This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: American Kestrel

  • Trump’s appeal: Without ‘America First,’ nothing gets done

    Trump’s appeal: Without ‘America First,’ nothing gets done

    Let’s be honestly introspective for a moment.

    If you’ve ever been more concerned with Donald Trump’s destructive brand of politics than radical Islamism, America doesn’t have time for you anymore.  If you believe that criticizing Islamic terrorism only increases the terrorists’ recruitment efforts, your legitimacy as a talking head is coming to an end.

    The sun is setting on the era of political correctness.  No, Donald Trump’s bullying version is not the requisite norm, but getting into a tizzy because a public figure speaks frankly is definitely passé.

    For too long, the progressives’ army of social justice warriors have been criticizing every aspect of America while simultaneously protecting and promoting the global Muslim ummah.  In their worldview, Americans are somehow responsible for all that is bad in this world – both globally and at home.

    Pandering to bullies has always been counterproductive – and Islamic extremism is the global bully.  We do not avoid punishing a violent offender – not because the rate of recidivism is too high, not because we are afraid of reinforcing a deviant stereotype, and not because we fear creating disgruntled familial relations and future criminals.  We incarcerate them because we know that the only way to ensure that they will not prey on innocence is to remove them from society.

    How, then, do some intellectual types adhere to a belief system completely divorced from these realities?

    When dealing with bullies and criminals, there is an expectation that justice will be meted out.  When confronted with radical Islamists, suddenly this formula of identifying dangerous individuals and publicly ostracizing them is abruptly abandoned for a softer more intellectual approach.

    For the liberal gate guards of Islam, any correlation between the peaceful religion and terror atrocities is a nonstarter.  Despite the fact that this approach screams of intellectual dishonesty, liberal power brokers – of particular note: our current president and presumptive Democratic nominee – have determined that this is the path toward progress.

    Not anymore.

    Ignoring facts, data, and common sense was yesterday’s progressivism.  Donald Trump, for all of his many shortcomings, is ushering in a new era of realism.  In this new era, Americans are permitted to call a spade a spade.  Americans will no longer feel ashamed of putting their needs above the needs of every disadvantaged person in every corner of the world.

    American families know that before you can be successful in the workplace, you have to be successful in the home.  If you neglect the home life, productivity in the workplace inevitably falls.  Trump’s “America First” proposition is precisely that – it’s time to take care of the American homeland.

    As a strong and prosperous nation, America has always assisted globally – WWI, WWII, the Cold War, the Persian Gulf War, and financing the U.N.’s peacekeeping mission.  (The U.S. currently accounts for more than one-fifth – 22 percent – of the regular U.N. budget.)  As a weak, divided, and economically depressed nation, we flounder and exert ineffective domestic and foreign policy – the Civil War, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and Syria.

    Americans are long overdue for a policy that puts the spotlight back on its citizens.  Americans are desperate for a president who assures us that our success, safety, and future are prioritized above our global colleagues.

    America has a plot of land that is strategically isolated from the epicenter of the world’s current problems.  We should never use this strategic depth as an excuse to enact isolationist policy, but failing to recognize that our geographic location allows us the opportunity to rebuild our nation while remaining insulated from the societal shift that the Middle East and Europe is currently undergoing is foolish.

    Let’s make America great again first.  It is only from a position of strength that we can enact lasting and positive change on the global stage.

    Crossposted at American Thinker

  • Commander in Chief

    Commander in Chief

    Hillary Clinton believes she’s qualified to serve as Commander in Chief of the United States military—and rightly so.  Coming off the heels of a freshman Senator, who learned how to lead while on the job, a Washington fixture like Hillary is more than qualified.

    Consider her military leadership bona fides:

    Lying about combat.

    In 2008, Hillary Clinton lied about landing under sniper fire while visiting Bosnia in 1996.  Here’s exactly what she said,

    I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.

    She later said that she “misspoke.”  For those of us that have been on the receiving end of hostile fire, I’m sure we can understand how a greeting ceremony where she engaged in conversation with a little girl could easily be mistaken for sniper fire.

    Lying to the Benghazi families.

    Three days after the attacks in Benghazi, Hillary Clinton lied to the families of the fallen when she blamed a video for being responsible for the deaths.  Here’s exactly what she said to Tyrone Wood’s father and later to the American people,

    We are going to have the filmmaker arrested who was responsible for the death of your son.

    We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.

    When pressed about claims that she blamed the deaths on the video, Hillary (I want to lead America’s military) Clinton said the families were lying and then incoherently blamed the “fog of war.”  Apparently she’s read Clausewitz, although it’s more likely that one of her advisers (probably a draft dodger) told her to use that phrase.

    Lying about her classified emails.

    On March 10, 2015, Hillary Clinton informed the world that although she used a private email server, she did not compromise our nation’s secrets.  She clearly articulated,

    There is no classified material.

    Less than a year later the State Department informed Americans that 22 of her emails were classified “top secret.”  True to form, as per her website hillaryclinton.com, she still maintains that “nothing she sent or received was marked classified.”

    I’ve previously discussed her “marked classified” statements (here and here), and I’ve explained how she relies entirely on semantics.  Suffice to say; Hillary Clinton is a lying liar who is clinically delusional.

    Lying about lying.

    Remember when she said this in an interview?

    You’re asking me to say, ‘Have I ever [lied]?’ I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever have. I don’t believe I ever will. I am going to do the best I can to level with the American people,

    Honorable mention:  Apparently she tried to join the Marines.

    Here’s her recounting of the event,

    He looks at me and goes, ‘Um, how old are you. And I said, ‘Well I am 26, I will be 27.’ And he goes, ‘Well, that is kind of old for us.’ And then he says to me, and this is what gets me, ‘Maybe the dogs will take you,’ meaning the Army.

    If this story is true (it’s not) I would suggest adding a rejection of Hillary Clinton to the Marine Corps Hymn.

    From the Halls of Montezuma

    To the Shores of Tripoli;

    We fought our country’s battles

    By rejecting Hillary

    And there you have it folks, the epitome of a military leader: lying, blame shifting, no empathy for the fallen and zero integrity.

    Hail to the Chief!

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Next Generation Jihadists: A Rant

    Next Generation Jihadists: A Rant

    There is an obvious push by radical Islamists to spread their barbaric belief system across the globe.  They call it the Caliphate, and they have aspirations of a world subjugated to their interpretation of Islam.  None of this is new stuff.  We’ve been watching and reading about it for several years now.

    This being the case, why has our main effort continued to be “whack a mole” while the Islamists are committed to a concerted effort to raise up a new generation of radicals?

    In 2014, a filmmaker from Vice News embedded himself with ISIS in Raqqa, Syria.  One of the ISIS members interviewed was running a training camp for children.  He stated,

    “For us, we believe that this generation of children is the generation of the caliphate. This generation will fight the infidels and apostates, the Americans and their allies, God willing. The right doctrine has been implanted in these children,”

    In November of 2015,  a PBS documentary reported on ISIS training children as young as three-years-old in Afghanistan’s Kunar province.  The documentary shows an ISIS member teaching the children to operate Ak-47s and hand grenades.

    The Long War Journal brings us the most recent development in the disturbing trend of radical Islamists and their strategy to indoctrinate the next generation of jihadists.

    The Islamic State’s “Library of Zeal” has released an application for teaching the Arabic alphabet to children on Android devices. The vocabulary taught within the application includes jihadist themes.

    Words like “tank,” “gun,” and “rocket” are among the first few taught within the application.

    By now, this end state shouldn’t surprise anyone.  Yet, European countries have continued to open their borders to Middle Eastern migrants, and any suggestion to the contrary in the United States it met with accusations of xenophobia.

    London just elected the first Muslim mayor of a Western capital, and in a demonstration of solidarity for Ramadan printed the phrase “Praise Allah” on the city’s iconic red buses.

    You know what, f**k Europe—we saved them twice.  They made their bed, let them lie in it.

    I’m more concerned with what the United States is doing against this clear and present danger? (h/t Tom Clancy)

    Answer: The Obama administration continues to make the humanitarian argument.

    Despite Paris and Belgium, despite the fact that European women and children are sexually assaulted by throngs of migrant men, Obama seeks to emulate Germany’s immigration debacle and believes that Angela Merkel “is on the right side of history on this issue.”

    In November of 2015, Obama made the claim that members of the GOP were “scared of widows and orphans coming into the United States of America”—as if only members of the GOP are concerned about more San Bernardino terrorists slipping through the cracks (pronounced walking upright through the gaping holes) in immigration.

    Ironically, Obama made this statement while in the Philippines—a state that has fought an insurgency with Muslim secessionists for decades.  A state that knows all too well how an organized body of Muslims can demand, fight for, and ultimately win autonomy.  A state that recently elected a new president—Rodrigo Duterte.  Duterte is known as the “Trump of the East” and has vocally pledged to kill suspected criminals and end crime within six months.  In reference to territorial disputes in the South China Sea, Duterte stated, “I’ll go down, riding a jet-ski, carrying a Filipino flag … and then I would say, ‘This is ours.”

    Duterte’s comments may be testosterone fueled rhetoric, but it demonstrates that the Philippine electorate is looking for stronger leadership to replace an ineffective leader and increasingly absent U.S. ally.  Good for them.  The world is in desperate need of leaders that view the world through a lens of realism.

    Could leadership, or its seven-year absence—in the United States—be partly responsible for the continued rise of ISIS—or Trump for that matter? (rhetorical) And to think, many Americans are seriously considering voting for a liar who refuses to utter the phrase radical Islamists. (and who lied about being in combat)

    The kid that blew himself up and killed 65 civilians in Baghdad was only a teenager.  We can’t afford to give the keys to the White House to a stolen valor c**t who will do nothing to prevent today’s three-year-olds from entering the U.S. and becoming tomorrow’s suicide bombers.

  • Bullet-Ridden Bin Laden

    Bullet-Ridden Bin Laden

    A fellow Army SF guy recently wrote an article for Business Insider titled “Here’s the real reason that photos of bin Laden’s body won’t ever be shown.”  In the article, Jack Murphy writes that inside sources claim,

    “When all was said and done, UBL had over a hundred bullets in him, by the most conservative estimate.”

    Murphy went on to write,

    “what should concern you is a trend within certain special-operations units to engage in this type of self-indulgent, and ultimately criminal, behavior. Gone unchecked, these actions get worse over time.”

    Where I grew up in the Army, we were trained to shoot a fallen enemy combatant as you approached, but once you came back to them, and they were still alive—unless they were a threat—you had to treat them as a wounded combatant and provide life-saving care.

    Obviously, there was a lot of ambiguity in those set of instructions, and most warfighters agreed that a proper amount of rounds would ensure that no medical attention would be needed.  Furthermore, there was a consensus that a breathing enemy is always a threat—the mind is our greatest weapon after all. /S

    I know it’s common practice for military dog handlers let their dogs bite a dead enemy combatant while on the objective.  Apparently it helps keep the dogs sharp and permits them to act out their training to the fullest.

    Can the same be said about for our Special Operators?

    Personally, I don’t have a problem with America’s warrior class putting some frustration rounds into an enemy that was just trying to rob them of their life.

    What say you?

  • Liberal Logic: Self-Defense Contradicts Justice

    Liberal Logic: Self-Defense Contradicts Justice

    Let me preface this with an apology for perusing on a liberal trash heap blog (Huffington Post).  But every once and a while you need a brief glimpse into the dysfunctional minds of the people who are behind Obama’s fundamental transformation of America.

    Today, I stumbled upon an “article” that attempted to argue that defending oneself (with a gun) contradicts justice.

    Feel free to read the entire article—it’s quite short.  But here are a few of the author’s pseudo-intellectual gems:

    (TRIGGER WARNING!!)

    “using a firearm to defend oneself is not legal because if the attacker is killed, he or she is devoid of his or her rights.”

    “A gun for civilians is a weapon for a revolution and not for ordinary use. The belief that a gun is a useful tool to protect one is counterintuitive because guns get into the hands of people who use them for horrible reasons.”

    If you take some of the article’s arguments to their logical conclusions, you are left with a society of helpless victims.

    Consider the statement,

    “The main problem with the notion of self-defense is it imposes on justice, for everyone has the right for a fair trial.”

    Evidently, the author does not concern himself with the reality that “self-defense” implies an attack, and criminals don’t regard “justice.”

    Only a liberal could ignore the fact that a “criminal” has abandoned his right to due process when he chooses to attack a fellow citizen, and that law-abiding citizens would be the only victims of his imagined utopia.

    The scariest part of this article is the title, “A Revision on the Bill of Rights, Part III”—I wonder what other liberal tweaks he has in mind?

  • Time is Not on Our Side

    Time is Not on Our Side

    A little over a week ago, a bomb rocked the city of Kabul.  As of April 25th, 64 are dead and over 300 were injured.  Despite the fact that the target of the attacks was a security team that protects government VIPs, the majority of the victims are reportedly women and children.

    In response to the attack, The commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. John W. Nicholson, stated:

    “Today’s attack shows the insurgents are unable to meet Afghan forces on the battlefield and must resort to these terrorist attacks,”

    Similarly, Afghan President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani condemned the attack and tweeted this.

    “Today’s terrorist attack…clearly shows the enemy’s defeat in face-to-face battle.”

    Finally, to further “control” the narrative, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul released the following statement:

    “Afghanistan deserves peace and security, not attacks that victimize parents taking their children to school, workers on their morning commute, and people who have stepped forward to help defend their fellow citizens,”

    With the continued withdraw of a military presence from Afghanistan, no one should be surprised that soft targets, which used to take the form of military supply convoys in rural Afghanistan, are now Afghan security units inside the Afghan Capital.

    The attack came a week after the official start to “Operation Omari” (named after the late Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar) which also coincided with the annual spring offensive AKA the fighting season.

    The Taliban described the operation as “[employing] all means at our disposal to bog the enemy down in a war of attrition that lowers the morale of the foreign invaders and their internal armed militias.”

    I think this statement perfectly defines what this war, from the Taliban’s perspective, has always been about.

    From the very beginning, as U.S. aircraft bombed the hell out of the Taliban, the enemy knew they could never defeat a Western military on the field of battle.  Instead, they adopted a strategy that focused on bogging us down, attrition and lowering morale.

    Afghan history taught the Taliban that whether it was the Brits, Soviets or Americans, foreign invaders would eventually tire of war and leave.

    As an American who has both a reverence for war and military history, I can appreciate the commitment to the enemy’s strategy because it is the same one General George Washington implemented to defeat the British Army during The American Revolutionary War.

    The strategy employed by both the Taliban and American revolutionaries is very reminiscent of the approach that Fabius Maximus utilized to defeat Carthaginian general Hannibal during the Second Punic War—dubbed The Fabian Strategy.  The Fabian strategy avoided decisive engagements, utilized terrain to nullify the enemy’s superior Cavalry, and focused on softer targets like foraging units.

    Of course, I’m not arguing that there was a moral equivalency between American revolutionary soldiers and the Taliban.  On the contrary, the Taliban has repeatedly demonstrated that they have no qualms about killing innocent civilians while fighting their war.  However, both insurgencies were determined to endure and banked on the enemy’s weariness of battle.  I also realize outside support from the French (for American insurgents) and Iran, Pakistan, and foreign Jihadists (for the Taliban) also facilitated in both insurgency’s ability to “go the distance.”

    My main point is to highlight that after 15 years, we have the NATO commander in Afghanistan—an American Army General—attempting to underscore that the Taliban’s terrorist attacks are a sign of weakness.

    No, it does, however, demonstrate that the insurgency is launching attacks inside an area that was previously considered a hard target and inaccessible in earlier stages of the war.

    With all due respect sir, the Taliban is not “unable” to meet Afghan forces on the field of battle; they simply are—strategically—choosing not to.  Americans are beyond exhausted with the Afghan war, and the enemy knows it.

    Like the British before us, time has become our greatest enemy and their greatest commodity.

  • Tale of Two Tunnels

    Tale of Two Tunnels

    What’s the difference between the cartel tunnels between Mexico and The United States and the terror tunnels between Palestine and Israel?

    The terror tunnels into Israel bring in terrorists that take human life immediately.

    The cartel tunnels into the United States bring in drugs and criminality that ruin/take lives eventually.

    Take home truth:  Nothing good comes from secret tunnels from one country to another.

    Of course, we Americans should not be concerned with the radical Islamist trends that are currently plaguing our allies in Europe and ally in the Middle East.

    I’m sure a mass migration of Muslims will never come to our shores, and the tunnels on our southern border will never be used by terrorists.

    We will never experience terror stabbing attacks like Israel deals with (except this one and that one).

    We will never have mass rape mobs like European women experienced as they rang in the New Year in 2016.  That is, as long as we decide sooner rather than later, that accepting tens of thousands of titillated Muslim men—that believe that women are property—is a horrible idea.

    It would behoove the United States to consider seriously the ramifications of going the way of Europe and avoiding the migrant quagmire, but we won’t I am mildly pessimistic.

    Oh, and the southern border is probably a significant issue too–and not just the tunnels underneath it.

     

  • U.S. Apologizes for Naval Vessel Being in The Way of Russian Fighters

    U.S. Apologizes for Naval Vessel Being in The Way of Russian Fighters

    Introduction; American Kestrel is the latest addition to our stable of writers here at TAH. He’s a former 18F special forces intel sergeant and he writes at a number of other places around the internet. Now he writes here, too. – Jonn

    In response to Russia’s repeated flybys in the Baltic Sea, Secretary of State John Kerry made this authoritative statement:

    “We condemn this kind of behavior. It is reckless. It is provocative. It is dangerous. And under the rules of engagement, that could have been a shoot-down. [The U.S.] is not going to be intimidated on the high seas.”

    Here are five reasons (not an exhaustive list) the United States will CONTINUE to be “intimidated on the high seas.”

    1. Russia: See above.
    1.  China: The U.S. has continued to do virtually nothing to prevent China from forcefully taking over territory in the South China Sea from our allies.  The Chinese have literally built islands in contested waters, militarized said islands, and threatened U.S planes flying over “their airspace.”
    1. Iran:Iran captured our sailors, exploited them for propaganda, celebrated and mocked their capture in parade form, and have plans to commemorate the ordeal with the construction of a statue.  Oh, and Secretary Kerry THANKED them for their professionalism.
    1. Funding: Chronic underfunding of Navy and Marine assets.  Here’s one example.  Six months ago, Lt. Gen. Jon Davis–the deputy commandant for Marine Aviation– stated that the F/A-18 was 19 percent below its minimum acceptable number of operational aircraft.  This has resulted in less flight time for pilots and a five-year high in Marine aviation deaths.
    1. Poor leadership:  Remember, Obama believes that Cold War-style tactics are ancient history.  In Obama’s world, all “Western” style nations solve their problems with diplomacy (not of the gunboat variety).  States taking over another country’s sovereign territory doesn’t happen anymore (except in Georgia, Ukraine and the South China Sea).

    While the Obama administration tries desperately to fit the real world into their liberal international affairs framework, the realists of the world–Iran, Russia and China–are outplaying the United States at every turn.

    In response to Russia’s provocation, Former Ambassador John Bolton stated, “I just hope Obama doesn’t apologize for destroyer getting in the way of that airplane.”

    I’m sure this was said tongue-in-cheek but, after all of the apologies that have flowed from this administration, who knows anymore.

    As an aside, being an Army guy, I realize that I should default to a Naval officer’s verbiage, but do people still refer to international waters as the “high seas?”