Iraq on a Platter, More to Come

Insist that U.S. Border Patrol, ICE, the White House and DHS close the Southern Border NOW. There is disease, there are rapists, there are drugs and more. Any 9-11 type terrorists can hide within the crowded incursion, the insurgency in any Southern border state. Simply said, no one in government can ensure-guarantee our safety. That is a breech of oath and a violation of countless laws.

Barack Obama has delivered Iraq to ISIS, and Lebanon and Jordan are in the sites of the Caliphate. Syria is not save-able. Turkey will align with the ISIS mission when it is over. Israel has no chance except to go it alone. Iran is watching and calculating. 9-11 as we knew it in 2001 is another very real probability.

The Southern border of the United States and there is virtually no control there now, such that anyone is welcome, Barack Obama turned the light from yellow to green and there is a robust organized event underway that terrorists/jihadis are going to state departments of public safety to obtain driver licenses in Latin names to assimilate easier and under the guise of the graces of Barack Obama.

Arabic southern border

ISIS is the top terror organization globally, way beyond that of al Qaeda, AQAP. AQIM, Taliban and Ansar al Sharia where Haqqani is ranked just below ISIS.

The rules in ISIS’ new state: Amputations for stealing and women to stay indoors.

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is now effectively governing a large chunk of Iraqi territory. Considering this is a group that al-Qaeda broke ties with for being too extreme, that’s a pretty big deal.

Now, as a de-facto government, they have released a document aimed at civilians in Nineveh, a province in the country’s northeast that contains the major city Mosul. Branded a “Contract of the City,” the document contains 16 notes for residents.

Among the 16 notes are a number of rules ranging from the benign to the worrying. Here are some of the highlights (these are paraphrased, not direct translations):

  • All Muslims will be treated well, unless they are allied with oppressors or help criminals.
  • Money taken from the government is now public. Whoever steals or loots faces amputations. Anyone who threatens or blackmails will face severe punishment (This section also quotes a verse from the Quran (Al-Ma’idah: 33) that says that criminals may be killed or crucified).
  • All Muslims are encouraged to perform their prayers with the group.
  • Drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes are banned.
  • Rival political or armed groups are not tolerated.
  • Police and military officers can repent, but anyone who insists upon apostasy faces death.
  • Sharia law is implemented.
  • Graves and shrines are not allowed, and will be destroyed.
  • A women are told that stability is at home and they should not go outside unless necessary. They should be covered, in full Islamic dress.
  • Be happy to live in an Islamic land.

The document is signed by the “Media Office for Ninawa Province.” You can read the full text in Arabic here.

ISIS Shelling Kurdish Peshmerga-controlled Areas South of Kirkuk

KIRKUK, Kurdistan Region – Kurdish Peshmerga leaders say that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has began shelling areas south of Kirkuk, where Peshmerga forces stepped in to fill in deserted Iraqi Army positions.

In response the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) Deputy Minister of Peshmerga, Anwar Haji Osman, urged Arab tribes in the region “not to let their territories be used by the ISIS for shelling other areas.”

As ISIS forces take cities and claim to be close to Baghdad – after the Iraqi army collapsed and fled before a threatened onslaught by the militants — Kurdish forces slowly moved in to take control of major roads, as well as Kurdish-majority villages and towns.

Obama’s Rebuke to Iraq

Syria mapThe blood and treasure of valiant U.S. troops and allied forces spent in Iraq are fading away. We are sadly witnessing a complete shift to supremacy in the Middle East such that the entire Obama National Security team must be fired, and NOW.

Maliki has begged for air support from NATO and the United States for more than a year. Barack Obama, simply said no. Instead Barack Obama chose to sell Iraq military assets that include fighter jets, weapons and surveillance equipment. There is no other plan to stop the caliphate. except between Barack Obama and John Kerry the only solution is a $5 billion Counter-terrorism Partnership Fund for the Overseas Contingency Operation. This Fund and its design has yet to be fully crafted, it is likely only in concept mode. This does not help Iraq nor does it help NATO.

Meanwhile Turkey is on full alert as their consulate in Iraq has been seized and at least 24 employees of the diplomatic staff there have been kidnapped.

ISIL is moving towards Baghdad, and one of the largest embassies of the U.S. is there. Currently the most proactive measure so far to protect our embassy is to put out travel warnings.

Since the invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces in 2003, Iraq had been the mandate of a multi-national contingent led by the U.S. However, as control began to slip away from this multi-national contingent, and later U.S. troops also started to pull out of Iraq, the Quds Force, which is the special-ops unit of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) of Iran, under the leadership of the enigmatic Major General Qasem Soleimani, by taking advantage of the situation managed to replace the multi-national force.

Dozens of comprehensive reports published in the past couple of years show that Soleimani has been wielding considerable power in Iraq and been enjoying a privileged position behind the political scene in that country. As it seems, he has under his thumb both Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister of Iraq, and Masoud Barzani, the President of the Iraqi Kurdistan Region. By exploiting his immense clout in Iraq, he has been tirelessly setting up numerous Shi’ite militia bands and training and equipping them, not only to enhance his influence and maintain his empire in Iraq but also to keep the road to Syria, where many pro-Islamic Republic contingents fight for the Assad regime, secure.

So, perhaps it is easier to explain by just looking at maps. The question now is what comes next? The power struggle is convoluted but it does include Iran’s al Quods force, Kurds, al Nusra, AQIM, Haqqani, Taliban, ISIS, which make up the whole region.

AQ map and affiliatesisil map

The Child Incursion

Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson is a busy man spinning the disaster at the Southern border laying blame on Congress.

illegals

Although the Obama administration labels the flow of children a “humanitarian” crisis rather than an enforcement problem, Mr. Johnson said he has directed agents to go after the smuggling networks that control the traffic across the border and are thought to be responsible for encouraging Guatemalans, Hondurans and Salvadorans to cross the U.S. border.

He also said the U.S. needs a “robust” public relations campaign to discourage Central Americans from attempting the journey and to warn of the dangers along the way.

Sadly however, Johnson is so wrong on every front as this insurgency was concocted by the White House exclusively and effectively advertised and sold to Central and South America effectively.

Newspapers in El Salvador and Honduras are promoting policies by the Obama administration that defer deportation to minors brought to the United States as children by their parents — known as “Dreamers” — and those that are housing illegal children at military bases in the South and West.

Signed by President Barack Obama in 2012, the policy grants temporary legal status to many young illegal immigrants, ending the threat of deportation for at least two years.

The policy, however, does not entitle the immigrants to state services. It was renewed for two more years.

“With the renewal of DACA, we act according to our values and code of this great nation,” Johnson said. “But the biggest task of comprehensive immigration reform is yet to come.”
In November 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the U.S. was pledging $100 million to support Latino entrepreneurs through a public-private partnership dubbed La Idea. The effort, Clinton said, “brings together diaspora communities, the private sector, and public institutions to work on some of the toughest issues we face.” She noted her excitement about one of the central elements of La Idea: a pitch competition calling for “ideas for new businesses that will create jobs and promote trade and investment” in Latin America.

Similar to other entrepreneurship programs backed by the U.S. government in Africa and the Caribbean, the La Idea contest revolves around the idea that the more than 2.3 million Latino entrepreneurs in the U.S. have plenty to teach their counterparts in Latin America, and vice-versa. The big idea is to encourage them to form partnerships and expand their ventures across the Americas to spur economic development, says Jane Buhks, a marketing and communications specialist at New York-based Accion U.S. Network, which is handling the contest’s administration.

The borders of North America under the Obama administration are only implied now and have no significance. There are many government agencies that are part of the edict from the Obama White House such that it involves, DHS, State, DoJ, Department of Education and Health and Human Services, all these secretaries have signed on. The rewards for the illegals are wide and deep at the expense of the taxpayer all without notice or approval.

A new federal policy allows young unauthorized immigrants who are low enforcement priorities to remain in the country temporarily. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy allows the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to exercise prosecutorial discretion in granting administrative relief from deportation for young people covered by the policy. A person who receives deferred action is considered to be lawfully present. Deferred action status, however, does not grant the immigrant any substantive rights, legal immigration status or a pathway to citizenship. Deferred action recipients are not eligible for the Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicaid, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Deferred action is permitted for a period of two years and can be renewed.

Those granted deferred action may apply for work authorization. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) began to accept applications for deferred action as of Aug. 15, 2012. This policy change was made via a policy memorandum issued June 15, 2012, by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The most important document of all is from the State Department, which demonstrates and aggressive and proactive objective to reach out to other countries, any country and encourage them to come to the United States, joining all races and cultures into one and the very easy path to U.S. citizenship.

Sovereignty is damned, the definition of ‘citizen’ is damned, law are damned and the taxpayer is damned.

 

Obama’s 2012 Pen, Today’s Border Insurgency

The truth is fleeting but the other scandal that is surfacing now beyond the boatload of others from 2012 orchestrated by the Barack Obama re-election team is the border insurgency by children.

Barack Obama ordered Janet Napolitano to instruct Border Security agents on deferred action and she complied. There were restrictions to this new lawless order, yet compliance is occurring which is no surprise.

So, now Barack Obama’s pen is about to cost tax payers at least $2 billion to handle the insurgency. This is going to cause chaos that had yet to be fully realized that includes illness, disease, food, shelter, investigations, transportation, education and burdens on states and the military that are not poised to handle.

Immigration agents are so overwhelmed that some children are being kept in detention and being processed during a longer time period than the 72-hour maximum requirement, these senior administration officials acknowledged. The officials briefed reporters on condition of anonymity.

Although they said they had been prepared for an increase this year in the Rio Grande Valley, the influx was much greater than anticipated. As many as 90,000 minors are forecast to enter the U.S. this year without their parents or guardians, the officials said.

The legacy definition of the word ‘citizen’ has been re-defined. The tangible and implied borders of the United States have vanished and the fact is there is no crisis in Central America causing the influx of this trafficking. This is all a condition of politics that was concocted in 2012 such that the wake of the disaster is being realized today and creating huge challenges for states and a handful of military  bases where Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has ordered some military bases to handle a humanitarian crisis.

One must remember the Mariel Boatlift was a crisis where Carter took a stand and reversed to influx of Cubans.

insurgency

This is human-trafficking sanctioned by Barack Obama and deemed so by a Judge.

‘Many of the children there were sleeping on plastic boards. According to the Associated Press, toothbrushes and toothpaste hadn’t arrived yet and were expected Monday. Hundreds of children had not bathed in days, and were taking turns using just four showers. Tony Banegas, Honduras’ honorary consul in Phoenix, told the AP that there were 236 Honduran children there on Saturday, including an 8-year-old’.  Read more here and take a look at the disgusting conditions Barack Obama, Janet Napolitano and Jeh Johnson created.

An estimated 60,000 such children will pour into the United States this year, according to the administration, up from about 6,000 in 2011. Now, Washington is trying to figure out how to pay for their food, housing and transportation once they are taken into custody.

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.

The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.

The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.

The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.

“This is a humanitarian crisis and it requires a humanitarian response,” Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski said in an interview. The Maryland Democrat, a former social worker, has likened the flood of unaccompanied children to the “boat people” of past exodus movements.

Barack Obama and his team broke a system, broke the law, broke enforcement and had no plan or intention to fix it, now when this crisis has reached an epic status, it will cost the taxpayers big bucks.

War Time President or Ally? Not so Much

Much has been written that Barack Obama is feeble when it comes to foreign policy. There is the matter of Syria where deference was given to Putin by the White House to handle matters regarding the civil war there as well as the chemical weapons. Well, now additional chemical weapons are being used today that are chlorine based barrel bombs. Then there is Iraq where war again is as bad today as it was in 2004.

One cannot overlook the matter of the Budapest Memorandum where the United States as well as the United Kingdom must protect Ukraine with something more than a VP Joe Biden visit and MRE’s.

Completely ignored until 300 girls were kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Harem, it was not until the media reported the vast kidnappings that we found that neither Hillary Clinton or John Kerry listed Boko Harem on the FTO (Foreign Terror Organization) list. Heck it was not until this past January of 2014 that the attackers in Benghazi, Ansar al Sharia was listed on the FTO.

There is a war brewing in the South China sea where China continues to be aggressive over disputed islands involving Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines.

So, sanctions rule and go where no offensive measures shall. Diplomatic victories should prevail for sure but to date, all diplomatic efforts and talks have failed with Iran nuclear negotiations are now permanently broken as is the matter between Israel and the Palestinians.

The truth be known, America is at war and Barack Obama has not figured out how to be a war time president except to retreat without tangible victories anywhere.

Allies are asking hard questions of the White House and not getting any responses, so their conclusions are such that they doubt seriously that America even with NATO’s Article 5 will not be at their side at all.

 

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May 27, 2014

U.S. Foreign Policy Barack Obama Is Accused Of Timidity Overseas, Raising Fear and Anger Among The Country’s Allies.

By Geoff Dyer

When President Barack Obama ran for re-election in 2012, he pulled off what for Democrats was a remarkable feat – he took foreign policy off the table as a campaign issue.  Ever since Harry Truman was accused of “losing China”, Republicans have sought to cast their Democratic opponents as weak in the face of foreign challenges. Yet fresh from his risky but successful military operation to kill Osama bin Laden, Mr. Obama side-stepped the usual assault during his re-election campaign. His challenger Mitt Romney hardly brought up foreign policy.  Eighteen months later, the political ground is shifting rapidly beneath Mr. Obama’s feet. As he prepares to give an important address on foreign policy at West Point tomorrow, the president finds himself under attack over what critics charge is a record of indecisive leadership.  The loudest voices have been Mr. Obama’s political opponents at home, but the critique of a rudderless, risk-adverse president has also found strong echoes among some of America’s most important allies. From Saudi Arabia to Japan, officials have been wondering whether the US would still come to their defense.  Mr. Obama’s election in 2008 reflected a widespread belief at home and abroad that there was “too much America” in the world. Although he still seems to be in tune with the US public, Mr. Obama faces the accusation that there is now too little.  Even John Kerry, his secretary of state, appeared to acknowledge this international perception in a speech last week. “We cannot allow a hangover from the excessive interventionism of the last decade to lead now to an excess of isolationism,” he told students at Yale. “Most of the rest of the world doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about America’s presence – they worry about what would happen in our absence.”

In his West Point speech, Mr. Obama will lay out how the US intends to “lead the international community but without getting overextended”, as a White House official puts it. But the persistent attacks have left Mr. Obama in a defensive crouch, tetchily defending his cautious approach.  “That may not always be sexy. That may not always attract a lot of attention, and it doesn’t make for good argument on Sunday morning shows,” he said during a recent Asia trip. “But it avoids errors.”  The rap sheet on Mr. Obama has two basic charges: that he is too timid in his approach to foreign affairs; and that the US has begun a process of retreating from its place in the world during his presidency.  “On all these issues, our response has been to do the minimum and no more,” says Bob Corker, the leading Republican on the Senate foreign relations committee. “Every allied government I talk to, I get the same questions about whether we will be there.”  On one level, the claim that Mr. Obama is too passive is part of a longstanding intellectual debate in Washington about foreign policy.

When he was first elected, many analysts pegged Mr. Obama as an idealist – a reflection of his stirring rhetoric, his reaching out to the Muslim world and his longstanding association with Samantha Power, now his UN ambassador and the leading intellectual voice of liberal interventionism.  Instead, in recent years Mr. Obama has revealed himself as a president more rooted in a realist tradition that is more focused on the defense of national interests and is wary of moral causes. This should not have come as a complete surprise: even during his first election campaign, he told interviewers of his respect for the foreign policy of George HW Bush. Mr. Obama’s reticence over Syria reflects a belief that it is better to avoid mistakes than to appear decisive.  “The United States has a hard-earned humility when it comes to our ability to determine events inside other countries,” Mr. Obama said in a speech to the UN last September.  “Obama’s mistake on Syria was not that he did not follow through on the red line he set [about the use of chemical weapons],” says John Mearsheimer, the University of Chicago scholar who is one of the leading realist thinkers. “It was setting a red line in the first place.” (He adds that he believes Mr. Obama “95 per cent supports” his point of view.)    Such a world view, however, puts the president at odds with a large part of the US foreign policy establishment on both the left and the right, which, despite the traumas of Iraq, is still instinctively interventionist.

Some supporters worry that the president’s caution can become an excuse for inaction. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, says that he believes Mr. Obama often has the right instincts but that “he does not always translate that into diplomatic strategies to achieve his goals”.  Mr. Obama has added to the impression of dithering and inaction through his highly deliberative style of decision-making, which is in stark contrast to George W Bush’s reliance on gut instinct. The months of painstaking discussion in the first term over whether to put more troops into Afghanistan have been matched in the second term by a series of reviews of Syria policy, which have each ended with Mr. Obama deciding to do little.  The root cause of much of the angst about Mr. Obama has been his public wobble last September over whether to launch Tomahawk missiles against Syria, culminating in the walk on the White House lawn when he decided to punt the issue to Congress. Outside of the Middle East, few US allies were worried about the details of the proposed Syria strike: what rattled them was the sight of a US president making a threat and then deciding he did not have the political authority to carry through with it.  “We have lost some of the aura we used to enjoy in the region,” says Vali Nasr, a former state department official in Mr. Obama’s first term who has been a strong critic of the administration’s approach to the Middle East. Since then the humanitarian catastrophe of the Syrian war has only deepened, yet Mr. Obama has consistently resisted pressure from within his administration to do more. Even those aides who agree with his caution admit it has been an inglorious episode.

The unfolding events in Europe and Asia have also fed the perception of a US president losing his capacity to shape events abroad. At a time that the Pentagon budget is being cut, China is increasingly bent on pursuing its territorial claims and on challenging American naval dominance in the western Pacific.  In Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been able to annex Crimea and to destabilize parts of the east of the country while the west has scrambled to come up with a response that will be effective in the short term. “While the wolf is eating the sheep, there is no shepherd to come to the rescue of the pack,” former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal told the FT.  The second, broader argument about the Obama presidency – that the US is disengaging from the world – is much harder to support. After all, the Afghanistan mission, which formally ends this year, is the longest-running conflict in US history.

The strongest complaints about American retrenchment have come from the Middle East. Yet even after the withdrawal from Iraq, the US military presence in the region remains formidable, following a dramatic expansion in recent decades. During the second term of Ronald Reagan, at the height of the cold war, the US had an average of 8,800 troops in the Middle East: it now has 35,000. “Over the years we have steadily militarized our approach to the Middle East, which has not always been in our interests,” says Dennis Blair, the retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence.  In some parts of the region and south Asia, Mr. Obama has provoked anger not for reticence over Syria, but for his aggressive use of drone strikes or cyber attacks against Iran.  Indeed, a significant part of the criticism from allies in the Middle East has been much less about the credibility of the American president and more about basic differences in interests. Washington’s biggest focus is preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon without starting a new war. The Saudis and Israelis, however, are incensed that the US would negotiate with a country they believe to be a rival for regional influence or an existential threat.  Many of the Sunni-dominated Gulf    nations see the Syrian war in sectarian terms and want to defeat Shia Iran. Yet the sectarian nature of the conflict is one of the main reasons the US is reluctant to get involved.

In Asia, the Obama administration is expanding America’s military presence, signing agreements with Australia and the Philippines for much greater access to bases and deepening co-operation with Japan. One explanation for recent Chinese assertiveness is that Mr. Obama has been pushing too hard rather than that he is considered a pushover.

Europe is the one place where the US military footprint has significantly shrunk. However, the case for a bigger American presence in Europe would be easier to make if European governments were not slashing their own defense budgets. Moreover, it is a stretch to suggest that Russia felt emboldened to annex Crimea because there were fewer US soldiers stationed in western Germany.  “We should worry less about putting more NATO troops in the Baltics, and more about whether there are disaffected Russian populations  that Putin can take advantage of,” says Thomas Graham, a former White House official under George W Bush.

Sometimes lost in Washington’s rancorous debates are the changes taking place in the world, the underlying shift in relative power that is being caused by the “rise of the rest”, the new generation of great powers that are staking their own claims.  The crises facing the administration are in many ways an early example of the harsh realities that a more multipolar world can bring.  Countries such as China and Russia appear to have found new ways to gradually chip away at US influence, pursuing territorial claims in Crimea or the South China Sea in a manner that fall well short of casus belli.  The fresh strategies that the US will require to meet this sort of challenge are rarely captured in the discussions about decisive presidential leadership.

Jeremy Shapiro, a former Obama administration official now at the Brookings Institution, highlights this changed foreign policy landscape. “With such a structural shift in international politics, the US will need to operate in different ways, but we are still struggling to come to terms with the new reality,” he says.