The Democrats are aware of this and face the same issues. Anyone who has been paying attention to politics knows that John McCain has been on the opposite side of the Republican base for years. He has favored gun bans, opposed tax cuts, sponsored McCain/Feingold (which creates a campaign finance system that most favors democrats), and supports the democratic position on Illegal Aliens. In short, much of the far lefts agenda will be successfully promulgated under a McCain administration for the exact reasons that Ms. Coulter ably notes. However, when you take this a step further, you realize that actually more of the far lefts agenda will be successfully completed if McCain is president than if a democrat is president, since many Republicans in congress will be more compliant if President McCain favors a bill. Further, the Democratic Party will not have to accept any responsibility for either the calamitous results of their programs, or the upcoming recession. Neither will they have to take any heat from their base about failing to immediately withdraw from Iraq, a policy which both parties realize is a strategic impossibility at this point, due to the oil economic issues. Likewise, they know that many of their wildest policies will be unpopular with a large segment of the population, so they want to avoid any backlash similar to the one that happened in 1994. With McCain in the White House, the democrats will have carte blanche to legislate their hearts desires, with the immunity and impunity of still having a Republican to blame it all on.

Across the aisle, the Republican base knows that Hillary Clinton has some very strange ideas, and none of her husbands charisma. So, if she were elected president, there would likely be two solid years of her attempts to promulgate terribly unpopular programs, which would be stymied in a closely divided congress, while the international situation and the economic woes can be solidly laid at the feet of the Democrats. After all, if the Democrats control the presidency and both houses of Congress, frustration directed at Republicans rings rather hollow. In all likelihood this is the only foreseeable means by which Republicans could regain control of either house of Congress.

So, in 2008, we may well find ourselves playing a game of "Presidential Hot Potato". Experienced and cagey Democrats may desperately want to lose this election. They may, like Sen. Kennedy, endorse Barak Hussein O'Bama, in the hopes that a wildly left wing black man, with connections to Islam, cannot possibly beat any Republican, that party may shove forward, regardless of how "soft headed" or inept. Likewise, the Republican base may want to "take a dive" here, and let Hillary or Hussein become president, so as to recapture congress in 2010 (Hillary being the safer bet, since Hussein O'Bama is much more likely to do things in foreign policy from which we will never be able to recover). The Presidency in 2008 is a "hot potato" which each parties "base" voters may want their party to avoid.

The result may be something extraordinarily strange and will befuddle all the pollsters. In the general election, we may see core Democrats crossing party lines to vote for McCain, since he is the candidate most likely to shepherd through the legislation of their hearts desires, while simultaneously giving their party political cover from their unpopular agenda. With this going on, the Republican base, combining revulsion for McCain, with some political savvy about losing some battles to win the war, may be willing to cross party lines to vote for Hillary. Since so much is currently at stake in the world, it reminds this author of the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times".

David Roth

Jan 31, 2008

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The Die is Cast

Almost immediately after independence, the U.S. government found itself in conflict with the Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy, stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail competition.[5] In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later, Algerine pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerine leadership refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates. In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy, President Thomas Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city three years later and winning the release of American hostages.[6] Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of 1812, Algerine pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.[7]

Many historians consider the Barbary wars a sideshow relative to contemporaneous events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon's conquests, and the War of 1812, but the Barbary wars are significant to today's conflict. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison each believed the Barbary wars to be a continuation of the American Revolution. The ground war in North America may have freed the United States from British tyranny, but the Barbary campaign was necessary to win the same freedom of action and commerce within the international community.[8] The episode also crystallized perceptions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the American mind. While Americans did not perceive the Barbary wars as a conflict between Christianity and Islam per se, religion was an issue. The two sides fought, not over theological differences, but rather as a result of the divergent ideologies enabled by the two faiths.[9] Washington and Adams referred to the Muslim leaders as "nests of banditti" while Jefferson's and Madison's campaign literature called them "petty tyrants."[10] The "despotic Turk" became the antithesis of early American republican identity.

What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians are sinners in the context of the Qur'an and that it was a Muslim's "right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners."[11] Islam gave great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because the Qur'an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim paradise after death.[12] Richard O'Brien, the imprisoned captain of the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to Algiers, related similar conversations with ‘Ali Hasan, the ruler of Algiers.[13] Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine.[14]

The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the treaties that U.S. officials entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves to American envoys as the "frontier posts of jihad against European Christianity."[15]

U.S. officials took a conciliatory attitude. Realizing that the North Africans were hypersensitive to the historic conflict between Islam and European Christianity, especially in the context of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, U.S. officials bent over backwards to deny the religious and ideological nature of the conflict, especially to the Muslims themselves. They realized that religious conflict might jeopardize the commerce that the United States still hoped to find in the Mediterranean. In 1821, President John Quincy Adams was barely able to resist assisting the Greeks in their war of independence when both the American and European publics urged war with the Ottoman Empire.[16] The founders possessed a deep conviction for religious tolerance and proudly explained in the short-lived 1797 treaty with Tripoli that the U.S. was not a Christian state at all but rather one which had no official religion and maintained laws forbidding the prohibition of religion.[17] Perhaps their denial of the religious and ideological nature of the conflict foreshadowed the attitude many Washington policymakers adopt today. Then as now, it has become the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of the conflict.

The Barbary conflict was the beginning of continuous U.S. interaction with the Muslim Near and Middle East. While Jefferson and Madison believed that a continuous U.S. military presence in the Mediterranean was necessary to protect U.S. national interests, in 1831, President Andrew Jackson secured a treaty of amity and free trade with the Ottoman Empire leading the secretary of the navy to report seven years later that it was no longer necessary to keep a U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean.[18] Three years after Washington withdrew the squadron, Ottoman privateers began raiding U.S. shipping, forcing the reconstitution of the fleet after the U.S. Civil War.

No longer, though, did the U.S. government feel content to view relations with Muslim governments only through a commercial lens. The Civil War interjected discussion of natural law and freedom into U.S. policy formulation. American missionaries increased their presence in the Muslim Middle East throughout the nineteenth century although Muslim prohibitions on conversion to Christianity led them to focus their efforts more on aid and education than on proselytization. Simultaneously, the Ottoman sultan and other Muslim rulers began to pursue more pronounced repression against both Christians and Jews.[19] Intolerant, fundamentalist strains of Islam gained ground on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.[20]

By 1840, the final year of his administration, and again during his unsuccessful campaign for a second term in 1848, Martin Van Buren expressed concern for the plight of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which he called "the most anti-Semitic of countries."[21] In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, strife between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and in Istanbul led President Ulysses Grant to dispatch six warships to the waterways around the city to ensure the safety of Americans.[22] In 1882, President Chester Arthur dispatched the Mediterranean Squadron to Alexandria to help evacuate Americans and Europeans following anti-Christian violence in the city. President Grover Cleveland even proposed an Anglo-American intervention in the Ottoman Empire to assist Armenian Christians against Muslim violence.[23] In 1903, an assassination attempt on the U.S. consul in Beirut amid anti-Christian rioting led President Theodore Roosevelt to dispatch marines to the city. A few months later, marines landed in Tangiers after the kidnapping of a Greek businessman from the U.S. consulate there.[24] Behind each incident was Muslim violence toward minority Christian and Jewish communities.

The nineteenth century foreshadowed increasing conflict between the United States and Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The failure of effective Ottoman political reform coupled with the evolution of Islamic reform toward greater Islamism and less tolerance set up a conflict between the American notion that governments rule at the consent of the governed and the dominant attitude among Muslim potentates who subscribed to an intolerant, coercive, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian ideology.

Twentieth-century Continuity

Into the early twentieth century, successive U.S. administrations sought to remain aloof from Arab and Ottoman politics. President Woodrow Wilson did not include the Ottoman Empire in the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an omission he said was to mitigate the risk of Ottoman retaliation against its Christian or Jewish populations, thereby implying his sense that the Porte saw the United States through a religious rather than just diplomatic lens.[25]

The U.S. government sought to remain detached in all but the commercial sphere. The U.S. trade relationship with the Middle East expanded exponentially in the mid-twentieth century. In the decade following the end of World War II, U.S. commerce increased 167 percent. The next decade saw a 226 percent rise, and the following decade a 321 percent increase in absolute terms.[26] Such involvement, though, had diplomatic and strategic overtones.

During the Cold War, "armed neutrality" could no longer protect U.S. strategic interests. Successive administrations and the State Department pursued a "pro-Arab" policy in the region to stymie the expansion of Soviet influence into those countries. In a January 1945 correspondence, Dean Acheson, secretary of state and chief architect of the U.S. Cold War Soviet containment policy, argued for a pro-Arab tilt to U.S. policy in order to deny the Soviet Union any possible inroads into the region.[27] Successive administrations embraced the policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdul Nasser against Israel, France, and Great Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis. While the U.S. government often stayed on the sidelines, in eleven of the twelve major Cold War and immediate post-Cold War conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the U.S. government supported the former group.[28] Washington, for example, backed the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and supported Bosnian Muslims against Serbs and Croats. U.S. administrations have even leaned hard on Israel, preventing the Jewish state's destruction of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies in 1967; ignoring the Israeli government's pleas not to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Saudi Arabia; and pressuring for concessions to the Palestinian Authority despite its embrace of terrorism. The only exception to Washington's pro-Arab tilt has been U.S. diplomatic intervention in support of Israel at the United Nations and White House commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge.

During the six decades since Washington abandoned its "armed neutrality" policy in favor of deeper relations with Arab states, friction has increased between U.S. officials and Islamist ideologues. The pro-Arab tilt Washington pursued during the Cold War to stymie Soviet intrigues and maintain energy security, meant partnership with non-democratic regimes and often corrupt rulers in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf emirates. Islamists and other opposition groups argued that Washington should support the people and not autocrats. But such rhetoric is laid bare by the antagonism that U.S. support for Israel engendered among many of these self-professed democrats. Israel is the only democracy in the region. Its citizens, 17 percent of whom are Muslim, enjoy basic civil liberties regardless of their faith and, even in the West Bank, enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of Egyptians and Jordanians.[29]

Jihadi Antipathy

Both the United States and Jews have become the focus of Islamists' irrational enmity as Islamist thinkers and Arab demagogues deflect any internal responsibility for Muslim countries' woes. This was a common theme both of Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and, later, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.[30] In Knowing the Enemy, Mary Habeck, a professor of military history at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, documents how Qutb and bin Laden spread a message that the decline of majority Muslim polities is not the result of flaws within Islam itself but is instead the deliberate effort of the United States and the Jews.[31] Today Pakistani madrasas (Islamic schools) alone spin out more than one million graduates per year steeped in jihadi ideology.[32]

Underlying much jihadi thought is antipathy toward democracy. Both Qutb and bin Laden argued that democracy is not a solution to inequity and corruption in Islamic societies.[33] In a video that marked the sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, bin Laden said, "It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their bloody sacrificing of soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of major corporations."[34] While some Islamists—such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or Muhammad Khatami in Iran[35]—speak of their embrace of democracy, seldom do they include Enlightenment concepts such as tolerance, rule-of-law, and property rights. They do not accept, as did the U.S. founding fathers, that people are endowed with both the natural right to freedom from coercion and the liberty to improve their lives. In practice, then, regardless of their rhetoric, they eschew democracy.

The failure of Islamic states to incorporate the Enlightenment's advances in thought has caused their stagnation, if not decline, over the last several centuries. In contrast, the incorporation of Enlightenment and democratic principles into Western governance has resulted in history's most rapid improvement in the human condition. Only those Muslim countries that have embraced, in some fashion, Western principles of democracy, free markets, property rights, tolerance, and the rule of law have prospered. Most Arab states refuse. Bernard Lewis, perhaps the doyen of Middle East studies in the Western world, explained, "By all indicators from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other authorities, Muslim countries—in matters such as job creation, education, technology, and productivity—lag ever further behind the West. Even worse, the Arab nations also lag behind the more recent recruits to Western style modernity, such as Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore."[36] All majority Muslim countries except Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and Turkey, which have recently adopted significant free market and democratic reforms, rank in the bottom half of world productivity; of the rest, only Morocco, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, and Bangladesh reach the third quartile.[37] According to the World Bank, the average per capita income of all majority Muslim countries collectively is less than half of the average for the globe. Only Kuwait approaches the global average life expectancy;[38] all other Muslim majority states lag in the bottom half of the world in this important measure of health.

Jihadis thrive in such stagnated conditions. This leads to negative annuity: Jihadism both grows amid stagnation and fuels stagnation. It accelerated coincident with the European Enlightenment and the relative decline of the Muslim Middle East. At its core, jihadism is a violent rejection of many of the fundamental principles of the European Enlightenment. Democracy, free markets, tolerance and freedom of religion, secular government, and separation between the religious, the political, and the individual spark religious fury. It is no coincidence, then, that jihadis, under the banner of cleansing their religion of evil Western influence, have focused their attentions on the United States, the clearest manifestation of the European Enlightenment today. They will continue to threaten Western civilization until they are checked.

Fumbled Strategy

One of the greatest challenges facing strategic leaders today is objectively examining the centuries-old roots of Islamic jihadism and developing a strategy that will lead to a lasting solution to the Western conflict with it. Many Western policymakers fail to assess realistically why Arab and Islamic governments have been unable to improve the condition of their populations, especially in contrast to the West. This inability to grasp the root of Islamic jihadism is the result of a moral relativism prominent in modern Western liberal thought. For example, over the last few decades, it has become common to value diversity and multiculturalism above societal well-being and improvements in the human condition.

It is not, as Thomas Friedman argues in The World Is Flat, that the fruits of the American experiment—free markets, property rights, tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law—have left Islam behind.[39] On the contrary, it is Islam that has opted out of progress by allowing, promoting, and embracing centuries of reactionary and retrospective reforms that rejected the idea that humans can indeed improve their condition through reason and rationality. Muslim clerics and leaders within the impoverished nations of the Islamic world need to understand that they are responsible for the condition and grief of their people. It is Islamism's rejection of religious tolerance, democracy, and the rule of law, in conjunction with its embrace of anti-Semitism, theocracy, and sectarian strongmen exempt from law and privileged by the authority they have usurped, that is the real enemy in the Islamic world's centuries-long interaction with the United States. While Islamists skillfully manipulate the Western mass media to enunciate an à la carte menu of grievances, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interactions show these are not the root cause of jihadi terror. Indeed, a U.S. intelligence assessment, published two years before Israel's independence and any subsequent jihadi grievance, already highlighted Islamist terrorism as a long-term threat.[40] So long as Western officials adopt a nearsighted, grievance-based view of the roots of Islamist terror, they will embolden jihadis through appeasement.

It is essential that the grand strategy of the United States addresses this basic conflict of interest. The present conflict is not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogues" have misappropriated religion is both naïve and counterfactual. U.S. and Western leaders must confront the reality that jihadism is a religious phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten the continued progress of the American experiment and the European Enlightenment. In the new grand strategy to defeat Islamic jihadism, America must campaign, through its scholars and theologians if appropriate, to encourage and facilitate imams and other Islamic religious authority figures to reform Islam in a forward direction, one that breaks from the past and encourages tolerance, the rule of law, free inquiry, and free markets. Imams who support, either passively or actively, jihadism should be undermined and exposed.

How should the United States revitalize its strategy? At home, the U.S. government must better educate and explain the conflict to the general audience. Education at all levels should inculcate U.S. citizens in the history, philosophy, mechanics, virtues, responsibilities, and achievements of the Western approach to freedom, liberty, and the free market. Tolerance and diversity need not mean acceptance of oppression and tyranny. Such an effort would entail reinstalling this subject matter into the curricula of public schools. The strategic leadership of the nation should drive the public education effort, much as the founders did in the eighteenth century. The Federalist Papers, generally attributed to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, are prototypical examples of effective strategic communications that aimed, among other things, to create a government strong enough to defend itself against the Barbary pirates.

Internationally, U.S. foreign policy should reflect U.S. national values and long-term objectives rather than near-term expediencies devoid of the principles enumerated by the founding fathers. U.S. foreign aid programs need reform.[41] Washington should set a visible standard by supporting non-corrupt democracies, rather than funding kleptocracies. Rather than fund short-term stability in regimes where power is centrally concentrated, Washington should promote trade and development in Islamic nations supporting the rule of law, tolerance, and democracy. Trade and development in these nations empowers people and entrepreneurs, catalyzes economic progress, and decentralizes power in a culture that has deep tendencies toward autocracy.[42]

The half-century-long policy of supporting Arab state stability regardless of its governance is a relic of the Cold War. In order to defeat jihadism, U.S. foreign policy should marginalize Muslim nations that are not supportive of the development of the rule of law, tolerance, and democracy. Washington should not apologize for supporting regional countries that seek peace, prosperity, and the improved well-being of their citizens. To do otherwise fuels jihadi rhetoric that the U.S. government seeks to oppress Muslims throughout the world.

Another requirement is for the West to embark on a radical program to redefine how its economies obtain and distribute energy. Former director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey argues that denying jihadis the use of oil as a weapon against the United States and the West should be Washington's highest priority.[43]

Finally, the history of U.S. interaction with Muslim polities shows that "diplomacy backed by force" is the only effective approach to relations with them.[44] Diplomacy is essential to ensure intentions are understood. Consistent diplomacy is essential to build the trust that majority Muslim countries need to support U.S. aims to advance Enlightenment ideals. Military weakness and the inability to project U.S. power have consistently led jihadis and Muslim kleptocrats to launch attacks against U.S. interests.

by Melvin E. Lee

--------------------------

Melvin E. Lee is a sea captain and a nuclear engineer in the United States Navy. He serves as special operations officer for the commander, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, and commander, U.S. 6th Fleet. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of the Department of the Navy or U.S. government.

---------------------------

[1] Ussama Makdisi, "‘Anti-Americanism' in the Arab World: An Interpretation of a Brief History," Journal of American History, Sept. 2002, p. 546.
[2] David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989), pp. 23-62.
[3] Robert Fisk, The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), pp. 305-15.
[4] Michael Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).
[5] Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), pp. 106-9.
[6] Richard B. Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary: A Diplomatic History (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. 103-30; Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 49-78.
[7] Kevin Baker, "The Shores of Tripoli," American Heritage, Feb./Mar. 2002, p. 21.
[8] James A. Field, "Novus Ordo Seclorum," America and the Mediterranean World, 1776-1882 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 3-26; Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 15-28.
[9] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, pp. 106, 112-4.
[10] Ibid., pp. 110, 123.
[11] Thomas Jefferson, "‘The American Commissioners' Report to John Jay," in Paul L. Ford, ed., The Works of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9 (New York and London: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1904-5), p. 358; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 116.
[12] Thomas Jefferson, "The American Commissioners' Report to John Jay," p. 358; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[13] Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 110-1.
[14] Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), p. 175.
[15] "The Truce with Tunis," Naval Documents Related to the United States Wars with the Barbary Powers, vol. 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 158-9; quoted in Lambert, The Barbary Wars, p. 117.
[16] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 133-40.
[17] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, pp. 134-5.
[18] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, p. 209.
[19] Ibid., pp. 345-73.
[20] Ahmad Dallal, "The Origins and Objectives of Islamic Revivalist Thought, 1750-1850," Journal of the American Oriental Society, July-Sept. 1993, p. 352.
[21] Field, America and the Mediterranean World, pp. 345-73.
[22] Ibid., pp. 368-70.
[23] Ibid., pp. 445-7.
[24] Anne Cipriano Venzon, "Gunboat Diplomacy in the Med," Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, Apr. 1985, pp. 26-31.
[25] Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace, pp. 259-60.
[26] Bernard Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Random House, 2003), pp. 126-8.
[27] Dean Acheson, "Internal Correspondence of the U. S. Department of State, January 1945," quoted in Robert Baer, Sleeping with the Devil (New York: Crown, 2003), p. 79.
[28] Barry Rubin, "The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism," Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2002, p. 75.
[29] R. James Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East: The Long War of the 21st Century," in K. M. Campbell, ed., An American Grand Strategy for the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: Aspen Institute, 2004), p. 37.
[30] Richard W. Bulliet, "The Crisis within Islam," The Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2002, p. 15.
[31] Mary R. Habeck, Knowing the Enemy: Jihadi Ideology and the War on Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 12.
[32] Michael G. Knapp, "The Concept and Practice of Jihad in Islam," Parameters, Spring 2003, p. 92.
[33] Reza Aslan, No God but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam (New York: Random House, 2005), p. 138; Habeck, Knowing the Enemy, p. 162; Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 159.
[34] Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, CNN, Sept. 7, 2007; United Press International, Sept. 7, 2007.
[35] Muhammad Khatami, "Islamic Civil Society," speech to the eighth session of the Islamic Summit Conference, Tehran, Radio Islam, Dec. 9, 1997.
[36] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 114.
[37] James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and William Easterly, Economic Freedom of the World, 2006 Annual Report (Vancouver: Fraser Institute, 2006), p. 39.
[38] Lewis, The Crisis of Islam, p. 113-9.
[39] Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), pp. 470-9.
[40] "Assessing the Islamist Threat, Circa 1946," Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2006, pp. 76-82.
[41] Alberto Alesina and Beatrice Weder, "Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Foreign Aid?," American Economic Review, Sept. 2002, pp. 1126-38.
[42] Iqbal Z. Quadir, "The Bottleneck Is at the Top of the Bottle," The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Summer/Fall 2002, pp. 86-8.
[43] Woolsey, "Grand Strategy in the Middle East," pp. 33-4.
[44] Parker, Uncle Sam in Barbary, p. 160.

This item is available on the Middle East Forum website, at http://www.meforum.org/article/1830

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Twenty years later, Mbembe was walking through the Chicago Zoo with his teenage son. As they approached the elephant enclosure, one of the creatures turned and walked to where Mbembe and his son Tapu were standing. The large bull elephant stared at Mbembe, lifted its front foot off the ground, and then put it down. The elephant did that several times and then trumpeted loudly, all the while staring at the man.

Remembering the encounter in 1986, Mbembe couldn't help wondering if this was the same elephant. Mbembe summoned up his courage, climbed over the railing and made his way into the enclosure. He walked right up to the elephant and stared back in wonder. The elephant trumpeted again, wrapped its trunk around one of Mbembe's legs and slammed him against the railing, killing him instantly. It is probably safe to conclude it wasn't the same elephant....

The lesson we can take away from this interesting and heartwarming story is one of statistical probability, bordering on certainty. A similar sequence of events will likely occur as the current crop of political candidates seek to befriend a nation of injured conservative elephants, many of whose youth have been sacrificed to open borders, drugs and Islamic terrorists. The election outcome experienced by incumbent Republicans and Democrats in the 2008 election at the hands of voters is likely to be painfully similar to Mbembe. At least I hope it is.

Red State Patriot

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In the second voting category, the delegates were able to vote for more than one candidate as unacceptable. In the Unacceptable Category, 427 out of 721 (59%) of the delegates declared McCain as one of their unacceptable candidates. The tallies were:
427 McCain
396 Paul
357 Giuliani (withdrawn)
340 Huckabee
156 Hunter (withdrawn)
152 Thompson (withdrawn)
121 Romney

In the third category, the delegates were able to vote for more than one candidate as acceptable. Those results were as follows:
370 Thompson (withdrawn)
358 Hunter (withdrawn)
356 Romney
235 Giuliani (withdrawn)
207 Huckabee
135 McCain
120 Paul

These issues were rated by the delegates as the most important for the presidential candidates to address:

643 STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION
552 WIN WAR AGAINST TERROR
518 REDUCE GOV'T SPENDING
406 LOWER TAXES
390 SUPREME COURT APPOINTMENTS
271 PRO-LIFE
226 CITIZEN'S GUN RIGHTS
196 DOMESTIC OIL PRODUCTION
106 CHOICE OF PRIVATE SS ACCOUNTS

Senator John McCain, you can run from your constituency, but you cannot hide.

Red State Patriot

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A key step in the development of Second Amendment jurisprudence was the Bush Administration’s decision to adopt the “individual rights” theory of the Second Amendment. This theory holds that the Supreme Court’s Miller decision was, in essence, incorrect, and that the right to keep in bear arms means what it says -- that an individual has a right to own guns. The Department of Justice in 2001 reversed the Clinton Administration’s previous position on the right to bear arms, setting off a firestorm of criticism. Yet for the past seven years, the Administration has stood its ground and consistently instructed its United States Attorneys to argue for the individual right to bear arms, if they could given the law of their Circuit.

So it came as an absolute shock to many supporters of an individual right to keep and bear arms when the Solicitor General filed a brief in the Heller matter opposing the plaintiffs’ claims. This remarkable brief brings back memories of the Administration’s position in the Grutter and Gratz cases, where the Administration argued that, while the schools’ affirmative action policies were unconstitutional, the rationale behind them was not.

The Solicitor General’s brief in Heller similarly tries to split the baby. It argues, strenuously, that the Constitution does protect and individual’s right to bear arms. It also argues that, like other rights in the Bill of Rights, the right to keep and bear arms is not unlimited. It then suggests a more restrictive test for the right than that used by the Court of Appeals: that a court should consider the practical impact of the regulation on the right to bear arms and the
government’s interest in the enforcement of the regulation, rather than the Court of Appeals’ more categorical approach to regulations of “Arms.” In other words, it argues for a kind of intermediate scrutiny. The Solicitor General suggests that the Court adopt a different test than that used by the Court of Appeals, and then remand the case for further review.

Which raises the question: What the heck was the Bush Administration thinking? For decades, a critical component of the Republican coalition has been working class gun owners who are bothered by the Democrats’ embrace of gun control. Republicans actually seem to have won that battle, with Democrats backing off of gun control legislation in the recent Congress. Why after enduring so much hostile press would the Bush Administration sell out the NRA at this critical juncture? And why make the reversal in a difficult election year, when the support of gun control opponents will be so critical to Republican fortunes?

There are two potential answers. The generous answer lies in the composition of the Court. It is thought that the four “conservative” Justices -- Thomas, Scalia, Roberts, and Alito -- are sympathetic to the individual right to bear arms. The four “liberal” Justices -- Stevens, Ginsburg, Breyer and Souter -- may be more hostile. This leaves Justice Kennedy as the swing vote. Kennedy is notoriously difficult to predict, especially on high-profile “social issues.” It is also true that within the next few years, Justices Stevens and Ginsburg will be replaced, possibly with a Republican President. So the Solicitor General may be gambling that Justice Kennedy will be easier to persuade with a lower standard, or that if the plaintiffs get a remand, the Court may be more conservative when the case comes back up, and more likely to win in the long run.

The less generous answer lies in the reality of the Bush Administration. Contrary to the caricatures painted by liberals, there are precious few issues that the Administration has not sold the Right out on. No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit, monstrous budget deficits, McCain-Feingold, Patient’s Bill of Rights . . . all of these issues cross the gamut of modern politics, and all of them are issues where the Bush Administration’s Rovian plotting has placed it at loggerheads with standard conservatism. Even on judges, where the Administration usually wins plaudits, conservatives forget Harriet Miers, and forget that two of Bush’s first ten Court of Appeals
appointments were Clinton appointees. Is it really that hard to believe that the Administration would lurch to the left on the issue of guns?

Regardless, this issue is in the Supreme Court of the United States. Its decisions are not easily overruled once they are handed down. Even if one gives the Administration the benefit of the doubt, it has made an awful error here by siding against the District’s citizens. The job of a conservative administration is to attempt to persuade the Court to
adopt conservative views, not to attempt to play politics or split the baby. It has foregone an opportunity to write a brief that could persuade the Justices to adopt a view of the Second Amendment that assigned scrutiny commensurate with those of other guarantees of the Bill of Rights. Moreover, in a high stakes election, which is likely to be a tough one for the Republican, the Administration has risked alienating a substantial portion of the Republican base, who are understandably incensed with the Administration, and will be apoplectic if the Court does not affirm the Court of Appeals.

The Administration seems to be playing a game of high stakes poker with an incendiary issue in an election year. One can only hope it does not get us all burned.

by Sean P. Trende
01/22/2008

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Because I am a contrarian, and cynical of human behavior (derived from three decades in federal law enforcement, and another decade on Arizona streets as a police officer, and repeated disappointments as a political observer in Washington, D.C.), it is a huge cause for concern when normally conservative and articulate Internet commentators appear desperate to find the smallest crumb of hope from Congress. While some sense of desperation from the rule-of-law contingent is understandable, considering the war zone on the borders, the question still remains: Why are so many people blindly embracing the SAVE Act as if it were the Holy Grail of immigration reform?

Think like a contrarian. What might be missing from this picture? What remains unsaid?

It is important that every citizen recognize at the outset of any discussion of immigration that the phrases "immigration reform," and particularly “comprehensive immigration reform,” represent ‘code words’ that mean only one thing – a consistent and defiant refusal by Congress and the Bush Administration to enforce existing laws.

The congressional solution to "open borders" and epidemic illegal alien lawlessness across the United States, and the threat of mind-boggling terrorism, is not enforcement of existing laws, but to rewrite immigration law turning previously lawless behavior retroactively into legal behavior - with amnesty given for the crimes committed by millions of illegal alien migrants.

The Bush Administration is either oblivious and insensitive to life and death on the streets of our cities, and along our dangerous border, or it is literally refusing to defend the country in a war being waged by Mexico against the United States. The latter suggestion begs the question, "Is the Bush Administration, in concert with Congress, consciously aiding a self-declared enemy to defeat the United States of America?" What other choices are there?

As for amnesty for illegal aliens in the United States, arguably it would be less of an atrocity, but equally insane, to grant amnesty to the September 11th Islamic highjackers since they've killed less than five percent of the number of United States citizens that have died at the hands of illegal aliens during the last two decades. Both ideas are beyond delusional and are equally insane - except to the politician who is willing to sell their soul.

Pause and reflect on a sobering fact. The United States Congress, and the Bush Administration, and many who aspire to become President of the United States of America, absolutely refuse to enforce the law – and not just immigration laws, but any laws. As a direct result of failed leadership and vacant moral values, lawless behavior now permeates political behavior from the President, down through the federal government’s administrative agencies (DHS, CIA, State Department) to Congress, to Governors, to state legislatures, to mayors, to police chiefs, to homeowners associations, and riddles the courts. Endemic lawlessness has ravaged the illegal alien community.

There exists no apparent respect for the law - all the way from the top of our national political and law enforcement structure, to the bottom. It follows logically that there will be less and less adherence to any rules of law at lower influence and income levels of society, and particularly in minority/illegal alien communities. At some point, laws that exist on paper will become meaningless from Massachusetts to California. We seem perilously close to going over that national cultural precipice today.

Justifiably, why should any United States citizen believe - ever again - that ANY law, whether newly crafted or already ‘on the books’ will be enforced, except for when it serves the agenda of ‘the government,’ or a special interest group or a minority interest?

From the perspective of a citizen soldier who has served in the trenches on the front lines in Southern Arizona, it appears far more likely to this observer that the SAVE Act is a giant Trojan Horse, intended from the outset to be a lethal strike against the combined efforts of all citizen border-enforcement advocates. Incredibly, this legislation is being willfully perpetrated by a dangerous coalition of some of the most corrupt and the most ignorant in Congress.

Let’s begin making the case with a quote from the Eagle Forum email:

“Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC) introduced the Secure America with Verification and Enforcement (SAVE) Act, H.R. 4088, and it already has over 100 cosponsors. The Senate version, S. 2368, was introduced by Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) and it is identical to the House bill. The SAVE Act tackles illegal immigration from three different directions: First, it increases technological surveillance and the number of Border Patrol agents. Second, it requires employers to use the E-verify program so they can be assured they are not hiring illegal aliens. Third, it will give the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) greater resources to strictly enforce current immigration laws and to better facilitate deportation when necessary.

How the SAVE Act Increases Border Security and Internal Enforcement:
• Increases the number of Border Patrol agents by 8,000 over five years.
• Employs the newest technology available, including satellite communication and aerial surveillance.
• Expands and mandates the use of E-verify, a free and effective program administered by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) so employers can confirm the legal status of their workers. The bill will phase in all employers over four years.
• Allows for information sharing between DHS and the Social Security Administration so as to close the loophole of mismatch letters going unresolved.
• Expands detention capacity and resources for ICE.
• Increases the number of Federal District Court Judges so as to expedite deportation hearings.

The SAVE Act is a great piece of bipartisan legislation ….”

There were currently 133 cosponsors of the SAVE Act at last count. The list of names is too long to reprint here. Many of the names of the cosponsors would cause any reasonable political observer to question whether the co-sponsors had actually read the proposed legislation and comprehend the unintended consequences – but that’s nothing new.

In a vain attempt to keep this critique reasonably short and to the point, permit me to point out the obvious. Every illegal alien currently in the United States, whether for the first time, or after repeated deportations and re-entry, is a serial criminal, many of whom are guilty of multiple unconscionable violent crimes, over fifty percent of all property crimes over the previous two decades, drug importation, human trafficking, domestic violence, gang affiliation and associated criminal behavior, document and identity fraud, and disorderly conduct in every conceivable manner.

If that were not enough, add vehicular mayhem on United States highways as illegal aliens operate motor vehicles within our nation’s borders with reckless abandon, without driving privileges, and most without valid registration or insurance (quaint requirements in state law applicable only to United States citizens).

The Department of Homeland Security and the State of Arizona have recently gotten together and chosen a novel way to facilitate the unlawful transportation needs of millions of illegal aliens who commute to illegal jobs – jobs that United States citizens once held. With DHS sanction, Governor Napolitano of Arizona plans to begin issuing legal identification in the form of federally-sanctioned driver’s licenses with radio identification chips. These legal documents will be issued to alien migrants (from anywhere in the world) without proof of United States citizenship, legal immigrant status, and/or even a fraudulent birth certificate.

Since the public outcry was so great when New York attempted to issue driver’s licenses and other forms of legal identification to illegal aliens, the innovative “work around” solution now is that the illegal alien driver’s license will be a federal identification, and only the administration of the program and distribution of the driver's licenses delegated to the states. The clever scheme has all the appearances of the same game, same objective, same deceit, and same amnesty – just a different day.

Governor Napolitano and the Department of Homeland Security envision that a driver’s license should be accepted in lieu of, and will suffice for, a passport at the U.S.-Mexico border. Subsequently, these same driver’s licenses will be used to convey legal work eligibility because those who possess the federally-sanctioned driver’s licenses would be presumed to be in the country legally for employment purposes. Ask yourself, why would the Governor of the State of Arizona issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens (which becomes a form of legal identification and a government sanction to use United States roadways to commute to jobs - jobs they are not legally entitled to have)? The SAVE Act and Governor Napolitano’s issuing of driver’s licenses to illegal aliens seems to be the groundwork for permanent legal residency, nothing less.

Governor Napolitano signed the agreement regarding driver’s licenses with Homeland Security Department Secretary Michael Chertoff on December 6, 2007. Apparently she did so without consultation with the Arizona State Legislature. Does Governor Napolitano have the authority to bind the State of Arizona in a federal agreement that violates federal immigration laws, contains state obligations to the federal government and relinquishes state sovereignty? Doubtfully, but we have yet to hear that the Arizona Legislature intends to repudiate the agreement.

Illegal alien's recklessly ricochet around the State of Arizona, and the country for that matter, committing a laundry list of crimes, both felonies and misdemeanors. When finally caught, refusing to be identified by using a myriad of Hispanic surnames, the combination of police, courts and detention facilities simply send them home to Mexico or Central America.

The SAVE Act does nothing to change any of that. In fact, the SAVE Act ups the ante in favor of the illegal aliens. To make the point crystal clear, when an illegal alien returns to the United States, aided by the Mexican government or MS-13, and is unfortunate or reckless enough to be apprehended for the umpteenth time, experience has taught the illegal aliens (and US citizens) that the Border Patrol/ICE will simply package them up and ship them home again at taxpayer expense, often in a luxurious bus or aircraft. Who pays for the deportation costs? Who pays for the carnage left behind from crimes committed and crimes yet undetected? Not the illegal alien, not the U.S. taxpayer-funded lawyers, and not the Mexican government.

How many lawyers will it take to represent 20 million illegal aliens? Who will be expected to pick up that tab?

If you have any doubts, read the legislation yourself, H.R. 4088, The SAVE Act of 2007 (Secure America with Verification and Enforcement). While it 'sounds good on paper,' the SAVE Act requires ONLY the development of a national strategy to secure the borders and all ports of entry to the United States by December 31, 2010. Specifically, the hypothetical strategy must: assess unspecified future terrorist threats years in advance without creditable intelligence; make risk assessment at ports of entry; address staffing needs; describe border security roles between federal, state, and local government; assess existing efforts and border technologies; ensure free flow of lawful travel; assess the need for additional detention facilities and beds; outline performance metrics to ensure accountability, and schedule implementation of the strategy’s objectives. That’s the SAVE Act in a nutshell.

In the meantime, sanctuary cities such of New York City, Phoenix and Houston continue to be a safe haven, a secure base from which illegal aliens can commit all forms of mindless violent and property crimes with seeming impunity. United States citizens and businesses continue to face withering accusations of racism as illegal aliens defiantly demand from city government’s to be insulated as a protected class of miscreants from all community responsibilities or criminal accountability.

At the state level, governors and courts are actively protecting illegal aliens by stalemating citizen initiatives or legislation that would curtail illegal alien social benefits or limit cross-border migration. At the municipal level, mayors and chiefs of police are actively providing physical, economic and criminal sanctuary to illegal aliens at the brutal expense of lawful United States citizens and business owners.

Unfortunately for U.S. citizens, Hispanic and Muslim activists and their checkbooks have undue policy influence because politicians are amazingly competent in selling their votes - if nothing else in life! Wise men have always understood that everything has a price. It would appear that politicians have been having an integrity fire sale and patriotism melt-down for decades. Bottom line: with very few exceptions, your elected congressmen are selling out your country.

In recent years, Congress has knowingly gone so far afield as to vote to fund an assortment of anti-American special interest groups. One example will suffice, i.e., the funding of La Raza by Congress with over a million dollars of taxpayer money. LaRaza, an admittedly racist Hispanic-supremacy organization, reportedly is subsidized not only by the Mexican government and the U.S. Congress, but by criminal enterprises with funding that flows through legally constituted special interest groups.

Enforce the laws? Sure, whatever you say. And Americans should believe the SAVE Act will be an exception. Forget the SAVE Act. Enforce existing immigration laws. Legislation that purports to do anything else is a sham.

After all is said and done, state and federal immigration policy for twenty years has been and continues to be, regardless of protestations to the contrary, "catch and release" – not enforcement. Enforcement implies accountability for crimes, and clearly there is NO accountability of any consequence.

Just how ridiculous is the SAVE Act? The SAVE Act clearly proposes to add additional layers of border bureaucracy, but what will it ultimately accomplish? Maybe a metaphor will help. With 8,000 new border agents and more taxpayer money for technology, the SAVE Act “pretends” to be putting more fishermen on the pond and more high-tech fish sensors on the boat. The premise is that more fishermen and better technology will catch more fish. But the problem is that we don’t want any more fish. This business of illegal alien migration isn’t a sport and it isn’t funny. In fact, we don’t want ANY illegal fish in our pond. The illegal fish are destroying the natural habitat of the native fish. The solution is to remove the illegal fish from the pond, by incentive preferably but by force if necessary, in order to preserve the beautiful natural habitat – and not to introduce more illegal fish and then hire more anglers (agents) at taxpayer expense and issue more fishing licenses.

Congress has betrayed the trust of so many Americans so often for so long, how can there ever be trust in legislation like the SAVE Act? How many instances of political infidelity for how many years by how many congressmen must Americans suffer before citizens throw the bums out of the ‘house’ into the street? These elite bullies have garnered their power and influence, passed laws to protect their position, surrounded themselves with law enforcement agencies for their own protection, voted themselves a king’s ransom of a retirement system and benefits, and now they’re laughing in our face! They’re literally challenging you and me! What are we going to do about it? It's not Left v. Right anymore, it's the State v. you.

In the vernacular, a schmuck is a stupid person, a jerk, a fool, or a gullible dolt - at the very least. We are perceived as schmucks by our elected representatives in Congress, and worse by an assortment of Mexicans, Europeans and Muslims, all of whom are gaming the “democratic system” and our naivety to further their own self-interests. The abuse of United States citizens has got to stop, both by Congress and by illegal aliens.

And so the cycle repeats, and the SAVE Act stands as credible evidence that politicians intend that the cycle of abuse will repeat endlessly. Sadistically, it also appears to be the wizard’s (President Bush’s) intent. Careful reading of the SAVE Act provides more than an ample justification to speculate that the real intention of the SAVE Act is to make it impossible to remove illegal aliens from the United States. If there was any intention – ever - to enforce immigration laws and deport illegal aliens, then just enforce the current laws and eliminate access to the taxpayer-funded social benefits. No SAVE Act would be needed.

So let’s agree up front that there is still no intention to enforce immigration laws regardless of new legislation passed by Congress and signed into law by the president. Its simply another fraud, not unlike a shell game or 3-card Monte. When you encounter such games on the street, you would probably be unaware that most of the persons standing around a game are in league with the operator. The cosponsors of the SAVE Act are also in league, make no mistake.

Possibly the one aspect of the SAVE Act that should worry citizens the most is that the DHS seeks by this legislation to broadly expand their authority, power and reach. The SAVE Act authorizes the federal government to permanently seize substantial sovereign power from the States just when power should be flowing in the other direction.

United States citizens find themselves in quite a bind because Congress’ votes have been bought and paid for by foreign and domestic special interests. Regular old fashioned law abiding patriotic play-by-the-rules United States citizens, having elected their representatives in good faith, now realize they’re going to have to compete with special interests and well-funded activists and try to buy representation from their own representatives.

Has anybody stopped to consider that none of the top-tier candidates for President of the United States in 2008, in either party, has gone on record regarding what they would do with the 20-40 million illegal aliens currently in the United States, or whether they would build the double-layer border fence, or whether they would continue to extend unearned taxpayer-funded medical care, education and social benefits to non-citizens and their children? Duncan Hunter was on public record claiming he will build the fence, however candidate Huckabee has changed direction so many times even he must feel dizzy. No current candidate has said he will enforce existing immigration laws. Not one Republican or Democrat candidate has said they will actively prosecute those responsible for identity theft or fraudulent use of Social Security numbers.

With the SAVE Act, policing social security fraud permanently becomes the function of the Homeland Security Department. The criminal misuse of Social Security numbers by illegal aliens, and employers who accept, utilize and report fraudulent Social Security earnings is already a secret held more closely than nuclear technology. Identity theft remains a serious, pervasive and unresolved problem. What person is typically victimized by identity theft? Who in many cases is financially devastated? Not the illegal alien. When was the last time you heard of the prosecution of anyone for fraudulent use of a Social Security number to illegally obtain employment?

It’s time for some serious sole-searching. Are you finally willing to acknowledge, based on past performance, that the status quo suits Congress just fine, otherwise Congress would have stopped the social security fraud? Are you finally willing to acknowledge, based on past performance, that the status quo in illegal alien migration also suits Congress just fine, otherwise Congress and/or the Bush Administration would stopped it long ago? Does anybody seriously think Congress or the Bush Administration have had an epiphany and the SAVE Act somehow represents a “compassionate” change of conservative heart?

Here is another sobering thought: Has anybody stopped to ponder that the only people in the entire world who do NOT benefit from paying United States income taxes are the people who pay them? If all men were created equal, why are so many people, both in foreign countries and in the United States, still on some form of U.S. welfare and more illegal aliens are applying for benefits daily?

Moving on, what about the touted E-verify system of work eligibility? Consider for a moment that businesses are incorporated in a particular state and function according to the state laws in which they conduct business. While we would hope that employers would not hire illegal aliens, any decisions to limit employment eligibility reside in the sole jurisdiction of the individual state. If the state legislature and governor want to mandate use of a federal E-verification system as a prerequisite to hiring in Arizona, so be it, but nobody in Washington, D.C. has the constitutional jurisdiction or authority to mandate the E-verify program contained in the SAVE Act. E-verify may become a welcome adjunct to business law at the state level, but not immigration law at the federal level. Who is offered or denied employment in the State of Arizona is no business of any administrative agency, politician or civil service employee in Washington, D.C.

Do you really want a United States government administrative agency to begin deciding who gets a job and who doesn’t? Be very, very careful what you wish for because the day will soon come when United States citizens who fail to curry liberal favor begin to find their name on the “no-job” list – without recourse – or on the “no-fly” list or “no-gun” list, both of which already exist.

As for lists, you’ve probably heard about the government’s terrorism watch list … the list they won’t tell you who’s on, who’s not, how they got there or how to get off. The government’s terrorism watch list grew by 200,000 people in 2006 to more than 750,000 names. There are terrorists in this country, without a doubt because of open borders and lax enforcement, but does anyone really believe there are three-quarters of a million terrorists in this country?

If that were not enough, Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey is relentlessly pushing legislation that would terminate a citizen’s 2nd Amendment gun rights if their name just magically happened to turn up on that terrorism list. If you think it couldn’t happen, the history course(s) were lacking or non-existent in the public school indoctrination curriculum you experienced. Disarming citizens has always been the first priority of every eventual tyrant or ruling class throughout recorded human history.

We learned from the Washington Post in the week before Christmas, 2007 that the Department of Homeland Security (FBI) is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

One more time for emphasis - please be very, very careful what you wish for. The Department of Homeland Security has no right under the Constitution or law to access Social Security records. There is no justification for such a massive invasion and probable future misuse of personal information. Arguably, we have in the making an American version of the infamous Soviet KGB, an intelligence organization that will keep a detailed computer database dossier on every aspect of the life of every United States citizen – from medical records to parking tickets. If you want to live in a political system that resembles the defunct Soviet Union, why not just move to Russia – but be sure to take your passport and a copy of George Orwell’s novel, ‘1984’.

Back to the point - because the unshakeable intent of Congress is now, and always has been, to grant amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens in exchange for campaign contributions, and the “Hispanic vote” to shore up the dwindling demographics of the liberal establishment, it is unlikely that Congress will make any effort to save United States citizens from the SAVE Act. As if more proof were needed, without any explanation, Congress has already stripped away the $3 billion in funds intended to build the double-layer border fence that was approved last year. Without telling the public, Congress pulled the plug on the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence that it voted to build with such enthusiasm and grandstanding (just before they asked voters to re-elect them). So what is the point of the SAVE Act except to try to scam the American public for the twentieth time into accepting the existence of an ever increasing number of illegal aliens in the United States? Many of these very same congressmen that defunded the border fence are touting the SAVE Act?

There is still one more small nagging detail. What about justice for past or present criminal acts committed by illegal aliens, criminal acts that accumulate year after year without justice? What about all the past deportations that were simply ignored or never enforced? What happened when the alien returned defiantly and reentered the United States? Where is the accountability for repeatedly crossing the border illegally, not to mention the crimes recklessly committed while in the United States?

Is there anybody (that is both awake and conscious) that does not believe that United States citizens deserve justice for what they have had to suffer - for the fraud, the violent crimes, deaths at the hands of illegal aliens that continue at the rate of 5,000 citizens per year, human trafficking, drug importation and property crimes – all facilitated for 20 years by elected representatives, such as Senator John McCain who is chief among men who seek to rule rather than govern, i.e., to become Caesar. If John McCain is unresponsive to 80-90 percent of his own state’s registered voters who want illegal alien migration into Arizona stopped, and has done nothing but pander to special interests for 20 years, is John McCain participating in governing as a representative of Arizona, or attempting to rule?

Maybe justice should begin with our elected representatives. Maybe Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano should be named as an unindicted co-conspirator on every homicide committed by an illegal alien in the State of Arizona.

Maybe Senator John McCain can explain why his refusal to enforce existing immigration laws is not a form of gross malfeasance in public office, and why facilitating illegal alien migration is not a cruel form of torture on every United States citizen?

Have you ever asked yourself, “How many United States crime victims at the hands of illegal aliens will finally be too many, even for a heartless politician?” Will 1,000,000 be too many? That sad milestone was passed a long time ago. Maybe Arizona Senator Jon Kyl has the answer? What are his “reasonable carnage” limits – otherwise known as acceptable collateral damage? If one rape in Iraq is too many, how many thousands of rapes of our cherished wives and daughters should be acceptable?

It should not be lost on voters that Senator Jon Kyl has just been promoted to the #2 position of Senate Republican leadership responsibility (Asst. Minority Whip) by his peers. This is the man who voted for construction of the border wall before he voted against funding it. Clearly, Republicans who voted for Senator Kyl to become Asst. Minority Whip proudly share his vacant value system – a belief system that says there are no limits on collateral damage suffered by citizens at the hands of illegal aliens in the United States. These are the very same men and women who are now among the 133 sponsors of the SAVE Act.

It may be a novel concept to liberals, including Democrats and liberal Republicans, but when someone says “enforce the laws,” THAT INCLUDES ACCOUNTABILITY, not just picking up illegal aliens off the street, filling out the paperwork and putting the alien on a bus back to Mexico. Enforcement includes accountability - or it is not enforcement. What part of ILLEGAL don’t American liberals and illegal aliens understand? Are we to assume that liberals in general and illegal aliens in particular will pick and choose which laws, if any, are applicable to them? So much for the SAVE Act.

United States citizens (except female teachers who rape young male students) are usually held accountable for crimes committed under state and federal laws. They do hard time. They are taken off the streets for extended periods of time both to protect society and to create a deterrent. They don’t get celebrity status and a “get-out-of-jail-free card” simply because they’re illegally in the United States. They’re not deported to their homes in a neighboring state or foreign country. They can't flee across an imaginary border to escape prosecution. Why should illegal aliens and potential terrorists be too good for the Rule of Law? Why not ask your congressman for an explanation why the potential Mexican votes are more important than those of United States citizens?

You already know the cynical answer. Hispanic activists, corporate interests, attorneys, and those who profit from the criminal enterprise of illegal alien migration, are buying congressional votes. You’re not. Pushing the SAVE Act through Congress is akin to putting more Congressmen in Washington, D.C. as if more congressmen will somehow lessen the political corruption.

There is only one thing that will ever stop illegal alien migration into the United States. Do you want the migration of illegal aliens to stop, or don't you?

Illegal aliens just like every other human being, including and exemplified by United States politicians, act with few exceptions in their own self-interest. Illegal aliens cross the border for only one reason – self interest. Illegal aliens must be made to fervently believe that they do not want to endure what they are going to find in the United States if they are found to have committed a crime as an illegal alien.

Besides, what illegal alien would want to come to the United States if there were no jobs readily available or social benefits waiting for them? Think about it; only a terrorist or a serial criminal would enter the United States illegally in the face of probable hardship.

The only solution to illegal alien migration, assuming that United States citizens have both the desire and the stomach to make it stop, is to create a credible disincentive to “illegal” migration - to make it socially and economically painful to be an illegal alien in the United States – of any ethnic origin or religious affiliation. If we as a nation (our congressmen) are not willing to strip away the taxpayer funded benefits lavished on illegal aliens, and protect United States jobs, American culture and the environment, why not just start printing and distributing engraved invitations?

Maybe we are all missing the point. Maybe Governor Napolitano’s DHS-sanctioned illegal alien radio-chip driver’s licenses are intended as an engraved invitation.

For those who are advocates of “hate crime” legislation, why not talk about the epitome of hate crimes? How about an illegal alien victimizing a United States citizen? If that crime scenario is not a hate crime, both against the United States and the citizen, nothing is. Men and women serving in uniform will tell you that desecrating the United States flag by flying it upside down subservient to the Mexican flag is among the worst of hate crimes.

For those who are environmental advocates, why not talk about the relentless destruction of the natural environment in the Southwest United States by illegal aliens, and their reckless consumption of valuable natural resources? Why should United States citizens, for example, have to subsidize the price of gasoline, and then be denied the supply of 50 million gallons of automobile gasoline required every day to transport illegal aliens to and from social services, education, medical care and illegal jobs?

The unfortunate reality is that sanctuary cities are still open for business, welcoming illegal aliens with chain migration, anchor baby citizenship, medical care, day labor centers and taxpayer-funded education. Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon and Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris are among the nation’s most notorious illegal alien enablers. Advocates of the SAVE Act don't care. What Rule of Law?

What about the border fence? Listen carefully. If you want a nation tomorrow, build the border fence today, and the converse applies. If you don’t care, so be it. The wall is the most effective and least expensive of all options – no exceptions – no debate. Doing nothing is likely to be the most expensive option in the long term, both in carnage and squandered tax dollars.

Do not allow yourself to be confused. Do you want a United States of America to exist or not? We are standing on the edge of a proverbial cliff and the advocates of illegal alien migration (and a North American Union) want us to jump off - voluntarily. They think we are that stupid. They think our patriotism, flag-flying, churchgoing, marriage, having children, owning a gun and driving an SUV is stupid. They think the goodness of America and its founding principles are stupid, particularly the part about private property and individual liberty. They think they're superior to 'We the People' and rest assured they intend to decide the future of our nation, or our city, or our homeowners association, because their brilliance is to be presumed, never challenged and without question. We love America and put our hand over our heart when the National Anthem is played (some congressmen don't). We proudly recite the Pledge of Allegiance (some candidates for president don't).

The issues of national sovereignty, free trade and the Rule of Law are not complicated. However, with each passing day that there is not a double-layer border fence, we lose a little more of the dwindling opportunity to regain control of our national sovereignty. Each day without decisive action to close the borders makes it more difficult to restore what was once the most successful culture in the history of mankind. The movement toward a collectivist hemispheric or world government already has considerable momentum. The important point to remember is that national borders are at the heart of the issue!

Opponents say that a double-layer border fence would be ineffective as a barrier to illegal aliens since the incentives to cross the border are simply too strong. The claim is that illegal aliens would only find another way – over, under or around. Why is it not logical to extrapolate using a little common sense? How can any number of border agents (standing shoulder to shoulder if necessary, 24/7, resembling a wall), including those authorized in the SAVE Act, ever hope to compete with the same social incentives that illegal alien activists say would defeat a rigid double-layer border fence?

Expensive technology (if it is not routinely vandalized) would be useful in telling us where and when illegal aliens are crossing the border, but technology is not going to stop the intruders, or apprehend them, or hold them accountable for their criminal activity, or most importantly, provide any disincentives to crossing the border.

Just as it is not in your best interests to unlawfully try to enter my house, illegal aliens from Mexico, or traversing Mexico, must be made to feel just as passionately as their American neighbors to the North that it is NOT in their best interests to illegally cross the United States/Mexico border. Nothing in the SAVE Act will lessen the current incentives to cross illegally, so what is the point of the SAVE Act? Everything in the SAVE Act intentionally avoids dealing with the incentives that attract illegal aliens into the United States. Nothing in the SAVE Act is designed to stem the illegal alien migration tsunami.

The actual point of the SAVE Act legislation may be insidious, i.e., to give every illegal alien some form of “a legal status” and identification that will entitle apprehended illegal aliens access to the United States judicial system, and appeals to higher courts, before their eventual deportation. As long as illegal aliens have some form of Congressionally mandated legal status, they are not illegal aliens under immigration law, just undocumented workers – people like you and me that have rights in United States courts and now have the legal sanction to remain on the streets of the United States until their immigration case is resolved, regardless of how long millions of such cases will take. If there are no illegal aliens, only undocumented workers, problem solved.

Do you recognize a pattern at work across the entire nation? Elected politicians at every level of government are simply ignoring existing laws. As long as the smorgasbord of social incentives for illegal aliens remains on the table, border agents might as well be standing in front of a runaway bus. Regardless of the numbers of new agents the SAVE Act would authorize, border agents have about the same chance of stopping a runaway bus as they do stopping illegal alien migration and drug trafficking without someone getting hurt or killed. If the border agent is lucky enough to survive an armed encounter with illegal aliens, it is probable the border agent will be prosecuted for violating the imaginary rights of the illegal alien and then inhumanely incarcerated.

The North Vietnamese imprisoned John McCain for attacking their country. We’ve imprisoned several of our own Border Patrol agents for defending our country. John McCain was tortured by his captors. Our Border Patrol agents have been brutally beaten in prison. Doesn’t it make you just swell up with pride?

United States citizens who care about the future of their nation are in a literal tug-of-war with their elected representatives, i.e., people who by their actions show they care nothing about anything but self-interest. Recognize that the U.S. Senate is absolutely defiant in their refusal to enforce all existing laws, not just immigration laws. Almost to the man and woman, Congress collectively remains determined to disregard the best interests of the United States and refuses to protect the nation’s borders from all enemies foreign and domestic.

The SAVE Act appears to be just another move in the open borders chess game, another shuffle of the cards, another variation of the shell-game we’ve become accustomed to – the con-job known as “comprehensive immigration reform.”

Red State Patriot

Comments are welcome at redstatepatriot@hughes.net. Please include the title of the article as your subject line. Selected responses, in whole or part, may be published (appended to the article).

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Storming the Courts is a fast read - and an advertisement for the fun one can have by going to law school. This resonated with me, since my current job involves promoting the role of lawyers in national security. Still, I found myself getting annoyed by some of the ideological protagonists, like a student referred to as "Lisa Do-Good."

Lisa has never had a job in her life and cries when she hears about the employment offers received by her classmates. Adult employment, it seems requires and certain amount of nuance and subtlety, not something she has in large quantities. To young Lisa, the government's policy on the Haitians was "f----- racist," pure and simple. She spends hours on the computer, reading cases that might stoke the revolution. She even makes Koh weary by her constant harping. She eventually turns on her Haitian clients, saying "I've been killing myself for these people and they don't even give a damn." Welcome to the life of law, Lisa.

When Clinton is elected near the end of the book, Lisa and her classmates allow themselves the hope that the incoming administration will eliminate the Department of Justice's Office of Immigration Litigation (OIL), because its lawyers have the audacity to defend immigration judge rulings to assure that the American borders are not porous.

To these students, OIL is an "insular group with a fanatically anti-immigrant culture." Of course, Janet Reno saw things differently as did her boss, who suffered the political blowback of mass refugee populations of the type depicted in Brian DePalma's Scarface being housed into Arkansas.

I would have liked Storming the Courts better if Koh and his students took up the cause of women who are relegated to slave-like status in the Muslim world, forced to undergo a gruesome medical procedure to assure that they will never enjoy sexual intercourse. Of course, that would require these students to embrace a cause they would rather ignore, because it is championed by right-wingers they likely despise.

Koh and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is also featured in the book, have done some good work over the years. I find myself cheering for them as they sue Latin American dictators and death squads and oil companies whose commercial activity leads to violent repression of native populations in Africa and Asia. To me, these cases represent American law at its best. I tend to cringe whenever one of them is thwarted by the appearance of the United States, as when the Justice Department - my employer over the past two decades - files "statements of interest" to stay to litigation against international villains in the name of foreign policy. Alas, my respect for CCR is unrequited. In a March 2007 Legal Times article, Michael Ratner publicly doubted that anyone likes me. I can take that, if that's the worst he can say about me.

Why am I such unlikeable person? For Ratner, it is because I have suggested that there is an unscrupulous form of lawfare. This is a shame, since I am enthusiastic about lawfare in general. It's only the bad form of it that frustrates me, because it makes my profession look ridiculous. This is not a distinction CCR understands.

Lawfare (efforts to achieve of military objectives through legal tools) has developed an unfortunate derogatory connotation, to describe the work of unscrupulous practitioners using legal institutions to thwart otherwise legal U.S. military operations. The problem is that war fighting is governed by international law, and its practitioners are hardly lawless. People who wrongly accuse the U.S. of war crimes are represented by lawyers who need a refresher course in legal ethics, and in what constitutes frivolous litigation.

These practitioners, I believe, deserve the criticism they get. I prefer to label what they do "bad lawfare" or "unscrupulous lawfare," thereby leaving open a form of the term that should be promoted. This distinction has not prevented a group of conservative legal commentators like Andrew McCarthy and Jack Goldsmith from sneering at the term itself, without the necessary qualification that I urge, nor has it prevented people from thinking that I invoke lawfare to condemn it in all forms. It's my goal to steal the term back from them.

I have written about this issue in FindLaw, an online legal magazine. The first of my lawfare articles introduced the concept (which, contrary to popular belief I did not coin), and suggested that lawyers have a vital role to play in counterterrorism, if for no other reason that they control certain levers of statecraft that are sometimes the only counterterrorism option. My second FindLaw article went further, arguing that the American legal community needs to look inward if we ever to take the term lawfare back from its derogatory connotation.

I wrote that there are anecdotal signs that certain American lawyers are practicing the odious form of lawfare, as when they use legal proceedings for their pet political causes or try to impose absurd legal requirements that would prevent the U.S. from fighting wars in a way that conforms with the Law of Armed Conflict. These efforts play into the hands of people who think that lawyers should be eliminated from U.S. national security decision making altogether. I maintain it is an obligation of lawyers to assess costs within our profession, to keep it clear of the taint of those who are inclined to dislike us. Of course I was not speaking on behalf of the United States. I was writing as a licensed lawyer, about an important matter to my profession

The second article apparently hit some FindLaw readers close to home. Over the weekend, I received a bunch of angry e-mails, mainly from human rights practitioners in Scandinavia and radical New York lawyers, who expressed chagrin in my comments.

I responded to all of them. This was easy, for they generally misunderstood my argument to say that lawyers should not be involved in counterterrorism or in seeking to enforce that the U.S. government act in a legal way. In fact, that was the exactly opposite of what I was saying. I made no apologies. Then, about a week later, I learned that Legal Times was planning an article on the controversy I had stoked, which would include suggestions that I had somehow violated ethics rules and should be fired from federal employment.

What an ironic way for lawyers to react, I thought, to a message with which they happen to disagree. Moreover, I was arguing in favor of lawfare, and limited my condemnation to the type of lawfare that gives lawyers a bad name. Since when is that a firing offense?

At the urging of the Department of Justice's Public Affairs Office, I spoke to the Legal Times reporter, explained my position, and pointed her to other articles I had written on the subject. She took it all in. The resulting piece was far more balanced than her initial inquires seemed to portend, though she included that quote from Michael Ratner that I am not a likeable person. Surely he was speculating, for we have never met. Still, that's fair. I don't much like Lisa Do-Gooder, though I've never met her.

The latest form of bad lawfare is exemplified by the absurd lawsuit CCR recently fired against Professor John Yoo. His crime was giving advice to his superiors when he was employed by the government. This advice included whether it was okay to hold Jose Padilla after he was arrested in the United States on his way to do something bad on behalf of al Qaeda.

Of course, we all know that Jose Padilla is being held incommunicado, deprived of the ability to see a lawyer. However, I seem to recall that the Supreme Court issued an opinion on Padilla's detention, which means that perhaps he did have a lawyer. I also heard a rumor that he had a trial, overseen by federal judge Marcia Cooke, and it involved a jury. I seem to recall that Padilla was convicted, and that there was something called a "sentencing hearing" this past week in Miami. At least that's what the newspapers say.

Given these rumors, what is it CCR alleges John You to have done? He spoke words to his supervisors. He even wrote words on papers that were routed to them. Now I seem to remember something about "sticks and stones," and how they might be contrasted with words, in terms of their ability to hurt. That may be just a rumor as well.

Of course, CCR believes that money - which can buy sticks and stone, as well as bombs and bullets - qualifies as something that can never cause harm. That is why they have argued that the United States cannot constitutionally criminalize the act of giving money to foreign terrorist groups, and that private lawyers suing on behalf of victims of Hamas terrorism cannot collect against those who gave Hamas money, even if the government has announced that it is foreseeable that all money sent to Hamas will help it wage its campaign of indiscriminate violence.

How would CCR feel about American manufacturing companies that sell some of its lawful products to the Israeli military? Is that unreachable? Hardly. Jennifer Green of CCR, who filed a lawsuit against Caterpillar for its acts of selling bulldozers to the Israeli government, stated "[I] imposing liability for knowingly providing substantial assistance in the commission of internationally wrongful conduct requires no revolutionary insight. It only requires faithful adherence to the understanding of the [American law] at its inception and the application of modern common law principles." Banks providing financial service to the South Africa Apartheid regime? Also fair game to CCR.

I see. So to CCR, it all depends on the identity of the defendant. If they have done something that CCR does not like, they can be sued. If not, such lawsuits are unconstitutional.

This makes likeability legally actionable. John Yoo's problem, like mine, is that he is not liked, at least to CCR. If CCR has its way, perhaps people will think twice before joining the McCain or Romney Administration. After all, there are a group of young lawyers and law students lying in wait, ready to storm the courts. Indeed, law can be fun.

By Jeff Breinholt
January 24, 2008

The original article can be found at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

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If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, this one speaks volumes.

Monday night news (January 21, 2008) featured coverage from the Martin Luther King Day parade on Channel 3 News, Corpus Christi, Texas.

Maybe the time has come to return the responsibility of educating our youth to the states!

Can anybody hear me? Does anybody care about the future of the United States of America?

Red State Patriot

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Before anyone waxes stupid, please don't tell me that all generalizations are invalid because not every member of the given group will conform to a generalization. Intelligent people understand that legitimate generalizations are