The list of countries that have provided tacit support to Israel for its imminent launch of preemptive missile attacks on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities now includes: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt, and… not-the-United-States.

The Saudi government recently conducted drills to ensure that their missile defense system does not shoot down Israeli jets that might fly over their airspace in the near future.  This is crucial for any bombing raids Israel may conduct on Iranian nuclear facilities, because the only feasible route to Iran’s nuclear plants is over a wide swath of Saudi Arabia.  Israel might also need to fly over Jordan and Kuwait, which have not objected to this arrangement.

A much quicker, as-the-crow-flies route to Iran’s cluster of nuclear facilities at Natanz, Qom, Isfahan, and Arak would be directly over Iraq.  However, use of this flight plan has one sticking point: the U.S. commander-in-chief’s stubborn refusal to allow Israel to fly jets through Iraq’s airspace.

In arriving at this position, President Obama may have been following the advice of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, who infamously offered the charming advice last year that if Israel tried to use Iraqi airspace to attack Iran, the U.S. should shoot Israeli jets down.

Saudi Arabia has never exactly considered Israel an ally, as the U.S. does.  Yet the Saudi government recognizes the danger a nuclear Iran poses to their country and the region, and is willing to clear a corridor of airspace for Israel over their country.  Why is Obama unwilling to do the same over Iraq, which isn’t even his country?

In 2007 Turkey allowed Israel use of its airspace in a sneak attack on a developing nuclear plant in Syria, Iran’s primary ally in the region.  At the time, the Syria attack was seen as a test run for an upcoming Israeli attack against Iran’s facilities, which means that Turkey was essentially helping Israel prepare for such an attack.

Egypt has also recently looked the other way as Israel sent warships and a nuclear-capable submarine down the Suez Canal toward the Arabian Sea in preparation for a conflict with Iran.

But due to Obama’s creepy, subtly anti-Semitic foreign policy, Israel must instead hurl its jets in a wide, boomerang-shaped flight path all the way around the southern tip of Iraq, across the Persian Gulf, and back up to central-northern Iran to get to the country’s primary nuclear facilities.

George W. Bush was certainly no hawk regarding the prospect of the U.S. attacking Iran under his watch.  However, it’s safe to assume, given the precipitous progress of Iran’s nuclear program over the past two years, Iran’s alarming self-declaration as a nuclear state this spring, and Israel’s brave willingness to confront Iran alone, that Bush would not have denied Israel the right to fly over Iraq if he were still President.

To put all of this in perspective: our current president is refusing to allow the only stable democracy in the Middle East (Israel) to serve as the U.S.’s front line of attack against the greatest state sponsor of terrorism in the world (Iran), by letting them fly over a country we recently liberated (Iraq) in order that they might serve as a model for neighboring dictatorships on the brink of regime change (such as Iran).

Ah, you say, but surely Obama has some other diplomatic maneuver up his sleeve, some nonmilitary means of pressuring Iran to abandon its nuclear program and allow weapons inspectors into the country.

Actually, no—the Obama administration has been working to weaken Congress’s proposed U.S. sanctions against Iran.  Obama fears that these injunctions may go too far and anger our allies.

These are not the sanctions imposed by the UN last week—the ones which we waited forever to be implemented, which two of the largest nations in the world (Brazil and Turkey) rejected, and which are watered down to the point of futility.  These are additional sanctions that would apply only to U.S. companies and not be legally binding on other countries.

The EU has already agreed to oil and gas sanctions of their own that go beyond the mild-mannered penalties imposed by the UN.  So even the likes of France and Germany are going further than the U.S. in isolating Iran, yet Obama still sees the need to appease our allies.

Americans ought to be deeply troubled by a U.S. foreign policy that fails to be as supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself as the doctrines of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt.



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Williams suggested that the filmmakers botched the following minor details: the vehicles, the armor, the armaments, the helmets, the uniforms, the communications technology, the military jargon, the unit structure, the command procedure, and the mission logistics.

On the plus side, Williams noted that the filmmakers accurately portrayed soldiers’ fingernails being dirty and their eyelashes being covered with dust.  Score one for cinéma vérité!  Williams also praised the film’s lovely desert scenery.

Williams ended, “I’d like to watch ‘The Hurt Locker’ with a combat veteran, but my layman’s eyes found way too much to quarrel with.”

Fortunately for Williams, many combat veterans have already seen the film.  Unfortunately for director Kathryn Bigelow, their criticism of the film is even more scathing than that of Williams.

Paul Rieckhoff, Founder and Executive Director of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, recently concluded in Newsweek that “Hollywood’s latest attempt to define the Iraq War and the American troops who have fought in it is just as disappointing as all the others produced so far.”

Rieckhoff, while pointing out additional and more nuanced inaccuracies than Williams, argues that the snowballing accumulation of gaffes in the movie is not trivial, but rather reflects an unforgivably sloppy rendering of the military that reveals profound ignorance and amounts to great disrespect on the filmmakers’ part.

For example, Rieckhoff criticizes the depiction of the highly specialized Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) group at the center of the film as casually putting on other military hats in their spare time, expertly carrying out sniper missions and kicking in doors and checking buildings for insurgents, jobs for which they would never have been trained.

Rieckhoff writes, “The scene with Jeremy Renner’s character sneaking off base to chase a boy he is worried about is as fictional as Jason Bourne…  The men in my platoon followed rules and orders, and they stuck with their fellow soldiers…  They don’t run around on their own unless they want to be court-martialed—or killed.”

The L.A. Times’ Julian Barnes cites EOD team members in Iraq who damn “The Hurt Locker” with faint praise: they call it “a good action movie if you know nothing about defusing roadside bombs or the military.”  (How about that sound editing!)

Barnes quotes EOD technician Sgt. Eric Gordon: “I would watch it with other EOD people, and we would laugh.”  (Then again, many people I know have had the same reaction to fellow Oscar nominee “Avatar.”)  Gordon compared one soldier defusing a bomb using wire cutters to having “a firefighter go into a building with a squirt bottle.”

An even more sobering criticism of the movie involves its portrayal of the main character, Sergeant William James, as a danger-loving, adrenaline-addicted, protocol-shredding commando who wantonly disrupts unit cohesion and endangers unit members with irresponsible, tough-guy playacting.

The Washington Post quotes Iraq veteran Ryan Gallucci stating that he had to keep turning the movie off “or else I would have thrown my remote through the television.”  Gallucci admits that he kept wanting to see James “blown up…  I wanted to see his poor teammates get another team leader, who was actually concerned about their safety.”

In an essay for The New York Times subtly titled “How Not to Depict a War,” EOD team videographer Michael Kamber adds that the film’s many factual errors “are mere details compared to the way Sergeant James repeatedly swaggers up to bombs…  [T]he chances of recklessly approaching even a single command-detonated bomb and surviving are quite small.  Yet we are made to believe that Sergeant James has disabled over 800 bombs in this reckless, cowboy-like fashion.”  (Yes, but will the film win Best Sound Mixing?)

The most damning indictment of the film, however, comes from American-Israeli journalist Caroline Glick.  As she notes, “There is no plot.  We don’t know anything about these soldiers.  We don’t know why they joined the US Army.  We don’t know how they feel about Iraq…  All we are given are GI Joes who defuse bombs.  Supposedly by watching them, we are supposed to achieve some deeper understanding of the war.  But really all we see is context-free violence which teaches us nothing about war.  Supposedly James is a hero.  But we don’t have any idea what he’s fighting for.  So why should we care about him?”

So why is “The Hurt Locker” nominated for a gazillion Academy Awards?  My theory is that the movie was made for people who either (1) know nothing about war, and are curious about what it would be like to be embedded in an Army unit, or (2) care nothing about war, and are delighted to see it depicted as a meaningless, nihilistic exercise that illustrates the futility of picking up arms to fight for one’s country’s security interests.

As far as the latter group, Glick writes, “The Hurt Locker works for them because its post-modern, context-free rendering of the war is a picture-perfect far-left portrayal of war.  No, the Americans aren’t terrible, they are nothings…  War is futile.  There is no purpose to war except staying alive.”

Glick counters: “[S]oldiers aren’t two-dimensional and war isn’t about nothing.  And the war in Iraq is neither futile nor meaningless.  The Hurt Locker was a two-dimensional film about a meaningless war and nothing soldiers.”

In other words: par for the course for Hollywood war films these days.

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Admittedly, one would have expected subjects such as Energy, Tax Cuts, and Lift American Spirits to be top-of-mind for Palin, who has consistently and admirably embodied these stances throughout her career, including her 2008 vice-presidential run.

What the MSM did not explain was how Obama’s ubiquitous reliance on his TelePrompTer, including at a recent pep talk with sixth-graders in Falls Church, Virginia, somehow reflected a greater skill at extemporizing or a more masterful command of facts on his part.

The Associated Press chided Palin for relying on a memory aid after having mocked Obama’s use of his TelePrompTer.  It’s true: Palin did jot down a few notes to help her stay focused during her 40-minute Tea Party Convention keynote address, the second-most important speech of her career.  Was Obama’s five-minute chat with 11-year-olds at Graham Road Elementary School so important to his legacy that it required twin, six-foot-tall TelePrompTer monitors to help him get every word right?

Meanwhile, Joe “Gaffe-tastic” Biden has continued to demonstrate his propensity for committing more blunders in any given week than Palin has made in her entire life.  Appearing on Larry King last week, Biden stated that the Iraq War “could be one of the great achievements of this administration.”

This is the same Iraq War, you’ll recall: (a) that Obama voted against, (b) that Biden voted for but later turned against, and (c) whose troop surge Obama and Biden voted against and denounced throughout 2008, even after it had demonstrably worked.  In 2007, Biden condemned General David Petraeus as “dead flat wrong” for wanting to go through with the surge rather than immediately withdrawing our soldiers and partitioning Iraq into three ethnic regions.

It would be one thing if circumstances had improved dramatically in Iraq since Obama took office, and the administration had acted quickly to remove troops ahead of schedule, thus saving the U.S. time and money and improving relations with Iraqis.  But the drawdown of 90,000 troops currently taking place was spelled out in 2008, according to a George W. Bush-negotiated arrangement, the Status of Forces Agreement, and is unfolding exactly as written.  So Obama doesn’t even deserve credit for “ending” the war in Iraq.

Saying that Iraq could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration is like saying that the stagehand who pulled the curtain on the debut of Così Fan Tutte is responsible for one of the great successes of the Metropolitan Opera House.

Then there’s Biden’s nutty defense of the Justice Department’s decision to read Christmas Day bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after just 50 minutes of questioning.  Biden noted that the Bush administration gave the same treatment to shoe bomber Richard Reid in 2001.  Unfortunately, Biden is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the military commissions to detain Islamic terrorists had not even been set up by the time the shoe bomber had struck.  Reid attempted his attack three months after 9/11, whereas Abdulmutallab attempted his attack eight years and three months after 9/11.

Let’s not forget that Biden was one of the chief opponents of the Afghanistan surge Obama reluctantly ordered in late 2008.  Biden had argued behind the scenes for increasing drone attacks to pick off Al-Qaeda members, and against sending more troops to fight counterinsurgents.  Fortunately, Obama didn’t listen to Biden, and the surge is already demonstrating results, as in Tuesday’s apprehension of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the most significant Taliban capture in over eight years.

This has been the pattern for a year-and-a-half now: Palin makes true statements—that the Vice-President is the head of the Senate, that the health care bill would require panels of bureaucrats to ration care—that are denounced as “gaffes” and “lies,” while Biden regularly weaves twisted fantasies out of cotton candy and is heralded as the voice of wisdom and experience.

The clincher that the MSM held Palin to a higher standard than Biden throughout the 2008 presidential campaign is that they constantly compared her record to Obama’s, not Biden’s.  (“The Republicans’ #2 doesn’t have that much more executive and business experience than the Democrats’ #1!”)

It takes a serious degree of intellectual dishonesty for Democrats to claim we are safer with Biden as Vice President than we would have been with Palin.

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Never mind that only a wee percentage of funds are seeping out eight months after the stimulus bill was passed, health care legislation wouldn’t start until 2013, and the 2016 Summer Olympics don’t take place for seven years.  Those items were all at the top of Obama’s to-do list.

The war in Afghanistan just entered its ninth year.  Obama formulated his grand strategy for Afghanistan in March, and replaced his former commander there with General Stanley McChrystal in June.  McChrystal, as requested, made his assessment of what was necessary to implement Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy, including adequate troop levels, and has been waiting since August for Obama to give him what he needs.

Now Obama tells us that before troops can be approved, we need to make sure we have a strategy.  As George Will recently asked, didn’t Obama formulate his strategy in March?  Has it changed since then?  If not, then why the delay in sending troops to carry it out?

For one, we are told that discontent is brewing among Congressional Democrats over sending more troops, and that Obama wants to take into account their diverse opinions.  Yet discontent is always brewing among Democrats over sending any American troops anywhere, unless the mission is purely humanitarian and serves absolutely no U.S. security interest.  People who think it’s always wrong to go to war or escalate a conflict cannot be trusted to give strategic advice on troop levels in any specific conflict.

Even Hillary Clinton is sane enough to realize that if we follow Vice President Joe Biden’s preferred plan of stepping up surgical strikes and predator attacks against Al Qaeda leaders, maintaining current troop levels, and allowing the Taliban to retake large swaths of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will return to the region before we know it.

Now, as a red herring, senior Democrats are criticizing McChrystal for “violating” the chain of command, simply because after a speech he gave last week he honestly answered a question on strategy by referencing the need for more troops in Afghanistan.

To remind Obama: McChrystal was brought in to replace General David McKiernan due to Obama’s stated intent to implement the new counterinsurgency strategy that General David Petraeus had successfully used in Iraq.  McChrystal privately requested 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops in August, a detail that was leaked to the press.  Last week, he obliquely reiterated the need for more troops in his factual response to a question.  How was he supposed to know that Obama had gone all mushy and was reconsidering his already committed to strategy?

To satisfy critics’ demand that he say nothing precise without clearing it with our commander-in-chief, McChrystal’s response to questions about strategy in Afghanistan would have had to have been, “We’re going to win in Afghanistan.  As for details, please ignore everything I’ve said before and the report and troop request I issued in August—all of that may or may not be true and reflect my honest assessment of the situation and the reason I was hired, but I have to speak with Obama to see if his strategy has changed in the last five minutes.”  (This would have been an especially interesting standard for McChrystal to live up to, inasmuch as Obama had had exactly one phone conversation with the general since he took command before last week.)

The most infuriating aspect of having to listen to all this dithering over troops is that we just went through this whole process in Iraq several years ago—and the “troop dilemma” was conclusively decided in favor of the surge option.  George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld mistakenly ignored the advice of then-General Eric Shinseki to implement massive troop increases in 2003.  The war bumbled along for several more years, until General Petraeus sent more troops and began his counterinsurgency operation in 2007, and by 2008 we were hardly hearing a peep from Iraqi insurgents.

In other words, we learned what to do in Afghanistan from what we finally did in Iraq.  General Petraeus now supports General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Why do we have to learn this bloody lesson the hard way all over again, just because Obama wants to appear “thoughtful”?

One eerie possibility is that Democrats actually believe all that nonsense they were spouting in 2008 about “many factors” being responsible for quelling the violence in Iraq, such as: cooperation from the nice Iraqi people, efforts made by the efficient Iraqi government, Sunni-Shiite compromises, the weather, oh—and also some super-helpful troops that were sent over at the last minute.

Some have suggested that Obama may listen to his inner Zen and take the “middle way”—that is, approve a modest increase, such as 10,000 troops, but not meet McChrystal’s full request.  This solution would offer the twin advantages of putting more U.S. soldiers in harm’s way and not giving McChrystal enough troops to succeed in his mission.  Sounds like a winner!

As Senator John McCain recently noted, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support,” as in Iraq.  Or, as Ike Shelton, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, more succinctly put it, Obama had better not “half-ass it and hope.”

Candidate Obama wailed for years about Bush’s war in Iraq and promised to remove all troops by March 2009.  The latest plan, which President Obama scrawled on a cocktail napkin at one of his Wednesday night White House soirees, is to remove them by August 2010 and leave up to 50,000 troops in place for security purposes—and if you believe those dates and numbers won’t be extended further as “conditions change on the ground,” you probably voted for Obama.  Admittedly, “Obama lied, kids died” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but I think if Bush had pulled a fast one like this, we would have heard a few more complaints about his mendacity.

Obama formerly countered the spectacularly successful surge in Iraq, claiming that there was no way it could work—then turned around as President and implemented something in Afghanistan that starts with ‘s’ and rhymes with ‘urge’ but is definitely not a surge.

As Senator, Obama rejected special funding measures for U.S. anti-terror military conflicts—then, while president, asked Congress for an additional $83 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; you know, the ones we were fighting all along.  On the campaign trail, Obama whined about the cost of war and swore that funding would not be approved without benchmarks; when Congress’s bill came to a vote, Obama asked that the benchmarks be removed.

Obama once complained that Predator drone air attacks on suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan were killing civilians; as President, he ramped up use of this targeted killing tactic at a higher rate and with more civilian casualties than under Bush.

Obama at one point criticized the Patriot Act, including its provisions allowing warrantless wiretapping and obtaining suspects’ financial, travel, and telecommunications records without their knowledge; now he supports renewing the act.

Obama previously opposed the use of the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent the required disclosure of evidence in court that would harm national security; in several cases stemming from the previous administration’s surveillance and interrogation practices, Obama’s Justice Department has invoked that very doctrine to prevent the disclosure of evidence.

Obama used to resist the practice of rendition, or capturing terrorist suspects and sending them to a third country for interrogation; recently he vowed to continue the practice.

At one time, Obama spoke out against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on high-level terrorist suspects.  Recently, however, he set up a committee to look into whether CIA interrogators should be allowed looser standards than military interrogators—i.e., he left the door open for these techniques to be used again if he deems necessary.  He rejected the call to establish a Truth Commission into the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and the prosecution of those who approved or implemented them.  When Nancy Pelosi claimed the CIA lied to her about the use of these techniques, Obama did not publicly support her, and allowed CIA director Leon Panetta to release a memo contradicting her claim.

In the past, Obama contested the practice of detaining terrorist suspects without trial; yet his Justice Department filed a brief claiming that his administration can hold for an indefinite period of time the following: Al Qaeda members, Taliban members, “associated forces,” and anyone who “substantially” supports them, which includes about half of Congress.  Federal judge Reggie Walton slyly mocked the Obama administration’s arguments as drawing “metaphysical distinctions” between his and Bush’s policy that were “of a minimal if not ephemeral character.”

Obama wrung his hands over denial of habeas corpus to terrorists in Guantanamo but has upheld the Bush position on denying habeas corpus regarding detainees’ conditions of confinement in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, which is sort of a Guantanamo Express.

More recently, Obama revived military tribunals for Gitmo detainees after having called them an “enormous failure” and sworn to end them (the tribunals, not the detainees).

Finally, last week Obama changed his mind and decided he would oppose the release of photos documenting abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

It shouldn’t be this way for the former Bush administration.  After seven-and-a-half years of doing the right but unpopular thing, suffering precipitous drops in their approval ratings, and enduring uninformed screaming from every corner of the media about their Nazi-like tendencies, Bush and Cheney shouldn’t be dependent for their legacy on the eleventh-hour conversion of an irresponsible, wet-behind-his-big-ears neophyte who isn’t adult enough to serve as Commander in Chief.  The Bush policies should have been praised all along for keeping us safe, and any candidate who ran headfirst against them should have been defeated in a landslide.

But at least Bush’s “rehabilitation” is happening sooner than we could have hoped—just several months into the subsequent administration.  Any honest commentator must admit that it is happening squarely on the back of the feckless Obama.

Is he kidding?  To rephrase the expression, Barack Obama never waited a day in his administration.  (Up until the presidential campaign, “worked an honest day in his life” covers him pretty well, too.)

Obama would have nationalized healthcare, banned carbon dioxide, withdrawn from Iraq, and started a second New Deal while still in the “Office of the President-Elect” if he could have gotten away with it.

President “I want a stimulus package on my desk by January 20” Obama couldn’t be bothered with niceties like posting the bill online for 48 hours for voters to read, even though he waited four days after it passed to sign it.  In his quote from the week before the $800 billion boondoggle was brought to a vote—“We can’t afford to make perfect the enemy of the absolutely necessary”—by “perfect” he evidently meant “a bill with completed wording.”

Obama is just fine with Nancy Pelosi ramming “healthcare reform” through Congress with a simple majority by inappropriately using budget reconciliation to write it into law after the budget is approved.

President “Delay is no longer an option” is content to let the Environmental Protection Agency enact cap-and-trade regulations if Congress doesn’t pass them soon enough for his liking.

Our Hastener in Chief is willing to lose the war in Iraq so he can make sure combat troops are home in time for the midterm elections.

And President “Bow at the Waist” Obama just can’t wait until he and Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Il, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are on good enough terms that he can add them as Facebook friends, even though Castro hasn’t promised to confirm his request.

Crouch explains Obama’s leadership style thus: “He clearly understands that a democracy with many, many circles of power is prone to a slow velocity of policy achievements.”  Apparently Obama understands it well enough to cut Republicans out of committee meetings on the stimulus package, cut the American people out of a chance to look at and comment on the bill, cut shareholders out of hiring and firing decisions at automobile manufacturers and banks, and cut Congress out of passing environmental regulations.  That’s one way to deal with “many, many circles of power,” otherwise known by our Founding Fathers as “checks and balances” and “limits on rule.”

Crouch contrasts Obama’s administration with a dictatorial or totalitarian regime by explaining that in the latter, “Orders are given to go with a theory…  Physical threats can almost always guarantee compliance and the speed once called ‘greased lightning.’”

Let’s recount what orders Obama has served up so far to go with his “theories.”  There are the massive stimulus package and budget to go with the discredited theory of Keynesian economics.  There are the wasteful bailouts to go with the meritless theory that some companies are “too big to fail.”  There are the suicidal environmental regulations to go with the delusional theory of man-made global warming.

As for threatening those who do not follow orders, Obama has already set his staff on private citizens who might impede his progress (Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer), fired or intimidated CEOs who interfered with his plans (Rick Wagoner, Vikram Pandit), ordered creditors to accept lousy bankruptcy terms and warned that he would ruin their reputations if they didn’t comply, and issued a veiled threat against dissenters by implying that he might unleash the Department of Homeland Security as a bulwark against their dangerous right-wing tendencies.

Crouch sagely counsels, “It is always good for our nation to sit back, be patient, be determined, be disciplined and listen carefully to everything that is said.”  Sorry—who was it who didn’t have time to post the stimulus bill online for Americans to read so they could “listen carefully to everything that is said”?  Who is too busy to provide promised details on how the stimulus money is being spent so we can be “disciplined” and spend it wisely?  Who isn’t “patient” enough to let U.S. soldiers in Iraq finish their job and let Congress and the American people have a chance to debate nation-altering healthcare and environmental legislation?

Perhaps what Crouch really meant is that Obama’s “patience” is demonstrated by his willingness to wait a long time for our problems to be solved.  Maybe Obama believes that precipitous action is needed now, and then we can relax and engage in luxuries like “debate.”  But if these issues have allegedly gone unaddressed for so long and will take years or decades to resolve, then we can certainly afford to spend a mere few months discussing them.

Even Stalin probably didn’t institute one of his Five-Year Plans without sleeping on it.