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Saturday, September 07, 2013
The Blasphemy Police
Blunt words about Muslim backwardness
By Mark Steyn
September 5, 2013
From National Review's Happy Warrior
In 2010, the bestselling atheist Richard Dawkins (pictured above), in the “On Faith” section of the Washington Post, called the pope “a leering old villain in a frock” perfectly suited to “the evil corrupt organization” and “child-raping institution” that is the Catholic Church. Nobody seemed to mind very much.
Three years later, in a throwaway Tweet, Professor Dawkins observed that “all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.” This time round, the old provocateur managed to get a rise out of folks. Almost every London paper ran at least one story on the “controversy.” The Independent‘s Owen Jones fumed, “How dare you dress your bigotry up as atheism. You are now beyond an embarrassment.” The best-selling author Caitlin Moran sneered, “It’s time someone turned Richard Dawkins off and then on again. Something’s gone weird.” The Daily Telegraph‘s Tom Chivers beseeched him, “Please be quiet, Richard Dawkins, I’m begging.”
None of the above is Muslim. Indeed, they are, to one degree or another, members of the same secular liberal media elite as Professor Dawkins. Yet all felt that, unlike Dawkins’s routine jeers at Christians, his Tweet had gone too far. It’s factually unarguable: Trinity graduates have amassed 32 Nobel prizes, the entire Muslim world a mere 10. If you remove Yasser Arafat, Mohamed El Baradei, and the other winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Islam can claim just four laureates against Trinity’s 31 (the college’s only peace-prize recipient was Austen Chamberlain, brother of Neville). Yet simply to make the observation was enough to have the Guardian compare him to the loonier imams and conclude that “we must consign Dawkins to this very same pile of the irrational and the dishonest.”
Full disclosure: Five years ago, when I was battling Canada’s “human rights” commissions to restore free speech to my native land, Richard Dawkins was one of the few prominent figures in Her Majesty’s dominions to lend unequivocal support. He put it this way: “I have over the years developed a dislike for Mark Steyn, although I’ve always admired his forceful writing. On this issue, however, he is clearly 1000% in the right and should receive all the support anybody can give him.”
Let me return the compliment: I have over the years developed a dislike for Richard Dawkins’s forceful writing (the God of the Torah is “the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” etc.), but I am coming round rather to admire him personally. It’s creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West’s chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group. I doubt The Satanic Verses would be accepted for publication today, but, if it were, I’m certain no major author would come out swinging on Salman Rushdie’s behalf the way his fellow novelist Fay Weldon did: The Koran, she declared, “is food for no-thought … It gives weapons and strength to the thought-police.”
That was a remarkably prescient observation in the London of 1989. Even a decade ago, it would have been left to the usual fire-breathing imams to denounce remarks like Dawkins’s. In those days, Islam was still, like Christianity, insultable. Fleet Street cartoonists offered variations on the ladies’ changing-room line “Does my bum look big in this?” One burqa-clad woman to another: “Does my bomb look big in this?” Not anymore. “There are no jokes in Islam,” pronounced the Ayatollah Khomeini, and so, in a bawdy Hogarthian society endlessly hooting at everyone from the Queen down, Islam uniquely is no laughing matter. Ten years back, even the United Nations Human Development Program was happy to sound off like an incendiary Dawkins Tweet: Its famous 2002 report blandly noted that more books are translated by Spain in a single year than have been translated into Arabic in the last thousand years.
What Dawkins is getting at is more fundamental than bombs or burqas. Whatever its virtues, Islam is not a culture of inquiry, of innovation. You can coast for a while on the accumulated inheritance of a pre-Muslim past — as, indeed, much of the Dar al-Islam did in those Middle Ages Dawkins so admires — but it’s not unreasonable to posit that the more Muslim a society becomes the smaller a role Nobel prizes and translated books will play in its future. According to a new report from Britain’s Office of National Statistics, “Mohammed,” in its various spellings, is now the second most popular baby boy’s name in England and Wales, and Number One in the capital. It seems likely that an ever more Islamic London will, for a while, still have a West End theater scene for tourists, but it will have ever less need not just for Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward and eventually Shakespeare but for drama of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe Dawkins is wrong, maybe the U.N. Human Development chaps are wrong. But the ferocious objections even to raising the subject suggest we’re not.
A quarter-century on, Fay Weldon’s “thought police” are everywhere. Notice the general line on Dawkins: Please be quiet. Turn him off. You can’t say that. What was once the London Left’s principal objection to the ayatollah’s Rushdie fatwa is now its reflexive response to even the mildest poke at Islam. Their reasoning seems to be that, if you can just insulate this one corner of the multicultural scene from criticism, elsewhere rude, raucous life — with free speech and all the other ancient liberties — will go on. Miss Weldon’s craven successors seem intent on making her point: In London, Islam is food for no thought.
Related
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Friday, September 06, 2013
One year later: Camp Bastion families still fighting for truth
By Michelle Malkin
September 6, 2013
Marines kneel beside a battlefield cross to pay final respects to Sgt. Bradley Atwell on Sept. 20. He died in the Sept. 14 attack on Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. (Cpl. Mark Garcia / Marine Corps)
Next week, “never forget” will resound across America as citizens mark a dozen years since the 9/11 terrorist attack and one year since the bloody disaster in Benghazi. But who will remember the American heroes who came under siege at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan on 9/14/12?
Two heroic U.S. Marines — Lt. Col. Christopher Raible and Sgt. Bradley Atwell — perished in the monstrous battle last year, and nearly a dozen others were injured. What happened at Camp Bastion and whether the Obama administration has learned from the deadly incident are timely questions as Washington prepares for war again in a jihadi-infested region.
And as military families know, there is no such thing as “no boots on the ground.”
The families of the fallen at Camp Bastion are still waiting for the results of an official CENTCOM probe into last year’s attack. They hear that members of Congress will get briefed on the investigation before the families themselves get the details about what happened to their loved ones — and who bears responsibility for the security lapses that enabled the attack.
Atwell’s aunt, Deborah Hatheway, told me: “We are hoping for the best, and that _the attack will always be remembered as one of the most horrific attacks by the Taliban, and that they will never be able to do this again.” A Capitol Hill source tells me the report could be ready by the end of the month.
Refresher: Three days after the bloody siege on our consulate in Libya, the Taliban waged an intricately coordinated, brutal attack on Camp Bastion. The base is a British-run NATO compound that adjoins our Marines’ Camp Leatherneck. The meticulously coordinated siege by 15 Taliban infiltrators — dressed in American combat fatigues and armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and other weapons — resulted in two deaths and the most devastating loss of U.S. airpower since Vietnam.
Six Harrier jets were destroyed; three refueling stations were wiped out; six hangars were damaged. The Taliban animals released video showing their jihadi training prep. The attack came exactly six months after a failed suicide attack targeting then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta.
As I first reported in June, relatives of the Marines killed in the raid learned on their own that their loved ones were left vulnerable to attack by military leaders who outsourced watchtower security on the base to soldiers from Tonga. The families zeroed in on Maj. Gen. Charles “Mark” Gurganus, who recently returned to the U.S. after commanding coalition forces in Afghanistan, as the man responsible for shortchanging security at Bastion.
Gurganus is the same one who ordered Marines to disarm — immediately after the failed attack on Panetta — because he wanted them “to look just like our (unarmed) Afghan partners.” Neglect of security at Bastion was widely known.
This past weekend, during the Labor Day holiday, military leaders quietly announced that at least four Marines who served with the Harrier squadron that came under fire at Camp Bastion have been awarded the Purple Heart. They are: Maj. Greer Chambless, Lance Cpl. Cole Collums, Sgt. Jonathan Cudo and former Cpl. Matthew Eason. According to the official news release, reported by the Military Times, the Marines were part of the unit that Raible led in a counterattack on the insurgents. Sixteen of the 50 Marines on hand at the time pushed out of the hangar, said Staff Sgt. Jesse Colburn, an ejection seat mechanic who was on the ground during the raid.
Cpl. William Waterstreet reported on the Purple Heart ceremony at the Yuma, Ariz., Marine Corps Air Station: “When the attack began, there were no friendly forces between the Marines of VMA-211 and the insurgents, so it fell to these Marines to act as the first line of defense for Camp Bastion. … Raible called on his Marines to take up arms and fight with limited ammunition, without body armor, automatic weapons, grenades or support against an enemy force of unknown size, strength or location in the dead of night; his Marines volunteered immediately.”
A new article in GQ magazine this month detailed how the courageous “mechanics and pilots turned defenders and riflemen … undoubtedly prevented a greater catastrophe.” Their actions deserve public attention far and wide. And the families deserve accountability. Yet, the Battle Rattle blog of the Military Times website noted something curious: The Marine Corps “did not disclose details about the Aug. 1 Purple Heart ceremony until nearly a month later.” The news was buried on a holiday weekend. President Obama has breathed not a word. Why?
September 11 was supposed to have taught us to collect the dots and connect the dots, to never underestimate Koran-inspired jihadi warriors, and to never subvert our security to indulge deadly political correctness. From 9/11 to Fort Hood to Benghazi to Bastion, it’s not whether we’ve forgotten that matters most. It’s whether we have learned.
***
Statement from Donnella Raible, widow of Lt. Col. Christopher Raible:
It’s been nearly one year since my husband was killed during an attack on Camp Bastion in Afghanistan. I join an unfortunate cohort of families who have lost loved ones since the War on Terror began. And today, our service members are still fighting and deploying and perishing as they have been for the past 12 years. Simply put – our all-volunteer force has and always will answer the call of duty. Unfortunately many military members and their families have lost faith that our nation’s leaders will perform the duties we elected them to carry out. While Congress bickers about even more military action in Syria, sequestration has left far too many military families, the same ones whose Marines and soldiers fight today, untethered and exposed. This is unacceptable and Congress should be held accountable. I believe our leaders should spend more time crafting policy that works on behalf of our citizens rather than playing politics.
***
Previous:
Previous:
June 21, 2013 Uncovering the Camp Bastion cover-up
May 1, 2013 The Camp Bastion Cover-Up
November 14, 2012 Camp Bastion Families Want Answers About Afghanistan
October 26, 2012 What about the Camp Bastion attack?
September 28, 2012 Deafening silence about the Camp Bastion attack
Community Organizer Goes to War
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
September 4, 2013
Oh, how I long for the days when liberals wailed that "the rest of the world" hated America, rather than now, when the rest of the world laughs at us.
With the vast majority of Americans opposing a strike against Syria, President Obama has requested that Congress vote on his powers as commander in chief under the Constitution. The president doesn't need congressional approval to shoot a few missiles into Syria, nor -- amazingly -- has he said he'll abide by such a vote, anyway.
Why is Congress even having a vote? This is nothing but a fig leaf to cover Obama's own idiotic "red line" ultimatum to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on chemical weapons. The Nobel Peace Prize winner needs to get Congress on the record so that whatever happens, the media can blame Republicans.
No Republican who thinks seriously about America's national security interests -- by which I mean to exclude John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- can support Obama's "plan" to shoot blindly into this hornet's nest.
It would be completely different if we knew with absolute certainty that Assad was responsible for chemical attacks on his own people. (I'm still waiting to see if it was a Syrian upset about a YouTube video.)
It would be different if instead of killing a few hundred civilians, Assad had killed 5,000 civilians with poison gas in a single day, as well as tens of thousands more with chemical weapons in the past few decades.
It would be different if Assad were known to torture his own people, administer summary executions, rapes, burnings and electric shocks, often in front of the victim's wife or children.
It would be different if Assad had acted aggressively toward the United States itself, perhaps attempting to assassinate a former U.S. president or giving shelter to terrorists who had struck within the U.S. -- someone like Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood terrorist.
With the vast majority of Americans opposing a strike against Syria, President Obama has requested that Congress vote on his powers as commander in chief under the Constitution. The president doesn't need congressional approval to shoot a few missiles into Syria, nor -- amazingly -- has he said he'll abide by such a vote, anyway.
Why is Congress even having a vote? This is nothing but a fig leaf to cover Obama's own idiotic "red line" ultimatum to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria on chemical weapons. The Nobel Peace Prize winner needs to get Congress on the record so that whatever happens, the media can blame Republicans.
No Republican who thinks seriously about America's national security interests -- by which I mean to exclude John McCain and Lindsey Graham -- can support Obama's "plan" to shoot blindly into this hornet's nest.
It would be completely different if we knew with absolute certainty that Assad was responsible for chemical attacks on his own people. (I'm still waiting to see if it was a Syrian upset about a YouTube video.)
It would be different if instead of killing a few hundred civilians, Assad had killed 5,000 civilians with poison gas in a single day, as well as tens of thousands more with chemical weapons in the past few decades.
It would be different if Assad were known to torture his own people, administer summary executions, rapes, burnings and electric shocks, often in front of the victim's wife or children.
It would be different if Assad had acted aggressively toward the United States itself, perhaps attempting to assassinate a former U.S. president or giving shelter to terrorists who had struck within the U.S. -- someone like Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood terrorist.
It would be different if Assad were stirring up trouble in the entire Middle East by, for example, paying bounties to the families of suicide bombers in other countries.
It would also be different if we could be sure that intervention in Syria would not lead to a multi-nation conflagration.
It would be different if we knew that any action against Syria would not put al-Qaida or the Muslim Brotherhood in power, but rather would result in a functioning, peaceful democracy.
And it would be different if an attack on Syria would so terrify other dictators in the region that they would instantly give up their WMDs -- say, Iran abandoning its nuclear program.
If all of that were true, this would be a military intervention worth supporting!
All of that was true about Iraq, but the Democrats hysterically opposed that war. They opposed it even after all this was known to be true -- indeed, especially after it was known to be true! The loudest opponent was Barack Obama.
President Saddam Hussein of Iraq had attempted to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush. He gave shelter to Abdul Rahman Yasin, a conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers in Israel.
Soon after Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi was so terrified of an attack on his own country, he voluntarily relinquished his WMDs -- which turned out to be far more extensive than previously imagined.
Al-Qaida not only did not take over Iraq, but got its butt handed to it in Iraq, where the U.S. and its allies killed thousands of al-Qaida fighters, including the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq became the first genuine Arab democracy, holding several elections and presiding over a trial of Saddam Hussein.
Does anyone imagine that any of this would result from an Obama-led operation in Syria? How did his interventions work out in Egypt and Libya?
As for chemical weapons -- the casus belli for the current drums of war -- in a matter of hours on March 16, 1988, Saddam Hussein slaughtered roughly 5,000 Kurdish civilians in Halabja with mustard, sarin and VX gas. The victims blistered, vomited or laughed hysterically before dropping dead. Thousands more would die later from the after-effects of these poisons.
Saddam launched nearly two dozen more chemical attacks on the Kurds, resulting in at least 50,000 deaths, perhaps three times that many. That's to say nothing of the tens of thousands of Iranians Saddam killed with poison gas. Indeed, in making the case against Assad recently, Secretary of State John Kerry said his use of chemical weapons put him in the same league as "Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein."
Not even close -- but may we ask why Kerry sneered at the war that removed such a monster as Hussein?
There were endless United Nations reports and resolutions both establishing that Saddam had used chemical weapons and calling on him to give them up. (For the eighth billionth time, we did find chemical weapons in Iraq, just no "stockpiles." Those had been moved before the war, according to Saddam's own general, Georges Sada -- to Syria.)
On far less evidence, our current president accuses Assad of using chemical weapons against a fraction of the civilians provably murdered with poison gas by Saddam Hussein. So why did Obama angrily denounce the military operation that removed Hussein? Why did he call that a "war of choice"?
Obama says Assad -- unlike that great statesman Saddam Hussein -- has posed "a challenge to the world." But the world disagrees. Even our usual ally, Britain, disagrees. So Obama demands the United States act alone to stop a dictator, who -- compared to Saddam -- is a piker.
At this point, Assad is at least 49,000 dead bodies short of the good cause the Iraq War was, even if chemical weapons had been the only reason to take out Saddam Hussein.
COPYRIGHT 2013 ANN COULTER
Sacrificing Military Women on the Altar of ‘Diversity’
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On September 6, 2013 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | No Comments
On June 5, 2013, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) approved legislation to address sexual harassment in the military. Yet what HASC failed to address is the far more important and potentially devastating issue of the Obama administration’s determination to put women in direct ground combat. When the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) asked senior Republican staffers why the organization’s analysis, “Sound Policy for Women in Military,” was ignored, the center was told leaders feared being labeled “anti-woman.” In short, little political will exists to oppose Obama’s new policies, which will endanger women and military integrity — all for the sake of “diversity.”
Last January, outgoing Secretary of State Leon Panetta lifted the 1994 Combat Exclusion Rule that had prohibited women from serving in frontline combat units. This paved the way for women to join elite units such as the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. It also does not merely lift restrictions on women’s integration in direct ground combat, but allows women to be assigned — or forced — into such situations. A compliance deadline was set for June 2016.
The need for increasing “inclusiveness” is belied by the reality that 88 percent of Navy jobs are open for women, as are 99 percent of jobs in the Air Force. And even though the goal is to open every job up to women, no matter how risky, the services were given the option of requesting an exception necessitating approval by the Secretary of Defense.
In the course of developing a timeline for total integration, the real and potentially devastating agenda behind this push was revealed. The services are developing new job-specific standards for combat units.
Those standards will be “gender neutral.”
Robert Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and West Point graduate, cut through the political facade erected by those two words in his book, “Deadly Consequences: How Cowards Are Pushing Women into Combat.” In an interview with Time, Maginnis insisted that “Pentagon brass are kowtowing to their political masters and radical feminists to remove exemptions for women in ground combat in defiance of overwhelming scientific evidence and combat experience.” He completely dismissed the Obama administration’s contention that they won’t lower standards to accommodate women in combat roles. As evidence, he cites the “diversity metrics” outlined in the 2011 Report of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission.
Maginnis is spot on. The report is a paean to diversity, asserting that “respect for diversity should be made an explicit core value of DoD [Department of Defenses] and the Services.” Diversity necessitates “a fundamental shift in institutional.” Toward that end, “diversity leadership must be assessed throughout careers and made, in both DoD and the Senate, a criterion for nomination and confirmation to the 3- and 4-star ranks.” Furthermore, implementation requires “a deliberate strategy that ties the new diversity vision to desired outcomes via policies and metrics.”
According to Maginnis, those desired outcomes must lead to a lowering of standards, due to the reality that there has to be a minimum number of women in combat units in order for the policy to be deemed a success. He notes this can only be accomplished by “gender norming,” a euphemism for judging women by less demanding standards than their male counterparts.
The necessity for imposing diversity metrics/gender norming was revealed at a September 2011 briefing before the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Services. A Marine colonel revealed the sobering statistics the diversity mavens are determined to ignore, noting that “on average, women have 47% lower lifting strength, 40% lower muscle strength, 20% lower aerobic capacity (important for endurance), and 26% slower road march speed.” He further noted that “both female attrition/injury rates during entry level training and discharge (break) rates were twice those of men, and non-deployability rates were three times higher.”
The CMR further reveals that 30 years of studies conducted by Great Britain and America, “have repeatedly confirmed physiological differences that would put women at a severe disadvantage in the combat arms,” and that there is no study they can find indicating training can overcome such differences. Thus, the study concludes that attempting to train women like men will either lead to a lowering of standards, or high attrition rate among female trainees.
Yet the most ominous part of the study noted that if women do make it into combat units, “it can be expected that commanders will shift tasks from women to men to avoid attrition from non-battle injury. It is a matter of speculation whether such task shifting is tolerable in actual combat. Given the non-battle injury rate of Army women in Operation Iraqi Freedom, increasing the presence of women below the brigade level may result in even greater losses.”
Such data, along with potential losses, are apparently irrelevant to those seeking to appease the radical left’s political agenda. What’s worse, reports indicate that Pentagon officials are well aware of the lowering of standards that will take place. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to reporters last January: “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, ‘Why is it that high?’ ‘Does it really have to be that high?’ With the direct combat exclusion provision in place, we never had to have that conversation.”
Remarkably, the push for women in combat largely ignores how the overwhelming majority of women currently in the service feel about the idea. A survey done last month by the Military Times revealed that only 13 percent of women desire a combat job, 9 percent aren’t sure, and a whopping 77 percent do not want a combat job at all. Furthermore, one of the military’s main rationales for the program, that career advancement necessitates combat experience, is untrue. As the CMR notes, “data going back decades indicates that women have been promoted at rates equal to or faster than men.” CMR further notes that any data undermining the idea that women should be given career opportunities in the infantry “is simply being withheld from public view.” Moreover, the process to implement the administration’s plans to put women into direct combat is being deliberately stretched out to give Congress the false impression that the issue is being addressed objectively — when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maginnis envisions the ultimate downside of women in combat, based on the reality that “a return to the draft is far more likely than most people realize.” This is due to the “unsustainably high costs of an all-volunteer military” in a nation weighed down by $17 trillion of debt. “Lifting all combat exclusions for women virtually guarantees that the Supreme Court will declare male-only conscription unconstitutional,” he explains, further noting that the direct consequence of such a ruling will be women “drafted and forced into ground combat roles” (italics mine).
CMR president Elaine Donnelly cut to the essence of the issue. “Are we willing to stand by silently while the Obama Administration ruins our military?” she asks. “If we do, future generations will wonder where we were when the culture of the finest military in the world was systematically burdened with social experiments that the administration plans to extend into the combat arms.”
Those social experiments may be part of a far bigger agenda than the effort to put women in combat. If there is one institution in America that has remained largely resistant to the ever-increasing imposition of a progressive agenda, it is the military. In fact, it may be the last bastion of well-organized resistance to progressive hegemony. Yet with each new “experiment,” the warrior culture that ought to dominate the nation’s military is being systematically degraded to accommodate that agenda.
With regard to women in combat, it is an agenda destined to exact a price far greater than the nearly 150 military women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan during the course of those wars. Yet for the Obama administration, higher numbers of dead and wounded women is a reasonable tradeoff. With all due respect to Gen. Dempsey, perhaps a conversation about that reality is far more important.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Last January, outgoing Secretary of State Leon Panetta lifted the 1994 Combat Exclusion Rule that had prohibited women from serving in frontline combat units. This paved the way for women to join elite units such as the Army Rangers and Navy SEALs. It also does not merely lift restrictions on women’s integration in direct ground combat, but allows women to be assigned — or forced — into such situations. A compliance deadline was set for June 2016.
The need for increasing “inclusiveness” is belied by the reality that 88 percent of Navy jobs are open for women, as are 99 percent of jobs in the Air Force. And even though the goal is to open every job up to women, no matter how risky, the services were given the option of requesting an exception necessitating approval by the Secretary of Defense.
In the course of developing a timeline for total integration, the real and potentially devastating agenda behind this push was revealed. The services are developing new job-specific standards for combat units.
Those standards will be “gender neutral.”
Robert Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and West Point graduate, cut through the political facade erected by those two words in his book, “Deadly Consequences: How Cowards Are Pushing Women into Combat.” In an interview with Time, Maginnis insisted that “Pentagon brass are kowtowing to their political masters and radical feminists to remove exemptions for women in ground combat in defiance of overwhelming scientific evidence and combat experience.” He completely dismissed the Obama administration’s contention that they won’t lower standards to accommodate women in combat roles. As evidence, he cites the “diversity metrics” outlined in the 2011 Report of the Military Leadership Diversity Commission.
Maginnis is spot on. The report is a paean to diversity, asserting that “respect for diversity should be made an explicit core value of DoD [Department of Defenses] and the Services.” Diversity necessitates “a fundamental shift in institutional.” Toward that end, “diversity leadership must be assessed throughout careers and made, in both DoD and the Senate, a criterion for nomination and confirmation to the 3- and 4-star ranks.” Furthermore, implementation requires “a deliberate strategy that ties the new diversity vision to desired outcomes via policies and metrics.”
According to Maginnis, those desired outcomes must lead to a lowering of standards, due to the reality that there has to be a minimum number of women in combat units in order for the policy to be deemed a success. He notes this can only be accomplished by “gender norming,” a euphemism for judging women by less demanding standards than their male counterparts.
The necessity for imposing diversity metrics/gender norming was revealed at a September 2011 briefing before the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Armed Services. A Marine colonel revealed the sobering statistics the diversity mavens are determined to ignore, noting that “on average, women have 47% lower lifting strength, 40% lower muscle strength, 20% lower aerobic capacity (important for endurance), and 26% slower road march speed.” He further noted that “both female attrition/injury rates during entry level training and discharge (break) rates were twice those of men, and non-deployability rates were three times higher.”
The CMR further reveals that 30 years of studies conducted by Great Britain and America, “have repeatedly confirmed physiological differences that would put women at a severe disadvantage in the combat arms,” and that there is no study they can find indicating training can overcome such differences. Thus, the study concludes that attempting to train women like men will either lead to a lowering of standards, or high attrition rate among female trainees.
Yet the most ominous part of the study noted that if women do make it into combat units, “it can be expected that commanders will shift tasks from women to men to avoid attrition from non-battle injury. It is a matter of speculation whether such task shifting is tolerable in actual combat. Given the non-battle injury rate of Army women in Operation Iraqi Freedom, increasing the presence of women below the brigade level may result in even greater losses.”
Such data, along with potential losses, are apparently irrelevant to those seeking to appease the radical left’s political agenda. What’s worse, reports indicate that Pentagon officials are well aware of the lowering of standards that will take place. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said to reporters last January: “If we do decide that a particular standard is so high that a woman couldn’t make it, the burden is now on the service to come back and explain to the secretary, ‘Why is it that high?’ ‘Does it really have to be that high?’ With the direct combat exclusion provision in place, we never had to have that conversation.”
Remarkably, the push for women in combat largely ignores how the overwhelming majority of women currently in the service feel about the idea. A survey done last month by the Military Times revealed that only 13 percent of women desire a combat job, 9 percent aren’t sure, and a whopping 77 percent do not want a combat job at all. Furthermore, one of the military’s main rationales for the program, that career advancement necessitates combat experience, is untrue. As the CMR notes, “data going back decades indicates that women have been promoted at rates equal to or faster than men.” CMR further notes that any data undermining the idea that women should be given career opportunities in the infantry “is simply being withheld from public view.” Moreover, the process to implement the administration’s plans to put women into direct combat is being deliberately stretched out to give Congress the false impression that the issue is being addressed objectively — when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maginnis envisions the ultimate downside of women in combat, based on the reality that “a return to the draft is far more likely than most people realize.” This is due to the “unsustainably high costs of an all-volunteer military” in a nation weighed down by $17 trillion of debt. “Lifting all combat exclusions for women virtually guarantees that the Supreme Court will declare male-only conscription unconstitutional,” he explains, further noting that the direct consequence of such a ruling will be women “drafted and forced into ground combat roles” (italics mine).
CMR president Elaine Donnelly cut to the essence of the issue. “Are we willing to stand by silently while the Obama Administration ruins our military?” she asks. “If we do, future generations will wonder where we were when the culture of the finest military in the world was systematically burdened with social experiments that the administration plans to extend into the combat arms.”
Those social experiments may be part of a far bigger agenda than the effort to put women in combat. If there is one institution in America that has remained largely resistant to the ever-increasing imposition of a progressive agenda, it is the military. In fact, it may be the last bastion of well-organized resistance to progressive hegemony. Yet with each new “experiment,” the warrior culture that ought to dominate the nation’s military is being systematically degraded to accommodate that agenda.
With regard to women in combat, it is an agenda destined to exact a price far greater than the nearly 150 military women who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan during the course of those wars. Yet for the Obama administration, higher numbers of dead and wounded women is a reasonable tradeoff. With all due respect to Gen. Dempsey, perhaps a conversation about that reality is far more important.
Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.
Article printed from FrontPage Magazine: http://frontpagemag.com
URL to article: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/sacrificing-military-women-on-the-altar-of-diversity/
Clear-Cut Stupidity on Syria
Everyone’s on the hook for Obama’s “red line” comments. Except Obama.
"The genius of you Americans,” the Arab-nationalist and one-time president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, once explained, “is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.”
I’ve long taken patriotic pride in such statements of befuddlement from foreigners. America is a gloriously complicated thing. We often confuse our national creeds for universal principles. We are a Jacksonian people (that’s Andrew Jackson, in case you were wondering) in love with Jeffersonian ideals and legalistically committed to Madisonian mechanisms. Like a guard dog that would rather not leave the porch, we are quick to anger but not necessarily quick to fight, and we are just as eager to forgive.
So from the vantage point of foreign brutes, bullies, and buffoons, it’s understandable that America’s methods could be confused for stupidity. This is why I love the old expression, “America can choke on a gnat, but swallow a tiger whole.”
So I am trying very hard to hold onto this perspective as I watch the president of the United States behave in a way you don’t have to be a pan-Arab autocrat to think is incredibly stupid.
Where to begin? Perhaps with Obama’s initial refusal to support the moderate rebels seeking to overthrow Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a puppet of Iran and bagman for Hezbollah. Or we might start with Obama’s refusal to support the Green Movement in Iran, which sought to overthrow the Iranian regime, which would have been a triumph for both our principles and our national interests.
These were odd choices, particularly given his decision to help depose Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, an indisputably evil man, but also a dictator who posed no threat, who abided by our demands to relinquish WMDs, and whose domestic death toll was a tiny fraction of Assad’s.
“We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people there will be no mercy . . . where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government” was Obama’s justification for an attack on Libya — without congressional approval. But when Assad killed tenfold as many men, women, and children, Obama refused to act for nearly two years. And when he finally decided it was imperative to attack Assad — after the dictator crossed a chemical-weapons “red line” drawn by Obama himself — he suddenly discovered the need for congressional authorization.
Sort of.
Obama doesn’t believe he needs authorization from Congress to strike Syria, he just wants it. He’s like a kid desperate for a prom date, but too vain to admit it. In Libya, Obama had the U.N. and NATO on each arm, so he didn’t bother with asking the dog on Capitol Hill for a date. But now, faced with the prospect of going it alone, he’s in effect telling Congress, “Hey, it’s not like I need your company, but you’d be crazy not to go to war with me.”
Whoops. As even Nancy Pelosi’s own grandkid now knows, we mustn’t call it a war. “The president is not asking you to go to war,” Secretary of State John Kerry told Congress. He’s merely asking them to authorize a sustained cruise-missile attack on military installations to “degrade” the regime’s “capabilities.”
But, according to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman General Martin Dempsey, no one has asked the military to do anything that might change the “momentum” of the Syrian civil war. This is like saying you’re going to attack a runaway car barreling toward a crowd of kids, but do nothing to actually, you know, slow it down. What good does it do to trash the radio and rip out the cup holders on an out-of-control car?
Meanwhile, according to numerous accounts, Assad is moving military assets into civilian areas and civilians into military areas, even as the Obama administration insists it makes no difference militarily to wait for Congress to debate. That’s not just stupid; it’s an outright lie that will be fact-checked with blood.
I understand the attraction the buddy system has for a man who, as a state legislator, perfected the art of voting “present” on hard questions. But it’s hard to see this as anything other than rank political cowardice.
The buck stopped with Truman. For Obama, the buck is kryptonite.
In Stockholm on Wednesday, the president said that the credibility of the world, America, Congress, and the international community is on the line. Everybody is on the hook for his red line, except for the one person who actually drew it.
I’d love to see the genius in that argument, but it looks like clear-cut stupidity to me.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of The Tyranny of Clichés, now on sale in paperback. You can write to him by e-mail at goldbergcolumn@gmail.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
Thursday, September 05, 2013
Unless he’s serious, vote no
By
September 5, 2013
Sen. Bob Corker: “What is it you’re seeking?”
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”
— Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, Sept. 3
We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander in chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.
Now, a shot across the bow is a warning. Its purpose is to say: Cease and desist, or the next shot will sink you. But Obama has already told the world — and Bashar al-Assad in particular — that there will be no next shot. He has insisted time and again that the operation will be finite and highly limited. Take the shot, kill some fish, go home.
What then is the purpose? Dempsey hasn’t a clue, but Secretary of State John Kerry says it will uphold and proclaim a norm and thus deter future use of chemical weapons. With a few Tomahawk missiles? Hitting sites that, thanks to the administration having leaked the target list, have already been scrubbed of important military assets?
This is risible. If anything, a pinprick from which Assad emerges unscathed would simply enhance his stature and vindicate his conduct.
Deterrence depends entirely on perception, and the perception in the Middle East is universal: Obama wants no part of Syria.
Assad has to go, says Obama, and then lifts not a finger for two years. Obama lays down a “red line,” and then ignores it. Shamed finally by a massive poison gas attack, he sends Kerry to make an impassioned case for righteous and urgent retaliation — and the very next day, Obama undermines everything by declaring an indefinite timeout to seek congressional approval.
This stunning zigzag, following months of hesitation, ambivalence, contradiction and studied delay, left our regional allies shocked and our enemies gleeful. I had strongly advocated going to Congress. But it was inconceivable that, instead of recalling Congress to emergency session, Obama would simply place everything in suspension while Congress finished its Labor Day barbecues and he flew off to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. So much for the fierce urgency of enforcing an international taboo and speaking for the dead children of Damascus.
Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies.
This year alone, Israel has four times conducted airstrikes in Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect. They care about just one audience — the party to be deterred, namely Assad and his allies.
Assad knows who did it. He didn’t have to see the Israeli prime minister preening about it on world television.
And yet here is Obama, having yet done nothing but hesitate, threaten, retract and wander about the stage, claiming Wednesday in Sweden to be the conscience of the world, upholding not his own red line but the world’s. And, incidentally, Congress’s — a transparent attempt at offloading responsibility.
What should Congress do?
To his dovish base, Obama insists on how limited and militarily marginal the strike will be. To undecided hawks such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who are prepared to support a policy that would really alter the course of the civil war, he vaguely promises the opposite — to degrade Assad’s military while upgrading that of the resistance.
Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.
This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategic plan, Congress should vote no.
John McCain changed the administration’s authorization resolution to include, mirabile dictu, a U.S. strategy in Syria: to alter the military equation (against Assad). Unfortunately, Obama is not known for being bound by what Congress passes (see, for example: health care, employer mandate).
When Obama tells the nation what he told McCain and Lindsey Graham in private — that he plans to degrade Assad’s forces, upgrade the resistance and alter the balance of forces — Congress might well consider authorizing the use of force. But until then, it’s no.
Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: “I can’t answer that, what we’re seeking.”
— Senate hearing on the use of force in Syria, Sept. 3
We have a problem. The president proposes attacking Syria, and his top military officer cannot tell you the objective. Does the commander in chief know his own objective? Why, yes. “A shot across the bow,” explained Barack Obama.
Now, a shot across the bow is a warning. Its purpose is to say: Cease and desist, or the next shot will sink you. But Obama has already told the world — and Bashar al-Assad in particular — that there will be no next shot. He has insisted time and again that the operation will be finite and highly limited. Take the shot, kill some fish, go home.
What then is the purpose? Dempsey hasn’t a clue, but Secretary of State John Kerry says it will uphold and proclaim a norm and thus deter future use of chemical weapons. With a few Tomahawk missiles? Hitting sites that, thanks to the administration having leaked the target list, have already been scrubbed of important military assets?
This is risible. If anything, a pinprick from which Assad emerges unscathed would simply enhance his stature and vindicate his conduct.
Deterrence depends entirely on perception, and the perception in the Middle East is universal: Obama wants no part of Syria.
Assad has to go, says Obama, and then lifts not a finger for two years. Obama lays down a “red line,” and then ignores it. Shamed finally by a massive poison gas attack, he sends Kerry to make an impassioned case for righteous and urgent retaliation — and the very next day, Obama undermines everything by declaring an indefinite timeout to seek congressional approval.
This stunning zigzag, following months of hesitation, ambivalence, contradiction and studied delay, left our regional allies shocked and our enemies gleeful. I had strongly advocated going to Congress. But it was inconceivable that, instead of recalling Congress to emergency session, Obama would simply place everything in suspension while Congress finished its Labor Day barbecues and he flew off to Stockholm and St. Petersburg. So much for the fierce urgency of enforcing an international taboo and speaking for the dead children of Damascus.
Here’s how deterrence works in the Middle East. Syria, long committed to the destruction of Israel, has not engaged Israel militarily in 30 years. Why? Because it recognizes Israel as a serious adversary with serious policies.
This year alone, Israel has four times conducted airstrikes in Syria. No Syrian response. How did Israel get away with it? Israel had announced that it would not tolerate Assad acquiring or transferring to Hezbollah advanced weaponry. No grandiloquent speeches by the Israeli foreign minister. No leaked target lists. Indeed, the Israelis didn’t acknowledge the strikes even after they had carried them out. Unlike the American president, they have no interest in basking in perceived toughness. They care only about effect. They care about just one audience — the party to be deterred, namely Assad and his allies.
Assad knows who did it. He didn’t have to see the Israeli prime minister preening about it on world television.
And yet here is Obama, having yet done nothing but hesitate, threaten, retract and wander about the stage, claiming Wednesday in Sweden to be the conscience of the world, upholding not his own red line but the world’s. And, incidentally, Congress’s — a transparent attempt at offloading responsibility.
What should Congress do?
To his dovish base, Obama insists on how limited and militarily marginal the strike will be. To undecided hawks such as Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who are prepared to support a policy that would really alter the course of the civil war, he vaguely promises the opposite — to degrade Assad’s military while upgrading that of the resistance.
Problem is, Obama promised U.S. weaponry three months ago and not a rifle has arrived. This time around, what seems in the making is a mere pinprick, designed to be, one U.S. official told the Los Angeles Times, “just muscular enough not to get mocked.”
That’s why Dempsey is so glum. That’s why U.S. allies are so stunned. There’s no strategy, no purpose here other than helping Obama escape self-inflicted humiliation.
This is deeply unserious. Unless Obama can show the country that his don’t-mock-me airstrike is, in fact, part of a serious strategic plan, Congress should vote no.
John McCain changed the administration’s authorization resolution to include, mirabile dictu, a U.S. strategy in Syria: to alter the military equation (against Assad). Unfortunately, Obama is not known for being bound by what Congress passes (see, for example: health care, employer mandate).
When Obama tells the nation what he told McCain and Lindsey Graham in private — that he plans to degrade Assad’s forces, upgrade the resistance and alter the balance of forces — Congress might well consider authorizing the use of force. But until then, it’s no.
Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook.
Wednesday, September 04, 2013
Obama seeks an accomplice for Syria action
By
September 3, 2013
Photo: Getty Images
Because Syria’s convulsion has become as serious as Barack Obama has been careless in speaking about it, he is suddenly and uncharacteristically insisting that Congress participate in governance. Regarding institutional derangements, he is the infection against which he pretends to be an immunization.
In the Illinois legislature, he voted “present” 129 times to avoid difficulties; now he stoops from his executive grandeur to tutor Congress on accountability. In Washington, where he condescends as a swan slumming among starlings, he insists that, given the urgency of everything he desires, he “can’t wait” for Congress to vote on his programs or to confirm persons he nominates to implement them. The virtues of his policies and personnel are supposedly patent and sufficient to justify imposing both by executive decrees.
In foreign policy, too, he luxuriates in acting, as most modern presidents have improvidently done, without the tiresome persuasion required to earn congressional ratifications. Without even a precipitating event such as Syria’s poison gas attack, and without any plausible argument that an emergency precluded deliberation, he wagedprotracted war against Libya with bombers and cruise missiles but without Congress.
Now, concerning Syria, he lectures Congress, seeking an accomplice while talking about accountability. Perhaps he deserves Congress’s complicity — if he can convince it that he can achieve a success he can define. If success is a “shot across the bow” of Syria’s regime, he cannot fail: By avoiding the bow, such a shot merely warns of subsequent actions.
Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has advertised his skepticism about intervening in Syria. His very public intrusion into a policy debate may exceed what is proper for the uniformed military, but he seems to have played Obama as dexterously as Duke Ellington played a piano. Dempsey assured Obama that the military mission could be accomplished a month from now. (Because the bow will still be there to be shot across?) This enabled Obama to say that using the military to affirm an international norm (about poison gas), although urgent enough to involve Congress, is not so urgent thatCongress’s recess required abbreviation.
Britain’s Parliament inadvertently revived the constitutional standing of Congress when British Prime Minister David Cameron’s incompetent management of the parliament’s vote resulted in the body refusing to authorize an attack. His fumble was a function of Obama’s pressuring him for haste. If Parliament had authorized an attack — seven switched votes would have sufficed — Obama probably would already have attacked, without any thought about Congress’s prerogatives. The Financial Times’s Gideon Rachman reports that, in an Aug. 24 telephone conversation with Cameron, Obama “made it clear that he wanted a swift military response — before global outrage dissipated and Bashar al-Assad’s regime had the chance to prepare its defenses.”
Many Republicans are reluctant to begin yet another military intervention in a distant and savage civil war. Other Republicans, whose appetite for such interventions has not been satiated by recent feasts of failure, will brand reluctance as “isolationism.”
Reluctant Republicans can invoke Dwight Eisenhower. He, who in 1961 enriched America’s lexicon with the phrase “military-industrial complex,” sought the presidency in 1952 to prevent its capture by what he considered an isolationist, or at least insufficiently internationalist, Republican faction represented by “Mr. Republican,” Ohio Sen. Robert Taft. Yet after one look as president-elect at the front line in Korea, Eisenhower ended that war. To advisers urging intervention on France’s behalf in Vietnam, he said (this from his memoirs): “Employment of airstrikes alone to support French troops in the jungle would create a double jeopardy: it would comprise an act of war and would also entail the risk of having intervened and lost.” He was not an interventionist regarding the 1956 Hungarian revolution, and he not only refused to support the 1956 British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, he ruthlessly forced its termination. About his brief and tranquil intervention in Lebanon, he wrote: “I had been careful to use [about U.S. forces] the term ‘stationed in’ Lebanon.”
Obama’s sanctimony about his moral superiority to a Congress he considers insignificant has matched his hypocrisy regarding his diametrically opposed senatorial and presidential understandings of the proper modalities regarding uses of military force. Now he asks from the Congress he disdains an authorization he considers superfluous. By asking, however reluctantly, he begins the urgent task of lancing the boil of executive presumption. Surely he understands the perils of being denied an authorization he has sought, and then treating the denial as irrelevant.
Read more from George F. Will’s archive or follow him on Facebook.
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