Category Archives: War Commentary

The Benghazi Lies

continue to collapse:

A newly-released government email indicates that within hours of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya; the State Department had already concluded with certainty that the Islamic militia terrorist group Ansar al Sharia was to blame.

The private, internal communication directly contradicts the message that President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice and White House press secretary Jay Carney repeated publicly over the course of the next several weeks. They often maintained that an anti-Islamic YouTube video inspired a spontaneous demonstration that escalated into violence.

You don’t say.

It’s nice to see Sharyl Atkisson finally free to do real reporting now that she’s out from under the strictures of the Democrat-enablers at CBS.

[Mid-morning update]

Boehner is (finally!) going to establish a special Select Committee. Rumor is that Trey Gowdy will lead it, which should have these criminals very worried.

Obama And The Middle East

One of his most towering achievements: He’s actually made one of the worst places on earth worse:

It would be the height of unfairness to blame the Obama administration outright for everything that’s happened in the Middle East in the past five years. The region’s bad actors and cultural disorders are often well beyond the reach of the United States, regardless of who’s in office. But limitations are one thing—ineptitude another. It’s simply hard to find a single instance of President Obama responding to recent regional events in a way that has paid off either for the United States or its allies. At the same time, America’s antagonists — chiefly Iran and its enablers — have been emboldened and are now ascendant.

It’s a pretty comprehensive foreign-policy disaster.

[Update a few minutes later]

No one defends Obama on foreign policy these days.”

Well, to be fair, Carney still does. But he gets paid to.

It’s pretty hard to, though I expect I have some commenters who will continue to pathetically attempt it.

[Update later morning]

Obama’s Punch and Judy foreign policy:

Obama, in other words, knows precisely what he doesn’t want to do. No errors. No big, embarrassing strikeouts. Singles and doubles. In baseball, that’s called a Punch and Judy, station-to-station offense. Move the runners along gradually; keep momentum going.

But if your global rivals know you best by your self-imposed limits, how capably can you project power? Is it canny to concede more than necessary? This is the central question for Obama’s foreign policy. He argued forcefully here that the greater danger is picking reckless fights or pretending a war-exhausted American public will support war in Syria, Ukraine, or anywhere in Asia.

The problem for Obama is the perception here and elsewhere that the most forceful thing he’s done on this trip or since Benghazi has been to explain what he can’t do — not what he can.

The number of things he can’t do is boundless.

The White House Directed The Benghazi Deception

Sharyl Atkisson’s take:

Obama administration officials have insisted they were acting on “the best intelligence available at the time” and that they clarified the story as they got more information.

But taken as a whole, the documents and testimony revealed since the attacks support the idea that the administration’s avoidance of the word “terrorism” was a strategy rather than an accident or mistake.

You don’t say.

A Mystery Shooter

Usually, we have to play “Guess that party!” In the case of the Kansas City shooter, we get to play “Guess his motive!”

Police would link at least 12 such attacks to the same .380-caliber weapon before they ultimately arrested 27-year-old Mohammed Pedro Whitaker. On Thursday, they swarmed his home in the south Kansas City suburb of Grandview, where a tributary of highways converge and where many of the attacks had happened.

In Whitaker’s home, police said, they found a .380-caliber handgun. After weeks of fear, they told the press they had their man, and not longer after, Whitaker was charged with 18 felonies. (It’s not clear if Whitaker, who has not entered a plea, has a lawyer, and he is being held in lieu of $1-million bond.)
No motive has been publicized, and police declined to speculate.

Emphasis added. I’m sure they decline to speculate, but the rest of us are under no politically correct strictures to do so.

I wonder if that’s the name on his birth certificate? Am I allowed to ask questions like that?

Geopolitics In Space

I talked to Glenn Reynolds yesterday about our Russian entanglement. Just civil, though, not the military space problem.

[Afternoon update]

Space News had a blistering editorial on Monday, excoriating the fools on the Hill:

Those who bemoan NASA’s reliance on Russia, yet shortchange the very program designed to fix that problem, are at the same time adamant that the agency spend nearly $3 billion per year on SLS and Orion, vehicles that for all their advertised capability still have no place to go. Their size and cost make them poorly suited for space station missions, even as a backup to commercial crew taxis, and in any case the first SLS-Orion crewed test flight won’t happen before 2021.

NASA currently lacks an independent crew launching capability because of decisions made a decade ago, the consequences of which were fully understood and accepted at the time. The longer this situation lasts, however, the more culpable the current group of decision-makers will become.

In that vein, the current criticisms of NASA and the White House might be viewed as a pre-emptive strike by lawmakers who sense their own culpability. But in pressing arguments that fail to stand up to even modest scrutiny, they not only undermine their credibility, they give NASA cover to pursue a Commercial Crew Program approach that might not be sustainable.

What a pathetic lot they are.

[Bumped]