Articles from Alan Jones

Benghazi’s Unconnected Dots
LAWRENCE SELLIN
12:24 PM 12/05/2016

If all politics is local, then all foreign policy is personal, a combination of piques, proclivities and prejudices.

The attack on the US government facilities in Benghazi, Libya on September 12, 2012 by radical Islamic militias and the death of four American was both an act of war and a national tragedy. In foreign policy terms, however, it was still just one scene in a larger international tapestry, a yet not entirely clear complex sequence of events.

During 2015, I wrote a series of articles about Benghazi, Libya and the Obama-Clinton policy of overthrowing authoritarian, but stable Arab governments and replacing them with so-called “moderate” Islamist movements like the Muslim Brotherhood as an alternative to more violent groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State published here, here, here, here, here and a 2016 summary here.

Those articles were based on a search of publicly-available sources and interviews with individuals directly or indirectly involved in the Benghazi attack, both American and Libyan, who will remain unnamed.

If Barack Obama’s approach to Libya could be described as the intersection of ideology and incompetence, Hillary Clinton’s was the product of naked ambition.

Clinton was among the most vocal early proponents of using U.S. military force to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi, claiming erroneously that Qaddafi was about to engage in a genocide against civilians in Benghazi, where the Islamist rebels held their center of power.

Eventually Obama bowed to her leadership on the issue, privately informing members of Congress that Libya “is all Secretary Clinton’s matter.”

Many will recall Clinton, on October 20, 2011, cackling to a TV news reporter over the death of Qaddafi: “We came, we saw, he died.”

According to released emails, Hillary, at that time, considered the violent 2011 “regime change” in Libya such a triumph that her aides discussed labeling it the start of a “Clinton Doctrine” and a prelude to her Presidential campaign in 2016.

In terms of US foreign policy and national security, the role of Hillary Clinton in the Libyan fiasco was as reckless as it was cataclysmic, but that is not the whole story.

What reignited my interest in this topic was a recent article in the New York Times “In Trump’s Security Pick, Michael Flynn, ‘Sharp Elbows’ and No Dissent.” Again carrying water for the Obama Administration, The Times criticized Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, President-elect Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, for the temerity to suggest Iranian involvement in the Benghazi attack, because, regurgitating the conventional wisdom, “Iran, a Shiite nation, has generally eschewed any alliance with Sunni militants like the ones who attacked the American diplomatic compound.”

That is not quite right.

Although you would be hard-pressed to find a heavy Iranian footprint in Libya, Iran, like the US, often operates via surrogates, in this case, Shiite Arabs speaking non-North African Arabic such as Levantine indicating someone from Lebanon or Alawite Syria. Furthermore, Shiite and Sunni Muslims often collaborate when their interests intersect as in opposition to the US or recent Syrian/Turkish joint action against the Kurds.

It would have been a disaster for the 2012 Obama reelection campaign, the Iran nuclear deal and his legacy, if it was known that Iran was involved in the Benghazi attack and that those operations, the interdiction of the flow of arms to Syrian rebels and the thwarting of US policy in Syria and Iraq were driven by penetration of the Obama Administration by Russian intelligence.

That is, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not only arrogant and inept in the conduct of their foreign policy, but they were duped and outmaneuvered by the Iranians and Russians, enmity from which may have spilled over into the 2016 Presidential campaign in the form of WikiLeaks and accusations of Russian meddling.

One wonders if Obama’s proclivity for appeasing Iran and his fear and loathing of Vladimir Putin are the keys to connecting the remaining dots of the Benghazi attack and perhaps might also explain Lt. Gen. Flynn’s hurried departure from his administration for treading dangerously close to the truth.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

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There is no place for me in Hillary’s America

By Lawrence Sellin, contributor

I consider myself a patriot, someone who believes in the Constitution, the rule of law and representative government.

Under a President Hillary Clinton, none of those will any longer exist.

Electing Hillary will mean, quite literally, the end of the United States as it was originally designed.

The Constitution will be de facto obsolete; the rule of law will be arbitrarily applied dependent upon one’s financial status or political clout; and we will have a government driven by crony capitalism and political expediency, benefitting only the rich and powerful, and one conspicuous for corruption, fraudulent elections and pseudo-representation.
Under Hillary’s open borders policy, the United States of America will be neither United nor America. It will not be a melting pot, a nation guided by the notion of E Pluribus Unum, but a collection of simultaneous arguments, where the only thing we have in common is our differences.

It will mean a president, who is, without any doubt, hopelessly corrupt and a pathological liar.

It will mean that the organs of government will not be used to enforce the law, but to enforce the political whims of Hillary Clinton, courtesy of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service.

Because, when blatant and outrageous lies are no longer sufficient to soothe the electorate into complacency, such a government must begin to curtail freedom and oppress the people in order to pursue its policies and remain in power.

For me, one who traveled in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Hillary’s approach to government has a familiar ring.

In “Mountain of Crumbs”, a memoir of childhood in the 1960s and 1970s propaganda-soaked Soviet Union, Elena Gorokhova explains the meaning of “vranyo”, the Russian word for “a white lie or half-truth:”

“In Russia we played the ‘vranyo’ game on a daily basis. The government lied to us, we knew they were lying, they knew we knew they were lying, but they kept lying anyway and we pretended to believe them.”

“In practice vranyo provided a coping mechanism for both unbearable tragedies and petty annoyances. Can’t feed your starving children? Tear up a piece of bread to make a mountain of crumbs and declare it an abundance of food.”

Or declare: the failed Obamacare a success, a moribund economy as booming, a world wracked by Islamic terrorism as safer, illegal immigration as beneficial or the Clinton Foundation as honest.

Angelo Cordevilla provides an insightful comment about the 2016 election:

Never before has such a large percentage of Americans expressed alienation from their leaders, resentment, even fear. Some two-thirds of Americans believe that elected and appointed officials — plus the courts, the justice system, business leaders, educators — are leading the country in the wrong direction: that they are corrupt, do more harm than good, make us poorer, get us into wars and lose them. Because this majority sees no one in the political mainstream who shares their concerns, because it lacks confidence that the system can be fixed, it is eager to empower whoever might flush the system and its denizens with something like an ungentle enema.

Hillary Clinton represents that wrong direction, the constipated status quo, while Donald Trumpprovides a laxative.

The United States under Hillary Clinton will become ungovernable. Millions of Americans, those “basket of deplorables,” who are the bedrock of the country will simply “tune out” the federal government and the media.

Without the Constitution, the rule of law, representative government, a recognizable culture or even defined borders, there is no reason to be patriotic and little reason to participate.

America will become Hillary’s dystopia, the ideological and the incompetent leading the unwilling to do the undesirable.

Sellin holds a Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

Hillary: If you like your corruption, you can keep your corruption

By Lawrence Sellin, contributor

The stain of corruption darkens everything that the Clintons touch.

Second only to national security, it is the responsibility of the president to uphold the law, not to position him or herself above it.

Setting the wheels of corruption in motion, the Obama administration has fundamentally transformed the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from law enforcement agencies into political hit-squads dedicated to suppressing opposition, silencing criticism and protecting the powerful from the consequences of their criminal activities.
In July of this year, Judicial Watch obtained FBI documents through a federal court order in a

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, which showed the following:

(1) “IRS officials stated that the agency was targeting conservative groups because of their ideology and political affiliation”;

(2) The FBI and DOJ had an abundance of evidence “suggesting illegal targeting, perjury, and obstruction of justice”;

(3) “Both the FBI and the DOJ collaborated with Lois Lerner and the IRS to try to prosecute and jail Obama’s political opponents”; and

(4) The FBI investigation “looked the other way when it came to Obama’s IRS criminality.”

Also in July, FBI Director James Comey provided shocking details from the Bureau investigation, saying that Clinton and her team at the Department of State were “extremely careless” when it came to handling classified materials; it found 110 emails on 52 separate threads that contained classified information.

Yet Comey made the appalling decision not to refer the email server evidence for prosecution by the DOJ; according to a Fox News report, one person close to the yearlong probe claimed that career agents and attorneys involved in the case “unanimously believed that Hillary should have been charged.”

Not only did Comey inappropriately absolve Clinton of any wrongdoing, he offered immunity to her aides, seemingly to obstruct rather than facilitate further investigation; he allowed witnesses of the alleged criminal activity to serve as Clinton’s “lawyers”; and he physically destroyed evidence contained on the laptops of Clinton’s staff.

Recently released FBI documents, according to Powerline, indicate that Clinton aide Patrick Kennedy “tried to bribe the FBI to change the classification of a Benghazi document so as to enable Hillary’s false claim that she didn’t send or receive classified information on her illegal home server.”

In addition, Hillary Clinton had email exchanges with her IT expert Bryan Pagliano, undermining a claim, made under oath, that she did not recall discussing with him the management of the private, unsecured email server she used at State — a server we can now conclude was set up to conceal the “pay to play” scheme between the Department of State and the Clinton Foundation.

According to The Spectator: “From 2001 to 2015, the Clinton Foundation raised over $2 billion in donations. From February 2001 to May 2015, Bill Clinton gave 637 speeches and made $132,021,691 in speaking fees alone. Hillary gave 92 speeches from February 2013 to March 2015. She was paid $21,648,000. While the Clintons made speeches to Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, it was the foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation that were the most disturbing.”

Of those cases described in Peter Schweizer’s book “Clinton Cash,” one directly affected national security. Rosatom, a state-owned Russian company, gained control of one-fifth of America’s uranium reserves. “Shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One,” states a New York Times report, Bill Clinton “received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.”

We now learn through James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas that Hillary Clinton and her acolytes have used unethical and perhaps illegal means to secure her election to the presidency, including using hired “provocateurs,” some even mentally ill, to instigate violence at Republican events. The clandestine videos also revealed discussions of voter fraud schemes taking advantage of sloppy registration policies for the purpose of registering otherwise ineligible voters. In another Project Veritas video, a Democrat activist who bragged about disrupting Donald Trump campaign events was found to be on Clinton’s campaign payroll after a search of Federal Election Commission records was conducted.

Electing Hillary Clinton will be an endorsement of permanent political corruption and consent for the use of government as an instrument to extinguish dissent.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D., is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

Hillary, Soros and the political genocide of Christianity

By Lawrence Sellin Ph.D., contributor

Hillary Clinton seems to have a problem with religious liberty when it conflicts with her progressive goals.

During an April 2015 speech to the Women in the World Conference she said, “Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed” for the sake of giving women access to “reproductive health care and safe childbirth.”

Translated, that means that Clinton, who believes that reproductive rights are a “fundamental human right”, would, through repeal of the Hyde Amendment, force all taxpayers to fund all abortions, even partial birth, that is, “day of birth” abortions regardless of our religious convictions.

Clinton is also willing to impose federal penalties, including denying tax-exempt status, in order to, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote, “stamp out every vestige of dissent” to a far-left agenda.

There is a deliberate and comprehensive anti-Christian plan being promoted by Hillary Clinton and funded by George Soros because they believe that Christian principles are an impediment to the implementation of their progressive policies.

In her now infamous “basket of deplorables” speech at a September 9th New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) fundraiser, Clinton said, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic – you name it.”

The phrasing was no accident. Those “grossly generalistic” accusations are the basis of every leftist diatribe meant to demonize any individual or group that stands in opposition to their extremist policies.

As reported by Ken Klukowski, senior counsel with First Liberty Institute, the largest law firm in the United States exclusively dedicated to protecting religious liberty, Hillary’s words originate from a report issued by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights two days before Clinton’s anti-Christian screed. Chairman Martin Castro, an ally and supporter of Clinton and Obama, said in a statement accompanying the report, “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ … remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.”

It is also no coincidence, according to conservative Ken Blackwell writing for The Hill, that Hillary’s running mate, Tim Kaine, during his “mission” trip to Latin America in 1980, apparently was and may still be a zealous advocate of “liberation theology,” which is “a radical, Marxist-based ideology at odds with the Church, the pope, and the United States, but supportive of (and supported by) the Soviet Union.”

All of that circles back to newly-released Wikileaks emails, in which longtime Clinton confidante, John Podesta discusses infiltrating the Catholic Church with progressive ideology to foment revolution as a “Catholic Spring.”

Podesta said, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this.”

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good (CACG) is a George Soros-funded nonprofit organization dedicated to galvanizing Catholic and Christian voters to support progressive candidates, causes, and legislation. CACG, which deplores economic inequality, characterizes modern America as a society where “greed, materialism, and excessive individualism” are ubiquitous and views conservative politics and free markets as the enemies of authentic social justice.

That is why theology that adheres to millennia-old Christian teachings on human life, other social issues, and religious liberty are considered “deplorable” and “irredeemable” by the Left.

That is why, according to Hillary Clinton, traditional Christian views “have to be changed.”

That is why John Podesta and George Soros established Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good; to make Christianity more amenable to Marxist-based ideologies such as government-run socialized healthcare, government redistribution of wealth and unlimited and unrestrained taxpayer-funded abortions.

It is what the Hillary Clinton campaign, in their leaked emails, calls “Christian democracy.”

It is what I call political genocide.

Sellin is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

LAWRENCE SELLIN

Retired Colonel, U.S. Army Reserve

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, captured the essence of the 2016 election when he commented about a number of Republicans disavowing endorsements of or support for Donald Trump following the release of the vulgar 2005 video:

“A lot of these bed-wetting, hand-wringing Republicans: They’re not afraid Donald Trump is going to lose — they’re scared to death that Donald Trump is going to win,” and “mess up the neat little package of fun they have and they all play to the donor class.”

Even avowed Hillary supporter MSNBC anchor Mika Brzezinski tore into Republicans who withdrew their support for Donald Trump over his hot mic comments, calling them “pathetic, weak and spineless.”

The arrogance of political establishment has only gotten more brazen since 1993, when Lewis H. Lapham (“A Wish for Kings”) wrote:

“The politicians dress up the deals in the language of law or policy, but they’re in the business of brokering the tax revenue, and what keeps them in office is not their talent for oratory but their skill at redistributing the national income in a way that rewards their clients, patrons, friends and campaign contributors.”

Corruption is now endemic in Washington DC, where politicians like the Clintons convert public service into personal profit by granting financial favors to foreign governments and international business interests.

I have long said that there is a Cold Civil War underway in the United States to determine who should control the federal government. It is not a contest between the Democrat and Republican ideologies, but a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political establishment versus the rights and liberties of the American people. It is a conflict between those who want to adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law and the party leaders, who wish to continue the practices of political expediency and crony capitalism.

In this election cycle, Donald Trump has forced the permanent political establishment out of the closet, exposing it to the voters for what it really is, an oligarchy; a small, mutually supportive group of politicians, media outlets and financiers that exercises control of the government for corrupt and selfish purposes.

It should surprise no one that Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan doesn’t support Donald Trump and wishes to continue business as usual in Washington DC.

It is because Ryan’s policies more closely match those of Hillary Clinton.

Both promote open borders and international trade agreements that treat American workers simply as chips in a high-stakes globalist poker game.

The rise of Donald Trump can be directly attributed to a Republican Party that never practiced the principles that it preached nor pursued the policies it proposed. They are people who are only interested in maintaining their position as the junior partners in the ruling elite and courting the affection of the mainstream media.

As Charles Krauthammer noted, Republican voters have felt not just let down or disappointed, but betrayed, sold out to donors and lobbyists:

“Did they repeal Obamacare? No. Did they defund Planned Parenthood? No. Did they stop President Obama’s tax-and-spend hyperliberalism? No. Whether from incompetence or venality, they let Obama walk all over them.”

When the disingenuous Republican establishment talks about “limited government,” what they really mean is limiting voter choice, limiting the need to fulfill their campaign promises and limiting their responsibility to represent the views of those who placed them in office.

Likewise, Hillary Clinton champions policy positions in public that are meant to deceive voters about the true intentions of her private policy positions.

Hillary’s America will be defined by globalist exploitation of our economy and the further subservience of our workforce to those global interests.

In Hillary’s America there will be unlimited mass migration through open borders, which will forever change the demographics of the country in ways that will render American culture unrecognizable and ensure a permanent far-left Democrat Party majority.

The First Amendment will be replaced by political correctness and speech codes.

Black Lives Matters and other domestic extremist groups will be encouraged to create crises that can be exploited to limit individual liberties.

For example, the Second Amendment will be decimated by additional federal regulations and executive orders, further restricting private gun ownership and ultimately leading to universal confiscation.

Do Americans want eight years of a President Clinton, who, through top aide Huma Abedin, will do even more to empower the Muslim Brotherhood and impose its agenda on America, such as Sharia in our schools, courts and communities?

If, according to the political-media establishment, the 2016 election is “over” because of crude, but private eleven-year-old comments in order to elect a thoroughly corrupt, tyrannical and ruthless woman, then America is surely “over” too.

Nothing is more important than defeating Hillary Clinton. Nothing.

www.dailycaller.com

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

FBI Director James Comey Has His Glenn Beck Moment

Lawrence Sellin
Retired Colonel, U.S. Army Reserve

Gone are the heady days when Americans could laugh at the ineptitude of government as a gaggle of befuddled politicians offering unworkable solutions for misunderstood problems to be executed by bureaucratic ignoramuses.

Now the survival of the country is at stake, threatened by Islamic terrorism and permanent political corruption.

During a hearing this week before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, FBI director James Comey faced pointed questions about recent terrorist shootings and bombings in the United States and about his failure to recommend indictment for Hillary Clinton in her private server scandal.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, referring to multiple instances of the FBI failing to act on evidence that it had on various terrorist suspects before they killed Americans, asked “Is it your position that no mistakes were made in each of these in judging them not to be credible threats?”

Channeling his inner Glenn Beck, a man now famous for his serial public melt-downs, Comey conceded that he is a “deeply flawed and fallible human” who failed to stop some terrorist attacks before they happened.

The FBI Director also admitted that he was out-maneuvered by Hillary Clinton’s aide Cheryl Mills during the Clinton email inquiry.

Pleading incompetence, Comey said “we are not perfect people,” noting that a pending inspector general investigation will help the FBI learn from its mistakes.

At that point, I had fully expected Comey to dunk his face in a bowl of crushed Cheetos.

Making mistakes in a sincere effort to thwart Islamic terrorism or to bring criminals to justice is unfortunate, but forgivable. Pursuing terrorist suspects through the filter of political correctness and not referring cases for criminal prosecution on the basis of political expediency are not.

There is now little doubt that the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails was a sham from the beginning, that the Bureau never had any intention of prosecuting her, turning its back on its own traditions of rising above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice.

Just how much Comey and the FBI punted on “EmailGate” has become painfully obvious, as noted by former National Security Agency analyst John Schindler:

“Redacted FBI documents from that investigation, dumped on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, revealed that Hillary Clinton either willfully lied to the Bureau, repeatedly, about her email habits as secretary of state, or she is far too dumb to be our commander-in-chief.

Worse, the FBI completely ignored the appearance of highly classified signals intelligence in Hillary’s email, including information lifted verbatim from above-Top Secret NSA reports back in 2011. This crime, representing the worst compromise of classified information in EmailGate – that the public knows of, at least – was somehow deemed so uninteresting that nobody at the FBI bothered to ask anybody on Team Clinton about it.”

That travesty of justice is further compounded by the revelation of Comey’s connection to the Clinton Foundation, a potential serious conflict of interest as leader of the FBI investigation into Hillary’s misuse of classified material.

Comey’s performance in office is symptomatic of a problem that cuts across the entire political-media establishment, namely the desperate attempts being undertaken by those trying to preserve the corrupt status quo.

As part of that effort, the FBI Director joins a long list of aspiring office holders and fawning journalists willing to exchange integrity for the opportunity to audition for a seat at Hillary Clinton’s Presidential dinner table.

President Trump should fire James Comey.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

www.Dailycaller.com

Sizing up Robert Gates’ criticism of Donald Trump

By Lawrence Sellin

In his September 16, 2016 Wall Street Journal commentary “Sizing Up the Next Commander-in-Chief,” former Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates concludes that Donald Trump is “unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.”

My response is — compared to whom?
The secretary might be reminded that Barack Obama assumed office without any foreign affairs or national security experience, although he excelled in the use of a teleprompter and the cadence of speech delivery.
Together with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Obama Administration brought us such international triumphs as Benghazi, ISIS and the Iranian nuclear deal.

In fact, all the festering national security problems enumerated by Gates as serious challenges for the new President i.e. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and the Middle East were inadequately addressed or aggravated during the tenure of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, according to Gates himself:

“Regarding Iran, whatever value Mr. Obama’s nuclear agreement has brought, the deal has led to no decrease in Iran’s aggressive meddling in the Middle East nor any lessening of its hostility to the U.S. Iranian naval challenges to U.S. warship operations in the Persian Gulf have nearly doubled over the last year.”

Were Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton misinformed by their advisors or “stubbornly uninformed about the world” as he claims Trump to be or, more simply, did they fail because they possess a toxic mixture of incompetence and ideological delusions?

Have they not been the contentions of the Obama Administration that climate change causes terrorism and ISIS arose from a lack of employment opportunities?

Gates writes:

“The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone. In domestic affairs, there are many checks on what a president can do; in national security there are few constraints. A thin-skinned, temperamental, shoot-from-the-hip and lip, uninformed commander-in-chief is too great a risk for America.”

Is Gates referring to Trump or Obama? I’m not sure.

Is it not Barack Obama who reflexively responds to every Islamic terrorist attack and racial incident with excuses for the perpetrators?

Was it not Secretary Gates, who claimed that Obama made a “serious mistake” that hurt America’s credibility in the world when he drew the red line in Syria and then did not act after the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian regime?

“Backing away from reacting once the red line was crossed impacted American credibility not just in the Middle East, but I think it was being watching in Moscow and Tehran and Beijing and Pyongyang and elsewhere,” Gates said.

That is, the China, Russia, North Korea and Iran about which Gates voices so much concern in regard to Donald Trump.

Gates also says Trump is “temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform,” unlike the Obama Administration, who made lying the primary instrument of government policy, were “extremely careless” in their handling of highly classified information, doctored intelligence reports and violated the most sacred creed of the armed services – no one gets left behind.

Although he provides no recommendations to remedy our current national security challenges, Secretary Gates offers the following bromide:

“I understand the broad anger and frustration against political leaders in both parties. I have written about my disgust as secretary of defense as I watched politicians repeatedly place re-election above the nation’s best interests. Polls make clear that most Americans are dissatisfied with the two major party candidates for president. But as I used to say in the Pentagon, we are where we are — not where we might wish to be.”

In their support of Donald Trump, the American people are stating unequivocally that we do not like where we are as a nation and we fully intend to go where we wish to be, even if it involves calculated risk and the irritation of the political establishment.

Gates seems to think that Hillary Clinton is an unknown quantity that before the election she will “address forthrightly her trustworthiness, to reassure people about her judgment.”

Seriously? Sorry, Mr. Secretary, I don’t think it is Donald Trump who is “beyond repair.”

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com

Defeating ISIS And Embracing Operational Ambiguity

LAWRENCE SELLIN

09/16/2016

Even without ISIS, the Middle East, the epicenter of radical Islam, is a complex political-military environment dominated by the Sunni-Shia religious conflict, but influenced by ethnic aspirations, tribal rivalries, regional hegemony, superpower competition and ever-shifting allegiances.

For example, Turkey under the leadership of Sunni Muslim President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan opposes the Syrian regime of Shia Muslim President Bashar al-Assad. Turkey is a NATO-member and ally of the United States. Assad’s government has strong diplomatic and military support from Russia, is a long-time ally of Iran, and is backed by Lebanon’s ShiaHezbollah militant group. Yet, such differences are superseded by their mutual fear of and animosity towards Kurdish independence or autonomy. On August 18, 2016, Turkey and Syria engaged in what appeared to be a coordinated attack against Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in and around the city of Hasakah.

The fighting in Hasakah came after the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), whose main component is the YPG, captured Manbij on August 13th, a strategically placed town in north Aleppo province. Four days earlier, Turkish President Erdogan had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and appears to have obtained his acquiescence to a limited Turkish military intervention in northern Syria. The Turkish-Russian, at least temporary understanding, relieved some of the hostility in the wake of the shooting down of a Russian fighter-bomber by a Turkish jet on November 24, 2015.

In its battle against ISIS, the US supports the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which is an alliance of Kurdish, Arab, Assyrian, Armenian, Turkmen and Circassian militias, but it is really a wholly owned subsidiary of the YPG. The umbrella organization of the SDF provides diplomatic cover for the US because the YPG is considered by many as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a group designated as a terrorist organization by the US and NATO and one that has been waging war against the Turkish state since 1984.

In regard to ISIS, it is an ambiguous operational environment offering only poor options and one largely of our own making.

If the strategy of George W. Bush can be described as naïve and punctuated by neoconservative hubris, those pursued by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent the intersection of ideology and incompetence.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush Administration, sought a long-term political solution to international terrorism, which they believed emanated from the lack of democratic participation, where resentful individuals, having been excluded from the political process in their own countries, directed their hatred and violence against the West. Bush chose Iraq as a starting point for the democratization of the Middle East, from where he had expected democracy to spread and, consequently, would both assimilate and contain potential terrorists. When democracy failed to take hold in Iraq or anywhere else for that matter, he initiated an alternative approach, the idea to integrate unspecified “moderate” Islamists into their own countries’ governments.

If the Bush method after the Iraq invasion had been largely tentative and reactive, the Obama Administration policy became preemptive; whereby the US would actively encourage, if not directly support, the overthrow of what it considered reactionary Arab regimes.

In 2010, Obama ordered his advisors to produce a secret report, later known as Presidential Study Directive-11 (PSD-11), which concluded that the United States should shift from its longstanding policy of supporting stable but authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa to one backing, what Obama Administration officials considered groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Turkish AK Party, now led by President Erdoğan, as a so-called “moderate” alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and Islamic State.

The disastrous consequences of the Obama-Clinton policies we have witnessed in Egypt, Libya and Syria result, not just from the policy itself, but, to no small extent, from the “zero footprint” manner in which it was executed.

The rise of ISIS can be directly linked to the power vacuum left after the premature withdrawal of US forces from Iraq in December 2011 and fueled by American abdication of a foreign policy in Syria, where we sub-contracted our foreign policy to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. Not surprisingly, those countries pursued their own interests; the Saudis supporting radical Islamic Salafists, while the Turks and Qataris backed the Muslim Brotherhood, whose goals do not defer markedly from Islamist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, that is, a global caliphate and the implementation of Sharia.

We are now left with only one short-term course of action: ISIS must be comprehensively defeated on the battlefield by whatever combination of methods and assets.

ISIS persists because they appear to be winning. In addition, it has a simple and uncompromising message, one that resonates with the alienated, aimless or unsuccessful. For disaffected Muslims, ISIS can represent a form of Islamic glamour that fills an emotional need both for purpose and redemption. It is an opportunity to belong and be a winner. For life’s losers, it provides a powerful enticement to live out sexual fantasies without consequences and to obtain revenge for real or imagined insults in the form of helpless victims.

Piles of dead ISIS fighters, however, make poor recruiting posters. An ideology has little chance to flourish, if there are few left eager to practice it.

Yet the defeat of ISIS will not solve the Iraq-Syria conflict and no outside player alone, whether it be the US, Russia, Iran or Turkey, can shape the outcome. The Shiites and the Kurds, for example, do not speak with one voice and the Sunnis have not found their place in a post-Saddam Iraq. It means that each faction and sub–faction will pursue their separate interests, likely resulting in continued or even greater fragmentation.

In the long-term, it is not the responsibility of the United States to reconcile all the various opposing factions in the Middle East, but to manage and sometimes leverage the chaos in a manner that fulfills our national security interests.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

Mosul: Averting A Humanitarian & Governance Nightmare After We Win

LAWRENCE SELLIN

It has been reported that the U.S. is gearing up to assist Iraqi forces in an offensive to reclaim the city of Mosul from Islamic State, an operation expected to begin as early as October.

Mosul was captured by Islamic State in June 2014 when Iraqi security forces, riddled with corruption and sectarianism despite billions of dollars in U.S. aid, dropped their weapons and fled from the insurgents.

An additional 400 American troops have been sent into Iraq to assist Iraqi forces consolidating south of Mosul in the city of Qayyarah. There now are more than 5,000 U.S. military personnel in the country.

According to the new commander of the U.S.-led coalition fighting Islamic State, Lt. Gen. Stephen Townsend, the battle to retake the jihadist group’s last major Iraqi stronghold will be a difficult and dangerous operation, like “a siege.” Fortifications, tunnels, improvised bombs and even civilians used as human shields likely await advancing forces. Islamic State fighters are digging moats and filling them with oil and tires and burning them to obscure the view of U.S. pilots conducting airstrikes or aerial surveillance.

Winning, however, is only half the battle. Conquest is easy. Control is not.

The Mosul operation has also triggered large-scale humanitarian planning, with the U.N. predicting that up to one million people could flee the city in all directions, potentially exacerbating the already-existing demographic and security concerns of regional players.

Governance may present an even greater challenge, a failure of which will only increase and prolong the humanitarian crisis.

The battle for Mosul is like the race to get to Berlin between the Soviets and the West in 1945. The positioning of forces of the Kurds, Shia and Sunni Arabs in this final push is expected to redraw the boundaries in northern Iraq. For the Shia-dominated and Iranian-aligned Iraqi government, who will attack from the south, this is a chance to reunify the country under the control of Baghdad. But for the Kurds in the north and east of Mosul, the fight against the Islamic State is an opportunity for greater autonomy or even independence. For the Sunni Arab militia, which will join the Kurds in attacking Mosul from the west, the battle is a chance to re-establish a Sunni presence that has nothing to do with the Islamic State, but everything to do with Iraqi politics and Iranian regional hegemony.

In a civil conflict or disaster situation, command and control is as important as food, water, or shelter. When human life is lost and the infrastructure is devastated, humanitarian and governance organizations can quickly become overwhelmed by the number and complexity of the problems without an efficient and effective means to integrate and coordinate relief and stability efforts.

The rapid deployment of ad hoc networks and services in event-driven environments should fulfill the following basic criteria:

Establish critical communication support capabilities to facilitate information sharing and collaboration among relief organizations through a secure wireless infrastructure supplying voice, data and video services.
Provide a single portal application interface for government, military, private sector, UN, and NGO relief organizations, whose features include:
Interoperability and collaboration based on commercial off-the shelf (COTS) components and open standards;
directory integration of names and contact information for inter/intra-agency collaboration and synchronous and asynchronous information exchange;
Situational awareness and incident tracking with geo-spatial mapping capabilities;
Multiple and instantaneous language translation.
The objective is to enable multiagency interoperability and real-time crisis management to help save lives, protect property and manage recovery efforts — after the battle.

A humanitarian and governance nightmare in Mosul and the surrounding area is inevitable. Whether that crisis can be met effectively with the necessary command and control infrastructure and policies remains an open question.

How the US wins the battle against the Islamic State and perhaps, more importantly, manages a fragile peace, may ultimately determine, at least strategically, our success or failure in the fight against radical Islam and the achievement of some degree of Middle East stability.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired US Army Reserve colonel, a command and control subject matter expert, trained in Arabic and Kurdish, and a veteran of Afghanistan, northern Iraq and a humanitarian mission to West Africa. He receives email at lawrence.sellin@gmail.com.

“Mosul: Averting A Humanitarian & Governance Nightmare After We Win”

Why Donald Trump appeals to ordinary Americans

By Lawrence Sellin

There is a winning coalition in America: one which Donald Trump represents, one inclusive of all Americans, and one for all those who believe in a simple proposition — honest, representative and effective government.

There are many important issues facing voters in the 2016 election: the threat of radical Islam, a weak economy, skyrocketing national debt, unchecked illegal immigration and a dying middle Class.

Yet, none of the problems can be solved without first recognizing a far greater danger to the survival of the country.
The federal government and the media are, as institutions, hopelessly corrupt and, although we have elections, we no longer have representative government.

This election is not simply a contest between the Democrat and Republican ideologies, but a battle between the entrenched power of the bipartisan political establishment versus the freedom and well-being of the American people.

It is a conflict between those who want to adhere to the Constitution and the rule of law and those who wish to continue the practices of political expediency and crony capitalism.

It is a choice between a government of the people, by the people and for the people or “elective despotism” when lies, corruption and tyranny are embraced by the political-media establishment.

Americans now believe that we are no longer citizens of a republic, but subjects of an elected aristocracy, composed of a self-absorbed permanent political class, which serves the interests of international financiers at the expense of the American people. They maintain their authority by an ever-expanding and increasingly intrusive government and use a compliant media to manipulate public opinion in order to maintain the illusion of democracy.

From the perspective of the ruling class, elections have become little more than occasions to redistribute power between select political elites. For the international financiers, who fund the politicians, it does not matter who wins the election as long as they can continue to influence policy through lobbies and political donations.

To maintain control, both Democrats and Republicans have fostered a culture of dependency. Democrats create dependency by expanding federal mandates and increasing entitlements. Republicans promote dependency by limiting voter choice and co-opting or crushing independent candidates and grassroots political movements.

The federal government is now an industry competing with the private sector, but unconstrained by regulation and the rule of law, which has inevitably led to massive and widespread corruption.

Our political-media establishment is now characterized by executive overreach, legislative complicity, judicial partisanship and journalistic decadence.

It is a fundamental principle of democracy that the efficiency and effectiveness of government are directly dependent upon the trustworthiness of government officials as representatives and executors of the views and desires of the people.

It is time to take America back.

When the history of the Obama Administration is written, the epitaph will read, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, “Never in the course of American history, has so much harm, been done to so many, by so few.”

It is not by accident.

What we are witnessing is the product of eight years of Barack Obama and his divisive rhetoric and destructive policies.

Obama’s “transformation” is a euphemism for the deliberate crippling and humbling of a great nation he fraudulently considers racist, oppressive, venal and dysfunctional.

It is not the imagination of conspiracy theorists and none of it is “home grown.”

There is an unholy alliance between the global political left and radical Islam, two totalitarian philosophies that have a shared hatred of Western civilization and Judeo-Christian democracy; and both are determined to extinguish liberty and subjugate the individual, either to Sharia or the state.

They cannot achieve global subjugation without first destroying the United States.

It can happen because America’s domestic enemies promulgate notions that attack the basis of our constitutional republic, which emphasizes the uniqueness and sacredness of the individual. They also promote policies that weaken our ability to transmit to the next generation the values and traditions upon which the United States was built.

Political correctness is part of that effort. Its aim is to narrow the range of thought in order to make independent thinking literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express those thoughts. It is accomplished through the systematic destruction of language as “microaggressions” or simply making statements that are patently untrue.

Anti-American, messianic political movements can only succeed when the individual believes that his or her actions are determined, not by personal freedom endowed by the Creator, but by the destiny of the community, controlled by a ruling elite of commissars or mullahs.

Most of the social chaos and extremism we are currently witnessing in our country is the product of a well-funded and well-organized anti-American, radical Islamo-leftist agenda — and an administration that enables rather than opposes the aims of our enemies.

I will not mince words.

To many Americans, the Democratic Party appears to be sympathetic to that agenda and promotes policies that undermine, not just the United States the sovereign nation, but our Constitution, our culture, our traditions, all of what “America” has come to mean.

Likewise, the Republican Party is dominated by globalists, obsessed with the acquisition of personal power and profit, uninterested and unwilling to defend the rights, liberties and well-being of American citizens. The GOP leadership has solidified its choice to no longer represent what had been its constituency, but to adopt the identity of junior partners in the ruling class.

Three years before the start of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said a government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free — that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Likewise, a government separated from the people cannot stand.

It is time to take America back.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is a retired colonel with 29 years of service in the US Army Reserve and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. Colonel Sellin is the author of, Restoring the Republic: Arguments for a Second American Revolution.