AUMF, or what shouldn’t be there. He wants them to just guess, because he is such a clownish, cartoonishly cowardly malefactor that he can’t be seen to have actually sent over a memo.

This is the worst man — not just the worst president, but the worst man — I have ever seen in a leadership position.

Yep.