re: "The Muslim Brotherhood's American Defenders"

Caroline Glick re-posted her Jerusalem Post article at CarolineGlick.Com ("the most prominent woman in Israel"), regarding America's current mis-comprehension of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Money quote(s):

"On Wednesday, John Brennan, US President Barack Obama's assistant for homeland security and counterterrorism, made a quick trip to Israel to discuss Hezbollah's massacre of Israeli tourists in Burgas, Bulgaria last week."

&

"Unlike previous US counterterror officials, Brennan does not share Israel's understanding of Middle Eastern terrorism.

Brennan's outlook on this subject was revealed in a speech he gave two years ago in Washington. In that talk, Brennan spoke dreamily about Hezbollah. As he put it, "Hezbollah is a very interesting organization."

He claimed it had evolved from a "purely terrorist organization" to a militia and then into an organization with members in Lebanon's parliament and serving in Lebanon's cabinet."

This is what comes of having a "war on terrorism" and "violent extremism" rather than responding directly to the organizations and movements which have employed those tactics against us.

Namely the MB and her sister- and daughter-organizations like Hezbollah.

"Brennan's amazing characterization of Hezbollah's hostile takeover of the Lebanese government as proof that the terrorist group was moderating was of a piece with the Obama administration's view of Islamic jihadists generally.

If there are "moderate elements," in Hezbollah, from the perspective of the Obama administration, Hezbollah's Sunni jihadist counterpart - the Muslim Brotherhood - is downright friendly."

&

"On February 10, 2011, Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made this position clear in testimony before the House Select Committee on Intelligence. Clapper's testimony was given the day before then Egyptian president and longtime US ally Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign from office. Mubarak's coerced resignation owed largely to the Obama administration's decision to end US support for his regime and openly demand his immediate abdication of power. As Israel warned, Mubarak's ouster paved the way for the Muslim Brotherhood's ascendance to power in Egypt.

In his testimony Clapper said, "The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaida as a perversion of Islam. They have pursued social ends, betterment of the political order in Egypt, etc."

Watching Clapper's testimony in Israel, the sense across the political spectrum, shared by experts and casual observers alike was that the US had taken leave of its senses."

DNI Clapper is not a working-level intelligence analyst. He has to function in the political realm and that can be expected to color his public remarks.

One does have to wonder what the non-public recommendations and assessments look like.

(CAA has no direct experience regarding the DNI but there are people CAA respects who have, and they respect him.)

"The slogan of the Muslim Brotherhood is "Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the path of Allah is our highest hope."

How could such a high-level US official claim that such an organization is "largely secular"?

Every day Muslim Brotherhood leaders call for the violent annihilation of Israel. And those calls are often combined with calls for jihad against the US. For instance, in a sermon from October 2010, Muslim Brotherhood head Mohammed Badie called for jihad against the US."

One can always blame bad policy decisions on bad advice, but you then have to shoulder the blame for choosing bad advisors.

"The obliviousness of Brennan and Clapper to the essential nature of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood are symptoms of the overarching ignorance informing the Obama administration's approach to Middle Eastern realities."

&

"(I)n October 2011, according to the Beirut-based Arabic news portal al Nashra, Dalia Mogahed, Obama's adviser on Muslim affairs, blocked a delegation of Middle Eastern Christians led by Lebanon's Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rai from meeting with Obama and members of his national security team at the White House. According to al Nashra, Mogahed canceled the meeting at the request of the Muslim Brotherhood in her native Egypt.

The White House canceled the meeting days after Rai visited with then French president Nicolas Sarkozy in Paris. During that meeting Rai angered the French Foreign Ministry when he warned that it would be a disaster for Syria's Christian minority, and for Christians throughout the region, if the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad is overthrown. Rai based this claim on his assessment that Assad would be replaced by a Muslim Brotherhood- dominated Islamist regime.

And nine months later it is obvious that he was right. With Syria's civil war still raging throughout the country, the world media is rife with reports about Syria's Christians fleeing their towns and villages en masse as Islamists from the Syrian opposition target them with death, extortion and kidnapping."

See my comment above about choosing bad advisors.

"Why is the Obama administration shunning potential allies and empowering enemies? Why has the administration gotten it wrong everywhere?

In an attempt to get to the bottom of this, and perhaps to cause the administration to rethink its policies, a group of US lawmakers, members of the House Intelligence and Judiciary Committees led by Rep. Michele Bachmann sent letters to the inspectors-general of the State, Homeland Security, Defense, and Justice departments as well as to the inspector-general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. In those letters, Bachmann and her colleagues asked the Inspectors General to investigate possible penetration of the US government by Muslim Brotherhood operatives."

Silly idea, right? Because of course none of America's enemies has ever tried to infiltrate our government for purposes of influence and espionage before.

(Well, not if you don't consider World War I, World War II, the Cold War..... )

"(T)he lawmakers made clear that when they spoke of governmental penetration, they were referring to the central role that Muslim groups, identified by the US government in Federal Court as Muslim Brotherhood front organizations, play in shaping the Obama administration's perception of and policies towards the Muslim Brotherhood and its allied movements in the US and throughout the world.

That these front groups, including the unindicted terror funding co-conspirators, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), play a key role in shaping the Obama administration's agenda is beyond dispute."

Do I really have to link to the Holy Land Foundation trial documents again?

I guess so.

"There is an ample body of evidence that suggests that the administration's decision to side with the hostile Muslim Brotherhood against its allies owes to a significant degree to the influence these Muslim Brotherhood front groups and their operatives wield in the Obama administration.

To take just one example, last October the Obama administration agreed to purge training materials used by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies and eliminate all materials that contained references to Islam that US Muslim groups associated with the Muslim Brotherhood had claimed were offensive. The administration has also fired counterterrorism trainers and lecturers employed by US security agencies and defense academies that taught their pupils about the doctrines of jihadist Islam. The administration also appointed representatives of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned US Muslim groups to oversee the approval of training materials about Islam for US federal agencies."

She concluded:

"It is clear that the insidious notion that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate and friendly force has taken hold in US policy circles. And it is apparent that US policymaking in the Middle East is increasingly rooted in this false and dangerous assessment.

In spearheading an initiative to investigate and change this state of affairs, Bachmann and her colleagues should be congratulated, not condemned. And their courageous efforts to ask the relevant questions about the nature of Muslim Brotherhood influence over US policymakers should be joined, not spurned by their colleagues in Washington, by the media and by all concerned citizens in America and throughout the free world."

7/27

re: "Silent Scream: The Sudan Ethnically Cleanses Its Christians"

Rob Miller at American Thinker (" a daily internet publication devoted to the thoughtful exploration of issues of importance to Americans ") described the traditional next phase after partition: ethnic cleansing.

Money quote(s):

"The government of the predominantly Muslim nation of Sudan has stripped its 500,000 to 700,000 Christians of citizenship and has put them on notice that they have one week to leave the country. Even sub-Jim Crow dhimmi status is to be denied them."

This sort of thing happens whenever a multi-ethnic, multi-confession country partitions into two (or more) states.

That doesn't make it right, but it does make it pretty predictable.

"(T)he government of Sudan has declared that all whose "parents, grandparents or great grandparents [were] born in the South Sudan or [who] belong to any southern ethnic group" are no longer citizens of Sudan and must leave by April 8...or else."

&

"The Sudan has always been a borderland between Arab and black African, between slavemaster and slave. And increasingly, between Muslim and Christian. During the decades-long jihad by the Sudan between the early 1980s and today against the black Africans to the east in Darfur and in the south, conservative estimates put the death toll at over 2 million. Al-Bashir has already been indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, something the Arab League has thumbed their noses at, with al-Bashir able to freely attend meetings and travel all over the region without fear of arrest. The charges he was indicted for -- the mass rapes, the slavetaking, the wanton murders -- make what's going on now in Syria look like a particularly sedate bridge party.

In July 2011, the jihad officially ended when the largely Christian South Sudan achieved independence, although sporadic attacks by al-Bashir's military and aircraft still continue in places like the Nuba Mountains and along the South Sudan borders.

Due to the discord caused by the breakaway, al-Bashir is under pressure to turn the Sudan into a extremist fundamentalist, Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Islamist state." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

One of the critical issues still outstanding between Sudan and South Sudan are that the border between the two states has never been officially demarcated.

"The Iranians already have an arms factory in the Sudan to supply Hamas and their allies in Somalia, Yemen, and Central Africa. If my sources are correct, they also maintain training camps staffed by Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Hezb'allah members, some of whom have been killed by Israeli air strikes on arms convoys headed north in the desert towards Sinai and Gaza.

What al-Turabi and his allies want from Bashir is a full-on Muslim Brotherhood-ruled sharia state, comparable to Iran, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, or Afghanistan under the Taliban.

After South Sudan seceded, the Islamists demanded that Bashir implement this, and they have pledged to drive him from power if he doesn't. They formed a party headed by al-Turabi known as the Islamic Constitution Front and drafted a sharia-based constitution that the imam of Khartoum's Grand Mosque endorsed, saying Bashir must "either rule by Islam or go." "

&

"The ethnic cleansing of over half a million Christians is only a first step.

What's notable about this is the hideous silence. There's little or nothing being reported in the media on this. For all the noise about the new Responsibility to Protect Doctrine that was evoked on Libya, the United Nations has nothing to say about what's happening in the Sudan, even though it violates the organization's own charter.

No one is talking about a no-fly zone to protect black Christians under air attack in South Sudan by the Bashir regime, even though our huge air base in Djibouti is within flying distance. The infamously misnamed U.N. Human Rights Commission is preoccupied with Israel to the point of derangement, and the Muslim countries running it will see to it that it stays that way."

&

"For all the demonization of Western Imperialism so popular these days, it was those hated imperialists who largely destroyed the slave trade in the 1870s and brought a measure of peace, civil order, and decency to the country for a brief time. It is our supposedly more modern and compassionate societies that have seen the horror that has gone on in Darfur and in the South Sudan and done nothing...except react with silence.

That silence comes from fear of offending Islam, no matter how egregious and hateful the actions of a significant number of its followers become and no matter how deeply those actions offend our civilized norms."

&

"It reminds me of nothing so much as the 1930s, when the appeasers in Britain and here in our own country reacted with the same indifference while Hitler armed his legions for conquest and ethnically cleansed Germany's Jews."

4/4

re: "What You Need to Know About the CIA Getting Rolled Up in Lebanon. That, and Larry Munson."

Andrew Exum at Abu Muquwama examined a major intelligence setback in Lebanon.

Money quote(s):

"As some of you may or may not already know, Hizballah, together with the Lebanese government, has rolled up what is believed to be the vast majority of the assets of the Central Intelligence Agency in Lebanon."

As Dr. Exum implies, Hizballah and the Lebanese government are sufficiently interpenetrated as to be considered unitary at this point. I suppose a Venn Diagram might show the Lebanese government as comprising two overlapping circles: the circle belonging to Syria, the circle belonging to Hizballah, and a mutual zone which serves two masters.

"I know about as much about clandestine operations and running agents as I do about playing linebacker in the NFL, but I do know a little about Lebanon, and I also know something about what my boss John Nagl likes to refer to as "learning organizations," a concept I believe to be relevant here. I first heard about this story from a journalist over lunch last week, and I'll relate to you what I told him and some of what he told me.

1. As many of you know, Hizballah and Lebanese intelligence have been quite good at rolling up Israeli intelligence assets since 2006. (Contrary to what I would have thought, Israel managed to keep a pretty good human intelligence network alive in Lebanon after its withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.) Our intelligence assets were vulnerable to the same counter-intelligence methods that did in the Israelis, but we apparently blew off the warnings."

Be sure to read the rebuttal comment as to what the CIA did or didn't manage to do.

"2. Given that negligence, if I am a member of the U.S. Congress, I am going to ask if it is really true that the station chief in Beirut was subsequently promoted within the ranks of the CIA. If told this is in fact true, I am going to ask who, if anyone, is being held accountable.

3. I am also, if I am a member of the U.S. Congress, going to be asking whether or not CIA tradecraft has eroded over the past decade as the agency has chased the bright shiny ball we'll call "drone-strikes-in-Pakistan". (A question that, quite frankly, needed to be asked afterthe 2009 bombing in Khost.) It's great to have an intelligence agency with a knife in its teeth, but the primary mission of an intelligence organization is to gather and analyze intelligence, not to thwack bad guys. If you fail in that primary mission, questions have to be asked as to why you are failing."

Sometimes you lose. Consider that in an environment like Lebanon, you're not just running an intelligence operation. You're simultaneously trying to run intelligence operations, counter-intelligence operations to protect your intelligence operations, and counter-counterintelligence operations (against your targets counterintelligence) as well.

And it only gets worse from there. Lebanon is a hostile, if not actually completely denied area for U.S. intelligence.

"In the same way that the U.S. Army has an institutional interest in convincing policy makers that every general officer is equal to another, the CIA has an interest in convincing outsiders that external evaluation will compromise valuable tactics, techniques and procedures and will endanger operational security. (This is not a good recipe for an organization that learns from its mistakes and solicits external criticism in an effort to be more effective.) All organizations resist criticism, but intelligence organizations resist criticism and then wrap themselves in the cloak of all-important operational security to avoid it."

Intelligence organizations, for reasons good and prudent, find it abhorant to "solicit external criticism."

(Frankly, "external criticism" is not much in short supply, particularly that of the uninformed variety.)

Now, CAA is perfectly aware of a tendancy towards over-classification on that part of those who would wish to shield themselves from the criticism which they are due, but that's as much a trait of political leadership as it is of the professional intelligence cadre.

"(T)hat's what it really comes down to: poor tradecraft. This is not a matter of some Lebanese Karla lurking out there, out-smarting us. This is our premier intelligence agency getting sloppy, resulting in the death or incarceration of some brave U.S. allies."

Might could be. Or they simply were better or luckier, on their home turf, than we were with our away game.

A commenter rebuttal included the following:

"1. Your statement that the CIA "apparently blew off the (counter-intelligence) warnings" is overly harsh. CI penetrations emanate from multiple vectors - whether from poor trade-craft or an asset that is posing as a double agent - and the problem is augmented when attempting to infiltrate a highly secretive and closed organization such as Hizballah. Rightfully, in a scenario such as this, the maximum amount of defensive CI measures should be implemented in order to thwart the efforts by the hostile intelligence services. Because of the "cloak of security," we will most likely not be privy to the efforts (if any) that were taken to mitigate the CI threat and protect the assets."

11/21

re: "Death By Cultural Misunderstanding"

MikeM at the former-Confederate Yankee ("Because liberalism is a persistent vegetative state.") put the recent D.C. restaurant assassination plot by Iran into larger context.

Money quote(s):

"What we now know is that the Iranian used-car salesman from Texas who was apparently the prime broker in the plot was actually trying to arrange not only the murder by explosives of the Saudi Ambassador in a Washington DC restaurant, but attacks on American and Israeli embassies possible in simultaneous strikes. Not only was this used-car dealer traveling between Texas, Mexico and Iran, but was prepared to deliver $1.5 million dollars to the DEA informant posing as a representative of a Mexican drug cartel. It is not known with certainty, but it seems we may have intercepted this plot for no reason other than that the Iranians blundered—by pure chance—into one of our assets rather than the Mexican killers he sought. If so, this is truly one of the most remarkable cases of serendipity on record." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Let's just get it out in the open that CAA is very much against the use of explosives in Washington DC restaurants.

"In its 30-year history of attacking the West, the Quds Force went out of its way never to be caught with a smoking gun in hand. It always used well-vetted proxies, invariably Muslim believers devoted to Khomeini’s revolution. And when the operation was particularly sensitive, they gave the job to Lebanon’s militant Shi’ite Hizballah, organization the Iranians themselves had founded and which has an unsurpassed record in political murder. Hizballah has cells all over the world, including in the United States. But the point of it all was that if caught — and they were, more than once — Iran still enjoyed plausible deniability, a commodity in this business worth its weight in gold. So, if this plot was genuine, why didn’t the Iranians use tried and tested Hizballah networks and keep Iranian nationals, much less unknown Mexican narcos, out of it?" " (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

A couple of possibilities, just to throw them out there, occur to me. The first, obviously (given how the writer leads you by the hand) is the possibility that this plot was meant to be blown. Which would take you to the next question: why?

Another possibility is that the plot was being arranged by some other, less professional, player in the sandbox of Iranian assassination operations.

"(T)he Revolutionary Guards have somehow gone rogue and are conducting, dangerous, provocative operations on their own, outside of the knowledge and control of the Iranian leadership. Another possibility is that the democratic Iranian opposition is trying to frame the Mullacracy in an attempt to bring the United States into a direct conflict that might unseat the hardliners, allowing democracy to flourish."

The "democratic Iranian opposition"? Hmm, who could that be?

Seriously, the Iranian opposition most qualified (as in experienced) in covert operations isn't all that democratic a bunch.

And the actual Iranian democrats, stipulating that they survived their almost revolution a couple years ago, might very well be sufficiently un-versed in this sort of thing, in other words they might-could be just about this amateurish. It's an interesting thought to consider.

"I am endlessly fascinated to discover that most Americans seem unable to truly understand that the peoples of other nations are so utterly different than Americans, so actually alien in the truest sense of the word."

What did the guy in Full Metal Jacket say? Ah yes:

"because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out"

"Americans tend to think of religion only within the American framework of separation of church and state and tolerance for the faiths of others. Americans may think adherents of some faiths to be a bit odd--holy Mormon underwear, people going to church on Saturday, eating only fish on Fridays—but they are generally accepting of that, and the fact that Americans are free to change religions and churches as often as they change their socks. Many Americans take their faith seriously, but the idea of killing in its name is—alien, as alien as the idea of being ruled by ministers, mutilating the genitals of their wives and daughters, killing their wives and daughters for violating family honor, killing friends, even family members who leave the faith, or killing anyone not of the faith for that reason alone."

This is something the pre-Founding Fathers brought with them from Europe, the psychic baggage of the Thirty Year's War, where European Christians did most of these things themselves, to one another, decade after decade. With the result that our Founding Fathers and Framers deliberately established a political framework and a civic secular culture inoculated against it.

"In a very real way, we are dealing with medieval thinking, a mindset that sees the world in black and white terms. There are the strong and the weak, the elect and infidels. There is, above all, the Dar al-Islam—the realm or land under Islamic control—and the Dar al-Harb—the realm of war or chaos, the land of the infidels where Islam is not in control. In the Dar al-Islam, Sharia—Islamic law—reigns supreme. It is a medieval code of conduct and justice administered by Imams, essentially Islamic ministers, who have absolute power over life and death. In Islam, there are no individual freedoms, not separation of church and state. The church is the state and individuals live—or die—at its whim."

Okay, while I get what Mr. McDaniels is saying, I have to lay down a few observations and reservations.

First, the myth of monolithic Islam. Not that there isn't considerable common ground between the various threads of Islam, even those that quite often occupy themselves with trying to kill one another, when it comes to opposing, attacking, invading, defeating, or otherwise troubling the infidel West.

Islam is even less monolithic than Communism was, and for many of the same reasons.

This is not to downplay or dispute that the things Mr. McDaniels describes here; they're true enough in plenty enough places.

But, for instance, the "Imams" mentioned are a feature of Shi'a Islam, not one of the more numerous Sunni muslims.

"Winston Churchill observed that individual Muslims may have "splendid qualities," and indeed, most Muslims wish only to live in peace with their neighbors. However, it must be clearly understood that these Muslim are not, in fact, following the dictates of their faith. It is those who war against the Dar al-Harb who are being true to the letter and intent of their religion. And if there are only ten million such Muslims in the world—and there are surely that many—who are determined to follow the clear dictates of their faith to the letter, it's not hard to see the depth of our problem." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

This cuts to the heart of the problem. Too much of their holy book reads like it could have come from Charles Manson, had he been born an arab. So it's part of their "operating system" and their "reality tunnel."

"In waging war, Americans generally abstain from striking the first blow, are incredibly cautious about harming non-combatants, even risking and losing American lives rather than accidently killing innocents. Americans even avoid unnecessarily destroying property. For Americans, there are specific laws regulating the conduct of soldiers. None of this is true for Muslims waging Jihad—holy war aimed at establishing a global Dar al-Islam. They kill indiscriminately, ignore the international laws of war, use innocents as human shields, and commit inhuman atrocities as common practice." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Sayin this is not precisely true takes understatement to the level of criminality.

There is a well-develeped and defined set of rules, laws if you will, governing the waging of war by and within Islam. It is not the same, has not the same basis, neither has it evolved with either the same considerations nor in the same directions as was we in our Western conceit have done with our "international laws of war." From a Western perspective, much of what it condones or even requires amounts to war crimes themselves.

"In the pursuit of Jihad, Islam encourages and allows Muslims to lie to infidels. However, it requires Muslims to give infidels a chance to convert to Islam. If they do not, they may be slaughtered at will. When Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens America and Israel and suggests conversion to Islam, he is not doing this because he has a sincere religious concern for the souls of Americans and Israelis, but because he is adhering to Islamic rules for war.

Americans make the mistake of hearing what they think is yet another preacher trying to convert them and think ignoring them will have no consequences just as it does in America. They fail to realize that when they don't immediately convert to Islam, the safeties have just been released on Muslim weapons." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

This has considerable historical basis and is part of the Islamic laws of warfare. Infidels must first be allowed to submit peacefully to Islam; if they decline, then harsher measures may lawfully follow.

"Jihadists recognize no international laws, no "international norms," no treaties, no diplomatic protocols. There is only the struggle to conquer the world, and apart from the Islamic rules for waging war, they observe no restraints, even killing other Muslims, which the Koran forbids." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

See my above. Jihadists do recognize international laws and "norms."

They just don't happen to be the same ones recognized by the West.

"One of the most dangerous misconceptions Americans have is confusing the political realities of America with those of other nations, particularly Islamic nations. "We can't attack Iran," our State Department says. "It's only the leaders of Iran that are bad. The people love us. There are many factions. There are moderates. Why, the leaders of Iran may not even know what is being done in their name!" Idiocy.

Doubtless many Japanese in 1941 had no desire for war. Many Germans were likewise peaceful people, but nations are responsible for actions done in their name, using their resources--$1.5 million and more in this case--pursuing their stated national goals. All of these factors are clearly present in the thankfully foiled plot." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

It wasn't the first Iranian act which could constitute casus belli for the U.S., and it surely won't be the last.

The thing is, acts of war are in the eye of the beholder.

"Islamic nations, particularly rogue states like Iran—unquestionably the foremost terrorist nation on the planet—do not brook internal opposition. There is no democracy, no debate, no effective political opposition. Iron-fisted rule extends from the top down. And while it is true that millions of young Iranians think well of the United States and would welcome having the heel of the Islamic boot lifted from their collective necks, this is a tactical, not a strategic concern.

It is not as though we are contemplating turning all of Iran, or even its major populations centers, into a sheet of glowing, radioactive glass. Alone in the world we possess the military means to strike with amazing precision, severely limiting collateral damage. Our assets could, with a few days of overwhelming strikes, severely damage, even obliterate Iran's ability to produce nuclear weapons and wage war."

&

"But Iran would be angry with us! Iran would strike out at us! Iran has been doing just that since 1979. Not only have its agents been caught on the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have captured its munitions, specifically designed and manufactured to kill American soldiers. There is no doubt that Iran is arming and training our enemies, enemies that have killed Americans and the citizens of our allies. Iran declared war on us in 1979 and has been actively pursuing that war on multiple fronts.

Yet, Iran has exercised some restraint. Its leaders understand that in a conventional military conflict with the United States, it wouldn't last a week. But they also understand that we are tied down in two conflicts. It works with China, North Korea, Syria, any nation opposed to America, to keep us occupied, to limit our ability and willingness to respond."

It is well to remember that Iranians, even "crazy" (by our standards) Iranian mullahs are Persians.

Persia is one of the oldest continuing civilizations in the world, certainly one of the oldest which was (and remains) the dominant culture within a multiethnic empire.

Islam is a major cultural overlay upon Persian culture, but it is only the top, latest layer.

Persians were civilized when most Westerners ancestors were, to put it plainly, not yet civilized. Politics, including international power politics, is something they were waging against not just the Romans, but the Greeks before them.

"Would Iran conduct an attack against Americans that would cause hundreds, even thousands of deaths? Of course it would. Iran has been killing hundreds, even thousands of Americans for years. But iran has never done anything so brazen before! You mean like seizing hundreds of American diplomats hostage and keeping them for more than a year? You mean like killing hundreds of Americans through proxies and by providing purpose-built weapons to them? But this hasn't been Iran's modus operandi—their method of operation—in the past!

Even if that were true—and it isn't--it is now." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

Nothing about this plot crosses any bright new lines for Iran. Assassinations of diplomats? Check. Operating in the U.S.? Check.

So check your preconceptions.

"Americans must now be careful in interpreting the clear words and actions of one of our most deadly and determined enemies. They say: "we will kill you all," over and over again. If we don't take them at their clear words, if we don't understand their mindset, millions of Americans and Israelis could die of a cultural misunderstanding."

10/16

re: "Because We Have Nothing Better To Keep Obsessing About"

Jules Crittenden at Forward Movement just marvels.

Money quote(s):

"What a strangely marvelous thing it must be to be an enemy of the United States. Feted and exalted as folk heroes by Euro-weenies and the American left, lavishly rewarded by the United States itself upon eventual ultimate defeat, with a well-financed, no-heavy-lifting assist on the propaganda front.

For the record: The American Civil Liberties Union has filed exactly no lawsuits against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, the Saudi banking system, Pakistan’s ISI, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraq’s former Baathist regime, the former Soviet regime, the current Cuban one, or any number of other associated entities for denying thousands of Americans their civil liberties or being complicit in the denial of a massive pile of American civil liberties up to and including life and the pursuit of happiness, though all of those entities at different times have operated and/or had assets and agents in the United States."

re: "Counterintelligence Still Secondary as Our Secrets Are Taken"

Douglas Farah laments the state of U.S. counterintelligence efforts.

Money quote(s):

"Counterintelligence has to have true national leadership, and is too important to be left to the hodgepodge of agencies that currently carry out bits and pieces of the policy."

&

"(T)he Chinese have managed to steal EVERY nuclear weapons design the U.S. has, allowing them not only to leapfrog generations and billions of dollars in development, but also to identify every vulnerability in the current systems.

Russia no longer needs to rely solely on KGB thugs to carry out much of its espionage. It simply carries out the best business intelligence gathering operations through front companies, and hires lobbyists to collect other information of interest.

Most tellingly, the Islamist world is heavily invested in the United States through shell corporations and the governments that host and sponsor terrorists, from Hezbollah and al Qaeda."

_____

Hat tip to the Counterterrorism Blog ("The first multi-expert blog dedicated solely to counterterrorism issues, serving as a gateway to the community for policymakers and serious researchers. Designed to provide real-time information about terrorism cases and policy developments.").